Anyone can take a case to the supreme court. So ‘other people’ is just anyone who isn’t the villains from your dystopian fiction.
There’s nothing neoliberal about your proposal. Though I’m aware that the word neoliberal has become little more than an ill defined amorphous bogey word used by people on the left at this point.
As a computer programmer, I’m 44% replaceable, but as a software developer I’m only 4.2% replaceable. As a computer systems analyst, I’m a mere 0.65% replaceable.
In the modern workplace, those are all the same job
Anyway, without a timeline, all these numbers are incredibly bogus. Will a computer take over my job in the next five years? doubtful. In the next 35 years? hard to say
Yep, all it takes is the right connections and access to several hundred thousand dollars and years of time working your way up the appeal chain. See “being able to pay the market rate” (AKA “unfair advantage”), above.
I know attorneys who’ve argued in front of the SCOTUS, and they were very honest that not just “anyone” can take a case there. The best case scenario for an average citizen is to get an organisation like the ACLU or a lobbying group on one’s side.
First, it’s not my proposal – it’s one I envision others pushing. And it is insofar as self-described neoliberals who’d realise they painted themselves into a corner would be the others pushing hardest for it. They’re really crony capitalists and Rotarian socialists, of course, but that doesn’t stop them from describing themselves as neoliberals now and I doubt it will in the future.
Yeah, I was confused about that myself.
Yep, all it takes is the right connections and access to several hundred thousand dollars and years of time working your way up the appeal chain. See “being able to pay the market rate” (AKA “unfair advantage”), above.
So in your dystopian scenario there isn’t a single person, or group of people, with enough resources to take a case to the supreme court? How did that happen, that sounds like a story worthy of it’s own dystopian fiction novel (it certainly doesn’t represent the current situation, or any reasonable near future situation I can imagine).
They wouldn’t be pushing for the form you described though, or they wouldn’t be neoliberals.
Actually, it’s those from the other end of the political spectrum that mischaracterize those types of people, people rarely (if ever) self describe as neoliberal these days (due to the negativity assigned to it and near meaninglessness of the term). Classical liberal does the job just as well, so it’s what I tend to use myself.
EDIT: good article on the history of the term and it’s misuses:
No, I’m saying that there would be equally or more powerful interests pushing for their “neoliberal UBI.” Which side do you think Justices like Roberts, let alone Gorsuch or Alito or Thomas, would side with? Yes, pro-corporate Justices siding with powerful pro-corporate interests is “unthinkable” dystopian SF, just like the current deranged celebrity “president.” (what was that about Citizens United, again?)
And yet we see a large number of conservatives in the American political establishment calling still calling themselves True Scotsmen adherents of neoliberalism (at least amongst their peers – for the rest it’s dutiful worship to the myth of the “free” market and its Saints Ronnie and Maggie). For them to accept a UBI it would have to look something like what I described.
“Rotarian socialist” is a term I picked up from a small-l libertarian, and I’ve heard the term “crony capitalists” more often in my circles from the right than the left. These executives and entrepreneurs and economists, none of whom would be anyone’s idea of a “leftist”, tend to be critical of neoliberal fundamentalists, too.
I must say, it’s nice to see at least one classical liberal who thinks it’s both desirable and politically feasible to drop $20k/annum on every citizen of the U.S. completely unrestricted. Usually in this country their go-to complaint of “moral hazard” (which they see as a disease of the unwashed masses) brings them up short. I guarantee you that the restrictions would be defended in part as a means of avoiding “moral hazard.”
