by Kate McFarland | Apr 27, 2018 | Opinion
The following is part one of a two part series in which former Basic Income News editor Kate McFarland interviews D. JoAnne Swanson of The Anticareerist on Basic Income.
The original article can be found here.
KM: You have a long career–if I might use that term–of critiquing “job culture” and promoting, as it were, a more leisurely society. There are others with similar interests who have called for alternative strategies, such as mandatory reduction in the work week and increase in vacation time, policies to promote job-sharing, and policies to allow workers flexibility in trading income for time-off. What caused you to begin promoting basic income in particular as a means to move from a more job-oriented society to more of a leisure society?
DJS: My basic income advocacy began with love and outrage: a deep and abiding love of the arts that led to outrage when I learned that so many artists live in poverty. I want every creative person who’s ever wanted to devote themselves fully to their arts and crafts to be free to do so on their own terms. I mourn the tremendous waste of gifts and talents happening every day as artists spend so much time and energy in jobs to meet basic survival needs while their art gets pushed into the margins of their lives. Art is essential; it’s not a frivolous luxury. People need art. There have even been times in my life during which art, music, books, and dance were the only reasons I wanted to go on living. How many brilliant artistic works have never come into being because artists are forced into flipping burgers just to make ends meet? That’s a massive loss to all of us. In order to promote artists’ work, there should be a system that allows them to keep their art without having to worry about finances. As well, more and more schemes should be introduced that can help them in borrowing money as an artist. This might enable them to continue to work on their art while they take care of their financial issues. UBI could free artists to be of service in the way we do best. If we could meet our basic needs without having to sell our labor to employers to survive, the arts would flourish. That’s the world I want to live in. UBI could help us build that world.
More broadly, though, I started promoting UBI because I wanted to ease the burdens of all economically marginalized populations, including caregivers and other unpaid laborers. UBI could provide a means of harm reduction and self-determination for those who are struggling financially. I want to liberate work from the constraints of paid employment, and empower people to say no to coercive employment. Massive suffering occurs every day because people are divided into “deserving” and “undeserving” categories based on our ability and/or willingness to hold wage jobs. This is fundamental moral injustice. People who aren’t in paid employment – or can’t work at all – should not be treated as if they are worthless. Benefits recipients should not be forced to prove their worth in order to receive food, shelter, and health care. Many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, for example, are suffering and dying because they aren’t healthy enough to maintain employment sufficient to pay their bills, yet the authorities deem them “not disabled enough” to qualify for disability income. UBI is desperately needed. It could save lives.
I do support reduced working hours, increased vacation time, job-sharing, and other policies that allow greater flexibility for employees. If well-implemented, these can be steps in the right direction. But those strategies only apply to employed people. UBI can make life easier for people outside of paid employment. I want people who hate their jobs to be able to quit without fear of homelessness and poverty. I want to help create conditions in which those who don’t want jobs don’t have to take them, and those who do want jobs can enter into them by choice and interest instead of by coercion born of financial need. When people don’t have the option to say no to selling their labor, they are much more easily exploited. A properly implemented UBI could strengthen the negotiating position of the labor force and reduce the suffering people endure when they can’t find employment that pays enough to meet their basic needs.
As for my career as a critic of job culture, I figure I’m justified in adopting the oxymoron “professional anticareerist” after 20 years of autodidactic study in a field of my own design, tongue-in-cheek though the title may be.
KM: Relatedly, do you think that, as a policy reform, UBI is sufficient to allow people to promote more opportunities for unpaid work, more leisure time, and the attendant ecological benefits to which you allude in your article?
DJS: I think it’s a necessary reform, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. A well-implemented UBI would be a major step in the right direction, but building a culture that values leisure and respects unpaid workers will require us to loosen the ideological chokehold of compulsory paid employment and the Puritan work ethic. I founded The Anticareerist (formerly known as Rethinking the Job Culture and whywork.org) to help facilitate this culture change.
So much of American culture is centered around a norm of full-time paid employment. Many people in the U.S. rely on jobs not just for income, but for health insurance. Making health insurance conditional upon employment or spousal relationships, as the U.S. does, exerts powerful coercive forces that keep many people stuck in unhealthy jobs and relationships to ensure they maintain access to healthcare. UBI alone would certainly be insufficient to address major structural issues like that, especially in the current political climate.
Regarding the ecological benefits of UBI…it’s often overlooked that compulsory paid employment is a major contributor to ecological crisis. As Ken Knabb puts it in his essay Strong Lessons for Engaged Buddhists:
“As long as there is big money to be made by producing weapons or ravaging the environment, someone will do it, regardless of moral appeals to people’s good will; if a few conscientious persons refuse, a multitude of others will scramble for the opportunity to do it in their place.”
Why does that multitude of others scramble for the opportunity to participate in ecological destruction? Because in a world without UBI, people desperately need jobs – any jobs – to pay for food and shelter right now, and that’s a powerful enough incentive that it leads our species to act in ways that threaten our long-term survival. What might we do with our time instead, if we weren’t forced into ecologically destructive jobs in order to feed and house ourselves? UBI provides a means to enable people to refuse ecologically harmful employment, and that’s a necessary reform…but even with a UBI in place, we’ll still need to address other incentives, norms, and ideologies that reward pathological behavior and punish responsible behavior.
KM: Some proponents of a job guarantee also support broadening the concept of “work” to include care work, housekeeping, volunteering, creative work, and so on–work like you describe in your article. That is, they would extend the job guarantee to cover such work. And, of course, employment would be guaranteed by the government, so doing the work wouldn’t require self-marketing. The job guarantee could also be accompanied by a shorter workweek and more vacation-time, to guarantee more time for leisure; it could even be a drastic reduction to allow for the interesting and important states of “deep leisure” that you describe. Some advocates of a job guarantee do also support shorter working hours, after all; the policies are not incompatible. Would you support such a job guarantee? Assuming that you would still prefer UBI, why?
