by Kate McFarland | Dec 29, 2016 | News
Timotheus Höttges, CEO of the multibillion dollar telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG, has previously expressed support of unconditional basic income. In December 2016, he again addressed the subject in an interview in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
In a recent interview with Handelsblatt, Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges talks about the changing nature of work, especially potential job loss due to digitization — to which, he admits, his own company is not immune — and the demand for more specialized skills. In response to a question about why he supports an unconditional basic income (“bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen”), he notes that jobs are becoming more project-based, with permanent full-time employment becoming less of a norm.
Timotheus Höttges
Between digitization and project-based work structures, we should expect that workers will need more time to retrain as well as more periods of unemployment or part-time employment — and, according to Höttges, Germany’s current welfare system is ill-equipped to support such workers. Thus, he believes that the government should replace its complex system of subsidies with an unconditional basic income [1].
Höttges adds that an unconditional basic income would promote more dignity (“Würde”) than Germany’s current welfare system — which puts the would-be recipient in the position of a supplicant, having to ask for aid — and that it could promote entrepreneurship.
Although he admits that some might take advantage of the basic income without contributing to society, Höttges denies that a basic income would create a “society of loafers” (“Gesellschaft von Faulenzern”), since it is through work that people find meaning and identity.
Höttges also points out that a basic income would encourage respect for those who choose to do work that is traditionally unpaid, giving the example of care for ailing parents. (It’s worth noting in this connection that, earlier in the interview, Höttges argues that revenue is no longer an adequate measure of productivity, given the extent to which information can now be created and distributed freely, as in Wikipedia.)
When asked about funding for an unconditional basic income, Höttges stresses that the policy needs to be seen as part of a broader package of a reforms, including tax reform. He maintains that corporate profits must be taxed and redistributed as a matter of justice, fairness, and solidarity (“Gerechtigkeit, Fairness, Solidarität”).
The interview also mentions top-ranked German CEOs who are sympathetic to basic income, including Götz Werner of dm-drogerie markt — with whom Höttges has discussed the idea — and Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, who called for “a kind of basic income” during the Süddeutsche Zeitung Economic Summit in November (although he subsequently indicated in a Tweet that he did not believe the basic income needed to be unconditional).
If you read German, you can read the entire interview here:
Ina Karabasz, “Telekom Timotheus Höttges CEO: ‘Wir sind zu satt’,” Handelsblatt, December 20, 2016.
[1] In the original German: “Also wird es Phasen geben, in denen der Mensch keine Arbeit hat, umschult oder nur in Teilzeit für ein Unternehmen arbeitet. Diese Phasen wird der Sozialstaat überbrücken müssen. Warum soll man dessen komplexe Förderungssystematik nicht mit einem bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen ersetzen?”
Timotheus Höttges photos: CC BY-SA 4.0 Sebaso
by Guest Contributor | Nov 21, 2016 | Opinion
Original post can be found at TRANSIT
Written by Bonno Pel & Julia Backhaus
On Saturday October 1st 2016, the Basic Income Earth Network celebrated its 30th anniversary at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). The picture shows the founding meeting in 1986, but is also quite applicable to BIEN 30 years later. The conference was held at the same location and many of the founders and their fellow militants met in good atmosphere to commemorate the early beginnings of the network. Together with other scholars and generally interested people, they discussed current developments in science and policy and ‘the way forward’ for the basic income movement.
picture source
An unconditional income for all
First, the picture is telling for the ways in which BIEN pursues transformative social innovation, namely through the development, discussion and dissemination of persuasive “new framings” and “new knowings”. The seminar room in the picture gathers several individuals who by now have become eminent scholars in economy, social philosophy or sociology. Over the course of three decades and together with activists, politicians and citizens, BIEN members have developed a whole complex of arguments, evidence and framings around the basic income. The idea itself is simple: An unconditional, individual income entitlement, more or less sufficient for fulfilling basic needs, promises real freedom for all.
