by Kate McFarland | Feb 4, 2018 | Opinion
My interest in basic income stemmed from the conjecture that such a policy could help to ignite a progression away from the culture of total work. However, there are many open empirical questions regarding the exact way in which a basic income would (or would not) influence work-related attitudes and behaviors.
One might hope that current and planned experiments will shed some light on this topic. My claim in this article is that this is not likely to be the case: the impact of basic income on work-related attitudes and behaviors is not readily amenable to experimentation.
1. Fixing the Viewpoint: Opposition to the Culture of Work
When I began casually following the basic income movement in 2015, and when I began volunteering for Basic Income News in November of that year, I was tentatively attracted to the policy as a means to subsidize lifestyles like downshifting and what I’d come to call anti-careerism – the rejection of idea that one’s life course should be structured and defined by a career path.
At that time, I was unaware of the movement’s budding interest in experimentation. I did not realize that the center-right federal government of Finland was about to declare its intention to fund an experimental trial of basic income, or that the provincial government of Ontario was also preparing to design and implement a trial of guaranteed minimum income.
I did not foresee the global surge of interest in experiments and pilot studies that would happen soon after the commencement of my volunteership. But happen it did, and thus, as a writer for Basic Income News, I was committed to expend considerable effort covering the current basic income implementation trials. Moreover, as a “just the facts” news reporter, it was my duty to report on them without allowing my own personal misgivings to show through (although I did have occasion to leak my skepticism in the Op-Ed section). As a result, I was often mistaken for someone with a genuine and favorable interest in basic income experiments.
Through it all, my main interest in basic income remained the conjecture that the policy might act as a subsidy for downshifting, anti-careerism, and working without pay, and thereby help to displace society’s overvaluing of selling labor for money. While such an “anti-work” approach to basic income is highly controversial, I will assume this perspective throughout the present article. (Those who do not share it may either accept it for the sake of argument or stop reading.)
Such an approach to basic income rests on untested empirical conjectures. In fact, however, many questions remain open. Would individuals living in a society with basic income come to hold different views about the role and importance of jobs? Would they fail to view an occupation or career as integral to self-identity? Would they deny that a high salary or professional advancement is essential for personal success? Would they ascribe greater value to self-development and social contributions that occur outside of paid work? Would they tend to prioritize activities that are rewarding in themselves over activities that contribute to professionalization and employability? To what extent would basic income actually enable people to lead lives without full-time or continuous jobs? It is sufficient to empower individuals to work fewer hours? (Probably not.) Would it permit some to withdraw from the labor market completely?
Some proponents take for granted that basic income would usher in a society in which the pursuit of passions is more important than paid work. Such optimistic predictions, however, must be moderated against the reality that the culture of work is deeply entrenched. When critics contend that it’s premature to “give up” on the goal of full employment, the normative assumptions behind their rhetoric should not be ignored: secure full-time jobs and careers remain central to the identity and self-worth of many who have them, and central to the goals and aspirations of many who don’t. Even more unsettlingly (in my view), many supporters enthusiastically maintain that basic income would not result in lower rates of employment–and might even increase work effort (as is the hypothesis behind Finland’s experiment, which is designed primarily to assess whether unemployed individuals would be more likely to accept work if their benefits were made unconditional). Some argue that it would act as a stimulus to business and grow the economy, never pausing to question the ethos of paid work and productivity.
We simply don’t know the long-term effects of basic income on work-related attitudes and behaviors. Given the myriad of unanswered empirical questions, one might guess that I would have been heartened to witness the unexpected onslaught of experiments that occurred during my volunteership with Basic Income News. But I was not: unfortunately, it is unlikely that the present wave of experiments will yield insight into the empirical concerns that interest me and others who approach basic income from the “anti-work” perspective.
2. Five Limitations of Experiments
I believe it’s possible that basic income could precipitate a mass transformation of work-related behavior and attitudes but, if so, it most likely occur through long-term, society-wide processes. Experiments, in contrast, are necessarily (1) limited in duration and (2) restricted to a subset of the population (rather than “universal”).
