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Bringing UBI into the Public Discourse, feat. Annie Lowrey

The Basic Income Podcast

Bringing UBI into the Public Discourse, feat. Annie Lowrey

00:00 / 20:59

Annie Lowrey, Contributing Editor at the Atlantic, has caused a buzz with her new book “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.” In addition to the book itself, she has furthered the conversation with a recent New York Times op-ed and an appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. She joined the podcast to discuss her book and the reactions it’s received.

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Episode Transcript

Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.

Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh.

One big recent development in the basic income space was the release of a new book. Give People Money: How A Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, And Remake The World is a new book from Annie Lowrey. We’ve had Annie on the past talking about some of the journalistic work that she did around the GiveDirectly experiments in Kenya, but this book is making quite a splash. We thought it might make sense to talk to her again and hear a bit more about her experience with that, and what thinking went into it.

Owen: Here for the second time on the podcast is Annie Lowrey. She’s a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic and author of Give People Money. Welcome, Annie.

Annie: Thanks so much for having me back, guys.

Owen: Yes, I should mention you are, I think, our first repeat guest ever on the podcast, so that’s kind of cool too.

Annie: I am honored.

Owen: By writing this book, you are now very publicly identified with the basic income movement. What made you decide to throw your full weight behind basic income?

Annie: I think as you guys know and folks who read the book, although I feel like the listeners of your podcasts are so probably deep in the weeds on this that there’s not too much you can possibly tell them about it, but there had been a number of things that were written about basic income from an argued perspective. People who are really concerned about technological unemployment, really concerned about stronger anti-poverty measures, or looking at it from a green perspective, or even like a philosophical perspective.

The idea was to do a journalistic look on for folks who maybe have heard of it but didn’t know much about it, maybe had never heard of it. To write for a more generalized audience. As you guys know, and I’ve covered extensively, there’s just so much interest. I feel like it’s like every day or every week you hear about a new proposal, a new pilot, something going forward. It just feels like there’s just so much momentum behind it.

That’s a really fun thing. Very often economic policy is kind of a really slow burn. To see something rapidly developing in this way is really exciting and really fun to watch.

Jim: On a related note, talking about some of the past books that folks have written on basic income, often times the titles are more broad value statements, something like “Fair Shot” or “In Our Hands.” You went very direct: “Give People Money”. I’m curious, was that tied into thinking about who your audience was here? I’m curious what led to that decision.

Annie: Yes, I think that there in the United States is so much kind of– there’s almost like a philosophical objection to this idea that the government should ever just give people money despite the fact that through how many hundreds of programs in a lot of cases that is what it should do or is doing. Despite the evidence that in a lot of cases that is what it should be doing, as opposed to giving them in-kind benefits.

I feel like it just gets to the argument at the heart of the book, which is that, we have progressive government that redistributes income, but very often we have this really deep-rooted cultural and philosophical objection to just giving people cash, despite there being such fantastic evidence on how powerful a thing that can be.

It was somebody in my publisher who was like, “Oh, I like the title ‘Give People Money’. It’s just eye-catching.” Because we’d gone through a bunch of titles, but that was the one that they felt was gripping. Which was is I think the literal reason that it got picked.

Owen: Yes, so speaking of how people think about basic income, and there’s the philosophy behind it, you obviously know the political landscape around this really well, but I’m wondering if any of reactions of the book have surprised you.

Annie: Yes, I think I flipped in the book to anticipate a lot of knee jerk reactions that people have. It being too expensive is a pretty central one and one that I think that you can rebut pretty strongly in the US. People really get caught up on that, but I just wanted to get out in front of that one and some of the other ones, the usual suspects about work and about the idea of getting something for nothing, which I obviously think is problematic just in its construction.

A lot of the response, I’ve been really happy. One thing in writing in the book was I wanted it to be instead of sort of an argument, more like a jungle gym where people could come and think and explore and didn’t feel like they were in a position to be persuaded as or not, so much as they were there to kind of get their minds expanded. It’s been nice people seeing that and saying this is, in some sense, a book about basic income, but in other sense, it’s really not. It’s about all of the ideas that intersect with it, which is really what I had at least tried to do or would hope would be true for some readers.

Jim: I’m curious as you were painting that picture, were there parts in particular that stood out as being difficult to wrestle with? How did you untangle and explain some of the aspects of it that might be a conceptual lead for a lot of folks?

Annie: Yes. I think if you’re thinking about a UBI, you have to go back to the Kuznets first principles of what gets counted in an economy and what doesn’t. This goes back as far as economic research goes back, so you can probably go back to Adam Smith even. The whole issue of what you’re measuring and what you’re counting and how that relates to money as opposed to effort or labor. I think that that stuff is all super fascinating. What I think is interesting is, you have economists as a profession who say, “We understand that what you are measuring economically is not the same as value in the economy and what’s being produced and the importance of the roles that different people are playing.”

Nevertheless, you actually don’t have that much economic research that plays with the boundary of that, like looking at household production and looking at what’s counted and what isn’t. I think that that’s surprising. I wonder if there isn’t just a lot more interesting work to be done there. Maybe it’s a data limitation thing. That’s just one example of the big ideas that you can get caught up in there.

I think that there’s just a ton of really interesting political economy. Questions about who counts, who matters, who has political power. A lot of that is sort of– one of the issues that I think is really hard here is, do you create even more of an us and them dynamic if you have a stronger social safety net? There’s a lot of evidence of that, not just in the US, but from some of the Nordic countries and the way in which they might have become more anti-immigrant or even more nationalist in some cases.

All of that stuff I think is really interesting. UBI is an interesting frame for looking at it.

Owen: Yes, so there are a lot of rabbit holes, you can jump down when getting into UBI. I’m wondering, because this book is going to be a lot of people’s first comprehensive introduction to the topic, what do you think goes into a thoughtful, responsible introduction to basic income?

Annie: I feel like if you just say, “Look, this is an idea that has been around for a long time. Many brilliant people have adopted it as their own for their own reasons, with their own motivations.” That sort of looking at it as being a really fascinating but very malleable trend. I think it’s so fascinating that it’s one of these great ideas that on the one hand, it’s so simple and so singular, and on the other hand, it’s just so malleable. It has such a rich history. I feel like I’m at least pretty well up to date on a lot of the research, but even I keep on finding things that I had never found.

