Equality From the Ground Up

Economic inequality is one of the major political issues of our time. It’s symptoms impact all dimensions of life, from educational attainment, health, family, to political polarization. When addressing economic inequality, the universal solution seems to involve changing federal taxes – depending on your politics either raising, lowering, or otherwise manipulating them. The thinking is that many programs may be funded through your proposed tax initiative, and the tax itself may change incentives if properly designed. I have no issue with such proposals per se, yet I find it interesting that the thinkers I’ve come across only seem to use the tool of taxes when trying to address issues of inequality.

My thinking on this matter comes from an idea I’ve had that I haven’t heard very often, and I’m not sure why. Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, argues that order to reach our “next utopia”, something like guaranteed income should be put in place and paid for by restructuring our tax system. I think the idea of a guaranteed basic income has a lot of promise – the argument that a basic income will increase the incentive of the poor to positively contribute to our economy does seem compelling to me. I can see how such a system could lower the stress levels of the poor which will allow them to make more rational decisions and start actively investing in the future.

Yet, I have to wonder if there’s another way besides guaranteed income to reach the same results. What if, instead of trying to raise GDP in order to reach the levels of prosperity where we can afford a basic income, we essentially pursued a more technological solution. What if we were able to provide every family with the capability to live on their own means AND still have free time left over to pursue their interests. Let me explain. If you were able to produce your own food, owned your own roof, and had your own heat and clothing, and utilization of these means of production was not tightly coupled with the greater economy, then your basic dependence on the greater market would be greatly diminished. If everyone had this type personal independence, then it would change the entire nature of the economy and politics as we know it. It would be as if each citizen became a wealthy landowner, as if each state became populated solely with millions of Thomas Jeffersons and George Washingtons – except without the issues of slavery and other means of bondage. This would be similar to an idealized version of basic income in that people of the state have the time and means to pursue their creative desires, but also very different because one is not beholden to world-scale economic and political power structures in order to maintain your livelihood. Such a world would allows much greater political freedom, and I believe it would preserve liberal ideals of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to a much greater degree than a system that must be mediated through an all-encompassing form of government.

Psychologists have studied the strength and durability of the social bonds we build, and find that the strength of our connections varies in inverse proportion to the number of connections of we are making. Humans seem built to make strong bonds with close family, then systematically weaker and weaker bonds with the other communities in their lives based on the overall size of those groups. I believe that economics and politics are likely to be much healthier if their analogous bonds mirrored this social organization. For example, if the amount of time and money that an ordinary citizen put into political organization was principally focused on the family and neighborhood level and only developed a weak connection to federal politics. Similarly with economics, if the transactions occurred at a local level, not between a citizen and multi-national corporations as the strongest link, then incentives and values would better align with a healthy and ethical style of living. As is currently the case these relationship seem inverted to this ideal. On the economic side, most workers are drawing wages from companies that transact at a global scale. In terms of welfare, most citizens safety nets and most citizens tax dollars are applied to the largest collective – the federal government rather the smallest – their towns and cities. I can’t point to hard data on why this is wrong, but it does not feel natural. It feels like a system that’s purposefully made to create hidden power. Inverting this power structure seems necessary in order to ensure the continuing safety of self expression and liberty within an era where the tools of power are more effective and easier to come by than ever before.

To be clear, I’m not advocating withdrawing from global capitalism, instead I’m advocating that the citizens of the world should not be forced to play in a system where they have no say about the rules in order to live well. Living well should be separated from playing the game of capitalism as well as separated from the game of national politics.

There isn’t any single silver bullet technology that can actualize this future I’m proposing. Rather, this line of thinking introduces a new dimension assessing questions related to engineering and economic value. Namely, how can we structure technology such that the physical means of production are designed from the start to be as close to the individual level as possible? Providing a Star Trek replicator to every family would do it but barring that, there’s many incremental steps in many areas of commerce that may be effective.

What happens when most production occurs at the point of consumption? Well from a macro stand point, GDP metrics plummet dramatically. In fact, GDP loses much of its relevance all together. If the only goods being transacted are base commodities, there is very little of value for a GDP to measure.

I would hypothesize that the total quantity of goods consumed would also go down – even taking into account any losses of efficiency due to local, unoptimized production compared to a massive and optimized factory. My theory here is that when raw materials are sourced directly by the consumer than the information about the production process is exposed, which is likely to create a response by the consumer to reduce the total amount of production. In a global supply chain, so much about the methods of production are hidden that even the producers are liable to have limited information about the raw goods cost of their production.

Driving local production is a great goal for technology. Too often new technology just further cements us into global supply chains. I’m not so sure it has to be that way. Sure, there will always be products that are imported, as I understand it there’s really no sense in us each having our very own battery factories or chip foundries, and not everyone can be their own doctor or health care specialist. But, with our current capabilities there’s already so much of the consumer world that can be brought to the individual level that it seems silly not to try.

As Rutger Bregman said, Utopia’s are always at the horizon – they are something to strive for and as soon as you reach one (which you never really do but you can get close) then its up to our collective imagination to chart out the next utopia. This is my horizon and I’m baffled that it’s not out there in more of the current zeitgeist.