Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #908 Easy “E’s”: Eugenics, Euthanasia and Extermination (A Message from the Past to the Future)

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: With tech­no­log­i­cal advances lead­ing some ana­lysts to con­clude that the future will fea­ture a large­ly  “employ­ment-free” world, the con­cept of a “uni­ver­sal basic income” has tak­en hold in some cir­cles. Con­clud­ing that all peo­ple will be giv­en a “work­able” sum with which to live, adher­ents of the con­cept envi­sion a qua­si-utopi­an world.

We fear the devel­op­ment of some­thing far more dystopic. With the con­tin­ued pop­u­lar­i­ty of the aus­ter­i­ty agen­da, despite strong evi­dence that it is counter-pro­duc­tive, we fear that a large­ly “employ­ment-free” envi­ron­ment will lead to the elim­i­na­tion of human beings seen as “super­flu­ous.”

The Third Reich’s exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams have been pop­u­lar­ly viewed as aber­ra­tion, an occur­rence that was sep­a­rate from “nor­mal” polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal events. This is not the case. Mur­der­ous Nazi racial and social pol­i­cy were the out­growth of main­stream intel­lec­tu­al trends that are very much with us today.

At the epi­cen­ter of the intel­lec­tu­al nexus under­pin­ning the Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams are the over­lap­ping inter­na­tion­al eugen­ics and inter­na­tion­al men­tal hygiene move­ments. Seek­ing to pro­mote the “right kind” of men­tal devel­op­ment, the inter­na­tion­al men­tal hygiene move­ment pro­mot­ed the ele­va­tion of the right kind of genet­ic make­up as a means of real­iz­ing its goals. In turn, ter­mi­nat­ing peo­ple born with dis­abil­i­ties, peo­ple who were old and poor, ster­il­iz­ing those with psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders and those with chron­ic ill­ness­es, advo­cates of euthana­sia paved the way for the Third Reich’s T‑4 exter­mi­na­tion pro­gram.

In time, the T‑4 pro­gram yield­ed the broad­er-based Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams, as those trained in the euthana­sia insti­tu­tions “grad­u­at­ed” to posi­tions in the exter­mi­na­tion camps, hav­ing acquired the nec­es­sary skills and demeanor.

Josef Men­gele’s Auschwitz work with twins in many ways high­light­ed the evo­lu­tion of main­stream eugen­ics research. Long pre­oc­cu­pied with the study of twins, eugeni­cists cel­e­brat­ed the Nazi dic­ta­tor­ship for its abil­i­ty to use coer­cion to achieve their objec­tive of detailed, inten­sive research of the sub­ject.

Lav­ish­ly fund­ed by the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion well into the tenure of the Third Reich, the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tutes were the pri­ma­ry focal point of eugen­ics research on twins. Men­gele con­duct­ed his bru­tal, lethal research at Auschwitz in con­junc­tion with the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tutes and his intel­lec­tu­al men­tor at that insti­tu­tion, Dr. Frei­herr Otmar von Ver­schuer, fill­ing out paper­work for the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute for each of the sets of twins on which he exper­i­ment­ed before pro­ceed­ing with his work.

With physi­cian-assist­ed sui­cide leg­is­la­tion gain­ing in many places, at the same time as the aus­ter­i­ty agen­da con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lar in elite eco­nom­ic and social plan­ning cir­cles, we should be on the alert for lethal, and alto­geth­er “final” solu­tions to the prob­lem of large num­bers of eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­placed peo­ple.

Most of the pro­gram is excerpt­ed from Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M12, record­ed in Feb­ru­ary of 1988. Oth­er pro­grams deal­ing with the eugen­ics move­ment include: FTR #‘s 32, Part I, 32, Part II117, 124, 140, 141534, 664, as well as Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M60

Pro­gram High­lights Include: 

  • The role of Ernst Rudin in shep­herd­ing Nazi phi­los­o­phy from eugen­ics to euthana­sia to exter­mi­na­tion.
  • The role Wil­helm Ploetz in shap­ing the Nazi eugen­ics pro­gram.
  • Review of the Knauer case, a key legal and philo­soph­i­cal step in the real­iza­tion of the Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams.
  • Enthu­si­as­tic reviews of the ear­ly Nazi eugen­ics pro­grams by intel­lec­tu­al coun­ter­parts in the Unit­ed States and oth­er West­ern coun­tries.
  • The exten­sive use of exten­sive offi­cial secre­cy to fur­ther the effi­cien­cy of the euthana­sia cen­ters.

1. Open­ing the pro­gram, a dia­logue between two New York Times eco­nom­ics colum­nists lifts the cur­tain on the con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Basic Income. We feel that, giv­en the pro­cliv­i­ties of the world’s pow­er elites, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a lethal solu­tion to the prob­lem of wide­spread job­less­ness is far more prob­a­ble.

“A Future With­out Jobs? Two Views of a Chang­ing Work­force” by Farhad Man­joo and Eduar­do Porter; The New York Times; 3/9/2016 [West Coast Edi­tion].

In the utopi­an (dystopi­an?) future pro­ject­ed by tech­no­log­i­cal vision­ar­ies, few peo­ple would have to work. Wealth would be gen­er­at­ed by mil­lions upon mil­lions of sophis­ti­cat­ed machines. But how would peo­ple earn a liv­ing?

Sil­i­con Val­ley has an answer: a uni­ver­sal basic income. But what does that have to do with today’s job mar­ket, with many Amer­i­cans squeezed by glob­al­iza­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal change?

Two colum­nists for Busi­ness Day, Farhad Man­joo, who writes State of the Art on Thurs­days, and Eduar­do Porter, author of Eco­nom­ic Scene on Wednes­days, have just tak­en on these issues in dif­fer­ent ways. So we brought them togeth­er for a con­ver­sa­tion to help sharp­en the debate about America’s eco­nom­ic future.

Eduar­do Porter: I read your very inter­est­ing col­umn about the uni­ver­sal basic income, the qua­si-mag­i­cal tool to ensure some basic stan­dard of liv­ing for every­body when there are no more jobs for peo­ple to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a cer­tain­ty, at least among the tech­no­rati on the West Coast.

But the eco­nom­ic num­bers that we see today don’t sup­port this view. If robots were eat­ing our lunch, it would show up as fast pro­duc­tiv­i­ty growth. But as Robert Gor­don points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Amer­i­can Growth,” pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has slowed sharply. He argues pret­ty con­vinc­ing­ly that future pro­duc­tiv­i­ty growth will remain fair­ly mod­est, much slow­er than dur­ing the burst of Amer­i­can pros­per­i­ty in mid-20th cen­tu­ry.

A prob­lem I have with the idea of a uni­ver­sal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage sub­si­dies or wage insur­ance to top up the earn­ings of peo­ple who lose their job and must set­tle for a new job at a low­er wage — is that it relies on an unlike­ly future. It’s not a future with a lot of crum­my work for low pay, but essen­tial­ly a future with lit­tle or no paid work at all.

The for­mer seems to me a not unrea­son­able fore­cast — we’ve been los­ing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employ­ment in the ser­vice sec­tor has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a night­mare) than a fore­cast. Even George Jet­son takes his brief­case to work every day.

Farhad Man­joo: Because I’m scared that they’ll unleash their bots on me, I should start by defend­ing the techies a bit before I end up agree­ing with you.

So, first, I don’t think it’s quite right to say that the pro­po­nents of U.B.I. are envi­sion­ing a future of no paid work at all. I think they see less paid work than we have today — after soft­ware eats the world, they say it’s pos­si­ble we’ll end up with a soci­ety in which there’s not enough work for every­one, and espe­cial­ly not a lot of good work.

They see a future in which a small group of high­ly skilled tech work­ers reign supreme, while the rest of the job world resem­bles the piece­meal, tran­si­tion­al work we see com­ing out of tech today (Uber dri­vers, Etsy shop­keep­ers, peo­ple who scrape by on oth­er people’s plat­forms).

Why does that future call for insti­tut­ing a basic income instead of the small­er and more fea­si­ble labor-pol­i­cy ideas that you out­line? I think they see two rea­sons. First, techies have a philo­soph­i­cal bent toward big ideas, and U.B.I. is very big.

They see soft­ware not just alter­ing the labor mar­ket at the mar­gins but fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing every­thing about human soci­ety. While there will be some work, for most non­pro­gram­mers work will be inse­cure and unre­li­able. Peo­ple could have long stretch­es of not work­ing at all — and U.B.I. is alone among pro­pos­als that would allow you to get a sub­sidy even if you’re not work­ing at all.

Eduar­do Porter: I know what you mean by think­ing big. Many of these new tech­nol­o­gy entre­pre­neurs think more like engi­neers than social sci­en­tists. In the same breath they will extol the ben­e­fits of indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty and the mar­ket econ­o­my and pro­pose some vast reor­ga­ni­za­tion of soci­ety fol­low­ing an ambi­tious blue­print cooked up by an intel­lec­tu­al elite. A few months ago I inter­viewed Albert Wenger, the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist you cite in your col­umn. He also told me about his vision of a future world in which work would be super­flu­ous. It made me think of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or George Orwell’s “Ani­mal Farm.”

If there are, in fact, jobs to be had, a uni­ver­sal basic income may not be the best choice of pol­i­cy. The lack of good work is prob­a­bly best addressed by mak­ing the work bet­ter — bet­ter paid and more skilled — and equip­ping work­ers to per­form it, rather than offer­ing a uni­ver­sal pay­ment unre­lat­ed to work.

The chal­lenge of less work could just lead to few­er work­ing hours. Oth­ers are already mov­ing in this direc­tion. Peo­ple work much less in many oth­er rich coun­tries: Nor­we­gians work 20 per­cent few­er hours per year than Amer­i­cans; Ger­mans 25 per­cent few­er. They have tak­en much more of their wealth in the form of leisure rather than mon­ey. But they still work for a liv­ing.

