I don't buy it. In a democracy, the government cares about votes, not people refusing to pay their taxes. The government has a lot of ways to compel you to pay taxes, but not your vote.
The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.
That's true in a democracy, but the question is why would the democracy remain a democracy if the productive, governing elite doesn't need the citizens for their economic activity?
From time to time, governing elites have asked themselves a question: is now the time to overthrow democracy?
When the wealth of a nation comes from the productivity of its citizens, you can't overthrow a stable democracy without destroying the wealth you intended to capture. But when the wealth of a nation comes from its natural resources, say gold or oil, the calculus changes. You can run a gold mine with dying slaves and still extract great wealth.
"The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."
Some economists refer to human labor as "the ultimate resource," a resource of value beyond gold, beyond oil. As automation becomes more and more useful, as the value of capital relative to human labor increases, the more we're cursing ourselves with the ultimate resource curse.
His point, as I understand it, is if you participate economically in a social structure, your vote represents economic activity in that structure. So if the nation was full of fast-food workers, the democratic structure that would come out of it would be something that favored fast-food workers and took their economic needs into account. In your example of retired people, a world full of retired people would create a governmental structure that understood and favored the economic activity of retired folks, which is basic consumption.
In a world where most people simply consume, such as those retired people, either you wouldn't get participation at all or you'd get participation that was structured economically around what retired folks do. In either case, it's a tyrannical and dysfunctional government. The only way to "fix" it is to have a de facto oligarchy where a small number of rich people control everything and deliver it to the masses. And that's as bad or worse than the other scenarios.
You're right, I don't understand it. Why does a government structured around the economic activity of its voters suddenly become tyrannical and dysfunctional when when most of them are no longer productive?
> Why does a government structured around the economic activity of its voters suddenly become tyrannical and dysfunctional when when most of them are no longer productive?
Because those people wield the power in the relationship, by virtue of the fact that they can stop working and disrupt the system economically.
This is, I believe, the author's point: political power follows economic power, over time. The two can diverge temporarily, but over the long run this tends not to be stable, or has to be maintained by force with much attendant unpleasantness.
Historically, I think this checks out. The combination of market(ish) economies and representative(ish) democracy that exist in most Western states evolved alongside the increased economic power of industrial workers, starting in the 18th century. Marxist theory takes the same ideas and runs with them further, hypothesizing inevitable conflict when worker-labor is alienated from the economic gains it produces. Neither of these two systems, which basically dominated the 20th century, would have emerged under conditions of agrarian peasantry. (And in the early Soviet Union, which basically blundered into Communism by mistake -- Marx had always thought it would emerge in more-industrialized Germany first! -- the peasantry was largely either forcibly transitioned into industrial laborers or exterminated, since they had no place in that political-economic system.)
But even in a democratic context, a "vote" is fundamentally meaningless; it is at best merely a suggestion. Underlying the idea of democracy is always the question of what the citizenry will do if the government decides to ignore the vote. Governments that depend on economic activity which citizens can disrupt through simple nonparticipation have a vested interest in keeping those same people happy and productive. Governments that only need to worry about armed insurrection can employ more draconian methods.
Historically, modern representative democracy, with something vaguely close to universal suffrage, has only been around for 100 years or so. You can look back farther and draw the conclusion that increasing economic participation results in increased democracy as you describe with the industrial revolution, but that doesn't imply that you're bound to reverse course if economic participation declines.
Because the interests of the majority in consuming does not align with the interests of the minority in producing.
In a widely-diverse economy, it's impossible to have huge voting blocks like that. There's just too many vastly different economic models represented. But if you start heading down the road of UBI, you're basically splitting the population into two groups. Something's gotta give somewhere. You either get debt default or oligarchy.
It currently works in the U.S. -- assuming you believe the U.S. is not dysfunctional -- because while we have retired folks, they're just a small part of a vastly more diverse electorate. And even then, you'd imagine they would bring some of their experience in the economy to bear on their current decisions. A nation full of people who have never economically participated would have no data to decide or discuss which voting decisions to make. It'd all just be about more consumption.
In fact, assuming you could make it work, it would end up with folks voting in short-term bumps in UBI increases at the expense of long-term budgets, for much the same reasons as corporate boards vote in CEOs who can increase the share price short-term at the expense of long-term strategy. Only way out of that is tyranny/oligarchy.
Note that I'm not saying it won't work. I want to see more experiments and real data instead of all of this arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Real data beats this kinda stuff hands-down. I'm simply saying it's an interesting argument that deserves some attention -- especially when looking at the results of the experiments when they roll in. The last thing I would want to see is something like YC doing an experiment where the only people looking at results were folks who were already true believers. That's total crap. You want results you can throw rocks at.
Why don't employed people act like a big block too? Is this an Anna Karenina sort of thing, where unemployed people are all alike, but every employed person is employed in his own way?
UBI would reduce the number of unproductive citizens, and increase the productivity of those already producivr, by allowing people more freedom to take actions that are suboptimal in the short-run and by replacing things like minimum wage laws which prohibit certain exchanges to avoid situations that are abusive without the kind of support UBI provides.
It's true that UBI is often sold as being a better way of providing support for the permanently unemployable, which it is, but it also reduces the ranks of the unemployable and removes disincentives to work that exist with means-tested safety net programs.
Because you can control the unproductive majority with the UBI. You can threaten with taking away the UBI if they oppose you, which they may fear and keep quiet about whatever you do.
I was more interested in understanding what the author was saying than debating it, but yes, it's quite possible.
I'm a firm believer that the jury is still out on UBI, but if you ask me, this is the best cautionary argument I've read so far. It's a simple mental experiment: if 90% of the people receive money and 10% make it, what forms of stable government could you have? There's only two. The first is where the government looks after consumption at the expense of production -- with runaway debt and a debt default spiral. The other is an oligarchy where people are "tended to"
I believe the UBI folks are all in the second camp, whether they realize it or not.
There are real structural issues at play here, and modernization should produce much more leisure time than it has. Kudos to folks trying to experiment to make a difference. Doing nothing is not very enlightening.
But what this author seems to be getting at is something like this: our individual struggles inside the economic system we've created to provide value to others makes us better participants in a representative republic. These experiences are based on real-world conditions and billions of little experiments we all perform daily. Basing our voting decisions on all of this anecdotal and irrational data sucks, but it sucks much less than simply picking whatever meme turns us on the most at the moment all around the theme of more consumption. It sucks, but it's a workable system. The other way, not so much.
"Modernization should produce much more leisure time than it has"
I fully disagree. Modernization changes the problems we face but we use the solutions as leverage to overcome our next challenges, whether real or imagined.
The massive political power of retirees in the US seems like a perfect example. They aren't very productive economically and they receive lots of benefits from the government, but they wield political power out of proportion to their numbers, and politicians won't dare cross them.