Written in rebuttal to this article in Newsweek
Newsweek published an article written by Clay Routledge & Gonzalo Schwarz that criticizes Universal Basic Income on very familiar ground. It’s an argument reminiscent of the case Charles Murray makes in Losing Ground in terms of its suppositions about human nature and the reasoning for advancing them; namely a belief in Social Darwinism and the moral virtue of denying financial aid to poor people.
At the outset, the case for UBI is presented as a response to automation eliminating jobs which has been among the most urgent reasons given for it in recent years. However, the case for UBI is far older and more robust than that rationale would have one believe.
Thomas Paine advocated for a Universal Basic Income back in 1797 in the pamphlet Agrarian Justice. Paine observed that to be poor in the US and Europe was a far worse standard of living than to live in native populations, “The life of the Indian is a continual holiday compared to the poor of Europe; and on the other hand it appears abject when compared to the rich”. The point being, specific choices in social engineering are responsible for the severe wealth inequality we see in modern life.
Paine confronts the idea that one can own land outright by making a distinction between the cultivation of land, the improvement of land, and ownership of land; observing that while it’s impossible to separate the labor one puts into the land from the land itself, there nonetheless is a distinction. To say that one can own the literal land of the earth is akin to saying you can buy and own a day of the year. We use land, but we don’t own it in any literal sense. To rectify the injustice presented by the societal convention of land as personal property, Paine proposed a national fund to be paid into by landowners by a “ground rent”, with the proceeds to be distributed to every citizen on an ongoing basis once they reach 21.
Henry George writing in 1879 expanded on Paine’s premise in much greater detail in a book called Progress and Poverty. He made the case that land as private property inherently denies others of their natural rights; “The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence”.
His logic is worth quoting at length:
“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of labor to its own produce. If one man can command the land upon which the other must labor, he can appropriate the produce of their labor as the price of his permission to labor. The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment by man shall be consequent to his exertion, is thus violated. The one receives without producing; the others produce without receiving. The one is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. To this fundamental wrong, we have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is separating modern society into the very rich and the very poor.”
Both George and Paine presented Universal Basic Income as a fundamental human right.
Through the past century under different names like a social dividend or negative income tax, Universal Basic Income has continued to be advocated for by many of the brightest economic and philosophical minds for a diverse array of practical and ethical considerations, from Alan Watts to Milton Friedman.
A History Of Universal Basic Income
There is much more to the historical case for Universal Basic Income but the main concern made in the article is that of the influence on the mindset of an individual receiving a consistent stipend from the government; on their motivation and ability under that condition to secure employment or engage in entrepreneurship.
There is a longstanding myth in western culture that a human being gets meaning in their life from labor in and of itself, independent of other variables. This kind of reductionism owes a lot to the school of economics which, like game theory, radically reduces the complexity of human behavior and the world as a whole in order to facilitate math equations. Many economic ideas about humanity stem from religious thinking, Adam Smith was a professor of theology. Protestantism denigrated idleness and valorized labor. The application of mathematics and linguistic formality to economics was an attempt to make it as serious a discipline as other Newtonian sciences grounded in empirical observation, but it’s not anything like physics or chemistry and it’s never been.
It is not labor as such which gives people meaning, it is labor with a constructive purpose. If labor in and of itself gave us meaning we could all find plenty of satisfaction moving a pile of rocks from one location to another and back again for 12 hours a day. Furthermore, the idea that people have to be compelled by circumstance to work productively has no basis in reality and ample evidence against it. Examples abound from the fact that lottery winners usually continue working after they win to the whole of open source culture. As far back as 1901 psychologist Karl Groos made the observation that infants express happiness when they discover that they can cause predictable effects in the world, labeling it “the pleasure at being the cause”.
