Why UBI?

In a 2/13/19 article on questions about Universal Basic Income (UBI), Kelsey Piper discusses issues surrounding Universal Basic Income and what it means after reading a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein .

The working paper raises questions about what problem UBI is meant to fix.


Are we looking for a UBI to increase labor market participation? Leave it the same? Decrease it? Do we want a UBI in order to fix welfare disincentives to work, or in order to fix the fact that people have to work to survive?

Kelsey Piper

But while the study and Piper are ostensibly well-intentioned, I’m not sure the right questions are being asked.

Most technologists are painfully aware of the likely effects of the coming wave of autonomous technology on human-as-machine labor. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, endless growth compensating for technological disemployment is not a realistic construct.

Human-as-Machine labor jobs will decrease. As these are the jobs that have been highly valued as the means of production for the last 250 years, the question facing our received notions of culture is really, “without these jobs, what will people do to live?” And how will we, as a society value what they do?

In a recent conversation, a colleague pointed out that with all this new tech, new jobs will be created. Of course that is true. But how many? When I was starting out in relational databases, it was “new tech” to most business development people. But I was simply doing what a roomful of clerks might have done ten or fifteen years before.

For one of the businesses I own, we used to employ four office workers beyond two executives. One assistant/secretary, two copyright clerks, and one “gopher” who made copies of audiotapes, bought microphones, and did deliveries. Beyond those workers, there was the phone vendor, the copy-machine service guy, the computer guy and a cleaner. Today, twenty years later, we have one employee, and that’s me. And I work from home. I can do all of those things faster and without getting up from my desk. Yes, the business is much more profitable, but none of those people is making money.

You might point out that people built the software and internet businesses I use, and they make money. Yes, but the workers who were replaced by those technologies would not have been able to become software developers. Fortunately, they were nearing retirement and were able to work for us until they no longer wished to.

So what will all these people do? The answer is that non-information economy workers will have to find a new purpose for their lives. And they will need money to spend to support economic growth.