Institute for Optimal Living

"The real effects on motivation But what about people then choosing not to work? Isn’t that a huge burden too? Well that’s where things get really interesting. For one, conditional welfare assistance creates a disincentive to work through removal of benefits in response to paid work. If accepting any amount of paid work will leave someone on welfare barely better off, or even worse off, what’s the point? With basic income, all income from paid work (after taxes) is earned as ...additional income so that everyone is always better off in terms of total income through any amount of employment whether full time, part time or gig. Thus basic income does not introduce a disincentive to work. It removes the existing disincentive to work that conditional welfare creates. Fascinatingly, improved incentives are where basic income really shines. Studies of motivation reveal that rewarding activities with money is a good motivator for mechanistic work but a poor motivator for creative work. Combine that with the fact that creative work is to be what’s left after most mechanistic work is handed off to machines, and we’re looking at a future where increasingly the work that’s left for humans is not best motivated extrinsically with money, but intrinsically out of the pursuit of more important goals. It’s the difference between doing meaningless work for money, and using money to do meaningful work. Basic income thus enables the future of work, and even recognizes all the unpaid intrinsically motivated work currently going on that could be amplified, for example in the form of the $700 billion in unpaid work performed by informal caregivers in the US every year, and all the work in the free/open source software movement (FOSSM) that’s absolutely integral to the internet."

"Women shouldn’t be fighting for a place at work; they should be inventing, designing, prototyping, and coding a new ideal of worksomething which isn’t based on an out-dated belief about gender roles in society."

The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

"The Constitution was written for an Agrarian Republic. The level of complexity that officials were expected to confront absolutely did not include things like Nuclear Power and Weaponry, Electronic Surveillance, Climate Change, Net Neutrality, Air Traffic Control, etc. If you’ve gotten a glimpse of CSPAN, you probably have exposure to how poor a grasp politicians have on even basic workings of some of these issues." Brilliant analysis of our unique moment in history! I highly recommend following Arthur Brock for practically-minded futurism.