Showing posts with label universal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label universal. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 March 2024
Wednesday, 29 November 2023
Friday, 4 August 2023
Are Universal Human Rights a form of Imperialism? Is the Chinese Communist Party right?
From The Economist
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 held out the promise that the world was about to enter a virtuous circle. Growing prosperity would foster freedom and tolerance, which in turn would create more prosperity. Unfortunately, that hope disappointed. Our analysis this week, based on the definitive global survey of social attitudes, shows just how naive it turned out to be.
Prosperity certainly rose. In the three decades to 2019, global output increased more than four-fold. Roughly 70% of the 2bn people living in extreme poverty escaped it.
Alas, individual freedom and tolerance evolved quite differently. Large numbers of people around the world continue to swear fealty to traditional beliefs, sometimes intolerant ones. And although they are much wealthier these days, they often have an us-and-them contempt for others. The idea that despots and dictators shun the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter should come as no surprise. The shock is that so many of their people seem to think their leaders are right.
The World Values Survey takes place every five years. The latest results, which go up to 2022, include interviews with almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. One sign that universal values are lagging behind is that countries that were once secular and ethno-nationalist, such as Russia and Georgia, are not becoming more tolerant as they grow, but more tightly bound to traditional religious values instead. They are increasingly joining an illiberal grouping that contains places like Egypt and Morocco. Another sign is that young people in Islamic and Orthodox countries are not much more individualistic or secular than their elders. By contrast, the young in northern Europe and America are racing ahead. The world is not becoming more similar as it gets richer. Instead, countries where burning the Koran is tolerated and those where it is an outrage look on each other with growing incomprehension.
On the face of it, all this seems to support the argument made by China’s Communist Party that universal values are bunkum. Under Xi Jinping, it has mounted a campaign to dismiss them as a racist form of neo-imperialism, in which white Western elites impose their own version of freedom and democracy on people who want security and stability instead.
In fact, the survey suggests something more subtle. And this leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the Chinese argument, universal values are more valuable than ever. Start with the subtlety.
The man behind the survey, Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan who died in 2021, would have agreed with the Chinese observation that people want security. He thought the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organised religion offer them solace.
This is one way to see America’s doomed attempts to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the failure of the Arab spring. Whereas the emancipation of central and eastern Europe brought security, thanks partly to membership of the European Union and NATO, the overthrow of dictatorships in the Middle East and Afghanistan brought lawlessness and upheaval. As a result, people sought safety in their tribe or their sect; hoping that order would be restored, some welcomed the return of dictators. Because the Arab world’s fledgling democracies could not provide stability, they never took wing.
The subtlety the Chinese argument misses is the fact that cynical politicians sometimes set out to engineer insecurity because they know that frightened people yearn for strongman rule. That is what Bashar al-Assad did in Syria when he released murderous jihadists from his country’s jails at the start of the Arab spring. He bet that the threat of Sunni violence would cause Syrians from other sects to rally round him.
Something similar has happened in Russia. Having lived through a devastating economic collapse and jarring reforms in the 1990s, Russians thrived in the 2000s. Between 1999 and 2013, GDP per head increased 12-fold in dollar terms. Yet, that was not enough to dispel their accumulated sense of dread. As growth has slowed, President Vladimir Putin has played on ethno-nationalist insecurities, culminating in his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Economically weakened and insecure, Russia will struggle to escape the trap.
Even in Western countries, some leaders seek to gain by inciting fear. In the past the World Values Survey recorded that the United States and much of Latin America combined individualism with strong religious conviction. Recently, however, they have become more secular–a change driven by the young. That has created a reaction among older, more conservative voters who reflect the values of decades past and feel bewildered and left behind.
Polarising politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the former presidents of America and Brazil, saw that they could exploit people’s anxieties to mobilise support. Accordingly, they set about warning that their political opponents wanted to destroy their supporters’ way of life and threatened the very survival of their countries. That has, in turn, spread alarm and hostility on the other side. Republicans’ sweeping dismissal of this week’s indictment of Mr Trump contains the threat that countries can slip back into intolerance and tribalism.
Even allowing for that, the Chinese claim that universal values are an imposition is upside down. From Chile to Japan, the World Values Survey provides examples showing that, when people feel secure, they really do become more tolerant and more eager to express their own individuality. Nothing suggests that Western countries are unique in that. The question is how to help people feel more secure.
China’s answer is based on creating order for a loyal, deferential majority that stays out of politics and avoids defying their rulers, at the expense of individual and minority rights. However, within that model lurks deep insecurity. It is a majoritarian system in which lines move, sometimes arbitrarily or without warning–especially when power passes unpredictably from one party chief to another. Anybody once deemed safe can suddenly end up in a precarious minority. Only inalienable rights and accountable government guarantee true security.
A better answer comes from sustained prosperity built on the rule of law. Wealthy countries have more to spend on dealing with disasters, such as pandemic disease. Likewise, confident in their savings and the social safety-net, the citizens of rich countries know that they are less vulnerable to the chance events that wreck lives elsewhere.
However, the deepest solution to insecurity lies in how countries cope with change. The years to come will bring a lot of upheaval, generated by long-term phenomena such as global warming, the spread of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the growing tensions between China and America. The countries that manage change well will be better at making society feel confident in the future. Those that manage it poorly will find that their people seek refuge in tradition and us-and-them hostility.
And that is where universal values come into their own. Classical liberalism—not the “ultraliberal” sort condemned by French commentators, or the progressive liberalism of the left—draws on tolerance, free expression and individual inquiry to tease out the costs and benefits of change. Conservatives resist change, revolutionaries impose it by force and dictatorships become trapped in one party’s–or, in China’s case, one man’s–vision of what it must be. By contrast, liberals seek to harness change through consensus forged by reasoned debate and constant reform. There is no better way to bring about progress.
Universal values are much more than a Western piety. They are a mechanism that fortifies societies against insecurity. What the World Values Survey shows is that they are also hard-won.
Thursday, 15 December 2022
The DWP has become Britain’s biggest debt collector.
Gordon Brown in The Guardian
Prime Minister Sunak talks about the need for “compassion” from the government this winter. But how far do social security benefits have to fall before our welfare system descends into a form of cruelty?
Take a couple with three children whose universal credit payment is, in theory, £46.11 a day. However, when their payment lands they have just £35, because around a quarter of their benefit has been deducted to pay back the loan they had to take out on joining universal credit to cover the five weeks they were denied benefit. And an extra 5% has been deducted as back payment to their utility company. According to Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) rules, money can be deducted for repayment of advance or emergency loans, and even on behalf of third parties for rent, utilities and service charge payments.
With gas and electricity likely to cost, at a minimum, £7 on cold days like today, and with a council tax contribution to be paid on top, they find that they have just £25. 80 a day left over, or £5.16 per person, to pay for food and all other essentials. Even if the Scottish child poverty payment comes their way, clothes, travel, toiletries and home furnishings remain out of reach. Parents like them are just about the best accountants I could ever meet , but you can’t budget with nothing to budget with. And that’s why so many have had to tell their children they can’t afford presents this Christmas. No wonder they need the weekly bag of food they get from the local food bank. But they also need a toiletries and hygiene bank, a clothes bank, a bedding bank, a home furnishings bank, and a baby bank.
The DWP has now become the country’s biggest debt collector, seizing money that should never have had to be paid back, from people who cannot afford to pay anyway. In fact, the majority of families on universal credit do not receive the full benefit that the DWP advertises. More than 20% is deducted at source from each benefit payment made to a million households, leaving them surviving on scraps and charity as they run out of cash in the days before their next payment. In total, 2 million children are in families suffering deductions.
Prime Minister Sunak talks about the need for “compassion” from the government this winter. But how far do social security benefits have to fall before our welfare system descends into a form of cruelty?
Take a couple with three children whose universal credit payment is, in theory, £46.11 a day. However, when their payment lands they have just £35, because around a quarter of their benefit has been deducted to pay back the loan they had to take out on joining universal credit to cover the five weeks they were denied benefit. And an extra 5% has been deducted as back payment to their utility company. According to Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) rules, money can be deducted for repayment of advance or emergency loans, and even on behalf of third parties for rent, utilities and service charge payments.
With gas and electricity likely to cost, at a minimum, £7 on cold days like today, and with a council tax contribution to be paid on top, they find that they have just £25. 80 a day left over, or £5.16 per person, to pay for food and all other essentials. Even if the Scottish child poverty payment comes their way, clothes, travel, toiletries and home furnishings remain out of reach. Parents like them are just about the best accountants I could ever meet , but you can’t budget with nothing to budget with. And that’s why so many have had to tell their children they can’t afford presents this Christmas. No wonder they need the weekly bag of food they get from the local food bank. But they also need a toiletries and hygiene bank, a clothes bank, a bedding bank, a home furnishings bank, and a baby bank.
The DWP has now become the country’s biggest debt collector, seizing money that should never have had to be paid back, from people who cannot afford to pay anyway. In fact, the majority of families on universal credit do not receive the full benefit that the DWP advertises. More than 20% is deducted at source from each benefit payment made to a million households, leaving them surviving on scraps and charity as they run out of cash in the days before their next payment. In total, 2 million children are in families suffering deductions.
