The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?
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I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down (say we run out of fossil fuels without developing a cheap alternative or all our productivity starts going to dealing with run-away climate change) then you just decrease the guaranteed minimum income. --Mark Russo
This.
Immigration can't be effectively regulated by any means available to a moderately democratic state. Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).
That's debatable. But lets assume it for the sake of argument.
> Should immigrants receive the BLS? If yes, you go broke. If no, the immigrants are essentially second-class citizens who have to work for an extremely low wage (because they would have to pay indirectly for the BLS).
I think this claim is overly simplistic; also, I think there are several categories to consider,that I think you've failed to distinguish:
(1) Naturalized citizens should certainly receive whatever universal or guaranteed income is adopted, but immigrants don't become naturalized citizens immediately.
(2) Legal immigrants (the number and characteristics of whom a democratic state can effectively regulate), who are not citizens, probably should be eligible for the support [1] as well, but may be admitted on criteria that include having means of support that make it less likely that immigrant will be a recipient (in a GMI scheme) or net recipient (in a BI scheme).
(3) Non-immigrant, but legally-present workers, visitors, etc. should not generally be eligible for the support. In the case of non-immigrant economic admission categories, adequate support means should be part of the conditions for admission. There may be some exceptions to this (note [1] again may apply to these exceptions) or some categories of non-immigrant admits that are qualified for alternative, status-specific support.
(4) Those illegally present probably should not be eligible for the benefits, but may be eligible for some kind of normalization of status process after which they would become legal immigrants who might be eligible for benefits (to which note [1] would apply again). This normalization process might include up-front payment of a fine for those with means, or commitment to income contingent future payment of the fine with nominal interest, and might even include limitations on benefit eligibility for some period even beyond what regular legal immigrants might face, or commitments to repay any benefits claimed during a certain transitional period on an income-contingent basis. (In general, payment for normalization -- or payment for above-quota legal immigration -- makes sense for individuals who are not personally barred, since limits on levels of such immigration are a cost-of-immigration control measure, and its better for people who want to immigrate to bear the costs then for society to bear the costs of inefficiently trying to keep them out, and then also bearing the costs of them coming in anyway.)
[1] As productivity advances and if the basic support improves to provide more than a very minimal floor, its not entirely unreasonable that non-citizens might recieve less than the full support level, however, possibly based on a sliding scale based on residency; in theoretical terms, in a rent on the commons model, this represents a kind of "vesting" process where the immigrant doesn't become a full "owner" until they are naturalized; in practical terms it provides basic social support but reduces the immediate immigration incentive.
In some sense we are already working towards a global government by claiming human rights to be universal. Out of that endeavour there will (in the far future) emerge a central authority or assembly which effectively enforces human rights and free trade.
In the US, undocumented immigrants have that problem though. Some politicians praised illegal immigration because that's a young, eager workforce with zero rights and benefits.
Also it seems that welfare states can't really save money by excluding immigrants. At the very least the society has to foot the bill for medical emergencies, so declining them prevention and health care may fire backwards. It's hard to "get rid" of the immigrants' children, so you better make sure they get the same education and chances as citizens do (or you end up with a young, poor and extremely discontent minority). If these children aren't put in good schools and fed accordingly, they will also be sicker and less intelligent than their peers.
That's why I think social security is a very profitable business for state and society.
That way, everybody is taxed fairly - proportionally to how much they earn and consume. So, everybody should also be treated fairly - provided all the basic services that the government provides.
The small, rich countries in the north have a lot less problems with controlling immigration, owing to cold or wet borders, low absolute population and low population density. These countries only recently became attractive to immigrants. They may even be able to deport most of the illegal immigrants.
Germany for example can't expulse illegal immigrants on a grant scale. Justified public outrage about "German mass deportations" would even be the least of problems. It's just logistically and politically impossible.
That's why I say that immigration is almost impossible to regulate effectively with the means available to a democratic nation. You'd need some kind of STASI to hunt down hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Nothing would be worth that....
