Topher Brennan is a progressive candidate from the state of California, currently running for US Senate. A self-professed “policy geek”, Brennan holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.
Brennan recently put forth a plan for implementing a basic income with his timely essay “The case for a basic income guarantee”. In it, he provides various examples of failures within the current welfare system – specifically the SNAP (food stamps) program – and discusses replacing SNAP, as well as the group of programs known as OASDI, with a basic income.
Dawn Howard: Please give our readers a little background into when and how you first became aware of basic income.
Topher Brennan: I’ve been aware of the concept of basic income for a long time, but I think I may have first heard about it in Robert Heinlein’s novel For Us, The Living, which I would have read back in in college, maybe even high school. I don’t remember what my initial reaction was. I may have thought “sure, that might make sense in the distant future, when everything is automated”—but by high school I was already a big fan of individual autonomy, so it wasn’t long before I figured out you could do something like that right now.
DH: Have you been following any of the current basic income pilot studies happening across the globe? If so, how do the design models and results of these pilots influence your own concept of its potential implementation?
TB: Most of the really exciting research I’m aware of is still ongoing. That said, I’m a huge fan of the charity GiveDirectly. I believe their basic income study hasn’t launched yet, but their research on one-time, no-strings-attached cash transfers provides strong evidence that when you give poor people money it really does lead to big improvements in their lives. It doesn’t all just get wasted on booze or anything like that.
I’m not sure I can claim this influenced my support for basic income—I was pro-basic income long before I knew about GiveDirectly, and the results of their research seem totally unsurprising to me. The reason the free market mostly works well is that (again, for the most part) people are pretty good at looking after their own interests. When politicians talk about creating jobs, no one retorts, “that won’t help, because the people who get the jobs will spend all the money on booze”. But when you talk about anti-poverty programs, suddenly everyone worries about that.
I should also say that when I was writing the article on basic income that I recently publish on Medium, a lot of the specifics were driven by looking at the current state of the social safety net in the United States specifically, and how it sometimes goes wrong. Basic income is a great idea no matter where you are, but I expect the implementation details will be somewhat country-specific.
DH: Given that poverty is typically considered a bi-partisan issue, how feasible would it be to implement a small-scale basic income pilot in California, given the state’s current budget concerns and overall political climate?
You might be able to do it, but it would be tricky. Thanks to proposition 13 (an anti-tax ballot initiative passed when California was a much more conservative state), you’d probably need a ballot initiative to fund it. Also, because most current anti-poverty spending comes from the federal government, and the federal budget as a whole is just bigger (even in terms of percentage of GDP), I think you could shoot for a much bigger basic income right off the bat, working at the federal level.
DH: In your essay ”The case for a basic income guarantee”, you write:
“Being poor means politicians will try to micromanage your life. Politicians like to say they support helping the poor, but only the deserving, and only for things they really need. Whatever you think of that in theory, in practice, the government is bad at telling who’s deserving. It’s also bad at telling what people really need. All that happens is that we make the lives of people we’re trying to help worse, with nothing to show for it.”
Given that you recognize the desire for self-determination and autonomy among individuals living in poverty, do you feel that the government’s role is simply providing a monthly or yearly payment, or do you feel that some recipients would benefit from further education and/or government assistance in order to budget their money wisely?
TB: With education, if we’re talking about adults, people have the option of spending their basic income on education for themselves. A free $8,000 per year, for example, would make college much more affordable. The question of to what extent the government should be subsidizing college education, I think, comes down to somewhat technical issues of how much of the benefit of a college education is captured by college graduates, versus being a positive externality. I don’t actually know the answer to that question.
With K-12 education, there are some additional complications. In the United States, there are states where homeschooling is totally unregulated, and the result is some parents end up educationally neglecting their children. That’s not a win for personal autonomy—those kids didn’t make an informed choice to go without a decent education in their early years; their parents decided that for them. And basic reading and math are important skills no matter what you do with your life, so I’m pretty comfortable with the government insisting children learn them.
Which is not to say our current K-12 is perfect by any means. But when I think about things I’d hope to see fixed in the near future, I think about evening out the disparities in school funding so we don’t have supposedly public schools that are de facto private because you can only go to them if your parents can afford the absurd housing prices in the district. What the right thing to do would be, in an ideal world, if we were designing the system from scratch—I don’t know. As for helping people with budgeting, I think most people who find themselves financially strained become pretty good at budgeting in a hurry because they have to be. You can add various caveats to this—supported decision making can be very helpful for people with intellectual disabilities, for example—but the idea that what poor people really need is help budgeting, at least the way it’s often meant, is a myth.
DH: Even though libertarians, greens and independents do not make up the lion’s share of registered voters in California, libertarians in particular might find certain aspects of your campaign platform appealing and consider voting for you. However, your stance on basic income might turn them off because of its distribution model – specifically that it puts more power in the hands of the federal government. How would you respond to this type of concern from voters who do not want the government running large-scale social welfare programs?
TB: I’d dispute the premise that it puts more power in the hands of the federal government. If it looks that way, it’s because the federal policies I’d like to replace (in part or in whole) are often designed to look smaller than they actually are. I really try to avoid that, because I think it leads to bad policy, even if it would be politically convenient. For example, the federal government spends over a trillion dollars a year on so-called “tax expenditures”, where the tax code is written a certain way not because it’s the most sensible way to raise money for things the government wants to do, but in the service of some social policy or other. Tax expenditures are popular because they let politicians say, “it’s not a spending increase, it’s a tax cut!” But they can have perverse effects relative to more straightforward approaches to the same issues. I’m not always sure these consequences are unintended. Because tax expenditures are confusing, they also make it easier to sell one policy to voters and another policy to donors.
Another example is means testing of government programs. It sounds like common sense—government programs should help only those who really need it. And it’s politically convenient, since it can make a program look much cheaper on paper. But means testing is functionally equivalent to combining a much larger program with a large income tax—the tax is just hidden. And because it’s hidden, it’s more likely to be designed in a stupid way where some people wind up with a 95% effective marginal tax rate, and have little reason to, say, try to get a promotion or take on more hours.
So I try, as much as possible, to avoid these policy mistakes—even if it means more work explaining a proposal to people.
DH: Many activists within the basic income community posit that our current economic system (capitalism) is inefficient and unsustainable, and that eventually we must transition out of it. Do you see basic income as a type of incremental step toward this transition – a kind of temporary “band aid”?
