This is a special post for quick takes by Felix Moses. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
By that I mean: problems it would be worth one million dollars to have solved. That also implies they would have to be solvable in some empirical fashion.
Epistemic status: strolling in Venice on a hot September evening tipsy with my mom
One of the advantages of church is that it forces encourages all members of a society to be part of social groups. This has a wide range of positive results from mental health to disaster preparedness and reduced wealth inequality, increased volunteering and more.
The down side is the whole God part. There are many communities that form without the God aspect, but they tend to be less diverse, harder to get into, and more focused around specific interests.
I will not list the accolades of universal basic income here, but rest assured, they are many. But, on its own, UBI is not very good at solving problems that require greater cooperation, such as healthcare or housing.
The idea: Every member of a society is entitled to X dollars just for the privilege of being born. But, in order to get access to it they must join a community, called a nurch, consisting of 50 to 250 people. The money will then be allocated to the nurch, and used as the democratic whole sees fit. (ideally using liquid democracy)
Crisique #1: People might just end up dolling the money out to the people and not do anything with it. Then it would just be normal UBI with extra steps.
Crisique #2: The next obvious critique is that some how the forces of democracy will cause the money to be be spent worst then if we just gave it to individuals. (think The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Chapman)
At 23 you're don with your old town, your old friends & your carrer. You need a change! You pack up your bags and arrive in Des Moines, Iowa with no real plan. The first thing you do after booking a room at a motel is head to city hall to register for a community.
There a city employ will help you look through the list of communities with openings to find one that seems like a good fit for you (or perhaps an AI assistant with deep knowledge of all the different going-ons in the city)[1]. Feeling like an asshole you ignore their sage advise and grab one at random.
As soon as you join the portion of the national surplus that you are entitled to will stop being sent to your old community back home, and instead will be added to you're new community in Des Moines, Iowa[2].
As for how they spend the money, its up to democratic whole of the group. You go to their website and see they have a community lunch this Saturday[3]. As soon as you show up you realize you made a mistake. You joined a Suburban community who spends the money mostly on a rec center/child support stuff.
But still, you go and meet some of the members. You are pulled out of the bubble of loneliness that engulfs so many people when they arrive at a new place. There you even manage to make a friends. Another guy who's they just cause his parents are in the community, but he's getting bored of it. He invites you to go to a club afterwards.
You spend the next two months as part of this community as you try to get your life together. People will post odd jobs to the community messaging board (they use facebook and you hate it), and you get invited to events.
After a while you and your one friends meet some friendly punks at a local club and after the mosh pit you get to talking. They are part of an anarchist squat collective. Instead of working they use all their money pooled together to pay and maintain a where house out at the edge of town and sleep there in big piles. This seems more you're vibe than wholesome middle class suburban living, so the next day you and your friend head down to town hall and change you're communities.
[1] Communities are stickily limited to between 50 & 250 people. Once they are getting up in to the bigger range, you know it's time to split soon. As for communities that don't want new comers: to me it makes good sense to allow they to ask for no new members, since after all, if they don't want you there, you probably don't want to be there either. Seems unpleasant. But what do you think?
[2] Billed monthly? So I guess it would only switch over on the first of the month maybe.
[3] One of the fundamental motivations for this policy is get people back as part of groups. Back in the old days that would have been church. My religious friends as soon as they move to a new place join a local church and immediately have a support group and connections in town. Obviously we can't count on faith to keep people going to community groups, so instead the idea is to bribe them into it. One of the failure modes is that groups just take the money, split it up, and never do community bonding events. How could we further sensitize people to make sure they don't do this?
Are you free to choose which community to join? Will there be a rationalist community in your area?
Is a community free to reject some people who want to join it?
Could we organize the entire society as a hierarchical group of groups (of groups... as many levels as needed) like this? That would allow us to pool money for larger projects (organized by groups of higher order).
In brief: Yes; If you want to start one; Maybe; It's not something that I've thought about, could you tell me more about what you would have in mind?
You can freely join and leave any group you want. I'm of two minds about preventing people from joining a group. On one hand if they don't like outsides, that probably a good sign outsides don't want to be there. On the other I'm not a big fan of making it easier to exclude people and hide away. If they black guy wants to join the KKK group, I feel like he should have the right. What do you think?
How do you imagine this russian nesting doll of groups to work? I love the idea, I just want to hear more!
We have a cultural taboo against excluding people, but there are situations where even one person can ruin the experience for many.
We have a cultural taboo against talking about these things. It is not a coincidence that your example of exclusion is a black guy vs KKK. When talking about exclusion, we are primed to think about the group that wants to exclude someone as the bad guys, and the one to be excluded as an innocent victim. Yes, sometimes it is exactly that. But sometimes it is the other way round. Try to imagine a community that includes one violent crazy person, one rapist, one thief, one drug dealer... and a few nice and decent people, but they are not allowed to get rid of the problematic ones, because inclusion is the buzzword of the day. Will those nice people feel happy participating at the community events?
