Social Policy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
This post is by Alice O’Connor, Professor of History and Director of the Blum Center on Global Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In recent years, the soothsayers of the fourth Industrial Revolution have joined a swelling — if not always harmonious — chorus in pronouncing the Universal Basic Income (UBI) an idea whose time has come. Long a default on the “future of work” tab, the UBI has begun to draw attention as a transformative social technology in its own right, promising undreamed-of degrees of individual freedom and self-actualization, along with much-needed economic security for the legions of ordinary workers destined to be displaced by robotic and digital technologies.[1]
UBI panels have become a regular feature on the stages of the World Economic Forum; delegates at Davos were greeted by a band of dancing “Robots for Basic Income” in 2016, calling for “a humanistic response to technological progress” that would relieve people from “the struggle for income” without causing “existential difficulties.”[2] TED Talks on the subject abound, headlined by the likes of venture capitalist and tech investor Albert Wenger, and popular historian Rutger Bregman, author of the aptly titled UBI-boosting book Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World.[3] Following the basic income beat on Business Insider, tech reporter Chris Weller names Tesla’s Elon Musk, Sam Altman of Y Combinator, and Facebook’s Chris Hughes as early UBI adopters, as a sign that Silicon Valley is getting serious about the problems its business model is producing — albeit without truly acknowledging that the business model may be at fault.[4] Identified as a future-of-work “thought leader” on the internet platform Medium, one-time Obama campaign organizer, and progressive data analytic entrepreneur (ShareProgress) Jim Pugh co-founded the Universal Basic Income Project in 2016 to raise popular awareness of the idea, with weekend-long Create-a-thons among advocates to devise new ways of using social media to get the word out.[5] Pugh earned his PhD in distributed robotics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
In what may be the ultimate guarantee of recognition as a vanguard of the fourth Industrial Revolution, the UBI is now being incubated in the real-life labs of Silicon Valley. In September 2017, the famed startup accelerator — and business disrupter — Y Combinator announced that it had completed a year-long feasibility study with a few households in Oakland, CA, and was preparing to launch a far more ambitious randomized trial experiment with 3,000 below-median-income households in two (as yet unidentified) states. Billing theirs as “the first-ever study of a basic income in the United States,” the announcement celebrated the project’s “ground-breaking” research design, highlighting its embrace of the “gold standard” for scientific research — randomized controlled experimentation — and unprecedented scope. Once launched, the project will provide 3–5 years of monthly payments of $1,000 to experimental households and $50 monthly to the controls. It also promises to produce an unprecedented trove of quantitative and qualitative data about the guaranteed income’s impact, on everything from time use and risk management to social, psychological, and cognitive capacities to political attitudes and behavior.
Though it is embedded in the protocols of experimental design and scientific credibility (including the imprimatur of Stanford’s Institutional Review Board and an A-list of academic advisors), the project boasts a distinctively Silicon Valley-esque imprint. Basic Income is a “bold idea that more traditional funders and research institutions have been hesitant to invest heavily in,” according the study website, making YCR’s social entrepreneurs all the more eager to take on the risk. Visitors to the website are invited, in effect, to crowdsource that notion by posting their videos about what they would do with an extra $1,000 a month, using the hashtag #mybasicincome. They are also invited to crowdsource the funding, with options to donate keyed to units of research: from $12,000 for a full year of an unnamed recipient’s basic income to $25 for one survey participation incentive payment.[6] In this, the YCR team was no doubt inspired by the upstart aid organization GiveDirectly, which since 2016 has been disrupting more established international development protocols by providing direct, unconditional cash payments to poor households in the developing world. In what it claims to be “the largest experiment in history,” the group launched a twelve-year randomized control study to test different models of providing guaranteed basic income to rural villagers in Kenya, which it funds in part by inviting individuals to “launch a basic income” by donating $1 per day (or the equivalent in Bitcoin).[7]
For historians of social policy, the appearance of the UBI as Silicon Valley’s latest “new new thing” (to borrow Michael Lewis’s felicitous phrase) is ironic, though not exactly surprising, to say the least.[8] For one thing, this is hardly a first. Visions of a future of work — and adequate income — without jobs go back at least to Edward Bellamy’s post second industrial revolution utopian novel Looking Backwards. Closer to hand, it’s been just over fifty years since the group of futurist intellectuals and activists known as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution came together in 1964 to call on the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to establish a guaranteed income for all. Though deeply concerned by the prospect of cybernetics-induced unemployment, that group — principally white, male, and ideologically social democratic — had much loftier visions of individual freedom, social and racial justice, shared wealth, and participatory democracy in view, all undergirded by a robust and redistributive program of public works, education, and social goods.[9] Over the course of the next decade they were joined by widening cadres of civil rights, welfare rights, and variously inter-denominational poor people’s movement activists in calling for a right to a livable income as one of the basic conditions for democracy. Others embraced the basic income idea on more pragmatic grounds: economists in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations, convinced they could all but eliminate income poverty while consolidating categorically allocated funding streams; social workers tired of imposing stigmatizing eligibility tests; even the free market acolytes of Milton Friedman, who had long since sketched out a bare bones version of the idea in a bid to replace all forms of social provision, including Social Security. They, too, albeit for varied reasons, considered the basic income an idea both necessary and feasible in an economy that simply could not, and should not, provide for everyone through employment alone. [10]
