Should the government pay you to be alive? 政府應該付錢讓你生活嗎?

Unconditional Basic Income
回覆文章
漢化組亞伯
文章: 84
註冊時間: 2014-04-26, 17:02

Should the government pay you to be alive? 政府應該付錢讓你生活嗎?

文章 漢化組亞伯 » 2014-04-29, 10:24

原文
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/0 ... story.html

Should the government pay you to be alive?
政府應該付錢讓你生活嗎?

“It sounds radical, but the ‘guaranteed basic income’ almost became law in the United States—and it’s having a revival now, with some surprising supporters.”
「儘管聽起來很激進,但『無條件基本收入』在過去的美國也幾乎快成為法律了--而且它正在獲得重生的動力,擁有令人吃驚數量的支持者。」

It was supposed to be better by now—maybe not all the way better, but definitely better than it is. With the unemployment rate still nearly 7 percent and more than 46 million Americans living below the poverty line, the recovery that was supposed to follow the Great Recession has been slow, frustrating, and increasingly worrisome.
過去的經濟狀況應該比現在更好-或許不是全部都更好,但絕對比現在好。隨著失業率仍然接近7%與4千6百萬名美國人生活在貧窮線之下,應該像1930年大蕭條時期之後那樣的就業復甦卻一直步履龜速、令人沮喪與日益令人憂心。

It’s a problem that has bedeviled the country’s leading economists and its most powerful policy makers. But explain the whole mess to an 8-year-old, and you might hear a solution that will sound laughably obvious: Why not just give everyone some money? That way, even poor people could afford to feed their families and pay rent.
這是個一直讓美國主要的經濟學家與最有權力的決策者抓狂的問題。但當把整團混亂向一位8歲孩童解釋時,你可能會聽到聽起來明顯可笑的解決方案:為何不要就是直接把一些錢給每個人?這樣一來,甚至是窮人都可以負擔其家庭生活開銷與支付租金了。

If that feels naive in its simplicity, prepare to be surprised. The notion of a government paying its people just for being alive has a name—“guaranteed basic income”—and has recently been making headway as a legitimate policy proposal in countries all over the world.
如果你覺得這種簡單的直覺太天真無知了,那麼準備好感到驚訝吧。政府付錢給人民就只是為了使其能生活下去的概念有一個名稱-「無條件基本收入」-而且最近已正在成功打入全球許多國家中作為一個合法的政策提案。

Activists in Europe, most notably in Switzerland, have succeeded at injecting the idea into mainstream political debate. A recent poll showed that it has the support of nearly half of Canadians. The president of Cyprus says he’ll launch a limited version of the scheme this summer. Brazil has been giving direct cash transfers to poor families ever since passing a basic income law in 2004; pilot programs have in recent years been carried out in India and Namibia.
在歐洲支持此想法的行動倡議者(最有名的是在瑞士),已成功讓此概念注入至主流的政治辯論中。而最近的一項投票顯示,幾乎一半的加拿大人也都支持。塞普勒斯的總統則說今年夏天他將發動一項此構想的有限度版本。而自從在2004年通過了一項無條件基本收入的法案後,巴西早已一直都正在給予現金的轉移給貧窮的家庭。許多試驗計畫在近年來也已在印度與那米比亞實施。

In the United States, the idea of handing out unconditional government allowances is seen, understandably, as a nonstarter, despite enjoying some recent buzz among policy wonks. If nothing else, in today’s political environment, it just sounds too much like a socialist fantasy. But the idea has a deep legacy in the United States that almost uniquely stitches together figures on the left and right: Its prominent supporters have included Martin Luther King Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, and a version initially suggested by free-market economist Milton Friedman nearly became law under President Nixon. Recently, conservatives like Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve” and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, have stepped forward to support the idea; it’s also been embraced by the “Occupy”-affiliated academic David Graeber.
在美國,儘管在熱衷的政策人員之中最近充斥著一些迴響的雜音,但分發無條件政府津貼補助的想法顯然仍被認為是不可能的任務,這是可以理解的。如果沒意外的話,在今日的政治環境中,無條件基本收入聽起來就是太像社會主義者的幻想而已。但這項想法在美國其實有深遠的傳承,幾乎獨具魅力地能調合左翼與右翼的政治人物想法上的差距。此想法著名的擁護者包括了馬丁·路德·金恩與經濟學家約翰·加爾布雷斯,而一開始由自由市場經濟學家米爾頓·傅利曼所提議的版本,在尼克森總統任期內幾乎就快變成了一項法律。在最近,保守黨的人像是Veronique de Rugy(喬治梅森大學Mercatus中心的資深研究員)與《The Bell Curve》一書的作者及美國企業研究院(American Enterprise Institute,美國的一個智庫)的一位學者Charles Murray,這兩人已跨出先鋒的步伐來支持這項想法。無條件基本收入也被與「佔領運動」有關連的學者David Graeber所支持擁抱。