Gordon Brown with workers at the Big Hoose multi-bank project, Fife, 8 November 2022. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
When the money runs out, and the food bank tokens are gone, parents become desperate and ashamed that their children cannot be fed, and fall victim to loan sharks hiding in the back alleys who exploit hardship and compound it, and prey on pain and inflame it.
The case for each community having its own multi-bank – its reservoir of supplies for those without – is more urgent this winter than at any time I have known. Since the Trussell Trust’s brilliant expansion of UK food banks, creative local and national charities have pioneered community banks of all kinds offering free clothes, furnishings, bedding, electrical goods and, in the case of the national charity In Kind Direct, toiletries.
In Fife, Amazon, PepsiCo, Scotmid Fishers and other companies helped to set up a multi-bank. It’s a simple idea that could be replicated nationwide: they meet unmet needs by using unused goods. The companies have the goods people need, and the charities know the people who need them. With a coordinating charity, a warehouse to amass donations and a proper referral system, multi-banks can ensure their goods alleviate poverty.
But the charities know themselves that they can never do enough. With the state privatisations of gas, water, electricity and telecoms, the government gave up on responsibility for essential national assets. But now, with what is in effect the privatisation of welfare, our government is giving up on its responsibility to those in greatest need – passing the buck to charities, which cannot cope. Just as breadwinners cannot afford bread, food banks are running out of food.
Charities, too,are at the mercy of exceptionally high demand and the changing circumstances of donors whose help can be withdrawn as suddenly as it has been given. And so while voluntary organisations – and not the welfare state – are currently our last line of defence, the gap they have to bridge is too big for them to ever be the country’s safety net.
According to Prof Donald Hirsch and the team researching minimum income standards at Loughborough University, benefit levels for those out of work now fall 50% short of what most of us would think is a minimum living income, with their real value falling faster in 2022 than at any time for 50 years since up-ratings were introduced. And still 800,000 of the poorest children in England go without free school meals.
When the money runs out, and the food bank tokens are gone, parents become desperate and ashamed that their children cannot be fed, and fall victim to loan sharks hiding in the back alleys who exploit hardship and compound it, and prey on pain and inflame it.
The case for each community having its own multi-bank – its reservoir of supplies for those without – is more urgent this winter than at any time I have known. Since the Trussell Trust’s brilliant expansion of UK food banks, creative local and national charities have pioneered community banks of all kinds offering free clothes, furnishings, bedding, electrical goods and, in the case of the national charity In Kind Direct, toiletries.
In Fife, Amazon, PepsiCo, Scotmid Fishers and other companies helped to set up a multi-bank. It’s a simple idea that could be replicated nationwide: they meet unmet needs by using unused goods. The companies have the goods people need, and the charities know the people who need them. With a coordinating charity, a warehouse to amass donations and a proper referral system, multi-banks can ensure their goods alleviate poverty.
But the charities know themselves that they can never do enough. With the state privatisations of gas, water, electricity and telecoms, the government gave up on responsibility for essential national assets. But now, with what is in effect the privatisation of welfare, our government is giving up on its responsibility to those in greatest need – passing the buck to charities, which cannot cope. Just as breadwinners cannot afford bread, food banks are running out of food.
Charities, too,are at the mercy of exceptionally high demand and the changing circumstances of donors whose help can be withdrawn as suddenly as it has been given. And so while voluntary organisations – and not the welfare state – are currently our last line of defence, the gap they have to bridge is too big for them to ever be the country’s safety net.
According to Prof Donald Hirsch and the team researching minimum income standards at Loughborough University, benefit levels for those out of work now fall 50% short of what most of us would think is a minimum living income, with their real value falling faster in 2022 than at any time for 50 years since up-ratings were introduced. And still 800,000 of the poorest children in England go without free school meals.
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I’m so cold I live in my bed – like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Marin
---
When it comes to helping with heating, the maximum that any family will receive, no matter its size, is £24 a week emergency help to cover what the government accepts is the £50 a week typical cost of heating a home. From April, the extra payments will be even less – just £16 to cover nearly the typical £60 a week they now expect gas and electricity to cost. And then, as Jeremy Hunt says, help with heating will become a thing of the past.
One hundred years ago, Winston Churchill was moved to talk of the unacceptable contrast between the accumulated excesses of unjustified privilege and “the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions”. Our long term priority must be to persuade a highly unequal country of the need for a decent minimum income for all, but our immediate demand must be for the government to suspend for the duration of this energy crisis the deductions that will soon cause destitution.
Ministers have been forced to change tack before. In April 2021 the government reduced the cap on the proportion of income deducted from 30% to 25%. During the first phase of Covid, ministers temporarily halted all deductions. In April, they discouraged utility firms from demanding them, but deductions as high as 30% of income are still commonplace.
There is no huge cost to the government in suspending deductions, for it will get its money back later. But this could be a lifesaver for millions now suffering under a regime that seems vindictive beyond austerity. Let this be a Christmas of compassion, instead of cruelty.
I’m so cold I live in my bed – like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Marin
---
When it comes to helping with heating, the maximum that any family will receive, no matter its size, is £24 a week emergency help to cover what the government accepts is the £50 a week typical cost of heating a home. From April, the extra payments will be even less – just £16 to cover nearly the typical £60 a week they now expect gas and electricity to cost. And then, as Jeremy Hunt says, help with heating will become a thing of the past.
One hundred years ago, Winston Churchill was moved to talk of the unacceptable contrast between the accumulated excesses of unjustified privilege and “the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions”. Our long term priority must be to persuade a highly unequal country of the need for a decent minimum income for all, but our immediate demand must be for the government to suspend for the duration of this energy crisis the deductions that will soon cause destitution.
Ministers have been forced to change tack before. In April 2021 the government reduced the cap on the proportion of income deducted from 30% to 25%. During the first phase of Covid, ministers temporarily halted all deductions. In April, they discouraged utility firms from demanding them, but deductions as high as 30% of income are still commonplace.
There is no huge cost to the government in suspending deductions, for it will get its money back later. But this could be a lifesaver for millions now suffering under a regime that seems vindictive beyond austerity. Let this be a Christmas of compassion, instead of cruelty.
Tuesday, 16 August 2022
Monday, 26 July 2021
Wednesday, 24 February 2021
Friday, 29 June 2018
Would basic incomes or basic jobs be better when robots take over?
Tim Harford in The Financial Times
We all seem to be worried about the robots taking over these days — and they don’t need to take all the jobs to be horrendously disruptive. A situation where 30 to 40 per cent of the working age population was economically useless would be tough enough. They might be taxi drivers replaced by a self-driving car, hedge fund managers replaced by an algorithm, or financial journalists replaced by a chatbot on Instagram.
By “economically useless” I mean people unable to secure work at anything approaching a living wage. For all their value as citizens, friends, parents, and their intrinsic worth as human beings, they would simply have no role in the economic system.
I’m not sure how likely this is — I would bet against it happening soon — but it is never too early to prepare for what might be a utopia, or a catastrophe. And an intriguing debate has broken out over how to look after disadvantaged workers both now and in this robot future.
Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job? Various non-profits, polemicists and even Silicon Valley types have thrown their weight behind the “free money” idea in the form of a universal basic income, while US senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have been pushing for trials of a jobs guarantee.
Basic income or basic jobs? There are countless details for the policy wonks to argue over, but what interests me at the moment is the psychology. In a world of mass technological unemployment, would either of these two remedies make us happy?
Author Rutger Bregman describes a basic income in glowing terms, as “venture capital for everyone”. He sees the cash as liberation from abusive working conditions, and a potential launch pad to creative and fulfilling projects.
Yet the economist Edward Glaeser views a basic income as a “horror” for the recipients. “You’re telling them their lives are not going to be ones of contribution,” he remarked in a recent interview with the EconTalk podcast. “Their lives aren’t going to be producing a product that anyone values.”
Surely both of them have a point. A similar disagreement exists regarding the psychological effect of a basic jobs guarantee, with advocates emphasising the dignity of work, while sceptics fear a Sisyphean exercise in punching the clock to do a fake job.
So what does the evidence suggest? Neither a jobs guarantee nor a basic income has been tried at scale in a modern economy, so we are forced to make educated guesses.
We know that joblessness makes us miserable. In the words of Warwick university economist Andrew Oswald: “There is overwhelming statistical evidence that involuntary unemployment produces extreme unhappiness.”
What’s more, adds Prof Oswald, most of this unhappiness seems to be because of a loss of prestige, identity or self-worth. Money is only a small part of it. This suggests that the advocates of a jobs guarantee may be on to something.
In this context, it’s worth noting two recent studies of lottery winners in the Netherlands and Sweden, both of which find that big winners tend to scale back their hours rather than quitting their jobs. We seem to find something in our jobs worth holding on to.
Yet many of the trappings of work frustrate us. Researchers led by Daniel Kahneman and Alan Krueger asked people to reflect on the emotions they felt as they recalled episodes in the previous day. The most negative episodes were the evening commute, the morning commute, and work itself. Things were better if people got to chat to colleagues while working, but (unsurprisingly) they were worse for low status jobs, or jobs for which people felt overqualified. None of which suggests that people will enjoy working on a guaranteed-job scheme.
Psychologists have found that we like and benefit from feeling in control. That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control. The money would be ours, by right, to do with as we wish. A job guarantee might work the other way: it makes money conditional on punching the clock.
