Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
As shaky as the the "science" of economics is, any Econ grad student could explain to you why that is simply, and absolutely not true historically. In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.
If you're using a fixed (or relatively fixed) commodity like gold as the basis for your currency then you might have an argument. Since we went off the gold standard, you do not see any correlation between the number of dollars in the system and inflation. The simplest way to express it is this: if the growth in monetary supply outpaces the growth in output, then there might be some inflation, but since we've had decades of increased output and virtually no increase in money in the pockets of working people, there is a lot of ground to make up before we start seeing any impact. So, if the Fed printing money to put in the pockets of rich people (aka, quantitative easing) has not caused monetary inflation, then certainly putting money in the hands of people at the other end of the spectrum won't either. In fact, the increase in demand would probably trigger greater output.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Profit is a tax on the labor of others.
Then work for yourself. Learn a skill and put an ad on Craigslist. I hired a plumber from Craigslist last month for $70 an hour. Everyone else was either too busy or charging even more. There is plenty of opportunity for anyone willing to show up on time and do the work.
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.
The premise is nonsense. UBI is a means of distributing wealth in a economy where the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero. It's a means to offer a transition into post-scarcity economy and a means to keep the ones at the lowest position in the pyramid at bay, because any other option would be more expensive. Rather having people who's jobs have been taken by robots grab kalashnikovs and start taking what they want society will chose to give them UBI. Those societies that will not do so when time is due will fail. UBI raises the bottom to which one can sick to something resembling a frugal but dignified life.
Uber and other shared economy services is just a transition from "private owned cars" to "robot cars used as a commodity" by transition over something that resembles taxis but really is nothing other than people doing lowly work that will be replaced by robots within 10 years. The main part about Uber is nothing but a piece of software anyway. I expect something like Waymo cars becoming attached to the Uber API or something like that within the next 5 years.
The Uber drivers of today will then get UBI. Where they don't, they will cause trouble, understandably.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Well one of the arguments in favor of UBI is it provides the financial stability/assurance to take risks.
If you're guaranteed to have at least enough money to make rent and keep yourself fed, maybe you can spend some time looking for a better job, or go back to school/get a new skill to move into a different profession, or rally for better pay and working conditions with less fear of getting fired over it (and being able to quit, which puts at least some weight in your position as an employee).
Or maybe you could take a chance at quitting your current job and starting a new business, since it's easier to afford to taking that risk.
=Smidge=
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 left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
=Smidge=
Every road and highway in the US is already a toll road, via the gas taxes collected (which, nominally, are supposed to pay for the roads - but rarely are dedicated to that purpose). In California, the State makes ~$0.50 per gallon; with about 15 billion gallons of gas purchased annually, that's around $7.5 billion in tax revenue, which is well above CalTrans (and local municipality) spending on road repair. Gas taxes are the tolls we pay to maintain the road - it's just often that the pot of money is raided for non-road use and thus poverty is claimed when it's time to raise more taxes/tolls for roads.
In 2014, about $324 billion (page 5-18) was spent on all transportation initiatives by local, State, and Federal agencies. This includes transit as well as roads. Those same Governmental agencies collected about $355.1 billion (page 5-21), making transportation more than self-sufficient - if it was all spent on transportation.
The Federal Government made $39 billion in gas and road taxes alone, even through it spent just $33 billion total on all transportation (a large portion of which went to transit). Of that $39 billion in revenue from roads, the Federal Government spent just $3.2 billion supporting roads.
Far from "capitalist roads killing you with tolls", we're already being excessively tolled by the Government - it's just done a gallon at a time.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
No one is taking your money, your paying taxes to have an environment where you can work and earn money. Don't like paying taxes, well it is easy to stop working and paying them. You can also move to a country without taxes such as Somalia or a country with low taxes such as Saudi Arabia and enjoy the freedom that not paying taxes brings.
Do you complain about the grocery store demanding money to allow you to walk out with groceries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
If people want to see where this gets them, just look up here to Canada. ~100 years of the federal government paying natives under treaty, and it's effectively collapsed their entire culture and society. Laziness is an inherent human trait, and without something that pushes large swaths of society to improve themselves it just all goes screaming downhill.
Om, nomnomnom...
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're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice. We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example (and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing).
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage. UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare. UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses.
Yaz
it would change society drastically. You could live where ever. Right now people go where the jobs are. I'm in a major city and I hate it. I'd much rather live in something about 1/3 the size where I am now. I don't care for night life, don't like traveling and hate traffic. But I'm stuck here because this is where the jobs are and I need money.
Also, lots of folks don't _want_ the poor to have options. I worked for a fast food joint in the 90s and the owner had figured out one of her managers' husband was using the insurance for life saving meds. This was before Obamacare did away with pre-existing condition denials so she was completely trapped at that job. Literally a death sentence for her husband if she ever left. As soon as the owner found out she jacked the manager's hours up to 60+/week (salaried of course). This went on until her husband eventually succumbed to his illness and she quit soon after.
The ruling class are well aware of the value of desperation and happy to exploit it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
"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...
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..