Nor, Silicon Valley to the contrary, is Y Combinator’s “the first-ever study of a basic income in the United States.” From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the federal government sponsored four large-scale basic income studies located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington state. These studies were notable, among other things, for their innovative use of random assignment and controlled experimental design. Although singularly focused on the basic income’s labor market effects (work disincentives), these studies did come to explore a broader range of health, educational, and social outcomes. Indeed, a generation of social scientists — including some now listed as academic advisors to the Y-Generator project — cut their teeth analyzing and reanalyzing the data from these studies, and otherwise building on their then “ground-breaking” designs. Canada was home to an even more far-reaching basic income experiment — known as “Mincome” — from 1974–79, when the (Pierre) Trudeau-era provincial government of Manitoba entered a cost sharing agreement with the federal government to supplement the incomes of all below-poverty households in the city of Dauphin up to a basic minimum.[11] The fate of these experiments, though varied, was tied to the political fate of the basic income itself. During a decade of bruising legislative battles, the U.S. experiments became fodder for basic income opponents, who cited otherwise disputed findings about work fall-off and family breakup to help kill the idea.[12] The combination of conservative ascendancy and cost overruns basically ended the prospects for the Mincome by 1979, leaving the extensive survey data only partially unanalyzed until the more recent wave of experimentation in Finland, the Netherlands and elsewhere contributed to a revival of interest in the findings.[13]
Of course, cyber-enthusiasts are not the only ones contributing to revived interest in the UBI. Now, as in the 1960s, the idea is gaining traction among activists, intellectuals, and policy analysts across a diverse and not entirely compatible ideological spectrum: from social democrats associated with the mostly European-North American but increasingly internationalizing Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), to Black Lives Matter activists for economic justice and reparations, to American Enterprise Institute affiliates reviving Milton Friedman-style social welfare replacement schemes.[14] But the differences between the two moments of basic income activism are more striking, and significant, in ways that remind us of what’s at stake as we consider the political economic implications of the current era of projected — and real — technological change. Today’s UBI movement has emerged amidst a massive and ongoing escalation of income and wealth inequality, driven by decades of stagnating or declining wages and extreme wealth concentration among the proverbial .01 percent. Organized labor is vastly diminished as a political or economic force. The rights and protections of social citizenship have been similarly eroded, as have investments in public infrastructure of all sorts. The issue, as we contemplate the prospect of a fourth industrial revolution, is not whether the UBI is the right “fix,” but whether we as a polity will be able to muster the movements and institutional conditions to make it tool for social and economic democracy rather than the shiny new object of the global elite.
[1] Gideon Haigh, “Basic Income for All: a 500-year-old-idea whose time has come,” The Guardian, November 11, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/11/basic-income-for-all-a-500-year-old-idea-whose-time-has-come.
[2] http://basicincome.org/news/2016/01/switzerland-robots-for-basic-income-dance-at-davos/, For a more conventionally-presented — if equally exuberant — case, see Scott Santens, “Why we should all have a basic income,” World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, January 15, 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income/.
[3] https://medium.com/basic-income/7-great-ted-talks-for-basic-income-1472e77b737f. Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Little, Brown, 2017).
[4]http://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-could-be-the-only-solution-in-a-robot-economy-2016-4; http://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-ted-talk-rutger-bregman-2017-5.
[5] https://www.universalincome.org/.
[6] https://www.inverse.com/article/36650-y-combinator-basic-income-experiment; https://basicincome.ycr.org/; Y Combinator Research, “Basic Income Project Proposal: Overview for Comments and Feedback,” September 2017.
[7] https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income.
[8] Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: Norton, 1999).
[9] The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, “The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights,” April 1964. See also Robert Theobald, ed, The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Socioeconomic Evolution? (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
[10] In agreeing to go along with what became known as the Family Assistance Plan, Nixon insisted that was not a guaranteed income — and eventually slapped work requirements on later versions to prove the point.
[11] Wayne Simpson, Greg Mason, Ryan Godwin, “The Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment: Lessons Learned
40 Years Later,” Canadian Public Policy, Volume 43, Number 1, March/mars 2017, pp. 85–104
[12] The politics of the U.S. experiments are discussed in Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Robert A. Levine et al “A Retrospect on the Negative Income Tax Experiments” in The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, eds Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis and Steven Pressman: 95–106
[13] Notably, only a year after its official launch, the Finnish parliament decided to end its basic income experiment, effective next year. http://fortune.com/2018/04/19/finland-universal-basic-income-experiment-ending/.
[14] For an instructive exchange see the essays included in the Basic Income Forum in the Boston Review (Spring, 2017); William O. Ensor et al, “A Budget-Neutral Universal Basic Income,” AEI Working Paper, May 2017. On the BIEN network see http://basicincome.org/.
