Tonight I will be participating in a panel discussion about Universal Basic Income. One of the key arguments for UBI is that we need to decouple people’s ability to meet their basic needs from traditional work because of the rise of automation. This is the case I make in my TEDx talk. But there is another way of framing the problem that has been on my mind. 

It starts with my contention that the current transition is as profound as the ones from the forager age to the agrarian age and from there to the industrial age, which you can see in my DLD talk from 2014. The key factor in the agrarian age was land. If you wanted to grow more wheat or raise more cattle you needed additional land. Fights over land were at the heart of many conflicts during the agrarian age.

The obsession with land lasted well into the industrial age. Even World War II was still about land. The German Empire had developed the concept of Lebensraum (literally: living space) which was secretly behind the ideological justification for World War I and overtly became a key component of Nazi propaganda. The German aristocracy in large parts wound up supporting this because they controlled land that they did not want to give up.

After World War II we were fully in the industrial age and now the key factor was no longer land but capital. Capital was required to build factories and to operate businesses at scale. Stock markets grew tremendously as did the banking system. Throughout politics, the interests of capital owners largely replaced those of land owners.

It turned out that the efficient formation and deployment of capital in a market system was the winning formula. The planned economies of the East ultimately failed because they neither produced enough capital nor deployed it to the right uses. It also turned out that for quite some time what was good for capital was good for labor: more factories translated into more work which translated into income that could be used to buy the products giving us a virtuous loop. And yes, I am completely glossing over the labor movement for the sake of brevity here.

Today, however, we face a situation with respect to capital similar to the one with respect to land at the end of the agrarian age. We have become obsessed with capital and our obsession with it is making us blind to the powerful changes from another round of technological innovation. And like the obsession with land which ultimately was controlled by a small fraction of the population, capital is controlled by a relatively small fraction of the population.

So here then is the historical parallel. The agrarian system worked reasonably well while the interests of land owners were somewhat aligned with those of peasants. That broke down with the technologies for industrial production. The industrial system worked reasonably well while the interest of capitalists were somewhat aligned with those of workers. That is breaking down now with information technologies.

Just as we had to go past land back then we now need to go past capital. Current policies such as quantitative easing and austerity are all designed to continue to support capital in a mistaken view that it still is the critical factor.

What then is the critical factor going forward? I have argued previously that it is knowledge (in my own broad definition). The argument for Universal Basic Income then is that it enables us to go past capital towards knowledge by freeing everyone to participate in its creation and maintenance.