On episode #73 of “The Waking Up Podcast”, host Sam Harris discusses the potential merits of Universal Basic Income with political science researcher and author Charles Murray.
The conversation begins at 1:52:22.
Harris opens by describing Universal Basic Income (UBI) as “a possible remedy for the increasing role automation is playing in this economy”.
“The idea is that you replace the current system with a UBI, and that you leave people alone to make their own decisions about how to use it,” Murray said.
He insisted that the money be deposited every month, electronically, into a known bank account and that this type of income stream gives people moral agency.
Murray went on to say, “I think replacing the Welfare state with UBI is going to be the rare case where you have side effects – not unintended side effects that are terrible – but unintended side effects that have the potential for rejuvenating America’s civic culture.”
Both Harris and Murray agreed that A.I. has the potential to radically transform the job market, unrecognizably, within 20 or 30 years.
Harris, who has expressed his concerns about UBI with previous guests on the podcast, asked, “Are you worried at all about the incentives just not being aligned if you give out UBI? Is there any tweaking of it that makes it more likely to produce the good changes you’re picturing?”
Murray responded by describing his plan.
“There are a couple of really, really important things. One of them is that indeed you do get rid of the other Welfare state services, and that you have a very high point at which the guaranteed income is subject to a surtax. I want to lure people into working so they get to a point where they can’t afford to quit. In my plan, I say it’s $30k of earned income, so until you get $30k of earned income on your own, you keep all of the…let’s say, $12k, and then after that you start to pay a small surtax back. Anything you go out and earn, you keep. So you’ve gotten into the habit of working and if you’ve gotten up to $30k, you are not going to trade a $42k per year lifestyle for a $12k per year lifestyle. But if you have the payback point quicker, I think you increase the likelihood that you have disincentives to work. It needs to be deposited electronically into a known bank account. It needs to be universal because one of the key things about this is that everybody knows that everybody else is getting the money. Once you have that universal knowledge, then a whole variety of interactions can be set in motion that wouldn’t be set in motion without that knowledge.”
Murray also discussed the potential for work disincentives, which is a common criticism of UBI.
“You can fairly easily design it so it’s quite likely to produce good effects. I am not denying it will have work disincentives. There will be work disincentives. But we are already at a point where something more than 20% of working-age males with high school diplomas – and no more – are out of the labor force. We’ve got a problem already and I see a lot of ways in which the moral agency of an income could make the problem less.”
I occasionally hear it asserted that increased familiarity with basic income tends to increase individuals’ support for the idea: as people learn more about basic income, they become more likely to endorse the idea. It is important to clarify the apparent source of this claim and why, given this, it is actually baseless.
(Note that, while there might be many problems associated with measuring both awareness of and support for basic income, I will assume for the sake of argument that the claim is sensible, and focus on the specific misinterpretation of data that, based on my observations, seems to have given rise to this claim.)
The Dalia Research Poll
As far as I’ve been able to deduce through my following of the discussion of basic income, the claim originated through a misinterpretation of the results of a survey conducted by Dalia Research in March 2016. The survey was a milestone in public opinion research on basic income: the first EU-wide opinion poll on basic income, featuring a representative sample of 10,000 Europeans across 28 countries. Its scope, as well as its encouraging results (64% of respondents said that they would vote for a basic income referendum in their country), led to its wide dissemination within the basic income community. These results go to show how important it is to conduct public surveys as businesses, and the general public can obtain better insight into everyday needs. To help with creating surveys at various levels, a template like one that can be found at https://www.qualtrics.com/marketplace/survey-template/ can serve as a good base to start at. Knowing how people truly feel is an important step for the public.
In a summary of survey results, researchers reported the additional finding that “Europeans who said they were aware of basic income were also more likely to report that they would vote for it.” This claim, as stated, is accurate. However, it tends to implicate an additional claim that is not substantiated by the survey: the causal claim that awareness of basic income increases support for it.
It’s important here to understand the design of the survey in a bit more detail. In the first question, subjects were asked, “How familiar are you with the concept known as ‘basic income’?” (without no definition of ‘basic income’ provided).
Following this preliminary question, the interviewers provided the definition of that was to be assumed during the remainder of the survey: “A basic income is an income unconditionally paid by the government to every individual regardless of whether they work and irrespective of any other sources of income. It replaces other social security payments and is high enough to cover all basic needs (food, housing etc.).”
Subjects were then posed the question “If there would be a referendum on introducing basic income today, how would you vote?” (“for it,” “against it,” or “not vote”).
