SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe

jones_supa writes: Saxo Bank, an investment bank based in Denmark, has released a list of its outrageous predictions for 2016. Among these predictions, economist Christopher Dembik claims that Europe will consider the introduction of a universal basic income to ensure that all citizens can meet their basic needs in the face of rising inequality and unemployment. This will come on the back of increased interest in basic income from Spain, Finland, Switzerland, and France.

Comments

Re:Already here

[jandersen]

I can't see why it's an "outrageous prediction".

They are referring to the illustrations and the general colour scheme, I think.

Inevitable

[duckintheface]

Automation and adoption of AI is replacing human labor at an accelerating rate, and not just for menial labor. Computers can now do much of work of doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, and a wide array of service occupations. Touch screen vending machines will soon replace counter and kitchen workers in fast food restaurants. This increased productivity (production per person-hour) means higher profits for the companies but that money goes to the owner class, not the general population. So how are people going to survive.

There are two possibilities and only two. A luddite revolution reverses automation so that we return to the economy of the 20th Century.. or... a socialist revolution redistributes the wealth so that the majority of people have a way to have a meaningful life. The either of those revolutions can be peaceful but probably won't be. And this does not mean just Europe. It's the trajectory of the human race. Coming to a continent near you.

Re:Inevitable

[bickerdyke]

it just goes straight up my ass, the thought of paying someone for doing nothing more than processing oxygen after being born.

Beside the sad fact that this seems to be the only thing some people know to do properly, what is your plan to stop automation that leaves less and less to do for human workers? Reducing population to match the remaining jobs?

Re:Inevitable

[boristdog]

But oddly you don't seem to be protesting spending trillions of your hard-earned tax dollars to bomb people in other lands.

I would rather my tax dollars go to helping people, INCLUDING those who don't work. I have friends who had jobs that have been replaced by automation. Hell, I'm an automation specialist and I probably helped put them there. The fact that my company makes scads more money because of it shouldn't mean they have to suffer.

And you know what? Some day my job may get replaced by a particularly clever bit of code. So I have no problem with Universal Basic Income.

Re:Inevitable

[shaitand]

The difference with a basic income is that you would be paid the income as well. It would not be charity or negated by profits via working. It is simply a more equitable distribution of profits from automation and outsourcing. After all, tech workers are currently being asked to work/develop themselves and their peers out of the job. It used to be that automation created new more skilled jobs to replace the old jobs. That is no longer the case, automation replaces workers or dumbs tasks down to the point where less skilled third world workers can perform the tasks leaving perhaps one skilled worker where there used to be 20. And these are high five well into six figure positions not factory workers.

Here in the US the need for this is pretty clear. Fiat currencies including our depend on inflation to function. Currently we can't manage to create inflation even with an effective zero interest rate (the fed creates money on demand and effectively gives it to banks for free or even at a loss should there be inflation over the loan term). Basically, as a nation our wealth is growing so fast we can't inflate the dollar despite refinancing virtually every mortgage, student, and auto loan in the country but the growth is not at the middle or the bottom (think 0.001% top not 1%).

This is not charity, this is a transition step on our path to a world where people no longer need to work. The "first world" has developed and advanced the technology. The elite class who largely no longer HAVE to work or need do so minimally would be expanding from a small sliver of the first world population to a small sliver of the global population, which is essentially the entire current first world. We developed and built all the technology for the foundation but we can't compete with the sheers numbers of the third world to build on the technological foundation we built for them. It's time to pass the labor on to the third world and let the first world enjoy the benefits of what they've done.

The minimum income shouldn't be paid for with taxes though, it should paid with new inflation dollars from the Fed. Normally we'd be terrified of out of control inflation but this provides no danger as I said before as we are actually at risk of numerical economic stagnation due to a tangible risk of deflation. The only result is those with entrenched wealth have to assume slightly more risk on investments but the resulting inflation rate is highly unlikely to be higher than at most times through the last 20 years. In fact, we could completely fund universal healthcare alongside this without much risk of that.

