by Michael Lewis | May 18, 2018 | Opinion
Facebook and Economic Security Project (ESP) co-founder, Chris Hughes has a new book out. Called Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn, the book is part memoir, part policy proposal. The memoir chronicles Hughes’ childhood growing up in a North Carolina working class family, his school days, including four years at Harvard, his co-founding of Facebook, his failure as owner of the New Republic, and his efforts trying to figure out how best to give away his new-found fortune. The things Hughes learned during this thirty-year journey led to the policy proposal part of the book.
Hughes advocates what he calls a guaranteed income (GI) and is clear about how his proposal differs from a universal basic income (UBI). A UBI would periodically provide everyone with a certain amount of money without any means-test or work requirement. Hughes’ guaranteed income proposal has two provisions which distinguish it from a UBI: it is means-tested and it does have a work requirement. His idea is that we should provide every adult living in a household with an income of less than $50,000 a year a guaranteed income of $500 per month. So if Tara and Willow were a couple with a household income of $45,000 per year, each would each receive $500 per month. Thus, each would end up with $6,000 per year or $12,000 per year for the two of them. If Buffy and Angel had a household income of $60,000 per year, they would be ineligible for the program.
One reason Hughes is so interested in distinguishing his proposal from UBI is that he believes UBI has become too associated with automation. That is, the most frequently heard argument for UBI is that as robots and automation destroy jobs, we will need to reorganize society so people will be able to get their needs meet without having to sell their labor. Hughes rightly points out that there is a fair degree of debate about the extent to which jobs will be destroyed and, therefore, the extent to which concern about automation is a compelling enough reason to advocate UBI. Hughes also rightly reminds us that whether or not automation will destroy all, most, or whatever number of jobs; the job market is already unstable enough for there to be a need now for a policy that promotes economic security. And he believes his GI proposal is that policy.
As an “old timer” in the basic income “movement” I feel obligated to point out that UBI was discussed long before folks in Silicon Valley were paying attention. And many of those discussions had little to do with robots or automation. Thus a name change, from UBI to GI, is not necessary to suggest there may be reasons to support UBI other than worries about robots taking our jobs. But here we get to the crux of the matter: Hughes’ proposal does not appear to be just a name change but a different policy altogether. As I said above, GI would not be universal and would not be granted to those who are not working. The means–tested nature of GI is clear: those in households with incomes under $50,000 per year would get it, while those in households with higher incomes would not. I’m not a fan of this aspect of Hughes’ proposal, but, for the purposes of this essay, I’m going to set this aside. The work conditioned nature of Hughes’ proposal is less clear. This is what I want to focus on in the rest of the essay.
Even though Hughes’ GI would require people to work in order to receive it, however it does not have to be wage-work. That is, Hughes is willing to expand the definition of “work” to include care work, such as uncompensated child and elder care, as well as studying for a formal degree or training programs. So someone caring for their child or studying for a B.A. would be considered a worker and, therefore, eligible for the benefit, as long as their income was under $50,000 per year.
Hughes places such emphasis on work because he believes it is good for us; he tells us that it makes us, “happier, healthier, and more fulfilled” (p. 103).
As I was reading this discussion of the problems faced by the unemployed, I found myself wondering how much stem from an inability to find something fulfilling to do and how much from stigma. I do not think it is unfair to say that our society denigrates people whom we think can work but choose not to.
But let’s say Hughes is right and people do feel more fulfilled if they engage in wage work. Let’s say that engaging in wage work makes us less prone to depression, irritability, and insomnia. Going to college or caring for one’s kids is not wage work. So what do studies showing we are less prone to psychological and physical problems when we engage in wage work have to do with the kinds of non-wage work Hughes wants to compensate with his GI? I suspect it’s fulfilling, at least some of the time, to take care of one’s kids or to attend college. Is this why care takers and students, along with wage workers, should be compensated with a GI? But if something being fulfilling is sufficient to warrant compensation, why stop at wage work, care work, or going to school? People do all kinds of things, besides these three, they find fulfilling. Why not give them a GI too?
On page 92 of his book, Hughes says that, “everyone who contributes to their community” should receive a GI. It seems that engaging in something fulfilling is not what warrants receipt of a GI — making some social contribution does. This raises the question of whether being a wage worker, care taker, or student are the only ways to contribute to one’s community. Hughes’ answer seems to be “no.” On page 112, he argues for a more expansive definition of “work” which would include not just wage work, care work, and studying but also community service, religious service, and artistic work.