It’s kind of humbling in that way. As you were commenting on, there are just so many rabbit holes, and there are many people who put so much thought into it. I wanted to capture that and highlight a lot of other work and research and all the thinking that’s gone into it. I think it’s probably only been in the last 20, 30 years that you’ve really had a movement around it, too. That’s interesting as well, that you have people who are straightforwardly advocating it, sometimes for a really different reasons, but nevertheless are just trying to promote this idea around the world, which is a really fascinating trend as well.

Jim: This is generally been quite a big month for basic income. Beyond your book coming out, we also had President Obama talking about the need to pursue the policy in his Nelson Mandela lecture. Then Chicago, it came out is considering doing a pilot there.

On one hand, we have this movement here. On the other, looking at the federal government, we’re clearly a long ways away from seemingly being able to pass much of anything. I’m curious from your perspective, where do you feel like the movement is right now? Are we close in some ways? Are we far away? Do you have thoughts on where we go from here?

Annie: Close and far away is probably a good way to put it. I think it’s going to be really hard– I’m very interested to see how things like Stockton and Chicago and the Y Combinator experiment and others that were looking at how those — some of the guaranteed and minimum income ideas that are out there — how those play out.

But I think it’s going to be pretty hard to get convincing evidence on some of this stuff without the federal income tax lever. States have to balance their budget. They just don’t have the kind of capacity that the federal government has. Nevertheless, I would love it if you could get some kind of laboratory of democracy effect where you would have something smaller that could scale up that could really convince people it was a good idea.

Federally, or nationally, to put it in a different way, I do think that you could see a lot of movement towards considering a negative income tax, an EITC expansion, a conversion of TANF into a child grant or some kind of modification and expansion of the Child Tax Credit. That’s where I think that it’s more marginal policies that are really influenced by the idea of UBI and in some cases have a lot of the same proponents, that you could see movement.

There’s just such excitement on the left for these big blue sky ideas. It’s just a matter of time before there’s a shift in power and some of them get the pushed. There’s obviously just so much uncertainty, not just around the midterms, but who knows what’s going to happen in 2020? But it’s impossible to imagine that whoever is the Democratic candidate is not going to at the very least have something, something big along these lines, although I’d be very surprised if it was UBI itself.

Owen: Yes, it does feel like whether it’s jobs guarantee or at least an EITC expansion, that were at that point where everyone is going to have something like that in the platform, in the presidential race.

Annie: The thing that I’m actually hopeful for is folks have been pretty tentative about saying, “We need to do more for the lowest income Americans.” They don’t vote, they don’t have a ton of political power. You get into this whole thing is like why would you help somebody who won’t work to help themselves, which obviously is a very problematic sentiment, but nevertheless a common one.

I just have my fingers crossed that you’ll move to something like child grants or, again, the total reform of TANF, which would be a really good bang-for-the-buck-wise. I’m just not sure that anybody would run on it for political reasons.

Jim: Yes, I guess we’ll see. Politics seems like a crazy space these days, so I feel like “Never Say Never” anymore.

Annie: Yes, seriously.

Jim: You were on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah just recently talking about your book. Congrats on that.

Annie: Thank you.

Jim: During your conversation, one issue that came up was race and what impact that’s had on the history of our social safety net, but also around implications for it going forward. I’m curious if you want to say a little bit about your perspective on that front.

Annie: Yes, absolutely. If you are looking from the discipline of history or the discipline of sociology or the discipline of economics. It’s pretty clear that one of the main reasons — and I think it’s one of these things that it’s perhaps not a sufficient answer but it’s a necessary part of the answer — is that we don’t have the safety net that you would see in Canada or in other high income, similar high income OECD countries. It’s because of race and racism and how that played out in construction of the New Deal and Great Society programs.

I do think that racism explains a lot of the welfare chauvinism that you have in the United States, a lot of the judgment of lower income folks. Obviously, UBI pushes really hard in the other direction and basically says like, “No.” To the extent you’re means-testing anything, you just want this to be about poverty. You don’t want this to be a work effort or anything else if you’re thinking about a minimum income or even some kind of loose means testing, which is perhaps not a pure UBI, but that’s the idea.

I think that on the one hand, it would be good as a policy not to remedy the injustices of the past — obviously UBI wouldn’t touch wealth inequality, the racial wealth gap, which is a really pernicious problem — but would probably be more fair and less racist going forward. Like eliminating a lot of the requirements that you have in TANF and SNAP and converting to just a basic cash transfer program.

You have this really fascinating thing happening where the Republican Party is becoming older and whiter and more male and retaining power, out-sized power. You have a Democratic Party that is becoming younger, more diverse, in some cases more female, at least among white folks. I just think that it’s really uncertain how that is going to play out, but the polarization is kind of a frightening thing.

I think that you’re going to see entrenchment on both sides. I was just reading, Amy Chua’s book, which touches a lot on this. I think it’s going to be a really difficult thing, as the United States is going through in some ways a legitimately pretty sudden demographic change, how that’s going to affect what policies become popular among whom and what things raise the hackles and the tribalism of the other side.

Owen: Yes, that’s harrowing to think about sometimes. I’m wondering if you see any other major challenges. Obviously, there’s more than a few, but in terms of actually seeing basic income as a federal program or a robust state program, do you see any other major hurdles?

Annie: Yes, in some ways, I think that there’s probably opportunities that we’re not thinking about. Say some state got a waiver to take its TANF program and turn it into a cash grant for kids. Nothing is stopping that happening. My understanding is that the waivers for TANF are pretty– nobody’s talking about that, but that would be a pretty cool way to do things and maybe a way to kickstart the conversation.

Also, going forward, it’s going to be interesting to see how much especially, progressives and liberals feel hemmed in by government spending in the safety net. Whether they feel like they need to be the stewards of fiscal responsibility and cut spending while they’re also raising taxes. That’s a big question mark.

Certainly, I think it’s an exciting time in which the Overton Window has really been thrown open. I wouldn’t be surprised to just see exciting and more expansive policy-making in the future. I really hope that just getting a bigger sense of what’s possible and what the government and society by extension could be doing.

I think that the other thing is, imagine that in the next recession, there’s a recession, we’re recovering, and GDP is growing, and productivity is increasing, but the unemployment rate isn’t going down or even as going up. It’s the cocktail of those three things — so productivity increasing, GDP increasing, and unemployment increasing — that would be I think a pretty powerful trigger to say, “Oh, man. Technology is changing our economy in a way that’s really frightening. Let’s start thinking about how we want to help people through that.”

It’s just something to keep an eye on. Who knows if and when that might happen, but I think that that could really change the political conversation pretty quickly.

Owen: That was Annie Lowrey, Contributing Editor at The Atlantic and author of Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionized Work, and Remake The World.