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TB: That’s a big question! It depends both on what you mean by “capitalism” and what happens with future technological development. The former we can argue about endlessly, and the latter I don’t think anybody knows for certain. I will say this, though—I think most people underestimate how many features of our current economic system are not the natural order of things, or even “what happens under capitalism unless someone reigns the corporations in”, but are the feature of specific government policies, which are often not well-thought-out, or which are designed to benefit the powerful rather than the average person.
Take prescription drugs, for example. I recently heard someone put this very succinctly: if prescription drugs were a free market, you’d be able to order them from Canada. High prescription drug prices are sometimes justified on the grounds that they’re necessary to fund drug research, but I think it’s pretty obvious we could find better ways to fund drug R&D than what we currently have.
And there are lots of things that are like that. So I think we could have a better, fairer economic system that would look quite a bit different than what we have right now, whether you’d end up classifying it as a variety of capitalism or not.
If you would like to learn more about Topher Brennan, you can visit his web site: www.topherbrennan.com
This article is inspired by the article titled “Helicopter money and basic income: Friends or foes” authored by Stanislas Jourdan (2017). He made a very important attempt to clear up confusion between two similar and conflicting yet important terms in the global economy at this moment. Hıs article has opened doors for another attempt to compare basic income scheme and cash transfer schemes. This article will explain the definitions of cash transfers (CTs) and universal basic income (UBI), as well as institutional frameworks under which the programmes are implemented. It will also address financing arrangements for the programmes, and linkages between UBI, CT and Sustainable Development Goals, in an attempt to explain the justification of UBIs in the current state of the global economy. Policy issues related to both CTs and UBIs will also be highlighted.
Basic income and cash transfers are not novel ideas for poverty alleviation. A basic income scheme was initiated in North America in the 1970’s and 1980’s with support from prominent economists of that time. Following the successful implementation of such programmes, governments and the World Bank began implementing cash transfers in emerging and developing countries. With the rising discontent toward the neoliberal economic system and austerity measures, poverty alleviation measures such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) have been resuscitated back to life in developed economies. Gradually, governments in emerging and developing countries are carrying out pilot projects to assess the efficacy of basic income projects.
Emerging and developing countries like India and South Africa, which are implementing cash transfers, are also contemplating introducing basic income projects. This demonstrates that there are differences between these two concepts. Indeed, these two programs are similar regarding their purpose of alleviating poverty and their nature of implementation. However, the analysis below will show why UBI stands out as a different programme from cash transfers, and why our current economic circumstances means a basic income scheme should be implemented globally even in developing and emerging economies.
DEFINITION OF BASIC INCOME AND CASH TRANSFERS
CASH TRANSFERS
Cash Transfer Programmes are founded on social inclusion theory in the context of economic development. The social inclusion theory posits that governments should integrate the poor into the general economy by supporting them with a basic amount of cash. Cash transfer programmes fall into two categories: conditional cash transfers and unconditional cash transfers. Under conditional cash transfers, recipients receive cash only if they can demonstrate that their behavior meets certain stated requirements. Under unconditional cash transfer programmes, the payout does not depend on individual behaviour (Forget E.L et al., 2013).
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) are used to encourage the behaviour of utilizing public services such as education and health services which lead to a reduction of poverty in the long run. For instance, in Mexico the conditional cash transfer programme provided cash to households on the condition that their children regularly attend schools and also access health services at clinics[1]. Proponents of conditional cash transfers argue that the scheme leads to better investments in human capital through access to social services that improve people’s knowledge and skills. The World Bank is a major supporter of the conditional cash transfer programme.
Meanwhile, advocates of the Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programme look at the situation from a different perspective. They argue that poverty is cyclic and hard to break out of when there are conditions imposed on your spending. For instance, with restrictions on peoples’ spending, some basic needs are left out of the spending equation. To meet these basic needs, people may engage in other risky income generating activities such as sex work. When people are in poverty and desperate for money, we should not condition help on changing their behavior. Therefore, advocates of UCT argue cash should not be given according to certain behaviors. Rather, these resources should be made available to poor families so that they can make spending decisions consistent with their socio-economic priorities regardless of the work or job they are engaged in. UCT programmes are supported by human rights advocates and are consistent with a human rights based approach to development.
Unconditional cash transfers are not only premised on certain behavioural requirements, they also have lower administrative costs than conditional transfers (Capriati 2016). In addition, in countries like Malawi unconditional cash transfers have also been merged with other social services like agricultural farm cooperatives and access to health services, hence improving their effectiveness. In this case, UCTs are more consistent with meeting a broader aspect of sustainable development goals.
This notwithstanding, with regards to impact, lessons from CCT and UCT programmes in Zomba city in Malawi have shown that both programmes have had positive results in terms of reducing child marriages, improving educational attendance, and avoiding early pregnancies. However, it has shown that UCT is relatively more effective in solving several challenges met by the families. This is because based on tastes, preferences, and priorities, families could decide how to spend money without constraints so that intended objectives can be met (Forget E.L et al., 2013).
BASIC INCOME
The concept of basic income is a relatively new phenomenon in the developing world as opposed to the developed world. In Canada, a basic income experiment called MINCOME was carried out as a means-tested negative income tax[2] in the 1970s. Meanwhile, a notable experiment was conducted in Namibia and currently two countries are carrying out pilot projects – Kenya and Uganda. Basic income guarantee or Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is considered as a UCT income large enough to guarantee everyone in an economy or in the world a minimum level of financial resources on an individual basis without imposed conditions.
Basic Income mainly works on the principles of unconditionality and universality. Proponents of basic income also argue that the programme is based on the intrinsic value of human beings in an economy. This value is generated from their contribution to the creation of the general wealth of the society and also from the inherited value of our ancestors who created the wealth we are enjoying today (Jourdan S. 2017). Just like cash transfers, basic income plays quite an array of roles from poverty alleviation, school attendance promotion, work emancipation, gender balance incentivization, social protection, modernization and early child marriage prevention.
INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR BASIC INCOME AND CASH TRANSFER PROGRAMME
The institutional framework of these programmes can be analyzed in terms of implementation, sources of funding, policies and financial infrastructure. Firstly, given the diverse nature of objectives of both cash transfer and basic income projects, different non-governmental organizations and line ministries of central government can implement these projects. The government normally implements both basic income and cash transfer projects in the context of fiscal policies.
Financial sector tools such as mobile payment technology and policies also play a huge role in implementation of both basic income and cash transfer projects. GiveDirectly, a US based NGO, is able to implement a basic income project in Kenya and Uganda due to robust mobile technology payment systems established in these two economies.