“You usually don’t have people from different ends of the political spectrum getting on board with the same sort of program,” said Brian Steensland, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University and the author of the book “The Failed Welfare Revolution,” about how basic income went from being a marginal academic idea to a congressional bill and back again. “There’s just something in there that’s really appealing for people from a whole range of intellectual, philosophical, and economic perspectives.”
「你通常不會看到從不同政治光譜兩端而來的人們,對於同樣種類的計畫有共識。」Brian Steensland說道,他是印第安那大學的社會學副教授與《The Failed Welfare Revolution》一書的作者。他提到無條件基本收入如何從一個為人所忽略的邊緣性學術概念,再次捲土重來並蛻變成國會的法案。「在無條件基本收入的想法中,真的就是有一些吸引人們的東西,有一系列的智識、哲學與經濟上的觀點。」

For pragmatists on the left, cash payments to all would be the fastest way to eradicate poverty, by making sure everyone, no matter their circumstances, has enough money to live on. For the utopian-minded, it holds the promise of a liberation from work—a way to make sure that the next John Lennon doesn’t have to waste all his time lifting boxes in a warehouse. For conservatives, it is a tool for rebuilding the bonds of civil society, putting people’s fortunes back in their own hands, and wiping out the messy, piecemeal, nanny-state safety net in one swoop.
對於左翼的實用主義者而言,支付現金給所有人將會是最快的方式來消滅貧窮,透由確保每一個人(不論其狀況為何)都有足夠的金錢來維生。對支持烏托邦思想的人而言,無條件基本收入保證了將人們從工作中解放出來-這能確保下一位約翰·藍儂不必浪費所有的時間在倉庫中搬舉盒子。對於保守黨人而言,無條件基本收入這項工具能重新建立公民社會中人與人之間的聯繫紐帶,返還人們的財富至其手中,並一勞永逸地掃除混亂的、零碎的與保姆國家的社會福利安全網。

At the moment, the idea is widely seen as too radical a departure from the status quo. Working out the mechanics would be a nightmare, and even that 8-year-old might suspect—rightly—that some people would just give up working. But even if the idea isn’t politically feasible in the short term, its proponents see it as the kind of deep-seated rethinking that may soon be needed to face a problem that doesn’t have an easy solution in our current system: that as technology, outsourcing, and other structural shifts transform our economy, it’s becoming increasingly clear that national prosperity does not necessarily mean there are enough good jobs for everyone who needs one.
目前無條件基本收入這種想法廣泛地被視為過於激進,與現實的社會經濟狀況脫節。要梳理出整個可行的運作機制會是一場惡夢,甚至連8歲的孩童都會確實懷疑有一些人就是將會從此放棄工作。但即使在短期內此想法不具政治上的可行性,其擁護者仍認為這是人們可能很快就需要的一種深層重新思考,以面對我們目前體系中沒有簡單解決辦法的問題:即當科技、外包與其它結構性的轉移改造我們的經濟時,正變得日益清楚的事實是國家的繁榮並不必然意味著有足夠的好工作來讓每個人都能做(但問題就在於,每個人當然都需要有工作才能生活)。

In that light, the viability of a solution like the guaranteed basic income—and whether it can be made palatable to Americans for whom work ethic is a prized national value—ends up coming down less to politics than to the fundamental question of how we see the role of work both in the lives of individuals and in society as a whole.
以此觀點而言,像無條件基本收入這種解決辦法的可行性-不論其是否能合乎認為需讚揚工作倫理這種國家價值的美國人的胃口-歸根究柢與其說是政治上的問題,倒不如說是更為基礎根本的問題:我們如何看待工作的角色-不論在個人的生活中或在社會整體之中。

