At the World Economic Forum in January this year, four panelists were invited to talk about universal basic income (UBI): Professor Guy Standing (University of London), co-founder of BIEN and author of several books on UBI, Neelie Kroes, former minister in the Dutch Parliament, former EU commissioner, and current member of several boards, Amitabh Kant, CEO of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), and Professor Michael Sandel (Harvard University), author of “What Money Can’t Buy, the Moral Limits of Markets”.
According to Guy Standing, there has been much evidence gathered through foundational research on the feasibility, affordability and implications of UBI, but this research has been ignored for many years. Due to the realisation of the potential effects of automation, however, interest in UBI has recently increased. Automation is not Standing’s personal motivation though—he advocates for UBI for three main reasons:
It is a means of realising social justice in line with Thomas Paine, Henry George and others, who have claimed that public wealth is created over generations. Therefore, if private inheritance is permitted, we should also establish public inheritance as a social dividend of this public wealth.
It is a means of enhancing republican freedom: freedom from domination by figures of authority using their arbitrary power.
It is a means of providing people with basic security. It is not designed to eradicate poverty per se, but rather to address the issue of insecurity, which underlies the rise of populism we see today. It is known that mental health and mental development is improved by basic security.
Standing: “I wish people would look at the evidence rather than continue with their views. We have done pilots, covering thousands of people and most fundamentally we found that the emancipatory value of a basic income is greater than the money value.
It gives people a sense of control of their time, so that the values of work grow relative to the demands of labour. The values of learning and public participation grow, the values of citizenship are strengthened. We found evidence from UBI experiments showing that the values of altruism and tolerance are enhanced. At the moment, society is suffering from a deprivation of altruism and tolerance.”
When asked to explain the support for UBI from both left- and right-wing politicians, Kroes argues that the flexibility of the concept is a reason why there is an interest from both left- and right-wing political movements: it can either decrease or increase the role of the government, the level of the UBI can vary and there are a number of different ways to fund it.
As Kroes explains, the UBI could replace large parts of the existing welfare system and would require choices to be made in advance regarding which benefits would be cut. This specificity would make it more difficult to find support from politicians across the political spectrum, which is why Kroes suggests starting off with a more modest system that would more easily find political support and can be seen as a starting point.
“The least ideological arguments in favour of a UBI are coming from technical entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley at the moment”, Kroes continues, noting that “they are trying to defend their own future”.
Kant is asked to explain the attractions of a UBI from a governmental perspective. He explains that the huge rural employment guarantee scheme and the public distribution system in India are very inefficient, mostly due to corruption.
Furthermore, India is facing changes in the labour market, where low skill-low pay jobs are decreasingly necessary, while the demand for high skill-high pay jobs is increasing. This shift requires radical restructuring of the educational system to provide the right skills, Kant argues.
There are huge inequalities in India: one third of the population is living below the poverty line. These are the people that should be targeted with a UBI, and 1000 rupees per person per month would be affordable, says Kant. India also has a few specific advantages, he further argues. There is a huge infrastructure of biometric and mobile phone payment systems in the country. At the same time, India recently transformed its ‘black economy’ of almost 1 trillion US dollars (parallel to a 2 trillion US dollar formal economy) into a ‘white economy’. This resulted in a significant increase of government tax income, so there is enough money to potentially fund a UBI, Kant explains.
Kant suggests it would be best to provide people with a UBI in the form of an interest-free loan for a period of three years, ensuring the money is repaid and recycled so it can reach more people. Simultaneously investing in creating jobs on the back of domestic consumption would give this scheme a push.
In response to this, Standing argues that, “in our pilots in India, we found that people improved their nutrition, family health, schooling, schooling performance, and entrepreneurship. The consequence was that they were generating more income and lowering the public service costs, as they were healthier. I would be very wary about turning it into a loan, because a loan rewards the entrepreneurial and therefore would increase the inequality in the villages. Where there was a basic income, it didn’t sort out the potential winners from the losers, it increased community solidarity”.
Professor Sandel is asked to talk about the role of work and the importance of paid work. “We tend to think of work primarily as a source of income, but work is also a source of meaning, an identity. The debate about basic income forces us to debate about the social meaning of work,” he explains.
