How would a basic income within a city affect how that city operates? To delve into this question, Jim and Owen spoke to Mark MacKinnon, City Councillor in Guelph, Ontario. The conversation ranges from the effects a basic income could have on local businesses to how the political appetite might change for other city improvements. MacKinnon also touches on the basic income pilot that just began in three cities within Ontario.
Jim and Owen answer listener questions from how to pay for basic income, which country will implement a basic income first and how we will get there. You can send your questions to the Universal Income Project on Facebook or Twitter, or tweet at Owen (@owenpoindexter) or Jim (@dr_pugh).
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Owen: Hello and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.
Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh.
Owen: A while back we asked you for questions about the basic income, and a number of you responded. In this episode, we are just going to go through a few of those.
Jim: Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to get to everyone’s question, but we did have a few that we thought would be good ones to start with. Here goes.
Owen: Alright. The first one is from Abigail Irwin, it came in through Facebook, “Here is the one big question I keep getting: how is it going to be funded?”
Jim: I would say for me as well, this is a question that people ask all the time. Since we’re talking about such a big program, people are naturally curious about, “Alright, where does the funding come from here?” One thing that I’ve mentioned before that I think is really important to remember is a lot of the conceptions we have right now about what the government “can or cannot afford” are really not based on reality.
That if you look at our economy and how much it’s grown over recent years, there’s actually so much money out there. Our Gross Domestic Product over the last 15 years has grown by four trillion dollars. Just taking a big picture snapshot, it’s important to know that there is money out there.
Owen: Yes and on top of that, I’ll say that while I think it’s important to talk about how are we going to pay for things, the government is very willing to drop billions of dollars on some programs without having this discussion. It’s only around new big programs where we do say, “Okay, well, where is that money going to come from because we haven’t already baked that in.”
Jim: We do see often around things like military spending, spending tens of billions of dollars ready at the drop of a hat is not uncommon, but as soon as we talk about billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars for social programs, people suddenly get very nervous about how we’re going to actually afford that.
Owen: And getting more into, “okay, how is it going to be funded?” — obviously, there are a number of ways you could do it. If you structure it as a negative income tax, you could just have a tax that runs backwards essentially. At a certain income level, you receive money instead of pay money in. That’s one way to do it where you don’t have to touch anything else.
Jim: Something I would add to that is, with negative income tax, one concern that I know people have is that if you’re actually not giving the same amount to different people, that could complicate the logistics figuring out, “alright, how do we actually assess someone’s income in the moment and decide alright, how big is the check we mail to them?” You can actually accomplish exactly the same thing using the tax code. You can structure it so that you give everyone the same amount of money every month regardless of how much they’re making but then make sure that you’re actually clawing back more of that money earlier on, based on how much they’re making when you’re actually assessing taxes. The same way you do now as far as withholding from paychecks.
Owen: Right, and just to offer a crude version of that, you could impose a flat tax and the revenue from that would just be turned into a dividend that would go equally to everyone. So everyone is paying the same percentage of their income into the basic income fund, but the way it works out is that at a certain point, you are paying and receiving about the same amount, and everyone above that ends up paying more, but they still get the dividend.
Jim: To give some more specific, since I want to actually make sure that we do give an answer to this question, there are actually a lot of different ideas for how we fund this out there. Depending on who you ask, you’re going to get different answers. Some of the most common ones that I hear proposed, one is the idea of — I think, particularly as the starting point — looking at the Carbon Dividend.
We’ve talked about that in the past. There was a proposal in California. There is currently, in fact, a campaign in Washington, DC around taxing carbon and paying out to revenue that comes in as a universal income, as universal dividends to people in the region. That could at the very least provide us with a powerful first step towards basic income by saying, “alright we’re setting up the system that gives everyone equally regular payments of money.”
Owen: I think that Carbon Dividend idea is my favorite in this whole space because it does start to address climate change as well. It takes this idea that we have shared resources, in this case, the air and the environment and that we are all invested in this whether we want to be or not. By taxing the use of the environment essentially which is a shared resource then we can all benefit from it.
Along the same lines, though very different, is the Financial Transactions Tax. That’s another one that gets thrown in periodically. We all benefit from the infrastructure of our financial system, and some businesses and people use that quite a lot to conduct business, trade stocks, whatever. By having just a very small fee on financial transactions, you could also do the same thing and fund the basic income.
Jim: Another one that often gets discussed is the idea that a Land Value Tax, where you’re assessing the value of any given piece of property that either a person or a corporation might own, and then saying, “we’re going to set some low level of taxation so that every month or every year, you are paying a certain amount based on the value of that piece of land.” Not just the land itself, but what’s actually on the land.
One thing that I think is really interesting about the Land Value Tax is it actually starts to get closer to the idea of a wealth tax. Something that is taxing not just how much money people are bringing in, but how much they actually own. Land isn’t a perfect measure of someone’s wealth, but it tends to be pretty close a lot of the time. That could help not only with providing the support that you get from basic income but also to share prosperity and share wealth across the country by really looking at that as the source of the funding.
Owen: Right. I think this is an important concept because while income is easy to track, or easy enough, a lot of the disparity that we see in the world is through wealth, and an actual wealth tax is very hard to administer because unless you have some way to track all forms of wealth, people are going to be able to move it around to not be taxed. But land is always there. You can’t pick it up and move it somewhere else. It does tend to be a good proxy for a holding place for wealth, especially in California, where we are.
Lastly, we can touch on general progressive taxation. We mentioned the income tax before but it doesn’t have to be a flat tax. It could be a progressive tax that increases as you go into higher income levels. There’s also a capital gains tax and perhaps others that you could mention.
Jim: Yes. Touching on the capital gains, right now we have the level of that set considerably lower than income. What that’s effectively doing is saying, sitting on wealth, you and the amount of money you get from that, you’re actually paying less in taxes and someone who’s working for the money.
Owen: You see those incentives pretty clearly in the market.
Jim: Right, exactly. That’s actually encouraging people to hoard rather than to spend. Also, again, if you look at the various campaigns that are going on around different policies, you’ll hear people talking about closing tax loopholes as well, particularly for corporations. There’s a lot of ways that companies are able to avoid what is the supposed tax rate that they might owe, due to how complex the tax code is in many places.
Owen: Hopefully, that gives you a sense of how we might fund the basic income. There are a lot of paths to do it, a lot of different sources you might look to. It should be said there’s no one answer to this. I’ve said this before the first step in creating a basic income is deciding that we want one. Once you have that destination, there are a bunch of paths to get there.
Jim: Right. I think it’s important to remember that oftentimes when we talk about these big bold policies, we know they’re going to cost a lot, but in most cases, we don’t necessarily have to go through all the math right upfront. It’s important to just know that yes, the funds exist out there. Let’s think about what this is going to do for people and then if this is actually something that’s going to help folks, let’s fight to make it happen.
Owen: Okay. Next question comes from Darcy Lengthier — hoping I’m pronouncing your name right, Darcy. “Which country will be next?” I have a couple guesses, and they’re pretty unoriginal.
[laughter]
Jim: Yes, we’ll probably have similar answers here. I would say any country that’s currently doing a pilot for basic income is probably pretty high on the list for ones that have potential to enact one. We talked about this before, but Finland launched their pilots in the last year. Ontario in Canada just launched their pilot. We do have the pilot happening in Oakland through Y Combinator, but it’s a little bit of a different situation since it’s a private entity funding it. I wouldn’t read quite as much into that as these programs that are actually being initiated by national governments and what that signifies as far as intentions.
Owen: I think my first pick in the draft would be Canada because they’re doing a pilot, and it feels like this federal government that seems like it would be ready to try something like this at least in terms of a Carbon Dividend or even like an Alaska style, natural wealth kind of thing.
Jim: That said, I think that there certainly are other countries out there talking seriously about it. Particularly for some of the smaller countries, if the people in power decided alright, this is a priority for us, if it was a country that was in a situation that have a reasonable amount of wealth or a lower cost of living for their population, they could potentially move pretty quickly to enact something.
