Should the tax on robots be high or low?
Sir, John Thornhill writes that Carl Benedikt Frey’s “The Technology Trap” informs us that “the number of robots in the US increased by 50 per cent between 2008 and 2016, each of them replacing about 3.3 jobs” “The return of the Luddites” July 13, 2019.
Those who are so replaced must surely have been generating some non-wage labour costs, like social security, that robots don’t. Therefore I frequently pose a question that, with the exception of some Swedes, no one wants to give me a definite answer to. It is:
Should we tax robots low so they work for us humans, or high so that we humans remain competitive for the jobs?
In an Op-Ed from 2014 titled “We need decent and worthy unemployments” I wrote: “The power of a nation, and the productivity of its economy, which so far has depended primarily on the quality of its employees may, in the future, also depend on the quality of its unemployed, as a minimum in the sense of these not interrupting those working.”
And over the years I have become convinced that in a universal basic income, large enough to help us out of bed to reach up to what is available, and low enough to keep us from staying in bed, lies our best chances to find the basic social stability we need to avoid societal breakdown,.
The financing of that UBI could include that those who exploit data on us citizens shared with us part of their ad revenues, a high carbon tax, and perhaps taxing robots and AI (though I do not know with how much)
PS. I case you wonder why some Swedes answered the question that has primarily to do with the existence in Swedish of the magical word “lagom”, meaning something like not too much not too little but just right. J
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