by Quentin Mathys | May 10, 2018 | News, Research
District of columbia Lincoln memorial Washington monument. Credit to: History Channel.
The district of Columbia has released on the 27th February 2018 a policy analysis that examines different approaches and strategies for providing a locally-funded guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income for its residents.
The study, named “Economic and policy impact statement: Approaches and strategies for providing a Minimum Income in the district of Columbia”, starts by evaluating the cost of living in absence of public social safety net assistance for three types of low-income households, 1) single adults without children, 2) single adults with one child, and 3) single adults with two children. The results show that a single adult without children would approximatively need an annual income of US$ 36 988 to meet their basic needs. For a single parent with one child, the annual income need is roughly US$ 66 113, while a single parent with two children would need about US$ 96 885 a year.
The paper then discusses the existing monetary and in-kind entitlements benefits, supports, and maintenance provided by the federal and District governments to low and moderate-income residents. According to the authors, the existing social safety net is strong enough to allow households who have full access to the public benefit programs to meet their basic needs. However, as Ryan Harrison underlines in his article about the report, households most in need for assistance do not qualify for the cash grants available, due to the work requirements of these means-tested policies.
In the next section of the study, the economic feasibility of implementing a basic income in the District is discussed. The authors explore three amounts for basic income where the first one is set at 100% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL), the second one at 300% and the third one at 450% of the FPL. The associated gross cost of the three policies is estimated at 7, 21.5, and 32.2 billion US$ per year, respectively. According to the authors, the implementations of a basic income set at 450% of the FPL is the only approach that would allow all the households to meet their basic needs. This is debatable, since being above the FPL would, in principle, mean that basic needs were covered. However, the authors fear that such amount would lead to many households deciding to drop out of the workforce and making this implementation expensive and inefficient. This is also questionable, considering existing results from performed basic income pilots. Based on these issues, the report does not simulate the impact of providing a universal basic income in the Columbia district.
Furthermore, the authors only discuss the gross cost of implementing a basic income. Mentioning the net cost would have been relevant, as cost reductions can be expected in existing social assistance programs, and a restructuring of income taxes and /or other forms of taxes to finance the reform. The report, nevertheless, introduces an important discussion about the feasibility of a basic income implementation of in the district of Columbia.
More information at:
Susana Groves and John MacNeil, “Economic and policy impact statement: Approaches and strategies for providing a Minimum Income in the district of Columbia”, Office of the Budget Director of the Council of the District of Columbia, January 27th 2018
Ryan Harrison, “District of Columbia releases policy analysis for basic income”, Medium, April 8th 2018
“Council Budget Office releases Economic and Policy Impact Statement: Approaches and Strategies for Providing a Minimum Income in the District of Columbia”, David Grosso DC Council at-large, February 28th 2018
by Karl Widerquist | May 9, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in December 2011.
I can’t believe the news. We are in the midst of the worst global depression in 70 years, and the governments of almost every major industrialized country are talking about austerity. They’re cutting government services; laying off public sector workers; cutting pay, pensions, and benefits for public employees—all in the name of austerity and balanced budgets.
This astounds me because we’ve been through it before. We’ve seen what works, and we know that austerity is not the way out of a major depression. Austerity makes depressions worse. To get out of a depression, the government needs to spend money—and lots of it. The lessons of history are clear, and the reading of history I’m going to discuss to make my point is not terribly controversial among economists. Let me explain.
In a depression (or a deep recession or whatever you want to call it), we get stuck at the bottom. People can’t spend as much because they’re not making as much, but they aren’t making as much because people aren’t spending as much. Debt is a related problem, and so, I believe, is the real estate market, but there’s no room in this editorial for a full explanation. If you understand the idea of getting stuck at the bottom because of the feedback between spending and income, you get the essence of it. This kind of unemployment is pure waste. Human resources (not to mention idle shops and factories) are simply going to waste unused. We can wait for all that to work itself out on its own—as Japan has been waiting since 1989—or the government can take action.
Austerity is a reasonable response to—say—finding half of our industrial capacity destroyed by aerial bombardment. If our physical capacity to produce goods has fallen, then we’ll all have to make do with a little less for a while. But austerity is the worst possible response to an economy in a depression, because a depression economy is no less able to produce goods than before; it’s simply letting productive capacity go to waste. And that waste exists because people aren’t spending as much. If the governments of the world respond by spending less as well, they simply exacerbate the problem.
We learned how to take action in a big way at the outset of World War II. I wrote a few years ago about “the economic lesson of 1938” (August 2009). Today’s editorial could as well be called “the economic lesson of 1941.” The accompanying graph (at the bottom) shows U.S. per capita GDP for the years 1929 to 1947—from the stock market crash at the beginning of the Great Depression to the bottom of the post-war recession. Per capita GDP is the income of the average American. The figures are in “inflation-adjusted” 2008 dollars, meaning they’re multiplied by an index to show the purchasing power that the incomes of the time would have at today’s prices. No inflation adjustment is perfect, but they give you a rough idea. In general the graph shows we were much poorer back then, but it shows much more about the times.
