In this new book, work, technology and society are discussed through a series of view points, given by several authors (e.g.: Matt Zwolinski, Michael Cholbi, Andrea Veltman, Evelyn Forget, among others). Universal Basic Income is a policy described at the center of this crucial societal challenge, analyzed by the authors in its wide implications. Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber are the editors.
In the summary it can be read:
Technological advances in computerization and robotics threaten to eliminate countless jobs from the labor market in the near future. These advances have reignited the debate about universal basic income. The essays in this collection offer unique and compelling perspectives on the ever-changing nature of work and the plausibility of a universal basic income to address the elimination of jobs from the workforce. The essays address a number of topics related to these issues, including the prospects of libertarian and anarchist justifications for a universal basic income, the positive impact of a basic income on intimate laborers such as sex workers and surrogates, the nature of “bad work” and who will do it if everyone receives a basic income, whether a universal basic income is objectionably paternalistic, and viable alternatives to a universal basic income. This book raises complex questions and avenues for future research about universal basic income and the future of work in our increasingly technological society. It will be of keen interest to graduate students and scholars in political philosophy, economics, political science, and public policy who are interested in these debates.
Chamberlain’s book explores universal basic income (UBI), which he calls unconditional basic income, as a potential step on the way from a “work society,” in which individual gainful employment is placed at the center of citizenship and community membership, to a post-work community in which the wellbeing of others is valued over individual achievements. Undoing Work, Rethinking Community focuses primarily on the UK and the US, moving through a detailed discussion of the place of work in contemporary life and politics, as well as more recent changes that have witnessed a gradual erosion of worker’s rights and stability, contending that the current overvaluation of work undermines freedom, equality, and justice. It then outlines a potential role for UBI in Chamberlain’s vision of the transition away from the work society, along with guidance for UBI advocates who share similar priorities with regard to shifting the conversation from its focus on encouraging employment. Finally, it sketches the theoretical beginnings of a “post-work” community.
Employment in Politics and the Meaning of Citizenship
Chamberlain begins by touching on the centrality of work and employment as a right and citizen’s obligation to the campaign rhetoric on both sides of the US 2016 election. Beyond America, he also points out 2011 UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s focus on employment as a solution to riots through the words “work is at the heart of our society.” In his very first pages, Chamberlain outlines his central contention: that citizenship and social participation are conditional upon employment and that those who are not able (or do not desire) to pursue employment for any reason, be it ability, other priorities or means of subsistence, family responsibilities, etc., are marginalized and configured as social pariahs or “freeloaders” rather than good citizens. In essence, he argues that society itself is currently understood to be the product of collective labour, and thus the work society values work ethic, the independence it permits, and the full citizenship or social participation made possible by said independence.
Interestingly, Chamberlain traces a brief history of types of “dependence” that used to be considered socially permissible or positive (that of a wife, for example, or the elderly) but have become more and more suspect, such that one must demonstrate the reason for one’s dependence (i.e., in the case of pregnancy, disability, or other inability to work) or show that one has paid one’s dues (in the case of the elderly) or is preparing oneself for employment (in the case of youth in school).
Undoing Work outlines the roots of the work society in history and political theory and examines several of the key arguments that connect work to citizenship. For example, the idea that individuals exist outside of society but collectively create society with their labour implies, in turn, that a lack of gainful employment is necessarily anti-social. This can be tied to a kind of apocalyptic, chaotic rhetoric, saying that unemployment will lead to social unrest and disintegration (as in David Cameron’s focus on employment in response to social unrest).
Studio portrait of James Chamberlain
(photo by Beth Wynn / Mississippi State University)
The “Work Society” Limits Freedom and Demands Increasing Flexibility
What is the problem with this social emphasis on everyone “pulling their weight”? Chamberlain argues that it limits the freedom to act according to one’s own “values, needs, and desires,” (10) when a person needs to take any or all employment available. Freedom is also limited when all of one’s time is occupied by making money with no opportunity to spend time on activities that don’t have a price put upon them. Furthermore, the increase in information technology has begun to dissolve the boundaries between work and the remainder of life. Importantly, restrictions to freedom do not fall equally upon a population, with regard to access to greater varieties and qualities of employment: “One can understand justice as equality of freedom or, more specifically, the equal ability of all members of society in ways that reflect their own ends” (12).