FINANCING OF BASIC INCOME AND CASH TRANSFER PROGRAMME
Cash transfer programmes and UBI programmes share some differences in terms of how resources are to be mobilized. There is readily available information in terms of how cash transfer programmes are being implemented and funded in developing countries like Malawi. As for UBI, the information is scant but constantly flowing, as different suggestions on how the scheme should be financed are being put forward by proponents.
From an experience of cash transfer schemes in Malawi, these Conditional Cash Transfers are mainly funded by the World Bank and implemented by the government of Malawi. Meanwhile, Unconditional Cash Transfer schemes are implemented by Unicef, Oxfam, Government of Malawi and several non-governmental organizations. These programmes are financed by various donors including the Government of Germany, EU, World Bank, Irish Aid and the Government of Malawi. At the same time, the government of Netherlands is funding the design of a linkage and referral system of the Social Cash transfer programme.
As for the financing of the UBI programme, the topic is currently being addressed in different circles at policy and academic levels. Some of the topics being discussed include how the resources should be mobilized, what kind of tools should be used and who should fund the programme. Understanding this aspect of the UBI programme can assist in providing information on how to strategize campaigning and advocacy programmes for UBI in different countries.
It is claimed that there are currently no established, in-country funding mechanism for UBI in developing nations, except for external funds, as in the cases of Uganda and Kenya. However, in selected developed countries that are piloting the schemes, governments are implementing the projects through their fiscal space. Given the need for longevity of the schemes, some authors such as Young (2017), Stern (2017) and Santens (2017) have suggested sustainable ways for mobilizing resources for UBI in the United Kingdom and United States of America. Some of the methods may apply to both developing and developed countries, while others are restricted to developed countries. Here we will dwell on Young’s proposal for financing UBI and this can be can be categorized into three main groups: 1. Recalibrating existing tax and benefit systems 2. Replacing CCT 3. Communalizing common assets 4. Direct grants from the private sector can also be utilized.
Advocates for proposal one argue that for UBI to be politically feasible, it must be achieved using the existing infrastructure of taxation and spending. The idea is that UBI is currently at a conceptual stage. To materialize this scheme, governments must begin with existing resources (on a trial basis) and there is neither a need for radical and rapid changes to the system nor additional taxes. In this approach, the UBI scheme can be small in scale, targeting the most vulnerable people across the board. As in the case of developed nations such as the UK, resources can be mobilized through restructuring the existing, inefficient and unfair benefit systems. Under this proposition, UBI can be used as a subsistence or sub-subsistence level of income to be supplemented by earnings from employment and/or disability, housing, or child benefits.
One of the ways in which savings for UBI can be generated is through restructuring existing benefits, as explained by Malcom Torry of the Citizen’s Income Trust. He states that the administrative savings from dismantling the means-tested benefits system are in the range of £8-10 billion. In other words, it is very expensive to decipher who is and isn’t deserving of government support, especially when recipients must prove their worthiness. Restructuring the benefits to look more like a UBI scheme can not only help save money but would also be fairer.
The second proposal for financing UBI is simply replacing the CCT scheme with a UBI scheme in developing and emerging economies. India is already on the way to do this. UBI is more closely related to a UCT scheme, hence all the benefits of a UCT scheme over CCT also accrue to UBI.
The third proposition involves communalizing common assets. Some proponents state this UBI financing mechanism takes a more radical and systematic overhaul approach. These proponents look at financing UBI in its universality context and hence propose financing solutions that span across geographical boundaries of both developed and developing countries. These proponents argue for the abolishment of private ownership of resources – be it physical, cultural, biological, or economic. They argue that resources such as the biosphere, atmospheric carbon, fisheries and forests, and unearned income of technological change should be respected as the common property for all, rather than be the source of exploitative disparities from unequal access and power. The implementation of such a systematic and transformative change requires establishment of new policies, institutions and a new economic paradigm at a global level.
There are several prominent advocates who have come up with several ideas on how resources can be mobilized under the proposal of communalizing common assets. First, Barnes Boyce and James Boyce put forward that charges should be put in place by governments on access and use of ‘communally inherited assets’ and that revenues must be redistributed. They argue that charges could be placed, for example, on polluting the scarce resource that is the carrying capacity of our atmosphere, or on trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives (the latter of which could raise $300 billion per year). Barnes and Boyce claim that charges on a portfolio of universal assets could grant a US citizen a UBI of $200 a month.
A wealth tax could also provide an alternative for resources for UBI ın some countries. Researchers such as Thomas Piketty suggest measures such as progressive capital taxation. Martin Faley suggests the Georgist land value tax (LVT) in the context of the UK. Faley claims that land taxes coupled with common licenses could fund a £4,500 annual UBI. A globalization fund could also strike a deal. Globalization has had some negative consequences as we can see from recent increased in nationalism and unemployment in developed and emerging economies. Multinational companies exploiting labor and cheap natural resources in developing countries whilst making billions of US dollars should be charged a globalization tax to be fed into the globalization fund. This fund can be used to support a global UBI dividend or grant.
The fourth industrial revolution is mainly characterized by automation of jobs and technological unemployment. Some economists and futurists have found leeway to press for resource mobilization to finance UBI. For instance, Economist Yannis Varoufakis and futurist Kartik Gada have each suggested that the labor savings from automation could (and should) pay for UBI. According to Varoufakis, the proposal is that one-part should be wealth tax and one-part should be ownership restructuring. That is, a small tax is levied on shares from every initial public offering put into a commons capital depository that in effect grants citizens property rights over new technologies that yield financial returns. The Commons Capital Depository would then pay out a UBI to all citizens.
The last proposal that is also being applied already is the financing of UBI activities with funds from the private sector. eBay is financing pilot projects in both Kenya and Uganda. More and more private companies can come in to support such projects in developing countries.
LINKAGES BETWEEN CASH TRANSFER AND UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Cash transfer and basic income share the same theories of how they change people’s behavior or improve living conditions of people in the context of Sustainable Development Goals.