The austerity years were 1929 to 1933. In addition to many other mistakes, the government responded to reduced tax revenue caused by declining economic activity by reducing its own activity to match. Average income went down from over $11,000 to less than $8,000—a loss of more than 25 percent. You can think of everybody getting a 25 percent pay cut at the same time or of 75 percent of people keeping their entire income while 25 percent of people lose their entire incomes. What actually happened was somewhere in between, a little bit of both. Unemployment went up to 20 percent, and in that sense the Great Depression was roughly twice as bad as what we’re going through now.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was elected and we started spending money to stimulate the economy. He called it “priming the pump.” Years later Keynesian economists would call it “simulating aggregate demand.” Whatever you call it, Roosevelt took what, at the time, looked like big action, spending money trying to help people, to get the economy moving again. And he had several years of success until he returned to austerity measures in 1937 and 1938, suddenly trying to balance the budget. I wrote about that problem in my earlier editorial. Except for that year progress was slow but steady. Yet, by 1941 unemployment was still at 9.67%. After 12 years of waiting for an end to the depression, more Americans were unemployed in 1941 than they are now in the forth year of our depression.
But in 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The United States entered World War II. And the depression ended virtually over night. We went from a 10-percent labor surplus to a labor shortage in a matter of months. The demand for labor was so great that women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers. They found good high-paying jobs waiting for them. Average income shot up to $20,000 per year—two and a half times what it was after four years of austerity in 1933.
The depression disappeared because the government spent money and massive amounts of it. The government hired the idle labor (and more) as soldiers and support workers. The government hired the idle shipyards to build boats, the idle automobile plants to build jeeps and tanks, and so on. It was good for people, and it was good for business. The entire New Deal—it turned out—was far too small.
There are dangers to stimulating the economy in the wrong way, at the wrong time, or in the wrong amounts. You can end up with unacceptable debt, inflation, or a delayed depression. This is why I have never thought of myself as a Keynesian, and I do not think that massive stimulus is the best response to a garden-variety recession like most of the ones experienced between World War II and today. I’ve argued in this series (May 2009) that the most important thing government can do during a downturn is the same as during a boom: make sure everyone’s basic needs are met. If that is done, we can often let recessions work themselves out. I guess I’m a last-resort Keynesian. I think most non-Keynesian economists are, although they probably disagree a lot in how bad things have to get before they’ll take up their last resort.
I don’t think we should wait any longer because the possible dangers of a government stimulus can be overblown. None of them manifested themselves during or after the Second World War. Except for the obvious losses to war, the spending was good for people. After the war people got married; they used the money they saved to make down payments on houses, to start families, and to build better lives than they had in the 1930s.
The depression never came back. This is why I end the graph in the recession year of 1947. That year was as bad as the economy got after the war, but yet, per capita income was still nearly $15,000, not quite twice what it was after four years of austerity in 1933 and still 25 percent higher than it was in the boom year of 1929. After 1947 we got good healthy growth punctuated by short, forgettable, recessions. It was one of the best periods of economic growth in American history. The Second Word War spending worked, and there was no post-stimulus hangover, not in the short, not in the long run. The most massive government stimulus we’ve ever had—perhaps the largest in world history—did not cause any significant problems with debt, inflation, or delayed depression.
You can look at the income and unemployment figures for almost every industrialized, capitalist nation at the time, and you will see the same pattern: as soon as they began massive war spending, the depression ended in their country. But we don’t need a war to stimulate the economy. We just need to break the political obsession with austerity and start spending money.
Without the need to spend a stimulus on war, we can spend on schools, bridges, public transits, infrastructure, or on services to help the needy through a basic income guarantee or through something else. What we spend on is less important for stimulating the economy than the need to spend. The basic income guarantee movement now needs to be part of broader movement around the world against the austerity craze. This is one reason I support the Occupy Movement in the United States and the anti-austerity movement in Europe. We must focus the world’s attention on the need for government to spend money to help people. Once we open that door, the possibilities are great. But until then, we practice austerity against the lessons of our history.
-Karl Widerquist (karl@widerquist.com), the Second Cup Café, Doha, Qatar, December 2011
by Andre Coelho | May 8, 2018 | News, Research
Since 2016 that Congresswoman Araceli Damián has supported and “presented an initiative to reform the Mexican Constitution and create the right to [a] universal citizen’s income”. In the latest version of this proposal, it is framed as an intrinsic human right, arguing that no human being’s survival should be dependent on any condition, “not even by the idea that a person should be socially useful”. The purpose has been to deliver basic income as a “central element for social policy, to face this crisis and to check the implications of including it in the Mexican Constitution”.