Self-directed action is what has resulted in the most consequential societal advances in human history. The leisure classes of antiquity didn’t need the carrot and stick motivator of employment by others to accumulate skills and knowledge and give their lives meaning. People that enjoyed leisure time to learn, create, and explore are responsible for the entirety of our earliest innovations in science, art, mathematics, and philosophy. As Bertrand Russel notes in his essay In Praise of Idleness, “Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism”.
In his popular book on motivation, Drive, Daniel H. Pink writes, “Human beings have an innate drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another”. The book draws on a robust array of work across disciplines over the last century that comprehensively illustrates the utility of autonomy in labor. It is outdated models of human behavior, or worse, models of human behavior promoted by people looking to exploit labor by fostering desperate need and de facto wage slavery, which tell us we need external direction to create meaning in life.
Study of 16 Basic Income Programs Show No Meaningful Work Reductions
Tying the concept of human capital to extrinsic goals or other people’s direction rather than innate drives ignores that absent conditions like depression or trauma and often in spite of them, people are naturally driven to be competent and knowledgeable. People are naturally curious, intrinsically prone to seek out novelty, and naturally enjoy learning.
Due to the excessive division of labor in society today and the severe stratification of education a case can be made that work done for reasons of extrinsic motivation or coercion lead to less human capital than work done for one’s own purposes.
Adam Smith made the case himself against the excessive division of labor in Wealth Of Nations, writing:
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”.
Simone Weil writing in her 1933 essay Prospects identified the increasing division of knowledge as a means of oppression, writing: “The ability to judge freely is becoming rarer and rarer, more especially in intellectual circles, owing to that specialization which forces each one of us, in the fundamental questions raised by each theoretical piece of research, to believe without understanding.”
We are all inherently interdependent in society. None of us built the culture we inhabit, everything we do is facilitated by the labor of generations of people who’ve come before us and millions of other people working alongside us. None of us are “self-sufficient” in any real sense of the word, our very language is an inheritance. We are a part of a system and as such, what benefits our community is a benefit to us as individuals. Systemically fostering desperate need is nothing to do with self-sufficiency or human flourishing, it’s a hindrance to both. A key argument for Universal Basic Income is that it gives the worker bargaining power, it inherently diminishes the ability for workers to be taken advantage of out of desperate need.
The Newsweek article mentions economic growth, which makes a person wonder what’s being referred to by the phrase. Certainly, it’s not a case being made for personal economic growth as UBI directly contributes to that. It’s not presented as arguing for the interests of the corporate sector but logically that’s what makes sense in this context.
CEO pay has risen 940 percent against worker pay since 1978 as pay has become effectively divorced from performance and output. Taxation of the wealthiest in society has been on a continuous decline for decades; the IRS isn’t even funded enough to pursue wealthy tax cheats. Deregulation of the finance industry has been catastrophic for the American people, successive crashes and recessions directly resulting from financial “innovations” (scams) have destroyed a generation’s chances at accumulating the wealth and security their parents enjoyed. Crimes like money laundering, conflicts of interest, insider trading, and outright fraud are rife throughout financial services. When caught, the only consequence is a fee that’s a small percentage of the income resulting from the crime. The people in charge of policing financial services often work in a revolving door with the regulating institutions themselves, like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who helped dismantle depression-era regulations during the Clinton administration then went to work for Citigroup and took advantage of the new laws. Banks have been freed up to take enormous risks while being completely insulated from the consequences to working people and because of government bailouts, even the repercussions of their mistakes.
Contrast this with the last several decades for workers. Since the 70s workers have been working more for less money, fewer benefits. Credentials have become increasingly necessary for a wider array of jobs, credentials which often require taking out loans at exorbitant interest rates to pay for tuition which has been ballooning beyond any relation to the value of the product offered. Health care has also become exorbitantly expensive for no other reason than the enrichment of a few at the cost and lives of many. In both education and health care, a pattern is evident of rising costs vastly out of proportion to other western countries with declining returns on the investment.
