We had a great response from listeners to our recent show,A World Without Work. Katherine B in Berkeley had a number of fantastic questions, so I asked our guest, Juliana Bidadanure, as well as our hosts, Debra and Ken, to respond to their favorite one.

Thanks, Katherine, for the great questions! And if you have a question for a guest or our hosts, send it tocomments@philosophytalk.org我们可能会在博客上介绍它。

Katherine:Culturally, Americans do not respect or care for poor or/and disadvantaged people. Most white people think that poor equals lazy, without recognition of context of the status of people of color. Look at the public schools and prisons. Do all people imbed the notion of education is important? Manditory voting is important? Healthcare is important? Public infrastruction is important? Habitable housing is important? White people AND people of color do not equally value the importance of these in building a stable country.

Debra:It's true that race is implicated in the weak welfare state that we have in America. And beyond race, American individualism many people blame the poor for their condition. The idea that we are all in this together, that all citizens deserve the resources for full membership in society—resources such as those mentioned in this comment—healthcare, decent housing and schools, public infrastructure—is contested. There have always been those who have resisted an expansive idea of citizenship and sought to deny benefits and services to the poor unless the poor could pay for them. There have always been those who have argued that the poor are “undeserving”—responsible for their own predicament. (One strength of the universal basic income proposal discussed on the show is that it seeks to circumvent questions of who deserves help and instead offers a social dividend to all.) But there are other currents in America as well. The labor movement fought for basic protections from risk and insecurity, and other social movements have argued that we need to expand the meaning, and prerogatives of citizenship.

Katherine:Americans do not vote in significant numbers and cannot therefore compel legislators to benefit the greater population of Americans.

Juliana:I agree that voting turnouts being so low is a bad sign to the extent to which americans enjoy democratic control over legislators and corporations. But I think voting should never be the only means through which politicians are held to account. Workplace democracy, strong social movements and organized labour are very important routes towards a more democratic society too. But to do all this, we also need more free time—time to learn more, find solutions and get organized. Ensuring people have access to a basic income so they can work one job instead of two, or devote weeks or months to political activism if they wish, could be part of the solution!

Katherine:Rich people do not want to share. Look at the named institutions. Named because rich people give enormous amounts to the institutions to name them. How do these rich people get so rich? Some of them get rich because they exploit other people via lowest wages possible for their workers, saving money by contracting out the work to contractors, not improving their rental properties, etc.

Ken:人们致富的方式多种多样。并非所有的财富都是不义之财。但无论它是通过什么方式获得的，无论是通过公平的经济竞争还是通过邪恶的手段，你肯定是对的人们并不一定倾向于出于他们的善良来分享他们的财富。我们不应该夸大这种情况，事实上，一些富人非常倾向于分享财富。很多富人给各种各样的慈善事业捐了很多钱。虽然其中一些可能完全是自我驱动的，但不是所有的都是。有很多非常富有的捐赠者匿名捐赠。当然，有些人想给东西起自己的名字，但如果以他们名字命名的东西做得很好，我们有什么资格嫉妒他们的自我满足呢?

不过，在你的问题背后隐藏着更深层次的担忧。当技术消除或至少从根本上减少了对人力的需求——无论是体力劳动还是脑力劳动——这可能会让一些人非常非常富有，而另一些人非常非常贫穷。我们该怎么做呢?正如我们在节目中谈到的，这是UBI-Universal Basic income可能发挥作用的地方。

But perhaps your question is about incentives. What would incentivize the very rich to spread the wealth to the very poor—since they don’t really do that so much now, at least not happily?

我们想一下。这是一个基本的事实，如果没有人购买他们的机器生产的东西，富人就不能致富。如果没有人消费你生产的东西，它对生产东西真的没有多大作用。机器人有一天可能会取代大部分的生产，但它们几乎没有机会取代人类的消费。

那么，在一个对人类劳动力的需求减少或消除的世界里，我们如何匹配消费者和生产者呢?一旦发生这种情况，你将无法出售劳动力来支持你的消费。那么你如何支持你的消费呢?

这儿有一个主意。也许我们会彻底摆脱货币经济——就像《星际迷航》里那样。你有没有注意到《星际迷航》里没有人需要花钱买东西?这是因为他们解决了物资匮乏的问题。货币基本上是通过价格机制来分配稀缺的一种方式。在《星际迷航》中，似乎没有什么东西是有价格的。你想要的东西，你不需要去买，你只需要在复制器或全息甲板上输入一个代码，然后砰的一声，一个闪亮的新物体或体验基本上是免费的。所以也许我们的未来就是这样。那么贫富之间的差距就会消失。

Frankly, I can’t really see how we get from here to there, though. Unfortunately, money and markets are probably here to stay for the foreseeable future. So if we’re going to have to find some way for people to have money to support their consumption. If they aren’t going to get it by the sweat of their brow or brain, then they have to get it by some other means.

And you’re right, it’s very unlikely that mere charity will do the trick. But I think it’s more a matter of self-preservation, because like I said before, no consumers means no producers. So I wouldn’t really worry about the rich hoarding absolutely everything for themselves.

You could still worry that the same is true now—that the ability of the producers to get rich depends on the consumers being able to afford what they produce. And that STILL doesn’t stop many of the rich from being hoarders of their wealth. Well, that’s sort of true. But it’s one thing to hoard in a economy in which, say, 4% are unemployed and many more under-employed, but hoarding would be a lot more sub-optimal in a society with 45% unemployment. We’d all just get poorer and poorer together as less and less got consumed and eventually produced. We would need to spread the wealth in order to make the economy work at all. And that’s why we’ve got things like progressive taxation, even now. Sure, people argue about rates of taxation and how progressive taxation should be. But I doubt you’ll find anybody who isn’t just an utter fool saying an economy can work without any spreading of the wealth. The Republicans may prefer trickle down economics to progressive taxation. But from their point of view, that’s just another way of spreading the wealth.

Final point, nobody pays taxes out of the goodness of their hearts either. We use the power of the government to FORCE them to pay taxes. You could of course worry that rich people own too much of the government too—and there is unfortunately truth to that. But that just means that if the robots take our jobs, we’d better make darned sure they don’t take our government too. The good news is that if we have more time for more leisure and need to do less labor, we can spend more of our time on politics and on making sure we keep the rich from seizing too much control. That way, those of us who are out of work, can force the rich to tend to our needs!