Making the Case for Universal Basic Income

The notion of a universal basic income (UBI)—provided to every eligible person whether in need or not—has come a long way in recent years.  Several books have been published supporting the idea, there is a Democratic candidate for president, Andrew Yang, who makes such a scheme the centerpiece of his candidacy, and recently we had a credible observer of the political and economic scenes, John Lanchester, publish a compelling article in support.  Let us consider Lanchester’s reasoning which appeared as Good New Idea in the London Review of Books.

Lanchester begins by pointing out that the left has not been doing well in the policy arena.  And it is recognized as having been complicit in all the damage that unrestrained capitalism has done to society in terms of economic inequality within our societies.  He also points out that current trends indicate that problems are only going to get worse.  The left needs a big new game-changing idea to make amends for past failures and to prepare society for the future to come.

“You don’t have to believe in an imminent artificial intelligence job apocalypse to see that work will continue to change in the direction of machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work.”

“The question is what to do about it. In response to the right’s bad old ideas – more nationalism, more borders, blame the immigrants, culture wars, trade wars and war wars – the left needs some good new ideas. And that is where Universal Basic Income comes in, because UBI has the potential to be the frame-changing, game-changing solution to a whole set of economic and political problems.”

The UBI is simple in concept.

“A guaranteed regular cash payment for every citizen, unconditionally and for life. The money would be enough to provide psychological and practical security, and enough to prevent destitution, but not enough to be a disincentive to work; if you wanted to live on it, you would be safe but not comfortable. (I’m paraphrasing, and there is, as we will see, no consensus about the exact amount of money we’re talking about.)”

Let’s begin by discussing the problems that Lanchester believes would be addressed by the existence of UBI.  Perhaps the most egregious example of economic unfairness is the manner in which society’s most critical tasks end up receiving low or no pay.  The economic engine requires children to be raised, educated, and delivered into its maw in order for progress to continue.  For this difficult and time-consuming labor mothers receive no compensation at all.  Teachers, who are an important part of this process, are compensated at a rate totally inconsistent with their importance.  Care giving for the disabled and invalids is often performed for free by relatives and friends, saving society a large expense.  When care giving is provided by the state it is usually compensated only at a minimum wage rate.  All of these services are primarily provided by women who bear the brunt of economic unfairness.  A UBI would provide some recognition that these efforts are of value.

“The amount of unpaid work done by women was dramatically highlighted in Iceland by the Women’s Day Off on 24 October 1975, an experience which seems to have raised the consciousness of the whole country. President Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first single mother to have become a head of state, credits the radicalising effect of the Day Off, which inspired her to go into politics: ‘It completely paralysed the country and opened the eyes of many men’.”

A worker in our current economic system has essentially no power but to accept whatever wage is offered.  This means that only a mandated minimum wage can put a floor on what workers are paid.  New trends in employment are aimed at making workers contingent, and left bidding against others to perform tasks most cheaply.  Work is being redefined so that many people are needed to perform ever simpler tasks for even less pay.  A UBI would restore some dignity to workers by allowing them to resist this trend and decline to perform tasks that humans shouldn’t have to do.

 “Recent decades have seen a catastrophic loss of worker power…a systematic attack on organised labour, and a corresponding reduction in pay, security and working conditions. UBI would, quite simply, make it easier for workers to say no.”

The notion that people who are not performing paid labor are of no value to society and of no value to themselves pervades our society.  This becomes a rather insidious concept as the forms of work available become more and more demeaning.  UBI would provide options for workers who wish to have more control over their existence.

“…UBI would have the effect…of ‘desacralising paid work’: of making it clear that there are other forms of work than paid work, and that work is not the only basis of worth, and that it is not true that any job is always better than no job. It would allow people to refuse work that they felt was demeaning, and to take creative chances with their lives; it would make possible deliberate career breaks and ease the strain of externally imposed periods in between jobs. Both of these, along with mid-career retraining, are widely seen as an inevitable feature of the future world of work, and UBI would be a big step towards making them much more endurable.”

