L’economia dopo l’automatizzazione

Paul Manson, per il Guardian:

The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen. The real dystopia is that, fearing the mass unemployment and psychological aimlessness it might bring, we stall the third industrial revolution. Instead we end up creating millions of low skilled jobs that do not need to exist.

The solution is to begin to de-link work from wages. You can see the beginnings of the separation on any business flight. Men and women hunched over laptops and tablets, elbows so close that if it were a factory it would be closed on health and safety grounds. […]

But to properly unleash the automation revolution we will probably need a combination of a universal basic income, paid out of taxation, and an aggressive reduction of the official working day. Typically, northern Europe is ahead of the curve: Sweden cut the working day to six hours, while Finland is experimenting with the idea of a basic citizen’s income.

Un altro articolo recente di FastCompany, prendendo spunto da Postcapitalismo (scritto, appunto, da Paul Manson), discute l’idea di un reddito di base universale:

The fundamental problem could be that work is losing its value. The thing that provided—that allowed families to prosper and individuals to build a sense-of-self—is under attack. […]

A basic income is key in a non-market economy. It’s what allows people to volunteer at nonprofit businesses, set up food co-ops, or design something using a 3-D design module. It wouldn’t stop people from working—those with well-paying, satisfying jobs would continue to do them—but it would stop people from having to do things that machines can do more easily and more safely.

A basic income is a way to spread the rewards of work across socially useful activities, only some of which are currently rewarded, economically speaking. “A basic income says, in effect, there are too few work hours to go around, so we need to inject liquidity into the mechanism that allocates them,” Mason writes. “The lawyer and the daycare worker would both need to be able to exchange hours of work at full pay, for hours of free time paid for by the state.”