It offers individual empowerment in the form of income security and the material conditions for a self-determined existence in society, but it is also in many aspects about changing social relations: between men and women (as the conventional breadwinner model is challenged by individual income entitlements), between employed and unemployed (as stigmatization lessens when entitlement is universal rather than for the ‘unproductive’ only), and between employee and employer (the latter’s possibilities to exploit the former are decreased by the basic income security). In current institutional-ideological constellations, the idea of a basic income is bizarre and outrageous for rewarding jobless ‘free-riders’. Apparently relinquishing hard-earned social security arrangements, BIEN members met (and continue to meet) with tough press, sidelining them as ‘irresponsible freaks’. Yet the power of BIEN members’ socially innovative agency resides in showing that it is actually many common ideas about work and income that are outdated, and harmful even.
Claus Offe (credit: Enno Schmidt)
Impressive examples of outdated conceptions were provided by prof. Claus Offe, who argued that we do not earn our income, as commonly believed. Wage flows from labour that forms part of ever-extending production chains of individuals and machines. The availability of jobs fluctuates cyclically, and independently from individuals’ employability efforts. Moreover, the current productivity in highly industrialized countries is possible because ‘we stand on the shoulders of giants’. It is largely inherited from previous generations. So it is rather the current insistence on employability, on meritocracy and on ‘earning one’s income’ that is out of tune with economic reality. Production has become post-individual, and this requires a matching social security system. Harmful effects of a capitalist system that ignores its obviously collective character through individualist ideology include blaming the losers and accepting precarious conditions for some. Economist Gérard Roland outlined how the basic income provides a better trade-off between labor market flexibility and precariousness than current social security arrangements. Sociologist Erik O. Wright views the basic income as a “subversive, anti-capitalist project”. He expanded how the concept allows moving on from merely taming to escaping the globalized, capitalist system. For him, the basic income can provide the basis for numerous social innovations that also the TRANSIT project considers, such as social and solidarity economy initiatives or co-operatives.
BIEN thriving on internal differences: many streams forming a river
Second, based on the variance of people’s clothing, the picture above also visualizes how BIEN has developed as an association of very different individuals. At the conference various founding members recalled the routes they had traveled towards the transformative concept. They arrived at the idea on the search for liberalist re-interpretations of Marx, through feminist commitments, when rethinking meritocracy, as a response to the structural unemployment of the time, or as a logical conclusion of a transforming and ‘robotizing’ economy. The forthcoming case study report on BIEN by yours truly spells out in more detail how these different little streams came to ‘form a river’, as expressed by a founding member. The internal differences between the generally principled and intellectually sharp BIEN members led to fierce debates, it was recalled. According to a longstanding motor, evangelizer and lobbyist for the basic income, BIEN has only survived as a network for members’ capacity to ‘step back a bit’ from their ideological disputes at times, and to recognize what united them. BIEN even thrived on its internal divisions. It functioned as a discussion platform, and helped to institutionalize basic income as a research field. Since 2006, there is even an academic journal on this example of transformative social innovation: Basic Income Studies.
Evolving communication: spreading the word
Philippe Van Parijs (credit: Enno Schmidt)
Third, the black and white photo immediately suggests how different the world was three decades ago. At the time of founding, network members and conference participants from various countries had to be recruited through letters. Initially, the newsletter was printed out, put in envelopes and stamped, for which members gratefully sent envelopes with pesetas, Deutschmarks and all the other European currencies, subsequently converted at the bank by standard bearer professor Philippe Van Parijs and his colleagues. Today’s e-mail, website and Youtube recordings obviously make a crucial difference when it comes to facilitating discussion and spreading the word fast and wide – especially for this social innovation that primarily travels in the form of ideas. The presentations on the history of basic income underlined the significance of the communication infrastructure. The history of basic income can be conceived of as a long line of individuals working in relative isolation, often not knowing of others developing similar thoughts and blueprints. The evolution of BIEN very instructively shows the importance of evolving communication channels and knowledge production for transformative social innovation – critical, weakly-positioned, under-resourced individuals no longer need to re-invent the wheel in isolation.
