by Kate McFarland | May 26, 2017 | News
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made his first public comment on basic income during Harvard University’s graduation ceremony on Thursday, May 25, calling it an idea “we should explore” to “make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”
Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard undergraduate student who dropped out to focus on his Facebook business, returned to the university on May 25, 2017, to receive his own degree (an honorary doctorate) and to deliver the commencement address for the rest of this year’s graduating class.
A prevailing theme in his speech was “giving people freedom to pursue purpose.”
Zuckerberg’s mention of basic income followed a discussion of what is needed to cultivate a culture of entrepreneurship, during which he stressed that “the greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail” and lamented having known “too many people who gave up on pursuing their dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.”
Speaking to an audience of millennials as a fellow millennial, the 33-year-old then declared, “Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract.”
Describing what this new social contract might look like, Zuckerberg proposed that “we should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.” He also called for other policy reforms such as affordable childcare and portable health insurance benefits (as opposed to the employer-linked health benefits that predominate in the United States), as well as continuous lifelong education.
Admitting that these reforms would not be free, Zuckerberg stated, “People like me should pay for it, and a lot of you are going to do really well, and you should, too.”
Zuckerberg then proceeded to other topics, such as the importance of charity and building communities at both local and global levels.
Although brief, Zuckerberg’s passing mention of universal basic income is noteworthy as the famed and influential entrepreneur’s first public comment on the topic. Moreover, while his singular remark was not an outright endorsement of the policy (as some headlines and social media posts quickly began to claim), it is clear that Zuckerberg sees it as at least worthy of serious investigation.
It is also notable that the Facebook CEO did not broach basic income as a solution to automation and technological unemployment, in contrast to some other tech entrepreneurs who have backed the idea (e.g., perhaps most famously, Elon Musk). Instead, Zuckerberg’s primary motivation seems to be the need to secure individuals against risk to facilitate, e.g., entrepreneurship, innovation, and cultural production.
Zuckerberg is not the first member of Facebook’s founding team to speak positively of basic income: cofounder Chris Hughes, a founding member and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, has become one of the policy’s foremost advocates in the United States.
Watch the full commencement address here:
by Karl Widerquist | May 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
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Indepentarianism is the political ideology associated with the political theory called “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA). I (Karl Widerquist) defined JPA and outlined its theory of freedom in my 2013 book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. It argues that the promotion of freedom in a society with private property requires, among other things, an unconditional basic income in part, on grounds that it is wrong to put conditions on anyone else’s access to the resources they need to survive. A worker needs the power to say no—not just to any one job, but to all jobs—to enter the market place as a free person and not as a forced laborer. Although this theory is drawn from principles stressing freedom in the most negative sense of the term, it is not associated with theories that use freedom to justify economic inequality. It is committed to the idea that economic and politically disadvantaged people in every society are the least free and that the promotion of freedom in the most meaningful sense requires far greater equality of income, wealth, and political power; greater respect for political dissenters, better stewardship of the environment, and other policies. I am planning to layout the JPA theory of property rights more fully in a future book entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.
The name, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord,” comes from the belief that most prevailing theories of justice in political philosophy today are utopian in the sense that they ignore the problem of reasonable disagreement about the basic principles of justice. Social contract theory imagines all the reasonable, rational people in the world agreeing to a hypothetical social contract outlining what justice is. Anyone who doesn’t agree in practice can be dismissed as irrational or unreasonable. Natural rights theorists do not believe that justice comes from any hypothetical agreement. It is just whether anyone agrees or not, but they believe that any rational, reasonable person can discover the true principles of justice by observation and contemplation and anyone who doesn’t agree can be dismissed is irrational or unreasonable. Even the best philosophers are not good at recognizing the difference between reasonable and unreasonable dissent.
These utopian aspects of the leading theories have produced dystopian consequences. Philosophers have misled people into the belief that everyone shares in the benefits of modern society. No matter how disadvantage a person maybe, we are told to believe that they are better off because the government and the property rights system exist. The truth, as Grant S. McCall and I argue in our 2017 book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, is that our institutions harm people. Many disadvantaged people are probably worse off than their ancestors were 20,000 years ago.
JPA makes no statement whether there might be a theory of justice to which all rational, reasonable people should or would agree, but it is based on the belief that we are far from the point of discovering such a theory. A true accord exists only if all people are fully autonomous and all literally agree to the social contract or some other basic structure such as a set of natural rights. The essential political problem in the world today is severe disagreement between reasonable people about the most basic principles of justice. We must always pursue that accord, but we should be aware we are unlikely to reach it. Therefore, whoever makes the rules always forces them onto reasonable dissenters. The ruling coalition’s right to make the rules stems both from the agreement of the majority and from their effort to create the minimum negative interference with dissenters. This constraint, of course, requires the governments of the world to treat the disadvantaged and disaffected people of the world much better than they do now—including a payment by those who are most advantage under the existing structure to compensate those who are most disadvantaged under it.
The name, “indepentarianism,” stresses the central role that freedom as independence plays in JPA. The book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, argues that an individual’s status as a free person is best understood as “Effective Control Self-Ownership” (ECSO freedom, pronounced “exo-freedom” as in external-freedom). In essence: status freedom is the power to say no. An independent person is free from all direct and indirect force to actively serve the interests of others. You can tell a person: go do what you want over there, but if you make it impossible for them to do live as they want without serving some other group of people, you have taken away their status as a free person.