Jim: I was really curious to hear from Annie as to what her motivations were around publishing a new book in this space. I thought her point about bringing a journalistic perspective to this made a ton of sense. As we talked about, if you look at the other books in the space, there’s a decent number out there at this point, but they do come at it from these different perspectives that inherently bring this lens. That affects how people perceive it. It affects who decides to read that. By taking this new approach, it opens up the potential that this might reach potentially a quite significant new audience.

Owen: Yes, I agree. It may reach a more, hopefully an academic crowd, but also a more popular audience just because she does have that cache as a well-known economic journalist. She gets into stuff that are a bit more weeds-y, like turning TANF into a cash grant. We should say TANF is the…

Jim: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

Owen: I was having trouble with the T. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or expanding the EITC, which of course is what Chris Hughes is calling for and maybe has a bit more momentum than UBI in terms of something that could happen sooner. It’s just good to get her perspective because it is very grounded in the data and the policy.

Jim: I thought it was also interesting and compelling to see how much of her perspective is informed by historical precedent. That she’s really thinking about what’s happened in the past, what has led us up to this moment, and what implications that has going forward.

I think often, particularly when people talk about UBI in the context of technology changing work, there is a tendency to just look at the system today and then extrapolate forward from there, as opposed to saying, “Well, let’s actually take the whole picture.” Let’s say, “How have things changed over past decades, and then given this moment, what do we think will actually happen going forward?”

Owen: We asked her about, her book is called Give People Money as opposed to some sort of value statement. But I feel like if you follow economics far enough, it is based on value statements. It was interesting to hear her unpack that a little bit in terms of the values, in terms of what we call work and what we call labor, and what’s compensated and what’s not. Obviously, that goes back at least a few hundred years, if not a few thousand.

Jim: It’s exciting to see how much traction this is getting so far and in the media pick up. Hopefully this just keeps momentum building.

Owen: Yes, more and more dominoes are following.

Alright, that’ll do it for this week on the Basic Income Podcast. Thank you to our producer Erick Davidson. Please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or the service of your choice. Tell your friends, we’re always looking for new listeners and more people in this conversation. We’ll see you next week.

Basic Income Q&A: How to Pay for It, Which Country Will Go First, and More (Rebroadcast)

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The Basic Income Podcast

Basic Income Q&A: How to Pay for It, Which Country Will Go First, and More (Rebroadcast)

00:00 / 20:17

In this episode, which initially aired last October, 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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Episode Transcript

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.

Basic Income vs. The Status Quo (Rebroadcast)

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The Basic Income Podcast

Basic Income vs. The Status Quo (Rebroadcast)

00:00 / 18:51

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. This is a rebroadcast of a previous episode. New episodes will resume in mid-July.

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Episode Transcript

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.

MacArthur Fellow Ai-jen Poo on What Basic Income Would Mean to Domestic Workers (Rebroadcast)

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The Basic Income Podcast

MacArthur Fellow Ai-jen Poo on What Basic Income Would Mean to Domestic Workers (Rebroadcast)

00:00 / 17:03

Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Co-director of Caring Across Generations, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient discusses the challenges faced by domestic workers in the U.S. and how a basic income could dramatically change things in that space.

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Episode Transcript

Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.

Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh.

Owen: Our guest this week is Ai-jen Poo. She’s the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, and co-director of Caring Across Generations. Welcome, Ai-jen.

Ai-jen: Thank you, great to be with you.

Owen: Why don’t you start by telling us about the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the work you do there?

Ai-jen: Sure. My work is alongside the millions of workers, mostly women, who go to work every day in our homes, and they care for some of the most important parts of our lives, our kids, our aging loved ones in our homes. They make it possible for millions of us to go to work every day knowing that our families are in good hands. Our work is really about making sure that this work is valued, respected, and protected, and, for the millions of workers who do this work, to be able to know that these jobs are good jobs with family-sustaining incomes and jobs that you can really take pride in and support your family on and one generation can do better than the next.

Now one of the things that started happening about five years ago is we started realizing that this workforce is growing at an incredibly rapid pace and that has to do with some pretty major trends in our demographics and in families and in our workforce.

To be clear about what those are, essentially the Baby Boomer generation which is this massive generation, culture-driving generation is aging rapidly at a rate of four million people per year turning 70 and also living longer than ever before because of advances in healthcare and technology. Then the Millennial generation which is the largest generation in history and most diverse, by the way, is also starting to have families of their own, turning 35, and having four million babies per year.

We suddenly need more care than ever before and therefore a stronger caregiving workforce. My work has been, especially now that we’ve launched this Caring Across Generations effort, it’s about creating the kind of solutions that allow for families to afford and have access to good care while making sure that the workforce that does the care has the respect and the kinds of quality jobs they deserve.

Jim: Can you tell us a bit about what are some of the biggest challenges that are facing domestic workers today?

Ai-jen: Sure. We still in the 21st century, have a hard time really treating this work as real work. It’s oftentimes referred to as help or companionship, and what that results in is this way in which this work remains in the shadows. Despite it being a real profession for millions of people, it’s treated as less than real work and that limits our ability to get access to the kinds of training and benefits and security that we deserve, and it certainly is reflected in the wages.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but for example, for the home care workforce which cares for the elderly and people with disabilities, the annual median income for a homecare worker is $13,000 per year. That is so far from a family-sustaining wage and so you think about these millions of workers who are working incredibly hard, doing incredibly important work, and earning poverty wages. That’s the lot for so much of our workforce.

Jim: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the campaigns that you’ve been fighting in order to really secure more rights and more economic justice for people in the space?

Ai-jen: Sure. Starting back in 2003 in New York, I started working on trying to create basic protections for this workforce in our nation’s labor laws. A lot of people don’t know this history but in the 1930s when we passed the labor laws that were a part of the New Deal, which are the cornerstone of protections that we all take for granted when we go to work, Southern members of Congress refused to support those labor laws getting enacted if they included domestic workers and farm workers, which is a part of a very dark history of racial exclusion in this country.

To this day, many of those exclusions remain. In the early 2000s, we set out to try to transform those exclusions and put real protections into place, state by state. We had our first big victory in New York where we passed the first Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in 2010, and now seven states have passed legislation. But I will say that just having the minimum standards on the books is far from enough to make these jobs, good jobs.

That’s why we launched Caring Across Generations five years ago to bring together all of the family caregivers, our seniors who need support in order to live independently, people with disabilities together with the workforce to say, “We need a whole new investment in caregiving in this country that allows for people to actually afford care, because it’s quite expensive, and that allows for these jobs to be really good jobs.”

