O Brave New World!
These “radical” ideas will be common sense in a century
Most coverage of politics and culture is focused on the near-term changes we can expect in the next year or two: Supreme Court cases, mid-term elections, swings in the markets, and so on. But sometimes, by casting our thoughts farther into the future, we can put those short-term debates into better perspective. Our world is dealing with a lot of crises right now: widening inequality, climate change, and erosion of trust in public institutions, just to name a few. Naturally our leaders should be concerned with reversing these trends. But instead of the incremental changes most likely to be debated in the mass media outlets, let’s take a minute to imagine human society in 2121, and think about some of the ways it has managed these (and other) problems.
Idea #1: Universal Basic Income
Universal Basic Income (UBI) solves the problem of poverty by simply abolishing it. Early data on UBI experiments in the developed and developing world have been promising. Participants have seen improvements to their physical and mental health without an accompanying increase in unemployment, as critics feared. Unlike traditional social welfare programs, UBI is easy and inexpensive to administer. Though costly if made truly universal, a means-tested version — sometimes called a “negative income tax” — would cost far less. This latter idea was even proposed by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, and therefore has the benefit of potentially garnering support from both ends of the political spectrum.
And make no mistake, UBI is definitely where we are headed. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are quickly making many old forms of employment obsolete. And unlike past technological revolutions, which displaced many workers but also created new employment opportunities centered around those new technologies, AI will likely fill any new employment opportunities as quickly as it creates them. AI promises to significantly enhance productivity, but if the owners of AI infrastructure are allowed to keep all the wealth it generates, we will see twin crises of staggering inequality and endemic unemployment.
UBI solves both of these problems by preventing the AI revolution from impoverishing workers, while at the same time freeing them to pursue other creative work, whether or not that work is remunerative. This is essentially what we saw during the pandemic, when extended unemployment assistance allowed people to walk away from so-called “shit jobs” and turn their energies to creating music, films, literature, and other creative works, or to learn new skills, some of which helped them procure better jobs than what they had before, but some of which simply improved their quality of life.
Critics’ assertion that UBI will make people slothful and sap their lives of dignity gets the facts exactly backwards. Poverty is what saps people of dignity, as do the derisory attempts our society makes to alleviate it, many of which require petty indignities like periodic drug testing and the requirement that recipients of aid regularly report to employment application centers. UBI, on the other hand, trusts people to act like adults, and the early evidence vindicates that trust. Most UBI payments are spent on things like food, housing, and clothing, with healthy amounts also spend on education, job training, health care, and paying down debt. Very little is spent on drugs or alcohol.
UBI enhances human dignity by giving people bargaining power vis-à-vis employers, thus resulting in increased wages, and by freeing them to pursue educational and job training opportunities they wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of otherwise. A hundred years from now, people will look back and wonder how it took us so long to realize that with one simple idea we could eliminate poverty, streamline the state, and radically expand human freedom.
Idea #2: Open Borders
I’ve always been a fan of free trade. It makes people richer and, by binding countries together economically, makes it less likely they will go to war. But I’ve also always felt it was both unfair — and economically stupid — to allow the free movement of goods and capital, but not the free movement of people. That’s why the second idea on my list is open borders.
Now, by open borders I do not mean no borders. Trafficking in guns, drugs, and human beings is something we’ll always need to be concerned about, as is the threat of terrorism. But allowing people essentially to move wherever they think they have the best prospects will alleviate many of these threats. For example, much human trafficking exists simply because there is an unmet demand to move to countries with restrictive immigration policies. Eliminate the restrictions and you eliminate the black market for human traffickers. Similarly, terrorists often recruit from people who feel they have no other life prospects, a sentiment less likely to exist in a world where people can up sticks any time.
But the most compelling argument in favor of open borders is that it would create tens of trillions of dollars in wealth almost overnight. That’s because workers who are required to stay where their talents remain undeveloped or unused are much less productive. The main victims of this criminal waste of human talent reside in poor countries. But people in rich countries, who often fear immigrants taking their jobs, should think twice. Immigrants, even undocumented immigrants, increase a country’s economic output, and an immigrant is much more likely to reach her full potential if she is allowed to immigrate legally and gain access to the kinds of educational and employment opportunities denied to her in her home country. As a result, native born citizens also benefit from a growing economy and the creation of new businesses and new jobs.
Future generations will wonder how we managed to let tens of trillions of dollars just sit on the table for for all those years.
Idea #3: Prison Abolition
There are over two million people imprisoned across the United States. That figure represents twenty percent of the world’s total incarcerated population, in a country with only five percent of the world’s people. It’s also a 500% increase since 1980, a period of time when crime rates were actually falling.