CT programmes reduce poverty and increase income. As income increases, people spend money to solve diverse needs of their families and they also spend on luxury goods. SDG 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 9
CTs and Basic income reduce risk. A CT or a Basic income is a form of social insurance that increases the planning horizon and allows one to take calculated risks. SDG 2,3,4
CTs and Basic income reduce income inequality. SDG 10
CTs and Basic income enhance social values of dignity and integrity, hence build communities through interaction. SDG 11, 16, 17
WHY UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME NOW
There are quite a number of reasons to justify the policy shift in favour of basic income in both developing and developed countries. The first reason is that the basic income is guaranteed over a long period, thereby enabling people to make plans for major life decisions ahead of time. The longevity of UBI can also stimulate demand in the global economy, hence leading to increased production and employment in the production sector.
Additionally, just as with unconditional cash transfers, basic income schemes could be cheaper than providing in-kind transfers and conditional cash transfers. In-kind transfers take the form of goods and services like cattle, books, schools, and hospitals. It is claimed that projects involving the provision of such projects have huge administrative, implementation and logistics costs. Besides this, they constrain people on their freedom to spend money on the goods and services of their choice. However, thanks to mobile technologies, basic income programmes are implemented with ease and offer economic freedom on expenditure of the money.
Basic income is also conventionally universal and is regarded as a human right. Basic income programmes target people across the board in an economy. The cash is provided irrespective of your employment status, gender, region, physical ability. Rather, it is based on one’s inability to meet basic needs in a society. Therefore, beneficiaries in a basic income project are diverse and the impact on poverty reduction as well as the multiplier effect on the economy are likely to be huge.
Finally, just as with conditional cash transfers, basic income offers an opportunity for long term investment in human capital. From the recent evaluation survey of GiveDirectly’s basic income project in Kenya, 20 percent of respondents said that they were using the money for payments of school fees for either themselves or their children. As the project is expected to last for some years, recipients of the cash can make long term and secured plans to finance their studies, hence building human capital in the economy.
POLICY ISSUES FOR CTs AND UBI
Basic Income is more closely related to UCT. Therefore, in terms of cost structure, the cost per unit of outcome will be lower with a UCT and UBI scheme compared to conditional cash transfer scheme.
UBI has a greater potential for political advocacy and long-term stability despite its perceived greater cost, due to its universality.
Financial Modelling of UBI in Malawi must be conducted to assess the possibility of carrying UBI and UCT concurrently.
Frank Kamanga is a former Economist of the Central Bank of Malawi. He is a co-founder of Global Hope Mobilization and Centre for Child Development of Research, two local NGOs in Malawi. He is member of the Basic Income Earth Network Outreach Committee and also Global Unification International UBI Africa Committee.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Capriati M. (2016) https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2016/07/whats-so-special-about-give-directlys-basic-income-pilot/ Accessed in April 2017
Forget, E.L, Peden A.D., and Strobel, S.B (2013). Cash Transfers, Basic Income and Community Building. Social Inclusion, 1(2), 84-91.
Young Charlie (2017). Conversation about Basic Income is a Mess. Here’s How to Make Sense of it. https://evonomics.com/basic-income-conversation-make-sense-charlie-young/. Accessed in April 2017.
[2]A negative income tax is a progressive income tax system where people earning below a certain amount receive supplemental pay from the government instead of paying taxes to the government.
I have a private basic income – a small, regular cash income without means test or work requirement. It’s probably large enough to meet my basic needs. And I got it thanks to privilege, nepotism, and two big lucky breaks.
My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar. Georgetown-Qatar, which is funded entirely by the Qatar government, has to pay an enormous premium to get faculty to agree to live and work in Qatar. If I had a home I might have considered comparing all available equity release plans to pay that premium but that wasn’t for me. I get paid three times as much as my wife. I teach half as many classes. She’s a full professor. I’m only an associate.
Qatar can pay more than US universities because of their own series of lucky breaks that put them in control of enormously valuable resources. Their position today comes largely from decisions made about a century ago, as the Ottoman Empire was breaking up. Britain and France arbitrarily drew lines on the map to create what became the states of the Middle East. They had no idea those lines would eventually give some of those states enormous amounts of oil and gas and leave others desperately poor.
The joy of options
I ‘earn’ my salary by doing a job few others are both willing and able to do. To some extent wages compensate for other disadvantages of the job. But this equalisation is only partial and more importantly, it only occurs among people with similar options.
fedee P/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)
I had better options than most people in the world. My white, American upper-middle class privilege gave me the opportunity to get the qualifications and the flexibility to take this job. For every highly paid professional ‘expat’ in Qatar like me there are maybe eight or ten extra-low paid ‘migrant labourers’, some of whom make as little as $200 a month. They live in dorms for years at a time, separated from their families. They are unfree to quit or to change employers. They are unfree to leave the country without their employers’ permission.
There is no combination of hard work and grit that could have put any one of these workers in my position from their starting point in life.
I see these workers often. They clean the toilets at my university. They bring me tea if I want it. They are, on average, several inches shorter than me thanks to childhood malnutrition, because human resource companies in Qatar have scoured the earth looking for the most vulnerable, cheapest labour. There is no combination of hard work and grit that could have put any one of these workers in my position from their starting point in life – nor is there a combination of bad choices that could conceivably put me in their position from my starting point. I’m paid partly because I’m willing to see unfree labourers up close rather than to stay home and consume the products of billions of workers like them without seeing them.
I do not ‘earn’ my salary in the sense of doing more useful work. I’m a competent professor, but I’m not outstanding. My work is no more valuable than the work other academics do – perhaps less because most of my students are already so wealthy they need education much less than the average person around the world.
I receive a high salary because I was lucky enough to be in the position to serve the whims of rentiers – that is, people who own resources and the stuff we make out of them. There are exceptions but on the whole, the highest paid people are those advantageously placed to serve the whims of wealthy people. Doctors who perform cosmetic surgery for rentiers make far more than doctors who treat malnourished children.
And the power of ownership
The real money isn’t in doing stuff for the people who own stuff. It’s in being one of the people who owns stuff. My chance to do that was my second big lucky break.
A few years before I left for Qatar, my brother returned to the Midwestern United States with a significant amount of money he’d saved while teaching English. With that money, he’d bought a couple houses, fixed them up, and rented them out. Although he made a very good rate of return, he had no more money to invest. He had less money because he was now teaching underprivileged children in a public school in South Bend, Indiana instead of teaching relatively wealthy people in Tokyo.
We were a perfect match. I had the money but not the time or skills. He had the time and skills but not the money. And as brothers we had a bond of trust. No one is going to give tens of thousands of dollars every year to some guy who owned a couple of houses and said he knew how to manage more, but I’d give it to my brother. Nepotism made my business possible.
