by Peter Knight | Oct 23, 2023 | News
“Time has always been political. Throughout history, how most people use their time has been defined and controlled by the powerful. Today is no exception. But we can reclaim control, and in this book, the pioneering economist Guy Standing shows us how.
The ancient Greeks organised time into five categories: work, labour, recreation, leisure and contemplation. Labour was onerous, while the keys to a good life were self-chosen work and leisure (schole), which included participation in public life and lifelong education. Yet now our jobs are supposed to provide all meaning in life; our time outside labour is considered simply ‘time off’, and politicians prioritise jobs above all else.
Today, we are experiencing the age of chronic uncertainty. Stress and mental illness are on the rise as more and more time is being stolen from us in myriad ways, particularly from the vulnerable and those in the precariat.”
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by Guy Standing | Jan 18, 2022 | Featured, Opinion
There are rare moments when a combination of threatening circumstances leads to a wonderful transformation that only a short time before would have been unimaginable. This year may be such a moment. The Republic of Korea could set an example to the world that would bring happiness to millions of Koreans, and to many more around the world.
The risks if politicians are too cautious are enormous. Before COVID-19, the global economy was already heading towards a crisis. For over three decades, more and more of the income and wealth were going to the owners of property, financial, physical, and “intellectual”. The commons, belonging to everybody, were being converted into the source of profits and rents. A new class, the precariat, was growing everywhere, suffering from multiple forms of insecurity, drifting deeper into debt. It was incredibly high debt – private, corporate, and public – that made the global economy uniquely fragile.
Meanwhile, the public across the world were realizing the threat posed by global warming and destruction of the environment. Nothing was being done. If that continues, life for our children and grandchildren will be impaired. And it is clear that mistreatment of nature has helped make this an era of pandemics. The COVID-19 outbreak is the sixth pandemic this century.
In these circumstances, policies that merely try to go back to the old normal will not work. We need a bold transformative vision, one of courage, one designed to give people basic economic and social security, one designed to make the economy work for society and every citizen, not just for the bankers and plutocracy, and one designed to revive the commons and our natural environment.
Jae-Myung Lee is campaigning for the Presidency in the March 2022 presidential election with an exciting and feasible strategy, based on a promise of a basic income for every Korean man and woman, paid equally, as a right, without conditions. It is affordable. What is important at this stage is not to set some ideal amount, but to be on the road towards living in a society in which everybody has enough on which to survive, even if they experience personal setbacks.
What makes the proposal for a basic income so profound is that Jae-Myung Lee has come from a humble background, knowing poverty and insecurity from his childhood. He understands two fundamentals. First, the income of every Korean is due to the efforts of all those Koreans who lived beforehand, and it is based on the commons, nature and resources that make up the country, which belong to all Koreans. Those who have gained from taking the commons, most of all, the land, owe it to all Koreans to share some of the gains. A modest Land Value Tax, or levy, is justifiable and fair, and should help fund the basic income.
He also understands that pollution and global warming must be combated by a carbon tax or eco-taxes. The rich cause more pollution than the poor, the poor experience the bad effects more than the rich, including bad health from exposure to poisonous air. So, the solution must include carbon taxes to discourage global warming and polluting activities. But by themselves such taxes would hit the poor harder, because the tax would amount to more of their income.
The only sensible solution is to guarantee that the revenue from eco-taxes will be recycled through a Commons Capital Fund to help pay for the basic income, as Carbon Dividends. The poor will gain, while society will be on the road to fighting global warming and ecological decay. A basic income will also encourage more care work and ecological work, rather than resource-depleting labor. It will stimulate the desirable form of economic growth.
The second fundamental Jae-Myung Lee and his advisers have understood is that basic security is essential for rational decision-making and mental health. There cannot be individual or societal resilience against pandemics or economic crises unless there is basic security, so that people can behave rationally rather than in desperation. Experiments have shown that a basic income improves mental health and the ability to make better decisions, for oneself, one’s family, and one’s community.
