by Guest Contributor | Mar 28, 2018 | Opinion
Written by Michael Laitman
Michael Laitman
Sadly, 33,000 Toys ‘R’ Us employees are about to be let go. They’ll pack that family vacation picture from their office wall in a brown cardboard box, take a toy or two for keepsakes, and, begrudgingly, go home. They will be joining a growing list of hundreds of thousands of people who are losing their jobs, not because they need to improve their performance or their work ethic, but simply because they are no longer needed.
More and more products are being manufactured using robots, which is more cost-effective for companies, as well as cheaper for consumers, who can order online with a swipe of a finger. Toys ‘R’ Us is only one example of the virtual-technological tsunami that is washing over the business world. It appears in the form giant corporations such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google and their trade partners, trampling every area of commerce possible: retail, banking, clothing, food, advertising and more. This wave doesn’t stop at the private sector; it’s washing away the public sector as well. For instance, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon are already on a joint venture to reinvent healthcare.
While it may seem like a silent revolution, these changes promise a socio-economic earthquake the likes of which humanity has never seen before. The virtual-technological future is gradually taking over the very foundations of the global economy and businesses are having to adjust to the change. From small things like providing virtual collaboration training for their employees to implementing more efficient computing operations, technology is changing every industry.
It is becoming normal to talk about robots replacing human labor, but we still have not yet acknowledged the magnitude of this change. Many politicians, economists, and analysts are seeing this as another industrial revolution that comes with labor pains, giving birth to a whole slew of new professions, and are predicting that a newly booming economy will emerge as a result. The use of machinery is always needed in manufacturing circles, that is why universal mills, CNC machines, lathe machines, etc. are constantly evolving to assist in as many areas as possible, hopefully not to entirely take over jobs just yet. Machines play a huge part in this industry, no matter how they are used, so it is important for them to function as a unit and provide what is needed of them. When they have to be moved, fixed, or changed, the use of equipment like Custom Skates as well as other supplies, are needed to keep everything efficiently moving along.
Surely, this is an encouraging view, but it is based on a limited understanding of new technologies being developed at an exponential speed. Even today, we could automate 45% of the activities people are paid to perform in the U.S. with existing technologies.
It’s not about the advanced machinery that replaces our hands and feet at work. It’s about the artificial intelligence being developed to gradually replace human intelligence. AI will think creatively, produce, analyze, develop, program, and work many times more efficiently than the most gifted employee, all the while being many times cheaper and easy to operate.
Artificial intelligence can learn and self-upgrade much faster than a person’s ability to retrain, and will eventually replace human labor everywhere: scientists, doctors, programmers, designers, financial experts, human resource managers. Only a fraction of the workforce will be required to operate and calibrate the various smart machines and advanced software.
Let’s Revolutionize Society – Without the Pitchforks
If you can fathom the future of technology, you can immediately spot the upcoming social crisis. Masses will go into indefinite unemployment, and modern economics will have no answers for them. Current economic models can hardly deal with a 15% unemployment rate. What’s going to happen when we hit 30%, 40% and 50% unemployment? That is unaccounted for in current economics.
If we settle for positive thinking, hoping this upheaval will somehow result in a new booming economy, we run the risk of a mass unemployment crisis. If masses of people have no hope of providing for their basic necessities, they will not sit calmly at home. Without hope, people could default to violence, extremism and support of radical leaders who will offer economic safety in order to come to power, as we have seen in the past.
Alternatively, if we plan in advance, we can revolutionize society – without a revolution. The sooner we acknowledge the inevitable redesign of our socio-economic infrastructure, in a way that jobs will no longer exist in the same sense as before, we will come to grips with the necessity to provide for the basic needs of all members of society.
Whether we do it through some form of Universal Basic Income, or any other technical mechanism, we must understand that a change of social values is the core issue at hand: Every country’s leadership must acknowledge that looking out for the basic needs of every citizen-food, shelter, clothing, education and health-is their top priority.
But what will people give back to society? If only few man-hours will be necessary to maintain the machines, what will human beings do? They will be busy “being human,” which means developing themselves, their families, their societies and all that makes us human rather than robots.
The Real Driver of Technology Is Human Evolution
The so-called “technological revolution” is not accidental, and it’s not actually technological. It’s an evolutionary revolution. Its purpose is the evolution of human society. It will help us step out of the endless rat race, fueled by a material obsession that doesn’t actually make us happy; a chase around the clock that has created a society of little cogs in giant corporations, accumulating stress and rust, while losing touch with one another and ourselves.
Instead of investing our collective energy into working like machines, we could be engaging in the only work that makes humans different from machines. In a society freed from the cyclical chase for material acquisition, we would invest a large portion of our time on a daily basis, investigating, exercising, and developing the sense of the natural human connection that binds us together. One method to realize our potential as human beings at the workplace is to engage in a variety of activities that are not directly related to work. Let’s say you’re at an event hosted by Uniqueworld destination management companies or something similar, and you get a glimpse of how employers function outside of the office. This could give you an outlook on what all you can do as an employer that might benefit your company.
