Olufemi O Taiwo researches and teaches political philosophy and metaethics at the University of California Los Angeles. He is an organizer for the Undercommons, an ongoing public meeting space initiated by African-American graduate students “to find ways to achieve liberation from white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, settler colonialism, and all forms of structural violence.” Taiwo has presented about basic income at the Undercommons.
In this Basic Income Interview, Taiwo was asked how he learned of basic income and why he supports it. Here is his reply:
I was an economics major in college. Milton Friedman was actually my first exposure to the idea of a universal basic income. At the time, I considered it a conservative sort of intervention, since this version of advocating for UBI, which I think of as “UBI-“, generally treats it as a replacement for other forms of welfare.
I support “UBI+”, or UBI that is meant to supplement at least some of the existing welfare structures. I think of it as at least a partial solution to a variety of social problems. One is the social presumption we seem to have that one ought to have to be economically productive – or in the case of seniors, to have had been economically productive – to earn the ability to provide for even their basic needs. This presumption is ableist on its face, since not all people’s abilities position them to earn high wages.
Other forms of bigotry aren’t far behind, given that the preponderance of evidence from social science suggests a myriad of ways in which various groups (e.g. women, people of color, and queer folks) are less than fairly compensated for their labor.
A second is just the presumption that work is valuable in and of itself. This is an idea worth challenging against any sort of historical background – even if a society needs some people to produce things, why should we make this a universal expectation? How much production is enough?
Of course, as the effects of climate change, driven by consistent overproduction, continue to manifest themselves, challenging this presumption will take on a greater urgency in this historical moment.
Photo: Olufemi Taiwo (right of podium) at meeting of the Undercommons, February 2016.
Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.
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