The coming AI crash

 From Owen Jones, talking to Professor Steve Keen, who correctly forecast the GFC.   He reckons the current AI boom will fizzle out within a year, to be followed by an AI bust as AI takes over more and more jobs.  He points out that a UBI will be essential, or people will starve to death, and there will be severe civil unrest, a dystopian "Hunger Games" scenario.  A new Great Depression, leading to massive economic and social change.

The world's biggest basic income experiment

From Vox

Residents of a Kenyan village learn they will receive UBI payments from GiveDirectly. Oliver Ochanda/Vox

Large sections of my brain that could contain useful knowledge are instead filled up with dumb tweets I saw years ago. One of my absolute favorites was someone identifying himself only as “Side Hustle King,” who would ask his followers, “Would you rather get paid $1,000,000 right now or $50 every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take Option B. That’s what passive income is.”

To save you some arithmetic: Unless you plan to live at least another 1,667 years (which is what it would take to make $1 million in $50 monthly increments) and do not care about inflation, Side Hustle King is mistaken. Option A is far better. It’s a case in point that, sometimes, you should take the lump sum, not regular payments.

GiveDirectly, a charitable nonprofit that sends cash directly to low-income households, has identified another such case, one where the answer was a little less obvious. For years now, GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028. Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.

One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.

The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. “The lump sum group doesn’t have to save,” Suri explains. “They just have the money upfront and can invest it.”

Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.

“It converts the small streams into lump sums,” Suri summarizes. “We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest.”

I visited one of the villages receiving the 12-year UBI back in October 2016, and even then I observed people putting together ROSCAs and making plans to accumulate cash to invest. Edwine Odongo Anyango, a father of two and handyman who was 29 at the time, told me he had formed a ROSCA with 10 friends. “The monthly thing is not bad, but I think a lump sum payment would be better,” he told me. “That way you can do a big project at once.”As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.

And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

I think this points to the takeaway from this research not being “just give people a lump sum no matter what.” Ideally, you could ask specific people how they would prefer to get money. For instance, if you were a Kenya politician designing a basic income policy on a permanent basis, you could design it such that a recipient could opt into a $500 payment every two years or a $20 payment every month.

But barring that, long-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.

Notice how small these payments are.  Yet they made a difference.   

The world's largest basic income experiment

sidents of a Kenyan village learn they will receive UBI payments from GiveDirectly.

 Oliver Ochanda/Vox

From Vox

Large sections of my brain that could contain useful knowledge are instead filled up with dumb tweets I saw years ago. One of my absolute favorites was someone identifying himself only as “Side Hustle King,” who would ask his followers, “Would you rather get paid $1,000,000 right now or $50 every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take Option B. That’s what passive income is.”

To save you some arithmetic: Unless you plan to live at least another 1,667 years (which is what it would take to make $1 million in $50 monthly increments) and do not care about inflation, Side Hustle King is mistaken. Option A is far better. It’s a case in point that, sometimes, you should take the lump sum, not regular payments.

GiveDirectly, a charitable nonprofit that sends cash directly to low-income households, has identified another such case, one where the answer was a little less obvious. For years now, GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028. Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.

One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.

The case for giving all the money upfront

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.

The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. “The lump sum group doesn’t have to save,” Suri explains. “They just have the money upfront and can invest it.”

Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.

“It converts the small streams into lump sums,” Suri summarizes. “We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest.”

I visited one of the villages receiving the 12-year UBI back in October 2016, and even then I observed people putting together ROSCAs and making plans to accumulate cash to invest. Edwine Odongo Anyango, a father of two and handyman who was 29 at the time, told me he had formed a ROSCA with 10 friends. “The monthly thing is not bad, but I think a lump sum payment would be better,” he told me. “That way you can do a big project at once.”

But I was surprised by just how often this attitude was reflected in Suri and Banerjee’s data. They found that the smallest increase in consumption — in actual regular spending on things like food and clothing — was in the long-term UBI group, which you might think is the group most able to spend a bit more every month. For the most part, they don’t do that: They invest the money instead.

The advantages of monthly

As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.

And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

I think this points to the takeaway from this research not being “just give people a lump sum no matter what.” Ideally, you could ask specific people how they would prefer to get money. For instance, if you were a Kenya politician designing a basic income policy on a permanent basis, you could design it such that a recipient could opt into a $500 payment every two years or a $20 payment every month.

But barring that, long-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.

Again and again, actual UBI (universal basic income) recipients have shown that they don't squander their gains on drink and frivolity.  Note how effective even tiny payments are in making a difference: $20/month, as they would be in South Africa.

Traditionally, a UBI in developed countries has been proposed as an alternative to unemployment benefit, the old age pension, child benefit, etc.  The traditional response is that it would be "too expensive", though if it were subject to income tax, which the poor do not pay, I personally don't think it would cost more than a couple of percent of GDP (I did my thesis on the negative income tax in South Africa).  

So perhaps, if we want to fight poverty, just give everybody $100 a month, even if they are already receiving the old age pension or unemployment benefits.  If old age pensions are already high in a country, perhaps they could be partially reduced to offset this.  In this case, a UBI, even of just $100 a month, would benefit the working poor.  And there are too many of those, thanks to neo-liberalism.  The best thing about it is that they wouldn't have to explain to some grumpy bureaucrat with her rule-book why they deserve it.

Money for nothing: A UBI

Source: Basic Income Australia

"UBI" stands for "universal basic income", and it is a periodic monthly or fortnightly income paid to everybody. The old age pension, in most countries, is a sort of UBI, confined to people past a certain age. A UBI which is above the poverty line is called a full basic income, if it's below the poverty line, it's called a partial basic income. Wikipedia has a nice piece on it here.

The old age pension, a sort of UBI for old people, was introduced because it was seen as the most effective way to eliminate poverty.   A UBI for everyone would be just as effective.  The old age pension has not affected my work ethic.  I would be happy to have an increase in my income, even though I get a fortnightly income from the government.  I see no reason why that would be any different for anybody else.  But obviously, people who deal with our garbage and our sewage will have to be paid more.   Which would a good thing.

[From The Guardian]

When Elinor O’Donovan found out she had been randomly selected to participate in a basic income pilot scheme, she couldn’t believe her luck. In return for a guaranteed salary of just over €1,400 (£1,200) a month from the Irish government, all the 27-year-old artist had to do was fill out a bi-annual questionnaire about her wellbeing and how she spends her time. “It was like winning the lottery. I was in such disbelief,” she says.