In this sense, most working people in the world are not fully free. If they had direct access to resources, they could hunt, gather, fish, farm, invest, or start a business or start some manufacturing venture by themselves or with whoever wanted to work with them. Instead, the rules of property create “propertylessness,” which in turn indirectly forces the vast majority of people to ask for a job from someone who controls enough resources to give them one. That is, it forces one group of people into become a subordinate of at least one member of another group of people—because we have robbed them of the power to say no to whatever jobs are on offer.
There’s nothing wrong with employment—as long as you choose it freely. Just like there’s nothing wrong with sex—as long as it’s not rape. A choice of bosses without the freedom to say no to all of them is not freedom from forced labor just as a choice of sexual partners without the power to say no to all of them is not freedom from rape.
One of the main reasons I defined indepentarianism as a new ideology is the lack of attention that most of the prevailing political ideologies pay to the injustice of indirectly forced subordination.
The book argues that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the best way to support ECSO freedom in the modern economy. But UBI support is not synonymous with indepentarianism. Someone could conceivably support indepentarian principles without believing they are best upheld by UBI or a similar policy. Although I hope all UBI supporters will have some interest in indepentarianism, I expect that most of them are not indepentarians. For example, one of the architects of the UBI movement, Philippe Van Parijs, argues for UBI on the theory of justice and/or the ideology he calls “Real Libertarianism,” which is based on very different principles than JPA.
JPA also differs from other political theories in its treatment of property rights in external assets: that is, assets external to the human body including natural resources and the things humans make out of them. Egalitarians tend to assume external assets are naturally collective property. Left-libertarians tend to assume that external assets should naturally owned individually in equal shares. So-called “libertarians” tend to assume external assets are natural unowned, but ownable by the first person to “appropriate” them by some procedure that tends to lead to highly unequal ownership. JPA assumes resources are “naturally” unowned and unownable. The only way to create a truly justice property rights system would be through a property rights accord, which is probably impossible. In the absence of that accord, the ruling coalition is always forcing a system of property onto reasonable dissenters. Therefore, they have to minimize the negative interference that their system of rights imposes on dissenters and future generations. This, responsibility, I argue motivates both a strongly egalitarian and environmentalist property rights system.
I plan to layout JPA property theory more fully in a future book, entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord. It will argue that this responsibility for an egalitarian property rights system requires a UBI high enough not only to maintain ECSO freedom but a UBI set at the highest sustainable level. However, I suspect that not everyone who agrees with the basic principles of indepentarianism will agree with this part of the argument.
I’m very interested in what people think—for and against indepentarianism. I’m especially interested to know whether there are other indepentarians out there. You don’t have to agree with all I’ve said here to call yourself an indepentarian. If you’re in agreement with enough of it to use the term, please say so in a comment. If you’d like to know more about it, please contact me at karl@widerquist.com. I am not interested in creating an echo chamber. I’m interested in respectful dialogue with people taking these ideas in their own directions. I’m also greatly interested in people who criticize any aspect of valetudinarianism.
All posts from my blog, the Indepentarian
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-Karl Widerquist, Begun in New Orleans, completed at Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, May 21, 2017
by Guest Contributor | May 19, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Conrad Shaw
There is an idea out there. It is of the transformational variety. It exists in various forms and goes by many names: universal basic income, basic income guarantee, negative income tax, citizen dividend. All of these monikers highlight important aspects of this concept. “Universal” because it applies to everyone with no conditional requirements. “Basic” and “guarantee” to emphasize that, rather than subsidizing luxury or ease, it’s about guaranteeing the right to simply live in dignity and security. “Negative income tax” to illustrate that tax structures can be understood and utilized not only as a way to extract money from the people, but also as a means of fair predistribution to those being underserved by our system. “Citizen” to encourage taking ownership of one’s community and obligations. “Dividend” to emphasize that it is not a form of charity, but a return on an investment, the rightful entitlement every one of us has to our proper share of this country’s resources and opportunities.
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
-Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)
This idea, if you haven’t heard of it before, is the simple premise that the government (composed of the people) would deliver a regular, guaranteed, and unconditional amount of income to every person in a society. Some argue that only citizens should receive it, some say legal residents, some suggest only adults, and some insist that every breathing human within the borders deserves the payment. There are valid arguments for all of these viewpoints, and I hope that soon enough we will have the good fortune of debating at great length these strategies on the national scale, because it will mean that the very premise has been accepted into our hearts and consciences as both essential and moral moving forward.
For that to happen, the idea must first inspire the support of the people as a whole, and because the United States is a nation of pride and marketing savvy, nothing sells here without a good, cohesive pitch. As a first order of business, we should settle on a name for our American version of this policy, and I have a suggestion:
The American Dividend
“American” because the only requirement is that you, in fact, are a part of this great country, and we will recognize that with your “Dividend,” your carried interest in the investment you and your family have made and continue to make in this country by merit of your participation in it.
On to the details. Perhaps alarm bells are ringing and red flags are waving for you right now. “That sounds like socialism,” you might point out. I freely admit that it is a socialistic policy, and I argue that an appropriate amount of socialism is essential in a successful and just society – even a capitalist one. We seem, in America, to cling to the naive idea that we can or should only have one or the other, socialism or capitalism. That idea has run its course; we must have both. Neither of these simple, broad ideologies is robust enough to run our complex economy alone, because our economy is not only one of markets, but also of human beings. Markets run by the laws of supply and demand, and are greatly motivated and spurred on by capitalism, the great incentivizer. A purely socialized, redistributive society in which all citizens received the same reward regardless of their contributions could squash the immense growth, motivation, and innovation that capitalism fosters. Human beings, though, survive and thrive by the natural laws of inalienable rights, defined and set out by and for ourselves as entitlements to which we are guaranteed by dint of nothing other than our humanity. Socialistic regulations are required to make sure we adhere to these natural laws. Healthcare, for example, must eventually be socialized and untethered from the need for financial means, because no supply and demand curve can fairly measure the value of health. The demand is infinite, because a sick or dying individual will agree to pay any amount for even a chance at survival. This is where capitalism fails. It eventually localizes far too much power in the hands of the few, the owners of property and corporations, and we find ourselves in a situation closer to extortion than free markets.