DJS: Well, for starters, I’ll say that if I were offered government-guaranteed pay to do my self-driven creative work on my own terms – i.e., the work I’d be doing anyway, whether or not I ever got paid – I’d gladly accept it. So in theory, a job guarantee sounds like it could be an improvement on what we’ve got now. However, without getting into policy details, I don’t believe it could be implemented in a way that would make it so. It would be much more complicated than basic income.
Furthermore, it’s still conditional income. What would happen to me if I could no longer write, nor do any work at all? Is my life only valuable to the extent I can be productive (however “productive” is defined)?
A job guarantee leaves the dominant work ethic unchallenged, and I think this is one reason many people find it preferable to UBI. Everyone must earn their pay – or so the story goes – and those who don’t work don’t deserve to eat. This ideology is surely among the most deeply entrenched cultural barriers to a UBI. It’s a powerful shaper of policy, and all the more so because it’s so rarely called into question. Fundamentally, my goal is to break the coercive link between paid employment and survival. A job guarantee doesn’t address that, so I wouldn’t support it. Without a UBI in place, a job guarantee would still amount to coerced labor on the state’s terms. In my vision of justice, people are regarded as intrinsically valuable regardless of their employment status or productivity.
KM: Sometimes the poor and unemployed, including those on welfare, do make claims like, “I don’t want a handout from the government; I want a job so that I can support myself,” implying that they themselves do see paid employment, not government-provided financial security, as a source of freedom and independence. What would you say to such individuals? Do they have a false consciousness?
DJS: Unpacking this can get complicated quickly. In cultures organized around paid employment – i.e., the cultures most of us live in – it’s true that jobs are genuinely important to many people. I don’t think they have a false consciousness, because these beliefs do make sense within the normative framing conditions of the dominant job culture. Often, unemployed people feel as if they don’t have a socially acceptable place to belong in the world, whereas a job can bring instant respect and recognition.
When gainful employment is equated with dignity and benefits recipients are maligned as “welfare bums,” it’s understandable that many people become accustomed to tying their self-worth to paid jobs. According to this narrative, wage labor – any wage labor – is vastly preferable to welfare, because jobs are inherently morally good. These cultural norms also place responsibility for economic productivity on the shoulders of individuals, which is convenient for capitalism because it diverts attention away from the immense harm caused by structural forces that force people into jobs.
Conflating the word work with paid employment also devalues and obscures unpaid labor, which compounds the problem. For example, it’s common to refer to those who aren’t in the labor pool as “not working,” regardless of whatever other forms of work they may be doing outside the job market. If I clean my own house, for example, that’s not considered “work,” but if I clean someone else’s house and they pay me for it, then suddenly I’m doing economically productive work. The dominant narrative asserts that all paid work is good because it provides jobs, and those jobs are necessary for survival. If we don’t question the veracity of this paid-employment-is-the-only-real-work narrative, and we internalize social taboos against desiring income without working for it, then it’s logical to come to the conclusions you describe above.
But you asked what I’d say to them. Most likely I’d encourage them to look into the work of writers and thinkers who challenge this narrative, such as David Frayne, James Chamberlain, Kathi Weeks, Sharon Beder, Peter Frase, and David Graeber. Graeber suggests “a labor theory of value that starts with women’s work & caring labor as the paradigm,” for example. I think that would be a great start to dismantling the notion that paid jobs make people “self-supporting.” That’s a misleading notion, because it obscures our interdependence and devalues all the unpaid labor that undergirds the job market.
KM: You mention, in passing, that there are “good reasons” why your creative work “should probably remain unpaid”. Do you mean this independent of the fact that you need to devote so much work and effort to securing funders? That is, even if your creative work could become a guaranteed job, there are reasons it might be better off unpaid? If so, this seems like it could be a relevant and important difference between a UBI and a job guarantee like the one I just described, and I wonder if you would elaborate more on this. What are these “good reasons”?
DJS: Good question! It deserves a full essay of its own, but here’s a start.
I have a saying: “endarken the work.” This is how I remind myself that my best creative work – the kind that’s worthy of being called art – emerges through immersion in endarkened or daimonic states. I cannot control these forces of endarkenment; they live in the realms of the gift, and they show up of their own accord. I can only surrender to them.
Dwelling in these endarkened states of creative flow requires me to trust my gut and allow my instincts to point the way. (By the way, I love the phrase “trust your gut,” as it’s an everyday acknowledgment of embodied forms of intelligence other than the much-vaunted intellect.) I cannot steer this process toward any external outcome desired by my waking mind, whether that be money, attention, praise, love, or influence. My conscious mind must act as servant, not as master. The work must be undertaken willingly, and it must be done for its own sake. It must be done because these are the gifts I’ve been given, and this is the work I’m entrusted to carry out. Period. If I attempt to monetize the creative process itself, hurry it along, or shape it into any form it does not want to take, I compromise its integrity or spirit.
When the work feels complete and true, then I can start thinking about how or whether to market it. If I consider monetary factors too soon, the creative process becomes truncated, because I’ve squeezed the work into the straitjacket of the conscious mind’s agenda. Audiences know the difference between work produced for an agenda and work infused with the integrity of daimonic states. They may not be able to explain it, but they can feel it.
One of my favorite writers, Stephen Harrod Buhner, describes writing that emerges from these endarkened states of relaxed receptivity as “soaked in life force.” I think that’s an apt description. This is also where the deepest joys of work reside for me: in spaces of creative endarkenment. I think of these processes as forms of everyday magic. Like William Morris, I believe that taking pleasure in the work itself is a necessary condition for the creation of artistic beauty.
As a writer who works with daimonic forces, I have certain obligations: to keep honing my skills so I can be a fit vessel for the work; to arrange my life so that I can respond appropriately when words show up of their own accord (“daimonic necessity,” as Matt Cardin calls it); and to make allowances for fallow periods. As I wrote in my original piece, states of deep leisure are essential components of my creative process. Without sufficient leisure, silence, and stillness, I cannot endarken the work.