In the Korean edition of my book Plunder of the Commons, I paid respect to the ancient Korean ethos of hongik ingan, which helped found Korea in 2,333 BC. It expresses a historically-grounded wisdom that Koreans should be re-teaching the world in an era of self-centered individualism and consumption-driven “success”. It conveys the sense of not just sharing in benefits of production but sharing in the preservation and reproduction of a sense of community, our sense of participation and our relationships in and with nature. A basic income would pay respect to that ethos. Jae-Myung Lee should be commended for having pioneered it in Gyeonggi Province, and would set the country on a new progressive road if elected President on March 9.
——
A Korean translation of this article was published by Pressian – a political news website headquartered in Seoul, South Korea.
by Guy Standing | Jan 28, 2021 | Featured, News
Advocates for basic income have long argued that it is much more than just a poverty relief measure. It is a matter of common justice that would enhance freedom and provide basic security for all. A new survey across six major European countries shows that people understand its potential to improve their lives. Not only do large majorities in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain favour basic income pilots and basic income as a permanent policy. The survey also reveals the advantages people believe a basic income would bring for themselves.
The poll, conducted independently by YouGov, found that two-thirds or more of respondents in the six countries were in favour of pilots and a national basic income system. Excluding the few ‘don’t knows’, support ranged from 65% in France to 87% in Portugal. Women were generally more supportive, particularly in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Even before the pandemic, European citizens were suffering from insecurity, stress and precarity, linked to rising inequalities. The pandemic has made things worse. In an era of shocks, policies to strengthen individual and societal resilience are vital. Instead, governments have resorted to measures aimed chiefly at propping up businesses, including furlough schemes, that have worsened inequalities and eroded resilience.
Resilience means being able to handle and recover from shocks. It is about feeling in control, able to handle setbacks because we can envisage a better future. But it cannot be provided by today’s labour market, increasingly characterised by flexible labour relations, insecure jobs and fluctuating wages, or by existing welfare systems, or by better public services alone, even though those are needed.
The survey provides cogent support for arguments in favour of basic income. High proportions of respondents said a basic income would reduce anxiety – over half in Poland and Portugal, and more than 40% overall, especially among women and youth. It is now well established that chronic anxiety increases the risk of mental and physical illness. A basic income offers the prospect of reducing ill-health and demands on health services. It might almost pay for itself.
Respondents also believed a basic income would open up opportunities for a better way of living and working. A high proportion of youths and women said it would give them more financial independence – 50% of young Italians and 41% of young Germans, for instance. This would reduce their sense of precarity, the feeling of being a supplicant reliant on others for discretionary help.
One horror of the pandemic has been the surge in domestic violence. Experiments have shown that, once women have basic income security, domestic tensions decline and women are more likely to walk away from abusive relationships.
Many youths said a basic income would enable them to pursue further education or training, including 49% in Portugal, 53% in Spain and 27% in Germany. This reflects the current inability of the precariat to develop their capabilities in the way they choose, because they must take whatever job they can get and put in as many hours of labour as possible. Basic security is conducive to the development of skills and a more educated society.
A basic income would also improve the quality of living. Young people, in particular, said it would enable them to take part in leisure activities that they cannot afford to do now – about a third in Portugal and Spain, for example.
And a basic income would foster work beyond ‘jobs’. Men as well as women, among all age groups, said a basic income would enable them to devote more time to their family. This was the case for one in five in Germany and more than a quarter of both men and women in Poland. The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the extent to which society suffers from a ‘care deficit’. And pilots have shown that a basic income encourages men to do more care work, helping to weaken the gender dualism that feminists rightly condemn.
Basic income would also foster a more entrepreneurial attitude. A significant proportion of respondents said it would encourage them to launch a small-scale business – 8% in Italy, 10% in France, 13% in Germany and 19% in Portugal. Entrepreneurial enthusiasm was even greater among youths – 14% in Italy, for instance. Many youths also said a basic income would enable them to devote more time to volunteering or social activism, including over a quarter of youths in Germany and 13% in France. Society surely wants more socially engaged and active youth.
One lesson surely learned during the pandemic is that most of us are vulnerable, not just to illness but also to shocks to our finances, relationships and lifestyles. In what was a cross-section of people in six relatively rich countries, only small minorities said a basic income would make little difference to their lives – 11% in Italy and 6% in Portugal, for example. Long-term basic security is still something most of us value.