Right now, we’re fighting for what we call Universal Family Care in the state of Maine and Michigan, which is essentially the idea that every single working family should have access to economic support to afford child care, elder care, and paid family leave. That would enable them to go to work and fully participate in the workforce and reach their full potential without having to choose this horrible false choice between work and family. In the 21st century, it just feels like we really need that. In Maine and Michigan, we’ve got this really exciting campaigns for universal family care.

Owen: Perhaps along those lines, you signed the belief statement for the Economic Security Project saying that we should explore basic income to guarantee economic security for all people. What motivated that decision?

Ai-jen: Well, I’m really passionate about the idea that most of the social contract that we have in place and the policies and systems that support our democracy and our economy to work properly are policies that were born of a very different age. A time when our economies were locally based, regionally based, and nationally based whereas now, it’s a globalized economy. A time when manufacturing was the base of this economy and now it’s very much a service driven economy.

So much has changed about the way that we live and work in this country. I think we need a new framework for and we need to rethink our social contract at its core to be reflective of the realities facing working families today in this country. I believe it entails a new set of universalisms. Social insurance programs like unemployment, for example, were created at a time when people had stable long-term employment and intermittent periods of unemployment.

The whole framework were set up to support that need of intermittent unemployment. Today, in more and more places, what we’re seeing is periods of long-term unemployment and intermittent and temporary employment. We need a different safety net and a different framework for thinking about meeting those needs in the economy.

For us, we’re obsessed with caregiving because we’re just seeing how we’ll never get to gender equality in the workforce, we’ll never get to a place where workers, men and women, can really realize their potential in our economy if they’re constantly being forced to make impossible choices around caring for the people they love and going to work. We think that’s a really big piece of the puzzle too, and universal basic income, universal family care, like a new framework for workers to have a voice, these are all pillars that need to be redesigned.

Jim: On that note, can you tell us a bit more about what impact do you think the universal basic income might have on the domestic worker space?

Ai-jen: I think part of it, it’s similar to family care whereas we live in such insecure economic times in that more and more workers are dealing with jobs that are temporary, part-time, independent contracted. There’s much less of the stable long-term employment as I mentioned. What that means is that you’re really living paycheck to paycheck and really struggling, and you’re on the brink.

Anything could go wrong: a car accident, a stroke in the family, any number of things could go wrong and create a kind of crisis that makes it impossible for you to then restabilize. It can trigger a spiraling of economic insecurity and into poverty that’s incredibly difficult to get out of. What something like family care support or basic income can do is make what should just be a temporary moment of need, keep it a temporary moment of need as opposed to a long-term crisis.

Owen: You mentioned before that the population of people in need of domestic workers is rapidly increasing. Do you see other changes in the domestic worker space these last few years and going forward into the future?

Ai-jen: There are so many changes. Already the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that home care aides, home care workers are the fastest growing occupation in our entire economy and the estimates are that by the year 2030, if you take all of the workers who are providing child care in different settings and all the workers who are providing elder care and support for people with disabilities in different settings, that that combine will be the single largest occupation in our entire economy.

We’re talking about the care economy, far from being marginal and in the shadows. It’s actually going to be defining of our entire economy. We all have a stake, beyond the fact that we all have families and we all want to work, we all have a stake in this work becoming dignified life-sustaining work because it sets such a huge tone for the rest of our workforce.

I’m of the belief that, in the ‘20s and ‘30s manufacturing jobs were dangerous, low paid, precarious jobs. We collectively as a country transformed those jobs into good jobs with the pathway to real economic security and stability. Our task of the 21st century is to look at the low-wage service jobs like care jobs and actually do the same and make the same transformation happen. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

Jim: Ai-jen, you mentioned that universal basic income would service one pillar in a larger new social contract that we could be moving towards. Can you tell us a little bit more about what else would be part of that contract, and also how you’re thinking strategically about moving towards it?

Ai-jen: Absolutely. I think that universal basic income, universal family care, this idea that every single working family would have some economic support to afford child care, elder care, and paid leave when they need it to care for their families, and portable benefits and three ideas that really deserve some oxygen and some real resources behind pilots and demonstration projects. They’re at the level of ambition that is appropriate. We’ve got some major challenges in this country with unprecedented levels of inequality, and I think we need bold solutions.

I also think of really important piece of this is going to be worker voice. We have a situation in our economy where 75% of the workforce earns less than $50,000 per year and meanwhile there’s so much wealth being generated. We have to figure out how workers have more of a voice and can share, where more workers can share in the prosperity that we’re collectively generating as a nation.

That has to do with voice, it has to do with having new forms of organization like ours, the National Domestic Workers Alliance. There’s lots of groups out there that are experimenting with different kinds of organizational forms to give voice to working people.

Owen: I’m wondering as the domestic worker population increases and as there’s more urgency around these issues if you’re finding that they get more attention or if that’s not happening yet?

Ai-jen: Great question. To some extent, it is happening partly because our movement is growing and partly because more and more families are really struggling with the need for care, whether it’s childcare or elder care. So more people are feeling the burn and the need in a way that feels right there at the surface.

I also think that the fact that more women are in positions of leadership in the private sector and in government can give voice to the challenges of doing work and having ambition and having responsibility in wanting to contribute in the workforce and then not having the support we need at home for our families. That’s becoming more and more a part of the conversation. We saw that during the election cycle in 2016. I think we’re going to continue to see that.

Jim: Those were all the questions that we had, but anything else you’d like to add?

Ai-jen: I will say that one of the things that is really important to me is in this period of a lot of political polarization and change that we preserve the space for big bold ideas like the universal basic income and universal family care and portable benefits. These are all ideas that need oxygen and resources to become real. We need to take them to their next level.

We don’t have everything figured out, but we need to start building from the ground up, which is why we’re really excited to be championing these campaigns in Maine and Michigan and folks are doing amazing work on the ground building constituencies behind these ideas and why I’m excited to be a part of the Economic Security Project.

Jim: Great. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us.

Ai-jen: Thank you.

Owen: That was Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, and co-director of Caring Across Generations on the Basic Income Podcast. Also, thank you to our producer, Erick Davidson. See you next week.

Momentum Toward Basic Income in Scotland, feat. Jamie Cooke

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The Basic Income Podcast

Momentum Toward Basic Income in Scotland, feat. Jamie Cooke

00:00 / 28:48

Momentum is building in Scotland to explore basic income as a policy that can be a centerpiece of the modern social contract. While automation is often mentioned as a catalyzing force in the basic income discussion, Scotland is looking at the policy more from a social justice angle. In this episode, Owen interviews the Head of RSA Scotland and Board Member of Citizens Basic Income Network Scotland, Jamie Cooke.