***

America’s modern safety net is a complex machine, estimated to cost almost a trillion dollars a year, which operates on the premise that there are those who deserve help from the government and those who don’t. Unemployment benefits only go to people who can prove they’re looking for work; children’s health insurance is free only if their family income stays below a certain level. The goal, understandably, is for assistance to be temporary and limited to the people who really need it. But the real effect, many say, is an expensive tangle that subjects the neediest people to the most bureaucratic headaches, while tethering their lives to the requirements of government programs.
現代美國的社會福利安全網是一部複雜的機器,據估計每年花費了近兆美元,其運行的基礎假設是社會上同時有那些應該/不應該得到政府幫助的人。失業補助只給予那些能證明自己正在找工作的人;孩童的醫療照護保險是免費的,但需要其家庭收入維持在某個水準之下。我們可以理解,社會福利安全網的目標在於提供有限度的短暫幫助給那些真的有需要的人。但許多人會說,真正的效果卻是昂貴且令人糾結的爛攤子,反而讓那些最貧窮的人屈從於最令人頭痛的官僚制度之下,同時也讓他們的生活綁死在政府補助計畫的標準之中。

The idea of a guaranteed basic income throws all that out the window, replacing it with one straightforward policy that applies to everyone equally. Of course, not all basic income activists imagine the program working the same way. The most important argument is between those on the left, who generally believe that cash payments should be incorporated into the safety net we already have, and those on the right, who tend to argue they should just replace the entire welfare state. Beyond that, proposed plans have varied widely in their details. Charles Murray, in his book-length defense of the basic income, “In Our Hands,” suggests dismantling the welfare state and instead paying every citizen over 21 years of age $10,000 per year. Yale Law School professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott argue for one lump sum payment of $80,000 to be distributed to everyone on their 21st birthday. Others call for deciding on a particular income as a floor, and then using the tax system to make sure everyone takes home at least that much.
無條件基本收入的想法把所有這些雜七雜八的東西都清理得一乾二淨,用一種直接的政策來取代社會福利安全網,也能平等地應用至所有人身上。當然,不是所有無條件基本收入的行動倡議者所想像的計畫運作方式都一樣。而最重要的爭論存在於左翼與右翼人士之間。一般而言左翼人士認為現金支付應被整合至我們已擁有的社會福利安全網之中,而右翼人士傾向於主張無條件基本收入就是應該取代整個社會國家。除此之外,各種倡議與計畫的細節也大相逕庭。Charles Murray為無條件基本收入辯護的書《In Our Hands》建議打掉整個福利國家,並反過來每年支付所有超過21歲的人1萬美元。耶魯大學法學院的教授Bruce Ackerman與Anne Alstott則主張分配一筆龐大的8萬美元給所有人在他們21歲的生日上。其他人則呼籲把某一等級的收入設為基準點,然後使用稅收制度來確保每個人至少都能帶回同等的金額回家去花用。

Though the concept of the state distributing money directly to its citizens has been around for centuries, in America the concept truly ripened during the 1960s.
儘管國家直接分配金錢給其公民的觀念早已存在了好幾世紀,但在美國這種想法的真正成熟則在1960年代。

This was not because of ’60s idealism, but because government economists looked out at the country and saw something terrifying. For the first time in history, they realized, job growth wasn’t keeping pace with the growing economy, meaning that there were segments of society where people couldn’t get work even as companies prospered.
這不是因為1960年代的理想主義,而是因為政府的經濟學家看著美國並發現一些駭人的東西。他們了解到,在歷史上第一次出現就業成長的腳步並未跟上經濟成長的現象。這表示在社會中存在著斷裂,其中即使公司蓬勃發展,人們卻不能得到工作。

This phenomenon, known as “structural unemployment,” combined with a fear about certain kinds of jobs being rendered obsolete by technology, led President Kennedy’s economic advisers to bring the notion of the guaranteed income to the table. It began to circulate in Washington policy circles in the form of a so-called Negative Income Tax — a term coined by Milton Friedman in his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom.”
這種現象被稱為「結構性失業」,並與某些特定工作被科技取代而淘汰的恐懼結合在一起。這讓甘迺迪總統的經濟顧問們達致了把無條件基本收入的想法帶到桌上討論的結果。於是此想法開始在華盛頓的政策圈子中流通,以所謂的「負所得稅」的形式出現-這個詞由米爾頓·傅利曼在其1962年的書《Capitalism and Freedom》之中創造出來。

