What happens when there are no industrial jobs left?
Fast Company comments positively on an interview (in German) with former Greek economy minister Yanis Varoufakis entitled “Greece’s former finance minister explains why a universal basic income could save us”. This is a topic to Fast Company’s heart. Varoufakis has already discussed the issue in other media, such as The Economist.
The concept of universal basic income (UBI) is still seen by many people as utopian, although it has been taken up across the political spectrum, by leftists, conservatives, and even some feminists. At present a growing number of governments, from national to local level, are looking into it.
Finland’s authorities see UBI as a way of simplifying its social security system. With 10 percent unemployment and 22.7 youth joblessness, four out of five Finns back the idea. At present a trial study is underway involving some 8,000 people who receive amounts of between €400 and €700 a month, and who are then monitored.
Iceland, a country always ready to try something new, could set up something along similar lines after this autumn’s elections, assuming the Pirate Party, which strongly advocates for these kinds of policies, wins the vote, as the polls predict.
Switzerland has been talking about universal income of around 2,500 Swiss francs per adult and 625 per child since 2013, and recently garnered enough signatures to put it to a referendum, which will take place on June 5, despite government opposition. There are already a number of positive outcomes to trial studies in Canadá, Utrecht, India, Macao or Irán, and has been around since at least it was proposed by Martin Luther King.
Opponents of universal basic income raise questions about its viability: how might a country like Switzerland avoid attracting unwanted migration as a result of such a policy? Trying to prevent free movement of people, as we have seen, raises all sorts of questions about human rights.
But as Varoufakis points out in the interview, the continuing replacement of people with machines means ever greater numbers of people with no work to do, a process that is also leading to greater inequality and that might lead to violence.
We live in a consumer society, but robots do not consume anything other than energy and maintenance, and what’s more, we’re moving toward ever-cheaper energy. If computing, energy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, robotics and self-driving vehicles are creating sustainable competitive advantages, then we face a dramatic redistribution of value chain costs.
Surplus value, a core element of Marxist economic theory, taken from David Ricardo’s labor theory of value, expresses the value that a worker creates above the value of his or her labor. When a worker is replaced by a robot, the surplus value increases due to the increase in output, reliability, and quality while at the same time, the amount of inputs diminishes. If robots do not tire, do not require payment, do not make mistakes, while at the same time improving in efficiency, becoming more intelligent and costing less to make, what happens to that surplus value?
In short, we’re talking about wealth creation on a scale never possible, and that will require better mechanisms to redistribute that wealth than currently exist. Leaving aside the question of whether people would stop working entirely if they had enough money to live on (there is no hard evidence from the many basic income trials that this happens), there is every possibility that such a system could spark a new productive model along the lines of another industrial revolution.
What people seem to abandon when wealth is somehow guaranteed is not their jobs, but the so called bullshit jobs, simple ways to keep the population occupied performing pointless tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed, to avoid social unrest. Jobs that lead them to the evidence that their existence has no meaning. Clearly, many of the problems that UBI has to solve have nothing to do with unemployment.
Is universal income a utopia, or is just plain common sense? The topic is now beginning to be discussed by politicians and we should be in on the debate as well. Changes wrought by technology will also have to be part of that debate.
(En español, aquí)
