by Guest Contributor | Dec 3, 2018 | Opinion
Review of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari
The third book by Yuval N. Harari, historian and author of the bestselling books “Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind” and “Homo Deus, a Brief History of Tomorrow”, was published in August this year.
What does the future hold, an unemployment ridden wasteland or a leisure based post-work society?
Whereas Harari’s former works were focused on the past of humankind or toward its future, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” investigates the most pressing issues of our times. Professor Harari finds 21 topics which embody the plethora of uncertainties surrounding our present and immediate future, and then, with the past history of our specie well in mind, suggests his thought-provoking vision about them. His unique timeliness is due to his unparalleled ability to reframe the past in order to investigate the present.
In the second lesson, “Work,” Harari talks about automation, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and the impact they will have on the labor market and society as a whole. In order to avoid collapse, deep change is required, a true renovation of our social models.
And Universal Basic Income (UBI) may be one of the answers.
The pace of automation
It is unclear how the labor market will look in the long run. What is certain is that it is undergoing change. The advances in Information Technology (IT), machine learning and robotics will bring on a wave of automation, the author said.
But it is not the first time in human history that society measures itself with automation, as we already faced similar events, most notably with the industrial revolution. And the fear of mass unemployment was proven unjustified. Thus, in Harari opinion, we have to ask whether this time will be different.
Are our concerns about a jobless future legitimate? Or are we exaggerating the magnitude of the phenomena? Do we incur in the risk to act like modern luddites?
The situation of the nineteenth century was different, Harari mantains. When industrialization hit, it is true that many jobs were appropriated by machines, but at the same times many new jobs were created and the quality of life was profoundly improved.
As humans have two kinds of abilities, physical and cognitive, during the industrial revolution machines competed for only one share of the things humans could do, the physical one. When jobs in the industrial or agricultural sectors were automated, they opened the door to jobs requiring a cognitive skill set, the category of jobs we commonly associate with the third sector.
What is happening is due to the fact that the AI revolution is not just embodied by the evolution of computers, becoming faster and more “intelligent,” but it’s closely related to other fields; the momentum of the revolution is shouldered by advances in biology and social sciences, Harari said.
As more is understood of the underlying biological mechanisms controlling the emotive dynamics of humans, the more computers become able to analyze human behavior, foresee human decisions, and take their place in a number of jobs. In addition to delivering results, these AI tools tend to keep other significant processes in mind as well. In many cases, managing IT services effectively and improving them requires more than manpower alone. There are times when IT professionals might take time to learn what is CMDB in ServiceNow or other relevant topics. Nevertheless, an AI-specific tool can decipher complex terms and provide results quickly. .
Advances in neuroscience and behavioral economics revealed that our choices do not depend on free will as much as on the calculations of the neurons in our brains, assessing probabilities at enormous speed, the author writes. Human intuition can be considered “hacked” as it was revealed to consist of pattern recognition, the ability to identify recurring patterns and use them to create models and make predictions. And AI can become very good at pattern recognition. If intuition is no more than assessment of probabilities and creation of predictive models, it should not come as a surprise that machines can take our place, given that our very functioning is imperfect and prone to errors: it relies on circuits created through the evolution of our specie, in contexts far in time and place from those in which we try to apply them –the savannah is nothing like today’s cities.
Automation will not impact the entirety of fields, as some jobs are more susceptible to it than others, Harari writes. Jobs based on repetition will be more prone to automation, so if you want to stand out with your applications, consider working with an executive resume writer. Multifaceted activities and unexpected scenarios are still a no-go zone for machines. Where the jobs of many doctors, requiring diagnostics and prescriptions could be expected to be a no-brainer for AI, the job of nurses would prove more problematic, requiring a mix of personal relationships and physical activity. Caretaking will probably be one of the most difficult task to automate, and could very well be the activity in which most humans will be occupied in the future, Harari suggests.