When masses of people are doing this regularly-as their new job-a new society will undoubtedly emerge. Its product will be the positive social energy required to preserve societal balance. It will be a society whose members’ daily work is to maintain the sense of unity and solidarity that prevent violence and extremism, allowing human beings to live together in productive peace.
This work can be done in unlimited creative ways, where people can apply their passion and desire, as long as they contribute to a warm social climate. But it has to start from fundamental training and education on the science of human connection, learning how positive social connections make us healthier, happier and better at everything we do.
Surely, all of the above sounds foreign in a world where we have been trained by advertisers to chase things we don’t need in order to impress people we can’t connect with. But when material needs are taken care of, human nature demands a deeper, more meaningful type of satisfaction. It’s no coincidence that happiness studies show time after time that healthy social relations are the number one predictor of human flourishing.
Our evolutionary social development pushes us to utilize our wiring for human connection, to distill it through constant work on our relationships, and evolve to a new social reality. Rather than competing with robots for an old school job, let’s make our job the only function that no robot will ever replace, and find the kind of happiness that money will never buy.
Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
Featured image from Wikipedia.
Editing by Dawn Howard
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 14, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in May 2009.
The global recession has been spreading and deepening for nearly a year. It could become the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it has captured nearly all of the attention we, our media, and our leaders pay to economic issues. Perhaps we’re paying too much attention to it. I want to convince you in this editorial that a recession—even a major depression—is not an economic problem of the first magnitude. Our most pressing economic problems are distribution, and they exist whether we are in recession or not. Recessions appear to be a major problem primarily because we allow existing distributional problems to get worse during recessions.
To see my argument, imagine that you lived through the entire Twentieth Century. You were born on January 1st, 1900 and died exactly 100 years later on January 1st, 2000. During all of that time, you were a member of a representative American family of three with an income equal to the average U.S. income for a family of that size.
I have included figures below of average income per person and per family of three for the entire Twentieth Century. The appendix includes a table with the background data for these figures as well as some information about the percentage changes you’re looking it. Don’t fear all these numbers. I’ll just ask you to glance at it and take a closer look at a few important ones. These figures are “adjusted for inflation” meaning that they are reported in 2008 prices. It is notoriously difficult to adjust for inflation in a world in which the prices of different goods are changing at different rates, new products are being introduced, and old products are being discontinued. Adjusting for inflation is much more subjective than most economists let on, but these figures represent our best guess about how to do it.
Financially, your imaginary family did awfully well during the Twentieth Century. A simple glance at the graph shows that your family’s income goes up and down, but mostly up. Your family’s income started at about $20,000 in 1900. It rose sporadically to reach $136,000 in 1999. That an increase of more than 577 percent—almost six times what your family made the day you were born. In the early years you could not have afford a computer, television, and many things we now take for granted, but your family’s $20,000 income would have been more than enough to pay for a home, for food, and for clothing for the whole family. At no time in that 100 year period would your family have had any difficulty securing its basic needs, and you were able to consume many luxuries as well.
Figure 1: GDP per family of three for the Twentieth Century
THIS FIGURE FAILED TO UPLOAD.
Figure 2: GDP per capita for the Twentieth Century
THIS FIGURE FAILED TO UPLOAD.
Your income didn’t rise every year; it fluctuated with the business cycle. Glance down the third column of the appendix table. That shows the percentage change in your income from year to year. The years when your income dropped (shown in bold) are the recession years. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, the business cycle was volatile. Your income could go down 9 percent one year and up 10 percent the next. But if you look at the graph, you see that the only downturn that looks terribly significant was the period of 1930-1933, when over four years your family’s income declined from by nearly 25% from $34,093 to $23,607.
You might be tempted to think that 1945-1947 was worse because your income declined by a greater percentage in a shorter time. To see that this isn’t so, you have to realize that there is a lot this table doesn’t show. I doesn’t show how hard you are working, how much you want to work, and what you’re working for. You had a great increase in your income during the years 1940-1945, but that was largely because you were working extra hard for the goal of winning the Second World War. The decline from 1945 to 1947 mostly reflects that you no longer needed to work so hard because the war was won. Your income in 1947 (after 3-years of decline) was still more than 25% percent higher than 1940 and 85% higher than in 1933. You were actually doing just fine in that year.
The depression was different. You didn’t want to work any less in those years, but as a representative American, you were unemployed 25% of the time in 1933. This would have been difficult for your family. You might have had to sell some of your luxuries or move into a smaller home. But your inflation-adjusted income was still more than 16 percent higher than when you were born. If you could feed, cloth, and house your family in 1900, you could do so in 1933 and you could have spent all of your additional income on luxuries that you couldn’t afford in 1900. As a representative American family, you were not in financial distress even in the depths of the Great Depression. There would have been no reason for a member of your family to stand in a bread line or head to California in search of work as a migrant farm laborer.
