UBI - A Musk Endorsed Idea.
I've been talking about the Universal Basic Income idea for a long time.
For me the concept emerges from thinking about the implications of automation. Automation makes our culture very productive - so productive that many people have no real prospect of ever finding well paying work.
The fact is, if everyone had a productive job with our current tech we'd create an ecological catastrophe.
We can't just - um - just dispose of the people not needed for production as surplus. But those people need incomes that enables them to live well and comfortably
My idea is that all citizens get a generous stipend each month from the government whether they work or not. If they worked the employer would deduct the amount of the stipend from wages and only pay the employee the difference. So for both employees and employers the idea is revenue neutral.
The big change would be for people who don't have good jobs - they would get a good income without having to jump thru welfare hoops. There would be a big change at the bottom of the income ladder - lots of minimum wage people would say 'you can take this job and shove it"
I do get what a huge change to our society this would be. But I first came to the idea when I was thinking about automation - how automation displaces workers and leaves those workers without incomes - what is society to do? Shall we declare those workers as surplus somehow and let them die in misery?
I have some experience of automation thru Mom and the printing industry. She worked as a typesetter at McMillan press and I'd drop in to visit on my way home from school. I'd take an old fashioned freight elevator (which safety regs would ban now) to the top of the building where she worked as part of the team that prepared type for printing.
She operated a big machine with many keyboards that cast lines of type in lead. Those lines would be taken by others and trimmed and locked up in a chase according to the document design. Within a couple of years she was running a computer that output type as an image on paper. Poof - many trades gone.
I worked in the printing trade for decades and I saw that process iterate many times until I could do it all on my computer. That sort of evolution is very common. I think it means that in the future there will be a lot of people who are not needed by the economy - how does society handle a problem like that?
To my surprise, Elon Musk agrees with me. We need a universal basic income and we need a new incentive system to cope with that.
A problem is that if people aren't goaded by poverty to get a job that nobody would work at all.
That kind of ignores the fact that people actually like to work. People practice to be able to join sports teams for instance without pay. The incentive is the camaraderie and the fun of exercising a skill.
There have been several pilot studies of the UBI that gave people money whether they worked or not. The results have been positive. It enabled people to study or to stay at home to care for sick relatives. The programs were cancelled because, basically, they were 'communist' (horrors).
Perhaps it's time to give that boogey man a rest.
What do you think?.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.