On the ‘automation’ argument for basic income

On the ‘automation’ argument for basic income

Written by: Michael A. Lewis
Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center

When I first became interested in the basic income, I was a graduate student studying welfare reform. For those who aren’t in the know, “welfare” is the more common name used in the U.S. to refer to a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and which used to be called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). TANF and AFDC aren’t exactly the same programs, but they do have some key things in common: they provide financial support to low income persons, most of those who receive such support are women and children, and, I think it’s fair to say, both programs are somewhat controversial.

The controversy around welfare has to do with the fact that many of those who receive benefits are apparently “able-bodied” persons who’re thought capable of working (“working” in this context means selling one’s labor in return for a wage, instead of, say, taking care of one’s children, something many would regard as work). Yet not enough of those on welfare are working, according to a common belief among many U.S. citizens/residents as well as, apparently, politicians. So in an attempt to socialize welfare beneficiaries into understanding the importance of work, many of them are required to work in return for their benefits, a practice commonly called “workfare.” Many also remain poor, even after receiving benefits, because the financial support they receive is pretty meager.

As a graduate student, I thought workfare, as well as the low level of benefits provided to recipients was a very unjust way of assisting poor persons; I also thought we could do better (in fact, I still think these things). My entry into the world of basic income was because I believed it a more just way of addressing poverty than welfare and related programs.

Once I started studying basic income and meeting others interested in the idea, I heard other justifications for it. It would enhance freedom, it would allow people to engage in care work if they so choose, it would give people an income representing their share of commonly owned natural resources, it would be a way of replacing some or all of the welfare state (which, of course, assumes there is something wrong with the current system), etc. But the argument that seems to have caught on the most, at least in the U.S., is the idea that a basic income will become necessary as robots/machines take our jobs.

I have to admit that part of me has been a bit concerned about the degree to which the automation argument seems to dominate basic income discussions. My worry is that as we spend so much time debating who’s right about whether robots will take most, or perhaps all, of our jobs and, therefore, whether there’ll be a need for a basic income, other arguments for such a policy get “crowded out” of the discussion. Yet as I’ve voiced this concern, mainly to myself, I’ve also wondered why this argument for a basic income seems to have caught on in a way that others haven’t?

I think part of the answer has to do with where I started—U.S. citizens/residents worry a lot about the degree to which healthy people work to take care of themselves (and their families) and are quite skeptical about policies they believe will allow people to shirk this responsibility. But I think another part of the answer has to do with the role of race in our society. I suspect that in the minds of many citizens/residents the degree to which a basic income would allow people to shirk their obligations to work would vary by race. To put it bluntly, I suspect many assume that black and brown people would be more likely to shirk this responsibility than whites would be. If I’m right about all this, then perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the U.S. isn’t naturally the most fertile place for the basic income idea to take hold. But why would it take hold in the form of the automation argument? I think the answer here might be pretty simple. If machines are about to take all our jobs, then automation represents a relatively indiscriminant force. That is, “hard working white people” might be threatened just as much as “lazy shiftless brown ones” are. Perhaps this has been enough to get white folks to take notice of a policy that perhaps could address the problem.

About the author: Michael A. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist by training whose areas of interest are public policy and quantitative methods. He’s also a co-founder of USBIG and has written a number of articles, book chapters, and other pieces on the basic income, including the co-edited work The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee. Lewis is on the faculties of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Graduate and University Center of the City University of New York.

Bill Gates is wrong: Don’t tax robots

Bill Gates is wrong: Don’t tax robots

Bill Gates made headlines when he suggested robots that take human jobs should be taxed at a similar rate as humans. The money, he said, could slow the rate of automation, and be used to fund government jobs.

Gates could not be more wrongheaded on this proposal.

The problem with Gates’ idea is that it assumes robots taking human jobs is something to be discouraged. The opposite is true. We should welcome robots doing more tasks for humans, thus freeing up humans to engage in other fulfilling endeavors.

Imagine the government took Gates’ approach with Microsoft computers to prevent their machines from taking jobs. Humanity would be worse off because of the unrealized productivity, connectivity, and convenience that would be impossible without computers.

The crucial component in response to automation that Gates does not mention is the Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI will ensure that those who lose their jobs to robots will have a flexible cash grant that could be used for training, education, or to pursue whatever the individual’s passion may be.

There is a legitimate worry that the companies that own the robots will accumulate most of the wealth, and the rest will be left behind. A basic income addresses this automation cliff more effectively than attempting to delay inevitable automation with taxation.

