Essay #3 Due 4-23-19
In the context of Annie Lowry’s Give People Money, support, refute, or complicate the argument that Universal Basic Income is a necessary implementation for human rights, social order, and permanent unemployment.
For other sources:
Read Oren Cass’ “Why a Universal Basic Income Is a Terrible Idea” and write an essay that supports, defends, or complicates the author’s position that UBI will do more harm than good. For sources, I refer you to Universal Basic Income explained, UBI being used in other countries, UBI explained by Jordan Peterson as a life-purpose problem.
Option B (New Addition): Should Community College be Free?
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that community college should be free.
Look at pros and cons from Forbes article.
Recent Atlantic article argues for free community college.
Option C: Read "In admissions scandal, the students should be expelled" by Michael Hiltzik and support or defend the author's assertion. Should rich students whose parents paid their way illegally into top-tier colleges be expelled? Are all these students equal? Some are not even taking classes seriously evidenced by their YouTube videos. Others may be performing well. Should their performance make a difference?
Also see Atlantic essay about "Real Scandal" and how there is no way to prevent the next college scandal.
See Clint Smith essay "Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Don't Belong."
3-28 Homework #9: Read Give People Money, chapters 6 and 7, and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how America’s racial injustice makes a compelling case for Universal Basic Income.
4-2 Homework #10: Read Give People Money, chapters 8 to end of the book, and in a 3-paragraph essay explain the practical, economic, and philosophical problems raised by trying to give everyone a Universal Basic Income.
4-4: Give People Money, chapter 8 to end of the book;
4-16 Option B (New Addition): Should Community College be Free?
Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that community college should be free.
4-18 Peer Edit for Essay 3 and Portfolio Grading Part 1
4-23 Essay #3 Due.
UBI: Optimistic Vs. Pessimistic Framework
Annie Lowrey and I both agree that UBI is a likely result of mass unemployment. However, whereas Lowrey is hopeful about UBI helping the people, I see UBI in a more pessimistic framework: UBI is about the inevitable decline of human free will, economic equality, and human dignity.
Or put my pessimism in a thesis:
Pessimistic Thesis
Contrary to Annie Lowrey’s hopeful embrace of UBI, I see UBI as an inevitability that spells the death of economic equality, human dignity, and free will.
Supporting My Thesis
UBI is part of a broader picture that is about humans becoming adapted to everything in a smaller, diminished form: self-worth, money, music, friendship. In other words, UBI is part of a not-so distant future dystopia.
UBI is not about championing humans; it's about diminishing them. We do this by tricking humans into believing they are being helped when they are being diminished.
Humans for example spend a lot of time on screens (smartphones) because they associate screen time with power and privilege, but the opposite is true. Americans will live a paltry life with their little UBI money, spending all day on their screens, petting their robot avatar friends, and listening to 2-minute songs on Spotify.
“Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good”
We Accept Less of Everything: Even Music
The Reason Why Your Favorite Pop Songs Are Getting Shorter
UBI Challenges the American Work Ethic (Cult?)
There is a notion in America, from the beginning of its European history, that being a hard worker means being noble, virtuous, and successful.
The contrary is also assumed: If you're poor and unemployed, your life is evidence that you are a member of the damned. You are morally depraved and bankrupt.
This notion comes from a form of Protestantism called Calvinism. John Calvin said evidence of being a member of God's elect was being a hard worker. German philosopher Max Weber said this became the "Protestant Work Ethic," the fuel of American capitalism.
Read "The Protestant Work Ethic Is Real"
Study Questions
What is Universal Basic Income?
You get a check, perhaps $1,000, every month with no questions asked and no questions. The money can help you barely survive and essentially protect you from destitution. You could live in a shared apartment, buy food, and have money for public transportation. That’s it. Everything above that would require some kind of job or side hustle.
Not all the details are ironed out. Countries haven’t agreed upon an age or a policy for recently settled immigrants.
UBI is response to shrinking middle class, shrinking real wages, unaffordable housing, overpriced education, technological-fueled unemployment, and an over complicated welfare system. Countries all over the world are seriously considering UBI. Some are already implementing it.
UBI will give workers more leverage with their employers. They won’t feel as desperate to work for a horrible boss and/or a horrible job.
UBI will give an escape route to abused spouse who needs to get out of a hellish marriage or relationship.
UBI may give protection to over 3 million jobs lost due to self-driving cars in the next 10-20 years.
Concerns
Some are concerned that UBI would motivate people to permanently drop out of job market and reduce productivity.
Lowry estimates the cost of UBI to be $3.9 trillion to US government every year.
Two. What is appealing to Annie Lowrey about UBI?
Lowrey writes that she is less interested in policy and more interested in the ethical foundation. She writes:
“What I came to believe is this: A UBI is an ethos as much as it is a technocratic policy proposal.” It contains within it the principles of universality, unconditionality, inclusion, and simplicity, and it insists that every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation.”
In other words, there is an ethical message: Deprivation and starvation are morally unacceptable. A fundamental safety net, no questions asked, must be made available to the citizenry. This is the least decent thing a society can and must do.
The above is Lowrey’s central argument.
Three. How is shifting employment affecting the UBI debate?
Lowrey shows evidence that more and more jobs are being permanently lost even during recoveries as AI is becoming more and more self-regulating and less dependent on human engineers.
