Silicon Valley talks a good game on ‘basic income’, but its words are empty

The reason I left academia and didn't pursue a post doc was because the prospects of making $32k in New York while trying to pay off a student loan, to maybe get an assistant professor position one day, wasn't appealing. I invested over 10-years of my life up to that point, but I certainly wasn't entitled to a job and believe me, a PhD is often a huge Liability when you're looking for a job. If you're making 20 pounds a day working for Uber then turn off the meter and go do something else.

other articles by this author:

"Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend the frontiers of capitalism" [0]

"Why growing old the Silicon Valley way is a prescription for loneliness" [1]

SV certainly has problems, but let's not escalate the debate to hysterical levels. There's a bit too much blanket generalization and hyperbole here for my liking.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/silicon...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/24/growing...

a trite and inaccurate article that equates all of silicon valley to data exploiters and tax evaders.

It mentions Y Combinator and Albert Wenger as Silicon Valley supporters of basic income. I suspect that means... 2 or 3 people? The article lists more radical Italian economists.

It's completely valid to create a simplified model to understand certain social effects, but when you're looking at such a tiny number of people, grouping them into some sort of blob seems more likely to be an attempt to distort than to understand.

There's a community of people online who like squashing logical fallacies. Thing is, articles like this represent a more subtle and high-level form of disinformation than the simply fallacies such people are trained to spot.

One aspect of this disinformation is treating "Silicon Valley" throughout as one big blob, an organisation or organised movement, rather than a group of diverse individuals and companies, each with independent opinions and objectives.

"YC is funding research on basic income - but Uber mines your data so how can these Silicon Valley elites be trusted?!!11"

Why do this? Because he wants to paint Silicon Valley as a power bloc. Remember that this is the writing of a public intellectual, and a well-connected member of the liberal establishment, in a major liberal newspaper, basically declaring that tech is a) too wealthy and powerful and needs to be cut down to size and b) their advocacy of basic income (libertarian socialism) is unsatisfactory, and only full-blown socialism will be deemed sufficient.

"Basic income, therefore, is often seen as the Trojan horse that would allow tech companies to position themselves as progressive, even caring – the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop – while eliminating the hurdles that stand in the way of further expansion."

In other words, "don't trust techies who claim to be good capitalists, there are no good capitalists".

Note that when an industry expands (which Morozov implies is bad) they sell more useful products and services to more people. When the welfare state expands and "flourishes" (which Morozov says is good), it forces more people to pay more money to other people.

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Near the end there's some illuminating new economic theory, which makes his thought process clearer:

"First, it is a way to compensate workers for the work they do while not technically working [...] Think of Uber drivers who are generating useful data, which helps Uber in making resource allocation decisions."

The data generated by one driver is of little value - probably no more than cents per trip.

"Second, because much of our labour today is collective – do you know by how much your individual search improves Google’s search index? Or how much a line of code you contribute to a free software project enhances the overall product? – it is often impossible to determine the share of individual contribution in the final product."

The essential point stands for any complicated enterprise - how much does one line of code contribute to a commercial project? As it's impossible to measure, there's only one way to settle the issue - worker and employer mutually agree on the value of worker's labour.

Evgeny's solution, remember, is to hand out more money to everyone. This would only be a fair system if the value of everyone's work was equal.

Note again the assumption that because many companies constantly mine data from everyone, and this data has some value, this means that everyone is creating value, all the time. The only value Uber and Google get from your data is the ability to better target services to you, so Evgeny's point is that companies should pay you for the ability to sell you stuff.

(I should point out that I think data mining is a shitty activity, and companies probably overvalue its benefit - on an unspoken "it's dubious so it must be useful" premise).

"First, that the welfare state, in a somewhat reformed form, must survive and flourish – it is a key social institution that, with its generous investments in health and education, gives us the freedom to be creative."

More freedom for those who get money, less freedom for those forced to pay for it.