In 2020, I thought a lot about Universal Basic Income

Published on 23 December 2020

I've been thinking of Universal Basic Income (or ‘UBI’)(1) for a while, but this year I’ve given it more thought than ever.

UBI is a fashionable policy proposal, which has attracted interest across the political spectrum. In its most basic form, the idea is to grant all citizens a regular income that would be sufficient to ‘get by’, where ‘get by’ means roughly that everyone should have the right to food, shelter, warmth and safety (think the bottom two layers of Maslow's pyramid(2)).

It’s very human-rights-y: the belief that everyone should be afforded the right to live with dignity is rooted in our intrinsic worth as human beings, not in our potential value in the workplace. Of course ‘afforded’ is the operative word here – giving everyone an unqualified salary is an expensive proposition.

The details, of course, matter. How much money? Who would get it? Is this a replacement for (all) other benefit programs? These questions are largely unanswered. Small-scale experiments exist but there haven’t yet been any broad roll-outs.

What interests me most is something that isn’t usually taken into account in the numbers and demographics. I’m interested not just in our material well-being, but in our likelihood of feeling happy and fulfilled. In other words, what happens to the ‘soul of man [sic]’ under Universal Basic Income?

Less work and more… what?

Hard-edged leftists want a world without work (or with significantly less). This is a principal goal of a UBI too. If people are able to live without needing to work, lower-salary jobs will have to:
replace formerly cheap human labour with more automation, or,
pay more and improve working conditions so that those jobs become more attractive.

So, let’s imagine that a UBI was introduced at half the national average income and everyone over 18 gets it. Many service jobs (such as retail or restaurant work) aren’t particularly fun or rewarding so it’s not a stretch to imagine that a lot of service workers would stay at home if they could receive a similar income without working.

So what would happen in the space that work used to occupy?

Dogmatic communist doctrine advances the intellectually fascinating – if dubious – theory that a society freed from want will produce a more perfected human nature. In other words: in a society that provides enough for everyone, there would no longer be a reason to steal, hoard, or deny things to others.

The theory goes that, when humans are freed from the drudgery of work they ‘flourish’.

‘Human flourishing’ is a goal for various theories of social change. It’s a catch-all term that implies you do things you find interesting — sometimes even useful. Maybe you’re learning to knit, writing poetry, or growing tomatoes for your neighbours. Flourishing isn’t specifically defined, but it’s emphatically not a job.

But the ‘more free time equals flourishing’ theory is pretty hard to test in a vacuum. Without substantially restructuring society, we can't predict changes to collective behaviour. What happens if large sections of the population no longer have to work is still an open question. What will people do? How will they feel? What are the outcomes? The ‘better human nature’ stuff is a neat idea that’s impossible to know. A UBI raises more questions than answers.

On the other hand, what are the outcomes we're seeing now?

The soul under lockdown

In the middle of a pandemic, we see some parallels and contrasts. Quarantines have left many furloughed, unemployed, or simply working less. Similar to the UBI proposal, the pandemic has resulted in many people working less and having more free time.

However, the UBI proposition reduces the need to work as a framing device for living in society: work if you want to, not because you have to. The UBI wants to fundamentally reshape our understanding of the world: to emphasise that being a person, and not your job, is what gives you intrinsic worth. In this new conception, losing your job is a detail rather than a precipitous decline in your quality of life.

During the pandemic, losing your job can be disastrous – as more jobs disappear, losing yours means it’s harder to find a new one. And once your income declines, you might not be able to pay your rent or afford next week's grocery bill. I'm not sure there is a whitepaper on this yet, but the news has plenty of troubling indicators including declining mental health(3), fear of evictions(4), and increasing domestic abuse(5).

In The Soul of Man under Socialism(6), Oscar Wilde wrote that, rather than addressing symptoms of poverty, “the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” Similarly, the aims of the UBI proposal are to address exactly the kind of stresses we are seeing right now, to envision a society where radically less work is sustainable: where losing your job is an inconvenience but not a travesty.

Admittedly, the nature of the ‘soul of man under UBI’ raises many questions, but it is hard to imagine worse outcomes than our souls under lockdown.

(1) Universal Basic Income, UBI Lab
(2) Maslow's pyramid, Wikipedia
(3) Declining mental health, The Guardian
(4) Fear of eviction, The Guardian
(5) Increasing domestic abuse, The Guardian
(6) The Soul of Man under Socialism, Oscar Wilde