by Guest Contributor | Aug 17, 2018 | Opinion
Written by: Alfredo Roccia
We talk so much about freedom.
-Ingmar Bergman, The passion of Anna
As argued by Karl Marx, “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”[1] Despite acknowledging the importance of external factors on men’s freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre did not share the Marxian thesis, however, asserting that “we have the war we deserve,” namely man, “being condemned to be free,” is only “responsible for himself,” regardless of their surrounding environment.[2] Therefore, according to the French philosopher, human beings have the decisive possibility to give meaning to their existence in absolute freedom, without any influence from pre-established principles.
However, what do we do when the future we want is precluded by precarious economic conditions or a staleness social system? What if we had to settle for what Martin Heidegger called “inauthentic” existence rather than pouring all our abilities out?
It is on the fine line between what Marx and Sartre exposed, that we could position the Universal Basic Income (UBI) and its significative impact on humanity’s freedom in a future scenario.
Although the reasons-be them of political, economic and social nature-which UBI advocates opt for, we could essentially group them in three sets of problems: (1) the current levels of unemployment, (2) the work threatened by the new advent of machines, (3) the current social care system as not sufficient for twenty-first century needs.[3]
However, the aspect of UBI which has won me over, besides the financial security that would result, is the freedom of choice that UBI could generate or at least reinforce in modern society. Also, those who Need Money Desperately might find this a huge relief. It can also pave way for their financial planning because now they have a recurring income to depend on.
A freedom that would allow everyone to express and legitimize his or her own talent through any job or activity without any kind of diktat from the market or society.[4] I personally consider this aspect deeply interesting since today, more than ever, human beings seem to have lost the ability to say “no,” being slaves of constant financial insecurity, trapped in not always satisfying careers, stressful working hours and short leisure time.[5]
Indeed, how do we define leisure time? Would it be perhaps a vacation every month, running away from the working stress, an apparent getaway from an unsatisfying life? Or maybe focusing on our own passions and talent just during weekends, because of the scarce free time we have, stolen from a job we do not love-therefore constantly working, ignoring the need for a vacation?[6] I believe it is clear how greater financial security would consequently enable a greater possibility of choice, less influenced by external factors, allowing our creativity to run riot, giving us greater flexibility within our lives.[7]
Staying in the creative sphere, it is clear how UBI could have a significant weight within the work of artists. Namely, it could help those who choose to devote themselves to art, despite sometimes agreeing to accept jobs not totally in line with their ambitions or realizing works whose typically commercial nature is imposed by the market and the need of paying the rent by the end of the month, rather than their artistic will.
Not being technically an artist, but feeling very tied with disciplines like photography, music, cinema or literature, I quite sympathize with those persons who, not being able of practice their own talent freely, are forced to follow careers alien to their pure artistic ambitions. However, thanks to current web platforms like YouTube, many young artists-among which also poets and philosophers, categories perhaps more penalized today than in the past from the job market-can display their own knowledge and talent through video tutorials, lessons, performances, etc., that are free and available to everyone. But, how can they finance all of this, since the working time required for writing, shooting, editing, and post-producing a very short video requires quite a lot of time? There are ways to make money from YouTube, such as by growing a large following and monetizing your videos. For small channels, it might be worth visiting Venturebeat to learn about buying YouTube subscribers. That could help the channel to grow, eventually leading to the channel making some money. However, there are other ways too. Crowdsourced funding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Patreon (just to mention some), can help young creative minds by promotional campaigns for financing a single project (see Kickstarter) or by subscriptions that provide an income on a recurring basis or per work of art, in return of special contents or rewards (see Patreon).[8] Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
So, it seems a kind of artistic basic income is already here and works quite well: many of these young artists can support their expenses with the help of their own backers, changing also the direction to their own career. It is common to see some of them quitting their job or devoting themselves to that virtual activity indeed.[9]
For instance, a case that personally surprised me and which I consider significative is that of a young YouTuber, Paul Davids, a Dutch musician who has shared video lessons about guitar and music theory since 2009.[10] Later, Paul joined Patreon, proposing special contents for his patrons, in exchange for a subscription. On February 20, 2018, Paul published a video telling his followers that he quit his job as a guitar teacher so he could devote himself to what he truly loves: offering high-quality videos, investing his time to improve his guitar skills and making more music.[11] It is interesting to note how Paul decided to quit that activity on which many musicians are “forced” to make do, namely scholastic or private teaching.[12] A difficult choice, but he thinks it could bring him more freedom to “take on bigger projects requiring more time.”[13]
Another example is the Patrick (H) Willems channel, registered on YouTube since 2011 and dedicated to short movies production and video essays about cinema. On a video published on May 7, 2018, the founder Patrick Willems shared the ambition of financing his works through Patreon community, so as to update his working tools, acquire a proper studio, and become more independent. He stated that he was grateful for getting as far as he could using equipment similar to avid media composer first editing software, audacity, and other free resources.