Owen: I wouldn’t put Switzerland at the top of the list right now, but they have already had the referendum. It’s a small country with a lot of wealth. The math is a little easier there.
Jim: I think the big answer is, we don’t know. I think as far as what country will do pilots next, we haven’t talked about it much, but Barcelona is in the process of getting a pilot going. I do know there’s a lot of others that are in these discussion phases if not quite ready to launch.
Owen: The one last thing I’ll throw in there is, if you were to say the five most likely countries or the field, I’m probably going to take the field. I could see this coming out of somewhere unexpected or somewhere we’re not figured out right now.
Jim: Absolutely. Our third question is, “what kind of timeline are we looking at for America as a whole to implement basic income?” That came from Tim Kelly on Twitter.
Owen: Maybe December, January?
[laughter]
Jim: They’re just about there.
Owen: More seriously, I think one step might be to have this become more mainstream within the Left / Democratic Party in the US. If and when the Democrats take back power, maybe we could see something like a Carbon Dividend. I could see that happening in the 2020s, to give a decade.
Jim: If we can have it in 2020, I would be very happy. That is probably a little sooner than I was–
Owen: It’s a bit aggressive.
Jim: I would say, I generally tell people that if those of us who support the policy approach this right, 15 years seems like a reasonable timeline. That said, I think this is a kind of policy where it’s going to be very, very far off until it’s not. I think that there’s going to be nothing linear about the progression of the basic income movement. It’s going to be those of us who are in the space talking about it, getting more people hearing about it. Really writing the playbook for how this might happen, and then it’s going to be a question of when is that moment.
When is that moment when suddenly people are like, “Oh, we need something really different. We actually need to guarantee fundamental economic security for people. How do we do that?” If at that point, we have really set the stage for basic income, it could happen really, really fast.
Owen: I agree. I used to think of self-driving cars and trucks as the moment when everything was going to flip. I have actually backed off that a little bit just because they’re already on the road. This is already happening, and it hasn’t really catalyzed a discussion in a way that means policy is going to happen very soon, but I think we might see something at some point where one day Amazon lays off thousands or tens of thousands of workers. It’s them, plus Google, plus others, and it creates some amount of desperation where people are looking for a policy fix.
Jim: I will say, I don’t think we haven’t seen any significant amount of layoffs around self-driving vehicles.
Owen: Right. That could still happen.
Jim: It’s something that I know at this point, a lot of people think could be coming relatively soon, but how that will actually proceed? I think we’ll have to see. I will say I think I’ve been struck by how much people’s perception about the fundamental characteristics of work have changed in the last couple of years. That two years back, I felt like most people believed that the way that we do work would stay — I think stay is actually the wrong word because it was already shifting at that point, but could remain similar to how we did that in the 20th century.
Now, I think more and more people recognized that that model for how our labor space operates just is — there isn’t a way to go back. We are in uncharted territories here. We do need to be thinking more outside the box as far as what are the right policies to provide people with security they need.
Owen: I think just to add a little bit onto that. The moments that might catalyze something might just be something where we realize that we are in uncharted territory, the collectively “we.” Because I think we’re already there. We are already into the woods, and we’ve lost our map. But you don’t necessarily know that until some day, you woke up, and you realize you’ve lost the path. Sort of a strange metaphor for us [laughs].
I think it’ll be as much a realization of where we already are than something where we get to a point and, yeah, we are there.
Jim: We’ve meandered a bit from the original question here. So if we had to name a timeline, I would say I’m going to stick with 15 years.
Owen: Okay, I’m going to go Price Is Right style and just take the under on that one.
Jim: [laughs] 14 years?
Owen: Aggressively optimistic there. On the Price Is Right, you say one year and then you get all the years below that, the below years. This is a very dated reference, I’m realizing. I don’t know think that show is even on the air anymore. Haven’t watched TV in a while. Okay, related question, also the final question, “how do we get there?” So, Jim, how do we get there?
Jim: Well, this is asked by StepUpBG on Twitter, and we covered a little bit of this in the last question. I truly believe that the right approach to move towards basic income is to say that right now, we are laying groundwork. We are doing the things that make basic income more familiar, more understood and so that once we get that moment, we can say, “Alright, we got this. We know what this is. We’re ready to go. Let’s make this happen.”
Owen: I think you find, at least in America, that often the first time people hear of this policy — maybe less so, I’m getting this reaction less and less — but the most common first reaction is some amount of shock towards the idea of just giving people money unconditionally. I think people do need to sit with the idea for a little bit, and it needs to penetrate into more circles and become something that people are less afraid of talking about.
Jim: Right, I think part of that is just talking to more people about basic income and what it might do, having it be a more familiar concept that people they know and trust actually think this could be a really good solution and I think part of that is looking at what are the stepping stone policies that, in practice, can actually show people more what this is about. I think what to makes sense to go back to here is looking at the Alaska model and how the fact that everyone there is getting an unconditional payment every year is actually something that makes this whole thing make more sense to people a lot of the time.
Owen: Yes, and along that, I’m very excited about the trials in Ontario that just started and the upcoming one’s run by Y Combinator because those will be real trials, real stories, real people who are benefiting, so then it’ll be that much less abstract and that much closer.
Jim: I think those stories are going to be important and then what I would really like to see is for some city or state in the US to enact some small universal dividend in the same style as the Alaska model because I think that it’s that combination of hearing the stories of people who are getting full basic income and then yourself receiving this smaller additional income. Suddenly the intellectual leap between everyone getting basic income is much, much less than it is today.
Owen: I’m of the mind that $100 a month, even though we usually talk in terms of around 1,000, something like a 100 could be transformative for a lot of people and, if not transformative, would make a big difference. You would feel it.
Jim: If you’re scraping by, 100 a month is a game changer.
Owen: Yes, and speaking from my own experience, I wouldn’t say I’m scraping by, but I’d love $100 a month. [laughs] That wouldn’t be nothing.
So, how do we get there? I think a lot of what we’re already doing, and hopefully more trials, more support, more talking about it, more and more podcast episodes.
Jim: I think this is one where all y’all listeners can actually play a big role here. Again, make sure you are talking to people about this, looking for ways that you can push the idea forward. That’s actually what’s going to help make this happen.
Owen: So thank you to everyone who sent in questions. Please keep those coming, you can send them to myself @owenpoindexter at Twitter or Jim, you’re @dr_pugh there.
Jim: Or just tweet out the Universal Income Project, @UIProj on Twitter. We’ll get them there too.
Owen: Or you can find the Universal Income Project on Facebook as well.
Thank you so much for listening to the Basic Income Podcast. Thank you to our producer, Erick Davidson. Again, please tell your friends, talk about basic income, talk about the podcast. This could be a good conversation starter for them. Subscribe if you have not already on Apple Podcast or the service of your choice. And while you’re there, please do leave us a rating or review. It’ll help more people find the podcast. See you next week.
Owen and Jim discuss Vice President Joe Biden’s recent objections to basic income, and the practical and philosophical points that come up around basic income and employment. They delve into why a basic income could be good for workers and how automation has both driven and skewed the basic income conversation. They also touch on the increasing precarity of today’s jobs and the highly valuable work that goes uncompensated.
How much would a basic income in the United States actually cost? What are the most common mistakes people make when calculating a basic income? To answer these questions, we spoke with Karl Widerquist, who has been studying and writing about basic income for three decades. Widerquist recently published a “back of the envelope” calculation on basic income which produced some surprising results.
As basic income becomes more of a topic in the media, it is finding its way into electoral politics as well. Owen and Jim speak with Detroit mayoral candidate Ingrid LaFleur, who included basic income as a key plank in her platform. LaFleur offers advice on how to approach a race as a basic income candidate, and shares some surprising reactions she got on the campaign trail.
Three years ago, few people had even heard of universal basic income. Now interest is growing across the country, and the idea is getting more exposure and support. What led to this shift? Owen and Jim delve into many of the factors at play, and discuss how we can take advantage of this moment.
