luntarily or involuntarily outside the system of paid employment. That can improve the safety net for those who are displaced by new technologies. It also “gives people a chance to build positions in the non-market economy” by subsidizing participation in volunteer work, co-ops and adult learning opportunities. Market work would still be rewarding as long as minimum wages were higher than the basic income.
In the long run, the abundance of things made available by hi-tech production methods would bring the monetary cost of living down and reduce consumers’ dependency on earned income. People could rely more heavily on non-market forms of sharing, since they would have more time for unpaid but socially useful activity. As the income tax base became smaller, government’s ability to pay a basic income would decline, but so would people’s need for one.
Can democracy survive the transition?
Just about every one of Mason’s political suggestions goes against conservative thinking, which sees the free market as the creator of wealth and the limited state as its supporter. In the conservative view, the state should tax and regulate capital as little as possible, protect wealth against inflation with tight monetary policy, and keep people dependent on paid employment by providing only the most meager welfare benefits. Mason ends his book by warning that if the democratic state tries to facilitate a transition beyond capitalism, the economic elite may decide that preserving capitalism is more important than preserving the democratic state!
How long will it take before the culture of the Western elite swings toward emulating Putin and Xi Jinping? On some campuses, you can already hear it: “China shows capitalism works better without democracy” has become a standard talking point. The self-belief of the 1 per cent is in danger of ebbing away, to be replaced by a pure and undisguised oligarchy.”
We can already see the beginnings of an alliance between right-wing autocrats and blue-collar workers fearful of losing their jobs, especially in doomed occupations like coal mining or pipeline construction. If such alliances succeed in taking over the governments of developed countries such as the United States, then things could get pretty ugly in the next few decades.
In the last great transition of capitalism, in the early twentieth century, authoritarian politics had to be defeated before the democratic state could help create a broader-based prosperity. (Third-world peoples and racial minorities remained excluded however.) We should not be surprised if the same turns out to be true of the twenty-first century, as we struggle to create a more inclusive and sustainable prosperity.