We should implore European policymakers to launch basic income pilots in communities around Europe. Ideally, some courageous governments would move in the direction of a national system. But failing that, surely it is time for pilots to explore the transformative potential of basic income. According to this survey, over 70% of Europeans want them.
Guy Standing is Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network.
Editor: You can support basic income in Europe by adding your name to the European Citizen’s Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income and WeMove/UBIE’s petitions for pilots of basic income and for the EU to enable member states to implement an Emergency Basic Income during the crisis.
A translation into Chinese can be found here.
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 6, 2019 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The website, Revista Libertalia, recently published an article in Spanish with extensive quotes from an interview conducted with me. The article is entitled, “Voces sobre la renta básica (II): ¿Está justificada? [Voices on basic income (II): Is it justified?].” It’s author is Pablo Magaña. The Spanish version was published on February 28, 2019. The author created, but did not publish an English version of the article. The quotes below reproduce the entire English version with no additional editing.
Voices on the basic income (II): Is it justified?
The idea of a basic income raises many hopes and some eyebrows. In this article, some of its defenders will explain to us which is, in their view, the best way to justify it. However, in order to make the discussion more interesting, we also asked them to answer one common objection that is often raised against the proposal: the free-riding objection. What does this objection say? Quite simple. Unlike other social security schemes, a basic income is unconditional, which means that you can be entitled to it regardless of your socio-economic condition. And, more crucially, regardless of the extent to which you contribute to your society.
For some people, this is plainly unfair. The viability of a basic income depends upon the existence of enough contributors to a common public fund. But, as long as this scheme is already in place and working in a stable manner, if any individual decided not to contribute to it, there would be nothing we could do in response: given the income’s unconditional character, the supposed free-rider would still be as entitled to it as any other citizen. Let us suppose – so goes the classical example[i] – that I decided to spent all my time living high, surfing the waves in Malibu, playing guitar under the moonlight, driving along endless highways on the wheel of an old van. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Still, since such a plan would only be possible if others work and contribute to a common fund, my decision might look like an injustice, a clear case of free-riding. But is it really like this?
Before introducing some possible answers to this challenge, we will look first at some arguments in favor of a basic income.
According to Hillel Steiner[ii], “the best way to defend the right to UBI involves a dual strategy: (a) showing that this right is implied by some more basic and uncontested principle, and (b) showing that this right is compatible with, and does not encroach upon, other widely accepted rights”. As a left-libertarian, Steiner regards the Earth as humanity’s common possession[iii], which entails that if somebody intends to appropriate herself of any portion of it, she should compensate her fellow co-owners. If she didn’t, she would be illegitimately appropriating of something that is not really hers. In other words, she would be stealing. Steiner’s emphasis on natural resources colors both his model of basic income and his preferred justification of it:
“In my view, a right to UBI should be funded by a 100% tax on the ownership of natural resources, commonly termed a ‘Land Value Tax’ or, more accurately, a ‘Location Value Tax’. This tax would be levied on the value of those locations themselves, and not on the value of any improvements made to those locations by human labour. A right to a UBI funded in this way satisfies (a) since those taxable natural resources/locations, not being the product of any person’s labour, are rightfully available for use by everyone. So if someone wants to privatise some of them, and to exclude all others from using them, then it seems only fair that the privatizer should compensate those others. The UBI I’m proposing simply is that compensation.”
This is a fairly common way to defend the right to a basic income, also employed by Guy Standing[iv], author of Basic Income: And How we Can Make it Happen[v]. In Standing’s view, “the right to a basic income can be justified on three ethical grounds. First, it is a matter of common justice. The land, the air, water, and even ideas inherited from our ancestors are all part of the commons which belong to everybody equally. But elites and the wealthy have been given, have inherited or have used the commons for their benefit. Therefore, they should compensate the commoners who have lost the commons, and the fairest way to do that is give everybody in society a common payment, a ‘common dividend’ on our collective public wealth”.