In a world without UBI, it’s difficult to maintain conditions that permit me to work this way, because leisure, silence, and stillness are made artificially scarce. I live in a culture that considers it not only acceptable but morally right that everyone should have to “earn a living” on the employer’s terms. The implicit threat underlying employment negotiations is: if you don’t find employment that earns enough money, you’ll be denied the basic means of life. Most people don’t have the option to say no to employment, which makes this structural coercion a fundamental moral injustice. If I don’t have time for creative incubation because my paid job consumes nearly all of my time and energy, then I can’t produce work that is infused with the daimonic.
So when I wrote that there are good reasons my creative work “should probably remain unpaid,” I didn’t mean my creative work is unworthy of payment. I’m talking about motivation. I mean that financial motives (or any motive that does not respect the integrity of daimonic forces) can compromise the integrity of creative work. In a world with UBI, I could do that daimonic work on its own terms, without regard to its marketability, and I could still pay my bills. That would liberate a great deal of energy, which would in turn allow me to produce better work. The same goes for all the other creators out there whose time and talents are being channeled into what Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” instead of devoted to their creative work.
In my original piece, I linked to your thought-provoking article “A ‘Paid Volunteer’ Against the Monetization of Voluntary Labor (and for Basic Income),” in which you wrote:
“…it seems that voluntary work is best supported and encouraged not by the monetization of that work, but by the provision of financial support entirely independent of that work – the type of financial support that would be provided, for instance, by an unconditional basic income. […] It is better to have enough financial security to work for no pay than to receive payment directly for the same work.”
I agree. My preference would be to receive unconditional income sufficient to allow me to work for no pay, rather than to receive direct payment for it. I have strong sources of intrinsic motivation to do creative work already, so I don’t need money as a motivator. But I do need it for material sustenance, so as long as I live in a world that requires me to “earn a living,” I must seek payment for it and/or maintain a day job for income.
Typically, when artists decry “selling out,” we’re talking about compromising the integrity of the creative process in order to satisfy market demands. “Art should be free” is one way of trying to give voice to this truth, but that phrasing is vague and easily misunderstood. Whether or not we can put it into words, artists intuit that art should be free of coercion. We know that true art comes to us as a gift. But that doesn’t mean art is financially worthless. It’s important not to conflate “free” in the creative sense with “free” in the financial sense.
We’re faced with a real dilemma, because art is socially valuable, and the world benefits when it’s made widely available. That’s what we’re getting at when we say things like “art should be free.” But if we make our art available free of charge in a world that requires us to “earn a living,” then our labor goes unrewarded. Art is real work. Art has social and political costs, many of which remain hidden to the general public. As things stand now, those costs are disproportionately borne by the artists themselves.
What causes this dilemma? The need to earn a living. The “starving artist” is not a problem inherent to art. Nor is it a problem inherent to money. The problem is structural; it’s about power relations. The problem is the need to sell our time for money. It’s hard to make space for full surrender to the creative process in a world that shoehorns nearly everyone into paid employment just to prove we deserve food, shelter, and healthcare.
When artists lose control over our time because we spend most of it at our employers’ behest, we pay a high price individually and culturally. That’s one of the tragedies of compulsory paid employment, and one of the reasons I started The Anticareerist.
KM: You have a very interesting passage in which you stress that Patreon is “a far cry from UBI”. I must say that, as someone who has dabbled in crowdfunding through Patreon, I couldn’t agree more. But, as you no doubt know, there’s a lot of talk in the basic income community about the writer and advocate Scott Santens as someone who crowdfunds “his own basic income” on Patreon. Indeed, Santens himself talks about having a “basic income” due to his support on Patreon. What is your opinion on the use of those like Santens as (purported) examples of people “who already have basic incomes”? Do you think it’s at all misleading or even dangerous to the movement?
DJS: In Scott’s case, I suspect that framing his Patreon earnings as a “basic income” may be a consciously chosen rhetorical strategy to attract support for the UBI movement. As a basic income writer, he’s demonstrating what he can do for the world when he’s given enough support by his readers to free him from the need to hold a conventional job. He’s using the phrase very loosely, for sure, because Patreon is arts patronage, not basic income. Scott doesn’t have a UBI; he has crowdfunding patronage that supports his media activism. UBI is unconditional and available to all. Patreon support is conditional, and it’s available only to those with sufficient artistic, social, promotional, and technical skills – and time! – to pursue their art while also managing a Patreon campaign.
Do I think the way he’s describing his income is dangerous? No. Misleading? Yes. However, considering our dire need for UBI – people suffer and die from preventable ailments every day for lack of a few hundred dollars – I’m also pragmatic enough to think this misuse is mitigated by the way his work helps to shift the dominant narrative and attract support for UBI sooner than it might come otherwise.
Scott wrote:
“Let’s get something straight here. It’s not that people with unconditional basic incomes won’t work. It’s that people with an actual choice instead of no real choice may not choose YOUR work at YOUR price. Basic income is the basic freedom to choose both OUR work and OUR price.”
Because he’s fortunate enough to have that ongoing financial support in place, he’s able to do his work by choice. Clearly he wants all of us to be so lucky, which is why he’s devoting his life to basic income activism. He knows what it’s costing the world not to have it. I respect that greatly. In a recent interview he said:
“There’s someone right now who is flipping burgers just to get by. They’re working for poverty wages for 100 hours a week. They’re too busy to be focused on really important, world-changing work. What is the cost to society of that? You can’t put a price tag on that.”
Indeed!
So although I’d prefer more accurate language about his crowdfunding situation – I’m a word nerd, after all – I think this is a minor “infraction,” especially when compared to the way so much of the discourse in the basic income movement reinforces the dominant work ethic.
KM: We see a lot of discussion these days about the idea that basic income encourages employment, because it removes a financial disincentive for those on welfare to take jobs. We see perhaps even more cases of basic income advocates rebutting the concern that people would work less if they had a basic income; a lot of proponents of UBI are eager to cite studies that show it doesn’t decrease employment. What is your reaction to this type of basic income discourse? Does it make you at all skeptical of the ability of basic income to combat the job culture?
