UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME—INTRODUCTION TO A CONTROVERSY WHOSE DAY IS COMING

For some time now, the warning signs have been clear to anyone studying the evolution of free-market economies worldwide. Job creation is not keeping pace with job attrition and demographic expansion. The tendency is toward a world with ever more people and ever fewer jobs. While most politicians and world leaders praise the technological revolution that has served up extraordinary advances to billions the world over, the dwindling sources of legitimate employment belie optimism for the average individual’s future work possibilities. Among possible solutions, one of the most salient is the controversial idea of some sort of basic “allowance” to ensure coverage of people’s personal needs. But this is an idea that is still in its infancy, while its practical application may be more urgently required than is generally presumed.

In Western capitalist society there has long been a conservative idea that the capitalist makes money through investment and that the worker makes a living with his or her labor skills and sweat. That conservative capitalist outlook, on the one hand, considers taxes an unfair burden on business (and, thus, anyone receiving any sort of social aid from the state a freeloader), but on the other hand calculates labor as “a cost” rather than an asset—one that it posits should be reduced to the minimum. Still today, far too few businesses are enlightened enough to see workers as their partners in creating the products and services that they sell and continue to treat them as an unavoidable liability of which they would gladly rid themselves if they could find an effective means to do so.  

This has long been the crux of a clash between left and right, between labor and capital.  When labor was still a critical ingredient in the entire industrial and commercial chain, it was a fairer fight, one in which unions were able to build the power necessary to stand up to big business and often force it to recognize the worker’s role through the implementation of fairer pay and benefit practices that turned employees in the West into a once burgeoning middle class, which proved instrumental in the growth of first world consumer economies. But since the end of World War II, dizzying technological advancements have been taking their toll on the job market and since the 1980s have severely undermined union power, and thus the clout of the average worker.

The result of these developments, particularly in what is known as “the first world”, has been, massive accumulation of wealth at the top of the food chain, a dwindling job market, ever weaker labor unions and a fast-waning middle class. And this situation is carrying over to the “third world”, which has long been employed by “first world” manufacturing operations (and later as an outsource for services as well) as a reserve of cheap labor and as a veritable cudgel with which to beat down any resurgence of unionism in their headquarters countries.

In other words, the divisions between the wealthy and the poor are becoming increasingly acute. And the key to these developments—considered a boon by business and a catastrophe by the average worker—has been the stunning advanced technology that has both provided people of all economic classes with access to previously unimaginable advantages and at the same time robbed them, to an ever greater extent, of a means of earning a living and of building a meaningful and satisfying existence. This is especially true considering that in the past three-quarters of a century, the world population has doubled, while the trend in business is to provide ever fewer jobs, replacing human physical and mental skills with ever-more prevalent robotics and computerization (e.g., artificial intelligence).

While in the United States and in Europe conservative politicians have been quick to frame the latest waves of immigrants as “enemies within” come to suck up all the jobs on the market, the truth is that jobs were already dwindling and that the biggest threat to the labor market isn’t the cheap labor provided by either foreign investment or incoming new blood from abroad. The real enemy of unskilled, semi-skilled and even some highly qualified labor is the dizzying expansion of artificial intelligence (AI).

A recent article in Wired Magazine summed up the dilemma in a title on the subject that read: The AI Threat Isn't Skynet. It's the End of the Middle Class. The reference to the nefarious computer-everything system, Skynet, in the 1980s classic sci-fi film Terminator, which becomes self-aware and wages a robotic war to destroy the human race would seem apropos to many millions of displaced workers who have seen their jobs being gobbled up by apps and robots. But the article makes it clear that the goal isn’t the annihilation of the human species, but the destruction of the institution of human work. According to Wired, scientists gathered at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California to discuss the problem seemed more worried about the “hollowing out” of the middle class than they were about a Skynet-type threat. Wired quotes MIT economist Andrew McAfee: "I am less concerned with Terminator scenarios," he said on the first day at the Asilomar conference. "If current trends continue, people are going to rise up well before the machines do."

