by Guest Contributor | Mar 28, 2018 | Opinion
Written by Michael Laitman
Michael Laitman
Sadly, 33,000 Toys ‘R’ Us employees are about to be let go. They’ll pack that family vacation picture from their office wall in a brown cardboard box, take a toy or two for keepsakes, and, begrudgingly, go home. They will be joining a growing list of hundreds of thousands of people who are losing their jobs, not because they need to improve their performance or their work ethic, but simply because they are no longer needed.
More and more products are being manufactured using robots, which is more cost-effective for companies, as well as cheaper for consumers, who can order online with a swipe of a finger. Toys ‘R’ Us is only one example of the virtual-technological tsunami that is washing over the business world. It appears in the form giant corporations such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google and their trade partners, trampling every area of commerce possible: retail, banking, clothing, food, advertising and more. This wave doesn’t stop at the private sector; it’s washing away the public sector as well. For instance, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon are already on a joint venture to reinvent healthcare.
While it may seem like a silent revolution, these changes promise a socio-economic earthquake the likes of which humanity has never seen before. The virtual-technological future is gradually taking over the very foundations of the global economy and businesses are having to adjust to the change. From small things like providing virtual collaboration training for their employees to implementing more efficient computing operations, technology is changing every industry.
It is becoming normal to talk about robots replacing human labor, but we still have not yet acknowledged the magnitude of this change. Many politicians, economists, and analysts are seeing this as another industrial revolution that comes with labor pains, giving birth to a whole slew of new professions, and are predicting that a newly booming economy will emerge as a result. The use of machinery is always needed in manufacturing circles, that is why universal mills, CNC machines, lathe machines, etc. are constantly evolving to assist in as many areas as possible, hopefully not to entirely take over jobs just yet. Machines play a huge part in this industry, no matter how they are used, so it is important for them to function as a unit and provide what is needed of them. When they have to be moved, fixed, or changed, the use of equipment like Custom Skates as well as other supplies, are needed to keep everything efficiently moving along.
Surely, this is an encouraging view, but it is based on a limited understanding of new technologies being developed at an exponential speed. Even today, we could automate 45% of the activities people are paid to perform in the U.S. with existing technologies.
It’s not about the advanced machinery that replaces our hands and feet at work. It’s about the artificial intelligence being developed to gradually replace human intelligence. AI will think creatively, produce, analyze, develop, program, and work many times more efficiently than the most gifted employee, all the while being many times cheaper and easy to operate.
Artificial intelligence can learn and self-upgrade much faster than a person’s ability to retrain, and will eventually replace human labor everywhere: scientists, doctors, programmers, designers, financial experts, human resource managers. Only a fraction of the workforce will be required to operate and calibrate the various smart machines and advanced software.
Let’s Revolutionize Society – Without the Pitchforks
If you can fathom the future of technology, you can immediately spot the upcoming social crisis. Masses will go into indefinite unemployment, and modern economics will have no answers for them. Current economic models can hardly deal with a 15% unemployment rate. What’s going to happen when we hit 30%, 40% and 50% unemployment? That is unaccounted for in current economics.
If we settle for positive thinking, hoping this upheaval will somehow result in a new booming economy, we run the risk of a mass unemployment crisis. If masses of people have no hope of providing for their basic necessities, they will not sit calmly at home. Without hope, people could default to violence, extremism and support of radical leaders who will offer economic safety in order to come to power, as we have seen in the past.
Alternatively, if we plan in advance, we can revolutionize society – without a revolution. The sooner we acknowledge the inevitable redesign of our socio-economic infrastructure, in a way that jobs will no longer exist in the same sense as before, we will come to grips with the necessity to provide for the basic needs of all members of society.
Whether we do it through some form of Universal Basic Income, or any other technical mechanism, we must understand that a change of social values is the core issue at hand: Every country’s leadership must acknowledge that looking out for the basic needs of every citizen-food, shelter, clothing, education and health-is their top priority.
