This piece was published in the Basic Income Australia blogs section last week.
--
In his landmark book Justice: What is the right thing to do?, Prof. Michael Sandel presents three important aspects of a just society: that a just society Maximises Welfare, Respects Freedoms, and Promotes Virtue. Interestingly, they are also three progressive checkpoints on that journey. I want to explore the implications of UBI in pursuit of those ends.
UBI for Welfare
As citizens of a civilised society, we are entitled to expect certain provisions from the state - that there be a rule of law, that there be functioning public infrastructure, and that there be availability of basic education and healthcare. We think that every citizen of the country, irrespective of their circumstances or other forms of eligibility, should be able to access these services. But in a capitalist society, a certain amount of income is needed too to pay for basic necessities and that role is usually fulfilled by employment. While traditionally governments have relied on private enterprise to ensure maximum employability, when economies stagnate or there's a massive downturn of the business cycle, they have stepped in as 'the employer of last resort' (the famed Keynesian policies). Over decades that has transformed into a mechanism like JobSeeker (unemployment insurance or, colloquially, dole) which has been instituted to ensure people have enough money to get by. So in terms of welfare, the intentions here in Australia are present.
Now there are at least 3 issues with this mechanism:
1. With this so-called 'Means Tested Eligibility', the government defines a set of conditions under which a person becomes eligible for payment. While this may seem like an understandable and acceptable policy, it is still a 20th century 'Seeing like the State' conception that may not be applicable to the dynamic, hard-to-categorise realities of the contemporary job market, especially with the AI revolution about to be tacked on. Additionally, a government in power can wilfully choose to exclude certain sections of the population to suit their own agenda. A recent example is the Coalition's decision to exclude university staff from JobSeeker payment during the COVID crisis.
2. This eligibility testing mechanism needs to ensure that 'bad players' are not gaming the system, so it needs a large organisational and technical structure to police and punish those getting benefits unfairly. Notwithstanding the bloat in the government and the expenditure of public money required to do so, we saw an example of the human suffering unleashed by faulty, inefficient and morally compromised actions the state is capable of with Robodebt .
3. This type of eligibility testing also gives a certain section of society the ammunition to malign those seeking benefit as freeloaders or somehow morally compromised or even deserving of their predicament (the former Prime Minister's Lifters and Leaners dichotomy comes to mind). While it can be accorded that a certain section of the population are in a precarious position because of their own failings (whatever they are), studies have shown that structural inequality is a much bigger cause of poverty. Today we have ample studies to show how the nefarious effects of wealth inequality has affected younger generations disproportionately , condemning them to structural poverty. So it is wrong to claim that all those who are poor deserve it. Although the more fundamental question to ask ourselves, considering how rich we are as a country and how unextravagant UBI is (it literally is the basic amount a person needs to get by), is whether we can't provide the basics to each member of our society, whoever they are and whatever they be like.
UBI for Freedom
The technology philosopher Venkatesh Rao once defined money as something like the best co-ordination mechanism created by humans. It is the fuel that powers economic activity that then promotes human flourishing. It obviously has no inherent value except as the lifeblood of an economy.
When we buy goods or services with money, we abstract away all the creativity, skill, material resources, physical labour into this single unit of exchange. The seller sells all that for money so that they can turn around and buy what they need. Of all the things money can buy it can, and does, buy freedom. When a person signs up for work, more often than not they are selling 8 hours of their day so that they can do what they want to in the other 16 hours. To have money is to be able to choose what one wants to do with their time- it could be time away from any work, or to buy and use goods and services required for personal well-being or enjoyment, or in fact being able to afford resources to unlock one's full potential to make more money or to create something else of value. But the weird thing about money is that it can be passed on inter-generationally within a family, so that gives some of us more freedom to begin with and others less. Freedom to access certain institutions, certain forms of knowledge, certain tools and comforts. And those can turn into staggeringly large advantages compared to those born into lesser money. The economist Prof. Karthik Muralidharan in regard to a country’s educational policies once said, and I paraphrase, "A society does best when all children start with the same resources and then they end up in a place they deserve. But the motive of every parent is to provide their child as much advantage as they can afford. That is the strange paradox”.
Another aspect of money is its information signalling capability. The argument is that since people make transactions of their own free volition in the marketplace, flows of money can be used to gauge what people value most and who is providing the most value, thereby incentivising entrepreneurs to produce most of what's in demand. It is the ability of individuals to participate in the marketplace that encourages them to buy and sell, thereby increasing their income and wealth while also providing what society values most (the famous 'Double Thank you Moment'). But what if an individual is locked out of the marketplace because they hardly have any money to even have their presence felt. That is what poverty is- it is an exclusion from the realm in which one can get rich. In a society that stringently upholds rules and rights of private property ownership, do we define those who don't have property and have been locked out of the legal methods to try and acquire it as non-citizens? And that's only one side of the equation; On the other side producers who stand to benefit from the sale of their goods to those in need cannot do it because those without money are not able to voice their preferences- because the only way to do it is via money.
And this is where the initial co-ordination characteristic of money comes in- it is of no good except as a way for society to communicate with itself. UBI seeks to correct the flaw in markets by providing those in most need to voice what they want. It is foolish to expect citizens of a society to have real political and social freedoms without economic freedom (in fact, traditionally depriving an individual of economic freedom was the most coercive way of curtailing their other freedoms), and like every citizen has a right to vote or be the way they wish to, they should also be able to afford a minimum, dignified lifestyle.
UBI for Virtue
In a popular TED talk, the designer Thomas Twaites talks about his attempt to build a toaster from scratch - an innocuous, everyday, "dumb" toaster and soon realises that he can't even properly source a few of the 400 or so components required to build it. Fascinatingly, he does not acknowledge what a huge advantage he already has- of all the cumulative knowledge that tells him what a toaster is, how it works and how he can go about building one. That knowledge is part of the commons, a shared bounty that belongs to all. While of course we should celebrate and reward those among us who create something valuable, it is imperative to remember that any new invention is not possible without the cumulative immense contributions of before. We, like bees, are an interlinked and interdependent species, more so as we advance technologically further where the proportion of an individual's knowledge keeps getting smaller in comparison to all the knowledge in the world. The fact that some people can have so much while many have so little is not, largely, because of inherent differences as much as how we have shaped our institutions, how power is so unequally distributed, and dumb luck.
The other aspect of this argument is how the market does not value the contributions of those who are responsible for taking care of the young or the old or the ill informally, or those who are producing work that the market doesn't understand or is incapable of valuing at this point in time- writers, artists, intellectuals, social workers, conservationists who are not necessarily, or entirely, motivated by money but nonetheless use their time and skill creating immense value and contributing to the greater good. Not all values can be, or should be, measured by money and thank heavens for that.
But this too is an instrumentalist argument. At the end of the day, a known fact is that right now in the world, we have the ability to ensure that every human in the world has enough to live at a certain level of dignity- we produce enough that, at least in a material aspect, no human has to suffer. The fact that there is as much poverty then is an indictment of our generation. We cannot let that happen and UBI is a good way for us to ensure that.
No comments:
Post a Comment