The income, which she will receive until September 2025, has enabled her to give up temping and focus instead on her art. “It covers my living expenses, my rent, food and day-to-day stuff.”

The concept of a guaranteed basic income might seem novel or neoteric, but it dates back to 1795, when the American founding father Thomas Paine suggested a “national fund” should pay every adult “rich or poor” a “ground rent” of £10 a year until the age of 50. Earth is “the common property of the human race”, he argued, so everyone has been collectively dispossessed by “the introduction of the system of landed property” and was entitled to compensation.

Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) learns from the collective intellectual and creative output of humans and uses this to dispossess workers of their livelihoods, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) as a possible solution is gaining traction. “We are seeing the most disruptive force in history,” Tesla founder and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk said last year, before speculating: “There will come a point where no job is needed – you can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction – but AI will do everything.”

The counter argument is that although AI could replace a range of jobs, it will also create new roles (including oversight of AI decision making – known as “human in the loop”). Yet for many workers, the advance of AI continues to be alarming. In March, after analysing 22,000 tasks in the UK economy, covering every type of job, a model created by the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted that 59% of tasks currently done by humans – particularly women and young people – could be affected by AI in the next three to five years. In the worst-case scenario, this would trigger a “jobs apocalypse” where eight million people lose their jobs in the UK alone.

UBI would provide a vital safety net. “Under capitalism, you need money to survive. It’s that simple,” says Dr Neil Howard, an international development social protection researcher at the University of Bath. He and his team have helped to develop basic income pilots around the world and, like Thomas Paine, he believes that a redistribution of the privatised resources of all human beings is inherently just. Howard likens the large language models of AI that rely on the aggregated collection of human knowledge to the enclosure of the commons, which began in the 1600s and privatised most of England’s common land. “The common wealth of the world and of humanity, should, by rights, belong to all of us,” says Howard. “It has been appropriated by the few – and that leads the many to either have to struggle to survive or simply not effectively do so. So there’s justice underpinning the claim of UBI.”

Contrary to expectations, he says, “It wouldn’t necessarily lead to people doing less work – it would enable them to do better work or to invest their time in more socially useful activities.”

This argument is backed up by a 2020 study conducted by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It found that unemployed individuals who were previously in receipt of benefits increased their participation in the labour market after they were given a basic income for three years. Rather than opting for insecure work – taking any job they could get – to fulfil the conditions imposed upon them by the benefits system, they were more likely to find and accept a long-term, well-paid job. They also took on more work.

“Humans need to do work that feels valuable, psychologically,” says Cleo Goodman, a UBI expert at the thinktank Autonomy. “It’s baked into us. It is complete nonsense to suggest that there’s a faction of society that just wants to sit around on the sofa all day, drinking beer and watching TV. We want to spend a fair amount of our time doing something that makes us proud.” She believes that everyone has the potential to find their “niche” – work they’re good at, that gives their lives meaning and purpose.

For example, she believes that if UBI was available, people would do more creative and charitable work. “The kind of work that it’s now very difficult to make an income from is the kind of work that I think people would move to in droves. And I think that would be positive for society.”

This is particularly true of care work and parenting, says Goodman. “People shouldn’t be punished for making those choices. Socially and economically, that work is valuable. But at the moment, economically, it’s not valued.”

Salaries for work that is essential, but unattractive, would need to rise if a UBI scheme was introduced. “We’d have to recognise the people that are doing the work in the sewers and cleaning the streets, they’re doing incredibly important jobs that we should be grateful for,” says Goodman. “So they should be compensated in a fair way. I think more people would be happy to get their hands dirty if they were being paid fairly.”

While no basic income scheme is now available in England, Autonomy is looking to change that. Goodman is fundraising to run a micropilot that would give 15 people in two areas – central Jarrow in South Tyneside and East Finchley in north London – £1,600 a month for two years, to observe the impact on their lives.

The only basic income pilot currently running in the UK is a Welsh government scheme for 600 young care leavers. Each is receiving £1,600 a month (£1,280 after tax), for 18 months, so that researchers can evaluate the scheme’s benefits. An interim report suggests recipients feel “a greater sense of choice and control over the future”.

In the US, where there are currently more than 100 UBI pilots being explored or delivered, researchers have seen similar results. One two-year pilot, In Her Hands, involving Black women in the state of Georgia, resulted in more women of colour returning to education.

Cheeoni Hampton, 47, a disabled grandmother who left school young to have children, was one of them. “When I found the flyer under my door, I was sceptical,” she says from her home in Atlanta where, at one point in her life, she experienced homelessness. “Then I researched it a bit, and thought: ‘Maybe I can get a real career, instead of hopping from job to job.’”

The income she is receiving – $850 [£673] a month until September – has enabled the former warehouse worker to take an online course and become a security guard, while simultaneously paying off debts. “A weight was lifted off my shoulders,” she says.

Hampton moved out of her subsidised apartment and bought a low-cost home with a mortgage. She is now earning enough to meet all her bills without getting into debt. With a little extra money, she says, you can really do a lot. “It motivated me to go out and do better for myself. It changed my outlook on life.”

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, former mayor Sumbul Siddiqui began a programme providing 2,000 low-income families with a guaranteed tax-free income of $500 [£395] a month, for 18 months. She is a member of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a coalition of 150 mayors in the US who are advocating for a nationwide guaranteed income scheme. Her scheme is costing the city $22m [£17m] but, she says, it was a “very easy” decision to make: “I think we have to do everything we can to provide financial stability and dignity to those who are the most vulnerable in our community.” She adds, “I think it’s important to say: ‘We recognise you could use help and assistance, and we trust you to figure out how best to use this money.”

An earlier pilot Siddiqui ran in the city resulted in significant improvements in financial health for 130 families, along with higher rates of employment, more time and space for parenting and improved educational outcomes for children.

In Cork, Elinor O’Donovan – who began receiving Ireland’s basic income for creative workers in 2022 – can now spend time doing a job that makes her feel fulfilled. “I made my first film last year, which was really huge for me, and I was able to pay other artists to work with me.”

Across the Irish sea, the Scottish government and the mayors of Manchester, Liverpool and London have all publicly expressed enthusiasm for running basic income pilots in their areas. But so far, none have managed to do so.

One of the biggest obstacles they face is that HMRC refuses to exempt participants from income tax, significantly increasing the gross amount that scheme providers must pay to provide each individual with a small but adequate net income. Participants also need to be financially compensated if other benefits are affected as a result of the pilot. That makes pilots in the UK more expensive than in other countries.

