Universal Basic Income + Automation + Plutocracy = Dystopia
caitlinjohnstone.com
caitlinjohnstone.com
UBI eliminates the last bargaining chip the masses have - labor. Without workers, there can be no strikes. With everyone dependent on the UBI for livelihood, nobody could afford to oppose the system.
This is what the "plutocrats" are after. Masses without a lever to organize.
I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, it's just that the article really doesn't get to the point.
The thing is, the rich only have the threat of violence then to keep poorer masses in check. Though there are many kinds of violence, disease, starvation, homelessness.
The thing is, without the dictates of the rich, there will be places they would be unable or unwilling to reach. There, a socialism of even purer kind could start given enough automation. The problem would be hydraulic despotism. Resources like water, oil, metals would be hard to get.
Much like what happened during French revolution.
UBI removes that risk.
I'm in favour of an UBI, but one that's really universal (rich and poor get the same amount of money, forever) and one that goes together with a real public system including public universal healthcare, public schools, public infrastructures - roads, railroads - and trasnportation, similar to the ones we have in many European countries, but improved.
He is also for universal healthcare. We already have public schools and roads, but perhaps I'm missing a larger point you are making here.
UBIs have to be universal (most proposals are not Universal, they are just Basic Incomes, Italy just created a fake one called "reddito di cittadinanza" literally translated as "citizen's income")
We may have public healthcare and schools, but most parts of the world, including the US, don't.
We also have universal public welfare, unemployment benefits, public housing, public transports, in Italy we also have mandatory car insurance, it means everybody has to pay for it, it also means that the prices are heavily regulated and must be affordable and - most of all - non discriminatory (you can't set a price based on personal data and background of the single client and there's an authority reviewing the methodology).
These are all things that in US don't exist or are seen as "socialist", hence bad.
If you add an UBI but don't fundamentally change the way the system works it won't make a difference, companies will just adjust the prices accordingly because more money will be in consumer's pockets (the market is always right! right?).
The only real point I can make is improving on the things that already work, just throwing money at problems won't solve problems.
If you assume prices work according to supply and demand, incorrect. The reason for this is that people also earn money from sources other than UBI.
To give an example, let's say I give every single person in the US, including children, $5. Will companies raise their prices accordingly? Maybe, but the difference in GDP is tiny. The difference in the purchasing power of the average 10 year old with no pocket money though, is vast, since they previously had $0 and now they have $5.
Similarly, UBI will probably result in price increases, but those will be less than the increase in purchasing power of those most in need of UBI.
I never said raise, but adjust.
Amazon will want those UBI money, they'll want you to spend money on their website instead of going to the dentist and we know they are good at it (too much if you ask me).
If the dentist is already paid by taxes, you could have both.
Not possible? Not technologically yet. But how many 'normal' people complain about there being 'too many people'? And if someone just has to talk to fancy Alexa on steroids to get whatever they want, why should they keep me around? Adulation? Holographics, gynoids, and there's and app for that.
After the explosion of neo-racism and fascism and similar ideologies in recent years I found myself wondering what would happen if liberalism did in fact fall deeply out of fashion. We have panopticon mass surveillance, bioengineering, drones, and loads of other super-technologies that could allow genocide on an incredible scale with almost no realistic possibility of resistance. Some DIY guerilla group or gun nut militia would last minutes against a modern army that truly did not show restraint because their actual goal is extermination.
Now throw migrant crises created by climate change in there. Look at how a relatively small migrant crisis in Europe helped resurrect fascism across all of the West and imagine a migrant wave 10X larger.
I could definitely see some future gangster plutocracy deciding it's time to follow "race realism" and the cult of IQ to its logical conclusion.
Comfortable conditions for living and food production are in synthetic environments only the rich can afford
If a disastrous climate change scenario does unfold it could be true that large farming regions will be devastated, etc., but those people will not just sit and die. They will try to migrate. They may also engage in aggressive warfare themselves, "raiding" as we call it among our closest genetic relatives. Most deaths will be from war and genocide, not starvation.
If this coincides with a true abandonment of liberal humanistic attitudes in advanced nations I could definitely see the top ~10% of humanity dispatching the other 90% in an organized fashion. Any members of the elite who voiced opposition would join the condemned.
Smaller more isolated versions of that have happened before. Never before have humans had the power to scale it.
BTW I think that's why people are so spooked by the Nazi holocaust vs what Stalin and Mao and many others did. The Nazi body count was not the highest, but the chilling thing is how they applied modern industrial and management practices to deliberate murder at scale. I suspect it's so chilling because of it hints at dark possible future scenarios. Imagine Hitler and the SS with China's surveillance state and CRISPR-CAS9.
