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I was going to write some more about deflation today but then Vice posted a piece on Universal Basic Income (UBI) by Nathan Schneider yesterday. I suggest you read it and then come back here for a response.
1. After introducing my support for UBI, Nathan writes “[Albert is] worried about the clever apps his company is funding, which do things like teach languages and hail cars, displacing jobs with every download.” No. I am not worried about what we fund. I love what we fund. Hailo makes calling a taxi easy and the dispatch more efficient. Duolingo is teaching languages to millions of people for free. And I could go through the entire USV portfolio like that.
2. More to the point, I love the potential of freeing humans to do things that humans are uniquely good at (culture, exploration, innovation, etc) and letting the machines do everything else. This is the path we have been on since the earliest days of humans making tools. I am excited and optimistic about this potential of technology. But I am also cognizant that we have needed social reforms along the way to ensure that the benefits of technology accrue to all and not just a few. That was true during the industrial revolution and that is true now. My interest in UBI goes back to a series of blog posts I wrote in the fall of 2012.
3. Nathan describes, correctly, that most UBI proponents, myself included, see it as replacing many or all existing government welfare programs. He then goes on “It turns out that the tech investors promoting basic income, by and large, aren’t proposing to fund the payouts themselves; they’d prefer that the needy foot the bill for everyone else.” That conclusion makes no sense whatsoever: these existing programs are funded by the very tax bills that I (and others) have been paying. Existing welfare is redistribution. UBI doesn’t do away with redistribution, it makes redistribution explicit and direct.
4. Later on comes the following “Workers might get money for nothing, but they’d also find themselves with dwindling leverage in their workplaces.” In this section it is unclear whether this is Nathan expressing his own opinion here or citing Kathi Weeks from her book The Problem with Work. Either way, the likely impact of UBI on the labor market is the exact opposite. UBI gives workers a “walk away” option which is exactly what is missing today and gives employers like McDonalds and Walmart so much power. Existing social programs don’t fill that need because many of them (eg public housing) are tied to specific locations and/or are not actually guaranteed, which means workers cannot rely on them.
5. Nathan ends his piece as follows: “A basic income designed by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley is more likely to reinforce their power than to strengthen the poor.” I am actually sympathetic to the argument that you should always ask cui bono? It is a legitimate line of inquiry as to whether I and others in tech are simply proposing this to give ourselves more power. But the piece provides this as an assertion and does absolutely nothing to establish how a “basic income arrived at through the vision and the struggle of those who need it” would be different from the one I have proposed. Showing such a difference, if it exists, would be a real contribution.
So while I am happy that Vice has picked up this topic which will bring it to a growing audience, Nathan’s piece unfortunately does nothing to advance the discussion and instead attempts to turn it into yet another “us versus them” issue. At a minimum, in the days of the web, the piece should have linked back to the many people cited so that readers can click through and form their own opinion.
Albert Wenger