There are two basic arguments for a UBI that are fundamentally distinct, according to Sandel: the ethical argument, which suggests that one can still choose to work and contribute to society, and the compensatory argument (from Silicon Valley), which sends the message that one is compensated for accepting a world without work and contribution to society is no longer of value.
Standing responds to Sandel’s view: “We need to reconceptualise what we mean by work. I believe the technical revolution is actually creating more work. The only problem is that it is not being remunerated, so it is contributing to growing inequality. The reason why Silicon Valley types are worried is because they think income is going to the owners of the robots and the others are going to be without an income.”
“The affordability question is a very easy one to answer,” Standing replies to a question asked by the chair. “Somehow, with Quantitative Easing [QE], the US government managed to fund Quantitative Easing of 475 trillion dollars. If that money had been used to pay a basic income, every American household could have received 56,000 dollars. That is just one little example. But I strongly believe that we must frame basic income as paid from rentier capitalism and from rentierism. Because at the moment the corruption of capitalism about which I’ve written is primarily because the returns to property and intellectual property and the rentier incomes from natural resources are going to a tiny minority – and we need to be sharing that.”
Spurred by Milton Friedman, the concept of “helicopter money” – under which central banks would distribute money to citizens – is making headway in economic debate, but is often confused with the idea of basic income. This article intends to clarify the distinctions and overlaps between these two concepts.
“Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated.”
When Milton Friedman wrote those lines in 1969, he probably never thought that “helicopter money” would become a buzzword in the 2000s post-crisis era. Friedman’s thinking was indeed quite radically unorthodox. How did the prominent neoliberal advocate come to suggest people should receive free money and that we would all be better off as a result? Far from philanthropic thinking, Friedman was in fact simply trying to illustrate his theory of the neutrality of money. If you need to make more money, you should consider renting out your spare room.
What would happen if we were to drop freshly printed notes over a population from a helicopter, just like rain? Nothing other than inflation, suggested Friedman, one of his main beliefs being that any increase in the money supply automatically leads to a proportional increase in consumer prices. Through this thought experiment, Friedman drew the conclusion that central banks can always avoid deflation by producing money and causing it to circulate in the economy.
In fact, however, the idea that we could create money and distribute it to the people goes back much farther than Friedman. In 1924, British engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas elaborated his theory of the “social credit”, its main component being the distribution of a monthly “national dividend” generated from money creation, the level of which would vary according to national production.
Although Douglas did gain some notable following at the time, especially in Canada, the idea was ultimately consigned to the oubliettes of history, leaving Friedman with the alleged paternity of the idea, centre-staging the helicopter analogy with it.
The concept wasn’t much thought of for 30 years following Friedman’s discussion, however, and it might have been forgotten again if it hadn’t been brought back to public attention in 2002 by one of the most influential voices of monetary policy. In a famous speech, the Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke alluded to this concept, making the case that, under important deflationary trends like that seen in Japan, the central bank could resort to helicopter money-style instruments to achieve its 2% inflation target.
Yet, far from initiating serious consideration, these remarks only caused Bernanke to endure mockery and “helicopter Ben” as a persistent nickname.
This is probably because the concept runs counter to the whole ideological turn of the 20th century in terms of monetary policy. Starting from the 50s, money creation has been gradually shifted from the sphere of public sovereignty into the quasi-monopolistic realm of the private banking sector. This process ultimately resulted in the outright prohibition, in most jurisdictions, of monetary financing of government budgets. Helicopter money sounds very much like a reversal of this trend, and a dangerous one to the ears of many mainstream economists.
An alternative form of money creation
There is recurring confusion around the exact meaning of helicopter money, which is probably caused by the simple fact that the alleged proponent of the idea, Milton Friedman, never seriously intended to implement it.
Thus, the concept finds itself often described in very diverse terms, ranging from the old-fashioned monetization of public debt to its purest form (and probably the one Friedman actually had in mind): the distribution of money directly to all citizens by central banks. The latter will be the one we assess in this article.
Helicopter money can thus be defined as the creation of money, without corresponding assets, and its distribution into citizens’ bank accounts.
