Mincome & Mass Unemployment
By September 3, 2014 9 Comments
I recently described my employment status as ‘Self-unemployed’.
I am not retired and I don’t earn a living. I am just pursuing what I love to do, while I have the resources to do it. Because of the freedom I have, I am able to focus my entire time on making a difference. I am happier and healthier than ever before, and my contribution is at an all time high. If I never needed to earn money again, I would be a far greater servant to humanity. And I see what I am doing now as something of an experiment and a preparation of the future.
You see, we are entering a phase of technological development that will make the Industrial Revolution look like child’s play. Rapidly emerging technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and automation will do more and more of the things we used to get paid for. The downside is the destruction of both blue collar and even white collar jobs at an ever-accelerating rate, so our economies will increasingly shed jobs.
It will be interesting to see whether or not job creation occurs at the same rate. An argument gaining more traction is that it won’t. That means we are potentially entering a new era of technology-driven mass unemployment.
On the positive side, the costs of all our basic needs will fall through the floor. Food, energy, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, and transport are all on the cusp of revolutions that will make them extremely affordable to everyone. We are entering the era of a technology-fueled abundance.
To me, the challenge for society in the future is how to provide people with enough resources for all basic needs so that each and every one of us can pursue the life we want.
To achieve that, we need a new approach. As societies, we have to start thinking more about how we facilitate life, not about how we create jobs.
Technically, a small number of people can work to provide for a very large number of people in the future. Those super-wealthy organisations and owners of organisations will need to redistribute wealth to those at the bottom of the wealth scale to prevent them becoming restless revolutionaries.
And we are starting to see it happening. Companies like Facebook and Google are working to provide for the basic need of a free internet connection for everyone on the planet. Even Coca-Cola is starting to understand that they have the power and distribution to bring clean drinking water to the entire planet, with their recent partnership with the inventor Dean Kamen. This type of behaviour will become more and more prevalent, giving us all ever-increasing financial freedoms. But this will still not be enough to cope with emerging unemployment problem.
And this is where a little-known societal experiment called Mincome comes in. The Mincome experiment took place in the 1970s, in a Canadian town called Dauphin. For 5 years it was a town without poverty, since all its citizens were provided with a basic guaranteed income.
One of the interesting things about the experiment is that there was very little change in employment levels. Only people like new mothers chose not to work, to spend time with their babies. Every other form of employment actually stayed pretty much the same. What did change in the employment market is that people had the freedom to choose the work they wanted to do, rather than had to do – which had some interesting knock-on benefits for the health and wellbeing of the community.
Mincome caused some significantly positive changes in healthcare outcomes, including fewer incidents of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits through car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.
This ubiquitous safety net provided an entire community the opportunity to thrive, rather than just survive. As this experimental data is beginning to resurface, it won’t be too long before there is a fundamentally conclusive challenge to the way we currently redistribute wealth. In Switzerland, there is a community-led movement to have a referendum to bring in a basic guaranteed income, which will be interesting if it comes to fruition.
I am also looking forward to seeing the first really entrepreneurial community in the world building a virtual currency that delivers a minimum income for its members without the need for government support. The first project that does this is bound to attract a lot of libertarian-based financial support: there for the taking by the first community that can put it together.
Experiments like this will shatter the illusion of what our welfare systems are all about.
Fewer and fewer people will control exponentially-increasing amounts of wealth. Those few people need to find ways to radically redistribute that wealth to others by either providing low-cost basics and/or a guaranteed income for everyone.
And that time can’t come too soon, because we are in danger of creating inequality on a scale never seen before. (If you are interested in learning more about the harmful impact of inequality on society, watch this TED talk from Richard Wilksinson).
The healthiest and happiest societies are the fairest – not the wealthiest – and we need to rapidly develop approaches to make society fairer whilst employment is becoming a relic of the past.
The old promise of productivity-driven liberation from the need to work may finally be coming true. And there lies the opportunity of mass unemployment for humanity. Once we start to shift our focus from providing an economy to providing for all our needs, then we will free people up to be the best they can be. We will free people up to solve problems in ways that they currently can’t. We will redefine the nature of work, and as a result, we will free those world-changers who can and will spend their lives making a better place for all of us to live.
Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how we handle a society of very high unemployment; where the self-unemployed can make a far greater contribution to humanity than they would if they had to work for a living. That, to me, will be a very interesting world indeed.
Do you believe that technology will drive unemployment?
Do you believe in a future of abundance?
Do you believe that a guaranteed minimum income is a solution for a fairer healthier society?
I would love to know your thoughts on this post. Please share your insights in the comments section below.
Marc
