<
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-universal-basic-income-ubi-strawman-never-dies-eduardo-porter>
"Eduardo Porter’s new
Guardian piece is built around a familiar move: treat
universal basic income as a single, maximalist policy meant to replace
paychecks, then declare it either unaffordable or socially corrosive, then
pivot to means-tested wage subsidies as the “serious” alternative. This time
the villain is AI. The structure is the same as last time. He even opens by
mocking UBI as a “space zombie,” a sci-fi idea that keeps crawling back no
matter how many times critics think they’ve killed it.
The reason it keeps coming back is not Silicon Valley fad-cycling. It keeps
coming back because the problems it addresses have kept getting worse for half
a century: rising productivity with relatively stagnant wages, growing
insecurity, a safety net that a significant percentage of people fall through,
and an economy that increasingly rewards ownership over labor. AI does not
create those problems. AI accelerates them.
Porter has changed in one meaningful way since he went after UBI in 2016. He
now takes the tech disruption of the labor market story more seriously. He now
acknowledges that AI can hammer job security, reshape bargaining power, and
intensify the distributional fight over who captures new productivity. That is
growth.
He has not changed in the way that matters. He still argues against UBI by
arguing against a policy that UBI advocates are not proposing. He loves
building straw men."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
