At Fast Company Ben Schiller provides a spirited defense of a universal basic income on grounds of realism:
Information goods aren’t like physical goods. Intrinsically, a computer program is different from a car. Building each new BMW is as hard as the one before; creating another copy of a computer program is easy. Once you’ve got the recipe, each extra unit is essentially free. That’s great for information giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple. It means that once they have a recipe, they can watch the money rush in. But maintaining the idea that what they’re selling is valuable requires a certain inventiveness. They need to appeal to intellectual property principles (a notoriously messy area of the law). They need to maintain monopolies, like Google’s de facto monopoly over search. Sorry Bing. Or they need to give the product away, then sell something else (Facebook sells your personal data to advertisers). None of these things are intrinsic to the main capitalistic exchange because the old law of supply and demand has broken down. We’ve moved from an era of scarcity to an era of abundance.
In time, technology is likely to drive many things to “zero marginal cost.” Energy, for example, won’t be subject to market forces. We’ll just have a solar panel on the roof and each kilowatt hour will essentially be free. When we need something for the house, we’ll just print it with a 3-D printer. And when we have an Internet of Things, everyone will be connected, enabling unparalleled co-creation and collaboration.
“Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks, and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information,” Mason says. “Everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy.
I think he’s getting ahead of himself. The most ambitious estimate of the role of “information goods” in the economy including the entire information technology sector is less than 15%. That means that more than 85% of the economy is still the old, stodgy, real non-information economy.
Under the circumstances reorganizing our society to address the implications of information goods would be grossly premature.
Additionally, even in the Star Trek economy (which is what he’s describing) people still work. Work provides constructive outlets for people’s energies and brings meaning and purpose to life for which there are no ready replacements. If there were no work, we would be forced to invent it.
Very much my feeling as well. For some odd reason I ended up with a solid gold work ethic, and that, along with the extraordinary good luck of seeing just the right woman at just the right moment, rescued me from a very different life.
I don’t understand the idea of retirement as it applies to my sort of occupation at least. Why would I ever voluntarily quit working? To do what, exactly? My father-in-law has spent better than 30 years just puttering around the house. That strikes me as being one of the nicer levels of hell, but still hell.
I use the pseudonym ‘Grant’ in honor of Ulysses. Great general, lousy president, he basically died writing to provide for his family. And he succeeded. He died with a best seller.
I ended up with a solid gold work ethic, and that, along with the extraordinary good luck of seeing just the right woman at just the right moment, rescued me from a very different life.
Those are ingredients, derived from temperament and luck, which have been of great benefit for many people, including myself. For me it was the “right” man.