by BIEN | Jan 12, 2017 | News, Testimonies
Interview by Scott Jacobsen
*Conducted via email with minor edits.*
The economy has shifted into high gear for knowledge and ability, the currently labeled Knowledge Economy concomitant with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. How has this affected inequality based on standard metrics of knowledge and ability, such as credentials from post-secondary institutions in relevant disciplines?
It has pretty much always been the case that an education will help you get a better job, with better pay and conditions. This is still basically true, though we are seeing even amongst the highly educated longer periods of unemployment, a failure to get “good” jobs, and increasing insecurity in the work that they do get. Why? Because we just don’t need the same number of people employed in order to make the economy work. By all means, get a great education, but look at it as much as an investment in developing yourself so that you will have a meaningful life as in getting a good job. Because maybe there is no job to be got.
You have argued for some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as fundamental to the “progressive civic” and “economic reinvention.” What are other terms or phrases for ideas associated with, but not the same as, UBI? What characterizes them?
There are a number of forms of basic income, not all of them universal. A common one is the idea of a negative income tax. So instead of paying tax, you are paid an allowance, but as you move back into work, get a job, the amount you are paid tapers until finally, you are back to paying tax and must make sure you do your year end tax planning. The real difference between this and a UBI is that it tries to integrate the allowance with the labor market whereas UBI tries to establish an income independent of it.
What makes the UBI plan of action unique?
I guess at heart it is the way it has the potential to break the nexus between remuneration and a job. It recognizes that many of the things we do as citizens and individuals fall outside the normal parameters of paid work but that nonetheless those things we do — from caring for children to volunteering with community organizations or political parties or sports groups — are valuable to society and so it makes sense to recognize that contribution. It also empowers workers to be able to say no to crap jobs offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
What are the most common success stories of UBI or similar programs? Any failures?
Every trial of UBI I know of has been successful in that it has dispelled one of the biggest myths about giving people a no-strings-attached income, namely, that people become lazy and do nothing. Every trial shows almost the exact opposite. One of the most comprehensive trials is the one I talk about in my book, run by UNICEF in India. But similar positive results have been shown in other trials, including the one in New Jersey run by the Nixon Administration.
What city seems the most progressive and forward-thinking in its implementation of UBI?
Hard to say. A number of cities, including Utrecht in the Netherlands, are running trials, as are a couple of cities in Canada and Finland. I think this is great. It builds momentum and adds to the data supporting implementation on a larger scale.
What country seems the most progressive and forward-thinking in its implementation of UBI?
I guess Finland, but I think there are some issues with the route they have decided to take. They have chosen to test a partial rather than a full version. Still, it is good to see a national government move in this direction, however tentatively.
Any advice for would-be policymakers or activists about strategies for the implementation of UBI?
Gather data through trials. With trials, implement them with populations that will receive conservative support. In Australia, that might include rural communities, including farmers. Don’t pitch it as “free money” because it isn’t. Don’t let that description stand. Educate people about the notion of universality and why, in a democracy, it is important that everyone is entitled to certain benefits. Reach out across ideological divides, right and left. Involve business in discussions. Lobby for corporations to set aside a percentage of stock to be held by the government as part of the common wealth. It’s going to be a hard sell, so the sooner you start, the better!
And this raises the major piece of advice I would give: don’t oversell the idea of Universal Basic Income. As important a tool as it is likely to be for dealing with technological unemployment, it will not by itself solve the various social and economic problems that beset us and we should be careful not to suggest that it will.
This is the Korean version of the text.
by Guest Contributor | Jan 11, 2017 | Opinion
On January 9th, Zygmund Bauman passed away at the age of 91. He is considered one of the great philosophers and sociologist of our time, who introduced the concept of “liquid modernity” to describe the postmodern age.
He is the main character in the recently released documentary “In the Same Boat” where he urges to tackle global problems on a global scale, and suggests exploring new roads such as a universal basic income.
Read more in this review: “Man vs machine, or man ahead with machine?”
MACHINE VS MAN, OR MAN AHEAD WITH MACHINE?
