UBI USA!
COMPILATION AN COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 15, 2019

MANY FEAR THAT ROBOTS WILL BECOME THE WORKERS IN MANY OR MOST SITUATIONS IN THE USA, LEAVING HUMANS WITHOUT AN OCCUPATION. UBI IS COMING, SAYS ROBERT REICH, “AND IT’S A GOOD THING.” I BELIEVE IT IS AN INEVITABLE PART OF A NEW AMERICA IF AUTOMATION CONTINUES AT ITS’ CURRENT PACE, BUT WE WILL HAVE TO ADJUST OUR ACTIVITIES TO MATCH SOME DRASTIC CHANGES IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE GOOD. THE UBI, OR UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, WILL GIVE US A BASIC LEVEL OF INCOME WHICH WE CAN ADD TO BY DOING WORK, STARTING BUSINESSES, OR FOLLOWING OUR FAVORITE ART FORM. WHAT ABOUT THOSE WHO AREN’T SO BENIGN IN THEIR ORIENTATION? “IDLE HANDS ARE THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP.”

MANY YEARS AGO IN THE 1960S, THERE WAS A BOOK CALLED “THE LEISURE SOCIETY,” AND I THINK THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WOULD/WILL HAVE UNDER THIS SITUATION. NO ONE WOULD HAVE FULL EMPLOYMENT. OUR TASK WILL BE ADJUSTING TO THE STATE OF MIND IN WHICH WE WILL HAPPILY GIVE OF OUR TIME AND ENERGY TO THOSE WHO NEED HELP, BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE JOBS THAT TAKE UP ALL DAY, AND WE WILL PERHAPS GET USED TO THE IDEA OF LIVING IN PEACE. IN FACT, PEOPLE MAY BE DISCOURAGED FROM WORKING FULL TIME, SO THAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN “SHARE” THE JOB. PEOPLE DO HAVE A NEED TO KEEP BUSY.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY HANDICAPPED PEOPLE TO HELP, THE ELDERLY AND THE YOUNG; AND WE CAN HELP EACH OTHER, OR SHARE JOBS THAT ARE AVAILABLE. WE COULD WORK PERHAPS 20 HOURS A WEEK, OR PARTICIPATE IN “JOB SHARING.” WE CAN WRITE, DO ART AND LESS WELL-PAID WORK SUCH AS GARDENING AND LANDSCAPING, WHICH MANY OF US LOVE TO DO ANYWAY. WE WOULD BE GETTING A WAGE THAT MEETS OUR BASIC NEEDS, SO WHAT PART TIME WORK WE DO CAN BE PUT TOWARD A CHOSEN PERSONAL ENDEAVOR, FOR PROFIT OR FOR THE AID OF OTHERS. A PERSON WHO DOES WORK WILL NEED SOMEONE TO COOK, CLEAN AND DO CHILDCARE. WE CAN TAKE THE TIME TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN READING AND OTHER SKILLS – MUSIC, PERHAPS.

HERE COMES ANOTHER POTENTIALLY FRIGHTENING CONCEPT, UBI.
UBI IS THE ACRONYM FOR A MOUTHFUL OF A NEW CONCEPT: UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, OR GUARANTEED MINIMUM INCOME. WIKIPEDIA EXPLAINS THE SEVERAL FORMS HERE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income. I’VE SEEN THAT PUT IN SOME OTHER WAYS, BUT THIS EXPLAINS THE IDEA BEST, AND YES, THIS IS ONE OF THE NEW PROGRESSIVE IDEAS THAT ARE BEING FLOATED BY BERNIE SANDERS AND QUITE A FEW OTHERS. IS IT FOR THE VERY POOR ONLY, IN OTHER WORDS A NEW KIND OF “WELFARE?" WOULD DRAWING IT BE TIME-LIMITED? THAT VARIES. FROM WIKIPEDIA, “GUARANTEED MINIMUM INCOME (GMI), ALSO CALLED MINIMUM INCOME, IS A SYSTEM[1] OF SOCIAL WELFARE PROVISION THAT GUARANTEES THAT ALL CITIZENS OR FAMILIES HAVE AN INCOME SUFFICIENT TO LIVE ON, PROVIDED THEY MEET CERTAIN CONDITIONS. ELIGIBILITY IS TYPICALLY DETERMINED BY CITIZENSHIP, A MEANS TEST, AND EITHER AVAILABILITY FOR THE LABOUR MARKET OR A WILLINGNESS TO PERFORM COMMUNITY SERVICES. THE PRIMARY GOAL OF A GUARANTEED MINIMUM INCOME IS TO REDUCE POVERTY. IF CITIZENSHIP IS THE ONLY REQUIREMENT, THE SYSTEM TURNS INTO A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME.”