The problems faced by the Mexican society are generally the same in many other regions afflicted by the capitalist system: unemployment due to automation and globalization, lower economic output (to restore some equality in resource redistribution), rampant labour precarity and failure of present social policies to reduce poverty. Given this grim scenario, which has been aggravating for the last decades, it has already been pointed out by the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (National Council for Social Policy Evaluation), or Coneval, that basic income-like policies should be looked into, in a 2014 document titled “Informe de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social en México 2014” (2014 Social Policy Evaluation Report).
Reporting back to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this basic income implementation proposal for the United States of Mexico is intended to be based on the basis that “every person shall have a standard of living compatible with their wellbeing”. This, according to Araceli Damián, would allow Mexico to “engage in the construction of a Social Rights Welfare State”, and would align the Mexican constitution with international legal standards on human rights.
As a first stage of implementation, the proposal suggests an individual monetary transfer covering basic (normalized) food necessities. This first step would be implemented in 20 years, and according to four sub-stages (extending coverage every five years), accounting for residency (urban/rural), age and sex. On a second stage, and for another 20 years period, basic income would be gradually distributed until normalized basic needs are met for all people. The purpose being to meeting all Mexicans basic needs by 2050.
Araceli Damián and her partner Norma Colín have calculated both costs and benefits for this kind of gradual basic income implementation in Mexico. Costs are associated with extra fiscal efforts to finance such a policy, while benefits also include avoided costs with public health, safety and social security.
For the first step of the proposal’s implementation, covering basic food necessities, an individual amount of 1765 Mexican Pesos per month (92 US $/month) would be enough. That would also include a 15% margin for affording conservation, preparation and consumption of food. According to the sub-stages referred above, priority would be given to rural population, elderly and children, which are already covered in part by existing social assistance programs. Coverage of (adult) women would also take priority over (adult) men, due to known structural disadvantage gaps and the need to reduce women’s economic dependence from men.
Araveli Damián. Credit to: El Colegio de México A.C.
The basic food needs coverage on the first stage would reduce poverty substantially, right from the start. Calculations show that total poverty could be approximately cut in half (72.7% in 2014, compared with 39.5% of the total population, with all four sub-stages of the first implementation step completed). This program would not particularly affect the higher income brackets parts of the population, while reducing extreme poverty almost down to zero (from 36.3% down to 0.7%). This step would represent 13.2% of the gross national product (GDP) if implemented today, which is below the OCDE countries average of 21.9% of GDP spending in social protection. Implementation costs would rise gradually, from 1% of GDP if starting this year (2018), up to 9.4% of GDP after 20 years.
However, according to Araceli and Norma calculations, a full basic income for Mexico, at this moment, would represent around 54.4 % of all state revenue. For the food coverage partial basic income, on the other hand, several financing sources are identified (values per year): savings from restructuring present-day social security (at all levels of government, in about 7000 million Pesos (360 million US$)), cuts in governmental overspending (around 697 000 million Pesos (35 800 million US$)), reduction in fiscal evasion (accounting for more 484 000 million Pesos (24 900 million US$) and progressive fiscal reform (there is room for incrementing fiscal collection, from present-day 19.6% GDP, up to at least 25% GDP).
The study argues that this food coverage basic income would help stabilizing gross demand, particularly among the poorest. This stimulates a better use od existing resources, without rising operation costs for companies, while considerably reducing inequality and poverty. It is also foreseen that implementing basic income in Mexico would increase employment in at least 3%.
Finally, Araceli and Norma propose to rewrite the Mexican Constitution in several articles, highlighting the following addition to article 4th:
“Every person, since birth, has the right to a universal basic income. The State will guarantee this right through monetary transfers, which value shall be enough for all people to reach a dignified minimum quality of life. The Law shall state the amount, periodicity and transfer method, as well as a program for its roll out in a gradual fashion.”
More information at:
(in Spanish)
“Informe de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social en México 2014 [2014 Social Policy Evaluation Report]”, Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Politica de Desarrollo Social (Coneval), February 2015
Araceli Gonzaléz and Norma Colín, “Que reforma y adiciona los artículos 4o. y 73 de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, suscrita por las diputadas Araceli Damián González y Norma Xóchitl Hernández Colín, del Grupo Parlamentario de Morena”, Gaceta Parlamentaria 4864-IV, 12th September 2017
by Kate McFarland | Apr 27, 2018 | Opinion
The following is part one of a two part series in which former Basic Income News editor Kate McFarland interviews D. JoAnne Swanson of The Anticareerist on Basic Income.
The original article can be found here.