And experiments have other shortcomings. For instance, they must be (3) designed to prevent subjects from being financially worse off as a result of participation, whereas any “real-world” UBI would almost certainly be introduced in tandem with a funding mechanism that causes some individuals to be net payees. Finally, as existing experiments have been designed, the target populations (4) consist of low-income individuals, the unemployed, and/or welfare recipients, and (5) consist mainly of adults who have already been acculturated into the present society and its ethos of work and consumption.
2.1 Experiments are limited in duration.
Most of the current BI-related experiments are two or three years in length. In the United States, the non-profit YC Research plans to launch an experiment in which some participants receive cash transfers for five years. The only projects of longer duration are taking place in developing nations: GiveDirectly is providing a 12-year basic income to 40 villages in its major experiment in Kenya, and the Brazilian non-profit organization ReCivitas has introduced a “lifetime basic income” in the village Quatinga Velho (note that the latter is not an “experiment” in the scientific sense). Even if longer term experiments were affordable, the pressure to obtain results would generally militate against them.
The short-term nature of experiments poses at least two major shortcomings vis-à-vis our present interests:
First, the payments’ limited duration disincentivizes financially risky behavior, such as abandoning a job or career. We should expect that few individuals would choose to make radical changes to their work and life if they are guaranteed unconditional cash payments for only two or three years. A two- or three-year gap in employment might jeopardize not only one’s ability to return to one’s former job or career path but also one’s general future prospects in the labor market.
Secondly, let’s assume that some participants do radically alter their workforce participation despite the short-term nature of the experiment (e.g. they might use the money to help provide financial security during the process of downshifting from a lucrative full-time job, with the confidence that the experiment’s timeframe is long enough to permit them to settle into stable part-time employment or freelance work). Under a society-wide and permanent basic income, such “first movers” might inspire others also to seek alternatives to the norm of full-time permanent employment, initiating a sort of ripple effect whereby downshifting and other such alternative lifestyles gain in practice and acceptance. A two- or three-year experiment, however, is unlikely to be long enough to observe these more slowly accruing effects on social attitudes toward work.
Stated otherwise: a basic income might enable some individuals to voluntarily accept less money pay through work, reduce their time in the labor market, or even cease employment entirely (especially in the many non-USA nations in which benefits such as healthcare are not dependent on full-time employment). It might, for example, liberate those who had already been keen to adopt such a lifestyle (say, downshifting) but were restrained by, and only by, the lack of a stable financial safety net. Meanwhile, however, other would-be downshifters might remain hesitant. The latter group might include, for instance, those who have been held back by not only financial anxiety but also fear of social marginalization. Over time, however, an increased prevalence and visibility of downshifting could increase the lifestyle’s social acceptability, thereby reducing its stigmatization and rendering more attractive to more people (which would further increase its visibility and social acceptance, and so on).
Of course, this is purely speculative. Even if a basic income were to bring about increase in the number and visibility of downshifters (which itself is uncertain), this might lead not to social acceptance but to angry complaints about “parasitism” and further stigmatization. But the point is just that experiments are unlikely to reveal which outcome would transpire.
Indeed, moreover, some of the effects basic income on social attitudes toward work might develop over generations. Perhaps children and teens would develop less material-driven aspirations if they were to grow up in a society in which basic material security is taken for granted; perhaps they would place less weight on monetary considerations when choosing work or other projects and pursuits. Perhaps they would not internalize the moral imperative that one must “earn a living” through paid labor. Perhaps it would merely seem intuitive to them to conceptualize work and income as independent. Perhaps, in turn, they would conceive of the value of work in terms other than income, such as the good it brings to the world and the satisfaction it provides to the worker. Views that are counternormative in our own society might come naturally to those raised in world with universal basic income…
But we certainly can’t be confident about any of that, and experiments will not help.