The welfare system in the US has been continually cut since Reagan to the point of being so anemic that unemployment needed to be augmented during the pandemic to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. The reasoning behind neoliberal austerity has been sold with the same logic the Newsweek article parrots to argue against Universal Basic Income, and the results have been empirically disastrous.
Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018
Wealth inequality in the US was extreme in the context of western countries two decades ago, and it is far worse today. However, the worst effects are not directly economic. James Gilligan is a psychiatrist who’s spent his life studying violence and working to prevent it within the Massachusetts prison system. The United States has a unique problem with violence. We have the largest prison population in the world while also leading the world in murders and suicides by firearm while also paying the most for law enforcement to ostensibly keep people safe. I’m writing this in the context of a recent shooting where a killer walked into a grocery store in Boulder Colorado and killed 10 people, days after another person went on a killing spree at massage parlors in Atlanta Georgia. Mass killings have become a feature of American life, beginning with postal shootings in the 1980s, to workplace killings, school shootings, and in recent years mass shootings in churches, movie theaters, grocery stores, concerts. Something isn’t working.
James Gilligan on Preventing Violence
Gilligan presents the cause of violence as shame and humiliation in all its permutations; disrespect, loss of dignity, feelings of inferiority. He ties shame to violence as surely as the tubercle bacillus causes tuberculosis.
He writes, “ When people lack self-respect, and feel they are incapable of eliciting respect from others in the form of admiration for their achievements and personalities, they may see no other way to get respect except in the form of fear, which I think of as a kind of ersatz substitute for admiration; and violence does elicit fear, as it is intended to”.
He goes on to identify how the social and economic system spreads shame in a population specifically through wealth inequality. The American dream of equal opportunity, you can get rich if you’re smart and work hard (which means if you don’t get rich you’re stupid and lazy), isn’t supported by reality. US workers stay in low-wage work longer and are less likely to leave poverty altogether than countries like Canada, Germany, and The Netherlands. The effects of austerity on our social support programs are directly implicated as is the Puritanical cultural beliefs around labor.
US ranks 27th in global survey of economic mobility
American culture has a long history of defining people’s worth through their employment, rather than intrinsically. The structure of many of our social benefits revolve around employment and stigmatize those who are not employed, as if to be unemployed places people in a different category of citizen, makes people less of an American. During Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign he articulated the idea of providing a sense of intrinsic value rather than conditional value as an essential social utility of a Universal Basic Income, “We need to disentangle economic value and human value”.
Taking culture, ideology and policy together the effect is “to maximize the gap between aspiration and attainment, which maximizes the frequency and intensity of feelings of shame, which maximizes the rate of violent crimes”, writes Gilligan.
Taking this into account, it’s worth revisiting the Newsweek articles lionization of the value of a job in the context of the Fed’s economic policy of maintaining a level of unemployment intentionally on the premise that low unemployment leads to inflation. The metric used is called the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate Of Employment or NAIRU limit. The Fed uses this number, typically between 5 and 6 percent, as a benchmark to predict what level of unemployment will result in inflation and then sets monetary policy to try and influence unemployment to stay above that benchmark number. The idea that there’s a correlation between employment and inflation has been frequently shown to be wrong; throughout the last several decades unemployment has been lower than the NAIRU number many times with no resulting inflation.
NAIRU: The Governing Myth of Economic Policy
The Fed defines full employment not as literal full employment, but as employment at the level they predict inflation won’t increase, which makes the employment of tens of millions of Americans at any given time a necessary sacrifice on the altar of the dogmatic beliefs of policymakers.
Would Universal Basic Income Cause Inflation?
The Newsweek article states, “Some UBI advocates argue that many jobs do not provide meaning because they are tedious or unpleasant”. This is a straw man, simply. It’s not a common confusion that what’s unpleasant is not meaningful. Childbirth has never been called meaningless because it was unpleasant. No matter how much one may enjoy work or how creative it may be, if it’s being done well, there are inevitable moments of boredom and tedium.