By the time Nixon and George McGovern were competing for the presidency in 1972, as Brian Steensland describes in his book, both the Democrats and the Republicans were floating versions of a basic income. McGovern advocated for a so-called Demogrant that would essentially drop a yearly gift of $1,000—not a full salary; more like $7,000 today—into the lap of every American. By that point, more than 1,000 economists had called on the federal government to adopt some kind of income guarantee immediately.
到了尼克森與喬治·麥戈文在1972年選舉競爭以取得總統大位時,如同Brian Steensland在其書中所述,民主黨與共和黨員都正在提出各自對於無條件基本收入的版本。麥戈文提倡所謂的「全民式補助(Demogrant)」,即實際上每年讓1千美元灑落至每位美國人的膝部上作為禮物-不是全薪,比較像是今日的7千美元。到了那時候,超過1千位經濟學家早已請求聯邦政府立刻採取某種形式的無條件基本收入。

Despite all this momentum — even Donald Rumsfeld, who became director of the Office of Economic Opportunity when Nixon was elected, was a supporter — the idea ran aground after it was brought to Congress in the form of the Family Assistance Plan. It was voted down in committee, with some Democratic senators protesting that it wasn’t generous enough and others fearing it would disrupt the agricultural economy in the South.
儘管有了這些所有的助力-甚至連唐納德·倫斯斐都是支持者(當尼克森當選時,他變成經濟機會局(Office of Economic Opportunity)的局長)-但這個想法卻被擱置了,而且之後是以「家庭援助方案(Family Assistance Plan)」的形式被帶到國會上。最後在委員會中的投票中被否決,而一些民主黨的參議員則抗議此方案還不夠慷慨,而其他人則害怕這將會破壞南方的農業經濟。

According to Steven Pressman, an economist at Monmouth University in New Jersey and the co-editor of a 2005 book on the basic income guarantee, the idea suffered another blow in that period, when it was given a field test: a series of extraordinary social science experiments conducted between 1968 and 1980 in a number of US states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Colorado. In randomized trials, some households got unconditional cash transfers; others were assigned to “control groups” that did not.
根據新澤西州Monmouth大學的經濟學家與2005年一本關於無條件基本收入的書的共同編者Steven Pressman所言,這個想法在該時期進行實際測試時又受到另一項打擊:一系列非比尋常的社會科學實驗在1968至1980年於美國的許多州被執行,包括了新澤西州、賓夕法尼亞州、北卡羅來納州與科羅拉多州。在隨機的測試中,一些家庭得到了無條件的現金轉移,而其它被分配為「對照組」的家庭則沒有得到錢。

The results confirmed the suspicions of skeptics: People who got the money worked less. Specifically, a small but significant percentage of secondary earners, typically women, reduced their working hours or dropped out of the labor force entirely. On top of that, the results showed that married couples who received cash transfers were more likely to get divorced.
結果證實了懷疑論者的疑慮:得到錢的人確實較少工作了。特別是有一小部份比率的次等收入者(但意義重大,通常是女性),減少了工時或完全失去了勞動力。除此之外,實驗的結果顯示,得到現金轉移的結婚夫婦,後來更有可能離婚。

“These two outcomes killed the idea,” said Belgian philosopher and political economist Philippe Van Parijs, one of the world’s most prominent advocates of a guaranteed basic income and a former visiting professor at Harvard. Ever since, Van Parijs said, the debate over how to end poverty in America has proceeded as if the option of a basic income simply didn’t exist.
「這兩個結果扼殺了無條件基本收入的想法。」比利時哲學家與政治經濟學家Philippe Van Parijs如是說。他是世界上其中一位最有名的無條件基本收入倡議者,也是前哈佛大學的一位客座教授。Van Parijs說自從那時起,關於如何終結美國貧窮的辯論一直在持續中,但無條件基本收入卻彷彿打從一開始就不存在一樣。

***

In 2014, APPROACHING FIVE YEARS after the Great Recession technically ended, the problems the basic income scheme was supposed to solve in the ’70s have returned to the forefront: America’s gross domestic product is ticking up, and the stock market is booming—but millions of people are persistently, unfixably unemployed. As MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in their new book, “The Second Machine Age,” this will get even more extreme with time, as computers get better at doing jobs long reserved for people.
在2014年,就在2008年的金融海嘯技術上而言結束後近5年,理應在1970年代就能透過無條件基本收入而解決的問題卻又再次躍然紙上、捲土重來:美國的國內生產毛額正在緩慢上升,而股市也正欣欣向榮-但數以百萬計的美國人卻持續失業而且無法彌補此現象。正如同麻省理工學院的教授Erik Brynjolfsson與Andrew McAfee在他們的新書《The Second Machine Age》中所主張的一樣:「隨著時間的流逝,情況會變得更為嚴重許多,因為就長久以來保留給人類的工作而言,電腦已經能做得更好了。」