After 1950, the business cycle became even less of a problem for you and your family. You experienced the occasional 1 or 2 percent decline, but such a small decline would have been barely noticeable, especially with your income being 300% or 400% higher than a few decades earlier. The worst recessions such as in the mid 70s and early 80s caused less than a 3 percent drop in your income. That might have slowed your accumulation of savings or caused you to put off buying a new luxury for a year or two, but no more than that.
The current recession might well cause national income to drop by 6 percent this year. Suppose it goes on, and we experience a decline similar to the Great Depression, say lowering national income to 20 percent less than it was in 1999. That would bring the income of our representative American family down to $109,509—higher than in the boom year of 1987. That means, even if we suffer the worst depression since the 1930s, we will still have a greater technical capacity to feed, clothe, house, and provide luxuries our people than we did in the boom year of 1987. If we dealt with such a crisis sensibly, it would affect only our consumption of luxuries, not necessities.
These facts illustrate the point that I’m trying to make: if we keep in mind the truly important economic issues, recessions are something we can easily handle. The most important thing about your income is not whether it rises or falls by a few percentage points in a given year, but that’s all a recession is. The most important thing is not even that your income grows over time, although a growing income is always nice. Actually, the most important thing about your income is that it meets your needs.
Our main concern about the national economy should be same the same as each individual’s main concern about his or her own income. Before worrying about the bankers, or about the rise or fall of an abstract figure like GDP, we should ask ourselves: how can we secure food, housing, clothing, medical care, and education for everyone? Whether we are in a recession or not has little to do with our answer to that question. Going back to 1776, there has never been a time when America lacked the economic capacity to secure every citizen’s needs. Nor was there a time when it was even close. This fact is not unique to America. Economist Amartya Sen has found evidence that there has not been a famine in modern history in which any nation actually lacked the economic capacity to feed its citizens. Modern famines have all been caused by mal-distribution of plentiful resources.
Sen’s observation is true only for modern history, not for all of human history. The Norse in Greenland, the Mayan Empire, the Easter Islanders and other societies all apparently experienced episodes in which they simply could not feed their people. But these were environmental disasters, not financial depressions. Once we solve the important economic problems of how to secure our needs without screwing up our environment, even a severe depression means no more than a fluctuation in our accumulation of luxuries. Distribution of necessities is what is important, not a 10 percent fluctuation in our ability to produce luxuries. A recession is a trivial issue for the nation as a whole; it is a minor fluctuation in output. This could and should cause no more than a pause in our accumulation of luxuries.
Of course, what actually happens during recessions is significant: more people are in poverty; more people are homeless; more people lack their necessities; more people have reason to fear economic security. All of this is true, but it is only true because we allow it to happen. We had the technical capacity to eliminate economic deprivation in the recession years of 1982 and 1992 just as we did in the boom years of 1987 and 1999. We did not do solve these problems in boom years and we let them get worse in recession years. A recession cannot hurt anyone in a significant way unless we let it. The tragedy is that we let it.
-Karl Widerquist, begun in Reykjavik, Iceland, completed in Oxford, UK, May 2009
Appendix: GDP per capita and per family of three in constant 2008 dollars for the Twentieth Century
by Karl Widerquist | Feb 7, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in June 2008.
What does the Stone Age have to do with modern justice? According to property rights advocates: everything; their arguments rely on two factual claims that can be enlightened by a look at prehistoric anthropology. (1) Property begins as individual property and then governments come along and impose taxes that interfere with the rights of owners. (2) A market economy with no restrictions on inequality makes everyone better off than they were befor the private property was created (i.e. when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers).
I have heard private property advocates make these claims many times, but I’ve never seen them support those claims by referring to anthropological studies of prehistory. How do we know that property began as private property? Are we sure that every single modern worker is better off than our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Recently I’ve taken a look at some anthropological studies including Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins, Bronze Age Economics and How Chiefs Come to Power by Timothy Earle, and The Evolution of Political Society by Morton Fried. I found out that the claims of property rights advocates don’t hold up very well.
To examine the first claim, we need to go back to the creation of fixed property rights in the Bronze Age. Property rights advocates like to imagine land being first appropriated by individualistic pioneers who tamed the wilderness by their own efforts. But that’s not what actually happened. The transformation from hunting and gathering to a settled agricultural life took the joint act of entire bands not simply one person. The rights of land tenure in primitive settled communities were extremely varied, but it seldom if ever looked anything like the neoliberal systems that property rights advocates suppose. In the earliest agricultural societies, every individual had a right of direct access to the land, which was usually owned (if at all) by villages or large extended families. In slightly more economically advanced societies where property rights have become exclusive, the original owners are not private businessmen, but chiefs. Ownership of resources was synonymous with ownership of the government.
The reason chiefs doubled as owners is obvious: the earliest societies were too economically simple to have separate spheres of power—such as government, religion, and business. All of these powers were vested in one person. The Hawaiian Islands were first settled by human beings around the year 600 and so they provide a very recent example of the first creation of property rights. For the most part by the 1400s, each island was run by a chief who owned the land and the irrigation systems that made everyone’s efforts to farm the land viable. Local lords were employees of the chief. They doled out land to peasants only if the peasants promised the interests of the chief. In short, the chief ran his island as a wholly-owned, for-profit business.
