Why are so few politicians prepared to champion basic income?

I’ve been reading about how technology will define the future of work, a topic I touch in chapter 10, entitled “Working 9 to 5” on in my new book, “Viviendo en el futuro” (“Living in the future”), which I hope will soon be available in English.

“We have the tools and technology to work less and live better”, by Toby Phillips, analyzes the number of hours that would be needed today to obtain the productivity of the average worker in 1930s Britain, concluding that a 45-hour week could now be reduced to between 7 or 10 hours, depending on the country. Phillips’ conclusions match the predictions of John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 that “in a hundred years, our societies would have advanced so much that practically we would not need to work.”

Does anyone today work between 7 and 10 hours a week? Where is the digital dividend promised by technology and digital transformation? How has it been distributed? Working conditions have generally improved since the 1930s, at least in most industrialized countries: we start work at an older age and have state pensions, meaning old people no longer tend to die on the job, in most cases giving us a third more life than we previously had; but we continue to work similar hours to our forebears of a century ago, despite the huge leaps in productivity gained from the use of…