14 February, 2017
Jeffrey Sachs: There’s a proposal around that’s got a lot of interest called universal basic income where everybody is guaranteed at least a certain level of income in the society. Some free market economists like Milton Friedman talked about a negative income tax which in effect had the same features of guaranteeing a certain level of income for everybody as a base.
I think from a human rights and decency standard there’s a lot of sense to the idea that everybody in a society should be able to meet their basic needs. There’s on the other hand this sense if you give someone a check whether they’re trying, not trying, working, not working. If there’s no effort, no conditionality involved at all maybe we’re going to get a lot of people that are absolutely doing nothing on the backs of those who are really working. So the incentive issues are real even if the sensitivity and decency issues are also real. I think that one way to handle this is a little bit more rounded rather than seeing a universal basic income as a check and kind of an unconditional check that’s just handed out as income.
I like the idea of social democracy as it’s applied in real countries in Europe, the Netherlands and Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany. The idea is everybody has access to publicly financed healthcare. Everybody has access to quality publicly financed education including college tuitions. Not a trillion dollars of crushing student debt, but tuitions paid for. Everybody has access to not only guaranteed vacation, but paid vacation. Everybody has access to quality childcare so that moms can go to work knowing that their kids are in a healthy, nurturing environment. Everybody has access to maternity leave so that moms and also paternity leave, dads can stay home with their kids for several months. It’s kind of decent where you say we have all this wonderful technology, this wealth. Why don’t we live decently, not miserably.
If people want a market income beyond that they’ve got to go work for it. If, of course, they’re disabled or for some reason can’t then there’s added social support but it’s not cash in people’s pockets. It’s decency. It’s public service. It’s basic needs met. I see it as basically living decent lives in decent societies. They have a very different spirit to them. There aren’t a lot of super rich Wall Street hedge fund misanthropes – and I’ll use the term advisably because I find a lot of people on Wall Street don’t give a damn about anybody else except they care about their money. And I find that really weird. But you don’t find that kind of idea in northern Europe because it’s really looked down upon. And people don’t like it when people are money grubbing. They’re kind of shunned. So the social ethos is different.
I remember once I was running to the airport in Oslo and I fly business class and I’m constantly moving around on trips relentlessly around the world. And I ran up and said, “Where’s the business class line to board?” And the guy looked at me like I was crazy and he said, “Excuse me, we’re boarding the Scandinavian way. Get back in line.” And I just thought okay, that’s pretty cool actually, you know. Everybody’s in line and let’s all get on the plane.
It’s a social spirit. It’s the idea that we like – well by the way this is not people tearing their clothes and living in hair shirts and not enjoying themselves. They like their vacations. They like their boats in the Stockholm archipelago. They like six weeks on their island. So they live beautifully. But they don’t want gazillions. They don’t want to do it at the expense of others. They want to do it as a society. God, if America could just get a little of that back rather than a president who believes in killers and losers. Sick, but that’s what we got and that is what’s degrading American society. Not just the technical issues. Not just the rising inequality but this spirit that you’re a winner or you’re a loser. And if you’re a loser get out of the way. That’s Ayn Rand talking. It’s ugly and we’ve had enough of it.
From a human rights and decency standard, everybody in a society should be able to meet their basic needs, says economist and Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs – but he questions whether a popular proposal known as Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the way to achieve a better standard of living in the U.S. At its simplest, UBI is an unconditional base salary that is paid to all citizens of a society, no matter their employment status, current wealth, attempts to gain work, and regardless of how they intent to spend it. Sachs sees the value in the idea, but isn’t confident in the proposal’s no-strings-attached nature – will some people coast for free off the hard work of others? A guaranteed basic income experiment known as ‘Mincome’ in Canada in the 1970s showed a just a 9% reduction in working hours among two main groups of citizens: new mothers, using their additional income to extend their maternity leaves and spend more time with their infants, and teenage boys who were using that income to stay in school. A new UBI trial is planned for 2017 in Ontario, and many nations await the results.
