Every month, nearly 20% of the country gets a Social Security check. What if that number were 100%? What if the government gave everyone an income?
That’s the premise behind universal basic income (UBI), an idea with a long and surprisingly mainstream history. Its popularity last peaked in the 1970s and now, after a relatively dormant few decades, it’s making a comeback. Pilot projects have been announced in Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada. This summer, Swiss voters will vote in a referendum that could give every adult about $2,500 a month.
These proposals aren’t much different from those floated 40 years ago. What’s new is the reasoning behind them. Basic income’s current revival is driven by fear of technology – specifically, the fear that robots and software will take our jobs, creating a massive social crisis that only UBI can solve. And nobody makes this argument more influentially than the tech industry elites who have become UBI’s most prominent and most powerful supporters.
“Silicon Valley’s basic income bromance,” the writer Lauren Smiley calls it: a group of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and futurists who together form an informal and extremely well-financed advocacy network for UBI. Most famous are Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a startup incubator that recently announced it would undertake a major study on basic income; Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist who writes a widely read blog; and Peter Diamandis, bestselling author of books about the future and cofounder of Singularity University.
UBI tech elites don’t agree on exactly how to implement a basic income. What they do agree on, emphatically, is why we need a basic income in the first place. In the very near future, they believe, breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence will automate many professions out of existence. The gap between rich and poor will grow sharply, as millions of people won’t be able to find work. A universal basic income will offer those people a way to meet their basic needs in an economy that has rendered them permanently redundant.
This vision of the future makes a few assumptions. One is that unemployment, and economic misery, are technological phenomena. Tech’s UBI advocates often make this point explicitly, pointing to the past three decades of stagnating median wages and a widening wealth gap as proof that technology creates inequality – and that accelerating technology is likely to create even more. It’s an interpretation with broad credibility, often repeated in the pages of The Economist and in the conference halls of Davos.
Yet it’s also entirely wrong. Central to the story of technological inequality is the idea of skills-biased technical change (SBTC): the theory that technology, by automating middle-income jobs, splits the workforce into high-skilled, high-wage workers and low-skilled, low-wage workers. This polarization fuels inequality, since elite workers reap an ever-growing share of the rewards.
But economic data suggests there’s no evidence that this is actually taking place. If it were true, you’d expect to see well-educated workers using their skills advantage to bid up wages. Instead, wage growth has stagnated since the 1990s for workers of all education levels. Workers in IT, generally considered the quintessential high-skilled field, earn about as much today in inflation-adjusted dollars as they did in the late 1990s.
So if technology isn’t to blame for inequality, then what is?
Elite-led globalization, the transformation of the tax code, the growth of the financial sector, and, above all, the collapse of working-class power since the 1970s. Inequality isn’t the inevitable byproduct of technological change. If it were, other industrialized countries should show levels of inequality comparable to the United States’ – and they don’t. The US has far higher levels of income and wealth inequality than Sweden, and nobody would call Sweden a technologically undeveloped country.
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