As part of their analysis, Dalia Research broke down the responses to the latter question by level of awareness as measured in the first question: “More aware” (corresponding to responses of “Understand it fully” and “Know something about it” on the first question) versus “Less aware” (corresponding to “Heard just a little about it” and “Never heard of it”).
As seen in the chart above, those who claimed to be relatively “in the know” about basic income were disproportionately likely to express willingness to vote in favor of the hypothetical referendum. This, it seems, was the main empirical support behind the claim that “awareness and support for basic income are linked,” as Delia Research cautiously phrased it. (We might also note that those with greater awareness were also disproportionately likely to express willingness to vote rather than to abstain. That is, awareness is associated not only with support but also with decisiveness.)
To cite the well-known Statistics 101 maxim, however, correlation does not imply causation. The finding that awareness and support for basic income are “linked” does not entail that higher awareness is the cause of support. In the present case, in fact, it’s easy to imagine a causal relationship in the opposite direction: plausibly, those who find the idea of basic income appealing are more motivated to research and learn more about it. (Indeed, this probably describes many of us who follow Basic Income News.) Moreover, to give another potential explanation, those who are generally interested in and supportive of progressive policy might be relatively likely to read publications that discuss basic income–and thus to learn about the concept–as well as being relatively likely to vote in favor of such a policy.
Whatever the underlying cause of the observed statistical relationship, one cannot cite the Dalia Research survey to support the assertion that awareness of basic income increases support. The survey simply did not test this causal claim, and thus provides no data on it.
Does Support Increase with Awareness?
How might one test the causal claim? One possibility might be to select individuals who initially report no knowledge of basic income, provide a short description of the policy, conduct a “pre-test” of their attitudes, provide more information about the proposal, reassess their attitudes toward the idea, and so on–making the imparting of information about basic income an experimental intervention. To my awareness, no such study has been conducted (although a 2016 survey of San Francisco voters, discussed below, comes close).
Given what we do know, however, it is unreasonable to infer that increased familiarity with basic income is sufficient–or even reliable–to generate increased support.
First, let’s consider the “real world” case study of the Swiss referendum. On June 5, 2016, citizens of Switzerland voted on a referendum that would have introduced an article in the federal constitution mandating a government-funded “basic income” sufficient to “allow the people to live in a dignified manner and participate in public life.” The referendum was defeated, with 23% of voters in favor. This final result suggests, if anything, a decline in popular support–compared, for example, to an April 2016 survey that indicated that 40% of Swiss voters were inclined to vote “yes” on the referendum–despite the fact that the basic income referendum continued be heavily publicized and debated between April and June (leading, presumably, to increased awareness).
Secondly, we might turn to “Oxford-style” debates on basic income, in which audience members are polled on their support for the issue before the debate begins and again after it has concluded. Presumably, nearly all audience members would claim that their familiarity with the issue being debated increases during the course of the debate. Minimally, then, such debate settings show that greater familiarity with basic income does not invariably lead to increased support, given that basic income proponents have “lost” Oxford-style debates such as ABC’s Intelligence Squared Debate (March 2017) and Ontario’s Wolf Hall Debate (April 2016), with even some initial supporters apparently changing their positions during the course of the debate. (Of course, the results can hardly be generalized: much depends on the quality of the particular debaters, and debate audiences are by no means representative of the general population.)
Finally, let’s look at a survey of 500 likely San Francisco voters conducted in April 2016. In contrast to most opinion polls on basic income, the San Francisco survey did attempt to discern the impact of increased understanding of basic income (initially called ‘base income’ in the survey) on support for the idea. At the start of the survey, subjects were asked “Do you support or oppose providing every resident of the United States with a base income?” No further elaboration on the concept of a “base income” was provided.
After respondents answered this initial question, the researchers provided more details about the proposed policy (which was relabeled as ‘universal basic income’) and polled respondents on their support or opposition to each individual policy detail: the payment “is not tied to work or having a job”; “the amount of the monthly check would be between $500 and $2000”; the “monthly income could be used for anything”; “the cost of the monthly income would be paid for by tax revenue”; “every adult resident would receive a monthly check.”
Finally, following the provision of these five policy specifics, respondents were against asked about their support for basic income. This post-assessment showed a decrease in support and increase in opposition (with fewer respondents remaining undecided). As Misha Chellam interpreted the result in a blog post, “digging into the details led to concerns and eroded the policy support.”