Written by: Bart Grugeon Plana
In the modern era, digital technology is substituting human brain power in a similar way as the steam engine did in the eighteenth century, making muscle power inefficient. Would it be possible, however, to harness this digital revolution for the benefit of humans and the planet, to share prosperity? The documentary “In the Same Boat,” which is being released in several countries throughout Europe, has opened up this interesting debate.
We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution and with the advance of Artificial Intelligence, this process is affecting an increasing number of sectors in the economy. Not only is traditional blue-collar work being carried out by machines, but also work that requires specifically human capabilities. In the coming years, for instance, the self-driving car will turn the transportation sector on its head.
This revolution in productivity can be seen as good news, since machines will do our traditional work and we can dedicate our time to education, care, hobbies and services. Also, new technologies and the availability of huge amounts of data allow us to optimise the planet’s scarce resources. However, there is no guarantee that the increase of wealth will be spread over the inhabitants of the planet with any criterion of equity. There is a real risk that the ownership of machines will be reduced to a small number of people and that the great majority of the world’s population will be left without the means to generate an income.
Most countries in the world have seen income inequality rise during the last decade, in part because of the technological revolution. Economic data (Link 1) show that since the year 2000, the western economy has invested more in technology and less in human capital. This strategy has endowed innovative entrepreneurs with more benefits, without creating more jobs or raising average incomes. The generated wealth went to a tiny minority. Wealth accumulation can come if you already have financial capital and know how to invest it, but if you depend on selling your skills in the labour market, it becomes more difficult to make a living.
When looking at the data of the concentration of wealth, there isn’t much margin for many interpretations. There are 62 people in the world that are as wealthy as the poorest half of the global population. In the US, the middle class is endangered; in the period of economic recovery between 2009 and 2013, the top one per cent of the population was assigned 25 times more of the national revenue than the rest (Link 2).
Many people feel that they are being excluded from the labour market, and they are aware that they have little chance to win the race against the machines. The solution is to learn to work ahead with technology and to think about a strategy to create wealth together, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an expert in information economy (Link 3).
“We are in full transformation towards the society of the 21th century, and the outcome is still open: either with shared prosperity, or, at the contrary, with more inequality. This decision depends on our individual choices and on our strategy as a society. The power is in our hands. Technology is merely an instrument,” Brynjolfsson said.
RECONCILIATION OF POWER AND POLITICS
Image still from ‘In the Same Boat’
The dominant political debate today doesn’t pay much attention to the digital revolution we are experiencing, and mainly focuses on creating favourable conditions to stimulate companies to create as many jobs as possible.
This way of thinking conforms to the paradigm of the second half of the 20th century, when we got used to the idea of ‘full employment’, explains sociologist Zygmund Bauman (Link 4). In our social consciousness, the normal situation is to be in employment and a person that is ‘un-employed’ does not fit this normality. However, in the new technological world, the techniques of the past don’t seem to work, and a solution for the structural problem of unemployment hasn’t yet been found. In Europe, 8.5 per cent of the active population has no job, with significant regional and age variation (Link 5). The situation in Greece and Spain is the most alarming.
According to Bauman (Link 6), we don’t know how to regain control over our economic system because it operates on a global scale: “With just one click on a computer, a company can decide to move 100.000 jobs from here to another part of the planet where labour conditions are more interesting,” he asserts, “Capital and finance move without restraints, but labour does not.”
Looking for solutions, citizens turn to the political class who ultimately can’t influence the economic decision-making process. “They have a local sphere of action, mainly at the level of the nation-state, but power is organised on a global scale and escapes from political control. This divorce between power and politics is the essence of the problem of our society in transformation”, says Bauman, who considers it is a task of all citizens to reconcile both (Link 7).
For the first time in human history, all inhabitants of the planet are interconnected and are interdependent. If we want to resist the populist and protectionist wave that is extending over the globe after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, we must think about different ways to organise work and to distribute wealth. Several experts insist that we should radically rethink the foundations of our society and they propose an open dialogue to come to sensible solutions.
WE ARE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT
The documentary “In the Same Boat” made a momentous effort to open this debate and to project the voices that invoke a new paradigm. Zygmund Bauman, Serge Latouche, Tony Atkinson, Mariana Muzzucato, José Mujica and many others explain why the current labour model has hit a dead end. With a cinematographic style, spectacular photography and a varied musical palette, the film is fresh and inspiring, even whilst dealing with such a weighty subject as the future of humanity.