NOTE: IF YOU READ THIS DESCRIPTION OF NBER, YOU WILL SEE THAT ITS’ “LACK OF BIAS” IS TIGHTLY HEDGED WITH DISCLAIMERS. THEREFORE, I HAVE LOOKED MORE DEEPLY AT THE ORGANIZATION “NBER.” BUT DON’T READ THE NBER ARTICLE ON THE UBI, WITHOUT ALSO READING THE SOURCEWATCH COMMENTS, AND THE NEW YORK TIMES PIECE BY ROBERT REICH. FOR THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE MONEY FOR BASIC NEEDS, THIS SHOULD BE INSTITUTED, WITH THE PROVISO THAT THEY MAY WORK TO THEIR HEART'S CONTENT UP TO A MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF ANNUAL EARNINGS COMBINED WITH PROPERTY OF A CERTAIN VALUE. AFTER THAT, THEY SHOULD BE TAXED AT THE PROPER UPPER LEVEL FOR THEIR NEW TAX BRACKET. IN OTHER WORDS, IT WOULD CONVERT TO A GRADUATED INCOME TAX LIKE WE HAVE TODAY ON THOSE NEWLY MINTED MIDDLE CLASS AND RISING PEOPLE.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/national-bureau-of-economic-research-nber/

“LEAST BIASED”

These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources. See all Least Biased Sources.

Factual Reporting: HIGH

Notes: Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals. The NBER is the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. Twenty-six Nobel Prize winners in Economics and thirteen past chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations. It is very important to note that the research papers produced by NBER are working papers and are not peer reviewed. In other words, the research is open to discussion and criticism. Some papers may contain bias and some could in fact be wrong. We give this source a least biased rating because the economists who are affiliated with the group come from all political affiliations. We give them a high factual reporting rating based on these papers being working papers and not stated as definitive fact. (D. Van Zandt 3/23/2017)
Source: http://www.nber.org/


https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Bureau_of_Economic_Research
National Bureau of Economic Research

A December 1, 2002, news story [From Reporter David Leonhardt] in the New York Times [1] on the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., of Cambridge, MA, called the institution non-partisan but failed to identify a penny of the $10 million it receives in conservative philanthropic underwriting.

"Reporter David Leonhardt found time to report that the bureau, headed by Martin S. Feldstein, guru to Bush-economics, is the 'nation's premier economic research organization,' but couldn't do a simple Google search to determine where it gets its money.

"But reporter Leonhardt 'does' have some interesting things to say about Harvard University:

"Still, Ec10, as it is known at Harvard, is hardly neutral -- in its readings or its lectures -- and its point of view contributes a good deal to his importance. Over the last two decades, thousands of Harvard undergraduates have received a decidedly anti-tax, free-market-leaning introduction to economics.

"And there's this gem about Feldstein's partisanship and his crappy economic analysis, 'driven' by partisanship:

"For his part, Mr. Feldstein has shown little taste since the 1980's for straying from the Republican Party line. In 1992, he predicted that the Clinton administration's tax increase would stifle economic growth and do little to erase the deficit...In 2001, when President Bush was forming his cabinet, Mr. Feldstein and his wife began a Boston Globe article by writing, 'Paul O'Neill was an inspired choice for secretary of the Treasury.' Mr. Feldstein is also on the board of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company with strong Republican ties.
"And the next time you hear someone refer to Feldstein as from Harvard, remember that, according to Feldstein,

"I have a Harvard office, but I hardly ever use it..."

