Although economic and technological developments indicate that we will need something like a universal basic income, or a redistribution of available labor, maybe shorten the workweek to 10 or 15 hours, there are still problems with this solution.
Image by Intellectual - source: Pixabay
In the 1950s many scholars, economists and sociologists predicted that we would have a 15 hour workweek somewhere in the 2020s; they predicted that the modern world as a whole would become richer and richer, while simultaneously the number of jobs, the amount of labor needed to produce all that wealth, would decrease. They were right about the riches, but wrong about the workweek as we've stubbornly hung on to the industrial capitalist model that started our way upward. And for a while things were moving in the right direction; in the 1960s and early 1970s workweeks did get shorter and pension-ages did get lower.
But instead of using the increased riches and the surpluses produced to further go on the slow path to a better world for everyone, we've since the 1980s gone back to the notion that riches belong to individuals only, and that only individuals can earn those riches. So the past four decades we've seen workweeks expand, we've seen women and students join the workforce, because one job per family isn't enough; not wanting to sound like a defender of "the patriarchy" I think it's fair to say that this has had a strong influence on the breaking up of the unity that the family once was. The riches have landed in the pockets of a few, and in order to keep alive the model that has worked so well for them, the inventing of ever more jobs began.
I can't remember the exact numbers, and I don't have the time to look it up right now, but when asked, a large percentage of employees indicate that they don't believe they're doing anything really productive. They believe the world would keep functioning just fine if their job didn't exist. In New York, in the 1960s and in other cities around the world, governments had to practically declare a state of emergency when the garbage collectors went on strike for one week. We, the society as a whole, can not function without them. Would society be hurt as much when all investment bankers, their army of lawyers, their assistants and math-geniuses that develop their trading algorithms, go on strike for a decade? I dare to doubt that.
But even the garbage collector will someday be unnecessary, when homes are built on top of a complex underground tube-system that collects and separates all waste by it's automated self. Setting all other shortcomings of our current socio-economic model aside, the realization of an old dream of shorter workweeks and less human labor is one of the main drives behind the idea of a universal basic income. On this basic level there seems little wrong with the idea of just granting everyone acces to all basic needs, it just logically follows from the fact that there's more than enough of everything to provide for every human life. Still, there's something else to consider here; there's a hidden trap in UBI.
Now, I won't write it all down here, as the short video below explains it better than I could myself. Implementing a UBI in the capitalist model of maximum extraction would potentially only keep the status quo alive and re-affirm us in the role of mere consumers. Watch the video, it's only 5 minutes short:
The colossal problem with universal basic income | Douglas Rushkoff
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