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Episode Transcript

Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast. I’m Owen Poindexter.

Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh. One of the countries where there’s actually been quite a lot of progress around basic income is Scotland. There’s been a lot of political development, people are talking about new ideas, but it’s been a bit difficult to actually follow everything going on from the media reporting around what’s happening there.

Owen: To get an actual sense of what’s going on on the ground, I got a chance to interview Jamie Cook. He is the head of RSA Scotland and sits on the board of Citizens Basic Income Earth network in Scotland. Here is my conversation with Jamie Cook. Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Thank you for having me on.

Owen: To start, can you just tell us about the work of RSA Scotland?

Jamie: Sure. So we’re an international think and do tank. We’ve got a presence in about 90 countries around the world. Headquarters down in London, between 90,000 fellows in different parts of the world, and covering a broad range of different topics and ideas that we’re looking at. Particularly around civic impact, and how we can not just think about things but actually make a difference with it.

Which I suppose is partly where we’ve become particularly interested in ideas around the economy, the future of work, artificial intelligence and automation and obviously connecting all of those really, basic income.

Owen: Of course we’ll get into that in a moment, but first I’d just love it if you could ground us a little bit in the general political climate in Scotland. What’s that like these days?

Jamie: It’s really interesting time we have here. Obviously, 2014, we had a referendum on Scottish independence which the new vote, so the vote stay in the United Kingdom, won by 55% to 45%. Since then, we’ve had quite an interesting political context I suppose. The Scottish National Party are very much the dominant political force in Scotland controlling Scottish Government and most leaders of political representation. I think there was a feeling that perhaps after the referendum that was once in a generation votes and therefore we would go into a different context.

The referendum in European Union membership that we took, and obviously the fact that the United Kingdom has voted to leave the EU whatever that may end up looking like, at the same time as Scotland actually across every single local authority area voted to stay in the EU, I think created quite a different context. Again, showed a bit of a disconnect between the politics and the discussions in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. That’s really kind of kick-started some of the debate again around Scotland’s constitutional future.

Just now, we’re at a position where we’ve just had the launch of a new growth commission by the Scottish National Party and Scottish government looking at what the economics of an independent Scotland could look like. I think very much signaling the beginning of at least a new discussion around Scotland’s constitutional future. At this stage I think it’s Brexit is so chaotic, and we’re not quite sure where it’s going.

I’m not entirely sure anyone knows what’s going to be the next steps or the next elements of discussion, but as it stands, I think there’s a very real chance we’ll have another referendum in our discussion around constitutional future of Scotland, whether that’s within the UK or actually as an independent nation.

Owen: Well, that’s really fascinating. We always have these conversations in a political context, but that one is very much in flux it sounds like. As you alluded to, the basic income discussion is alive and well in Scotland. Can you tell us what the status of that is right now?

Jamie: Sure. I think this reflects partly the fact that in Scotland, I suppose, wherever anyone stands on the constitutional debate, there is an understanding that as a small country, whether that’s independent or as part of the UK, Scotland is trying to find its place in the world, and how it can interact with other nations, how we can make decisions for some of the challenges we face here in Scotland. Really, what’s been quite exciting about that is opening up a space for considering more radical ideas and perhaps would be considered at other points.

For example, we’ve seen quite a push in Scotland around world-leading environmental change targets. There’s questions you can have around the implementation of those, but certainly the targets we’re aiming for are quite hard. We’re looking around new ideas for our Social Security and how some of these ideas can work in a different way in Scotland to the rest of the UK. I think that’s opened a really interesting space that basic income has been able to find a bit of traction.

I’ve been involved in it for a couple years now, and really the shift in momentum and interest during that period has been phenomenal. From something that was very much a fringe concept, as we’ve seen in other countries around the world, to one that actually in September last year the Scottish Government, so Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister, arranged within her program for governments, the outlining of her strategic or policy priorities for the coming year, basic income experimentation being one of those key priorities.

I think that’s been a massive step forward in terms of the engagement with political decision-makers but also the wider push within Scotland around whether we could explore some of the ideas attached to a concept like basic income really has pushed forward a lot of momentum. We’re at a position now where the Scottish Government has put money aside to support feasibility work by four of Scotland’s local authority, so council areas, to look at what basic income experiment might look like in those areas.

Glasgow and Edinburgh is our two biggest cities. Glasgow is the biggest, Edinburgh is our capital. Also North Lanarkshire and Fife, which are two areas that combine both commuter towns but also rural communities as well, it’s quite a diverse spread. We’re in a really interesting space of testing out these ideas and seeing where they might be able to go for Scotland.

Owen: And the conversation also in the US has really picked up in the last few years. What’s motivating that sudden surge over where you are?

Jamie: I think it’s been really fascinating having those conversations with our colleagues in the US, but I think there are slightly different pushes. I’m generalizing slightly here, but I think in the US there’s definitely been a huge push for you guys around the future of work, automation, artificial intelligence, how this is going to impact on jobs and how we see the next stage of, if you like, economic evolution. I think that’s partly why there’s been such a push and buy-in from some of the big tech leaders and so on.

I think here in Scotland, the pitch has been primarily from a social justice perspective; how can we create an economy and a society that is better balanced and better supportive to all of our citizens? I think there’s been a huge disconnect in many ways between political decision making in Scotland around social security and welfare in the United Kingdom. We’ve seen a system introduced under Universal Credit from the UK Government, it’s very much rooted in sanctions and presuming the worst of people. Really the idea you have to force people to behave in a positive manner or they will game the system.

Even though that isn’t written in any sort of evidence or, in fact, much to the contrary, it’s defined how our approach to social security has been in the UK over the last few years. I think within Scotland, there’s been a bit of a push back against that. I think as well within a Scottish context, there’s a recognition that in some of our communities, we have very long-standing challenges.

A city like Glasgow has been booming, has done a lot of really good renovation work over the last few years, is recognized on an international level for being a very attractive place to visit, to do business, and so on. Yet, there are also communities, particularly in east-end of Glasgow and the north of Glasgow, that have deeply entrenched issues around unemployment, around education, around health, well being, addiction, and so on.

I certainly have found with my conversations with a lot of community leaders and local authority representatives, that there’s a realization that we’ve tried to do the same things over and over again and they haven’t made those changes. In fact, we can’t just look to incremental change anymore to hope that the economy will pull everyone up with it. Actually, we need to try something quite radically different.