DJS: I’ve been a basic income supporter for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled to see how much the movement has grown in recent years. But the prevalence of rhetoric supporting productivist values and the dominant work ethic troubles me enough that I often feel alienated from the movement. I think anti-careerism/un-jobbing needs an organized movement of its own. Ideally we could work collaboratively with the basic income movement.
Nonetheless, considering that the work ethic is so firmly entrenched, it does make sense that some of the discourse focuses on challenging the notion that UBI is about “enabling laziness” or discouraging work.
I find it discouraging that a typical first reaction to the idea of UBI is “but wouldn’t people just spend it on drugs or be lazy and not work?” Only in a world that normalizes compulsory employment could it be so widely accepted that people should be driven into jobs by shame about “laziness” and fear of destitution rather than by choice and interest. I think “laziness” is often a healthy resistance – a mutiny of the soul, as Charles Eisenstein calls it – to a coercive job culture. Even if some people were “lazy,” though, so what? Who cares? Coercing people into jobs they hate costs us a lot more than providing them with a UBI – not just economically, but also psychologically, socially, culturally, and ecologically. “Lazy” people stuck in ecologically harmful jobs for the sake of a paycheck could do more for the world by quitting their jobs and lying on the couch than they could by staying in those jobs. I’ll cheer them on!
When I first learned about UBI, “laziness” didn’t even cross my mind. I thought about how it might allow me to quit my day job and write on my own terms instead of my employer’s. I thought about how it could empower people to resist coercive employment. I thought about how it could enable people to leave abusive partners. I thought about how it could reduce food insecurity. I thought about how beneficial it would be for welfare recipients to receive support without the stigma and means-testing of a punitive social assistance system.
I also thought: How many people are doing tremendously beneficial work right now without much (or any) income from it? “A lot” would be a massive understatement; I think everyone reading this could name many of them without even missing a beat. How much easier could their lives be with UBI? Would we rather continue to allow masses of people to suffer because we think jobs prevent a few people from “being lazy,” when we could instead be saving lives, freeing people from abusive relationships, easing the burdens of care labor, and promoting a flourishing of the arts?
That said, I do think it’s important to note one of the ironies here: namely, that many people, myself included, yearn for a UBI out of ongoing frustration at not being able to do more of the work they want to do. This interview is a good example. It took me many months to squeeze in enough time to answer these questions, since most of my waking hours are consumed by wage labor and maintaining a household. In a world with UBI, my creativity would flourish, because I’d be free to do my unpaid work. I’m confident that I could be of much greater service to the world as a writer without a job (but with UBI!) than I can with one. But until we live in a world with a UBI, I doubt I’ll have a chance to prove it.
You can find out more about The Anticareerist and its author HERE.
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by Kate McFarland | Feb 4, 2018 | Opinion
My interest in basic income stemmed from the conjecture that such a policy could help to ignite a progression away from the culture of total work. However, there are many open empirical questions regarding the exact way in which a basic income would (or would not) influence work-related attitudes and behaviors.
One might hope that current and planned experiments will shed some light on this topic. My claim in this article is that this is not likely to be the case: the impact of basic income on work-related attitudes and behaviors is not readily amenable to experimentation.
1. Fixing the Viewpoint: Opposition to the Culture of Work
When I began casually following the basic income movement in 2015, and when I began volunteering for Basic Income News in November of that year, I was tentatively attracted to the policy as a means to subsidize lifestyles like downshifting and what I’d come to call anti-careerism – the rejection of idea that one’s life course should be structured and defined by a career path.
At that time, I was unaware of the movement’s budding interest in experimentation. I did not realize that the center-right federal government of Finland was about to declare its intention to fund an experimental trial of basic income, or that the provincial government of Ontario was also preparing to design and implement a trial of guaranteed minimum income.
I did not foresee the global surge of interest in experiments and pilot studies that would happen soon after the commencement of my volunteership. But happen it did, and thus, as a writer for Basic Income News, I was committed to expend considerable effort covering the current basic income implementation trials. Moreover, as a “just the facts” news reporter, it was my duty to report on them without allowing my own personal misgivings to show through (although I did have occasion to leak my skepticism in the Op-Ed section). As a result, I was often mistaken for someone with a genuine and favorable interest in basic income experiments.
Through it all, my main interest in basic income remained the conjecture that the policy might act as a subsidy for downshifting, anti-careerism, and working without pay, and thereby help to displace society’s overvaluing of selling labor for money. While such an “anti-work” approach to basic income is highly controversial, I will assume this perspective throughout the present article. (Those who do not share it may either accept it for the sake of argument or stop reading.)
Such an approach to basic income rests on untested empirical conjectures. In fact, however, many questions remain open. Would individuals living in a society with basic income come to hold different views about the role and importance of jobs? Would they fail to view an occupation or career as integral to self-identity? Would they deny that a high salary or professional advancement is essential for personal success? Would they ascribe greater value to self-development and social contributions that occur outside of paid work? Would they tend to prioritize activities that are rewarding in themselves over activities that contribute to professionalization and employability? To what extent would basic income actually enable people to lead lives without full-time or continuous jobs? It is sufficient to empower individuals to work fewer hours? (Probably not.) Would it permit some to withdraw from the labor market completely?
Some proponents take for granted that basic income would usher in a society in which the pursuit of passions is more important than paid work. Such optimistic predictions, however, must be moderated against the reality that the culture of work is deeply entrenched. When critics contend that it’s premature to “give up” on the goal of full employment, the normative assumptions behind their rhetoric should not be ignored: secure full-time jobs and careers remain central to the identity and self-worth of many who have them, and central to the goals and aspirations of many who don’t. Even more unsettlingly (in my view), many supporters enthusiastically maintain that basic income would not result in lower rates of employment–and might even increase work effort (as is the hypothesis behind Finland’s experiment, which is designed primarily to assess whether unemployed individuals would be more likely to accept work if their benefits were made unconditional). Some argue that it would act as a stimulus to business and grow the economy, never pausing to question the ethos of paid work and productivity.