BIEN, a research community? Ways forward
A fourth, telling element the picture above is the confinement of the seminar room. There have been discussions about BIEN’s existence as a researchers’ community, with the expert-layman divides it entails (during this meeting of experts, yours truly fell somewhat in the latter category). There are in fact also other networks of basic income proponents that have rather developed as citizen’s initiatives and activist networks. BIEN, as a network that can boast such a high degree of conceptual deepening and specialization, is illustrative for the ways in which it remains confined in its own room. It is significant in this respect that the current co-chair brought forward two lines along which the network should reach out more. First, BIEN should be more receptive towards and engaging with the various attempts to re-invent current welfare state arrangements. While this may imply using a more practical language and taking off the sharp edges it may yield real contributions to social security. Often these change processes (regarding less stringent workfare policies, for example) are not undertaken under spectacular headings and transformative banners, but they involve application of some basic income tenets such as unconditional income entitlements. A second line for outreaching confirms the importance of comparative research into transformative social innovation like TRANSIT: The co-chair highlighted that BIEN will explore and develop its linkages with other initiatives, such as Timebanks and alternative agriculture movements more actively.
Basic income: a ‘powerful idea, whose time has come?’
Fifth and finally, the seminar room setting depicted in the photo raises attention to the knowledge production that BIEN has been and is involved in. The socially innovative agency of its members can be characterized as ‘speaking truth to power’. Basic income activism has taken the shape of critiques, pamphlets and counterfactual storylines (Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ being a 500 year-old example), but also featured modeling exercises, forecasts, and economic evidence to support the case. BIEN members’ key resource is their expertise. Moreover, considering the strong arguments and evidence gathered in favor of the basic income over the past decades, there are reasons to be confident in basic income ending up as the ‘powerful idea, whose time has come’. As described in Pel & Backhaus (2016) and currently considered further, it is remarkable how much BIEN seems to have developed in line with the trend of evidence-based policy. The commitment to hard evidence gives rise to an important internal discussion on the recent developments towards basic income-inspired experimentation (such as in Finland and in the Netherlands). The common stance of BIEN members is that these experiments fall short of providing any reliable evidence for their limited duration and scope, and for the system-confirming evaluative frameworks that tend to accompany them. However, there is also a somewhat growing attentiveness to the broader societal significance of experiments and pilots in terms of legitimization, awareness-raising and media exposure. It is therefore instructive for the development of TSI theory to study the basic income case for the new ways in which ‘socially innovative knowings’ are co-produced and disseminated.
About the authors:
Bono Pel (Université libre de Bruxelles; bonno.pel@ulb.ac.be) and Julia Backhaus (Maastricht University; j.backhaus@maastrichtuniverstiy.nl) are working on TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory), an international research project that aims to develop a theory of transformative social innovation that is useful to both research and practice. They are studying the basic income as a case of social innovation, focusing on national and international basic income networks and initiatives.
by Roland Duchatelet | Sep 30, 2016 | Opinion
During the 20th century, the increase in purchasing power of the workers in Western Europe was negotiated by the labour unions and paid for by the spectacular increase in productivity of agriculture and industry: we made more and better products with less workers. This yielded generous increases of net salaries and on top of that it allowed governments to pay for schools and health care. This resulted in the general belief that the wealth of a nation is the result of labour, because it paid not only for salaries, but also for social security and other government spending. Since then, the world elite believes that labour participation is the basis of our social security system and our wealth.
There are a few problems with this belief, however.
The first problem is that with the collapse of communism in 1989, the size of the economy grew from 1 billion participants (Europe, the US, Japan and a few small countries) to 6 billion. Cheap labour supply became abundant while the world wide bargaining power of labour unions became irrelevant. Many manufacturing companies moved their production to low cost countries. The “low cost” of these countries was mainly due to the insignificant tax on labour there, compared to Western Europe, where the labour tax was between 100 and 200% of the (higher) net salaries. The saving of the high labour tax was a major cost reduction driver for companies which moved their production, much more than the net salaries of the highly qualified, well trained, loyal, productive local workers which lost their jobs. Political Europe was sleeping apparently, not realising that the corresponding financing of the social security was moving away with the factories.
The second problem is that increasingly machines, robots and computers used in production of goods and services decrease the need for human workers.
The third problem is that social security contributions from the rapidly increasing public and subsidised employment are not real, because the wallet which collects them is the same wallet which pays them: the state.