KM: You have a long career–if I might use that term–of critiquing “job culture” and promoting, as it were, a more leisurely society. There are others with similar interests who have called for alternative strategies, such as mandatory reduction in the work week and increase in vacation time, policies to promote job-sharing, and policies to allow workers flexibility in trading income for time-off. What caused you to begin promoting basic income in particular as a means to move from a more job-oriented society to more of a leisure society?
DJS: My basic income advocacy began with love and outrage: a deep and abiding love of the arts that led to outrage when I learned that so many artists live in poverty. I want every creative person who’s ever wanted to devote themselves fully to their arts and crafts to be free to do so on their own terms. I mourn the tremendous waste of gifts and talents happening every day as artists spend so much time and energy in jobs to meet basic survival needs while their art gets pushed into the margins of their lives. Art is essential; it’s not a frivolous luxury. People need art. There have even been times in my life during which art, music, books, and dance were the only reasons I wanted to go on living. How many brilliant artistic works have never come into being because artists are forced into flipping burgers just to make ends meet? That’s a massive loss to all of us. In order to promote artists’ work, there should be a system that allows them to keep their art without having to worry about finances. As well, more and more schemes should be introduced that can help them in borrowing money as an artist. This might enable them to continue to work on their art while they take care of their financial issues. UBI could free artists to be of service in the way we do best. If we could meet our basic needs without having to sell our labor to employers to survive, the arts would flourish. That’s the world I want to live in. UBI could help us build that world.
More broadly, though, I started promoting UBI because I wanted to ease the burdens of all economically marginalized populations, including caregivers and other unpaid laborers. UBI could provide a means of harm reduction and self-determination for those who are struggling financially. I want to liberate work from the constraints of paid employment, and empower people to say no to coercive employment. Massive suffering occurs every day because people are divided into “deserving” and “undeserving” categories based on our ability and/or willingness to hold wage jobs. This is fundamental moral injustice. People who aren’t in paid employment – or can’t work at all – should not be treated as if they are worthless. Benefits recipients should not be forced to prove their worth in order to receive food, shelter, and health care. Many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, for example, are suffering and dying because they aren’t healthy enough to maintain employment sufficient to pay their bills, yet the authorities deem them “not disabled enough” to qualify for disability income. UBI is desperately needed. It could save lives.
I do support reduced working hours, increased vacation time, job-sharing, and other policies that allow greater flexibility for employees. If well-implemented, these can be steps in the right direction. But those strategies only apply to employed people. UBI can make life easier for people outside of paid employment. I want people who hate their jobs to be able to quit without fear of homelessness and poverty. I want to help create conditions in which those who don’t want jobs don’t have to take them, and those who do want jobs can enter into them by choice and interest instead of by coercion born of financial need. When people don’t have the option to say no to selling their labor, they are much more easily exploited. A properly implemented UBI could strengthen the negotiating position of the labor force and reduce the suffering people endure when they can’t find employment that pays enough to meet their basic needs.
As for my career as a critic of job culture, I figure I’m justified in adopting the oxymoron “professional anticareerist” after 20 years of autodidactic study in a field of my own design, tongue-in-cheek though the title may be.
KM: Relatedly, do you think that, as a policy reform, UBI is sufficient to allow people to promote more opportunities for unpaid work, more leisure time, and the attendant ecological benefits to which you allude in your article?
DJS: I think it’s a necessary reform, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. A well-implemented UBI would be a major step in the right direction, but building a culture that values leisure and respects unpaid workers will require us to loosen the ideological chokehold of compulsory paid employment and the Puritan work ethic. I founded The Anticareerist (formerly known as Rethinking the Job Culture and whywork.org) to help facilitate this culture change.
So much of American culture is centered around a norm of full-time paid employment. Many people in the U.S. rely on jobs not just for income, but for health insurance. Making health insurance conditional upon employment or spousal relationships, as the U.S. does, exerts powerful coercive forces that keep many people stuck in unhealthy jobs and relationships to ensure they maintain access to healthcare. UBI alone would certainly be insufficient to address major structural issues like that, especially in the current political climate.
Regarding the ecological benefits of UBI…it’s often overlooked that compulsory paid employment is a major contributor to ecological crisis. As Ken Knabb puts it in his essay Strong Lessons for Engaged Buddhists:
“As long as there is big money to be made by producing weapons or ravaging the environment, someone will do it, regardless of moral appeals to people’s good will; if a few conscientious persons refuse, a multitude of others will scramble for the opportunity to do it in their place.”
Why does that multitude of others scramble for the opportunity to participate in ecological destruction? Because in a world without UBI, people desperately need jobs – any jobs – to pay for food and shelter right now, and that’s a powerful enough incentive that it leads our species to act in ways that threaten our long-term survival. What might we do with our time instead, if we weren’t forced into ecologically destructive jobs in order to feed and house ourselves? UBI provides a means to enable people to refuse ecologically harmful employment, and that’s a necessary reform…but even with a UBI in place, we’ll still need to address other incentives, norms, and ideologies that reward pathological behavior and punish responsible behavior.
