Taking universal basic income to the next level
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s engineering director, believes universal or unconditional basic income will be a global reality within a decade or so, providing people with a reasonable living standards and allowing large numbers of us to focus more on the meaning and purpose of our lives rather than just earning a crust.
Kurzweil has long been interested in systems whereby all citizens (or permanent residents) of a country receive a regular, livable and unconditional sum of money from the government and coincides with the views many thinkers, founders and leaders from the technology industry who have proposed models ranging taxing the super-rich to distributing the profits created by increased automation and the use of AI or by harnessing natural resources, carbon tax payments, or sovereign wealth funds.
Critics say the tech industry’s interest in universal basic income is driven by a sense of guilt over the loss of jobs it is responsible for.
The basic problem with economic models based on universal income is that they involve a radical rethinking of the world as we know it, so that most people dismiss it out of hand, rather than seeking to understand it in depth. The idea of a world where work is voluntary, where we work not out of need but because we want to, or where we discard the five-day week, means overcoming all kinds of assumptions and deeply held beliefs, from the quasi-religious (work as a kind of Biblical curse requiring us to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow) to the idea that with no external motivation, we would just sit around taking drugs and watching television all day. But the reality shown by experiments with universal basic income around the world is the opposite: the sense of wellbeing that comes from having our basic needs covered, secure in the knowledge that we will not lose our payment if we work, opens up myriad possibilities, so that many people end up working more, because they are doing something they are interested in.
The other main objection: who pays for universal basic income, has to be looked at in the context of the current system: state subsidies that are cut when circumstances change, which discourage people on benefits to seek work or if they do, to enter the informal sector. The reality is that universal basic income does not require financing, but instead a reassignment of the money spent on subsidies, with the current means testing and surveillance replaced by a highly automated management system controlled by blockchain technology to prevent abuse.
I’ve been reading and writing about this subject a lot recently, and would recommend investing some time and effort to understand its variants and implications. I believe it is one of the keys to a sustainable future. Implementing it will not be easy, and it clashes with many apparently insoluble problems and will require considerable thought, study and hard work to overcome doubts and dispel myths. But one way or another, it will end up replacing our current post-industrial economic model, the limitations of which have already been exposed.
(En español, aquí)