We simply don’t know the long-term effects of basic income on work-related attitudes and behaviors. Given the myriad of unanswered empirical questions, one might guess that I would have been heartened to witness the unexpected onslaught of experiments that occurred during my volunteership with Basic Income News. But I was not: unfortunately, it is unlikely that the present wave of experiments will yield insight into the empirical concerns that interest me and others who approach basic income from the “anti-work” perspective.
2. Five Limitations of Experiments
I believe it’s possible that basic income could precipitate a mass transformation of work-related behavior and attitudes but, if so, it most likely occur through long-term, society-wide processes. Experiments, in contrast, are necessarily (1) limited in duration and (2) restricted to a subset of the population (rather than “universal”).
And experiments have other shortcomings. For instance, they must be (3) designed to prevent subjects from being financially worse off as a result of participation, whereas any “real-world” UBI would almost certainly be introduced in tandem with a funding mechanism that causes some individuals to be net payees. Finally, as existing experiments have been designed, the target populations (4) consist of low-income individuals, the unemployed, and/or welfare recipients, and (5) consist mainly of adults who have already been acculturated into the present society and its ethos of work and consumption.
2.1 Experiments are limited in duration.
Most of the current BI-related experiments are two or three years in length. In the United States, the non-profit YC Research plans to launch an experiment in which some participants receive cash transfers for five years. The only projects of longer duration are taking place in developing nations: GiveDirectly is providing a 12-year basic income to 40 villages in its major experiment in Kenya, and the Brazilian non-profit organization ReCivitas has introduced a “lifetime basic income” in the village Quatinga Velho (note that the latter is not an “experiment” in the scientific sense). Even if longer term experiments were affordable, the pressure to obtain results would generally militate against them.
The short-term nature of experiments poses at least two major shortcomings vis-à-vis our present interests:
First, the payments’ limited duration disincentivizes financially risky behavior, such as abandoning a job or career. We should expect that few individuals would choose to make radical changes to their work and life if they are guaranteed unconditional cash payments for only two or three years. A two- or three-year gap in employment might jeopardize not only one’s ability to return to one’s former job or career path but also one’s general future prospects in the labor market.
Secondly, let’s assume that some participants do radically alter their workforce participation despite the short-term nature of the experiment (e.g. they might use the money to help provide financial security during the process of downshifting from a lucrative full-time job, with the confidence that the experiment’s timeframe is long enough to permit them to settle into stable part-time employment or freelance work). Under a society-wide and permanent basic income, such “first movers” might inspire others also to seek alternatives to the norm of full-time permanent employment, initiating a sort of ripple effect whereby downshifting and other such alternative lifestyles gain in practice and acceptance. A two- or three-year experiment, however, is unlikely to be long enough to observe these more slowly accruing effects on social attitudes toward work.
Stated otherwise: a basic income might enable some individuals to voluntarily accept less money pay through work, reduce their time in the labor market, or even cease employment entirely (especially in the many non-USA nations in which benefits such as healthcare are not dependent on full-time employment). It might, for example, liberate those who had already been keen to adopt such a lifestyle (say, downshifting) but were restrained by, and only by, the lack of a stable financial safety net. Meanwhile, however, other would-be downshifters might remain hesitant. The latter group might include, for instance, those who have been held back by not only financial anxiety but also fear of social marginalization. Over time, however, an increased prevalence and visibility of downshifting could increase the lifestyle’s social acceptability, thereby reducing its stigmatization and rendering more attractive to more people (which would further increase its visibility and social acceptance, and so on).
Of course, this is purely speculative. Even if a basic income were to bring about increase in the number and visibility of downshifters (which itself is uncertain), this might lead not to social acceptance but to angry complaints about “parasitism” and further stigmatization. But the point is just that experiments are unlikely to reveal which outcome would transpire.
Indeed, moreover, some of the effects basic income on social attitudes toward work might develop over generations. Perhaps children and teens would develop less material-driven aspirations if they were to grow up in a society in which basic material security is taken for granted; perhaps they would place less weight on monetary considerations when choosing work or other projects and pursuits. Perhaps they would not internalize the moral imperative that one must “earn a living” through paid labor. Perhaps it would merely seem intuitive to them to conceptualize work and income as independent. Perhaps, in turn, they would conceive of the value of work in terms other than income, such as the good it brings to the world and the satisfaction it provides to the worker. Views that are counternormative in our own society might come naturally to those raised in world with universal basic income…
But we certainly can’t be confident about any of that, and experiments will not help.
2.2 Experiments are not “universal” in scope.
As I have written elsewhere, a bigger question than “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” is “What would you do if everyone’s income were taken care of?” What a financially self-sufficient individual would choose to do in a society of full-time workers is not necessarily identical to what that same financially self-sufficient individual would choose to do in a society in which everyone could afford to live without a job.
Experiments require a control group. This effectively prevents an experimental test of a truly universal basic income. Now, to be sure, some experiments do aim to include universality in their design. In GiveDirectly’s experiment, for example, the experimental units are not individual people but entire villages. In this major study, the treatment groups are each composed of communities in which all individuals are receiving unconditional cash transfers. An earlier experiment in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh also implemented a basic income in several villages, using similar villages as controls. There is even precedent in the developed world: the much-discussed “Mincome” experiment, a negative income tax experiment conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s, used the town of Dauphin as a saturation site; every resident of Dauphin was unconditionally guaranteed a minimum income from 1974 to 1979, when the experiment was terminated.