[14]
Those of Paul and Patrick are only some of the hundreds of cases in which young YouTubers, by the funding of Patreon or similar services, can finally pour their own ambitions out through a greater financial security.[15]
But, how long will all of this last? Can we really think that platforms such as Patreon could support young artists forever, behaving as a proper basic income?
Actually, it is important to stress how crowdsourced funding could not replace any form of UBI because of their fundamental differences. It is true how they allow people to collect money through crowdfunding and perhaps even more than what a person could get with any current experiment involving UBI. However, crowdsourcing is breaking what is probably the first rule of UBI, namely its universality. Platforms such as Patreon are not open to everybody in so far as creators need to offer content in return for being supported by their community. Poor or “uncreative” people are evidently excluded from this policy. Moreover, those platforms are usually made by private companies and run for private purposes: they could stop anytime, evolve in something totally different or even close the business for any reason. This could really affect people from planning their own career grounding on a variable amount of money they can get every month, while UBI would be potentially perpetual as well as more inclusive.
However, despite being its surrogate, crowdsourced funding is the proof that the UBI concept can be extremely useful for young artists, at least at the beginning of their career. Moreover, it could allow them to go beyond the current constraints which those platforms implicate-not always making frequent content can be an attractive thing for videomakers-as well as to exceed the rather narrow frame of YouTube.
Perhaps, we should start with what those platforms are representing at the moment and try to mutate the modern perception we have about work and the current values system which characterize it. A greater freedom for artists could mean a boost of creation of those “things that enable market production but lie outside the monetary system,” in a structure in which UBI would have been seen “as capital, and not just money,” allowing a cultural renaissance and the production of new values for an invigoration of the twenty-first century economy.[16]
About the author:
Alfredo Roccia is an Italian-born architect working in London, UK. He studied architecture at the “Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II”, where he graduated in 2012. In the past five years, he has worked in Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, where he currently lives.
[1] Karl Marx, preface to A contribution to the critique of Political Economy, trans. Nahum Isaac Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1904; initially published in German as Zur kritik der Politischen Oekonomie in 1859), 11–12.
[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956; initially published in French as L’Être et le néant in 1943), 553–5; Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (1948; repr. London: Methuen, 1960; initially published in French as L’Existentialisme est un humanisme in 1946), 29.
[3] For a deepened analysis about UBI and its more recent applications consult: Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Guy Standing, Basic Income: And how we can make it happen (London: Pelican, 2017); Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley, eds., It’s Basic Income: The global debate (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018).
Various are the forms that UBI is assuming in current debates and during tests adopted by some countries. However, herein I will refer to its most “pure” version, that is “an unconditional, automatic and non-withdrawable payment to each individual as a right of citizenship.” Malcolm Torry, “History and the contemporary debate in the UK” in Downes and Lansley, Basic Income, 123–4.
[4] “Somehow release those who are technically and imaginatively proficient from the restraints imposed by the business system and there will be unprecedented productivity and wealth in the economy.” John Kenneth Galbraith, A history of Economics: The past as the present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 172. In this passage, Galbraith summarizes the thought of the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen as he made explicit in his Theory of business enterprise (1904).
[5] Matt Zwolinski, “The libertarian case for universal basic income” in Downes and Lansley, Basic Income, 152. According to Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “nearly two-fifths (38%) of U.S. employees reported that they were very satisfied with their current job, whereas a greater proportion (51%) stated they were satisfied but to a lesser degree, indicating that the majority of U.S. employees are to some extent satisfied with their present job role.” SHRM, “2017 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement,” accessed May 28, 2018, https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Documents
/2017-Employee-Job-Satisfaction-and-Engagement-Executive-Summary.pdf.