And, by the way, I’ve read about robots that can pro­gram. So maybe the pro­gram­mers aren’t safe either.

Farhad Man­joo: One key fac­tor in the push for U.B.I., I think, is the idea that it could help reorder social expec­ta­tions. At the moment we are all defined by work; West­ern soci­ety gen­er­al­ly, but espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can soci­ety, keeps social score accord­ing to what peo­ple do and how much they make for it. The dreami­est pro­po­nents of U.B.I. see that chang­ing as work goes away. It will be O.K., under this pol­i­cy, to choose a life of learn­ing instead of a low-pay­ing bad job.

Eduar­do Porter: To my mind, a uni­ver­sal basic income func­tions prop­er­ly only in a world with lit­tle or no paid work because the odds of any­body tak­ing a job when his or her needs are already being met are going to be fair­ly low. The dis­cus­sion, I guess, real­ly depends on how high this uni­ver­sal basic income would be. How many of our needs would it sat­is­fy? We already sort of have a uni­ver­sal basic income guar­an­tee. It’s called food stamps, or SNAP. But it’s impos­si­ble for peo­ple to live on food stamps alone.

This brings to mind some­thing else. You give the techies cred­it for seri­ous­ly propos­ing this as an opti­mal solu­tion to wrench­ing tech­no­log­i­cal and eco­nom­ic change. But in a way, isn’t it a cop-out? They’re just pass­ing the bag to the polit­i­cal sys­tem. Telling Con­gress, “You fix it.”

If the idea of robots tak­ing over sounds like sci­ence fic­tion, the idea of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment agree­ing to tax cap­i­tal­ists enough to hand out checks to sup­port the entire work­ing class is in an entire­ly new cat­e­go­ry of fan­ta­sy.

Farhad Man­joo: Yes, this is per­haps the biggest crit­i­cism of U.B.I.: It all sounds too fan­tas­ti­cal! It’s straight from sci-fi. And you’re right; many of these pro­po­nents aren’t shy about being inspired by fan­tasies of the future.

But para­dox­i­cal­ly, they also see U.B.I. as more polit­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble than some of the oth­er pol­i­cy pro­pos­als you call for. One of the rea­sons some lib­er­tar­i­ans and con­ser­v­a­tives like U.B.I. is that it is a very sim­ple, effi­cient and uni­ver­sal form of wel­fare — every­one gets a month­ly check, even the rich, and the gov­ern­ment isn’t going to tell you what to spend it on. Its very uni­ver­sal­i­ty breaks through polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. And I should note that it’s not only techies who are for it — Andy Stern, the for­mer head of the S.E.I.U., will soon pub­lish a book call­ing for a basic income.

Still, like you, I’m skep­ti­cal that we’ll see any­thing close to this sort of pro­pos­al any­time soon. Even Bernie Sanders isn’t propos­ing it. The techies, as usu­al, are either way ahead of every­one, or they’re liv­ing in some oth­er uni­verse. Often it’s hard to tell which is which.

But let’s get back to the ques­tion of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. You’re right that soft­ware hasn’t pro­duced the sort of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains many had said it would. But why do you dis­agree with the techies that automa­tion is just off beyond the hori­zon?

Eduar­do Porter: I guess some enor­mous dis­con­ti­nu­ity right around the cor­ner might vast­ly expand our pros­per­i­ty. Joel Mokyr, an eco­nom­ic his­to­ri­an that knows much more than I do about the evo­lu­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, argues that the tools and tech­niques we have devel­oped in recent times — from gene sequenc­ing to elec­tron micro­scopes to com­put­ers that can ana­lyze data at enor­mous speeds — are about to open up vast new fron­tiers of pos­si­bil­i­ty. We will be able to invent mate­ri­als to pre­cise­ly fit the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of our homes and cars and tools, rather than make our homes, cars and tools with what­ev­er mate­ri­als are avail­able.

The ques­tion is whether this could pro­duce anoth­er burst of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty like the one we expe­ri­enced between 1920 and 1970, which — by the way — was much greater than the mini-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty boom pro­duced by infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy in the 1990s.

While I don’t have a crys­tal ball, I do know that investors don’t seem to think so. Long-term inter­est rates have been grad­u­al­ly declin­ing for a fair­ly long time. This would sug­gest that investors do not expect a very high rate of return on their future invest­ments. R.&D. inten­si­ty is slow­ing down, and the rate at which new busi­ness­es are formed is also slow­ing.

Lit­tle in these dynam­ics sug­gests a high-tech utopia — or dystopia, for that mat­ter — in the off­ing.

2. Most of the pro­gram con­sists of an excerpt­ing of  Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M12, record­ed in Feb­ru­ary of 1988. The pro­gram traces the evo­lu­tion of Ger­man eugen­ics think­ing, its evo­lu­tion into a eugen­ics pro­gram and the grad­ual inten­si­fi­ca­tion and esca­la­tion of that pro­gram into the full-blown Nazi exter­mi­na­tion pro­grams.

 

Discussion

4 comments for “FTR #908 Easy “E’s”: Eugenics, Euthanasia and Extermination (A Message from the Past to the Future)”

  1. Charles Mur­ray, the aca­d­e­m­ic of choice for con­tem­po­rary eugeni­cists, recent­ly had anoth­er piece advo­cat­ing a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income. Or, rather, advo­cat­ing his spe­cif­ic vision for how a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income (UBI) should work. It’s an impor­tant piece because it serves as a warn­ing for the phase in the far-right’s attack on pub­lic ser­vices in the con­text of the employ­ment envi­ron­ment of the future where hyper-automa­tion and AI make a grow­ing per­cent­age of pop­u­lace as basi­cal­ly redun­dant. Because as Mur­ray makes clear in the arti­cle below, he agrees that automa­tion and AI are poten­tial­ly going to trans­form the nature of and employ­ment in com­ing years and sta­ble, non-pover­ty wage jobs are going to be increas­ing­ly out of reach for a grow­ing seg­ment of the pop­u­lace.

    And while a UBI would seem like exact­ly the kind of thing soci­ety would want in that kind of future, there are a few strings attached to the the UBI Mur­ray has in mind: it must replace all pub­lic assis­tance pro­grams and the safe­ty-net: Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, food stamps, Sup­ple­men­tal Secu­ri­ty Income, hous­ing sub­si­dies, wel­fare for sin­gle women and every oth­er kind of wel­fare and social-ser­vices pro­gram must be replaced with the UBI or Mur­ray sees it as an inevitable fail­ure that would just result in peo­ple liv­ing on the dole and soci­etal implo­sion. And no extra income for chil­dren.

    What’s the lev­el of income Mur­ray envi­sions for the UBI? $13,000 per year, with $3,000 allo­cat­ed towards med­ical care. So indi­vid­u­als will have $10k to live on and that’s going to replace Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, food stamps, Sup­ple­men­tal Secu­ri­ty Income, hous­ing sub­si­dies, wel­fare for sin­gle women and every oth­er kind of wel­fare and social-ser­vices pro­gram. And no extra income for kids. Keep in mind that the pover­ty lev­el for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual in the US is around $11k for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual and $23k for a fam­i­ly of four and there’s pre­sum­ably pub­lic assis­tance pro­grams that are sup­ple­ment­ing that income. So Mur­ray’s plan is for the UBI to replace the cur­rent safe­ty-net with some­thing that will pre­sum­ably make many poor indi­vid­u­als much poor­er. Espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er the poten­tial cost of med­ical expens­es that are cov­ered by pro­grams like Med­ic­aid. As Mur­ray sees it, the pri­vate char­i­ty and social groups will step in to cov­er the new­ly cre­at­ed gaps in things like med­ical costs and oth­er needs that can’t be ade­quate­ly paid for with an indi­vid­u­al’s the UBI. So in addi­tion to shift­ing many exist­ing social ser­vices into pri­vate sec­tor func­tions that are paid for with the UBI, Mur­ray’s plan also assumes that pri­vate char­i­ty will just step in to also fill in the gaps. In oth­er words, Mur­ray’s UBI is basi­cal­ly a cat­a­lyst to pri­va­tize the pub­lic saftey-net.

    But Mur­ray’s ver­sion of the UBI does envi­sion cre­at­ing one big new kind of saftey-net in Amer­i­can soci­ety: indi­vid­u­als will now feel safe and secure in just telling peo­ple who are still in need that they are on their own and if the UBI can’t cov­er their costs, oh well. And by giv­ing peo­ple the new found free­dom to just say, “we no longer feel any respon­si­bil­i­ty to those in need because they have a (pover­ty-lev­el) UBI,” indi­vid­u­als will feel more per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and there­fore become bet­ter, more vir­tu­ous peo­ple.

    That’s seri­ous­ly how Mur­ray’s ver­sion of the UBI is sup­posed to work. It’s a reminder that the list of Charles Mur­ray’s life­time accom­plish­ments includes smear­ing the idea of a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income:

    The Wall Street Jour­nal

    A Guar­an­teed Income for Every Amer­i­can
    Replac­ing the wel­fare state with an annu­al grant is the best way to cope with a rad­i­cal­ly chang­ing U.S. jobs market—and to revi­tal­ize America’s civic cul­ture

    By Charles Mur­ray
    June 3, 2016 11:59 a.m. ET

    When peo­ple learn that I want to replace the wel­fare state with a uni­ver­sal basic income, or UBI, the response I almost always get goes some­thing like this: “But peo­ple will just use it to live off the rest of us!” “Peo­ple will waste their lives!” Or, as they would have put it in a bygone age, a guar­an­teed income will fos­ter idle­ness and vice. I see it dif­fer­ent­ly. I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a com­ing labor mar­ket unlike any in human his­to­ry and that it rep­re­sents our best hope to revi­tal­ize Amer­i­can civ­il soci­ety.