No current experiment in the developed world, however, includes the use of a saturation site (even though Hugh Segal, the adviser to the Ontario pilot study, initially recommended it). In Finland, the experimental group consists of a random sample of 2,000 individuals who had previously been receiving federal unemployment benefits. Similarly, in the Dutch municipal experiments, participants have been randomly selected from current welfare beneficiaries residing in the respective cities, and Barcelona’s experiment involves a stratified sample of welfare recipients within one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. In Ontario, experimental groups will be randomly selected from self-selected applicants, where eligible applicants are restricted to low-income individuals from three specific regions of the province. And YC Research has designed its experiment as a randomized controlled trial with a target population of low-income young adults in two regions of the US. (See this summary for more information on the design of the experiments.)
A consequence of these design decisions is that all of the above experiments will fail to capture social multiplier effects. For an example of social multiplier effects in the context of minimum income experiments, consider one of the most striking results from Dauphin: an increase in high school graduation rates. Last year, I attended a talk by Evelyn Forget, the scholar responsible for the analysis of the experiment, wherein she described survey data that revealed that the decisions of Dauphin teens to remain in school were due not only to the financial security of their individual families but also to the fact that their peers were able to stay in school as well.
We should expect that work-related behavior could also be susceptible to social multiplier effects. Like teenagers’ decisions to stay in school, adults’ decisions to withdraw from full-time employment might depend not only on their personal financial status but also on the actions of their peers. An individual with a personal source of passive income might be financially able to quit her job, and even desire to do so, but nonetheless choose to remain employed if – and because – her friends and coworkers stay in their jobs. She might, for example, believe that she would become socially isolated if she were to opt out of work while her peers remained in full-time employment. She might think about her lack of friends available before 5 pm on weekdays, or she might feel pressure to continue to earn enough money to continue to engage in costly dining, entertainment, and other activities with friends who remain lucratively employed. She might fear a lack of sympathy or understanding, even ostracism, if she were to become the only person within her peer group to abandon traditional employment.
Furthermore, as discussed above, the potential impact of basic income is not limited to the liberation of those who already desire to downshift; another possibility is that, through social multiplier effects, a basic income could generate this desire in those who had not previously considered the option. Our attitudes and aspirations are also influenced not only by our private circumstances but also by our observations of others’ choices lifestyles, and by our perception of what is socially acceptable. Some who now lack any interest in downshifting might develop one in the face of social or structural changes that legitimate or popularize the lifestyle.
Even experiments with saturation sites would be insufficient to permit us to assess all of these potential effects; the social, cultural, and economic forces that impinge on work-related attitudes and behavior vastly exceed the local scale.
2.3 Experiments exclude net contributors.
A “real world” basic income would almost certainly be introduced in conjunction with tax increases to help to finance the program, which would likely include higher income taxes on top earners. But researchers cannot ethically introduce manipulations that leave some subjects worse off as a result of the experiment. Consequently, tax increases cannot be part of experimental trials. This limits the ability to test how the full policy package would affect work-related behaviors. Even those that have studied taxes and come from financial education backgrounds such as through Northeastern University wouldn’t be able to test how different experiments could affect society and financial systems.
For one, it’s not basic income per se but redistribution – reduction of inequality – that carries the greater potential to curb the demand for positional goods. As mentioned above, a worker might hesitate to downshift if the maintenance of social relationships requires engagement in costly dining, drinking, entertainment, or luxury holidays. In a society with high inequality, a mere basic income might do little to reduce the demand for positional goods, limiting the temptation to downshift or opt out of paid work to live on a subsistence income. Many might continue to feel the need to wear nice clothing, drive a new car, and live in an affluent neighborhood to be taken seriously in society, and thus might continue to prefer greater earnings to greater leisure, despite the possibilities opened by the introduction of a basic income. Conversely, the less that one perceives one’s social status to depend on spending and consumption, the more one might be inclined to trade higher earnings for more leisure time. Policies that mitigate financial inequality, such as progressive taxes on wealth and income, help to address this barrier to downshifting.
Additionally, policies that stymie the ability to become “filthy rich” might discourage those who would otherwise be inclined to choose jobs and careers based primarily on their prospects for financial gain. Sufficiently high income taxes could reduce the role of monetary incentives in selecting work. Limitations on wealth acquisition might push some would-be profiteers to instead seek work that they could find non-monetarily rewarding.
Such effects could enhance the ability of a “basic income plus tax reform” package to transform work-related attitudes and behavior; however, they are bound to be missed in experiments.
2.4 Existing experiments are restricted to low-income populations.
So far, we have focused on limitations that are destined to afflict all basic income experiments, merely in virtue of the nature of experiments. Let’s now turn to a contingent design decision that constrains all current experiments in developed nations: in each experiment, as mentioned above, the target population contains only individuals who are low-income and/or receiving social assistance or unemployment benefits or other benefits or with incomes falling below a certain level.
To be fair, none of the existing experiments have been inspired by questions like “Can basic income provide a subsidy for downshifting?” or “Would basic income promote the acceptance and desirability of lifestyles outside of full-time employment?” On the contrary, most are motivated by the desire to determine whether unconditional cash transfers would be more effective than existing programs in addressing poverty or unemployment. In this light, these choices of target populations seem reasonable. But these choices make the experiments less congenial to the questions of those who are interested in the ability of basic income to facilitate a reduction in paid work.
A test of a policy’s potential to foster downshifting only makes sense if experimental subjects are drawn from a population of people who have the potential to downshift, and “downshifting” typically implies a reasonably well-paying position from which one shifts down. Thus, for an experiment to address our key interests, the target population should encompass individuals who are currently employed in relatively well-paying jobs. An experiment limited to the unemployed will tell us little about a policy’s ability to promote voluntary reduction of working hours. An experiment limited to the poor will tell us little about a policy’s ability to promote voluntary reduction of earnings and consumption.
The inclusion of “successful” workers among test subject is also important with respect to the question of whether basic income would reduce the stigma associated with the receipt of public benefits or, more precisely, voluntary “benefit scrounging” (which is, in essence, just a pejorative term for what I’ve been politely describing as “using a basic income to subsidize downshifting”). Quite likely, the “scrounging stigma” is too strong to disappear during the course of a short-term experiment in any case. If a basic income were to play a role in reducing the stigma, however, it would almost certainly not be by allowing poor and unemployed individuals to live upon government subsidies while they voluntarily opt out of the search for full-time jobs. Unfortunately, such an outcome (however desirable) seems much more likely to feed existing stigmas and stereotypes than to combat them.
