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Last time, I suggested that the real horrors that AI is going to visit upon the world will be economic, not artistic. As AI improves (at an alarming rate), it’s going to be able to automate more and more jobs, leading to skyrocketing unemployment, depressed wages, and a wealth gap that would make Margaret Thatcher squirt in her grave. The only way that most of us are going to avoid living in a caste that makes the proles in 1984 look glamorous is by ditching neoliberalism and making some changes to how the economy is structured.
Fortunately, there’s already a scheme for restructuring our economy that’s been around for a while and has been gaining popularity (and supporting data) as it’s become increasingly obvious that we’re no longer living in anything that can even be dishonestly labeled a free market. It’s called a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and it grew out of futurists and economists trying to figure out how to prevent pitchfork-wielding mobs from tearing down society in exactly the kind of world that AI could easily create. The gist of how it works is kind of right there in the name, but let’s break it down anyway.
Universal
Universal Basic Income is universal, so the regular payouts provided by the program are the same for everyone. If we decide that Universal Basic Income for the U.S. should be $1500 a month, that means I get $1500 a month, you get $1500 a month, your Aunt Sally gets $1500 a month, and Jeff Bezos gets $1500 a month. Well, I think Jeff Bezos gets it. If he’s given up his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes or something, fuck that guy. Actually, fuck that guy even if he hasn’t. We could probably fund a few states worth of public schools just from the taxes Amazon manages to lawyer and lobby its way out of paying.
The biggest advantage to universal programs–other than the fact that most people like it when the government gives them money, no matter how much they complain about the government giving people money–is that it’s really simple. Everybody who’s a citizen gets a check every month, so you don’t need people to means test or investigate fraud. This simplicity eliminates the massive administrative expenses that are built into most of our social programs, freeing up that money to go into the UBI pool. This is something we could build an AI to administer today. We might need humans for a few years to collect data and get things running, but once it’s up and running the number of human workers required to keep it going would be miniscule.
Unfortunately, for us, the “Universal” part of UBI is probably the biggest hurdle in our current political reality, because “not Universal” is incredibly useful politically. As long as the worker bees are focusing their anger on the unemployed bastard who used their EBT card to buy a bag of Cheetos, the Lords of Industry can keep fleecing them in a million different ways without anyone noticing. Having a working class whose ability to afford even a modest life is precarious creates a working class that is scared, angry, and ready to lash out at someone. Urban legends about welfare queens and lobster dinners bought with food stamps ensure that they keep lashing down instead of up.
You probably saw the political efficacy of setting up different tiers of government benefits in a recent election (I don’t know which one, they all kind of run together) when someone floated the idea of publicly funding college educations. The next day, the Shitlib Bureau of Talking Points sent out a memo to let everyone know that publicly funded colleges would mean that Barron Trump could go to college for free (as if a Trump would be caught dead at a state school). When it comes to the left, that kind of thing might actually be a bigger problem than deflecting anger from campaign donors: Universal programs by their very nature mean that benefits will almost certainly go to the “wrong” people. Liberals prefer government benefits to be tiered so they reward the people who are most worthy according to their current hierarchy of identarian intersectionality. Fortunately, a lot of people who aren’t insane seemed to think that a free education for Trump’s spawn was a small price to pay if it meant they or their kids could get a college degree.
Basic
A basic income means that the money you get is enough to keep you alive, but not much more. The exact standard of living that a Universal Basic Income should cover isn’t really standardized. Some proponents think it should only cover housing costs. Others add food, medical care, and other unavoidable costs of living to the calculation. Across the board, however, most theories of UBI assume that anyone who wants to do more than merely survive is going to have to find another source of income. If those welfare queens were real, Universal Basic Income would mean a pay cut for them.
The reason that most models of UBI concentrate on covering basic survival costs is that most UBI supporters believe you shouldn’t have to die just because you don’t have a job. Unfortunately, that’s also why so many Americans will oppose it, thanks again to the Protestant Work Ethic. Our society assigns so much virtue and value to having a job that a lot of people truly believe that those who don’t work deserve to die–unless of course they have generational wealth or belong to one of the categories that are deserving of assistance due to illness, age, or other factors. Remember that for many Americans, their biggest criticism of social programs is that they just aren’t Dickensian enough and may allow those who benefit form them to occasionally experience a moment of peace or joy.
