Covid-19 and the Need For UBI

COVID-19 AND THE NEED FOR UBI

As the Coronavirus spreads around the world, it is leaving a path of disruption in its wake. Lives are at risk, and our social activities have had to undergo some radical changes. And added to the concerns for our health and social lives we have financial worries to contend with too. As businesses close and employees are sent home, people fear that debts will mount up, cut off as they are from the wages needed to keep up with the cost of living.

(Image from the ITN News)

It seems to me that these financial worries would have been considerably reduced if we had been wise enough to abandon the practice of holding people’s incomes hostage, cutting off their access to money when they are unemployed.

The practice of holding incomes hostage results in negative consequences for society. Most obviously, it generates a great deal of stress whenever we find ourselves in a situation like the one we are now in.

Another problem is that it makes all jobs seem like they are vitally necessary, because one can just as well ask “how will someone paid to serve booze survive without pay” as “how will our food producers survive without pay?”. In reality, not all jobs are vitally necessary in the sense that they provide something we really couldn’t live without. The hospitality industry is a case in point. Could we live without restaurants, bars and hotels? Of course we could. It’s nice to have access to such services, because they make life more pleasant. But in a world where incomes were not held hostage, such jobs would be treated as serving a useful but ultimately trivial purpose that in no way can be confused for fundamentally necessary work.

At least those working on hospitality provide services that increase social value by adding some fun and entertainment. But there are other forms of employment that offer questionable social value. In fact, surveys reveal that up to forty percent of workers in rich countries feel their jobs are either pointless or actually harmful to society in general.

Many of these bullshit jobs are created as a result of holding incomes hostage. Listen to what ‘Leslie’ had to say:

“My job shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, because of the whole train of BS jobs invented to keep people who need money from having it...Even when someone is entitled to something, the process of applying is so complex most need help to understand the questions and their own rights...At my end this starts with hours searching for the relevant forms, making phone calls...hours every month compiling statistics and monitoring forms...Juggling rules and language on behalf of people who just need help to fill out the paperwork, so they can get on with their lives”.

So, basically, Leslie’s entire job involves helping claimants negotiate the incredibly complex bureaucracy that have built up around the means-tested benefits system. Her job is only ‘necessary’ because the benefits system is so stupidly confusing.

As has been demonstrated in studies, any system of means-testing will inevitably result in at least twenty percent of those legitimately qualifying for benefits just giving up. Even if nobody was formally denied benefits, so long as one must nevertheless undergo means-testing that twenty percent would still fail to successfully claim their entitlements.

But, really, the percentage of those who fail is much higher, because means-tested social welfare has actually been designed to deny as many claimants as possible. As David Graeber explained, “between sanctions and capricious use of the rules, we’ve gotten to the point where sixty percent of those eligible for unemployment benefits in the UK don’t get them...A vast apparatus that exists to maintain the illusion that people are naturally lazy...that even if society does have a responsibility to ensure they don’t literally starve to death, it is necessary to make the process of providing them with the means of continued existence as time-consuming and humiliating as possible”.

So one reason why many people believe they have a bullshit job that either provides no social value or worse is actively causing harm, is because they work for a vast bureaucracy that seems to exist primarily to make the poor and unemployed feel bad about themselves.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, if employees suddenly faced with loss of wages as a result of Covid-19 are really stressing out.

The alternative to such a bureaucracy would be to stop holding incomes hostage and provide a basic income to all citizens, no questions asked. Whether you are employed or not, or rich or poor, you receive an income that is sufficient to live a reasonably comfortable life. There would be no means-testing as everyone would be entitled to a universal basic income.

Mention UBI and a couple of objections invariably come up. People question how we could possibly afford it, and they wonder if anyone would work if we were not compelled to seek employment by having our incomes held hostage.

The first objection is meaningless unless we ask “unaffordable compared to what?’. Really there are only two alternatives to UBI, and that is either to have means-tested benefits in order to determine who should not be supported if paid work is not providing support, or to have no social safety net whatsoever.

As David Graeber has argued, “basic income might seem like it is a vast expanse of state power....but in fact it’s exactly the reverse. Huge sections of government-and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they most deeply involved in the more surveillance of ordinary citizens-would be simply closed down”.

As for having no social safety net whatsoever, that would generate enormous costs in the form of negative externalities caused by the mental stress that would inevitably come from being cut off from any means of financially supporting yourself. The governments of the world clearly recognise that this would lead to civil unrest and even revolution if the numbers of those thrown out of work rise significantly, which is why they are now scrambling to provide support as Covid-19 closes down whole sectors of the economy. If they didn’t or if all those people had to negotiate the punitive workfare system, we would not just have panic shoppers rushing to stockpile, we would have armed looting.