My argument even leaves aside our very significant problem with automation. As we continually and irretrievably lose massive chunks of our labor market to machines, these pressures toward economic inequality will exponentially intensify. Properly addressed, however, these same technologies could provide abundance to society rather than greater scarcity and insecurity.
The answer to the question of growing complexity in human and economic markets is not to throw away our hard-won structure as a total failure, but rather to keep tweaking the capitalism/socialism balance to calibrate it to the changing needs of the times. In determining what should be socialized, we can tie it all back into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Written deep within our American values, these freedoms are the inheritance of all people regardless of circumstance, be it race, culture, gender, age, or financial means. Life requires, at the very least, food, shelter, and health. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the ability to choose one’s path without fear of harm or retribution from any authority, and without fear of starvation. Our system has never fully guaranteed these things, and so we have not yet managed to fulfill our constitutional mission statement. The American Dividend can be used to ensure those rights. It can guarantee all people the ability to feed and house themselves as well as the power to say NO to any path in life that doesn’t serve their interests, be it a line of employment or an unhealthy relationship.
If we understand that we have always lived in a blended society of both socialism and capitalism, we can let go of our distrust of these words, our reflexive labeling of them as inherently evil or good, and instead see them simply as tools in the constant balancing act of governance.
Let’s address the two main sticking points the American Dividend will encounter: 1) the fear/resentment of subsidizing laziness by paying hard-earned money for others to sit around and do nothing, and 2) the very prudent concern that it might be simply infeasible to fund a program of such broad scope – essentially the fear that we can’t afford to guarantee these rights to all.
Paying for Sloth?
As to subsidizing laziness, this fear is created and nourished by a skewed perspective in the American capitalist culture that money is the driving motivator for work. We place the dollar on a pedestal far above all others, but money does not deserve this worship. The adage that money is the root of all evil is myopic. Insecurity is the root of evil, and money, or more accurately the lack thereof, is merely our means of expressing and comprehending insecurity. Whereas money is nothing but a tool, poverty is a force. It is the lack of freedom. Because we have been inculcated our entire lives with the idea that money represents value and merit, we have fallen into a misunderstanding of our fellow human beings. We have descended into the weary and preoccupied mind’s fallacy of “othering.” This is to say we have allowed ourselves to perceive the other members of our society as opponents, statistics, enemies, leeches, and threats to our own security. When we are in constant competition mode, we forget the other players for the sake of the game.
When we take the time to truly examine and understand our neighbors, compatriots, brothers, and sisters, however, we see that they are merely reflections of ourselves. We all have hopes and dreams; we all want to be special; we all want to contribute. The current system, which clumsily attempts to reward valuable effort but often disincentivizes hard work and ethics, leads people to despair and apparent laziness, sapping their motivation. In its current form, welfare assistance disappears the moment someone gets a job and increases their income, creating welfare traps. Additionally, other societally valuable endeavors like child-rearing, home healthcare, the arts, furthering education, and entrepreneurialism aren’t deemed worthy of any kind of salary in this economy. They can only be done on faith, at a loss, and at risk of harm to oneself. Throughout human history, a great majority of the movers and shakers of the arts, sciences, and business have had the luxury of pursuing their passions without earning an income from an employer because theyither came from means or they gained access to a benefactor. Wouldn’t it be something new and remarkable if those rich in inspiration and motivation but lacking an inheritance or extreme risk tolerance weren’t forced to spend years of their lives struggling to survive, seeking funding, essentially asking permission from corporations and the owner class in order to pursue the realization of their visions? With guaranteed security and the freedom to choose one’s work and define one’s value, people will contribute their best selves, and we can slowly change our national ethic from one of taking and hoarding to one of contribution. Productivity increases, health improves, and crime decreases in a society that chooses not to allow poverty, thereby permitting its members to be more effective versions of themselves. “Survival job” should not be a term, and a gun to the head is not nearly as effective a motivator in the long term as the ability to pursue meaning in life.
But the Cost!
Now comes paying for it all. Let’s do some simple, back-of-the-napkin, ballpark math for the numerically inclined. To immediately raise every American above the poverty line, we could provide a dividend of $12,000 per year to every adult and $4,000 per year to every child. That’s a bit under $3.25 trillion, which is certainly a huge number, but it’s not a direct expense. Think of it this way: the US GDP is approximately $18 trillion. If a simple across-the-board tax increase was levied on every American to raise that full amount for the dividend, a flat tax plopped down on top of our progressive system, that would mean about an extra 18% in taxes we’d each pay. That may sound like a lot, but since every taxpayer would also be receiving an extra $12,000 in income, then everyone making under $66,000 would come out ahead to some degree. At the $66K breakeven point, an individual would be paying $12K in extra taxes to receive the $12K in dividends. You can plug $66K into this US income percentile calculator and see that this represents over 75% of all Americans who would receive more money under this policy than they would give in taxes to pay for it, thereby directly profiting at the same time as we strive to completely abolish extreme forms of poverty and homelessness. That in itself should make the American Dividend a no-brainer.
