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Are Universal Basic Incomes 'A Tool For Our Further Enslavement'? (medium.com)
Douglas Rushkoff, long-time open source advocate (and currently a professor of Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College), is calling Universal Basic Incomes "no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement."
Uber's business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating. When it's looked at the way a software developer would, it's clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that's fundamentally flawed. The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you're doing something wrong or "leaving money on the table."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.
The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."
tool for enslavement: using emotionally loaded language.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That is a complete nonsese. Let's say everyone will get $1000 UBI. Does this mean, that they will earn $1000 more of value? NO. It will inflate global prices about $1000 so prices will be (TODAY_PRICES + $1000), so they will gain no value at all. No one.
40+ years and trillions of dollars after Johnson declared war on poverty and here we are wondering how to enslave more generations in poverty with even more expensive schemes.
You are right, instead we should reward them for being liars (PR) or sociopaths (CEOs) or just plain old gun dealers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Capitalism is theft, plain and simple. Profit is a tax on the labor of others. You should not reward people just because they can fog a mirror while being rich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
UBI is a safety net without the expensive part of qualifying people for different welfare programs. Nothing more or less. It's a more efficient form of welfare, where the costs of the UBI are recovered with higher income and/or sales taxes as incomes increase.
Also, people who don't feel as poor tend to be more mobile. If you're making $10/hr at Mickey Dee's at 40hr/week, you're too busy surviving to go back to school or look for vocational training to better yourself. Take away the immediate need for as much income, and people end up with more options -- this will end up making people MORE productive in the long run.
The world is better off as a whole eliminating the work done by the least productive members of society, even if it means subsidizing them through something like a UBI, which is probably the least terrible form of wealth redistribution, but that's an aside. It fails to consider that as the world becomes more productive, the cost of goods and services decreases, which actually means that it becomes cheaper and cheaper to subsidize someone to a basic level of living. You can even see homeless people with smartphones and internet access these days and that's because they both became incredibly inexpensive relative to what they previously were.
Some people like to complain that as this wealth is created that a disproportionate amount of it goes to the wealthiest people, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter if the wealthiest are getting a disproportionate amount of it as long as everyone is moving up, and if you look at the world, poverty has been declining globally at massive rates. Even in the U.S. which is already wealthy, people are moving up. You often see people complain about the shrinking middle class, but what they fail to mention is that it's because the upper middle class is growing.
If anything is a problem with UBI, it's that humans seem to need some purpose in order to function well and for a lot of people that's a job that they feel gives their lives meaning. Many proponents like to think that most UBI recipients will learn new skills, etc. but I think a large number either won't or there might be a few at the bottom who won't be able do any kind of productive labor that wouldn't be better done by a machine. Even though further industrialization will continue to drive productivity higher and make goods more affordable, people without purpose tend to fall victim to substance abuse or other forms of behavior with similar consequences and outcomes. I think that's going to be the harder problem to crack, because I'm not sure if technology can do anything about it.
That sounds like a desperate last-ditch effort to discredit UBI. According to his logic, employment is just another tool to funnel money to Uber and Walmart as well, so we should all quit our jobs right now to stop them.
OTOH, is we actually issue UBI, people won't need to work for Uber until they're too poor to work anymore. They can hold out for a real job that pays what their time and resources are worth.
So UBI will basically be like a minimum-wage job today, except with ability to make more money by working more and not lose any benefits you may have. Or have more free time to better oneself and eventually end up doing something either (a) better-paying or (b) genuinely useful to society.
As opposed to Capitalism, which in it's modern form mostly consists of idle rich skimming all the profit off of the labor of the masses,
UBI money has to come from somewhere. taxes or just more borrowing?/p?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money). Or with their drivers, they trade money for use of the contractor's time and car wear and tear.
Both their customers and their contractors are better off after their interaction with Uber because they all exchange something they value less for something they'd rather have. The customer would rather have the ride, the contractor would rather have the cash and Uber would rather have their cut of the money than keep their app and system of organizing rides to themselves.
If Uber isn't efficient enough in their part of the transaction, then Lyft (Or Ula, or whoever) will come in and take their market share. So Uber can't profit any more than they can make the whole process more efficient.
The problem with the Walmart example is that the "Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want" never happens. You can still go into any Walmart and pay less for things than any of the "small" shops which may have been around before. They have to compete with places like Amazon, etc... anyway. It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them. It's not like they took a lower paying job at Walmart in order to get food stamps.
Really, this guy sounds like he's one conspiracy theory away from climbing into a clocktower somewhere.
The groups which "extract" resources from the economy, rather than help create new ones, are bureaucrats and politicians via taxes. They skim off the top and never return more than they take overall (i.e. the "multiplier" is less than 1), not even including the economic drag of their endless micromanaging rules for everyone to follow.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Look, Uber can die in a fire for all I care. But unless, for some bizarre reason, UBI recipients are required to give some percentage of their income specifically to Uber, dropping that company into this discussion is so disconnected from the topic at hand that it doesn’t even deserve to be called a straw man.