We are watching the economy change before our eyes, and Zipcar Cofounder Robin Chase has been at the forefront of that change. She gives her observations on the platform economy, automation, self-driving cars, and how a basic income could be what smoothes the transition as we move to a different type of relationship between people and their work.
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Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.
Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh. When people think about basic income, they often tie it to some future scenario where automation has drastically affected the way that the people work. But just thinking about how technology affects work is not something limited to the future — it’s actually something that exists today.
Owen: I feel like automation and just the way that technology impacts employment and how people relate economically is something that comes on much more slowly than people tend to appreciate. And the self-driving cars may be a perfect example.
We think of them as this kind of futuristic thing that’s going to be a whole new product that looks pretty unlike what we have today. However, we’ve got automatic transmission, cruise control, a lot of cars have lane-keeping right now where it automatically stays in your lane, self-parking. The same kind of thing happens with the economy where recently more and more we have shared resources, the collaborative economy, the sharing economy. These are slowly chipping away at the legacy structures that have existed for decades.
Jim: There’s more and more companies out there that are adopting new approaches to the way that they employ people and the way that, really the conception of what a worker is. The people who are working in these companies really have a first-hand experience as to seeing what’s happening here and what impact it’s having on people’s lives and the economy at large.
Owen: This week, we are very lucky to have someone who’s at the forefront of the new economy. Robin Chase is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc. Welcome, Robin.
Robin: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jim: To start with, Robin, can you tell us a bit about what first got you interested in universal basic income?
Robin: When I was writing this book Peers Inc, I was thinking a lot about, I would say, the platform economy. I was understanding from a trend basis and from economic basis that everything that can become a platform will become a platform. That the outsourcing of workers — and I say that in a kind of negative way — is incredibly economically compelling. That companies that think of themselves as platforms grow faster, they learn faster, they are hyper-adaptive and hyper-localized. They’re very hard to beat. So if your company can take that shape, you’re going to take that shape.
We’re seeing it today. I was looking at something that was the top 50 innovative companies in the world. I would say 98% of them are what I would consider to be Peers Inc companies. Companies that are based on a platform with this satellite of assets that are outside of them. Once you understand that trend and internalize that trend, it says, “Whoa, oh my god.” We have completely structured our economy on the idea that people work full-time and get benefits full-time.
The fact is, I don’t know if that was ever true, maybe it was true in 1940, but it is not the economy that we’re seeing today. Our social safety nets and workplace rules have been tied around this aging idea, outdated idea of what work looks like and that is not the future. I’ve realized we really need to have a universal basic income.
I would say the other place that has taken me down this path is I do a lot of work on the future of self-driving cars. Unlike previous transitions, I expect this one to happen quite quickly because it’s economically compelling to make the transition from both the supply side, if you’re a supplier of transit services, and from the demand side, if you’re a consumer of transit services.
It’s very compelling, economically compelling to make the switch. Which means we’re going to put a lot of drivers and their ecosystem out of work not in 60 years but in 5 to 10 years. Another reason why I am definitely supportive of doing pilots at a minimum around universal basic income because I see it’s something that we definitely are going to need to have. We need to have it today, and we’re going to need more of it, we are going to need it more profoundly in our future.
Owen: The changing economy is something we talk a lot about here. How would you describe what it’s like to be a worker in the platform economy?
Robin: If I think about, let’s just talk about the upsides first. I am 58, and when I got a job, my first job, my first job was boring as hell, and I hated it. My mom would say, “You can’t quit that job. You can’t quit that job for at least a year and a half because it’s giving you benefits. If you quit any earlier, you’re going to look like a shifty worker.” It took me years and many different jobs to figure out what it was that I was good at, what I loved to do. It was a kind of very slow iterative process sequential learning of what it was I was good at.
One of the beauties of working on these platform economies is that I can do many things at the same time. There’s this nice sentence I got from someone else that said, “My father had one job in his lifetime, I’ll do six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will do six jobs at the same time.” Those six jobs at same time — and so maybe it’s going to four, who knows? But when I do that, I can have a passion job. I can have a job where I’m learning. I can have a job that’s my money job. I can have these different types of parts of my life where I’m exploring different things that I might like to do or that I’m interested in while I’m making some income.
One of things that people really love about it is being in control of your time. Being flexible, having the flexibility. You are your own boss. Coming back to the contrast with the idea of full-time jobs as being the end-all: in a full-time job economy, you’re in a binary position. You’re either employed or unemployed. You either have income or you have no income. That choice about being employed or unemployed is out of your hands. It’s some boss that’s choosing to hire you or not hire you.
In this platform, Peers Inc economy, I am able to choose my own, I can make money with my own initiative. I can work the number of hours, I can earn the amount of money I need. All that said, those are all the positives. So, positives: flexibility, figure out what you’re good at, having economic agency. Those are really positive things.
On the flip side, it’s very precarious. It’s precarious while you figure out what you are good at. It’s precarious in that some of these things are– some of this work is seasonal. It’s precarious around health benefits and workplace rules. All of which now fall into the burden of the individual. If we were precarious before, when we work in this Peers Inc economy, this platform economy, we are more precarious than before. There’s both resilience and precarity built into this doing four jobs at the same time.
That’s kind of how I see the upside and downsides. I just want to say one more thing about this: when we talk about the collaborative economy, of which we are finding and discussing many negative aspects, I want to say the fact that there are negative aspects doesn’t mean it’s not a great thing because I just explained lots of great things.
If I go back to the foundation of industrialization, people worked seven days a week and we had child labor. We fixed those things. The fact that this new way of work has downsides, it does have downsides, and we have to correct and work on those downsides. Right now, we are seeing people increasingly having to work not in full-time jobs work at many things and we don’t have the– we haven’t corrected for the downsides that come with that way of work.
Jim: On that note, how do you see basic income connecting here? How does it serve to deal with some of the issues that you just described?
Robin: There’s that common– there’s that statistic that, I think it was Gallup that did, that was saying 40% of people couldn’t cover a $400 bill. I look at that and when you do sociological reading, you see that these outlier events are the things that take people into bankruptcy and take them into terrible jobs. I see universal basic income as being the minimum platform on which we can now arrange our life.
It’s giving us a basic income security, and what is that number? I think about, one thing about universal basic income, I don’t know if it’s going to be $1,000 a month or if it’s going to be $400 a month. I don’t know. I know that at both of those points, it’s incredibly valuable to people. It takes away the precarity. Then I was interested at Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech and that he also pointed out this other upside which is rich, well-educated, privileged people have the opportunity to follow their passions and take risks.
Poorly educated people who don’t have rich parents, spouses, cousins, and relatives to support them can’t take any risks pursuing any sort of interesting things. Basic income will enable them to do that. It seems, it’s not– it’s an equity piece, but I think it’s also an uncovering of innovation, improved quality of life, just a better– we’re getting more out of people. We’re getting more of the best out of people, rather than tying people to a go safe, don’t take risks type of work.
Owen: You mentioned self-driving cars earlier. A very common response to the automation issue is that, “Well, we’ve had these concerns in the past, and new technology always brings about new opportunities.” How would you respond to that argument?
Robin: That argument is extremely frustrating to me. That I look at it, and I say, and I think, you venture capitalist, you businessman sitting in your chair can say that. But the person who is in Bloomington, Indiana, who has a high school education, who’s 50 years old, who’s been driving a taxi for the last 30 years — that opening up of the new ideas of jobs, that is not going to help him. That is specific people with specific education and specific geographies. The idea that this is going to open up new jobs is, it’s a kind of rainbow fantasy dream.
Sure, in the fullness of time over the entire economy, it could have new interesting things that happen, but starting Day One and Year One and Year Two for specific people and specific economies, we know profoundly that that is not the case. That we have people in cities that have lost their steel industry that are still terrifying. We have Detroit. If it were so straightforward, wouldn’t that have– we wouldn’t be seeing 30 years on the issues you have, the unemployment you have in Detroit. I think that’s a specious argument.
Jim: There’s been a lot of discussion and germination of ideas around basic income in the last two years in the US. What do you see as the most exciting recent developments there?