However, a uniform tax levy like this is far from the only source of funding at our disposal. We could fund a large part of the American Dividend in many other ways. Taxes on the use of resources can chip in quite a bit. Taxes on carbon, pollution, minerals, timber, land value, and other natural resources acknowledge that we all own the land in equal share and would simply require companies profiting from and often damaging our commonly-owned property to repay the costs we bear by permitting them to do so. This would also discourage abuse of resources and incentivize more ecologically sustainable innovation. Very small taxes on financial trades would both reduce harmful speculation currently performed on a massive scale by large institutions with black box algorithms – encouraging long-term investment in its place – and it would acknowledge that we all own the financial system in this country and deserve a return from its continued function. Cutting tax exemptions that benefit the wealthy almost exclusively — scrapping the social security tax cap, raising unearned income tax rates to at least the level that earned income bears, cutting the home mortgage deduction, and a host of other such measures — would fund a significant part of the dividend. These measures are long overdue in any case and would represent a strong step forward against the economic injustice in our current system. Finally, raising the income tax rates on those in the very top brackets would acknowledge the fact that these earners have attained their position not only through intelligence and merit, but also through the good fortune of living within a system that allows for a few to leverage their positions to reap enormous returns — a system of laws, infrastructure, and opportunity that has been built over the course of generations, a system that each of us owns in part and deserves a share of. Factor in these methods, and we could pay for much of the dividend. As an example, if we paid for a third of the dividend this way (an entirely feasible amount according to the economists with whom I’ve spoken), it would bring the necessary tax increase down to around 12% and the break-even point to everyone making under $100K. Plug that into the calculator and see for yourself that more than 88% of the country would directly and immediately profit from the American Dividend under this scenario. Someone out of a job or unable to work would receive the full $12,000. Someone making $50K would come out $6,000 ahead. Someone breaking even at $100K will know that they are part of a stable system that will protect them should their fortunes turn for the worse. So, while it will end extreme poverty as we know it, the American Dividend is clearly not just for the extremely poor. It is for all Americans.
What’s more, we haven’t even factored in the savings yet. When people are secure, healthcare costs fall, crime drops, and entire welfare programs can eventually be phased out. This pushes the break-even point even further upward. This is not yet even accounting for the benefits reaped from fueling innovation and entrepreneurialism. Also, unlike the failed policies of trickle-down economics under which much of the money this country makes lands in wealthy bank accounts and simply sits there, money given to the lower classes is generally spent immediately on necessities and better quality of life, equating to a massive boost in the overall economy as businesses gain new customers across the board. It would be presumptuous to predict the actual magnitude of these windfalls, but I would bet you the American Dividend, in very short order, would begin to pay for much of itself.
Bear in mind this is not a panacea, and we mustn’t perceive or promote it that way. The American Dividend will not immediately usher in a new Utopian Age, and there will still be some that need help, but it has the power to effectively end catastrophic poverty and homelessness. It will grant all Americans a real shot at the American Dream. It will mean a simpler governmental system, a change of social and cultural ethics, and a betterment of individual quality of life across the board. And we have the means to do it. All we need is the political will of the people to stand up and demand it.
Give it to Me Straight
So tell me, if this idea of an American Dividend can: 1) end homelessness and catastrophic poverty, 2) establish and reinforce basic human rights and security across the nation, 3) improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs, 4) reduce crime, 5) encourage entrepreneurialism, 6) act as an economic stimulus, AND 7) result in an immediate net income gain for the vast majority of the population… tell me how can this idea not sell? How can it not sweep the nation? Tell me it’s not an issue of marketing savvy.
And tell me, now that you’ve seen my arguments about the wider economic implications, what would you do with your Dividend? Take a little time and play out the thought experiment. Now imagine what your brother, mother, sister, father, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, boss, coworker, employee, or passing acquaintance would do with it? What would each be able to contribute? What would your community look like? What would America look like?
It’s time for the American Dividend.
Check out our upcoming film, Bootstraps, at www.bootstrapsfilm.com
by Andre Coelho | May 16, 2017 | News
Back in 2014, Johan Bollen and four other colleagues published an EMBO report, presenting a new and radical approach to scientific funding. Since then, Johan has paired with Marten Scheffer so as to develop and communicate further the notion of SOFA – Self Organized Fund Allocation. Scheffer has recently led the Dutch parliament to ask the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to start a SOFA test pilot.
But what is a SOFA? It is a new way to allocate funds for scientific research. The traditional approach usually means a funding agency receiving many applications, which entail a time-consuming process in itself. Plus, it costs a large percentage of the funding amount to run and manage this top-down driven system. According to a recent article on the issue, by Jop de Vrize, that percentage can be as high as 25%. On top of that, it has been proven highly inefficient, since the success rate of these application is usually below 20% (19.1% in 2016 according to the US National Institutes of Health, and 11.3% at the European Research Council Starting Grants for the same year). The result is that some scientists get lots of money, while a lot of others get a fraction of that money, or even nothing.
The new SOFA funding scheme is, at its core, a distributed, self-allocating system. The funding agency still attributes a certain amount of money to a research community, but then, instead of going through a cumbersome, time-consuming, unfair and inefficient process of distribution, the idea is to get the researchers themselves to allocate funds to other researchers. Specifically, the SOFA system would attribute an equal, unconditional amount of money to each researcher – a certain earmarked value by the agency, divided by all researchers in the community – and then each one would donate 50% of their present and past funding [1] to other scientists, trusting their best judgment.
Proposed funding system (Johan Bollen et al.)