    The great free-mar­ket econ­o­mist Mil­ton Fried­man orig­i­nat­ed the idea of a guar­an­teed income just after World War II. An exper­i­ment using a bas­tardized ver­sion of his “neg­a­tive income tax” was tried in the 1970s, with dis­ap­point­ing results. But as trans­fer pay­ments con­tin­ued to soar while the pover­ty rate remained stuck at more than 10% of the pop­u­la­tion, the appeal of a guar­an­teed income per­sist­ed: If you want to end pover­ty, just give peo­ple mon­ey. As of 2016, the UBI has become a live pol­i­cy option. Fin­land is plan­ning a pilot project for a UBI next year, and Switzer­land is vot­ing this week­end on a ref­er­en­dum to install a UBI.

    The UBI has brought togeth­er odd bed­fel­lows. Its advo­cates on the left see it as a move toward social jus­tice; its lib­er­tar­i­an sup­port­ers (like Fried­man) see it as the least dam­ag­ing way for the gov­ern­ment to trans­fer wealth from some cit­i­zens to oth­ers. Either way, the UBI is an idea whose time has final­ly come, but it has to be done right.

    First, my big caveat: A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all oth­er trans­fer pay­ments and the bureau­cra­cies that over­see them. If the guar­an­teed income is an add-on to the exist­ing sys­tem, it will be as destruc­tive as its crit­ics fear.

    Sec­ond, the sys­tem has to be designed with cer­tain key fea­tures. In my ver­sion, every Amer­i­can cit­i­zen age 21 and old­er would get a $13,000 annu­al grant deposit­ed elec­tron­i­cal­ly into a bank account in month­ly install­ments. Three thou­sand dol­lars must be used for health insur­ance (a com­pli­cat­ed pro­vi­sion I won’t try to explain here), leav­ing every adult with $10,000 in dis­pos­able annu­al income for the rest of their lives.

    Peo­ple can make up to $30,000 in earned income with­out los­ing a pen­ny of the grant. After $30,000, a grad­u­at­ed sur­tax reim­burs­es part of the grant, which would drop to $6,500 (but no low­er) when an indi­vid­ual reach­es $60,000 of earned income. Why should peo­ple mak­ing good incomes retain any part of the UBI? Because they will be los­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, and they need to be com­pen­sat­ed.

    The UBI is to be financed by get­ting rid of Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, food stamps, Sup­ple­men­tal Secu­ri­ty Income, hous­ing sub­si­dies, wel­fare for sin­gle women and every oth­er kind of wel­fare and social-ser­vices pro­gram, as well as agri­cul­tur­al sub­si­dies and cor­po­rate wel­fare. As of 2014, the annu­al cost of a UBI would have been about $200 bil­lion cheap­er than the cur­rent sys­tem. By 2020, it would be near­ly a tril­lion dol­lars cheap­er.

    Final­ly, an acknowl­edg­ment: Yes, some peo­ple will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. But that is already a prob­lem. As of 2015, the Cur­rent Pop­u­la­tion Sur­vey tells us that 18% of unmar­ried males and 23% of unmar­ried women ages 25 through 54—people of prime work­ing age—weren’t even in the labor force. Just about all of them were already liv­ing off oth­er people’s mon­ey. The ques­tion isn’t whether a UBI will dis­cour­age work, but whether it will make the exist­ing prob­lem sig­nif­i­cant­ly worse.

    I don’t think it would. Under the cur­rent sys­tem, tak­ing a job makes you inel­i­gi­ble for many wel­fare ben­e­fits or makes them sub­ject to extreme­ly high mar­gin­al tax rates. Under my ver­sion of the UBI, tak­ing a job is pure prof­it with no down­side until you reach $30,000—at which point you’re bring­ing home way too much ($40,000 net) to be deterred from work by the impo­si­tion of a sur­tax.

    Some peo­ple who would oth­er­wise work will sure­ly drop out of the labor force under the UBI, but oth­ers who are now on wel­fare or dis­abil­i­ty will enter the labor force. It is pru­dent to assume that net vol­un­tary dropout from the labor force will increase, but there is no rea­son to think that it will be large enough to make the UBI unwork­able.

    Invol­un­tary dropout from the labor force is anoth­er mat­ter, which brings me to a key point: We are approach­ing a labor mar­ket in which entire trades and pro­fes­sions will be mere shad­ows of what they once were. I’m famil­iar with the retort: Peo­ple have been wor­ried about tech­nol­o­gy destroy­ing jobs since the Lud­dites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is dif­fer­ent” has a lot going for it.

    When cars and trucks start­ed to dis­place horse-drawn vehi­cles, it didn’t take much imag­i­na­tion to see that jobs for dri­vers would replace jobs lost for team­sters, and that car mechan­ics would be in demand even as jobs for sta­ble boys van­ished. It takes a bet­ter imag­i­na­tion than mine to come up with new blue-col­lar occu­pa­tions that will replace more than a frac­tion of the jobs (now num­ber­ing 4 mil­lion) that taxi dri­vers and truck dri­vers will lose when dri­ver­less vehi­cles take over. Advances in 3‑D print­ing and “con­tour craft” tech­nol­o­gy will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 mil­lion peo­ple now employed in pro­duc­tion and con­struc­tion.

    The list goes on, and it also includes mil­lions of white-col­lar jobs for­mer­ly thought to be safe. For decades, progress in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence lagged behind the hype. In the past few years, AI has come of age. Last spring, for exam­ple, a com­put­er pro­gram defeat­ed a grand­mas­ter in the clas­sic Asian board game of Go a decade soon­er than had been expect­ed. It wasn’t done by soft­ware writ­ten to play Go but by soft­ware that taught itself to play—a land­mark advance. Future gen­er­a­tions of col­lege grad­u­ates should take note.

    Exact­ly how bad is the job sit­u­a­tion going to be? An Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nom­ic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment study con­clud­ed that 9% of Amer­i­can jobs are at risk. Two Oxford schol­ars esti­mate that as many as 47% of Amer­i­can jobs are at risk. Even the opti­mistic sce­nario por­tends a seri­ous prob­lem. What­ev­er the case, it will need to be pos­si­ble, with­in a few decades, for a life well lived in the U.S. not to involve a job as tra­di­tion­al­ly defined. A UBI will be an essen­tial part of the tran­si­tion to that unprece­dent­ed world.

    The good news is that a well-designed UBI can do much more than help us to cope with dis­as­ter. It also could pro­vide an invalu­able ben­e­fit: inject­ing new resources and new ener­gy into an Amer­i­can civic cul­ture that has his­tor­i­cal­ly been one of our great­est assets but that has dete­ri­o­rat­ed alarm­ing­ly in recent decades.

    A key fea­ture of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism has been the propen­si­ty of Amer­i­cans to cre­ate vol­un­tary orga­ni­za­tions for deal­ing with local prob­lems. Toc­queville was just one of the ear­ly Euro­pean observers who mar­veled at this phe­nom­e­non in the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies. By the time the New Deal began, Amer­i­can asso­ci­a­tions for pro­vid­ing mutu­al assis­tance and aid­ing the poor involved broad net­works, engag­ing peo­ple from the top to the bot­tom of soci­ety, spon­ta­neous­ly formed by ordi­nary cit­i­zens.

    These groups pro­vid­ed sophis­ti­cat­ed and effec­tive social ser­vices and social insur­ance of every sort, not just in rur­al towns or small cities but also in the largest and most imper­son­al of mega­lopolis­es. To get a sense of how exten­sive these net­works were, con­sid­er this: When one small Mid­west­ern state, Iowa, mount­ed a food-con­ser­va­tion pro­gram dur­ing World War I, it engaged the par­tic­i­pa­tion of 2,873 church con­gre­ga­tions and 9,630 chap­ters of 31 dif­fer­ent sec­u­lar fra­ter­nal asso­ci­a­tions.

    Did these net­works suc­cess­ful­ly deal with all the human needs of their day? No. But that isn’t the right ques­tion. In that era, the U.S. had just a frac­tion of today’s nation­al wealth. The cor­rect ques­tion is: What if the same lev­el of activ­i­ty went into civ­il society’s efforts to deal with today’s needs—and financed with today’s wealth?

    The advent of the New Deal and then of Pres­i­dent Lyn­don Johnson’s Great Soci­ety dis­placed many of the most ambi­tious vol­un­tary efforts to deal with the needs of the poor. It was a pre­dictable response. Why con­tin­ue to con­tribute to a pri­vate pro­gram to feed the hun­gry when the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing bil­lions of dol­lars on food stamps and nutri­tion pro­grams? Why con­tin­ue the mutu­al insur­ance pro­gram of your fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tion once Social Secu­ri­ty is installed? Vol­un­tary orga­ni­za­tions con­tin­ued to thrive, but most of them turned to needs less sub­ject to crowd­ing out by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

    This was a bad trade, in my view. Gov­ern­ment agen­cies are the worst of all mech­a­nisms for deal­ing with human needs. They are nec­es­sar­i­ly bound by rules applied uni­form­ly to peo­ple who have the same prob­lems on paper but who will respond dif­fer­ent­ly to dif­fer­ent forms of help. Whether reli­gious or sec­u­lar, non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion are inher­ent­ly bet­ter able to tai­lor their ser­vices to local con­di­tions and indi­vid­ual cas­es.

    Under my UBI plan, the entire bureau­crat­ic appa­ra­tus of gov­ern­ment social work­ers would dis­ap­pear, but Amer­i­cans would still pos­sess their his­toric sym­pa­thy and social con­cern. And the wealth in pri­vate hands would be greater than ever before. It is no pipe dream to imag­ine the restora­tion, on an unprece­dent­ed scale, of a great Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of vol­un­tary efforts to meet human needs. It is how Amer­i­cans, left to them­selves, have always respond­ed. Fig­u­ra­tive­ly, and per­haps lit­er­al­ly, it is in our DNA.