Property rights advocates sometimes claim that only recent history matters, but taxation and regulation of property are not new. Modern governments inherited their regulatory powers from medieval kings, who owned the right to regulate their domain in any way they saw fit. Modern landlords hold titles that derive from the medieval vassals of the king. Government taxation is simply the exercise of property rights that are as old as or older than private holdings of property. Some countries went through a brief laissez faire period in the Nineteenth Century, when governments chose to tax and regulate less than before. But I know of no government that signed an enforceable contract to alienate its rights over its domain. So-called property rights advocates simply want to interfere with the property rights of kings to promote opportunities for his vassals, which has about as much to do with “freedom of property rights against interference” as redistribution from condo associations to condo owners, from landlords to tenants, or from stock holders to middle management. If the property rights system the king set up is unjust, his rights should go to the people, not his lords. If the property rights system the king set up is just, we must respect his rights and not force him to cede power to his lords.
To examine the second claim, we need to go back all the way to the Stone Age. Studies of hunter-gatherer communities that survived into the Twentieth Century show that people worked an average of three to four hours per day (including time spent preparing food and commuting). They worked at their own pace and slept more than people do today. Researchers reported that they appeared to feel extremely secure about their ability to find food and other necessities, and they never had to answer to a boss. When a hunter-gatherer is in the mood to forage for food, she sees if anyone else feels like joining her. If not, she waits or goes out alone.
Modern capitalism is a very productive system with great potential to produce goods that could benefit everyone, but as we practice it, it has extreme inequalities. People live on the street and eat out of garbage cans. Others work long hours in sweatshops at the edge of their physical ability and still face the possibility of hunger and malnutrition. Most modern workers have more access to luxuries and better medical care than hunter-gatherers, and on the whole they live longer. But many work longer and harder; they have to follow the orders of a boss; they have less economic security; and do not forget the some individuals die young (and younger than many hunter-gatherers) because of malnutrition and other complications of poverty. In short, the transition from hunter-gatherer society to modern capitalism has not been an unequivocal gain for the working class. It has been a tradeoff. But a tradeoff is not good enough to meet the standards that property rights advocates set for themselves.
I am not the one who put forward the standard that the poor must be at least as well off as their Stone Age ancestors. Property rights advocates chose that standard because they thought it was easy to meet. It is. A society, as productive as ours, can easily make everyone far better off than they would be as hunter-gatherers, but we have failed to do so. The minimum we can do to justify our property rights is to make sure that every single human being has more freedom and economic security our Stone Age ancestors. To make sure the standard it met, we only need to make sure that everyone can have some minimal level basic necessities without having to submit to a boss.
We don’t, I believe, largely because we, the better off, have convinced ourselves that we have the right to boss around the poor. We have property and they don’t; and therefore, supposedly, we have the right to make them do what we say 40 hours per week. Yet, studies of societies without property rights show that our property rights are the only thing coming between the poor and their ability to meet their own needs with less effort and without following anyone’s orders. It is we who owe them, not they who owe us. Perhaps we can make the poor work for us if they want to share in the luxuries of capitalism, but we have no right—even by the standards set by property rights advocates—to force them to work for us just to meet their basic needs.
-Karl Widerquist, New Orleans, LA, May 2008
by Karl Widerquist | Dec 7, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in August 2005.
Jay Hammond, the governor of Alaska from 1975 to 1982, who led the fight to create the Alaska Permanent Fund, was found dead at his Homestead about 185 miles southwest of Anchorage, on Tuesday, August 2, 2005. He led an amazing life. Hammond was a laborer, a fur trapper (by dogsled), a World War II fighter pilot, an Alaskan bush pilot, a husband, a father of three, a wildlife biologist, a backwoods guide, a hunter, a fisher with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a homesteader. Hammond was one of the last people to take advantage of the Civil-War-ear U.S. law giving away land. Other than a requirement to build a house and farm the land for five years, it was given away free—no strings attached.
Hammond was also a hero to everyone who believes that no one should be barred from the resources they need to meet their basic needs—no strings attached.
Hammond got the idea for a resource dividend when he was mayor of a small town on Bristol Bay, Alaska in the 1960s. He realized that salmon were being taken out of the area without necessarily helping the town’s poor. He proposed a three percent tax on all fish caught in the area to be redistributed to all residents of the town. By an enormous stroke of luck, the man who had that idea (and saw it work in Bristol Bay) would be elected governor of Alaska just as the state was beginning construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Oil companies stood to make billions of dollars, and of course, they argued that Alaskans would benefit through new job opportunities, but Hammond knew one way to make sure that every single Alaskan would benefit from the pipeline.
And so the Alaskan Permanent Fund was born. For the last 20 years, every Alaskan has received income from state oil revenues. A portion of the state’s taxes on Alaskan oil goes into an investment fund, which pays dividends from the interest on those investments—hence the permanent fund. Dividends vary, but they are usually more than $1,000 per year for every man, woman, and child living in the state.
