On June 26, 2016, Chris Weller writes on Business Insider:
Ever since he was a kid, Sam Altman has been obsessed with a very specific kind of utopia.
As a young “Star Trek” fan and lover of sci-fi novels, he devoured stories of robots becoming a vital part of society, eliminating the need for humans in the workforce. Altman believed the upside to this seemingly fantastical reality was that robots produced unlimited wealth, which humans could share among themselves. They could live the lives of their choosing, unburdened by the pressures of a paycheck.
Altman is 31 now, and he’s still very much thinking about that wild idea, known today as “basic income.”
As the founder and president of Y Combinator, the largest and most well-known startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, Altman is leading the charge on bringing basic income to the American public.
“When it’s feasible, we can totally restructure how society works,” Altman tells Tech Insider.
Since Altman founded Y Combinator in 2005, its primary function has been to help promising start-up companies get off the ground. It offers guidance, equipment, and cash to turn startups like Reddit and Airbnb — and many, many more — into the tech giants that every young CEO dreams of running.
Fast forward to the summer of 2015, and a kooky idea called basic income had started to make international headlines. Countries such as Finland and the Netherlands began announcing their plans, mostly on the city level, to launch experiments in which residents get money for doing nothing in exchange. It was the first sign of life for the idea since the Canadian town of Dauphin conducted its own small-scale experiment in the 1970s.
The media’s growing infatuation with basic income was a pleasant surprise to Altman.
“It never even crossed my mind that this was something we should try to reach out to journalists about,” he says. “I didn’t think anyone would be interested in covering it.”
But then he published a blog post about the initiative in January 2016, which was essentially a job listing for the researcher who would lead the experiment. News quickly spread that Silicon Valley’s most influential incubator wanted to dip its toes in an idea that might not just revolutionize how people earn a living, but eliminate the need for earned income altogether.
With the logistics entrusted to Elizabeth Rhodes, a University of Michigan researcher whose dissertation focused on relieving poverty in East Africa, Y Combinator announced in late May the terms of its pilot study. Officially, Y Combinator would lead the first basic income experiment to take place on American soil.
100 California families are receiving ~$1,500 per month for free
Later this year, it will begin with 100 families in Oakland, California, all of them from varied ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They’ll receive between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, no matter what. Even if the recipients move or quit their jobs, they’ll still receive the money. The goal of the experiment will be to see how people’s lives change when they don’t have to worry about falling through the cracks in the system.
“If the pilot goes well,” Altman wrote on Y Combinator’s blog, “we plan to follow up with the main study.”
The main study is much broader in scope. It involves selecting thousands of citizens throughout the US to receive a regular paycheck, no strings attached, for a period of five years. The same conditions apply: Even if people gamble it all away or uproot their lives to start a business in Guam, the checks will keep coming.
If the Oakland pilot doesn’t go well, Altman says, Y Combinator will consider different approaches. It’ll conduct follow-up trials in other cities with slightly different methodology, though still in preparation for a larger five-year trial. A failure in Oakland doesn’t necessarily mean a failure of basic income.
Some families have already been chosen to experiment in Altman’s pilot program for basic income, which will allow them to receive ~$1,500 per month without any strings attached.procsilas/flickr
Altman likes to challenge the idea that eliminating work also removes an essential path toward character-building, arguing that people shouldn’t be forced to compromise their sense of autonomy in life just to put food on the table. Like the characters in his sci-fi novels, they should be free to pursue whatever passions they want without feeling guilty.
“I don’t think we should be making a moral judgment about how people choose to spend their time,” Altman says, emphasizing that if people don’t want to work because we have plenty of resources to cover their unemployment, they should be free to play video games all day, read books, or make art.
Altman is hardly the only person is Silicon Valley to hold these views. That’s because the tech giants that produce society’s most advanced automated robots are the same ones that will need to answer for the rampant unemployment those robots cause.
Robots will take every job within the next 100 years
The Relay robot is already being used by some hotels to replace room service.Savioke
Altman doesn’t know exactly when artificial intelligence will be sophisticated enough to merit a universal basic income, but he knows it will happen. He says it’ll take no more than 100 years and no fewer than 10 years for AI to reach a point where governments will have no choice but to issue cash handouts en masse.
If all this is beginning to sound like socialism, Altman would like to reassure you: It’s not.
Basic income doesn’t cap the amount of wealth people can amass; it only installs a financial floor, not a ceiling. Altman believes people should be as free as possible to get “as rich as they fucking want,” so long as the people at the very bottom still have all their basic needs met.
“I am almost sure that in a world of basic income, [income and wealth inequality] will get a lot, lot worse,” he says.
While some people will coast by, happy to live on their minimum payments each month, others will retain their entrepreneurial spirit and build fortunes. “We need to be ready for a world with trillionaires in it, and that’s always going to feel deeply unfair. It feels unfair to me. But to drive society forward, you’ve got to let that happen.”
Y Combinator aims to uplift companies that Altman and his teammates think could move society toward a brighter future. The basic income experiment is just an extension of that.