"Universal credit" is an administrative project to coordinate all the existing systems. The disability payments you linked to are subject to increasingly stringent processes which end up declaring terminally ill or permanently severely disabled people "fit to work" and withdrawing the funds they need to survive. This has resulted in some poverty-related deaths and suicides.
Jobseekers' allowance is also subject to heavy scrutiny. I've heard that the best strategy if you have children is to declare yourself self-employed on a zero-hours basis: this stops the jobcentre from hassling you as you no longer count as "unemployed", you just don't have any work. You can then claim "working family tax credits", housing benefit, and child benefit.
I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic doesn't really carry that far anymore, and I'm not sure why.
The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War.
The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game.
I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as described by the right.
- Make college tuition tax deductible
- Don't tax SS income
- Don't tax tips
- Bar surveillance of protests
- Make sure members have time to read legislation
Most everyone I've met thinks these are good ideas.
Anyway, what was inspired by a man that wanted to keep taxes and government power in check was commandeered by low class opportunist like Palin and other neo-cons. This was helped along by the press. The neolib side like MSNBC and the neocon side like Fox News were all to happy to reshape the message. They did this because at the end of the day, neither of these groups liked what the Tea Party originally stood for...less federal government power.
Still, you're point stands. I believe in Adam Smith's invisible hand and I think Ayn Rand's concept of good intentions with unintended consequences can and does lead to disaster. Though, dismissing them as stupid is a little childish.
Full list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislation_sponsored_b...
Class warriors believe in zero-sum games. Wealth inequality to them means that if the rich are getting richer, then everyone else must be getting poorer; never mind that living standards have been improving for virtually everyone over the last 50 years (stagnant in closed societies, but those are far and few).
Also, please don't use terms like "far right". It could mean Ayn Rand or Hitler, and they don't have a thing in common.
(1) Collecting the money used, and (2) And choosing how to spend money for the benefit of the beneficiaries.
Both basic income and traditional welfare rely on government for #1, true. The difference is in #2.
Yes, it is.
> Lots of libertarians (including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) support basic income as a more efficient safety net than government-run programs.
Well, first, "libertarian" says nothing about left vs. right. "Lots of libertarians support one side of the issue" doesn't mean it doesn't split left vs. right.
Second, neither Milton Friedman nor Friedrich Hayek can be counted as current supporters of, well, anything.
To be fair, the left feel this way too.
Both sides compromise, but only when they think they are getting the better deal. There are moderates on both sides who get things done, and there are extremists on both sides that stifle progress. One side is not better at compromise than the other, in any regard. They are all politicians, and they are all motivated by the same thing: power and self fulfillment.
public opinion is plastic, especially when faced with real world pain
Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.
I get the impression you're wanting to provide standardized essentials, a room, 5 shirts, 5 pants, government cheese. This invariably leads to weird market issues, people want more of X so they sell off some of Y - for example, using foodstamps to buy steak, then selling it in the parking lot for a big discount. Why bother with that administrative hassle, and innefficiency? the vast majority of people want what they want, and balance their resources as well as they can. The biggest complaint about US welfare is it's so inflexible. "Easy" to get food, but sometimes people need extra cash to fix their car. That's pretty much impossible in the current system.
However that is not desirable in this case since it makes it too easy to live on government money with little incentives to take whatever job you can. If you lived in a government room, got your government clothing and ate in your government chow hall/mess tent/whatever then you could get a benefit out of shoveling dogshit for 10usd/hour since you could get a better shirt, a more tasty meal, etc. You can't sell access to a government bed because every person would be entitled to one, you can't sell access to government food if any person could show up and you could sell your government shit, but to whom? That person would also be able to get 5 shirts.
With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table, you would have to provide incentives to work (since it is better for society), etc.
When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work. And it will be an epic achievement, but in the transition period we still have to use the carrot and stick.
The incentive to take whatever job you can is that even if a job pays very little, that's on top of the basic income.
> With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table
No, the whole point of basic income (vs. traditional means-tested welfare) is that you don't have to do that, and that its counterproductive to do it anyway. All you have to check is "are you a citizen [1]". If you are, you get the benefit.