On the other hand (again!), we like to keep busy. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert have found that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. And social contact is generally good for our wellbeing. Maybe guaranteed jobs would help keep us active and socially connected.
The truth is, we don’t really know. I would hesitate to pronounce with confidence about which policy might ultimately be better for our wellbeing. It is good to see that the more thoughtful advocates of either policy — or both policies simultaneously — are asking for large-scale trials to learn more.
Meanwhile, I am confident that we would all benefit from an economy that creates real jobs which are sociable, engaging, and decently paid. Grand reforms of the welfare system notwithstanding, none of us should be giving up on making work work better.
We all seem to be worried about the robots taking over these days — and they don’t need to take all the jobs to be horrendously disruptive. A situation where 30 to 40 per cent of the working age population was economically useless would be tough enough. They might be taxi drivers replaced by a self-driving car, hedge fund managers replaced by an algorithm, or financial journalists replaced by a chatbot on Instagram.
By “economically useless” I mean people unable to secure work at anything approaching a living wage. For all their value as citizens, friends, parents, and their intrinsic worth as human beings, they would simply have no role in the economic system.
I’m not sure how likely this is — I would bet against it happening soon — but it is never too early to prepare for what might be a utopia, or a catastrophe. And an intriguing debate has broken out over how to look after disadvantaged workers both now and in this robot future.
Should everyone be given free money? Or should everyone receive the guarantee of a decently-paid job? Various non-profits, polemicists and even Silicon Valley types have thrown their weight behind the “free money” idea in the form of a universal basic income, while US senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have been pushing for trials of a jobs guarantee.
Basic income or basic jobs? There are countless details for the policy wonks to argue over, but what interests me at the moment is the psychology. In a world of mass technological unemployment, would either of these two remedies make us happy?
Author Rutger Bregman describes a basic income in glowing terms, as “venture capital for everyone”. He sees the cash as liberation from abusive working conditions, and a potential launch pad to creative and fulfilling projects.
Yet the economist Edward Glaeser views a basic income as a “horror” for the recipients. “You’re telling them their lives are not going to be ones of contribution,” he remarked in a recent interview with the EconTalk podcast. “Their lives aren’t going to be producing a product that anyone values.”
Surely both of them have a point. A similar disagreement exists regarding the psychological effect of a basic jobs guarantee, with advocates emphasising the dignity of work, while sceptics fear a Sisyphean exercise in punching the clock to do a fake job.
So what does the evidence suggest? Neither a jobs guarantee nor a basic income has been tried at scale in a modern economy, so we are forced to make educated guesses.
We know that joblessness makes us miserable. In the words of Warwick university economist Andrew Oswald: “There is overwhelming statistical evidence that involuntary unemployment produces extreme unhappiness.”
What’s more, adds Prof Oswald, most of this unhappiness seems to be because of a loss of prestige, identity or self-worth. Money is only a small part of it. This suggests that the advocates of a jobs guarantee may be on to something.
In this context, it’s worth noting two recent studies of lottery winners in the Netherlands and Sweden, both of which find that big winners tend to scale back their hours rather than quitting their jobs. We seem to find something in our jobs worth holding on to.
Yet many of the trappings of work frustrate us. Researchers led by Daniel Kahneman and Alan Krueger asked people to reflect on the emotions they felt as they recalled episodes in the previous day. The most negative episodes were the evening commute, the morning commute, and work itself. Things were better if people got to chat to colleagues while working, but (unsurprisingly) they were worse for low status jobs, or jobs for which people felt overqualified. None of which suggests that people will enjoy working on a guaranteed-job scheme.
Psychologists have found that we like and benefit from feeling in control. That is a mark in favour of a universal basic income: being unconditional, it is likely to enhance our feelings of control. The money would be ours, by right, to do with as we wish. A job guarantee might work the other way: it makes money conditional on punching the clock.
On the other hand (again!), we like to keep busy. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert have found that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. And social contact is generally good for our wellbeing. Maybe guaranteed jobs would help keep us active and socially connected.
The truth is, we don’t really know. I would hesitate to pronounce with confidence about which policy might ultimately be better for our wellbeing. It is good to see that the more thoughtful advocates of either policy — or both policies simultaneously — are asking for large-scale trials to learn more.
Meanwhile, I am confident that we would all benefit from an economy that creates real jobs which are sociable, engaging, and decently paid. Grand reforms of the welfare system notwithstanding, none of us should be giving up on making work work better.
Monday, 18 December 2017
Universal basic income is no panacea for us
Sonia Sodha in The Guardian
There aren’t many ideas that unite trade unionists, the libertarian right, the green movement, and the Silicon Valley tech scene . But that’s the rainbow alliance backing a universal basic income, a centuries-old idea posited as the solution to a range of 21st-century problems. Is its surprising coalition of bedfellows a sign of an idea whose time has at last resoundingly come – or a symptom of a catch-all, superficial fix in search of a problem?
Universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income, is the idea that the state should pay every adult citizen a regular, modest income. It is a no-strings payment, so unlike benefits currently available to people of working age, it is not means tested. You get it regardless of whether you have a job, are looking for work, or whether you are even willing to work.
A basic income has long counted on support from the political fringes. It has appealed to radical feminists and greens frustrated by capitalist failure to properly value non-monetary work, such as care. The libertarian right embraces it as an opportunity to roll back the bureaucracy of the state, replacing public services with a simple, regular cash payment, to be spent as people wish.
But the real reason for basic income’s unlikely elevation to idea of the moment is the growing chorus of thinkers who seem to believe the modern economy can’t function without it. Tech utopians talk up the rise of robots and the development of artificial intelligence, which they say will leave less work to go round. They argue that this is the perfect opportunity to embrace a four-day working week and top everyone up with a basic income payment.
Labour market dystopians, on the other hand, rightly point to growing insecurity in the low-paid labour market and the millennials bouncing from gig to gig, never quite pinning down the security of a permanent contract. For them, a basic income is the poverty backstop that could help people cope with this brave new world.
Ken Loachian welfare critics, meanwhile, denounce today’s convoluted benefits system, worlds away from the contributory, insurance-based system of the past. It has become overloaded with sanctions as politicians compete to become ever more punitive to demonstrate there’s no such thing as something for nothing. So people who have been laid off find themselves pushed further into hardship after having their benefits docked for reasons outside their control. Wouldn’t it be easier to eradicate that inhumane, overbearing complexity, and replace it with something that gives people more breathing room to find the right job?
But, like so many ideas overstretched to become the answer to all problems, a basic income falls short on all of the above. If we could be bothered, we could fix the caring issue simply by increasing the generosity of the stingy state benefits paid to those who care full-time for older people or adults with disabilities. If we were so inclined, we could get rid of punitive benefit sanctions and replace them with a welfare-to-work system that puts much more emphasis on training and support for people to find the job that is right for them, not the first that comes along.
But it is in its most ambitious and radical incarnations that basic income runs aground. People have been predicting the end of work for a long time. Guess what: whether they count themselves utopian or dystopian, they have always been proved wrong. The wheel, the loom, the washing machine, the PC: as innovation after innovation has replaced some forms of human labour, the steady march of progress has replaced that labour with something else.
It’s tempting to think our inventions are more transformative than those of our ancestors. But it’s much more likely that, as in the past, technology will radically reshape the world of work without reducing its sum total. That’s partly because the idea that there is a set amount of paid work to be done is an error, which economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”. In fact, the richer we get, the more cash we have to spend – creating more demand and more jobs.
None of this should take away from the fact that we have some serious challenges ahead. The idea that the labour market is being reshaped rather than shrunk won’t be very comforting to taxi drivers losing their jobs to self-driving cars and finding they lack the skills for the new ones being created. But paying people a meagre basic income won’t help: we know from deindustrialisation in the past that leaving people who get laid off languishing on long-term benefits wreaks untold damage on working lives curtailed decades too early.
Britain has also always had too many low-skill, low-paid jobs offering poor prospects of progression. That should seriously worry us, particularly in the light of new research that suggests having a low-paid, stressful job is even worse for your mental health than unemployment.
Far from robots stealing jobs, the reality of today’s economy is that many companies are underinvesting in technology, suppressing productivity growth. In some sectors, labour is so cheap and easily exploitable it doesn’t make sense to modernise – for instance, Leicester’s garment industry is still heavily reliant on old-fashioned sweatshop models. In sectors such as parcel delivery and logistics, technology itself is being used to turn workers into quasi-robots. Wrist-based devices measure routes workers take round the warehouse or delivery rounds to check them for speed and efficiency, and track them right down to how long they take for toilet breaks.
The answer cannot be to accept this sorry state of affairs and try to patch things up with a basic income. It must be to address the fundamental power imbalances that allow employers to shift risk on to their employees by forcing them to become self-employed contractors, or refusing to pay them for breaks. And to develop long-term solutions for improving the quality of work.
You can see the attractions of a basic income for Silicon Valley. Firms such as Uber, whose drivers are classified as self-employed “partners” rely on this risk-shift model. Even as Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, heaps praise on a basic income, the tech giant does all in its legal power to avoid tax and dodge paying its fair share towards the social infrastructure it relies on. The left must not allow itself to be seduced. A basic income is a distraction from these core issues of economic power; a radical-sounding excuse to look the other way from the less glamorous, more complex question of how to ensure labour market rights are properly enforced. Accepting a deterioration in employment rights and working conditions in exchange for a basic income could be dangerously counterproductive.