    Regard­less of what vol­un­tary agen­cies do (or fail to do), nobody will starve in the streets. Every­body will know that, even if they can’t find any job at all, they can live a decent exis­tence if they are coop­er­a­tive enough to pool their grants with one or two oth­er peo­ple. The social iso­lates who don’t coop­er­ate will also be get­ting their own month­ly deposit of $833.

    Some peo­ple will still behave irre­spon­si­bly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will rad­i­cal­ly change the social frame­work with­in which they seek help: Every­body will know that every­body else has an income stream. It will be pos­si­ble to say to the irre­spon­si­ble what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act togeth­er. Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t.”

    The known pres­ence of an income stream would trans­form a wide range of social and per­son­al inter­ac­tions. The unem­ployed guy liv­ing with his girl­friend will be told that he has to start pay­ing part of the rent or move out, chang­ing the dynam­ics of their rela­tion­ship for the bet­ter. The guy who does have a low-income job can think about mar­riage dif­fer­ent­ly if his new family’s income will be at least $35,000 a year instead of just his own earned $15,000.

    Or con­sid­er the unem­ployed young man who fathers a child. Today, soci­ety is unable to make him shoul­der respon­si­bil­i­ty. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his month­ly grant to be extract­ed for child sup­port before he ever sees it. The les­son wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.

    Or con­sid­er teenage girls from poor neigh­bor­hoods who have friends turn­ing 21. They watch—and learn—as some of their old­er friends use their new month­ly income to rent their own apart­ments, buy nice clothes or pay for tuition, while oth­ers have to use the mon­ey to pay for dia­pers and baby food, still liv­ing with their moth­ers because they need help with day care.

    These are just a few pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios, but mul­ti­ply the effects of such inter­ac­tions by the mil­lions of times they would occur through­out the nation every day. The avail­abil­i­ty of a guar­an­teed income wouldn’t relieve indi­vid­u­als of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­se­quences of their actions. It would instead, para­dox­i­cal­ly, impose respon­si­bil­i­ties that didn’t exist before, which would be a good thing.

    ...

    My ver­sion of a UBI would do noth­ing to stage-man­age their lives. In place of lit­tle bun­dles of ben­e­fits to be used as a bureau­cra­cy spec­i­fies, they would get $10,000 a year to use as they wish. It wouldn’t be charity—every cit­i­zen who has turned 21 gets the same thing, deposit­ed month­ly into that most respectable of pos­ses­sions, a bank account.

    A UBI would present the most dis­ad­van­taged among us with an open road to the mid­dle class if they put their minds to it. It would say to peo­ple who have nev­er had rea­son to believe it before: “Your future is in your hands.” And that would be the truth.

    The UBI is to be financed by get­ting rid of Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, food stamps, Sup­ple­men­tal Secu­ri­ty Income, hous­ing sub­si­dies, wel­fare for sin­gle women and every oth­er kind of wel­fare and social-ser­vices pro­gram, as well as agri­cul­tur­al sub­si­dies and cor­po­rate wel­fare. As of 2014, the annu­al cost of a UBI would have been about $200 bil­lion cheap­er than the cur­rent sys­tem. By 2020, it would be near­ly a tril­lion dol­lars cheap­er.”
    Yep, some­how social costs would be hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars cheap­er under Mur­ray’s UBI plan. How does accom­plish this while still pro­vid­ed the same lev­el of pub­lic ser­vices or bet­ter? By not pro­vid­ing then and just telling peo­ple “you bet­ter start pulling those boot­straps because you’re on your own!”

    ...
    Under my UBI plan, the entire bureau­crat­ic appa­ra­tus of gov­ern­ment social work­ers would dis­ap­pear, but Amer­i­cans would still pos­sess their his­toric sym­pa­thy and social con­cern. And the wealth in pri­vate hands would be greater than ever before. It is no pipe dream to imag­ine the restora­tion, on an unprece­dent­ed scale, of a great Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of vol­un­tary efforts to meet human needs. It is how Amer­i­cans, left to them­selves, have always respond­ed. Fig­u­ra­tive­ly, and per­haps lit­er­al­ly, it is in our DNA.

    Regard­less of what vol­un­tary agen­cies do (or fail to do), nobody will starve in the streets. Every­body will know that, even if they can’t find any job at all, they can live a decent exis­tence if they are coop­er­a­tive enough to pool their grants with one or two oth­er peo­ple. The social iso­lates who don’t coop­er­ate will also be get­ting their own month­ly deposit of $833.

    Some peo­ple will still behave irre­spon­si­bly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will rad­i­cal­ly change the social frame­work with­in which they seek help: Every­body will know that every­body else has an income stream. It will be pos­si­ble to say to the irre­spon­si­ble what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act togeth­er. Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t.”
    ...

    These are just a few pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios, but mul­ti­ply the effects of such inter­ac­tions by the mil­lions of times they would occur through­out the nation every day. The avail­abil­i­ty of a guar­an­teed income wouldn’t relieve indi­vid­u­als of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­se­quences of their actions. It would instead, para­dox­i­cal­ly, impose respon­si­bil­i­ties that didn’t exist before, which would be a good thing.

    ...

    A UBI would present the most dis­ad­van­taged among us with an open road to the mid­dle class if they put their minds to it. It would say to peo­ple who have nev­er had rea­son to believe it before: “Your future is in your hands.” And that would be the truth.

    “Some peo­ple will still behave irre­spon­si­bly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will rad­i­cal­ly change the social frame­work with­in which they seek help: Every­body will know that every­body else has an income stream. It will be pos­si­ble to say to the irre­spon­si­ble what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act togeth­er. Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t.”
    Oh how nice. After gut­ting all social wel­fare pro­grams and effec­tive­ly mak­ing the poor poor­er, Amer­i­can soci­ety will just become like one giant fam­i­ly where no one is allowed to starve. What exact­ly we’ll do when it isn’t, “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act togeth­er. Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t,” but instead, “We won’t let you die from [insert expen­sive med­ical cir­cum­stance] before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your act togeth­er. Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t,” is unclear, but pre­sum­ably pri­vate char­i­ty will assume the grow­ing med­ical expens­es of an increas­ing­ly poor aging Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion or, you know, just tell them “Don’t try to tell us you’re help­less, because we know you aren’t.” Either response appears to be a viable option under Mur­ray’s plan. After all, the threat of let­ting peo­ple starve is is key ingre­di­ent of Mur­ray’s UBI secret sauce.

    And, again, since there’s a very high prob­a­bly that get­ting rid of the min­i­mum wage would also be part of any UBI plan note how Mur­ray sells his UBI plan as a response to a future job mar­ket where automa­tion and AI make qual­i­ty employ­ment

    ...
    Exact­ly how bad is the job sit­u­a­tion going to be? An Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nom­ic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment study con­clud­ed that 9% of Amer­i­can jobs are at risk. Two Oxford schol­ars esti­mate that as many as 47% of Amer­i­can jobs are at risk. Even the opti­mistic sce­nario por­tends a seri­ous prob­lem. What­ev­er the case, it will need to be pos­si­ble, with­in a few decades, for a life well lived in the U.S. not to involve a job as tra­di­tion­al­ly defined. A UBI will be an essen­tial part of the tran­si­tion to that unprece­dent­ed world.

    The good news is that a well-designed UBI can do much more than help us to cope with dis­as­ter. It also could pro­vide an invalu­able ben­e­fit: inject­ing new resources and new ener­gy into an Amer­i­can civic cul­ture that has his­tor­i­cal­ly been one of our great­est assets but that has dete­ri­o­rat­ed alarm­ing­ly in recent decades.
    ...

    So we need a UBI to address the loom­ing job-poca­lypse. But the UBI is going to be a pover­ty-lev­el income, with no back­up for when med­ical or oth­er expens­es exceed that pover­ty lev­el, and the only way to achieve non-pover­ty-lev­el income is to get the extra income in the job-poca­lypse job mar­ket. That should go well:

    Backchan­nel

    Say Good­bye To Your High­ly Skilled Job. It’s Now a “Human Intel­li­gence Task.”
    Dig­i­tal crowd­work­ers don’t only do menial tasks like data entry. They’re smart, capa­ble, and hun­gri­er than any algo­rithm. And they work for cheap.

    Mark Har­ris
    6/6/2016

    Har­ry K. sits at his desk in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da, scan­ning sepia-tint­ed swirls, loops and blobs on his com­put­er screen. Every sec­ond or so, he jabs at his mouse and adds a flu­o­res­cent dot to the image. After a minute, a new image pops up in front of him.

    Har­ry is tag­ging images of cells removed from breast can­cers. It’s a painstak­ing job but not a dif­fi­cult one, he says: “It’s like play­ing Etch A Sketch or a video game where you col­or in cer­tain dots.”

    Har­ry found the gig on Crowd­flower, a crowd­work­ing plat­form. Usu­al­ly that cell-tag­ging task would be the job of pathol­o­gists, who typ­i­cal­ly start their careers with annu­al salaries of around $200,000—an hourly wage of about $80. Har­ry, on the oth­er hand, earns just four cents for anno­tat­ing a batch of five images, which takes him between two to eight min­utes. His hourly wage is about 60 cents.

    Grant­ed, Har­ry can’t per­form most of the tasks in a pathologist’s reper­toire. But in 2016—11 years after the launch of the ur-plat­form, Ama­zon Mechan­i­cal Turk—crowd­work­ing (some­times also called crowd­sourc­ing) is eat­ing into increas­ing­ly high-skilled jobs. The engi­neers who are devel­op­ing this mod­el of labor have a bold ambi­tion to atom­ize entire careers into micro-tasks that almost any­one, any­where in the world, can car­ry out online. They’re bank­ing on the idea that any tech­nol­o­gy that can make a com­plex process 100 times cheap­er, as in Harry’s case, will spread like wild­fire.

    Per­haps it’s inevitable that in a few years, soft­ware will swal­low up these jobs, too. But as the tech con­ver­sa­tion has fix­at­ed on how arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will affect the job mar­ket, crowd­work has qui­et­ly grown in impact and scale.