“It’s an impasse,” says economist Prof Mike Danson, who has carried out research advocating for a basic income scheme in Scotland. “We know that, privately, some senior civil servants are in favour. But politicians are afraid of making that big step and trusting the population to do the right thing.”

Research on the impact on participants of pilots in places with similar economies to the UK is so overwhelmingly positive that, he suggests, the resistance in government must be “ideological”. “So, until there’s quite a radical change in thinking in Westminster, nothing can change, really, anywhere in the UK.”

But AI may be the impetus for this radical change in thinking, especially if massive job losses do occur. “One view is that basic income has to happen because, to continue, businesses need people to have money. People need an income they can spend on goods and services. So if you’re taking a lot of income out of the economy, with people losing their jobs, then that’s a problem,” says Danson.

It’s not just economists who think a UBI scheme will be necessary in the future. Prof Geoffrey Hinton – a computer scientist generally regarded as “the godfather of AI” – is among those advocating for it. “I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that UBI was a good idea,” he told the BBC in May. He fears AI will destroy jobs and increase productivity: “It’s going to increase the gap between rich and poor,” he said.

Darrell West, author of The Future of Work: AI, Robots and Automation, says that just as policy innovations were needed in Thomas Paine’s time to help people transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, they are needed today, as we transition to an AI economy. “There’s a risk that AI is going to take a lot of jobs,” he says. “A basic income could help navigate that situation.”

AI’s impact will be far-reaching, he predicts, affecting blue- and white-collar jobs. “It’s not just going to be entry-level people who are affected. And so we need to think about what this means for the economy, what it means for society as a whole. What are people going to do if robots and AI take a lot of the jobs?”

Nell Watson, a futurist who focuses on AI ethics, has a more pessimistic view. She believes we are witnessing the dawn of an age of “AI companies”: corporate environments where very few – if any – humans are employed at all. Instead, at these companies, lots of different AI sub-personalities will work independently on different tasks, occasionally hiring humans for “bits and pieces of work”.

These AI companies have the potential to be “enormously more efficient than human businesses”, driving almost everyone else out of business, “apart from a small selection of traditional old businesses that somehow stick in there because their traditional methods are appreciated”.

Watson speculates that only jobs that require human interaction (like hospital chaplains and care workers) or involve complex physical tasks (like plasterers, plumbers and hairdressers) will need to be done by humans in the future. As a result, she thinks it could be AI companies, not governments, that end up paying people a basic income.

AI companies, meanwhile, will have no salaries to pay. “Because there are no human beings in the loop, the profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy. This could be a way of generating support income in a way that doesn’t need the state welfare. It’s fully compatible with capitalism. It’s just that the AI is doing it.”

Howard is also optimistic that we will one day see a basic income scheme introduced in the UK: “We have lots of evidence – and people make it very clear – that the universality, the unconditionality, the automaticity of payments give people a sense of dignity. It manifests that they matter and that their experiences as human beings matter enough to be given this solid cash floor,” he says.

“I think we need to be calling for basic income on the basis of a sense of shared morality, because economic insecurity is grim. It’s empirically damaging and it’s based on historical injustices that are translated into present inequalities. So there’s a very strong case for redistributive basic income right now, irrespective of whether or not the machines are coming.”

South Africa to introduce basic income for all

I did my thesis on what was then called negative income tax in South Africa. So of course I am very interested in SA's moves towards a universal basic income.

From The Guardian

South Africa is facing the most dramatic political shift since the end of apartheid after the African National Congress lost its majority in the general election of 29 May. Weeks of difficult negotiations between the ANC and its rivals on how best to form a governing coalition are expected.

One commitment that unites most parties – including the incumbent ANC and its biggest rival, the Democratic Alliance – is to maintain or increase income support for adults, which includes monthly Covid payments to the poorest households.

But the ANC has gone one step further. A week before the election, it released a statement deepening its commitment to finalising a policy to transform the state’s Covid grant into a universal basic income (UBI) within two years of forming a new administration. If implemented, this would make South Africa the first country in the world to work towards a policy of paying all people between the ages of 18 and 59 a regular grant, with no condition to be seeking work.

At the moment, South Africa’s Social Relief of Distress grant (SRD) is paid to people who have less money entering their account each month than the individual food poverty line – or the minimum needed to afford food with enough calories to survive.

The ANC has committed to expanding eligibility to all adults by progressively increasing the means-test threshold. At present, the means-testing is based on the 2021 poverty line, which has increased, but the means-test threshold has not, meaning some people in food poverty do not qualify.

The idea of a basic income for all people regardless of age, class or employability has long been discussed as a way to tackle inequality. Elon Musk touted it as the solution to robots taking human jobs. Martin Luther King wrote about it as the answer to widespread poverty. A policy that captured the public imagination during the pandemic, when governments around the world paid or subsidised wages, could finally become reality.

“When you put money into the hands of the poorest households it lifts the whole economy,” says Kelle Howson, a senior researcher from the Johannesburg-based Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), which is part of a coalition of civil society organisations calling for a basic income grant in South Africa.

Ninety-three per cent of recipients spend SRD payments on food. Meanwhile, research from a large UBI study in Kenya by GiveDirectly found that recipients used the money to save up for large purchases, improve their diet and start their own businesses.

Despite these benefits, the idea of a basic income was largely the stuff of political debate and fantasy until Covid. During the pandemic, many governments issued emergency grants and income support to replace employment in a way that would previously have been politically impossible.

Spain implemented an anti-poverty payment of €1,015 (£900) a month to 850,000 households, while the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act in the US paid $1,200 to all adults earning less than $99,000 a year. In the UK, furlough and the self-employment support scheme distributed £100bn to those out of work and the self-employed, as well as raising universal credit payments by £20 between March 2020 and October 2021.

Afterwards, it was harder for governments to argue that a basic income was impossible to administer. But politics turned a sharp corner. Instead of expanding on these new social policies, many countries implemented austerity measures to address record government borrowing during the pandemic.

In the UK, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that maintaining the uplift in universal credit payments, which ended in 2021, would have limited the number of households in extreme poverty – defined as lacking essentials like food, shelter, heating, clothes and toiletries – to 1.5 million in 2022. Instead, destitution rocketed to 2 million.

South Africa was an exception: it maintained its Covid grants, despite broader austerity policies pushed through by the ANC. When the grants were stopped briefly, in April 2021, a summer winter of rioting followed, spurred by the imprisonment of Jacob Zuma. By August, the government had reinstated the payments.