Working under the table is a tax problem, but its a problem that you already have to address for the tax system, not separately for the benefit system since its not relevant to benefit calculations in a BI system.
> When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work.
With BI at the level that can be maintained without utopian level productivity of that type, people will both need to work and be incentivized to do so; there's no need for an explicit stick, relative deprivation is itself a motivator (sure, not everyone will work, and progressively fewer will work as productivity increases through technology and sustainable BI levels increase. But not everyone needs to work, and BI lets market forces drive that.)
[1] or "citizen or legal immigrant" or whatever the status-based qualification is. Income, etc., isn't part of it.
The goal isn't to provide largess (is it?) its to provide the basics with no strings attached free of charge, anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
> "citizen or legal immigrant"
I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals. This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right? Why should specific people starve?
The goal, in my view, of Basic Income is to mitigate the fundamental structural inequity of capitalist markets (particularly in the way that money/commodity exchanges work as a proxy for value/utility), to wit, that such markets weight present utility experienced by market participants by past wealth accumulation, and thus are progressively distortive in terms of distribution of utility.
Providing a basic, no-strings-attached allowance is a means, not an ends.
> anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
As it does in BI -- you have to gain income from market exchange to realize utility beyond that attainable with the BI alone. The difference between BI and your "basic welfare" where the government provides a standard-issue basket of goods and services is that BI is simply additive with other income, whereas the limited exchangeability and substitutability of the standard basket of basic welfare goods and services means that it takes a large additional income to get a small additional benefit, which reduces the incentive to provide additional value since, over some range at the bottom.
> I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals.
BI serving its purpose does not preclude other programs serving people present in the jurisdiction of the nation that aren't subject to it. Nor does the example of potential classifications mean that BI couldn't have a different eligibility rule ("everyone physically present in the national jurisdiction" is also a possible rule.)
> This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right?
There are many moral problems. Not all of them have the same solution.
> Why should specific people starve?
I don't recall arguing that anyone should starve.
Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society and money saved is debt that hasn't been called in, whether inherited or earned. If society has seen vast productivity gains in the interim then of course money earned by mowing someones lawn a 100 years ago would go a lot further today.
I don't see the accumulation or ownership of capital as fundamental structural inequity
Neither.
> IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society
Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange.
That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems.
But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.
Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
People will still die whatever you do (and whether you do it by BI or whether you do it by central purchasing of common goodie baskets) -- probably more in the latter case than the former, for a given expenditure level, because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ.
> What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
People can -- and do -- gamble goods when they don't have cash, and get robbed of goods as well; those aren't problems unique to cash, nor are they problems that central purchasing of common baskets of goods makes any easier to address than distributing cash does.
I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher with more predictable results and mass production (or are we defining costs differently?). Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?
I'm proposing unlimited baskets of goods purely for predictable cost reasons, it doesn't really matter if they gamble them away, although I find it unlikely they'd find any takers since everyone has access to the same baskets.
Welfare is a cost, basic income doesn't seem like it would satisfy that cost in the most efficient way.
There's an agency problem when one actor is making purchasing decisions on behalf of others without any necessary alignment of interests, which, absent other controls (which themselves have a not-insignificant cost, both in terms of administration and in terms of potentially distorting results in other ways), those decisions end up reflecting interests of the decision-maker rather than the nominal beneficiaries -- this is the problem that gives us, on the one hand, outright corruption in government purchasing when there aren't adequate controls, and, where controls are adopted to fight that, frequenly byzantine bureaucratic rules nominally designed to prevent corruption that have the side effects of making both sides of government contracting more costly in administrative terms and effectively restricting government contracting to those entities that specialized in navigating those rules -- restricting competition and decreasing efficiency.
With the central welfare authority deciding what people need, where to source it from, and in what quantities, there are lots of points where either corruption opportunities or expensive corruption controls are necessary; when the only administrative determination that needs to be made is whether straightforward class membership like "citizenship", etc., are met, the number of points at which you either pay the cost of corruption or corruption controls is reduced.
> Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?