In contrast, basic income might have a greater and more favorable cultural impact if it subsidized downshifting among individuals in relatively well-paying jobs and promising career paths – among those, that is, who embody conventional images of success. Society accords respect and admiration to those in lucrative careers, which makes such individuals uniquely well-positioned to attract curiosity, perhaps even sympathy, if they were to spurn the life of traditional employment and choose to rely upon government monies to meet their basic expenses (which is not to say that they would not also elicit the scorn or many others). Admittedly, the idea that basic income could lessen the stigma of “benefits scrounging” is far-fetched. The point at hand, however, is simply that existing experiments are not designed in a way that can adequately illuminate how far-fetched.
2.5 Experimental subjects have already “come of age” in the culture of work.
Each of the existing experiments is focused on effects on adults who have already been acculturated into the dominant work ethic. It is possible, however, that some of the social and cultural effects about basic income would result from its influence on younger generations. Perhaps teenagers would internalize different attitudes toward work if they were to come of age under an unconditional guarantee of financial security – not necessarily taking for granted that a core defining features of “adulting” is to find employment at a full-time job in order to earn a living. Perhaps young adults would formulate different personal goals and ideals of success if they did not face an immediate need to earn money through a job.
In a past feature article for Basic Income News, I speculated that entering adulthood with a work-independent college stipend – which shared some commonalities to a five-year “basic income” – could have played a large role in solidifying my own rejection of the ethic of (paid) work. For example, by allowing me to continue to dedicate myself to schoolwork without worrying about paid work, it might have helped to “prevent me from unlearning” that the fact that an activity is unpaid does not imply that the activity is not worthwhile, rewarding, or hard work – or that it’s not the best use of one’s time.
To some extent, this is just to repeat the point that experiments are too limited in duration to capture multi-generational effects of a policy. In principle, though, one could design a short-term study to test the effects of a guaranteed income on a cohort of young adults at critical transitional phases, such as leaving home for college or leaving college for “the real world” (i.e., usually, either a job or the search for one). But existing experiments are not this.
3. Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, then, I expect the current wave of experiments to shed little light on the question of whether, or to what extent, basic income would promote a cultural shift towards a decreased valuation of paid work. Any apparent evidence that basic income would not have such an effect (e.g. a lack of observed change in workforce participation or self-reported attitudes toward work) could be explained as an artifact of the limitations of experimental design.
Arguably, however, the biggest problem with experiments is not that they most likely won’t show considerable reduction in workforce participation (and yet for reasons that are inconclusive) but that many of the policy’s own proponents don’t want them to. When committed supporters of basic income demand more experiments, as often happens these days, they aren’t doing so because they want to decide for themselves whether to endorse the policy; they already have. The hope, generally, is that experiments would produce results that allay the fears of skeptical policymakers, such as the commonplace “fear” that basic income would cause a decrease in workforce participation. As many supporters are fond of pointing out, previous experiments have not shown a marked decrease in workforce participation, or have shown a decrease only within population segments where reducing work hours is socially acceptable (e.g. school-age teenagers or mothers of young children). This attitude toward basic income experiments only recapitulates society’s overvaluation of paid work.
The policymakers who assess experiments for “failure” or “success” will do so relative to the norms and values of the status quo. Political speeches and media reports are likely to portray any observed decrease in labor force participation as evidence of the failure of the policy, as happened when a negative income tax was tested in several cities in the United States in the late 1960s and 70s. My impression, based on two years of intense work in the basic income movement, is that many supporters realize this but call for experiments nonetheless, believing that the trials will in fact yield outcomes that are “successful” relative to the norms and values of the status quo.
Hence, in addition to being unlikely to produce interesting or useful results, basic income experiments may also threaten to reinforce these norms and values in the minds of advocates and other readers. And, from the standpoint as critic of the culture of work, this is not only unhelpful but dangerous.
Photo: banned :: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments CC BY-NC 2.0
by Kate McFarland | Nov 17, 2017 | News
The US charity GiveDirectly has officially launched its trial of basic income in rural Kenya, and is now enrolling experimental participants.
The US$30 million experiment will be the largest trial of basic income to date, in terms of both size and duration. All residents of about 120 rural Kenyan villages, comprising more than 16,000 people in total, will receive some type of unconditional cash transfers during the experiment; some of these villages, moreover, will receive the universal basic income for twelve years.
It is also unique among current experiments in that it is designed as a randomized controlled trial in which the experimental units are villages rather than individuals. This means that, unlike the studies occurring in Finland, Ontario, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, the GiveDirectly experiment will be able to capture community-level effects of the basic income [*].
The experiment will include three treatment groups. In two groups, villages will receive a universal basic income of about US$23 per resident per month (roughly half of the average income in rural Kenya). In one group, comprising 80 villages, the payments will continue for two years; in the other, comprising 40 villages, the payments will continue for twelve years. In the third treatment group, all residents of each village will receive a single lump-sum payment equal in amount to the two-year basic income (i.e. about US$276). Another 100 rural Kenyan villages have been randomly assigned to a control group.
Chief Financial Officer Joe Huston announced the official launch in a blog post dated November 13, declaring, “It has begun! As I write, field officers in Bomet County, Kenya are beginning to enroll the first (post-pilot) households into the largest basic income initiative in history.”
The launch had been delayed from its originally anticipated date in September, due in part to political disruptions in Kenya surrounding a contested presidential election.
Since October 2016, GiveDirectly has been running a preliminary pilot in a single Kenyan village. All residents of this village (numbering 95 at the start of the pilot) were guaranteed a monthly unconditional cash payments, which will continue in this village for 12 years.