The fourth problem is that life expectancy is growing, affecting the cost for the state paid pensions. Since health care cost is much higher in old age, the cost of state paid health care increases as well.
The fifth problem is that income from savings is trending toward zero. Citizens owning property are mostly excluded from social aid provided by the state, since they are supposed to derive an income from their property. This induces a new type of poverty. Moreover, the decrease in income from capital affects overall consumer spending, also within the working class.
As a consequence, the purchasing power of the working class has stalled in Western Europe and the US since 2000. This is hidden in the national accounts because in those figures the “income” which households derive from labour is the “gross” income including social security contributions and income taxes. The latter have risen.
Some political parties start to plead the reduction of social security benefits, which would be the start of a negative spiral.
The labour tax based system is structurally unstable. When sales decrease due to economic slowdown and workers are laid off, their income decreases so they buy less leading to further sales decreases and job losses in other businesses. The “Labour Church” will tell you that the central bank then should decrease the interest rate to stimulate investment and spending. This is speculative and slow to start effect. In any case, the interest rate is now zero and hence cannot be reduced anymore. The “Labour Church” system is in deep trouble. They seem to hope for a miracle: I see no “Plan”.
There is however one stabilising factor, our social security, which makes people continue to spend money when they have no work. This hints to the fact that “Purchasing Power” could be the solution to our stalled economic system. When the economy weakens, we should inject additional purchasing power into the economy. When the economy gets overheated, we could reduce the purchasing power injection.
Purchasing Power injection, Basic Income, should replace “labour” as the motor and regulator of our economic system. The distributed purchasing power generates spending, entrepreneurship and work for those who want to earn more money. Tax on labour can only be an auxiliary source of funding if we want such a system to be stable.
Basic Income supporters are a minority still. But we have a Plan.
by Kate McFarland | Sep 5, 2016 | Opinion
Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, the authors of Only Humans Need Apply, favor a job guarantee (JB) over a universal basic income (UBI). In this first part of a three-part article, I review their main argument, and assess one their central claims: the supposition that joblessness causes people to be less happy (irrespective of income).
Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, the authors of Only Humans Need Apply (2016, HarperCollins), believe that automation will radically change the structure of work. However, they further maintain that there is no need to fear a robot job apocalypse — in defiance of the picture painted by the popular CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply, to which the book’s title alludes. On their assessment, humans and machines will be able to work together in the new economy. Indeed, Only Humans Need Apply consists largely of strategies that workers can pursue to reduce their risk of losing their jobs to machines.
Davenport and Kirby are not proponents of universal basic income (UBI). Instead, as they mention briefly near the end of their book, they favor a job guarantee (JG) program. In this article, I will review their main argument against UBI, and present what I take to be its major shortcomings.
Something, though, should be said upfront: for the purposes of this article, I am happy to grant Davenport and Kirby’s premise that there’s no robot job apocalypse on the horizon. Indeed, I agree that it’s plausible that people will continue to create abundant opportunities for paid employment despite increased automation; after all, they have been doing so for decades already. However, as I’ve stressed elsewhere, there are plenty of reasons to support basic income that have nothing to do with automation; we don’t need to fear the rise of the robots. For one, I believe that a UBI should be demanded in part to free individuals from the need to sell their labor in the marketplace.
It’s on this last point that I markedly disagree with Davenport and Kirby, who hold that jobs are good. More specifically, Davenport and Kirby maintain that jobs are good for those who work at them — and for more than just income. It’s largely for this reason — which I’ll present in more detail below — that they eschew UBI in favor of JG.
1. The ‘Jobs Have Non-Monetary Value’ Argument
Davenport and Kirby devote only one chapter of Only Humans Need Apply to government policy, and only one short section of this chapter to universal basic income (pp. 241-243). (In fact, most of the relevant content was reprinted as an article in Fortune.)
Davenport and Kirby are quick to dismiss UBI — which they believe “misses the point” by neglecting the non-monetary value a jobs. It is worth noting what their complaints against UBI are not. For one, they do not worry that a UBI would be too expensive. Indeed, they assert that “the huge gains in productivity will mean we could afford, as a society, to go in either direction” of a UBI or JG (p. 243). Nor are they convinced that a guaranteed income would encourage laziness. They are clearly skeptical (as we’ll see later on), but at the same time they concede that this question is an empirical one — and go so far as to “applaud” cities like Utrecht for their willingness to experiment (p. 242).