This is not, precisely, a test of the effect of increased awareness on support for basic income. For one, the terminology was alerted, with the usual term ‘base income’ used in the initial question. Additionally, we cannot be certain that the survey questions had the effect of imparting new information to respondents: in some cases, the additional questions might merely have had the effect of raising the salience of previously known information, which happens to cast a less favorable hue on the idea of implementing basic income. By way of example, surveys conducted in recent years in Finland and Canada indicate that support for basic income decreases when respondents are requested to entertain the idea of funding it through tax increases. In these cases, plausibly, it’s not that respondents did not previously believe that at least part of the funding for a basic income would come from tax dollars; it could simply be that this consideration was not salient when they were first asked, in the abstract, whether they favored the idea of a basic income.
We might note here, however, that 51% of respondents the San Francisco poll claimed to know “nothing” about universal basic income prior to the survey. Thus, it is quite likely that, for a majority of respondents, the questions on policy specifics did have the effect of introducing more information (not merely, that is, increasing the salience of old information or existing beliefs). In this light, the San Francisco survey not only fails to confirm the claim that greater awareness leads to greater support, but also supports the opposing claim that greater familiarity with the idea of a basic income tends to lead to a decrease in support (at least in the population studied).
Overall, we still know very little about the effect of awareness on support for basic income. To my knowledge, however, there is no sound empirical basis for the claim that awareness increases support–outside, perhaps, of anecdotes and hearsay.
Basic income began to be debated in Italy from a diverse range of viewpoints about 4-5 years ago, when two law proposals were submitted to the Italian Parliament: one a part of the 5S Movement and the other the outcome of a popular initiative which had more than 50,000 signatures (the necessary threshold according to the Italian Constitution) collected by a pool of political and civil society associations. The role of Bin-Italy, which took part in the judicial extension of the latter text and played a consulting role for the 5S Movement, was particularly important. The two proposals have much in common (for example, that the financing burden falls on collective taxation, that the provision should be individual and not family-based, that the beneficiaries should have, at least at the beginning, an income below the threshold of relative poverty) but also have some differences, especially as to the degree conditionality is concerned.
For the 5S movement the possibility of refusing a job offer is a constrained to a maximum of three times and there is an obligation to work a number of weekly hours in community service. For the law of petition (BIN-Italy law), it introduced the concept of “fairness”, that it is possible to reject any job offer, which is considered “unfair”, since it is in line with the following three parameters: 1. the salary level is lower than previous jobs held or not in line with contractually stipulated pay rates (in the case of the young searching for their first job, without success); 2. the job is not in line with the qualifications and skills of the job-seeker; 3. the workplace is more than 70 km from the job-seekers residence.
Currently, these laws were discussed in the appropriate Labour Committees of the House and Senate but have not yet been put up for voting because the government chose other paths: in March, the new government approved the introduction of Reis (Social Inclusion Income) which presents very different characteristics from basic income and cannot also be considered a minimum income according to the parameters of the EU (PE Resolutions 2009, 2010, Charter of rights, the 1992 Commission Recommendation). Reis is only paid to families that have a total taxable income of less than € 3,000 a year (a ridiculously low amount), have a dependent or a disabled or at least two children and the breadwinner is over 55 years of age. Moreover, Reis includes an obligation to follow a path of integration to work, under penalty of revocation. The available financial resources amount to € 1.1 billion for 2017 and it is expected to increase to € 1,6 billion in 2018. The result is that only ¼ of households in absolute poverty can be helped. It is an expense of 0.1% of the national GDP in a country that already in social spending (net of pension) spends less than half of the average for European countries. The expense to cope with the two proposals for a real minimum income is between € 14 and 16 billion, according to different official statistical sources.
The current debate has given way to some experiments at the local level. Among these, the City of Livorno is testing (for a period of only 6 months), the introduction of a form of income support. To this purpose it has been allocated € 300 thousand. The municipality received 997 applications. Among the requirements was residency in the municipality for at least five years, unemployment status, registration at the employment center and a family income not exceeding € 6530 gross per year. In exchange for € 500 monthly, the municipality invited successful applicants to perform socially useful work.
Some Italian regions such as Puglia, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardy have anticipated the governmental model of income support for those in absolute poverty and dependent children or only for the long-term unemployed and often with the obligation to carry out community service: in any case these are not even remotely sufficient to restore decent living conditions. The governor of Apulia Mr. Emiliano even spoke about the cleanliness of the palm leaves on the Bari seafront!
Acceptance with the condition of performing “community work” has been extended to unemployed and workers temporary outside production because of restructuring. Most minimum income experiments at local level are thus more like workfare programs, if not just poverty benefits still tied to a purely assistance-concept, selective, and on a strictly family-oriented basis; this has little to do with a ‘idea’ of a basic minimum income which is also an instrument of freedom and personal self-determination. Further, they are not in line with the instruments already in place in more European countries of fighting social exclusion.
