Tuesday, February 05, 2019

Is UBI a solution to the unemployment crisis?

By 2030, 800 million could lose their jobs across the world. Universal Basic Income can help keep them afloat.

Automation is here on us, and, in the years to come, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take it to an unprecedented level. It will bring about a profound change in the way we live and earn our livelihood. According to McKinsey, it can potentially leave 800 million of us jobless by 2030 across the world. The situation may be all the more alarming in developing countries; 69% of jobs in India risk losing their relevance in the same period.

That’s a scary possibility, given a highly unequal distribution of technological resources. Industry leaders whose innovations will likely influence the AI-related developments suggest Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution. For example, Elon Musk told CNBC: “There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation.” Mark Zuckerberg said during his Harvard commencement speech: “Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.”

In India, the opposition Congress party has announced that it will provide a basic minimum income guarantee to the poor, and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has similar ideas to offer. Such schemes are bound to bring immense pressure on the exchequer in their present forms. But, has the Indian political class unintentionally ended up providing a dress rehearsal for a future in which we are likely to face a permanent class of jobless people, in need of state support for survival?

When the machine came with the industrial revolution, it democratised the work culture to a large extent, weakening the institutions of slavery and caste, and making it unavoidable for the rest to work for subsistence. But for the first time in history, humans are facing an existential dilemma, where a substantial number of us stare at the prospect of being jobless because AI doesn’t only make humans’ physical work irrelevant, it also challenges the human brain, and it will only get better at it with time.

There may be newer job avenues with the proliferation of AI, but it would also mean that to keep themselves employed, humans would have to continuously update their skills. “A generation ago, the half-life of a skill was about 26 years, and that was the model for a career. Today, it’s four and half years and dropping,” Indranil Roy, the head of the Deloitte’s Future of Work Centre of Excellence, told the BBC.

But we are not prepared — emotionally, mentally and in terms of infrastructure — to adapt to such changes so quickly, threatening a prospect of great unpredictability around employment. Among the sectors that are likely to remain relevant — with constant training, of course — are creative, cognitive and technological, but for a large section of workers, it won’t be easy keeping up with these.

The possibilities of AI are, however, endless. It can open up jobs that are beyond our imagination right now, and may as well offset the loss in jobs. But the worrisome fact is that it can equally lead to an unprecedented inequality where the haves, having AI (like developed countries and a few individuals like Zuckerberg), will keep growing at a rate which have-nots will never be able to achieve. It may herald an age in which, initially, there is an unprecedented growth but little rise in pay or employment. Eventually, AI-driven automation will cheapen products, resulting in a decline in the wage of leftover jobs, and stagnation in the economy and employment — and could lead to the market’s collapse. UBI, in this context, makes business sense to keep the economy running.

Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, calls basic income as “the venture capital for the people”. It could compensate for the loss in jobs and skills, and also help in innovation. Multiple surveys suggest that the young in this age do not recall their working hours as their happiest memories; may be, the UBI-funded creativity pursuits might help better our happiness index. Many consider George Orwell and Harper Lee, among others, as successes who were provided with basic support.

For many, such possibilities may simply be a red herring. But even if we discount the possibility of a loss in employment, certain activities would undoubtedly become automated (about half of the present-day skills, McKinsey, 2018), making a lot of workers easily dispensable, again leading to lesser pay for the rest of the employed — or pay polarisation, resulting into immense income inequality.

People cried wolf that machines and computers would eat up their jobs. But for the first time in history , it’s not just that humans’ physical power is being challenged, but also their thinking power, which was unique to humans. Precedence shows that the fallout of shifting from an Industrial and IT age to Artificial Intelligence age would indeed mean loss of jobs — for example, AT&T, worth $267 billion in today’s valuation, employed more than 7.5 lakh peoplein 1967, Google, worth $370 billion, employs merely 55,000.It increasingly appears that the news of the wolf’s arrival may not be too far. UBI can become part of the solution, more so in developing countries such as India.

Source: Hindustan Times, 5/02/2019

Call it the Razor’s Edge

You may get motivated to pursue the spiritual path due to various reasons: maybe you were hurt by your loved one or you failed to achieve what you strived for. It is possible that you turned to spirituality to fill the void that appeared on realising that you, me or anyone is doing nothing extraordinary. This may lead to disillusionment with the materialistic world and relationships. In such times, the adage ‘world is mithya’ seems to start making sense. Some others are driven by the curiosity to know Truth or Reality, to understand Creation. Is there a common denominator driving these disparate groups? Yes, it’s ananda. Don’t most spiritual paths and sermons promise that the way to end suffering and to experience pure and unbounded joy is to look within? Many of us believe that meditation and spiritual practice would bring elation to a mundane existence. If one is very dejected, meditation or spirituality alone might not help in the short run. Counselling, medication, lifestyle changes and communicating with the person involved to heal the hurt might be necessary. Once committed to a particular spiritual path or master, most inquirers do not expect pitfalls or sufferings. Somerset Maugham’s work titled The Razor’s Edge was inspired by the Upanishads that state that the path to salvation is as difficult as passing over the razor’s edge. However, many spiritual paths refrain from forewarning prospective seekers that there might be phases along the journey, when they might feel worse than when they had started out.

