To make this proposal make sense, we need to rephrase it in financial terms that Sam and HN readers would understand.
GDP is a revenue number. Roughly speaking, it's the aggregate sales of all American businesses. Or the aggregate spending of all American consumers.
Obviously there's no sense in which you can "own" a share of revenue. You own capital, not revenue.
So a workable translation of this idea into financial reality might be: every public company dilutes itself by 20%; the new shares are assigned to the government; the new shares are distributed to all Americans. Not unlike the voucher side of the Russian post-Communist privatization scheme.
Then the fun begins. Do the recipients actually own these shares? For instance, can they sell them? In theory, shares should produce dividends, but our tax system has made dividend distribution mostly a thing of the past. Profits are more likely to go through buybacks. You earn returns from capital by selling shares.
But if people can just sell the shares, what stops them from selling them all, and ending up right back where we started? A study of low-income lottery winners and their financial behavior would add a lot, I think, to our understanding of this and similar UBI schemes.
Why doesn't anyone respond directly to this blogpost? You would think that, if the goal was to convince people to believe that Sexy Cyborg is completely authentic, maximum transparency would be the appropriate strategy. Instead what we see is maximum invective.
It doesn't make your case more convincing, I think, that you maneuver sideways into "so what if it's true, it doesn't matter." Two orthogonal arguments are usually not better than one.
What am I doing wrong here? Should I not be suspicious at all? Can you genuinely not imagine that anyone could suspect that the author of the second article might not be the person on the screen in the first video?
This seems absolutely typical of the modern world's approach to truth. Increasingly, the question is not what is true, but what should be true.
For the record, here is the original blogpost -- which no one in this discussion links to or seems to have read, and which Dale Daugherty evidently found convincing:
Is it morally wrong to be convinced by, for instance, a disparity between spoken and written English skills? If we believe that a narrative which is factually false is being presented to the public, are we allowed to question it factually? If not, what kind of world do we live in?
Bunnie is wonderful. Bunnie is a great hacker. You can go through all of Bunnie's post, and not see any response to the facts and inferences laid out in the original blogpost.
Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. Organizationally, Calico seems to be built in the exact opposite way from the Manhattan Project.
Imagine you were building the first fission bomb, but doing it the Calico way (which is the way most science is done these days). You'd say: we need enormous progress in a wide variety of very distinct fields: nuclear physics, isotope chemistry, metallurgy, high-speed photography...
So you'd ask PIs in all these fields to send you grant proposals related to the problem of building an atom bomb. They would take their existing grant proposal template, rewrite it to talk about atom bombs, and send it in. You would send them money. They would deliver progress reports.
What would happen? Probably, you'd build an atom bomb. The first test would be in 1986, after 45 years and 500 billion dollars. It would cause major damage to three creosote plants and severely startle a jackrabbit.
Next, imagine Calico's funders said: we will take this same amount of money, and pour it into a single problem -- rejuvenating a dog. Much like Manhattan's single product deliverable.
Moreover, we will not hire existing players to repaper their existing lines of research. We will hire the best new PhDs and tell them to do whatever want to do, so long as it represents one piece of a reasonable strategy for, or step toward, an realistic engineering procedure for rejuvenating dogs. (Or at least mice, if long-lived animals are too hard a first step.)
In this kind of organization -- ie, a hierarchical company-shaped structure with a company-shaped goal, delivering a product -- the standards of relevance and collaboration will be much, much higher. Los Alamos hired the best people in the world, but no one took their existing research and tried to shoehorn it into the Manhattan Project.
No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. We actually put a lot of money into science and technology, and the personnel are just as talented as ever. Every PI is an Oppenheimer. But there is no General Groves.
It always bugs me when I hear someone who I know knows better use a line like: "Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC" -- as though this was a matter of dropping a postcard in the mail. I'm confident that these writers know better.
The real situation -- as you can see in any of the stories about Blue Bottle's non-IPO, Hedosophia, etc -- is that "just do it legally" is rapidly approaching the regulatory singularity of "just get the NRC to license your new nuclear reactor design." Even for multibillion-dollar companies, "just do it legally" is becoming prohibitively costly. Compare to the 1990s, when sub-100M IPOs were not that weird.
This has enabled VCs to earn enormous monopoly fees, originally as gatekeepers to the IPO process, now as gatekeepers to a gigantic secondary market in "unicorns." Lambos all around.
As in taxi medallions, this bottleneck creates immense profits. Naturally, the spectacle of Uber versus the taxi mafia, or ICOs versus the VC mafia, creates a lot of passions. Especially among those with axes to grind.
There is one big difference: Uber provides a consistently excellent transportation experience. Whereas most ICOs are straight-out terrible. Let's hope that the sheep get separated from the goats, as fast as possible.
GDP is a revenue number. Roughly speaking, it's the aggregate sales of all American businesses. Or the aggregate spending of all American consumers.
Obviously there's no sense in which you can "own" a share of revenue. You own capital, not revenue.
So a workable translation of this idea into financial reality might be: every public company dilutes itself by 20%; the new shares are assigned to the government; the new shares are distributed to all Americans. Not unlike the voucher side of the Russian post-Communist privatization scheme.
Then the fun begins. Do the recipients actually own these shares? For instance, can they sell them? In theory, shares should produce dividends, but our tax system has made dividend distribution mostly a thing of the past. Profits are more likely to go through buybacks. You earn returns from capital by selling shares.
But if people can just sell the shares, what stops them from selling them all, and ending up right back where we started? A study of low-income lottery winners and their financial behavior would add a lot, I think, to our understanding of this and similar UBI schemes.