But what will people give back to society? If only few man-hours will be necessary to maintain the machines, what will human beings do? They will be busy “being human,” which means developing themselves, their families, their societies and all that makes us human rather than robots.
The Real Driver of Technology Is Human Evolution
The so-called “technological revolution” is not accidental, and it’s not actually technological. It’s an evolutionary revolution. Its purpose is the evolution of human society. It will help us step out of the endless rat race, fueled by a material obsession that doesn’t actually make us happy; a chase around the clock that has created a society of little cogs in giant corporations, accumulating stress and rust, while losing touch with one another and ourselves.
Instead of investing our collective energy into working like machines, we could be engaging in the only work that makes humans different from machines. In a society freed from the cyclical chase for material acquisition, we would invest a large portion of our time on a daily basis, investigating, exercising, and developing the sense of the natural human connection that binds us together. One method to realize our potential as human beings at the workplace is to engage in a variety of activities that are not directly related to work. Let’s say you’re at an event hosted by Uniqueworld destination management companies or something similar, and you get a glimpse of how employers function outside of the office. This could give you an outlook on what all you can do as an employer that might benefit your company.
When masses of people are doing this regularly-as their new job-a new society will undoubtedly emerge. Its product will be the positive social energy required to preserve societal balance. It will be a society whose members’ daily work is to maintain the sense of unity and solidarity that prevent violence and extremism, allowing human beings to live together in productive peace.
This work can be done in unlimited creative ways, where people can apply their passion and desire, as long as they contribute to a warm social climate. But it has to start from fundamental training and education on the science of human connection, learning how positive social connections make us healthier, happier and better at everything we do.
Surely, all of the above sounds foreign in a world where we have been trained by advertisers to chase things we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t connect with. But when material needs are taken care of, human nature demands a deeper, more meaningful type of satisfaction. It’s no coincidence that happiness studies show time after time that healthy social relations are the number one predictor of human flourishing.
Our evolutionary social development pushes us to utilize our wiring for human connection, to distill it through constant work on our relationships, and evolve to a new social reality. Rather than competing with robots for an old school job, let’s make our job the only function that no robot will ever replace, and find the kind of happiness that money will never buy.
Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
Featured image from Wikipedia.
Editing by Dawn Howard
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 21, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in August 2009.
If I use the phrase “lesson of 1938,” most people will probably think about Britain’s unsuccessful attempt to avoid war with Nazi Germany by giving away a piece of Czechoslovakia. There are important lessons in that event, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
1938 was also an important year in American economic history, and the economic lesson of that year is relevant to our handling of the global recession today. By 1937, the Great Depression had been going on for eight years. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had been stimulating the economy for five years, and they began to show significant signs of working. Industrial production and national income were coming back up. Employment was going back down. The economy appeared to be just about out of the depression—
—and then—
Roosevelt and Congress decided to balance the budget. They raised taxes. They reduced government spending. They contracted the money supply and helped send the economy back into depression by 1938, and it remained in recession for three more years. Unemployment was still 10 percent when the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941. At that point, the government started spending massive amounts of money. They worried less about the budget deficit and more about spending what it takes to do the job. The depression disappeared almost overnight.
The economic lesson of 1938 is that the government cannot balance the budget during a major recession—even in the early stages of recovery. A depressed economy needs a stimulus. Although politicians usually won’t say it out loud, a stimulus often requires not only spending but deficit spending. One of the things that turn a financial crisis into a recession is that people and businesses stop spending in a reinforcing cycle. They can’t afford to spend because they’re not making money. They’re not making money because no one else is spending. Only the government has the size and budget flexibility to break the cycle. In a financial recession, concern for the government’s budget deficit can wait.
