In this new book, work, technology and society are discussed through a series of view points, given by several authors (e.g.: Matt Zwolinski, Michael Cholbi, Andrea Veltman, Evelyn Forget, among others). Universal Basic Income is a policy described at the center of this crucial societal challenge, analyzed by the authors in its wide implications. Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber are the editors.
In the summary it can be read:
Technological advances in computerization and robotics threaten to eliminate countless jobs from the labor market in the near future. These advances have reignited the debate about universal basic income. The essays in this collection offer unique and compelling perspectives on the ever-changing nature of work and the plausibility of a universal basic income to address the elimination of jobs from the workforce. The essays address a number of topics related to these issues, including the prospects of libertarian and anarchist justifications for a universal basic income, the positive impact of a basic income on intimate laborers such as sex workers and surrogates, the nature of “bad work” and who will do it if everyone receives a basic income, whether a universal basic income is objectionably paternalistic, and viable alternatives to a universal basic income. This book raises complex questions and avenues for future research about universal basic income and the future of work in our increasingly technological society. It will be of keen interest to graduate students and scholars in political philosophy, economics, political science, and public policy who are interested in these debates.
Transportation is not the only sector where automation is eating away jobs. Large commercial ports are also being hit hard, as recent events in Vancouver show. Workers at the Port of Vancouver went on strike last month, due to a pressing issue on automation with the employer Global Containers Terminal (GCT). According to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), pressing automation technology has the capacity “to eliminate 80 to 90 percent of the [human] labour requirements”.
McKinsey & Company consulting firm has studied global port operations and concluded that automated ports are safer, more predictable, much cheaper to operate (25 to 55%) and more productive (10 to 35%). Although significant technical hurdles still exist, it seems only a matter of time until these predictions come true, especially when, actually, a few automation efforts have already been proven successful (e.g.: fully automated port in Los Angeles-Long Beach, semi-automated facilities in New York-New Jersey, and Virginia, USA).
Worker unions in this field naturally oppose any suggestion of automation, for the obvious reason that it might displace their jobs, from which workers extract their livelihood. However, falling costs of automation technologies is quickly shortening the gap to economic implementation, and so human labour is losing ground. This shouldn’t be a problem, of course, if human jobs where not tightly linked to access resources. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has eloquently stated, earlier this year, “our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources”, and “we live in a society where if you don’t have a job you are left to die”. Although that reality could be more sharply defined in the United States than, for instance, Finland, the link exists virtually everywhere in the so-called “developed” world, but fortunately is starting to be contested as the global discussion around basic income progresses.
But maybe there should be no content here, between ILWU members and GCT, or any other worker-employer dispute over automation. Maybe jobs should not be the sole vehicle to get the necessary money to access the necessary Earth resources to live on. As Scott Santens has put it, on a by-now famous writing: “It’s time for technology to serve all humankind. Jobs are for machines. Life is for people.”
Mike Dunleavy, sitting on top of an oversized Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend check. Picture credit to: Anchorage Daily News.
Basic income yes, but not at any cost. The alarm comes from Alaska, where governor Mike Dunleavy has announced cutting his 2020 state budget by as much as $410 million, one-third of which will fall upon the University of Alaska. To the University, that represents 41 percent of its own annual budget, which means that, if applied, these cuts would render the state’s university unrecognizable. Dunleavy calls this move a “policy choice” linked to his professed promise to increase the Permanent Fund dividend Alaskans benefit each year.
Arguably, consequences for the Alaskan economy, and particularly for the state university, would be devastating.
The University President, James R. Johnsen, has stated that this “will strike an institutional and reputational blow from which we may likely never recover.” And the implications for the wider Alaskan economy and even throughout the world may be far reaching since research has shown that investing in universities has considerable positive effects on the economy, and also because the University of Alaska is a core centre of research for Arctic issues. This is particularly important these days, in the middle of a climate crisis).
These budget cuts from Dunleavy’s Office are, however, rooted in a deeper rationale and tradition. That is because politics in Alaska of late have been largely tied to oil money, and the collection of taxes has been scarce, or nonexistent.
Michael Howard, professor at the University of Maine and specialist in basic income related policies, has stated on Facebook:
“A better framing of the problem in Alaska would include Alaska’s lack of an income tax, reliance on oil revenue to fund state government, and the steady decline of the oil revenue. Alaskans don’t have to abandon the dividend in order to fund the University. They just need to pay income taxes like people in most other [US] states. However, this story does vividly illustrate that universal cash payments in practice always need to be evaluated in comparison to the competing policies for government spending and the budget constraints. Slashing the university budget by 41% ought not to be an option.”
All ten candidates at the Democratic Deabte for the United States Presidential elections.
“It is not left, it is not right, it is forward”. Andrew Yang drank from Scott Santens famous words, to finish off his contribution to the Democratic Debate to the United States Presidential elections in 2020. The political debate, held on June 27th 2019, featured all 10 Democratic Party candidates who qualified to be in the televised debate (more than 65000 donors). Yang’s Freedom Dividend was voiced, for the first time ever, on a US national debate stage, shortly described as a 1000 $/month for every adult citizen, unconditionally.