Again, the basic income is presented as a way of compensating human beings for having deprived them of what is, in essence, a public good. However, as we have seen, Standing believes there are additional reasons on behalf of a basic income. “[A] second fundamentally ethical reason for a basic income”, he contends, “is that it would enhance individual and societal freedom. In particular, it would strengthen republican freedom — the freedom from domination by figures in unaccountable positions of power. Whether you are on the political left or right, we all claim (or most of us do!) to believe in freedom. But you cannot be free unless you have the capacity to say ‘no’ to people who can oppress or exploit you. If you do not have basic income security, you do not have that capacity.”
Note that this argument is slightly different from the previous one. Granted, here the argument is also premised upon the existence of an injustice. Yet in this case the injustice does not involve the illegitimate appropriation of what is commonly owned, but rather the presence of a structure of domination under which individuals cannot really be considered autonomous or free. According to this argument, justice requires that nobody ever feel the need to be subjected to another’s arbitrary will, an aim which would only be secured by implementing a right to a basic income[vi].
Political philosopher Karl Widerquist[vii], author of many books and articles on the basic income[viii], has defended a similar view. As he puts it, we need acknowledge that:
“[I]t’s wrong for anyone to come between another person and the resources they need to survive. It’s wrong for anyone to put conditions on people’s access to the resources they need to survive. Don’t ignore this fact: poverty is the lack of access to the resources you need to live a decent life. A healthy person with the right skills and access to a healthy environment can do many things that are impossible for an impoverished person in society today. They can build their own house; fish, farm, or hunt their own food; they can work with who they want. They call work alone or with whoever they want. They don’t need a boss. They never have to follow orders.”
“Our societies create poverty by interfering with people who would like to use the resources of the Earth for themselves. We do it because better off people want to control all the world’s resources. By allowing a small group to control the world’s resources without paying compensation to the people they thereby make propertyless, we put most people in the position in which “work” becomes synonymous with “a job.” Making a living means taking orders. This is not a fact of nature. It is the outcome of society’s rules. We need to change those rules.”
“UBI rectifies that problem. It says if you’re going to hold more resources than others, you have to pay something back in compensation, so that no one ever again is forced to live in poverty and no one is ever forced into the position where they must take orders to survive.”
“UBI is not the end of the market or the end of paid labor. It is simply a market where income doesn’t start at zero, and workers are freed from the threat of destitution. With UBI, workers enter the labor market as free people. Employers have to pay enough to make it worthwhile for workers to take those jobs. UBI will give us a high-wage economy that works for everyone.”
One view in this vicinity has been defended by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson[ix], who, nonetheless, does not believe that a basic income would necessarily be the best option. Now, if it was, she says, the best way to ground it would be as follows:
“The best case for the UBI is as follows. Automation, and changes in the nature of employment, are bringing about the disappearance of stable jobs and the rise of a precariat class whose members are unable to support themselves with steady employment. UBI is needed to provide the security and basis for a decent life for a rising number of people in the world. BI should be universal to ensure its political stability and to avoid the costs of means testing and intrusive investigations of people’s lives.”
Among other things, Anderson is well-known for her defense of so-called “relational egalitarianism”[x], the view that theorists of justice should focus a bit less on how resources are distributed and more on how we treat each other (the latter having obviously implications for the former). This is to say, what matters the most is not who gets what, but whether we treat each other as an equal or not – without distinctions based on social status or power asymmetries.
Before finishing this part of the article, let us look at another possible strategy to justify a basic income. Until now, the arguments we have seen have focused either i) on a compensation for an illegitimate appropriation of a common good, or ii) on the need to make sure that individuals enjoy a minimal independence, in that they ought not to be forced to choose between accepting orders or starve. But there is a third line of argument, which would stress iii) the alleged positive consequences of a basic income. This is Guy Standing’s third argument:
“The third ethical reason for wanting a basic income is that it would tend to provide basic security, which is what we call a public good. We all want basic security in our lives, and basic security is a superior public good in that if everybody in our community has basic security, it increases the value of it for everybody. Basic security has been shown to increase tolerance, resilience, altruism and mental bandwidth (or mental health and IQ).”
