tl;dr: UBI has a whole host of problems, instead, we should be strengthening the unions to increase wages to force the capitalists to invest in technology that makes us more productive
His argument seems to boil down to the following:
1) Labour being replaced by automation isn't going to happen because it is going to create more jobs than it displaces..... Not sure if I agree with this point.
2) That a basic income necessarily needs be IN PLACE OF existing welfare and labour protections... While some other forms of welfare may evaporate and some labour protections loosened, it doesn't have to. It provides flexibility for labourers and employers to negotiate without the looming threat of not having a basic living wage. It increases the labourers negotiating position more than the employers IMO.
3) Technology makes us more productivity, which means we can work less hours which means we can have more leisure time. The problem with this argument is that it assumes those "less hours" are equally distributed across the entire pool of laborers. What it just means is there are less hours for a limited pool of skilled labourers to fight over. Which means more unemployment. It does not mean that the taxi driver who has his 12 hour days eliminated by driverless ubers now gets to work 3 hours a day driving an uber or gets to work 3 hours a day programming those cars.
4) Instead of having a UBI, we should have a militant (violent) revolution against the rich where we demand increased welfare and labour protections. Increased welfare like a UBI? I'm not sure why the author feels like positive social institutions can't be a voluntary concession of the rich to satisfy discontent of the masses. Why do we have to get out our pitchforks to get bread if they are offering to hand out a livelihood to every citizen?
This sounds like the sort of leftist rhetoric that comes from someone in a very comfortable position. Try telling someone in real need that they shouldn't accept a basic income because "it's just a bribe from the rich so we don't start some vague revolution!".
UBI can be an answer to this, but given the political climate, I don't particularly think it's a viable solution in the short to medium term.
It seems to be a just an Economists (albeit a lefty one) looking for solutions in previous data.
1) That is the only conclusion that can be gleaned from the past century of data. Projections as to the effect of an "exponential explosion in AI/ML" have no data to support it.
2) I don't think he advocates for either. Though as a lefty he definitely doesn't advocate for busting of social programs (esp Healthcare)
3) Very True.
4) Labour doesn't necessarily ask for increased welfare, they ask for perfect employment. Which the author implies is a larger force for productivity boosts than something like UBI. It also gives the masses some control (therefore keeping the pitchforks away).
Historically, weakening labour has led to slumps in productivity for a myriad of reasons (that he could've done a better job at laying out). And we have no evidence that a UBI would increase productivity, but we do know it will destroy labour unions. Without productivity increases (towards zero marginal cost), UBI may not be able to deliver on its lofty promisies.
On the flip side: Increasing power to labour would mean another concentration of power that can (and has) be corrupted easily.
4) I think that perfect employment is a good goal, but how we get there is something else entirely. We can create more jobs, we can "re-educate" workers, we can decrease hours to create more shifts, but all of this still leaves a lot of people in the cracks. I think that one of the main benefits of a UBI is that it guarantees that nobody falls through the cracks.
I don't see how UBIs would entirely destroy labour unions either, since labour unions are often about more than setting minimum hours and negotiating standard compensations. Unions provide a lot more utility than that so I don't see workers abandoning their unions just because they get a check in the mail from the government every month. If that was the case, the union probably had very little utility to begin with IMO.
I don't know if a UBI is the right solution for solving poverty or worker inequality. But I don't think the author makes a convincing argument for an alternative, and I don't think doing nothing is a solution either.
I think a more useful way to think about the problem of automation isn't that it replaces jobs directly, it's that it devalues human capital. New jobs will involve more skill, which means each person will need more education and training. It might get to the point where training everyone so they can work for a living is less efficient than just taxing and paying for some people's sustenance directly.
I've linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU many times and I'll do it again.
Recently I've been coming to the conclusion that whilst free market capitalism deals very well with a fairish distribution of scarce resources, it doesn't deal very well with abundance (or rather, it deals ruthlessly with it - the price drops to near zero). We're facing an abundance of labour, and I don't think things are going to end well if the market rate for that ends up so low that labourers can't eat.
Sorry, this was never suggested? "Scaling" existing labour is the same as investing in new labor, is it not? Or do you mean new "types" of labour?
Either way, most new productivity boosters allow you to do more with the same labour force. Ideally. So you let the labour force collectively bargain higher wages so the company is forced to invest in new technology (exp(n) boost) to scale their operations instead of increasing the size of the workforce (n boost).
And then a couple sentences later...
> At the end of the 18th Century, 90 percent of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. As of 2009 (the latest year for which there are figures), less than 0.7 percent are farmers. It’s not the case that now 90 percent of Americans are out of work; they’re now engaged in other, often less back-breaking labour. The percentage of people engaged in hard, dangerous and boring jobs has tumbled.
That is a clear contradiction even if we had the same level of employment we did back then (which we don't when you account for child farm labor and low rates of retirement), "less back-breaking labour" is less labor.