Robin: I have to tell you a funny story to tee up this. When I was writing Peers Inc and I got to this chapter about the fact and I saw, whoa, everything that can become a platform is going to become a platform. I’m seeing this huge push of work into these insecure part-time types of things. I thought, “You know what? What we really need is– people need an income that just comes in every month as a basic standard.” It was as if in my mind, I had come up with a really crazy idea that I invented. Kind of like my 11-year-old coming home and saying, “Mom, what if dogs pulled sleds? There could be something called dog sledding.” I thought, that’s been invented.
I want to say, with humility, with incredible amusement at myself, two-and-a-half years ago, I had never heard of universal basic income. When I was writing this book, I thought, “Oh my God, we need a universal basic income.” I think I called it, We Need a Basic Income. Then when I was– after I wrote this chapter, I sent it out to an economist and a person doing tech futures, a kind of tech futurist. I said, “I feel like I’ve really gone too far in this recommendation.” Their emails back to me were laughing. “Robin, what are you talking about? This has definitely got to be part of the future. This is something that has been tested and piloted in other places.”
I was very amused. If I think about the last two years, what really struck me is that this has become an increasingly mainstream conversation. What I thought two years ago, as a person who worked in tech, who works in innovation, who is very well-educated, I had never thought about it. I had never thought about it, never heard of it, never considered it, and now we see articles about it all the time. Not just on Medium, we see them in regular everyday newspapers, on televisions, and around the world.
That’s been what’s been amazing to me over the last few years, is to see the increasing beat of discussion. Whenever I’m going toe-to-toe with someone on the idea of universal basic income, and they want to say, “We can’t afford it,” or “People are going to stay home, play video games, and smoke weed.” My answer to that is, “Maybe.” We have to do some pilots, because until we do some pilots, we’re just going to continue have this circular discussion about its impossibility and its impacts.
That’s what’s been quite interesting to me is to see a larger– is start to see the rise of more and more pilots, so that we’re going to get more and more data, so we can put an end to this circular conversation that I think has been– is where we used to be, and we can start getting to a place of real data.
Owen: You’re both the proponent and a builder of the collaborative economy. A great example of that is the company you co-founded, Zipcar, in which people, in which there are cars that anyone can access and take for the day or for the hour. Do you see the collaborative economy as a piece of the same puzzle along with the basic income, or are they more parallel to you?
Robin: I see the collaborative economy as a restructuring of our current economy. That restructuring requires new rules, and that’s where UBI comes in. In the old industrial capitalism, you would build– the way you extracted the most value out of something was to put a very strong barrier around the company. You knew– and we would do that with patents and copyrights and certifications and trademarks. You knew very, very clearly who worked for the company and who didn’t work for the company. Who owned what assets and who the assets belong to. It was very clear, the ownership model.
In this future economy, this currently blossoming and growing economy, this collaborative economy, it is very ill-defined and very fuzzy. Who owns these assets? Are you an employee, or are you not an employee? Who are you partnering with? What assets are you using? Is this a personal asset, a commercial asset? Is this — I’m looking outside my window — is this a residential district, or is it a commercial district?
Who owns my data, who has access to my data? Whose access to my smartphones? All of this today is becoming very intertwined and multi-purposed. All of those old rules that went with that old economy no longer suit this new way of working and collaborating and sharing assets and ideas and data.
UBI is a very nice underpinning to this new economy, to allow this fluidity of work, fluidity of ideas, fluidity of innovation to happen with all of– I just feel like, I feel a swirl, if you go deep into the idea of shared assets and data and space and time. If you want to get the most out of that multi-purposing and most of that potential, you need to have a nice, a firm economic standing that gives you the opportunity to take advantage of how you extract this new value, how you find new potential, how you share these assets in a fluid way. You need to have a kind of bedrock economic standing underneath that.
Owen: That’s fantastic. My last question is, I’m just wondering if there’s anything you’d like to add on any of these topics.
Robin: We haven’t talked about it a lot yet, but when I think about the automation of self-driving cars, if I had my dream future, which I’m working hard to help achieve in cities, all cars would be shared. Which would mean we’d only need 10% of them, which means 90% of the cars, let’s go to say 50% of cars we’re building today, we don’t need them to be built. We don’t need the resources to be dug up out of the ground, transported long distances, assembled in factories, transported to new places, housed and warehoused on streets.
It completely– it takes this big piece of the economy out, in a way, and I see there’s a huge upside to that. That we can take back our cities and our curbs and our houses and parking lots, if we get this gigantic win from sharing cars and not having to store them. All of that, I want that transition to happen as quickly as possible because it has so many upsides. In order for that transition to happen as quickly as possible, we need to provide this support structure.
I look at that, and I think that’s just one sector of the economy. I feel like our entire economy, from my perspective, a sustainability and equity perspective, is quite broken. I would like us to be able to evolve much more quickly without having the incredible anxiety over what’s happening to individuals within that economy. It’s another argument for me to have free universal basic income.
If we don’t do that, two things unfold. One is, when we think about the automation of agriculture, we did that in a horrible way and a lot of people, millions and millions and millions of people worldwide, suffered through that 20-, 30-, 40-year transition. We should be doing much better today. I’d like us to do a much better job of that transition, and I’d like it to be much faster because of the incredible upside and the potential to unleash people best selves instead of their worst, “how can I get paid doing whatever it is required” self. I want us to do many more pilots on universal basic income. Ultimately, I want us to be a adopting it and paying for because I think it will unlock a dramatically better quality of life and dramatically more innovation than we see today.
Owen: That was Robin Chase, co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc. Thank you so much for joining us.
Robin: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure.
Jim: You’ve been listening to the Basic Income Podcast. Thank you to our producer, Erick Davidson. If you like what you hear, please make sure to rate and review us on iTunes, Stitcher, or the podcast platform of your choice. Also make sure to share with your friends. We’re always looking for new listeners who’d like to hear more about universal basic income. Talk to you next week.
Last week, Hawaii became the first state to pass legislation on universal basic income, declaring that everyone in the state deserves basic financial security. The bill’s author, Representative Chris Lee, joined the Basic Income Podcast to discuss the legislation and his views on basic income.
We often talk about what effect a universal basic income would have on financial stability, but what about our mental state? Jim and Owen delve into the research around poverty and cognition, and explore the differences between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset.
With so many universal programs designed to fight poverty, why do poverty rates still skew along racial lines? And how might a universal basic income solve some of these problems? Dorian Warren, President of the Center for Community Change Action, a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Co-chair of the Economic Security Project, joins Jim and Owen to discuss these issues and his UBI+ proposal.
Jim continues the discussion started on the Intelligence Squared debate over basic income with Jared Bernstein, who argued against the basic income. Bernstein explains various concerns he has with the concept, focusing on existing social programs, and a similarly radical proposal: a jobs guarantee. Bernstein is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and served as Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden from 2009-2011.
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Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.
Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh.
Owen: In every episode we’ve done, whether we’re talking to an artist, a politician, an activist, everyone has been a supporter of the basic income. But this week, we actually have a dissenter.
Jim: A couple months back, there was a debate on basic income that was organized by Intelligence Squared. It put Andy Stern and Charles Murray arguing for basic income up against Jared Bernstein and Jason Furman argument against it. Most of the debate focused on the pros and cons of universal basic income, but one thing that popped up was Jared Bernstein mentioned that he was actually a fan of a jobs guarantee program, which would be another ambitious plan that falls pretty far outside of the scope of the legislation that has been considered in the US, also aimed at providing economic security, but looking different than something like an unconditional basic income.
Owen: Jim sat down with Jared Bernstein and discussed their feelings on the basic income and the jobs guarantee and a bunch of other topics. From my listening, I found that Jared Bernstein has a lot of the same goals and a lot of the same perspectives as people in the basic income movement but comes at them from something of a different angle and different experience and that comes out in the conversation. Without further ado, this is Jim Pugh and Jared Bernstein on the Basic Income Podcast.
