You might have heard of something called Universal Basic Income (or UBI).
This is when a government gives every citizen money on a regular basis. And that is unconditional, meaning everyone gets it whether they work or not, and no matter how much money they already have.
The proposal was first floated in Thomas More’s 1516 satirical book Utopia, in which one character said that a country should “provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.“
In modern times, More’s proposal has been taken up by a range of diverse advocates, ranging from left-wing politicians like Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, to Silicon Valley tycoons Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. American former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang also promised to pay every American aged 18 and older $1,000 a month.
Possible reasons to adopt UBI include alleviating citizens’ economic insecurity, countervailing technological unemployment, but also – in the more libertarian version – slashing all government spending on welfare, which would be replaced by UBI.
While the idea has been trialled in limited pilots – notably in the Canadian province of Manitoba, or with 1,000 unemployed individuals in Finland – no UBI scheme has ever been rolled out on a more significant scale, for instance for the citizens of a whole country. But now calls are rising all over the globe for governments to do exactly that.
The reason? Coronavirus.
As people from Europe to India, to the US, to Latin America are being asked to stay at home to stop the coronavirus contagion, the question on everyone’s mind is: how will they earn a living? That’s why UBI is making its comeback.
In the US, Democratic lawmakers asked the government “to provide for an emergency non-taxable Universal Basic Payment of $1,000 per month to all adult Americans” during the crisis. In the UK, a cross-party coalition also pushed for the creation of a UBI scheme. In Italy, the founder of the Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, wrote a blog post calling for the establishment of a UBI system in order to help the “millions of Italians [who] won’t have a secure income in the next few months”.
So far, no government has taken the step of launching UBI, even if some of the measures adopted provide for direct cash payments to affected citizens. Are we being timid? Is the coronavirus pandemic the time to launch UBI, in every country, forever?
According to Guy Standing, a Soas professor and a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, definitely. Standing worked with the Labour party to sketch out a UBI pilot that found its way into its 2019 election manifesto, and has just published a book, Battling Eight Giants, detailing all the reasons why UBI has become an urgent necessity.
“The pandemic is making it even more imperative that we introduce basic income in every part of the world,” Standing says. While the coronavirus crisis can be compared to the Spanish flu – which claimed tens of millions of lives between 1918 and 1920 – there is a key difference between the two pandemics, he argues.
“What was extraordinary about [the Spanish flu] is that there was no economic crisis immediately afterwards. By contrast the coronavirus pandemic is going to be associated with an incredible economic crisis that spreads across the world,” Standing says. “And it’s this combination – the pandemic and the economic crisis – that is going to cause many more people to die or have lives of misery.”
According to Standing, vertiginous levels of private and corporate indebtedness, the swelling of the ranks of economically insecure workers, plus the dependence of many sectors of the economy on the integrity of global supply chains make today's world economy inherently fragile.
The coronavirus – with its baggage of furloughs, financial insecurity, healthcare systems overload, and societal fragmentation – might trigger a collapse. A basic income, Standing thinks, would stave that off.
Standing thinks that many governments might eventually wind up adopting UBI as a temporary emergency measure, but that the policy will stay put once citizens have tried it, and seen its benefits.
“UBI will become a legitimate part of our society very quickly,” he says. In the long run, he hopes that the policy might become the backbone of a society built around “work, not labour”. In Standing's ideal world, people liberated from economic insecurity would devote their time to community work, the arts, and productive leisure.
One question, of course, remains. Even Yang’s relatively tame UBI plan would cost the US’s coffers over $2.8 trillion a year – higher than the historic $2 trillion stimulus package President Donald Trump signed last week to confront the coronavirus emergency. Where would that money come from? The answer usually has to do with technology – which, due to automation and Big Tech monopolies, is often portrayed as a cause of the inequality and unemployment that make UBI necessary. Yang himself proposed levying higher taxeson Amazon, Apple and Google to partially fund his scheme. Others have floated creating a tax on robots. As for Standing, he thinks that finding the money would be no biggie.
“In the UK, we have 1,156 forms of tax relief. And they are regressive, in the sense that the people gaining from these tax breaks are the wealthy and wealthy corporations,” Standing said in an interview last year. “Government data show that those tax breaks cost the public exchequer £430 billion per year. You have all the money there.”
Gian Volpicelli is WIRED's politics editor. He tweets from @Gmvolpi
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