Had there been UBI in place to begin with, the stress people felt when they learned their means of employment was going to suddenly dry up would have been considerably reduced. Yes, some adjustments would still have been necessary as many live more expensively than a universal basic income alone could afford. Having said that, I think a case can be made that a great deal of this expensive, credit-card fuelled living is compensatory consumerism indulged in only because so many jobs now offer no other form of value discernible to those actually doing it. With UBI those who feel their jobs are BS would be in a much better position to just quit and seek value elsewhere.

Speaking of, since UBI would be paid no matter what you did with your time, people would be free to volunteer, adopt temporary work patterns or dabble in entrepreneurialism, secure in the knowledge that whatever they did, at least a basic income was guaranteed.

But this brings us to the second objection, which is that if people received ‘free money’ there would be no incentive to work.

(Image from Common Dreams)

In fact, whenever free money has been handed out, we typically find people are still willing to be productive members of society. This is true even when those receiving unconditional benefits are what you might think of as the dregs of society.

For example, a London-based aid organisation called Broadway gave thirteen homeless men £3000 each, to spend in whatever way they liked. Far from squandering this windfall on drink and drugs, the men were very thrifty, spending an average of just £800 after one year. According to Rutger Bregman, “a year and a half after the experiment began, seven of the thirteen rough sleepers had a roof over their heads...All thirteen had taken critical steps toward solvency and personal growth”.

Overall, providing these down-and-outs with no-questions-asked money cost about £50,000 what with having to pay the social workers administering the project. But prior to receiving this handout, the cost of dealing those thirteen vagrants, what with all the bureaucracy involved in means-tested social services, police expenses and court costs, had cost the city of London an estimated £400,000 a year.

So, if even heroin-addicted vagrants can turn their lives around when income is no longer held hostage, why should we suppose that people in general would squander free money if unconditional incomes were made universally available? While I would expect some people to be content to just stay home watching TV all day, it’s hard to believe that the percentage of those ‘doing nothing’ would equal the forty percent who feel their job is pointless or pernicious. It’s also worth pointing out that the number of bullshit jobs could be even higher, when we consider that there are seemingly legitimate jobs that are only being performed because BS jobs exist. For example, offices where people do nothing all day but pretend to shuffle papers, update their social media and attend ‘attitude-adjustment seminars’ require cleaners so they can do their non-jobs in comfort. While cleaning and catering are obviously not BS jobs in and of themselves, they become bullshit when having to work in places that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If we include real jobs done in the service of BS jobs, the percentage of jobs that could disappear without anyone caring in a world where wages were not held hostage would be around 50 percent.

It’s hard to believe that fifty percent of those currently employed would choose to just ‘do nothing’ if their basic income was guaranteed. Even if they did, at least they would not be doing anyone any harm, whereas if they had a job there’s a good chance they are just producing throwaway consumer crap, tricking people into believing they have problems that throwaway consumer crap can solve, or working in that part of the managerial/clerical/administrative sector that exists only to extract wealth through the manipulation of debt. Or, to speak more plainly, parasites.

We won’t really know if a universal basic income would be preferable to the alternatives until we implement such a policy on a large scale. It does seem like the coronavirus situation is resulting in something like a large-scale guarantee of income. The British chancellor has pledged to support those who lost their jobs as a result of businesses closing, and there are increasing demands to support those in the gig economy and on zero-hours contracts as well. We may therefore see how people behave when given cash handouts without having to jump through hoops in order to qualify (assuming the money really is handed out with a minimum of bureaucratic intrusion).

Of course the situation we are now in cannot show us how people would normally behave. The social restrictions that have been put in place to help slow down the spread of infections will inevitably restrict the ways in which we could use guaranteed incomes for purposes like voluntarism, collaborative hobbies and setting up new businesses. Watching the news and seeing people getting into punch ups over toilet paper, and seeing that thugs have set fire to delivery vehicles, can lead one to despair and suppose free money would just be wasted. But then again there are uplifting stories of people coming to the aid of fellow citizens, rapidly reorganising their businesses in order to produce much-needed medical equipment like ventilators, and other forms of community spirit. Freed from financial stress, I would expect to see much more of this community spirit as people would feel less like life is a zero-sum game where your gain is my loss. Hopefully, when all this is over we will have realised just how stupid it is in this day and age to punish people for being alive by holding wages hostage, and just guarantee a basic income to one and all.

REFERENCES

‘Bullshit Jobs: A Theory’ by David Graeber

‘Utopia For Realists’ by Rutger Bregman