Where the rubber meets the road

I think if you go back far enough in the supply chain of any manufacturing process, you’re going to reach a point where the people doing the initial harvesting – whether rubber, cotton, gold, coffee, or diamonds – will be found to be living in relative economic poverty.

I suppose this is true of the harvesters of souls, too; those who find, help, treat, work with, the “least of us, the homeless” – outreach and shelter workers, animal rescuers and conservationists, etc.

“Note harvesters” and “color and shape harvesters” as well – those who work in obscurity and/or poverty to make their music, their art, their poetry, from forgotten or undiscovered fragments they encounter or cultivate or simply recognize in the world.

But I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the prospects for hope and real prosperity of spirit among these hunters and gatherers. Living close to the ground, getting one’s hands dirty, being able to connect with the nature around you, is not without its rewards. I think all of us who have ever marveled at the beauty of a found stone or seashell, or relished the simple pleasure of paddling down a river or hiking in the woods, or cried a tear of joy or relief when a rescued bird you’ve cared for flies away, or pointed with pride to a building you laid the bricks for, or “made a song” out of the sounds of tin cans or balloons or spokes on a wheel, has felt an inkling of that. That these feelings often come to us in the midst of (or as an antidote to) living our lives “back home” in relative splendor, is some testament to the potency of these simple joys of doing and of being that we sometimes overlook.

Rubber tires – A dirty business | a DW Documentary

Will we need a universal basic income in the future?

I was drawn into a conversation recently of whether we will need a universal basic income at some time in the not-so-distant future. This is something that I’ve been thinking about perhaps since I graduated from college, and I’m now a few years away from retirement. So it’s something I’ve thought of from time to time, over the years.

I’d like to share with you a couple of TED Talks on the subject that I came upon just within the last week or two. First, one by Martin Ford, called “How we’ll earn money in a future without jobs,” and another, by Rutger Bregman, “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash.”

There are others as well. But these two I found particularly key; the point drawn out of the first one is that even though this is a familiar tune we’ve heard numerous times before – the robots are going to put us out of work – the technology has shifted, not just in degree, but in kind, in ways that make it perhaps more of a realistic possibility now than at other times in the past. And the second illustrates the difference in peoples’ responses to everyday occurrences, decisions they have to make, life choices, etc., when comparing their financially-secure state with their financially-at-risk state. It makes the case for a guaranteed minimum income for reasons of what I’ll call social pragmatism, where the first one does so for reasons of technological encroachment on human employability.

It seems clear to me that the idea of “running the country like a business,” as some still say they want us to do today, is an idea whose time has simply passed. With more and more business processes being executed by machines, computers, systems, etc., what does running a business have to do with solving human problems?

I think the time has come, rather, to run the country like a junior high school concert band, or soccer team. Here, the coach/conductor is rightly more focused on building character, helping the team members to find their strengths, than on winning competitions. With a sufficient safety net such as our modern society ought to be able to provide, people can be led to find their own truths, their own best skills, and quite probably make the greatest contributions to society at large. In eliminating the survivalist “do unto others before they do unto you” kind of thinking, we can create an entirely different national dialog and identity.

A guaranteed minimum income can provide the means to that end. And it may well have to.