KM: Some proponents of a job guarantee also support broadening the concept of “work” to include care work, housekeeping, volunteering, creative work, and so on–work like you describe in your article. That is, they would extend the job guarantee to cover such work. And, of course, employment would be guaranteed by the government, so doing the work wouldn’t require self-marketing. The job guarantee could also be accompanied by a shorter workweek and more vacation-time, to guarantee more time for leisure; it could even be a drastic reduction to allow for the interesting and important states of “deep leisure” that you describe. Some advocates of a job guarantee do also support shorter working hours, after all; the policies are not incompatible. Would you support such a job guarantee? Assuming that you would still prefer UBI, why?
DJS: Well, for starters, I’ll say that if I were offered government-guaranteed pay to do my self-driven creative work on my own terms – i.e., the work I’d be doing anyway, whether or not I ever got paid – I’d gladly accept it. So in theory, a job guarantee sounds like it could be an improvement on what we’ve got now. However, without getting into policy details, I don’t believe it could be implemented in a way that would make it so. It would be much more complicated than basic income.
Furthermore, it’s still conditional income. What would happen to me if I could no longer write, nor do any work at all? Is my life only valuable to the extent I can be productive (however “productive” is defined)?
A job guarantee leaves the dominant work ethic unchallenged, and I think this is one reason many people find it preferable to UBI. Everyone must earn their pay – or so the story goes – and those who don’t work don’t deserve to eat. This ideology is surely among the most deeply entrenched cultural barriers to a UBI. It’s a powerful shaper of policy, and all the more so because it’s so rarely called into question. Fundamentally, my goal is to break the coercive link between paid employment and survival. A job guarantee doesn’t address that, so I wouldn’t support it. Without a UBI in place, a job guarantee would still amount to coerced labor on the state’s terms. In my vision of justice, people are regarded as intrinsically valuable regardless of their employment status or productivity.
KM: Sometimes the poor and unemployed, including those on welfare, do make claims like, “I don’t want a handout from the government; I want a job so that I can support myself,” implying that they themselves do see paid employment, not government-provided financial security, as a source of freedom and independence. What would you say to such individuals? Do they have a false consciousness?
DJS: Unpacking this can get complicated quickly. In cultures organized around paid employment – i.e., the cultures most of us live in – it’s true that jobs are genuinely important to many people. I don’t think they have a false consciousness, because these beliefs do make sense within the normative framing conditions of the dominant job culture. Often, unemployed people feel as if they don’t have a socially acceptable place to belong in the world, whereas a job can bring instant respect and recognition.
When gainful employment is equated with dignity and benefits recipients are maligned as “welfare bums,” it’s understandable that many people become accustomed to tying their self-worth to paid jobs. According to this narrative, wage labor – any wage labor – is vastly preferable to welfare, because jobs are inherently morally good. These cultural norms also place responsibility for economic productivity on the shoulders of individuals, which is convenient for capitalism because it diverts attention away from the immense harm caused by structural forces that force people into jobs.
Conflating the word work with paid employment also devalues and obscures unpaid labor, which compounds the problem. For example, it’s common to refer to those who aren’t in the labor pool as “not working,” regardless of whatever other forms of work they may be doing outside the job market. If I clean my own house, for example, that’s not considered “work,” but if I clean someone else’s house and they pay me for it, then suddenly I’m doing economically productive work. The dominant narrative asserts that all paid work is good because it provides jobs, and those jobs are necessary for survival. If we don’t question the veracity of this paid-employment-is-the-only-real-work narrative, and we internalize social taboos against desiring income without working for it, then it’s logical to come to the conclusions you describe above.
But you asked what I’d say to them. Most likely I’d encourage them to look into the work of writers and thinkers who challenge this narrative, such as David Frayne, James Chamberlain, Kathi Weeks, Sharon Beder, Peter Frase, and David Graeber. Graeber suggests “a labor theory of value that starts with women’s work & caring labor as the paradigm,” for example. I think that would be a great start to dismantling the notion that paid jobs make people “self-supporting.” That’s a misleading notion, because it obscures our interdependence and devalues all the unpaid labor that undergirds the job market.
KM: You mention, in passing, that there are “good reasons” why your creative work “should probably remain unpaid”. Do you mean this independent of the fact that you need to devote so much work and effort to securing funders? That is, even if your creative work could become a guaranteed job, there are reasons it might be better off unpaid? If so, this seems like it could be a relevant and important difference between a UBI and a job guarantee like the one I just described, and I wonder if you would elaborate more on this. What are these “good reasons”?
DJS: Good question! It deserves a full essay of its own, but here’s a start.