For Davenport and Kirby, the deciding factor seems to be that (on their view) a JG provides benefits to individuals that exceed those provided by a UBI. What benefits? Well, jobs.
Jobs bring many benefits to people’s lives beyond the paycheck, among them the social community they provide through having coworkers, the satisfaction of setting and meeting challenging goals, even the predictable structure and rhythm they bring to the week. In 2005 Gallup began conducting a global opinion survey called World Poll. Analysis of the responses reveals that people with “good jobs” — which Gallup defines as those offering steady work averaging thirty or more hours per week and a paycheck from an employer — are more likely than others to provide positive responses about other aspects of their present and future lives.
Another World Poll question presents “aspects of life that some people say are important to them” and asks respondents to categorize each as to whether it is something essential they could not live without, very important, or useful but something they could live without. Gallup chair Jim Clifton says that by 2011, “having a good quality job” had reseach the top globally — putting it ahead of, for example, having a family, democracy and freedom, religion, or peace (pp. 7-8).
Work has value in itself as a way to find meaning in life. As we’ve noted, having a good job is the most desired thing in the world in global polls. Freud said that, “Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” Many studies have found that unemployed people are less happy, and that compensating them anyway doesn’t make them as happy as putting them back to work (p. 242).
To be sure, Davenport and Kirby are at times a bit flip. The Freud quotation, for instance, merits no more of a rebuttal than “The Beatles said, ‘All you need is love, love; love is all you need.'”
However, the basic worry — that work brings value to life that’s not provided by income alone — is indeed an important concern, and it merits a serious reply. Indeed, as I will concede later, it’s possible that, for some individuals, a JG would provide more benefit than a UBI — due precisely to the fact that jobs provide many people with rewards other than a mere paycheck. But I will argue that, all things considered, this is not a persuasive reason to favor a JG to UBI.
In particular, I want to highlight three main shortcomings of Davenport and Kirby’s argument:
1. It is inappropriate to extrapolate the results of studies like those in question (viz., surveys of unemployment and unhappiness) to a society with UBI. This is because a UBI itself might engender importantly different norms, values, and societal expectations.
2. Such generalizations ignore the fact that many individuals are discontent in their jobs, and that some would be happier (and more productive) if not confined to any traditional job. A UBI, but not a JG, would help such individuals immensely.
3. It’s important not to ignore that a UBI does not compel individuals to stop participating in paid employment; thus, it would not hurt those people who do have jobs and value them.
The decision between a UBI and JG must not construed as a choice between a society in which most individuals lack jobs and one in which they have them. After all, studies of guaranteed income, such as the Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, have shown little negative effect on employment. It is a choice between a society in which those individuals choose jobs at their own will and one which the majority are forced to take jobs out of financial necessity.
In this article, I will focus on the first consideration above. Since UBI does not “cause” employment, it might seem that this issue is a red herring; nonetheless, it is illustrative to scrutinize some of the reasons that the extrapolation of results on “unhappiness” is unwarranted.
In a second article (to be published), I will turn to the second and third.
2. The Extrapolation Worry
Go back to one of Davenport and Kirby’s more provocative claims: “Many studies have found that unemployed people are less happy, and that compensating them anyway doesn’t make them as happy as putting them back to work” (p. 242). Let’s grant that this is true, and that there were no fatal flaws in the design of the studies. My claim is that, nonetheless, it’s inappropriate to extrapolate these results to a society in which a UBI has been enacted.
Suppose that, in general, unemployed people are less happy than employed people, and that this difference in happiness cannot be accounted for merely by the loss of income. Can we conclude that a job guarantee should be favored over a universal basic income?
I believe that the answer here is clearly no. This is because, in our actual society, there are other variables that are confounded with the presence or absence of paid employment. For one, to lack a job is to have a stigma (perhaps especially if one is receiving income without working). Secondly, jobs often play a large role providing individuals with a sense of meaning and personal identity. No doubt that bearing a stigmatized identity can contribute to unhappiness, as can the lack of a sense of identity and purpose. But what I want to stress here is that these correlations are present in our actual society — and there is good reason to believe that these connections would be attenuated by the institution of a UBI itself.
