UBI Referendum in Switzerland + Hollywood Looking Shaky

Switzerland will vote Sunday, June 5 in a referendum on a modest -- $2,500 a month for adults, $625 for minors -- universal basic income (UBI). The UBI is gaining a toehold in public debate now that it is becoming apparent that remunerative, meaningful work for the masses is a thing of the past.

A pro-UBI statement by Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark can can be found in "Basic Income Gathers Steam Across Europe"; a con-UBI pronouncement is available this morning by The Times' Eduardo Porter in "Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty."

Porter, believe it or not, makes some cogent points, foremost is one borrowed from Marxist ontology, that work is how we communicate our being. People need work in order to live meaningful lives. Warehousing people in favelas with access to high-speed Internet sounds more like The Matrix than a post-scarcity Utopia.

Then there is Porter's assessment of the cost:

Its first hurdle is arithmetic. As Robert Greenstein of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it , a check of $10,000 to each of 300 million Americans would cost more than $3 trillion a year.

Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes. Cut it by half to $5,000? That wouldn’t even clear the poverty line. And it would still cost as much as the entire federal budget except for Social Security, Medicare, defense and interest payments.

Thinkers on the right solve the how-to-pay-for-it problem simply by defunding everything else the government provides from food stamps to Social Security. That, Mr. Greenstein observes, would actually increase poverty. It would redistribute wealth upward, taking money targeted to the poor and sharing it with everybody, including you and me.

As Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and one-time top economic adviser to President Obama, told me, paying a $5,000 universal basic income to the 250 million nonpoor Americans would cost about $1.3 trillion a year. “It would be hard to finance that in a way that wouldn’t burden the programs that help the poor,” he said.

Raventos and Wark come to the UBI from a completely different direction. They see it not as a replacement for work but as a guaranteed income, a buffer and bargaining aid for the increasingly pauperized average worker. It also helps solve the problem of demand in an economy that is increasingly one of automation.

If the Swiss pass their modest UBI on Sunday that will be a wonderful first step. I am skeptical it will pass. I think citizens of the West are just beginning to get a glimpse of the dystopia barreling their way and are not yet willing to put their shoulders to the paradigm shift wheel.

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Though sales are up so far this year, the dream machine is beginning to sputter. Brooks Barnes reports in "‘X-Men’ and ‘Looking Glass’ Disappoint at Weekend Box Office" that:

Bombing was “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” which cost Walt Disney Studios $170 million to make. It took in $28.1 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. “We’re obviously frustrated and disappointed,” said Dave Hollis, Disney’s executive vice president for distribution. “Alice in Wonderland” arrived to $127 million in domestic ticket sales in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. 

But the misgivings in Hollywood extend beyond one disappointing weekend, even one as important as Memorial Day. A troubling box office trend started last summer and has only become more pronounced: The riches are not flowing evenly — four of the six major movie factories are struggling — and only expensive event films seem to be drawing crowds, with many general purpose, middle-tier movies being virtually ignored despite aggressive marketing. 

What seems to be succeeding are familiar and liked brands (Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War”), bold interpretations (“Deadpool,” “The Jungle Book”) or movies that are events for a particular audience (“Miracles From Heaven,” “The Angry Birds Movie”). Increasingly lost in the mix are films aimed at older audiences or designed as alternatives to effects-driven spectacles: “The Nice Guys,” “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “Money Monster,” “Mother’s Day,” “The Finest Hours,” “The Boss,” “How to Be Single,” “Hail, Caesar!”

Studios have long fought through hits and misses. The worry is that audiences — unhappy with rising ticket and concession prices and increasingly bivouacked in their living rooms — seem to be saying that an entire section of studio output is no longer viable in theaters: Unless it’s a must-see movie, we’ll catch it on Netflix.

The superhero blockbuster is all we are now willing to gather together to celebrate. We have a great longing for justice and transcendence. But for the most part we prefer the solitude of our personal big screens.

Universal Basic Income and the Heroin Epidemic

Two stories caught my eye recently. One appeared last week in the business page, Farhad Manjoo's "A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck"; the other, Katherine Seelye's "Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View," on yesterday's front page.

There is a prescription painkiller and heroin epidemic in the United States and people are regularly overdosing in public. At the same time, according to Manjoo, we are in the midst of a robot revolution in this country:

[W]ithin in two to three decades we’ll have morphed into the Robotic States of America. 

In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.

How will society function after humanity has been made redundant? Technologists and economists have been grappling with this fear for decades, but in the last few years, one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future.

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck? 

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that. 

While U.B.I. has been associated with left-leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives. It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work.

Rather than a job-killing catastrophe, tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens.

These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering.

In theory this is true. But in actuality technology has concentrated wealth in the 1%. The current vogue of the UBI is a version of the "workerless factory" of the first half of the 20th century. The idea was that the working class would have to toil less as technology was integrated into the job site. The reality has been the exact opposite. People have to struggle harder, work longer at less stable employment, to earn less than what they made before. Look at a chart of the productivity gains since the early 1970s, a fraction of which has gone to the working class.

Hillary beat reporter Amy Chozick had a line in a story, "Clinton Offers Economic Plan Focused on Jobs," the other day that summed it up: "This is the latest revision to the corporate tax code Mrs. Clinton has proposed in an effort to create jobs and lift wages, which have been virtually stagnant for 15 years even as the costs of college, child care, housing and health care have soared."

We live a precarious, stressful. "no future" life these days. The rich would sooner see the vast majority slaughtered than guarantee a basic income. This hopelessness, a rudderless moral destitution, is part of what is fueling the heroin binge.