Source: Economic Times, 5/02/2019

Monday, February 04, 2019

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 54, Issue No. 5, 02 Feb, 2019

Editorials

Political Dynasty Casts a Shadow on Democracy

Opposition Strategy for Uttar Pradesh

Climate Change and the Poor

Commentary

Alternative Standpoint

Unity in Diversity - Dream and Reality

Gurpreet Mahajan

Book Reviews

Battles to Control the Constitution

G Mohan Gopal

Displacement and Migration - Comparing China and India

Chris de Wet

Perspectives

Estimating Public Spending on Health - Using Information on Withdrawals

Mita Choudhury, Jay Dev Dubey

Special Articles

Social Movements and Educational Change - A Case Study of the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam

Amman Madan, Rama Sastry, B Ramdas

Unqualified Medical Practitioners - Their Illegal but Indispensable Role in Primary Healthcare

Shailaja Chandra, Sreedeep Bhattacharya

Is India Digitally Prepared for International Trade?

Rashmi Banga

Referees Consulted in 2018

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: Telengana Turmoil

Letters

Hiding behind ‘Indian Values’

Abhik Bhattacharya

Political Crisis in Venezuela

Noam Chomsky, Laura Carlsen, Greg Grandin, Miguel Tinker Salas, Sujatha Fernandes, Steve Ellner and others

Current Statistics

What is performativity in philosophy?

Performativity as a concept was first developed by the philosopher of language John L. Austin to define the capability of language as a mode of action and not just as a mode of description. It ran counter to the positivist view of speech as essentially comprising utterances that were either true or false. Marriage vows, promises of help, judicial verdicts, placing of bets are all instances of performative utterances that signify indulgence, and not any verifiable description.

Source: The Hindu, 4/02/2019

Legitimacy of the basic structure

The doctrine may be derived from the abstract. But it exists within the Constitution itself

It has now been more than 45 years since the Supreme Court ruled inKesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala that Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution was not unlimited, that the Constitution’s basic structure was infrangible. But as entrenched as this doctrine might now be, it remains, to some, a source of endless antipathy. There have already been grumblings over the rule’s legitimacy in certain quarters in response to challenges made to the recently introduced 103rd Constitutional Amendment, which provides for reservations based on economic criteria in government jobs and education.

Unwarranted censure

The common criticism is that the doctrine has no basis in the Constitution’s language. The phrase “basic structure”, it’s argued, finds no mention anywhere in the Constitution. What’s more, beyond its textual illegitimacy, its detractors also believe the doctrine accords the judiciary a power to impose its philosophy over a democratically formed government, resulting in something akin to what Union Minister Arun Jaitley once termed as a “tyranny of the unelected”.

Unquestionably, some of this censure is a result of the Supreme Court’s occasionally muddled interpretation of what the Constitution’s basic structure might be. But to reject the doctrine altogether because the judiciary sometimes botches its use is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For not only is the basic structure canon legally legitimate, in that it is deeply rooted in the Constitution’s text and history, but it also possesses substantial moral value, in that it strengthens democracy by limiting the power of a majoritarian government to undermine the Constitution’s central ideals.

Ever since the Constitution was first amended in 1951, the true extent of Parliament’s power to amend the document has been acutely contested. But the dangers inherent in granting untrammelled power to the legislature were perhaps best brought out in a lecture delivered by a German professor, Dietrich Conrad. His talk “Implied Limitations of the Amending Power”, delivered in February 1965 to the law department of the Banaras Hindu University, came at an especially fraught time. Only months earlier Parliament had introduced the contentious 17th Constitutional Amendment. Through this, among other things, a number of land reform legislations had been placed into the Constitution’s Ninth Schedule. This meant that those laws, even when discriminatory, were immunised from challenge.

But it wasn’t the merit of the amendment that troubled Conrad. He was concerned with the suggestion that Parliament’s power to alter the Constitution was plenary. Influenced by the theoretical scholarship of the jurist Carl Schmitt, Conrad believed that even if a legislature were bestowed with the widest of powers to amend the Constitution, its authority was always subject to a set of inherent constraints. Parliament, he contended, was, after all, a creature of the Constitution. It could not, therefore, make changes that had the effect of overthrowing or obliterating the Constitution itself.