Between those shifts, and the mounting size of the safety net—add the ballooning cost of Medicare and Social Security to the government programs of the ’70s—some thinkers now believe we need to do more than wait out the post-recession hangover: Instead, we need a wholesale rethinking of government benefits.
在這些改變與社會福利安全網日益龐大的規模之間-增加了1970年代政府計畫中如氣球般膨脹的醫療與社會保障成本-現在開始有一些思想家相信,我們需要做更多的事,而不是期望並等待經濟衰退後的餘波會自動消退:相反地,我們需要大規模重新思考政府的補助津貼。

“At some point, we are going to be spending such a ridiculous amount of money on [the welfare state] that it will become ridiculous to everyone,” Murray said. “Right now it’s already ridiculous to people on the right. How can we have ‘X’ trillions of dollars in transfer payments and still have 15 percent of the population below the poverty line? It’s idiotic. Well, at some point it will also become idiotic to people on the left, and so, that’s what I see as the opportunity, ultimately, for a grand compromise.”
「在末來的某一時點上,我們將要花費如此荒謬可笑的龐大金額以維持福利國家的運作,這對所有人而言都將變成荒唐事。」Murray如是說。「對右翼人士而言,現狀就已經夠荒謬了。我們如何會在早已有『X』兆美元來轉移支付(transfer payments)的情況下,卻也仍然擁有15%的人口生活在貧窮線之下?這是愚蠢的。呃,在未來的某一時點,對左翼人士而言,這也會是愚蠢的,所以這就是我認為雙方最終能達到一個偉大妥協的機會。」

That grand compromise, he explained, will involve the libertarian right saying, “we’ll give you on the left big government in terms of the amount of money we spend on people, if you will give us small government in terms of the ability of the government to screw around with people’s lives.”
他解釋說這種偉大的妥協將包含了自由主義的右翼人士說:「我們將給你們左翼大政府式的龐大金錢花在人們身上,但你們也要給我們表現一個小而美政府式的能力來讓人們自由生活。」

“I don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Murray said. “But we are a lot closer to that point in 2014 than we were when I published the book [eight years ago.]”
「我不知道這什麼時候才會發生。」Murray說。「但比起八年前我出版書籍時,我們在2014年將遠遠更接近這個時機點。」

Graeber, an anarchist and an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, sees a similar breaking point coming: “The free-market guys have been on this dogged campaign to convince people that any sort of visionary politics is only going to lead to the Gulag....But of course the system’s about to fall apart, as the people running it increasingly recognize.” The fact that even conservatives like Murray are coming around to the basic income idea, he said, means “they’re trying to grab onto it, because they know something’s gotta happen.”
Graeber是一位在倫敦政治經濟學院的無政府主義者與人類學者,他也預見類似的突破點的到來:「擁護自由市場的那些傢伙一直都在頑固地向人們宣傳,使其相信任何有遠見的政治只會導致古拉格(Gulag,前蘇聯的勞改集中營)式的下場…但當然目前的體系也將要分崩離析了,而運行這個體系的那些人也正在明白到這一點。」Graeber說甚至像Murray這樣的保守派都正在跳出來圍著無條件基本收入打轉的這個事實,都表示了「他們正在試著理解並掌握它,因為他們知道有些事就要發生了。」