But the system is far from perfect. The payments are just R370, the equivalent of about £16, or half the income needed to meet the extreme or “food” poverty line, and millions of people do not get the grant each month. The IEJ says the process is designed to be exclusionary. It is given digitally, in a country where not everyone has a computer and internet access, and uses automated means-testing systems that often exclude eligible people, the IEJ says.

Elizabeth Raiters is one of the many unemployed South Africans who regularly get declined. She works on the #PayTheGrants campaign, which joined the IEJ in filing court papers against the South African government in July 2023, challenging regulations excluding millions of people living in poverty from monthly payments.

In the UK, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that maintaining the uplift in universal credit payments, which ended in 2021, would have limited the number of households in extreme poverty – defined as lacking essentials like food, shelter, heating, clothes and toiletries – to 1.5 million in 2022. Instead, destitution rocketed to 2 million.

South Africa was an exception: it maintained its Covid grants, despite broader austerity policies pushed through by the ANC. When the grants were stopped briefly, in April 2021, a summer winter of rioting followed, spurred by the imprisonment of Jacob Zuma. By August, the government had reinstated the payments.

But the system is far from perfect. The payments are just R370, the equivalent of about £16, or half the income needed to meet the extreme or “food” poverty line, and millions of people do not get the grant each month. The IEJ says the process is designed to be exclusionary. It is given digitally, in a country where not everyone has a computer and internet access, and uses automated means-testing systems that often exclude eligible people, the IEJ says.

Elizabeth Raiters is one of the many unemployed South Africans who regularly get declined. She works on the #PayTheGrants campaign, which joined the IEJ in filing court papers against the South African government in July 2023, challenging regulations excluding millions of people living in poverty from monthly payments.

For comparison, the old age pension is roughly R2000 a month.  Unemployment benefit varies by income, but you can only get it if you've paid into the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF)  which obviously, if you've been unemployed, you won't have.  The unemployment rate in SA is around 33%.

Many will criticise the level of the proposed UBI, saying it's too low.  Which it is.  But as so often, the perfect is the enemy of the good.  It is impossible for people in developed countries to envisage the dire poverty of most South Africans.  Even a small payment makes a huge difference.  And once the principle and mechanism of a UBI has been established, it can be increased.  Make no mistake, even the old age pension of R2000 (US$160) a month is hard to live on.  Yet millions do.   

How do desperately poor South Africans survive?  They eke out a living working in the informal economy, doing whatever piece work they can find, scrounging through rubbish dumps, by relying on relatives.  Whole families, of children as well as nieces and nephews, will survive on the meagre income of one adult.  Yes, R370 a month is far too low.  But it would still make a real difference to the poorest of the poor, who don't have even that.  Over time, the UBI should be increased until it matches the old age pension.

The mechanism is key.  Poor South Africans can't afford to have bank accounts (the monthly fees would use up all their income).   So the government is going to have to find a way to give the UBI without using bank accounts.   I'm sure it's feasible: for example, each recipient could get a passbook, and collect their UBI every month from the post office.

I hope they do it, and I hope it works.

Golden Gate, southern Orange Free State, South Africa

A basic income in South Africa

From Resolve Global Health

The streets and even the highways are empty, except for the police and military patrols. An eerie stillness has engulfed South Africa’s economic heart, Johannesburg.

It is March 27, 2020, and the country has embarked on one of the world’s strictest covid-19 lockdowns, confining most people to their homes, initially for three weeks. The country, already under a national state of disaster because of the virus, deploys the army in residential areas to enforce the shelter-in-place order.

Under the country’s apartheid government, South Africans of colour were forcibly relocated to segregated and underdeveloped areas called townships. In Johannesburg’s largest Black township, Soweto, self-trained photographer Thando Makhubu had been running a small business. “All our money was from event photography, but then lockdown came, and there was no work,” he says.

Still, Makhubu believed then that covid-19 would pass. “I wasn’t really worried,” he remembers. “We were just watching the news and trying to understand what’s going on.”

Soon, the three weeks of lockdown turned into five. By May 2020, Makhubu had joined the ranks of the roughly three million South Africans who became unemployed within the first three months of the covid-19 epidemic, according to a national survey by local universities. The research found an almost 20% decrease in jobs during the first three months of the outbreak and nearly half of the respondents reported running out of food during the lockdown.

“My bank accounts were drying up,” Makhubu says. “That’s when I realised that life wasn’t the same anymore.”

Unemployment on the rise

The epidemic worsened an already fragile employment situation. South Africa’s mix of historical racial oppression and poorer-than-expected economic growth has fuelled increasing unemployment in the last three decades. In what the World Bank estimates is the most unequal country in its global poverty database, almost half of working-age South Africans are unemployed, government statistics show.

“We’re looking at [a lot of] people whose probability of getting a well-paid job is almost nothing,” explains Isobel Frye, the director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute, on a recent podcast.

The country runs an extensive social grant programme for at least 17 million children and caregivers, the elderly, veterans and the disabled. Still, without social security for the country’s 11.5 million otherwise healthy yet unemployed, these grants often subsidise entire households. Almost one third of the country experiences daily hunger.

Reviving a decades-old idea

In May 2020, South Africa’s hard lockdown eased, and the country—like more than 200 other nations—extended social security protections in response to covid-19. For the first time in South Africa’s democratic history, the unemployed became eligible for a R350 (US$24) monthly grant.

Nearly 10 million people applied for the money in the first six months. More than 90% of the recipients surveyed used the money to buy food, helping increase the number of families who could regularly afford food, according to a 2021 United Nations University working paper. It helped reduce inequality in the country.

“When they announced the grant, the government said you can apply via SMS, WhatsApp or email and said you must just apply once,” Makhubu remembers. “I applied on SMS, WhatsApp and email. I really wanted to get this money and do something with it because I wasn’t receiving anything.”

The grant, which will run until March 2023, has reignited a decades-old debate about whether South Africa can afford a permanent basic income grant. Some of the country’s best economic minds say it can, but it will almost assuredly mean raising taxes.

“We can afford it, but let’s not pretend we can afford it without making sacrifices,” says Michael Sachs, an economist and adjunct professor at the University of Witwatersrand.

At the very least, a monthly basic income grant of R595 ($US41) could halve the number of hungry people, Sachs and others argue in a recent analysis. At most, a cash transfer of R1,300 ($US88) could almost eliminate some forms of poverty while making modest reductions in inequality.