This preliminary study was conducted to help the researchers fine-tune the implementation of the full-scale experiment, and data collected from the pilot village will not be included in the analysis of the experiment. Because of the latter, GiveDirectly has decided to make data and information from pilot village available to the public (no data collected from the experiment itself will publicized until the trial has concluded). For example, the charity has published responses to a survey of participants and is now running a three-part series on “lessons drawn” from a year of observing the pilot village.
[*] In describing the experiment on its website, GiveDirectly suggests that it is interested mainly in individual-level (rather than community-level) effects of basic income, stating, “We will assess the impact of a basic income against a broad set of metrics, including: economic status (income, assets, standard of living); time use (work, education, leisure, community involvement); risk-taking (migrating, starting businesses); gender relations (especially female empowerment); aspirations and outlook on life.” This does not render the community-level effects irrelevant, however, since individual attitudes and behavior can be influenced by social multiplier effects.
Correction (Nov 17): An earlier version of this article stated that the experiment would include 200 villages in total (with 80 in the lump-sum payment treatment group), amounting to around 26,000 total recipients. This statement was based on out-of-date information, and has now been corrected. In fact, approximately 120 villages will be included in the study (totaling more than 16,000 recipients), with a reduction of the number of villages in the lump-sum treatment arm.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
Photo CC BY-SA 2.0 David Brossard
by Kate McFarland | Nov 8, 2017 | News
In an interview with BBC News, Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that basic income (citizen’s income) should not be the current priority of the Government of Scotland.
On September 5, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that the Scottish Government would provide funding for basic income trials in the regions of Fife, Glasgow, North Ayrshire, and Edinburgh, where pilot studies of the policy had received the support of local authorities.
During October’s Inclusive Growth Conference, Sturgeon reaffirmed the government’s commitment to supporting trials of basic income, despite acknowledging that the policy might prove infeasible in the end:
Despite the fact that this has some critics, we are going to work with interested local authorities to fund research into the feasibility of a citizen’s basic income scheme.
I should stress our work on this is at a very early stage. It might turn out not to be the answer, it might turn out not to be feasible.
But as work and employment changes as rapidly as it is doing, I think it’s really important that we look and are prepared to be open-minded about the different ways in which we can support individuals to participate fully in the new economy [1].
Stiglitz, who has served as an economic advisor to the Scottish Government since 2012, believes that pursuing a basic income would represent misaligned priorities in light of Scotland’s fiscal constraints. Instead, the distinguished economist urges the government to prioritize benefits targeted to those who need them most, job creation to ensure a job to all who want one, and a livable income for all who work full-time.
When asked about the UK’s interest in basic income during an interview with the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland, he replied:
I think the point of a citizen’s income is that it recognizes rights of ordinary individuals–that supporting individuals, social protection, is not aimed at those who have been left behind, but is a basic part of our society.
But I do worry about two things. One, as you say, there are fiscal constraints. Should the scarce money be used to give everyone a basic amount, or should it be targeted at those who have particularly strong needs? I think there needs to be some targeting.
Secondly, over the long run, our responsibility as a society is to make sure that everybody who wants a job can get one. And the underlying problems of the lack of employment and lack of adequate pay–anybody who works full time ought to have a liveable income–those are the issues that, in the long run, we need to address.
Stiglitz has previously been hailed in the basic income community as one of a long Nobel-winning economists who have (reportedly) endorsed basic income. His presumed endorsement took place at the World Summit on Technological Unemployment in February 2015, when he was asked if he supported basic income as a policy response to technological unemployment, and replied “Yes, that’s part of the solution,” before going on to stress that basic income alone is not a complete solution.
In October 2016, Stiglitz again said that “the idea of a basic income is a good idea” in response to a question from Vox reporter Ezra Klein (“What you do think about a universal basic income in America?”). He added, however, that he had not yet made up his mind about the question of whether it is better to target limited resources to those most in need:
If you don’t have a lot of resources, isn’t it better to try to target the limited resources you have at those who really, really need it, the people who are disabled, the people who are elderly without other sources of income, a variety of people who are seriously disadvantaged. The problem with the universal basic income is that you give a flat amount to a large amount of people, and that means, because you have so many people, you can’t give as much as you would to help those who most need it.
He went to note that, “on the other side of the coin, those who most need it have difficulty in navigating the bureaucracy” — a problem that would be avoided by a basic income.
It appears, then, that Stiglitz has not changed his mind on basic income so much as determined that, in Scotland and the UK, fiscal constraints and the need for targeted benefits outweigh the advantages promised by universality.
Watch Stiglitz field a question basic income on Sunday Politics Scotland:
[1] Quoted in Tom Martin, “Sturgeon vows to press ahead with radical benefits overhaul, despite official warnings,” Express, October 21, 2017 (accessed October 27, 2017).
Photo: “Old Scotland” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Tatters ✾
by Kate McFarland | Oct 29, 2017 | Research
A basic income and job guarantee are commonly presented as competing solutions to poverty and economic insecurity. In a new paper for the Institute of Labor Economics, however, Felix FitzRoy and Jim Jin of the School of Economics and Finance University of St. Andrews make a case for combining the approaches.
According to the authors, proponents of a basic income often fail to give due attention to the importance of work and employment to subjective well-being and life satisfaction; unlike a basic income, a job guarantee can provide a good job for all those who want to work, and can also offer training and experience to allow individuals to advance to better jobs. At the same time, the authors argue that a job guarantee overlooks the importance of non-standard employment (they note, for example, that self-employed workers often report high levels of satisfaction, and value their autonomy) and unpaid labor, such as child and elder care.
FitzRoy and Jin develop a proposal for a modest basic income (or partial basic income) in conjunction with a guaranteed job offer for those able and willing to work, striving to combine the advantages of each approach in a policy package that is also both affordable and politically feasible.
Read the full paper here:
Felix FitzRoy and Jim Jin, “Basic Income and a Public Job Offer: Complementary Policies to Reduce Poverty and Unemployment,” Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Policy Paper No. 133.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
Photo: Employment Office (1916), CC BY 2.0 Seattle Municipal Archives