At the same time, what job growth there is exists in the “crummy jobs” department with fast food and temporary work being the new boom. Over 40% of fast food workers are over 25; in other words, adults are supporting their families with “crummy jobs.”
American workers are becoming more and more part of the odious, dreadful gig economy, a life of hustle without good pay, stability, or benefits.
We have a “good jobs crisis.” That crummy jobs are on the rise gives employers leverage to punk people with those jobs. But UBI will take some of that leverage away.
On page 49, we read of growing economic disparity between 1979 and 2014 in a major study.
Bottom half of earners in 1979 had 20% of income; in 2014, they had gone down to 13%.
In contrast, the 1% top earners jumped from 11% to 20% in that same time period.
Hysteresis
We have a new class of unemployed who suffer from long-term unemployment, about 2-3 years or more. They suffer from hysteresis: They lag behind in every category and has permanent lower earnings even after a recession.
Temporary Jobs on Vice News Video
Four. Why is not working so hard for Americans?
Let us set aside the economic need for work for a second and imagine being economically independent of work. Americans have a psychological dependence on work that does not exist in other countries.
Believe it or not, America has a relationship with work that is unique in the world. In other countries, people work for money, but the job does not define them.
Not so in America. We have cultivated a work ethic that makes one’s personal identity and spiritual virtue synonymous with the kind of work one does.
We see work, or industriousness, as a “social obligation and a foundation of the good life” (70).
This mindset makes us vulnerable for a variety of reasons.
One, should we make any job define who we are? Why is industriousness a “national religion”? Why do we have this mentality but other countries do not?
Two, is this a healthy mindset when crummy jobs are on the rise and desirable jobs are on the decline?
Three, is this a wise mindset in a world where technology could lead to massive permanent unemployment?
Four, have we been brainwashed to our detriment?
Consider the ancient Greeks and Romans argued that the highest quality of life was based on leisure and philosophical contemplation, not industriousness.
But Americans are under the spell of the Puritan work ethic which says idleness leads to the work of the devil.
Therefore, always be busy. Always strive for more. Always incorporate a side hustle.
While European countries see our social and economic class as a matter of fate and circumstance, Americans subscribe to the myth of the self-made man who lifts himself out of his bootstraps.
Unlike Europeans who see poverty as a trap from an unfair system, Americans see poverty as a matter of self-blame, the result of one’s character defects.
Social Validation
Unlike others, Americans are dependent on social validation that results from their job. Identity, self-reliance, moral and social obligation, and social validation connected with job status.
Social Stigma from Joblessness
Being jobless in America leads to shame, social stigma, ignominy, and chronic depression. It becomes a sort of death.
Americans recover from death of loved one, divorce, catastrophe. But they do not recovery from joblessness.
This mental state presents a challenge to UBI and future world of mass unemployment.
Freeloaders?
There is a work mindset in America that would resist UBI: Why should people get money for free? What kind of sick morally bankrupt system would allow such a thing?
However, Lowrey points to program in Iran that is similar to UBI, and it did not result in increased unemployment as a result of making people too lazy to work (82).
Going to School, Caring for Ailing Parent, Parenthood
Another argument for UBI is that rather than make people lazy, people will have more freedom to attend college, care for a sick parent, or do the duties of parenting.
Perhaps it is too extreme to argue that UBI would destroy the labor force.
Four. Why is the question about how UBI will affect our relationship with work “scary”?
Lowrey writes that this question is “scary” because employers won’t have as much leverage over their employees.
People wouldn’t have to do work they don’t want to do and they could gravitate to work they do want to perform.
Sample Thesis Statements
Universal Basic Income is doomed to fail because it is a concession of a failed economic system, a surrender to the oligarchy, and a miserable fake solution to poverty and human dignity.
Failed or not, Universal Basic Income is the palliative dog treat that will be stuffed down our throats in order to pacify the masses from revolt in a new economy that will surely leave more and more people behind.
While sure to go through its growing pains, UBI must be embraced because we have no choice but to hinge our hopes for human dignity and humanitarian aid to the masses through UBI and be diligent as we perfect it over time.
UBI is the stinky monster we must go to bed with because without that stinky monster we will have to go to bed cold, wet, and hungry.
Conservatives and liberals alike rightly embrace UBI because it is the reasonable response to permanent mass unemployment and the need for a streamlined welfare program for the have-nots.
Far-left pundits are correct to reject UBI as a crappy drug designed to shut up the masses who will be getting punk-fed while the 1% laugh their way to the bank.
Even if UBI works on an economic level, human beings are not psychologically and spiritually hard-wired to live a life without structure, responsibility, and accountability, and as a result, UBI will spell the death to millions of the unemployed masses whose crap existence will be at its essence a condition of moral and intellectual dissolution.
My 1C Thesis:
Contrary to Annie Lowrey’s hopeful embrace of UBI, I see UBI as an inevitability that spells the death of economic equality, human dignity, and free will.
Equally Dark Variation of Above Thesis
Take What Sucks Less
Sure, UBI sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix.
We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates.
So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness.
Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war.
We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.
The Sucks Less Approach Is Hideous
The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison.
For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair.
Finally, he assumes the worst case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.
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