Of course, this new system is not devoid of problems, or potential challenges. Freed to allocate 50% of their research income to other scientists, researchers could choose to give money only to their friends, collaborators or mentors. Also, the problem of the money not reaching those who are needing it the most may still arise, only partially offset by the unconditional amount that will be equally distributed (50% of each year’s grant). However, Bollen and Scheffer are confident, after running many simulations, that “rather than converging on a stationary distribution, the system will dynamically adjust funding levels to where they are most needed as scientists assess and re-assess each other’s merits”. They also agree that the system would have to be include programmed features to avoid self-attribution and hide funding decisions (to keep decisions unbiased), for instance. An important feature of the SOFA system is that no one individual researcher has access to enough information so as to try and influence the attribution mechanism (contrary to the present system, which is more easily politically malleable).
The unconditionality associated with the SOFA scheme, plus its widely-distributed nature draws some similarities with the basic income concept. Basic income, as defined at the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), rests on the independence of income and work-status, or even willingness to work. Granted, the SOFA scheme implies that the money is distributed among scientists, devoted and committed to scientific work, with clear and established study plans. However, it is also clear that some of the previous conditions associated with funding decisions – mainly a discussable notion of merit coming from a very small group of peer-reviewers who end up allocating the grants – will collapse if SOFA is introduced. Another similarity with basic income proposals has to do with de-complexification of the attribution system, also reducing its overhead costs, as a function of both distributing 50% of the grants unconditionally and putting in the hands of the researchers themselves the responsibility of distributing the other half of each grant. In the basic income arena, that advantage usually takes the form of reduced costs with social security management, and lowering complexity through existing program’s extinction and remodeling. A third similarity has to do with trust. Unlike the present system, SOFA inherently trusts researchers to allocate 50% of their grants to others. This trust is also present in most basic income proposals, which allow recipients to spend their basic income as they see fit, hence furthering their personal freedom and capacity to more efficiently solve problems in their own lives.
The SOFA scheme has been presented to Eppo Bruins, a member of the Dutch House of Representatives, who proposed a call for a SOFA test pilot in June 2016, which was approved by the parliament. However, the NWO, the agency which would start and manage the experiment, has resisted the initiative. According to Scheffer, that is understandable, since “if applied universally, the novel system would make the agency redundant”.
Notes:
[1] – Management of past funding options is still not included in the proposed model, but is considered important by the authors, to better use of unused funds.
More information at:
Johan Bollen, David Crandall, Damion Junk, Ying Ding, Katy Börner, “From funding agencies to scientific agency”, EMBO reports 15 (2), September 7th 2014
Jop de Vrize, “With this new system, scientists never have to write a grant application again”, Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), April 16th 2017
by Guest Contributor | May 11, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Conrad Shaw, Bootstraps Documentarian
The Debate
About a month and a half ago, on March 22, the podcast debate forum Intelligence Squared (IQ2) held a debate regarding universal basic income (UBI) in New York City. Being a denizen of New York and a relatively recent and enthusiastic recruit to the cause of UBI advocacy (my partner Deia and I are undertaking an ambitious film project about it), I was eager to go and see this debate play out. I was even more excited when I found out that a recent interviewee and new friend of ours, labor legend Andy Stern, former head of the SEIU union, was to be one of the debaters. This was a chance for a large audience to be presented with the idea of UBI in a thoughtful and cogent way. Andy would be teaming up with libertarian Charles Murray to defend the motion that “Universal Basic Income is the Safety Net of the Future.” Their opponents were to be Jason Furman and Jared Bernstein, Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s top economic advisors, respectively.
The outcome of the debate was far less satisfying than I’d hoped it would be. In short, UBI got spanked. IQ2 judges the winner of a debate to be the side that sways more of the audience in their favor. Before the debate, 35% of the audience were for the motion, 20% against, and 45% undecided. Afterward, the numbers were 31% for, 61% against, and 8% undecided. This means that not only did UBI fail to convince any of the undecideds, but some of those who were for it switched sides. As someone who’s putting a lot of effort into making the case for UBI to the American people, this felt like a foreboding omen of what could come as the UBI discussion begins to take the national stage. For something I considered to be so obvious and beneficial, so necessary, to be, instead, so handily quashed was confusing and painful. In order to understand the reaction of the audience, we did some of our own polling of the audience before and after, and I’ll go into why I think the results turned out the way they did below.
I’d had some uneasiness going in, of course. For one, Charles Murray is a persona non grata among many UBI advocates (and others) for attitudes he’s expressed in the past toward disadvantaged populations, suggesting in his book The Bell Curve that intelligence is the primary factor in predicting societal outcomes like pregnancy out of wedlock and crime. That line of thinking, seemingly discounting outright the imbalances many perceive in our society, makes me very uncomfortable. Sure, intelligence factors in, but I also think it foolish to ignore the factors of class, race, and gender, as well as the neighborhood one grows up in. I’ll admit that my information about Mr. Murray was mostly hearsay with a bit of Wikipedia research on my part, so I didn’t truly know what to expect. To some UBI advocates, Murray is the devil, not to be given a platform from which to spout his evil message, and so, quite understandably, I was worried that the debate could be taken down unproductive and perhaps even bigoted paths.
Despite this caricature of Charles, however, he proved to be a shrewd advocate of basic income in the debate. Although he is libertarian, he stuck to lines of argument that did not put off the debate’s mostly liberal Manhattan audience. In the end, he made some lovely appeals to human decency and equality and got a warm reception from the audience. At one point, he even defiantly rejected Mr. Bernstein’s scoffs that he was naive to think people in neighborhoods and communities would be more helpful to each other under a system of security provided by a basic income. It was not lost on me that this “villain” was the one in the room most loudly protesting for the existence and prevalence of basic human decency and of our ability to trust in other human beings, when people are given the chance to be secure.