Jim: I am here with Jared Bernstein, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Jared, thank you for joining us.
Jared: Thanks for inviting me.
Jim: Many of our listeners may have seen the basic income debate that was held by Intelligence Squared back in March between Andy Stern and Charles Murray arguing for a basic income as the social safety net of the future, and then you and Jason Furman arguing against that idea. One of the things you mentioned there was the idea of a jobs guarantee program in the US. I’m just curious, can you tell us a little bit more about how you think a program like that might work?
Jared: Well, sure. Let me start by saying a little bit about why I think we need it. As we speak, the unemployment rate is quite low nationally. It’s 4.4% and most economists, and I’m someone who thinks about the questions of full employment a lot, will tell you that’s full employment. That’s certainly what the Federal Reserve would say. In fact, we know that there are pockets of weak labor demand where even at a low national unemployment rate, there are parts of the country where people can’t find enough work. I’ve observed that even at full employment, sometimes, the labor demand is insufficient.
You need to think about a program to fill that gap. The way I think of it is we all agree or at least the economics community agrees that when credit markets freeze up, you need a lender of last resort, and that’s the federal reserve. Well, when the job market fails to provide adequate opportunities for all of commerce, I think you need a job creator of last resort. There’s a couple of different ways to do that which I can get into in a minute. I just wanted to give you that motivation first.
Jim: I know, I’m based out in the Bay Area, and particularly around here, there’s a lot of new companies that are basing their approach to work very much on a task-based model. Not seeing it as full employment but rather seeing it as smaller sets of work that people will take on in that “gig economy.” I’m curious to hear is that something that you feel connects here? Is that something entirely separate?
Jared: It’s definitely a connection. There’s definitely a connection there, but I think it’s separate in the sense that what I’m talking about are places where there’s just not enough work for people who want and need it. Now, in the case of the gig economy, there may be not enough steady work or work of a structure that people want. If somebody wants a steady job where they know their hours, the flexibility of the gig economy or maybe even the insecurity therein just doesn’t appeal to them, that’s a job quality issue or structural employment issue.
I’m talking about something that’s different than that. Think of the Rust Belt, you’ve certainly heard about that in the context of the Trump story, but also there are neighborhoods and urban areas that are like job deserts. There’s not enough jobs there for folks who want them.
I can think of two ways to deal with that. The first is a real direct job creation program by the federal government, where the federal government creates gainful employment for people. I do think not just in terms of job quantity but job quality, so these jobs have to be adequately remunerative, and the other is a subsidized model where the government subsidizes employers to hire workers, sometimes to the tune of 80% or 90%, that is the government would pick up 80% or 90% of the wage for some fixed amount of time. I know a lot more about the second one because we did something like that during the Recovery Act when I was working for the Obama Administration.
But those are the two broad models, one where the government directly creates jobs, almost in the spirit of the New Deal, and the other is more of a subsidized employment model.
Jim: If we were to pursue a jobs guarantee program, do you have any sense what sort of timeline this would be on? Is this something that we’re talking about, with the big caveat that who knows what will be happening with the federal government over the next few years, but is this something that seems achievable in the relatively short-term or is this more of a longer term, something 10 -20 plus years from now?
Jared: With a rational, functional government, at least the subsidized employment idea could would be ramped up quickly and interestingly, this is not very well known, there are a number of programs like that in place already. The VISTA Jobs Program, there’s a number of youth employment programs. These are all very small programs, but again, during the Recovery Act, so in 2009, we quickly ramped up a subsidized employment program, it was under the aegis of TANF Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and there was something like maybe under $2 billion I think I have that right, that was assigned to a program where in states — it was actually more of a kind of flow of resources than a program, but basically we said to states, you can use this money, which we’re ramping up for TANF, because we’re in this really deep recession, you can use this money to subsidize employment for low-wage people who are facing labor market barriers. They can’t get into the job market.
You have to be careful not to displace somebody else, so an employer can’t say, “oh, well, by the way, you’re fired, but Ricky, you’re hired.” So you have to be careful to avoid this. There are ways in which you have to craft this thing to make it most effective, but we found that during the Recovery Act, this program created over 250,000 jobs in a bunch of different states, subsidizing employment, again, often to the tune of 70, 80, 90% sometimes for three months, six months, maybe a year and after the subsidized employment ended, as it’s a time-limited program, a number of those workers were able to stay on in the labor market. It looked like in some cases the program helped them get over a labor market barrier that was blocking them.
Jim: During the Intelligence Squared Debate, you raised several concerns about universal basic income as a policy to pursue. For those who weren’t able to watch the debate, could you share with us what your main concerns on that front are?
Jared: Yes. I would say my main concern comes from the proposal by Charles Murray who is one of my opponents in that debate. So he was on the other side, and he’s arguing for a form of UBI that I am absolutely sure would significantly worsen and deepen poverty and economic insecurity.
What Murray wants to do and I’m not telling tales out of school here, because I’ve debated him numerous times on this. Sometimes it’s not fair to argue with somebody who’s not there to defend themselves, but Charles knows exactly where I’m coming from here. He wants to essentially take all of the resources that we’re devoting to both the safety net and to some of our social insurance programs, Social Security, Medicare, and giving them up per capita across the whole population, so make it a universal basic income paid for by aggregating all the resources we’re currently spending on the safety net and social welfare program, and social insurance programs.
Obviously the arithmetic is quite simple because you’re going to be really seriously diluting the resources that are already targeted and pretty well targeted, I argued in that debate, at folks in the bottom half, bottom third of the income scale. So if you take resources that are well-focused, well-targeted and as I argued that night, having their intended effect and pretty effective and you give them to 320
million people, the population of the US, you’re very much going to dilute the program. That’s probably my main objection to at least that version of the plan.
Jim: I do think that something that’s become more apparent within the space of people advocating for basic income in recent months is that there are two quite different views on what the policy could be. What you just described, the repeal and replace model, tends to be favored much more by Libertarians…
Jared: That’s a phrase we hear a lot these days.
Jim: [chuckles] …often with the idea of having something radically simpler being one of the main things that attracts people to that version of it.
On the flip side, you have a more progressive view, which is more to support and strengthen model, of something that would be providing basic income and perhaps replacing some programs that exist today that seem fully redundant if people are receiving a basic level of cash every month, but done with the intention of making sure that people are not being left worse off than they were previously. I’d be curious to hear your perspective on that vision of the policy.
Jared: Well, there are aspects of that vision that I like and share. As I said that night, mostly focused on some of the work of Andy Stern, who I’m sure is known to your audience — he was the other “opponent.” I can’t really think of Andy as an opponent because he’s fighting for social justice for as long as I’ve known him and that’s been many decades — is a version that says, “let’s build off of what we have.” And there are many ways in which I’m supportive of that.
However, while I think it’s perfectly legitimate to suspend political disbelief when you have these debates — even the jobs debate we had earlier about guaranteed or subsidized employment, as I said, this congress isn’t going to do that. I’m always happy to suspend disbelief. I think there’s a question of just how far out of the box do you want to go. One of the things that worries me is that if you start opening up this opportunity to take resources from one program and give them to a bunch of people. There is a U, in UBI. In other words, there’s a universal aspect to it. This dilution problem I think is a real one unless you’re really talking about adding significant new resources.
Well, we’re in a climate where that’s really tough to do and one of the things that I recognize, I recently wrote about this in a piece called UBI and I, is that many of the programs that I think are well-targeted and working pretty well — not perfectly by a long shot, and I suspect you and I can have a good conversation about how to improve some of the safety net programs that are existent — but they’re underfunded.
Before I would think about building on top of what we have, I probably want to get the Earned Income Tax Credit to be a lot more robust. I’d want the child tax credit to be a lot more robust and to start, instead of at dollar 3,000 of earnings, to start at zero and perhaps be fully refundable and not conditional on work. There’s a child allowance idea that I’ve been getting more interested that shares some characteristics with UBI, but it’s just targeted at kids.