Advances in automated warfare will keep the rich safe and they wont have to get their hands dirty.
They'll own the communication infrastructure so if things get bad first will be absolute surveillance then they can just pull the plug on communications if the outsiders get too rowdy.
Self sustaining means you cant use scorched earth tactics. Internal power generation so no blackouts. Internal food production so no attrition warfare.
Be very careful what ideas you invest time and energy in perpetuating. Think through the consequences first. What would happen if this were actually believed by many people and by powerful people?
If the dominant idea is that the value of a human being is quantitatively measurable as their contribution to GDP or their IQ, we get a future like we are discussing. Racism is the same idea but with a much less sophisticated metric.
Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops.
The masses are mostly average and below. They are the people living paycheck to paycheck, the working among them are on the verge of employment induced burnout, and almost all of them have no savings, and little / no access to capital. They are myopic and/or willfully blind. They have little to no situational awareness and don't solve problems until it's too late.
They are incapable, vision-less, disorganized and most importantly: resourceless - how are they going to just go and build a utopia?
The top 10% will get elysium and the 90% will get nothing.
> Im not sure that there's the stomach for active oppression throughout the whole of the ruling class.
Not personally but oppression is automated, thats the entire point. The rich live in their gated community bubble, and automation and security takes care of things at the boarders.
> Additionally, comms being what they are, cheap mesh networks can win through attrition so the masses can simply go off channel and avoid monitoring. From there the only way to find out what they're doing is through trust ie. Be (or pretend but then the entry bar gets raised) a good actor at which point the oppression stops
Mesh networks can be DoS'd easily if they become a problem. I know, I built and sold my first startup doing this.
On a macro scale this is what colonization is, specifically that trait of going off to find some land to make your fortune. Historically this has worked well, excluding the bit where indigenous populations were wiped out. Realistically here we're talking about getting the leftovers resource-wise.
I'd be willing to bet that despite automation, not all the ruling class could rest on their conscience ie. the Elon Musks, Bill Gates etc. of this world would be dissenting, and in a position to act as visionaries (in fact they would likely be polarized by others' actions) to help build out alternative infrastructure. This solves the directionless+resourceless issues you've raised.
Mesh networks can be DoS'd but that'd require active oppression to shut down the mesh, and if that happens, we get two possibilities, either you get help from aforementioned visionaries (wired network build-out) or you run a separate mesh, and keep doing so every time it's brought down.
Cost is affordable with say esp32s and lipo (the attrition aspect I mentioned), bandwidth is a different matter but then we're talking about jamming rather than DoS.
100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions.
Climate change, soil depletion, water crisis, unaffordable food are not "just happening".
The ongoing genocide is caused by wealth inequality.
And furthermore, rich are perfectly capable of science, I bequeathe to you a gentleman scientist archetype.
Our holy books still recommend that we be fruitful and multiply. We still have systems in place (like social security) that will fall apart unless we can maintain unbounded growth. Our society is riddled will all of these leftovers from a time when having more people actually was a good idea. Those memes aren't serving us anymore, and evolution will prune them with time. It probably won't be a comfortable time.
Cultural attitudes towards population aside, the nightmare scenario you describe is unfolding in tiny little pockets all around us. There's no need to nuke the poor people all at once when you can just let them starve one at a time. Nobody needs to make the single big hugely unethical decision of genocide, they just need to repeatedly make the small mildly unethical decision of apathy.
I'm hoping that we can make the former into a stronger effect than the latter, but I'm not optimistic.
The Nordic countries have experienced this problem firsthand, where in spite of a safety net and generous funding of arts, culture, and leisure in areas suffering from high unemployment, a substantial number of people still prefer to drink their lives away or hang out on internet fora to complain about how they feel no purpose in their lives.
This is a logical fallacy. It can be claimed that any human right can make the population complacent: 5 days work week, public healthcare and so on and there is no evidence to prove it's true.
On the contrary, it's well known that people with free time can become socially and politically engaged, while people working 2 jobs have no time for it.
> They can’t organize labor strikes if they have no labor.
The idea of UBI isn’t to make it so that the masses never work again. The idea is so they don’t starve and die when between jobs. It’s to give people a real chance to live their lives while training or retooling. Money gives people choices and options. Today’s lack of choices for people at the lowest levels of income amounts to slavery.
Low income people can and will still work under a UBI system. So I’m not sure the article’s central thesis makes sense.
12k in the US is not so bad for costs other than healthcare (lots of families of 3 are living on $35,000).