Zygmund Bauman considers the message of ‘In the Same Boat’ the complete antithesis of Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan ‘TINA’; claiming that “There Is No Alternative” to the liberalisation of all parts of society as it is the only way to guarantee welfare. On the contrary, the polish sociologist proposes to “change the course of the boat that all inhabitants of the planet are in”. He believes that the new paradigm of the 21st century should cut the ties between income and work. “We should abandon the idea of working to make our living. We cannot condition the right to live to the interests of the company we work for,” he argues (Link 8).
The documentary proposes a universal basic income as one of the solutions to fair wealth redistribution. It is not considered a charity for the misfortunate, but rather a technological dividend of the past — a common right. Mariana Mazzucato (Link 7), an economist specialized in technological innovation, explains that “innovation largely depends on public financing and on a collective effort. Moreover, innovation today is a heritage of discoveries of the past.” In other words, what makes your smartphone smart (battery, GPS, Internet, mathematical algorithms, touch screen, etc.) are no individual or private inventions, but are the result of the effort of society as a whole with publicly-funded research programs. Why is it then that the benefits of this technological heritage go to just a privileged minority? How can it be justified that the cost and the risk of research is burdened by the public, but the rewards are privatised? If technology allows us to delegate work to machines due to the effort of many generations, wouldn’t the legitimate heir be society as a whole?
The film has arrived at the precise moment to put the current economical and institutional crisis into a wider perspective. Hopefully it can help to spark a global debate about the necessary societal changes.
“In the Same Boat” was released in Spain in November 2016 and will be screened in other countries during 2017. Members of the Basic Income Network that want to organise local screenings can contact the team on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/inthesameb.
Included is the trailer of the documentary and the presentation with Zygmund Bauman, talking about the future of work. Barcelona, February 2016.
About the author:
Bart Grugeon Plana works as an investigative journalist for the Barcelona based newspaper La Directa, and collaborates with other news platforms such as Apache.be and Ouishare Magazine. He has a special interest in common-based peer production, collaborative economy, platform cooperativism and energy transition.
Trailer In the Same Boat
Interview with Zygmund Bauman
Link 1 the great decoupling
https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling
Link 2 US inequality
https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/107100.pdf
Link 3 Brynjolfsson
https://raceagainstthemachine.com/
Link 4 Bauman
https://www.socialeurope.eu/2013/05/europe-is-trapped-between-power-and-politics/#
Link 5 EU unemployment
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics#Unemployment_trends
Link 6 Bauman
https://wpfdc.org/images/docs/Zygmunt_Bauman_Living_in_Times_of_Interregnum_Transcript_web_I.pdf
Link 7 Bauman
https://directa.cat/actualitat/zygmund-bauman-ordinadors-poden-fer-nostra-feina-essers-humans-serem-redundants
Link 8 Mazzucato
https://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/
by BIEN | Jan 10, 2017 | News, Testimonies
Interview by Scott Jacobsen
*Conducted via email with minor edits.*
You write on the future of work. What is the future of work? Where will humans find meaningful and fulfilling lives with or without work?
The future of work will see continued technological pressure on the paying jobs that humans do. This will change the nature of work, it will eliminate many jobs, and create some new ones. Humans will continue to do the things that only humans can do well — being creative, imaginative, empathetic, playful and social — and do less of the things that machines can do better than us. That will include everything from building things, digging things, and driving things, to researching and data crunching.
People are already involved in much meaningful work, and that meaningful work is not always their job. Sometimes it is, however, and the loss of such jobs — and therefore meaning — from people’s lives will be difficult to deal with. What we have to ensure is that people are financially supported even if they don’t have a job so that they can continue not just to exist but to engage in work that is meaningful to them. We have to destroy this notion that you are only a good citizen if you have a job: before it destroys us. I have enormous faith in our ability to find meaning even in a world where technology does a lot of the jobs we do now.