There’s ways in which I’d want food stamps to be, SNAP to be, maybe expand benefits particularly in the downturn which is something that worked in the recession, and I could go on. I very, very much want to see a quality preschool program in place. I think we just really hurt the potential of a lot of kids who really need a quality opportunity when it comes to preschool.
There’s a bunch of stuff I’d rather put in place before I start thinking about building on top of what we have in the spirit of UBI. Again, I’m always worried about the dilution problem. I do think that U in the UBI is something that gives me pause sometimes.
Jim: One thing I’d be curious about is, it does seem that there is, at least to some degree, a chicken and egg issue around how big of or how radical of a policy you propose versus what’s realistic today. I think that’s something that, as basic income has become, at least to some degree, more of a mainstream idea over the last couple of years, people who support it are thinking about, well, what are the stepping stone policies that move us in that direction?
I think some of what you just mentioned, actually, are policies that are discussed there, something like a child allowance. Programs that are providing unconditional cash in different scenarios. So I don’t know, and I realize that this is in some degrees conflating two worlds here, the economic side and the political marketing side, but if you have any thoughts around, do you think maybe that fighting for something that’s radical, basic income, might actually make some of these policy that you were discussing possibly easier if we’re shifting the debate window?
Jared: Yes. I think that’s a good point. One has to be very careful to not negotiate with yourself and not say, “oh, I don’t like super progressive idea X because it’s too progressive. I like some other idea because that’s half as progressive or half as ambitious.” Because if you realize that you’re already starting on a very tough battlefield, Negotiation 101 suggest that you should start from a very ambitious place. What you’re saying resonates with me.
I think one of the problems that UBI has this — some of my friends are Libertarians, so this sounds worse than it than I mean it – this kind of infection from the Libertarian side. There are those who are just gunning for what they call the welfare state. There are people in this debate, this UBI debate who view it as a vehicle by which they can undermine social insurance, by which they can undermine the safety net.
Read Charles Murray, literally on page three he says, “The safety net is a horrible failure. It is imploding. It’s crashing in on itself, and before it explodes or implodes, or whatever the words there, we have to do something different.” Well, that’s all completely wrong. I think that not to say that these programs are perfect, but if you go back to my wrap during the Intelligence Squared Debate, I tried to provide pretty nuanced analysis of the way in which these programs are having their intended effect, working very well in terms of staving off probation that is faced by many low income people, but also having some very positive long term effects.
Medicaid, food stamps, Earned Income Credit. We now have people who were exposed to these programs as children, and we follow them over their life cycle. We can look at their outcomes as adults and we see earnings advantages, better health outcomes, better educational outcomes. These programs aren’t just consumption, they’re also investment.
Every time I say this, I’ve been careful to say that they’re far from perfect. I’m not saying that there’s not work to be done there, but I do think one of the challenges — while I take your point about the importance of being ambitious and not being, not self-negotiating because of political constraints — I also think you’ve got to be mindful of these dark forces in this debate.
Jim: Going back to the jobs guarantee idea: one aspect of basic income that appeals to a lot of advocates is opening up new types of opportunity for work. The ones that come up most often, I would say, are entrepreneurship — giving people a runway to be able to pursue a new idea for business — but also recognition of unpaid labor, particularly care giving work that happens at home. Is that something that if you were to pursue a jobs guarantee program, you might be missing that gain?
Jared: I think those are legitimate concerns. I must say that the UBI programs that I’ve seen articulated — I think it’s important not to talk in the abstract, but look at the programs that Andy Stern or Charles Murray is writing down there — they don’t look to me like they really afford people all the resources they would need to explore much in terms of entrepreneurship.
For that I think you just need much more liquid credit markets and the ability of people to access those markets. Perhaps they need a backstop, a loan guarantee if they don’t have the wealth or the resources or the networks to collateralize the loans they need. I probably approach that more through credit markets than through a UBI.
In terms of the work things: one of the things I don’t know that I have mentioned is I’m pretty sensitive to two aspects of this debate. One is that, the US approach to anti-poverty policy has consistently become more and more oriented towards work. Now again, this is a trend that you could decide to accept in your policy taking or push back on.
But there are many aspects of that trend that makes sense to me. I started out about 150 years ago in this business as a social worker in New York City and ever since then, and since then I’ve recognized that a lot of people particularly low income people raising kids really want to have a good, secure, high quality remunerative jobs.
The problem that many of them face is sometimes inadequate skills, but just as often, inadequate demand for labor. One of the things that really sticks in my craw in this debate is this conservative mantra that all you have to do to get a good job is to want a good job. The only thing it’s holding you back is you’re lazy, or you’re dependent on welfare programs. The demand side of the labor market, the opportunities and availability of good jobs, that’s something that I’ve been very sensitive to, the insufficient numbers of throughout my work. That motivates me in that space.
Jim: It seems like on one hand, we have some people who may not currently have access to a job who really want one, but on the other hand, there may be people who are interested in entrepreneurship or engaging in labor that isn’t paid in today’s economy. Could there be some hybrid model that actually can combine a jobs guarantee and a negative income tax in order to be serving both of those populations?
Jared: There could be, but I think one of the things you’ll run into there is the income constraint that Jason Furman and I focused on at the Intelligence Square Debate. Again, I recognize that it’s a little squirrely to keep raising these political hurdles where you want to. I think that the job guarantee is more in sync — I’d say I know this — with anti-poverty policy, which is becoming more and more work oriented.
In that sense, while everything is a hugely heavy political lift, it’s less of a heavy political lift than a UBI. At least a UBI that’s not done in the Libertarian or Murray sense, which just undermines stuff we’re doing already. I think in a way you’re saying, the hybrid services “well, let’s do both.” If we had unlimited resources, I’d say, “yes, let’s do both and a bunch more too.” But in a world with constrained resources I’ve at least set my sights on a job guarantee, which I think is actually a pretty already ambitious and progressive program.
Perhaps, as in the child allowance case, which I view as not conditioned on work, and as you and I agreed earlier, that is certainly a step in the direction I think you want to take things. There may be other ways to go about that, maybe other ways to get at conditioning income not on work, but I’d say before I was too interested in a hybrid, a UBI attached to a job guarantee, I’d work on the job.
Jim: Alright, Jared, this has been great. Really appreciate you taking the time to chat. Anything else you’d like to add?
Jared: No. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground.
Jim: Great. Alright. Well, thank you again.
Owen: That was Jim Pugh and Jared Bernstein on the Basic Income Podcast. I think it’s pretty clear that Bernstein comes from a perspective of fighting for and defending these programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicare, food stamps. He’s defending them against people who often argue that they’re worthless and that we should just get rid of them. If we’re going to propose something big and new that might replace at least some of these programs, we do need to make the case that a basic income is an improvement on what we have now.
Jim: I think that’s exactly right. I think that there’s a fear of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. I think it was clear also from the discussion that ultimately political viability is coming into play here. Despite generally talking outside the realm of what’s possible today, he had major concerns about how far from our current political thinking we actually get.
In some ways I think we’re coming at this from qualitatively different perspectives. Are we actually talking about something that feels more achievable with the way people think about things today, or are we talking about this North Star vision of where we ultimately want to end up, and then recognizing that it’s going to take us potentially decades to get there, but saying that that’s where we want to keep our eye, and see what steps we can take in that direction.
Owen: Honestly, I find the fact that we are maybe talking on a decade’s perspective to be liberating because we don’t need to be thinking about what is politically viable in the next five years. We need to be thinking about, what do we want going forward? What are the best policies? I think you can draw parallel to healthcare. There is a debate around, do we tweak and fix the system we have now, or do we move something towards something like universal healthcare?
I would think the basic income debate is pretty analogous. Do we improve systems like the Earned Income Tax Credit, or do we move toward this North Star vision of a basic income for everyone?
Jim: One thing that basic income supporters may have noticed is that we never actually talked about automation during our conversation. That was actually quite intentional.