So Charles wasn’t the issue on that day.
Andy’s arguments were sound and compelling as always, taken in and of themselves. He has an empathetic and adaptive approach, and I’ve become a deep admirer of his ability to think outside the box in a changing world, even when it threatens to overwrite his legacy. In his book, Raising the Floor, co-written with Lee Kravitz, he makes a compelling case as to why labor unions are no longer a tool that will suffice to fight the labor market inequality and disruption many expect moving into the future, even though his most lauded achievements to date are tied to his labor union efforts. It takes a very strong and humble individual to take a pronounced lateral step from his life’s work like that when being confronted with uncomfortable evidence that it has become insufficient.
However, while Andy’s and Charles’s arguments were valid and compelling, they simply were not enough in the context of this debate. They weren’t sufficient to persuade the audience in the face of the arguments and the pedigrees of their opponents. Over and over again, Jason or Jared would dismiss the concept as utopian or idyllic. “$12,000 is great! Why not $25,000, or $50,000, or a million?” is a paraphrase of something Mr. Furman said once or twice that struck me as especially disingenuous.
For the most part, though, the opponents provided honest, albeit predictable, complaints regarding the costs and logistics of distributing UBI, and asserted that it was simply too expensive, that it would amount to taking from the middle class to pay the poor, and that some lower-class people (especially those with children) would lose out under the UBI scheme Andy proposed. Disagreeing with much of this assessment, I awaited the response that would put those claims to rest in the minds of the audience, but they didn’t come. Andy and Charles chose to pursue more ideological arguments than economical and logistical ones, and the audience roundly took that to mean that the math really wasn’t there.
Our conversations with audience members after the event made clear to us that this was the issue that swayed them. They came in hopeful, and many were leaning toward this strange concept of UBI, and then the chief economic advisors of their political heroes and most powerful men in the world walked out and dismissed it as numerically, arithmetically infeasible, and that claim was not rebutted. If you watched the debate, you may have noticed a rather dashing yet awkward young man in a checkered shirt, trying not to appear unhinged while asking the second audience question (at 1:01:23), in an effort to steer the discussion toward specific and practical ways that could be implemented to pay for a real, workable, UBI. That slightly agitated fellow was me, and my question wasn’t really answered at the time, except with the outright assurance by the opponents that my suggestions simply would not be enough.
I felt a little nauseated during the final tallying phase, because I sensed the spanking coming. These people needed to hear that this is not just an idealistic plan, but an intelligent plan, and the details weren’t provided for them to believe in that.
In the end, I thought all of the debaters did a fine job presenting their arguments. Andy and Charles hit the old beautiful points on human rights, human nature, and the promise of a world of security that I had hoped they would, and they also sounded the alarm bells about the impending threat of automation to our workforce. Jason and Jared displayed a wealth of experience as well as real compassion for those in need in our society. I sensed a lot of room for common ground. I felt that the real issues that might remain, if the money issue could be resolved, would be 1) a disagreement around how to administer aid in general, in essence whether people could be trusted with cash and freedom over bureaucratic in-kind giving, and 2) the dilemma of political feasibility, whether in working up the will of the people or that of the Congress.
I also thought the debate format was one of the best I’ve seen, with incredibly delicate and intelligent moderation executed by John Donvan, who struck me as funny, nimble, and fair. Deia and I were truly honored to be there and thrilled that UBI was getting real time in the national dialogue.
The format, however, still left one major thing to be desired for me. It was still a debate. Debates are made for winning, and throughout this one you can hear both sides often plea “and that’s why I want you to vote for my side.” I much prefer a discussion to a debate, with no declared winners or losers. If the only thing to be gained is a bit of mutual growth and understanding, I think we can all get to the work of progressing a little faster.
Actively keeping my cool after the final applause, I hovered maybe 12 feet from Jason Furman and his friends and admirers until I could politely poke my head in and beg him for an interview. I already had about 453 questions in mind. He graciously accepted without a second thought, which went a long way in elevating my estimation of a man who had just stepped on my heart and ground it into the dirt a little.
The Interview
A few weeks later, Deia and I were on a bus from New York City to Washington D.C. to interview not only our first opponent of UBI, but a man who had batted it down so very effectively and seemingly effortlessly. I was nervous, thinking about how new at interviewing I am. Was this going to be a gotcha interview? Should I try to catch him with his words somehow? As I doubted whether I could pull that off, even if I wanted to, in the end I decided that I really just wanted to tap into his very real working expertise of the American economy. This man is an extremely valuable resource, a wealth of knowledge, it occurred to me. Come to think of it, as a chief advisor of one of my greatest heroes (yes, I love me some Obama), and someone who was instrumental (along with Andy Stern, I might add) in passing some very consequential legislation, I reminded myself that Jason Furman, then, is also a hero of mine. He even shared a freshman dorm room with Matt Damon, another major role model in my acting and filmmaking pursuits. Oh crap. Was I going to geek out and ask awful fanboy questions about all his friends or about his D.C. battle stories? Would I be that kind of interviewer?
But enough of my inner monologue. We’re here to talk about UBI, about the economy, about a nation’s growing pains and long-established shortcomings, and about truly progressive solutions to bring greater empowerment, dignity, and democracy into the lives of over 300 million people.
Still, a large part of me expected to walk out of our interview frustrated once again.