Anyway, the idea is that UBI will cover the cost of living, but there’s not going to be money left over to go on vacation or buy a new iPhone every year. Nearly every model of UBI assumes that most people will want an additional source of income. But since the basic costs of survival are covered, the system creates the one kind of free market that capitalists don’t want: a free market for labor. If people don’t have to worry about getting evicted or losing their healthcare if they quit their job, employers who don’t offer decent pay, benefits, an work environments are going to lose the people who do the actual work that makes the company its money. On top of that, a lot of people aren’t going to want to waste moste of their lives at work if they don’t have to, which means more people will start their own businesses (which is possible with the anti-homelessness insurance provided by UBI) or look for part time work. More people working for themselves, more people working part-time jobs, and higher pay for those jobs is a great way to spread the jobs left after the AI apocalypse out among more people. Unfortunately it means employers will have to pay people what they’re worth, which means our current politics probably won’t allow it.
If you think providing everyone with enough income to survive without a job will mean that everyone will just sit around the house collecting their check, the research disagrees. A number of countries, states, and cities have conducted short term (usually a few years) experiments with UBI and in most cases the people receiving UBI continued to work. In fact, it’s common for people who previously survived on government benefits to join the workforces, since UBI doesn’t have all that means testing that can cause people to lose benefits if they get a job. Under our current system, a lot of people on the dole would make less if they took a low-paying job, especially if it requires commuting or arranging child care. In that situation, staying on the dole is an exercise of the kind of enlightened self-interest that libertarians should be able to get behind.
Income
Finally, UBI is income, which means its your money and you can do what you want with it. It’s not a voucher for you to give to a slum lord, it doesn’t come with requirements that you visit a social worker or prove you’ve looked for a job, and there’s not a list of approved items in the grocery store that you can spend it on. It’s your money, and you can spend it all on birth control and beer if you want to. You probably don’t want to do that, though, because UBI replaces our current social safety net programs for most people. There may still be some programs to help those who can’t work, but they’re not going to help you if you spend your whole UBI check on cocaine and Alf pogs.
Who’s Going To Pay For It?
The knee-jerk question that most people ask anyone who mentions UBI–or for that matter any program that doesn’t involve bombing brown people or giving the rich a tax cut–is, of course, “How do you expect to pay for this?” A chunk of it can be covered with the money we save by making the program universal and eliminating most of the bureaucracy that’s required to support our current means-test social safety net. In fact, the sheer amount of money that could be saved in this way is substantial enough that some libertarians are advocating UBI because replacing safety net programs with universal income might actually save taxpayer money. Even if it doesn’t, at least it directs most of the money to people who actually need it rather than using it to pay civil servants.
We could also actually implement some of the money-saving measures that people have been suggesting for years, like eliminating loopholes so corporations and the wealthy actually have to pay their taxes and are taxed at rates that aren’t half what working people pay. We could also dial back the Pentagon budget so it only outpaces the military budgets of the next two or three world powers instead of the ten or whatever it beats now. One that I personally would like to see is a return of the death tax, or at least dropping the exemption to pre-Obama (or better, pre-Reagan) levels. The ability to pass down enormous generational wealth tax-free is something that should have ended with feudalism. If the children of the wealthy can’t get by on an inheritance of a few million dollars, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to handle money in the first place.
A lot of UBI models support paying for the program in part by reviving the idea of the commons, an old English idea that basically says that commonly-held resources should benefit everyone. So instead of Massey Coal buying a Senator so they can get mineral rights for public land at little or no cost, they’d actually pay the market rate for those rights. The commons can also be expanded to include things like technology and research. A lot of the wealthiest corporations in the world (especially in the tech and pharma fields) are built on technology developed through research funded by taxpayers, which they get for free. Instead of letting companies effectively remove these innovations form the commons by patenting small but significant variations or derivatives–or worse, simply replacing the public agencies that did most of the work, like Musk is trying to do with NASA–we should be making them pay licensing fees on patents held by the government. I know the idea of making rich people pay for the public resources that they use is unpopular and runs the risk that they’ll take their toys and move to Galt’s Gulch, but I think it’s a risk we can afford to take. At the very least, a rethinking of the commons would require us to also rethink our increasingly ridiculous intellectual property laws, under which farmers aren’t allowed to fix their own tractors and the current length of a copyright is “5 years more than it would take Mickey Mouse to become public domain.”