It is possible in the future, humans will be able to scale back their work hours, while still receiving a comparable overall income through UBI because robots would be doing the bulk of humanity’s work. An individual could spend more time on volunteering, entrepreneurship, their family, civic engagement, and creative endeavors.

The greater the dividend humanity receives from robots because of their higher productivity, the larger the basic income can be without disrupting the economy.

Gates and others are stuck in the mindset that humans are meant to spend eight hours a day, five days a week in a traditional work environment. Robots are threatening to upend the system, which should be welcomed as it opens new possibilities for what people can do with their time.

Just because someone receives a wage from a company does not mean they are maximizing their potential for themselves and what they can provide to society. For example, is a single mother doing more for society by working twelve hour shifts, or spending more time raising her child?

As automation intensifies and countries inevitably start to implement basic income, many will continue to work full-time in the traditional system. Others will work part-time. And still more will find different ways to contribute to society. There is a basic human drive to develop one’s self and bring positive change to the world.

Traditional work will not necessarily cultivate each person’s true comparative advantage. The irony is that robots taking more jobs will give us more freedom to choose our best path, if coupled with an unconditional basic income.

Instead of taxing robots, we should tax activities that we want to discourage. For example, activities that harm the environment, such as fossil fuel use, animal agriculture, and resource extraction. Land ownership could also be taxed at a higher level. This could raise the same amount of revenue from wealthy individuals as Gates’ suggested robot tax in order to fund UBI and other government services, without discouraging the positive good of robotic development.

The dramatic expansion of automated jobs is going to remake the economic order and will require governments around the world to respond. The biggest mistake will be fighting this change and attempting to preserve the same system we have now, instead of using the opportunity to drastically improve it.

Image: Red Maxwell, Flickr, Ted Talk: 2009.

China must be ready for automation

China must be ready for automation

China’s spectacular growth in the past thirty years has begun to slow down in recent years. Emerging signs suggest that China is woefully unprepared for the fallout from exponentially rising automation of manufacturing jobs. While businesses are still going to sites like https://gembah.com/guides/manufacturing-in-china-like-a-pro/ to find the best way they can manufacture their products, the factories in China need to make sure they are prepared for the increased automation that will be coming to the manufacturing industry in the coming years.

The former Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) orchestrated the country’s economic miracle through a dramatic increase in exports to the rest of the world. For the next several decades, China reoriented the world economy, and many companies stationed their factories within China to take advantage of the cheap labor. Many of these factories might be making use of system integration software soon to increase the efficiency of their factories. I hear it reduces a lot of admin work and increases productivity. As wages rise and the population ages, the value of the original bargain is starting to erode.

In absolute terms, China is leading the world in the number of robots used for production. Over the next decade, China will start to catch up to other advanced economies in terms of per capita robots. By 2019, China may even nearly double its number of robots. At the same time, robots will complete increasingly complex tasks, threatening an even wider range of jobs for humans. Inevitably, this will cause many low-skilled workers in China (and around the world) to lose their jobs. And absent incredibly disruptive government intervention that would likely do more harm than good, these low-skilled jobs will never come back.

Young people in China are more educated than ever, and are increasingly less likely to want to pursue factory jobs anyway. Automation can help propel China toward a more innovative and service-based economy by freeing up labor for these higher value pursuits. In the meantime, though, college-educated Chinese are having difficulty finding jobs as China’s economy readjusts. Without a proper safety net in place, China risks facing social unrest as automation begins to accelerate.

As it stands, China’s main welfare program dibao is too bureaucratic and ineffective to handle the influx of unemployed individuals because of all of the conditions attached to the program. When addressing automation, China’s best solution may be to universalize the dibao to create a universal basic income. This would allow for a smooth transition away from China’s reliance on human-led manufacturing. The need for product inspection in China is highly important for manufacturers, as they must make sure everything is made to the highest specifications. Using a China inspection service can help prevent issues and malfunctioning products, hopefully, this form of checking is not looked over when the change to more automated manufacturing is completed. China acts as a pillar for world economic growth. The basic income would not only stave off the most destabilizing aspects of the coming automation revolution in China, but it is also crucial for the stability of the international economy.

Elon Musk reaffirms UBI prediction at World Government Summit

Elon Musk reaffirms UBI prediction at World Government Summit

Elon Musk — the famed entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors and SpaceX, who now sits on a panel of economic advisors to President Donald Trump — was a featured speaker at the World Government Summit, held February 12 through 14 in Dubai.

In a dialogue with UAE Minister Mohammad Al Gergawi, Musk reaffirmed his belief (first expressed in a CNBC interview) that “some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary” to cope with unemployment due to automation of labor.