I have a saying: “endarken the work.” This is how I remind myself that my best creative work – the kind that’s worthy of being called art – emerges through immersion in endarkened or daimonic states. I cannot control these forces of endarkenment; they live in the realms of the gift, and they show up of their own accord. I can only surrender to them.
Dwelling in these endarkened states of creative flow requires me to trust my gut and allow my instincts to point the way. (By the way, I love the phrase “trust your gut,” as it’s an everyday acknowledgment of embodied forms of intelligence other than the much-vaunted intellect.) I cannot steer this process toward any external outcome desired by my waking mind, whether that be money, attention, praise, love, or influence. My conscious mind must act as servant, not as master. The work must be undertaken willingly, and it must be done for its own sake. It must be done because these are the gifts I’ve been given, and this is the work I’m entrusted to carry out. Period. If I attempt to monetize the creative process itself, hurry it along, or shape it into any form it does not want to take, I compromise its integrity or spirit.
When the work feels complete and true, then I can start thinking about how or whether to market it. If I consider monetary factors too soon, the creative process becomes truncated, because I’ve squeezed the work into the straitjacket of the conscious mind’s agenda. Audiences know the difference between work produced for an agenda and work infused with the integrity of daimonic states. They may not be able to explain it, but they can feel it.
One of my favorite writers, Stephen Harrod Buhner, describes writing that emerges from these endarkened states of relaxed receptivity as “soaked in life force.” I think that’s an apt description. This is also where the deepest joys of work reside for me: in spaces of creative endarkenment. I think of these processes as forms of everyday magic. Like William Morris, I believe that taking pleasure in the work itself is a necessary condition for the creation of artistic beauty.
As a writer who works with daimonic forces, I have certain obligations: to keep honing my skills so I can be a fit vessel for the work; to arrange my life so that I can respond appropriately when words show up of their own accord (“daimonic necessity,” as Matt Cardin calls it); and to make allowances for fallow periods. As I wrote in my original piece, states of deep leisure are essential components of my creative process. Without sufficient leisure, silence, and stillness, I cannot endarken the work.
In a world without UBI, it’s difficult to maintain conditions that permit me to work this way, because leisure, silence, and stillness are made artificially scarce. I live in a culture that considers it not only acceptable but morally right that everyone should have to “earn a living” on the employer’s terms. The implicit threat underlying employment negotiations is: if you don’t find employment that earns enough money, you’ll be denied the basic means of life. Most people don’t have the option to say no to employment, which makes this structural coercion a fundamental moral injustice. If I don’t have time for creative incubation because my paid job consumes nearly all of my time and energy, then I can’t produce work that is infused with the daimonic.
So when I wrote that there are good reasons my creative work “should probably remain unpaid,” I didn’t mean my creative work is unworthy of payment. I’m talking about motivation. I mean that financial motives (or any motive that does not respect the integrity of daimonic forces) can compromise the integrity of creative work. In a world with UBI, I could do that daimonic work on its own terms, without regard to its marketability, and I could still pay my bills. That would liberate a great deal of energy, which would in turn allow me to produce better work. The same goes for all the other creators out there whose time and talents are being channeled into what Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” instead of devoted to their creative work.
In my original piece, I linked to your thought-provoking article “A ‘Paid Volunteer’ Against the Monetization of Voluntary Labor (and for Basic Income),” in which you wrote:
“…it seems that voluntary work is best supported and encouraged not by the monetization of that work, but by the provision of financial support entirely independent of that work – the type of financial support that would be provided, for instance, by an unconditional basic income. […] It is better to have enough financial security to work for no pay than to receive payment directly for the same work.”
I agree. My preference would be to receive unconditional income sufficient to allow me to work for no pay, rather than to receive direct payment for it. I have strong sources of intrinsic motivation to do creative work already, so I don’t need money as a motivator. But I do need it for material sustenance, so as long as I live in a world that requires me to “earn a living,” I must seek payment for it and/or maintain a day job for income.
Typically, when artists decry “selling out,” we’re talking about compromising the integrity of the creative process in order to satisfy market demands. “Art should be free” is one way of trying to give voice to this truth, but that phrasing is vague and easily misunderstood. Whether or not we can put it into words, artists intuit that art should be free of coercion. We know that true art comes to us as a gift. But that doesn’t mean art is financially worthless. It’s important not to conflate “free” in the creative sense with “free” in the financial sense.
We’re faced with a real dilemma, because art is socially valuable, and the world benefits when it’s made widely available. That’s what we’re getting at when we say things like “art should be free.” But if we make our art available free of charge in a world that requires us to “earn a living,” then our labor goes unrewarded. Art is real work. Art has social and political costs, many of which remain hidden to the general public. As things stand now, those costs are disproportionately borne by the artists themselves.