In his very first comment, Mr. Furman expressed regret that he hadn’t emphasized during the debate that he is very much open to discussing the merits of direct cash benefits as opposed to in-kind ones, and that his main criticism of UBI was, in fact, the universality of it. This was immediately a change in tone indeed, and it set me at much greater ease about the plan I had made for my line of questions:
1) I would start from a premise, a proposed national implementation scheme for UBI taken as sort of a “best of” from the many versions Deia and I have come across in our interviews, plus a few tweaks of my own, and would establish that all questions in this interview should be considered in the context of this proposed system rather than any other conceptions of UBI floating about.
2) I would walk Mr. Furman, one item at a time, through a list of potential sources of revenue that I was aware of and ask him, in his experienced opinion, what each of those sources could bring in.
Simple.
The “wonkiest of wonks,” as Mr. Furman has been called, was happy to oblige this approach. He would make no promises, and these were all to be understood as ballpark estimations, but he would give his best effort.
The Premise
Although my ideas have evolved slightly since publishing an article that included a nascent version of them, a little while back, my proposal for implementation still generally holds the same. This is a simplified version of it. None of these ideas are groundbreaking within the basic income movement, and many others would likely venture forth a very similar scheme:
- $12,000 per year per adult, delivered at least monthly (preferably weekly) via direct deposit to individual accounts (not as cumulative sums to joint or family accounts)
- $4,000 per child, paid to each child’s guardian, until 18 or age of emancipation, whichever comes first, with a percentage (I suggested 25%) being kept in a trust for the child to access at emancipation, when they would also begin to receive the full $12,000. (Note: It has since been argued to me that all of a child’s money in a UBI program should be accessible to the guardian as needed, and any baby bond type program would be better kept as a separate program, and I’m open to that as well.)
- Current welfare programs should not be directly axed so much as allowed to naturally phase into obsolescence. For example, if every American’s basic income were high enough to disqualify them for food stamps, then food stamps would naturally disappear, and the food stamp bureaucracy along with it. This would follow the basic rule of “do no harm,” in that the benefits an individual received under a UBI must be at least as valuable as welfare benefits previously received, and so at the very least nobody would be worse off financially, and now the aid would be guaranteed and permanent instead of something for which one must perpetually qualify, and instead of something that would be lost upon earning more income elsewhere.
- The total cost of this plan, given the current population and demographics of the U.S., would be approximately $3.3 trillion.
This plan immediately differed in a couple major ways from the plan Mr. Furman argued against at the IQ2 Debate, the plan Andy and Charles were using as their premise. Most notably, Andy’s plan did not provide any basic income for children. This was Furman’s primary complaint against that plan, in fact, because it would in essence act more beneficially toward singles or those without children than toward families. A family of five would fare worse than a family of four, all other things being equal. Furman stated to me outright that this one change made him much more amenable to the plan I proposed.
The major remaining issue now was the same issue I imagine Andy was hoping to mitigate by leaving children out of his plan: the price. Andy’s plan was $1.8 trillion to my $3.3 trillion, and if Furman painted Andy’s cost as naive and fundamentally unfeasible, mine must be delusional. But he was willing to go through the numbers, and I felt good that he was now at least in support, morally, of the structure of the benefits and the effect they would have on the American people.
So how, then, do we pay for it?
Let’s start simple. Funded with the most blunt instrument possible, this $3.3 trillion price tag would require levying approximately a 20-25% flat tax (depending on how you choose to approximate it) on top of our current progressive system. In other words, every American would pay an additional 20-25% on whatever income they earn outside of the basic income. In a worse-case scenario of a 25% flat tax, this would create a break-even point of $48,000 for an individual. Citizens earning less than this break-even point would be net beneficiaries of the system (in essence, the individual earning $48,000 would pay an extra $12,000 in taxes and receive $12,000 in basic income). The break-even point for a family of four would be $128,000. The less you make, the more of your basic income you end up keeping.
Of course, this means that people above the break-even point would be net contributors, paying more into the program than receiving from it, and most would agree that levying even a small amount of extra taxes on someone making $50K-$60K is neither ideal nor easy to sell politically. Even though it would already represent a net benefit for more than 60% of the country, and even if it would essentially eradicate extreme poverty and homelessness, and even if it would give every American enough security to know they won’t ever end up in the streets, we should be able to do better than $48,000, right?
And so if we want to do this intelligently, we shouldn’t simply slap a flat tax on top of the system we already have and call it a day. We should pay for as much of the UBI as possible through other means in order to drag the necessary flat tax percentage down. If we can lower it to 15%, for example, then the break-even point for individuals would become $80,000. At 10%, it would be $120,000. For families of four, it would be $213,000 and $320,000, respectively. At that point you’d have to be in the top 10%-20% of the country to not be receiving extra money off of UBI. So, let’s try to work in that direction.
Does all of this still sound numerically far-fetched? How could 90% of the country directly profit off of a system like this? The money has to come from somewhere, right? Does this amount to pure socialism? I had the very same instincts at first, and so some back-of-the-napkin calculations were necessary for me to even decide whether UBI was idle fantasy or worth looking into further.
The reality truly is numerically far-fetched in the opposite direction, and it’s just not yet widely understood the extent to which that is the case. The extremely wealthy make so much more money than the rest of Americans that funding a UBI is more than feasible. Just as an example, if we went full socialist and we took all of the net worth and income that households in this country own and make, that we know of, and divided it evenly between all Americans, we could give every man, woman, and child each around $280,000 in savings and an income of $55,000 per year.