In conclusion, not only is there no actual testing of basic income in Italy, nor are there even forms of guaranteed minimum income consistent with EU parameters. Finally, there is a generalizing culture of coercive control on beneficiaries and induction to accept any kind of work. This is paradoxical in a country known to be free from the implementation of efficient active policies in the labor market and efficient employment services and training.
Last, but not least, in Italy we suffer from a cultural delay regarding the idea that basic income is mainly a primary income. It is a means of remuneration, and not only passive assistance, of all the lifetime that today is put to labor and to value but not yet certified as productive labor and, hence, paid. It is not even related to the fact that unpaid labor is sharply increasing.
Fabiano Horta, the Mayor of Maricá, Brazil, has extended the unconditional income already distributed in Maricá, Brazil, to all its residents. He also aims at raising the distributed value tenfold during 2017.
The unconditional income is paid in Mumbuca, a local social currency. One Mumbuca is valued at one Real. The initial income was 10 Mumbucas per month, roughly equivalent to 3 €/month. It was introduced by Washington Siqueira (known as Washington Quaquá), who was Mayor of Maricá until late 2015. This was reported on at the time. The modest amount was given independently of the recipient’s job status, and initially only distributed to the town’s poorest residents, around 35,000 people. Under Mayor Fabiano Horta the program has already been extended to all residents (around 150,000 in total) in Maricá.
Like Quaquá, Horta is a PT party (left-wing) affiliate and federal deputy. Horta wants to raise the unconditional income, financed by the town’s oil revenues, to 30 €/month during 2017. This unconditional dividend is supplemented with conditional subsidies to poor families, where an extra 85 Reais/month (28 €/month) is available from current welfare programs.
The stipend is being paid electronically in the Mumbuca social currency even though fewer than 10% of all businesses in Maricá accept Mumbuca (businesses have to wait more than a month to get Mumbuca exchanged into Reais by the government). The program has been criticized by opposing politician Fillipe Poubel, who says that people will become dependent on the stipend. Poubel calls for the creation of jobs instead. Horta maintains the unconditional income will stimulate local economy. He also has said that the town will be able to scale up this project “in an exponential way over the next ten years”.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Jason Hickel writes that “a basic income could defeat the scarcity mindset, instil a sense of solidarity and even ease the anxieties that gave us Brexit and Trump.”
Hickel argues that a basic income is not just a privilege, nor just a nice idea – instead, basic income is a birthright.
Hickel begins by reflecting on the Charter of the Forest, 1217, a companion document to the Magna Carta, which enshrined the right of Englishmen to access royal lands, “which they could use for farming, grazing, water and wood [collecting].” Hickel argues that the Charter defended the right of individuals to access the resources necessary for survival.
This understanding of grazing rights has with time fallen out of usage. This decline began in the 15th century with the enclosure movement, which drove peasants displaced by enclosure into the labour market, “to sell themselves for wages for the first time.” It became necessary for low income farm labours to move into urban areas and become workers in order to survive. Hickel reminds us that the global south understands this scenario very well: a legacy of colonialism having taken away lands that were once common, and divided them into private allotments. For these countries, which Hickel does not note specifically, any attempt to undo this process of driving populations into the capitalist labour market was undone by the post-colonial country’s indebtedness to international corporations and creditors.
Hickel goes on to argue that first the global south has had its land taken away with the promise of employment, and in the future it risks losing its jobs to the rise of automation. For him, employment is no longer a secure economic alternative to the livelihood disparities created by the private ownership of once common land. Automation threatens jobs everywhere throughout the world, Hickel says. The solution, he argues, is an understanding of wealth where earth’s natural resources belong to everyone, where the basic necessities are understood as a birthright, and where a basic income is a way to implement this vision.
The solution, he argues, is an understanding of wealth where earth’s natural resources belong to everyone, where the basic necessities are understood as a birthright, and where a basic income is a way to implement this vision.
With the above in mind, Hickel presents a universal basic income as the most appropriate answer to the rise of automation. UBI, Hickel argues, offers a solution to inequalities that in the past were mitigated by free access to the resources necessary for livelihood. It is a return to the principles of the Charter of the Forest; a “de-enclosure” where every resident receives a dividend of what is commonly held: natural resources. For example, Hickel points to a carbon tax and dividend system.
Possible pushback is explained away by a move up in scale: he proposes a global fund, a trust for every human being rich or poor, and an expansion of our mindset so that again, natural resources and land cannot be simply understood as enclosed and private, but instead as common and vital to every individual’s survival.
De-enclosure is for Hickel an alternative to the road of further labour market integration, an alternative threatened by automation. For Hickel, we avoid considering UBI at our peril.
