Comment by jasode
9 years ago
Meta question: if this essay about "American Equity" is another way of proposing "universal basic income", why is there circumlocution around UBI?
Possibilities are "UBI" has been poisoned with negative connotations can you can't talk about it anymore. That's possible but it seems like the overwhelming sentiment on HN and reddit is massive support for it.
As far as I can tell, "UBI" doesn't have negative connotations such as the phrase "welfare queens". UBI is already widely understood. What's the motivation for the neologism "American equity"? (My guess is it's a UBI-indexed-to-GDP.)
For one thing, it allows the branding to focus around Altman’s specific idea instead of the wide variety of UBI ideas. I think it would make a program more defensible if it had a new name, so that the proponents of that program only have that program’s ideas to defend and not the giant flank of every UBI implementation ever proposed, all lumped together by a common name.