Lots may be doing it, but you'd be living in poverty your whole life. There's no way a family of 3 could get by on 35k a year without accumulating debt.
12k hardly covers just your rent in many places in the US
Expenses do not scale down linearly with household size.
Turns out that has a real impact on expenses even when they aren't family.
[1] with the sole exception of “celebrity”, a role that can’t scale
Is our current system captured by the wealthy and special interests? Absolutely, and his Democracy Dollars and Ranked Choice Voting policies directly address those, and as a supporter I'm more excited about those two positions then the UBI as I think it is even more of a structural change.
I highly recommend his talk with Lawrence Lessig, who has been fighting the good fight against corruption for years.
On the other hand, washing out lobbyist money with people's Democracy Dollars could be a game changer. And since the politicians benefit from this arrangement too, it has a decent chance of getting their support. I imagine it'd be hard for the lobbyists to lobby against this one.
You need to actually argue against the principles not just assume bad faith of those supporting it.
A UBI seems like it should be more like a social assistance program where the people receiving it get to decide how to allocate the funds instead of a bureaucratic institution.
I guess maybe utopia + plutocracy = dystopia?
Democracy Dollars and some of Yangs other policies directly address this.
His whole platform is about giving people more individual freedom and power.
Even if the wealth tax could go negative at low income levels, it doesn't seem obvious that this would _augment_ UBI.
"Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data"
https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/
[1] creator of "Doodling in math class", "Pi Is (still) Wrong", and other fun math videos
Some of the best things about society are that plutocrats can be brought to justice and market forces can bring financial empires down. These are extremely critical sorts of checks & balances on plutocracy, and we need to entrench them more and more, to make it harder and harder for plutocrats to hide from legal or financial consequences.
And we won't stop, because people would rather kill each other over their creature comforts than come to the realization that all people are inherently equal and we need to share a limited pool of resources.
There is no solution and this will all end in tears.
Relevant reading: Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future
1. All resources are distributed for labor in an open market. 2. All resources are held, some are distributed for labor in an open market, some are distributed for UBI. 3. All resources are held, there is little to no open market left, the rest is distributed via UBI. 4. UBI now require certain conditions to be claimed, such as participation in various labor programs, or, perhaps, whatever program you are assigned to. The open market has collapsed or is too small to offer a meaningful alternative to, effectively, economically enforced labor.
Think of an economy like in Player Piano: only the engineers have jobs. The rest 'work' for their pay, but have no agency.
No it does not. That the idea of universal basic income. Everyone gets it.
We have seen this happen, generally with good intentions, in Federal funding for roads and such.
I'm not saying this course of events is inevitable, only that it is very possible to imagine. Particularly now, as many of our enshrined institutions are being corroded.
seems like a strong claim about something that hasn't actually been tried at scale afaik.
I wrote a pretty lengthy article about this & the evolution of wealth: http://free.eco .
Government: UBS
Marketplace: UBI
Here are some specific silly parts:
"This means we can predict that a universal basic income will just self-adjust to treat $1K/ month as the new $0."
"At present in the United States, there are more empty homes than homeless people on the street. The flaw with the current economic model is that if these homes were given out, that would incentivize people to become homeless in order to get free housing, and a free house is a loss in profit."
Dynastic wealth is what creates civilizational rot. A mobile populace with fluctuating power centers spells dynamism.
Let us think of all the poor children born to rich families who would not get the chance to tell the story of their self-made wealth.
I think this will lead to the end of the human race. We are becoming useless, and have already stopped reproducing. Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand. When it fails, the remaining people will die, or start everything again without any technology.
Like a shovel or whatever. If you assume an order of magnitude drop in population, there would be plenty of refined metals just sitting around to maintain quite a base of simpler technology.
I also wonder if we will see cultures/groups emerge that keep on reproducing at high growth even in the face of economic security.
You could also, you know, stop producing stuff at that point?
> Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand.
I think the human population might shrink to somewhere around 10-100 million over the next 10,000 years. It's hard to conceptualize, but humans were around 10,000 years ago, and we'll be around 10,000 years from now.
I personally believe that we're heading towards a utopian future, although there will be a lot of serious bumps along the way. Maybe we'll agree to maintain a population of 10 million humans on earth, and there will be many more living on interstellar arks that are slowly heading towards distant planets. We will have achieved immortality, so the birth rate will be very close to zero.
Everything depends on whether the machines can fix and improve themselves, and do we want to give them that level of independence. If they're independent, I'm not sure if they would want to keep us alive.
I think we should aim for as many people as possible, but currently it seems a lost cause.