The government can get away with deficit spending because the government budget doesn’t work like an individual’s budget or even a corporation’s budget. Government creates the money supply; its spending is not limited to what it takes in or what it can borrow. If you or I spend more than we can get, we will go broke. The government doesn’t have to “get” money. It creates money. If the government creates too much money at any given time, it will overstimulate the economy and create inflation. If inflation becomes a problem, we can take action, by say, taxing some of that money back, but for now it is not a major concern. At a time like this, when resources are going unused because no one’s buying, the government as a lot of leeway to create and spend money without worry of inflation.
We should be more concerned with making sure that the direct beneficiaries of government stimulus are the people most in need. Too often the government stimulates the economy by helping corporations (such as investment banks, automobile manufacturers, and defense contractors), telling us that the stimulus will indirectly make its way to help those who actually need help.
A more effective way to stimulate the economy and help people is with universal programs. Universal healthcare or a universal basic income guarantee would be excellent ways to do so.
-Karl Widerquist, Doha, Qatar August 9, 2009
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 14, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in May 2009.
The global recession has been spreading and deepening for nearly a year. It could become the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it has captured nearly all of the attention we, our media, and our leaders pay to economic issues. Perhaps we’re paying too much attention to it. I want to convince you in this editorial that a recession—even a major depression—is not an economic problem of the first magnitude. Our most pressing economic problems are distribution, and they exist whether we are in recession or not. Recessions appear to be a major problem primarily because we allow existing distributional problems to get worse during recessions.
To see my argument, imagine that you lived through the entire Twentieth Century. You were born on January 1st, 1900 and died exactly 100 years later on January 1st, 2000. During all of that time, you were a member of a representative American family of three with an income equal to the average U.S. income for a family of that size.
I have included figures below of average income per person and per family of three for the entire Twentieth Century. The appendix includes a table with the background data for these figures as well as some information about the percentage changes you’re looking it. Don’t fear all these numbers. I’ll just ask you to glance at it and take a closer look at a few important ones. These figures are “adjusted for inflation” meaning that they are reported in 2008 prices. It is notoriously difficult to adjust for inflation in a world in which the prices of different goods are changing at different rates, new products are being introduced, and old products are being discontinued. Adjusting for inflation is much more subjective than most economists let on, but these figures represent our best guess about how to do it.
Financially, your imaginary family did awfully well during the Twentieth Century. A simple glance at the graph shows that your family’s income goes up and down, but mostly up. Your family’s income started at about $20,000 in 1900. It rose sporadically to reach $136,000 in 1999. That an increase of more than 577 percent—almost six times what your family made the day you were born. In the early years you could not have afford a computer, television, and many things we now take for granted, but your family’s $20,000 income would have been more than enough to pay for a home, for food, and for clothing for the whole family. At no time in that 100 year period would your family have had any difficulty securing its basic needs, and you were able to consume many luxuries as well.
Figure 1: GDP per family of three for the Twentieth Century
THIS FIGURE FAILED TO UPLOAD.
Figure 2: GDP per capita for the Twentieth Century
THIS FIGURE FAILED TO UPLOAD.
Your income didn’t rise every year; it fluctuated with the business cycle. Glance down the third column of the appendix table. That shows the percentage change in your income from year to year. The years when your income dropped (shown in bold) are the recession years. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, the business cycle was volatile. Your income could go down 9 percent one year and up 10 percent the next. But if you look at the graph, you see that the only downturn that looks terribly significant was the period of 1930-1933, when over four years your family’s income declined from by nearly 25% from $34,093 to $23,607.
You might be tempted to think that 1945-1947 was worse because your income declined by a greater percentage in a shorter time. To see that this isn’t so, you have to realize that there is a lot this table doesn’t show. I doesn’t show how hard you are working, how much you want to work, and what you’re working for. You had a great increase in your income during the years 1940-1945, but that was largely because you were working extra hard for the goal of winning the Second World War. The decline from 1945 to 1947 mostly reflects that you no longer needed to work so hard because the war was won. Your income in 1947 (after 3-years of decline) was still more than 25% percent higher than 1940 and 85% higher than in 1933. You were actually doing just fine in that year.