It is therefore an alternative form of money creation, which is strictly different from the most common way in which money is created today: through the banking sector’s credit issuance functions. It is worth clarifying this point here: as the Bank of England has clearly demonstrated, today’s monetary supply is almost entirely controlled by private banks issuing credit into the economy. This is sometimes referred to (somewhat misleadingly) as the “fractional reserve banking system”. Although the benefits and pitfalls of such an arrangement are subject to never-ending controversy between academics, the way in which this system functions is nowadays largely undisputed.
Money tree sculpture in front of the Central Bank of Ireland.
The key advantage of helicopter money resides precisely in the fact that it would bypass banks as money creators, and is therefore one way for the central bank to maintain the money supply regardless of whether banks play their role as suppliers of money into the economy. In its purest form, helicopter money also bypasses governments’ treasuries, and is therefore not legally prohibited under the monetary financing rule (Art. 123 of the EU Lisbon Treaty).
A second clarification is also required at this point: helicopter money is also different from the so called “quantitative easing” (QE) policies that have been implemented by several central banks, although they pursue a similar objective: boosting the money supply to avoid deflationary pressures.
Under QE, central banks create money (the so called central bank’s reserves) and mobilize those reserves to purchase financial assets on a large scale and over a certain period of time. Usually, central banks purchase sovereign bonds with the intention of pushing down interest rates on those bonds, to encourage the financial sector to move away from investing in sovereign bonds and to instead lend money to riskier projects under the so-called “portfolio rebalancing effect”. This type of money creation is therefore targeted to the financial sector, with assets as collateral on the central bank’s balance sheet and, more importantly, is a temporary operation: the central bank destroys the money once the bonds it holds come to maturation.
Helicopter money is therefore very different from QE. In fact, it is precisely because of the many shortcomings of QE that helicopter money is being presented by a growing number of people as a superior alternative.
Helicopter money as an alternative to quantitative easing
The assessments of QE programmes in the US, Japan, and the UK have been subject to a wealth of contradictory conclusions. In Europe, the ECB’s QE programme was first applauded as progress, after years of speculation and resistance to implementation of QE when it was desperately needed – when the Greek crisis hit. However, it is becoming clear that QE recipes, in Europe and elsewhere, never really do the trick.
Generally speaking, QE does cause lending conditions to improve, but it does not automatically lead to an increase in bank lending. In other words, the “transmission channel” of monetary policy does not work so well under QE. To be fair, this is not the banks’ fault: there is little banks can do when conditions are so bad that virtually no companies or households want to take on debt because the economy is already over-indebted.
Economists talk of a “liquidity trap” whereby injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to stimulate the real economy. QE doesn’t overcome this trap.
Even worse, QE is often accused of creating asset bubbles and increasing wealth inequality, because the massive injection of money is narrowly targeted towards financial asset disproportionately owned by the rich. The Bank of England itself estimates that its own QE programme has increased by 40% the wealth of the richest 5% of Brits.
Against this background, helicopter money is experiencing a comeback, perhaps with even more strength than Friedman could ever have imagined. Since the start of the crisis, prominent economists and commentators, including Martin Wolf, Steve Keen, Anatole Kaletsky, Willem Buiter, Adair Turner, John Muellbauer, Bradford Delong and Martin Sandbu, have advocated for central banks to implement some form of helicopter money. Anatole Kaletsky and Steve Keen almost simultaneously proposed re-branding the concept “QE for People”, which later became the name of a European campaign (for which the author currently works).
Conference about “Quantitative Easing for People” at the European Parliament
The case for QE for People is quite straightforward: since the banking sector is not currently able to “transmit” the central bank’s monetary policy accommodation by increasing their loan’s issuance, why shouldn’t the central bank do it by itself? If the main task of central banks is to maintain inflation at around 2%, certainly the most effective way would indeed be to distribute money to people so they can spend it.
The debate on helicopter money took another turn when it was mentioned by the ECB’s chief Mario Draghi, under the spotlights of a press conference on March 9th 2016 and later by other senior ECB officials. “Helicopter money is a very interesting concept” Draghi said, while adding that the idea was not yet being considered by the ECB. Whether one think this was sincere curiosity or a clumsy statement on Draghi’s part, the fact is this single sentence provoked a historic tide of comments and debate on the idea, including within policymaker spheres.
How about basic income?
Similarities between helicopter money and basic income have led some commentators to offer very confused explanations, claiming, for example, that Finland was already undertaking a “helicopter money” programme (the basic income experiment).