But could it also buy South Africa gains in reducing deadly epidemics of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes and depression? The answer lies buried in the many complicated and hidden ways poverty shapes our health and perhaps even our genes.

Hunger and an unfortunate inheritance

NCDs like type 2 diabetes and hypertension are often associated with lifestyle factors and overconsumption, but too few nutrients early on in life can also play a role.

The number of babies that die before their first birthday in South Africa is nearly five times that in the United States, 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) data shows. Dietitian and University of the Free State lecturer Chantell Witten has studied an important factor behind these deaths: the country’s abysmal rate for exclusive breastfeeding, which makes babies more vulnerable to die from conditions like diarrhoeal disease.

Babies who are not breastfed also have a higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, which is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, the American Diabetes Association warns. For the mother, breastfeeding has been shown to lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and breast or ovarian cancer.

Although it’s unclear how breast milk protects against NCDs, a 2014 research review posited that it could be epigenetic—meaning nutrition could influence how some genes behave and vice versa, leading to changes that could potentially be passed down through generations . In South Africa, this plays out in a broad context of increasing obesity driven partly by the rise of cheap, high-calorie and high-fat ultra-processed food.

Crucially, hunger may determine whether mothers feel able to breastfeed. As part of a 2020 study published in the International Breastfeeding Journal, Witten interviewed nearly 200 new mothers in poor townships. About 40% lived in households earning less than R2,900 (US$200) a month, and a similar proportion experienced signs of depression.

Witten found that hunger was physically and emotionally painful for these women—something they feared they could transmit to their children through their breast milk. “The minute the mother is aggravated, a baby can feel that—the mums in my study completely internalised this,” she says, describing what women in the study perceived as challenges to breastfeeding babies. “When they were breastfeeding, women would say, ‘I feel hungry. So I'm literally feeding my child my hunger’.”

In some ways, Witten says, the women are right. “Hunger is actually a trauma to the body—it elevates your cortisol, which is the stress hormone,” she explains. “Those stress hormones have been found in breastmilk.” But although cortisol levels in breastmilk can fluctuate depending on the mother’s stress, it is not known what, if any, impact this has on babies.

Still, for many women in Witten’s study, hunger—and their beliefs around it—played a role in their inability to exclusively breastfeed infants. Fewer than one in five women in her research exclusively breastfed their babies for the WHO-recommended six months.

"We live in a country where 95% of households access food through the formal, retail system," she says. "If they don't have money to buy food, we can't expect them to have good nutrition."

The poverty-depression link

By August 2020, Thando Makhubu had received three tranches of the covid-19 grant. The first bought family groceries, but the rest he used to open an ice cream shop out of the family home. The Soweto Creamery now employs five people, and its success garnered Makhubu a mention by name in the President’s February 2022 State of the Nation address.

In the public’s eye, Makhubu has come to represent what might be possible with a small amount of state-provided money in a country with widespread unemployment. “Unemployment isn’t really something I think about—it’s something I see,” he says, sitting at one of the many picnic tables for customers that now dot the family yard.

“Here in the ’hood, we're living in small spaces, we're malnourished, we don't have cars—it's depressing,” he explains. “Some people have lost hope.”

Living in poverty has been strongly linked to an increased risk of depression, says Crick Lund, a professor of global mental health and development at King’s College London. The link, he warns, is more complicated than it seems. The stress of poverty’s harsh realities—hunger, overcrowding, living in more dangerous communities—increases the risk of depression.

But the relationship also runs in the other direction. “If you’re living with depression, you’re more likely to drift into poverty,” Lund says. “You spend more on healthcare, and the disability associated with being depressed means it’s more difficult for you to generate income or maintain an occupation.”

He adds that people who are depressed are also more likely to have other conditions. People living with NCDs are also at an increased risk of depression, according to a 2007 research review in The Lancet.

Pairing cash with care

In South Africa, high unemployment triggers an ​​insidious chain reaction where poverty and hunger drive increased rates of NCDs like diabetes and hypertension. These conditions raise the risk of depression, which means people can struggle to earn an income and are therefore more likely to be depressed.

Still, as a recent review in Nature Human Behavior found, cash transfers like basic income grants improve mental health and wellbeing. Emerging research also suggests that pairing cash with a health intervention, like classes on coping skills, might make for an even more powerful tool for mental health, Lund says.

If this happened alongside a basic income grant in South Africa, it would allow health workers to finally reach a large population of men who might otherwise never set foot in a clinic, unlike women and children, who seek healthcare more frequently.

“There is emerging evidence to support pairing a mental health intervention with a cash transfer to yield interacting economic and mental health benefits, particularly for vulnerable populations like unemployed youth,” Lund says.

Economist Iraj Abedian is a former University of Cape Town professor and founder of Pan-African Investment and Research Services Group. He says the question is no longer if South Africa can afford a basic income grant.

"Often, I hear from different quarters: can South Africa afford this?” he says. “I'll flip it and ask: can we afford not to?”

 Even a very small basic income ($40/month) makes a difference.  Too often, basic income advocates ask for large basic incomes to be paid.  Of course, that would be the ideal.  But it makes paying basic incomes much more costly to the exchequer, which in turn means it isn't introduced.  

I've worked with poor people (I volunteer at an op shop (thrift store)) and I promise you that in Australia, even a few hundred dollars a month would make a significant difference to the real poverty I see every day.  It's time for a UBI, here in Australia and everywhere.  If South Africa can introduce a UBI, then very wealthy nations should be shamed into doing the same.

The Tesla Optimus 1 humanoid robot

 From Tesmanian

Tesla is developing a bipedal humanoid robot called Optimus that will eventually be able to perform a wide range of tasks. According to Elon Musk, the prototype could be completed by the end of 2022, and version 1 could go into production in 2023.

In August 2021, at AI Day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a humanoid robot, saying that it would be a general-purpose machine that would perform a wide range of tasks. Ultimately, the robot, named Optimus, will be able to do everything that people do not want to do.

On April 7, during the Giga Texas launch event, Musk said that Tesla could start production of the first version of the robot in 2023. “We have a shot of being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year,” he said.

During the 2021 Earnings Call, Tesla Musk tried to explain the importance of the company's new development. He said that in terms of the priority of products, the humanoid robot is the most important product development that Tesla is doing this year. In addition, Musk explained that Optimus has the potential to become more significant than the vehicle business over time.

“So, in terms of priority of products, I think actually the most important product development we're doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot. This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.”