Funding:

Between 1985 and 2001, the organization received $9,963,301 in 73 grants from only four foundations:

John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife)
Smith Richardson Foundation


SEE BELOW.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/13/18220838/universal-basic-income-ubi-nber-study
The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet
Does it replace existing programs? How much should it be? And who pays for it?
By Kelsey Piper Feb 13, 2019, 11:00am EST

PHOTOGRAPH -- Oakland, California, is one of many cities trying a universal basic income pilot program. Ben Margot/AP

Universal basic income — the idea of giving everybody money — has been gaining momentum in policy circles lately. Finland just wrapped up a trial, and India might adopt a nationwide program. Proponents are hoping that the US, as it grapples with mounting inequality, will figure out how to offer a UBI here.

But a new National Bureau of Economic Research* (NBER) working paper by Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein dumps some cold water on UBI enthusiasm. In their paper, the economists argue that a developed-world UBI is more distant than we realize, and that pilot programs aren’t going to change that.

The aim of their paper was to pin down some UBI proposals in enough detail to analyze their effects, and to summarize what we know already (from existing research on the effects of welfare) about the likely income and employment effects of a UBI. “There is a lack of clarity on what makes a UBI, what problem it is meant to solve, whether the social safety net can or is providing these benefits, and what (if anything) can be learned from the pilot programs that we don’t already know,” the paper argues. “Our paper seeks to fill this gap.”

Their takeaway? We’re studying the wrong things. We’ve pinned so many hopes to UBI — some of them contradictory — that it’s not clear anymore what concrete empirical results from our pilot programs would help us conclude it’s a good idea. At the same time, proponents typically haven’t characterized their plans in enough detail that we can figure out how to pay for them and how they’ll affect the poor.

That doesn’t necessarily mean UBI is a utopian pipe dream. But it does suggest that, right now, UBI is proposed as a solution to many different social ills, and the details of UBI proposals are often underspecified — so it’s not clear who’d get money, how much, or how we’d pay for it. If we want to fix our welfare system, that has to change.

Giving people money solves problems — but which ones?

The idea of a universal basic income is simple: give everyone free money, no strings attached.

There are a lot of problems with America’s current welfare system. People fall through its cracks; they have difficulty finding out which programs they’re eligible for and experience shame and stigma for being on welfare.

There are also a lot of problems on the horizon. Technological unemployment hasn’t quite panned out yet — new technology might shift where the jobs are, but it doesn’t seem to destroy them — but some people fear that won’t be true forever, as we learn to automate more and more. And inequality is rising, leaving people worried that the gains from new technologies will leave most of us behind.

It’s that perfect storm of policy worries that has gotten so many people excited about UBI.

“Attention may be running ahead of actual policy development,” Hoynes and Rothstein argue in the opening to their paper. In particular, lots of arguments are being floated about UBI. They mostly rely on different and incompatible visions of the program, and they sometimes make exactly opposite predictions.

For example, take the argument that the current welfare system discourages work and traps people in poverty. This implies that a UBI would be good in part because it wouldn’t discourage work; if the program was working as intended, we’d see labor force participation increase.

A related argument, the paper observes, is the argument that UBI could “shift labor supply from unpleasant/precarious jobs to jobs that combine low pay with high amenities, jobs with opportunities for human capital accumulation*, or simply jobs more aligned with individual tastes (e.g., in the arts).”

[*https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032715/what-human-capital-and-how-it-used.asp* -- Education and skills of each employee.]

That is, instead of people working poorly paid jobs they hate, they’d feel able to work jobs that might be similarly poorly paid but which they love — founding a company, opening a restaurant, managing a community theater, making art, running kids’ programs. That’s a way UBI could avoid affecting the labor supply at all, while making the world a better place.

But other arguments for UBI assume it will decrease the labor supply. The technological unemployment argument, for example, seems to rest on the assumption that UBI will decrease the labor supply — and that this is a good thing. Under this model, UBI is part of how we transition from a society where people need to work to a society where they don’t. Complaining that they won’t get jobs is beside the point.

