Agreed.

I tend to think a job guarantee would work better than UBI: have the government provide a job to anyone who can't find one somewhere else, something like what was done in the 1930's in the US. Come up with a list of things needed (can you think of anything that needs fixing?), and pay people a living wage and benefits to take care of those things. Call it 'Universal Basic Work.'

Beyond spending government money to take care of the country and beyond providing those hired with enough to take take of themselves, it'd force private employers to pay and provide benefits at least as well as the government UBW jobs if they want to hire employees.

I further imagine that a person making enough to get by would be less prone to being hopeless and frustrated, supporting social cohesion. And that there's a dignity in that both for the individual and the community they are a part of.

"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."

- Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)

I lucked in to meeting him once, in Cambridge. A gentle intellectual giant.

I repeatedly borrow this quote from his 1980 Turing Award speech, 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'... "At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modern software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution."

My interpretation is that whether shifting from delegation to programmers, or to compilers, or to LLMs, the invariant is that we will always have to understand the consequences of our choices, or suffer the consequences.

Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else.

As economist Stevie Wonder once said, "When you believe in things that you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way"

> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization

For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.