South Bend is a fabulous place for small investors to get into real estate. Thanks to overbuilding 50 years ago, houses there are extremely cheap to buy, but not as cheap to rent. So, we needed less money to buy in and made a higher return than most real estate investors in most US cities.
There are no doubts about it, investing in real estate is a fantastic way to boost your income. Whether you want to sell your Palmdale house fast for cash or whether you are a first-time buyer, the real estate industry is booming, and now is the time to get involved in property investments. However, that being said, managing multiple properties at one time can be overwhelming, and adding inherited property can raise further points for consideration. With this in mind, if you are considering investing in real estate, it might be worthwhile researching a few different property management companies in your area. Above all, a property management company can take care of everything from finding tenants to advertising your property on social media. Accordingly, you can learn more about the benefits of working with a property management company by doing some research online.
I also benefited because the US tax structure is extremely favourable to business owners in general and landlords in particular. Capital gains are taxed far less than income, and people who don’t need their income are taxed less than people who do. My brother needs to live off of the salary our business pays him, and so he pays income tax on it. My wife and I don’t need the money we make from owning most of the business. We live off the salaries of our jobs, and reinvest virtually our entire share of the business. These reinvestments count as “losses,” and so officially we have never made any income or paid income taxes on our share of the business.
The business pays property taxes, but they average about $15 per house, per month – minuscule compared to the rent we make. Our business needs to maintain the houses, but the cost of maintenance is far less than we receive in rent. Eventually, I’ll take money out and pay income taxes on it, but that amount will probably always be a small portion of the returns to my share of the business. As long as my wife and I (or our heirs) keep reinvesting most of our profits, the vast majority of it will never
My wife and I don’t have enough property income to put us in the one percent, and at our age, it probably won’t get there while we’re alive. But we could quit right now and be safely out of poverty with probably as much as the most generous basic income proposals on the table right now.
We have a basic income – a permanently growing basic income – not just for life, but forever. Because we own stuff we don’t need, our society rewards us with more and more stuff every year. We don’t have to do anything to get more every year. Our money works for us, so we don’t have to.
Because we own stuff we don’t need, our society rewards us with more and more stuff every year.
We don’t quit because employers have offered us jobs with good working conditions and pay that makes us significantly better off than living on our basic income alone. Most people in a similar position would do the same. If some people don’t work when a basic income becomes available, we should consider the possibility that employers aren’t paying high enough wages. My wife and I are not better humans than most of the world’s poor. Our lucky breaks make us different from the poor. And those same lucky breaks make us similar to most other people with money.
Just because I benefit from the unfairness of our economic system doesn’t make its rules any fairer. Those rules are not some natural feature of the universe. People made them. People can change them.
Why don’t we?
Obviously people who own stuff have a great deal of political power, but there’s more to it than that. Most people and policymakers do not understand the difference between rewarding people who do stuff and rewarding people who own
stuff. Spending rewards production, but rewarding production is not the same as rewarding people who do things that make production happen. Everything humans produce is made from a combination of human effort and resources. Some spending rewards human efforts, but the biggest rewards go to the owners of resources and of the things we’ve made out of them in the past.
People like to think that owners are ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘job creators’. To some extent this is true. Entrepreneurs are owners who put forth effort to increase the value of what they own, and often what they do is valuable. But there are three reasons entrepreneurship can’t justify the enormous inequalities in the world today.
1. For owners, work is optional. For everyone else, it’s mandatory. Owners do not have to be entrepreneurs. They don’t even have to be competent. They can hire competent people to manage their money for them. The amount of ‘entrepreneurship’ in my story was miniscule. It amounts to this. I lucked into money. My brother knew what to do with it. I gave it to him. For nothing more than that, I never need to work again. Neither will my successors. And unless they’re spendthrifts or exceedingly incompetent investors, they’ll have more than me, and their successors will have more than them.
2. Most owners aren’t really entrepreneurs. Economists have a saying, “the entrepreneur tends to become a rentier”. The reason is simple. The more money you make, the more it makes for you, and that part of your income will eventually outstrip the part from the things you actually do. As a human, you will eventually stop working, and so, you’ll stop getting money for doing stuff, but your stuff will keep on making money forever.
3. We can get entrepreneurship without the enormous rewards to ownership we have today. Rewards were smaller a half century ago, but there was just as much entrepreneurship. What can I possibly have done in the seven years that I’ve been accumulating stuff to justify rewarding me and my successors with a perpetually growing stream of work-free income? In short, nothing. I do not exaggerate. I’ve studied the market as an economist and as a political theorist. I’ve lived it as a wage earner and as a business owner. It’s not just me and my wife. It’s how the economy works.
Some people who read this story will probably accuse me of hypocrisy, saying something like, “If you’re an egalitarian, why are you rich?” If I wrote a similar description of the economy when I was poor, they’d accuse me of jealously, saying something like, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” That’s the catch-22 for people who complain about the rules of our economic system. You’re either hypocritical or jealous. No one has the right amount of property to complain about the distribution of property.
I plan someday to use most of my money to do something good for others instead of just for myself. But it’s the system that needs to change. Individual owners giving away things at their whim will not fix the unfairness of the system. We need to change the rules.
We don’t need to eliminate the market economy or property rights. We just need to realise that a lot of the income in the world today goes to the people who own resources and the stuff we’ve made out of them. Tax that unearned income and share it with everyone – a universal and unconditional basic income. The most common objection to basic income is that it’s supposedly wrong to give things to people who don’t work for it, when actually, the economy already gives billions of dollars of unearned income to people who are already wealthy. The problem is we don’t share it.
Chris Lee, a Democratic state representative from Hawaii, made international headlines when he passed legislation creating a working group to study Universal Basic Income.
Lee recently joined the UBI Podcast to discuss the legislation.
He said the working group will analyze Hawaii’s exposure to automation and the potential for solutions, such as basic income, to address this issue. The working group will also look at the efficacy of Hawaii’s current social services system and whether it is adequate for the challenges of the future.
“It’s safe to say, that if we do nothing…these programs that we are already spending money on are going to go through the roof. To say nothing of unemployment and other changes in the economy that is going to exacerbate income inequality and limit the opportunity for people to work and make a living,” Lee said.
There is no end-date to the working group, and Lee said the key players will likely be organized by the end of this summer. Lee said he hopes that by the next legislative session in January the working group will have produced enough research to push for funding for deeper research into evaluating various proposals.
A potential outcome of the working group is to create a pilot program that is “not necessarily administered by the state,” but is tailored to the local economy, he said.