This is all very well, one might say. But, what happens with our Malibu surfer? Isn’t he objectionably free-riding on his fellow citizens? Isn’t it unfair that he can live a highly pleasant life while I have to break my back from 9 to 5?
In Steiner’s view, the answer is no: “[E]veryone – lazy, as well as industrious – is entitled to that compensation”. For remember that, according to him, a basic income is not just another subsidy, but the compensation that those who want to possess more than their fair share of the Earth’s natural resources have to pay to the rest of us – whether we are surfers or not.
Widerquist, in his reply, invites us to cast some doubt on the value judgments and the assumptions presupposed by the objection:
“The thing that most detracts people from UBI is the belief that prosperous people have the right and responsibility to tell less prosperous people what to do. We, the prosperous, want to think we are better than the less prosperous. We want to think our virtue—rather than a less-than-perfectly-fair system—is the reason people are less prosperous than we are. We like to think that we know what the less prosperous need to do to become prosperous—even though the vast majority of us have no idea what it is like to grow up poor and how different people’s circumstances can be.”
“Not only are these beliefs unfounded, they are not good for the middle class. Because we want to put the very poor in the position where they have to do what more prosperous people want, we put the vast majority of people in the position where they have to do what the wealthiest few want. Probably well more than 90% of people in every country have no choice but to take a job for a living. The vast majority of us—even some very prosperous people—are unfree to work for ourselves. And so, we must go to an employer—most of whom represent very wealthy corporations—get a job, and take orders all day. That is neither freedom nor fairness.”
“UBI will put the middle class in a much better bargaining position. In most countries, the middle class is not significantly better off than they were 40 years ago. Virtually, all the benefits of the last 40 years of economic growth have gone to the wealthiest 1%. UBI will help the other 99% command the better wages and the shorter working hours that they have earned.”
Another way to answer the free-riding objection involves calling into question its relevancy. Why should we care so much, the rejoinder goes, about something that is actually very unlikely? A rejoinder of this type has been endorsed by Guy Standing:
“The normal human condition is to want to work, to improve ourselves, to improve our living conditions, to improve the life prospects of our children and so on. I would feel sorry for somebody who would not work because he or she had a modest basic income. But of course this is not what happens or is likely to happen to more than a tiny number of people. We have found in our pilots that people with a basic income work more, not less, and are more productive, not less.”[xi]
Indeed, Standing believes that even if free riding was as likely as the objection assumes, the good consequences of a basic income would probably outweigh its potential defects or unfair aspects. As he puts it, a basic income “would encourage more of us to spend more time doing work that is not labour, such as caring for elderly frail relatives or children or doing community work. Most of us will go into old age wishing we had done more of that type of work and less of labour”.
Finally, one can accept the core of the objection – namely, that justice requires some degree of reciprocity – while denying that one’s contributions to society must be measured solely according to their market value. In Elizabeth Anderson’s words: “Everyone ought to contribute to society. But not all positive contributions to society need be via paid employment on the market. Much of women’s work taking care of children and elder dependents is not paid, although it is socially necessary. Much nonprofit work makes a huge difference for others, but it is also not paid. Most people want to make a positive contribution and will do so in one way or another. Society should expand opportunities to make a contribution, but not insist that they survive a market test”.
What this view suggests is that Californian surfers needn’t be free-riding on us. Though their economic contribution to society may border on nothingness, this wouldn’t necessarily imply that they cannot contribute in other ways, nor that they are unable to provide us with valuable things. Suppose we discovered that no member of the Rolling Stones has ever paid a dollar in taxes since they became famous. Would that mean they haven’t contributed to society as much as they should? Probably. Would it also mean they haven’t contributed anything at all? That seems harder to stomach. For many people, listening to their songs, going to their concerts, or simply learning to play guitar by imitating Keith Richards or Roon Wood are in themselves valuable experiences that would not vanish of a sudden.
Are these arguments convincing? Do they answer adequately to the free-riding objection? Do they really succeed in justifying a basic income? That is something for the reader to decide.
—————-
[i] This objection was famously formulated by John Rawls in his article “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good” (1988), Philosophy & Public Affairs 17(4): 257, n. 7. For an equally well-known response, see also Philippe van Parijs,“Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income” (1991), Philosophy & Public Affairs 20(2): 101-131.