Undeniably, there are resemblances between the two concepts, as both involve making unconditional payments to all citizens and usually without means-testing. Basic income’s principles of universality and unconditionality can also be found in helicopter money.
Key differences quickly emerge under careful analysis, however. Under a helicopter money regime, there is no clear commitment from the central bank to make payments periodic. Quite the contrary in fact, as most proponents of helicopter money (read the prolific Eric Lonergan for example) are keen to be clear on the fact that this should be an exceptional measure, to be used on a one-off basis, with the possibility (but not the commitment) to renew if necessary.
There is nevertheless some theoretical overlap with basic income. In addition to Douglas, several key advocates of basic income have put forward the case that money creation could be used to finance the benefit, either as a “boot” phase or as a way to supplement the fiscal means to finance basic income schemes. The French economist Yoland Bresson made the case that perpetual low interest sovereign bonds could be used to kick off the basic income in a first stage, thus leaving time for the government to implement all the necessary reforms of the tax-benefit system to make UBI fully functional.
These theories relate to the understanding of basic income as a mechanism of pre-distribution (as opposed to redistribution), whereby basic income is a recognition of the intrinsic value of all participants in society, or even as common inheritance. If all citizens create value “because they exist”, then it makes sense to “pre-validate” this economic value using money creation. If we are all richer today because of our predecessors’ work and heritage, then one can argue that more money should be introduced into circulation to recognise this added wealth.
These are, however, only marginal justifications today, put forward to support neither helicopter money nor basic income. Beyond some theoretical common ground, the differences between the two policies are most clear when one understands that they pursue different objectives.
Put simply, helicopter money can be framed as a punctual measure (extreme, one may say) with a rather narrow purpose: to stimulate economic activity by boosting people’s incomes under some strict circumstances, that is, when the economy is under threat of deflation.
Basic income, on the other hand, pursues a very wide range of objectives from poverty alleviation to work emancipation, gender balance incentivization, social protection modernization, more aggressive redistribution and so on. In contrast, stimulating people’s purchasing power is certainly not the main argument for doing basic income.
From those different objectives also stem different institutional frameworks. If the objective of helicopter money’s proponents is merely to stimulate demand, then transfers to citizens is only one practical means by which to achieve this single clear goal. From this viewpoint, it also makes sense to give independent central banks the legal capacity to distribute a citizens’ dividend as a new instrument in the monetary policy toolbox.
If basic income pursues more numerous and complex objectives, by contrast, it then makes sense that it should be the responsibility of elected governments to design and implement it, just like any other fiscal policy.
In conclusion, helicopter money could be seen as one of many “partial basic income” proposals: schemes that share some of the characteristics of basic income but not all of them. Yet given the very clear institutional distinctions just covered, it does not make sense then to associate too closely the two concepts. In this light, it might be more meaningful to refer to helicopter money payouts as “social dividends” or “monetary dividends” as opposed to “basic income”.
Can helicopter money lead to basic income?
Despite all the institutional and practical distinctions drawn above, it is quite enlightening to recognize the political porosity between the two proposals. Helicopter money proponents tend to also favor basic income (though not all do) and vice versa.
This is probably because the two ideas, to some extent, share some common strategic interests and help one another in the struggle for cultural acceptance of each proposal, especially in regards to unconditionality and the disconnection of money from labor.
From a basic income viewpoint, the rise of the helicopter money discussion is a useful addition to basic income’s financing question. If central banks can create money, then surely it would be easier to finance a basic income.
On the other side, it is also convenient for helicopter money proponents that the basic income discussion is making headway in the argument for universal payments to citizens: it levies an important moral blocage.
Even more strategically, perhaps, there is a case for seeing helicopter money as a necessary step to the implementation of a full-fledged basic income policy.
This is a particularly relevant argument when it comes to the European Monetary Union, which is currently deprived of any significant common fiscal policy. Because of this, it will probably take years before we might see something like a eurodividend (an EU basic income scheme financed by an EU budget) as articulated by Philippe van Parijs.
Speech by Philippe van Parijs on the Eurodividend at the European Social and Economic Committee in Brussels.