What is contended is that many jobs have employees work in degrading conditions or pay them too little relative to their cost of living. As I write this Amazon has been in the news for its excessive quotas so strict that employees have to pee in bottles to make time or risk losing their job. Major companies like Inspire Brands aggressively fight against legislation like the minimum wage increase while also having many employees who use public assistance like food stamps. Kroger is closing locations in LA over mandated hazard pay while their CEO takes in 21 million a year. Copious examples emerged over the past year of companies that paid their executives millions in bonuses while their companies went into bankruptcy and their employees were fired. This isn’t a problem of ignorance or lack of knowledge, this is a lack of care and in some cases outright contempt for workers.
It’s also contended that many jobs are “make-work” jobs, jobs that exist simply for the sake of the jobs themselves; what anthropologist David Graeber called bullshit jobs in his book of the same name. He made a distinction between a bullshit job, a job that serves no purpose, and a shit job, which is tedious and unpleasant. People that have shit jobs often get a sense of meaning from them, people that do bullshit jobs do not.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
While the case made about what constitutes a bullshit job and why bullshit jobs exist is beyond the scope of this essay, the salient point is that to pursue jobs as an end in and of itself doesn’t achieve the desired result of meaningful productive employment conducive to human flourishing, in a way that’s analogous to our GDP not reflecting standards of living, or our stock market not reflecting our economy. As a demonstration of this Graeber shares a quote from President Obama about his justification for supporting the inefficient and costly market-based health care system rather than the popular with the electorate Medicare-for-all:
The above quote certainly illustrates a willingness to sacrifice efficiency and efficacy for the sake of keeping a bunch of people off the streets. The inefficiency and expense is the point here, waste a lot of money on a pointless bureaucracy that produces worse outcomes at a greater cost to the consumer. A Universal Basic Income would go far to negate this justification for waste at the very least.
The Newsweek article concedes a point when it says, “Yes, some people would use the extra money to pursue the types of goals that lead to upward mobility”, (betraying ignorance about the state of poverty in the country; for many there is nothing “extra” about the money they’d receive) and then assures the reader that anyone who benefits in the specific way the authors envision is the “type of individual” who would have thrived in spite of abject poverty.
This logic has always bothered me wherever I’ve encountered it, whether it’s people in the early days of the pandemic saying that the people who die from Covid because of co-morbidities would have died anyway; or the people saying that if a person couldn’t get their hands on a gun they would have been a murderer anyway. Money makes a difference in people’s lives, as sure as access to a gun can make the difference between a person injuring or killing, or killing one or killing ten.
There is absolutely nothing in life that “would’ve happened anyway”. At a macro level, any careful reading of history reveals a convergence of a tremendous amount of individuals, movements, and events that come together in concert to make any outcome occur. On a personal level everything around us in our environment, the people in our life, the time from our last meal, everything that reaches our senses influences how we think and behave. The means to pay some bills and eat without struggle as a base condition of existence is not hedonic, it is a basic reality of life for many and can be made a basic reality of life for everyone. The only reason it isn’t already a reality for everyone is greed.
Universal Basic Income and Mental Health
UBI would impact society in a comparable way to Martin Luther’s translation of the bible and the subsequent spread of literacy. As literacy enabled people to make their own choices about their faith and not be dependent on someone else’s interpretation of their scripture, UBI would give freedom of choice to people oppressed by the gutting of social support, suppression of wages, and the diminishing power of unions. The corporate sector has magnified its wealth and power by petitioning the government to write the law of the land in its favor, greatly aided by the legal idea that money is speech and that they can give as much money to politicians as they want. If money is speech, then UBI is a matter of civic engagement.
Universal Basic Income and Democratic Engagement
The context above makes the case that Universal Basic Income is a necessity, a minimum of action; an essential step towards rectifying the challenges to human flourishing imposed on American society by managerialism and greed.