The tax credits that function as income top-ups for people in low-paid work have steadily been eroded by Conservative chancellors over eight years. Labour rights are more future proof: it’s impossible to imagine the government being able to cut statutory maternity leave, the minimum wage or limits on the working week without a much tougher fight – although if they are not properly enforced these rights can end up meaning little in practice for workers with unscrupulous employers.
The left will have to pick its battles. It must focus on winning the right to a decently paid job for all, not sell out by extolling a basic income as a panacea for the ills of the modern labour market. It must choose the fight for power, not the fight for a dribble of cash.
There aren’t many ideas that unite trade unionists, the libertarian right, the green movement, and the Silicon Valley tech scene . But that’s the rainbow alliance backing a universal basic income, a centuries-old idea posited as the solution to a range of 21st-century problems. Is its surprising coalition of bedfellows a sign of an idea whose time has at last resoundingly come – or a symptom of a catch-all, superficial fix in search of a problem?
Universal basic income, sometimes called a citizens’ income, is the idea that the state should pay every adult citizen a regular, modest income. It is a no-strings payment, so unlike benefits currently available to people of working age, it is not means tested. You get it regardless of whether you have a job, are looking for work, or whether you are even willing to work.
A basic income has long counted on support from the political fringes. It has appealed to radical feminists and greens frustrated by capitalist failure to properly value non-monetary work, such as care. The libertarian right embraces it as an opportunity to roll back the bureaucracy of the state, replacing public services with a simple, regular cash payment, to be spent as people wish.
But the real reason for basic income’s unlikely elevation to idea of the moment is the growing chorus of thinkers who seem to believe the modern economy can’t function without it. Tech utopians talk up the rise of robots and the development of artificial intelligence, which they say will leave less work to go round. They argue that this is the perfect opportunity to embrace a four-day working week and top everyone up with a basic income payment.
Labour market dystopians, on the other hand, rightly point to growing insecurity in the low-paid labour market and the millennials bouncing from gig to gig, never quite pinning down the security of a permanent contract. For them, a basic income is the poverty backstop that could help people cope with this brave new world.
Ken Loachian welfare critics, meanwhile, denounce today’s convoluted benefits system, worlds away from the contributory, insurance-based system of the past. It has become overloaded with sanctions as politicians compete to become ever more punitive to demonstrate there’s no such thing as something for nothing. So people who have been laid off find themselves pushed further into hardship after having their benefits docked for reasons outside their control. Wouldn’t it be easier to eradicate that inhumane, overbearing complexity, and replace it with something that gives people more breathing room to find the right job?
But, like so many ideas overstretched to become the answer to all problems, a basic income falls short on all of the above. If we could be bothered, we could fix the caring issue simply by increasing the generosity of the stingy state benefits paid to those who care full-time for older people or adults with disabilities. If we were so inclined, we could get rid of punitive benefit sanctions and replace them with a welfare-to-work system that puts much more emphasis on training and support for people to find the job that is right for them, not the first that comes along.
But it is in its most ambitious and radical incarnations that basic income runs aground. People have been predicting the end of work for a long time. Guess what: whether they count themselves utopian or dystopian, they have always been proved wrong. The wheel, the loom, the washing machine, the PC: as innovation after innovation has replaced some forms of human labour, the steady march of progress has replaced that labour with something else.
It’s tempting to think our inventions are more transformative than those of our ancestors. But it’s much more likely that, as in the past, technology will radically reshape the world of work without reducing its sum total. That’s partly because the idea that there is a set amount of paid work to be done is an error, which economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”. In fact, the richer we get, the more cash we have to spend – creating more demand and more jobs.
None of this should take away from the fact that we have some serious challenges ahead. The idea that the labour market is being reshaped rather than shrunk won’t be very comforting to taxi drivers losing their jobs to self-driving cars and finding they lack the skills for the new ones being created. But paying people a meagre basic income won’t help: we know from deindustrialisation in the past that leaving people who get laid off languishing on long-term benefits wreaks untold damage on working lives curtailed decades too early.
Britain has also always had too many low-skill, low-paid jobs offering poor prospects of progression. That should seriously worry us, particularly in the light of new research that suggests having a low-paid, stressful job is even worse for your mental health than unemployment.
Far from robots stealing jobs, the reality of today’s economy is that many companies are underinvesting in technology, suppressing productivity growth. In some sectors, labour is so cheap and easily exploitable it doesn’t make sense to modernise – for instance, Leicester’s garment industry is still heavily reliant on old-fashioned sweatshop models. In sectors such as parcel delivery and logistics, technology itself is being used to turn workers into quasi-robots. Wrist-based devices measure routes workers take round the warehouse or delivery rounds to check them for speed and efficiency, and track them right down to how long they take for toilet breaks.
The answer cannot be to accept this sorry state of affairs and try to patch things up with a basic income. It must be to address the fundamental power imbalances that allow employers to shift risk on to their employees by forcing them to become self-employed contractors, or refusing to pay them for breaks. And to develop long-term solutions for improving the quality of work.
You can see the attractions of a basic income for Silicon Valley. Firms such as Uber, whose drivers are classified as self-employed “partners” rely on this risk-shift model. Even as Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, heaps praise on a basic income, the tech giant does all in its legal power to avoid tax and dodge paying its fair share towards the social infrastructure it relies on. The left must not allow itself to be seduced. A basic income is a distraction from these core issues of economic power; a radical-sounding excuse to look the other way from the less glamorous, more complex question of how to ensure labour market rights are properly enforced. Accepting a deterioration in employment rights and working conditions in exchange for a basic income could be dangerously counterproductive.
The tax credits that function as income top-ups for people in low-paid work have steadily been eroded by Conservative chancellors over eight years. Labour rights are more future proof: it’s impossible to imagine the government being able to cut statutory maternity leave, the minimum wage or limits on the working week without a much tougher fight – although if they are not properly enforced these rights can end up meaning little in practice for workers with unscrupulous employers.
The left will have to pick its battles. It must focus on winning the right to a decently paid job for all, not sell out by extolling a basic income as a panacea for the ills of the modern labour market. It must choose the fight for power, not the fight for a dribble of cash.
Monday, 6 March 2017
Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty
Rutger Bregman in The Guardian
Why do poor people make so many bad decisions? It’s a harsh question, but look at the data: poor people borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthily. Why?
Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect”. Though not many would go quite so far, the view that there’s something wrong with poor people is not exceptional. To be honest, it was how I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.
It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later I discussed the theory with Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioural science and public policy at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study. The reason, put simply: it’s the context, stupid. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s time, money or food, it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. This narrows your focus to your immediate deficiency. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
‘Indian sugar cane farmers scored much worse on IQ tests before the harvest than after.’ Photograph: Ajay Verma/REUTERS
Suddenly the reason so many of our anti-poverty programmes don’t work becomes clear. Investments in education, for example, are often completely useless. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it makes almost no difference at all. Poor people might come out wiser, but it’s not enough. As Shafir said: “It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.”
So what can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions. We could make the paperwork easier, or send people a text message to remind them of their bills. These “nudges” are hugely popular with modern politicians, because they cost next to nothing. They are a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the causes.
I asked Shafir: “Why keep tinkering around the edges rather than just handing out more resources?” “You mean just hand out more money? Sure, that would be great,” he said. “But given the evident limitations … the brand of leftwing politics you have in Amsterdam doesn’t even exist in the States.”
But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history’s leading thinkers. Thomas More hinted at it in Utopia, more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Friedman.
It’s an incredibly simple idea: universal basic income – a monthly allowance of enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. And it’s completely unconditional: not a favour, but a right.
But could it really be that simple? In the three years that followed, I read all I could find about basic income. I researched dozens of experiments that have been conducted across the globe. And it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon the story of a town that had done it, had eradicated poverty – after which nearly everyone forgot about it.
‘Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line.’ Photograph: Barrett & MacKay/Getty Images/All Canada Photos
This story starts in Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine a warehouse attic where nearly 2,000 boxes lie gathering dust. They are filled with data – graphs, tables, interviews – about one of the most fascinating social experiments ever conducted. Evelyn Forget, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2009. Stepping into the attic, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was a treasure trove of information on basic income.
The experiment had started in Dauphin, a town north-west of Winnipeg, in 1974. Everybody was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. And for four years, all went well. But then a conservative government was voted into power. The new Canadian cabinet saw little point in the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left for an analysis of the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away. In 2,000 boxes.
When Forget found them, 30 years later, no one knew what, if anything, the experiment had demonstrated. For three years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis. And no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment – the longest and best of its kind – had been a resounding success.
Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of children improved substantially. The hospitalisation rate decreased by as much as 8.5%. Domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn’t quit their jobs – the only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students, who stayed in school longer.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need, instead of things experts think they need
So here’s what I’ve learned. When it comes to poverty, we should stop pretending to know better than poor people. The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need. Imagine how many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, scientists and writers are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can’t afford not to do it – poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the US are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education and more crime. It’s an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country’s current military budget, to do what Dauphin did long ago: eradicate poverty.
That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.
We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, and we’ve got the means. Now, 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, we need to update our worldview. Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
Why do poor people make so many bad decisions? It’s a harsh question, but look at the data: poor people borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthily. Why?
Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect”. Though not many would go quite so far, the view that there’s something wrong with poor people is not exceptional. To be honest, it was how I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.