2.2 Experiments are not “universal” in scope.
As I have written elsewhere, a bigger question than “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” is “What would you do if everyone’s income were taken care of?” What a financially self-sufficient individual would choose to do in a society of full-time workers is not necessarily identical to what that same financially self-sufficient individual would choose to do in a society in which everyone could afford to live without a job.
Experiments require a control group. This effectively prevents an experimental test of a truly universal basic income. Now, to be sure, some experiments do aim to include universality in their design. In GiveDirectly’s experiment, for example, the experimental units are not individual people but entire villages. In this major study, the treatment groups are each composed of communities in which all individuals are receiving unconditional cash transfers. An earlier experiment in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh also implemented a basic income in several villages, using similar villages as controls. There is even precedent in the developed world: the much-discussed “Mincome” experiment, a negative income tax experiment conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s, used the town of Dauphin as a saturation site; every resident of Dauphin was unconditionally guaranteed a minimum income from 1974 to 1979, when the experiment was terminated.
No current experiment in the developed world, however, includes the use of a saturation site (even though Hugh Segal, the adviser to the Ontario pilot study, initially recommended it). In Finland, the experimental group consists of a random sample of 2,000 individuals who had previously been receiving federal unemployment benefits. Similarly, in the Dutch municipal experiments, participants have been randomly selected from current welfare beneficiaries residing in the respective cities, and Barcelona’s experiment involves a stratified sample of welfare recipients within one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. In Ontario, experimental groups will be randomly selected from self-selected applicants, where eligible applicants are restricted to low-income individuals from three specific regions of the province. And YC Research has designed its experiment as a randomized controlled trial with a target population of low-income young adults in two regions of the US. (See this summary for more information on the design of the experiments.)
A consequence of these design decisions is that all of the above experiments will fail to capture social multiplier effects. For an example of social multiplier effects in the context of minimum income experiments, consider one of the most striking results from Dauphin: an increase in high school graduation rates. Last year, I attended a talk by Evelyn Forget, the scholar responsible for the analysis of the experiment, wherein she described survey data that revealed that the decisions of Dauphin teens to remain in school were due not only to the financial security of their individual families but also to the fact that their peers were able to stay in school as well.
We should expect that work-related behavior could also be susceptible to social multiplier effects. Like teenagers’ decisions to stay in school, adults’ decisions to withdraw from full-time employment might depend not only on their personal financial status but also on the actions of their peers. An individual with a personal source of passive income might be financially able to quit her job, and even desire to do so, but nonetheless choose to remain employed if – and because – her friends and coworkers stay in their jobs. She might, for example, believe that she would become socially isolated if she were to opt out of work while her peers remained in full-time employment. She might think about her lack of friends available before 5 pm on weekdays, or she might feel pressure to continue to earn enough money to continue to engage in costly dining, entertainment, and other activities with friends who remain lucratively employed. She might fear a lack of sympathy or understanding, even ostracism, if she were to become the only person within her peer group to abandon traditional employment.
Furthermore, as discussed above, the potential impact of basic income is not limited to the liberation of those who already desire to downshift; another possibility is that, through social multiplier effects, a basic income could generate this desire in those who had not previously considered the option. Our attitudes and aspirations are also influenced not only by our private circumstances but also by our observations of others’ choices lifestyles, and by our perception of what is socially acceptable. Some who now lack any interest in downshifting might develop one in the face of social or structural changes that legitimate or popularize the lifestyle.
Even experiments with saturation sites would be insufficient to permit us to assess all of these potential effects; the social, cultural, and economic forces that impinge on work-related attitudes and behavior vastly exceed the local scale.