Here I found myself wondering how far Hughes is willing to go. That is, how expansive a definition of “work” does he want? The more expansive his definition becomes, the more fuzzy the distinction between GI and UBI (the unconditional part) becomes. To see what I’m getting at consider the following example.
In downtown Manhattan, there’s a famous, at least among many basketball lovers, outdoor basketball court on 4th Street and 6th Avenue. Basketball, in a sense, is a very communal game. A person may shoot jump shots all by themselves. But to play a full-court pick-up game requires ten people. So if someone decides to play, even for the “selfish” reason that they get fulfillment from it, they benefit the other nine players as well, simply by making the game possible. Now the folks who play at this Manhattan court are quite good. Many of us who’ve seen games at this court think it’s some of the best pick-up basketball we have ever witnessed. In fact, the quality of games at this court is so high, that large crowds of people usually gather just to watch the action. Presumably, these spectators get a great deal of enjoyment from watching these folks try to get the “ball in the hole.” Now here’s the question: are the players at this court, simply by playing, making a social contribution? They are not doing wage work, care work, art work, or religious service. Are they doing community work? If Hughes’ GI were enacted and all these players were from households with incomes of less than $50,000 per year, should they receive it?
Another way to get at the question above is this: under an expanded definition of work what would not qualify as work? If it turned out that anything done during one’s waking hours was work, then the difference between GI and the unconditional part of UBI would simply be semantic. Hughes could respond that semantic distinctions are not “merely semantic.”
In a society where work is a fundamental value it may be necessary to call something work, as well as convince others that it is, in order to give the person engaged in that activity a guaranteed income. This is a response I would agree with. But I would add that the importance of semantics cuts both ways.
Requiring an activity to be considered work before the person engaged in it can receive income support is also sending the semantic, or symbolic, message that only working people deserve economic security. I can understand why we might want to do this in a hunter-gatherer society where all are living on the brink of starvation. But do we really need to in the richest society the world has even known? Consider something that may at first appear unrelated.
The U.S. currently imprisons about 1.5 million people. Anyone familiar with the U.S criminal justice system is aware that our prison population is, arguably, one of the most despised groups of people in the nation. Yet we grant all these prisoners a right to food. Prison life is no doubt hard. And we certainly do not feed incarcerated people the best food possible. But we do feed them, and I suspect anyone who proposed that we stop doing so would not get very far. Now here’s a question: is refusing to make a social contribution worse than the most serious violent crimes we have imprisoned some people for committing? If not, why propose a policy which sends the semantic message that non-working people do not deserve income support, income that could help them obtain food, as well as meet other basic needs? Why send a semantic message which implicitly amounts to the claim that non-working people are worse than some of our most violent prisoners?
To anticipate a possible misunderstanding, I am not claiming that non-working people are better than some of our most violent prisoners. My point is simply that if all prisoners have a right to subsistence, why not grant non-working people that same right? Prisoners, non-working people, and all the rest of us are human beings in need of food and other means of subsistence. A UBI, at the semantic level at which I am speaking, acknowledges this. Hughes’ GI proposal does not.
Thanks to Chris Hughes for his very helpful comments on this piece. Any mistakes or errors are, of course, my responsibility alone.
About the author:
Michael A. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist by training whose areas of interest are public policy and quantitative methods. He’s also a co-founder of USBIG and has written a number of articles, book chapters, and other pieces on the basic income, including the co-edited work The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee. Lewis is on the faculties of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Graduate and University Center of the City University of New York.
by Karl Widerquist | May 17, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This summer and fall I’ll give at least ten talks in seven cities in six countries including the United States, Canada, France, Scotland, Finland, and Lithuania. Here’s the information I have on each talk so far:
Friday, May 18, to Sunday, May 20, 2018, keynote speaker at “New Directions in Basic Income Workshop,” the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, presenting “The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments,” Sunday, 1:00 – 2:30pm.
Thursday, May 24, to Sunday, May 27, 2018, participant at “North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress,” McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, presenting “The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments,” Saturday 10:30 – 12:00pm, Room 1305/07.
Wednesday, June 13, Paris, France. Guest speaker at Science Po, presenting “Freedom as the Power to Say No.” Details TBA
Thursday, June 14, to Saturday, June 16, 2018, participant at “The Economic Ethics Network Conference.” Invitation only. University of Paris, presenting “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.”
Sunday, June 17, Talk to Basic Income Activists on “Basic Income’s Third Wave,” Paris, France, details TBA
Monday, June 18, 3 to 5pm, guest speaker presenting “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
Friday, July 20, 2018, presenting “A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments: The Devil’s in the Caveats,” Glasgow, Scotland
Friday, August 24 to Sunday, August 26, 2018, participant at Basic Income Earth Network Congress, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland, presenting “Microsimulation Analysis of the Cost of Basic Income in the United Kingdom” (joint presentation with Georg Arndt).