    The next jobs to receive the crowd treat­ment? Doc­tors, man­agers and teach­ers.

    ———–

    When Ama­zon revealed Mechan­i­cal Turk in 2005, the ser­vice became an overnight hit. It was the first online plat­form to allow busi­ness­es to post small jobs (called ‘HITs,’ short for ‘human intel­li­gence tasks’), and it quick­ly attract­ed a glob­al pool of under-employed peo­ple eager to tack­le these jobs for equal­ly small rewards. Work­ers, or ‘turk­ers,’ choose which tasks to accept, and how long to work. They might, for exam­ple, check web­sites for open­ing hours, cat­e­go­rize images, or answer sur­vey ques­tions.

    Isaac Nichols, now Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer of the plat­form zCrowd, was part of the team that devel­oped Mechan­i­cal Turk. The orig­i­nal intent was to use crowd­work­ers to clean up the company’s data­bas­es, extract infor­ma­tion from pho­tos, and com­plete list­ings for CDs and MP3s. “We had a huge need for a work­force to do this work, but man­ag­ing that was com­pli­cat­ed in terms of hir­ing, staffing, and sea­son­al­i­ty of the work,” he says.

    Ama­zon real­ized that if it was fac­ing these kinds of issues, oth­er com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal ecosys­tem were like­ly also suf­fer­ing. “Mechan­i­cal Turk was designed from the ground-up to be an exter­nal tool,” says Nichols. It wasn’t long before oth­er crowd­work­ing plat­forms soon popped up. “If you have a task that almost any­one in the world can do, then there’s a seem­ing­ly infi­nite sup­ply of peo­ple will­ing to do it,” says Lukas Biewald, founder of Crowd­Flower, the plat­form Har­ry uses. If you need­ed to pitch the con­cept to a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist in an ele­va­tor, you could say crowd­work­ing is Uber for brains.

    More than a decade lat­er, dozens of crowd­work­ing plat­forms now serve up tiny units of labor to mil­lions of work­ers around the world. Last year, the JPMor­gan Chase Insti­tute looked at the anonymized accounts of 6.3m of its cus­tomers, and found that over 265,000 peo­ple had received income from online econ­o­my plat­forms. This includes so-called cap­i­tal plat­forms like Uber or AirBnB, which encour­age peo­ple to mon­e­tize their pos­ses­sions. These have made mon­ey for an esti­mat­ed 3 per­cent of Amer­i­cans, com­pared with only around 1 per­cent of Amer­i­cans (about 3 mil­lion peo­ple) for crowd­work­ing.

    But crowd­work­ing is grow­ing faster, hav­ing increased more than ten­fold in the last three years. The mon­ey crowd­work­ers earned grew even more dra­mat­i­cal­ly between 2012 and 2015—by a fac­tor of 54. Most crowd­work­ers ini­tial­ly turn to dig­i­tal labor to sup­ple­ment low earn­ings or fill gaps between tra­di­tion­al jobs, but once they start, they tend to do more of it.

    Unlike Uber dri­vers or many TaskRab­bit labor­ers, who usu­al­ly have to be phys­i­cal­ly present wher­ev­er they are need­ed, dig­i­tal work­ers can earn mon­ey from cof­fee shops or kitchen tables any­where in the world. And unlike the design, writ­ing and cod­ing pro­fes­sion­als you can find on plat­forms like Upwork or Elance, most crowd­work­ers need no par­tic­u­lar skills or train­ing. Robert Reich, Sec­re­tary of Labor in the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion, calls these work­ers “fun­gi­ble, sought only for their reli­a­bil­i­ty and low cost.” Tech work­ers some­times use a more vis­cer­al term: meat­ware.

    ———–

    The down­side of mak­ing some­thing 100 times cheap­er means that someone—and prob­a­bly lots of people—are los­ing mon­ey. A few pathol­o­gists need­ing to retrain might not upset you, but how exact­ly can peo­ple like Har­ry live on 60 cents an hour? In 2010, researchers at New York Uni­ver­si­ty cal­cu­lat­ed the medi­an wage of Mechan­i­cal Turk work­ers at $1.38 an hour. While a few expe­ri­enced crowd­work­ers say they earn between $5 and $12 an hour, many requesters con­tin­ue to pay far below the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage of $7.25 (which does not apply to inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors).

    For exam­ple, a recent job post by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, required work­ers to com­plete a 45-minute sur­vey for $1.13, equiv­a­lent to $1.50 an hour, with the risk of for­feit­ing the entire pay­ment should they answer a sin­gle ques­tion incor­rect­ly. And some pay­ments are actu­al­ly falling.

    “When I start­ed work­ing orig­i­nal­ly on the legal HITs, it was 25 cents each,” says Ser­ana Win­ter, a 34-year old Ohioan spe­cial­iz­ing in pro­cess­ing legal doc­u­ments. “We now do them for 15 cents a HIT. Four used to get me to a dol­lar, now it takes sev­en.”

    She esti­mates that “I can do 8 hours of work and make $30, if I’m lucky.” Win­ter uses zCrowd, which adds an effi­cient work­flow man­age­ment sys­tem with­in Mechan­i­cal Turk, and she puts in a full eight-hour shift sev­er­al days a week. She is also work­ing towards a bachelor’s degree in health and well­ness, so the flex­i­ble hours make it worth it for her.

    Isaac Nichols, zCrowd’s founder, admits that pric­ing is tricky. “What’s dif­fi­cult is that you’re deal­ing with aver­ages, but every job is slight­ly dif­fer­ent. We often have work­ers who get 7, 8 or 9 bucks an hour,” he says. “I’d love to pay more but [there are] some upper bounds in terms of what our cus­tomers want to pay.”

    ...

    So I decid­ed to ask them. I want­ed to know why any­one would work for such small change, and whether they felt pres­sured, exploited?—?or per­haps even empow­ered as part of this rev­o­lu­tion in labor.

    ...

    One thing they have in com­mon is their con­cern over pay. Near­ly half say that crowd­work­ing is rarely or nev­er fair­ly paid, and twice as many think that pay is decreas­ing rather than increas­ing. “Even requesters who once paid a fair wage drop that wage when they real­ize that there is some­one out there who will keep work­ing on their HITs for pen­nies,” says one work­er.

    (I also ran a larg­er sur­vey, ask­ing 209 turk­ers how much they actu­al­ly earned, day in, day out. The aver­age hourly rate they report­ed was $3.25, with a third earn­ing less than $3. Few­er than one in ten crowd­work­ers said they earned $7 an hour or more).

    Sev­er­al crowd­work­ers feel like they are in a race to the bot­tom, not just with human rivals, but with machines, too. “Some of [my work] could pos­si­bly be as eas­i­ly done auto­mat­ed,” says a 27-year old work­er from Flori­da. “It is real­ly up to the requester if they want a com­put­er to com­plete it or have it done by a human being. If they find it cheap­er to do auto­mat­ed, they will more than like­ly go that route.”

    Per­haps such mechan­i­cal work is bet­ter han­dled by machines any­way. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs in devel­oped coun­tries have been replaced by assem­bly line robots. Many of the rou­tine image recog­ni­tion and trans­la­tion tasks car­ried out by human turk­ers are now being tar­get­ed by AI researchers. A start­up called Mirador, for exam­ple, asked turk­ers to clas­si­fy 50,000 images as ‘nude’ or ‘not nude’. Once its deep learn­ing soft­ware had been trained on that data, the human work­ers were no longer need­ed. (Arguably, this is a great use for automa­tion, as soft­ware can auto­mat­i­cal­ly sift porno­graph­ic, vio­lent or dis­turb­ing imagery from social media with­out a human hav­ing to suf­fer it.)

    “Algo­rithms are going to take a piece of the work,” admits Isaac Nichols. “It’s a slow, pow­er­ful steady process,” agrees Lukas Biewald. “What we see is that peo­ple will move lit­tle pieces to auto­mat­ed sys­tems over time.”

    Adam Devine, a vice pres­i­dent at Work­Fu­sion, anoth­er crowd­work­ing plat­form, goes fur­ther. “There is absolute­ly no future where a per­son is read­ing infor­ma­tion and sim­ply key­ing in data.” For exam­ple, one of WorkFusion’s clients process­es pay­ment records between banks in dif­fer­ent coun­tries. These doc­u­ments arrive from glob­al banks in emails, spread­sheet files, PDFs and even fax­es. Work­ers then have to tran­scribe each one per­fect­ly. Accord­ing to Devine, a sin­gle mis­take can cost half a bil­lion dol­lars.

    Devine says that by tog­gling back and forth between a human work­er train­ing an algo­rithm, and an algo­rithm that makes a mis­take and is cor­rect­ed by a human, Work­Fu­sion can achieve near-per­fect accu­ra­cy at a fifth of the cost of using peo­ple alone. And as machines get smarter, the illeg­i­ble writ­ing and scrawled num­bers that cur­rent­ly need human input will get few­er and few­er. “The work­ers don’t even real­ize that they’re work­ing on an inter­face that’s ulti­mate­ly going to remove a lot of the work they’re doing,” says Devine.

    ...

    A few peo­ple in my sur­vey said that they had learned skills like typ­ing, research and cod­ing on the job, but only a quar­ter said that they actu­al­ly want­ed to be stretched by their work online. Even those that do aspire to more inter­est­ing tasks have low expec­ta­tions about forg­ing a career from them. “I would like more chal­leng­ing work,” says a 38-year old work­er liv­ing in Wis­con­sin, “But they’d prob­a­bly not pay enough any­way.”

    One 28-year old New York­er with a master’s degree thinks that crowd­work­ing has expand­ed her knowl­edge base slight­ly, “but I wouldn’t say I’ve gained any real world skills.” Per­haps this is the real dan­ger. Increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sys­tems are mak­ing it ever eas­i­er to atom­ize some dai­ly duties of doc­tors, lawyers, teach­ers and man­agers into dis­crete tasks, but the skills lost at the top do not seem to be trick­ling down to the crowd.