[6] John Maynard Keynes already dealt with problems within a future “age of leisure” in his “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren (1930),” in Essays in persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73.
[7] “We need to make the case that entitlement to an income and a dignified life should not be dependent on working for an employer, nor conditional on searching for employment. A basic income would free people from this compulsion, granting them much fuller freedom to direct their lives, engage in civic activity, or enjoy leisure time.” Avi Lewis and Katie McKenna, “A down payment on a new cooperative economy” in Downes and Lansley, Basic Income, 72.
[8] cf. GoDaddy Inc., “Top 20 crowdfunding platforms of 2018,” by Erick Deckers, last modified February 27, 2018, https://www.godaddy.com/garage/top-20-crowdfunding-platforms/.
[9] In 1969 Nixon administration already launched the “Family Assistance Program (FAP),” a welfare reform proposal whose unexpected results showed an increase of the time devoted to study or artistic activities by people involved in the experiment. cf. Jacobin, “Nixon’s Basic Income Plan,” by Rutger Bregman, accessed May 28, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05
/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/.
[10] Paul Davids, YouTube channel, accessed May 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/user/Luapper/about.
[11] “Giving guitar lessons, especially private lessons, they are very time-consuming and with YouTube I get so many cool and awesome offer, all of the things I simply can’t do because I don’t have the time.” Paul Davids, “I’m Quitting,” February 20, 2018, YouTube video, 5:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nruh9SSXoQ.
[12] “For many musicians…teaching is a way to pay the rent, to pay for food and everything else. When you don’t have many gigs, you want to have a secure income…but nowadays YouTube and everything around…can provide for those things for me.” Davids, “I’m Quitting.”
[13] “I’m very relieved to quit teaching. From now on I can really focus on my channel, work harder for my videos, accept more cool side projects and hopefully play in more bands.” Davids, “I’m Quitting.”
[14] “In the past year the channel finally got to the point where I can afford to do it full-time…just making enough to live off of. So, there isn’t much money left to put into the budgets for the video themselves.” Patrick (H) Willems, “Upgrading Our Videos (Patreon Announcement),” May 7, 2018, YouTube video, 3:48, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A57-1JteA&t=0s&index=2&list=WL.
[15] “We’ve got…a hundred and sixty-nine thousand subscribers. So, imagine if every one of them pledged $1 a month, it would be crazy!” Willems, “Patreon Announcement.”
Following the live streaming video platform Twitch, other companies such as YouTube and Facebook have recently launched the option of sponsoring videomakers. Artists make more money the more followers they have which is why many of them use one of the 22 Best Sites to Buy Twitch Followers to increase their profits. cf. Business Insider UK, “Twitch raises incentives for creators,” by Kevin Gallagher, accessed May 28, 2018, https://uk.businessinsider.com/twitch-raises-incentives-for-creators-2017-4?r=US&IR=T; CNBC, “Facebook is opening up ways for video creators to make money,” by Michelle Castillo, last modified March 21, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/facebook-opening-up-ways-for-video-creators-to-make-money.html; Variety, “YouTube Kills Paid Channels, Expands $4.99 per Month SponsorshiModel,” by Janko Roettgers, accessed May 28, 2018, https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/youtube-kills-paid-channels-1202563599/.
[16] Roope Mokka and Katariina Rantanen, “Universal basic income for the post-industrial age” in Downes and Lansley, Basic Income, 65–6.
by Kate McFarland | Aug 7, 2018 | News
Photo: Stormy weather in Ontario, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Jeff S. PhotoArt
Ontario’s guaranteed income pilot has been ended nearly two years early, prompting researchers and advisors who contributed the project to speak out.
On Tuesday, July 31, Ontario’s recently elected Progressive Conservative (PC) government announced the cancellation of the province’s guaranteed income experiment, reneging on a statement made during the campaign that the PC would see the three-year experiment through to its end if elected to form the new government.
The abrupt and unexpected announcement stirred the ire of politicians, anti-poverty advocates, and, not least, program participants themselves. Nonetheless, Lisa MacLeod, who presented the news at a press conference in her capacity as Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, has held her ground, dismissing claims that the PC broke a campaign promise as “fake news” since the party never included a commitment to the experiment in its campaign platform. Her words, however, have left many unappeased and continuing to fight to save the project.