It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later I discussed the theory with Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioural science and public policy at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study. The reason, put simply: it’s the context, stupid. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s time, money or food, it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. This narrows your focus to your immediate deficiency. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
‘Indian sugar cane farmers scored much worse on IQ tests before the harvest than after.’ Photograph: Ajay Verma/REUTERS
Suddenly the reason so many of our anti-poverty programmes don’t work becomes clear. Investments in education, for example, are often completely useless. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it makes almost no difference at all. Poor people might come out wiser, but it’s not enough. As Shafir said: “It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.”
So what can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions. We could make the paperwork easier, or send people a text message to remind them of their bills. These “nudges” are hugely popular with modern politicians, because they cost next to nothing. They are a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the causes.
I asked Shafir: “Why keep tinkering around the edges rather than just handing out more resources?” “You mean just hand out more money? Sure, that would be great,” he said. “But given the evident limitations … the brand of leftwing politics you have in Amsterdam doesn’t even exist in the States.”
But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history’s leading thinkers. Thomas More hinted at it in Utopia, more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Friedman.
It’s an incredibly simple idea: universal basic income – a monthly allowance of enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. And it’s completely unconditional: not a favour, but a right.
But could it really be that simple? In the three years that followed, I read all I could find about basic income. I researched dozens of experiments that have been conducted across the globe. And it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon the story of a town that had done it, had eradicated poverty – after which nearly everyone forgot about it.
‘Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line.’ Photograph: Barrett & MacKay/Getty Images/All Canada Photos
This story starts in Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine a warehouse attic where nearly 2,000 boxes lie gathering dust. They are filled with data – graphs, tables, interviews – about one of the most fascinating social experiments ever conducted. Evelyn Forget, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2009. Stepping into the attic, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was a treasure trove of information on basic income.
The experiment had started in Dauphin, a town north-west of Winnipeg, in 1974. Everybody was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. And for four years, all went well. But then a conservative government was voted into power. The new Canadian cabinet saw little point in the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left for an analysis of the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away. In 2,000 boxes.
When Forget found them, 30 years later, no one knew what, if anything, the experiment had demonstrated. For three years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis. And no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment – the longest and best of its kind – had been a resounding success.
Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of children improved substantially. The hospitalisation rate decreased by as much as 8.5%. Domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn’t quit their jobs – the only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students, who stayed in school longer.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need, instead of things experts think they need
So here’s what I’ve learned. When it comes to poverty, we should stop pretending to know better than poor people. The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need. Imagine how many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, scientists and writers are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can’t afford not to do it – poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the US are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education and more crime. It’s an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country’s current military budget, to do what Dauphin did long ago: eradicate poverty.
That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.
We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, and we’ve got the means. Now, 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, we need to update our worldview. Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
Wednesday, 1 February 2017
The hidden agenda behind Benevolence - An Indian critique of Universal Basic Income
G Sampath in The Hindu
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground globally. While Switzerland held a referendum on it last year (it was voted down), Finland introduced it earlier this month. Media reports suggest that the government of India’s flagship Economic Survey this year is likely to endorse the UBI, setting the stage for its introduction.
On the face of it, an unconditional basic income for everyone seems a great idea. In the West, the UBI is being discussed as a solution to two problems: unemployment due to automation; and growing social unrest caused by extreme inequality and precarity. It is expected to solve the unemployment problem by decoupling subsistence from jobs, freeing human beings to realise their true potential, preferably through entrepreneurship. It would address the second by supplying monetary resources to access the necessities of life. This, in a nutshell, is the popular understanding of the UBI. The reality, however, is not so rosy.
The UBI debate in India has been a narrow one — restricted, for the most part, to financial viability. Its advocates argue that it is a more efficient way of delivering welfare, while its opponents hold that the fiscal burden would be too much. What hasn’t received adequate attention is the politics behind the UBI: who is pushing the idea? To what end? And why?
The UBI evangelists
The most eloquent advocates of UBI today are free-market enthusiasts — the same lot branded as neo-liberals for their advocacy of deregulation, privatisation, and cuts in welfare spending. Their guru, Milton Friedman, was an early advocate of basic income. Outside the academic realm, the biggest champion of UBI is the global tech sector. Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have publicly backed the idea.
Could it be possible that the global financial elite have finally sprouted a conscience? The reports of the UBI pilot projects conducted so far offer a clue. Invariably, they all present the same conclusion: giving cash to the poor is better than traditional welfare.
Of course, it would be wonderful if the problem of inequality and poverty were solved for us by a sudden moral awakening of the rich. Unfortunately, the current enthusiasm for the UBI is not the product of such a momentous development.
Not an add-on benefit
The biggest myth about the UBI, partly responsible for sections of the Left endorsing it, is that it is a redistributive policy that would reduce inequality. It is indeed possible to have a redistributive UBI. But it would need to fulfil two conditions: it must be funded by taxing the wealthy; and the existing entitlements to the poor must not be taken away. Such a UBI would actually be a socialist measure that would increase the bargaining power of the working classes by giving them an income cushion.
But neither of these conditions is met by any of the UBI designs being promoted today, either globally or in India. The much-touted Finnish experiment is restricted to the unemployed. It does not cover all working individuals. And it only replaces the already existing basic unemployment allowance and labour market subsidy — it is not an add-on benefit.
In India, too, the UBI is not an add-on. On the contrary, it is about giving in a different form (cash), and under one umbrella, what is already being given (in-kind and cash benefits) via different channels.
Back in 2008, in an influential paper in the Economic and Political Weekly titled ‘The case for direct cash transfers to the poor’, Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser of the government, along with economists Devesh Kapur and Partha Mukhopadhyay, argued that the ₹1,80,000 crore spent annually on centrally sponsored schemes and assorted subsidies should instead be distributed as cash directly to 70 million households below the poverty line. Put simply, the UBI in India is nothing but the old wine of direct cash transfer in a fancy new bottle.
Its objective remains the same: to eliminate the public distribution system (PDS) and with it, the food, fuel, and fertiliser subsidies. The same old arguments for replacing the PDS with cash transfers are now being trotted out in favour of the UBI. The addition of the word ‘universal’ signals greater ambition but alters neither the substance nor the motive.
But let us take the arguments in favour at face value. What constitutes a basic income? Common sense dictates that it should be whatever is required to take care of basic life needs. A logical equivalent for this figure would be the minimum wage. The central government’s move last year to raise the minimum wage for non-skilled, non-agricultural workers to ₹9,100 per month was set aside following opposition from industry. Perhaps ₹9,100 per month is too luxurious an income to qualify as ‘basic’. The actual minimum wage in India is around ₹4,800 per month. Could we then expect at least this amount from our UBI?
While different numbers have been bandied about, there seems to be a broad consensus around the Tendulkar committee poverty line of ₹33 a day. This works out to a basic income of ₹1,000-₹1,250 a month or ₹12,000-₹15,000 a year. But even this modest figure is estimated to cost 11-12% of the GDP. In contrast, all the government’s subsidies put together account for only 4-4.5% of the GDP. This presents three options: one, the government makes up the deficit through additional tax revenue; two, it limits the fiscal burden by shrinking the UBI coverage from ‘universal’ to those below the poverty line; and three, it further shrinks the amount being doled out.
Given India’s narrow tax base, and a policy mindset hostile to the idea of extracting more tax revenue from the wealthy, we can rule out option one. So the UBI we get, if we get one, would be derived from a combination of the second and third options, which means both ‘U’ and ‘B’ are out of UBI, leaving us effectively with what we already have: cash transfers.
Most critically, one aspect is taken for granted by all the three options: the UBI will be funded primarily by the money allocated for CSS and subsidies. In other words, a basic income, however paltry, would help strengthen the case for the elimination or a significant roll-back of programmes such as the PDS, midday meal schemes, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
Why a UBI now?
There is no point reprising here the case against direct cash transfers, which economists such as Jean Dreze have made convincingly. It is nonetheless fascinating to see the emerging contours of a distinctive political project.
The Jan-Dhan Yojana set out to make every Indian accessible to global finance. The Aadhaar card set out to make every Indian identifiable and enumerable as data — the currency of global tech. The high mobile penetration has connected every Indian to the global digital network. An element that was missing was consumer behaviour, which the recent demonetisation sought to address, by force-feeding ‘cashless’ to a cash-dependent population. The UBI fits perfectly in this scheme of things, as it seeks to compress the whole gamut of welfare benefits into one, and mount it on a singular JAM (Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) platform.
But why a UBI now? One explanation could be the immense pressure on India in secretive free trade negotiations. The developed nations have for long wanted India to wind up its food security-related provisions — both state procurement of foodgrains, and their subsidised distribution via PDS. A UBI would pave the way for the elimination of these measures, dealing a death blow to food security and deepening farm distress.
Another is that the Indian state is stuck with welfare commitments it cannot renege on without political and legal consequences. The efficiency/inefficiency argument for scraping PDS and MGNREGS never acknowledges that these are rights-based social entitlements with specified outcomes — and that is not accidental. Shifting the welfare paradigm to UBI would loosen the bonds of legal and social accountability. Under the PDS, for instance, the state must provide a specified quantity of foodgrains to the poor no matter what. With UBI, it has the option letting the payout slide behind inflation, as has already happened with the old age and widow pensions.