The depression was different. You didn’t want to work any less in those years, but as a representative American, you were unemployed 25% of the time in 1933. This would have been difficult for your family. You might have had to sell some of your luxuries or move into a smaller home. But your inflation-adjusted income was still more than 16 percent higher than when you were born. If you could feed, cloth, and house your family in 1900, you could do so in 1933 and you could have spent all of your additional income on luxuries that you couldn’t afford in 1900. As a representative American family, you were not in financial distress even in the depths of the Great Depression. There would have been no reason for a member of your family to stand in a bread line or head to California in search of work as a migrant farm laborer.
After 1950, the business cycle became even less of a problem for you and your family. You experienced the occasional 1 or 2 percent decline, but such a small decline would have been barely noticeable, especially with your income being 300% or 400% higher than a few decades earlier. The worst recessions such as in the mid 70s and early 80s caused less than a 3 percent drop in your income. That might have slowed your accumulation of savings or caused you to put off buying a new luxury for a year or two, but no more than that.
The current recession might well cause national income to drop by 6 percent this year. Suppose it goes on, and we experience a decline similar to the Great Depression, say lowering national income to 20 percent less than it was in 1999. That would bring the income of our representative American family down to $109,509—higher than in the boom year of 1987. That means, even if we suffer the worst depression since the 1930s, we will still have a greater technical capacity to feed, clothe, house, and provide luxuries our people than we did in the boom year of 1987. If we dealt with such a crisis sensibly, it would affect only our consumption of luxuries, not necessities.
These facts illustrate the point that I’m trying to make: if we keep in mind the truly important economic issues, recessions are something we can easily handle. The most important thing about your income is not whether it rises or falls by a few percentage points in a given year, but that’s all a recession is. The most important thing is not even that your income grows over time, although a growing income is always nice. Actually, the most important thing about your income is that it meets your needs.
Our main concern about the national economy should be same the same as each individual’s main concern about his or her own income. Before worrying about the bankers, or about the rise or fall of an abstract figure like GDP, we should ask ourselves: how can we secure food, housing, clothing, medical care, and education for everyone? Whether we are in a recession or not has little to do with our answer to that question. Going back to 1776, there has never been a time when America lacked the economic capacity to secure every citizen’s needs. Nor was there a time when it was even close. This fact is not unique to America. Economist Amartya Sen has found evidence that there has not been a famine in modern history in which any nation actually lacked the economic capacity to feed its citizens. Modern famines have all been caused by mal-distribution of plentiful resources.
Sen’s observation is true only for modern history, not for all of human history. The Norse in Greenland, the Mayan Empire, the Easter Islanders and other societies all apparently experienced episodes in which they simply could not feed their people. But these were environmental disasters, not financial depressions. Once we solve the important economic problems of how to secure our needs without screwing up our environment, even a severe depression means no more than a fluctuation in our accumulation of luxuries. Distribution of necessities is what is important, not a 10 percent fluctuation in our ability to produce luxuries. A recession is a trivial issue for the nation as a whole; it is a minor fluctuation in output. This could and should cause no more than a pause in our accumulation of luxuries.
Of course, what actually happens during recessions is significant: more people are in poverty; more people are homeless; more people lack their necessities; more people have reason to fear economic security. All of this is true, but it is only true because we allow it to happen. We had the technical capacity to eliminate economic deprivation in the recession years of 1982 and 1992 just as we did in the boom years of 1987 and 1999. We did not do solve these problems in boom years and we let them get worse in recession years. A recession cannot hurt anyone in a significant way unless we let it. The tragedy is that we let it.
-Karl Widerquist, begun in Reykjavik, Iceland, completed in Oxford, UK, May 2009
Appendix: GDP per capita and per family of three in constant 2008 dollars for the Twentieth Century
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 7, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in February 2009.
