A cautionary note before we begin: this post might wander around a bit! It is a reflection of several articles read and several face-to-face discussions from the past couple of months.
With that out of the way... ONWARDS!
8 1/2 years ago I stumbled upon Hive's predecessor as a result of somebody sending me a link on Facebook, to an article about Universal Basic Income (UBI).
The context had nothing whatsoever to do with promoting our old community here, and everything to do with a friend wanting me to read an article and let him know what I thought about the author's ideas. Here we are, all these years later I don't even remember who that author was but I find myself still here on Hive and for no specific reason I found myself thinking about UBI again recently and wanted to touch back on that subject.
UBI is often the proverbial "hot potato", particularly in an environment like this which is often heavily dominated by libertarians and anarcho capitalists.
You barely even get to say the words before a chorus arises about "not trusting government" and how it's "just a handout to lazy people who don't want to work" and are essentially representative of the worst caricatures and stereotypes of people on welfare.
Typically, the actual benefits and potential necessity for such a program is completely overshadowed by angry commentary and complaints about not trusting a government to administer something, and that it is a virtual form of socialism.
For the purposes of what I'm writing here I don't really care about whether people trust government or not and I don't really care about who administers it and I don't really care about the funding of it.
What I care about is the potential necessity for it, along with the reality of what actual pilot programs have shown in the past, in terms of debunking common objections.
The problem we face — as a species — is that we're living in a world of increasing automation. The old assumption has always been that if your job is replaced by automation you just go and get some training and then you do a different job instead of the one that became obsolete. But that particular line of thinking doesn't hold true quite the way it once did.
We are rapidly moving towards a point in human development where human beings are simply not needed to do more and more tasks, and there isn't the need for them to do other tasks. As such, the whole notion of work is gradually changing, and the old slur ”learn to code” is even becoming outdated as we now have AI that can write its own code more effectively than human beings in a fraction of the time and with far fewer mistakes.
Aside from which — at a purely practical level — we don't actually need that many coders!
You don't have to go very far to get a first hand sense of what's going on in the world. About 4-5 years ago I our local Safeway supermarket Got its first for self-checkout counters. Four years later, there are now 12 self-checkout counters, and at any given time there are only two conventional service checkout counters open... even during busy times.
Where 12 checkout lines would once have to be operated by 12 cashiers there is now a single supervisor overlooking 12 check stands. That means 11 jobs simply don't exist anymore.
So what does this have to do with UBI?
Well, we're employing all this automation to produce goods and services at a greater and greater rate, more efficiently and faster... meaning that all those goods and services are still coming off the production line with the expectation that somebody is going to buy them.
But if people don't have jobs then where are they going to get their income from... enabling them to buy the stuff?
Apologists for the conventional way of looking at economics always try to assure me that "we'll never run out of jobs!" and point to various statistics about "expected job growth" over the next 20 years... which invariably is based on some very dodgy assumptions.
But back to the idea of a tangible need for some kind of "supplemental income" for people.
Even as I write these words, statistics increasingly show that more than half of US households are struggling to make ends meet on their current incomes, making me wonder what that number is going to look like as more people find that their jobs are replaced by automation? Seems to me that meager income streams are likely going to be replaced by no income streams.
How is that going to intersect with the manufacturers producing all these products if we don't actually have any money to buy them? And if we don't have any money to buy anything other than the bare necessities how is that equation going to work out? And maybe we can't even buy the bare necessities if we don't have jobs? Surely there's a better alternative than becoming a nation of vagrants with a tiny uber-class?
Once again I'm not interested in the discussion of whether we *trust government to implement UBI, or whether it comes through private enterprise or through some form of penalty tax on automation designed to somehow at least partially replace the income the people who are displaced by that automation... I am simply asking the very basic question of how we're going to be able to live if the need for labor — which provides us with money to buy food and housing and so forth — is increasingly going away.
And let me be clear here: I'm not talking about giving people a bunch of money, either... just enough help pay for very basic housing and food. No "welfare Cadillacs!"
I fear the day where some form of basic income will become inevitable is closer than we might like to think.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.06.19 01:42 PDT
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