In the final analysis, we need to answer a simple question: is the UBI about reducing inequality and poverty? If the answer is yes, then there are many things the state could do at a fraction of what the UBI would cost — from enforcing the minimum wage law, to releasing funds on time for MGNREGS. But if a dispensation hostile to these tried and tested anti-poverty measures develops a sudden zeal to eliminate poverty through UBI, a measure of scepticism is in order.
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground globally. While Switzerland held a referendum on it last year (it was voted down), Finland introduced it earlier this month. Media reports suggest that the government of India’s flagship Economic Survey this year is likely to endorse the UBI, setting the stage for its introduction.
On the face of it, an unconditional basic income for everyone seems a great idea. In the West, the UBI is being discussed as a solution to two problems: unemployment due to automation; and growing social unrest caused by extreme inequality and precarity. It is expected to solve the unemployment problem by decoupling subsistence from jobs, freeing human beings to realise their true potential, preferably through entrepreneurship. It would address the second by supplying monetary resources to access the necessities of life. This, in a nutshell, is the popular understanding of the UBI. The reality, however, is not so rosy.
The UBI debate in India has been a narrow one — restricted, for the most part, to financial viability. Its advocates argue that it is a more efficient way of delivering welfare, while its opponents hold that the fiscal burden would be too much. What hasn’t received adequate attention is the politics behind the UBI: who is pushing the idea? To what end? And why?
The UBI evangelists
The most eloquent advocates of UBI today are free-market enthusiasts — the same lot branded as neo-liberals for their advocacy of deregulation, privatisation, and cuts in welfare spending. Their guru, Milton Friedman, was an early advocate of basic income. Outside the academic realm, the biggest champion of UBI is the global tech sector. Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have publicly backed the idea.
Could it be possible that the global financial elite have finally sprouted a conscience? The reports of the UBI pilot projects conducted so far offer a clue. Invariably, they all present the same conclusion: giving cash to the poor is better than traditional welfare.
Of course, it would be wonderful if the problem of inequality and poverty were solved for us by a sudden moral awakening of the rich. Unfortunately, the current enthusiasm for the UBI is not the product of such a momentous development.
Not an add-on benefit
The biggest myth about the UBI, partly responsible for sections of the Left endorsing it, is that it is a redistributive policy that would reduce inequality. It is indeed possible to have a redistributive UBI. But it would need to fulfil two conditions: it must be funded by taxing the wealthy; and the existing entitlements to the poor must not be taken away. Such a UBI would actually be a socialist measure that would increase the bargaining power of the working classes by giving them an income cushion.
But neither of these conditions is met by any of the UBI designs being promoted today, either globally or in India. The much-touted Finnish experiment is restricted to the unemployed. It does not cover all working individuals. And it only replaces the already existing basic unemployment allowance and labour market subsidy — it is not an add-on benefit.
In India, too, the UBI is not an add-on. On the contrary, it is about giving in a different form (cash), and under one umbrella, what is already being given (in-kind and cash benefits) via different channels.
Back in 2008, in an influential paper in the Economic and Political Weekly titled ‘The case for direct cash transfers to the poor’, Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser of the government, along with economists Devesh Kapur and Partha Mukhopadhyay, argued that the ₹1,80,000 crore spent annually on centrally sponsored schemes and assorted subsidies should instead be distributed as cash directly to 70 million households below the poverty line. Put simply, the UBI in India is nothing but the old wine of direct cash transfer in a fancy new bottle.
Its objective remains the same: to eliminate the public distribution system (PDS) and with it, the food, fuel, and fertiliser subsidies. The same old arguments for replacing the PDS with cash transfers are now being trotted out in favour of the UBI. The addition of the word ‘universal’ signals greater ambition but alters neither the substance nor the motive.
But let us take the arguments in favour at face value. What constitutes a basic income? Common sense dictates that it should be whatever is required to take care of basic life needs. A logical equivalent for this figure would be the minimum wage. The central government’s move last year to raise the minimum wage for non-skilled, non-agricultural workers to ₹9,100 per month was set aside following opposition from industry. Perhaps ₹9,100 per month is too luxurious an income to qualify as ‘basic’. The actual minimum wage in India is around ₹4,800 per month. Could we then expect at least this amount from our UBI?
While different numbers have been bandied about, there seems to be a broad consensus around the Tendulkar committee poverty line of ₹33 a day. This works out to a basic income of ₹1,000-₹1,250 a month or ₹12,000-₹15,000 a year. But even this modest figure is estimated to cost 11-12% of the GDP. In contrast, all the government’s subsidies put together account for only 4-4.5% of the GDP. This presents three options: one, the government makes up the deficit through additional tax revenue; two, it limits the fiscal burden by shrinking the UBI coverage from ‘universal’ to those below the poverty line; and three, it further shrinks the amount being doled out.
Given India’s narrow tax base, and a policy mindset hostile to the idea of extracting more tax revenue from the wealthy, we can rule out option one. So the UBI we get, if we get one, would be derived from a combination of the second and third options, which means both ‘U’ and ‘B’ are out of UBI, leaving us effectively with what we already have: cash transfers.
Most critically, one aspect is taken for granted by all the three options: the UBI will be funded primarily by the money allocated for CSS and subsidies. In other words, a basic income, however paltry, would help strengthen the case for the elimination or a significant roll-back of programmes such as the PDS, midday meal schemes, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).
Why a UBI now?
There is no point reprising here the case against direct cash transfers, which economists such as Jean Dreze have made convincingly. It is nonetheless fascinating to see the emerging contours of a distinctive political project.
The Jan-Dhan Yojana set out to make every Indian accessible to global finance. The Aadhaar card set out to make every Indian identifiable and enumerable as data — the currency of global tech. The high mobile penetration has connected every Indian to the global digital network. An element that was missing was consumer behaviour, which the recent demonetisation sought to address, by force-feeding ‘cashless’ to a cash-dependent population. The UBI fits perfectly in this scheme of things, as it seeks to compress the whole gamut of welfare benefits into one, and mount it on a singular JAM (Jan-Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) platform.
But why a UBI now? One explanation could be the immense pressure on India in secretive free trade negotiations. The developed nations have for long wanted India to wind up its food security-related provisions — both state procurement of foodgrains, and their subsidised distribution via PDS. A UBI would pave the way for the elimination of these measures, dealing a death blow to food security and deepening farm distress.
Another is that the Indian state is stuck with welfare commitments it cannot renege on without political and legal consequences. The efficiency/inefficiency argument for scraping PDS and MGNREGS never acknowledges that these are rights-based social entitlements with specified outcomes — and that is not accidental. Shifting the welfare paradigm to UBI would loosen the bonds of legal and social accountability. Under the PDS, for instance, the state must provide a specified quantity of foodgrains to the poor no matter what. With UBI, it has the option letting the payout slide behind inflation, as has already happened with the old age and widow pensions.
In the final analysis, we need to answer a simple question: is the UBI about reducing inequality and poverty? If the answer is yes, then there are many things the state could do at a fraction of what the UBI would cost — from enforcing the minimum wage law, to releasing funds on time for MGNREGS. But if a dispensation hostile to these tried and tested anti-poverty measures develops a sudden zeal to eliminate poverty through UBI, a measure of scepticism is in order.
Tuesday, 3 January 2017
Basic income is the latest bad political idea that refuses to die
John Rentoul in The Independent
The zombie policy of the universal basic income is the first to rise from the grave of well-intentioned impractical ideas in 2017. Labour-controlled Glasgow city council is the latest to announce that it intends to investigate a pilot scheme.
There is a reason why the basic income is the eternal news story. Someone, somewhere, is always saying what a marvellous idea it is. Some local government, or much less often a national government, is saying that it is going to look at it, or going to bring in a pilot scheme or even, every now and again, actually bring in a pilot scheme, which usually involves something which is nothing like a basic income.
Last year Elon Musk, John McDonnell and the Scottish National Party said what a marvellous idea it is. Fife council in Scotland is also looking at it. Two Canadian provinces are said to be interested, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the second of which is normally useful only for pub quizzes.
But the big one is Finland, an entire country, which is going to do a pilot, selecting 2,000 unemployed people at random and giving them a monthly income of about £500, which is more than unemployment benefit but less than a living income. After two years, they will find out whether the scheme has encouraged people to work, given that the participants will be able to keep every euro cent that they earn (after tax).
The idea behind the basic income is lovely. It is that, if the state gives every citizen enough to live on as a right of citizenship, they will accept irregular, part-time or precarious work because they won’t lose welfare benefits if they do so. It is particularly appealing to people who think that the world of work in the future is going to be irregular, part-time and precarious, with people taking portfolios of jobs and being encouraged to become entrepreneurial risk-takers by the safety net of the basic income.
The practice, however, is very expensive. One rudimentary scheme worked out for the UK by Malcolm Torry – and remember that he is an advocate of the basic income – proposed an income of £8,320 a year, to replace all benefits except housing and council-tax benefit. That is hardly a generous annual stipend, and yet if it is to be funded through the income tax system it would require the rates of income tax to go up from 20, 40 and 45 per cent to 48, 68 and 73 per cent. That means anyone on today’s average full-time earnings of about £27,000 a year would lose out, because although the £8,320 a year would make up for losing the income-tax personal allowance, every pound of earnings would be taxed, and more heavily.
