Another tech titan joins Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in supporting Universal Basic Income for Americans
Another tech titan joins Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in
supporting free cash handouts for Americans
By Catherine Clifford August 9, 2017
One by one, some of the biggest names in tech are
publicly supporting the idea of giving cash handouts to all Americans.
The latest is self-made multimillionaire Stewart
Butterfield, the CEO and co-founder of the workplace chat program Slack, which
is reportedly in the process of raising $500 million at a $5 billion valuation.
Butterfield also co-founded Flickr, which sold to Yahoo, reportedly for $35
million.
He joins Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg and Y-Combinator president Sam Altman, who all say society will
both need and benefit from universal basic income (UBI), a guaranteed cash
payment given to every resident irrespective of employment status.
Doesn't have to be much, but giving people even a very
small safety net would unlock a huge amount of entrepreneurialism.
It "doesn't have to be much, but giving people even
a very small safety net would unlock a huge amount of entrepreneurialism,"
says Butterfield in a recent Twitter exchange about UBI.
"If you can't afford to take any risks, you
generally won't take any risks," Butterfield adds.
Twitter user Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School,
which provides students a computer science education with little or no upfront
costs, notes that giant tech behemoths like Facebook and Microsoft were started
by founders who were getting financial support from their parents. "That's
the universal basic income argument that's compelling to me," he tweets.
"[T]hat little cushion is so valuable."
Indeed, it's the same argument made by Zuckerberg
himself.
"If I had to support my family growing up instead of
having time to code, if I didn't know I'd be fine if Facebook didn't work out,
I wouldn't be standing here today," says Zuckerberg in his Harvard
commencement speech in May. The tech titan grew up financially secure thanks to
his dad's career as a dentist.
"Now it's our time to define a new social contract
for our generation. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give
everyone a cushion to try new things," Zuckerberg says.
In July, Zuckerberg also commented on the positive
benefits of the state-widecash handout program in Alaska. "Seeing how
Alaska put this dividend in place reminded me of a lesson I learned early at
Facebook: organizations think profoundly differently when they're profitable
than when they're in debt. When you're losing money, your mentality is largely
about survival," he says.
Musk thinks universal basic income is a going to be a
virtual necessity as more and more low-skilled jobs are replaced by robots and
automation.
Altman agrees. "I'm fairly confident that at some
point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and
massive new wealth gets created, we're going to see some version of [UBI] at a
national scale," he writes. He's working on a pilot program in Oakland,
Calif., to study how people behave when they are given such payments.
Even as Silicon Valley thought leaders talk openly about
the idea of cash handouts, it's not likely to become reality in the near term.
Culturally, the U.S. is a country that celebrates the idea of working hard to get
ahead. And politically, the current administration is trying to repeal the
universal basic health care.
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