These are dramatic examples, but the same happens at lower stakes. Try to have a rationality meetup, but also there are five visitors who can't stop talking about some conspiracy theory they believe, or five religious fanatics that can't stop trying to convert everyone. The discussion is derailed. The only way to have the kind of community you want is to exclude them.
(Also, if the group size is limited, inclusion is exclusion. Suppose the community already has 49 out of 50 members allowed, and you want your friend to join, but someone else joins faster. Oops, the group is full, your friend cannot join anymore.)
However, there is the fact that if groups are allowed to exclude people, some people will end up without a group. That is also a problem with my hierarchical idea, that some groups may be excluded from higher-level groups; for example, if you live in a religious country, you may join an atheist group, but it will be excluded from the religious group-of-groups.
I don't have a specific idea about the hierarchical system, it was just a quick "if we propose this system for individuals, why not go all the way up?". It would solve the problem of "what if I want to do some group activity that requires more that 50 people?". But it opens many additional questions.
That makes sense to me! Perhaps a good way to do it would be that there's not systematic way to keep people out, but there are options for kicking people out if the group votes against them. That way it takes active effort to maintain exclusivity, as opposed to allowing people to do it by active default.
One other thought on it: since people NEED access to these groups to be entitled to their UBI benefits, everyone has be allowed in each one. That being said, ya, a child molester in a group with a bunch of parents might not be a good idea.
So the question becomes is it better to distribute the problem cases across society, where hopefully there is more pressure to improve and better role models, or stick them in a group with all the other worst people and let them be a cesspool of misery?
Church often becomes so important to many homeless people precisely because it's one of the last communities willing to have them, even when they are rejected everywhere else by the rest of society. Although even here in our imaginary world with CUBI, churches will not cease to exist, they will just be better funded since most likely they will spring up around communities.
As for the group size thing: I had said 50 to 250 to be circling around Dunbar's number, then as it's get to it's upper limit, it's time to split the group in two. I imagine this will be often be a drama filled affair, but it seems like a good idea since it allows for successful groups to very naturally continue to grow (think of cell division). Both groups would start off with the same polices of the previous whole group, then they can continue to evolve on their own parallel branches.
By the way, I suspect that we are reinventing some "anarcho-something-ism" here...
Thinking about the people at the bottom is a difficult trade-off: it would be better if they didn't stay abandoned, but for everyone else it is better to stay far away from them.
Traditional solution: ignore them, or kill them if they become annoying
Religious solution: promise Heaven to those who volunteer to spend time with them
Socialist solution: put them in a mental institution and don't talk about the topic anymore
Woke solution: leave them on the streets, don't talk about the topic and attack those who do
...sorry for politics, but I tried to list all the solutions I am aware of.
I was thinking more of rift on UBI, not a fundamental reordering of society. Iceland has a system where you can declare you're religious instantiation and money goes to it there, people have used that to have more community funded even non religious groups.
So this would be a combo of UBI and Sóknargjald (“congregation fee”). The main addition here is to make it fully non-religious and cap it at a size where you can actually know everyone else involved.
As for the what to do with people at the bottom question: Houston has done a better job than most with it's housing first policies. The best programs to me are ones that aim to really prevent people from become homeless in the first place, once you're mind has been ruined by a couple years of living outside and drugs it's seem almost impossible to functionally reintegrate people into society.
Even if homeless circles, clearly forming community's and pooling resources does work. For a good example of this I think of Camp Resolution in Sacramento. This, of course, does come with problems, so I understand why cops choose to break up these encampments, but I think it does cause a real damage to communities they destroy. If they could somehow get enough money (say through a program like the one I'm proposing) to at least do group aparments or something like that, I think it would go someway to allowing the more functional homeless people to reintegrate into society. I've worked a decent amount with the homeless, and there are a group who are certainly beyond help, but there at also a lot of people who I think still could be real productive members of society.
So, when a community will reach 240, it will have an incentive to don't grow to don't have drama and decrease of efficiency because of economies of scale? How would you prevent it?
I probably should have made it clear: this is not a replacement of capitalism. As the title suggest, this is an alternative to UBI. I think thinking of better ways to do UBI becomes more and more important as AI gets better and better. Already, this would be more efficient along economies of scale line than traditional UBI since it goes from a single person, to a community.
As for getting up to the cap: here's what I was thinking. Once you get to arround ~150 ish, so around Dunbar’s number, it's time to starting splitting, the extra is just to make it so it's less likely for you to hit any hard caps before you reach it.
As for incentivizing communities to not grow: that seems counter productive. If there's some sort of organization that's working really well and everyone want's to join we want it to start replicating and this would be a good mechanism for that to happen. Out with the old, in with the new.