The head of the company also explained the true importance of the new development. According to him, Tesla Bot will become a universal replacement for human labor, since labor is the basis of any economy. The robot will also alleviate the labor shortage due to the significant decline in the birth rate, which will create a problem in the future. In December 2021, at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) board summit, Musk said:

“[Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor...The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. I think one of the biggest risks for civilizations is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate.”

The head of Tesla said that initially, the Tesla bot will likely be used at the company's own facilities. “The first use of the Tesla Bots, Optimus, the Optimus name seems to be sticking at least internally, Optimus Subprime. Like if we can't find a use for it, then we shouldn't expect that others would. So, the first use of the Optimus robots would be, at Tesla, like moving parts around the factory or something like that,” he said.

Musk believes that AI is a potential threat to humanity. With this in mind, the head of Tesla is one of the strictest observers who will control the process of its creation. At the same time, all of us will also be watching this process to make sure it is safe. “As you see Optimus develop, everyone’s going to make sure it’s safe,” Musk said. “No Terminator stuff or that kind of thing.”

This development means that a universal basic income (UBI)/social wage is likely to become even more essential.

20 Things which will change the world by 2040

Here are 20 things in no particular order which I think will totally change the world over the next 20 years.

1.  CHEAP ELECTRICITY

 Wind costs are falling by 5-10% per annum, solar by 10% to 20% and batteries by 15% plus.  Wind's cost declines will prolly slow over the next 10 years—it's a mature technology.  But the cost declines in solar are likely to continue, and in batteries, there's a real chance they'll accelerate.  If these trends continue (and why won't they?), in 10 years electricity will cost 25% of what it does now.  If the trend decline then halves to, say 7% a year, then in 20 years, electricity will cost just 10% of what it does now.  Cheap energy supercharges economic growth.  The low oil price from 1945 to 1973 helped drive rapid and sustained growth in the world economy.  Cheap renewables will do the same over the next 20 years and beyond.

2.  EVS

They're going to be cheaper than ICEVs (internal combustion vehicles) to buy, and much cheaper to run.  They'll be replacing ICEVs  so the shifts in society might not seem dramatic.  But with AIs running them, transport as a service will become common.  You'll summon a car using your phone, and it will drive itself to where you are and then to where you want to go.  Because EVs will last much longer than ICEVs and will be significantly cheaper to run, "transport as a service" will be a popular way for people to get around.  Car sales are likely to decline by 50% plus, as TAAS takes off.  Air pollution in cities will end.  By 2040, most of the world's vehicle fleet will be electric.  Maybe hydrogen fuel-cell, but I doubt it.  The cost of building a hydrogen refuelling network will be much more costly than just attaching your car to an already existing network, the electric grid.  And the energy efficiency of the hydrogen cycle is much lower than batteries.

3.  AI

I don't think we'll have true AI, as in sentient robots.  But we will have very sophisticated computerised control systems, such as those which will allow for self-driving cars and self-landing rockets.  This has been made possible by the 5 or 6 orders of magnitude decline in the costs of and size of super computers, as Tony Seba points out.  SpaceX's ability to land and re-use its rockets would not have been possible without the advances in computing power.  These advances and changes all interact.

4.  3-D PRINTING

This cuts the cost of manufacturing metal things by at least half, because there's much less scrap.  It also reduces the stock of parts you have to keep on hand.  And allows you to make more complicated things, like SpaceX's extraordinary new Raptor rocket engines.  On the ISS, there is a 3-D printer to make spare parts.  On Mars, and the Moon, 3-D printers will be used to build habitats; to make things which would take too long or are too expensive to get from Earth; and to make things which have short production runs or are experimental.

5.  VAT MEAT, MILK AND FISH

Cheap energy will change agriculture.  Right now, 20% of Australia's tomatoes come from a factory in the semi-desert in the north of the State of South Australia, using desalinated sea water and growing the tomatoes in greenhouses.  This undertaking uses no fossil fuel at all.  Animal rearing  uses vast areas of land, is highly polluting, and contributes 20% to global CO₂ emissions.  Vat meats and fish are already starting to take off.  Their costs are declining year by year.  By 2040, they will become the norm.  

There won't be "real" meat on Mars or on the Moon or in Space Stations .  There just aren't the resources to grow it.  If vat meat, fish and milk taste like the real thing, cost about the same or less, are environmentally kinder, and involve no animal suffering, why wouldn't you switch?  This will reduce emissions by 20% while allowing the rewilding of unused fields and grasslands.

6.  CHEAP ACCESS TO SPACE

Cheap access to space will change everything.  To settle Mars, we'll need to rapidly improve a whole range of technologies, like vat meat production, genuine air conditioning (meaning far more than just heating and cooling), hydroponics, water purification, extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere, genetic modification, medicine, and so on.

By the time SpaceX's Starship is running, SpaceX will have cut the cost of launching a kilogram to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) from $22,000 to ~$20.  Whenever you have a 10-fold decrease in costs you get disruption, as new technolgies take off.   This will be a 1000-fold decrease in cost.  We're already seeing the consequences of cheaper launches in the roll-out of SpaceX's Starlink super fast internet.  The development of a space-faring civilisation will spawn new technologies we haven't even thought of.  Who would have thought 20 years ago that we would carry computers in our pockets millions of times more powerful than the first IBM computer, computers which connect us to a massive knowledge network as well as news, videos, maps, Wikipedia?   None of that was predicted.  Yet think of the businesses which have developed because of those twin inventions, the smart phone and the internet (Apple, Google, Uber, Air BnB ....).  And think also how the explosive growth of smart phone sales also drove down li-ion battery prices,  allowing EVs and grid energy storage to happen.

7.  ASTEROID MINING

With cheap access to space also comes asteroid mining.  Because the asteroids aren't in deep gravity wells like the Earth or Mars, nudging them into orbits which intersect Earth's or Mars's will be cheap.  The resources of a single medium-sized  asteroid, for example for rare earth metals, will more than equal all the rare earth metals that have ever been mined on Earth.   We will prolly stop stripping the Earth to produce metals and minerals and instead start disassembling asteroids to do that.  The world's major resource companies will be asteroid miners.

But some of these will be used in space manufacturing.  Why take stuff into the gravity well when you can build it in LEO?  Asteroid mining will be even more important on Mars, as asteroids will likely provide the volatiles needed to give Mars an atmosphere dense enough for humans to work in without needing to wear pressurised space suits. 

