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Musings Report 2017-48 12-1-17 Announcing My New Book "Money and Work Unchained" (50% discount)
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Announcing My New Book "Money and Work Unchained" (50% discount)
Readers have been asking me what I thought of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as the solution to the systemic problem of jobs being replaced by automation.
To answer this question, I realized I had to start by taking a fresh look at work and its role in human life and society. And since UBI is fundamentally a distribution of money, I also needed to take a fresh look at our system of money.
That led to a radical critique of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and an outline for a much more sustainable and just system of money and work than we have now.
To adequately explore these critical topics, I ended up writing a 50,000 word book, Money and Work Unchained, which I'm offering to my Inner Circle (all of you) at a 50% discount ($4.95 for the Kindle ebook) through Sunday, December 3, after which the price goes up.
The print edition will be available shortly at a 20% discount ($16).
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is increasingly being held up as the solution to automation's displacement of human labor. But it turns out this is a false promise; rather than solve this problem, UBI merely masks a broken system. We can do better, and I lay out how in this book.
I was only able to write this book over the past year as a result of your financial support. Thank you for supporting my work!
Here is the book's introduction:
Do we understand work and money? Most of us would probably answer “yes.”
• Work is what we do to earn money.
• Money is what we earn from work, and what we use to buy things we want or need.
But is that all work is—a way to earn money? And is that all money is, something we use to buy things?
Or do we just think we understand work and money simply because they are commonplace features of everyday life?
Work is actually much more than a way to earn money, and money is much more than a means to buy things. The two are key to understanding wealth, which is also much more than just an abundance of money.
Money and work are also key to understanding capital, which is more than the conventional definition of tools, commodities, stocks, bonds and real estate.
The title of this book is Money and Work Unchained. You may assume I mean unchaining money from work, but in reality, money is already disconnected from work. Consider the following: if I borrow $1 billion at 1% interest, and invest this money in a bond yielding 3% interest, I would earn $20 million annually (2% of $1 billion) just for typing a few computer keystrokes.
The privilege of borrowing a large sum of money at low interest rates earned me the money, not my labor. Clearly, money is already unchained from work.
Work is also already unchained from money, as a great deal of useful work isn’t paid. Indeed, a large part of all the work performed on Earth isn’t paid.
What we’ll be exploring is unchaining work from our preconceptions of work and unchaining money from our preconceptions of money. By freeing work and money from the shackles of our assumptions, we’re free to design a more productive, sustainable and fair society with a much broader distribution of real wealth and capital.
So why is it important to free money, work, wealth and capital from our current conceptual assumptions?
The world has entered an age of accelerating automation that is rapidly replacing human labor. The common assumption is that this is will free humans from the burdens of work, and enable millions of people the luxuries of leisure and artistic expression. This is the dream embodied by Universal Basic Income (UBI), the increasingly popular proposal to give everyone a monthly income without any strings attached.
But where will the money come from to pay us all to no longer perform productive work?
To infer that the money will come from automation’s profits or by borrowing the money from future taxpayers makes erroneous assumptions about the nature of money, profit and wealth.
The danger is that if we don’t fully understand work, money, wealth and capital, we may find ourselves in a behavioral sink of purposeless despair with no income at all. Rather than entering a paradise of paid leisure, we might find ourselves in a nightmare of social dysfunction that extends far beyond financial destitution, deep into a toxic poverty of purpose and meaning.
This book poses a thought experiment: let’s assume we don’t really understand work and money, and that we’ll discover their nature by asking a series of questions:
• What is work?
• What role does work play in human life?
• How is work connected to money, capital and wealth?
• Once we have a better understanding of work, where does this take us?
Then we’ll ask the same questions of money:
• What is money?
• What role does money play in human life?
• How is money connected to capital, wealth and work?
• Once we have a better understanding of money, where does this take us?
We also need to investigate the connections between money, work, capital and wealth:
• What are the connections between work, money, capital and wealth?
• Once we understand the connections, where does this take us?
The process of asking these questions reveals a startling truth: we naturally assume our conceptions of work and money are like laws of Nature—that our concepts are reflections of immutable characteristics of work and money.
But the reality is that our concepts are not laws of Nature—they are social constructs. And once we reach a different understanding of work and money, we can adopt entirely different social constructs that will improve our lives and communities in a sustainable fashion.
From Left Field
The 6 Laws of Technology Everyone Should Know
Why Are We Addicted To Debt? (with a focus on Asia)
Amazon's Last Mile -- gig economy deliveries...
The Ridiculous Amount of Energy It Takes to Run Bitcoin
The Unexpected Industries About To Be Disrupted By Blockchain Technology
GDP, Jobs, and Fossil Largesse (Nate Hagens) -- an excellent summary of humanity's trajectory
The Great American Single-Family Home Problem -- difficult to replace single family homes with higher density...
Artificial Intelligence Can Translate Languages Without a Dictionary
Farmers squeezed as big agribusinesses get too big says expert group (via Bart D.)
Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari (14:42) (via John F.)
Why we can't have nice things: dockless bikes and the tragedy of the commons (via Joel M.)
Impeachment of the president, explained
What’s worse than leaving Trump in office? Impeaching him. (WaPo)
"No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected." Julius Caesar
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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