As A.G. Noorani has pointed out, Conrad was affected by his own country’s history. In Germany, the virulent end brought to the Weimar Republic by Nazism had meant that when the country adopted its Basic Law in 1949, it quite explicitly placed checks on the legislature’s powers. This included a bar on lawmakers from amending those provisions of the Basic Law that concerned the country’s federal structure, that made human rights inviolable and that established constitutional principles such as the state’s democratic and social order.

Questions to ponder

In his lecture, Conrad said India hadn’t yet been confronted with any extreme constitutional amendment. But jurists, he warned, ought to be mindful of the potential consequences inherent in granting Parliament boundless power to change the Constitution. How might we react, he wondered, if the legislature were to amend Article 1, for example, by dividing India into two. “Could a constitutional amendment,” he asked, “abolish Article 21,” removing the guarantee of a right to life? Or could Parliament use its power “to abolish the Constitution and reintroduce… the rule of a Moghul emperor or of the Crown of England?”

Although it was delivered to a limited audience, M.K. Nambyar, who was to soon lead arguments in the Supreme Court against the 17th amendment in Golaknath’s case, was alerted to Conrad’s urgings. Devoid of any direct precedent from other Commonwealth nations, where an amendment had been subject to the rigours of judicial review, Nambyar thought the German experience carried with it a set of important lessons. Were Parliament’s powers considered infinite, he argued, the parliamentary executive can be removed, fundamental rights can be abrogated, and, in effect, what is a sovereign democratic republic can be converted into a totalitarian regime.

Interpreting ‘amendment’

The court, in Golaknath , didn’t’ quite feel the need to go this far. But, ultimately, just four years later, in Kesavananda Bharati , it was this formulation that shaped Justice H.R. Khanna’s legendary, controlling opinion. While the judge conceded that it wasn’t possible to subscribe to everything in Conrad’s arguments, this much, he said, was true: “Any amending body organized within the statutory scheme, howsoever verbally unlimited its power, cannot by its very structure change the fundamental pillars supporting its Constitutional authority.” Yet, the limitation, wrote Justice Khanna, wasn’t as much implicit from a reading of the Constitution as a whole as it was evident from the very meaning of the word “amendment”. According to him, what could emerge out of an amendment was only an altered form of the existing Constitution and not an altogether new and radical Constitution.

This interpretation, as Sudhir Krishnaswamy has shown, in some depth, in his book, Democracy and Constitutionalism in India , is compelling for at least two reasons. First, it represents a careful reading of the text of Article 368, and, second, it delivers an attractive understanding of the moral principles that anchor the Constitution. Article 368 grants Parliament the power to amend the Constitution, making it clear that on the exercise of that power “the Constitution shall stand amended”. Therefore, if what has to remain after an amendment is “the Constitution”, naturally a change made under Article 368 cannot create a new constitution. Such a construal is also supported by the literal meaning of the word “amendment”, which is defined as “a minor change or addition designed to improve a text”. Hence, for an amendment to be valid, the constitution that remains standing after such a change must be the Constitution of India; it must continue to possess, in its essence, those features that were foundational to it even at its conception.

Now, consider Conrad’s extreme example: were an amendment to be introduced relinquishing control over India to a foreign power, would it not result in the creation of a constitution that is no longer the Constitution of India? Would not such an amendment strike at the root of the Constitution’s Preamble, which, in its original form, established India as a sovereign democratic republic? On any reasonable analysis it ought to, therefore, be clear that the basic structure doctrine is not only grounded in the Constitution’s text and history, but that it also performs an important democratic role in ensuring that majoritarian governments do not destroy the Constitution’s essential character.

We must remember that constitutions are not like ordinary laws. Interpreting one is always likely to be an exercise fraught with controversy. But such is the nature of our political design that the court, as an independent body, is tasked with the role of acting as the Constitution’s final interpreter, with a view to translating, as Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court once wrote, abstract principles into “concrete constitutional commands”. It may well be the case that the basic structure doctrine is derived from the abstract. But that scarcely means it doesn’t exist within the Constitution.

Suhrith Parthasarathy is an advocate practising at the Madras High Court

Source: The Hindu, 4/02/2019

Oh So ‘Backward’

Metropolitan notions of progress are challenged by the lifestyle of a Naga tribe

Mon. The name will not ring a bell for most of us. The land of the last legendary head-hunters, this picturesque district of Nagaland, running along the Myanmar border, is one of the remotest in the country. Mon is also typically considered one of the most “backward” districts. In my one year of work and stay at Mon, I, however, have often felt compelled to contemplate on what it really means to be backward. Having grown up in one of the most prosperous and well-administered parts of India — in and around Chandigarh — and having lived in two megalopolises — Boston and London — I thought I knew what it means to not be backward. The people of Mon, belonging to the Konyak Naga tribe, continuously challenge my hitherto held clichéd notions of advancement and backwardness. I share the story of one such subversion.