Thursday, August 30, to Saturday, September 1, 2018, participant European Network for Social Policy Analysis Conference, Institute of Sociology and Social Work, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania, presenting “Basic Income’s Third Wave.”
Thursday, October 18, to Saturday, October 20, 2018, participant at Association for Political Theory, Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Pennsylvania, presenting, “The Prehistory of Private Property, Part 1: The Myth of Appropriation.”
by Julen Bollain | May 14, 2018 | News
The Red Renta Básica association (official section of the Basic Income Earth Network) announces the offer of two scholarships, covering part of the costs to start the Interuniversity Postgraduate course in Analysis of Capitalism and Transformative Policies (from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Barcelona). The purpose being to enable access to suitable students who are in a difficult economic situation.
In the Interuniversity Postgraduate course in Analysis of Capitalism and Transformative Policies, the main ideas of republicanism, socialism, anarchism, environmentalism, feminism and the theories of justice and the commons will be discussed. Capitalism, jobs, trade unionism and both traditional and the most recent proposals of social policies will also be analysed. Moreover, there will also be several explanations about the most relevant political and social processes. Several members of the Red Renta Básica association will be teaching in the Postgraduate course and some of its lessons will deal with basic income.
Applications are already opened, and more information can be sought at Red Renta Básica. The deadline for submitting applications ends on June 30th, 2018. The jury in charge of selecting applicants winning the scholarships is composed by three members of the Red Renta Básica board: Julen Bollain, David Casassas and Francisco Ramos.
by Karl Widerquist | May 2, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in May 2011.
In March 2011, Brazilian Senator (and tireless campaigner for BIG), Eduardo Suplicy told me and other members of the USBIG and BIEN Committees that he would soon be meeting with President Barak Obama at a dinner during the President’s visit to Brazil. Suplicy asked me to draft a letter to President Obama on behalf of the two organizations. With a lot of help from the committee members and from Alfredo de Romaña and other volunteers, we completed the following letter (see below). Suplicy delivered it on March 19, 2011. According to Suplicy, “[Obama] said that I could be sure that he would read it.”
The full text of the letter to President Obama
Karl Widerquist, Georgetown University-Qatar
Co-Chair (along with Ingrid Van Niekerk), the Basic Income Earth Network
Newsletter editor, the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network
March 18, 2011
Barack Obama
President of the United States of America
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing you on the occasion of your visit to Brazil—the first country in the world to approve a law authorizing the phase-in of a full Unconditional Basic Income to the whole population. The law (n. 10,835/2004) was passed by consensus of all parties in the National Congress and sanctioned by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on January 8, 2004. According to the law, Basic Income will be introduced step-by-step, starting with those most in need, through the Bolsa Família Program.
Basic Income is the simple idea of a small, government-ensured income for all citizens. It exists today only in one place: the State of Alaska. For the last 28 years Alaska has distributed a dividend, financed out of oil revenues, to every man, woman, and child in the state. Alaska’s “Permanent Fund Dividend” usually varies between $1000 and $2000 per person per year. It has become one of the most popular state government programs in the United States. It has helped to give Alaska the highest economic equality and the lowest poverty rate of any state in the United States.
Many opportunities exist to introduce a similar program at the federal level. The Cap-and-Dividend and Tax-and-Dividend approaches to global warming include a small Basic Income. The inclusion of this dividend can help counter the argument (used against the Cap-and-Trade approach) that taxes on carbon emissions will hurt average American families.
While in Brazil, you will have the opportunity to exchange ideas about Basic Income with President Dilma Rousseff and the author of the law that created the Citizen’s Basic Income, Senator Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy. He can discuss how the Bolsa Família might be expanded into a true Basic Income and how it might help to attain the main aim of President Rousseff to eradicate absolute poverty and to promote more equality and justice.
I believe that you can improve on the success of the Bolsa Família and the Alaska Dividend by moving toward a Basic Income in the United States. The University of Alaska-Anchorage will hold a workshop entitled “Exporting the Alaska Model” on April 22, 2011. Several researchers will discuss how programs of this type can be introduced and improved. I invite you to send a member of your team to participate in that workshop.