As the paper spells out, this makes it tricky to evaluate whether UBI programs are living up to expectations. We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it.

That’s a problem, Rothstein told me. Studies like the one Finland recently conducted are “meant to tell us whether a UBI is a good idea, but it’s not clear what results would lead to you saying, ‘Yes, it’s a good idea’ or, ‘No, it’s not a good idea.’”

Are we looking for a UBI to increase labor market participation? Leave it the same? Decrease it? Do we want a UBI in order to fix welfare disincentives to work, or in order to fix the fact that people have to work to survive? “You can’t solve a problem and its opposite with the same solution,” Rothstein said.

Does a UBI replace existing programs or supplement them? Both options have problems.
“A truly universal UBI would be enormously expensive,” the paper argues. This is uncontroversial, even among UBI supporters, but it’s important to spell out — and to look in depth at our options for paying for it.

“The kinds of UBIs often discussed would cost nearly double current total spending on the ‘big three’ programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid),” the paper finds. “Moreover, each of these programs would likely be necessary even if a UBI were in place, as each addresses needs that would not be well served by a uniform cash transfer.”

How expensive does a UBI have to be? That depends on how you’re defining it, of course. The NBER team argues that to qualify as a UBI, a program needs to be universal — given to everyone, not to targeted subgroups. It needs to be sufficient to raise the recipients out of poverty — for their core model, they consider a UBI of $12,000 a year.

That’s, unsurprisingly, super pricey. “A universal payment of $12,000 per year to each adult U.S. resident over age 18 would cost roughly $3 trillion per year,” they find. “This is about 75 percent of current total federal expenditures, including all on- and off-budget items, in 2017. (If those over 65 were excluded, the cost would fall by about one-fifth.) Thus, implementing this UBI without cuts to other programs would require nearly doubling federal tax revenue.”

Many advocates of UBI have a solution to that: UBI should replace other programs, not just supplement them. The NBER paper argues that this solution doesn’t work as well as we’d hope. “Even eliminating all existing transfer programs — about half of federal expenditures — would make only a dent in the cost,” they observe.

And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive,” the paper argues. That’s not what anyone’s going for.

Making a UBI generous enough that we could afford to eliminate all other programs would raise the costs further. I asked Rothstein about a program that also provided payments to kids (a UBI in general isn’t yet on the table politically, but a UBI for kids may be). He said their paper hadn’t — and couldn’t — compare every possible program, but that you could improve the redistributive effects with an approach like that one. But again, any expansion of the benefits increases the price tag.

Rothstein and Hoynes argue that while supporters of a UBI are trying to make the transition from “out-there idea” to “serious policy proposal” with pilot programs, the pilot programs aren’t going to be able to answer the most important questions that remain. Those questions are how UBI will fit with existing programs, and how we’ll pay for it. If UBI is to become a real option on the table for Congress anytime soon, those are the details we’ll have to nail down — and getting them right should be our next priority.

The paper is a discouraging read for UBI proponents. But it’s not a reason to abandon the idea that everyone deserves to share in society’s prosperity, whether they work or not. Instead, it’s a reason to remember that a big idea isn’t a policy proposal, and that you have to start putting forth policy proposals — specific enough that they will be criticized — to get real policy change. I came away from the paper wanting a much smaller UBI (per person, not per adult) that we could scale up as the economy grows and the country becomes more prosperous. This paper needn’t be a call to give up on UBI, but a call to figure out how to make it work.

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VIDEO FROM ROBERT REICH:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/04/24/robert_reich_universal_basic_income_is_coming_and_thats_a_good_thing.html
Robert Reich: Universal Basic Income Is Coming And That's A Good Thing
Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date April 24, 2018


UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/books/review/annie-lowrey-give-people-money-andrew-yang-war-on-normal-people.html
NONFICTION
What if the Government Gave Everyone a Paycheck?
By Robert B. Reich
July 9, 2018

GIVE PEOPLE MONEY
How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World
By Annie Lowrey
263 pp. Crown. $26.

THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE
The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
By Andrew Yang
284 pp. Hachette Books. $28.

If climate change, nuclear standoffs, Russian trolls, terrorist threats and Donald Trump in the White House don’t cause you feelings of impending doom, you might think about artificial intelligence. I’m not just referring to big-brained robots taking over civilization from us smaller-brained humans, but the more imminent possibility they’ll take over our jobs.

It’s already happening. Robots and related forms of artificial intelligence are rapidly supplanting what remain of factory workers, call-center operators and clerical staff. Amazon and other online platforms are booting out retail workers. We’ll soon be saying goodbye to truck drivers, warehouse personnel and professionals who do whatever can be replicated, including pharmacists, accountants, attorneys, diagnosticians, translators and financial advisers. Machines may soon do a better job than doctors at scanning for cancer.

This doesn’t mean a future without jobs, as some doomsayers predict. But robots will almost certainly push down wages in all the remaining human-touch jobs (child care, elder care, home health care, personal coaches, sales and so on) that robots can’t do because they’re not, well, human. Even today, with technology having already displaced many workers, there’s no jobs crisis. The official rate of unemployment is at a remarkably low 3.8 percent. Instead, we have a good jobs crisis. The official rate hides millions of people working part time who would rather have full-time jobs, along with millions more who are too discouraged to look for work (many ending up on disability), college grads overqualified for their jobs and a growing army of contingent workers with zero job security. Blanketing all are stagnant or declining wages and vanishing job benefits. Today’s typical American worker earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 1979, adjusted for inflation. Nearly 80 percent of adult Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next paycheck will be.

Image
Advancing technologies aren’t the only cause of this predicament, but notwithstanding Trump’s claim to the contrary, technology is a bigger culprit than trade. The economy keeps growing yet most economic gains are going to a few — largely financiers and, increasingly, inventors and owners of the digitized devices that are replacing good jobs. Our economic system isn’t designed for this. If the trend continues, it’s unclear who will even earn enough to buy all the future robots.

Economic change on this scale doesn’t happen without something cracking. The shift from farm to factory featured decades of bloody labor conflict; the move from factory to office and other sedentary jobs caused more upheaval. What will happen when robots push most people out of steady work and into lower-wage gig jobs? I doubt we’ll see a revolution. A more likely scenario is a slow slouch toward authoritarianism and xenophobia. We may already be there.

What’s the answer? Here in the Bay Area where I live, where inventors and engineers are busily digitizing everything, many civic and business leaders are touting something called a universal basic income, or U.B.I. It’s universal in the sense that everyone would receive it, basic in that it would be just enough to live on and cash income rather than voucher-based, like food stamps or Section 8 housing. To the rest of America, a U.B.I. may seem like a pipe dream, but from my vantage point some form of it seems inevitable.

Several recent books have provided good background briefings for what a U.B.I. could be, including those by the labor leader Andy Stern, the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and the Belgian academics Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght. To these offerings, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, adds his own, somewhat breathless version in “The War on Normal People.” Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment in “Give People Money.” Both are useful primers on the case for a U.B.I.

The two books cover so much of the same terrain that I’m tempted to wonder whether they were written by the same robot, programmed for slightly different levels of giddy enthusiasm. Both cite Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman as early supporters of a U.B.I. Both urge that a U.B.I. be set at $1,000 a month for every American. Both point out that with poverty currently defined as an income for a single adult of less than $12,000 a year, such a U.B.I. would, by definition, eliminate poverty for the 41 million Americans now living below the poverty line. It would also improve the bargaining power of millions of low-wage workers — forcing employers to increase wages, add benefits and improve conditions in order to retain them. If a U.B.I. replaced specific programs for the poor, it would also reduce government bureaucracy, minimize government interference in citizens’ lives and allow people to avoid the stigma that often accompanies government assistance. By virtue of being available to all, a U.B.I. would not only guarantee the material existence of everyone in a society; it would establish a baseline for what membership in that society means.

