IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Over the past week, the SXSW innovation and technology festival featured presentations on various topics, including the issue of universal basic income. One of the people to reignite this subject in tech-savvy circles was U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who argued that, in reality, we should be excited about automation processes rather than the opposite, as is customary.
Although automation has already caused half a million people to lose their jobs in the United States and still holds the prospect of eliminating around 800 million jobs by 2030, Ocasio-Cortez argues that the problem is not actually losing a job to a machine, but rather the fact that being unemployed today, in our current socio-economic context, means becoming destitute.
In other words, the problem is not automation itself, but the systems behind this process (from both an industrial and governmental standpoint) that are unable to handle this transition. In her words, “We should not be panicked that a toll booth operator is no longer going to be a toll booth operator. We should be happy about that. But the reason we’re not is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die.”
One of the proposals raised by the congresswoman echoes Bill Gates' idea regarding a robot tax, which, in other words, means taxing companies that have automated their processes and services at 90%, or even focusing the receipt of universal basic income on those who lost their jobs due to automation, an idea supported by 68% of respondents in a Gallup poll in 2018. “Whether it’s through the tax level or the distribution of the wealth that is generated by automation, if we start thinking about solutions for our systems and having ideas like these, then we should be happy about automation because of what it potentially could mean,” added Ocasio-Cortez.
For the congresswoman, in a society where government systems are capable of ensuring that wealth is generated and that everyone has access to it sustainably, people would then have more time to invest in education, art, scientific research, and invention—we would, in other words, have more time to “enjoy the world we live in,” after all, “not all creativity needs to be tied to a paycheck.”
It is in this sense that the congresswoman touches on the issue of the future of work as something connected to purpose. “We should be working as little as we possibly can if we were actually being paid based on how much wealth we were producing, but we’re not,” she comments. In this sense, the problem is not the number of hours worked, but how this dedication from the worker is disproportionate to how they are rewarded. As pointed out by a study conducted by the International Labor Organization, between 2006 and 2015, workers generated profits higher than their wages, with a mismatch of 2.3% per year for profits and 2.1% for wages. In other words, we are more productive, but not better paid, which calls into question the work model (and, especially, the workload) we have today.
But although Elon Musk is one of the key figures when it comes to technological innovation and extraordinary ideas, he sparked a new controversy last year when he tweeted that “no one changes the world working 40 hours a week.” To him, a “sustainable” work schedule for those who truly want to change the world would be 80 to 90 hours per week, which means working 11 to 18 hours a day if you want to keep your weekends free.
This idea is nothing more and nothing less than the proposal of the hustle culture, which has been debated here before. Despite its symbolic value in the corporate environment, doctors continue to fight to debunk this practice and make it clear that the number of hours worked is not proportionally linked to a person's actual productivity, not least because “productivity needs fuel and we all need to recharge to maintain it,” as clinical psychologist Janet Kennedy, founder of the organization NYC Sleep Doctor, states. According to her, “sleep deprivation causes cognitive impairment that can lead to costly and dangerous errors and accidents at work.” Furthermore, this type of behavior also makes us more prone to illness, depression, and anxiety issues—all of which run counter to the possibility of becoming a productive professional.
The counterpart to this is that the first universal basic income experiments have already yielded some results, such as in Finland, where there was a 37% reduction in the depression rate among recipients, while in Ontario, Canada, an unofficial analysis of a now-concluded pilot indicates that 88% of beneficiaries felt less stressed and 47% felt less marginalized as they also had better access to food and housing.
In addition, a new study conducted by Princeton University also points to the possibility that universal basic income programs help in how we relate to people, whether in marital unions or as a society. This became clear regarding the experiment conducted in Kenya with the support of the NGO Give Directly, which made transfers to residents in the western part of the country between 2011 and 2013. But more than influencing the purchasing power of Kenyans, the basic income program ended up intervening in an alarming statistic in the country: 42% of Kenyan women aged between 20 and 44 claim to have experienced some type of physical or sexual violence from their partners.
The discovery made by the team of researchers at Princeton, which includes professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer, was precisely that this type of financial aid had an effect on the incidence of domestic violence cases. “Violence is strongly related to purchasing power—poorer families tend to have higher rates of domestic violence,” the academic argues. In this sense, his team sought to understand if reducing poverty in these family units could have an effect on this problem, and the answer was as positive as the changes were significant.
As elucidated in the Fast Company report, “in households where women received the money via bank transfer, both sexual and physical violence rates decreased significantly. The researchers focused on violence against women. Compared to the control group, the number of women who reported being kicked, dragged, or assaulted by their husbands decreased by 51% among the beneficiary women. In the homes of these beneficiary women, incidents of forced sexual acts decreased by up to 66%. In households with male beneficiaries, physical violence rates fell by 59%, but the reductions in sexual violence were not statistically significant.”
For Haushofer, these results suggest that physical violence is likely used by husbands to extract resources from their wives. “When there is financial slack in households—the transfer money can be used to meet some of the husband's preferences—they no longer engage in this type of [violent] behavior,” the professor adds. However, in the case of sexual violence, the picture changes somewhat as Haushofer analyzes the less significant results in this regard when considering households where men were the ones benefiting from the program. In other words, “the reduction in sexual violence rates in households where women received the money may reflect the fact that the extra payments [also] gave women more power, whether to resist sexual violence or to leave the relationship.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that even women who were not beneficiaries of the program also perceived and experienced an improvement in their communities, which leads to the conclusion that the experiment is not just focused on supplementing the income of some people, but on how this ends up radiating beyond the beneficiaries. Given this, Haushofer's team only found one more argument to justify the importance of actually implementing the program and making it definitively universal. After all, if even by benefiting only a portion of the population the others already experienced positive effects, then it is likely that general distribution would further enhance the possibilities behind the project. This calls into question the way we deal with work and its schedule model, since we then begin to dissociate the power to generate money from our competence as professionals to understand that obtaining purchasing power is, first, a basic survival right of a citizen and only then an indicator of success (whether financial or not).