Automation came up during the Intelligence Squared Debate, and there was just complete lack of alignment. Bernstein isn’t sold that automation is going to have a drastic impact on the workspace that we have today and that there will be new jobs created. I mean, we could have gone back and forth on that, but we’re really not going to come to any sort of consensus there. When we do start to see a drastic impact from automation and when you can really feel that more tangibly, I think that is going to lead to a different conversation. But it’s not one that we are really going to be able to get to a conclusion on where we are today.
Owen: And again, I would just take that zoomed out perspective. I think 10, 20 years from now this automation conversation is going to be quite different, and we do need to be thinking about how we might prepare for that if certain predictions come true about just how intelligent artificial intelligence is going to get.
Jim: I think for me really the big takeaway here is, even though Bernstein was skeptical about it, it seems like these aren’t competing policy, jobs guarantee and basic income.
If you’re looking at basic income and your motivation is really guaranteeing economic security, we’re fighting for the same things here. I worry about setting these up as head to head contestants because I think that if we’re actually pushing for big policies that aim towards that value of making sure everyone has enough to get by, we can be open minded here, and we can think about different scenarios. What are situations where guaranteed employment might be really attractive to people, and what are situations where an unconditional payment that opens up opportunities and spaces that really haven’t existed before actually could be the game changer that many us think it is?
Owen: All right. That’ll do it for this week’s episode of the Basic Income Podcast. Thank you to our producer Erick Davidson. I encourage you to subscribe on iTunes, and please do leave a rating or a review while you’re there. It’ll help other people find the podcast. See you next week.
We talk with Conrad Shaw and Deia Schlosberg, co-creators of an ambitious film, Bootstraps, that will crowdfund and donate a basic income to multiple people and then follow the recipients to see how it changes their lives. Hear what inspired them to embark on this multi-faceted project and donate to their crowdfunding campaign here:
https://handup.org/campaigns/bootstraps
Most arguments against the basic income can be summed up in two words: “status quo.” Owen and Jim explore the thinking behind some of the most common objections to the basic income and why these arguments are understandable but ultimately shortsighted.
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Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.
Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh. Today, we are going to be having a discussion episode.
Owen: We’re going to be tackling some of the issues around how the basic income bumps up against the status quo.
Jim: I really see status quo broadly as one of the biggest obstacles. When I talk to people about basic income usually with a long conversation, once they get past some initial hurdles, they think if not that is a great idea, at least, that the idea has some merit for further exploration.
Owen: Yes, in fact, I think you could sum up almost every objection to the basic income with the word status quo just with different details inserted based on who’s doing the talking.
Jim: We’re going to try to delve into some of the key areas where it seems like status quo thinking is really creating a barrier to people accepting or even sometimes recognizing how the idea could actually be really helpful.
One of the first ones that I have seen often is those people who have more of an incremental vision on how policy progresses thinking that the way we’re going to make progress is by making small tweaks to the programs we have today, rather than exploring big new ideas that very much differ from what we have right now.
Owen: Honestly, I think we saw this in the last election. There is a strong political appeal to big wholesale ideas that present a vision that is very clear and is maybe different from what we have right now.
Jim: I think if you’ve been particularly operating in Washington for the last 5, 10, 20 years, just because there hasn’t been an opportunity to implement big policy, it’s very easy to get caught up in the thinking that that will persist indefinitely.
Owen: One of the first things I hear is like, “Well, sounds like a nice idea, but that’ll never pass Congress.”
Jim: Yes, exactly. I think one of the recent examples that really stood out is, for those of our listeners who saw the Intelligence Squared debate between Andy Stern and Charles Murray arguing for basic income against Jared Bernstein and Jason Furman, both economists from the Obama administration. If you looked at the arguments that were being made almost all of them boil down to, “This is too big. We have to come at these problems in smaller ways that more resemble what we have today, and that something as radical as what you’re proposing just doesn’t make sense.”
Owen: Right, because most people aren’t thinking like, “Okay, what politically could be accomplished in 10, 20 years.”
Jim: I will say that I have noticed a pretty marked shift in recent months that seemed to coincide and likely be caused by the November elections. I think that’s a lot of, what was standard conventional wisdom leading up to that got thrown out the window, and suddenly, a whole lot more people are willing to consider that maybe some things that are much different than they are today might actually be quite possible.
Owen: One thing that we should keep in mind is that even though yes, there is this grand vision of a universal unconditional basic income, you will still have to have stepping stone policies along the way. For instance, we’re currently very excited about the trials going on in Canada or that are about to start in Ontario, and it’s 4,000 people in one area of Canada. It’s very small on one hand, but it’s looking toward this broader vision.
I’ll throw in another one that I actually just heard about today. Ro Khanna, I think that’s how you say his name, who is the new representative in Congress from Silicon Valley, is going to propose a drastic increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit and has no real hope or optimism around that becoming law anytime soon. Also, I think he is looking more toward basic income, which the earned income tax credit is not exactly a basic income, but these are little steps that we’re taking with this broader vision in mind.
Jim: Yes, I think, and there’s talk, at least, of some state-level policies that start to move us in that direction whether through some universal child allowance or through some other smaller universal income driven by a carbon dividend or something like that. I think people often do miss that when we talk about the ideas, it doesn’t mean that’s the only thing being considered. It just means that we’re keeping that big end goal in mind. That we’re saying that this is where we want to end up, and there will be smaller policies along the way. We can be strategic about how we fight for it, but we are always saying this is where we want to be ultimately and having that North Star policy to fight for.
Owen: Another major monument of the status quo that we want to take on is the austerity versus abundance mindset. This inserts itself in the background of a lot of basic income discussions that I’ve had, and Jim, I’m sure you’ve had too. Basically, it’s people generally have the idea that our resources are ultimately scarce and there’s only so much to go around.
Jim: This one actually surprises me often because, while most basic income advocates I’ve talked to recognize that incrementalism is a bad status quo perspective to keep when talking about basic income, I’ve found that a lot of advocates themselves fall into the austerity mindset when thinking about the policy. As they are trying to figure out, how do you actually pay for providing basic income to everyone, they end up in this zero-sum mindset where they’re thinking about, “I have to cut something or figure out a very, very specific source of funding in order to be able to cover the cost,” rather than recognizing that we have an amazing amount of wealth in this country at this point.
Owen: I think a lot of it comes from reverse causality thinking. This one example is, at least, here in Bay Area, we have a lot of homeless people. I think it’s natural to think, “Well, there just aren’t enough homes to go around. Otherwise, why would people be sleeping on the street.” In fact, there are enough homes to house the homeless population six times over in the US, which is an incredible statistic. I’m sorry, it’s enough empty homes, not enough homes. You won’t have to take on a new roommate. We’ve got empty space for these people, and it’s not just homes, it’s wealth, generally.
Jim: Yes, if you look, our GDP has grown by four trillion dollars in the last 15 years. We’re growing enough food in the US to feed everyone twice over. There’s absolutely enough resources to go around. The idea that inherent to our society, we don’t actually have enough to provide for everyone is a complete myth.
Owen: Yes. It is a logistical challenge to get the abundance of food to hungry people, but that’s the magic of cash, is that you give people cash, they will find food. That’ll mostly sort itself out.
Jim: I do think something that is so relevant here is, there’s a quote from Nelson Mandela which is, “Poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” I think that’s very much what we’re looking to do with basic income.
Owen: And I would just tack on to the end of that quote, “especially today.”
Jim: I would say that incremental versus radical change and austerity versus abundance mindsets are the two most obvious ways that I see status quo thinking blocking progress on basic income today, but I do think as we move forward, as basic income becomes more of a mainstream idea and as we get to the point where we’re actually starting to be close to enacting policies, we are going to start seeing some pretty serious pushback from industries that are actually rooted in the way things are done today, and particularly, in poverty.
Owen: Yes, I think it’s not too controversial to say that, there are giant industries out there that see the economic opportunity in having people that are desperate or just have difficult circumstances that ultimately, there’s money to be made there.
Jim: If you look at our larger prison system that exists today, it has become one, very privatized. There’s a lot of companies that are cashing in on the fact that we have such an enormous prison population in the United States. The driver of people going to that system is ultimately, poverty. It’s people who are being put in situations where they don’t see that they have better options, and so, are ending up in a situation where they’re susceptible to ending up in jail.