Finally, neoliberalism is not a “myth”, it’s a descriptor of (as the name implies) the new and extreme form that economic liberalism (or laissez-faire) took in praxis during and after the Reagan and Thatcher years. Some hold the appellation proudly, some obscure it, some practise a watered-down version, but it is a legitimate description of a rather extreme economic philosophy.
just fyi, here’s a definition of moral hazard. I’ve heard the term used in health insurance debates sometimes (i.e. if you don’t bear any of the cost directly then you have no incentive not to use services unnecessarily) but I have no idea how it would relate to universal basic income
I’m aware of the definition, which is why I used it. The idea in the case of the neoliberal UBI would go something like: “if the taxpayers just give all those horrid poor people $20k/year without restriction they’ll waste it on booze and cigarettes and gambling and other risky endeavours instead of spending it on rent and food.” Conservatives already use versions of the moral hazard argument all the time when they want to put restrictions on welfare.
Hope that clarifies.
not really? If I buy cigarettes instead of food, then the person making that decision is still the one bearing its consequences
In their view, the state/taxpayer is bearing the costs and the consequences of the funds not being applied toward the intended goal. To avoid the state entering into a moral hazard situation, it places restrictions on application of funds.
Put another way, in their view the moral hazard of handing out unrestricted welfare is being assumed by the state/taxpayer, not the recipient (I think this is where you got confused, which is understandable since conservatives use the supposed irresponsibility of the recipient as a jumping-off point to decry what they see as the habitual irresponsibility of the state).
My nuclear physics lecturer in 1975 was perfectly capable of a coherent lecture. It didn’t make it any more interesting and in the end we did replace him with what was effectively an automaton. He lectured from the textbook so we formed a rota and one of use would attend each lecture to note down the page numbers. At the end of term we put the list together and each of us spent a weekend precis-ing the pages. Exeter Uni. Physics Dept. exams, including the final, were all open note. All of us on that rota got top marks in nuclear physics.
Thankfully he was very much the exception and the rest of the lecturers were better at both lecturing and setting exams. The quantum mechanics final really sorted the wheat from the chaff because there wasn’t a single question in it that had been directly covered in the lectures; you had to think and apply what you knew to extrapolate to new situations. Terrifying but exhilarating, I doubt I could hack it now. I think it would be hard to automate that sort of teaching.
Just not very many. If your horses are an analogy for humans I don’t find it very consoling.
Back in the late sixties and early seventies systems analyst was a real job and career but I haven’t seen one for a few decades now.
That doesn’t make sense in a full automation economy though, because the cost of the universal income would be relatively low, and easy to budget for, you wouldn’t need to worry about contamination, there’s no risk to the greater economy (if anything, the risk to the economy is in not providing it). In our current system there certainly is a chance of moral hazard from ballooning social welfare and pension payments, but we’re not talking about our current system, but a hypothetical one where the cost of labour has dropped to sub-subsistence levels, and where the cost of providing goods and services is nominal at most.
Yeah, I’ve heard legends of those days, when programmer meant that you read a flow chart and implement someone else’s algorithms in code, like a poorly optimized compiler layer made of flesh.
I am still living in those days.
Math PhDs come up with the math, but it’s up to me to make something useful out of that math.
Well, we don’t NEED as many humans either. Hence why birth rates are WAY down in many places.
That’s the problem, right there. It wasn’t growing pains, it was serious social upending. We need to acknowledge that and plan for it, or we’ll have the same violent shifts again. Much of this never happened with any sort of forethought, planning, or “phasing.” Most people were literally just forced into the new economy, with no regard for what happened to them.
I think that @gracchus’ view is very much grounded in history. I’d suggest that many of the changes that happened in the era of capitalism very much seemed like a dystopia to a whole lot of people. This is the point I’m trying to make, that the changes in the past, that had some very positive outcomes for a lot of people, were also very violent in nature, involved a a hell of a lot of force, and did not seem to have positive outcomes for many people, at the time. [quote=“caze, post:68, topic:101902”]
the modern age has created the most wealth and least poverty compared to any other time in human history
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That doesn’t mean that GETTING THERE wasn’t fraught and dangerous AT THE TIME. No one planned our modern world, we stumbled and lucked into it, with a fair amount of carnage along the way. To gloss over that point means that we can’t plan for the future.
I had always naively assumed that the “robot/sex worker” relationship would work the other way around.