Put otherwise: The correlations between unemployment and stigma, and between employment and self-identity, are products of our society and culture. They would not necessarily hold in a society with a UBI. Thus, if it’s really the stigma and/or the loss of identity that causes many unemployed people to be unhappy, we can’t conclude that unemployment would have this same effect were a UBI to be put in place.
2.1 Unemployment and Stigma
Take the fact that unemployment is stigmatized. Some observations do suggest that stigma does play a role in contributing to the unhappiness associated with unemployment — such as the following three. First, retirees are not disproportionately unhappy. Second, in one study designed to test the stigma hypothesis, it was found that unemployed individuals enjoyed a boost in life satisfaction upon reaching retirement age, even though (curiously) employed individuals did not [1]. Third, if unemployment makes individuals unhappy, then the average happiness levels within societies should be expected to decrease when unemployment rates rises; however, this has been found not to happen [2]. Davenport and Kirby would argue that everyone wants a happy retirement, so whether being unemployed beforehand or not, wouldn’t or shouldn’t effect this. To be honest, retirement is closely linked to the age of senility. Therefore, this becomes the time for many to enjoy the last few happy years on the planet. That said, expecting a happy retirement is a normal human tendency. Many people expect a retirement devoid of the fear of writing a will or maybe getting in touch with a probate attorney in Denver (or nearby places) in advance to take care of the estate administration in case of death.
Anyway, these three observations can’t be explained merely by the hypothesis that people are unhappy when they lack a job. They can, however, be explained by the “stigma hypothesis”. Take the first two observations: although our society expects that able-bodied, non-elderly adults are employed full-time, this expectation does not hold for individuals past retirement age; “retirees” is a socially-acceptable, non-stigmatized category. Additionally, the third observation could be explained by noting that, when the unemployment rate is higher in a region, unemployment becomes more familiar, and thus ceases to bear as much of a stigma.
And we should add that there is also stigma associated with the receipt of “handouts”. Thus, if stigma is a large factor in the mechanism by which unhappiness contributes to unemployment, we should not expect that merely giving money to unemployed individuals would restore their happiness. If the money is perceived as a “handout” — a symbol of personal unfitness or inadequacy — then to accept it is to assume a stigmatized identity on top of a stigmatized identity.
That is our present world. Now, consider a world with UBI. In this world, a basic income is awarded to everyone. There is no need for anyone to prove their neediness in order to receive enough money to live, nor must anyone demonstrate that they are physically or mentally unable to work, or that they seeking employment but unable to find it. Because of the universality, there would be no stigma attached to individuals’ receipt of this form of cash assistance. Receiving the benefit could not in itself be construed as evidence of personal inadequacy.
Of course, it’s possible that individuals who did not work, living upon the basic income alone, would still be stigmatized in UBI-world. Perhaps they would still be branded as lazy, freeloaders, or incompetent to find work. However, in a society in which all individuals are guaranteed an income sufficient to meet their basic needs, some highly driven individuals might voluntarily opt out of the paid workforce in order to concentrate solely on their passions — artists and writers, independent researchers and open-source programmers, political activists and volunteers for humanitarian projects, and so on. If such individuals are numerous, successful, and productive, then unemployment might cease to be stigmatized, and could instead come to be regarded as a socially acceptable life-choice.
The final point relates directly to the second “confounder”: as a matter of fact, paid jobs provide a sense of meaning and identity to many people; however, this is not necessarily the case.
2.2 Employment versus Meaningful Work
Davenport and Kirby are surely correct that jobs function as an important “a way to find meaning in life”: for many people, having a job is a way to feel like one is providing some sort of important social contribution. And even those who find their jobs unfulfilling, perhaps even meaningless, might find in their job and career a source of self-identity. In American culture, a customary question to ask upon meaning a new acquaintance is “What do you do for a living?” Relatedly, a customary question to ask a child is “What do you do want to be when you grow up?”