2.3 Experiments exclude net contributors.
A “real world” basic income would almost certainly be introduced in conjunction with tax increases to help to finance the program, which would likely include higher income taxes on top earners. But researchers cannot ethically introduce manipulations that leave some subjects worse off as a result of the experiment. Consequently, tax increases cannot be part of experimental trials. This limits the ability to test how the full policy package would affect work-related behaviors. Even those that have studied taxes and come from financial education backgrounds such as through Northeastern University wouldn’t be able to test how different experiments could affect society and financial systems.
For one, it’s not basic income per se but redistribution – reduction of inequality – that carries the greater potential to curb the demand for positional goods. As mentioned above, a worker might hesitate to downshift if the maintenance of social relationships requires engagement in costly dining, drinking, entertainment, or luxury holidays. In a society with high inequality, a mere basic income might do little to reduce the demand for positional goods, limiting the temptation to downshift or opt out of paid work to live on a subsistence income. Many might continue to feel the need to wear nice clothing, drive a new car, and live in an affluent neighborhood to be taken seriously in society, and thus might continue to prefer greater earnings to greater leisure, despite the possibilities opened by the introduction of a basic income. Conversely, the less that one perceives one’s social status to depend on spending and consumption, the more one might be inclined to trade higher earnings for more leisure time. Policies that mitigate financial inequality, such as progressive taxes on wealth and income, help to address this barrier to downshifting.
Additionally, policies that stymie the ability to become “filthy rich” might discourage those who would otherwise be inclined to choose jobs and careers based primarily on their prospects for financial gain. Sufficiently high income taxes could reduce the role of monetary incentives in selecting work. Limitations on wealth acquisition might push some would-be profiteers to instead seek work that they could find non-monetarily rewarding.
Such effects could enhance the ability of a “basic income plus tax reform” package to transform work-related attitudes and behavior; however, they are bound to be missed in experiments.
2.4 Existing experiments are restricted to low-income populations.
So far, we have focused on limitations that are destined to afflict all basic income experiments, merely in virtue of the nature of experiments. Let’s now turn to a contingent design decision that constrains all current experiments in developed nations: in each experiment, as mentioned above, the target population contains only individuals who are low-income and/or receiving social assistance or unemployment benefits or other benefits or with incomes falling below a certain level.
To be fair, none of the existing experiments have been inspired by questions like “Can basic income provide a subsidy for downshifting?” or “Would basic income promote the acceptance and desirability of lifestyles outside of full-time employment?” On the contrary, most are motivated by the desire to determine whether unconditional cash transfers would be more effective than existing programs in addressing poverty or unemployment. In this light, these choices of target populations seem reasonable. But these choices make the experiments less congenial to the questions of those who are interested in the ability of basic income to facilitate a reduction in paid work.
A test of a policy’s potential to foster downshifting only makes sense if experimental subjects are drawn from a population of people who have the potential to downshift, and “downshifting” typically implies a reasonably well-paying position from which one shifts down. Thus, for an experiment to address our key interests, the target population should encompass individuals who are currently employed in relatively well-paying jobs. An experiment limited to the unemployed will tell us little about a policy’s ability to promote voluntary reduction of working hours. An experiment limited to the poor will tell us little about a policy’s ability to promote voluntary reduction of earnings and consumption.
The inclusion of “successful” workers among test subject is also important with respect to the question of whether basic income would reduce the stigma associated with the receipt of public benefits or, more precisely, voluntary “benefit scrounging” (which is, in essence, just a pejorative term for what I’ve been politely describing as “using a basic income to subsidize downshifting”). Quite likely, the “scrounging stigma” is too strong to disappear during the course of a short-term experiment in any case. If a basic income were to play a role in reducing the stigma, however, it would almost certainly not be by allowing poor and unemployed individuals to live upon government subsidies while they voluntarily opt out of the search for full-time jobs. Unfortunately, such an outcome (however desirable) seems much more likely to feed existing stigmas and stereotypes than to combat them.