“I want to have the maximum good impact on the world that I can,” Altman says. “If there are things I believe very strongly are going to happen, then I should dedicate our organization’s resources to helping with that.”
While some people will coast by, happy to live on their minimum payments each month, others will retain their entrepreneurial spirit and build fortunes.Max Whittaker/Stringer/Getty Images
Anyone in the startup world knows that making an impact involves plenty of failure along the way. Y Combinator’s pilot data, for example, could easily show that people used the money for trips to Disneyland instead of home repair and school supplies.
That’s why for a basic income experiment to work, companies and governments need to place extreme trust in human beings’ ability to look out for themselves. It may be the only way society can ever create a future in which, 50 years from now, people will be able to tell their robot servants to make sure their basic income checks were wired properly.
For those who still cling to the idea of work being necessary to gain fulfillment, Altman encourages people to consider how future societies may come to see us once basic income has taken over. He believes the fact that early 21st-century societies denied certain people basic needs could make us all seem like barbarians.
“I do think at some point, and I don’t know when,” he says, “people will be somewhat horrified that we let people not have enough heat.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-y-combinators-basic-income-project-2016-6
The author states that Sam Altman, the head of the prestigious startup accelerator program, Y Combinator, is pursuing a test experiment to see how a guaranteed basic income would work. But Altman is said to be willing to consider different approaches should the experiment not live up to expectations.
Altman accurately recognizes that technological progress has become a job killer. But a redistributed “cash payment” made equally to every citizen, while it sounds good, is not a solution to the continuous concentration of wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset ownership among the already wealthy ownership class and their heirs.
We are on the verge of our society dividing into a small elite who own the technology and a huge army of the unemployed living in squalor. The challenge is how do we effectively empower EVERY citizen (children as they advance through their adulthood, women and men) to become productive and earn money. While it seems direct to simply put money into people’s pockets, as with the Altman experiment, we should empower EVERY citizen to be individually productive and earn the money they put in their pockets, and that does not mean demanding that EVERY citizen be employed and work in return. There is a difference.
While tax cuts, as politicians propose, will stimulate the economy to an extent, tax cuts generally go to the richest among us and rich people have a greater propensity to save than the average citizen. Thus, the rich continuously save and invest to further acquire more productive capital ownership in the corporations growing the economy.
Most economist, who are schooled in Keynesian economics, believe that technology makes workers more productive. That’s because they only see productivity as related to the human work force, and do not see the distinction between the non-human factor and the human factor of production, as independent factors of productions. Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions. And with technological invention and innovation killing jobs, it is essential that EVERY citizen become an owner of the wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets of the future. Otherwise, even with a distributed basic income, the ownership of productive capital will further concentrated among the already wealthy capital ownership class.
A national basic income or universal basic income is a “welfare” scheme, which does not tie people to individual productive input, but redistributes through “taxation” of those in society who are productive to those who are unproductive or underproductive. Because it is not tied to new productive engagement, it will not strengthen the incentive to work, where there is no work to be had due to the economy’s stagnation resulting from poor consumption demand.
What we really need is monetary and tax reform, by which an annual Capital Homestead Account (CHA) in the form of insured, interest-free capital credit is extended equally to EVERY citizen, without any requirement for past savings, a job, or education. The capital credit loans would strictly be used to invest in new wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets formed by qualified, successful corporations growing the economy. The capital credit loans would be repayable out of the future earnings of the new investments, and once paid would continue to produce income for the new productive owners, who would use the income to satisfy their needs and wants, thus resulting in spiraling upward environmentally responsible economic growth.
The problem is that technological invention and innovation – change – makes the non-human means of producing – tools, machines, structures, and computerized processes – ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power – and relatively constant). This means that fewer and fewer people are necessary to produce the products and services needed and wanted by society. But when a job is one’s ONLY way to be productive and earn an income and jobs are disappearing and the worth of labor is being devalued due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, we have a problem. The problem is magnified by the fact that upward of 95 percent of the products and services are produced by physical productive capital – the non-human factor – owned by less than 10 percent of the population and highly concentrated among less than 1 percent of the population. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment – thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on equal opportunity to produce, full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the myth that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Physical capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input and in the future physical capital and other non-human techno assists will dominate our lives. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When the “tools” of capital owners replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another, such as a proposed universal basic income.
The capitalism practiced today is what should be termed “Hoggism,” propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. “Hoggism” institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). “Hoggism” is about the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success – always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent is not representative of the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption made possible by “customers with money.” It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being, not to a hand-out derived from government coercion that takes from those who make productive contributions as workers and capital owners and gives to those who are unable to earn a minimum sustainable income; or derived from non-asset-backed government debt that continues to grow without end.
Binary economist Louis Kelso postulated: “When consumer earning power is systematically acquired in the course of the normal operations of the economy by people who need and want more consumer goods and services, the production of goods and services should rise to unprecedented levels; the quality and craftsmanship of goods and services, freed of the corner-cutting imposed by the chronic shortage of consumer purchasing power, should return to their former high levels; competition should be brisk; and the purchasing power of money should remain stable year after year.”
