Name: Universal Basic Income, the 30-Hour Workweek, and the Economics of Poverty | Michael Slaby
Uploaded: 2017-08-10T14:53:18.000Z
Duration: 6 min 57 s
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The imperative

The comparative

I think what is familiar is easier for people, and not everybody wants disruption and innovation

and entrepreneurship; not everybody wants to have seven jobs.

I think the idea, the sort of assumption that “everybody is an entrepreneur” is a bit

I think many people are willing to be entrepreneurs given no other option, but a lot of those

Founders are sort of unique animals in sort of our social ecosystem.

But what I think it requires of us as individuals is: this pace of change is unlikely to be

It could be slowed down in ways that are super unproductive like being isolationists and

protectionist and trying to make a global economy smaller in ways that ultimately hurt

There are ways of slowing down innovation, but I don't think any of them are actually

I think the reality is we have to get better at teaching flexibility.

We have to teach critical thinking and adaptability to students as part of how we're preparing

We also have to be willing—this is where leadership matters a lot—willing to be more

We tend to think about progress in generational terms, “I want my kids to be better off

Like if it's easier and more effective to make something somewhere else we can take

And I believe that we can do that, that we have the capacity to embrace something more

ambitious for ourselves now in our lifetime in a way that isn't terrifying and in a way

that isn’t—it's about seeing these things as opportunities and addressing the anxiety

of trying new things and embracing new things, and that requires leadership that is confidence-inspiring

and that speaks to the discomfort that we're in, and that meets us at an emotional level

of leadership that I think politicians are pretty scared of a lot of the time.

And I don't think it's just politicians, I think it's also business leaders, I think

it's community leaders, I think this is a cultural shift in an attitude toward what

“success” looks like and what “work” looks like.

And it may be the case that we're moving into this sort of post-industrial economy, we're

sort of in this complicated shift and industrial jobs are moving and changing.

Value is no longer linearly correlated with work.

So in a typical industrial system, if I work more hours I create more value in a relatively

linear equation, which is why an hourly wage makes sense.

But in a world where one more hour of work might create 10X more value, but in the world

we're currently in all of that value goes to an investor and none of it goes to me as

And it might be the case that if we did a better job sharing in that value creation

and spreading the cost of disruption around more effectively maybe we only need to work

30 hours a week, and maybe that is full employment.

Maybe our definition of full employment needs to be revisited just like a lot of our other

And maybe we don't need seven jobs, maybe we just need it to do a better job sharing

the value we're creating, and that leaves more time to be parents.

Like I don't know that we need to take as a given the 40-hour work week.

Most other countries don't and they haven't for a long time.

Look, I think that this concept of shared success and collective progress leads us toward

a conversation that invites the question of universal basic income.

I'm not an expert in it and I'm not convinced that it's the only answer.

I think things like requiring companies to do things like profit-sharing is part of the

same conversation that ultimately what universal basic income is about; is that we are collectively

creating value and we should collectively share in that value.

I think that we live in a community where accepting the suffering of any of us makes

all of us poorer and makes all of us less well-off.

Aand accepting that that is like the default part of the gradient should be unacceptable

Is the answer a check from our government that creates a minimum layer?

That may be exactly the kind of public good that the government should create.

The question is: who gets it, and how, and when, and what are the cutoffs?

Which is not to say it's a bad idea, I just think it's a lot more complicated at the point

of implementation than most people talk about, of who qualifies?

I mean this is a similar conversation to welfare, who qualifies, at what point am I making enough

money that I don't qualify for that, and does that create a valley or a cliff in my economic

well-being and progress that creates problems for people—that people get stuck in this

valley, which is very true with especially welfare where you must be working to get to

The work-first mentality that started in the '80s means that you can't like, for instance,

study while on welfare because you have to work full time.

And so you can study at night and yes you can go to work and you can study at the same

time, but it creates incentives that create this weird valley in the middle of, sort of

the way welfare systems, our welfare system gets executed in the United States.

I think that's the kind of thing that we have to be really, really conscious and careful

I think the concept that we should accept that anybody living in poverty shouldn't be

We have enough wealth and value and opportunity in this country for that not to be true and

I think accepting it as true is just us wimping out on a hard problem.