In our current culture, job-centrism starts young — and persists. You might be interested in temporary work such as Interim Director Jobs. Maybe it is unsurprising that our culture should be this way: if jobs that consume most of our adult years are inevitable for us (given its financial necessity), then perhaps we might as well accept our jobs as core features — often the core features — of our personal identities.
But there seems to be nothing intrinsic about paid employment such that it should be more central to our self-identities than, say, unpaid work. Indeed, later in their section on UBI, Davenport and Kirby themselves state that volunteer service also “leads to greater happiness” (p. 243). Unemployed individuals seldom turn to volunteer service as a way to replace the lost non-monetary rewards of paid employment (I assume); however, this itself is plausibly an effect of society’s job-centrism. In our society, it is assumed that an unemployed, able-bodied person ought to devote as much effort as they can into searching for a new job; exclusive dedication to volunteer work, unless it is clearly a possible path to paid employment, is likely to be seen as imprudent and a waste of time.
Once again, however, a UBI might engender an entirely new culture — one which in more people, freed from the inevitability of full-time employment, turn to non-paid work to make their lives meaningful and valuable. This, I believe, is by no means an improbable effect of a UBI. After all, even in our present society, some individuals don’t turn to jobs for meaning and purpose — or would prefer not to. (I will return to this point in Part 2 as well.)
To take just one example, Zipcar CEO Robin Chase spoke of her research on “passion jobs” a recent White House roundtable discussion on automation an UBI. She has interviewed individuals from a cab driver who wrote music that made autistic children happy (but could not afford to pursue this passion full-time) to a computer programmer who slept on friends’ couches probably while being in the process to install git to write open-source software for 3D printers. In her informal research, she has encountered many people who are unable to pursue socially valuable and personally gratifying projects, simply because these projects are not financially lucrative; instead, these people are stuck in “crummy jobs”, detached from their passions. Chase herself supports a UBI as a way to allow individuals to pursue vocations that would give their lives much more meaning than the jobs to which they must resort for income.
If she is right, then a UBI might create an environment in which individuals routinely turn to voluntary work or other unpaid activities for meaning, fulfillment, and self-identity.
Similar points apply to other non-monetary benefits that many individuals derive from traditional jobs, such as those mentioned by Davenport and Kirby earlier in the book: “the social community [jobs] provide through having coworkers, the satisfaction of setting and meeting challenging goals, even the predictable structure and rhythm they bring to the week.” (I will return to similar points in Part II of this multi-part editorial.)
Presumably, most people are less happy when they lack engagement in projects, causes, and communities. In our present society, where jobs are (of necessity!) central to most people’s lives, lacking a job can mean lacking such a project, cause, or community. Again, however, this link is contingent — and could be severed through the institution of UBI itself. Thus, we can’t conclude that unemployment would have the same effect on unhappiness given UBI.
TL;DR –
Even though unemployment is correlated with unhappiness in modern developed societies (even when controlling for monetary factors), this result is plausibly a reflection of the job culture itself: it’s not that our culture values jobs because jobs intrinsically make us happy; it’s that being employed tends to make us happier because we are stuck in a culture that values jobs [3].
While the relationship between unemployment and unhappiness is no doubt highly complex — involving the interplay of more factors than we can reasonably discuss in a short response piece — the acknowledgement of the factors described above should at least lead us to question the appropriateness of invoking such studies in an argument for the superiority of a JG to UBI.
[1] Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe, Ronnie Schöb (May 4, 2012) “Identity and wellbeing: How retiring makes the unemployed happier“, CEPR VOX.
[2] Cf. Petri Böckerman and Pekka Ilmakunnas (2006) “Elusive Effective of Unemployment on Happiness”, Social Indicators Research 79: 159-169.
[3] For more discussion of the non-naturalness of our modern notion of “work”, see this recent article: Ilana E. Strauss (Jun 8, 2016) “Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?” The Atlantic.
Davenport and Kirby: Full Bibliographical Entries
Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby (2016) Only Humans Need Apply: Winners & Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, HarperCollins Publishers.
Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby (May 26, 2016) “What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs“, Fortune Magazine (and reprinted in Yahoo Finance).
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka
Photo (“Workers”) CC BY 2.0 Daily Sunny
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