You don't object to some people getting enjoy retirement? Think of this as earned retirement for the collective workers of the first world. Eventually the class who need not work will grow to include currently developing nations as well until everything is automated and people work to pursue goals they want and occupy their time rather than because they need do so to fulfill basic needs.

Re:Already here - it feels unfair to some

[Sique]

You will pay for them nonetheless. Either you pay them directly, or your pay burglar alarms, private guards, the police, courts and prisons necessary to keep them away from plundering you. As it seems, especially the court and prison system can get quite expensive, much more expensive than just handing out a basic income to everyone. What you save in welfare, you have to spent several times in protection.

Re:They can't afford it

[pijokela]

All of these basic income articles always get these "free moneys" comments, while the actual plan is not about giving unemployed people more money than what they now receive. The idea is to make taking any work always beneficial compared to unemployment. The current system - where you have to demonstrate that you have no work - has the problem that taking a short gig may you may end up losing money before you can again show that you are unemployed.

Also hopefully we will get less bureaucrazy etc.

Even now, every refugee that is granted refugee status will start receiving unemployment benefits.

Re:They can't afford it

[Alwin Henseler]

Whenever the subject of a basic income comes up, this same argument is made. But it's simply not true:

There's already scores of people who -for whatever reasons- aren't part of the work force. Usually they do have an income. Be it a retirement allowance (65+), some disability provision, some temporary allowance between jobs, etc, etc. Replace that with a basic income, and the net financial result is the same. Minus the overhead.

People who do have a job, often get various allowances too: low-income rent subsidies, health care benefits, child support, the list goes on. Replace that with a basic income, adjust tax levels such that [previous net income + allowances] = [basic income + new net income], and again net result is the same. Minus the overhead.

As a poster in a previous discussion remarked: this can be done gradually by giving a basic income to select group(s) of people, and then one-by-one, roll various other groups into the same regime. Reducing the governments' administrative overhead at each step along the way.

Bottom line: yes, western countries can afford this, period. Because in one way or another, they already do. Plus the overhead, that is. What's missing is the political will (or balls ;-) to turn it into reality.

Re:Already here - it feels unfair to some

[Junta]

While I sympathize with the sentiment, the fantasy of being able to just redistribute the 'wealth' of the top 100 doubling the standard of living of everybody else is rooted in the mathematical fiction of 'wealth' (as we model it today).

Wealth is an assessed value of their assets and their money. Assets including cars, land, bulidings, stocks, etc. If Steve Balmer one day said 'I want to trade in my 15 billion dollars of microsoft stock for some cash', he wouldn't get 15 billion dollars of cash because the share price would tank. If you took the resources that go into building a 400,000 exotic car, you could not take those same and just build 20 family sedans, though the 'math' says you could.

On the flip side, a lot of homeless folk are technically more 'wealthy' than some pretty comfortable folks. In the early part of his vice presidency, Joe Biden had negative net worth. By the same standards that establish the top 100 as being able to elevate the rest of the world, Joe Biden was a more pitiable man than people in cardboard boxes (he had plenty of assets, but more debt than assets). Incidentally this scenario applies to most young families with a house and a car or two, but they wouldn't trade that in for a cardboard box to get wealthier.

In general don't look too hard at the ostensible numbers of wealth, because in aggregate it's a situation with many hacks to workaround this nonsense. A lot of the high-dollar things are more like 'high scores' than some indicator of meaningful value that is accurate relative to the experience of most. One would hope there's a better way than just increasingly playing make believe with numbers, but we haven't really come up with something that works in the way modern life goes (no, a return to gold standard or something in the same spirit wouldn't help, it would just limit the ability to do the 'workarounds' to fix things when the behavior of the participants in the economy goes nuts).

Re:How did their past predictions turn out?

[AmiMoJo]

It's just an invitation to have a discussion. That's what Slashdot is about.