by Kate McFarland | Nov 6, 2016 | News
In an interview with CNBC on Friday, November 4, famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk — founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity — stated that a universal basic income will likely become necessary due to automation.
Musk says, “There’s a pretty good chance we’ll end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation. I’m not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”
In recent years, UBI has received a surge of attention from Silicon Valley’s tech industries, where it is often viewed favorably as a way to soften the blow of technological unemployment and to facilitate entrepreneurship. Most famously, perhaps, Y Combinator–the start-up incubator headed by UBI-proponent Sam Altman–is preparing a pilot study in Oakland that will lay the groundwork for a larger scale trial of a basic income. O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly and (particularly notable in this context) Tesla Motors software engineer Gerald Huff are among the other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite who have written in support of UBI.
However, Musk has remained silent about the issue prior to Friday’s interview with CNBC.
Musk has been an outspoken champion of other political causes, particularly the introduction of a carbon tax to combat climate change (a policy that itself enjoys popularity among many UBI supporters who see the tax as a way to fund a social dividend).
Reference
Catherine Clifford (November 4, 2016) “Elon Musk: Robots will take your jobs, government will have to pay your wage” CNBC.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation
by Kate McFarland | Nov 5, 2016 | News
The United States Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network has released its Call for Participation in the 2017 North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress, which will be held at Hunter College in New York City from June 16-18.
Sixteenth Annual North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress,
Call for Participation
The North American Basic Income Congress will be held at:
The Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College
2180 Third Ave.
New York, NY 10035
June 16-18, 2017,
With a special event June 15 at Roosevelt House, 47-49 East 65th St.
Papers, panel discussions, roundtables, strategy sessions, and events of other kinds related to basic income are encouraged. Activists in particular are encouraged to propose events in and around the congress, in the evenings for example. Send your proposal, no more than 500 words, to Kate McFarland (mcfarland [dot] 309 [at] osu [dot] edu) by February 1, 2017.
This is the official general Call for Participation of the congress. CFPs for specific panels and other sessions are likely to be released at later dates. For example, a CFP for a panel on philosophy and basic income has been released, and can be viewed at
PhilEvents and the
American Philosophical Association. Other topic-specific are currently being planned, and prospective participants are invited and encouraged to propose their own.
Updates and announcements concerning the event will be posted on the Facebook pages of
USBIG and CFP point-person
Kate McFarland as they become available.
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 2, 2016 | Research
An article on the impact of cash transfers on longevity was published in the April 2016 volume of the American Economic Review, a highly distinguished peer-reviewed journal published by the American Economic Association.
Abstract
We estimate the long-run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children’s longevity, educational attainment, nutritional status, and income in adulthood. To do so, we collected individual-level administrative records of applicants to the Mothers’ Pension program — the first government-sponsored welfare program in the United States (1911-1935) — and matched them to census, WWII, and death records. Male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers. They also obtained one-third more years of schooling, were less likely to be underweight, and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers.
The charity GiveDirectly, which is planning a major basic income trial in Kenya, has published a blog post (dated September 20) on the importance of the study. GiveDirectly points out, for one, that most previous research on cash transfers focuses on developing countries, and little research has been published about the US.
Reference
Aizer, Anna, Shari Eli, Joseph Ferrie and Adriana Lleras-Muney. 2016. “The Long-Run Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Families.” American Economic Review, 106(4): 935-71.
Online: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20140529
Photo CC BY 2.0 Tony Fischer
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