While the United States had a debate over basic income during the Nixon Administration, Lee said he hopes that initiatives like this working group can bring the discussion to a new generation.
“I think this is definitely an inflection point where we have to acknowledge that the challenges that face us are far larger than our existing infrastructure and economic system is equipped to deal with,” Lee said.
Lee said there must be some changes in the system.
“I think that ultimately we have no choice and it is inevitable that we see some sort of paradigm shift in the way we are doing things,” he said.
The legislation passed unanimously, and Lee said he has not encountered opposition to the proposal. The legislation had support from labor unions, the business community, social justice advocates, and regular Hawaiians.
There were even a handful of legislators Lee worked with on the working group that already had exposure to basic income previously, he said.
“I think that respect for one’s neighbor, that ‘aloha spirit’ is something that drives our value set so that when we come together and say that everybody should have the right to basic financial security — that’s something I think is meaningful to people. So I think everybody has at least been open to the idea of having this discussion and seeing where it will go,” Lee said.
On Wednesday, April 12th, Philippe Van Parijs, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, Emeritus Professor at the University of Louvain and former Director of the Hoover Chair in Economics and Social Ethics, presented his latest book on Basic Income at Stanford University.
He offered a powerful defense of UBI as an instrument of freedom and argued that it can be economically sustained and politically achieved—especially if political communities consider starting with a small UBI. Basic income should be designed, he argues, to go alongside publically funded services, such as quality healthcare and education, and should be given to all fiscal residents of a country.
“I’ve listened to criticisms and questions about basic income in five continents and seven languages,” Van Parijs told an audience of more than a hundred students, teachers and members of the broader community. He remains convinced that the policy has no fatal flaws.
Co-written with Yannick Vanderborght, and with the heroic title Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Econom
y, the book is an absolute must read for basic income enthusiasts and critics, advanced and beginners alike. As the idea of UBI spreads faster than ever throughout the world, it can be hard to keep track of all the major developments in the academic and political worlds. Their book is a seamless solution to this problem.
Over eight insightful chapters, the authors offer the most comprehensive survey ever produced of the scholarship surrounding the recent and less recent revivals of the old idea. Van Parijs and Vanderborght trace back the roots of the policy proposal in the history of public assistance and social insurance, as well as in utopian thinking from Thomas Paine to Charles Fourier, and Martin Luther King. As a scholar, writing and teaching on basic income, I cherish the more than 100 pages of notes and references at the end, which prove to be inexhaustible sources of knowledge.
We learned from Philippe’s talk more about the long journey that led Philippe where he is now. From his first (disappointing) encounter with Rawls over breakfast to his (equally disappointing) encounter with Dworkin in a taxi. On those occasions, both political philosophers challenged the view that liberal egalitarian justice requires a universal cash payment. He recounted for us how he nonetheless ended up convinced that basic income was the instrument of freedom.
In the book, the authors argue that UBI enables a fairer distribution of the most important good of all – the real freedom to lead one’s life as wished, through work and outside work. They make the case that UBI is ethically justifiable by taking on the most pervasive objection of all – that unconditional cash would allow an unfair freeriding of some on others.
Vanderborgth and Van Parijs also offer answers to the many other questions and objections to UBI that come up again and again in political debates. For a start, how would people who believe that work is a moral duty and see the welfare state as a moral hazard ever agree to a system where we don’t even require recipients to demonstrate a willingness to work? And even if we could get them to agree, how could we afford it? And how could such system be sustained? Presumably, if people get money for doing nothing, they will stop working, which will in turn make it impossible to afford a generous UBI. Should we give it to migrants? Won’t it create a dangerous pull effect? And, what about the global poor anyway? Each time, they dissect the objections and scrutinize the questions with the rigor of philosophers, the wise perspective of historians, the rationality of economists and the pragmatic outlook of political advocates.
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We also learned more from the talk about how UBI can help build a sane economy. Automation and globalization are important threats to employment and workers’ rights. Van Parijs argued that UBI could be a possible solution to support displaced workers – allowing them to retrain, and giving them access to the means to lead a decent life. He also shared his vision of a form of work-sharing that could help prevent two opposite problems – the fact that so many work too much and burnout, and the fact that so many are depressed for being out of work. A ‘sane economy’, then, is one that works for the many and does not make so many of us stressed and unhealthy.
I remain convinced that one of the most exciting promises of basic income is that it can help us see a way out of the current dominant regressive mindset on public assistance. Existing benefits systems often condone an obsession with screening out a supposedly undeserving underclass: the “welfare queens” and benefits scroungers. At worst, politicians take advantage of this paradigm to get elected, promising to screen out the free riders. At best, they address the problem in a shortsighted way, making benefits even more conditional to show that they are preventing scroungers from abusing the system. In doing so, they strengthen the myth that benefit claimants are indeed undeserving of assistance. Van Parijs and Vanderborgth’s book proposes to try out the opposite strategy to help rebuild the welfare state: doing away with conditionality to avoid benefits traps while also rejecting means testing, so that more workers also benefit from public assistance.
The authors would prefer if everyone had access to the highest sustainable basic income, but they fear basic income will only work with a great deal of realism and pragmatism. The challenge is to strike the right balance between the ideal and the feasible – without compromising the vision and without wishful-thinking on what is achievable. For basic income to work, Van Parijs said at the end of his talk, the world needs visionaries, enraged activists, and opportunistic thinkers to work together. But don’t worry, he added, “I am sure that all three kinds can be found in this room”.
*** All Pictures are a courtesy of Christine Baker-Parrish
*** A longer review of the book by Juliana Bidadanure can be found on the Stanford Social innovation Review website here.
*** For more on the event, please read Sara Button’s review here.
It is better to have enough financial security to work for no pay than to receive payment directly for the same work — or, at least, this has been my own experience as a volunteer in the basic income community.
If my first year of active involvement in this community has done one thing to bolster my own support for a basic income, it has been this.
as a “pure volunteer,” later dabbled in crowdfunding, and eventually received a grant for my work. Through it all, I have come to believe that there is good reason that voluntary work should remain voluntary, as long as it is financially feasible for volunteers to remain such (if, for example, volunteers had access to a work-unconditional guaranteed income).
Of course, no bold conclusions can be drawn from my experience alone. I am but one datum, a voluntary (no pun intended) sample of n = 1. The anecdotes that follow are meant only to be suggestive, to inspire critical reflection on ways in which the monetization of labor might compromise our attitudes as workers and, in turn, the quality (and quantity) of our output.