    We are at a turn­ing point for crowd­work­ing. In one sce­nario, the crowd con­tin­ues to grow and expand, but the work remains mun­dane, rep­e­ti­tious and poor­ly paid. Even­tu­al­ly, much of it gets auto­mat­ed com­plete­ly.

    In anoth­er, as crowd­work­ing expands, the incre­men­tal jobs require more respon­si­bil­i­ty, more social inter­ac­tion, and more gen­uine intel­li­gence than today’s mech­a­nized chores. Fair­ly paid work becomes avail­able to almost any­one, any­where with access to a com­put­er. This in turn entices some of the 40 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who are of work­ing age but not cur­rent­ly employed to rejoin the work­force.

    “It’s not about cre­at­ing some new kind of mag­i­cal com­pu­ta­tion­al data cen­ter of the work­place,” says Praveen Par­i­tosh. “It’s more about build­ing a plat­form in the dig­i­tal world that fol­lows the mod­el of being humane and being a good co-work­er and being pleas­ant to work with. I know that there will prob­lems as we go along. But the big­ger prob­lem would be if crowd­work­ing dies before it gets there.”

    Crowdworking’s cur­rent woes fore­shad­ow a prob­lem that will only become more acute as AI matures. Do we have the polit­i­cal and social will to trans­form the way we live and work, to embrace the effi­cien­cies of automa­tion with­out dis­card­ing the tremen­dous cre­ativ­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty of human beings? If we can’t, the world of work will be a much poorer—and prob­a­bly even more poor­ly paid—place.

    “The down­side of mak­ing some­thing 100 times cheap­er means that someone—and prob­a­bly lots of people—are los­ing mon­ey. A few pathol­o­gists need­ing to retrain might not upset you, but how exact­ly can peo­ple like Har­ry live on 60 cents an hour? In 2010, researchers at New York Uni­ver­si­ty cal­cu­lat­ed the medi­an wage of Mechan­i­cal Turk work­ers at $1.38 an hour. While a few expe­ri­enced crowd­work­ers say they earn between $5 and $12 an hour, many requesters con­tin­ue to pay far below the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage of $7.25 (which does not apply to inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors).”
    Have fun work­ing you way out of UBI pover­ty in the job mar­ket where mak­ing some­thing 100 times cheap­er by reduc­ing labor costs is the new hot thing and a long-term employ­ment mega-trend. And remem­ber, you and you alone are respon­si­ble for your future under the new UBI ethos. What a great recipe for invig­o­rat­ing Amer­i­ca’s civic cul­ture!

    Part of what makes Mur­ray’s UBI-trolling so unfor­tu­nate is that it real­ly is one of those pol­i­cy tools that could be invalu­able, but not if folks like Mur­ray trash the con­cept in advance. Or do worse and actu­al­ly get the Mur­ray UBI imple­ment­ed as law. Because let’s imag­ine a UBI on top of basic ser­vices like health­care. One that allows peo­ple to live in dig­ni­ty with­out hav­ing go out and get a Mechan­i­cal Turk job for scraps.

    What kind of econ­o­my would that cre­ate? Well, the “non-pover­ty UBI + ser­vices” mod­el would basi­cal­ly act as a pub­lic union, which could have a pro­found­ly pos­i­tive impact on the ‘dis­pos­able’ labor mar­ket that’s emerged in recent years. And the stronger that “pub­lic union”, the high­er wages would be and more peo­ple would be tempt­ed to enter the labor mar­ket.

    But let’s also not for­get one of the biggest pos­i­tive impacts a “non-pover­ty UBI + ser­vices” mod­el could have on the US labor mar­ket: It would final­ly free of the labor force for the biggest “Mechan­i­cal Turk” job in the coun­try. A job that no one gets paid to do but requires vir­tu­al­ly every­one to do any­way. Democ­ra­cy.

    Think about it: while the main pos­i­tive fea­tures of democ­ra­cy that we’re taught to cel­e­brate is that, regard­less of the qual­i­ty of the gov­ern­ment, at least that gov­ern­ment has a sem­blance of legit­i­ma­cy, that’s real­ly just one of its main ben­e­fit. Because don’t for­get that democ­ra­cy is also a giant exer­cise in crowd-sourc­ing and uti­liz­ing the ‘wis­dom of crowds’ to shape and direct pub­lic poli­cies across a broad array of dif­fer­ent issues. Or at least that’s how it’s sup­posed to work...as a giant Mechan­i­cal Turk-like exer­cise in infor­ma­tion diges­tion and analy­sis. Except unlike the Turk jobs, where you’re net out­put is accu­mu­la­tion of a series of micro­tasks for pen­nies apiece all under the direc­tion of some cen­tral orga­ni­za­tion, with democ­ra­cy we (hope) vot­ers are freely and inde­pen­dent­ly tak­ing in all sorts of infor­ma­tion from a vari­ety of sources and the final out­put comes in the form of vot­ing for the kinds of pol­i­cy-mak­ers who seem the most like­ly to achieve bet­ter results for every­one. So it’s a very dif­fer­ent Mechan­i­cal Turk-like task than what Ama­zon is ped­dling. And it’s far more vital, espe­cial­ly in an increas­ing­ly eco­nom­i­cal­ly and envi­ron­men­tal­ly stressed out world where intel­li­gent col­lec­tive sac­ri­fice is going to be a crit­i­cal sur­vival skill. And in a Mechan­i­cal Turk future, where hours of human poten­tial are wast­ed on a micro­task race to the bot­tom, that crit­i­cal Mechan­i­cal Turk-like unpaid job called democ­ra­cy is going to con­tin­ue to face major labor short­ages.

    So let’s hope the debate over the poten­tial util­i­ty of a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income isn’t dom­i­nat­ed by the Charles Mur­rays of the world. Because the most impor­tant job in the world requires us all. And it does­n’t pay. At all.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 11, 2016, 3:37 pm
  2. This next arti­cle talks about either unau­tho­rized ster­il­iza­tions or ones being per­formed on mis­lead­ing pre­tens­es at an ICE facil­i­ty hous­ing ille­gal migrants. How­ev­er, this is not the first time that the US has been prac­tic­ing Eugenic exper­i­ments on unwit­ting human beings. The arti­cle states:

    “In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, white Amer­i­can intel­lec­tu­als were pio­neers of race sci­ence, advanc­ing the idea that “unde­sir­able” traits could and should be bred out of the pop­u­la­tion with gov­ern­ment plan­ning and selec­tive, invol­un­tary ster­il­iza­tion pro­grams. Every­thing the Nazis knew about eugen­ics, they learned from the Unit­ed States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Vir­ginia had the right to ster­il­ize a 20-year-old named Car­rie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly racist pop­u­la­tion engi­neer­ing by state gov­ern­ments. Fed­er­al­ly fund­ed eugen­ics boards were estab­lished in 32 states, through which tax dol­lars were spent to ster­il­ize approx­i­mate­ly 70,000 peo­ple, most­ly women. These pro­grams were used to enforce via state law the racist fic­tion of Amer­i­ca as a white coun­try, and forced ster­il­iza­tion dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get­ed Black women.”

    “A sep­a­rate fed­er­al pro­gram in the 1960s and 1970s dep­u­tized doc­tors with the Indi­an Health Ser­vice to choose which Native Amer­i­can women they per­son­al­ly deemed fit to repro­duce, and to make those women’s repro­duc­tive choic­es for them accord­ing­ly. They decid­ed that approx­i­mate­ly a quar­ter of Native Amer­i­can women were unfit to have chil­dren, and ster­il­ized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin coun­ty cen­ter, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their pro­ce­dures, or were ster­il­ized with­out their knowl­edge dur­ing oth­er surg­eries. Some Native women were told, incor­rect­ly, that the ster­il­iza­tions were reversible; oth­ers were told that they were being treat­ed for appen­dici­tis, or need­ed to have their ton­sils removed. They dis­cov­ered the truth when they woke up.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hysterectomy-allegations-us-eugenics-history?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Posted by Mary Benton | September 20, 2020, 7:47 am
  3. This next arti­cle 9-17-2020 Guardian Arti­cle by Moira Done­gan talks about either unau­tho­rized ster­il­iza­tions or ones being per­formed on mis­lead­ing pre­tens­es at an ICE facil­i­ty hous­ing ille­gal migrants.

    How­ev­er, this is not the first time that the US has been prac­tic­ing Eugenic exper­i­ments on unwit­ting human beings. The arti­cle states:

    “In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, white Amer­i­can intel­lec­tu­als were pio­neers of race sci­ence, advanc­ing the idea that “unde­sir­able” traits could and should be bred out of the pop­u­la­tion with gov­ern­ment plan­ning and selec­tive, invol­un­tary ster­il­iza­tion pro­grams. Every­thing the Nazis knew about eugen­ics, they learned from the Unit­ed States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Vir­ginia had the right to ster­il­ize a 20-year-old named Car­rie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly racist pop­u­la­tion engi­neer­ing by state gov­ern­ments. Fed­er­al­ly fund­ed eugen­ics boards were estab­lished in 32 states, through which tax dol­lars were spent to ster­il­ize approx­i­mate­ly 70,000 peo­ple, most­ly women. These pro­grams were used to enforce via state law the racist fic­tion of Amer­i­ca as a white coun­try, and forced ster­il­iza­tion dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get­ed Black women.”

