MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech still rings true today in many ways. Clearly for the black community in the United States, police brutality, social segregation and institutionalized poverty are still relevant issues. And for this, we all suffer: blacks, whites, Latinos, and all Americans. We suffer together. Injustice continues to oppress our nation. Poverty continues to shackle our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans. Each day, millions of Americans miss out on their "inalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And so as the great Dr. MLK said, "We cannot be satisfied... We cannot be satisfied as long as the [poor man's] basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one." We cannot be satisfied so long as the institution of poverty unjustly detains even one of our fellow Americans.
While the task is obvious, we have too long toiled in defining success. If it is self-evident that "all men are created equal," let us aim for freedom from generational transfer of poverty. Let the poor man's son grow up with the rich man's daughter, the rich man's son with the poor man's daughter. Arm in arm they we must let all our children seek in fairness and truth the life, liberty and happiness this nation promises them.
Success is an equal outcome for rich and poor alike. Success is a simple and just tax system. Success is elimination of poverty, homelessness, and joblessness.
Success is solving poverty. Most simply, poverty is solved with a minimum income tied to cost of living. Because cost of living is tied to location, this means that if the government maintains that its citizens have the freedom to chose where they live, migratory trends will impact the cost. In order to achieve the basic level of human rights considered to be universal, this income should cover healthy food, clean water, basic heating, clothing, housing, healthcare and the needs of any children. Children need education, in addition to the basic needs described above. All of these expenses entail a significant tax burden on the working population. Obviously, if too many people are unemployed, this system fails.
Solving poverty is the first real step on the path to global collaboration. Certainly if we have people struggling to subsist, they will be even further incapable of collaborating meaningfully to the progress of our global society. And without meaningful participation in our global society, they lack meaning to it, must fail to derive truth from it. They would be reasonable and right to lack trust in it. Moving forward into a shared truth, a cultivated trust and a collaborative process is, first and foremost, the same as creating a society free from poverty.
How do we liberate ourselves of destitution? There are many solutions we might test. For one, despite having existed as a societal species for thousands of years, we have yet to thoroughly test the successful hypothesis of minimum income: society free from poverty. Oddly, government has restricted information on the one real experiment - Mincome, performed by Canada in the 1970s. Recent attempts in Finland and Switzerland to test the idea more broadly have been rejected by the public.
Even if such an unchecked mincome arrangement were to fail at a local or national level, compromises may also be tested. Perhaps the government only pledges a subset of the universal basic rights. The right to children alone threatens to bloat the cost of social services immensely. Nixing that single provision might well be sufficient to balance the entire system of rights.
Alternatively, requiring people to work might add the productivity required to balance the system. Educating the citizenry to the level required for individual productivity may challenge the system in this case. If people cannot do the jobs available at the precipice of societies productive progress, forcing people to work will negligibly or detrimentally impact the system's overall output. In developed countries today, this is already a problem as many well-paying positions with intense prerequisite knowledge and/or experience go unfilled.
Additionally, it remains unclear whether all people possess the physical and biological capacity to productively participate in cases where all such jobs require high levels of technical expertise. For example, there is some initial evidence that certain people lack the capacity to learn computer programming. Time will tell the extent to which this challenge exists and persists, if at all. However, if more people challenge society to accommodate them, the slower society will progress.
People and the environment together form the system which sustains and enriches us. So similarly, the environment challenges progress in several ways. Resource limitations impose a concrete boundary to the system. Because the energy available comes almost entirely from the sun, we know the maximum capacity at which the entire system operates.
Knowing these limitations actually frees us to design and test different societal and technological arrangements. Without the understanding of how the universe and how humanity operate, the blind assumption must be that anything is possible. We would never know where to start. Given the truth surrounding the challenges to the systems in which we exist, we can finally begin to progress in a guided and methodical fashion, rather than by the chance nature of our stochastic biology.