The future of jobs
Harari sustains that talking about a jobless future is premature, as automation will allow for more time and resources to be invested in study and research, with the potential to develop new treatments, drugs and deepen our understanding of the biological world. There are jobs where machine automation is not desirable, such as many law-related jobs. Furthermore, there will be a place for human-machine cooperation.
Drones require many operators to work them, driverless vehicles require some form of supervision, and cybersecurity and maintenance will be needed. Some of the top cybersecurity threats aren’t simple to defeat – you can’t just set up a firewall, you need to actively fight against any hacks or viruses. With this being said, as we advance in technology the requirement for human intervention will become less stringent.
But the jobs we are talking about are knowledge intensive, which means that even if they were numerically sufficient to limit unemployment (and they are not), we would nonetheless be left with the problem of unemployment due to under-specialization. In Harari’s opinion, one of the main differences of this technological revolution from the precedent is the degree to which professions are interchangeable. When jobs are less specialized, it’s easier to switch from one profession to another, its often the same for machines. What we may find then is that jobs that machines will not be able to do interchangeably are most likely going to require a high degree of specialization from people. This alignment could pose the risk of facing “the worst of both worlds”: mass unemployment and lack of qualified workers.
And professor Harari notices how, even for those who are able to pursue a new career like in the example shown above, the rapid pace of technological advance or societal changes could make it obsolete in the matter of years. Not just professional development, but jumping from a field of study to another will become the norm in a volatile job market, as the ephemeralization of work will make the idea of formation for a career as an one-off effort laughable.
This should also be seen as an emotive cost for workers, the uncertainty causing a great strain in terms of mental health: if the unstable job market of the first decades of the twenty-first century produced an explosion of work-induced stress, mental resilience to change will be among the factors skimming the employment market.
Societal change
Looking back at the history of the industrial revolution, Harari considers how the new social conditions – great industrial metropolis and the dynamic nature of the arising economic markets – could not be accommodated by the existing political, economic and social models. Institutions such as religion, monarchy and feudalism were no longer apt to direct society. A whole century of social unrest followed before an equilibrium was found, with liberal democracies, fascist regimes and communist regimes on the playing field. What automation will bring rests in the realm of speculation, but Harari highlights how there is potential for great societal disruption, and we cannot afford complacency at the risky of bloody revolutions following systemic unemployment, given the great destructive power of modern warfare.
Universal Basic Income
The author then goes on investigating the role governments will have to assume as technology advances, saying that they will necessarily have to intervene, both via the creation of a dedicated structure for permanent formation, and by providing a safety net for people as they face transitions between jobs. The mantra should be the one which Scandinavia is already applying: “protect workers rather than jobs.”
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the potential models that could respond to the technological and economical revolution we are expecting, Harari says. Its focus on the provision of means to satisfy basic needs is aligned with the necessary imperative of protecting people and not jobs, and could help to preserve the social status and self-worth of humans in a work-lacking future.
Financed through progressive taxation, an UBI would act as a redistributive instrument in a world which sees growing polarization between the riches and the poor. An alternative idea, in the author’s opinion, is to rethink the meaning of work by taking into account the education of children and caretaking. Considering caring for others as work which should deserve a monetary compensation would help foster informal safety nets and strengthen communities. Doing so would help preserve the social fabric which could be disrupted by the upcoming AI revolution. Since it would fall upon governments to pay for such activities, this would not ultimately differ from UBI.
Given that UBI could prove itself a valuable instrument to build a model for the society of the future, Harari calls for a better investigation of its possible application; that is, minimum and universal need to be defined.
In a globalized world, where market and industries are interconnected and delocalization is the norm, the meaning of universal need to be ascertained. UBI experiments have always been of reduced geographical extension, and it is usually thought, in its largest declinations, as a country specific measure. But if it was applied at the national level, its locality would create a problem, as its redistributive effects would not affect those who need it the most. As the wealth appropriated through the world is concentrated in a few nations, a progressive taxation used to fund UBI would then redistribute wealth not globally, but to a lucky minority.