    “A sep­a­rate fed­er­al pro­gram in the 1960s and 1970s dep­u­tized doc­tors with the Indi­an Health Ser­vice to choose which Native Amer­i­can women they per­son­al­ly deemed fit to repro­duce, and to make those women’s repro­duc­tive choic­es for them accord­ing­ly. They decid­ed that approx­i­mate­ly a quar­ter of Native Amer­i­can women were unfit to have chil­dren, and ster­il­ized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin coun­ty cen­ter, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their pro­ce­dures, or were ster­il­ized with­out their knowl­edge dur­ing oth­er surg­eries. Some Native women were told, incor­rect­ly, that the ster­il­iza­tions were reversible; oth­ers were told that they were being treat­ed for appen­dici­tis, or need­ed to have their ton­sils removed. They dis­cov­ered the truth when they woke up.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/17/ice-hysterectomy-allegations-us-eugenics-history?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Posted by Mary Benton | September 20, 2020, 8:12 am
  4. There have been many recent rum­blings about Euro­pean Com­mu­ni­ty Pres­i­dent Ursu­la Von Der Leyen and her husband’s pos­si­ble fam­i­ly ties to fas­cism. While it is clear that there was a Frei­herr Joachim von Der Leyen who com­mit­ted atroc­i­ties in Ukraine dur­ing WW2, there is no hard evi­dence that he is close­ly relat­ed to Ursula’s hus­band, Heiko. It is quite like­ly that they are at least dis­tant­ly relat­ed, how­ev­er, there are no genealog­i­cal records that prove this and I could find no genealog­i­cal inter­links between Heiko’s wing and Frei­herr Joachim’s in the past few cen­turies.

    How­ev­er, Ursula’s own fam­i­ly has some inter­est­ing char­ac­ters! There has been well-sourced dis­cus­sion of her fam­i­ly ties to the Lad­son South­ern slave-own­er fam­i­ly and she even used the Lad­son name in her ear­li­er years. There has been much less dis­cus­sion of her actu­al grand­fa­ther, Carl Albrecht.

    It is quite like­ly that he was involved with the Nazis,  how­ev­er, it would­n’t have been in a front­line stormtroop­er capac­i­ty or man­ag­ing slaugh­ters in Kiev. He was a well-regard­ed psy­chol­o­gist... who spe­cial­ized in med­i­ta­tion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty! He seemed to be doing fine in Bre­men dur­ing the war and his son, Ursu­la’s father, was accept­ed to Cor­nell in 1947. So he seems to have done well under the Nazis, then remained fat and hap­py with the US occu­pa­tion after the war. Inter­est­ing. I just thought about some­thing that may reflect some spin from Ursu­la. She describes her father see­ing the hor­rors of the war “as he helped his father Carl dur­ing the war”.  But he was a psy­chol­o­gist? How could a pre­teen “help” a psych?  I guess maybe Grand­pa could have been doing psych help on Ger­man patients, but it sure reads like she wants us to think he was a med­ical doc­tor. I could be mis­read­ing that, but it just came off weird. FFT. It’s pos­si­ble that the Nazis were so short on med­ical doc­tors they were press­ing psychs into ser­vice. It is also pos­si­ble that he start­ed as a med­ical doc­tor, then switched focus to psy­chol­o­gy. Incon­clu­sive.

    Here is some bio info on Carl, trans­lat­ed from the Ger­man from this “Christ­like Con­tem­pla­tion” site.  I have a hard time believ­ing that a guy like this doing ground­break­ing research on med­i­ta­tion and spir­i­tu­al con­scious­ness dur­ing WW2 would have escaped Himm­ler’s atten­tion. Hell, I have a hard time believ­ing that some­one was doing research like this with­out DIRECT encour­age­ment and fund­ing from Himm­ler. It is right down his alley. When I saw ana­lyst Jacques Baud dis­cussing “mur­der­ous deci­sions” made by Ursula’s elders, I assumed he was talk­ing about front-line deci­sion-mak­ing. How­ev­er, it is pos­si­ble he was talk­ing about such “deci­sions” being made at a much high­er lev­el... like the Himm­ler lev­el? Again, FFT.  Where he worked, when, etc. are just com­plete­ly opaque. Just “impor­tant psy­chol­o­gist from Bre­men”.

    https://www.christliche-kontemplation.ch/josuab.htm

    Carl Albrecht was born on March 28, 1902 in Bre­men. After his med­ical stud­ies, he became acquaint­ed with auto­genic train­ing, which he lat­er devel­oped into his own immer­sion tech­nique in his med­ical-psy­chother­a­peu­tic prac­tice, which final­ly opened the gates to reli­gious-mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence after many years of approach to faith. After the expe­ri­ences of the 2nd World War and a health break­down, Albrecht had doubts in 1947 about the mys­ti­cal qual­i­ty of his immer­sion expe­ri­ence. This irri­ta­tion formed the start­ing point of his research.
    In a let­ter, he com­ment­ed ret­ro­spec­tive­ly on the motive of his sci­en­tif­ic work: “For years, I myself was in the mys­ti­cal ref­er­ence to expe­ri­ence. Like any seri­ous mys­tic, I was tor­ment­ed by the ques­tion of whether the mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence was “real”. Since I do not live in the 16th cen­tu­ry, but in the twen­ti­eth, I did not go to my con­fes­sor like There­sa, but had to try to solve the phe­nom­e­non in the sphere.
    To exam­ine the sphere of crit­i­cal think­ing.” The fruit of this cathar­sis of thought is his mys­tic stud­ies, unique in their own way, which were received with great approval by thinkers such as Gabriel Mar­cel and Karl Rah­n­er soon after their appear­ance. In the course of his life, he suc­ceed­ed in switch­ing back and forth between the intro­spec­tion of the con­tem­pla­tive and the diag­nos­tic gaze of the doc­tor and, through patient research, phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal­ly bright­ened and arranged the vari­ety of mys­ti­cal forms of expe­ri­ence. Albrecht died on July 19, 1965 after a pro­longed heart dis­ease.

    Here is his wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Albrecht_(psychologist)

    Carl Albrecht was an expert in and some­thing called “auto­genic train­ing”, which is basi­cal­ly self-hyp­no­sis. Let’s read about auto­genic train­ing. FYI: This piece gets nuts, and one of the most impor­tant parts is at the bot­tom of the email.

    The god­fa­ther of auto­genic train­ing was a guy named Johannes Hein­rich Schultz. He was a T4 guy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Heinrich_Schultz

    In 1933 he began research on his guide­book on sex­u­al edu­ca­tion, Geschlecht, Liebe, Ehe, in which he focused on homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and explored the top­ics of ster­il­iza­tion and euthana­sia. In 1935 he pub­lished an essay titled Psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences of ster­il­iza­tion and cas­tra­tion among men, which sup­port­ed com­pul­so­ry ster­il­iza­tion of men in order to elim­i­nate hered­i­tary ill­ness­es. Soon after he was appoint­ed deputy direc­tor of the Göring Insti­tute in Berlin, which was the head­quar­ters of the Deutsches Insti­tut für psy­chol­o­gis­che Forschung und Psy­chother­a­pie (Ger­man insti­tute for psy­cho­log­i­cal research and psy­chother­a­py).
    Through this insti­tute, he had an active role in the exter­mi­na­tion of men­tal­ly hand­i­capped indi­vid­u­als in the frame­work of the Aktion T4 program.[3]
    There he began to test many of his the­o­ries on homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Schultz strong­ly believed that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty gen­er­al­ly was not hered­i­tary and that most homo­sex­u­als became so through per­ver­sion. He stat­ed on numer­ous occa­sions that homo­sex­u­als dis­played “scrub­by and stunt­ed forms of per­son­al­i­ty devel­op­ment”. Con­se­quent­ly, he also believed that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty was cur­able through intense psy­chother­a­py. Dur­ing his time at the Göring Insti­tute, 510 homo­sex­u­als were record­ed to have received numer­ous psy­chother­a­peu­tic treat­ments and 341 were deemed to be cured by the end of the treat­ments. Most of his sub­jects were con­vict­ed homo­sex­u­als brought in from con­cen­tra­tion camps. After treat­ing his patients, Schultz test­ed the treat­ments’ effec­tive­ness by forc­ing them to have sex with pros­ti­tutes. In a case study he lat­er released, in which he briefly dis­cussed the process of deter­min­ing whether a young SS sol­dier, who had been sen­tenced to death for homo­sex­u­al acts, was ‘cured’, Schultz stat­ed: “Those who were con­sid­ered incur­able were sent back to the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but ‘cured’ homo­sex­u­als, such as the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned SS sol­dier, were par­doned and released into mil­i­tary ser­vice”. In this way Schultz actu­al­ly saved numer­ous accused homo­sex­u­als from the hell­ish life of a con­cen­tra­tion camp but he stat­ed lat­er that “suc­cess­ful­ly treat­ed sub­jects were sent to the front, where they most prob­a­bly were killed in action”.
    After the war, the Göring Insti­tute was dis­band­ed but Schultz faced no reper­cus­sions for his more dubi­ous research and meth­ods dur­ing the past decade. In fact he released a case study on his work with homo­sex­u­als in 1952 titled Organstörun­gen und Per­ver­sio­nen im Liebesleben, in which he admit­ted to the inhu­man­i­ty of some of his exper­i­ments but also still sup­port­ed their results. In fact he con­tin­ued to sup­port his find­ings and even con­tin­ued to advo­cate para­graph 175 for the rest of his life.[4]
    In 1956, he became edi­tor of the jour­nal Psy­chother­a­pie, and in 1959 founder of the Ger­man Soci­ety for Med­ical Hyp­no­sis (Deutschen Gesellschaft für ärztliche Hyp­nose).

    NOTE: This Amer­i­can group called the Men­ninger Foun­da­tion uses biofeed­back with auto­genic train­ing. Let’s read about the Men­ninger Insti­tute.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menninger_Foundation

    The Men­ninger Clin­ic, also known as the C. F. Men­ninger Memo­r­i­al Hospital,[1] was found­ed in the 1920s in Tope­ka, Kansas.[2] The Men­ninger San­i­tar­i­um was found­ed in 1925.[3]
    The Men­ninger Clin­ic estab­lished the Southard School for chil­dren in 1926. The school fos­tered treat­ment pro­grams for chil­dren and ado­les­cents that were rec­og­nized world­wide. In the 1930s the Men­ningers expand­ed train­ing pro­grams for psy­chi­a­trists, psy­chol­o­gists, and oth­er men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als.

