Some hoax!

By Paul Fell 

I'll take your leftovers

 By John Darkow

La Belle Époque

 By William Balfour

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.

The search for a moral justification for selfishness

 From a toot by Mark Holtom

20 Years Ago on July 6th, 2002 - the brilliant economist and thinker John Kenneth Galbraith, gave an interview in which he said this perfect bit:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

This is Wikipedia's article about J K Galbraith.  His book, The Affluent Society, is remarkable.  I must re-read 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.”

Colorado's solution to chronic homelessness

Solid Ground, a 40-unit supportive housing apartment complex, seen June 4, 2024, in Lakewood. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

From The Colorado Sun

When Solid Ground Apartments opens next week in Lakewood, it comes with proof of concept — giving people who are homeless a place to live, no strings attached, not only changes their lives but can save public money.

The new 40-unit complex is the first permanent supportive housing project in Colorado to copy Sanderson Apartments, which welcomed its first residents in 2017 as a national model in solving homelessness.

Both projects are run by community mental health centers and both invite people who are living outside — the ones burning through taxpayer dollars as they cycle in and out of jail, detox and hospital emergency rooms — to move directly into their own apartments.

A third, similar project is also in the works, set to open next spring. At the same time Jefferson Center for Mental Health prepares to welcome its first residents at Solid Ground, Denver’s mental health center, WellPower, announced it is breaking ground on a 60-unit project called Sheridan on 10th.

Solid Ground, as well as WellPower’s Sheridan on 10th, will have on-site mental health services, peer support specialists and case managers, all of which are available to residents but not required. Residents don’t have to have jobs and it’s OK if they have criminal records or are not sober or in recovery. Still, the “low-barrier” apartments have some rules — residents cannot cook illegal drugs on site, or start a fire to keep warm in the courtyard, or commit violent acts.

It’s not a step-up program intended to push people toward jobs and finding their own, independent apartments. The housing is available to them for as long as they want to stay.

“It means that people have a permanent home from the first day they move in,” Kuenzler said.

Both new buildings are designed for people who have grown used to sleeping outdoors, which means light-filled rooms, an abundance of plants, no dark hallways and plenty of outdoor space. At Solid Ground, residents can bring their dogs, and there is a community barbecue for people to use. The laundry room was strategically placed in a corner of the building so it has two walls with windows looking outside, creating a bright, airy feeling uncommon for a typical laundromat.

“We have heard time and again that laundry rooms are triggering areas,” said Taylor Clepper, Jefferson Center’s director of navigation and housing services and project manager for the complex. People who are homeless have been assaulted in laundromats, gotten into altercations about machines and belongings, and had their tent, cart or other belongings stolen outside while they were doing laundry.

The entire building is structured to make people feel comfortable and safe, in the hope that it will lead to recovery from mental health issues and substance use.

“There is a kind of dichotomy on the streets,” Clepper said. “There is safety that is created. There are groups, communities that form and really create safety for individuals and that’s where they feel safest. Conversely, there is a lot of trauma that happens on the streets. It’s a both-and situation, and we are trying to meet people where they are.”

“Trauma-informed” furniture was arriving at Sold Ground this week, including beds made for people accustomed to sleeping on the hard ground. Instead of wooden slats under the mattress, the beds have a wooden platform so people can remove the mattress and sleep directly on the wood.

Sleeping inside “feels very different than not having four walls around you or feeling the sun come up over your head,” Clepper said. The couches are narrow by design, to encourage people to try sleeping in their beds. Sleeping in the courtyard will not be encouraged, but it isn’t a deal-breaker. Overnight guests are allowed, but with restrictions, because it’s typically not the resident but the resident’s friends that lead to evictions, Clepper said.

Case managers will be on site, 24-7.

“We are going to work on housing first and then we will work on the rest,” Clepper said. “The goal is not to kick people out if there is a safe way to work with you. This is low-barrier housing and the intention is to keep them housed.”

There is evidence, based on years of studying and following up with the residents of Sanderson Apartments in Denver, that it works.

The Urban Institute tracked people’s usage of emergency services, hospital stays and the criminal justice system before and after moving into Sanderson.

The national think tank found that the first 250 residents had cost the government a total of $7.3 million per year when they lived outside and in shelters. After they were housed, researchers found a 40% reduction in arrests, a 30% reduction in jail stays, a 65% decrease in detox services and a 40% drop in emergency department visits.