And that proposed scheme doesn’t even abolish housing benefit. One of the reasons it cannot is that housing is so much more expensive in London that to set the basic income high enough for the capital would make the scheme unaffordable at any tax rates.
The alert and sceptical reader will have noted that the Finnish scheme isn’t even remotely a basic income, because it is limited to unemployed people. It is therefore merely an experiment in the incentive effects of paying higher unemployment benefit.
The problems of the basic income have been explained again and again, by people who have actually worked on social security policy making and implementation. But journalists and politicians naturally seize on ideas that seem to offer neat and plausible solutions to difficult problems. Elon Musk says robots mean we will have to have a basic income, because traditional salaried jobs will disappear. That doesn’t follow, and besides, most workers in rich countries still work in traditional salaried jobs and will go on doing so for the foreseeable future. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, says “we can win the argument” on a basic income. And yet he hasn’t even begun to try.
None of which would matter very much, except that it would be good for the democratic health of this country to have an opposition that came up with practical policies rather than pie in the sky. The worst thing about the basic income is that it is a tragic misdirection of a compassionate, egalitarian and libertarian impulse: to do something about the often counter-productive interaction of the benefits system with the world of employment.
If only the advocates of the basic income in Britain would devote their attention to the cuts in tax credits that are still pencilled in for remainder of this parliament (Philip Hammond refused to do anything more than soften them slightly at the edges in his Autumn Statement). If it’s grand, universal reform of the benefits system you want, study the everlasting disaster of the Universal Credit system and devise a practical way to make that work, instead of diverting your energies into campaigning for the schemes of impractical dreamers.
The zombie policy of the universal basic income is the first to rise from the grave of well-intentioned impractical ideas in 2017. Labour-controlled Glasgow city council is the latest to announce that it intends to investigate a pilot scheme.
There is a reason why the basic income is the eternal news story. Someone, somewhere, is always saying what a marvellous idea it is. Some local government, or much less often a national government, is saying that it is going to look at it, or going to bring in a pilot scheme or even, every now and again, actually bring in a pilot scheme, which usually involves something which is nothing like a basic income.
Last year Elon Musk, John McDonnell and the Scottish National Party said what a marvellous idea it is. Fife council in Scotland is also looking at it. Two Canadian provinces are said to be interested, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the second of which is normally useful only for pub quizzes.
But the big one is Finland, an entire country, which is going to do a pilot, selecting 2,000 unemployed people at random and giving them a monthly income of about £500, which is more than unemployment benefit but less than a living income. After two years, they will find out whether the scheme has encouraged people to work, given that the participants will be able to keep every euro cent that they earn (after tax).
The idea behind the basic income is lovely. It is that, if the state gives every citizen enough to live on as a right of citizenship, they will accept irregular, part-time or precarious work because they won’t lose welfare benefits if they do so. It is particularly appealing to people who think that the world of work in the future is going to be irregular, part-time and precarious, with people taking portfolios of jobs and being encouraged to become entrepreneurial risk-takers by the safety net of the basic income.
The practice, however, is very expensive. One rudimentary scheme worked out for the UK by Malcolm Torry – and remember that he is an advocate of the basic income – proposed an income of £8,320 a year, to replace all benefits except housing and council-tax benefit. That is hardly a generous annual stipend, and yet if it is to be funded through the income tax system it would require the rates of income tax to go up from 20, 40 and 45 per cent to 48, 68 and 73 per cent. That means anyone on today’s average full-time earnings of about £27,000 a year would lose out, because although the £8,320 a year would make up for losing the income-tax personal allowance, every pound of earnings would be taxed, and more heavily.
And that proposed scheme doesn’t even abolish housing benefit. One of the reasons it cannot is that housing is so much more expensive in London that to set the basic income high enough for the capital would make the scheme unaffordable at any tax rates.
The alert and sceptical reader will have noted that the Finnish scheme isn’t even remotely a basic income, because it is limited to unemployed people. It is therefore merely an experiment in the incentive effects of paying higher unemployment benefit.
The problems of the basic income have been explained again and again, by people who have actually worked on social security policy making and implementation. But journalists and politicians naturally seize on ideas that seem to offer neat and plausible solutions to difficult problems. Elon Musk says robots mean we will have to have a basic income, because traditional salaried jobs will disappear. That doesn’t follow, and besides, most workers in rich countries still work in traditional salaried jobs and will go on doing so for the foreseeable future. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, says “we can win the argument” on a basic income. And yet he hasn’t even begun to try.
None of which would matter very much, except that it would be good for the democratic health of this country to have an opposition that came up with practical policies rather than pie in the sky. The worst thing about the basic income is that it is a tragic misdirection of a compassionate, egalitarian and libertarian impulse: to do something about the often counter-productive interaction of the benefits system with the world of employment.
If only the advocates of the basic income in Britain would devote their attention to the cuts in tax credits that are still pencilled in for remainder of this parliament (Philip Hammond refused to do anything more than soften them slightly at the edges in his Autumn Statement). If it’s grand, universal reform of the benefits system you want, study the everlasting disaster of the Universal Credit system and devise a practical way to make that work, instead of diverting your energies into campaigning for the schemes of impractical dreamers.
Sunday, 1 January 2017
Universal basic income trials being considered in Scotland
Libby Brooks in The Guardian
Scotland looks set to be the first part of the UK to pilot a basic income for every citizen, as councils in Fife and Glasgow investigate trial schemes in 2017.
The councillor Matt Kerr has been championing the idea through the ornate halls of Glasgow City Chambers, and is frank about the challenges it poses.
“Like a lot of people, I was interested in the idea but never completely convinced,” he said. But working as Labour’s anti-poverty lead on the council, Kerr says that he “kept coming back to the basic income”.
Kerr sees the basic income as a way of simplifying the UK’s byzantine welfare system. “But it is also about solidarity: it says that everyone is valued and the government will support you. It changes the relationship between the individual and the state.”
The concept of a universal basic income revolves around the idea of offering every individual, regardless of existing welfare benefits or earned income, a non-conditional flat-rate payment, with any income earned above that taxed progressively. The intention is to provide a basic economic platform on which people can build their lives, whether they choose to earn, learn, care or set up a business.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has suggested that it is likely to appear in his party’s next manifesto, while there has been a groundswell of interest among anti-poverty groups who see it as a means of changing not only the relationship between people and the state, but between workers and increasingly insecure employment in the gig economy.
Kerr accepts that, while he is hopeful of cross-party support in Glasgow, there are “months of work ahead”, including first arranging a feasibility study in order to present a strong enough evidence base for a pilot. “But if there is ever a case to be made then you need to test it in a place like Glasgow, with the sheer numbers and levels of health inequality. If you can make it work here then it can work anywhere.”
The idea has its roots in 16th-century humanist philosophy, when it was developed by the likes of Thomas More, but in its modern incarnation it has lately enjoyed successful pilots in India and Africa.
Despite its utopian roots, champions believe that this is an idea whose time has come, particularly in Scotland where the governing SNP voted in support of a basic income at their spring conference (although the proposal has yet to make it into their manifesto).
At the heart of any experiment with basic income is money: how much should people get and where will it come from? Kerr says his instinct is to base the amount on similar calculations to those made for the living wage.
“It’s about having more than just enough to pay the bills. But part of the idea of doing a pilot is to make mistakes and also find out what is acceptable to the public. There will be a lot of resistance to this. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Part of the problem is we’re working against a whole discourse of deserving and undeserving poor.”
As for where the money comes from, “the funding question is always the big one, and really will depend upon the approach a pilot takes,” says Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, which has been spearheading research on the subject across the UK.
Drawing on the experience of similar projects ongoing in Finland, Utrecht in the Netherland and Ontario in Canada, Cooke suggests: “It could be funding from particular trusts, it could be individual philanthropic funding, as we have seen in the States, or it could be a redirection of the existing welfare spend.” Obviously the latter is much harder to do in a pilot, although that will be happening in Finland next year where the experiment is being taken forward by the national government.
As the Scottish government consults on what it has described as “the biggest transfer of powers since devolution began” – the devolution of around £2.7bn, or 15% of the total Scottish benefits bill, affecting 1.4 million people – both Kerr and Cooke believe that this is an ideal moment to consider the basic income seriously. “It’s a time to be testing out new – or rather old – ideas for a welfare system that genuinely supports independence,” says Kerr.
Cooke likewise believes that cross-party support is key, pointing to the fact that the leader of the Conservative group on Fife council has joined forces with the Fairer Fife Commission, the council’s independent poverty advisory group which initially recommended the trial, with the aim of designing a pilot within the next six months.
Scotland was recently added to the list of “places to watch” for basic income activity by the Basic Income Earth Network, founded by the radical economist Guy Standing, whose hugely influential book The Precariat identified an emerging social class suffering the worst of job insecurity and most likely to be attracted to rightwing populism.
“The thing about Scotland is that they really understand the precariat,” says Standing, who recently visited the country to meet civil servants, local authorities and campaigners to discuss a basic income. “The sense of insecurity, the stagnating living standards, all of those things are clear in Scotland and the fact that so many within the SNP are supportive means there’s a real opportunity to do a pilot in Scotland.”
The momentum is there, he says, and once it is framed around a desire for greater social justice “then you get away from the stale debate about whether if you give people the basic income then they will be lazy”.