As meaningful work becomes rarer, we must recognize that no paid work at all can become a useful form of participation in society.

 “It is possible that some people would take the ‘desacralising’ even further, and choose not to work at all. To some thinkers of a utopian or anarchic bent, such as Graeber in Bullshit Jobs or Srnicek and Williams in Inventing the Future, that is one of the most positive features of UBI, which represents a profound break with our culture’s deeply imbued ideas about the innate and redemptive virtue of paid work. It’s not as if most people find their jobs satisfying. A survey from Gallup showed that only a third of workers in the US are ‘engaged’ with their work, which isn’t great, but is a lot better than the findings in the UK: only 11 per cent of British workers feel ‘engaged’.”

Finally, a UBI contributes to our liberty.  In the United States, the term liberty generally refers to license to do something.  The liberty referred to here is the freedom to be, or attempt to be, whoever one might want to be.  A UBI would support a person who wished to try a career as an artist, or as an author, or even as an entrepreneur.  It might also encourage some to participate in otherwise low-paying public service fields.

Lanchester realizes that there are plenty of reasons why such a scheme might not work; but concludes that there is sufficient existing evidence to indicate that a UBI is worth a try.

“By about this point, most people hearing about UBI for the first time are saying ‘but but but …’ The questions and objections have two main strands, the first of which concerns whether it would work, or be destroyed by unintended consequences. Here are some of them: that people would take the opportunity to drop out of work, and society would end up with a permanently entrenched underclass; that people would spend the money irresponsibly, squander it, so none of the benefits of increased security would be realised; that people would piss the money away on ‘private bads’ (wonderful term, the opposite of public goods, and meaning essentially drugs and drink); that it is inherently invidious to treat the non-working and working poor alike; that too much money would go to people who don’t need it. (Note that plenty of money already goes to people who don’t need it: during quantitative easing, the UK spent £435 billion on buying assets, all of it going to rich institutions and people, to uncertain effect. That would have been equivalent to £50 a week paid to everybody in the UK for two years. I think you would have trouble finding a sane economist who doesn’t think the stimulus effect of that would have been much greater.)”

“Fortunately, there is a large body of empirical evidence about the effects of UBI, thanks to a range of pilots and experimental schemes, from an extraordinary range of places: Manitoba, Iran, Finland, Stockton, Kenya, the Cherokee nation, Alaska, Brazil, Mexico, Liberia, Honduras, Indonesia, even the City of London.”

There will obviously be people who will abuse the benefit, but if on average, the lives of the recipients are significantly improved, then the trial UBI can be considered a success.

 “As always seems to happen with these unconditional cash transfers, people spend it mainly on things they really need…the most common thing people say, when asked what they do with the money, is: ‘It helps me make ends meet’.”  

Lanchester reports on several of these UBI trials.  We will consider a few.  The first examples come from Brazil and Mexico, the last has been ongoing in Alaska for many years.

“The largest sort of UBI programme in the world is Brazil’s bolsa familia. (I say ‘sort of’ because it is paid only to families and is conditional on the children being vaccinated and attending school. That makes it technically not a UBI but a CCT or Conditional Cash Transfer. Acronyms are fun!) It cut extreme poverty by 50 per cent, reduced inequality by 20 per cent, increased school attendance and cut the suicide rate, inter alia. A similar programme in Mexico increased women’s earnings by 65 per cent, increased the amount of time children spent in the school system by a year and three months, cut childhood rates of illness by 23 per cent, and reduced stunted growth in girls by 39 per cent.”