I think basic income has therefore offered space to challenge and to debate some of the norms or the expectations around the economy and around society that perhaps we’ve taken for granted for several decades.

Owen: That starts to get into what I wanted to ask you next, which was, if you have this goal of a more balanced society where people are a bit more equal, why is basic income the answer as opposed to say a jobs program or other social benefits?

Jamie: I think there’s several reasons that. One is there’s almost that kind of philosophical element to basic income and the recognition of us all having rights, connections, responsibilities, and opportunities as citizens. Actually, taking away from the idea that what we receive or give in to society is purely based on our economic activity. Actually, all of us, every single one us citizens, are entitled and deserve to have an element of security from that wider system that we’re in.

I think that recognizes those who’ve gone before us. The cliche about being an island, no man is, no woman is, we all are based on those who have come before us and those who come after. I think there is that recognition of having a better connectivity amongst society. Probably, and I think in a Scottish context, we shouldn’t over exaggerate these ideas of being more socially progressive as a nation than other places, I think we try to and that’s not always borne out.

But I think the political environment lends itself to the type of discussions around community involvement and connectivity and social responsibility that are sometimes harder elsewhere. I think though as well, there’s a recognition about the way that the job landscape is changing. Actually, the very nature of work is and should change. When we see the growth of insecurity, when we see the precarious lives that people are living, there are traditional ways we’ve approached that.

The social contract in the United Kingdom we created in the post war period, in response to Beveridge’s giants that he identified within the society, that we had to combat, we created the NHS and all our other fantastic and vitally important social security and welfare systems, but actually, they need to evolve and adapt to a different world were in now. There is a recognition that that’s an important space for us to start to get into.

How do we create a flexibility? As a small country, I mean Scotland is a very small country. It’s one of our strengths and one of our challenges where we have a smaller population than London does. That gives us a great flexibility, but it’s only a flexibility if we are able to give security and the ability to change and adapt to our citizens. There’s partly a recognition within that of this is a system that gives people the opportunity to grow into try new ideas and respond to the opportunities and challenges that arise for them.

Owen: Along those lines, there are a lot of different versions of basic income that you’ll hear proposed, from a straight universal basic income to a negative income tax, to a carbon dividend, or a sovereign wealth fund. What do you think might be the most feasible and best fit for Scotland?

Jamie: I think for Scotland, it’s funny, in some ways when we talk about the universality of basic income, you can sometimes get a bit of a instinctive negative response to that in Scotland. Because there is a feeling of, why would we be giving money to people who have more money than they need already? One of the important things we emphasize within all of our discussions in Scotland, is the basic income is not a policy that can operate in isolation.

For me, it’s a foundation stone to a new social contract. We wouldn’t introduce a basic income in Scotland with nothing else alongside it. It would go alongside reforming the tax system. It would go alongside, for example, looking at rent control, because if you don’t introduce some control of our own rent, our basic income would just vanish into the pockets of landlords. It would go around looking at the current measures we have in place for a minimum and living wage, for example.

That’s an important element whereby we look at that, and actually the universality therefore is very attractive. I find it very fascinate — I find it funny when I talk at quite a lot of events, sometimes people will stand up and shout at me at the end and say, “Basic income is a policy that Hayek and Friedman supported. You’re just trying to destroy the welfare state,” which I’m quite happy to defend the fact that I’m not.

The negative income tax as variation upon or way to approach it, hasn’t had the same resonance. It has a lot of negative connotations within the Scottish political context because of some of the proponents behind it previously. I would expect if we were to see success with this moving forward, and I think we have a very strong opportunity with the work we’re doing just now to really push towards basic income as a national policy in future years in Scotland, if we can demonstrate the evidence of success, I would expect to see that on a universal level.

I would expect to see it across society, because within the Scottish combination and political environment of basic income being both policy that supports individual decision making, but within a wider social context. It’s not one or the other. It doesn’t ignore the individuals, but also doesn’t ignore the fact that society does exist. That’s probably the most natural way that we would see that fit in Scotland moving forward.

Part of the interesting element of the experiments: one of the things I would give the most credit to the Scottish government, and to the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon for, is the fact that, when you see a policy that suddenly picks up a lot of interest and momentum, and quite frankly fashion in some ways as basic income has, which is great and we’re really excited about. It’s very easy, I think, for a political decision makers, especially leaders of a country, to go one of two ways. Either they throw themselves into wholeheartedly and this is the answer to all their problems, which is not helpful or sustainable, or they reject it because it’s just a popular decision.

I think actually what’s been really positive to see from Scottish Government from the First Minister, is that what they see the popularity showing is that basic income is worthy of being explored further and being explored within a Scottish context, but with global conversations. They’re not throwing themselves into saying this will definitely be the policy in Scotland moving forward, but they’re also giving the space for us to experiment and explore and see what kind of implications this might be able to have for Scotland.

I think that gives us a really interesting space and opportunity and environment, that we can actually create quite a Scottish specific and targeted version of the policy in many ways that will work within a particular context that we have here, but also can learn from what’s happening in Finland and Stockton, California and Ontario and various other places just now as well.

Owen: You started to get into it there, I’m wondering what the public reaction has been to this whole basic income discussion. Do you think people are generally supportive?

Jamie: I think it’s getting there. I think one of the biggest things we need to do over the next year or so is really work on that public engagement. I think there’s probably still to big a proportion of the Scottish population haven’t engaged with the context yet. What I found in doing a lot of public speaking and public events and workshops and so on around the topic, is within a Scottish context you tend to get one of two reactions.

I think we’re lucky in Scotland in that we have a political context where we’ve had quite an open space to start from, maybe more so than in some other countries. For example, after the independence referendum debate, I think you had this huge growth in civic and citizen engagement in politics around the independence referendum. Registration for voting the referendum was not far shy of 100%; a huge turnout, people engaged in events.

I think when the referendum finished, people wondered where to go with that. Some people joined political parties, but I think for a lot, they were looking for that idea of a better Scotland. Whenever they sat on the constitution that was what was motivating them. I think therefore, we’ve had this great parts of the population we could tap into in a sense, who are looking for a progressive positive idea to really get behind, and I think basic income has lent itself to that.

Interestingly, the other reaction you find is quite a knee-jerk. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but it’s quite an instinctive reaction, which is when you talk about the concepts or giving people money and choice over what they spend it on, a reaction of, I know Jimmy in my street would spend that money on drink. He will spend it on alcohol, he will spend it in cigarettes, that’s not a good use of any sort of policy.

