B.1.i – Inequality and Basic Income
There will be no enough new occupation opportunities after industry four revolution like after third one (new occupation such as software developer just covers one percent of all job market). Disruptive technologies being emerged in our modern world have the potential to leave humans lacking income and hence purpose.
Without an influential task which can be easily gathered via a professional job, people may lose their purpose and duty. At this point. religions or law systems may not be enough to give rise to an order in society, which is the main goal of our modernity attempts in the history.
We need to encourage people not to lose their goal by directing and rewarding them with a dynamic incentive system. People needs to be put into a continuous and self-motivated improvement procedure in order not to let their meaning of existence (feelings of mission and duty) gone.
For an unemployed person, a Basic Income can be life-saving by creating Leisure-Time for self-improvement. We need to create a transparent system distributing basic income to citizens according to their Social Contributions, Artificial Creativeness and Environmental and Judiciary Respectfulness.
If we do not vary the basic income payments according to the person’s attitudes, in other words if we perform an unconditional full-equality principal, it may cause a catastrophe in daily life where no one carries a respect to each other, to environment and society since there will be no punishments (income cuttings) according to behavioral actions.
It is a necessity to replace the term ‘Income Inequality‘ with the ‘Income Unfairness‘. Because, the goal of making all gaining the same income would be much more ideological than being reasonable. Every ones who stand closer to laziness than being hard-working and closer to be consumer than being productive should get what they deserve! And we can be sure that there will always some kind of choices in the society in significant amount.
But on the other hand, it seems inexorable that the income inequality will rise especially between ones who already owns capital and technology (machines and algorithms) and who do not. The ones who even exhibits remarkable efforts will possibly need more time to leverage her/his intellectual level in the aim of preserving or increasing her/his socioeconomic position (Social Mobility).
Above figure [1] illustrates the statistics about the historical social mobility performances of American citizens. And clearly states that the chance of Social Mobility (in the aspects of income) decreases significantly through the generations, even for the low and middle income classes.
With the help of ‘Universal Basic Income‘ system we can provide more leisure time to them that they can use wisely. We have to design the system self-determining the expectation levels for members of different socioeconomic layers of the society.
This new proposed system will help them to keep track on self-motivated-education which is the key of intellectual improvement and social mobility opportunities. Open Education platforms, already gaining global reputation and impacts, are going to take the star responsibility for encouraging society to make economical and intellectual jumps with much more cheap and accessible way. For a better world, we need to empower the cycle of: {‘Accumulated Knowledge’ –> ‘Social Intellectualism’ –> ‘Objective Commonsense’ –> ‘Hard Democracy’ –> ‘Accumulated Knowledge’}.
B.1.ii- Adam Smith & Perfect-Market Dream
New system may convert the Adam Smith’s dream of ‘Perfect/Atomistic Competition” assumption of microeconomy principals to be true by bringing the chance of satisfying theory’s conditions:
- Majority
- Apportionability
- Homogeneity
- Transparency
- Liquidity
with the help of E-Commerce. The only obstacle may exist in the condition of ‘liquidity’ due to powers of national governments and their commerce restrictions. But as the power of international companies dominates the world, governments loses their impact and those restrictions becomes more and more weak and pseudo.
For full freedom of information, which is essential for a Perfect-Market, we need to merge commercial services of all countries as one [1]. This will happen in anyway, sooner than we thought without depending on whether we are willing to do it now or not! And this also helps ‘Beneficiary Ethics’ theorem of J. S. Mill and Adam Smith, pioneers of Liberal Economics, to be true with detailed analytical/information based calculations depending on the records of citizens’ daily economical activities and attitudes.
B.1.iii- French Revolution and Share of Wealth
French Revolution, which brings the Representative Democracy, happened mainly due to the inhumane conditions of low-classes and the demand for more fair share of prosperity. As Karl Marx said, every historical occurrence depends on an economical (materialist) reason. French Revolution converted the source of power from slavery to employment and also the sovereignty from aristocracy to oligarchy (intend to be democracy). Oligarchs (top level bourgeoisie) fooled the public which were united against aristocrats and gained the control of wealthiness and hence the government. It was a half-achieved revolution failed to provide prosperity to the ordinaries.
There are actual indicators of this failure. We all know the scary reports of Oxfam [2] about the income inequality and its incremental trend over time. The number of low-income people increases all year to have the equal wealth with the richest 1%. According to the last report of Oxfam, 2020, top 1 share captures twice as much as the bottom 90%.
This also damages the Social Mobility abilities of the society and creates a negative-feedback-loop.
As the Figure-4 [3] shows, there is a disruptive shift from middle-class to upper ones, but the lower ones stuck on their positions. The gap between blue-color and the white-color increases over time. So, the society loses its middle class.
It would be enough to remember Aristotle’s critism for this situation to make a remarkable conclusion in this section: “Democracy cannot be implemented with high and low casts in the society, since those are the big and small thieves trying to enlarge their assets and playgrounds. We need middle classes!”.
New generation technology (digitalization) can complete what French Revolution could not achieve, the real Democracy by:
- destroying intermediaries (privileged companies) keeping the ways through public services,
- empowering shared-economy increasing the possibilities of social mobility,
- developing collaborative platforms catalyzing individual contributions and
- much importantly opening the ways of information to everyone about every actions in the world (transparency)
especially with the help of Blockchain based systems, like popularly known cryptocurrencies.
References
[1] Remember the ‘universal singularity of legalism’ of Stoicists and the symbolic object of it, ‘Cosmopolis’.
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-decline-of-upward-mobility-in-one-chart/
IntelligentDemocracyProject 