IMO, the goal of BI is, on the theoretical side, to address systematic distributional inequities in capitalist markets, and, on the pragmatic side, to provide a glide-path out of an economy oriented around wage labor as the primary source of individual support as automation and other changes render that increasing less viable as a basis for the economy with broad prosperity.
Enabling people to avoid starving in the streets is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for that.
Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.
Incentives to be productive don't go away, can you create something other people want? Art? Literature? Take a loan or find investors. Worst case scenario you end up back on welfare.
Welfare needs to be thought of as a cost, not an investment.
That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high.
One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it.
> Incentives to be productive don't go away
With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.
Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.
More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)
With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.
Yet nobody really suffers like they do today, nobody has to go hungry (this also helps those whoes parents aren't good with money, since they will still get food) nobody has to become homeless.
I'm imagining the urchins living in identical concrete boxes that make up the under-city dwellings, lining up in droves for their government pants.
If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid.
Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.
A minimum income means that it is in everybody who doesn't works interest to raise it, which is what will happen (because that is what will win elections) which will cause more people to not work, which will further the pressure.
This will banckrupt any state that starts down that path, assuming you set the initial income about what 10% or so makes, which is typically enough to swing an election.
Or better yet, let's vote on issues collectively and do away with representation system. We have the internet. Then the majority of people who make more than the minimum income will vote out the ones who do.
The root issue is that votes should be linked to net tax dollars paid - the more you pay the more you get to decide.
Even if I bought into the narrative of the end of useful labor, which I don't, and even if I bought into the narrative of people who can't be trained, which I don't, the economics of this don't make any sense to me.
I wouldn't oppose it, though. Instead let's get a few dozen small experiments going, see how they work out. Even bad ideas are good if you can learn from them. The real enemy to progress is the idea that we are forced to either reject new ideas like this in their entirety or embrace them at some huge scale.
That decision would have lots of consequences. People usually live slightly beyond their means. Decrease their means, and suddenly the majority of your population is living way beyond their means.
Any guaranteed minimum income can't ever go down for this reason. You could try to drop it, but then you'll wind up paying them the same amount anyway in welfare, because many more people will be seeking welfare to supplant their missing guaranteed income.
There've been brief periods in US history where that was true (where the savings rate was negative), but that usually been when there's been an economic downturn [1] in the wake of stronger economic times, and in any case relies on credit availability or savings to make possible.
A drop in guaranteed minimum income or basic income doesn't mean welfare automatically reappears, it means that the standard of living drops for those dependent on the GMI/BI. But that's what you'd expect in a broad-based economic downturn -- the mean standard of living drops.
(Even if you keep GMI/BI at the same nominal level, lower productivity will increase the inflationary effect of GMI/BI, which will have the same net effect as cutting the nominal level -- its just that price levels will go up rather than payments going down.)
[1] which may include an "effective" downturn for most people during what is in aggregate terms an expansion, but where narrow distribution means that most individuals/households are making less with a small class making all the gains.
Translation: The poor can no longer afford food, because there's no welfare program and their guaranteed minimum has dropped.
Maybe they entered into a predatory loan situation where they can't simply break their contract and have to keep paying a monthly minimum, so there's not enough money for food + payment each month.
Maybe it's a standard loan situation, and now their car is repo'd because they've missed a bunch of monthly car payments. "Just sell the car and get a cheaper one!" Nobody's buying it because the economy is in a downturn, which is why the guaranteed minimum dropped in the first place. So now they can't get to whatever employment they decided to have for themselves, which further reduces their income to a level that they can't even afford food. And then there's no welfare program to turn to. So now their family is in an oh-crap situation and there isn't any government solution.
There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles. Any new system has to have fallbacks so that the poor can still feed themselves. Not "feed themselves in an idealized scenario where they don't have any existing debts."
> There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles.
Poor people not being able to afford adequate food during an economic downturn -- or even an economic boom -- on their own (including with whatever government assistance is provided) isn't, however, one of them. During good economic times, some of that gap is covered by private charities (especially for the poor in relatively affluent areas), but (1) that goes away during economic downturns, and (2) that's not something that BI/GMI replaces, anyway.