    The Men­ninger Foun­da­tion was estab­lished in 1941. The Men­ninger School of Psy­chi­a­try was estab­lished in 1946. It quick­ly became the largest train­ing cen­ter in the coun­try, dri­ven by the coun­try’s demand for psy­chi­a­trists to treat mil­i­tary vet­er­ans.
    Men­ninger announced its affil­i­a­tion with Bay­lor Col­lege of Med­i­cine and The Methodist Hos­pi­tal in Decem­ber 2002. The con­cept was that Men­ninger would per­form treat­ment while Bay­lor would over­see research and edu­ca­tion.

    ...Dr. Will Men­ninger made a major con­tri­bu­tion to the field of psy­chi­a­try when he devel­oped a sys­tem of hos­pi­tal treat­ment known as milieu ther­a­py. This approach involved a patien­t’s total envi­ron­ment in treat­ment. Dr. Men­ninger served as Chief of the Army Med­ical Corps’ Psy­chi­atric Divi­sion dur­ing World War II. Under his lead­er­ship, the Army reduced loss­es in per­son­nel due to psy­cho­log­i­cal impair­ment. In 1945, the Army pro­mot­ed Dr. Men­ninger to brigadier gen­er­al. After the war, Dr. Men­ninger led a nation­al rev­o­lu­tion to reform state san­i­tar­i­ums. In 1948, Time mag­a­zine fea­tured Dr. Men­ninger on its cov­er, laud­ing him as “psychiatry’s U.S. sales man­ag­er.” 

    ...In the 1960s the Men­ninger Clin­ic stud­ied Swa­mi Rama, a not­ed yogi, specif­i­cal­ly inves­ti­gat­ing his abil­i­ty to exer­cise vol­un­tary con­trol of bod­i­ly process­es (such as heart­beat) which are nor­mal­ly con­sid­ered non-vol­un­tary (autonomous) as well as Yoga Nidra. It was part of Gard­ner Mur­phy’s research pro­gram into cre­ativ­i­ty and the para­nor­mal, fund­ed by Ittle­son Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion. In the 1960s the Men­ninger Clin­ic stud­ied Swa­mi Rama, a not­ed yogi, specif­i­cal­ly inves­ti­gat­ing his abil­i­ty to exer­cise vol­un­tary con­trol of bod­i­ly process­es (such as heart­beat) which are nor­mal­ly con­sid­ered non-vol­un­tary (autonomous) as well as Yoga Nidra. It was part of Gard­ner Mur­phy’s research pro­gram into cre­ativ­i­ty and the para­nor­mal, fund­ed by Ittle­son Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion.

    NOTE: Damn, now I need to look into Swa­mi Rama and Yoga Nidra.  Would you believe it? Swa­mi Rama was accused of sex­u­al­ly abus­ing stu­dents. Wow, nev­er heard that one before. This is from Yoga Jour­nal. Man, they do good work clean­ing out the trash of yoga, which is con­sid­er­able. It’s fun­ny that they do sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism than sup­posed polit­i­cal jour­nal­ists. They also did that great arti­cle explain­ing the Ger­man roots of yoga that you have read on air before.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=iekDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false

    NOTE: More on “Yoga Nidra”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_nidra

    ...The mod­ern form of the tech­nique, pio­neered by Den­nis Boyes in 1973 and pop­u­larised by Satyanan­da Saraswati in 1976, and then by Swa­mi Rama, Richard Miller, and oth­ers has spread world­wide. It is applied by the US Army to assist sol­diers to recov­er from post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der. There is lim­it­ed sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that the tech­nique helps relieve stress.
    Swa­mi Rama writes that yoga nidra results in con­scious aware­ness of the deep sleep state.[14] He taught a form of yoga nidra (in a broad sense) which involves an exer­cise called shavay­a­tra, “inner pil­grim­age [through the body]”, which directs the atten­tion around “61 sacred points of the body” dur­ing relax­ation in shavasana, corpse pose. A sec­ond exer­cise, shithali karana, is said to induce “a very deep state of relax­ation”, and is described as a pre­lim­i­nary for yoga nidra (in a nar­row sense). It too is per­formed in shavasana, involv­ing exha­la­tions imag­ined as direct­ed from the crown of the head to dif­fer­ent points around the body, each repeat­ed 5 or 10 times. The yoga nidra exer­cise itself involves direct­ed breath­ing lying on the left side, then the right side, then in shavasana. When in shavasana, the atten­tion is direct­ed in turn to the eye­brow, throat, and heart cen­tres or chakras.[15]
    ... Richard Miller
    
The west­ern pio­neer of yoga as ther­a­py, Richard Miller, has devel­oped the use of yoga nidra for reha­bil­i­tat­ing sol­diers in pain, using the Inte­gra­tive Restora­tion (iRest) methodology.[16] Miller worked with Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter and the Unit­ed States Depart­ment of Defense study­ing the effi­ca­cy of the approach.[17]
    [18] Accord­ing to Yoga Jour­nal, “Miller is respon­si­ble for bring­ing the prac­tice to a remark­able vari­ety of non­tra­di­tion­al set­tings” which includes “mil­i­tary bases and in vet­er­ans’ clin­ics, home­less shel­ters, Montes­sori schools, Head Start pro­grams, hos­pi­tals, hos­pices, chem­i­cal depen­den­cy cen­ters, and jails.”[19] The iRest pro­to­col was used with sol­diers return­ing from Iraq and Afghanistan suf­fer­ing from post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der (PTSD).[20][21][18] Based on this work, the Sur­geon Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States Army endorsed Yoga Nidra as a com­ple­men­tary alter­na­tive med­i­cine (CAM) for chron­ic pain in 2010.[22]

    NOTE: The biggest sup­port­er of Yoga Nidra in the West was well-known guru Satyanan­da Saraswati. Would you believe he also had major sex­u­al abuse scan­dals? This is some hor­ri­ble stuff. I’ve heard of him and his Yogav­ille before. FYI: There is anoth­er guru Satyanan­da who was tight with Sav­it­ri Devi, but this is not him.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2859080/This-relationship-don-t-tell-Sexual-abuse-not-uncommon-Satyananda-yoga-movement-celibate-life-promoted.html

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2860429/Brutal-initiation-ceremony-Satyananda-yoga-movement-saw-seven-year-old-girl-sexually-assaulted-leader-licked-blood.html

    NOTE: One of the lead­ers of the Men­ninger Foun­da­tion was a guy named Otto Fleis­chmann who was involved in Wal­len­berg’s res­cue oper­a­tions, which we have dis­cussed before and their his­tor­i­cal white­wash­ing. Not accus­ing Fleis­chmann of any­thing nefar­i­ous, but he had inter­est­ing asso­ciates. He was focused on Hun­gar­i­an Jew­ish psychs. Again.... Hun­gar­i­ans.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Fleischmann

    NOTE: OK, here is what I was think­ing I might find. Every­thing about the Men­ninger Foun­da­tion screams “MK-Ultra meets Paper­clip”.  Yep, they were doing LSD research up through 1969 at least. Rest is behind a pay­wall, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/354885

    ...The his­to­ry of research with psy­che­del­ic drugs has pro­duced a vari­ety of meth­ods for their use and con­flict­ing claims about results. First came the wave of excite­ment among exper­i­men­tal­ists in the 1950s when it was claimed that lyser­gic acid diethy­lamide (LSD) could pro­duce a mod­el psy­chosis which might be use­ful in under­stand­ing schiz­o­phre­nia. While this promise was fad­ing, enthu­si­as­tic reports about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of LSD as an aid to psy­chother­a­py in the treat­ment of alco­holism and oth­er psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders appeared. All these approach­es were rep­re­sent­ed in 1959 at the first inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence devot­ed entire­ly to LSD.1 Since then, there have been at least five more pub­lished pro­ceed­ings of such con­fer­ences on var­i­ous aspects of psy­che­del­ic drugs.2–6 The most recent con­fer­ence on var­i­ous means of pro­duc­ing states of con­scious­ness was spon­sored by the Men­ninger Foun­da­tion and the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Human­is­tic Psy­chol­o­gy on April 7 to 11, 1969, in

    NOTE: I pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed the Men­ninger Foun­da­tion, which was involved with both the “auto­gen­ics” stuff that Albrecht was pro­mot­ing AND LSD research as well as study­ing a yogi named Swa­mi Rama. That Swa­mi research was fund­ed by a group called the Ittle­son Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion. I could­n’t find much of inter­est about the Ittle­son fam­i­ly, but I will point out that they have an Auch­in­closs on the board! They are also involved in AIDS and men­tal health research fund­ing.  Gulp.

    https://ittlesonfoundation.org/about-the-foundation/officers-and-directors/

    NOTE: Andrew Auch­in­closs is a cousin of the Auch­in­closs who mar­ried Jack­ie O’s moth­er. He is a trust/estate lawyer for the rich and the trustee of Gore Vidal’s estate. His father Louis Auch­in­closs worked at Sul­li­van and Cromwell from 1941–1951, a hell of a time to be there, right? Louis then became an author, writ­ing about the foibles of the North­east elite in fic­tion.

    https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/11/08/gore-vidals-final-feud/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auchincloss

    NOTE: I also found this lit­tle tid­bit in the archives of Karl Men­ninger at the Kansas His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety. As I sus­pect­ed would be the case, Karl Men­ninger was absolute­ly in con­tact with Joly­on West. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this just men­tions the cor­re­spon­dence, it isn’t online. Would prob­a­bly have to go there to see it.

    https://www.kshs.org/index.php?url=camp/units/view/249297

    Posted by Charlie McMansion | June 2, 2022, 10:19 am

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