For those of us with secure, comfortable, abundant/overabundant lives, it may take imagination to consider the desperation of this wealthy nation’s most vulnerable. For those who wish to see, the grotesque disparate economic impact of the pandemic has made it only more obvious.
During the 1930s Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt fiercely fought conservative opposition to create a system of social security, which essentially meant economic security, for at least some of the nation’s people—the elderly poor—who without it might not have survived. Now, even at risk, social security is taken for granted as essential to the fabric of collective responsibility that holds a society together. Even golf cart people who don’t like “government” (unless it benefits them) do like social security (but without considering that younger generations are paying in without the surety that they, the young people, will ever see the return on their contribution). (That’s how the system’s mechanics work.) (With proper leadership, we can fix that.)
As a community of humane people, we could imagine social security then. In different economic times, we now need to consider the essential humane safety net of universal basic income, sometimes abbreviated as “UBI.” There’s plenty of bloat in this economy, but in the wrong places, and we can afford to pursue overall wellness instead.
Andrew Yang was not destined to become president. But he rightly brought universal basic income into the conversation and made it central to his campaign. I’m glad he continues to speak about “human capitalism,” and “social credits,” people rewarded not so much just for achieving their own narrow economic self-interests (sometimes by actively harming those of others) but instead for solving more significant communal problems and generally contributing to the larger cultural well-being of all.
Jack Dorsey founded Twitter and is a really rich guy (also with a really long beard). He recently donated millions to communities across the United States, supporting local universal basic incomes so they could guarantee neighbors might stay in their homes, keep on the power and water, buy food, and (an incalculable comfort for many who don’t have much comfort) even feed their pets.
Beginning as a wonky idea, in recent years UBI has caught on in some places—Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, Scotland, Iran, Nigeria, Liberia, and Oakland, California. Results have mostly been good.
It’s simple, more so than most economic policy. It makes sense within the structure of our economic times, just as the introduction of social security did in its.
The UBI guarantees a modest, stable financial base so that individuals and families can feel secure enough to use the rest of their human potential not just on mere survival. Without money worries front of mind, these people can focus instead on their own talent, opportunity, and prosperity which all in the end contribute to the whole community.
Much like the pandemic relief of 2020 (and surely now 2021, thank you Georgia), these funds don’t waste time moralizing, or putting people in crisis, without enough resources, through bureaucratic barriers they have no capacity to leap. (An aside. Over the past year we’ve learned—if we’re paying attention—that no one “means-tested” the big banks and big corporations that got pandemic money intended for small businesses and their employees.)
In 2018, Nathan Heller wrote about universal basic income in The New Yorker.
Heller’s piece begins with some history of the English village of Speenhamland around the turn to the 19th century. It faced a social crisis based on poverty and the actual starvation of its people. Town leaders came up with a plan, as Heller puts it, to group poor adults—first, those who could work—second, those who could not work—and third, those who could but would not work.
Concepts of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor people carried into 20th century American public policy. As Heller recounts, Richard Nixon (really) tried to do a then-version of a UBI, but it failed in Congress and the Senate over concerns about the “idle poor.” Bill Clinton, infamously, had his hand in the “work requirements” of “welfare reform” which mostly served the continued impoverishment of non-privileged women and children in this country. Critics of some version of universal basic income come from political right and left. The right presumes it encourages imprudence—having children without being able to afford them, money dribbled away on the familiar vices of beer and cigarettes, or plain bad choices. The left maintains that it lets capitalist business off the hook for its failure to fairly compensate the workers who create its profits. There are some who question how it might be “paid for,” mostly by those who never asked how decades of uncalled-for wars and unnecessary tax breaks for already really rich families and incredibly (tax-savvy) huge corporate behemoths could be “paid for.”
In my experience as a researcher and writer in economic policy, continuing as an informed reader of honest journalism on that theme, I see wide agreement among smart people that standard economic indicators just don’t validly reflect the financial reality of most lives. It’s not the last century’s economy, with strong unions, stable employment, linear resume paths. Our time is one of workplace technological disruption, vast student and medical debt, the gig economy, career entrepreneurship, now pandemic (and it won’t be the last one…and then…climate crisis).
Biological species respond to the inevitable change around them and the ones which adapt survive. Human systems, same thing. The universal basic income is only one small step in our becoming an economy grounded not in a past that’s gone, but in a reality-based future that’s up to us to create.
Dayna Finet 