One of the grandest annual celebrations in Mon is the “Lao-Ong Mo”, a post-harvest festival of the Konyaks. I too was invited to express gratitude to the divine spirits for the bountiful harvest by way of praying, singing, dancing and feasting. It was a spectacular affair, attended, inter alia, by a posse of political leaders, senior government officials, heads of village councils and local unions. The feast was a gastronomical delight — tables groaning under the weight of an endless array of dishes, prepared from the freshly harvested produce. But more than the colourful cuisine, it was the unique dining experience that struck a real chord. As I walked into the dining hall, a bearer, decked in her traditional finery, handed me a beautifully woven bamboo food tray. The tray was shaped quite like a North Indian thaal/thaali, sturdy yet light to hold. It was lined with fresh green leaves. After I had finished eating, another equally charming bearer swiftly cleared away my tray. I followed my gentle helper, out of curiosity, to the room meant for disposal. I saw her upturn the tray into a large waste bin, also made of bamboo. The leaves had been lined on the trays with such skill that they fell into the bin as a neat little packet with all the waste food secured inside, without any of it soiling the tray, and without the cleaner having to touch any leftovers. The trays were being collected for sunning and reuse.

As per the Konyak tradition, an anti-oxidant rich black tea, called “phika” is served after food. I was again thrilled to find my steaming phika cha poured into a disposable glass, carved out of bamboo stem. Such a seamlessly biodegradable pattern of food consumption was a first-of-its-kind experience. I was also one of the luckier guests, who received a gift hamper of local produce. Recently harvested millets, spices and vegetables were meticulously packed in firm packets made of palm leaf, and all the packets were tucked inside a beautiful sturdy bamboo basket. Not a speck of plastic was used in the otherwise usual guzzlers — feasting and packaging.

Generally, public events of such scale, both in India and abroad, would generate an abominable quantity of non-biodegradable waste. Material prosperity, associated with high-end retail and luxurious lifestyles, but built on toxic and unsustainable consumption patterns, may not quite be a sign of advancement. For instance, Starbucks’ reported consumption of plastic, of which the straws alone annually contribute 2,000 tonnes of plastic to the world’s oceans, is exacerbating global menaces like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and threatening the marine ecosystem.

At the end of the festival, I scanned the vast ground and the massive dining hall and found not a trace of refuse. I stood there for a while, immensely satisfied to have had my stereotypes about “backwardness” take a beating, yet again. It was a powerful reminder that true advancement must encompass the good sense to clean up after ourselves and the thoughtfulness to adopt consumption patterns generating as little waste as possible.

My experiences in Mon regularly reveal to me that there is more to every story and so much to learn in places one might little expect. This new year, let’s embrace advancement by looking beyond the constructed narrative, shrugging off generalisations, and learning from one another’s transformative ideas and cultural wisdom, even those in faraway corners.The Father of the Nation would have been proud of Mon. I certainly am.

Source: Indian Express, 4/02/2019

To protect tigers, India needs more better-equipped forest personnel

India is currently the most dangerous country in the world for forest rangers. In 2017, 29 rangers were killed on duty in India; the Democratic Republic of Congo (17) and Thailand (8) made for a distant second and third, says a report of the International Ranger Federation. On January 27, unidentified poachers with weapons hacked to death two guards in the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Bihar.

At a time when there are almost daily reports of man-animal conflicts across the country, the Indian government’s pledge to protect tiger habitats and tiger corridors is a heartening piece of news. The second part of the promise is of utmost important because, while India’s total tiger population went up from 1,411 in 2006 to 1,706 in 2010 and 2,226 in 2014, the country recorded a 12.6% decline in tiger occupancy in connecting tiger habitats outside tiger reserves between 2006 and 2010, the latest period for which this data is available. This promise to protect tiger habitats and corridors was published on Monday in the fourth edition of the Global Tiger Action Plan.

Unfortunately, the action plan didn’t release data on the decline in the tiger population outside protected areas for 2014. The 2018 tiger census estimations, likely to be released on March 31, may see an increase in overall tiger numbers but may not offer any trends on their numbers in corridors (outside the protected areas) because it follows a different methodology.

Saying that India has changed its approach to tiger conservation to focus on the corridors, The Global Tiger Action Plan adds that now the country prioritises “source-sink dynamics” (how variation in habitat quality may affect the population of tigers) by restoring habitat connectivity. This includes providing incentives to local people for conserving forests along tiger corridors and providing subsidised LPG connections to people to reduce dependence on timber from the forest.

Along with these steps, the Indian State needs to invest heavily in other areas if it is keen to protect tigers, no matter where they are: increase recruitment; improve ground-level infrastructure in forests (vehicles for patrolling, staff quarters with basic facilities); and provide better training and arming of forest guards, the first line of defence against poaching and illegal public intrusion, who at present, operate with outdated guns and little training.