The system is not perfect. Hammond told Tim Bradner, of the Anchorage Daily News, that his biggest regret was to let the legislature eliminate the state’s income tax. Without the citizens’ responsibility to pay taxes to support state services the fund will be vulnerable, and the legislature has been trying to raid the fund ever since. So far, the enormous popularity of the fund has protected it fairly well. Hammond also regretted that the fund was too small. Only one-eighth of the state’s oil tax revenues go into the fund. If half of oil tax revenues went into the fund, as Hammond envisioned, every Alaska family of four could expect to receive more than $16,000 this year. Hammond died campaigning to increase the size of the fund.
But the most important thing about the fund is that it exists. It’s simple, it works, and everyone in the state benefits from it every year. How many elected officials can say they did that? According to Sean Butler in Dissent Magazine, Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith, called the Permanent Fund, “a model governments all over the world would be wise to copy.” It is a pilot program for resource taxes and basic income plans all over the world. Economists have recommended the Alaska solution for resource-rich, poverty-ridden countries from Nigeria to Iraq. Just this summer the government of Azerbaijan sent a delegation to Alaska to study the Permanent Fund. You can’t keep a good idea down.
Jay Hammond spoke at the 2004 USBIG Congress in Washington, DC. Here is how Butler describes the event: “The father of the Brazilian basic income, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, also presented at the USBIG conference last year. During his speech, he noticed Jay Hammond sitting in the front row, and, to warm applause from the assembled crowd, descended from the stage to shake his hand. The two basic income pioneers had at last met. Hammond and Suplicy make an odd couple. The Republican Hammond, with his Hemingway-like white beard and grizzly build, wears his far north ethos of self-reliance with pride. Suplicy, a founding member of the left-wing Brazilian Workers Party and a U.S.-trained economist, has the dignified appearance of an intellectual and professional politician. Its tropical socialism meets arctic capitalism; yet somehow, when the two come together over basic income, they get along.”
I had the good fortune to attend that event and meet Governor Hammond. He was warm and engaging. He wasn’t there to bask in the glory of people who admired his past achievements but to fight to keep improving the APF. He was a genuine hero.
An article on Hammond and basic income by Sean Butler, entitled, “Life, Liberty, and a Little Bit of Cash,’ appeared in Dissent Magazine just a few weeks before he died.
There have been many good tributes to Hammond in the news and on the internet since his death. Here are just a few:
Frank Murkowski, current governor of Alaska, “Hammond’s Legacy Will Stand Out,” Alaska Daily News
Tim Bradner, “Hammond has passed; his ideas must live on,” Alaska Daily News
Douglas Martin, “Governor of Alaska Who Paid Dividends,” New York Times
by Kate McFarland | Oct 23, 2017 | Opinion
Relaxing Conditions on ‘Basic Income’: A Case Against Definition
From a linguistic standpoint, there is no one “correct” definition of the term ‘basic income’ [1]. Different groups and organizations have adopted different definitions, suitable to their purposes, and these definitions sometimes conflict with one another.
BIEN, at present, coordinates affiliates who use the term differently from one another, organizes conferences to bring together individuals who use the term differently from one another, and issues news reports on varied stories in which the term is used in different ways.
I have come to believe that, in its role as such an umbrella organization, BIEN’s attempt to define ‘basic income’ does not lend clarity. Instead, to avoid equivocation and confusion, it would do better to admit upfront this diversity in definition and shades of meaning.
BIEN’s Definition of ‘Basic Income’: One Among Many
At its 2016 Congress in Seoul, BIEN adopted the following definition: “A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
When I write for BIEN’s website, I accept this as a stipulative definition of the term, and call attention to potentially confusing differences in usage. For example, when I report on the recently launched “basic income pilot” in Ontario, I note that the program being tested–in which payments to participants are household-based and income-dependent–does not actually satisfy BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ (although, as I emphasize below, it does congeal with an established and widespread use of the term within Canada).
My comments in might sometimes seem to treat BIEN’s definition as privileged or authoritative. This, however, is only an artifact of the particular context in which I am writing–BIEN’s website–and my desire to maintain consistency within this context. I do not believe that BIEN’s definition is privileged in any absolute or objective sense, or that it is more “correct” than other uses that have become established within other groups, organizations, and geographical regions.
As I take it, my prevailing duty as a news writer is to prevent readers from believing false things. In this context, clarity and consistency in meaning are of utmost importance, and BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ is a burden I must bear, knowing that there will be many situations in which it will be inconsistent with the definitions employed by the parties on whom I report.
Two particularly important cases, in my experience, are the following two types of definitions:
- Definitions that additionally stipulate that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
- Definitions that lack the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
A. Definitions stipulating that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
Many high-profile groups and organizations have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ with this additional necessary condition (philosophers may enjoy the opportunity to say that, on these definitions, “the ‘sufficient’ condition is a necessary condition”); for example (emphases added):
- GiveDirectly, the charity organization known in the basic income community for its impending major experiment in Kenya, defines ‘basic income’ as a type of cash transfer that is “unconditional (recipients don’t have to work or do anything else to be eligible), universal, with all members of society receiving, enough to cover basic needs, and guaranteed for the recipients’ lifetimes”.