To circumvent this cumbersome and very long-term political route, Slovenian economist Jože Mencinger has repeatedly suggested the use of helicopter money as an “ideal experimental possibility” to kick-start a form of basic income in the EU.
Instead of QE, the ECB could start a helicopter money scheme by giving 200 euros per adult citizens for one year – no strings attached, no taxes involved, simply courtesy of the ECB’s (digital) printing presses. This would involve about three times less money printing than under QE and yet would be more likely to fulfill the ECB’s objective.
If this works and garners favorable public opinion, there would be even greater political momentum for implementing something like a permanent eurodividend scheme. The ECB’s temporary scheme would allow some time for EU policymakers to create the institutional and fiscal infrastructure for such a eurodividend to be functional.
In the long run, nothing forbids us from thinking that the ECB could permanently fund such a eurodividend scheme at a certain level, as Kevin Spiritus and Willem Sas have sketched. Yet such funding cannot be seen as an obligation for the ECB under the current legal framework. More intellectual debate will be required before policymakers come to the conclusion that some form of permanent helicopter money is necessary and desirable.
There is still much work to be done before either basic income or helicopter money can be put in place. However, 10 years after the financial crisis, it is clear that central banks’ models have not delivered as they were expected to. There is clear mismatch between the massive size of their balance sheet interventions and the bleak outlook of the economy.
There is a growing case that the whole central banking theoretical framework must be revised. Helicopter money is certainly one idea that is usefully challenging the monetary policy status quo. It will surely take another leap of determination and audacity for central bankers to take this step forward, but we should not rule out that it might also be the most pragmatic thing central banks can do at some point in the future. When things get to this point, the basic income movement must stand ready to play its part in facilitating the move towards helicopter money, while making sure to build upon this gigantic central bank experiment towards a permanent and sustainable basic income.
A mix of Dutch speakers from different fields, all in favor of a basic income, interactively discussed the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) during the symposium “a basic income, full speed ahead!!” [“het basisinkomen, volle kracht vooruit!!”] on January 23rd . The aim was to gather ideas about how to progress to make UBI a reality in the Netherlands as soon as possible. The symposium was organized by “Basisinkomen2018”, the organization behind the petition signed by more than 66,000 citizens (a number that is still growing).
Johan Luijendijk, co-founder of “Basisinkomen2018”, announced a few activities his organization will be organizing and/or funding in the Netherlands such as competitions between universities and informative movies aimed at countering negative preconceptions about a basic income.
He states that supporters can be found in left as well as right wing populations, but the image of a basic income is that of a left wing idea. There is still a lack of understanding of the concept of a basic income and many still believe it will make people lazy. There is also an obstinate, Calvinistic opinion in the Netherlands that one has to work for every penny, argues Luijendijk.
The audience expressed the need for a clear overview of each political party’s stance on basic income in the Netherlands. (On March 15th, the country’s Parliamentary elections will take place).
“Overall, the idea of a basic income is very much alive in the Netherlands, and Basisinkomen2018 will continue to invest in explaining the concept to the people,” Luijendijk assured the audience. An explanatory animation about basic income was introduced during the meeting, including strategic instructions about how to share it (not all at once).
According to Reinier Castelein, chairman of a Trade Union “de Unie” (financial sector), very few trade unions focus on a basic income because they are traditionally focused on work. However, he went on to say:
“An ever-increasing number of people are living on social benefits. Unemployment is increasing and will continue to increase, especially if you realize you disappear from the statistics when you don’t apply for jobs anymore. In the financial sector alone, 60,000 jobs have disappeared and more are expected to disappear. Due to the misbehavior of some people at the top of some banks, there is no empathy for these people in society.“
“More and more people are working in multiple small jobs in order to earn enough money for a decent living. With a basic income, unemployment can be abolished.” Castelein continues, “a basic income would contribute to a redistribution of work and income with less working hours a week, creating possibilities for participation in caring roles or other (currently unpaid, but useful) work.” People from the audience complemented these expected results with positive effects on health, decreasing criminality, and more room for creativity and contribution to solutions for the problems in society.
Employees can better focus on their work if they are not distracted by the struggle to make a living and the quality of work will improve under such circumstances, argues Ton Stuy, an employer in the transportation sector.
