by Kate McFarland | Nov 5, 2016 | News
The Seventh Bowling Green State University (BGSU) Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy, to be held at the BGSU campus on April 7-8, 2017, will be organized around the theme “The Future of Work, Automation, and a Basic Income”.
The two keynote speakers are Matt Zwolinski, a political philosopher at the University of San Diego who has developed a libertarian justification of basic income, and Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba who is known in the basic income community for analyzing the results of Manitoba’s “Mincome” experiment.
A call for abstracts has been released (submissions due December 1), and additional information will become available at BGSU’s website.
Photo CC BY 2.0 Anthony Crider
by Kate McFarland | Nov 1, 2016 | News
On October 4, The New York Times published a symposium called “Easing the Pain of Automation”, which raised the issue of universal basic income among other strategies for managing the prospect of technological unemployment.
Contributors included Arun Sundararajan (New York University), Dean Baker (Center for Economic Policy Research), Maya Eden (World Bank), Andy Stern (former President of the Service Employees International Union), Jerry Kaplan (author of Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know), and Andrew McAfee (MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy).
Stern, whose short article is titled “A Universal Basic Income Would Insure Against Job Loss”, argues that the United States should institute a universal basic income now as “insurance against the difficult transition to new jobs or future job losses” (the main thesis of his recent book Raising the Floor).
Other contributors also bring up UBI in passing.
Sundararajan, for instance, mentions UBI as a possible part of a package of policies designed to ensure that the benefits of automation are shared (including also, for example “investments in physical and social infrastructure”):
Fashioning and funding a next-generation social contract, perhaps as a new partnership between the government, the individual and the institution, or maybe even as a universal basic income, may be instrumental in preventing modern-day versions of the Luddite rebellions that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.
Meanwhile, McAfee thinks that our present strategy should be to “give the economy every possible chance to create new types of good jobs”. He sees UBI a possible long-range solution–although one not yet in demand:
We might someday have a super automated, labor-light economy that requires large-scale wealth redistribution via something like a universal basic income. But it’s not here yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s too much work to do right now.
Read the full symposium:
“Easing the Pain of Automation” (October 4, 2016) The New York Times.
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
Photo CC BY-SA 2.0 Matthew Hurst
by Kate McFarland | Oct 20, 2016 | News
NPR (National Public Radio), a popular and influential news radio network in the US, has broadcasted a short segment about automation and basic income on September 24.
The segment focuses on the interest in UBI among the Silicon Valley tech sector. Guests include basic income supporters Natalie Foster (of Institute of the Future), tech entrepreneur Misha Chellam, and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes.
Listen and read the transcript here:
Queena Kim, “As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We’ll Need A Guaranteed Basic Income” (September 24, 2016).
Photograph: The fully automated restaurant Eatsa (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Yelp Inc), available as part of Yelp’s Eatsa album Qurazy for Quinoa.
by Roland Duchatelet | Jul 20, 2016 | News
A Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is an obvious policy solution as machines and computers replace labour to an extent that the “income through labour”- model is coming to an end.
The challenge is to “sell” BIG to all those who still believe full employment is possible and desirable.
We know we are dead right about BIG. The challenge is to convince a mass of people who are not interested because their minds are “blocked” by something they learned previously that is in contradiction with BIG. The door in their brains to think about the topic in a rational way is closed. We should not be angry – that is how nature works.
This is the case for most economists: they have been trained to accept the economic theory diffused by the textbooks of Paul Samuelson since the middle of the last century that labour and capital are essential “production factors” and pillars in the economy.
Now that many factories produce smartphones and cars in fully automated lines – without labour – and China showed the world that a country can develop an economy without capital, just by creating money. However, 99 percent of those economists persist in believing in the old model because they studied it so thoroughly to earn their degree. Later they repeated this old line of thinking so often to others that their minds are physically incapable of thinking anything else.