In contrast, basic income might have a greater and more favorable cultural impact if it subsidized downshifting among individuals in relatively well-paying jobs and promising career paths – among those, that is, who embody conventional images of success. Society accords respect and admiration to those in lucrative careers, which makes such individuals uniquely well-positioned to attract curiosity, perhaps even sympathy, if they were to spurn the life of traditional employment and choose to rely upon government monies to meet their basic expenses (which is not to say that they would not also elicit the scorn or many others). Admittedly, the idea that basic income could lessen the stigma of “benefits scrounging” is far-fetched. The point at hand, however, is simply that existing experiments are not designed in a way that can adequately illuminate how far-fetched.
2.5 Experimental subjects have already “come of age” in the culture of work.
Each of the existing experiments is focused on effects on adults who have already been acculturated into the dominant work ethic. It is possible, however, that some of the social and cultural effects about basic income would result from its influence on younger generations. Perhaps teenagers would internalize different attitudes toward work if they were to come of age under an unconditional guarantee of financial security – not necessarily taking for granted that a core defining features of “adulting” is to find employment at a full-time job in order to earn a living. Perhaps young adults would formulate different personal goals and ideals of success if they did not face an immediate need to earn money through a job.
In a past feature article for Basic Income News, I speculated that entering adulthood with a work-independent college stipend – which shared some commonalities to a five-year “basic income” – could have played a large role in solidifying my own rejection of the ethic of (paid) work. For example, by allowing me to continue to dedicate myself to schoolwork without worrying about paid work, it might have helped to “prevent me from unlearning” that the fact that an activity is unpaid does not imply that the activity is not worthwhile, rewarding, or hard work – or that it’s not the best use of one’s time.
To some extent, this is just to repeat the point that experiments are too limited in duration to capture multi-generational effects of a policy. In principle, though, one could design a short-term study to test the effects of a guaranteed income on a cohort of young adults at critical transitional phases, such as leaving home for college or leaving college for “the real world” (i.e., usually, either a job or the search for one). But existing experiments are not this.
3. Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, then, I expect the current wave of experiments to shed little light on the question of whether, or to what extent, basic income would promote a cultural shift towards a decreased valuation of paid work. Any apparent evidence that basic income would not have such an effect (e.g. a lack of observed change in workforce participation or self-reported attitudes toward work) could be explained as an artifact of the limitations of experimental design.
Arguably, however, the biggest problem with experiments is not that they most likely won’t show considerable reduction in workforce participation (and yet for reasons that are inconclusive) but that many of the policy’s own proponents don’t want them to. When committed supporters of basic income demand more experiments, as often happens these days, they aren’t doing so because they want to decide for themselves whether to endorse the policy; they already have. The hope, generally, is that experiments would produce results that allay the fears of skeptical policymakers, such as the commonplace “fear” that basic income would cause a decrease in workforce participation. As many supporters are fond of pointing out, previous experiments have not shown a marked decrease in workforce participation, or have shown a decrease only within population segments where reducing work hours is socially acceptable (e.g. school-age teenagers or mothers of young children). This attitude toward basic income experiments only recapitulates society’s overvaluation of paid work.
The policymakers who assess experiments for “failure” or “success” will do so relative to the norms and values of the status quo. Political speeches and media reports are likely to portray any observed decrease in labor force participation as evidence of the failure of the policy, as happened when a negative income tax was tested in several cities in the United States in the late 1960s and 70s. My impression, based on two years of intense work in the basic income movement, is that many supporters realize this but call for experiments nonetheless, believing that the trials will in fact yield outcomes that are “successful” relative to the norms and values of the status quo.
Hence, in addition to being unlikely to produce interesting or useful results, basic income experiments may also threaten to reinforce these norms and values in the minds of advocates and other readers. And, from the standpoint as critic of the culture of work, this is not only unhelpful but dangerous.
Photo: banned :: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments CC BY-NC 2.0
by Faun Rice | Jan 26, 2018 | News
In a July 2017 televised Town Hall with KCET, Economic Security Project co-chairs Chris Hughes and Natalie Foster were asked about the principles of a Universal Basic Income. Public questions from Facebook were delivered by the moderator, the first common concern of which was: should we “give everybody a Basic Income,” even the lazy and wealthy?
