On October 4, The New York Times published a symposium called “Easing the Pain of Automation”, which raised the issue of universal basic income among other strategies for managing the prospect of technological unemployment.

Contributors included Arun Sundararajan (New York University), Dean Baker (Center for Economic Policy Research), Maya Eden (World Bank), Andy Stern (former President of the Service Employees International Union), Jerry Kaplan (author of Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know), and Andrew McAfee (MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy).

Stern, whose short article is titled “A Universal Basic Income Would Insure Against Job Loss”, argues that the United States should institute a universal basic income now as “insurance against the difficult transition to new jobs or future job losses” (the main thesis of his recent book Raising the Floor).

Other contributors also bring up UBI in passing.

Sundararajan, for instance, mentions UBI as a possible part of a package of policies designed to ensure that the benefits of automation are shared (including also, for example “investments in physical and social infrastructure”):

Fashioning and funding a next-generation social contract, perhaps as a new partnership between the government, the individual and the institution, or maybe even as a universal basic income, may be instrumental in preventing modern-day versions of the Luddite rebellions that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.

Meanwhile, McAfee thinks that our present strategy should be to “give the economy every possible chance to create new types of good jobs”. He sees UBI a possible long-range solution–although one not yet in demand:

We might someday have a super automated, labor-light economy that requires large-scale wealth redistribution via something like a universal basic income. But it’s not here yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s too much work to do right now.

Read the full symposium: 

Easing the Pain of Automation” (October 4, 2016) The New York Times.


Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı

Photo CC BY-SA 2.0 Matthew Hurst