A treasury of clear thinking

There is too much loose talk about a universal guaranteed income. A lot of it comes from ill-informed sources. The faulty exposition leads to criticisms of the concept – for the wrong reasons. Now possibly the best authority on basic income has gathered it all in one book so we can judge from a level playing field. Guy Standing has dedicated himself to basic income, helping found the European Society (BIEN) for it as well giving it its name. He knows the history of it going back to ancient Greece, and all the many pilot programs worldwide where it has proven itself beyond any doubt. Standing examines the principles, the programs, the record, the criticisms and the failures. It has all been taken care of. All one need do is read it.

The concept is to take a nation’s wealth and issue what amounts to a dividend, weekly, monthly or yearly, to at all adult citizens. There is no quid pro quo – nothing is expected of the recipient, because that is limiting and adds unbearable overhead of reporting and sanctions. Standing also argues that means tests, behavior tests, sanctions and intrusive prying have not provided for the greater good, that means-spirited acts by the state foster mean-spirited acts by the citizenry. (E.G. The working poor detest the impoverished. ) Basic income is supposed to be liberating.

The need gets clearer every day. In the newly globalized economy, uncertainty (unknown unknowns) is the biggest factor. It doesn’t lend itself easily to unemployment insurance or workfare and requires much higher rates of mobility which are rapidly declining – because of uncertainty. Artificial intelligence is another threat. So is inequality. In the USA, the federal government manages 126 different welfare programs. Then there are the states. And none of them is changing the makeup of the classes. All that overhead could go away if there was a simple cash transfer to everyone, automatically. The average homeless person costs the British taxpayer £26,000 a year in police, medical and prison charges. Poverty leads to kids leaving school and overstressed families for whom strategy is a joke. They have no way to plan; they barely make it to the end of the month. The insecurity (said Confucius, more than a few years ago) is worse than the poverty.

Giving the Fed’s QE money to every American would have been a $56,000 boost to every household. Instead, all the money went to Wall Street billionaires. What a difference household spending would have made. That was exactly what the Fed wanted, and it went about it in exactly the wrong way. Today, a new carbon tax could fund a basic income program.

Standing says that only since the 1900s has economics/government assumed that only labor in the marketplace has value, “which is nonsense”. House work, maintenance, repairs, child rearing and business building are all unpaid, but are real work. Jobs (labor) are not a superior function. The basic income frees people to perform this unpaid and necessary work. Pilot programs where recipients had no strings attached (land a job, look for work, only spend on certain things) do worse than unrestricted cash, which families use as they need to get ahead in life. And that’s what happens, in every pilot.

What is astounding is all the pilot programs, all over the world. There are far more than we realize. Basic income is far more established and credible than we realize. The pilots have been funded by national and regional governments, NGOs, individuals and even crowd funding. And it seems that every one of them, no matter how badly designed, has proffered results that consistently exceed expectations. Basic income works. It saves several dollars for every dollar spent when not accompanied by reporting and sanctions. That is, it can be profitable! At some point, some enlightened government will do it permanently, nationwide, and turn the world upside down.

In the mean time, what if the United States had offered a basic income to everyone in Afghanistan, instead of spending untold billions hammering the country into rubble?

David Wineberg