Basic Income

How It’s Developing

Basic income has become particularly important considering advances in robots and artificial intelligence. Oren Etzioni, CEO of The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, states of artificial intelligence’s effect on society, “There will be very real disruption. Jobs will be taken away and those people need to be taken care of. People have floated the idea of universal basic income, of negative income tax, of training programs. We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.” [1]

Routine manual labor is frequently mentioned as susceptible to automation – transportation and delivery, manufacturing, etc. – but increasingly, AI could make advances to routine cognitive labor like health care, law, reporting, and business. Basic income could be a strategy used by governments to ease the dislocation caused by technological progress, but the strategy would need to be funded by the technology disruptors who have will have produced so much economic surplus that they could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from labor and suffering. [2]

Provided that the disruptors are willing or required to share their surplus, this liberation of labor could come at a very important time. Real wages for workers have stagnated. Unemployment and underemployment is a major concern. Many employed individuals have cobbled together part-time work with limited benefits and protections. And many individuals report that they are neither engaged nor satisfied by their work. Basic income could help address a fundamental problem that work is losing its value in a technology-driven society. [3]

The basic income argument has a range of proponents. Government efficiency advocates see potential cost savings in basic income. In place of social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would provide even disbursement to citizens. [4] This wouldn’t necessarily mean that everyone would stay home; even with their regular disbursement, individuals could determine whether they wish to continue to work or not. And some research suggests that, rather than weaken the will to work, unconditional regular disbursements could let people manage their careers and education more wisely. [5] For those concerned with the welfare of all members of society, basic income could be a strategy to strengthen the social safety net and redistribute wealth to those from whom opportunity may have been taken away. [6] There is also a feminist argument for basic income that sees this strategy as a way to equalize or reimburse mothers and other caregivers for the significant labor they do, recognizing their labor with a general entitlement equal to other members of society. [7] 

The Finnish government will experiment with basic income by randomly selecting roughly 2,000 unemployed people to receive automatic benefits, absent bureaucratic hassle, and any penalties for amassing extra income. [8] Basic income proposals have been considered or are under consideration in Switzerland, France, Canada, the Netherlands, and India. [9] In California, the startup accelerator Y Combinator announced plans to provide one hundred families in Oakland with $2,000 a month as an experiment in basic income, stating that “People will be able to volunteer, work, not work, move to another country—anything. We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that freedom.” [10] In the UK, the recent Pathways to Universal Basic Income report from the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) proposes providing two payments of £5,000 paid over two years to every Britsih citizen under the age of 55 – the proposal would help compensate workers for the way jobs are changing and help citizens through the 2020s, "as automation replaces many jobs, climate change hits, and more people face balancing employment with social care." [11]

While basic income is under new consideration, it is not an entirely new idea. Similar policies were tested in both Canada and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s – though assessment of their effects were flawed or abandoned – and Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for basic income as a tool for the Civil Rights Movement and war on poverty in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, writing, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” [12]

Basic income detractors note that the strategy could limit society’s efforts to adapt and thrive in a new economy and hinder the process in which we figure out the future of work, as well as allowing governments to avoid some of the challenges that have led to the current workforce circumstances, such as failing schools and substandard public services. [13]

Why It Matters

An obvious question – would the work of library professionals be automated and so result in our own personal needs for a basic income?

At the same time, part of the assumption of a basic income would be that individuals would be free to pursue education and training, so libraries’ role as spaces for teaching and learning would remain and perhaps become even more popular in a society where individuals are freed from labor and able to pursue their own interests.

Basic income could also liberate people to pursue productive leisure activities – the arts, hobbies, crafts, reading, writing, etc. – and so, again, libraries’ role as spaces for these types of activities would remain and perhaps become more popular in a basic income society.