8. BECOME A MULTI-PLANETARY SPECIES

Our first colony will be Mars.  Read  the Red Mars trilogy to see how colonising Mars will change Earth too.  Not just in technological advances but also in social advances.  Looking down on Mars and Earth from space will change mankind's perception of itself.  As Robert Zubrin says, knowing that there is no shortage of resources because we have unlimited resources in space means that most of the causes of war on Earth will disappear.  Of course, no matter how technologically advanced and prosperous humans become, there is no reason to suppose we will ever be more intelligent, less venal, less greedy, and less petty. 

After we colonise Mars, we'll start on Venus.  That'll be much harder.  But by then we will also have colonies in the asteroid belt and large inhabited space stations in orbit round the Earth and Mars.  We will truly be a multi-planetary species.  And that will change everything.

9. TRULY GLOBAL HIGH-SPEED INTERNET

SpaceX's Starlink has kicked off a revolution in high-speed internet.  Starlink's network will be truly global, available in the Arctic and Antarctic,  the Sahara and across the world's oceans.  In countries where wired internet is only available in cities, such as most of Africa, Starlink will provide links to remote villages and towns.  It'll be expensive ($100 per month), but villages could club together to pay for it.  Those same villages are off the electric grid, too, and small solar panels and batteries will change that.  Children who do their homework by candlelight will now be able to do it by LED light, and access the internet, connecting to the ginormous encyclopedia which is the interweb.  20 years ago we didn't have Wikipedia.  Today, even if your village doesn't have a library, even if you  can't afford to buy a book, you'll still be able to study science, maths, languages, technologies.    

10.  TERRAFORMING THE EARTH

The current fall in emissions isn't rapid enough to prevent a rise of more than 1.5 degrees C, maybe even 2 degrees C,  in global temperatures.   We will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  One way would be to cover desert and semi-desert areas with forests.  To do this would require desalination plants, powered by solar, which will get cheaper and cheaper over the next 2 decades.  It would be a mammoth undertaking, almost beyond our imagination.  But it will prolly be necessary.  Given the scale of the problem, any de-carbonisation method will have to be massive.  But something will have to be done to remove CO2 from our atmosphere.  Changing a planet's climate to make it more livable is called terraforming.  You might also call it geo-engineering.  Whatever; we will prolly have started to do it by 2040.  We will have no choice.


11.  GENE THERAPY & GENETIC MODIFICATION

The colonisation of Mars and the growth of space travel will accelerate the development of gene therapy, because radiation on Mars and in space will cause genetic damage.   Treating that will become imperative, and as technology often responds to extreme need, it will likely be developed, because it has to be.  Gene therapy will provides cures for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and inherited genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis. 

Creating plants which will grow in our domes on Mars and on space stations to provide us with food will be important to the pioneers.   Dwarf wheat, larger tomatoes, low-rise almond/fruit trees, and so on and so on.  The need for these advances will drive rapid change.  But the advances themselves will drive down the cost of food back here on Earth.  


12.  THE RISE OF AFRICA

Africa is the second-largest continent, in population and size, compared to Asia.  For decades, Africa has been an economic laggard.  But solar favours countries near the equator.   Seasonal storage needs are much less than in high latitudes further from the equator.  8 hours of storage will be enough for most places within 30 degrees north and south of the equator.  Cheap electricity will be even cheaper in Africa.  In addition, Africa's population is young, it speaks English as a first or second language, and it's so far behind the production possibility frontier that high speed internet and distributed solar power will be transforming.    

Until recently, Africa has lagged the world economy, but access to electricity and information will change everything.  Africa will be the new China, with high growth rates, falling poverty and  rapid development, and with that will come greater political power.  China has recognised this reality; the rest of the world has not.  That needs to change.


13.  THE END OF NEO-LIBERALISM

Neo-liberalism has been tried for 40 years.  It has resulted in greater economic and financial instability, and vastly increased inequality of income and wealth (especially in those mostly Anglophone countries which have most enthusiastically embraced it), as well as a lower growth rate.   The rising inequality has also led to increased political extremism.  Economists like to pretend that economics is separate from politics.  But the consequences of increased inequality and greater uncertainty have shown that there is a non-economic price for neo-liberalism: the rise of far right parties and policies. The dogma of small government, low taxes, and deregulation is becoming tarnished.  The Covid crisis has conclusively shown that there are some things government does better than the private sector.  Unlike the neo-liberal dogma, the private sector doesn't inevitably do things better and more cheaply than the public sector, especially when second order effects are considered.  Privatisations of state-owned enterprises have mostly failed: costs are higher, services no better, corruption worse.

Expect a gradual retreat from the extreme tenets of neo-liberalism towards a more measured and pragmatic process.  Big(ger) government is back.  The big borrowings government took up under Covid are not going to be repaid.  Instead, governments will start running deficits again.  The post WW2 pragmatic neo-Keynesian synthesis will once again modify red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism.  

14.  A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Technological advances will cause major disruptions to job markets.  So will shifts in economic growth and development.  In the past, dire poverty among the old was reduced by the introduction of a universal basic income or social wage for old people, otherwise known as the old age pension.  A UBI in developed countries, for everyone, has so far been seen as a step too far.  But opinion is changing.  If we are truly to drain the poison of the extreme right, we will need to address the insecurity and poverty of the precariat, which will likely be worsened by the technological and economic changes I think will happen.   A UBI would do that.

15.  HYPERSONIC INTERCONTINENTAL FLIGHTS

SpaceX would like to use Starship to run suborbital long-distance flights.  Musk has said that over long distances, suborbital flights will have a lower cost than conventional jet travel.  At 20 times the speed.  Anybody want to bet it won't happen?

16.  NEURALINK

Musk is afraid that a real AI (as opposed to very clever software) would end up ruling the world and humanity would end up being no more than pets of the machines.  If we even survive.  His response to that is to develop brain-machine interfaces.  This would make us as clever as our AI overlords.  We would have chips in our brain, like a permanently embedded smartphone.  It might never get to that, but if an interface can enable a blind person to see again, or a disabled person to walk, then that would be huge.  And having a small device in your head which allows one to communicate directly with the interweb would be revolutionary.  Not sure I like the security implications of that, though.