#DeleteChrome
This is similar to what happened at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Instead of 10 farmers being minimally productive and all eking out a living, one farmer could become highly productive, obtain dollars for the things of value he's producing, and the other farmers go out of business. This has continued till the present day, where we have mega-farms and agribusiness, and few smaller (though still large) farms.
Automation and centralized purchasing centers (web sites) are similarly consolidating value. As a company is able to replace more and more workers with machinery, it does not require assistance in the creation of things that people value. The company - the management - is able to keep it all for itself. Instead of a store requiring 100 people to generate 20 million a year in value, it now only requires 10.
It's the "Consolidation of the Production of Value."
Initially, there's tremendous dislocation. People gotta eat and have shelter and clothes everyday. But it can take decades for new sectors to form which can make use of the displaced workers.
I too started feeling pitchforky when I read the summary. There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of psychopathic malfeasance at the top levels of the economy and government. But, we need to understand what's going on, in order to fairly and justly address it, in order to provide the greatest standard of living for the most people.
At least cab companies are local, pay local taxes and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange. I gain value from paying someone to do something for me because I value my time, or whatever is involved more than I value what I'm paying them to do it. Look up consumer surplus, for example.
The amount of profit for both sides is minimized by the amount of competition for what they are providing.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market. They exchange one thing of value (in the case of Uber, transportation services) for another thing of value (money).
The point your ignoring, which the article summary touches on is the concept of externalities. Wal-Mart is heavily subsidized by the government, since a great many of its employees couldn't exist without government assistance. UBI is just government assistance in a different form. It may work out or not. It has the bonus of allowing the end user to control how it is spent and I suppose the negative of allowing the end user to control how it is spent. The actual outcome depends on the end user.
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others. Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces. Do also remember that regulation tends to come about as a result of bad behaviour, so quite often removing regulations has consequences that are significant.
So to answer the question of the article. No, not really. UBI is not slavery. If anything it is the opposite. A person could do what they love, even if it takes awhile to find, cause their basics are met. Of course, whether UBI is feasible is another matter...
That's... beyond untrue. Lot's of government programs produce values that are many times the amount spent on them.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
"You load sixteen tons and what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store"
Presentism; noun. An uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
Guess what? What you complain about has nothing to do with capitalism. Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive. Capitalism in those days merely inherited what existed before it. Technology was primitive, productivity was low and therefore wages were low. It was through their hard work and sacrifice that we have what we have today and via ours that the people of the future have what they have.
Yes working in a coal mine sucked big time in those days. It also sucked working as a feudal serf 200 years before that and it sucked pretty much all the way back to the beginning of human history. People worked 12 hour days in a coal mine and factory because it was better working conditions and better pay than 14-16 hour days on a farm. You will find NOBODY protesting poverty in 1700 for the same reason you won't find people protesting old age today. What's the point in protesting something that there is no solution to?
If you can't even understand the past you have no hope in forming useful thoughts about the future.
Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Nonsense. If I buy a pair of socks from amazon, I gain a hell of a lot of value; I save the many hours of labour which would be required for me to go out and sheer a sheep, turn the wool into yarn or thread, and then weave the yarn into a pair of socks. Whereas Amazon gains maybe a dollar.
That fact that amazon might sell 10 million pairs of socks and get 10 million dollars of "value" as a result doesn't change the fact that in each individual transaction the consumer benefits far more than the seller. This is the very foundation of trade. The whole point of buying stuff is that you get more value from buying it than from producing it yourself. If the seller ends up richer than you it's not because he's getting more value from your transaction; it's because he's conducting a hell of a lot more transactions.
Perhaps the better option is for these 8-year-olds not to exist in the first place because the parents had access to condoms, IUDs, hormone treatment, or other means of birth control.
Ironic. California indian's are reported to have spent 4 hours a day meeting their needs, and in a virtual paradise.
"Poverty is the DEFAULT state for humanity, with the average person working 12-16 hour days 6 days a week just to survive."
Oh my brother, you are woefully misinformed about history.
The horrific living conditions you describe are typical of the urban proletariat in the mid-19th century. 19th century capitalism can be seen as one of the all-time nadirs of human civilization. Such conditions were not at all typical of previous eras in European history. Peasants, serfs, and even most literal slaves in antiquity did not work nearly so much nor in such bad conditions.
The brutal living conditions of this new urban proletariat - a social grouping that had not existed a hundred years prior - appalled men of all classes. It directly inspired movements of anti-capitalist resistance such as communism, socialism, and the corporatist forbearers of fascism.
You might enjoy reading _The Great Transformation_ by Karl Polanyi for a detailed history of the development of capitalism and it's attendant poverty, squalor, & misery. Note that Polanyi would probably be described as "rightist" in contemporary American politics, illustrating again the bogusness of the left/right dichotomy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Except Amazon didn't shear the sheep either. It bought the socks, took your order and paid someone to deliver them to you. And you paid them more than it cost them to do that. That is called profit.
Doesn't matter. He didn't have to source the socks, negotiate a sale price for a quantity of 1 (pk), arrange delivery, etc.
