Pretty much all of this research is funded by one side or another— we should always be as scrupulous as possible in examining an argument, and assume there's money behind it.
Also, pedantic here but it's Koch, pronounced like "Coke", rather than Kock. :)
Kind of an ad hominem argument. I'm a liberal and I think we probably will need a UBI at some point, but I do see the point he's making, where a lot of big tech proponents seem to side-step the problems they're helping to create (loss of jobs) by calling for universal basic income.
Plenty of western countries, including the US and UK have record high employment, and plenty of un-filled open positions. The unemployment we do have is a skill shortage, not a jobs shortage. Meanwhile China has employed hundreds of millions of people and salaries there have boomed. None of this shows any real sign of a squeeze on overall employment.
I know there’s a lot of talk about AI putting people out of work, but it doesn’t actually seem to be happening yet. Automation has been putting people out of work for hundreds of years now, yet there are more jobs than ever. Ultimately maybe we’ll all live in a Star Trek future when ‘work’ is synonymous with ‘slavery’. We’re a very long way from anything like that, yet people talk a lot as though it’s already happening when it really isn’t.
He gives an argument that the answer is still "yes". If UBI happens and Uber et al still ends up with all the money, then the argument still holds. Using a non-existent UBI as an argument for how they behave today is another level of problem.
He complains that UBI would funnel more money to the people producing goods. At the end he advocates "universal basic assets," distributing ownership of productive assets instead of just income. If anything it's more left-wing than UBI.
Frankly, those two things are more similar than they might look.
I mean, what's the practical difference between owning 0.00000001% of the nation's productive assets versus getting paid 0.00000001% of GDP as UBI?
One aspect is that ownership might be alienable (i.e. you can sell that basic asset), but a system like that would be just a short-term bandaid since we'd expect that within a few decades we'd have millions of people who own nothing, and then we'd back to square one. But if it can't be sold, then ownership of productive assets is pretty much the same thing as getting dividends from those assets, and that is pretty much the same thing as unconditional income, perhaps with a slightly different calculation rules on how it changes year by year.
> distributing ownership of productive assets instead of just income
Yeah, that's pretty much standard communism ("collective ownership of the means of production"). The million dollar question, is "how do we go about doing this without setting up a fascist state?"
How different is that from public companies with large funds- for example pension funds- as shareholders? Even if the property is public, the objective of maximizing profit doesn't change, and that is obtained by appointing ceos and managers.
It's absolutely right-wing. It's not libertarian, but libertarian isn't equal to right-wing; you can have right-libertarians, but even the most extreme of those is more moderately right (and within the wide classical liberal tradition) than fascists, who are essentially—while certainly there was some novelty involved in Mussolini's time—a conscious throwback further right to classical conservatism.
Libertarian isn't equal to right-wing, but neither is nationalism or racism or anything else that you may see in fascism.
Fundamentally, the left is about collectivism and the right is about individualism. The difference is whether you think the state is a provider or a parasite. It's about wanting the government to take care of you or get out of your way. It's about wanting the government to make everybody have equal stuff or an equal opportunity.
> Fundamentally, the left is about collectivism and the right is about individualism.
No, its not. That's pretty much the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is largely orthogonal to the left-right axis. Libertarian socialism is not only a thing, it's an older thing than modern, pro-capitalist right-libertarianism. (It's also older than Leninism.)
So what exactly is left-right in your mind? It's looking like you don't think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on the left, and you don't think Rand Paul and Clarence Thomas are on the right.
Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition. If so, you should qualify it as something like "UK right" or "UK left" or whatever.
> It's looking like you don't think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on the left
Relative to the center in the US they are on the left and also, if not on the authoritarian side, at least not on the libertarian side either.
> and you don't think Rand Paul and Clarence Thomas are on the right.
Paul is, rhetorically at least, a right-libertarian. Thomas is a partisan Republican who is quiet enough on ideological issues that I wouldn't try to place him other than somewhere vaguely on the right.
> Perhaps you are calibrated to a non-US definition.
No, actually, my degree is focussed on the US political space, not that it really matters (the US center is way to the right of the developed world, such that what is by broader standards a center-right faction has recently been dominant in the left-most of the two major parties, but that just affects position on that axis, not what the axes are; it's also true that US politics seems unidimensional due to the two party system, so all variations often get characterized as left-right even when they aren't and only weakly, if at all, correlate with left-right variation.)
UBI is a libertarianish policy, and Big Think has published pro-UBI articles in the past.