Owen: Yes, and of course, those people also tend to not have the same legal resources to defend themselves when they do get involved in the court system. Another one is payday loan companies. Someone who is middle class or above probably won’t need to get $200, a thousand dollars a month to just pay their rent or to feed themselves for the end of the month, but people who are doing less well have to do that regularly. There are always payday loan companies that can charge exorbitant interest rates just for a short-term loan, and they could effectively go out of business if we had a robust basic income.
Jim: I think as we move forward, we’re going to start to see rumblings from some of these sectors and the others that really have their economic model based on the idea of people being on the edge and needing to claw for resources in times of desperate need.
Owen: One more topic that we want to take on here is maybe more of a philosophical one, which is the idea that we’re to some degree decoupling income from work, and this can make people pretty uncomfortable.
Jim: This whole idea, this Puritan work ethic, where in order to actually be deserving, you need to have a paying job. This is so much at the core of how people view life to a large degree. It’s not something that’s existed forever. If you go back more than certainly a few hundred years and even I would say early 20th century, there is a pretty different view on people’s deservedness, and whether it was, in fact, necessary to be slaving away at a job to actually make ends meet, but it is certainly rooted in the American consciousness that we have today.
Owen: I’d say this is another kind of reverse causality situation where I think people somewhere in their minds assume that we have to be doing all this work otherwise everything would fall apart. I can personally say I don’t think I ever had a job that was necessary for directly causing me to have a house and to have food. I’ve never built houses. I’ve never farmed outside of my own backyard. I’ve done things like blogging and marketing and that contributes to the economy, it has some effect. You have to connect a whole lot of dots before you tie that to me or anyone else being able to eat or feed themselves or take care of their basic needs outside of the income it brought in.
Jim: I think something else worth considering here is, we often talk about automation as a need for basic income because there may not be enough work to go around in the future, which doesn’t really fit with our model today, but there could be a positive side to that which is automation is allowing us to do more for less. It means we don’t need to work so much, that we actually can produce enough to cover maybe not just basic needs, but far more than that and have plenty to go around so that everyone has access to it.
Owen: Automation should be good news. If we have deemed certain tasks to be valuable and then you just have to hit a button and they happen by themselves, that’s great. As long as we have a society and an economy that makes it okay for whoever was pressing that button before to step back.
Jim: I do think it’s important to also remember though that basic income doesn’t mean we’re expecting people to not work — it just means that we are decoupling that income from their nine-to-five jobs. They may still be working as much or even more than before, but that work could be somewhat different. It could be a broader definition. We could be recognizing care work at home as actually valid work. We could be recognizing art. We could be recognizing community service. All valuable and important things, but ones that aren’t actually getting compensated today.
Owen: I feel this is a case where opponents of the basic income or just people are hesitant about the idea can get a little bit extreme in the degree to which they think people are going to quit their jobs and watch TV all day. Proposals you see out there are usually maybe around $12,000 a year per person, maybe up to 15 or 18 in today’s dollars. That’s not really enough to live certainly not a lavish life. Here in San Francisco, you’d barely be getting your housing together for that amount. It’s not like the economy will just be on a volunteer basis. People, to maintain their current standard of living, are going to need to work.
Jim: We actually had some pretty hard evidence on this front. We have the Canadian experiment in Dauphin where they provided the whole town with a negative income tax. We had four negative income tax experiments in the United States, and the decrease in work was pretty small. It was on the order of 10%. We know pretty clearly that even if we were to provide basic income, we wouldn’t have a mass exodus in the workforce. It would just open up more options.
Owen: A lot of that exodus, I believe, was high school students and parents and people who you can understand why they would leave the workforce and maybe focus on something they deemed more important.
Jim: I do think it is worth, at least, considering though some of the variants on basic income that people are talking about that may make this more palatable from a working perspective. In particular, I’m quite interested in a proposal from Roy Bahat which is that we should actually, along with basic income, create some national service program and that, upon entering adulthood, you could spend a couple of years working in service, and then, basic income effectively is your pension that you received throughout the remainder of your life as compensation for being an active citizen.
Owen: Yes, that’s an idea that I’m still tossing around in my head personally, but I think I like that one. I like the idea that probably a lot of people would do it after leaving high school or college, but you could maybe do it when you’re 35 or whatever you want depending on your life.
Jim: I think there’s a lot to explore here, but I think there’s both an implementation question and really in some ways, a marketing question. I do think that this is a really big obstacle that exists today, and so, we’re going to need to be thoughtful about how we approach it.
Owen: On that note hopefully, this discussion has helped you and maybe helped some other people get out of their usual headspace and how they think about basic income and how it will interact with our society.
Jim: As I said earlier, when we have actually had a chance to have longer conversations with people on basic income, they usually go really well. I usually am able to get through to them and get them to think critically about what a world with basic income might look like, and how the assumptions that they have today don’t necessarily need to apply in that situation, but it takes a fair amount of effort to get them there.
Owen: One thing that I think will help and has helped already are all the pilots that are going on right now. We’ve got Canada, Finland, and Kenya, through GiveDirectly. The evidence that’s come out from similar work has been really good, surprisingly good, both in how people generally don’t stop working, and a lot else in their life like health outcomes and even things like domestic violence rates, GiveDirectly has found, have gone down. As more evidence comes out, hopefully, this will be a less scary topic.
Jim: I think not just the evidence, but the actual stories. Hearing about how people’s lives are changed and how receiving a basic income can really open up so many more options, can lift them up out of some really bad situations in a lot of cases, but actually giving people a chance to empathize because I think that’s the other obstacle here. It’s always easy to think about, “What would the other person do? How would this have a negative effect or not turn out well for them?”
If we can actually show people how basic income can be transformative across the board, that I think will certainly help getting around the work hurdles that they see as obstacles and I think can set us up with a very strong coalition to be able to overcome some of the more institutional status quo obstacles that will lie ahead.
Owen: All right. That’ll do it for this discussion episode of the Basic Income Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. A big shout out to Erick Davidson, our producer. To hear more episodes like this and some fantastic interviews, please subscribe on iTunes or you can go to TheBasicIncomePodcast.com and subscribe on the podcast service of your choice. Have a great day.
From March 24-26th, the Universal Income Project hosted a Basic Income Create-a-thon. This is a dedicated time for artists, activists, coders, writers, politicians and many more to work on projects that advance the basic income movement. Projects ranged from a giant sign hung outside a busy train station to a software platform that allows small groups to establish their own basic income.
What would a basic income mean for artists? Jim and Alexis Frasz delve into this topic in this insightful interview. Alexis Frasz has worked as a researcher, creative strategist and consultant in the arts and cultural sector for over a decade. Since 2007 she has been a lead researcher and strategist with Helicon Collaborative, an organization seeking to elevate the role of culture in making communities better places for all people – more vital, sustainable and just. She currently leads strategic initiatives on the role of culture in environmental sustainability, cultural equity, and reclaiming the role of beauty in individual and societal health. Alexis serves on the board of Food Shift, a Bay Area nonprofit organization working to end food waste and hunger, and is on the advisory committee for the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has a degree in cultural anthropology from Princeton University and has pursued Masters level studies in Chinese Medicine.
Sean Kline is a public servant who is not afraid to speak openly about his support for the basic income. Hear about his work at the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment and his ideas about bringing a basic income to U.S. cities.
An interview with Juliana Bidadanure, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, Stanford University, on basic income, basic capital and more.
Andy Stern, one of America’s most influential organizers and activists, describes his time as SEIU President, why he stepped down and eventually turned to the basic income as a policy solution for the new economy. Stern is the author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Restore the American Dream.
Sandhya, Jim and Owen provide an overview of what the basic income is, its biggest benefits, most common objections, results of pilot studies and what’s driving the conversation today.
A conversation with Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-Hour Workweek. We discuss what brought him to the basic income movement, some historical basic income experiments, and how a basic income could benefit his home country of the Netherlands.