Those who have spoken out again this decision of the PC government’s include several individuals involved with the implementation of the experiment, such as project advisors Hugh Segal and Kwame McKenzie, and at least one researcher who spoke to the press anonymously out of concern for confidentiality.
Former Canadian Senator Hon. Hugh Segal
The Honourable Hugh Segal, former Canadian Senator of the Conservative Party, was appointed as Special Advisor on Basic Income by Ontario’s Liberal government during the project’s initial planning stages. In this role, Segal authored the comprehensive discussion paper (“Finding a Better Way: A Basic Income Pilot Project for Ontario“) that laid the groundwork for the design and implementation of the experiment.
When MacLeod announced the pilot’s early termination, Segal responded with a scathing opinion column in The Globe and Mail, in which he foregrounds the issue of fairness to participants: “These people believed the promise that they would not end up worse off for signing up for the pilot project. They have now been let down badly.”
“[W]hen a party gives its word – as then-Official Opposition leader Patrick Brown gave me in 2016 and PC Party Leader Doug Ford echoed through his spokesperson during the 2018 election campaign – that it would let the pilot project go forward before judging the results […] , this assurance influenced those signing up.”
Segal also addresses the assertion of MacLeod and PC government that the experiment was too expensive to continue: “Looking at the cost of the pilot project is fair enough – but frankly, simplistic. We know that poverty is a perfect predictor of poor health and early hospitalization, bad educational outcomes, substance abuse and problems with the police – all of which cost Ontario billions.”
Drawing a connection to Premier Ford’s key policy goal of ending so-called “hallway health care” (hospital facilities so inadequate that patients must be treated and housed in corridors), Segal additionally speculates that a guaranteed income could lower hospitalization rates as low-income individuals begin “eating better, living more balanced lives and making progress in work, education and family.” He laments that “we will now never know” whether the policy would have had such predicted positive effects on health outcomes.
Dr. Kwame McKenzie
Dr. Kwame McKenzie, psychiatrist and CEO of the Wellesley Institute, had been named Special Advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot by the previous provincial government. Like Segal, McKenzie is now concerned about the effect of the experiment’s cancellation on those currently enrolled in it. The psychiatrist tweeted on August 1, the day after the experiment was cancelled, that he “woke this morning more worried about the health impacts on participants. This is a high risk situation.”
McKenzie spoke to CBC Radio about his concerns, emphasizing that participants currently face a “difficult and stressful time” which could lead to many and severe possible physiological consequences. He noted that many of those who enrolled in the pilot have made “life-changing decisions” founded on the belief that they would have a three-year guaranteed income, and argued that they now need both adequate financial support (he recommended at least a year to wind down the project) and personal support in making new decisions.
Also like Segal, McKenzie believes that a guaranteed income could have promoted key objectives of the PC government. He stressed, for example, its potential to result in better jobs for low-income people. Asked by CBC about MacLeod’s work-focused approach to welfare, McKenzie stated that he agrees that “good jobs is a great health intervention” (while cautioning that bad jobs tend to worsen health). He went on, however, to explain that a guaranteed income might have offered a effective means to achieve this goal, bemoaning “Now I guess we’ll never know.”
Speaking anonymously to CBC, another researcher on the experiment’s academic team more directly addressed MacLeod’s allegation that the pilot project is not working: “There’s no conceivable way that they were told the project wasn’t working. We just don’t have any data to know whether it was working or not.”
The researcher acknowledged that individual recipients have gone to the media with stories that are “very positive” but underlined the fact that these reports might not be representative: “[T]he whole point of our project was to just stand back from all the stories people are telling and try to look at the data in a reasonably scientific way.”
If the experiment had continued as planned, the research group was expected to evaluate outcomes in many areas — potentially including, among others, food security, stress and anxiety, healthcare usage, housing stability, education, and employment — comparing data gathered from the 4,000 guaranteed income recipients to that collected from a control group.
Results had been expected to be reported to the public in 2020.
by Guest Contributor | Jul 27, 2018 | Opinion
Voting is a sacred right, offering American citizens a voice in the local and national governments that set rules on their behalf. Yet, millions of citizens who have the right to vote in principle do not have the right to vote in practice.