In his third chapter, Chamberlain discusses the idea of increasing flexibility of employment, from Reagan and Thatcher to the gig economy and the increase in remote work. Flexibility is a double-edged sword. Half of it entails deregulation, erosion of support for workers, increased precarity in terms of employment and compensation, dissolution of work–life boundaries, lack of collective bargaining, and other employer-friendly policies. Many qualities of flexibility can also be worker-friendly, however: flexible scheduling and the dissolution of work–life boundaries may allow a person to work from home or on their own time, or it may ask them to devote significant quantities of their life to work without any additional compensation. At least there are solutions available to offer support to those remote working away from the office so that they can receive additional training and mentorship from wherever they may be and still progress in their careers. Without the support, those working from home may quickly find themselves without motivation and disassociated from their work colleagues. Companies have begun to look at ways to combat this by finding virtual team building activities such as the ones you can see at BreakoutIQ. This is in the hopes of instilling a sense of comradeship between co-workers.
UBI: Undoing or Supporting Employment?
If our jobs are becoming increasingly flexible and precarious, allowing us to participate socially in a complete manner and support ourselves as independent citizens less and less, then UBI is one way to fill that gap and allow people to continue to find meaningful employment: however, it is just this argument for UBI that Chamberlain finds suspect. In Undoing Work, UBI is established as a partial solution to many of the aforementioned issues, a very important stop-gap permitting what he claims is actually required, which is to dismantle the work society and the social value of employment.
Chamberlain identifies an ideological disjuncture within the UBI movement, between advocates who say that UBI will support employment and advocates who contend that supporting employment is beside the point. This is echoed in the works reviewed by BIEN, as emerging UBI research and economic simulations define different metrics for success, and many of them are focused on employment rates rather than health indicators or other measurements associated solely with wellbeing. Undoing Work places UBI proponents on a spectrum from a full commitment to the work society to the preference for freedom from employment/right and ability to refuse employment. However, Chamberlain acknowledges that some who have argued for UBI’s positive impact on employment rates have done so for the sake of expediency. In other words, supporting a truly Unconditional BI may necessarily be politically precarious due to its promise to give “something for nothing.”
Chamberlain then contends that UBI’s implementation and effects depend upon the ideologies of social participation and citizenship by which it is surrounded. Whether or not a UBI recipient lives in Chamberlain’s “work society” will have a significant impact on a basic income’s ability to transform their lives for the better.
To highlight his point, Chamberlain contrasts UBI with workfare/unemployment and means-tested benefits, examining the differences between the administrative goal of re-integrating a person into the workforce and UBI. An implementation of the latter without a corresponding ideological shift may simply result in social forces creating the same stigmas against and marginalization of those who appear not to be contributing in a normative manner. In other words, without a cultural change in the value of work, people receiving UBI will still feel the pressure to take jobs regardless of interest or aptitude. From the perspective of a reader perennially curious about the intercultural differences in UBI implementation around the world, this is an interesting and important point, though it is beyond this book’s purview to speculate about the international differences that might be seen in UBI implementation depending on each country or region’s ideological variations.
A more radical implementation of UBI may in fact encourage people to shape new “purposes,” voluntary or collectively informed but not necessarily rewarded or validated by a wage. Indeed, if work is as essential to a valuable and meaningful life as its proponents suggest, Chamberlain suggests that it is unlikely that UBI recipients (i.e., all of us) will simply give up any kind of occupation or responsibility.
The Post-Work Society
The final chapters of the book examine visions of a post-work society. Chamberlain suggests that many contemporary visions of post-capitalism (e.g., André Gorz’s work, or Hardt and Negri’s Empire) have not in fact theorized a real “post-work” society because they remain centred upon community-oriented production and reproduction: they still see the common/society as produced by some form of work or labour, and participation in their post-capitalist models is still frequently predicated upon social contribution conceptualized as labour.
A real post-work society, argues Chamberlain, means that membership in one’s community must not be connected to work (paid or unpaid). Rather, he suggests a vision of community that is predicated upon concern for the wellbeing of others but does not then turn around and stigmatize or marginalize community members who do not appear to share similar concerns.
One key part of this is that we should not view individuals as things that can be separated from a community or society (or accordingly marginalized as “non-contributors”). Rather, a community is in its fundamental form made up of interconnected relationships that have little to do with labour.
Chamberlain argues that the tendency to think about this kind of community as encouraging “freeloading” is an intuitive response from those of us who have grown up valuing employment so highly. Accordingly, Chamberlain provides some insightful advice for UBI advocates, suggesting that arguments for UBI should be focused on collective well-being rather than employment potential, shaped in a way that does not encourage critics to jump straight to criticisms about giving “something for nothing.”
Chamberlain’s vision for a post-work society is outlined in terms of what it must not be. The lack of a fuller picture is understandable given the magnitude, impossibility, and perhaps unsuitability of attempting this task theoretically (a challenge he acknowledges). Despite this, the last few pages of the book cite reasons for hope of a transition: the prevalence of conversations about UBI, minimum wage movements, and economic cooperatives, as some examples.