Ideally, a global government could work out a functioning form of global UBI, but at the cost of its feasibility: redistributing wealth globally could very well prove impossible, in the opinion of professor Harari.
If a minimum income has to be enough to accommodate one’s basic needs, we have to decide which needs are basic, and this could prove to be a difficult exercise: homo sapiens needs food and water to survive, everything else may be considered superfluous, the author says.
Today we may consider also shelter, healthcare and instruction as basic needs, but there is no certainty about what is going to be included among them in the future. Human needs depend very much on expectations, they are far from being objective, and so the definition of minimum will remain a fluid concept as society changes through time, Harari forecasts. This means that the mere access to an income will not per se suffice in making people happy, but UBI will have to be integrated with activities which makes people satisfied, from civic engagement to sport.
Harari suggests that his country of origin, Israel, could be thought of as a testing field for a satisfying life in a post-work world. There, half of the ultra-Orthodox Jews do not work, but spend their lives praying and studying the sacred tests, while receiving government subsidies and a share of free services. They derive their happiness from the strong ties they develop with the community they live in and from the fulfillment gained via their investment in religion, Harari mantains.
Even as they are looked at with contempt from the laic citizens of Israel, which see them as freeloaders, their example may very well provide a model for the society of the future: life will be spent in the search for purpose, which could be found through the development of a strong sense of community and by investing time studying and in the construction of social relationships. Those activities, combined with the economic safety net provide by UBI, can maybe provide a picture of the society of tomorrow.
Written by:
More information at:
Yuval N. Harari, “21 Lessons For the 21st Century”, Jonathan Cape, 30 August 2018
Yuval N. Harari, “Yuval Noah Harari on whatthe year 2050 has in store for humankind”, Wired, 12 August 2018
by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 30, 2018 | Opinion
Taiwan has seen its first series of referendums since the significant liberalization of its referendum law early this year. The results could have implications for the basic income movement in Taiwan and possibly the Asia Pacific.
There has been discussion among Taiwan’s basic income activists to organize Asia’s first basic income referendum on the island.
In January, the new referendum law came into effect in Taiwan, lowering the threshold for the number of signatures required to get a referendum on the ballot. The law also decreased the voting participation requirement from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Such a change made it realistic for a basic income referendum to make it to the ballot in Taiwan.
During the election last weekend, seven of the ten referendums were passed, the first such national referendums to pass in Taiwan’s history. Long lines waited for hours to vote, as many carefully studied the referendum language.
Most notably, opponents of gay marriage successfully passed three anti-LGBT referendums (two pro-LGBT referendums failed to pass), putting Taiwan’s legislature in a precarious position since its top court mandated that same-sex marriage must be legally recognized by May 2019.
How the referendum results will affect legislative action is unclear, since there is no precedent for legislating referendum results in Taiwan. Additionally, the referendum law does not create clear enforcement mechanisms to compel the legislature to act (except in the case of abolishing laws, which must take place within three days of the referendum result).
Regardless of how legally binding the results actually are, Taiwan’s legislature will feel pressure from the popular results to follow the principles of the referendums.
If Taiwan’s government fails to put the referendum results into law, it could have a chilling effect on future referendum movements and create questions about Taiwan’s democracy. There have already been signals from Taiwan’s presidential office that approved referendums regarding nuclear and coal will not lead to a change in energy strategy.
On the other hand, a robust response from the legislature will mobilize activists to utilize referendums as a key legislative strategy. It is likely that 2020 will see a wave of even more referendums than this year.
If some an income guarantee referendum were to pass, Taiwan’s government would only be compelled to submit a proposal and discuss the policy. There would have to be a significant societal mandate from the referendum to ensure the legislature will act to pass a law.
Polling from Academia Sinica and UBI Taiwan find 40 percent to 47 percent respectively of Taiwanese support basic income. As was seen with the competing gay rights referendums, using referendum as a vehicle to advance basic income can also mobilize opposition groups.
The LGBT referendums invited a wave of international attention. Certainly, a basic income referendum would attract regional and international attention as well.
However, a premature basic income referendum without institutional support and lacking a broad activist movement to defend the idea poses substantial risks. Basic income is still a new idea in Taiwan and Asia in general, and misunderstandings could derail the idea before it has an opportunity to develop in the region.
Anti-LGBT groups outspent the pro-LGBT movement and used misinformation and scare tactics to successfully persuade a large portion of Taiwan that LGBT marriage threatened the next generation of families.
It is without question that a basic income referendum would invite backlash from invested groups, who would probably have more financial resources than the nascent basic income movement in Taiwan.
Would an overwhelming vote in opposition to basic income do more harm than good for the movement in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific?
Certainly, Switzerland’s referendum was incredibly successful in propeling discussion of the idea around the world, even though it failed at the ballot box. However, both civic society and basic income activism are far more mature in Europe than in Taiwan.
A rejected basic income referendum in Taiwan could be portrayed as yet another global failure for UBI, along with the cancelled experiment in Canada, the ending of the Finland pilot, and even the rejection of the original Swiss referendum.
If I had to wager, I would bet that the societal discussion over basic income generated from a Taiwanese referendum will be overall helpful to advancing the movement in the Asia Pacific even if it does fail. This is especially true since backlash from opposition groups is inevitable anyway.
It is essential, though, that the basic income movement in Taiwan and beyond carefully consider its strategy to make UBI a reality.
by Andre Coelho | Nov 25, 2018 | News
India Network for Basic Income (INBI) will host the 19th BIEN Congress in Hyderabad, India, from 22nd to 25th of August 2019. At a time when the welfare state is undergoing major crisis, all around the world, and the discussion around basic income is gaining traction, it is ever more important to give voice to speakers and participants to present and debate this crucial new approach to social security. Being an international Congress, participants and speakers will be coming from different parts of the world, which only adds to the diversity of views and opinions a real global debate like the one referred above needs. Last year’s 18th BIEN Congress was held in Tampere, Finland, organized by the local BIEN affiliate.
The Congress organization results from a partnership between INBI and the NALSAR University of Law, which will house the Congress in its state-of-the-art campus on the outskirts of Hyderabad. INBI is also partnering with SEWA Madhya Pradesh, one of the largest membership-based women’s organization in the world and which played a key role in the Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot study. With SEWA, INBI will be producing short films and planning several campaign events in Madhya Pradesh and other parts of the country in the run up for the Congress. The days running up to the Congress will also host a major Hackathon in Hyderabad, organized by another INBI’s partner organization, the WisoCoLab. This event will also feature discussions around basic income and will feed in the Congress with a sum of its activities. Finally, the Mustardseed Trust is also partnering with INBI, as a financial supporter to the Congress, and in presenting a session at the Congress under “Basic Income and Caring Economy”.
The Congress itself will have plenary sessions, dynamic plenaries (panel of experts, with a moderator) and parallel sessions, in a structure similar to other BIEN Congresses. As in the latest Congress in Finland, there will also be a basic income short film festival integrated into to program schedule. New features planned are the BIEN Civic Forum, and the Basic Income Ideas Bazaar. The former, happening in the 22nd of August, intends to bring together different stakeholders in a given national or regional context to share views and debate basic income. The idea is to bring together policy-makers, corporate leaders and academics at the highest levels in the Indian context so as to strengthen the basic income debate in India. The latter is a space where organizations, artists and groups working on basic income who wish to showcase their work can do so at a nominal cost.
A formal Call for Papers to the Congress will soon be released.
More information at:
André Coelho, “Finland / International: BIEN Congress 2018 (part 2)”, Basic Income News, September 5th 2018
by Andre Coelho | Nov 19, 2018 | News
City Leaders attendees in L.A. at City Summit. Credit to: NLC.
The National League of Cities (NLC), an organization serving the interests of 19000 cities, towns and villages across the United States territory, has released, in a partnership with the Stanford Basic Income Lab (BIL), a basic income report to serve as guide to piloting UBI in cities. Framed as a toolkit, it is directed at city leaders and aims to guide policy rather than blueprint UBI pilots. It is intended to help cities considering introducing basic income experiments, providing historical background, prior experiment reports and results and present-day efforts in that regard.
The UBI is seriously contemplated by the NLC as a possible solution – although not a panacea – to growing automation, labour precariousness and peaking inequality. Basic income is also seen as an effective way to boost entrepreneurship, while providing a solid safety net. City leaders are conscient, though, that cities are limited in their ability to introduce basic income schemes, as they are part of wider nation-state organizations and governments. However, cities can act as experimental grounds to provide results and identify hurdles, both crucial aspects of an eventual nation-wide UBI implementation.
The basic income toolkit for cities is also meant to be a piece in what has been called a Theory of Change (ToC). A ToC is a study built as a roadmap to introduce meaningful change to a complex system such as a city. It is designed to help cities articulate their short, medium and long-term goals, and, within this context, draw important and already available outcomes from unconditional cash-transfer programs. Conversely, the ToC helps in calibrating the UBI experiment, informing on which data to collect, and when.
In a nutshell, the basic income report for UBI experiments in cities issues recommendations on identifying the goals (of the experiment), choosing those involved and when these should participate, defining the choice of recipients, specifying how to measure success and creating an effective communication strategy.
More information at:
Brooks Rainwater, “Yes, Cities Can Pilot Universal Basic Income”, National League of Cities, November 9th 2018
Juliana Bidadanure et al., “Basic Income in Cities – A guide to city experiments and pilot projects”, National League of Cities and Stanford Basic Income Lab, 2018
by Faun Rice | Nov 13, 2018 | Research
Photo by Stefan Kühn, CC BY-SA 3.0
The CESifo Group of Munich is a European research group that seeks to employ both high-quality economic theory and the methods of an empirical institute. Operating since 1999, CESifo is a collaboration between the Center for Economic Studies (CES), the ifo Institute (“Information and Forschung” or research), and the CESifo GmbH (Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research).
CESifo publishes a quarterly journal, the latest issue of which is devoted to Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). Five of seven pieces within this 48-page publication present a variety of perspectives on UBI research and theory, predominantly addressing the European context.
- Straubhaar, Thomas, “Universal Basic Income – New Answer to New Questions for the German Welfare State in the 21st Century”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 03–09 | Details| PDF Download
The focus: Transforming social support in Germany by replacing Bismarckian welfare state ideals
Straubhaar describes a series of proximate social and economic changes due to globalization, aging societies, income polarization, and dissolution of traditional economic safety nets. He comments that the contemporary version of the welfare state is founded upon 19th century Bismarckian principles that rely on a classic population pyramid (weighted by youth at the bottom), a male-breadwinner model, a fast-growing economy, and a labor-focused Protestant work ethic, none of which will continue to be relevant indefinitely. He proposes UBI as a welfare state model that would completely replace all other publicly financed social support and provide a 21st century solution to the aforementioned changes, particularly in Germany, but as a model for the rest of the world.
- Torry, Malcolm, “Some Lessons from the Recent UK Debate about Universal Basic Income”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 10–14 | Details| PDF Download
The focus: Enhancing UBI data distribution and ensuring that discussions maintain a clear definition of the difference between UBI and other related economic policies
Torry highlights a number of key events and issues from the UK that have broader relevance for the global community interested in UBI. The first discusses the important use of microsimulation to predict the impact of economic policies on households of varying incomes (for example, to estimate the loss of disposable income to low-income families if means-tested benefits remain or are removed). The second relates a story in which a public organization cherry-picked UBI data, to which Torry simply says that high-quality research ought to be better distributed. The third and fourth call the reader’s attention to the importance of using specific definitions of UBI schemes and not allowing the term to be misused.
- De Wispelaere, Jurgen, Antti Halmetoja and Ville-Veikko Pulkka, “The Rise (and Fall) of the Basic Income Experiment in Finland”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 15–19 | Details| PDF Download
The focus: Improving the international understanding of Finland’s basic income experiment, its origins, and its limitations
The Finnish basic income experiment began as a one-line commitment in the national Government Programme in 2015. Kela, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, proposed several experiment design options, and a two-year control trial began in January 2017. Kela will evaluate the results and present them to Parliament in 2019.
Basic income stakeholders have become increasingly critical of the trial parameters, raising concerns about the limits of the sample and the pilot’s restricted scope and goals. The authors argue that proponents of UBI initially overstated the extent of the Finnish government’s commitment and capabilities, heralding the commitment as a “watershed” moment for European basic income, when in fact the Finnish experiment and others have been limited from the outset by policy inertia, existing budgetary and taxation systems, and other institutional limitations. The pilot program is designed to assess basic income as a means of activating the labour market, a politically safe goal, and was never likely to result in policy changes of the kind UBI advocates desire to see.
- Colombino, Ugo and Nizamul Islam, “Basic Income and Flat Tax: The Italian Scenario”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 20–29 | Details| PDF Download
The focus: Evaluating proposed basic income-related policy packages in Italy and comparing their political origins
Like other European countries, Italy has seen several basic income proposals that have yet to be implemented. Several current potential models are rooted in different political ideologies and thus provide an interesting comparison. The first, “Reddito di Inclusione,” (RdI) is a basic income scheme that targets the most impoverished segment of the population in practice but is intended to be universal. The second, “Reddito di Cittadinanza” (RdC) is means-tested and only covers the population “below the relative poverty threshold” (20). Another model, proposed by Istituo Bruno Leoni (a think tank), involves both basic income and a flat tax.
The authors provide a basic overview of the differences between UBI, means-tested guaranteed income, and negative income tax. They then simulate and evaluate the various government-proposed combinations of policies, concluding that while it is possible to design a fiscally neutral policy package, current government proposals have not yet done so.
- Widerquist, Karl, “The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Brief Discussion of the Difficulties of Basic Income Experiments”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 30–35 | Details| PDF Download
The focus: Making UBI research accessible and understandable, particularly with regard to its limitations
Widerquist’s basic thesis is that, contrary to popular representations of policy research, all UBI experiments contain a significant list of caveats. He argues that science journalism has not done an adequate job of communicating the limitations of UBI studies, or indeed any social sciences research, to the public. Furthermore, specialist researchers’ lists of caveats are inadequate for communicating a study’s limitations. Widerquist has an upcoming book that will address both best practices in UBI research given its inherent difficulties and best practices in communication the results of said research to the public and policymakers. In this article, he identifies four broad strategies: (1) iteratively designing studies with public feedback, so that research directly addresses the questions relevant to local stakeholders; (2) highlighting UBI’s impact in publications, rather than its side-effects (even though the latter might be more interesting to researchers); (3) attempting to define a “bottom line” or generalizable conclusion from research; and (4) addressing and discussing ethical controversies.
- Clauss, Michael and Stefan Remhof, “A Euro Area Finance Ministry – Recipe for Improved Governance?”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 36–43 | Details| PDF Download
The authors discuss the possibility and potential function of a euro-area finance ministry. Such an organization could either martial Europe’s national fiscal policies to align them throughout the region, or it could be one more “layer” of fiscal authority in each European nation. This paper does not explicitly address UBI.
- Nam, Chang Woon and Peter Steinhoff, “The ‘Make in India’ Initiative”, CESifo Forum 19 (3), 2018, 44–45 | Details| PDF Download
The authors discuss a 2014 federal initiative to promote industrial manufacturing in India. This paper does not explicitly address UBI.
More information at:
“CESifo Forum 03/2018 (Autumn): Unconditional Basic Income”, 01-48, ifo Institute, Munich, 2018