It’s a very quick and it’s very powerful and understandable reaction, but what I’ve also found with a lot of those reactions is it doesn’t take much of a space of discussing and allowing people to play with the idea and explore it. To also hear them saying, “I know he would spend it on alcohol, but I also know my cousin has been looking to set up a business and this would give her the spur to do it.” Or, “I know so and so who spent this time where they want to care for their husband who’s unwell, but they haven’t been able to do so because of financial reasons.”

I think it gives me the feeling that we won’t get 100% population behind this concept straight away, because you never do and that wouldn’t be sensible or indeed frankly [unintelligible] in many ways. I think there’s a real space there for us to be able to play with and challenge and experiment with the idea. That actually when we do that, and when we give particularly citizens the chance to do that instead of telling them this is a policy you’re going to accept whether you like it or not, there’s a real appetite in Scotland for doing that.

I think the more we can expand that and that’s — you mentioned me being a board member at CBINS, which is the Scottish affiliate of the Basic Income Earth Network, it’s one of the areas that we’re really looking at within CBINS is how do you train and empower and give the confidence to people to take these ideas out into the communities to discuss and challenge them. Frankly, maybe that will come back and push us in different directions, but that’s good. It’s a good way to engage the wider population.

Owen: What would you say are the next steps for basic income in Scotland?

Jamie: I think there’s a few elements. I think the biggest bet just now is the four local authorities who have been identified as the key test areas, if you like. They’re working. They’ve set up a steering group. They’re bringing in a kind of small staff team who will focus on developing a feasibility study into challenges and opportunities around experimenting with basic income in Scotland. I think it’s worth being honest about the fact that we do face challenges in Scotland.

As it stands, Scotland cannot introduce a basic income because we lack the devolution of fiscal powers and Social Security powers to be able to do that realistically. Currently out of the entire Social Security budget in United Kingdom, about 15% is controlled by the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament. We have a realistic situation just now where we can’t do that forward.

If in the feasibility, for example, the financial costs of experimentation or the potential issues around the Department of Work and Pensions who run our Social Security Systems in the UK primarily, or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs who run our tax system, we are going to have work to really explore what are the ways that these could impact on any experiments.

Actually, therefore, what can we experiment with, what can we expect to be able to test and demonstrate, and frankly what do we have to be very honest about and say, “We can’t do that in this context.” That feasibility work is going to be to be vitally important and from an RSA perspective, we will be looking to engage with and support a lot of that and contribute to it. We’re looking at a number of complementary areas, but it will be a very important opportunity for Scotland.

I think the other thing that’s particularly important over the coming months and year really, is our engagement in Scotland with the rest of the world. One of the really exciting things with the basic income movement just now, so why we’re on this conversation just now is because it’s taking on a global dimension. Maybe taking on different characteristics in those areas, but we’re very much looking to learn from the rest of the world.

We’ve been working with our colleagues in Finland with a experiment underway just there. We’ve got events lined up in Scotland over coming months with leading basic income academics, Karl Widerquist from Georgetown University in Qatar, Evelyn Forget from Manitoba in Canada. We’re looking at how we can engage, I’m speaking at the Basic Income Earth Network Congress in Finland in the summer.

I think there is a really exciting space there for that global dimension; what can we learn and what can we share? I think that’s one of the things that’s been attractive in a Scottish context, but also shows us that we’re not just being individually radical here, we’re actually looking at something that’s taking on a lot of attraction and a lot of relevance in a number of different geographic and international contexts just now.

So I think the next year will be really exciting. I think it’s a space for us hopefully to identify the challenges to experimentation, but therefore ways around those. I think it’s definitely a space for us to start to design the process of what experimentation in Scotland would look like. I think with very much a strong focus and emphasis around the evaluation stage of that, the capacity building, the way to really build in wider society to the conversations where we’re having.

If we can take those forward, then I think a very exciting space for us to be able to put a package to the Scottish Government, to the Scottish Parliament, to our local authority partners and say, “This is our chance to really experiment and do something radical and exciting in Scotland.”

There are obviously political challenges to that, Brexit is a huge issue. If we are into a second referendum on Scottish independence that could have political connotations for this. I think by creating the model of what a basic income pilot or experiment in Scotland could look like, I think in the very least, we will create something very powerful that could be used in many different parts of world.

Realistically, I think with the discussions I’ve had and the feedback from various people, I think a very powerful opportunity, a real chance that we could do this forward and have a direct impact on Scottish policy moving forward.

Owen: Great. It’s a lot of exciting stuff. Those are the questions I had for you, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Jamie: No, I think that’s the crucial bits. I think it really is about that international dimension. I think we’re really keen to learn from what happens in Stockton, discussions you guys are having across California, I think potentially that impact around tech. For me, I feel we need a better synthesis between the element of tech AI focus, automation focus, there has been at points in the US with the social justice focus in Scotland because actually, I think what we need is both of those brought together better. Anything we can we can be learning and we can be contributing to in a global perspective, I think is definitely a hugely attractive particularly given the political context in Scotland just now.

Jim: That was Jamie Cook, head of RSA Scotland, on the Basic Income podcast.

Owen: I thought it was nice to hear that all these experiments, all the trials going on in different countries, it is a global conversation, especially within Europe, but also over here in California, these places are learning from each other and watching each other and it’s becoming a global movement.

Jim: That’s absolutely true. I think we often talk mostly about what’s happening here in the US, but we wouldn’t be having a lot of these conversations if it hadn’t been, well, a few years back for the Swiss referendum, but also the traction that this policy is really gaining in countries around the world. All of that adds onto itself and so I think altogether, that’s what’s led to more this snowball effect and you’re starting to see a lot more general conversation around the policy.

I also thought it was really interesting that his view is that automation is not the driver in Scotland, that it’s really about the social justice framework. I think that, certainly here in the US, the tech motivation is what you hear, at least in the news media for the most part. I think that’s why we feel like there’s more of a conversation today just recently. It’s really interesting to hear that in Scotland it is not about the tech it is about what could this do to really lift people up.

Owen: Yes, and that’s encouraging that the conversation is broadening to the social justice issue because automation provides a catalyst. Instead of us just coming out of nowhere and saying, “Hey, why don’t we just start giving people money”, it’s a motivating force, but there are so many more reasons to pursue basic income beyond that.

Getting back to how so many countries are doing this, it is hard to address every issue at once. Finland’s focusing on unemployment benefits. Stockton is more just about getting stories and lifting people up. Y Combinator, we’ll get a better sense of soon, but it is nice how because there’s so much going on, we are able to segment different parts of this conversation through different experiments.

