| Stuff |
[Oct. 12th, 2011|09:28 pm]
Scott
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Basic income guarantees.
The first time I heard about them was five years ago, and I decided they were stupid. I think I thought about them again briefly two or three years ago, and was still pretty sure they were stupid. A couple weeks ago, wallowinmaya from Less Wrong asked me what I thought about them, and I was all prepared to say they were still stupid, but after thinking about it longer I'm not so sure.
A basic income guarantee is a system where the government pays everyone in the country a small but liveable income, let's say $15000. If you're poor, you get $15000 a year to live on. If you're rich, you get $15000 from the government above and beyond what you earn from your corporate empire. Everyone in the country, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, young or old, gets $15000.
And the obvious reason it's stupid is that someone has to pay for that. And giving every US adult $15000 a year would cost somewhere around the order of $4 trillion, or just over the current Federal budget.
The real cost would be a bit less, because the government could save some money on things like welfare payments now that nobody is really all that poor. But it would be pretty hard to imagine it costing less than $3 trillion or so, meaning we'd have to at least double taxes, which would have all sorts of horrible domino effects.
And there is much for everyone to hate about the proposal. If you're the type who doesn't like welfare because it takes money away from productive people and gives it to unproductive people who might not even be trying that hard, well, basic income guarantee does the same thing, only much more so. And if you do like welfare, because you think it's important to help the poor, well, basic income guarantee takes the vast majority of the money it raises and hands it over to the middle-class and rich, making them richer. If you're going to give the government ungodly amounts of money to distribute, why not reserve it for people who really need it?
And although the optimist in me conceives of people who use their newfound freedom from fear of poverty to pursue the careers they've always dreamed of as musicians or inventors, or to live in the forest in harmony with nature, the realist in me knows that the vast majority of those people would in fact spend their time drinking beer and watching TV and having ten kids who they never send to school because obviously if you don't need literacy for a job later attaining it just wastes valuable reality-show-watching-time.
So those were the reasons I used to think basic income guarantees were stupid. The reason I'm not so sure now involves structural unemployment and the idea of post-scarcity society.
Back in the 50s, everyone assumed robots would be doing all our work by now and we'd be sitting by the beach all day sipping robot-stirred martinis. That never happened, but it wasn't entirely the roboticists' fault: we did automate a lot of formerly difficult jobs. It just turned out that instead of the people whose jobs were replaced by robots sitting on the beach all day drinking martinis, they become unemployed and essentially unemployable since their only skills were things robots could do better. Although "Well, they should retrain" is a nice thought, not every 50 year old grizzled miner can learn how to program social networking software. So most of them just became destitute and miserable. The gains from automating manufacturing went partly to people in nonmanufacturing fields, who could get more manufactured goods at cheaper prices, and to rich people who owned manufacturing companies and managed to cut costs.
In the future, we can expect technology to replace more and more jobs. This isn't just in the sense of dominating entire job categories like auto manufacturing (although they'll do that too - secretaries and waiters won't be long for this world once we get voice recognition and mobility at low costs) but even in terms of making jobs easier - so that now one engineer can do the work it used to take two engineers, with the second engineer out of a job. The winners will smart people, who can get jobs in technology, and rich people, who can invest in technology and sell what it produces. The losers will be all the unemployed people.
Extending the trend out into the far future and potentially past the singularity, humans will be relatively useless for all forms of work, including robot design (by that time we'll have robot-designing robots). The only people with access to any wealth will be people who own technology and live off what it produces. This is quite like the feudal economy where if you were born owning land you could live off it forever with no work, and if you were born without land, you were out of luck.
This is a relatively dystopian future - enough technology to give everyone a fantastic standard of living with minimal work, but the majority of people being poor and miserable because the technology is concentrated in the hands of a few people who have no incentive to share it with anyone else.
(if you think society is too smart to fall for this, it's essentially the situation right now with world hunger. We have more than enough land/technology/etc to feed everyone in the world, but the poor can't afford food and no farmers want to produce food for free, so the technology goes to making silly luxuries for rich people like sunglasses for dogs. The poor can and do break out of their condition through having natural and human resources that the rich want and will trade for, but as technology increases this advantage will disappear.)
As I write this, this sounds sort of Marxist with stuff about the means of production and so on. But Marx was wrong for a few reasons. For one, workers could save up to own the means of production themselves. For another, human capital proved to be more important than machinery during his era. For a third, the capitalists needed the workers almost as much as the workers needed the capitalists, and advances in worker organization and state regulation gave the workers more bargaining power. In a society where labor becomes less valuable, or completely useless, these checks on the Marxist system disappear.
This whole spiel about technology displacing workers isn't just for the far future. Some economists have suggested this is going on now - that the banking crisis certainly didn't help, but that a lot of ther reason unemployment is so high now is that the economy just really doesn't need that many unskilled people any more, and not everyone has (or can develop) skills.
I don't see an economic or scientific pathway from here to the future where we're all sitting on the beach enjoying the fruits of technology, as opposed to the future where everyone's unemployed and poor except the people who own the technology. The only path I can think of is a political one, in which we start redistributing the heck out of income. And simple welfare won't work; a world in which everyone is on the dole and being constantly hounded by welfare officers and looked down upon by the few people with paying jobs is almost as dystopian as the one where everyone starves to death. At some point we have to say that most people can't produce wealth and that's okay.
It may be too early to start such a redistribution program, although depending on how the economic indicators turn out it might not be. But I would feel a whole lot better if society was at least discussing this question and had a good plan for the transition to a post-labor stage. |
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You're going to have to rephrase that. Either you forgot a "not" or two, or I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
From:  jimstone
2015-04-23 01:22 am (UTC)
Start modestly with the basic income. | (Link)
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We can start with a more modest basic income, say 10% of per capita GNP (or whatever the most appropriate accounting category turns out to be).
That comes to about $450/month right now, and pegging it to growth means it increases with inflation and per capita productivity.
We could fold some current welfare into that payment, but we would would still need some money for existing entitlements for the time being. That leaves the total bill south of $1T.
Starting modestly allows us to study the effect on work motivation and inflation, and to tweak things as needed.
If the value of human labor continues falling below that of machine labor, we can change that single parameter one vote at a time.
Also, we should frame it as a dividend rather than as an income. It connotes a savvy investment in our country rather than a dole. | |
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