Like millions of people around the world, I watched Obama’s inaugural last month and saw the panning shots of huge crowds against the backdrop of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. This image made me think not only about Washington and Lincoln but also Martin Luther King, Jr. and the pictures of the crowds listening to his “I Have a Dream” Speech. The fact that that picture from the center of U.S. capital brings to mind those three names, shows how much the racial divide has affected U.S. history.
There is a line on the Washington Monument about a third of the way up to where the stone slightly changes colors. Tour guides say that this line is there because construction was halted during the Civil War, and builders couldn’t find a perfect match for the original stone when construction resumed. There is something fitting about that. Slavery disfigures Washington’s legacy. Washington made it clear that he knew slavery was wrong, as did Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and many other revolutionary leaders. But none of them found a way to put an end to it. Instead, they set us on a path that led to the Civil War, and to the racial divide that Lincoln and King dreamed of resolving.
With the election of Obama, the United States became the first majority-white nation to elect a black chief executive. I think most Americans of both parties are rightly proud of that. Ideally, there should be nothing special about electing a member of a minority group, but for more than two centuries, America chose all of its presidents because they were white men. This time we didn’t. Certainly, our willingness to put a black man in charge indicates that racism isn’t as strong as it was 50 years ago when few whites would accept a black in any position of authority over them. Maybe white racial identity will no never be a prerequisite for political success in the United States.
The election of a black president is probably the most significant in a long series of small victories in the struggle against racism in America, but it doesn’t mean racism is over. Familiar racist incidents are still happening. On election night three white supremacists set fire to a predominately African-American church in Massachusetts. On New Year’s Day, a police officer in California shot an unarmed black man who was being held down on the ground by another police officer. In three states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, more than 85% of whites voted for the white candidate and more than 85% of blacks voted for the black candidate. Such racially polarized voting has to indicate a continuing problem with racism.
And, as Rev. Joseph Lowery reminded us in his benediction at Obama’s inaugural, oppression isn’t about any one group. It would not be a victory for equality if European-Americans lost all prejudice against African-Americans only to single out some other group such as Arab-Americans, women, gays, Muslims, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. But comparing the United States today to where it was 50 years ago, I think members of almost every group that has suffered from prejudice would say we have made significant progress.
How will we know when we have won? I’ll offer two thoughts. First, ask a member of the oppressed group. Ask many. Don’t tell anybody else when their problems are solved; let them tell you. Second, maybe oppression is over when we have no more ghettos. As long as children still grow up in large concentrations of poverty, despair, and danger, we still have oppressed people whatever their identity.
I think this is why Martin Luther King turned to the Poor People’s Campaign in the last year of his life. Nominal legal equality was largely achieved by the Civil Rights legislation of the mid-60s, and King recognized that economic and social barriers were now the main obstacle to real equality and freedom. King proposed a host of economic reforms, including a basic income guarantee, not to reduce—but to eliminate—poverty, because by then poverty was the greatest source of oppression in America. It remains so today.
I think we can celebrate an important achievement, but we should remember that we have lot more to do to build a society free from oppression.
-Karl Widerquist, Reading UK, January 2009
by Toru Yamamori | Mar 7, 2018 | Opinion
The International Women’s Day is approaching.
This is a poster for the International Women’s Day march 45 years ago. (Photo above) Two working-class women, one carries a buggy, and the other carries a placard containing written slogans reflecting three of the original four demands of the British Women’s Liberation movement. It displays the name of organization: London Women’s Liberation Workshop. Naturally, it looks like a photo of two women in a protest that London Women’s Liberation Workshop organised or took part.
However, it isn’t. The photo was edited. Here is the original photo. (Photo below) Between two women, there was a man, and the original placard said: ‘End Cohabitation Rule / Fight with the Claimants Unions’. The photo was taken at a protest that the Claimants Unions organised.