“Alaska has had a version of UBI since 1976, thanks to a policy brought in by the Republican governor Jay Hammond. It is called the Alaska Permanent Fund and takes a quarter of the annual royalties from fossil fuel extraction and puts them into a government-run fund…The fund hands out 2.5 per cent of itself in cash annually in the form of a cheque given to every resident of Alaska except prisoners and convicted felons. The amount usually comes to between $1000 and $2000; the typical payout has been about $1400, which for a family of four is more than $6000 a year, not a lavish sum but not a trivial one either…Alaska has one of the lowest rates of inequality of all fifty states. Studies have concluded that the fund dividend has no negative effect on Alaskan employment rates – a big part of the argument against UBI schemes is that they reduce the incentive to work.”

Lanchester also concludes that the various forms of a UBI are more affordable than one might think.  The money must come from somewhere and there are many ways in which it can be accomplished.  Choosing the best approach could be difficult, but clearly tax increases and spending cuts will be part of the package.  This illustrates one generous form of UBI.

“Andy Stern suggests a form of UBI giving every American adult $1000 a month, at a cost of $2.7 trillion, to be paid for by getting rid of existing programmes, cutting tax breaks (which cost $1.2 trillion), reducing defence spending and instituting a sales tax.”

For perspective, the current size of the economy is about $21 trillion, and annual federal expenditures are currently about $4 trillion. 

There is a bit of a warning that comes with these considerations.  The small-scale experiments that seem reasonable in terms of results might have unintended consequences when applied to an entire economy.

“Pilot schemes can give you all sorts of evidence about the effect of UBI on individuals, but to run an economy-wide UBI you would be running an economy-wide experiment, and by definition, we don’t know how that would work out. This is a good reason for starting UBI low and seeing what happens.”

Lanchester provides a final word of advice to ambitious progressives.  And he turns to none other than the conservative economist Milton Friedman.

“The left will need a new toolkit. It will need to have done its intellectual prep. That, more than anything, is what this new wave of work on UBI represents. Milton Friedman wasn’t right about everything, but he knew more than anyone in modern political economics what it takes to change an intellectual climate. He worked out how to make a new idea take shape first as something thinkable, and then as a specific policy. He said that the crucial step was to be ready…”

Then this quote attributed to Friedman:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Lanchester’s final word:

“The list of progressive alternatives which currently fit that description is one item long: universal basic income.”

The Republican Deep State: Whites, the Wealthy, the National Security Complex

Joseph O’Neill came from the UK to take up residence in the US in 1998.  Coming from another country at a time when political partisanship was really revving up, he could provide an interesting and valuable perspective on our state of affairs.  He makes that attempt in an article for the New York Review of Books titled Real Americans.  It is a wide-ranging article, but here the focus will be on his initial hypothesis that there might be a “deep state” supporting the Republican Party.  That notion arose from observations about how the two political parties comported themselves during the attempt to resolve the Bush-Gore election battle.

“What struck me, in the chaos that followed, was that the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy. Bush had prematurely positioned himself as the president-elect, and the media had largely deferred to him in this. It made no sense. Gore had won the popular vote by more than half a million; there were strong reasons to believe that the Democratic tally in Florida had been erroneously reduced by a faulty ballot design; black Floridians had experienced outrageous voting problems; and, astonishingly, the Republicans were actually trying to prevent an accurate count of the vote.”

“Why the curious timidity of Democrats in Florida and the unaccountable self-righteousness of their aggressive Republican counterparts? Were my eyes and ears fooling me, or was everybody somewhat scared of the Republicans? The penny finally dropped when the Republican majority in the Supreme Court incoherently decided, in Bush v. Gore, to halt the vote-counting while their candidate still held a lead. Oh, I thought to myself. It’s a deep-state thing.”

Let’s leave the timidity of the Democrats for another time and pursue this notion of a Republican deep state.  O’Neill does not refer to a deep state as a collection of elites who are in a position to take control should the momentum of the state drift in an unacceptable direction.  Rather, he views our deep state as a concept, or viewpoint that was formed before the United States of America was founded.

