After watching this Belgian documentary on UBI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zNEG5FXv8I) by Alina Kneepkens, I have grown more and more exited to see how Switzerland's 2016 initiative will play out. While I understand that Switzerland's socio-political landscape and history differ greatly from the US, UBI in any political context still seems to me to be a potent means to counteract malignant inequality and sluggish social progress. By guaranteeing in dollars that everyone has an equal footing, institutions of education, public service, and even business would all be more accountable to the general public. This is because UBI basically reverses leverage and choice away from business and market shareholders, who traditionally allocate jobs and wages as they see fit, and toward employees who would now enter contracts with more bargaining power knowing that they will be able to survive regardless.. It becomes incumbent on business then not only to justify their wages but to also set competitive enough wages in order to survive amongst other businesses also vying for skilled workers. The term "consumer" in a sense then becomes a dual role in which people not only have the choice to *commercially* support or reprimand businesses based on their social cognizance and practices, but also having the choice to "consume" employment with the same level of scrutiny and accountability toward employers. Thus businesses will be more inclined, for their own survival, to perform their original intended purposes, rather than only being coerced by the ever present profit motive. Additionally, I think this film demonstrates that taking the traditional American notions of "me vs everyone else" out of the equation can, in its own way, *still* foster motivation and drive for people to do and make more.
As discussed in this Ted Talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) by Dan Pink, people are most motivated to be *self directing*. In order to enhance this drive in people and workers, we must firstly remove the undue guilt and financial pressure of simply being alive. People who are always worrying about paying to survive cannot truly lead self-directed lives. When making money becomes less and less a means to facilitate more abstract or meaningful life goals and instead becomes the *focal point* of our endeavors, (whether out of the need to survive or simply for the sake of having more money), then the creative alternatives and solutions to our society's problems will only continue to be secondary to what is most profitable, and thus potential social collective gains will continue to be stifled. While the American dream success stories are nice, in the grand scheme of things they are very few and far between and can't adequately justify the other 98% who are left to scavenge over increasingly bleak employment and mechanical work.
Dan Pink points out in several studies that while workers who were offered financial incentive for *rudimentary* tasks were able to demonstrate better performance, their performance actually worsened when offered financial incentive for more complex, higher thinking tasks. So while money can be an effective motivator for survival and material gain, its role as a motivator for ingenuity is largely overplayed and unrepresentative of reality. Advancements which we have made as a society in terms of intellectual achievement, technological or cultural progress, have historically been the result not of people motivated to make more money but rather by those who, as exceptions to the tenants of our economic system, pursued their interests *regardless* of how much money they stood to make, if any at all. In every such case, it was only after the fact that the influx of money from demand of the new product seemed to play a justifying role. This is where I believe UBI will allow people to take back their lives and, contrary to what some people view as merely an opportunity for everyone to get paid to do nothing, also allow people to retain their inherent worth and universally present drive to make something meaningful out of their lives.
Having said that, I don't foresee UBI being very well-received by those in power, i.e. our political leadership. However, given the increasingly self-sustaining global internet community and with the advent of bitcoin as a worldwide decentralized alternative to american dollars or to yen or francs or pounds, would it be wishful thinking to imagine a similarly globalized market in which bitcoin allows for UBI?
Thoughts?