Wired went on to say that “McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. Now, most new jobs are either at the very low end of the pay scale or the very high end.” But the magazine indicated that, despite the presentation’s somber message, other researchers tended to take an even more extreme view of the situation and later, in the hallways at Asilomar after McAfee’s talk, many warned him that the coming revolution in AI would eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than even he was positing.

The immediate problem is that while on the whole, capitalists have tended to embrace and praise the technological revolution and to blithely ignore its social consequences—considering these not to be “their problem”—economists, sociologists and a handful of politicians have, for decades, been warning that kicking those consequences down the road without constructing an effective solution is tantamount to engendering a future social upheaval of massive proportions. One could very well argue that the current resurgence of far-rightwing populist movements like those that led to World War II are an outward manifestation of this impending revolt. And the conclusion of many experts has been that if the institution of honest work is indeed on a declining trend, then society needs to find a means of allowing the population at large to at least survive without a steady job.

The conclusion that numerous social and economic researchers have drawn is that there is a need now, and that there will be an increasing need in the future, for society to ensure that a portion of the wealth that it generates is pumped back into the population at large in the form of a basic “allowance” of some kind to replace or at least supplement work as a means of “making a living” (or in other words, as a means of survival). Although the theoretical tool for doing this has been given a number of names, the most common is “universal basic income” (UBI).

The advantages and consequences of UBI are multiple and worthy of profound debate, but the basic idea behind it is that as jobs disappear by the millions (some experts calculate that as much as 47 percent of all current jobs are at risk of disappearing due to advances in artificial intelligence in the not too distant future), society will necessarily have to adapt. Business and government cannot, without risking social chaos, violence and the rise of de facto political systems, simply write off hundreds of millions of jobs that will never come back and cut adrift those who held them. Especially when the creation of new jobs is lagging far, far behind. Like it or not, the most efficacious solution, more and more social scientists are proposing, would be for those who profit from society to contribute to covering the basic needs of that society, and that the best way of ensuring that those needs are actually covered is by means of paying a direct basic allowance to every citizen, so that their subsistence will no longer be at risk.

This idea is, of course, the absolute antithesis of everything that we in Western society have been brought up to believe. We have been imbued with the belief that success is the result of “honest work”, that work is a “basic right”, that welfare is a “shameful free ride”, and that work ennobles and empowers the common man and woman. This mindset also further lays de facto blame on the unemployed for their own plight, as if the sole fact of being laid off proves their lack of worth as useful members of society, and it brands accomplishments that one might achieve without pay as mere “hobbies” or even “a waste of time.” None of these beliefs, no matter how noble and worthy one may find them, prepares us for what appears to be the irremediable dwindling of available jobs and of what Jeremy Rifkin has described as the inevitable “end of work.”

What will be required in the future, then, will be a massive restructuring of society as we know it, if we are to avoid the typical sci-fi scenario of a planet laid to waste and the remainder of the human species scrambling with rats and cockroaches for their meager share of the shambles of a once great civilization. Until such a planet-wide restructuring process can take place, however, UBI would appear to be the most practical means possible of coping with the ever-growing problem of class deterioration, marginalization, indigence and the seeds of worldwide revolution that this process sows. Some major advocates of this concept include Rutger Bregman, Milton Friedman, Guy Standing, Hillel Steiner, André Gorz, Ailsa McKay, Karl Widerquist, Peter Vallentyne and Philippe Van Parijs.

As viewed by the majority of its supporters, UBI differs from other forms of social security in that it is unconditional. In other words, it is designed to be a basic income paid to all citizens or residents of a country on a regular basis—an unconditional sum of money, provided either by government or by some other type of public institution, in addition to and regardless of any other income that individuals might earn from elsewhere. It is, then, a means of ensuring the basic subsistence of all citizens in a world where common everyday jobs will be in ever more scarce supply.

In upcoming articles, I’ll be talking more specifically about theories and controversies surrounding UBI and about the stances of some of the best known experts on the subject.