“The United States has secretive agencies that do legally dubious things, but it doesn’t have a deep state in the Turkish sense. It may be said to have a deep state in another sense, however: America. America preceded, and brought into being, the republic we now live in—the United States of America. Almost everyone still talks about America, not about the United States; about Americans, not USAers. America, in short, was not extinguished by the United States. It persists as a buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve. Primordial America (at least in the popular imagination) was where folks prayed hard, worked hard on the land, and had rightful recourse to violence. In this imaginary place, people were white, Christian, English-speaking. They had God-given dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. All of this inevitably informs the way American nationals apprehend one another and their country. They feel in their bones that some people are Americans and other people are merely citizens of the United States.”

We seem to accept this notion that whites are more American than others with the labels we use.  If you are black, you are an African American; if you are Asian, you are an Asian American; if you are of Indian heritage, you are a Native American.  Every time we use these labels, we are implicitly sending the message that only whites are “true” or “pure” Americans.”  This declaration was made explicit when immigration legislation in 1924 was designed to limit immigrants who were not white.

“In 1924 the United States officially preferred immigrants of “Nordic” ethnicity and drastically reduced its intake of Jewish and Southern European immigrants. Asian or African immigration was largely out of the question. This regime more or less persisted until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.”

Ronald Reagan and others made a conscious decision to try to capture the white vote by promoting the notion that whites were “more American” than others.  This embrace of whiteness involved welcoming racists, white nationalists, and Ku Klux Klan types into the fold.  This collection of deplorables have been faithful Republican voters ever since.

However insightful O’Neill’s observation might be, there are more participants in the Republican deep state.  The traditional alliance of the wealthy with the Republican Party has been maintained, if not strengthened.  Once the party of fiscal probity, the Republicans have demonstrated there is no length they will not go to in order to lower taxes on the rich.  That service is repaid with generous campaign contributions, and financial support for the myriad think tanks, universities, and advocacy groups that spew out conservative propaganda and promote conservative policies.

There is a third component to this deep state that is so powerful that both political parties have proved unable to counter it: the national security complex.  The long cold war generated a version of a military industrial complex that far exceeded what Eisenhower had warned us about.  We acquired the need and the ability to project military power anywhere in the world, to gather intelligence anywhere in the world, and to provide surveillance of our own population in order to counter any domestic threats to our agenda.  When the cold war ended and our one true enemy dissolved, we could have declared victory and reigned in our resources and used the fiscal savings for domestic needs.  But there was no gain for the national security complex in peace. 

A new mission and new enemies had to be found.  The agenda became the spread of representative democracy throughout the world, the expansion of free-market capitalism, and the enforcement of a rules-based approach to foreign affairs.  To execute this agenda would require that the United States maintain overwhelming military superiority.  With our broad trade interests and network of allies, new enemies would be easy to find.  Any state that became a threat to an ally could be deemed our enemy; any nation that threatened our economic power could become an enemy; any state that insisted on following its own political path could become a target for military or economic harassment; and any nation that refused to be cowed by our military might would be a threat, if not an outright enemy.

It would be the Republican Party that would be the most fervent supporter of this national security agenda.  Those who gained financially or in personal status from its related activities took note that life was better for them when Republicans were in power.  Supportive politicians were repaid for their efforts.

David Hendrickson reports on these issues in his book Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition.

“The dimensions of the national security state, the nerve center of the American Empire, are not easy to describe.  The core of the network is the armed forces of the United States, but it embraces as well its police and regulatory agencies.  Included within it are its impressive array of foreign bases, its panoply of external sanctions, its global military commands, its vast spying and surveillance apparatus…Stretching beyond the military et al. complex are the prison-industrial complex, the homeland security complex, the multifaceted array of U.S. institutions dedicated to the proposition that coercive powers to destroy or incapacitate are indispensable remedies for the maladies of the human condition.  They all reflect a movement in American maxims from liberty to force.”

The military force tasked with carrying out this national agenda has changed over the years, becoming less a nonpartisan agency to one which has acquired its own agenda.  Centers of power have also shifted throughout the body politic.

