Blog

Some weeks ago The Citizen published an AFP piece on the growing acceptance of what I call “Basic Pay” and their headline called “Universal income finding favour” [2 Feb, 2017].
 
I anticipated a flood of random outraged/acrimonious/ responses and have: either missed them, or they didn’t happen. This is odd since this subject should be the biggest subject in the country … never mind the world. We may well discover its completely hidden role in maintaining order, should the threatened ending on March 31st of the contract to supply 17,000,000 [seventeen million] persons with “Basic Pay”, RSA style, come to pass.
 
Then we may well discover it to be a mechanism to stave off mass conflict with those alleged to be, according to your correspondent; with reference to the recent Swiss, first round referendum on the subject, rewarding “… the lazy and the feckless” beneficiaries. While in reality they have [regrettably] committed an ancient sin of being superfluous to need.
 
Late last year you published a Gwynne Dyer piece, called “Half the jobs are going”, which I used as a discussion piece for a year end 9th grade exam. It was one of a rising tide of such articles appearing over the past few years. Simultaneously while U.S. Pres Trump is making much of his ‘bring back the workers’ theme there is growing evidence, some reported for instance this past week on the Bloomberg channel, that only about 20% of the jobs were lost to ‘cheaper’ venues from the Manufacturing industries of the USA over the past three decades; were actually lost to cheaper offshore labour.
 

80% apparently was lost to automation.
 
And this was obvious to me some 23 years ago when I began writing a futuristic [fictional story] called the Jonker Memorandum*. Aside from being intended as entertainment, the story also contains, the fact of Basic Pay and its associated Digital accomplice, The Transaction Levy [also loosely known as a Transaction tax or a Tobin tax,] as well as some ‘historical’ comment on some of the economic arguments used to justify it. This idea is currently under review in a number of quarters and China recently indicated they would be introducing it on a zero based level to begin with.
 
My site has, since its inception in 2011 attracted some 7,000,000 hits, mostly from machines, but also by some human persons: adding my arguments to the global debate.
 
In constructing my fictional world I embraced many of the ideas proponents are postulating in your AFP piece, albeit one of two departures is in your opening line… Rather than promoting basic i.e. ‘Universal’ pay in my story as a “Utopian idea” it is rather, a solution for an increasingly dystopian environment… a world increasingly perceived as less and less egalitarian.
 
Most obviously a world that continues to pour out an ever increasing mass of persons for whom no form of employment will ever exist, beyond new evolutions of self employment, is one facing mass scale disaffection; as is being revealed via BREXIT, Trumpism and a range of similar psychic reversal leaps in “LEFT BEHIND!!!!”current thinking.
 
Therefore different ways of managing survival calls for a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of the role of money [as opposed to wealth] in the world and so my story is at heart a sales pitch for the introduction of these tools [Basic Pay and the Transaction Levy] into society. If we can survive Quantitative easing to the rich why shouldn’t the same system work for the poor… at least they will spend the money: and the world’s problem [at east one of them] as the Federal Reserve keeps telling us, is an absence of demand.
 
Those unenlightened Neo Luddite persona who envisage “Taxing ROBOTS”, as your correspondent’s “Benoit Hamon surprise Socialist candidate” for Frances’s pending elections suggests, or more latterly, and surprisingly, Mr. Bill Gates suggests, have completely lost the plot regarding the destiny of both the human race and the future of the “Internet of Things”.
 
I chose with difficulty to write fiction, because by inclination I prefer poetry. So I wrote what eventually became an 84 episode allegoric prose poetic podcast cyber serial, over a period of years from 1994 to final episode uploaded in 2014. When I started on the journey I realized that it would take disruption of the most terminal type to bring about the revolution posed by basic pay and the transaction levy, so I used an event in 1998 as the trigger for a wave of disruptive tsunamis and other seismic phenomena that completely changes the dynamics of the planet; during which my Heroine introduces the idea as a solution to chaos.
 
Over the past years since I wrote and then read the world a “bedtime story’” a la Podcasting, I have noted [with concern, after all I thought I was writing fiction] that a disturbing number of things predicted as part of my story have become reality. Included amongst these is that, apparently, the mechanization of work has advanced to such a degree that three years ago in 2014 a Hong Kong based venture capital company, Deep Knowledge Ventures, achieved a world first: appointing an Algorithm to their board with equal voting rights to the other five [human] board members*. Current indications are that the algorithm performs better than the humans.
 
In closing I would mention that my position on the inevitability of Basic Pay financed through the Financial levy was first influenced and then founded by me on the following observation by Wassily Leontif [Nobel Economist 1983] who noted [then] that “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished: and then eliminated. Technology” he concluded, “can sever the link between infinite desires and full employment.”
 
Given the almost complete disappearance of horses from daily life can any statement have been more prescient?
 
Thank you.

* Ref: Homo deus Yuval Noah Harari. p322