Your new book, Why the Future is Workless, describes a workless future. One powerful collective force (aside from potential nuclear catastrophe and climate change) looms into the immediate future: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Your book is about technology, and the social and political effects of such technology in a world after work. What probable outcomes will emerge from the Fourth Industrial Revolution by 2025 and 2045?
We’ll see not just a change in the nature of work but in social relations. Services will replace products, something that has already happened with movies and music. This will likely happen with cars too, amongst other things. People will look to have experiences rather than to own things. Many everyday things will become cheaper, almost to the point of being free: zero marginal cost, as the economists say. Technology will get smarter and we will move from dealing with the web via direct questions typed into a search engine to talking with the tech on an ongoing basis, as we are seeing with services like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Whether this will all be a boon or a burden for people will depend on how we deal with these changes politically. We have to make choices to create a fair world: it won’t just happen.
What is happening now, especially with things like Amazon Go?
We are seeing the start of a lot of this stuff already, as with Amazon Go. So we are right at the bottom of the change curve, entering a change of era, not merely an era of change. The real change will happen when powerful, cheap processors are embedded in things — fridges, sidewalks — and they are all networked. It will be a different world. Again, though, it’s important to stress: this might be heaven or hell, depending on how we handle the politics.
How can automation and machines release human beings from the drudgery of hard labour, whether physical (open to the elements) or mental (repetitive, simple tasks)?
They will make things cheaper and more ubiquitous. We will move from scarcity to plenty. Technology will turn products into services. It will create enormous wealth. The question becomes: how do we distribute that wealth, especially if a lot of paying jobs disappear.
How do you propose to deal with growing inequality in the world?
Via a reinvention of distribution. We will need taxes on global financial flows and the implementation of systems that require corporations to stop freeloading off the social wealth created by governments and citizens (this is an idea put forward by Yanis Varoufakis). Corporations will be required to provide a percentage of their capital value as a kind of common stock, revenue from which is then distributed to all of us, probably in the form of some sort of basic income. We will also need shorter working hours, without loss of pay or conditions.
Neoliberal economists assume the creation of new jobs as a given, but you disagree. That is, some neoliberal economists assert ‘if jobs go, they will come back’ – while you think this is not necessarily so. Why?
The nature of the economy is changing. We are shifting from scarcity to plenty, from industrial to knowledge, and from long working hours to short. In such an economy, we simply don’t need as many people doing things — jobs — as we did in the past in order to create the stuff we need. Sure, there will be new jobs, they just won’t need many people to do them. We already have huge populations surplus to the requirements of the economy (as the economists say) and they are refugees, prisoners, the unemployed, the under-employed, and the 800 million people subsisting in the slums on the edges of some of our great cities. Paid employment is already becoming a really bad way of distributing wealth and we should stop pretending that the jobs will “come back” and make everything all right again. We have to come up with a better idea than “jobs”.
This is the Korean version of the text.
by Guest Contributor | Jan 9, 2017 | Opinion
Seth Ackerman, Mateo Alaluf, Jean-Marie Harribey, Daniel Zamora. Contre l’allocation universelle , Lux Éditeur. Kindle Edition, 2016
Review by: Pierre Madden
This is a book written by and for French intellectuals. Hegelian and Marxist notions are bandied about like so many baseball scores. Nevertheless, the message is plain and the reason for the vigorous opposition to Basic Income (BI) is clear. Some of the points inviting skepticism are well taken. Tracing the origins of BI back to Thomas More and Thomas Paine is in fact quite a stretch. The same familiar More passage is always quoted but have you ever seen a different one? We are dealing here with a posteriori myth making to establish legitimacy.
For this group of authors, the concept of BI is a part of neoliberal ideology. “The concept of BI is tied to the emergence of neoliberalism both in its response to the crisis [in post-war social protection] and in the conception of social justice it embodies.” Furthermore, in the words of economist Lionel Stoléru “the market economy can encompass the fight against absolute poverty” but “it is incapable of digesting stronger remedies against relative poverty.” The latter refers to income inequality rather than to deprivation.
Neoliberalism is opposed to the concept of social rights. A generous BI would be prohibitively expensive without cutbacks in “collective” spending such as welfare, education, public pensions, health, etc. Market forces would replace the idea and institutions of social justice. The “equality of chances” defended by neoliberalism would lead to a society that is more meritocratic but no less unjust, claim the authors.