“The U.S. military that arose after the end of conscription in 1973 is markedly different in outlook and sensibility from the military that arose out of World War II.  The new military is much more conscious of its distinctness from society than the old, while remaining decidedly invested in the liturgy of threat inflation.  Its members are much more theological; once largely Episcopalian, they became increasingly evangelical.  The political loyalties of the officer corps overwhelmingly skew toward the Republican Party, whereas previously they were thoroughly nonpartisan.”

“Civilian elites have also changed.  The general move of political power from North and East to South and West is one indication of that; another is the rise of foreign lobbies.  The Israel, Cuban, Taiwanese, and Eastern European lobbies work together on Capital Hill and in attempts to influence the executive branch.  They have pushed an expansionist agenda and have deployed profound influence over foreign policy, often playing a key role in elections.  These efforts are complimented by the arms lobby and by the thick growth of think tanks that depend on their largess.  Reinforcing all these interests is the profound dependence felt in nearly every state and congressional district on the concrete benefits conferred by military spending.  A politically potent multiplier effect really goes to work there.”

People mistakenly associate conservatism with a resistance to change.  In fact, political conservatives are quite willing to accept change as long as that change increases their power.  For a politically conservative party like the Republicans, possessing power is the first priority; policy can follow later as needed to maintain power.  It is this belief that any practice or policy that helps Republicans get elected is acceptable that defines the party.  Its firm base consisting of whites, the wealthy, and the national security complex, provides it with a good shot at winning elections.  However, its support from those directions creates the divisions that plague our society: anti-minority biases, economic inequality, and lack of funding for social needs.

And there is danger in the direction the Republican Party is moving.  Its base consists of special interests rewarded by Republican loyalty, a profoundly undemocratic tendency.  And the serving of the national security complex is facilitated by a chief executive free to do as he/she wishes.  Consider this statement made by Donald Trump.

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

If that isn’t a threat, I don’t know what is.

The National Security State: Why We Don’t Pledge “No First Use” of Nuclear Weapons

One of the contentious issues raised at the recent debates of the Democratic presidential candidates involved “no first use” of nuclear weapons.  Thus far, the United States has not been willing to issue such a statement.  It is not immediately clear why the “most powerful nation in the world” would feel endangered by such a declaration.  Our traditional nuclear adversary, Russia, is still joined with the US in a continuing “mutual assured destruction” stalemate.   Launching first provides no real advantage if the other side can retaliate before the damage from first launch is realized.  The US and Russia entered that bizarre state via fear that one might wish to annihilate the other to gain political or military advantage.  Such a threat dissipated long ago, but because defense industries on both sides needed the threat to continue, we must pretend that it still exists.  The other countries we have chosen as our enemies, China, Iran, and North Korea, either have no capability to threaten us with a nuclear weapon, or don’t seem to have anything to gain by threatening us.  The most likely cause of a nuclear exchange would be from an accidental or rogue launch from a nuclear state, or from a nonstate group who might acquire a weapon of some sort— events nearly impossible to anticipate.  If one had intelligence about a terrorist-like attack, conventional means presumably would be available to address it.  So, why exactly do we wish other countries to believe we might use nuclear weapons against any adversary?

David Hendrickson addresses issues related to our “defense” posture in his interesting book Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition.  He describes the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union as one in which the US was the absolute military master of the world.  It could have decided that with no possible threats to its security, it was time to relax its military posture and withdraw from its global presence and let other nations pursue, peacefully, their own interests.  Instead, the nation decided that from its position of power it should indefinitely maintain military superiority over any and all and use that power for the “benefit” of the world.  The benefits that the US wished to provide included representative democracy, free market capitalism, and rules for conducting international affairs properly.

In fact, the US has often chosen to use its military, technological, and economic power to interfere in the affairs of others.  The decision by George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq was not driven by any threat to the United States or its interests, and not driven by the putative presence of weapons of mass destruction, but rather by the desire to remake Iraq and the Middle East to be more in its image.