- International Basic Income Week, an annual initiative that is pursuing partnership with BIEN in 2018, stresses four conditions that must be met to use ‘basic income’ to refer to a cash transfer policy: payments must be (1) universal, (2) individual, (3) unconditional, and (4) high enough.
- Founding members of the Economic Security Project, a major US-based initiative launched in late 2016, have decided to reserve the use of ‘basic income’ for programs in which payments are high enough to meet basic living expenses, and have endorsed the neologism ‘base income’ to refer to programs that provide universal and unconditional payments of lesser amount.
- Multiple affiliates of BIEN–including groups in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Switzerland, and perhaps others–have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ (or its translational equivalent) that include some type of condition specifying that the amount of payment must be “sufficient” or “high enough” to meet some type of minimal needs (see “Affiliate Definitions of ‘Basic Income’”).
The question of whether BIEN itself should include the sufficiency condition as a necessary condition (so to speak) has been the cause of previous terminological controversies within the organization, including the one that eventuated in the vote at the 2016 Congress in Seoul, in which BIEN rejected the proposal to restrict the definition of ‘basic income’ in such a manner. In a paper delivered at the 2017 BIEN Congress (“What’s a Definition? And how should we define ‘Basic Income’?”), Malcolm Torry, General Manager of BIEN and Director of the UK’s Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, defends this decision. According to Torry, the adopted definition does not “conflict with any affiliate’s definition”, “represent[s] the consensus among affiliates”, and “reflect[s] common usage of the term”.
All of these claims seem dubious, however, especially when one considers that BIEN has aspired to provide a definition–that is, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to use the term ‘basic income’–rather than a non-exclusive list of necessary or paradigmatic features.
First, notice that the different definitions of BIEN and some of its affiliates lead to different assignments of truth and falsity to certain sentences. For example, the sentences ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Iran once implemented a basic income’ seem to be true on BIEN’s definition [2], but they are false on definitions of ‘basic income’ that include a provision that the amount must be high enough to meet basic living expenses. The definitions disagree on whether certain core cases discussed in the basic income literature are actually cases of basic income–and this, I wager, counts as “conflict” between the definitions if anything does.
Secondly, it would be more accurate to say that BIEN’s definition reflects a–but not the–common usage of ‘basic income’, and that it does not represent consensus, even amongst BIEN’s own affiliates. As reflected by the above list of examples (and further examples could be given), it is unquestionably typical for many speakers and organizations to restrict application of the term to policies that provide livable cash payments.
If one still wonders why a less restrictive definition should prove contentious, it is significant to notice that the act of defining carries evaluative and expressive element: to establish a definition of a term is not merely to clarify and elucidate current usage, nor is it necessarily an attempt to honor as much of present usage as possible while introducing greater clarity and precision; to establish (and insist upon) a specific definition is often also to express what one values. Specifically, speakers sometimes choose to adopt definitions that are narrow or exclusive and reject ones that are more encompassing.
Many conservative Christians, for example, continue to resist the redefinition of ‘marriage’ to allow the term’s application to same-sex partnerships. And many pro-choice Americans were recently outraged that the US Department of Health and Human Services decided to define ‘life’ broadly to the point of conception. Or, in a somewhat lighter vein, consider cocktail purists who scoff at the practice of using ‘martini’ to refer to any mixed drink served in a v-shaped glass. In the eyes of the conservative Christian and the cocktail purist, the more inclusive definitions are simply unacceptable, for they disrespect the sanctity of marriage and martinis (as God and the International Bartenders Association intended them to be). And when the definition in question has legal or political ramifications, the choice bears substantial weight.
Likewise, in my experience in the basic income movement (especially in the US context), I have observed that many left-leaning proponents of basic income insist upon the strict definition–with the “sufficiency” condition–as a way to distance their own proposals from right-wing and libertarian schemes, such as Charles Murray’s proposal to replace all existing programs with a universal flat-rate cash payment of 10,000 USD per year. Often, champions of a narrow definition of ‘basic income’ don’t want Murray-like proposals to be assimilated into the basic income movement, and their preferred definition reflects this.
Such activists might decry definitions like BIEN’s as unacceptable precisely because it aspires to retain neutrality on the level of the payment. If BIEN were simply to reply that the definition should be kept broad in order to accommodate all proposals for regular unconditional cash transfers, including views like Murray’s, then it would quite directly miss their point. It is their prerogative as speakers to fine-tune the meaning of terms in light of their values and interests, and they might have good strategic and political reasons to insist upon these particular definitions.
I believe that BIEN should acknowledge this difference as what it is: disagreement about word meaning–and not at all uncontentious. This disagreement threatens to present readers and newcomers with potentially confusing discrepancies, such as disagreement about the truth of such commonly heard claims like ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Finland is experimenting with a basic income for its unemployed population’. For the reader of BIEN materials, forewarned is forearmed.