1. Background: Becoming a “Paid Volunteer”
When I began working for Basic Income News in early 2016, I did not seek financial compensation for my labor, nor did I have any expectation ever to do so. BIEN has been entirely volunteer-based since its inception and had no hiring plans for the foreseeable future. At that time, the praise and acceptance that I received as a result of my contributions — the satisfaction of providing something of quality and utility to people whom I respected — was all the motivation I needed. I also, at that time, had the means to support myself temporarily (a self-funded basic income, if you will). Thus, in mid-2016, I chose to treat this work for BIEN as if it were my “full-time job” while I self-financed my living.
Kate drinking fancy beer while supporting basic income
As my work began to gain attention, however, my situation changed. First, colleagues encouraged me to raise money for myself on Patreon, à la basic income writer and advocate Scott Santens. Allured by the prospect of a longer “career” as a freelance basic income reporter and writer, I did indeed create my own Patreon account, and reached a peak monthly “salary” of over $300 within only a few months.
However, crowdfunding — and the associated attempts to “brand myself” as a public figure — proved to be a considerable drain on my morale, and, as discussed below, it created perverse incentives that very nearly undermined my sense of solidarity with the BIEN and Basic Income News community. Thus, although I kept my account open, I ceased to devote time and energy to personal crowdfunding.
At the end of the year, though, the impulse to monetize my volunteer labor returned through a different vehicle: in December 2016, the Economic Security Project (ESP) launched in the United States, with the bold proclamation that it would be distributing $10 millionin cash grants to projects related to researching or promoting basic income. With the support of my colleagues, I applied for, and received, a grant amounting to $2,000 per month to support my work for Basic Income News for one year. It felt like a dream come true to me — the highlight and capstone of an unexpectedly exciting and successful year.
In the ensuing months, however, I noticed that — despite its unquestionable benefits to my personal finances — even the receipt of the ESP grant began to impact my attitude and morale, my relationships with colleagues, and the quality of my work in ways that were not altogether salubrious.
Given the present political reality, my personal circumstances — being paid to volunteer, if you will — are about as good as they can be. But I believe that, if reality could be otherwise, I might have been a much more effective contributor to the good of Basic Income News and BIEN, and perhaps the basic income community at large, if I simply had the wherewithal to continue to support myself while engaging in true volunteer work.
2. From Collaborator to Competitor
In my experience, the single most salient adverse effect of monetizing volunteer work — whether through crowdfunding or through grant-seeking — has been its tendency to induce a change in mindset that transforms allies and collaborators into rivals.
Whether I was raising money to support myself on Patreon or pursuing an individual grant, I was pursuing money to support myself as anindividual. I was forced to market myself, to promote myself, to present
myself as individually (and uniquely among BIEN volunteers) deserving of funds — even though the job to which I had agreed, and the job that I initially loved, was to work for BIEN. During my first months with the organization, when I thought nothing about monetization, I tended to select my tasks for any given day based upon what I perceived as BIEN’s most pressing needs and demands, in conjunction with my own abilities, interests, and inclinations. But when I found myself faced with the tasks of earning and retaining funders, new questions emerged at the forefront: How can I make it appear that, out of all volunteers in the basic income movement, I am worthy of money? How can I stand out from the crowd?
Unsurprisingly, the drive to “stand out” as individually worthy of support can have deleterious effects on work in a collaborative environment like BIEN and Basic Income News. For example, the news service requires much “behind the scenes” work to remain functional. Most would-be funders, however, are not privy to our backstage activities — and would-be fundees like me know this. Meanwhile, Basic Income News posts are generally published under the names of their authors; thus, as actors on the front stage, news authors do sometimes gain the attention of those outside of the news team itself. As a consequence, the pursuit of outside funding tends to incentivize writing as much as possible under one’s own name, while minimizing administrative tasks, proofreading, editing, volunteer training, general website updates and maintenance, and any other such “invisible” work, despite the indubitable importance of the latter for BIEN.
Thus, for one, the pursuit of outside funds can create incentives that may lead the “fundee” to act contrary to their better judgement of how they could most effectively use their time and talents to further the good of their organization or cause. However, there can be even darker effects of the competitive, individualistic mindset engendered by personal profit-seeking.
Here are two examples from my experience — which, I must admit, fill me with shame and disgust even to relate. The first concerns a change in attitude towards proofreading and editing. I joined Basic Income News as a copyeditor and style editor, and I initially continued this work on an as-needed basis even after I also began to write articles under my own name. When I started crowdfunding, however, I nearly abandoned these proofreading and editing tasks — or, for that matter, providing any type of assistance to other volunteers — and I became much less thoughtful and meticulous when I did provide any type of editorial feedback. In part, this was motivated by the factor mentioned above: a newly acquired distaste for anything that distracted from the more “visible” work of self-authored posts. In part, though, it was driven by still more nefarious thoughts: “I have many ideas about how to make this draft into a better piece; thus, if I simply let it be published in its current state, my own work should then look better by comparison…”
Another tendency I noticed, after I began crowdfunding, was an avaricious urge to seize each and every good news lead for myself — neither asking nor caring whether any other volunteers might enjoy writing the story or might be better positioned than myself to write on its particular topic or region. When other writers claimed major news lead, I wasn’t happy to see that they were contributing, nor was I happy even to have less work for myself; instead, I felt a twinge of envy.
It’s a gross understatement to say that I’m not proud of these thoughts and never was; the feeling that I was required to outdo my own peers and allies was anything but fun or exciting.
It should additionally be noted that I encountered this perverse effect — the felt demand to treat collaborators as if they were competitors — despite the fact that no other Basic Income News volunteers were raising money for themselves. This is because, I think, I faced a special mental burden as the sole volunteer seeking monetary contributions: the burden of rationalizing to myself why I sought funding while my collaborators did not (or why, given that they were not receiving their own donations, I did not donate a portion of my own proceeds to them). When I observed my own money-seeking behavior, I saw that this behavior implied that I saw my own work and contributions as “more deserving” than those of my collaborators. Trying to “outdo” other volunteers, then, was in part a mechanism to relieve cognitive dissonance: if I could prove to myself that I was “the best” of the Basic Income News volunteers, I could rationalize my behavior of seeking donations for myself and myself alone.
In the end, I found one way to overcome these counterproductive attitudes and urges: I ignored the prospect of future money in basic income news writing, and accepted the assumption that I would not bring in additional money on Patreon, would not secure an additional year of grant funding, etc. That is, I retrained myself not to think of my work as a money-making venture.