Foster took the question and responded with a “yes,” commenting that a universal policy “had more political resiliency” (programs with universal access would attract more support), and that shifting economic situations for the American middle class suggested that support for everyone was logical. She clarified that a Basic Income, whatever the size, is intended to be delivered to everyone with “no strings attached.”
Hughes followed up during a second question on the affordability of Basic Income. He commented that a program could be made more affordable by starting small and scaling up, by, for example, beginning with small monthly payments of $200 to American adults (not quite universal, but not means tested), between the ages of 18 and 64, placing the brunt of the tax burden for this measure on wealthy Americans or in a carbon tax. Hughes also compared Basic Income’s feasibility to existing social security programs.
More recently, Hughes’ new book, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (February 2018), will propose a guaranteed income of $500 per month for working adults whose households earn less than $50,000 annually, with the same provided for students and unpaid caregivers.
Hughes’ book is promoted by but independent of the Economic Security Project, “a network committed to advancing the debate on unconditional cash and basic income in the United States.” Their purview includes, but is not limited to, a Universal Basic Income (UBI), as defined by BIEN: “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
Chris Hughes. Credit to: SpeakerHub
The version of guaranteed income that Hughes promotes is very different from that espoused by others at ESP, such as senior fellow Andy Stern, whose 2016 book Raising The Floor makes a case for UBI, because a test based on household income and employment is not the same as giving every individual an unconditional Basic Income. Ongoing coverage of guaranteed income experiments has shown that many governments and organizations follow the same trend as Hughes, pursuing studies that offer cash payments that are means-tested, based on employment status, or revoked when income or employment status exceed minimum limits. Several Dutch experiments encountered obstacles to implementing a UBI pilot not just in public opinion but also in federal compliance issues. UBI proponents may face pressure to give money only to the worthy, and to define that worthiness socioeconomically.
The idea that a guaranteed income is best directed at the poor (and more specifically the working poor) is reiterated in Hughes’ press release email for Fair Shot:
As I write in the book, I’m the first to recognize how lucky I got early in life, but I’ve come to believe this luck doesn’t come from nowhere. We’ve created an economy that creates a small set of fortunate one percenters while making it harder and harder for poor and middle-class people to make ends meet. But we also have a proven tool to beat back against economic injustice—recurring cash payments, directly to the people who need them most. A guaranteed income for working people would provide financial security to all Americans and lift 20 million people out of poverty overnight. It would cost less than half of what we spend on defense a year.
The question raised by the KCET Facebook commentators about ESP’s proposal to give money to “everyone” reflects the same ongoing public concerns that some have about welfare and social programs. It asks for beneficiaries to prove that they are worthy in order to receive public money, and it raises the suspicion that recipients will be lazy or will not attempt to re-enter the workforce. Hughes’ new message in Fair Shot attempts to counteract this by arguing that the beneficiaries are worthy: they are employed, hard working, and “need it most.” He thus reassures the reader that the recipients are deserving.
In contrast, the answer given by Foster in the July 2017 town hall promoted a “no strings attached” UBI. The Economic Security project and associated individuals encourage research and debate around Basic Income and guaranteed incomes; the parameters of upcoming affiliated projects like the Stockton Demonstration (yet to be fully released at this time) suggest an interest both in UBI and in guaranteed income systems.
More information at:
KCET Facebook feed, ‘Town Hall Los Angeles: Q&A with Chris Hughes and Natalie Foster’, KCET Broadcast and Media Production Company, 26th July 2017
Chris Hughes , ‘Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn’, FairShotBook.com (‘Amazon Review: Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn’, Amazon.com)
‘Kirkus Review’, KirkusReviews.com, 24th December 2017
Kate McFarland, ‘NEW BOOK: Raising the Floor by Andy Stern’, Basic Income News, 11th June 2016
Andy Stern, ‘Moving towards a universal basic income’, The World Bank.org Jobs and Development Blog, 4th December 2016
Kate McFarland, ‘Overview of Current Basic Income Related Experiments (October 2017)’, Basic Income News, 19th October 2017
by Karl Widerquist | Jan 17, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in April 2007.