B. Definitions lacking the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
As mentioned above, this type of definition seems particularly common in Canada, where the idea has enjoyed a long history, where an experiment in Manitoba in the late 1970s became one of the most famous trials of a negative income tax–or what many Canadians politicians, academics, and journalists would call a ‘basic income’.
For example, on a page titled “About Basic Income”, BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, Basic Income Canada Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ (which seems to be used synonymously with ‘basic income’) as a program that “ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status” [3] [4]. Similarly, the Government of Ontario, which has recently launched a new experiment of what it calls a ‘basic income’, defines the term as “a payment to eligible families or individuals that ensures a minimum income level, regardless of employment status” [5].
Exemplifying this usage, Canadian politician Guy Caron has introduced a proposal for what he calls ‘basic income’, which is a “top-up aimed at helping low-income Canadians to reach the ‘low-income cut-off’”, clearly not a universal and non-withdrawable payment. I submit that this proposal, like Ontario’s pilot, is not inaccurately named: it merely reflects what might be described as dialectical ambiguity with respect to the term ‘basic income’.
Also in his 2017 paper, Torry states, speaking of the Ontario experiment, that the payments “do not constitute a Basic Income, and perhaps BIEN should say that”. I would contend the appropriateness of Torry’s advice depends, in part, on one’s audience. If addressing an audience of basic income activists in UK, for example, then it might indeed be important to clarify that Ontario’s pilot is “not a basic income” (assuming they endorse, and are most familiar with, the definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by BIEN, the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, and Basic Income UK). But it would be quite presumptuous to make the same assertion to the Government of Ontario itself.
By analogy, suppose a British child were to overhear an American speak of “eating biscuits with dinner before the football game”. It might be important to clarify that the food in question is “not really biscuits” and the game in question is “not really football” in order to prevent the child from forming misconceptions about the American’s selections of baked goods and sports. But it would not be appropriate, presumably, to tell the American himself that he is “not really eating biscuits or watching football” and should stop using his words like that. But Ontarians are not en masse misusing the term ‘basic income’ any more that Americans are en masse misusing the words ‘biscuit’ and ‘football’. The term has merely taken on a different meaning, one with antecedents dating at least to the time of the Mincome experiment in the 1970s.
Given this divergence in meaning, there is again a pronounced threat of equivocation and confusion. Widely used sentences like ‘Ontario is testing basic income’, ‘Manitoba’s Mincome was an experiment of basic income’, and ‘Milton Friedman supported basic income’ might be either true or false depending on the speaker. Indeed, the truth or falsity of such sentences can be determined only after knowing the specific definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by the speaker (or, as a clue, the speaker’s nationality).
Once again, I believe the lesson here is that a wide-scope organization like BIEN must acknowledge this diversity in word use if it wishes to ward against such confusion.
C. “Similarities Overlapping and Criss-Crossing”
In working as a reporter for Basic Income News, I commonly observe speakers–many of them with considerable experience and expertise in the movement–use the term ‘basic income’ in accordance with the two types of definitions described above.
In itself, such ambiguity is benign; it is a common feature of natural language that the meanings of words are shaped and honed in somewhat different fashions within different communities or groups of speakers. When a speaker realizes that a term carries multiple definitions, she knows that she must attend to context in order to resolve the ambiguity, and she knows to be cautious of drawing certain inferences if that ambiguity cannot be resolved.
Complications arise, however, when casual readers falsely assume that ‘basic income’ is well-defined and unambiguous. And, unfortunately, this is all too easy: most articles and websites that purport to introduce “the” concept of basic income do not mention that the term is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, between different speakers. On the contrary, many authors blithely write as if the term does have a single conventional meaning, offering a gloss on a definition with no mention of the fact that others define the term somewhat differently. Thus, many casual readers might be unaware of the ambiguities that surround the use of the term–raising the specter of unintentional equivocation, confusion, and false belief (e.g. one might unwittingly come to accept falsehoods like “Alaska provides its residents with livable annual income” or “A town in Manitoba was the site of an experiment in which every resident, regardless of income, received a fixed monthly cash payment”).
If an organization like BIEN wishes to be a broad church, facilitating discussion between diverse parties that research or support something they call ‘basic income’, then, I submit, it should cease to posture as if the term has a single definition.
BIEN could state outright that there is no set of conditions that constitutes a unique standard meaning for ‘basic income’. Then, as an alternative to definition, it could provide a list of stereotypical or paradigmatic features of proposals that bear the name. Some of these features–such as being paid in cash and at regular intervals–are more central than others, and might even be said to be necessary features of anything called ‘basic income’. Other features, however, are matters of dispute or discrepancy (such as consisting of a livable amount and being paid in equal amount to all regardless of income).
New problems would likely arise when attempting to decide what to say about frequently cited conditions or features of a basic income. Even the condition of unconditionality, for instance, might not be sacrosanct. Some have spoken about questions such as whether a “participation requirement should be added to the basic income”: is this loose talk, semantic nonsense (akin to asking, perhaps, whether a “marriage requirement should be imposed on bachelorhood”), or evidence that unconditionality is not really a necessary or immutable part of the conceptual core of what speakers call ‘basic income’? If informed and competent speakers’ judgements fail to detect paradox in phrases like ‘a participation requirement on a basic income’, then it is likely the latter.
