A basic income really could end poverty forever - But to become a reality, it needs to get detailed and stop being oversold, por Dylan Matthews (Vox):
Basic income advocates like to talk in effusive terms about the idea’s cross-partisan appeal, how it unites radical Marxists like André Gorz and libertarians like Milton Friedman and American heroes like Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King Jr. They speak of its radical potential to remake society, and position it as an inevitable and necessary response to an incoming torrent of technological change. (...)
You can’t assume away politics, though. And when you take a look under the hood of major plans from basic income advocates, the politics begin to look daunting. The coalition between left and right evaporates, the idea’s economic inevitability looks fanciful, and the promise that the plan could end poverty forever looks more dependent on technical details than you might think. (...)
We have gone through large automation shocks before; are self-driving trucks really a bigger step than, well, trucks were? And if trucks and washing machines and all the other labor-saving inventions of the 20th century didn’t put anyone permanently out of work, but instead shifted the kind of work that was being done, why would we think matters would be any different in the 21st century? Why could the laundry workers of the 1940s find new jobs but the truck drivers of the 2020s can’t?
Indeed, as my colleague Matthew Yglesias is fond of pointing out, technological productivity growth is actually well below historical averages. These are days of miracle and wonder, but our grandparents seem to have lived through even more miraculous times and did not see work disappear in the process.
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