Happy Yuletide! (and thoughts about sustainability and UBI)

[sonia]

First thing this morning I opened up the Yuletide 2023 archive and found a beautifully written story set in the world of Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home.
How to Enter the Five Houses by ellen_fremedon.
It catches the tone of canon perfectly - I responded to it the same way I remember responding to the book, which is to get impatient with the anthropological segments and wander off, but keep coming back to read more.

Like the book, the story focuses on what it takes to make a community sustainable in the long term. I've been thinking about Universal Basic Income (UBI), and how it would neatly remove the impetus for everything to keep growing and growing, and reset us toward sustainability instead.

I was thinking about it in relation to advertising. If people weren't desperate to sell their thing to make sure they could eat and have a place to live, if people didn't have become advertising executives to eat and have a place to live, the whole advertising machine would wind down to what it sometimes tries to imitate, a chain of genuine recommendations about things people enjoy.

This Finnish experiment tells us that Universal Basic Income provides a huge boost to well-being. "People receiving the basic income reported better health and lower levels of stress, depression, sadness, and loneliness—all major determinants of happiness—than people in the control group." Shocking, right? Remove the ongoing threat of losing everything they need, and people feel better.

The "problem" with Universal Basic Income, at least in the US, is that Black people would get it too. It's heartbreaking how much of the precarity of our lives is due to racist white people trying to keep good things away from Black people.

Now that I've written all this out, I should find a way to support the effort to create UBI. I believe it would not only help individuals, it would help us as a society move in the right direction to stop fueling climate change.

Comments

[silveradept]

The hardest hurdle for UBI to get over toward adoption is that it is, in fact, universal, and therefore the person that you detest the most in life still gets it along with you. There's so much in history where one groups stops believing in the humanity and intrinsic worth of another group that they'd rather sabotage themselves than allow the other group to gain anything. Zero-sum thinking is what needs to change if UBI is going to have a prayer of widespread adoption. Because basically everywhere that experiments with it finds that it is an unalloyed good.

[sonia]

Yes. And, people are harder to control and manipulate when they’re less desperate. I keep hoping the right thing will happen anyway.

Ahhhh!

[jesse_the_k]

I appreciate your insight that UBI could help us step away from the ultimately wasteful "need" to grow. Also! Yuletide rec. Thanks.

Re: Ahhhh!

[sonia]

Enjoy!