by Kate McFarland | Dec 2, 2016 | News
On November 20, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Joe Kaeser, CEO of the multibillion-dollar engineering company Siemens AG, has demanded a basic income.
According to the news report, Kaeser, speaking at the Süddeutsche Zeitung Economic Summit in Berlin, said that a basic income would eventually be necessary to protect workers who become displaced due to artificial intelligence and automation. Subsequently, many readers credited Kaeser with support for unconditional basic income (bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen), as endorsed by BIEN.
In later remarks, however, Kaeser clarified that he does not demand an unconditional basic income–as the Siemens Press Office tweeted on November 22:
Source: Siemens Press Office (via Twitter)
While Kaeser believes that the state must offset the hardships faced by those whose jobs are adversely affected by technological progress, he does not believe that the support must be unconditional.
Despite Kaeser’s own subsequent disavowal of UBI, the initial (and perhaps misleading) news report generated a surge of interest in the idea. Süddeutsche Zeitung itself–Germany’s largest subscription newsletter–followed its article about Kaeser with a week-long series on basic income.
One article revisited the ideas of Götz Werner, the billionaire founder of the drugstore chain Drogerie Markt who called for a universal and unconditional basic income of 1000€ per month. Others provided further commentary on Kaeser’s initially reported statement that a “kind of basic income” will be unavoidable in the face of automation.
In comments to Basic Income News, Ronald Heinrich of the basic income political party Bündnis Grundeinkommen described Kaeser’s remarks as a “tipping point” in German media coverage of basic income.
Reference
Max Hägler (November 20, 2016) “Siemens-Chef plädiert für ein Grundeinkommen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung [German]
Joe Kaeser photo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 CSIS
by Kate McFarland | Nov 28, 2016 | News
A tech conference held in October in Berlin, Germany, included a panel on universal basic income, which featured basic income popularizer Michael Bohmeyer (Mein Grundeinkommen) alongside three AI experts.
The Data Natives conference, which took place in Berlin from October 26 through 28, featured a variety of sessions on data science, AI, machine learning, and related technical topics, as well as sessions on business in a data-driven age [1].
Amidst its panels and presentations on data science, software development, and business, there was one politically-oriented panel: “The Future of AI and Universal Basic Income”.
The panel discussion was moderated by Hans Uszkoreit, scientific director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (who speaks about his own work in a separate session), and included three panelists: Abdourahmane Faye, a machine learning specialist who works on what advanced data analytics can do for business; NiMA Asghari, UAV applications expert at Drone Industry Insights; and Michael Bohmeyer, founder of Mein Grundeinkommen, a German non-profit organization that has given away dozens of year-long basic incomes to randomly-selected entrants.
Panelists discussed such issues as whether artificial intelligence really will destroy jobs, whether individuals with a basic income would lose motivation to work and help others, and whether it is accurate to extrapolate the findings of basic income pilot studies (including individual trials like those of Mein Grundeinkommen) to a society with a full-scale universal basic income.
While Bohmeyer, of course, is a champion of UBI, others on the panel hold less favorable views. Faye opposed the policy: expressing confidence in humanity’s ability to continue to create new jobs in a digitized, automated economy, he does not see a need for UBI, and he worries that a UBI would undermine work incentives. Asghari seemed to assume a more neutral territory, raising points both for and against UBI throughout the discussion.
Watch the four men speak from really short chairs in this complete video of the session:
[1] The author, being both fond of puns and a big fan the band Einstürzende Neubauten, would like to make special note of a session entitled “Einstürzenden Neudaten“.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: nHow (conference venue) lobby CC-BY-SA-3.0 Forster82
by Kate McFarland | Nov 24, 2016 | News
British journalist and broadcaster Paul Mason, author of Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future, recently delivered a lecture in Amsterdam in which he points out the need for a universal basic income as a partial solution to changes in the economy due to new technologies. He raises related concerns in an article in The Guardian published shortly thereafter.
On October 25, author Paul Mason delivered a lecture at the De Balie culture center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, wherein he argues that technological advancement has been not only correlated with but in fact a cause of economic stagnation. He attributes this to several characteristics of new information technologies: the ability to automate more jobs and job tasks, the ability to produce and reproduce goods at very low (even zero) marginal cost, and the ability to combine data through networks to generate new goods not reflected in standard measures of economic growth.
