Name: The colossal problem with universal basic income | Douglas Rushkoff
Uploaded: 2019-04-04T17:27:30.000Z
Duration: 5 min 24 s
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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: For a long time I was a fan of universal basic income.

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And the logic I had was that I always hear politicians talking about,

That's what we need is jobs, more jobs,' as if that's what's going to solve

So the government is supposed to lend money

to a bank, who can then lend money to a corporation, who

will then build a factory in order for people to have jobs.

In California, they're tearing down houses as we speak,

because the houses are in foreclosure, and they

The US Department of Agriculture burns food every week

in order to keep the prices of that food high,

even though there's people who are starving and people who need homes.

We can't just let people have those homes.

So now we're supposed to create jobs for people

to make useless stuff for other people to buy plastic crap that we're

going to throw away or stick in storage units

or end up in landfill just so those people can have jobs

so that we can justify letting them participate in the abundance.

So I thought, well, shoot, rather than creating

useless jobs, what if we just let people have the stuff that's in abundance?

And UBI kind of goes along that lines of,

well, if we have more than enough stuff, if we don't need everybody working all

the time, then why don't we just let people have income?

Or at least go to a four-day workweek or a three-day workweek

If work is the thing that's scarce, then why

don't we mete that out and say, 'OK, we've

got these 10 days that you're allowed to work this year.

So come on, come onto the farm and do that work,

and then you'll have to find something else for you to do the rest

If we were really that efficient, then we

wouldn't be destroying the planet with pollution.

What we've done is found ways of making stuff and doing

things that require very little labor, but externalize

a host of other problems to a whole lot of other places.

So we could 3D print or something, but where do you

get the plastic goop for your 3D printer?

What mine in Africa is it coming out of, and which topsoil is it destroying?

You know, when we're going to run out of topsoil in 60 years,

it means that we're not actually using the appropriate labor

intensive permaculture solutions in agriculture and all that.

So first off, that whole idea that we're moving towards lower employment

We've faked lower employment through extremely extractive, exploitative,

polluting, and unsustainable business practices.

And second, I was giving a talk at Uber, and I

was talking to them about the problems with their business model

and how they're putting all these drivers out of work.

And here they are, these freelancers working for the company,

basically training the algorithms that will

be replacing them without any profit participation in the end-game company.

And one of the guys got up and basically quoted back to me

a passage from my own book, "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" he said,

And when I heard it coming out of their mouths, I realized, 'Oh.'

So universal basic income isn't just a way

to help people have the money they need to survive and have time to innovate

It's becoming an excuse for companies like Uber

to not pay a living wage to their workers.

Oh, we'll get the government to print more money to give it

So what really happens what is universal basic income?

It's just a way of perpetuating our roles

as consumers at the bottom of the pyramid, not as owners.

If we're going to go to anything, I would

What if the workers owned the means of production?

So you don't just give them a handout so that the money ends up

in the same corporate coffers and going into the same shares.

What universal basic income does, if you look at the whole model,

is allows the people who own the lion's share of our world

We just print more money, and more of it goes up to the top.

That's not the way to get long-term equity.

Sure, Social Security, welfare, the dole, all those things

But it's not a great long-term economic strategy.

It's really just a Band-Aid on extractive corporate capitalism.

We'll just print more cash for us to extract.