[ii] https://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/hillel.steiner/
[iii] See, for instance, Steiner’s article “Left Libertarianism and the Ownership of Natural Resources” (2009), Public Reason 1(1): 1-8.
[iv] https://www.guystanding.com/.
[v] For the Spanish tradition, see: https://www.marcialpons.es/libros/la-renta-basica/9788494769474/.
[vi] Let us remember that a similar argument was put forward by Matt Zwolinski in this article’s predecessor: https://www.revistalibertalia.com/single-post/2019/02/09/Voces-sobre-la-renta-basica-I-La-renta-basica-y-el-libertarismo.
[vii] https://www.qatar.georgetown.edu/profile/karl-widerquist.
[viii] See, for instance, https://www.amazon.com/Independence-Propertylessness-Basic-Income-Exploring/dp/1137274727.
[ix] https://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/.
[x] The locus classicus of this discussion is “What is the Point of Equality?” (1999), Ethics 109(2): 287-337.
[xi] These results are discussed in chapter 8 of the book mentioned in note iv.
“Voces sobre la renta básica (II): ¿Está justificada? [Voices on basic income (II): Is it justified?]” by Pablo Magaña, Libertalia, February 28, 2019
![Wayne Lewchulk: “We could use [basic income] as an opportunity to discover the potential of humans”](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/B88239635Z.1_20180618205505_000_GPK7LDBK.3-0_Super_Portrait.jpg?resize=1%2C1&ssl=1)
by Andre Coelho | Jul 2, 2018 | News
Wayne Lewchulk. Picture credit to: The Halmilton Spectator
“This isn’t your grandparents’ labour market”. Wayne Lewchulk, a professor at the McMaster University and specialist in labour markets, precarious employment and health, says it crystal clear on an interview given on May 24th 2018.
Lewchulk, who has been teaching labour issues for more than 35 years, is completely aware that his stable job as a professor at McMaster is becoming the exception, rather than the norm. This is aligned with the line of reasoning professor and writer Guy Standing also advocates in his latest book on the subject. As a Canadian, and resident in Hamilton, Ontario, he is a co-founder of the Poverty and Economic Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) project, which joints with the McMaster University and more than other 30 universities, community organizations, labour unions, government and media outlets, to advance research and policy debate around labour and particularly precarious employment.
Lewchulk has also helped to organize the latest North America Basic Income Guarantee Congress, this year hosted at McMaster University. He has also been influential at the Ontario Basic Income pilot project, as a member of the evaluation panel. Even though this pilot project is not quite a basic income as far as the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) definition goes, it may still be an important step towards a real implementation in Canada.
Despite a rise in employment in the last decade, in Canada, this has been mostly for part-time, Uber and Mechanical Turk style kind of employment. These forms of employment, Lewchulk explains, are very insecure, limiting workers ability to “form relationships or settle in one spot, let alone buy a house”. That also means lack of labour benefits, which can mean less health-related coverage. More employment with less money will also mean less opportunities for children, since parents cannot afford development activities for them. Moreover, expenses with gaining qualifications and learning throughout life also diminish. Capital and business owners have been, successfully, passing on labour costs to workers themselves, as technology and economic change agitate and deteriorate working conditions worldwide.
Asked about technological disruption, however, Wayne Lewchulk remains optimistic: “I think it’d be fantastic to have machinery doing a lot of the things we do, so we could focus on the things that we let fall by the wayside right now: being good to each other; creating art; spending time with our families”. According to him, basic income can be a powerful instrument to attain this goal, “but we have to figure out how to pay for it”.
More information at:
Sonia Verma, “This isn’t your grandparents’ job market”, McMaster University Brighter World, May 24th 2018
Guy Standing, “The Precariat – The new dangerous class”, Bloomsburry Ed. 2011
Sara Bizarro, “Canada: NABIG Congress 2018 in Hamilton, Ontario”, Basic Income News, June 6th 2018
André Coelho, “CANADA: Quebec is implementing a means-tested benefit, not a basic income”, Basic Income News, January 24th 2018