Jim: Yes, absolutely. I think his view that this is really a foundation stone for a new social contract, and that he’s seeing other policies really going along with this to create that full picture of what it means to move into 21st-century social contract. That’s, I think, an exciting and smart approach to take.

Owen: I think that is where the conversation needs to go because that is an open question of what does the whole social safety net look like when you have a basic income and obviously there are a lot of opinions around that on both sides, but that is the next big question.

Jim: That will do it for this episode of the Basic Income podcast. We’re actually going to be taking a break over the next few weeks. We’ll still be releasing episodes, there’ll be some of our hits over the last year and a half. You’ll still keep hearing from us and we’ll pick up with new episodes in a month or so.

Thank you for listening. Thank you to our producer Erick Davidson. If you’re like what you hear, please do rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or the podcast service of your choice. Please do tell your friends about the podcast. We’re always looking to reach new people. We’ll talk to you soon.

A Basic Income Presidency, feat. Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang

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The Basic Income Podcast

A Basic Income Presidency, feat. Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang

00:00 / 30:51

What would it take to truly prepare the U.S. for the potential of widespread technological unemployment and invest in people in a way that allows them to really reach their potential? These questions and some novel answers inspired Venture for America founder Andrew Yang to run for president: he is a declared candidate for the 2020 election. Jim interviewed Yang at an event in San Francisco on his candidacy, vision, and the political path forward for basic income.

UBI and the Values Embedded in our Social Safety Net, feat. Almaz Zelleke

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The Basic Income Podcast

UBI and the Values Embedded in our Social Safety Net, feat. Almaz Zelleke

00:00 / 25:33

To understand our current anti-poverty measures and the full impact of a basic income, we need to understand the values and assumptions embedded in the safety net right now. In this episode, Owen discusses these issues with Almaz Zelleke, Associate Professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai, who is working on a book on the ethics of basic income in the U.S.

Economic Analyses of Basic Income, featuring Rakeen Mabud

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The Basic Income Podcast

Economic Analyses of Basic Income, featuring Rakeen Mabud

00:00 / 11:30

How would universal basic income impact the economy? The Roosevelt Institute has done numerous analyses on how unconditional cash transfers could affect the economy at various levels and program designs. Rakeen Mabud, Program Director of the Roosevelt Institute, joins the podcast to discuss these analyses and what they mean for the wider basic income conversation.

Universal Basic Assets, featuring Marina Gorbis

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The Basic Income Podcast

Universal Basic Assets, featuring Marina Gorbis

00:00 / 21:37

When considering the impact of basic income, we usually think of it as a standalone policy — but there’s nothing stopping us from imagining UBI as one piece of a larger policy framework. In this episode, Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of Institute for the Future, shares her perspective on a comprehensive framework for the future: Universal Basic Assets.

Zipcar Cofounder Robin Chase on UBI and the Emerging Economy

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The Basic Income Podcast

Zipcar Cofounder Robin Chase on UBI and the Emerging Economy

00:00 / 21:46

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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Episode Transcript

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.

Dorian Warren on Basic Income and Racial Justice

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The Basic Income Podcast

Dorian Warren on Basic Income and Racial Justice

00:00 / 26:24

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.

Jared Bernstein on Basic Income vs. a Jobs Guarantee

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The Basic Income Podcast

Jared Bernstein on Basic Income vs. a Jobs Guarantee

00:00 / 28:30

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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Episode Transcript

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.

The Bootstraps Basic Income Documentary

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The Basic Income Podcast

The Bootstraps Basic Income Documentary

00:00 / 17:03

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

Dr. Evelyn Forget on Mincome & Basic Income in Canada

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The Basic Income Podcast

Dr. Evelyn Forget on Mincome & Basic Income in Canada

00:00 / 19:22

Canada’s basic income trials in trials in the 70s–the “Mincome” experiments–were largely forgotten until Dr. Evelyn Forget found records of the Mincome trials and individuals who had received a basic income. She discusses what she found, and the implications for Canada’s upcoming trials in Ontario.

Basic Income vs. The Status Quo

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The Basic Income Podcast

Basic Income vs. The Status Quo

00:00 / 19:21

——

Episode Transcript

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.

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.

Owen: One of the first things I hear is like, “Well, sounds like a nice idea, but that’ll never pass Congress.”

Owen: Right, because most people aren’t thinking like, “Okay, what politically could be accomplished in 10, 20 years.”

Owen: And I would just tack on to the end of that quote, “especially today.”

Senator Art Eggleton on the Ontario Basic Income Pilot

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The Basic Income Podcast

Senator Art Eggleton on the Ontario Basic Income Pilot

00:00 / 19:56

We spoke with Senator Art Eggleton of Ontario on the upcoming pilot program, which will supply a basic income to 4,000 people in three cities across the province of Ontario. Eggleton described the rationale for the trial and where we might see future basic income experiments across Canada.

Annie Lowrey on the Basic Income in Kenya & the Power of Cash Transfers

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The Basic Income Podcast

Annie Lowrey on the Basic Income in Kenya & the Power of Cash Transfers

00:00 / 21:10

Annie Lowrey, writer for the Atlantic, discusses her trip to Kenya to cover GiveDirectly’s village-wide basic income trial for the New York Times Magazine. Lowrey explains the move in the aid community toward cash transfers and away from tangible items, such as cows, medicine or sports equipment. She also describes the moment when the village learned that they will be receiving an unconditional basic income, and the visual transformation that happens to villages where at least some citizens have received cash transfers.

The 2017 Basic Income Create-a-thon in San Francisco

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The Basic Income Podcast

The 2017 Basic Income Create-a-thon in San Francisco

00:00 / 33:32

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.

Enno Schmidt on the Swiss Basic Income Campaign

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The Basic Income Podcast

Enno Schmidt on the Swiss Basic Income Campaign

00:00 / 22:23

Enno Schmidt, co-founder of the Swiss campaign to enact a countrywide basic income, joined us in San Francisco for a live event about his groundbreaking campaign. Schmidt spoke about the unique design of the Swiss campaign, and why they chose to invest in stunning, eye-catching images. He was interviewed by Co-Director of the Universal Income Project Sandhya Anantharaman.

“Two people is all it takes to start a revolution.”

Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, on Innovation and Basic Income

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The Basic Income Podcast

Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, on Innovation and Basic Income

00:00 / 17:27

Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, discusses the future of employment and why a universal basic income could spur innovation. He also discusses the mental leaps it requires to wrap our minds around the basic income, and what we can do to help others to make those leaps.