“It looked toward a vast political reconstruction of the region that would leave the United States, in its victorious aftermath, with the power to coerce others.”

The United States has also held up its worldwide series of alliances as a mechanism for maintaining a “rules-based system” for international affairs.  In practice, however, breaking the rules has occurred often when it was convenient or useful.

“In theory it is a ‘rules-based’ set of relationships, but in practice it has been based on the distinction between friends and enemies.  In such a system, you are supposed to be good with your friends and tough with your enemies.  Indeed, being tough with your enemies is often the litmus test of whether you are good to your friends.  That distinction is an old one in political thought.  It suggests that the American alliance system has been a form of ‘negative association,’ whose central feature is cooperation against a common enemy.”

Maintaining worldwide military dominance is terribly expensive and could not be politically feasible without enemies to justify the required resources.  It has been the job of what Hendrickson refers to as “the national security apparatus” to identify the needed enemies and provide the weapons required to defeat them.  Since China has become a global economic force and can afford to spread its influence, economically and militarily throughout its part of Asia, it is a threat to the dominance of allies Japan and South Korea in the region and therefore a threat to the US.  The Middle East is involved in a religious battle between Sunni and Shiite Moslems, coupled with the complicated politics of Israel’s presence.  Since Sunni Saudi Arabia and Israel are considered US allies, then Shiite Iran must be the enemy.  In greater Europe, Russia has long been the enemy of the US and the nations of western Europe.  Russia, under Putin, is trying to regain some of the political influence lost in years past, and contention over the status of central European states will continue.

Curiously, the identification of Russia, China, and Iran as enemies has encouraged them to collaborate against their common adversary.  How clever of the US security apparatus.

So, the US has set forth from an era of overwhelming military dominance to one in which it has identified Russia, China, and Iran as “enemies” with whom it must contend.  The problem is that the US could never possibly have maintained such undisputed power, even though it is committed to acting as if it has.  In truth, the US hasn’t the resources to defeat any one of these countries militarily.  All are large nations with established societies and large populations.  There is no option for invasion by the US.  It is left with being able to convince an enemy that the price of resistance will be too high to bear and submission is necessary.  Hendrickson indicates the current strategy through a description of the AirSea Battle Concept as applied to a conflict with China.

“In a war with China, America would deploy ‘networked, integrated forces capable of attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and defeat adversary forces.’  After withstanding an attack and seizing the initiative, ‘US forces would then sustain the momentum across all domains, rapidly identifying targets and breaking down the adversary’s defenses promptly and in depth—targeting the adversary’s reserves, fire support, logistics, command and control…US retaliation could destroy critical portions of China’s command and control network along with missile storage, manufacturing and launch sites.  Further salvos might also damage ports, airfields, logistical hubs and perhaps parts of the domestic security apparatus including facilities associated with the security services and the Peoples Armed Police Force’.”

This sounds much like an advertisement for a video game.  What it really is, is a plea for continued funding for ever more of the highly expensive and highly vulnerable Navy ships and planes.  This is not a plan to win a war—winning a war requires boots on the ground.  It is an attempt to intimidate an adversary.  And since our chosen adversaries are unlikely to be intimidated by conventional forces—where they are at or near parity—the threat of nuclear destruction must remain available as part of that intimidation strategy.  This is a tactic known as “escalation dominance.”

“The United States has local military inferiority in the Baltics, for instance, and can only cover that with ‘escalation dominance.’  It has local military inferiority in the South China Sea and can only cover that with ‘escalation dominance.’  This once looked easy; it has now become hard.  Anxiety about the permanence of conventional superiority in distant theaters is a key reason behind the establishment’s refusal to countenance a ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons pledge…”

The national security state consists of players and industries committed to an aggressive and coercive role for the US in international affairs.  These are foolish people playing a foolish and dangerous game.

And a no-first-use pledge would be a sign of progress.