Prison imposes enormous costs of society. Housing an inmate can cost up to $60,000 per year in some states, and $30,000 per year on average. When you consider that most UBI schemes would pay people a fraction of that amount, and would at the same time alleviate many of the social and economic pressures that push people towards crime, you start to sense how wasteful our system of incarceration has become. Furthermore, given that the average American’s income is around $50,000 per year, even if the average prisoner would make significantly less were he free, that’s still tens of billions of dollars of wealth per year that isn’t being created, taxed, and spread around, including to survivors of violent crime.
And there are other costs that are more difficult to quantify. What has been the cost of a generation of young men raised without fathers? What is the cost to society of dealing with people brutalized by the prison environment and then released back into their communities? What has been the cost of directing tax dollars to private prisons whose incentive is to fill beds rather than empty them? How might that money have been spent in ways that could have strengthened communities and families, schools and businesses?
And it’s not like there aren’t viable alternatives to prison. Technology for tracking and monitoring individuals has reached a point where most people who are currently incarcerated could be released, with certain restrictions on their movement during non-work hours. This would allow currently incarcerated people to obtain gainful employment and literally pay down their debt to society. Furthermore, the cost of using social workers to monitor and check in with offenders to make sure they are fulfilling the terms of their sentence would be much less than the cost of warehousing them in facilities where all the future wealth they might have created — for themselves and for society — is simply destroyed.
Even violent offenders would benefit from the transformation of existing prisons into something more like Halden prison in Norway, where guards and inmates eat and work together, and a maximum 21 year sentence, even for murderers, gives authorities an enormous incentive to ensure inmates are treated humanely and develop the practical and psychological skills needed to survive on the outside.
The history of crime and punishment in the United States reflects poorly on us as a society. Following the adoption of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, newly revised “black codes” and the convict leasing system meant that as a practical matter very little changed. State terrorism and involuntary servitude remained facts of life for most Black southerners. Uncompensated prison labor destroyed the wealth that convicts would have earned, but also depressed wages for workers who now had to compete with them. This depressed the economic output of generations of people and whole communities across the country, communities that are today disproportionately likely to be over-policed and over-represented in our prisons.
Prison abolition is therefore not only the more efficient, more humane road for us to take. It is also the most just. Future generations will look back on mass incarceration the way ours looks back on slavery. As late as the 1850s many in the South believed the “peculiar institution” would last forever. Here’s to hoping the boosters of today’s carceral state find themselves similarly stunned by history.
Idea #4: The End of Meat
The first three ideas in this list I would be happy to see happen tomorrow. But as someone who loves a good filet mignon as much as the next red-blooded American male, this last one is difficult for me to admit. But admit it I must. The facts are staring us in the face. Every year plant-based alternatives to traditional protein sources are getting more sophisticated, cheaper, and more ubiquitous.
The case for switching to vegetarianism is already fairly compelling: vegetarian diets are typically healthier, require fewer greenhouse gas emissions to sustain, and do not involve the morally problematic issues related to eating meat. With respect to the latter, I’m not just talking about the thorny issue of whether it is morally acceptable to raise animals for slaughter, though that is a tough problem. I’m also referring to the often horrendous conditions on large-scale animal farms, horrendous from the perspective not just of the animals but the workers too.
A few months ago I met a venture capitalist at a friend’s wedding, someone who helps raise money for companies doing research on plant-based proteins. I shared with him my suspicion that the future would be meatless in a hundred years. “More like ten,” he said, and then proceeded to preview for me several technological breakthroughs that would make most forms of animal protein superfluous in the years to come. “At that point,” he said, “you’re only eating meat because you really want to kill that cow or kill that chicken.” He didn’t convince me that we’d all be vegetarians by 2030, but I came away from our conversation realizing that I had vastly underestimated the speed of technological innovation in this area, and I suspect most consumers have as well.
Finally, the recent pandemic has reminded me that most past pandemics, and this one as well, were the result of a virus jumping from animals to humans. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Jared Diamond famously argued that the greater number of domesticated animal species in Europe made epidemics like smallpox and the plague more likely there, conferring immunity on Europeans that residents of the New World lacked. But in a future in which plant-based alternatives to animal protein are cheap and abundant, why would we run the risk of another plague just for the privilege of killing an animal and eating its flesh?
So there you have it. Four ideas that seem outlandish now, but which I suspect future generations will simply take for granted. It’s helpful to cast our minds far into the future sometimes. We tend to get bogged down in the 24-hour news cycle until it drains us of energy and imagination. But the power of imagination is exactly what we need right now. Imagination spurs innovation but also fosters empathy, and sometimes priming that pump starts with asking yourself a simple question: how will people in the future see things differently from me? Which of my beliefs will fail the test of time?