Sincerely,
Karl Widerquist
The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network Committee:
Michael Howard (chair), University of Maine; Eri Noguchi, Columbia University; Michael Lewis, Hunter College; Almaz Zelleke, New School; Steven Shafarman, Income Security Institute; Al Sheahen, Author; Fred Block, University of California-Davis; Dan O’Sullivan, RiseUpEconomics.org; Karl Widerquist, Georgetown University-Qatar; Jason Burke Murphy, Elms College.
The Basic Income Earth Network Executive Committee:
Ingrid Van Niekerk (co-chair), Economic Policy Research Institute, South Africa; Karl Widerquist (co-chair) Georgetown University-Qatar; David Casassas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain; Almaz Zelleke; The New School, USA; Yannick Vanderborght, Facultés universitaires Saint Louis in Brussels, Belgium; Louise Haagh, University of York, United Kingdom; James Mulvale, University of Regina, Canada; Dorothee Schulte-Basta, BIEN-Germany; Pablo Yanes, Secretary of Social Development, Mexico City, Mexico; Andrea Fumagalli, University of Pavia, BIN-Italia, Italy. Honorary co-presidents: Eduardo Suplicy, the Brazilian Senate; Guy Standing, the University of Bath; Claus Offe, Hertie School of Governance, Germany. Chair of the International Advisory Board: Philippe Van Parijs, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
by Kate McFarland | Apr 30, 2018 | Opinion
The following is part two of a two part series (part one can be found here) featuring Kate McFarland interviewing D. JoAnne Swanson of The Anticareerist on Basic Income. The original article can be found here.
KM: Are there any particular writers or thinkers on basic income who have influenced your views? Is there any additional literature that you would recommend for those who are interested, specifically, in the idea that basic income could facilitate and encourage unpaid work?
DJS: This could be a long list! Not all of these people are basic income writers per se, but they’ve all greatly influenced my views on basic income and unpaid work. Here are some of the writers I refer to most frequently, along with a favorite quote from each:
David Frayne – his interview in Contrivers’ Review is among the most lucid treatments of these topics I’ve ever read. I love his writing. I highly recommend his book The Refusal of Work.
“…there has to be more political organisation to create change. The book is deliberately very explicit about this because I felt a strong need to distinguish it from popular books promoting lifestyle changes like “slowness” or “life simplification” as solutions to the problems with work. We are seeing a lot of these books where the author is positioned as a sort of lifestyle guru, who is going to tell us the secret key to living well, and it is usually by working less, being less materialistic, and so on. I don’t think that people really benefit from being told this, and these books actually anger me to a degree, because they suggest that change is a matter of changing individual habits.”
Charles Eisenstein – author of Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible
“Why do we want to create more jobs? It is so people have money to live. For that purpose, they might as well dig holes in the ground and fill them up again, as Keynes famously quipped…Wouldn’t it be better to pay people to do nothing at all, and free up their creative energy to meet the urgent needs of the world?”
“Unfortunately, the term leisure carries connotations of frivolity and dissipation that are inconsistent with the urgent needs of the planet and its people as the age turns. There is a vast amount of important work to be done, work that is consistent with degrowth because it won’t necessarily produce salable product. There are forests to replant, sick people to care for, an entire planet to be healed. I think we are going to be very busy. We are going to work hard doing deeply meaningful things that no longer must fight upstream against the flow of money, the imperative of growth. Yet I also believe we will have more true leisure — the experience of the abundance of time — than we do today. The scarcity of time is one reason we overconsume, attempting to compensate for the loss of this most primal of all wealth. Time is life. To be truly rich is to have sovereignty over our own time.”
Charlene ‘Eleri’ Hamilton of Women4UBI on The Work Trap:
“Some detractors of Basic Income say that it will create dependency and slavery to the government. That is what is happening with our so-called safety nets now. You have to prove yourself to the government to get benefits. You have to continue to prove yourself to keep benefits. You are told when and how and why you can use those benefits. You will lose those benefits the moment you step out of the framework. Basic Income eliminates all that.
Basic Income is about trust and respect. We respect you as a member of our society, and we trust you to make your own choices. We don’t need to means test you, or scour through your finances, or judge what you buy when. When everyone gets the same level of benefit, then no one needs to be judged, shamed or excluded.”
Peter Frase – search his blog for the “work” tag. In particular, see Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs and Work To Need. From Workin’ It:
“I want to separate the different meanings of work. But doing so is essentially impossible in a world where everyone is forced to work for wages, because they have no other means of survival. In that world, all work is work in the first sense, “necessary” because it has been made necessary by the elimination of any alternative.”
Kathi Weeks – The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries and A Feminist Case for Basic Income:
“Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we have more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives.”
Silvia Federici – Wages Against Housework
See also the Caring Labor Archive.
“…under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit.”