Even putting aside felon disenfranchisement, impoverished Americans are disproportionately excluded from exercising their right to vote owing to the expense of taking off work on election day and the paperwork they face due to voter ID laws and frequent relocation. Universal Basic Income (UBI), by eliminating the financial stress underlying these barriers, has the potential to greatly expand voter turnout and civic participation more generally, restoring voting rights promised by the constitution.
Last month, a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that unconditional cash transfers, such as UBI, increase voter participation across two generations. By helping financially disadvantaged children catch up with their peers in a number of important ways, the transfers narrowed long-term participatory gaps in voting. The researchers found that cash transfers causally encourage greater voter turnout by increasing high school graduation rates and improving social skills among the children of recipient households. The only caveat, it seems, is that adults who received the cash transfers did not change their life-long voting habits—a fact that could make universal basic income more politically palatable to Republicans who would need not worry about the policy immediately undermining them in elections through increased turnout.
But beyond the parents’ transmission of voting habits to their children, I would argue that a UBI would make a sizable number of adult voters more civically engaged even if they did not vote more per se.
Take my mom as one example. Working erratically scheduled shifts as a Walmart cashier and other part-time jobs on the side, she lacks the energy to thoroughly research candidates or volunteer politically. Even when given the days off to vote, she often feels insufficiently informed about the candidates and realizes that the dominant party’s primary winner will nearly always win the election in our hyper-partisan state. A basic income, by relieving financial uncertainty, would lend her more agency to care and fight: not just pull a lever on Election Day but also participate actively in the democratic process. The ability to scale down her part-time cleaning work around election time would give her time to make a better-informed choice or volunteer to make calls for a local campaign.
Like my mom, Americans below or near the poverty line face more than just material barriers to voting; there is also a widespread sense that the political system is too saturated by dark money and elite manipulation to ever change. While the ivory-tower bemoans the historically low voter turnout rates in recent presidential and midterm elections, the underlying logic behind the indifference to voting is reasonable when viewed through this prism.
In the 2016 election, Pew Research Center reported that 25 percent of people who chose not to vote cited “dislike of the candidates or campaign issues,” alongside 15 percent who believed their vote “would not make a difference.” By putting money, now a critical mechanism of political speech, into the hands of working-class Americans, they will have more power to support candidates who truly represent them, donate to organizations holding politicians accountable once they are in office, or consider becoming candidates themselves.
And this is not just pie-in-the-sky thinking. In Taiwan, where there are discussions to bring forward a national referendum on basic income, polling from UBI Taiwan asked 879 Taiwanese citizens what they would do if they had a UBI. Nearly 2 in every 5 said they would pursue greater vocational training or education, and approximately 1 in 10 said they would volunteer more. Many more were simply undecided. These preferences suggest that, with more money, people would take steps to become more engaged and informed citizens.
From empowering women to leave abusive relationships to helping people navigate structural unemployment from automation, UBI remains a pragmatic method to move society forward. Although the policy is not a panacea, by helping to restore voting rights for low-income and middle-class Americans, a UBI would give voters the power to fight for solutions to problems a guaranteed income cannot directly solve. And that’s why it’s got my vote.
About the author:
James Davis is on the Board of Directors of UBI Taiwan. He is an incoming M.P.P. Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and holds a B.A. in economics and history from Columbia University.
by Andre Coelho | Jul 27, 2018 | News
Barack Obama. Credit to: CNBC.
Despite having failed to actually endorse basic income, for the second time, international media is portraying Barack Obama as a supporter. For instance, the Trumpet, a news depot that “seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description”, depicts Obama as a hard-core socialist, sending him an indirect message saying that “the Bible warns against a get-something-for-nothing mentality”. However, and apparently, being knowledgeable in clerical issues and having served in the Church of England ministry, hasn’t stopped Dr. Malcolm Torry from supporting and studying in detail the basic income policy.
Another online news service, the Independent Sentinel, which announces it “report[s] the news the media won’t”, blatantly calls Obama a communist. A communist who has “saddled us [in the United States] with the far-left system of healthcare which has been an expensive and failed experiment”. Considering the nature of the privatized-insurance based healthcare system in the US, Sweden’s healthcare could be called an extreme-far-left successful case study. This news article joints Barack Obama and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis as unrepented communists who promote basic income, a policy under which “people become enslaved to the State”.
The Mic reports the same event on a soberer tint. However, its post starts out by pointing that Obama “come[s] out in support of an economic policy that is far to the left of anything being proposed by most sitting U.S. politicians”. The writer and basic income Scott Santens once claimed that basic income was neither left or right (it’s forward), but apparently polarized politics is still very much popular in the US.
Quartz Africa reduces the focus on Obama’s reference to basic income itself, to highlight his speech on inequality, and his views on what should be the solution to humanity’s current crisis: an inclusive capitalism, “which protects collective bargaining, breaks up monopolies, enforces laws that root out corruption”. Unresolved remains Obama’s belief that “a job […] provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose”, while saying in the same breath that “we’re gonna have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like universal income.”
In a CNCB article, on the other hand, a more cautious approach is taken concerning Obama, who is, arguably, a more fervent supporter of a job guarantee than a basic income. He his cited to have said that “the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful [will get] tougher, and we’re going to have to be more imaginative, […] to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job”. The article also mentions Obama’s former vice-president Joe Biden, who basically supported that view integrally.
Whether former US President Barack Obama is a basic income supporter or not, it is rising to become one of the most debated issues in contemporary politics. Robert Reich, former President Clinton’s secretary of labor and ex-member of Obama’s transition advisory board, already looks at some sort of basic income policy as “inevitable”, along with tech moguls like Elon Musk. And that’s not only over the elite’s dome, it’s also among the average American citizen, whose support for the policy has been steadily increasing over the past few years, reaching almost half of the population according to recent polls.
More information at:
Karl Widerquist, “Obama speaks favorably about UBI but stops short of endorsing it (for the second time)”. Basic Income News, July 18th 2018
Andrew Miller, “Barack Obama Voices Support for a Universal Basic Income”, the Trumpet, July 19th 2018
S. Noble, “Barack Obama Promoted Universal Basic Income in South Africa”, the Independent Sentinel, July 18th 2018
A.P. Joyce, “Barack Obama signals support for a universal income”, Mic, July 17th 2018
Lynsey Chutel, “Barack Obama says the rich owe the world a huge debt”, Quartz Africa, July 17th 2018
Catherine Clifford, “Barack Obama suggests cash handouts be considered to address workforce challenges”, CNBC, July 18th 2018
André Coelho, “UNITED STATES: Joe Biden believes that jobs are the future, rather than basic income”, Basic Income News, September 23rd 2017
Catherine Clifford, “Ex-Labor Secretary: Some kind of cash handout ‘seems inevitable”, CNBC, July 13th 2018
André Coelho, “United States: American citizens support for UBI rises four times, compared to a decade ago”, Basic Income News, July 10th 2018
by Guest Contributor | Jul 20, 2018 | Opinion
Written by: Michael Laitman
There is no controversy about the benefits of breast milk, but its politicization is giving us food for thought. The New York Times claimed that the US government unsuccessfully threatened to retaliate against nations backing breastfeeding to favor the $70 billion-dollar infant formula industry, an accusation fervently denied by the current administration. Beyond the sensational headlines, the key factor is that such an important health-related topic for mothers and children has been put back on the table. It is also time to open the discussion about practical measures to encourage breastfeeding to benefit society.
Breast milk is rich in nutrients and includes antibodies to fight off viruses and bacteria protecting the baby from infections and allergies. While those who can’t breastfeed can use baby formula from a site like tastyganics.com, it may not provide that same level of protection. In fact, breastfeeding can save a baby’s life. It boosts the immune system, reduces infant mortality, and helps for a quicker recovery from common childhood illnesses. A Harvard study in 2016 estimated that 3,340 premature deaths a year among both mothers and babies could be prevented in the US alone given adequate breastfeeding. It also lowers a mother’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and osteoporosis.
It also reduces stress for both mother and baby, which helps to relieve common ailments such as colic. Whilst many believe that something like Infacol is the best cure for colic, gripe water, which has been used for generations, has been found to be just as effective. Gripe water, which is a simple syrup that can be made at home, has slowly been replaced by medication such as Infacol, and whilst, yes, they can be used together, there’s really no need to use Infacol when a natural alternative exists. This is a similar situation to breastfeeding, with formula slowly replacing natural milk over the years. The formula industry now has such a hold on new mothers that it’s hard for many of us to remember a time when breastfeeding was considered normal.