Amazon handles all of this, for billions of transactions. Each person served pays a tiny bit of "markup" to save themselves time. It would take each person far more time to visit individual retailers for individual products than the value of the extra money they give to Amazon to do this for them.
Conversly, Amazon can only remain in business, by collecting this tiny markup, from millions of transactions. It specializes, in a sense.. It serves as a central distribution point. Same as any other general retailer.
There's a reason Farmer's Markets exist. It would be a huge pain in the ass to drive to Farm A for eggs, Farm B for bacon, and Farm C for milk. A central location is much preferred. Items A,B, & C can all be purchased within a few feet of each other. Reducing time and effort, on the part of the consumer, to obtain these items.
In exchange for access to a much larger target market, the farmers pay the distributor a percentage of their profit.
I guarantee you that the amount the farmer's pay is far less than the cost for them to distribute the products themselves. If it wasn't, they'd distribute the products themselves.. Nobody pays for anything that they think is worth less than the money they are handing over. Who, in their right mind, would do that?
Should you attempt to do so, you will be coercively prevented by armed agents of the state, on the basis of private pooperty.
That is, unless you are a member of the vanishingly small group of self-sufficient farmers who post on Slashdot.
The fallacy of "because someone doesn't do something, they can't do something"
This person is perfectly able to purchase land in the country and raise sheep. They choose not to. Perhaps it's because their current employment is far more profitable than being a sheep farmer who raises sheep to produce wool for one pair of socks.
Once again, we are back to the economics of scale. It is wholly unprofitable to produce the wool to create socks for a single person. It's far more efficient if 1 guy produces the wool for ten thousand socks. Cost per unit drops through the floor when compared to the cost per unit in the former scenario.
Humans have been specializing for the last ten thousand years (at least). A fisherman fishes... He doesn't farm, he doesn't raise sheep. He fishes for the whole village.. Conversely, the wheat farmer grows wheat.. For everyone.. And so on and so forth.
The fisherman trades (or sells) a tiny bit of his catch to one person to obtain wheat.. Wheat that would cost him far more to grow on his own. He'd have to take time away from fishing to grow the wheat..
Just another example where people trade money or goods to obtain other money or goods in a transaction that is worth way more to them than to the other party.. The other party has to rely on the economics of scale to be profitable... Sell wheat to a whole lot of people.. Sell fish to a whole lot of people..
To read the original post carefully, he is saying that the progress of capitalism has left us slaves to a small number of corporate overlords. I have to say, that's true.
We let this happen because we enjoy having Amazon figure out what we want to buy, and make it easy for us to pull the trigger. Same with Uber. It's not really that bad, and also not that different from what is historically normal.
Now, enslaving overlords aren't what they used to be. They have learned a lot of lessons from historical episodes like the French Revolution, the mass unemployment in Britain of the 1920s, the early Great Depression in the US, and many others. The lesson is captured in what someone upthread referred to as "pitchforkiness," and others refer to as the frog-in-hot-water syndrome: Don't let the slaves get too uncomfortable.
It's incredibly good to be in the quiet ruling class of a prosperous, hopeful world. It really sucks to be the unquestioned despot of masses of people who feel that life is going the wrong way for them. Talk to billionaires and centi-millionaires (which I do), and you'll realize they totally get this.
What is happening now is that the lessons of noblesse oblige are steadily being unlearned by the newest class of oligarchs, who like most people 35 and younger, are astonishingly ignorant of history. I actually date this movement to the Enron blowup, and the less-celebrated concomitant event, the destruction of its auditor Arthur Andersen & Co. I remember boardroom conversations at that time about the significance of this episode: that the relatively few people with true power have lost any ethical sense, and we all had better start getting it back.
Guess what? We haven't, and it's gotten much worse since then.
In terms of basic economics, this is showing up as deflation. Not in the textbook monetary sense, but in the fact (mentioned by many posters here) that it's getting noticeably harder for ordinary middle-class people to afford many economic goods that were easily within reach in more prosperous times. This is a really big and separate topic (it intersects with the disastrous aftermath of the 2008 GFC). But for present purposes it represents the lever by which the truly powerful are exerting their control.
The extreme example of this is the situation in Silicon Valley. You'd think the C programmers making $240K/year and the data scientists literally making up to a million, have it made in the shade. So why are they constantly obsessing over real estate? They have plenty of money, but there's not enough for them to buy with it. That's a new kind of deflation (which many people mistake for inflation), and something like it is happening across all sectors of the economy, and in nearly every country. That's what we have to be worried about, because our economic overlords aren't doing anything about it.
Among many other more important things, this led to the rise of Donald Trump, who achieved nothing more (or less) than recognizing it and giving it a name. We're rather lucky that he's a feckless idiot. A more capable individual, more plugged into the true economic power structure of Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Tencent, Alibaba, etc., could wreak tremendous harm.
FYI people didn't work 12-16 hours on a farm on a regular basis, the industrial revolution made people work longer hours than before.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma...
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog...