What is universal basic income, anyway?
Part 1 of a multi-part exploration into universal basic income as a possible policy proposal (what is it? pros and cons? alternatives?)
🌎 What is universal basic income, anyway?
To kick off Cultivating Care, we’re gonna start a multi-part exploration into universal basic income, ie UBI, starting out by answering the question “what is universal basic income?”
Why are we starting here, you might be wondering? Well you see, I recently shared a tongue-in-cheek TikTok (see below) meant to highlight that I believe people would keep working (ie contributing to the world around them) even if their basic needs were met by something like a universal basic income.
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Wow did people have some big feelings about this one.
To be honest with y’all, before posting it I hadn’t done a ton of research into the specific concept of UBI myself. It’s not something I’ve been actively fighting for or against, though I do think the general idea of a society oriented around supporting each other’s needs is something to be aimed for. But the visceral response (both from folks who think that people who want basic social support are lazy freeloaders and folks who think we could and should automate away all work and live a life of leisure, neither position I agree with) made me realize this is something to explore further.
Is UBI something that will really help us get to a more supported, caring society? Is it a utopian ideal that makes no sense? I think this is going to become even more a part of common conversations as we move into the next stages of neo-capitalism and start seeing artificial intelligence’s impact on our global economies.
This is something we will explore in multiple parts, because it’s a large topic with many different angles. Let’s start with defining “what is universal basic income”, as that was something that was debated plenty in my comments 🤣
What is “universal basic income”?
In its simplest definition, a universal basic income is “a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement or other conditions.” The key differentiator between UBI and current common welfare systems is that it is universal. There are no limitations on who gets the income, why, or how they spend it, beyond being an adult in a particular community.
Most existing forms of welfare (whether given by the state or by NGOs) are “means tested” which basically just means that there are some sort of requirements and you have to prove that you meet them. This not only restricts the recipients but also builds up an entire workforce around delivering and verifying this testing. So a whole chunk of money and time is spent just making sure that we don’t give money to the “wrong” people.
Universal basic income does away with this whole apparatus of means testing to simply deliver the payment to all members of a community. However, this high level idea has a lot of nuances when the rubber hits the road and people define policies to actually implement it, as we will discuss later.
Before diving into some of those nuances, let’s address some of the key misunderstandings people have about UBI from what I saw in my TikTok comments. (Note: there are a variety real arguments against UBI, and we’ll get to those. These are just the incorrect understandings of the basic definition of UBI.)
UBI means that no one gets paid for work. This is not a part of the idea of universal basic income as we defined it above, and it hasn’t shown up in any UBI proposals I’ve read about. The idea is that UBI is a supplement to paid work not that it eliminates paid work.
Under UBI, everyone would get paid the same for different labor. Similar to the above, UBI is generally proposed as a safety net. It underlies our current labor market structure, it does not propose to drastically alter it. (Whether it should or not is a different story for later exploration.) Nothing about UBI implies that doctors can’t make more money than janitors. (Though again, whether they should or not is up for debate.)
Currently existing welfare programs are the same as UBI. As discussed above, universal basic income is different than current welfare programs in that there are no qualifications one must meet in order to receive the payment. This is a critical difference, as it removes the negative incentives that currently exist to stay on welfare. If you’re currently on welfare and the only work you can access is minimum wage, and then you’d be trading 40 hours a week for only slightly more income than you’re currently receiving. Where is the incentive to make that shift? There is also an argument that making the payment universal would help remove some of the of social stigma of receiving welfare support, which differentiates the two .
UBI proponents want a few people who are stuck working to support the lazy masses. As we will review later, most studies have shown that basic income doesn’t reduce a community’s labor output. So there’s strong reason to think this fear is oversized, and this definitely isn’t what anyone who argues for UBI is saying they want. It’s reasonable that a lot of things would change if people have enough safety net to make different choices, but I’d argue they would change for the better (even if it doesn’t seem that way at first: change is often uncomfortable.)
With UBI, no one would need to do anything they don’t enjoy. I suppose this depends on your definition of enjoy. But the idea that a UBI would mean no one has to work ever again is, of course, absurd. We need people to do things in order for us to have stuff in the world. Opponents of UBI who argue against this are arguing against a straw man, but proponents of UBI who think this is possible are also working against their own cause. The idea that we could provide basic needs to everyone in a community relies on the underlying assumption that people in that community are doing whatever work is requires to supply those basic needs. However, that amount of work is likely much less than we’d be led to expect by how much we work today. And having basic needs met gives workers much more choice about the conditions under which they are willing to work to provide those needs for each other. When you can walk away without the threat of homelessness or starvation, you’re much less likely to accept abusive working (or living) conditions. But I digress — we will explore pros and cons later!