The reductions made up for half of the cost of the program, which was started with $8.6 million from eight private investors as well as local housing resources.

The institute’s research also found that 86% of people in the program were still housed after one year, and 77% were still housed after three years.

The 60 units at Sanderson Apartments were originally filled through Denver’s “social impact bond,” a public-private partnership that included selecting the highest-users of the health care and criminal justice systems and inviting them to move in. Private companies loaned money to the mental health center and the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to build the complex, and the city paid them back with the savings created through decreased arrests, jail time, detox and emergency room visits.

The Urban Institute said its findings about Sanderson Apartments “disrupt the false narratives that homelessness is an unsolvable problem and that people who experience chronic homelessness choose to live on the street.” Researchers called for expanding supportive housing, arguing it could “end homelessness, break the homelessness-jail cycle.”

All the construction, funded largely by tax credits and grants, would make it seem that Colorado has turned a corner in how it gets its chronically homeless population off the streets. Have the years since the COVID pandemic, when homelessness was more visible and entrenched than ever, convinced people that government-funded, permanent housing is the solution?

“I would love to say yes to that,” said Kiara Kuenzler, president and CEO of Jefferson Center. But “I think there is still a lot of stigma, and sometimes the more visible folks without houses are in communities, the more that people can stigmatize and want to push away what is uncomfortable.”

Bringing neighbors and the public in general around to the idea is “requiring a lot more dialogue — even more dialogue now than when homelessness was less visible.”

Kuenzler often tells skeptics that people without housing are going to live in their neighborhoods anyway, so “whether they are in a tent or whether they are in an apartment with wraparound services really makes a difference.”

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

Poverty is the 4th cause of death in the US

Source: Mirriam-Webster

From The Guardian

Can you name the top 10 causes of death in America? Without too much trouble, most Americans could likely come up with some of them: cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents. But it would come as a surprise to many to know that poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

A recent study by one of our colleagues shows that cumulative poverty over many years is the fourth leading cause of death in this country. Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses. Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills.

But if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs? The relationship of poverty to disease and death is a well-established fact detailed in reports by the World Health Organization, the World Bank and our own government. But we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.

Sadly, the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In addition, poverty affects us all. Seventy-five per cent of all Americans between 20 and 75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives. Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.

Finally, poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.

But what if we could end poverty in America, the misery and suffering it generates – the 500 deaths a day it causes in this country? Our colleague Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?

As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.” Matthew Desmond elaborates a similar theme in his recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

It is difficult to believe that some people are pro-poverty. The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others. This is what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory workers, the conditions of the slums and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.

But this is not our destiny. We can be the generation that abolishes poverty, the country that goes from the bottom of the heap among its peers – whether it’s about poverty, or life expectancy – to the top of it. We can rise to lead and “we the people” of the US can stand up to form a more perfect union, lifting this generation and the generations after it out of poverty, wiping away the deaths being poor causes in this nation.

But this means holding up a mirror to who we are as a country. Those who gain from keeping people in the chains of poverty, condemning them to early death, must be confronted with a movement that names poverty in the richest nation on Earth as a public health crisis, an economic dead weight, a moral abomination and a stain on the republic. When the poor and low-wealth people of this nation link arms to make the moral case for an economy that works for everyone, we have the power to change the conversation about what is possible in Washington and in our statehouses.

The US claims to be a beacon of democracy abroad and a nation committed to justice and general welfare at home. This cannot be true as long as poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the richest nation in the history of the world. Poor and low-wealth people are fighting for their lives and for the life of our democracy through the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which worked with members of the US House of Representatives last year to introduce a Third Reconstruction Resolution that outlines policy priorities that can guide legislation to end poverty.

In an echo of the Bible, this movement is saying, “Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet been. Indeed, people who know that they do not have to accept the death sentence of poverty are leading the way.



[The Rev Dr William J Barber II is founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Gregg Gonsalves is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health]

Over the last 40 years, real wages in the US haven't risen, while real GDP has.  All the increase has gone into the pockets of the top 10% and the top 1%.  Much the same has happened over the last 10 years in the UK and Australia.  Neo-liberalism has failed.   Worse: it is literally killing people.

See also  Shit life syndrome

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.

Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs?

 From The Conversation

For decades it was conventional wisdom in the field of economics that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs.