Republican Presidential Candidate Tommy Thompson has endorsed BIG—at least in a foreign country. On his campaign website, the former Wisconsin Governor calls himself “the reliable conservative in the 2008 presidential race.” The first reason he gives is, “Tommy Thompson is the father of welfare reform.” Thompson has a good claim to that title. Since 1996, welfare reform, also known as “workfare,” replaced conditional cash support for single mothers with work requirements, sometimes for less than minimum wage, without providing daycare. The plan was modeled on an earlier Wisconsin program initiated by then-governor Thompson. Workfare is usually motivated by the belief that poor people have a responsibility to take whatever jobs are offered, even if they have substantial childcare responsibilities.
Thompson is literally the last America one might expect to endorse BIG—a plan to provide unconditional cash benefits to every citizen. But Thompson has not only endorsed BIG, he has made it a major initiative in his campaign. He has discussed it in numerous interviews and speeches and at the Republican presidential debates. He hasn’t endorsed BIG for the United States but as part of his strategy to win the war in Iraq. The BIG element in Thompson’s Iraq strategy is that one-third of Iraqi government oil revenues will be reserved for a fund to provide every Iraqi with a small income guarantee modeled after the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). USBIG Newsletter readers will recall that the APF was the initiative of another Republican Governor, Jay Hammond. It provides a small but significant income guarantee to every Alaskan resident.
Of course, both the APF and any likely Iraq proposal fall short of the goals of most BIG supporters because they are not large enough to cover the recipient’s needs—a “partial BIG” rather than a “full BIG.” But Alaska experience has show that even a partial BIG can make a great difference to the needy and sets the right precedent.
Thompson’s plan is rather far from implementation, however. To introduce it, the U.S. would have to be continuing its involvement in Iraq two years from now, when a president Thompson would take office. At that point the U.S. will have been at war for nearly six years. Even then, Thompson could only recommend the plan to the Iraqi Parliament, which is formally recognized by the U.S. government as the sovereign government of an independent country. If the whole of Thompson’s plan is adopted, United States would likely remain at war in Iraq for four more years while we find out whether the military elements of his plan work.
Thompson has not discussed extending the Alaska-style plan closer to home, nor does he seem aware of the possible conflict between the goals of an APF-style BIG and his pedigree, Workfare.
What’s the big deal if a politician in one country supports BIG in another country where he may have little influence even if elected? It show that framed in the right context, BIG can have a great appeal even to work-ethic conservatives, and it demonstrates the growing appeal of the APF precedent. The APF is so obviously successful, so popular, and so cost-effective that it appeals even to the father of workfare. Much of the motivation for workfare has been popular American resentment against people who receive direct government payments. But there is little resentment in America for people who receive property income whether or not they work and whether or not they received their property through work. The APF makes some part of Alaska’s oil revenues into part of the personal property of every Alaskan. It’s theirs; they own it. It is quite natural to infer that if it is right for every Alaskan to own a share of their oil, then perhaps every Iraqi should own a share of their oil too. But once you have endorsed that principle it is quite natural to infer that every South African should own a share of their gold. Every Botswanan should own a share of their diamonds. Every Welshman should own a share of their coal. Every Bolivian should own a share of their tin. And the full inference is that everyone should own a share of all natural resources. If we put that principle into practice, single mothers would not need workfare at all.