What causes this dilemma? The need to earn a living. The “starving artist” is not a problem inherent to art. Nor is it a problem inherent to money. The problem is structural; it’s about power relations. The problem is the need to sell our time for money. It’s hard to make space for full surrender to the creative process in a world that shoehorns nearly everyone into paid employment just to prove we deserve food, shelter, and healthcare.
When artists lose control over our time because we spend most of it at our employers’ behest, we pay a high price individually and culturally. That’s one of the tragedies of compulsory paid employment, and one of the reasons I started The Anticareerist.
KM: You have a very interesting passage in which you stress that Patreon is “a far cry from UBI”. I must say that, as someone who has dabbled in crowdfunding through Patreon, I couldn’t agree more. But, as you no doubt know, there’s a lot of talk in the basic income community about the writer and advocate Scott Santens as someone who crowdfunds “his own basic income” on Patreon. Indeed, Santens himself talks about having a “basic income” due to his support on Patreon. What is your opinion on the use of those like Santens as (purported) examples of people “who already have basic incomes”? Do you think it’s at all misleading or even dangerous to the movement?
DJS: In Scott’s case, I suspect that framing his Patreon earnings as a “basic income” may be a consciously chosen rhetorical strategy to attract support for the UBI movement. As a basic income writer, he’s demonstrating what he can do for the world when he’s given enough support by his readers to free him from the need to hold a conventional job. He’s using the phrase very loosely, for sure, because Patreon is arts patronage, not basic income. Scott doesn’t have a UBI; he has crowdfunding patronage that supports his media activism. UBI is unconditional and available to all. Patreon support is conditional, and it’s available only to those with sufficient artistic, social, promotional, and technical skills – and time! – to pursue their art while also managing a Patreon campaign.
Do I think the way he’s describing his income is dangerous? No. Misleading? Yes. However, considering our dire need for UBI – people suffer and die from preventable ailments every day for lack of a few hundred dollars – I’m also pragmatic enough to think this misuse is mitigated by the way his work helps to shift the dominant narrative and attract support for UBI sooner than it might come otherwise.
Scott wrote:
“Let’s get something straight here. It’s not that people with unconditional basic incomes won’t work. It’s that people with an actual choice instead of no real choice may not choose YOUR work at YOUR price. Basic income is the basic freedom to choose both OUR work and OUR price.”
Because he’s fortunate enough to have that ongoing financial support in place, he’s able to do his work by choice. Clearly he wants all of us to be so lucky, which is why he’s devoting his life to basic income activism. He knows what it’s costing the world not to have it. I respect that greatly. In a recent interview he said:
“There’s someone right now who is flipping burgers just to get by. They’re working for poverty wages for 100 hours a week. They’re too busy to be focused on really important, world-changing work. What is the cost to society of that? You can’t put a price tag on that.”
Indeed!
So although I’d prefer more accurate language about his crowdfunding situation – I’m a word nerd, after all – I think this is a minor “infraction,” especially when compared to the way so much of the discourse in the basic income movement reinforces the dominant work ethic.
KM: We see a lot of discussion these days about the idea that basic income encourages employment, because it removes a financial disincentive for those on welfare to take jobs. We see perhaps even more cases of basic income advocates rebutting the concern that people would work less if they had a basic income; a lot of proponents of UBI are eager to cite studies that show it doesn’t decrease employment. What is your reaction to this type of basic income discourse? Does it make you at all skeptical of the ability of basic income to combat the job culture?
DJS: I’ve been a basic income supporter for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled to see how much the movement has grown in recent years. But the prevalence of rhetoric supporting productivist values and the dominant work ethic troubles me enough that I often feel alienated from the movement. I think anti-careerism/un-jobbing needs an organized movement of its own. Ideally we could work collaboratively with the basic income movement.
Nonetheless, considering that the work ethic is so firmly entrenched, it does make sense that some of the discourse focuses on challenging the notion that UBI is about “enabling laziness” or discouraging work.
I find it discouraging that a typical first reaction to the idea of UBI is “but wouldn’t people just spend it on drugs or be lazy and not work?” Only in a world that normalizes compulsory employment could it be so widely accepted that people should be driven into jobs by shame about “laziness” and fear of destitution rather than by choice and interest. I think “laziness” is often a healthy resistance – a mutiny of the soul, as Charles Eisenstein calls it – to a coercive job culture. Even if some people were “lazy,” though, so what? Who cares? Coercing people into jobs they hate costs us a lot more than providing them with a UBI – not just economically, but also psychologically, socially, culturally, and ecologically. “Lazy” people stuck in ecologically harmful jobs for the sake of a paycheck could do more for the world by quitting their jobs and lying on the couch than they could by staying in those jobs. I’ll cheer them on!
