So I have a question on the technical disruption side.
I live in San Francisco, arguably the center
of a lot of the disruption.
And technocrats in San Francisco, for the past year or two, have really
gotten into this idea of guaranteed basic income,
or mincome, as a possible solution to this.
And to me, it seems, at best, a band-aid, and at worst, the beginning of the dismantling
of the social welfare state.
And I wondered if you had any of opinions about the feasibility or impact of a
mincome policy.
So this is one of these ideas that have been--
Can I actually add to that?
Sure.
Because I've spent the last 18 months in the Bay Area too.
And at least the kind of community, the intellectual community around Stanford,
has this thing of "this is really great that we actually
don't have enough work for labor.
Because none of us should work anyway.
We should just take 10% off of the top 1%, distribute it,
and everybody gets to do whatever they want with their time."
It's not a terrible solution, if you could actually
make it happen, right?
Yeah.
And so why should any of us work anyway?
If it's going to be a sharing economy, if everybody's
going to be Uber and Air BnB?
I'm really curious about this question and what you think about that.
Because it's radical and it's anti-capitalist, but it could work.
Right.
I totally agree, but the problem's getting your hands on the cash, right?
So my favorite example for this that I
like to give in talks where I bump into Republican audiences,
which is usually when I talk to financial conferences
and things, is to say, "so how many of you
voted for Mitt Romney?"
And quite a few hands are going up.
"OK, why?"
And I don't mean this as a partisan thing.
I didn't mean it as a fairness thing.
What was Mitt Romney's effective tax rate?
9%.
Because he only pays capital gains at 15%.
And he basically has tax shelters and incorporations
in Delaware and Arizona and the Cayman Islands
and all the rest of it.
And he basically pays about an $0.08 to $0.09 on the dollar.
I pay $0.33.
If you add up all my state and local, I'm paying German rates of tax, but I'm
getting-- what would I call it?
Third world public services.
So I can't vote for that.
That's just unfair.
So there's a fairness question.
But it hasn't really become a political topic.
Because if that becomes the issue, then you can make an argument for that
type of radical redistribution, which is essentially
"pay your goddamn taxes."
And given that you've got most of the money,
don't tell me you pay most of the taxes.
You do in volume terms, but you're cheating on the margin.
You owe a hell of a lot more.
So there's a wonderful book called Treasure Islands.
And the estimate in that is if you go to all the tax havens where all the
Mitts in the world have all their cash stored, and this
is just those bits.
There's other places, like art, warehousing, and all that sort
of stuff you can hide wealth.
$29 trillion.
I'll say that again-- $29 trillion.
That's a lot redistribution you could do.
And all of that is basically money that people have avoided tax on.
So if the Community Chest agreement is, "you made it here, you pay your taxes,"
well, we're making it everywhere and we're not paying any taxes.
Hence Poland, Ireland and all that sort of stuff.
So you can see the beginning of movement on this, particular on the corporate side.
That's there.
But let's get to the heart of the matter.
Because this is really it.
Why should we work?
I often think that economists forget that the most basic thing you learn in
economics is the labor-leisure trade off.
As we get richer as a society, we're meant to work less.
We're not meant to be more insecure, working for crappier wages more and more hours.
So why is that happening?
Well, it's actually about the property rights behind it.
So let's go to San Francisco for a minute.
Uber is fantastic.
I think Uber is absolutely brilliant.
I love it.
I love the fact that when you need to get to the airport,
they actually show up.
I love the fact that it doesn't smell like nine people who've
been murdered in the back of this car before I get in it, which is your average
city taxi.
And I love the fact that all even if these guys are
basically ripping off the drivers, a much larger proportion of what they're
actually earning goes to them than rather it goes straight
to medallion holder who holds the license that's basically
a money pump from basically poor immigrants
who are earning an equivalent of less than minimum wage in tips.
So I love it.
It's great.
Let's say Uber gets driverless cars sorted out.
You'll eliminate 8 million jobs in the United States like that.
Now, unless you're going to give them some kind of compensation,
a basic income or anything like that, what exactly do you do?
Now, this is where it gets more into the ethics of capitalism,
because essentially we have a system that
says you need to work.
Everybody needs to work.
But what if you don't need them?
And this is a way bigger problem.
Because all the returns go to the guys at Uber.
All the returns go to the guys at Whatsapp, whoever gets robotics sorted out, all
the returns goes to them.
That 1% is going to become basically an enormous chunk
of national wealth.
It's going to go to increasingly fewer people.
Now, what we tend to do in those situations is we bust up the firms.
So go back to the 19th century.
Go back to the early 20th century.
Anti-trust.
Even in the '70s, Bell, telecoms, the whole lot.
When it gets too concentrated, when the returns are going
all one way, we tend to step in and actually break up the firms, redistribute the
property rights, whatever.
That's what you really need to do.
You need to democratize the returns to robots.
If you do that, then it's sustainable.
Because I wouldn't care if you replace me with a robot
if I got to go fishing instead.
Right?
That would be fine.
And There's still a lot of things-- forget the hype-- that robots simply
can't do.
What's the fastest growing job in the United States?
Elder care nurse.
Would you trust a robot to lift your nanna a bit?
Not going to happen, is it?
Not in a long time.
So there's still a lot of actual human contact
jobs which really can't be technologically disrupted.
But there's a hell of a lot that can be,
and they tend to be the people who are already
in that slice of the cake.
They're pissed off, both the left and right parties.
So you're raising exactly what the right issue-- why do we need to work?
So it's more than basic income.
It's actually about we can produce-- we can produce a super mega surplus for
the planet with 10% of the population working.
China can literally make everything that we need.
Why are we bothering?
Why does every country in the world need to make cars?
Why do we need to have so many different types,
if ultimately you're just going to have a few self-driving models that will take
you from here to there, and you can call
them up on your phone?
So this is way bigger than just those issues.
So they're exactly the right issues.
I don't have an answer, but that's definitely what the question needs to be-- why do
we need to work?
I ask myself that every morning.
Usually, when I've been out the night before.
"Why do I need to work?"