Musk’s attitude was not entirely optimistic, however. He noted that technological unemployment, and the resultant need for UBI, is something he thinks will happen as a matter of fact — not something he wishes will happen — and he expressed concern that many people might lack “meaning” in a world with mass technology-driven unemployment.  

As quoted in Fast Company News, Musk said, in full:

There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen. And if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, than we have to think about what are we going to do about it? I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary. The output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation there will come abundance. Almost everything will get very cheap. I think we’ll end up doing universal basic income. It’s going to be necessary. The much harder challenge is, how are people going to have meaning? A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. So if there’s no need for your labor, what’s your meaning? Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.

 

According to its website, the World Government Summit drew over 4,000 attendees from more than 130 countries. In addition to Musk, featured speakers included Ruler of Dubai H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde, World Bank President Jim Kim, UNESCO Director Irina Bokova, Linked-In co-founder Reid Hoffman, and many others.

Elizabeth Rhodes, director of Y Combinator’s basic income research project (currently conducting a pilot study in Oakland), attended the World Government Summit as part of a panel on the “legacy of the 21st century” — which also examined the societal impact of automation.    

 

See also:

Elon Musk warns global governments about the future,” World Government Summit, February 14, 2017.


Reviewed by Cameron McLeod

Elon Musk photo CC BY 2.0 Heisenberg Media

UBI needs peers to control services of general interest (part one)

UBI needs peers to control services of general interest (part one)

 

Written by: Katarzyna Gajewska

The argument that the system of peer production on a wide scale requires securing stable income for peers from the state is promoted, among others, by Michel Bauwens. In this article, I will argue that the reverse is also true. In order to be sustained, unconditional basic income (UBI) needs to be accompanied by changes in the realm of general interest services. This applies particularly to the domain of services of general interest that participate in the subsistence. Money transfer needs to be accompanied by de-commodification of subsistence measures.

Although UBI certainly would contribute to bettering the situation of the poor, it does not challenge the capitalist power relations. The domain of work and production is only one of the opportunities for the capitalist class to exploit inequalities and accumulate wealth. Other sources of wealth extraction are property rights, real estates, rent, access to natural resources, urban infrastructure, land grabbing. Elsewhere, I elaborate how, despite introducing a UBI, capitalist class domination would continue in the domain of subsistence1 and housing 2 if other elements of the system were preserved.

Technological unemployment due to robotization of production is indicated as one of the reasons for a UBI. Robotization would cause centralization of power in the hands of machine owners and technological elites. Since labor used to exercise influence on their wages through the threat of withdrawing from production, under the condition of technological unemployment it would lose its leverage.3 Therefore, adjusting the basic income to the level that enables a decent living would be increasingly difficult. On the other hand, the capital owning the means of production in the domain of services of general interest such as water, food, electricity, health or housing can demand higher prices once having dominant position, and there may even be additional costs for things like commercial water treatment products for businesses after the initial price is paid. Therefore, neoliberal pressure for privatization of subsistence-related services and goods is particularly dangerous. As a result of privatization, citizens can increasingly less meaningfully participate in the governance of general interest services, being left with the relatively passive roles of voter and client.4 The UBI movement needs to take this into account in formulating proposals for UBI reform, namely advocating for more democratic control over the means of subsistence.

Subsistence services in citizens’ hands: some inspirations

Representative democracy alone does not seem to prevent that services of general interest are privatized. Specific citizen mobilization around this issue is required. Three types of strategies can be pursued to bring more control over essential services: re-municipalization, overtake by citizen cooperatives, and commoning. I will give more space to the latter one because the two former have been described in other publications.

Remunicipalization

There are different models that incorporate the democratic dimension in the provision of services of general interest. For example, in water supply services privatization turned out to be dissatisfying for the customers both in terms of quality and prices. The book “HERE TO STAY: WATER REMUNICIPALISATION AS A GLOBAL TREND”5 analyzes examples of how this trend has been reverted by re-municipalization initiatives. It illustrates how significantly the quality can improve and prices lowered with the involvement of public authorities.

However, involving citizens in the process of decision making does not guarantee their influence on the final output. Incumbents’ initiatives in the realm of political participation do not seem to alleviate the democratic deficit. Participatory elements within the new public management and neo-Weberian state models can be motivated by the instrumental aim of overcoming resistance.6 Participatory and deliberative procedures can be used as ‘public relations’ tools by political elites to give citizens the illusion of engagement,7 so-called ‘participatory window-dressing.’8

Cooperatives

Citizens can organize to buy the infrastructure related to subsistence needs. In a small German town, Schoenau,9activists bought out electricity infrastructure to convert it into a cooperative of which citizens can buy shares. As an act of protest against the nuclear power, they turned to solar energy. Similar attempts have been undertaken by activists in Berlin to prevent the renewal of a contract with a multinational company of Swedish origin. Certainly, in the case of services that are sold on the market, there is a danger of degeneration of cooperative ideals due to the market pressure, which is quite common among worker and consumer cooperatives. Still it may be a better option in comparison to an accumulation of power in capitalist enterprises.

Commoning

The precariat, in the face of unresponsive state institutions, prefers the self-organized provision of services in order to become autonomous of these institutions.10 Heynen11 argues that the realm of social rights and the welfare state has diminished in recent decades in the US, so social movements have invented other forms of pursuing their struggles. Instead of trusting that delegation to the state will ensure the provision of public services and redistribution, activists create services themselves. For instance, Food Not Bombs produces and redistributes food. Furthermore, representatives of the recent generation of social movements believe that creating alternatives rather than reforming the system is a better way to bring about change, which reflects the mistrust of and awareness of the danger of cooptation by elitist politics and institutions.12 Activists focus on the ‘here and now’, practicing alternative forms of production and organization parallel to the state-based and market-based ones as everyday ‘revolutions.’13 For example, the domain of food-producing resources, although now mostly privatized, can be organized in a different way. In ancient times and still nowadays there are various communal arrangements in some parts of the world.14

In articles on People’s Potato, I describe a worker cooperative that coordinates the preparation of partly dumpster-dived food with the help of volunteers. Financed by fee levies, the meals are distributed for free. This type of the organization of food provision can be defined as peer production, which means a voluntary, spontaneous, and inclusive work contribution to produce a good or service in common that serves a broader community. Peers produce use value that is accessible even to those that have not contributed to its production. Initiatives such as Food Not Bombs or Incredible Edible follow similar philosophy. In the article on technological unemployment and work, I describe further initiatives of self-organized services: retirees time bank in Germany and subsistence cooperative in Catalonia.15 One could expect to optimize the costs and use of resources by restructuring production into commons. Las Indias’ Manifesto demonstrates potential gains that can be achieved by escaping the capitalist organization of production. Kibbutz movement managed to increase productivity and reduce the use of water in agriculture.16

Basic Income movement for other causes

“All we can ask of politics is to create the spaces in which the alternative social practices can develop.”17

Joining other movements in demanding the democratization of services, UBI movement could focus on a twofold struggle: mobilization against the privatization of services and for the re-appropriation of spaces for citizen participation and self-organization.

Elinor Ostrom argued in favor of creating institutional arrangements ‘for cooperative housing and neighborhood governance (…) to facilitate co-productive efforts for monitoring and exercising control over public spaces.’18Kooiman presents a model of ‘societal governance,’ a mix of self-governance, co-governance, and hierarchical governance.19

Bovaird predicts that the governance system may evolve into ‘self-organizing policy and service delivery systems – ‘governance without government.”20 The progressive theories of public administration have a vision of public administration that is ‘collaborative, facilitative, or transformational social role in support of citizen emancipation and self-governance.’ This type of re-conceptualization of the role of public administration has a longer tradition in the feminist movement and in the 2000s several authors have postulated this direction of change.21 In an academic article, I propose a change to the tax system. Taxpayers could allocate certain part of the due taxes to the organizations of their choice. In this way, the organizations can plan their yearly budget and produce as much as the collected sum allows.22 Also laws facilitating the access to unused spaces would make it easier for the self-organizing groups to start commons projects.

The example of People’s Potato, which struggles against corporate monopoly in food provision at Concordia University in Montreal, illustrates that the mobilization although it requires true determination, can begin now, case by case. I summarized the relations between People’s Potato, commercial food providers, and the university administration in another article:

“People’s Potato discovered that part of kitchen space previously used by Sodexho/Marriot was vacant, while the major part was overtaken by Chartwells. They started to use this space for their cooking. For another two years, People’s Potato struggled with the administration to get official use of the space. It is equipped with all necessary industrial kitchen facilities. The university charges the Potato for some repairs, like painting or heavy maintenance, but they pay all of their other utilities, such as garbage removal, electricity and hot water. The status of the collective within the university structure is ambiguous and there is always a fear of losing support from other organizations and the kitchen space as no official contract has been signed. “23

Instead of waiting for a more serious debate on UBI among political elites where activists could present a more encompassing reform, the change can arise from single initiatives. Späth and Rohracher point to the power of local experiments, which can mobilize actors. Niches, spaces protected from economic pressures can develop into full-fledged models for change. The local level change is possible in ‘off the radar’ spaces for interests of dominant economic actors. In this way, it is easier to overcome the problem of nested interests preventing change. Furthermore, institutional voids can enable introducing new practices.24

 

About the author: Katarzyna Gajewska is an independent writer. She has a PhD in Political Science and has published on alternative economy and innovating the work organization since 2013. You can find her non-academic writing on such platforms as Occupy.com, P2P Foundation Blog, Basic Income UK, Bronislaw Magazine and LeftEast. For updates on her publications, you can check her Facebook page or send her an e-mail: k.gajewska_comm@zoho.com. If you would like to support her independent writing, please make a donation to the PayPal account at the same address!

 

References:

1Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Technological Unemployment but Still a Lot of Work: Towards Prosumerist Services of General Interest. Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(1): 104-112.

2Gajewska, Katarzyna (May 2014) : UBI and Housing Problem, https://basicincome.org.uk/2014/05/housing-power-land/

3Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Technological Unemployment but Still a Lot of Work: Towards Prosumerist Services of General Interest. Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(1): 104-112.

4 Elinor Ostrom, “A Communitarian Approach to Local Governance,” National Civic Review (Summer 1993): 226-233.

5HERE TO STAY: WATER REMUNICIPALISATION AS A GLOBAL TREND :https://www.tni.org/files/download/heretostay-en.pdf

6 William N. Dunn and David Y. Miller, “A Critique of the New Public Management and the Neo-Weberian State: Advancing a Critical Theory of Administrative Reform,” Public Organization Review 7 (December 2007) 345-358, 355.

7 Léon Blondiaux, “L’idée de démocratie participative: enjeux, impensés et questions récurrentes,” In M.-H. Bacqué et al. (eds), Gestion de proximité et démocratie participative. (Paris: La découverte, 2005). Léon Blondiaux and Yves Sintomer, “L’impératif délibératif,” Politix 15.57 (2002): 17–35.

8 Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, “Countervailing Power in Empowered Participatory Governance,” in Deepening Democracy (London/New York: Verso, 2003), 265.

9Elektrizitätswerke Schönau Netze, https://www.ews-schoenau.de/

10 Christophe Trombert, “Expertise professionnelle et contre-expertise militante dans l’accès aux droits sociaux: tension à front renversé autour du général et du singulier,” SociologieS, Théories et recherches, 25 June 2013. URL : https://sociologies.revues.org/4360

11 Nik Heynen, “Cooking Up Non-violent Civil-disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry: ‘Food Not Bombs’ and the Resurgence of Radical Democracy in the US,” Urban Studies 47(6 2010): 1225–1240.

12 cf. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity.”

13 Marco Silvestro and Pascal Lebrun, “La révolution à l’échelle humaine, une radicalité actuelle concrète,” Argument 12 (Spring-Summer 2010).

14Vivero, Jose Luis (2015) : Transition Towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-Commoning Food to Crowd-Feed the World, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2548928

15Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Technological Unemployment but Still a Lot of Work: Towards Prosumerist Services of General Interest, Journal of Evolution and Technology 24(1): 104-112.https://jetpress.org/v24/gajewski.htm

16Las Indias’ Communard Manifesto, https://lasindias.com/the-communard-manifesto-html

17Gorz, A. (1999): Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-based Society. Cambridge: Polity, p. 79.

18Ostrom, Elinor (1993): A Communitarian Approach to Local Governance, National Civic Review Summer, 226-233, 232.

19Kooiman, J. (2000): Societal Governance: Levels, Modes, and Orders of Social-political Governance. In Jon Pierre (ed.) Debating Governance: Authority, Steering and Democracy, (pp. 138–64). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20Bovaird, Tony (2005): Public governance: balancing stakeholder power in a network society. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 71(2), 217–228, p. 226.

21Stout, Margaret (2010): Back to the Future: Toward a Political Economy of Love and Abundance, Administration & Society 42(1): 3–37.

22Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Peer production and prosummerism as a model for the future organization of general interest services provision in developed countries: examples of food services collectives. World Future Review 6(1): 29-39.

23Gajewska, Katarzyna (30 June 2014): There is such a thing as a free lunch: Montreal Students Commoning and Peering food services. P2P Foundation Blog, https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/there-is-such-a-thing-as-a-free-lunch-montreal-students-commoning-and-peering-food-services/2014/06/30

24P. Späth, H. Rohracher (2012): Local demonstrations for global transitions – Dynamics across governance levels fostering regime change. In: European Planning Studies 20(3), pp. 461-479.