Their thinking is just as outdated as the gold standard. I intend to write short contributions highlighting the growing weakness of the current mainstream economic system.
by Kate McFarland | Jul 7, 2016 | News
On July 5, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough hosted a roundtable conversation on automation, featuring panelists Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, and Martin Ford, author of the popular books Rise of the Robots and The Lights in the Tunnel. Both Chase and Ford have previously spoken in favor of a universal basic income — a topic that came to loom large in the conversation.
The conversation began with a general discussion of the effects of new technologies on the economy. While both panelists emphasized that deep-learning, autonomous vehicles, and other new technologies promise myriad benefits to society, both also stressed that, without policy changes, these innovations will lead to widening social and economic inequality.
This theme eventually segued into a discussion of universal basic income.
McDonough, acting as the mouthpiece for the White House, stated that the federal government does not see a need for United States to adopt a UBI.
Instead, according to McDonough, the focus should be on expanding and improving the nation’s existing social safety nets — “We can build on things that work, and we’ve seen that they work,” as he puts it — and on reforming educational curriculum (e.g., to include more computer science components integrated throughout various classes).
As might be expected, however, Chase and (to a lesser extent) Ford expressed much more enthusiasm about UBI.
Ford described himself as a supporter of introducing a guaranteed income “eventually” (i.e., when it becomes necessary due to automation), although he consented that it is “pretty much off the table” in the current political climate in the US.
Chase, in contrast, spoke strongly in favor of a basic income in the immediate future — presenting a string of arguments in response to McDonough skepticism of the need for such a policy. For one, she argued that the country’s current safety nets are not adequate to a society in which many people are freelancing or working in multiple part-time jobs or contracting ventures. (To use a line she quoted, “My father had one job in his lifetime, I had six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.”) In contrast, as Chase emphasized, a guaranteed basic income would enable individuals to diversify their work opportunities by “building more resilience” into their incomes.
Another major talking point for Chase was the need for a basic income to enable more people to pursue their “passion jobs” (jobs which, as she and Ford both stressed, might not always be financially profitable). Early in the conversation, Chase made the point that much labor presently done by humans not only can but should be automated, in order to unlock the creative potential of those who are currently trapped in jobs that simply don’t need to be done by humans.
Later, she added that the jobs and tasks we’re able to automate today might be what “rich white men thought were great things” — and that there exists a potential for great social and cultural innovation as people are freed from automatable “crummy jobs” and have more time to engage their own interests and creativity.
At this point in the conversation, Ford intervened, making explicit the connection to the demand for a universal basic income:
A lot of those opportunities are not income-generating; they’re not necessarily things that someone would pay you to do. One of the best arguments for a basic income is that it would open up these possibilities for people to do things that count, that right now our society does not reward.
Chase agreed, and eagerly expanded on Ford’s point. She described a previous project in which she had interviewed people about their passion jobs — from a cab driver who wrote music that made autistic children happy, to a computer programmer who slept on friends’ couches while writing open source software for 3D printers. Many of her interview subjects were unable to pursue socially valuable and personally gratifying projects, simply because these projects were not financially lucrative.
Although McDonough himself appeared to be unmoved by the arguments of Chase and Ford, this passionate discussion of basic income at a White House roundtable should register as a breakthrough for the movement in America.
A video of the White House Conversation on Automation is available to view at the website Futurism. (The conversation starts at 4 min, 27 sec. Discussion of basic income in particular begins at around 20 minutes.)
Additional commentary on the roundtable with particular attention to the discussion of basic income:
Samantha Ehlinger, “White House: U.S. wants to be the forefront of automation policy,” Fed Scoop, July 5, 2016.
Nickalous Hines, “When Technology Eliminates Jobs, We’ll Want a Basic Income,” Inverse, July 5, 2016.
Nissan “Autonomous Drive” photo CC Norbert Aepli
Thanks to Dawn Rozakis for proofreading a draft of this article.
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (Click the link to see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News.)