Several years later, women in the Claimants Unions raised a motion for asking the whole British Women’s Liberation movement to endorse an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) at the National Women’s Liberation Conference, and succeeded. So UBI was an officially endorsed demand of the British Women’s Liberation movement. However, this fact slipped away from the official history of feminism, like erasing what those two women in the poster demanded by editing the photo. Let me reclaim their struggle briefly, and demonstrate it’s modern relevance.
The first Claimants Union was formed 50 years ago. It was intended as a claimants’ version of a trade union. A trade union is for workers. A claimants union is for welfare claimants. It wasn’t a feminist organisation. The membership of claimants unions consisted of women, men, and trans-gendered people. The majority of membership consisted of women, and their demand for ending the cohabitation rule is related to sexist administration of welfare benefits.
Under the ‘cohabitation rule’, many of the women claimants were subjugated to snooping by welfare officers. Those ‘sex snoopers’ conducted spot checks late at night. If a woman claimant had a sexual relationship with a man, it was assumed they should be supported by him, honestly by the sounds of this females claiming back then would have been better off exclusively using a suction dildo or another pleasurable toy instead of getting involved with a male. Sometimes just friendly activities, such as a male neighbour coming into the house to help fix a tap or a bulb would be assumed to be a partner/boyfriend; the next week her benefit would be suspended. If this was still the case in this day in age, any woman that went on Find a fuck buddy or a similar online site to find sexual pleasure, would immediately be seen as in a partnership and lose their financial support. Does this seem fair?
The philosophy behind this sexism has not yet gone to the dustbin of history.
On 13th February 2018, the department for work and pensions (DWP) of the British government sent out its Valentine Day message:
Claiming to be living alone is one of the most common types of benefit fraud – don’t ruin #ValentinesDay by failing to declare your true circumstances https://ow.ly/3bkn30imZya
The attached gif image reads:
Declaring your true love tomorrow?
Don’t forget to declare your true living arrangements too.
Don’t get separated from your Valentine.
Tell us of a change now.
They put the link to the article by the Daily Express that reports several cases that claimants didn’t report their relationships and financial supports.
A similar message from DWP was circulated on TV during the 2007-8 season. One of DWP’s TV advertisements called ‘we’re closing in‘, trying to focus in on what DWP calls ‘one of the most common types of benefit fraud’. The video shows a woman, who seems to claim a benefit and to declare that she lives alone, and then chats with a man on her door step. When she went inside to iron men’s shirts, the end-roll says ‘We’re closing in. Targeting benefit thieves’.
In order to make sense of this advertisement, we need to accept several assumptions. First, if you are female and chatted with a male on your door step, and/or you iron men’s cloths, it means that you are in an intimate relationship with that male. Second, if you are in an intimate relationship with a male, you share a household budget together. Third, that male should support you financially. Fourth, that male can support you financially.
Some might say that spreading this kind of message is needed for running our society in a just manner. DWP seems to think so. However, as we have seen, there were many women who suffered because of assumptions made by the government, assumptions that are behind this kind of message. Some of them (with other claimants of both sexes) depicted sexism behind the message, revealed how it affected them, and proposed a less sexist policy alternative, which is now called a UBI. This year marks the 50th anniversary of their movement.
Oh, I have forgotten to retweet the DWP’s message on the Valentine’s day. I would retweet with the following question: Isn’t true love unconditional?
For more on this forgotten struggle, see:
Toru Yamamori, ‘OPINION: Reclaiming the Women’s Liberationist Demand for a Citizen’s Income’, The Basic Income News, 17 April 2015.
Toru Yamamori, ‘A Feminist Way to Unconditional Basic Income: Claimants Unions and Women’s Liberation Movements in 1970s Britain’, Basic Income Studies, 9(1-2), 2014, pp.1-24.