OTOH, Rushkoff's objections are from a left perspective, and leftists in general seem to be coming out against it.
In the past some less-radical leftists have been for it (and one or two very atypical communists), but now that it is officially coded "tech-bro" I see leftists reiterating conservative arguments against minimum wage, except against UBI. It's odd.
As someone on the left and someone who has actively participated in multiple socialist parties in the US for years, the opposition to UBI from the left (DemSocs, Marxist-Leninists, various flavors of anarchists) is because we see it as a way for the ruling class to gut social programs instead of supplement them. The idea of "guaranteed income" argued for by people like MLK was a way to abolish poverty forever.
Well, that's part of the deal if UBI is ever to get off the ground.
Normally UBI is considered to be sort of a truce between the left and the right. The left wants the UBI, and the right wants to get rid of government bureaucrats. The left gives up on the government bureaucrats ("gut social programs") and the right gives up on tossing out all forms of welfare.
Of course, both sides are motivated to break the truce. You just admitted that in fact, wanting to not "gut social programs". Enforcing the truce doesn't seem possible.
> Normally UBI is considered to be sort of a truce between the left and the right.
No, it's not, or at least not by most people who back UBI. There are people who back forms of it on the Left, and people who back forms of it on the Right, and, sure, it's conceivable that one way it might pass is an alliance between those two that involves some compromise, but it's just as plausible that it would get implemented, if at all, by a Right- or Left-leaning governing coalition in a compromise between UBI-favoring elements and others from the same side of the spectrum.
Normally UBI is considered to be sort of a truce between the left and the right
By whom? There is nothing outlandish about implementing UBI without gutting every other aspect of the social safety net, it's just that the interests against it want their pound of flesh in exchange for any increase in social services.
For instance, all of this could be paid for with a tiny portion of the US defense budget.
I do understand that, but I have also heard things from supposed leftists like "Oh, everyone's rent will go up by $1000." This says less about leftist movements than the people I talk to.
I think that Douglas's argument addresses a strawman : UBI fails to fight the evils of capitalism.
Which is totally not the point of UBI. The point of UBI is to increase the efficiency of our economy and to improve the living conditions of our population, which results in all kinds of other improvements.
Actually, the idea that the Koch brothers fund only "conservative stuff" is not terribly accurate. They fund things all over the map. "Conservatives" don't particularly trust them either. If you really get down to what they fund, instead of reading people's screeds about them and scapegoating, it's rather hard to characterize. (I've also seen them called "libertarian", but they have rather more left-wing and big-government stuff than you would expect with that.)
The (David H.) Koch Institute For Integrative Cancer Reasearch at MIT (https://ki.mit.edu) was partly funded by a $100m grant from him, and does not appear to have a conservative agenda.
I think it is a reasonable interpretation of solidsnack9000's request that it be something ideological as well. Pretty much everyone agrees that cancer is bad and should be cured.
It is true that you can find conservative thinkers who have been in favor of UBI, but it is not a generally-conservative idea right now. The general conservative idea remains to try to "get government out of the way" of the economy and let the free market provide people with jobs. I don't see conservative sites talking about UBI in positive ways; I see it as a generally liberal idea where one of the arguments the liberals are using is that some conservative leaders have written about it positively in the past. (Which is a valid enough argument.) "Nobody" "knew" that certain conservative thinkers had written positively about UBI until it was picked up as a liberal, left-wing idea and somebody found those arguments.
(Note I am merely mentioning certain arguments, not making them.)
The Koch foundation has also been fairly vigorously anti-Trump: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/koch-broth... , including opposition to the immigration restrictions from certain mainly-Muslim contries, a relatively liberal perspective. Whether or not you consider some of the other mentioned positions "conservative" starts getting down into some weeds. (i.e. "Is Trump conservative, and is opposing Trump therefore anti-conservative?" is something you could write a lengthy essay on that would largely come down to "it depends on which definition of conservative you're using", and would really be more a springboard for examining the relevant definitions and how they differ.)
I'm not saying they aren't often in the position of opposing liberalism (which I think may be more accurate than "being conservative"... there are more than two sides to the world), but it's not 100%, either. It's more complicated.
Nor am I particularly defending them here, either. I'm not a huge fan either, just for different reasons than most people here. Again, going back to "there's more than two sides in the world".
All owner-class capitalists should. The machine needs ever more cheap labor to fuel the endless growth, and the bigger the labor pool, the less you can pay people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Think