Think about that for a minute, or twelve. That includes children, the homeless, and retirees. That would be over a million in the bank and a yearly income of $220,000 for every family of four. That’s how rich the rich are. That’s what has been hidden from us. If we’re asking for zero redistribution of already-owned wealth and only $12,000 of that $55,000 in income per person per year so that nobody starves in the street, it’s not only possible, but it’s simple. It’s a matter of public awareness and political will. It’s a matter of priorities and values. Homelessness and poverty are choices made not by their victims, but by the very structure of our society. Every time we feel a pang of guilt at walking by a homeless person on the street, it should be accompanied by a stab of outrage, because we have the power, today, to fix it. If we don’t each stand up and fight for it, we are each complicit in the pain of so many.
Also, bear in mind that UBI won’t solve the problem of massive income inequality. The very wealthy will remain the very wealthy. Poverty will still be a force to be reckoned with as automation disrupts labor markets. Further changes to our system will undoubtedly be needed. But a UBI can ensure that nobody need be on the street, and that everyone can live in dignity while we wade through the transformational societal changes on our horizon. Many will still struggle, but no one will have zero. It won’t guarantee anyone luxury, but everyone will have options.
The Devil in the Details
With the bigger picture numbers laid out, we then must delve into the finer points of financing a basic income. Here is where Mr. Furman and all of his up close and personal experience re-enter the picture.
You can listen to the interview and/or read the transcript to see for yourself what we came up with and how it unfolded. These numbers, I’ll note, are very rough estimates, and they seem to me to trend in a more conservative direction. In many cases Furman was not comfortable venturing a guess at all, and so I left those out. Here’s a summary of his estimates in trillions:
In essence, even with many potential forms of revenue discounted (including the ones I forgot to bring up, like a VAT tax, a wealth tax, etc.); with arguably conservative estimates given all around; with zero accounting for potential positive benefits in areas of stimulus, crime reduction, health improvement, etc.; and with only a 10% flat tax added, we came up with ⅔ of the $3.3 trillion needed for my proposed plan. That would be enough for on the order of $7,000 per adult and $2,700 per child each year. This, to me, represents an amount I would be ecstatic to see in any legislation coming up, an amount that would deal a tremendous blow to poverty in America and act as a significant empowering agent for Americans.
Again, many will point out that these numbers are all very fuzzy. Of course they are. The intent here is to show that the scale of the funding is feasible. If you disagree with the values, then let’s sit down and hash out what they truly should be and see what total we arrive at.
No doubt Furman saw where I was going with this line of inquiry, and in the end I imagine that’s why he affirmed that he’d rather see that same money going toward a childless EITC or other, more targeted forms of getting cash to people. This implies to me that, in the end, the financial feasibility of a UBI is not the real issue for him. At the heart of his hesitance is valid concern over the method of delivery of aid, and at the heart of that delivery system lies an issue of faith. Who do we trust more with money, our government or our people, and to what extent? I daresay that nobody wants the government having a hand in all of our day to day decisions, and yet most of us will recognize the need for a certain amount of regulation and oversight to protect us from the large and insensitive forces of capitalism to which we are vulnerable as small individuals. Furman apparently leans more in the direction of relying on government to determine how money should be spent. Those in favor of UBI put more of their trust in individuals. Both parties seem to me to lie not too far from each other on the spectrum, just on opposite sides of center. Then there are those who are far more extreme in either direction.
I certainly can’t blame Furman for his inclinations. We’re talking about his legacy, after all, and the liberal government has arguably managed to affect measurable, positive change, raising many out of poverty who would be there without any bureaucratic aid. It will take great strength of character for our country and our civil servants to see where we need something drastically new and better than our tried methods, and, as Andy Stern did when he stepped away from the SEIU labor union, to bravely and humbly take that lateral step away from our legacies. We must abandon the hope that a benevolent bureaucracy will save us from our ills and instead invest in deputizing our people to enhance their own well-being and create more opportunities for themselves. Our social safety net has served to arrest our fall in many ways, and so it has been beneficial, but people are falling through the holes of that net, and some people have missed it entirely. It’s time to retire the net and replace it with a floor. As a people, we can stand on a floor. We can walk on a floor. We can build upon a floor. Have you ever tried building on a net?
UBI is about putting the money in the hands of the citizens to choose for themselves how to spend it best. It’s about removing the middle-man, the father figure, and the teacher, instead trusting individuals and communities to step up to the plate and invest in themselves in the wisest ways they can. Basic income is, quite simply, power to the people boiled down to its most simple essence: cash. And cash is nothing more than our expression of security.
If we can drive the conversation beyond semantics and distractions to these very fundamental principles, and if we can carry out this discussion civilly and with respect for all political leanings and backgrounds, I believe that implementing a universal basic income will emerge as an irrefutably sensible solution moving forward, passed by wide, nonpartisan popular support. What I encountered most in our interview with Mr. Furman was agreement, and we have had much the same experience with every American we engage in this discussion, be they liberal, conservative, libertarian, progressive, or other. Almost everyone, pro or anti, Furman included, expresses great interest in seeing the results of the ongoing basic income trials going on all over the world. This gives me great hope.
(Note: Speaking of basic income trials, we’re doing one of our own for our documentary BOOTSTRAPS. Our aim is to share with the public the human stories of real Americans from all walks of life receiving a basic income for two years. If you count yourself among the many who are either supporters of UBI or who are unsure about it but would be very interested to see the results, please consider contributing to our crowdfunding campaign. Every dollar will go toward our pilot, meaning into the bank accounts of the subjects of our film. Our production budget will be raised and administered separately. If you’re interested in being involved with or helping the production, you can contribute to the production fund or write to us at bootstrapsfilm@gmail.com.)
Image from iq2 UBI debate website.