Reviewed by Michael Gillan Peckitt and Tyler Prochazka
by Guest Contributor | Mar 1, 2018 | Opinion
By JOHN MCCONE
Basic income has many advantages over means-tested benefits: no processing times (with funding gaps where people can be left homeless); no restrictions on freedom; less disincentive to work; and a higher credit value to raise loans at lower interest compared to means-tested benefits. Overall the reliability, unconditionality and lack of bureaucracy makes basic income the dream benefit to receive.
But while basic income may be the dream benefit for recipients, it is a budgetary nightmare for those funding it. Whichever way you run the numbers, a given tax revenue distributed evenly throughout society will provide the most needy with less than if they were the sole recipients. This typically causes enthusiasm for basic income to wane as policy makers consider the practicalities of budgeting for it.
Is there any way for society to reap the benefits of a universal basic income while reducing its cost? What if basic income was restricted to those who live in the countryside (who don’t regularly commute to the city)? Most developed countries today are highly urbanised with 70% or more of their populations living in cities (82.6% in the U.K. in 2015). A rural basic income would cost the taxpayer 3 to 5 times less than a universal basic income and leave room in the budget for means-tested benefits to the needy.
While a basic income limited to rural inhabitants would not be universally distributed, it would be universally available. Anyone could move to the countryside and automatically receive it. This would close any gaps in the benefits system and ensure that those who were truly desperate but did not qualify – or understand how to apply – for means-tested benefits could always move to the countryside and immediately receive a rural basic income. The countryside is very different from the city due to different ways of life. People in the city are more likely to go to the gym, whereas, those in the countryside are more like to go shooting or become a collector. You could learn more about shooting, accessories (red dot sight) and insurance at Sniper Country in case you wanted to give it ago!
In addition to reducing the budget, distributing a basic income to rural locations, where land rents are minimized, maximizes its impact. All a person really needs is food, shelter and water. Low rents make shelter less expensive as well as providing land where people can cheaply grow food. We often overlook the amount of extra time that otherwise unemployed people have compared to salaried workers which, given the right tools and resources, they can apply to provide for themselves. Thus, a basic income does not necessarily have to be large enough to enable people to purchase their material needs from retailers (e.g. groceries, restaurants); it must only be sufficient to give people access to the capital they need (e.g. fertilizer, greenhouses, farm tools) to apply their own labour to produce what they need for themselves. So low land rents have a huge impact on the cost of self-provision.
Given two choices people usually choose the more preferable option. If the goods that can be procured with a given amount of effort from a lifestyle in the countryside are greater than the goods that an identical effort in the city can procure, then people will tend to move to the countryside. It is perfectly possible that the quality of life that working in nature, with low rent payments and a solid basic income of £5,000 (front-loaded with a low interest loan to buy, say, a log cabin) in the countryside might be better than a precarious salary of £20,000 and a 2 hour daily commute in a high rent area of the city. If this is the case, all those with lower salaries than £20,000 will leave for the countryside creating labour scarcity and increasing the salary of unskilled labour to £20,000. Thus, a relatively modest basic income in an area where money is scarce and the cost of living low could exert a highly leveraged effect on salaries in areas where the cost of living is high and money is plentiful.
Beyond raising wages, giving everyone the option to provide for themselves in nature, as opposed to working for somebody else, will strengthen the negotiating position of employees across the board. Managers will have to struggle to retain their workers, this struggle will produce more satisfying jobs and a more fulfilling work environment. A scarcity of labour will also mean that jobs in the city will be easily available to anyone who wants to take them. Furthermore, even a small number of people heading for the countryside will leave a surplus of un-rented accommodation. This in turn will make rents more affordable.
From this we can see that, not only is a rural basic income an affordable way to conveniently pay benefits to those who choose to move to the countryside, but it will also indirectly increase wages, employment and job satisfaction in the city along with lowering rents. A rural basic income could thus affordably improve the lives of everyone.
Author of The Countryside Living Allowance (Link: https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/8487802-the-countryside-living-allowance)