-Karl Widerquist (Michael Lewis contributing), New Orleans, LA, April 2007
by Aleksander Masternak | Nov 13, 2017 | Opinion
Philippe Van Parijs, co-founder of BIEN and professor emeritus at Université catholique de Louvain, presented a talk about Basic Income and citizen work duties at the Q Berlin conference, held on the 19th and 20th of October 2017. This was the first installment of Q Berlin but it is set to become an annual event where specialists and influencers from various fields present talks and answer audience questions on five broad topics. [1] Van Parijs’ talk concerned the topic, ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
When I heard this question, the first thought that sprang to mind was ‘what should a government faced with an unmanageable level of unemployment do when conventional policy has failed to resolve the issue?’ Perhaps then a seemingly radical solution, such as universal basic income (UBI), becomes plausible.
Van Parijs took a different take on this question: what would human beings do when they need not work to survive? Critics of UBI persistently raise concerns that individuals who are not incentivised to work will become idle because they will apparently have nothing left to do. Van Parijs argued that any reasonable proponents of the policy understand that people will have things to do.
UBI frees individuals from having to work, allowing them to broadly pursue their own conception of the good life. Those who prefer to become employed would hold more negotiation leverage with their employer. In fact, Van Parijs stated that UBI gives individuals the freedom to say ‘yes’ to jobs. Individuals will not have to do that which they do not wish to do. Fewer people will engage in menial and unsatisfying work.
UBI creates a floor (minimum level) on the income distribution curve, alleviates poverty, and gives bargaining power to the ones who have it least. In this way UBI acts as a systematic subsidy for all underpaid or unpaid jobs that are undervalued by the market but which people wish to do. With UBI, the demand for menial, gruelling work is expected to decrease. Van Parijs theorised employers may be forced to increase the wages for such jobs.
Van Parijs presented UBI as venture capital that allowed individuals to do anything they wish to do. Those who prefer to change fields can invest in education and training. The option to retrain is a particularly pertinent concern for those whose job is at risk of automation.
Forgetting about work for a moment (if you can), think about what you should do when your physiological needs are no longer a concern. If you’ve had a passion at the back of your mind then you might finally pursue it. If, on the other hand, you’ve passed life going from one kind of busy to another, then you might have missed opportunities to reflect and figure out what you would like to be doing. The cost of failure may have been too high if it meant putting you or your family’s livelihood at risk.
At this point in the talk, Van Parijs paused and asked the audience a question. Assuming UBI ensures a basic livelihood for everyone in a community, do these citizens have a duty to give back by working? Do individuals have a duty to accept paid, available employment? Some supported the idea, more disagreed. He then reframed the question and drew a distinction between formal employment and work broadly. Do individuals have a duty to do something? Van Parijs asked the audience to think of examples of socially-beneficial work. Most respondents agreed individuals have a duty to do something, apparently if it is socially beneficial.
Van Parijs preferred not to tell others what they should do. When asked off-stage, he said he has his own conception of the good life and was reluctant to share the details. Rather he said there was something about people helping each other for its own sake that makes for a good society. A society is not well functioning if it’s members are not interested in actively improving each other’s well-being. Working for your community takes several forms. Van Parijs drew the example of caring for the those who cannot care for themselves (such as the elderly, children and disabled). One could volunteer for various causes they care about, whether they be social, environmental, tech-related or so on.
Even if you disagree that working for your community (or giving back) is a duty, if you’re not doing anything else, why not try it? In the best case, your efforts will be appreciated. Your recognition that you have alleviated the suffering of others might make you feel like you have done something meaningful. In the worst case, you might think your efforts yielded insufficiently satisfying results, be it for yourself or your target beneficiaries, and you have wasted your time. UBI provides the opportunity for you to try contributing to your community in different ways. This freedom lets you find a way to contribute that is most satisfying for yourself.
Notes:
[1] This year, the topics included: ‘Imagine yourself as the other self. How do we embrace tolerance and difference?’ ‘What will be the next social contract?’ ‘Urban Angst and Stamina. What are the promising concepts to handle the rise and fall of the city?’ ‘How should we govern at the pace of economic, social and technological change?’and ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
