Gonzalo Schwarz

Given recent progress in the development of artificial intelligence, many policy conversations take for granted that such advancements will lead to mass technological unemployment and could even create a permanent underclass. Once these “facts” are established, a radical and sweeping policy solution typically follows, most often an argument for the necessity of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But despite their growing popularity, such apocalyptic predictions about the role of AI in replacing human labor and the need for a UBI are greatly overblown. Although I’ve written on this topic previously (one article even garnering a response from Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang), the doomsayers’ case seems to be in need of a robust response.

Social media has pushed us to try to summarize everything we think and feel in less than 140 characters. In Stubborn Attachments Tyler Cowen accomplished a figurative tweet, answering some of the most complex questions of philosophy, politics, and economics in less than 140 pages.

Whether policymakers should even consider ideas for a UBI, given recent studies that suggest an expanded labor market from future AI and relatively strong current economic conditions, is still an open question.

As a nonprofit entrepreneur and consultant to think tanks looking to implement industry best practices, I’ve always used and recommended writing a business plan. However, after founding a public policy think tank, the Archbridge Institute, I’ve come to realize that despite the hypothetical importance of business plans grit and a belief that you have some good or service that the world wants ultimately drive success. This applies to both for profit and nonprofit enterprises.

The Archbridge Institute is pleased to welcome two stellar academics and leading scholars in the field of social mobility to our Board of Academic Advisers as Senior Fellows. In our mission to lift barriers to human flourishing, we seek to collaborate with scholars who share our desire to study and remediate causal and fundamental barriers that restrict social mobility and further unjust inequalities.

Gonzalo Schwarz, president and CEO of the Archbridge Institute, reviews the literature and examines recent studies on the importance of structural factors in understanding economic mobility. He finds that the analysis raises quite a few questions and notes that expanding the opportunity to climb the income ladder should be the main focus of the inequality and mobility debate.