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In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all.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.

The Future of Work + Hillary's Suicidal Southern Strategy + the Biden Decoy

On this Labor Day, give yourself a sense of the perilous times we are in by scanning the weekly Popular Resistance newsletter put together by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. What jumped out at me is "The Future of Work" section:

The Future of Work 

There are some major trends that indicate we are in the midst of a radical transformation of what work means and how people will have income. 

The most significant trend involves robotics, artificial intelligence and software that will do most current jobs. The research firm Gartner predicts that “one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025.” Oxford University researchers estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2033.  Already the official unemployment rate hides the fact only 63% of working-age adults are actually working. 

These changes are happening alongside the demise of unions and worker power; as well as globalization resulting in lost jobs and a race to the bottom of low paid workers.  Workers are already in politically and economically weak positions to survive the onslaught of robots. 

It is time for these issues to rise to the top.  The transformation of jobs and what to do about them is not even discussed in the 2016 elections, other than reforms like raising poverty wages. A broader discussion is needed.

The authors go on to advocate for a universal basic income and worker cooperatives.

One thing is for sure, the economy is not working for most people. Official unemployment is down to 5.1 percent, what many mainstream economists believe to be the "natural" rate of unemployment, but wages are still broadly stagnant. This fact is succinctly explained in Doug Smith's "Labor Day? Let's Tell the Truth and Call It 'Assets Day' ": "Take heart. Through your self-denial, executives, owners, and shareholders have grabbed all the productivity gains of the past quarter century for themselves."

Krugman's Labor Day column, "Trump Is Right on Economics," addresses the root of Trump's popularity: He is the only Republican addressing this issue of the systemic lack of work in the globalized neoliberal economy:

And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions.

The thing is, we didn’t really know that until Mr. Trump came along. The influence of big-money donors meant that nobody could make a serious play for the G.O.P. nomination without pledging allegiance to supply-side doctrine, and this allowed the establishment to imagine that ordinary voters shared its antipopulist creed. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s hapless attempt at a takedown suggests that his political team still doesn’t get it, and thinks that pointing out The Donald’s heresies will be enough to doom his campaign. 

But Mr. Trump, who is self-financing, didn’t need to genuflect to the big money, and it turns out that the base doesn’t mind his heresies. This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics. 

Again, I’m not making a case for Mr. Trump. There are lots of other politicians out there who also refuse to buy into right-wing economic nonsense, but who do so without proposing to scour the countryside in search of immigrants to deport, or to rip up our international economic agreements and start a trade war. The point, however, is that none of these reasonable politicians is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

Like Trump, Bernie Sanders is also bringing the neoliberal temple down, except for the Democratic half of the duopoly. Sanders only gets a fraction of the media attention though; nonetheless, at this point, the Clinton camp has basically acknowledged that it is going to lose Iowa and New Hampshire. That was the point of yesterday's "Hillary Clinton Relying on Southern Primaries to Fend Off Rivals," by Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick:

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign is methodically building a political firewall across the South in hopes of effectively locking up the Democratic nomination in March regardless of any early setbacks in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, struck by the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders in those two states, have been assuring worried supporters that victories and superdelegate support in Southern states will help make her the inevitable nominee faster than many Democrats expect. They point to her popularity with black and Hispanic voters, as well as her policy stances and the relationships that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have cultivated. Mrs. Clinton was similarly confident at this point eight years ago, before Barack Obama and his superior organizers began piling up delegates, including in many Southern states.

In interviews, advisers said the campaign was increasingly devoting staff members and money to win the South Carolina primary on Feb. 27 while laying the groundwork to sweep Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia on March 1. Those Super Tuesday states are highlighted in red on maps in the offices of Mrs. Clinton’s senior aides in Brooklyn.

The eight primaries will deliver several hundred delegates for Mrs. Clinton, advisers believe, toward the goal of more than 2,200 needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign is barraging superdelegates in the South with requests for support — sometimes even jumping the gun by sending pledge forms prematurely — in hopes of adding scores of these party leaders who can bring their votes to the Clinton column at the Democratic National Convention.

The Southern firewall also includes Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina, which vote through mid-March. If Mrs. Clinton wins big in the Michigan and Ohio primaries that month, her advisers and supporters believe, the nomination will essentially be hers (though crossing the total delegate threshold takes time).

In order to sew up the nomination, Hillary is relying on votes in states Democrats have slim chance of winning in 2016, votes based on ignorance of Bernie Sanders' positions vis-a-vis Clinton's. This is her "Southern Strategy." If it is to pay off and she is to win the nomination, it will almost certainly be a Pyrrhic victory. Winning a nomination based on the ignorance of voters who reside in states most of which will not be in play for Dems next year is a prescription for disaster. How can Hillary juice turnout and return the Obama coalition to the polls if she is relying on public ignorance and superdelegates to push her across the finish line?

As for the Biden, after reading the coverage of his jaunt to Florida and Georgia, it is clear to me he is not going to run. Seventy-two is 72 and not an age that allows for a late-entry, come-from-behind win of a presidential nomination. Biden exists as a decoy to keep rank-and-file Democrats from giving Bernie a look and thereby to keep as many Dem voters on the Clinton reservation as possible. Clinton's support is fast disappearing. To slow things down the Democrat power elite have introduced a Biden mirage.