Where did the idea of universal basic income come from?
Andrew Yang brought universal basic income to a mainstream audience in the US for the first time in decades, but the idea didn’t start with him. People have theorized and promoted the idea of a universal guaranteed support for all citizens for centuries. It’s easy to understand why. We come together in a society to better our lives, and having access to resources to support the basic needs of our lives is a clear path to betterment.
In Thomas More’s Utopia (the origin of the word), he includes a basic income in his society, as a way to reduce theft. (Instead of locking people up, give them resources — another thought we will explore later.) We continue to see even now people rejecting the idea of a basic income as “utopian” (ie in their minds unrealistic and impossible).
However, in the last century, more socio-political thinkers have popped up sharing arguments for some for full or partial basic income, and in the last few decades more cities and countries have started testing varieties of basic incomes (though few have approached true universality.) The idea that we could use social funds to better support each other isn’t new, but letting go of means testing and trusting that it wouldn’t cause society to come crashing down continues to be a tough argument to get accepted on a wide scale.
Stay tuned for part two…
…where we’ll explore some of these recent tests of UBI to understand how they’ve been implemented and what we’ve learned from them. Then we’ll explore more general pros and cons about UBI and the different positions folks have taken over time. We’ll follow that with some alternatives to the more common understanding of a state-funded UBI that might better lay the path to create caring communities supporting collective liberation.
🧘 What inner shifts does this idea call for?
If we are to build a world where communities support each other to have their basic needs met, we have to get over the internal fears and biases that block us from believing this is possible. Here are a few of the common blockers I’ve seen. If you recognize yourself nodding along with some of them, that’s alright! We’ve all had different life experiences that form our core beliefs, whether intentional or unintentional. After each idea are some reflection questions you might use to explore your feelings around the topic.
You can also use these reflection questions if you’re talking to someone else who holds these beliefs. It can help to keep in mind that no one thinks they are wrong. If we hope to find alignment or change someone’s perspective who thinks differently than us, we have to first respect that they think they are right and then dig deeper until we can hit on a place of connection and understanding.
People are lazy and won’t contribute. What makes you feel this way? Are you lazy and wouldn’t contribute? If not, why do you fear this in other people? (This can usually lead to some specific examples which you can then explore more deeply. Why are those examples the ones that stick out? What percentage of the wider population do those examples likely represent? Is it actually significant?)
I saw people during COVID19 get money and not work, so they wouldn’t work with UBI. I recognize that not everyone feels this way, but consider that COVID19 was a global pandemic. Maybe this person you saw was concerned about their health? Do you know what they were feeling or did you just see their activity from afar? Were they burned out from work beforehand and used this opportunity to take a break? Do you want to take a break and can’t?
I don’t want my work to support other people. What are ways you are supported by other people in your life right now? I’m certain you can find at least one. Do you really want a world where the only way to give and receive support is to pay someone to do something? Do you have supportive, caring friendships in your life? If so, how do you show up for each other? Is that something you could see expanding to a wider community? Why or why not? If you don’t have supportive, caring friendships, is that something you’d like? Why or why not?
I don’t think there’s enough to go around. Why do you think that? What is “enough” for you? Are you basing this on data or just a generalized concern? (This question is worth multiple explorations on its own, so we won’t go into all of them them here, but starting to question this belief can prepare us to go deeper.)
There are of course a million more places to explore, but this is a start. When we’re able to show up to ideas with curiosity and openness, we make space to build something new instead of staying entrenched in the relative comfort of existing systems. Cultivating that openness and curiosity is a daily practice. We’ll continue to share practices to deepen this as part of staying soft and open while we explore pathways for a better world, both now and into the future.
🗣 Question of the day
What would you do with your time and energy if you knew your basic needs were going to be met? How would you contribute to your community? What would you like to do or explore?
Drop a comment or hit reply and let me know your thoughts — I’ll share some responses in the next post!
🧠 For further exploration
In the meantime, here are some links for you to check out and explore this topic more. I’d love to hear any thoughts or other recommendations you have in the comments!
📚The Future is Degrowth - This is more an exploration in degrowth, but it does suggest a type of universal basic income as a policy proposal. (And we’ll talk more about degrowth in the future .)
📚Utopia for Realists - A case for UBI, 15 hour work week, and open borders by Rutger Bergman, a Dutch historian.
📝Everywhere basic income has been tried, in one map by Vox (from 2020)
🎧Episode 75 of The Fire These Times, The Precariatized Mind and the Case for Basic Income by Joey Ayoub with Guy Standing from BEIN