Strong case for a Universal Basic Income in India but is it realistic?

I have blogged about the UBI and read about how India would provide a strong case for its implementation. The rationale for this is the fact that India’s welfare programmes (950 that the central government run) are numerous, inefficiently run and encourage corruption. Add to those the programmes run by each state and you have a bureaucratic nightmare unfolding. However this has been part of Indian society and not so long ago it took businesses 6 months to acquire a permit to import computers. The UBI was raised as an alternative to the inefficiency of welfare handouts and this unconditional cash payment be disbursed not just to the poor but to everyone. In more advanced countries the case for UBI is based on technology making many jobs obsolete and no new jobs being created in their place. Although this is not the case in India and it warrants the UBI for other reasons:

1. UBI is easier to administer than India’s current antipoverty programmes which largely take the form of subsidies paid to sellers of grain, fuel, fertilizer and other essentials. Current programmes are plagued by waste, corruption and abuse. UBI would save 2.07% of GDP.

2. By making everyone eligible, a universal basic income removes the messy task of identifying who is and who isn’t in need of assistance.

3. By paying money directly into bank accounts, it would allow India to do away with the vast administrative machinery currently needed to supply the poor with cheap wheat, rice and other goods.

4. By one estimate, around one-third of the grain set aside for India’s food-welfare program never reached the intended beneficiaries in 2012, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available. Payments under a giant rural-work program are regularly delayed, leaving families in the lurch.

5. paying a basic income directly into bank accounts would encourage more people to use formal financial services, which would then help banks invest in expanding access to banks and ATMs.

Concerns

1.  households—“especially male members”—may fritter away their basic income on liquor and tobacco

2. India’s underdeveloped financial infrastructure could make it hard for many people to access their entitlements. According to the World Bank, there are only around 20 ATMs for every 100,000 adults in India, compared with 70 in South Africa, 114 in Brazil and 132 in the U.K. Although the government says it has helped open 260 million bank accounts since 2014, one-third of Indian adults remain unbanked.

3. The government paper suggests that 25% of the population should be excluded in order to make it more affordable. However deciding who is poor and who isn’t an easy task especially when over 35% of the richest 1% of Indians benefit from subsidized food to which they are not entitled.

4. There is a risk that a UBI would just supplement the welfare programmes rather than replacing them.

Source: The Economist – Wall Street Journal

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Should we have a Universal Basic Income?

I posted on this issue last year when Kim Hill (Radio NZ) interviewed Paul Mason  – author of Post Capitalism (now out in paperback). Mason makes the point that we are going to live through a long transition from capitalism – the state and the market to post capitalism which is the state, the market and the shared collaborative economy. With technology taking a lot of the jobs in traditional industries in the UK he states that further development in this sector is not the way of creating new jobs. He talks about delinking work from wages by just paying people to actually exist – rather than tax to exist.
Liam Dann (NZ Herald) wrote a piece about Amin Toufani’s presentation at SingualrityU summit in Christchurch where he talked about people in the labour force having to learn, unlearn, and learn again – unlearning should be core competency. However as there maybe many people who will struggle with this concept Toufani believes that a universal basic income (UBI) may need to be adopted – see RSA video below.

Recent events – UBI

• Switzerland held a referendum on a basic income in June this year but it was comprehensively turned down.
• Finland is going to run a U.B.I. experiment in 2018
• Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator firm, is sponsoring a similar test in Oakland USA.

Why has the UBI become such a popular talking point?

• The automation of a lot of jobs has left people very concerned about redundancy.
• The modern economy can’t be expected to provide jobs for everyone
• The UBI is easy to administer and it avoids paternalism of social-welfare programmes that tell people what they can and can’t do with the money they receive from the government.