Besides the physical benefits and what laboratory experiments show, breastfeeding is one of the best ways of bonding with a baby. It releases oxytocin, which is the hormone responsible for other loving behaviors that make us feel good about a person.
Extended breastfeeding for the first two years of life allows for the child’s proper development, and women express more maternal sensitivity well past the infant and toddler years, according to a study by the American Psychological Association. Beyond such findings, there is also a natural inner connection between the mother and the child that allows for positive biological and internal development, which starts inside the womb.
The Need to Support Stay-at-Home Mothers
Considering the vital role mothers play in each individual’s development from the earliest of ages, it stands to reason that stay-at-home mothers should be given all the support possible to raise the next generation. They need to be entitled to receive financial assistance that will let them perform their remarkable duties without worrying about how to make ends meet, giving them a sense of freedom and control of their lives.
In today’s world, however, this is not the case. The bulk of the burden falls on the mother, who is usually expected to prioritize her career over her family, juggling tasks and becoming increasingly exhausted and unsatisfied. With the massive rise in the cost of living, mothers in most societies struggle to manage a balanced life, considering work as an economic necessity rather than liberation and personal progress and fulfillment. It can be difficult for mothers to get this balance right. Necessities are of different kinds. Home amenities like HVAC, electricity and water requirements are in addition to long-term and current expenditures. They need money for their family, but they also need to look after their kids, so they can’t work. This means that mothers often have no money to do anything, such as home improvements. So many stay-at-home mothers want to improve their homes, but they have no money to do so. They want faux stone panels on the outside of their home, but they are unable to do this. That’s why it’s so important that these mothers get more financial support to make sure they can improve their home or provide more for their family. Mothers get caught in an ever-tightening entanglement of commitments at work and home with very little restitution at any level. In extreme cases, there have been situations where work-stressed mothers abandoned their children while they rushed to work, e.g. a hospital CEO forgetting her child in a hot car where the child died, or a McDonald’s employee leaving her child alone in a public park while she worked her entire 9-hour work day.
Moreover, childcare can be extremely expensive and many women usually work just to cover its costs, challenging the whole purpose of going to the workplace. The so-called advancement of women’s rights to choose is in practice an oxymoron. At the end of the day, women who decide to fulfill a traditional role as stay-at-home mothers do not receive enough recognition, value, and economic support from society, as if raising a new generation were not the most important enterprise of all.
The same way science has been unable to create an artificial uterus that brings an embryo to life, a mother’s role of nurturing and educating the child is irreplaceable. We cannot pretend to be wiser than nature. If we really want to empower and foster women’s self-determination, society should create conditions for a comfortable motherhood.
Why UBI Should Prioritize Mothers
This is precisely where UBI can enter to encourage mothers who wish to raise their children full-time. UBI should benefit women first and foremost, particularly mothers who based on their own personal preference choose to leave the workplace in order to raise their children. Basic income should be provided for mothers without preconditions: not as welfare or charity, but as a remuneration for a crucial job in society.
Prioritizing UBI for mothers would be a win-win situation: it not only would help mothers, it would directly boost support for the entire next generation of society that mothers are now raising. Many personal and social problems, such as depression, anxiety and mental illness later in life, can be traced back to phenomena such as childhood neglect, stress, and traumas. Therefore, UBI would let mothers live with reduced economic stress, freeing them up to focus on caring, bonding with, and raising their children.
Likewise, as I’ve mentioned before, basic income for mothers would allow their participation in pro-social, connection-enriching activities, such as groups for pregnant women, parenting and home economics, among others, to enhance their motherly abilities with a supportive social climate. Naturally, such engagement in society would also positively influence their children.
Instead of treating mothers as second-class citizens, they should be recognized as “society’s CEOs”-the ruling force in creation, the only ones capable of giving birth to and nurturing a whole new generation. Keep in mind that the world is our roof, humanity is our home, and women are the pillar of this structure. Motherhood plays a critical role in giving birth to a new humanity. Therefore, taking a step forward in promoting UBI as critical support for mothers is a decision of utmost importance for a more promising future to all.
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.
