Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav

Author:Aaron Benanav
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Free Money

Like the radical Keynesians, the automation theorists want to wind down the economy. However, they propose a different way to get there: not by raising levels of public investment and legislating a progressive reduction in the work-week, but rather by distributing no-strings-attached incomes to every citizen, without exception.23 Set at a high enough level, this universal basic income would end poverty outright. It would also provide workers in insecure employment with a measure of security—a crucial reform in an era of mass underemployment. Advocates argue that UBI would also do much more, renewing society at a deeply moral level: by showing that there is a shared investment in each individual’s thriving, a UBI would restore our sense of social solidarity. Governments in Spain and Scotland, as well as Democrats in the United States, have been weighing the idea of implementing emergency, minimal UBI programs due to COVID-19, which could then be made permanent once the pandemic ends.24

In a country like the United States, where racism birthed welfare programs that treat the poor with suspicion, if not contempt, a transition from means-tested benefits to universal ones would be a welcome move toward justice in itself. Meanwhile, in lower-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, UBI could make possible new welfare programs to service the poor without requiring states to build complex means-testing infrastructures.25 Debates within the UBI camp concern whether UBI payments should be higher or lower, whether they should be taxed back from high-income earners, whether they should supplement or replace other welfare-state programs, and whether they should be extended widely or restricted to citizens.26

For the automation theorists, UBI resolves the central conundrum of their vision—how to provide people with an income, to price their preferences, in a world where human labor has been rendered largely or even fully obsolete. UBI is the technical solution that transforms the nightmare scenario of automation into the dream of post-scarcity. On this basis, automation theorists often present UBI as a neutral policy instrument—appealing to left and right—that solves the problem of global un- and underemployment, just as the Green Revolution technologies were supposed to solve the problem of global hunger. There is an inner affinity between technological determinism, which is the core of the automation discourse, and its recourse to technocratic solutions. Both positions elide difficult social and political questions by transforming them into putatively objective facts.

Such technocratic neutrality is a fantasy: depending on the manner in which it is implemented, UBI will lead in radically different directions, most of which will not bring us closer to a world of human flourishing.27 A critique of the automation discourse’s market-based vision of post-scarcity will help reveal the contours of a nonmarket alternative.

UBI proposals long predate the advent of the automation discourse. Some trace their origin to Thomas Paine, who suggested as early as 1797 that a lump-sum payment should be distributed to all individuals on reaching the age of majority.28 Paine justified this coming-of-age grant along classically Lockean lines, arguing that all land had originally been held in common but had since been divided up into parcels of private property.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.