Although severely time restrained to hush in his ideas – he was only allowed 2 minutes and 50 seconds of speaking time, the lowest of all candidates present in the debate – Yang succeeded in the attempt to plant the seed of basic income among the American People. People are definitely interested in basic income, or at least the basic income as Andrew Yang conceives it, considering the spikes in views of his intervention clips, posted by NBC, which surpassed those of any other candidate. Soon after the debate, Google searches for “basic income” spiked to about 300% of the average search results for those terms.
In March, Yang’s candidacy had just surpassed the 65000-donor mark; now it has gone over 130000 donors, qualifying him to further debates, to be held in September and October this year. Also, his platform’s list of followers shows no signs of slowing down, having gained more than 100000 new followers, just for having participated in this debate. Whether or not Andrew Yang will become the next President of the United States, his candidacy has already been historical, by definitely sketching basic income on the public and political arena.
Yang’s contributions to the debate can be seen on this short video:
In this article, Daniel Mermelstein delves into the relationship between basic income and cryptocurrencies. The combination of these two innovative, by some considered radical approaches to social security and money, can rock the foundations of most people’s beliefs.
Starting with cryptocurrency, Mermelstein opens with a brief history of Bitcoin, addressed how to has become more mainstream thanks to the bitcoin gordon ramsay and other celebrities have advertised or talked about, the first computer-based coin to overcome the problem of “double-spend”. This was a major step, since in the digital world it is very easy to just make copies of, say, 5€ bills. The process of making transactions with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is very complex, involving “difficult cryptographic mathematics”, but in the end it boils down to a few crucial characteristics: anyone can access to bitcoins (by opening an account named “wallet” or through cryptocurrency trading portals like kryptoportal.pl), all transactions are public and verifiable (on the blockchain), it is corruption-proof (internal cryptographically linked kind of structure) and the supply of money is known and controlled. It is also independent of governments, banks, rating agencies and other institutional edifices which are often prone to corruption and secrecy.
Although Mermelstein acknowledges basic income and cryptocurrencies as foreign concepts for many people, he assures that as time goes on more people will learn about crypto, find the best crypto alerts apps, invest, and buy/sell things using it. Let us refresh our memory with the fact that the idea of basic income is already imbued in social policy programs such as Child Benefits, and that other, non-state tokens (forms of money) have already been in circulation for quite some time, without many surprises (e.g.: private “loyalty card points”, “air miles”). So, he points out that cryptocurrencies can actually help implementing basic income, since the former can be designed in such a way to deliver basic income main attributes: universality, unconditionality, individuality, money-based and periodic. As the only operational example, he cites Manna, which can be traded by other currencies (such as the US dollar) and claims a 100 000 users base at the moment. Manna features Eric Stetson as CEO, and Andrew Yang as one of the consultants.
As for challenges and the path going forward, Mermelstein lists a few hurdles still to overcome by cryptocurrencies, especially in the attempt of dispensing a basic income. One such difficulty is guaranteeing individuality, since at the moment it is very difficult to connect a ‘wallet’ (as in the Bitcoin system) to a single person. This is handy for those buying cryptocurrency australia has to offer, but not so much for basic income purposes. Another problem has to do with universal adoption, since these systems require, at least, an electricity power supply, a computer and/or a smartphone and an internet connection. This leaves out, at the moment, a large proportion of the world’s population. Also, scale can be a problem in operating cryptocurrencies, given the amount of data necessary to guarantee accuracy and tamper-free operation. If a large segment of the population uses such a system as Bitcoin to its daily expenses, there isn’t, at present, enough available computing power to guarantee a smooth operation. That only becomes a problem, though, if in fact enough people adopt a cryptocurrency as their preferred medium of exchange. Adoption, on the other hand, is always critical, since, at core, it is a trust issue. Finally, and apart from the corruption-free design of these new currency systems, there is always some core group of developers, who, especially in the case of large-scale adoption, will be targeted for scrutiny and fairness.
The initiative calls for the application of a Carbon Fee, collected by European Countries, to be redistributed entirely through the general population, with no attached conditions. The scheme rests on three main pillars: the collection of the Carbon Fee, as upstream as possible in the fossil fuel economic tree; the distribution of the Dividend to European Union (EU) citizens, with only a small part of it used to pay for its administrative costs (governments do not keep any of the collected revenue); the introduction of a Border Carbon Adjustment, guaranteeing that EU businesses and industries do not suffer from unfair competition from countries with no such carbon fee and dividends policies (pollution intensive products entering the EU would pay a tax and exports from the EU would be refunded).
The scheme is based on solid research concerning carbon emissions scenarios, climate change and carbon pricing in order to reach Paris Agreement goals (for the EU). According to the IPCC, carbon prices should gradually be raised to around 13 times what they are today, so that a 2ºC maximum increase in global temperature is attained. Naturally that only rising prices on carbon-intensive products and services is regressive on its own, tending to hit harder on the vulnerable and poor. Hence redistributing the proceeds through the entire population ensures that lower income people will afford to pay for the goods and services they need, and the wealthier – who usually bear a higher per-capita carbon footprint – will generally lose out economically under this policy.
According to the initiative instigators, there is wide support for this kind the general Carbon Fee & Dividend policy, which they hope will be materialized in the collection of signatures process referred to above. This support has been voiced by scientists, economists, NGO’s, industry and EU citizens.
More information at:
“Support the European Citizens’ Climate Initiative” website