U.B.I.’s critics understandably worry that it would spur millions to drop out of the labor force, induce laziness or at least rob people of the structure and meaning work provides. Both Yang and Lowrey muster substantial research to rebut these claims. I’m not sure they need it. After all, $12,000 a year doesn’t deliver a comfortable life even in the lowest-cost precincts of America, so there would still be plenty of incentive to work. Most of today’s jobs provide very little by way of fulfillment or creativity anyway.

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A U.B.I. might give recipients a bit more time to pursue socially beneficial activities, like helping the elderly or attending to kids with special needs or perhaps even starting a new business. Yang suggests it would spur a system of “social credits” in which people trade their spare time by performing various helpful tasks for one another. (I.R.S. be warned.) Surely a U.B.I. would help compensate many people — especially women — for the unpaid labor they already contribute. As Lowrey points out, some 40 million family caregivers in America provide half a trillion dollars of unpaid adult care annually. Child care has become so expensive that one of every three stay-at-home mothers today lives below the poverty line (compared with 14 percent in 1970).

But how could America possibly afford a U.B.I.? A $1,000-a-month grant to every American would cost about $3.9 trillion a year. That’s about $1.3 trillion on top of existing welfare programs — roughly the equivalent of the entire federal budget, or about a fifth of the entire United States economy. Both Yang and Lowrey come up with laundry lists of potential funding sources — from soaking the rich (raising the top tax bracket to 55 percent, enlarging the estate tax and implementing new taxes on wealth, financial transactions and perhaps even the owners of the robots and related devices that are displacing jobs), to instituting a carbon tax or a value-added tax.

Whatever the source of funds, it seems a safe bet that increased automation will allow the economy to continue to grow, making a U.B.I. more affordable. A U.B.I. would itself generate more consumer spending, stimulating additional economic activity. And less poverty would mean less crime, incarceration and other social costs associated with deprivation. “You know what’s really expensive?” Yang asks. “Dysfunction. Revolution.”

If these measures still aren’t enough to foot the bill, Lowrey suggests making a U.B.I. less universal by taxing away U.B.I. payments to high-income earners and reducing other forms of social insurance (for example, eliminating food stamps and welfare programs). As a last resort, she writes, a U.B.I. could be implemented as a kind of negative income tax, by which government simply ensures that every person or household has a certain minimum yearly income. This is what Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman had in mind. Lowrey figures that the cost of such a guarantee would approximate the current total costs of the earned-income tax credit, supplemental security income, housing assistance, food stamps and school lunches. She notes that the simplest way to achieve this would be to transform existing antipoverty programs into unconditional cash transfers.

But there’s a logical flaw in her argument. Once a U.B.I. is no longer universal or even basic (what if the poor are worse off when other forms of assistance are stripped away?), it’s hard to see the point of having it in the first place. More troubling is Lowrey’s blurring of the distinction between a U.B.I. that redistributes resources from the superrich to the growing number of vulnerable lower-income Americans and one that merely turns programs for the poor into cash assistance. The latter may be warranted, but it wouldn’t touch America’s growing scourge of inequality and economic insecurity, which will be made worse as robots take over good jobs.

A core challenge in the future will be how to redistribute money from the ever richer owners of the robots and related technologies to the rest of us, who are otherwise likely to become poorer and less secure. This is not just an economic challenge but also a political one. As we know from recent history, vast fortunes translate directly into political power, and such power effectively resists redistribution. Sadly, neither of these authors discusses how to deal with this paradox.

A world inhabited only by robots, their billionaire owners and a large and increasingly restive population is the plotline for countless dystopian fantasies, but it’s a reality that appears to be drawing closer. If we continue on the path we’re on, we will need to make fundamental choices about how to support human livelihoods and ensure equal participation in our economy and society. Most basically, we will have to confront the realities of vastly unequal economic and political power. Even if we manage to enact a U.B.I., it will not be nearly enough.

Robert B. Reich, a former secretary of labor and a professor of public policy at Berkeley, is the co-creator of the Netflix documentary “Saving Capitalism” and the author of “The Common Good.”

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A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2018, on Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Barely Afloat in America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe