Kindle Notes & Highlights
By my definition, egalitarian society is the product of a large, well-united coalition of subordinates who assertively deny political power to the would-be alphas in their group.
Jeff Roach liked this
if you were looking for a safe place for a long-term investment, you probably wouldn’t choose the oil industry.
Driverless vehicles will end up being ownerless vehicles. They will become public utilities, summoned when they are required for the specific trip you have in mind at the moment. Urban car clubs and peer-to-peer rentals are one precursor of this phenomenon; Uber and Lyft, in their different ways, are another.
if the subsistence farmers of two centuries ago could make the transition to urban workers in industry and commerce who were paid in cash, today’s urban workforce can probably make a gradual transition to a more leisured existence without suffering a collective nervous breakdown.
yes!
the moral objection to UBI, if that’s the right word, is that people deprived of work will suffer from existential angst because all meaning and purpose will have vanished from their lives. Without work, they will suffer a paralysing identity crisis and find it impossible to fill their days, and having to rely on a UBI will only make matters worse. Their sense of meaninglessness can only be cured by jobs – even if we have to invent them. There are a number of possible responses to this, some of which are polite enough to be printable.
if we should adopt a universal basic income to protect ourselves from a job apocalypse and runaway populism, it would have the added benefit of healing many of the social wounds opened up by great disparities in income.
The rise of Donald Trump is forcing us to analyse the problems that brought him to power: inequality, exacerbated by automation.