In part, that’s because it’s based on the law of supply and demand, one of the most well-known ideas in economics. Despite it being called a “law,” it’s actually two theories that suggest if the price of something goes up – wages, for example – demand will fall – in this case, for workers. Meanwhile, their supply will rise. Thus an introduction of a high minimum wage would cause the supply of labor to exceed demand, resulting in unemployment.

But this is just a theory with many built-in assumptions.

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this year’s Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesn’t actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

Economics studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. And so, like other social sciences, economics is fundamentally interested in human behavior.

But humans behave in a wide variety of often hard-to-predict ways, with countless complications. As a result, economists rely on abstraction and theory to create models in hopes of representing and explaining the complex world that they are studying. This emphasis on complicated mathematical models, theory and abstraction has made economics a lot less accessible to the general public than other social sciences, such as psychology or sociology.

Economists also use these models to answer important questions, such as “Does a minimum wage cause unemployment?” In fact, this is one of the most studied questions in all of economics since at least 1912, when Massachusetts became the first state to create a minimum wage. The federal wage floor came in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And it’s been controversial ever since. Proponents argue that a higher minimum wage helps create jobs, grow the economy, fight poverty and reduce wage inequality.

Critics stress that minimum wages cause unemployment, hurt the economy and actually harm the low-income people that were supposed to be helped.

Most students in my introductory microeconomics class can easily show, using the standard supply and demand model, that an increase in the minimum wage above the level that the market sets on its own should drive up unemployment. In fact, this is one of the most commonly used examples in introductory economics textbooks.

However, this result assumes a perfectly competitive labor market in which workers and employers are abundant and employees can change jobs with ease. This is rarely the case in the real world, where a few companies frequently dominate in what are known as monopsonies.

And so others theorized that because monopsonistic companies had the power to set wages artificially low, a higher minimum wage could, perhaps counterintuitively, prompt companies to hire more workers in order to recover some of their lost profitability as a result of the increased labor costs.

How can economists tell which of these two theories may be right? They need data.

Studying the real world is difficult, and it’s constantly changing, so it is not easy to obtain all the relevant evidence.

Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials, a method vacinologists used to test the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Due to financial, ethical or practical constraints, we cannot easily split people into treatment or control groups – as is common in psychology. And we cannot randomly assign a higher minimum wage to some and not others and observe what will happen, which is how a biomedical scientist might study the impact of various treatments on human health.

And in studying the minimum wage, we cannot simply look at past times when it was increased and check what happened to unemployment a few weeks or months later. There are many other factors that affect the labor market, such as outsourcing and immigration, and it’s virtually impossible to isolate and pin down one factor such as a minimum wage hike as the cause.

This is where the pioneering work of natural experiments like the ones Card and Krueger have used over the years to study the effects of raising the minimum wage and other policy changes comes in. It began with their 1994 paper, but they’ve replicated the findings with other studies that have deepened the amount of data that shows the original theory about the minimum wage causing job losses is likely wrong.

Their approach isn’t without flaws – mostly technical ones –- and in fact economists still don’t have a clear answer to the question about the minimum wage that I posed earlier in this article. But because of Card, Krueger and their research, the debate over the minimum wage has gotten a lot less theoretical and much more empirical.

Only by studying how humans actually behave can economics hope to make meaningful predictions about how a policy change like increasing the minimum wage is likely to affect the behavior of the economy and the people living in it.

In Australia, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has done a study which concludes that a rise in the minimum wage (Australia has an extensive system of minimum wages) has no effect on employment or hours worked.  This is a particularly interesting study because it looks at each level of minimum wages (there are several) which have in the past had different percentage increases.  Those with higher percentage increases should have had higher rates of employment/hours worked losses.  And they did not.  Fascinating.

2 centuries of progress, but ...

 ... still a long way to go.

From  Our World in Data  (read the whole article --- it's fascinating)

The final chart summarizes the global history of poverty. It focuses on the last two centuries when humanity left the stagnation of the past behind and achieved growth for the first time. 

The world made good progress – in the last decade the share that lives on less than $10 per day has declined by 10 percentage points – but the chart also shows that much progress is still needed. 62% live on less than $10 per day and 85% live on less than $30. 

The global data makes clear why the world needs much more growth to end poverty. The world as a whole today is in a situation not so different from Sweden a century ago. The majority of the world left extreme poverty behind, but is still far poorer than $30 a day. 

Even after two centuries of the global fight against poverty we are still in the early stages. The history of global poverty reduction has only just begun.

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.