Low wages appear to be necessary to coax firms into taking on new employees, often in very low-productivity jobs that could potentially be done by machines instead. A universal basic income would shift purchasing power toward people who do work which, though valuable to society, is not rewarded financially. In most of the world, they work more hours a day than men do, but command a lower share of financial resources, largely because they take on more unpaid child care and responsibilities for the family home. Women do the lion’s share of the world’s unpaid labour. So is finding fulfilment in unremunerated ways.Ī basic income could also help to right certain old injustices. The security of a basic income could boost enterprise, because leaving a job and using up savings to open a business are more palatable prospects in such a world. Workers could take more time to train and explore different careers. Startup statistsīackers make other arguments, too. “Fifty years from now.it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people,” is how Mr Altman puts it. Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, a startup incubator, plans to pilot a basic income of $1,000-2,000 a month in Oakland, a city in California. Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, a technology-oriented venture-capital firm, argues in favour of the policy in a new book “World After Capital”. To the extent that such disruption is part of their business model, this beneficence is also a way to neutralise complaints about the havoc their innovations may wreak. Some of the people behind today’s technological change see universal basic income in similar terms-a way of assuring a living for all in a world of robots and artificial intelligence. (The first novel by Robert Heinlein, a canonical 20th-century science-fiction writer much rated in libertarian circles, consists largely of arguments in favour of social credit and nudism, both of which he saw as central to his Utopia.) He suggested that governments could make up the gap by issuing every citizen with a “national dividend”. Douglas, a British polymath, was born of the worry that technology was opening up a gap between total output and the income earned by workers. The basic income, or “social credit”, put forward in the 1920s by C.H. The idea of a universal basic income has long been tied up with worries about accelerating technological change.
Unsurprisingly, given the Utopian and libertarian flavour of the idea, Silicon Valley is interested, too. The idea also has some support in the further reaches of the left as, in the words of a paper published in 1986, “A capitalist road to communism”. Along with writers such as Anthony Atkinson, a British economist, and Andy Stern, an American union leader, they see a basic income (in some form) as a way of expanding the welfare state to reduce growing inequality (see chart 1). It feels that, though it might prefer a world with no government redistribution, a basic income is the simplest, least intrusive and least condescending way to provide redistribution if redistribution there must be.Īmerican liberals including Paul Krugman, an economist and columnist, and Robert Reich, a former labour secretary, are also interested.
The Cato Institute, an American think-tank which spends much of its time calling for a smaller state, published a sympathetic analysis of the policy in 2015. Political activists and thinkers across a broad array of ideologies, from libertarians to social liberals to the hard left, are intrigued, or even keen.
On June 5th the Swiss will vote on a constitutional change to introduce a basic income for all citizens. Similar programmes are being mulled in several Dutch cities.
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Finland will roll out a trial programme next year, in which some citizens will receive unconditional cash grants of up to €800 ($900) per month. Three centuries on, a handful of governments around the world, mostly in rich countries, are launching experimental basic-income programmes, or at least considering the idea. The idea has a long pedigree, endorsed by great figures of the enlightenment such as the Marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Paine.
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