Yet more new problems would arise when considering the fact that the paradigmatic form of the policy contains further attributes that are often not mentioned explicitly in definitions of the term: the amount is typically assumed to be relatively stable; the program is typically assumed to be created and administered by a government (although, with some activists proposing privately-funded programs, some definitions deliberately reject it); the condition of “universality” is often (although not always) implicitly assumed not necessarily to extend to children. (See Torry’s paper for further discussion of examples of implicitly accepted paradigmatic features.)
Still more points of controversy could be mentioned. Should ‘basic income’ be defined to require payment in conventional currency (to exclude cryptocurrency-based proposals), or should it be sure not to impose this constraint? Should ‘basic income’ be defined as a universal payment to citizens, permanent residents, or some other specification of the relevant population base?
At the beginning of his 2017 Congress paper, Torry mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the idea of “family resemblance” in his Philosophical Investigations. He does not, however, carry this Wittgenstein reference to its natural conclusion: a case against definition. I suggest that we do.
According to Wittgenstein, terms of natural language typically do not lend themselves to definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Different uses of a term need not exemplify a common core meaning–and, often, they don’t. Instead, Wittgenstein tells us, different uses of a word are often related by a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”.
To illustrate, he delivers the example of the word ‘game’:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. … Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how (§66).
The natural progression of Torry’s Wittgenstein reference would have been to argue that ‘basic income’ is like ‘game’: as we examine the diverse and multifarious uses of ‘basic income’, similarities crop up and disappear, with no single common meaning able to be identified. Although Torry does not take this tack, I believe that it would have been precisely on-point.
Of course, an association of “gamers” is free to stipulate a specific definition of the particular type of game in which it is interested. Likewise, an organization like BIEN could stipulate a specific definition of ‘basic income’ to describe the particular type of policy with which it is concerned. One concern, however, is that BIEN’s other actions don’t seem to accord with this desire for specificity. BIEN, at present, seems unified more by word-shape than word-meaning: it coordinates affiliates who support what they call ‘basic income’ (allowing affiliates to adopt their own definitions thereof), organizes conferences to bring together individuals who are interested in something they call ‘basic income’, and publishes news stories about people who talk about something they call ‘basic income’. If BIEN wishes to unify its activities in this way, then it cannot prescribe a definition of ‘basic income’ but must instead defer to the groups and individuals who use the term and who constitute its membership–and, as seen, their definitions of the term are varied and disparate, with only a thin and insubstantial core of features possessed by all.
But we may leave aside questions of BIEN’s mission and goals, for there is another concern facing the organization’s decision to adopt a particular stipulative definition: as a mere matter of fact, the term is used in varied manners that are not always consistent, media coverage of basic income is not always clear to dissociate these (and is usually not), and BIEN does not hold purchase over media reporting on basic income. Adding yet another organization-specific definition to the mix does not lend clarity to confusion. What is needed is straightforward acknowledgement of the diversity and disparity in uses of the term ‘basic income’.
Notes
[1] In this essay, I use single quotes to notate that I am speaking about a linguistic item (the term ‘basic income’) rather than the thing it refers to (a basic income).
[2] Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and Iran’s oil subsidy reform program possess other non-stereotypical features. Most notably, perhaps, the level of the payments is not only non-livable but also unstable and uncertain. No fixed amount is guaranteed from year to year. (Indeed, as it happens, the future of the PFD is presently uncertain due to ongoing fiscal crisis in Alaska–in an unprecedented decision of the state’s Governor, its amount was halved between 2015 and 2016–and Iran has begun withdrawing higher earners from the subsidy program.)
[3] Note that other groups, such as BIEN’s Australian affiliate, also use ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ interchangeably, but with a definition that includes the qualifications that the payments must be individual and non-withdrawable; thus, the use of the word ‘guarantee’ does not imply that the “Canadian-type” definition of ‘basic income’ is at play.
[4] BIEN’s US affiliate, the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ in a manner similar to BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, as “a government ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason” (with no condition that the support must be non-withdrawable or paid on an individual basis). However, USBIG does not treat ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ as synonyms, but defines ‘basic income’ in a manner similar to BIEN, as type of basic income guarantee in which “every citizen [is given] a check for the full basic income every month” (leading to peculiarities like the truth of the sentence ‘Ontario is testing a basic income guarantee, but it is not testing a basic income’).
[5] Although common, this is not the only definition in use in Canada. For example, François Blais, a political scientist researching income guarantee programs for Quebec, has defined ‘basic income’ as “an unconditional income that the government awards to every citizen” (see his book Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians)–which, as written, could be interpreted as implying an individual and non-withdrawable payment (although not explicitly specified).
Earlier draft reviewed by Tyler Prochazka and Heidi Karow
Cover Photo (Games): CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 B