When I first learned about UBI, “laziness” didn’t even cross my mind. I thought about how it might allow me to quit my day job and write on my own terms instead of my employer’s. I thought about how it could empower people to resist coercive employment. I thought about how it could enable people to leave abusive partners. I thought about how it could reduce food insecurity. I thought about how beneficial it would be for welfare recipients to receive support without the stigma and means-testing of a punitive social assistance system.
I also thought: How many people are doing tremendously beneficial work right now without much (or any) income from it? “A lot” would be a massive understatement; I think everyone reading this could name many of them without even missing a beat. How much easier could their lives be with UBI? Would we rather continue to allow masses of people to suffer because we think jobs prevent a few people from “being lazy,” when we could instead be saving lives, freeing people from abusive relationships, easing the burdens of care labor, and promoting a flourishing of the arts?
That said, I do think it’s important to note one of the ironies here: namely, that many people, myself included, yearn for a UBI out of ongoing frustration at not being able to do more of the work they want to do. This interview is a good example. It took me many months to squeeze in enough time to answer these questions, since most of my waking hours are consumed by wage labor and maintaining a household. In a world with UBI, my creativity would flourish, because I’d be free to do my unpaid work. I’m confident that I could be of much greater service to the world as a writer without a job (but with UBI!) than I can with one. But until we live in a world with a UBI, I doubt I’ll have a chance to prove it.
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by Guest Contributor | Apr 13, 2018 | Opinion
Written by Anca Stănescu
The saying goes that every person is the change he or she wants to see in the world; that every good action has an impact on others; that we just have to want to change something and we can do it. Is that really how the world works?
What if each human being is empowered to change himself or herself for the better, perhaps the world just improves on its own.
How many of us really have the freedom to actively think about making the world a better place? How many people can enjoy the certainty of a decent life, peace, time and a lack of worries about day to day life? The world could change itself for the better if the Earth’s nearly eight billion people all enjoyed this kind of freedom.
This state of freedom is attainable and it is called Universal Basic Income.
Universal Basic Income implies that every human being has the right to life. Many will say that the right to life is already the most natural right of the human being, guaranteed in the constitutions and conventions of the world. Is this really the way it is?
In order for us to live, we need food and water in the first place. However, as long as food and water are not free resources, but assets in the possession of someone who will only provide them to us in exchange for an amount of money, how are we still guaranteed the right to life if we do not have that amount of money? We are not. The right to life is an obsolete clause in an agreement concluded between one seller and nearly 8 billion buyers.
Next to food and water, we need walls and a roof. We also need some utilities, such as a heating system of our home, so we don’t get sick and therefore are able to exercise this so-called guaranteed right – the right to life. Now, it may be a stretch to say we have the right to maintain this with a roofing contractor, but think about it. We deserve to have our walls and roof maintained, kept safe and well for us to live under. Plus we also need to know that we are entitled to these few basic resources without conditions, that we can enjoy them for the entire duration of our life (to which, of course, we are entitled) and they will not be taken away from us, so we don’t get sick of the thought that we have to struggle to survive, and therefore we can exercise our right to life. We do not get any of these when we are born. Everything has to be bought. And everything is bought with money. All these basic resources only ensure a decent survival – not happiness, not self-esteem, just survival. These are essential to us, that is why there are companies who are trying to adapt and advance their technology and mechanics so that people who have utilities are able to use them safely and efficiently without worrying that there will be an issue that they will be left without. This includes installing new equipment such as stronger powerlines, safety wiring, disconnect switches, etc. If people want to know “what are disconnect switches?” or “how do I get safety wiring installed?” they will need to discuss this with their utility providers and see how they can keep these necessities safe within their homes.
So the right to life, written on paper, means nothing as long as survival must be bought with cash. And if life must be bought, then let’s all, unconditional, guaranteed, and continuously, have that amount of money, enough just to cover our basic needs. Let us all have a universal basic income, a sufficiently large amount of money obtained unconditionally and (perhaps) monthly, to provide every human being with the possibility to buy the floor of existence – food, water, shelter and access to utilities – in such a way that on this floor anyone can voluntarily and creatively build new levels of existence.
No, people will not stop working and productivity will not drop, because once the basic needs are fulfilled, human beings will have other needs too. We will continue to work in order to satisfy the needs on the upper levels of the pyramid, which only in the presence of a universal basic income could really become needs to make the world a better place.
In a world where no one has to worry for survival, every human being has the freedom and the power to change for the better. Maybe the saying should go that the world changes human beings for the better, and not the other way around.
Anca divides her free time between writing on a science blog and gathering basic income supporters. She is an early advocate of basic income in her country, having launched in 2016 the first Romanian website devoted to the promotion of basic income fundamentals.
References:
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
https://medium.com/basic-income/if-we-no-longer-force-people-to-work-to-meet-their-basic-needs-won-t-they-stop-working-3996442b7585
