by BIEN | Jan 12, 2017 | News, Testimonies
Interview by Scott Jacobsen
*Conducted via email with minor edits.*
The economy has shifted into high gear for knowledge and ability, the currently labeled Knowledge Economy concomitant with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. How has this affected inequality based on standard metrics of knowledge and ability, such as credentials from post-secondary institutions in relevant disciplines?
It has pretty much always been the case that an education will help you get a better job, with better pay and conditions. This is still basically true, though we are seeing even amongst the highly educated longer periods of unemployment, a failure to get “good” jobs, and increasing insecurity in the work that they do get. Why? Because we just don’t need the same number of people employed in order to make the economy work. By all means, get a great education, but look at it as much as an investment in developing yourself so that you will have a meaningful life as in getting a good job. Because maybe there is no job to be got.
You have argued for some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as fundamental to the “progressive civic” and “economic reinvention.” What are other terms or phrases for ideas associated with, but not the same as, UBI? What characterizes them?
There are a number of forms of basic income, not all of them universal. A common one is the idea of a negative income tax. So instead of paying tax, you are paid an allowance, but as you move back into work, get a job, the amount you are paid tapers until finally, you are back to paying tax and must make sure you do your year end tax planning. The real difference between this and a UBI is that it tries to integrate the allowance with the labor market whereas UBI tries to establish an income independent of it.
What makes the UBI plan of action unique?
I guess at heart it is the way it has the potential to break the nexus between remuneration and a job. It recognizes that many of the things we do as citizens and individuals fall outside the normal parameters of paid work but that nonetheless those things we do — from caring for children to volunteering with community organizations or political parties or sports groups — are valuable to society and so it makes sense to recognize that contribution. It also empowers workers to be able to say no to crap jobs offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
What are the most common success stories of UBI or similar programs? Any failures?
Every trial of UBI I know of has been successful in that it has dispelled one of the biggest myths about giving people a no-strings-attached income, namely, that people become lazy and do nothing. Every trial shows almost the exact opposite. One of the most comprehensive trials is the one I talk about in my book, run by UNICEF in India. But similar positive results have been shown in other trials, including the one in New Jersey run by the Nixon Administration.
What city seems the most progressive and forward-thinking in its implementation of UBI?
Hard to say. A number of cities, including Utrecht in the Netherlands, are running trials, as are a couple of cities in Canada and Finland. I think this is great. It builds momentum and adds to the data supporting implementation on a larger scale.
What country seems the most progressive and forward-thinking in its implementation of UBI?
I guess Finland, but I think there are some issues with the route they have decided to take. They have chosen to test a partial rather than a full version. Still, it is good to see a national government move in this direction, however tentatively.
Any advice for would-be policymakers or activists about strategies for the implementation of UBI?
Gather data through trials. With trials, implement them with populations that will receive conservative support. In Australia, that might include rural communities, including farmers. Don’t pitch it as “free money” because it isn’t. Don’t let that description stand. Educate people about the notion of universality and why, in a democracy, it is important that everyone is entitled to certain benefits. Reach out across ideological divides, right and left. Involve business in discussions. Lobby for corporations to set aside a percentage of stock to be held by the government as part of the common wealth. It’s going to be a hard sell, so the sooner you start, the better!
And this raises the major piece of advice I would give: don’t oversell the idea of Universal Basic Income. As important a tool as it is likely to be for dealing with technological unemployment, it will not by itself solve the various social and economic problems that beset us and we should be careful not to suggest that it will.
This is the Korean version of the text.
by BIEN | Jan 10, 2017 | News, Testimonies
Interview by Scott Jacobsen
*Conducted via email with minor edits.*
You write on the future of work. What is the future of work? Where will humans find meaningful and fulfilling lives with or without work?
The future of work will see continued technological pressure on the paying jobs that humans do. This will change the nature of work, it will eliminate many jobs, and create some new ones. Humans will continue to do the things that only humans can do well — being creative, imaginative, empathetic, playful and social — and do less of the things that machines can do better than us. That will include everything from building things, digging things, and driving things, to researching and data crunching.
People are already involved in much meaningful work, and that meaningful work is not always their job. Sometimes it is, however, and the loss of such jobs — and therefore meaning — from people’s lives will be difficult to deal with. What we have to ensure is that people are financially supported even if they don’t have a job so that they can continue not just to exist but to engage in work that is meaningful to them. We have to destroy this notion that you are only a good citizen if you have a job: before it destroys us. I have enormous faith in our ability to find meaning even in a world where technology does a lot of the jobs we do now.
Your new book, Why the Future is Workless, describes a workless future. One powerful collective force (aside from potential nuclear catastrophe and climate change) looms into the immediate future: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Your book is about technology, and the social and political effects of such technology in a world after work. What probable outcomes will emerge from the Fourth Industrial Revolution by 2025 and 2045?
We’ll see not just a change in the nature of work but in social relations. Services will replace products, something that has already happened with movies and music. This will likely happen with cars too, amongst other things. People will look to have experiences rather than to own things. Many everyday things will become cheaper, almost to the point of being free: zero marginal cost, as the economists say. Technology will get smarter and we will move from dealing with the web via direct questions typed into a search engine to talking with the tech on an ongoing basis, as we are seeing with services like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Whether this will all be a boon or a burden for people will depend on how we deal with these changes politically. We have to make choices to create a fair world: it won’t just happen.
What is happening now, especially with things like Amazon Go?
We are seeing the start of a lot of this stuff already, as with Amazon Go. So we are right at the bottom of the change curve, entering a change of era, not merely an era of change. The real change will happen when powerful, cheap processors are embedded in things — fridges, sidewalks — and they are all networked. It will be a different world. Again, though, it’s important to stress: this might be heaven or hell, depending on how we handle the politics.
How can automation and machines release human beings from the drudgery of hard labour, whether physical (open to the elements) or mental (repetitive, simple tasks)?
They will make things cheaper and more ubiquitous. We will move from scarcity to plenty. Technology will turn products into services. It will create enormous wealth. The question becomes: how do we distribute that wealth, especially if a lot of paying jobs disappear.
How do you propose to deal with growing inequality in the world?
Via a reinvention of distribution. We will need taxes on global financial flows and the implementation of systems that require corporations to stop freeloading off the social wealth created by governments and citizens (this is an idea put forward by Yanis Varoufakis). Corporations will be required to provide a percentage of their capital value as a kind of common stock, revenue from which is then distributed to all of us, probably in the form of some sort of basic income. We will also need shorter working hours, without loss of pay or conditions.
Neoliberal economists assume the creation of new jobs as a given, but you disagree. That is, some neoliberal economists assert ‘if jobs go, they will come back’ – while you think this is not necessarily so. Why?
The nature of the economy is changing. We are shifting from scarcity to plenty, from industrial to knowledge, and from long working hours to short. In such an economy, we simply don’t need as many people doing things — jobs — as we did in the past in order to create the stuff we need. Sure, there will be new jobs, they just won’t need many people to do them. We already have huge populations surplus to the requirements of the economy (as the economists say) and they are refugees, prisoners, the unemployed, the under-employed, and the 800 million people subsisting in the slums on the edges of some of our great cities. Paid employment is already becoming a really bad way of distributing wealth and we should stop pretending that the jobs will “come back” and make everything all right again. We have to come up with a better idea than “jobs”.
This is the Korean version of the text.