“With a basic income you can take away discontent and it is an answer to Brexit and Trump’s protectionism. Furthermore, a basic income creates room for lowering wages and it will not cost more than the crazy things we spend money on now, “ he states.
With respect to the affordability of a basic income, Stuy argues: “If you invest in the well-being of people, it will come back and therefore it will not cost anything, but will even be profitable. Employers who treat their employees well should get more attention.”
Liesbeth van Tongeren, a politician from the Green Left party (“GroenLinks”), compares the discussions about basic income with the discussions about the abolishment of slavery and the discussions about women’s empowerment in the past. In both cases, people originally argued it would be unaffordable and an unachievable goal. Eventually both turned out to be achievable and affordable.
The concept of a basic income also touches the question of what is appreciated: effort or the economic benefits? Many people say, “My job is a useless job, nothing would change if I didn’t do my job.” In reaction to the remark of Ton Stuy, who thinks a basic income will have a decreasing effect on wages, van Tongeren argues that the effect will be in both ways: some jobs will be paid more and others less. It will change the established hierarchy in society and it will also change the interrelationship of many men and women. These effects cause anxiety, according to van Tongeren.
For van Tongeren, the reality is that more and more people are falling out of the system. At the same time, 90 billion euros a month are created and spent in Europe in the context of quantitative easing. This money could instead be divided amongst the European citizens, which would be a good start. It would help if the IMF would make a statement about it in this context, van Tongeren states.
George van Houts, from the theater group The Seducers (“De Verleiders”), shares his experience with the audience and explains the role theater can play in the discussion about the current financial system. His theater group played several pieces around this topic and attracted full theatres. “We are informed by a group of scientists (Our Money, “Ons Geld”), who check if the information is accurate.” Van Houts explains that money is made by commercial banks, as debt.
“We performed a play around this topic at the Dutch central bank (“De Nederlandsche Bank, DNB”), and we were not argued against, but Klaas Knot (President of the DNB) asked why we would worry the people. ”Many top bankers know something will have to change, as the system is about to burst, according to van Houts. The responsibility of the creation of money should be given back to the government and it should not be created as debt, which is the case now.
Van Houts indicates a parallel system is already in place: the DNB-coin (similar to the bitcoin). This system can function parallel to the euro and people could be given a bank account at the DNB, which could be used for a basic income, for example. This could then be managed by a public organization that is not dependent on ‘voters’ favour’.
A basic income is inevitable, according to Jan Rotmans, Professor in Sustainability Transitions at Drift (Erasmus University Rotterdam). He supports this prediction by comparing the current stage of the “digital revolution” with the industrial revolution of the 19th century. “We live in a time of chaos, anxiety and social inequality, but eventually, the optimists were right.” The most important resistance comes from within, Rotmans explains. “It is better to have one small success story than many meetings trying to think it all through in order to implement it on a large scale. Just start doing it. Examples of such small scale initiatives in The Netherlands are the crowd funded basic income project in Groningen and the initiative in Terneuzen.” (The city council of Terneuzen thought they had found a way to implement a basic income for a small group of citizens on social benefits, but a few days after the symposium the central government claimed it was illegal). The technological developments are causing a battlefield in the middle part of the working-class and this is likely to cause a downward spiral of fear that “it will happen to me”. “Can we keep everyone at work? No,” so radical solutions are necessary, according to Rotmans, one of which can be a basic income.
Info and links
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Jenna van Draanen for reviewing this article
Photo: symposium a basic income, full speed ahead!!, January 2017, Rotterdam the Netherlands by Hilde Latour (at the desk from left to right: George van Houts, Jan Rotmans, Liesbeth van Tongeren and Johan Luijendijk)
Last week, a group of 35 economists signed a letter demanding that the Treasury and Bank of England consider new policies to stimulate growth, including direct cash transfers to citizens.
On Thursday, August 4, the Bank of England announced that it would cut interest rates for the first time since 2009. This measure is intended to promote spending, and the bank believes that a recession can be averted. Nonetheless, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned that an economic slowdown remains inevitable in the wake of Brexit. For those British businesses who are trying to fight through this, they may be looking at ways they can support their business such as looking into merchant accounts from Unicorn Payment to assist with online payments. Anything that can aid in British businesses finding their feet after Brexit is important.