***

Whether the American people could ever embrace some version of a guaranteed basic income may come down to how they feel about the results of those experiments from 40 years ago—the ones that seemed to show that people who get free government money tend to work less and get divorced more. While those outcomes were widely seen at the time as dooming the whole idea, some basic income proponents believed that view got it backward. The economist James Tobin, for one, a Nobel laureate who wrote the first technical paper on how a basic income would work, wondered why it had been seen as a negative thing that women, possibly stuck in marriages out of economic dependence, had been given the means to leave their husbands. And as Van Parijs remembers Tobin saying to him before his death in 2002, “If some people, for a period, want to make their own life easier by avoiding the double shift and getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning, why shouldn’t it be welcomed? Does it not make for a more flourishing life?”
美國人是否真能擁抱某種版本的無條件基本收入的這個問題,最終都要回歸到他們對於40年前的那些實驗結果感覺如何-這些結果似乎顯示出,從政府免費得到金錢的人們傾向於較少工作而且更易離婚。儘管現在那些實驗結果被大多數人認為是毀了這整個想法的罪魁禍首,但一些無條件基本收入的擁護者相信這種觀點反而才是使其退化的原因。經濟學家詹姆士·托賓(James Tobin,1981年諾貝爾經濟學獎得主),寫了第一篇關於無條件基本收入會如何運作的技術性論文,他對於在40年前以下這件事竟然被視為負面的而感到奇怪:因為經濟上的依賴性而有可能被婚姻束縛住的女性,被給予了離開其丈夫的方法手段(即無條件基本收入)。如同Van Parijs記得托賓在2002年去世之前所說的:「如果一些人在一段時期內想讓自己的生活更輕鬆(藉由避免輪兩班制與早上5點起床),為何不應該歡迎這個想法?難道這不會讓生活更精彩與充實嗎?」

The future of the basic income in the United States will depend on whether there’s room, politically, to discuss that question. It’s an article of faith in America that work is a positive value: full employment, full time, with no such thing as a free lunch. The basic income may be, as Martin Luther King Jr. suggested in his final book, a more moral and humane way than our current welfare system to share the fruits of a democracy. But it also requires a radical shift in thinking: by guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in exchange, we decouple their value in society from their ability to do a job.
無條件基本收入在美國將取決於政治上是否有討論此議題的空間。在美國,「工作是一種正面的價值」是一種信念:充份就業、全職、天下沒有白吃的午餐。但如同馬丁·路德·金恩在其最後一本書中所主張的,比起我們現在的社會福利系統,無條件基本收入可能是一種更道德與更人道的方式來分享民主的果實。但這也需要一個思維上激進的轉變:透過向人們保證他們不需要做任何事來交換就能得到金錢的方式,我們反而使其工作的能力與舊有慣常的社會價值一刀兩斷了(因此也才需要調適)。

To some advocates of the basic income policy, this is an idea we have to start getting used to. Jobs, they suggest, are disappearing not just because of a temporary recession, but because technology is making it increasingly easy to build an economy with fewer laborers, thus driving the earning power of less skilled workers below the poverty level. This amounts to a looming disaster, the argument goes, unless we as a society commit to making sure everyone has enough to survive regardless of their employment status.
對一些擁護者而言,無條件基本收入這個政策是一種我們必須開始去習慣的想法。他們主張工作正在消失並非是因為短暫的經濟衰退,而是因為科技正在讓「建立一個更少勞工的經濟」這件事變得日益簡單了,因此消滅了較無技能的勞工的賺錢能力,使其最終落入貧窮線之下。此論點也主張這等同於正在隱約浮現的災難,除非我們社會能致力於承諾確保每個人都有足夠的金錢來生存,而不論他們的就業狀態。

Put another way, the fact that humankind has advanced to the point where we need so much less human labor to maintain the same level of productivity can be seen as a positive, as long as we can let go of the belief that a full-time job is a prerequisite for a complete, meaningful life. If we live in a nation that can afford it, say the most utopian of the basic income thinkers, shouldn’t we give people the option of working less, or at least prevent them from having to scramble to stay alive?
換一種方式說,目前的事實是人類已進化到一個歷史上的關鍵時刻,其中我們只需要少上許多的人類勞動就能維持同樣程度的生產力,這件事可以被視為是正面的,只要我們拋掉「全職工作是一個完整、有意義的生命的必要前提」這個信仰。如果我們生活在一個真能負擔得起無條件基本收入的國家,例如大多數無條件基本收入的烏托邦思想家所認為的那樣,那麼我們難道不應該給人們「較少去工作」的選擇嗎?或不應至少使其免於必須整天心慌意亂才能求得生存嗎?

For people who have never received a handout, who draw their dignity and identity from the work they do every day, that might sound like an unthinkable stretch. For others, it sounds like a solution.
對於那些從未接受他人施捨的人,即那些每天從所做的工作中掙得尊嚴與身份認同的人,無條件基本收入可能聽起來就如同無法想像的天方夜譚。但對其他人而言,這聽起來就像是一帖解藥。

回覆文章