Sure, lets question if alternatives to the status quo do what we want, but lets also not pretend the status quo does things that it doesn't.
And yes, I'm pretty sure that the USA is the only country in the world where "People usually live slightly beyond their means".
^ Citation needed. Maybe it's become common since the advent of easily available credit, but for most of human history it was physically impossible to live beyond your means.
Also, how does this propagate after a few generations? We can already see the welfare lifestyle being inherited - will this be any better? Especially since there is much less reason to try to be better under this system.
For the record, I favor a (reasonably sized) basic income, and would object to a minimum income.
Silly but simple thought experiment: - 10 people on an island - 2 people can pick enough coconuts for all 10 to eat well - Using a ladder, productivity picks up enough so 1 person can pick enough coconuts for all 10 - A coconut picking robot is developed, picking enough coconuts for all 10 The coconut picking robot's productivity can't scale indefinitely but it doesn't have to.
I am sure you can see the implications of using robots in the real world.
Edit: Speaking of babies, prof. Hans Rosling's TED talks are mandatory. http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
Anyway, I think the first people to lose their jobs would be the ladder makers.
Second, China solved the overpopulation problem quite well with the one-child policy (maybe too well, even).
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There are equally likely explanations for people sitting around drinking. Maybe they don't work first shift. Maybe they're on vacation. Maybe they're disabled for some reason.
The fact that you leap to "oh the government pays them to be unemployed" is on you, not the government or them.
(also note that it's increasingly difficult to get SNAP benefits in states due to budget cut backs)
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Meaningless assertions like "the education system has to change to prepare young people for a world in which most of today’s jobs are automated" don't begin to answer the real question - how are we to be prepared for this change? What are we expected to do with our time without paid work? How does an economy run if a significant number of people are not earning more than a basic wage?
Fascinating subject, superficial and unhelpful article.
What would you do if you had infinite free time? I would spend more time exploring my city, read more books, and finally get around to my garden project. In fact, I fantasize about retirement all of the time because I imagine myself doing these things.
On a long enough timeline...
The reasoning for this is very simple. It's why the Luddites were wrong then and the Luddites are wrong now. When a job is automated away, the benefit is distributed among three areas: 1. Automation company profit 2. Automation user profit 3. End customer costs. The net benefit is always positive, or else the automation would not be used in the first place. These 3 groups do not take their earnings and hide it under the mattress. This newly produced value has to be spent somewhere. So we end up with fields that were historically not viable, but because automation lowers the overhead of doing other things, now are viable. These fields recreate the labor requirements "lost" to automation.
The question, of course, is how long it will take for unskilled laborers to retool, and what will they do in the time between jobs? Perhaps there will be technical solutions to speed the retooling process.
Yeah, not really. Capital gained the upper hand through systematic lobbying/corruption of government and trade policy. It wasn't robots in Wisconsin that took American jobs, it was Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Guatemalan and other factory workers in factories built with American money.
This article is not really supposed to be a serious analysis of technological trends. It's mostly insinuation (wealth inequality is getting worse and robots are getting better. coincidence?), anecdotes about robots and a survey asking a bunch of experts what they think will happen in the future (this has never been a reliable way of predicting the future).
Now for the really interesting question: why does this article exist?
This article decrying the 'new luddites' exists for mostly the same reason why somebody paid a bunch of money for this advert:
https://i.imgur.com/VZAEg5b.jpg
The reason this meme is really pushed, in both adverts like the one above, talking heads on TV and editorials like this (hastily researched; mostly cribbed from the output of think tanks) is largely to keep workers afraid and insecure.
Insecure workers keep their head down, don't strike, don't demand raises and work overtime without complaint. All of these things are good for profits.
This isn't to say that automation won't make job roles obsolete, just that its purported effect on net job destruction (i.e. jobs lost - jobs gained) is likely to be significantly overstated for very clear political reasons - keeping the working classes disenfranchised.
To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine, that's the pattern in the world so far.
A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.