A reader may wonder if none of the smaller communities established within and regardless of political boundaries, including economic or social cooperatives, faith-based communities, secular or intentional communities, families, or Indigenous or ethnicity-based communities, already value interpersonal wellbeing more highly than labour and, accordingly, exhibit unique social economies. While it is sensibly out of the book’s scope to conduct an international comparison of work ideologies, Chamberlain’s focus on national discourse feels relevant and interesting but also general and totalizing, spoken from the “voice” of the work society without exploring the diversity that may be occurring within a nation or testing its borders on local scales. However, overall, Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community is a considered and valuable critique of the role of employment in life, politics, and UBI policy and discourse. His discussion of increasing precarity, demand for flexibility, and the lack of freedom that employment often delivers despite independence’s promises to the contrary will strike home for many readers.
What we are going through now is not a disaster, it’s a process. Last time, it took over a century of mass misery and, occasionally mass bloodshed to get through it (…) We should try to do it a lot better and quicker this time.
By Lynette Geddes
International affairs commentator Gwynne Dyer latest book, “Growing Pains: The future of democracy (and work)”, is a balanced and compelling look at the current rise of populism and how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) could be “a tool that might cool the anger (…)”.
The first chapter, titled “A giant orange canary”, claims the election of Donald Trump might actually be good for history as he is the canary in the coal mine of the growing unrest in the developed world. Dyer argues that, contrary to political rhetoric, it is not the immigration of cheap labour, or the out-migration of factories to other countries or free trade that are at the root of the problem. It is automation and the concomitant stagnation of middle-class incomes. The author states that “out of 7 million manufacturing jobs lost in the United States in the past forty years, at least 5 million were lost to automation.”
Dyer briefly outlines the calamities of the twentieth century – economic depression and wars – and draws parallels to our current geo-political conditions. However, he believes it to be widely accepted that the social safety nets that were implemented during that time in all western countries – though to varying degrees – have almost certainly mitigated the conditions that might now lead to similar extremes. But more must be done if we don’t want to slip back into the destruction of the past century.
Dyer argues that humans, unlike our simian ancestors/cousins, are fundamentally egalitarian and that solutions lie in understanding this. Though acknowledging that “non-violent revolution” sounds like a contradiction in terms, history shows us that “people can and will act together spontaneously to resist domination”. He quotes Harold Schneider, economic anthropologist, “All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule, they prefer to remain equal.”
Throughout the book, two premises arise repeatedly: that income inequality brought about by automation is the problem and that some form of a UBI is a solution. He concedes that the concept of UBI is not new but it is an idea which is compelling, plausible, and gaining traction. It is also one that appears to span the political spectrum. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a well-known International Institution for Public-Private Cooperation that brings business and political leaders together annually. In January 2017, several of the invited speakers addressed the concept of UBI.
Arguments against UBI, Dyer writes, include the notion that people’s self-respect comes from their job, or that countries can’t afford it, or that giving people “free money” will lead to laziness. He neatly disputes those ideas with facts but also a little facetiously. “As Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith once put it, ‘Leisure is very good for the rich, quite good for Harvard professors – and very bad for the poor. The wealthier you are, the more you are thought to be entitled to leisure. For anyone on welfare, leisure is a bad thing.’”
Dyer closes the book with his opinion that, with climate change physically threatening existence as we know it, there isn’t time to waste on these political issues. “What we need now is a quick fix that reduces inequality to a tolerable level and re-stabilises our democracies, (…) ensuring that everybody has a decent income despite the unstoppable advance of automation, and doing it in a way that does not humiliate those who no longer have jobs.”
At least six different Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments are underway or planned right now in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Finland, and Kenya. Several more countries are considering conducting experiments. Yet, there seems to be more interest simply in having UBI experiments than in exactly what we want to learn from them. Although experiments can produce a lot of relevant data about UBI, they are crucially limited in their ability to enlighten our understanding of the big questions that bear on the discussion of whether to implement UBI as a national or regional policy. And, past experience shows that results of UBI experiments are particularly vulnerable misunderstanding, sensationalism, and spin. This book examines the difficulties of conducting a UBI experiment and reporting the results in ways that successfully improve public understanding of the probable effects of a national UBI. The book makes recommendations how researchers, reporters, citizens, and policymakers can avoid these problems and get the most out of UBI experiments.
More information can be found, and the published version can be purchased here.
An early draft of the book can be downloaded for free here.
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 centuryproduced 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: Daniele Fabbri
More information at:
Yuval N. Harari, “21 Lessons For the 21stCentury”, Jonathan Cape, 30 August 2018
Yuval N. Harari, “Yuval Noah Harari on whatthe year 2050 has in store for humankind”, Wired, 12 August 2018