J. Larochelle & C.A. L’Hirondelle of Livable4All – “What is Jobism?”
“…anyone doing informal but necessary work such as unpaid care-giving is put under financial duress because their time used for unpaid work cannot be used for paid work. Families, neighborhoods and communities are robbed of the time and resources they need thrive and be healthy. This robbing resources from the informal sector causes great harm to children, elders, people with extra needs from illness or disability and it breaks apart families and communities. This creates a negative feedback loop because the subsequent problems fuel the need for more ‘fixing’ jobs (e.g. social workers, addiction counsellors, police, lawyers, jailers, etc.).”
Ethan Miller – Occupy, Connect, Create! Imagining Life Beyond ‘The Economy’
“The sorcery of capitalist economics is precisely to make its own violence invisible, so that it can appear to be nothing but the miraculous liberator of human potential and the progressive deliverer of ever-abundant goods. And there is a disturbingly good reason for us to give in to this illusion: most of us are dependent on the very economy that has systematically exploited us and undermined the health of our communities and our environments. We have come to rely on the very “job creators” (that new euphemism for exploiters) whose project of profiting at our expense we condemn. We have come to need the very economic growth machine that is eating our world and destabilizing our planetary climate in the name of “progress.”
Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear, Yeoshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith, founders of the gender justice movement Give Your Money To Women: The End Game of Capitalism.
“This goes back to classism again and again and again. If you look across the spectrum, things women do for society are valued little or not at all in terms of money. They’re essentially forced to access capital through their relationships with men: personal, familial, professional.”
Molly Scott Cato – See Arbeit Macht Frei (the first edition of this book was released in 1996 under the title Seven Myths About Work.)
“Work is a confidence trick that lies at the heart of the economic system of capitalism. If a man walked up to another man and hit him over the head with a stick and stole half the money in his wallet this would be considered a crime and the man would be considered a threat to society. But if a man offers another a job and pays him half the value his labour generates we laud him as a wealth-creator, as a worthy entrepreneur, the sort of person our children should be taught to emulate in school.”
Sarah Jaffe – See Opting for Free Time:
“…we need to be willing to argue for leisure as a right, and as a feminist issue. […] A gendered demand for leisure would argue that women’s time is as important as men’s, whether we are spending it parenting or reading a book or lying on a beach. It would take into account the racialized and classed expectations of different groups of women, and argue that low-income women deserve time off too (and it would argue that they deserve to make enough money to enjoy that time.) It would point out that what is earned vacation for white women is not “laziness” in women of color.
It would argue not from any biological imperative (that rarely gets us anywhere good), but from a time-honored (though lately forgotten) labor and left tradition that says that time, as much as anything, is a right—and it would take from the Wages for Housework movement the idea that unpaid work in the home is still work that we deserve a respite from.”
Karl Widerquist – Among my favorite quotes from his work is this powerful statement:
“One answer of mine to one of the common questions [about universal basic income, a.k.a. UBI] is unusual, and it’s been a major theme in my writing since I started. When people say it’s something for nothing, I argue most emphatically that it is not. We force so many terrible things onto the poor. We don’t get their permission. And without UBI, we don’t pay them back for what we force on them. We make them live in a world where everything else is owned. We make rules about all kinds of things they could otherwise do. Our ancestors lived without such rules for 200,000 years. They could hunt, gather, fish or farm as they wished. We’ve taken all that away and given them nothing in return. UBI is long overdue. UBI is paying for the privileges you have taken. If we don’t have UBI we put the propertyless in the position where they have no other choice but to work for the very people whose privileged control of resources makes the propertyless unable to use resources for themselves. UBI is no less than the end of effective slavery.”
James Chamberlain, whose work I just discovered a few weeks ago. (My first reaction: “where were the people who were writing things like this when I was applying to graduate school?”) I’m very excited to read his new book Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, especially after reading an early draft of the first chapter.
“Not only does the requirement to work keep many of us too busy to engage in deep reflections on fundamental questions of collective existence, but the ideology of work erodes freedom by constructing paid work as an unassailable good and by placing it outside the realm of “reasonable” or “realistic” debate. By encouraging us to see the requirement to work for pay as an inevitable or even natural feature of collective existence, the ideology of work therefore chips away at our freedom to even imagine alternative futures in which paid work might play a different role (or none at all), and thus reduces our capacities to act according to our own ends.”
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You can find out more about The Anticareerist and its author HERE.
Want to read back issues? An archive of all published issues is HERE.
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In May, Kate McFarland will be speaking about anticareerism at the North American Basic Income Guarantee congress in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