As we build general affluence for EVERY American, only then can we successfully alter the choices people must make between choosing alternative, more costly greener choices that do not threaten the environment and their very livelihood. This challenge is particularly a challenge for the property-less struggling middle class and the poor who must deal daily with livelihood issues, due to the precarious situation and loss of employment opportunities and the devaluing of the worth of labor as a result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, resulting in less need for human worker input. Thus, realistically most people cannot be expected to sacrifice what little wealth and income they have to support more costly greener choices.
To see the change that so many Americans would like to see with respect to the support for greener choices will require that American lifestyles and tastes adopt more costly processes, products, and activities that are the greener and healthier substitute.
But the reality is that none of these changes can be practically achieved unless enough people can afford them.
Without this necessary balance, hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and responsible economic growth.
America has tried the Republican Party “cut spending, cut taxes, and cut ‘entitlements,’ eliminate government dependency and shift to private individual responsibility” and the Democratic Party “protect ‘entitlements,’ provide tax-payer supported stimulus, lower middle and working class taxes, tax the rich and redistribute” through government brands of economic policy, as well as a mixture of both. Republican ideology aims to revive hard-nosed laissez-faire appeals to hard-core conservatives but ignores the relevancy of healing the economy and halting the steady disintegration of the middle class and working poor.
Some conservative thinkers have acknowledged the damaging results of a laissez-faire ideology, which furthers the concentration of productive capital ownership. They are floundering in search of alternative thinking as they acknowledge the negative economic and social realities resulting from greed capitalism. This acknowledgment encompasses the realization that the troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital will threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the contenders for the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need, as a society, to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.
Our current system is rigged to continually concentrate the ownership of capital in the 1 to 5 percent of the population. The current system is presently propelled by greed in our society, which creates dire moral implications. A new system that would ensure equal opportunity for every child, woman, and man to acquire productive capital with the earnings of capital and broaden its ownership universally does not require people to be any better than they presently are, but it does enable our society to leverage both greed and generosity in a way that honestly recognizes and harnesses productive capital as the factor that exponentially produces the wealth in a technologically advanced society.
The resulting impact of our current approaches has been plutocratic government and concentration of capital ownership resulting in an oligarchic economy, which denies every citizen his or her pursuit of economic happiness (property). Market-sourced income (through concentrated capital ownership) has concentrated in individuals and families who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer products and services. They already have most of what they want and need so they invest their excess in new productive power, making them richer and richer through greater capital ownership. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or government welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
While Americans believe in political democracy, political democracy will not work without a property-based, just free market system of economic democracy. The system is the problem, but it can and must be overhauled. The two prerequisites are political power, which is the power to make, interpret, administer, and enforce laws, and economic power, the power to produce products and services, whether through labor power or non-human productive capital.
Kelso wrote: “In the distribution of social power, whether it be political power or economic power, all things are relative. The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or under-capitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy.”
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor –the equivalency of mass murder – the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The government should acknowledge its obligation to make productive capital ownership economically purchasable by capital-less Americans using insured, interest-free capital credit, and, as Kelso stated, “substantially assume financial responsibility for the economy through establishing and supervising the implementation of an economic, labor and business policy of democratized economic power.” Historically, capital has been the primary engine of industrialization. But as used, as Kelso has argued, has, as well, “been the chief cause of the institutional deformities that have created and maintained two incompatible classes: the over-capitalized and the under-capitalized.”
We cannot balance the budget without cutting out coerced taxpayer-dependent redistribution of the earnings of capital workers, which if we did at this juncture would collapse the economy and ruin lives, resulting in social strife, personal suffering and degradation, the erosion of freedom, and ultimately anarchy, which will bring on totalitarian government. While welfare, private charity, boondoggle employment and other redistribution measures are now seen as necessary, they do not have to be sustained indefinitely. There are policies that can be adopted and executed to reverse the ultimate direction of collapse of the American market economy system. Such policies are based on the recognition that as the production of products and services changes from labor intensive to capital intensive, the way in which every human being – not just a few, but every person – earns his or her income must change in the same way. At the core of this quiet revolution is the understanding and commitment to broadening the ownership of productive capital.
That is the essence of the work conducted by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org), which has proposed monetary justice reform at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice and legislation in the form of the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
We need new justice-committed leaders, especially those who want to end the corruption built into our exclusionary system of monopoly capitalism – the main source of corruption of any political system, democratic or otherwise. We need to advocate the need to radically overhaul the Federal tax system and monetary policies and institute proposals to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings or welfare. Under the JUST Third Way’s (http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797) more just and simple tax system, access to ownership of the means of production in the future would be provided to every child, woman and man by requiring the government to lift all existing legal and institutional barriers to private property stakes as a fundamental human right. The system was made by people and can be changed by people. Guided by the right principles of economic justice, “we the people” can organize and demand that the system be reorganized to make true economic democracy the new foundation for true political democracy. The result of this movement of new justice-committed leaders and activists will be inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