Although many economists expected the bank to make this decision, some lobbied against it — arguing that, after seven years, the lowering of interest rates has proven unsuccessful in boosting the British economy. On August 3, the day before the bank’s decision, The Guardian published a letter signed by 35 economists, directed to Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond.
The letter called upon the Treasury and Bank to adopt policies that will stimulate spending directly, and it posed several suggestions to this end:
A fiscal stimulus financed by central bank money creation could be used to fund essential investment in infrastructure projects – boosting the incomes of businesses and households, and increasing the public sector’s productive assets in the process. Alternatively, the money could be used to fund either a tax cut or direct cash transfers to households, resulting in an immediate increase of household disposable incomes. Furthermore, competitive business energy prices for UK companies could also boost production and the economy as a result.
In any of these policy scenarios, new money will be directly introduced into the real economy, stimulating aggregate demand and boosting employment, investment and spending. While it is a job for the Treasury to set up the framework for these policies to be deployed, it would remain a decision for the monetary policy committee as to the timing and size of any future stimulus.
Signatories include BIEN co-founder and co-president Guy Standing, anthropologist David Graeber (a vocal advocate of basic income), Keynes biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky (who has also written in support of basic income), Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan (who have previously written in support of direct cash transfers), and Steve Keen (who coined the phrase ‘quantitative easing for the people’).
Many of the economists were also signers on a similar letter to European Central Bank (ECB) written last year, which encouraged the ECB to consider policy alternatives to quantitative easing — the policy of printing new money to purchase bonds from financial institutions. This letter had recommended that the ECB use its money to stimulate spending directly, such as by simply giving the money to citizens.
Although Wednesday’s letter to Hammond did not impact British monetary policy (yet), it did generate publicity about the economic benefits of one of the central features of a basic income: the direct transfer of cash to consumers. Subsequent articles in The Guardian, by Larry Elliott and Simon Jenkins, stressed the benefit of cash transfers in boosting spending. (As Jenkins concludes, “There could be a ‘spending Olympics’. There could be vouchers, scrappage schemes, Christmas bonuses and, horror of horrors, cash for the undeserving poor. Why not try it? All else has failed.”)
Similarly, writing in The Independent about the projected effects of Bank of England’s interest rate cut, Ben Chu raises the question “Why doesn’t the Bank just print money and give it to people and firms to spend directly?” Referring to Wednesday’s letter, Chu points out that “a growing number of academic economists are arguing that this would be a more effective, and less financially distortionary, way of stimulating the economy.”
Eric Walberg is a Canadian journalist who specializes in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia, and has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.
Last May, he published two articles related to basic income, which are available on his website:
This article makes an argument for a guaranteed annual income (GAI) in Canada as a way of abolishing poverty. Referencing Evelyn Forget, he suggests a GAI of $18,000: if a Canadian has no other money, the state will issue them a GAI of $18,000 in full; however, the amout of the supplement would taper off with additional earned income, with a “break even” point around $30,000.
This article reviews the results of basic income trials in Canada (1974-9), Namibia (2008), and India (2011) (and, briefly, Brazil’s cash-transfer program, Bolsa Familia) — noting, for instance, that the trials provide strong counter-evidence to the common concern that, with a basic income, people will stop working or spend their money unwisely.
* While Walberg’s argument for GAI is well worth reading, it’s important to point out that the title of the article is misleading, as is a sentence in the first paragraph.
Two points of clarification:
• The term ‘basic income’ usually refers to unconditional or universal basic income (UBI), which is not the same as GAI. A UBI is not means-tested; for example, the $18,000 subsidy would go to all Canadians, regardless of other income, if it were a UBI.
When Walberg cites a cost of $12 billion, this is the cost of “topping up” the incomes of Canadians to a level high enough to get the unemployed and low-earners out of poverty — not the cost of providing every Canadian with $18,000 per annum.
• Neither ‘basic income’ nor ‘guaranteed annual income’ should be used synonymously with ‘helicopter money’. Helicopter money — the printing of new money to be distributed directly to individuals or households — is one possible way to finance a basic income. It has been supported recently by American investor Bill Gross and the European group Quantitative Easing for the People, among others. However, many supporters of a basic income (of GAI) do not favor the printing of new money; more commonly, in fact, their proposals rest on the redistribution of existing income.