In addressing how the left should respond, Mason says, “Our long-term aim should be to push more and more economic activity [to be] done outside the market and the state.” This requires, in part, that we “end [the] reliance on wages for work.” In this context, he continues: “We need quickly to pursue the experiments with the universal basic income … and aim within 10 years for states to be in a position to roll out the policy itself.”
He goes on to add, however, that UBI alone is insufficient; the state, for instance, should also provide “cheap basic goods” (he mentions housing, healthcare, education, and transportation) and promote open source and non-profit businesses.
The entire lecture, along with the Q&A session, can be viewed below. Mason has also published a text version of his lecture on Medium.
https://vimeo.com/188859000#t=8m42s
In an October 31 article in The Guardian, Mason again broached UBI as a potential solution to technological unemployment — predicting a world in which smart technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, cause paid work to become scarce and sporadic. Here, in passing, Mason also links UBI to the potential fulfillment of Marx’s vision of a society in which people are free to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner” without ever assuming an occupational identity as hunter, fisher, cattle-rearer, or critic.
References
Paul Mason (October 27, 2016) “Postcapitalism [in Amsterdam]” Medium.
Paul Mason (October 31, 2016) “The battle over Uber and driverless cars is really a debate about the future of humanity” The Guardian.
Photo: Paul Mason in 2015, CC-BY-SA-4.0 DTRocks via Wikimedia Commons
by Roland Duchatelet | Nov 23, 2016 | Opinion
About 25 years ago, when internet emerged, I addressed an audience saying: “If newspapers [didn’t already] exist today” there is “no way investors or bankers would support the business-idea to collect news, print it on paper around midnight and dispatch this printed stuff using thousands of vehicles to bring it to shops and individual readers before morning comes”.
In most western countries, social security became significant approximately 70 years ago, when it got an extensive legal basis. It now plays a crucial role in developed countries to give purchasing power to citizens who do not have an income from a job. Moreover, in many countries it provides free health care for everybody.
Just like internet changed the way news is distributed, the fact that computers and robots replace human work is a “game changer” for social security, which was totally based on labour contributions since its inception. More and more jobs are subsidised and therefore do not really “contribute” to the social security system anymore. Just like we continue to get news, even better and faster, we want to keep social security and improve it despite paid labour becoming less important in our economic system. In most West European countries, the amount distributed by the social security system increased constantly as a share of income of households and is now, if you include benefits in kind, more or less equal to the net pay households get from work. There is little political awareness of this fact.
Assuming social security never existed and we decide to create it, how would we organise the cash redistribution part of it? Just like blood in the human body redistributes blood cells to make all parts of our body work, money fulfils a similar role in society: allowing exchange of goods and services amongst individuals.
Like the heart of the human body pushes blood in various parts of our body and collects the blood on the other side, the social security system injects money, purchasing power, into society to fuel exchanges of goods and services.
In the future, the total amount of money distributed should be no less than today, and should gradually increase when automation further decreases the demand for paid labour in our economic system because we need purchasing power to drive economic activity.
The conditional character of the current social security system limits freedom to work, to move in with friends and so on. It is a huge deterrent to work and enjoy life. Assume a Belgian person gets 1200 € unemployment benefit and could get a job paying 1350 € net per month. Because that person loses the 1200 € as soon as she/he starts to work, the marginal reward is 150 € per month. Since there are approximately 150 working hours in a month, it is only worth 1 € per hour. Stupid system, yes indeed.
Therefore, the biggest part of the new social security system’s cash distribution, around 90 percent, should be a straightforward unconditional basic income distributed to everyone, the amount solely depending on the age. In the example above, this unconditional basic income could be 800 € per month for the 26 to 67 age group, lower than the highest “replacement income”, but not much lower than the average unemployment benefit in Belgium today. A second layer to the system should be conditional, based on specific needs or situations like invalidity, requiring administration. By comparison the administration cost of the new social security system would be roughly 90 percent lower than the current one.
