NewScientist (25 June 2016, paywall) reports on one possible response to the loss of jobs to robots and other forms of automation: UBI. They trace it back to US Founder Thomas Paine:
Universal basic income has a long history. Thomas Paine, a US founding father, believed that natural resources were a common heritage and that landowners sitting on them should be taxed and the income redistributed. While the idea has never fully materialised, neither has it entirely gone away. In a few corners of the world variants are discreetly part of the furniture. In Alaska, for example, an annual dividend from state oil revenues is paid to citizens each year – a windfall of $2072 per person in 2015.
And some preliminary results:
Evelyn Forget at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg recently revisited the [Dauphin, Manitoba, CA] experiment, comparing public records from Dauphin with those from similar small towns. Forget found the only groups that spent less time in work during the trial were teenage boys and new mothers. The boys were staying in school rather than bowing to pressure to take agricultural jobs, and the mothers were nursing. What’s more, Dauphin had noticeably lower hospitalisation rates and fewer depression-related illnesses.
That was just one small-town trial. But in Alaska, experience suggests that a basic income could help reduce the rising inequality that has been hobbling world economies. Economist Scott Goldsmith at the University of Alaska Anchorage points out that the state is the only one in the US in which the income of the poorest 20 per cent grew faster than that of the top 20 per cent between the 1980s and 2000.
An interesting result, although whether the oil dividend contributes substantially is not entirely clear. NS reports the near future of UBI includes an experiment by a private firm investing in startups, Y Combinator. From the Y Combinator blog back in January of 2016:
We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work. …
So it would be good to answer some of the theoretical questions now. Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled? Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and benefit society far more? And do recipients, on the whole, create more economic value than they receive? (Questions about how a program like this would affect overall cost of living are beyond our scope, but obviously important.)
50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income. And I think that, combined with innovation driving down the cost of having a great life, by doing something like this we could eventually make real progress towards eliminating poverty.
In the last day of May they published an update:
We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.
But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods–how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.
Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality. We think these traits make it a very good place to explore how basic income could work for our pilot.
They have hired a Research Director, Elizabeth Rhodes, and are moving ahead. So far they appear to be treating this as a research subject that simply interests them; so far I have not seen any intent that private sector firms should be involved directly in the long term funding of UBI.