Sachs prefers a different strategy: social democracy, which requires a cultural reform in the U.S. alongside an economic reform. Sachs holds up the ethos of Northern European countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany who have publicly financed healthcare and education. Free and equal skills for all, over free and equal money. The more egalitarian spirit operating in these countries would clash dramatically with the Wall Street ‘winners and losers’ mentality that dominates American economics. "That is what’s degrading American society. Not just the technical issues. Not just the rising inequality but this spirit that you’re a winner or you’re a loser. And if you’re a loser get out of the way. That’s Ayn Rand talking. It’s ugly and we’ve had enough of it."
Jeffrey Sachs's most recent book is Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable.
Image source: NASA/Big Think
Surprising Science
- Most stars begin in binary systems, why not ours?
- Puzzles posed by the Oort cloud and the possibility of Planet 9 may be solved by a new theory of our sun's lost companion.
- The sun and its partner would have become separated long, long ago.
If most stars form in binary pairs, what about our Sun? A new paper presents a model supporting the theory that the Sun may have started out as one member of a temporary binary system. There's a certain elegance to the idea — if it's true, this origin story could resolve some vexing solar-system puzzles, among them the genesis of the Oort Cloud, and the presence of massive captured objects like a Planet Nine.
The paper is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Oort cloud
Image source: NASA
Scientist believe that surrounding the generally flat solar system is a spherical shell comprised of more than a trillion icy objects more than a mile wide. This is the Oort cloud, and it's likely the source of our solar system's long-term comets — objects that take 200 years or more to orbit the Sun. Inside that shell and surrounding the planets is the Kuiper Belt, a flat disk of scattered objects considered the source of shorter-term comets.
Long-term comets come at us from all directions and astronomers at first suspected their origins to be random. However, it turns out their likely trajectories lead back to a shared aphelion between 2,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun to about 100,000 AU, with their different points of origin revealing the shell shape of the Oort cloud along that common aphelion. (An astronomical unit is the distance from the Sun to the Earth.)
No object in the Oort cloud has been directly observed, though Voyager 1 and 2, New Horizons, and Pioneer 10 and 11 are all en route. (The cloud is so far away that all five of the craft will be dead by the time they get there.) To derive a clearer view of the Oort cloud absent actually imagery, scientists utilize computer models based on planetary orbits, solar-system formation simulations, and comet trajectories.
It's generally assumed that the Oort cloud is comprised of debris from the formation of the solar system and neighboring systems, stuff from other systems that we somehow captured. However, says paper co-author Amir Siraj of Harvard, "previous models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects." As an answer to that, he says, "the binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most sun-like stars are born with binary companions."
"Binary systems are far more efficient at capturing objects than are single stars," co-author Ari Loeb, also of Harvard, explains. "If the Oort cloud formed as [indirectly] observed, it would imply that the sun did in fact have a companion of similar mass that was lost before the sun left its birth cluster."
Working out the source of the objects in the Oort cloud is more than just an interesting astronomical riddle, says Siraj. "Objects in the outer Oort Cloud may have played important roles in Earth's history, such as possibly delivering water to Earth and causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Understanding their origins is important."
Planet 9
Image source: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)/NASA
The gravitational pull resulting from a binary companion to the Sun may also help explain another intriguing phenomenon: the warping of orbital paths either by something big beyond Pluto — a Planet 9, perhaps — or smaller trans-Neptunian objects closer in, at the outer edges of the Kuiper Belt.
"The puzzle is not only regarding the Oort clouds, but also extreme trans-Neptunian objects, like the potential Planet Nine," Loeb says. "It is unclear where they came from, and our new model predicts that there should be more objects with a similar orbital orientation to [a] Planet Nine."
The authors are looking forward to the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO) , a Large Synoptic Survey Telescope expected to capture its first light from the cosmos in 2021. It's expected that the VRO will definitively confirm or dismiss the existence of Planet 9. Siraj says, "If the VRO verifies the existence of Planet Nine, and a captured origin, and also finds a population of similarly captured dwarf planets, then the binary model will be favored over the lone stellar history that has been long-assumed."
Missing in action
Lord and Siraj consider it unsurprising that we see no clear sign of the Sun's former companion at this point. Says Loeb, "Passing stars in the birth cluster would have removed the companion from the sun through their gravitational influence. He adds that, "Before the loss of the binary, however, the solar system already would have captured its outer envelope of objects, namely the Oort cloud and the Planet Nine population."
So, where'd it go? Siraj answers, "The sun's long-lost companion could now be anywhere in the Milky Way."