There is no need of for additional taxes in the new system (see this Economist graph) if the basic income becomes a part (and does not come in addition) of the current income from work (or current social security benefits). For example if we decide the basic income for adults in the US to be 900 $ per month and a person’s net income from work is presently 1900 $, his pay-check will read: “basic income 900$, income from work 1000 $”. This could be done in two ways. The first way is the employer pays the basic income of his employee. The second way is that the state pays the basic income to the employee but charges a tax equal to the basic income to the employer. Either way, the employee keeps getting the same income, the employer has the same employment cost as before and the state has no extra cost. But to be aware of all these things, the employer might need to take advice about employment law from the advisors of the consultancies like Sentient in Leeds. If you own a company, you can look out for similar firms in your city or state to get an idea of all the laws before any kind of settlement about salary or employment contracts.
Only citizens which have no income at all or less than 900 $ would get more cash from the new system than what they get today. This extra distribution of money can be funded thanks to the lower administration cost of the basic income system in comparison to the present one.
If we could start all anew, we would cherish the local economy, promoting free and uncomplicated exchanges of goods and services between individuals to improve our well-being. For instance, if we have a plumbing issue in our home, instead of calling expert service providers, who have already made a big name for themselves and are doing well, we might want to contact local plumbers (such as royalflushsa.com.au) who do not necessarily have much publicity, but have excellent reviews. With an unconditional basic income-based social security, working for each other would be allowed. It would be even better if there were no labour taxes on services individuals provide to each other in the “proximity economy”.
Would the state lose much of the revenue from the income tax? Not much, since those exchanges of services do not tend to occur now, unless in “black”. But there would be an increase in revenue for people involved in proximity services, like for those who do not perform paid work today. Retired people would also consider earning money on top of their pension if they are sure there is no paperwork hassle at their Social Security office locations in Colorado, or wherever was local to them, and no risk for them to lose part of their retirement benefit.
The extra income would – for example – be spent in restaurants. That spending will yield income taxes and consumption taxes for the state, paid by those restaurants.
The social security system we know is a 70-year-old house to which our governments did not stop adding extensions. Meanwhile, they changed the windows, put in a new kitchen and bathroom, isolated the roof and connected everything by lots of cables.
We can reorganise the redistribution or purchasing power in a much better way: let’s build a new house.
by Kate McFarland | Nov 5, 2016 | News
Tim Dunlop, a Melbourne-based journalist, blogger, and political philosopher, has published a new book, Why the Future is Workless. In the book, Dunlop argues that we are approaching a postwork future in which many jobs are rendered unnecessary.
A discussion of basic income is central to the book. Indeed, the first non-introductory chapter is devoted to the topic, which Dunlop introduces as a prerequisite to analyzing the ways in which societies can respond to changes in the nature of work. As he states in the introduction (which has been reprinted on Medium), “This chapter is a close look at how basic income would work in practice, about the different forms it could take and, most importantly, about how its implementation would change the way workers and employers relate to each other.”
Dunlop has also written an article for The Guardian, drawing from the book, in which he argues that technology will make many jobs unnecessary or obsolete. Turning briefly to address positive solutions, he states, “The approach we should be taking is not to find ways that we can compete with machines – that is a losing battle – but to find ways in which wealth can be distributed other than through wages. This will almost certainly involve something like a universal basic income.” (And, yes, the link to BIEN’s website was in the original.)
Read More:
Tim Dunlop (2016) Why the Future is Workless, Newsouth Books.
Tim Dunlop (September 19, 2016) “Why The Future Is Workless: Introduction,” Medium.
Tim Dunlop (September 25, 2016) “Humans are going to have the edge over robots where work demands creativity,” The Guardian.
John Tomlinson — a leader of BIG-Australia (BIEN’s Australian affiliate) and co-editor of the book Basic Income in Australia and New Zealand (2016) — has written a review in which he compares Why the Future is Workless to Guy Standing’s new book, The Corruption of Capitalism:
John Tomlinson (October 11, 2016) “The Corruption of Capitalism explains Why the Future is Workless,” On Line opinion.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Image: CC BY-NC 2.0 quisnovus