It is no secret that wealth has increased dramatically since the 1970s but that the rich have benefited disproportionately. BI is seen by the authors as a Trojan horse in the heart of Social Society, whose purpose is to undo all of the social programs developed in the 20th century before the advent of neoliberalism. Proponents in the libertarian left argue that BI would be the “Capitalist road to Communism,” in the words of Philippe Van Parijs himself. BI is seen as a synthesis of liberal and socialist utopias. A description of the conflicting attitudes towards work will best illustrate the divergence in approaches. The classic leftist view is that a citizen’s work defines his contribution to society and tends to conflate work and employment. It is up to society to validate each member’s work effort. The authors claim that BI proponents refuse to accept the idea that work can be a factor for social integration, thus their view that full employment is not a useful goal. On the contrary “the social utility of an activity cannot be established as valid a priori; it must be submitted to democratic approval.”
What democratic approval would mean in practice is not explained but then the Swiss were asked to approve BI with few details provided and 23% voted in favour. Another argument in favour of BI is that it would enable natural caregivers in the home to provide for the young, the sick and the elderly. The authors of this book cannot agree that these activities are valid work in the Marxian sense. To believe otherwise, they say, is “to espouse neoclassical propositions omnipresent in economic pseudoscience.” Some feminists also oppose BI because they see it as a trap to keep women in traditional roles.
So, is BI just a neoliberal plot to destroy the social protections developed in the post-war years by the social state that are inextricably linked to the strength of labour? If not a conspiracy, BI is presented as the culmination of the free market utopia in our collective neoliberal imagination.
The four writers of this tract are nostalgic of more coherent times:
“Since Durkheim,the sociological tradition considers that in developed societies, the division of labour and the resulting specialization of functions produces a solidarity that assures social cohesion. The assignment of individuals to social positions does not only depend on their own will. Impersonal social forces, determinism, belie the claims that attribute to individual merit alone the possibilities of emancipation. The more autonomous the individual the more dependent he is on society. We cannot therefore be but ourselves, anchored in our individuality, to the extent that we are social beings.”
This is no longer the world we live in. In a post-industrial sharing economy, we are still social beings but employment where labour is pitted against capital no longer defines us. The nostalgic socialist authors are justifiably suspicious of neoliberal aims to cut existing social programs but these have a long history and broad support. Making sure that BI beneficiaries do no receive less than before is a part of any serious discussion or test of Basic Income. Vigilance is always appropriate but not to the extent of, as we say in French, tripping on the flowers woven into the carpet.
Book reviewer biography: Pierre Madden is a zealous dilettante based in Montreal. He has been a linguist, a chemist, a purchasing coordinator, a production planner and a lawyer. His interest in Basic Income, he says, is personal. He sure could use it now!
by Kate McFarland | Jan 6, 2017 | News
On January 16 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day), American basic income activists will convene at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in the nation’s capitol, where they will set up a multi-media display to commemorate King’s support for a guaranteed income.
Source: Bob Fitch photography archive
Organized by videographer and basic income advocate Matt Orfalea, the event is intended to raise awareness of Martin Luther King’s support for a guaranteed annual income. Renowned for his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, King also championed a guaranteed income for all Americans, especially in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967). Orfalea states, “Everyone is familiar with MLK’s dream for racial equality but he also had a dream about economic justice. That’s what we want to showcase with our exhibit.”
The exhibit will include posters and banners with quotes from King related to guaranteed income, economic injustice, and job automation, in addition to looped video clip from King’s speeches.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a US federal holiday, held on the third Monday in January in connection with King’s birthday (January 15). Because of the holiday, many visitors–as well as reporters and journalists–are expected to be present at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Because of this, Orfalea says, “What’s different about this from other actions is rather than march around, everyone will be coming to us!”
Orfalea has expressed additional plans to create a documentary that will combine coverage of the upcoming event with the historical video clips.
Read more about the event, and receive up-to-date announcements, at its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1845391152385149.
Martin Luther King Memorial photo CC BY 2.0 Ron Cogswell
