Despite the alarm of the British Luddites, automation has not in fact destroyed everyone’s job. But there is a growing chorus of policy gurus who warn that this time might be different. Rich countries’ populations are declining and aging: fast growth and millions of new high-tech jobs seem unlikely. Whether you are a believer or not, anticipating the death of millions of white-collar and “big muscle” jobs is probably prudent.

Angry right-wing populism is driven, in part, by stagnant wage rates, high levels of unemployment, and the visible lifestyles available to the 1 per cent against the hard struggles of everyone else. A collapse in white collar skilled jobs would make Trumpism look mild, as voters’ anger exploded. For all these reasons, previously unthinkable changes in the social safety net are gaining traction. The net is threadbare in countries like the U.K. and the United States after years of cuts, no longer effective in providing citizens the ability to pull themselves out of poverty.

Quietly, therefore, discussions are taking place about radical alternatives. Ottawa and two large provinces today have teams of inside and outside experts analyzing all social assistance payments. Brussels has been being pushed by the Macron government to start similar deep thinking.

The radical reformers focus on one big problem, and increasingly favour one big solution. Rising costs: administrative over-burden to manage social assistance keeps growing as a share of total expenditure — especially with non-universal programs requiring enforcement and investigation. Tougher oversight and higher public-sector salaries are a worrying trend-line, not yet tamed by technology.

Overlaps in a country as complexly governed as Canada become tangled spaghetti over time. One of the deans of the Ontario public service teases with this bon mot: “You probably don’t understand why the province needs to have 23 separate agencies and programs for child welfare, do you? Well, that’s because you are not a senior bureaucrat, and I am…”

As governments — always better at measuring inputs than outcomes — shovel more cash in, they have little evidence or ability to assess what dollar contributed to which better result. So, some form of dramatic efficiency booster would seem to be essential.

Enter the son of the “guaranteed annual income.”

Today it is dubbed the UBI — universal basic income. Pilot studies are underway in Finland, Brazil and… Ontario. The idea could not be simpler: every adult gets a transfer of cash into their bank accounts monthly to cover basic costs. The money required is breathtaking – unless you set those costs against the expenditures they might replace.

In Ontario, a fully funded UBI would be stratospheric, in the tens of billions of dollars, for it to be politically acceptable as an alternative to shutting down existing social transfer programs. However, several policy goals could be delivered at once: corporate tax expenditures that the federal Liberals have promised to slash could supply perhaps a third of a mid-range UBI; administrative cuts, mergers, downsizing, and overlap disentanglements, perhaps another third; and reductions in some forms of social assistance programming the remainder.

Costing and cuts would be challenging to get right. It is such unknown terrain, with such huge potential impacts, that more pilots and small steps would be prudent.

No UBI yet tested or proposed would supply a full living wage; the costs appear unmanageable. So recipients would continue to work, but probably for less, part-time and/or as volunteers.

Yet the main argument against a UBI is that it will kill work incentives. One intensive study of a 1970s scheme in Dauphin, Man., puts the lie to this conservative qualm. In a study by Prof. Evelyn Forget of the University of Manitoba, women, teenagers and people in their twenties did work less – so they could be more involved mothers and stay in school. Men’s work was not seriously impacted.

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Today I suspect the findings would be similar, except that more women would keep working too. Early experience in Finland appears to be that most take their UBI freedom to do things like community building, caregiving and mentoring that they could not afford to do before.

As the robots march through every industry, perhaps we can find a way to manage their relentless job-killing while preserving the basics of a life of dignity for everyone.