by Kate McFarland | Nov 24, 2016 | News
British journalist and broadcaster Paul Mason, author of Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future, recently delivered a lecture in Amsterdam in which he points out the need for a universal basic income as a partial solution to changes in the economy due to new technologies. He raises related concerns in an article in The Guardian published shortly thereafter.
On October 25, author Paul Mason delivered a lecture at the De Balie culture center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, wherein he argues that technological advancement has been not only correlated with but in fact a cause of economic stagnation. He attributes this to several characteristics of new information technologies: the ability to automate more jobs and job tasks, the ability to produce and reproduce goods at very low (even zero) marginal cost, and the ability to combine data through networks to generate new goods not reflected in standard measures of economic growth.
In addressing how the left should respond, Mason says, “Our long-term aim should be to push more and more economic activity [to be] done outside the market and the state.” This requires, in part, that we “end [the] reliance on wages for work.” In this context, he continues: “We need quickly to pursue the experiments with the universal basic income … and aim within 10 years for states to be in a position to roll out the policy itself.”
He goes on to add, however, that UBI alone is insufficient; the state, for instance, should also provide “cheap basic goods” (he mentions housing, healthcare, education, and transportation) and promote open source and non-profit businesses.
The entire lecture, along with the Q&A session, can be viewed below. Mason has also published a text version of his lecture on Medium.
https://vimeo.com/188859000#t=8m42s
In an October 31 article in The Guardian, Mason again broached UBI as a potential solution to technological unemployment — predicting a world in which smart technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, cause paid work to become scarce and sporadic. Here, in passing, Mason also links UBI to the potential fulfillment of Marx’s vision of a society in which people are free to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner” without ever assuming an occupational identity as hunter, fisher, cattle-rearer, or critic.
References
Paul Mason (October 27, 2016) “Postcapitalism [in Amsterdam]” Medium.
Paul Mason (October 31, 2016) “The battle over Uber and driverless cars is really a debate about the future of humanity” The Guardian.
Photo: Paul Mason in 2015, CC-BY-SA-4.0 DTRocks via Wikimedia Commons
by Toru Yamamori | Nov 9, 2015 | News
Leeds Taking Soundings Readers’ Meetings
The date: Monday, November 16th (2015)
The time:6PM
The venue: Broadcasting Place AG10 (opposite the Fenton pub).
The contact: https://www.takingsoundings.org.uk/contact-us/
The organiser’s homepage said, ‘Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism, has attracted a lot of attention, and deservedly so…..The Leeds Taking Soundings group wants to provide an opportunity to discuss what the book is about and how relevant it is.’
The book recommends the implemantation of an unconditional basic income as one of necessary measure during the transition to what the author called ‘PostCapitatalism’ from capitalism.
by Toru Yamamori | Nov 4, 2015 | News
Postcapitalism: Paul Mason Lecture
The date: 18 November 2015
The time: 6.30-8pm
The Venue: Old Theatre, LSE Campus, London.
This event is free and open to all however a ticket is required, only one ticket per person can be requested.
The contact: events@lse.ac.uk or 0207 955 6043.
The detail can be found here.
Paul Mason advocates an unconditional basic income in his recent book.
by Toru Yamamori | Nov 2, 2015 | News
Post-Capitalism 2015: Paul Mason Talk and Film Screening of Boom Bust Boom with a Producer Q&A
The date: 6 November 2015
The time: 18:00 – 21:00
The venue: Lecture Theatre A Rose Bowl
Leeds Beckett University
The contact: Katy Shaw (katy.shaw@leedsbeckett.ac.uk)
The detail can be found here.
Paul Mason advocates an unconditional basic income in his recent book.
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 15, 2015 | News
Paul Mason, the award-winning economics editor of Channel 4 News, argues in favour of a basic income in his new book entitled PostCapitalism: A guide to our future, published in 30th July 2015 by Allen Lane, London.
Neoliberalism is broken, Mason argues, and we have the chance to create a new global economy which he calls ‘Postcapitalism’. He gives three reasons why this is possible: information technology is reducing the need for work; the abundance of information goods is undermining the market-based pricing mechanism which relies on scarcity; collaborative production is rising.
A basic income play a key role in Mason’s argument for the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Implementing it could ‘socialize the costs of automation’ by formalizing ‘the separation of work and wages’, while subsidizing ‘the transition to a shorter working week, or day, or life’.
What makes Mason’s argument unique among the many other existing arguments for a basic income, is that a basic income will be possible only during the process of transition and will disappear when the transition to post-capitalism is completed.
‘The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it takes to produce what humanity needs. Once this happens, the tax base in the market sector of the economy would be too small to pay for the basic income. Wages themselves would increasingly be either social – in the form of collectively provided – or disappear. So as a postcapitalist measure, the basic income is the first benefit in history whose success measure is that it shrinks to zero.’
Although Mason referred to a basic income in his contribution to the Guardian several months ago, this book locates a basic income in his wider perspective on history and the current state of capitalism as well as his design for future.