Concerns

• Potentially drives up wages and employees will compare their wages with the UBI.
• Easier for people to take risks with their job knowing there is the UBI to fall back on.
• It takes away the incentive to work and lowers GDP
• UBI – not cheap to administer and would likely cost 13% of GDP in the US

Positives

• In the Canadian province of Manitoba where the UBI was trialled, working hours for men dropped by just 1%.
• The UBI would make it easier for people to think twice about taking unrewarding jobs which is a good consequence.
• In the developing world direct-cash grant programs are used very effectively – Columbian economist Chris Blattman.
• In New Jersey young people with UBI were more likely to stay in education

If the U.B.I. comes to be seen as a kind of insurance against a radically changing job market, rather than simply as a handout, the politics around it will change. When this happens, it’s easy to imagine a basic income going overnight from completely improbable to totally necessary. 

James Surowiecki – New Yorker – 20th June 2016

 

Technology, jobs and the universal basic income

It is nothing new to consider how machines can perform the tasks done by the layout force. Experts believe that it is not blue collar or white collar jobs that are at risk but those jobs that are routine or non routine. Manual labour tasks have been constantly under pressure from technology but now more jobs that have cognitive tasks are now feeling the pinch.

Jobs said to be under threat from computerisation are:

• taxi and delivery drivers
• receptionists and security guards
• cashiers, counter and rental clerks, telemarketers and accountants

It is estimated that the development of machine learning will impact 35% of the workforce in Britain and 49% for Japan. See chart from The Economist – Computerisation of different occupations.

Job Polarisation – Middle Skills Jobs v Low-Skill and High-Skill Jobs

Economists are already worrying about “job polarisation”, where middle-skill jobs (such as those in manufacturing) are declining but both low-skill and high-skill jobs are expanding. In effect, the workforce bifurcates into two groups doing non-routine work: highly paid, skilled workers (such as architects and senior managers) on the one hand and low-paid, unskilled workers (such as cleaners and burger-flippers) on the other.  

Source: The Economist June 25th 2016

Universal Basic Income

After two centuries in which capitalism has dominated the western world, this economic system has become desperately dysfunctional: inequality is growing, climate change is accelerating and nations are beset with bad demographics, debt burdens and angry voters.

Paul Mason – Channel 4 economics correspondent and author of ‘PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future’ states that:

“information technology has reduced the need for work” — or, more accurately, for all humans to be workers. For automation is now replacing jobs at a startling speed

“information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly”. For the key point about cyber-information is that it can be replicated endlessly, for free; there is no constraint on how many times we can copy and paste a Wikipedia page. “Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant.”

“goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy”. More specifically, people are collaborating in a manner that does not always make sense to traditional economists, who are used to assuming that humans act in self-interest and price things according to supply and demand.

There is concerns in many countries as to what can be done with a growing labour force with limited job prospects. There have been call for more money given towards social welfare to protect those impacted by the changes to the labour market and assist them move to new jobs. Some have favored a universal basic income instead of the welfare system that involves paying a fixed amount each year to all citizens to actually exist – rather than tax to exist. Supporters of this idea argue that:

• People who are not working, or are working part-time, are not penalised if they decide to work more, because their welfare payments do not decline as their incomes rise.
• It gives people more freedom to decide how many hours they wish to work, and might also encourage them to retrain by providing them with a small guaranteed income while they do so.
• Those who predict significant job destruction see it as a way to keep the consumer economy going and support the non-working population.
• If most jobs are automated away, an alternative mechanism for redistributing wealth will be needed.

However those against this idea argue that:

• It is regressive as spending on existing welfare schemes would reduce income for the poorest, while giving the high incomes money they do not need.
• Furthermore funding such a venture would require a much higher tax rate that at present.
• The basic income would discourage some people from retraining, or indeed working at all—why not play video games all day?—though studies of previous experiments with a basic income suggest that it encourages people to reduce their working hours slightly, rather than giving up work altogether.

Whether technology will take over jobs and ultimately humanity is dependent on the rate of change and how we live through the long transition from capitalism (the state and the market) – to post capitalism (the state, the market and the shared collaborative economy).

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.  John Stuart Mill

Source: The Economist June 25th 2016