The California Democratic Party has made universal basic income (UBI) a plank in its official platform. I’m giddy that the party is willing to champion bold revisions to the social contract that we probably will need. But I’m queasy about actually instituting a UBI in 2018. Here’s why UBI is premature:
Mass unemployment is not happening this decade or next. UBI’s most standout proponents are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. Their followers believe that technology will soon render around half of American workers obsolete. There simply won’t be as many jobs as there are people. Unemployment will shoot upwards even as labor force participation plunges.
Our medium-term economic prognosis is not really so apocalyptic. Like sanguine baseball fans in early spring, technologists are overconfident. Musk and others believe that we will soon create human-level artificial intelligence (known as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI). AGI could by definition perform any human task. But from what I’ve gathered from recent evidence, AGI is at least a few theoretical leaps and bounds away.
Without AGI, there will remain things humans can do that computers can’t. And UBI proponents have insufficient faith in humans’ ability to assign value to things that weren’t valuable before. Throughout history, this tendency has enabled the creation of entirely new jobs as technology replaces old ones. Growth ensues in job categories that capitalize on things humans can still do. In the coming decades, humans will have the opportunity to perform more jobs -- some new, some very old -- requiring creativity, strategic thinking, social intelligence, and the ability to care for others.
Proposed UBI amounts are really small. Most UBI proposals would allocate something like $1,000 each month to recipients. That’s not even close to a living wage. If you’re worried about the ability of half the population to subsist, how does a citizen salary of $12,000 solve that problem? At the same time, it’s hard to see a larger sum being feasible anytime soon, given that at UBI of $12,000 would cost over $3 trillion.
It’s possible that technology could unleash an exponential increase in wealth creation, which when shared with all people via a much larger UBI would bring about mass abundance. But scenarios this utopian-sounding don’t usually come to pass.
UBI is a drastic step given stable economic conditions. Unemployment is at 4.1%. Wages seem to be rising. If technology is going to create an economic crisis, it hasn’t happened yet. Can’t we wait until unemployment rises, I don’t know, two points in one year amid productivity increases and without a recession, before we break the link between income and labor?
I’m as anxious as anyone about what a fully platformized economy will mean for most people, and I’m glad that Democrats are willing to contemplate radical measures. In the long run, I’d bet that AGI will be created. Some kind of epoch-shifting system of wealth redistribution may become vital to economic equality. But the economy won’t be fully platformized for a while yet, and I’m not sure UBI is the right system. Let’s let more grounded timelines of economic change inform our immediate policy proposals.