Only with a shared understanding of these systems can we build trust among ourselves. For this reason, understanding, accepting and establishing standards for agreeing upon the nature of the universe with which decisions are made and actions taken is crucial. Reasonable doubt is important, and for the save of robustness and diversity within the system, doubt should be tolerated to the extent that it remains unthreatening to the system's sustainability and progression. Utter rejection of basic principals that threaten the system itself must be reasonably contained.
Especially in the transition to a global society, knowing the limitations may yet be insufficient to provide for the security and well-being within any region, nation-state, or local civilization. Unless a subset of society can balance the global impacts of the remaining humans, the external portion of humanity will always threaten the maintenance and progression of any and all subsets. Even when completely isolated economically, they share their environment.
Collaboration therefore facilitates addressing global environmental challenges. At minimum, an isolated nation would require information regarding the external behavior of the remaining society to predict and address its impacts on their environment. Beyond facilitating solutions, collaboration is almost required, as the alternative, proved surveillance, seems likely to activate the vicious cycle of reducing trust, increasing external information protection and increasingly invasive surveillance.
A similar virtuous cycle, increasing collaboration and trust simultaneously, paves the road to facilitating global problem solving. This makes building trust between and among nations just as important as the raw collaboration. And while collaboration between individuals or states may increase trust, the interaction between citizens and their governments is far less obvious. Trust within nations seems instead to be derived from prosperity and wealth distribution. Extending this result to the global society suggests that in a stagnating global economy, only a globally equitable wealth distribution is capable of maintaining the trust required to facilitated maintenance and progress of a global society in the face of passive adversity. (Active adversity, such as an external invader, in itself elicits cooperation among distinct, mutually threatened groups.)
Logically, fairness, including equitable wealth distribution is required for trust. Wealth distribution is determined by social and economic policy and people determine policy. If the system is unfair and produces an unfair distribution of resources, I must ultimately fault people. People control the government by participating in it or by being accepting of it. Some of those people have high levels of influence over the system, others little, and because all people have some level of influence over the system, eventually, the system's unfairness will breed distrust among the people.
Still, equitable wealth distribution is insufficient alone to produce trust. There must be a cultural component as well, such that the rest of the system is perceived as fair. In fact this culture can broaden the wealth distribution curves that are perceived as equitable. In essence, trust must exist and cannot be simply or easily injected into an untrusting society. The transition is eased by equitable resource distribution, good governance, fairness and other social factors, but the generational and learned inmates trust can be strengthened independently of other influences in individuals that chose to trust first. In fact it is the leap of faith to trust first that seems to make interaction building possible at all.
So long as the flame of trust burns, it brightens the future for all.
Even in the light of trust, with strong collaboration among people and nations, false truth can undermine a society's ability to deal with adversity. While individual doubt is healthy and required, societal action must be reasonably permitted, and individuals must be forgiving of the actions flying in the face of their personal doubt. And in time, we must assume that our doubts and mistruths will be resolved in accordance with the universe. To some extent, it is even required that we trust the universe that the resolution process is amicable or at least acceptable. This is just as true for nations and societies as it is for individuals.
When assessing different solutions for the system in its entirety, we need to allow and encourage testing of such solutions. Thorough tests are nearly or completely impossible to conduct. Still, small scale approximations that work well can and should have an accepted process for scaling up to change even the outermost level of organization. Proposing San Francisco, California as a test bed for unrestricted Mincome, we might easily run a thought experiment first to generate our hypothesis.
San Francisco is a popular place to live. Additionally, it has some strong physical limits imposed by the landscape, being surrounded by water on three sides. Already, we know this causes problems with space availability as reflected in the housing market. So, we can easily expect a naive, unrestricted Mincome implementation to fail because no amount of money would allow the people that want to live there to find housing. There is no more housing to find. Even if we allow them to build housing, serious cost and space concerns arise.
On the other hand, if San Francisco is allowed to prevent immigration locally, much as the Galápagos Islands restrict travel, the thought experiment would likely result in a provocative success. Either the city could remove the existing homeless population and prevent their reentry, or they could subsidize away the problem for the existing population and prevent further immigration. This solution removes freedom of travel, making it more comparable to a global implementation of minimum income because immigration to Earth doesn't exist.
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