17.   ELECTRIC PLANES

We will soon see the introduction of electric planes which will allow short flights (up to 400 km) at 1/20th the cost of jet or jet-prop aircraft of today.  They will be used to connect outlying regions to the spaceports where suborbital ultrasonic flights will depart from and arrive at.  The long-term outlook for conventional airliners isn't good at all.  What these two developments mean together is that one will be able to fly from a small town in the bush to another small town on the other side of the world in a few hours.  A hundred years ago, it took 3 weeks for a ship to sail from Australia to Europe.  Currently, it takes 24 hours to fly that distance.  With suborbital hypersonic rockets, the journey time will be down to just an hour.

18.   NUCLEAR FUSION

Nuclear fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission, where large atoms, e.g., uranium, are split into smaller atoms, releasing massive amount of energy.  Fusion is what happens inside stars like our sun, where the lightest atoms, hydrogen, are blasted together under intense heat and presure to produce heavier atoms.  And therein lies the difficulty--it's very hard to create those conditions outside the fiery heart of a star.   For 70 years, the joke goes, nuclear fusion has always been 30 years away. But maybe that's changed.  Fusion is likely to make much faster progress now that private firms and individuals are bankrolling research than it has under the aegis of giant bureaucracies, so I think we'll prolly have fusion by 2040.  We will need nuclear fusion on Mars, and to mine the asteroids.  And it will be enormously useful on Erarth, too.

19.  A RETURN TO DEMOCRACY

Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst system, apart from all the others.  People have pointed to the Chinese and Russian dictatorships as exemplars of how to run politico-economic systems.   Yet both countries have declining growth rates.  This is particularly interesting in the case of China, which is far from being a wealthy country, and where you would expect growth to remain higher than it is, given where it is in the typical development pathway.  For all America's faults, and despite the out-and out dementia of the Right and the Republican Party, the technological developments there are breathtaking.  Perhaps people need freedom if they are to innovate.  Just a thought.  

If we drain the pus of divisiveness and far-right toxins from our democracies by reducing inequality, and again giving ordinary people hope that their lives and the lives of their children will be better, I believe that the autocratic political/social/ economic alternatives of China and Russia will be seen as what they are: relative failures.

20.  SYNERGY

All these changes will interact, just as smartphones and internet did, the one driving the development of the other.  And the interactions will spiral out of control unforecastably. changing the world in ways which will surprise and shock us.  And some of the consequences will be adverse.  But it's going to be a most interesting ride.

Populism and anti-vaxxing

From ZME Science:

In recent years, the world has witnessed a string of populist politicians rising to power. Archpopulist Donald Trump served as a lightning rod for most of the discussions but elsewhere in the world, other politicians have used similar approaches to climb into power. Jay Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are two striking examples, but Europe has had its fair share of populists in recent times.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, Europe is also experiencing its biggest measles outbreaks in over a decade, largely fueled by vaccine reluctance. Researchers suspected a correlation between the two. Populism relies on fueling hate towards experts and the perceived elite, and antivaxxing relies on a similar approach. Lead author Dr. Jonathan Kennedy from Queen Mary University of London, study author, explained:

“It seems likely that scientific populism is driven by similar feelings to political populism, for example, a profound distrust of elites and experts by disenfranchised and marginalised parts of the population.”

“Even where programmes objectively improve the health of targeted populations, they can be viewed with suspicion by communities that do not trust elites and experts. In the case of vaccine hesitancy, distrust is focused on public health experts and pharmaceutical companies that advocate vaccines.”

So along with colleagues, Kennedy analyzed national-level data from 14 European countries, looking at the percentage of people who voted for populist leaders and comparing it to the percentage of people who think vaccines are not important and/or effective.

They found a strong correlation between the two: wherever people would support populists, they would also start to question the effectiveness of vaccines. In this sense, vaccination can serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for future populism. When elected, populist leaders also always tend to push an anti-vaccine agenda. In Italy, the newly elected Five Star Movement (5SM) repeatedly spoke against vaccines — with important results. The Italian Parliament recently passed a law to repeal legislation that makes vaccines compulsory for children enrolling in state schools. Meanwhile, in Italy, MMR vaccination coverage fell from 90% in 2013 to 85% in 2016, a seemingly harmless drop, which resulted in an increase in measles cases from 840 in 2016 to 5000 in 2017.

It seems that the more extreme a party is, the more likely they are to support antivaxxing — regardless of whether they are left or right wing. In Greece, the left-wing SYRIZA government proposed that parents should be able to opt out of vaccinating their children. However, their efforts haven’t been particularly fruitful, as Greek confidence in vaccines has recently been increasing. In France, where several childhood vaccinations have been made mandatory by law, the right-wing Front National have also raised concerns about vaccine safety.

Researchers also note just how much damage a single, blatantly flawed paper can cause. Much of the distrust in vaccinations comes from a paper published by Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield reported that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine can cause autism. This has not only been repeatedly disproved, but it has since been shown that Wakefield knowingly tampered with the data and subjected children to inhumane treatment — and yet, his echo still lives on.

In the US, Donald Trump has also spoken against vaccines. Although his own experts have disproved his claims, a recent survey has found that 1 in 3 Trump supporters believe vaccines and autism are related. Meanwhile, on the plus side, countries like Portugal, Finland, and Belgium seem to have no affinity towards either populist leaders or antivaxxing.

[Read more here]

Neo-liberalism has increased inequality within countries even as it had decreased inequality between countries.  China and India and Brazil and Turkey have go richer, but working class people in developed countries have been left behind.  Neo-liberalism has benefitted the already rich in developed countries, but incomes for the lowest one or two deciles of income have barely risen in real terms, while job security has declined.   But neo-liberalism hasn't just made our societies more unequal.  It has also made them nastier.  I doubt Trump would have won the election if working class per capita incomes hadn't stagnated for 30 years.  And if the working class hadn't come to believe that the Democrats had stopped caring about them.

What can be done about it?  Well, a universal basic income in developed countries would be a huge step to alleviating poverty.  Just as a universal old age pension helped reduce poverty among the old, so a UBI would reduce poverty among the poorest of our society, including the working poor.  A universal free healthcare system makes illness a health problem not a financial disaster like it is in the USA.  There are other steps our societies could take, for example, by making zero hours contracts illegal, but perhaps the biggest step would be the UBI, because it would give the jobless the option not to work for exploitative employers.   Things don't have to be like this.  We can change them.

Margaret Thatcher: "Poverty is a personality defect"

Who else but Margaret Thatcher could say something so wrong?

Rutger Bregman gives an entertaining and informative speech about poverty.   He ends with "Poverty is not a lack of character.  Poverty is a lack of cash."  The video is only 15 minutes long but it is revelatory and fascinating.  Oh, and he proves The Iron Lady wrong.