Why can we not take Universal Basic Income seriously?
On work, AI and the most important social idea yet to get any real traction.
Jonah AndristFollow
7 min read
A normal scene in the city.
I am going to start with rhetoric; Universal Basic Income is the primary interesting idea left on the table for completely reshaping human societal structure. This is not to say that UBI doesn’t have potential failure points or gaps — UBI is an experimental idea — and like all experimental notions has to allow for the possibility of failure.
But it is the simplest idea with an emotional core that is very difficult to argue with.
I’m going to blow up my “academic” credibility by cursing. The main negative consequence (or the ideal consequence) to giving the people a standard 15,000 dollars a year, as far as I can tell, is some subsets of professions which provide a small convenience for the wealthy may disappear. Any job that is done by a worker who never wanted to be at said job, this job will no longer exist. I don’t care if you agree or disagree with my logic in that last sentence — but if you disagree with the emotional morality of people not having to do things they don’t want — you can take a flying fukk you (a yeet?) off a bridge. Acknowledge to yourself that you are emotionally defending slavery.
Yes there might be other ways to address this problem, but for many people there is refusal to acknowledge any problem at all. Making money only matters to many insofar as it is a preventative from gross suffering.
I have no data on the percentage of people for whom this is true. Most people like work and would get bored if they didn’t have something to do on a regular basis. There will still be bus drivers. There will still be restaurants, hell, restaurants will probably get better with UBI. There will be fewer restaurants but you’ll know that by and large everyone working there is doing so by choice.
It feels to me that now, more than ever, UBI should be on the tips of our tongues. Artificial Intelligence has in the past couple years proven its ability to create art amalgams. Most people in the arts have taken this as a threat, rightly so. Because it incurs on their ability to make a livelihood.
But what should be talked about, in conjunction, is that anyone who was too concerned with the “big windfalls” of making art were probably not in it for the right reasons.
Money works on a proposed value system. Personally I don’t think those values are ever going to be replicated by an AI … but to this point my thinking is we should let the chips fall where they may — so long as there’s a backup plan which allows people to live regardless of their personal usefulness.
If the point of technological innovation hasn’t been for the possibility of something like Universal Basic Income — where people are allowed to follow their passion in whatever way they see fit — what has been the point?
A Couple Personal Suggestions for Thinking about UBI
I have been thinking about basic income for a long time. At 27 I wrote a short story imagining the first day of its rollout. For that story I had one big suggestion.The cash payment should be given in the form of a lump sum.
My reasoning behind that is twofold. In the first place UBI pays for itself partially by cutting down on bureaucracy. It’s a simplification of government grants. No more applying, no more gatekeeping. Everyone gets it regardless. In the spirit of limiting paperwork giving a lump sum means not needing to have a bureaucratic base which needs to continuously cut checks.
The second part of my reasoning is also a little “conservative” in nature. Lump sum payments will cause the least amount of disruption.
You may think my reasoning a little wonky cause the day everyone gets those checks is going to be a doozy — but the people who blow big chunks of it right away are going to have to go back to work quickly. Lump sum encourages the main point of UBI; that people have the choice to use it however they want.
In my imperfect estimation UBI in lump sum form will have the least impact on inflation because you know a good percentage of people will have blown their payments in 3–6 months. But if the payments are rolled out bi-weekly or monthly that will encourage a subtle raise of price in everything.
Getting off the Starting Blocks
First thoughts in conversation.I write this article with the hope that a conversation about UBI is not an impossible one to have. I believed Andrew Yang in his democratic bid for president that UBI is doable, right now. At the very least it strikes me that most of the counter arguments are emotional or ill thought out. Like this one that suggests as soon as people get a taste they’ll want more and more. Which in philosophy we call the slippery slope fallacy.
I like to think that any potential argument for why not has a counter argument for why. We can get caught in an endless cycle of predicting the failure points but any would be impossible to prove until the concept is real world tested.
I also think there’s an ethics benefit. That if we allow for people to have freedom from necessity to work at jobs they don’t want — making ethical decisions, like not doing unnecessary driving or other abuse of resources, these choices will be easier to make.
I have worked my entire adult life at jobs I didn’t really want to show up to. Part of that is my fault. Being a writer means living on the periphery so the perspective of culture is seen at a distance.
But it also means I know what it’s like to go to a job mopping floors and have had regular interaction with the job market at large. I’ve written other articles about the modern disenfranchised worker but suffice to say the job market is not a coherent supply/demand for “tasks which really honestly just need to get done”.
At a certain (low) level, too much intelligence in a job is a liability. Already automation and AI are taking much of the human intelligence out of the workplace. All that will be left is us cleaning up after each other. Which requires an incredible amount of empathetic work — but work you can also not, technically, “get better at”. The social structure for this century can not be as focused on achievement as it was in the last century. Such a mindset is bad for mental health in a world where achievement doesn’t coincide with personal gains.
To return to some of the smaller and possible ethical successes; with the rollout of UBI that there will be less delivery drivers. Some people will drop out of doing a five day work week delivering packages. If we acknowledge that our continuous burning of fossil fuels is not only bad for the planet but literally unsustainable — how could this not be a good thing?
Maybe delivery drivers will have to consolidate their deliveries. It’s really pretty ridiculous this idea of people getting packages delivered on a daily basis. Ethically there seems to be no conversation about it. Why? Because it serves the wealthy and the hours justify an income. Challenging that status quo is unpopular. Even poor people like to feel wealthy from time to time. But there’s no real reason anyone needs to spend their adult life doing this job. It is dictated by a lack. It is a failure of imagination.
If our species got over our jealousy and insecurity is there not a world where everyone can try to follow their bliss? Maybe that life is part of being a service worker — I insist that this aspect will not disappear — what hopefully would disappear is forcing anyone who doesn’t want to do something to do that for the rest of their life.
If what is at stake is starving or not or being homeless or not: the stakes are not reciprocal. Those stakes, in no uncertain terms, are slavery. Yes if one was alone in the wilderness the stakes would be life or death but one cannot pretend like that logic applies to a modern city.
I keep repeating myself with emotional truisms because the counter rhetoric seems to never acknowledge an emotional stake in the system. The conversations about work are a little crazy right now cause the market for truly necessary things to do is flooded. Companies can be crazy picky about nearly irrelevant details.
A requirement I saw in my ongoing job search. I’ve used a power washer in multiple different jobs before and I have no idea what they actually mean with this.
Why can UBI not be taken seriously?
This is the question this article started with and it’s part of a conversation in which everyone is going to have an opinion.My best guess about why it can’t be taken seriously is also the most obvious; anyone who is already in a position of power is not interested in such a meager amount of money. They don’t understand the possibility that some of us truly just want to work on our projects. Anyone addicted to power would scoff at the idea of 15,000 dollars a year. That’s literally in the category of poverty.
But what I’ve tried to accomplish here is that it is possible to have conversations about it. Undoubtedly; most of you if you’ve gotten this far in the article already agree or understand the reasoning behind what I’m saying.
What I want to confirm is that if someone puts up a fight you can tell them that what they are fighting against is something they would never want to do themselves. They are fighting the idea that if they hadn’t made the choices they made they could’ve been okay regardless. Again, isn’t this a good goal? It would’ve been okay to not be a lawyer and spend most your hours painting ducks. Who knows to what interior place that activity would’ve taken you.
If someone wants to inform me on an angle I haven’t seen on this issue I’m happy to hear it … but I suspect for your argument there’s an equally good counter argument. And that’s the conversation which doesn’t seem to be happening.
