It's tempting for many to look at Universal Basic Income (and any derivatives) and dismiss it out of hand as "Oh, that's just giving people a free handout!" or taking the political route and saying "That's a SOCIALIST nightmare! No Way!"
But what are we really dealing with, here? And is it possible that there increasingly are situations and reasons why it could not only be useful, but almost essential... maybe not in its original form, but in a "hybrid" system?
Declining Employment
Here's one for you: What do Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common? They both promised "more jobs" for the American people.
Without a doubt, that'll continue to be a talking point with future Presidential candidates — both here in the US, and overseas — for many many years to come.
What becomes more and more evident is that these are becoming increasingly "Hollow" promises that can't seriously be made, as absolute statements. Like it or not, automation and AI are taking over an ever-increasing percentage of the world's work...
The displaced workers are not readily re-employable, because their jobs simply went away, and other jobs requiring a similar education level and skill set are also being taken over by automation.
Sorry, you are simply not NEEDED to work, anymore...
The old put-down "learn to code!" is also — ironically — in the crosshairs, as AI increasingly generates superior code to humans, and at a fraction of the cost, and in minutes, rather than weeks.
Like it or not, we seem to embrace capitalism here in the USA... but if we DO so, we don't get to sweep the fundamentals of capitalism under the rug, like they magically don't exist: The Purpose of a Corporation is to Maximize Profits.
Simple enough. Maximizing profits... while operating in a world where most of your customers/consumers are actually losing real purchasing power (because they are losing their jobs) SHOULD entail reducing costs, so prices can be kept affordable.
For a while, that worked as "outsourcing," letting someone making $8 an hour in the Philippines or Thailand assemble your iPhone, instead of someone making $30 an hour. The next natural iteration of that is to have a machine that requires no salary, benefits or paid vacation do the job.
That's all well and good, but someone still has to be able to afford to buy the iPhone. Last I looked, an iPhone 15 Pro will set you back $1,000... and more.
Putting People Back to Work!... It's Too Late... or Something...
The idea of putting people back to work is noble enough... but there's something increasingly functionally impossible about it, in our day and age.
Why? Because the only way to gain significant inroads would be to reduce efficiency. Which is precisely the opposite of the corporate objective of maximizing profit. It makes no sense so send a bunch of coal miners in West Virginia back into fully automated mines... armed just with picks and shovels, in the name of "job creation."
In a sense, I sometimes think Basic Income gets a bad rap because people hear the term and treat it like a "final solution," when perhaps it is best used as a "bridge" to get us from "now" to a fully automated economy in which consumer goods cost only a few percent of what they cost today.
And in some ways, companies helping to underwrite UBI is not so much a handout, as an investment in their own survival: you won't have a company if nobody has a job, and hence no money to buy your stuff.
Of course, this is predicated on the "Growth Paradigm" that has been with us for many generations... some schools of economic thought believe that "contractions" in an economy are a necessary — and even positive — thing.
In some ways, I agree. I think about the government bailing out large companies... might it not have been better to allow those companies to fail (after all, why would they be failing, if they didn't have sketchy business practices?) and instead use all those billions to subsidize the displaced workers... in the process allowing better run companies to become the market leaders?
Automation and Freedom
There's no doubt this is all a very complex issue.
One of the thoughts I keep coming back to is that we keep thinking of "not working" a somehow being bad and a negative to avoid. Maybe that's just an outmoded way of thinking? Couldn't we re-frame our perceptions to where having some machine do our grunt jobs is actually a blessing of sorts?
"Well, you MUST have a JOB!"
Why? From where I am sitting, what we "must have" is enough goods and services for everyone. The notion that they "must" be the result of human toil... is what, exactly?
Of course, the problem we face is that gap between corporations wanting to maximize profits, and people's purchasing power shrinking as "required human labor" becomes less and less. At some point, surely, someone must realize that a company raising their prices "because inflation" while their production costs are dropping due to automation is not going to hold up, in the long run.
So, Basic Income...
If it sounds like I have wandered a bit off-track from talking about Basic Income, it was primarily to illustrate where the need arises.
I am also not using the term "Universal" in this context. Because it would be quite selective, in the sense that it would be funded mostly as a sort of tax/fee for companies that extensively made workers redundant with automation.
And the benefit would only be available to those who could directly document that their long term jobs had been replaced by automation. Or maybe even their industry. Like trucking, which will be massively affected by autonomous vehicles over the next 20 years.
Also, it's important to consider that it would be basic income, not "living high on the hog income."
Some might say that "conservatives would never accept it," so maybe the idea has to be told as a "negative income tax," instead. Conservatives love reducing taxes...
Regardless, it's one of those things I can't help but speculate on.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2024-05-11 00:33 PDT
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