3. The Threat of “Selling Out”
It probably requires little imagination to understand why seeking money from donors could threaten to compromise journalistic integrity. One should hope, at least, that news reporting would answer to the facts rather than the preferences and predilections of any monied interest.
Even when writing opinion pieces, such as this one, I consider myself to be bound by ethical and epistemic duties that the pursuit of donors might threaten to comprise. Roughly, I believe that I have a responsibility to write in support of positions that I believe Basic Income News followers should see supported, and to criticize positions that I believe Basic Income News followers should see criticized. Sometimes acting in accordance with this responsibility amounts to defending unpopular positions — such as, say, emphasizing some of the limitations of basic income or even questioning its feasibility — knowing that many readers are unlikely otherwise to seek out articles that challenge their pre-existing views. Indeed, even writing a full-fledged defense of basic income is likely to alienate some readers, given that there are many incompatible versions of basic income and that many incompatible reasons have been adduced to support them. I know, for example, that many basic income supporters would prefer to de-emphasize or outright reject approaches that turn on degrowth or post-work utopias.
When I supported myself financially, I was free to write whatever I believed needed to be written. Money seeking, however, introduces new questions. Should I try to remain as neutral and inoffensive as possible, even when writing opinion pieces, in order not to alienate potential funders? Should I avoid writing neutral and objective summaries of reports and articles that oppose basic income — knowing that most of my actual and potential funders would prefer to read a rebuttal? Should I try as much as possible to pander to the interests and positions of those basic income supporters with the most disposable cash (say, perhaps, those among the tech elite)? And, just to be safe, should I rule out ever writing a critical piece on the motives behind Silicon Valley’s interest in basic income? Should I assume that some rich potential supporters are likely to be pro-growth, and so stay away from ever writing in favor of a degrowth perspective — even though the latter is much closer to what I support? Should I avoid any sort of criticisms of the basic income movements that apply to my own funders? Should I stay quiet if I notice that one of my donors has begun spreading inaccurate or misleading claims about the status of one of the basic income experiments? And so on.
Fortunately, I was never tempted to compromise on my values as a journalist or writer in order to try to obtain donations, although it was distressingly easy to see that matters could have been different had I been in more dire need of funds, especially when attempting to crowdsource money through Patreon. I have occasionally, however, felt some pull after the fact to avoid criticizing those who have contributed to my funding — out of a sense of loyalty or respect to those who have shown generosity. Although superficially more virtuous, perhaps, the latter impulse — the desire not to offend those who have been charitable — can be just as problematic insofar as it becomes a threat to journalistic integrity.
4. From Social Norms to Market Norms
So far, I have focused on problems that arise when one fixates on the goal of securing or retaining funding. But adverse monetization-related effects on attitude and motivation can persist even within a secure funding arrangement — as I have experienced as a grantee.
Let’s look back to late 2016, prior to my receipt of the ESP grant. I have never tracked my hours, but I would guess that, at this time, I would sometimes willingly devote 50 or 60 hours per week to work for BIEN and Basic Income News. Since I did so for no pay, and without the expectation of future pay, the effort was clearly my choice; it was something I elected to do because of the appreciation it received from others and the sense of fulfillment it offered to me.
After I was offered $2,000 per month to complete the same work, my attitude began to shift. While there were surely many confounding factors, I feel certain that monetization played a distinct demotivational role at this point in my “career.” In fact, I felt a bit like an embodiment of research by behavioral economists like Dan Ariely on the tendency of monetary compensation to “crowd out” intrinsic and altruistic motivation to perform tasks. I grew disinclined to put in long hours of work, and sometimes even felt resentful when I imagined that others were expecting me to continue to work as much as I had been working at the end of 2016.
The fact that I was receiving only $2,000 per month played a role in this motivational change that was sometimes cognitively explicit. To be sure, this was the amount I had requested — the maximum amount, in fact — and I had requested this particular amount under the assumption that I would use it to cover basic expenses while continuing to work full-time (or more) each week. Prior actually to receiving the grant, I never thought about the fact that I was probably working at least 40 hours per week, and that, in the US, it would typically be seen as exceedingly cheap to hire a PhD-holder to perform a full-time job for a pre-tax salary of $2,000 per month without health insurance or other benefits.
After receiving the grant, however, I conceptualized my work much different: as Ariely might put it, I began to conceptualize my work in terms of economic norms instead of social norms. I was no longer working for the good of BIEN, for the basic income movement, or for any pleasure I intrinsically received from the work; I was instead working for$2,000 per month (with no benefits) — which seemed to merit no more than part-time work and effort. If I were to put in a 50 or 60 hour week, it no longer felt to me like I was voluntarily breaking my back for a good cause, as it did when I was doing the same amount of work for no compensation whatsoever. Instead, when I worked such long hours for a relatively small salary, I just felt underpaid relative to my efforts.
5. Epilogue
Eventually, I was able to work with ESP to resolve specific conditions on my grant funding, and I am happy to say that they are extremely reasonable (and, of course, they carry no expectation that I must work time-and-half!). It remains true, however, that the effect of financial compensation has not been to increase my effort or enthusiasm in my work for Basic Income News. On the contrary, I am now working much lessfor the news service than I was prior to being paid.
In the end, I believe, allof the effects of the grant have turned out well for me — even if not precisely (or at all!) in the way that might have been expected: given my tendencies toward workaholism, I am indeed rather grateful for any financially-induced loss of motivation. I am now much more inclined to moderate the time and effort that I dedicate to Basic Income News and, as as consequence, less stressed. It’s likely that, had it not been for monetization, I would have soon been a victim of burnout (yes, burnout at volunteer work).
Meanwhile, I have avoided other potentially adverse effects of monetization — such as the sense of competition against my peers — simply by adopting the acceptance that I will not continue to be funded in 2018 (and by assuring myself that this is okay, that I’ll find a way to make do, long enough, until I find something else). This mindset allows me to revert attention from the question “How can I secure money for myself?” back to questions like “What needs to be done?” and “What do I want to do?” The latter questions, I find, are much more conducive to the production of quality work and, certainly, healthier and happier attitudes.
So, while I have found an effective strategy, it depends, essentially, on having a personal financial safety net on which I can fall if I do not immediately secure additional paid labor.
It would irresponsible to assert that my experience can be generalized to others, in other circumstances of voluntary work. To the extent that it does generalize, however, 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.