“People relate to the idea that everyone should have a social dividend. Everywhere I go, it’s the communities that feel left behind by globalisation that are most interested [in the idea of a basic income]. We have seen a sea-change in attitudes.
“This sense of alarm about populist rightwing politics has brought more people to thinking we need to do something to provide better security for people. We are risking our economic and political stability if we don’t do something about it.”
Scotland looks set to be the first part of the UK to pilot a basic income for every citizen, as councils in Fife and Glasgow investigate trial schemes in 2017.
The councillor Matt Kerr has been championing the idea through the ornate halls of Glasgow City Chambers, and is frank about the challenges it poses.
“Like a lot of people, I was interested in the idea but never completely convinced,” he said. But working as Labour’s anti-poverty lead on the council, Kerr says that he “kept coming back to the basic income”.
---Also Read
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Kerr sees the basic income as a way of simplifying the UK’s byzantine welfare system. “But it is also about solidarity: it says that everyone is valued and the government will support you. It changes the relationship between the individual and the state.”
The concept of a universal basic income revolves around the idea of offering every individual, regardless of existing welfare benefits or earned income, a non-conditional flat-rate payment, with any income earned above that taxed progressively. The intention is to provide a basic economic platform on which people can build their lives, whether they choose to earn, learn, care or set up a business.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has suggested that it is likely to appear in his party’s next manifesto, while there has been a groundswell of interest among anti-poverty groups who see it as a means of changing not only the relationship between people and the state, but between workers and increasingly insecure employment in the gig economy.
Kerr accepts that, while he is hopeful of cross-party support in Glasgow, there are “months of work ahead”, including first arranging a feasibility study in order to present a strong enough evidence base for a pilot. “But if there is ever a case to be made then you need to test it in a place like Glasgow, with the sheer numbers and levels of health inequality. If you can make it work here then it can work anywhere.”
The idea has its roots in 16th-century humanist philosophy, when it was developed by the likes of Thomas More, but in its modern incarnation it has lately enjoyed successful pilots in India and Africa.
Despite its utopian roots, champions believe that this is an idea whose time has come, particularly in Scotland where the governing SNP voted in support of a basic income at their spring conference (although the proposal has yet to make it into their manifesto).
At the heart of any experiment with basic income is money: how much should people get and where will it come from? Kerr says his instinct is to base the amount on similar calculations to those made for the living wage.
“It’s about having more than just enough to pay the bills. But part of the idea of doing a pilot is to make mistakes and also find out what is acceptable to the public. There will be a lot of resistance to this. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Part of the problem is we’re working against a whole discourse of deserving and undeserving poor.”
As for where the money comes from, “the funding question is always the big one, and really will depend upon the approach a pilot takes,” says Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, which has been spearheading research on the subject across the UK.
Drawing on the experience of similar projects ongoing in Finland, Utrecht in the Netherland and Ontario in Canada, Cooke suggests: “It could be funding from particular trusts, it could be individual philanthropic funding, as we have seen in the States, or it could be a redirection of the existing welfare spend.” Obviously the latter is much harder to do in a pilot, although that will be happening in Finland next year where the experiment is being taken forward by the national government.
As the Scottish government consults on what it has described as “the biggest transfer of powers since devolution began” – the devolution of around £2.7bn, or 15% of the total Scottish benefits bill, affecting 1.4 million people – both Kerr and Cooke believe that this is an ideal moment to consider the basic income seriously. “It’s a time to be testing out new – or rather old – ideas for a welfare system that genuinely supports independence,” says Kerr.
Cooke likewise believes that cross-party support is key, pointing to the fact that the leader of the Conservative group on Fife council has joined forces with the Fairer Fife Commission, the council’s independent poverty advisory group which initially recommended the trial, with the aim of designing a pilot within the next six months.
Scotland was recently added to the list of “places to watch” for basic income activity by the Basic Income Earth Network, founded by the radical economist Guy Standing, whose hugely influential book The Precariat identified an emerging social class suffering the worst of job insecurity and most likely to be attracted to rightwing populism.
“The thing about Scotland is that they really understand the precariat,” says Standing, who recently visited the country to meet civil servants, local authorities and campaigners to discuss a basic income. “The sense of insecurity, the stagnating living standards, all of those things are clear in Scotland and the fact that so many within the SNP are supportive means there’s a real opportunity to do a pilot in Scotland.”
The momentum is there, he says, and once it is framed around a desire for greater social justice “then you get away from the stale debate about whether if you give people the basic income then they will be lazy”.
“People relate to the idea that everyone should have a social dividend. Everywhere I go, it’s the communities that feel left behind by globalisation that are most interested [in the idea of a basic income]. We have seen a sea-change in attitudes.
“This sense of alarm about populist rightwing politics has brought more people to thinking we need to do something to provide better security for people. We are risking our economic and political stability if we don’t do something about it.”
15 rules for creative success in the Internet age
Molly Crabapple in Boing Boing
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Friday, 23 December 2016
Thursday, 14 April 2016
Unconditional Basic Income for all?
The idea of a universal basic income is about to leap from the margins to the mainstream, bringing promises of a happier and healthier population
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
With a basic income, the harsh, punitive model of ‘welfare’ is a distant memory – passing in and out of the gig economy is something everyone can afford. Photograph: David Pearson/Alamy
John Harris in The Guardian
John Harris in The Guardian
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
Friday, 20 June 2014
Splitting India II
Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed continues his exclusive series for The Friday Times on the partition and its aftermath
In my article dated 20 September 2012, I had inadvertently given February 1940 as the date for the fall of Singapore. It was February 1942. That mistake, however, does not detract from the fact that the British were determined from the very start of WW II, and especially after the Congress ministries resigned in September 1939, to crush any challenge to their hold over the Indian empire which was a matter of great pride for them and a major supplier of troops for the war. These resignations were a major Congress miscalculation whose damage to their political influence was second only to the even more disastrous Quit India movement they launched in August 1942. These two decisions greatly undermined their ability to influence the course of the freedom struggle as all their cadres were incarcerated from August 1942 to June 1945.
During that absence from the political arena the Muslim League swept the key north-western provinces of Punjab and Sindh and made inroads into NWFP with their message that the creation of Pakistan would bring to an end the tyranny of the caste system and the economic exploitation of the moneylender. Thus the creation of Pakistan appeared to be a rational choice to the Muslims and they expressed it in the 1946 provincial elections when they voted overwhelmingly in favour of Pakistan. The Congress got the general votes including those of Hindus, Christians, Jains and others for a united India and the Sikhs of Punjab voted for the Panthic parties that wanted the Punjab partitioned, if India was partitioned. Such polarization meant that negotiations on the future of India were headed for a deadlock and the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946 confirmed that. Nehru's ill-considered July press conference in Bombay saying that the Congress would 'enter the Constituent Assembly unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise' provoked an angry reaction from Jinnah who gave the call for direct action. The violence that broke out in Calcutta in August 1946 followed by more violence in Bihar, Garhmukhteshwar in UP and then Hazara district of KP finally engulfed the Punjab in March 1947.
Under the circumstances, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten's 3 June 1947 Partition Plan to which Nehru, Jinnah, Baldev Singh and others tamely acquiesced was premised on an entirely false assumption: that the transfer of power would be peaceful. The warnings of Punjab's Governor Sir Evan Jenkins did not warrant such complacency at all.
The whole thing was based on a woefully flawed concept: while civil and military officialdom would have the choice to opt either for India or Pakistan the ordinary people would stay put! Mahatma Gandhi alone among all the leaders could sense that rivers of blood would flow and warned about it. On the other hand, Sardar Patel was prepared to let the Sikh leaders have a free hand in driving the Muslims of East Punjab out, though he probably did not realize that they were planning to use it to create, for the first time in history, a compact Sikh majority in some parts of East Punjab. Later, the Khalistan movement, which emerged in the 1980s, came to haunt the Indian state. Equally, since March 1947, local and Punjab-level Muslim League leaders were complicit in the attacks on the Hindus and Sikhs in the western districts. Neither Jinnah nor Liaquat Ali Khan took any steps to warn the Muslims of East Punjab that on 23 June 1947 the Punjab Assembly had voted to partition the province and a grave possibility existed of rioting. It is impossible to believe that they were not in the know of what was happening in the Punjab. On the other hand, the Congress leaders kept telling Lahore's Hindus and Sikhs to stay put as that city would be given to India, even when the Muslims were in a majority of 60 per cent there. All these details, along with extensive interviews with survivors are fully covered in my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
In this regard, let me address a major criticism some readers have made of my argument that the partition of India was not necessarily the best option for Muslims. They have pointed out that the Indian Muslims have remained one of the poorest groups in secular India. Therefore the creation of Pakistan was necessary to save the Muslims from permanent Hindu domination. In principle this is a compelling argument in favour of creating Pakistan, but it needs to be put into perspective.
Mr Jinnah had prepared his brief on a separate Pakistan on the basis of categorical rejection that a Hindu-majority government could ever be fair to the Muslims. When he was asked what would happen to the most vulnerable, deprived and poor sections of Muslims from Muslim-minority provinces if they were left behind in India, he had asserted that one-third of Muslims should not prevent two-thirds of them escaping Hindu domination. It was a typical utilitarian argument deriving from the notion of the greatest good of the greatest number rather than the greatest good of all. However, in August 1947 when some reporters asked him before he left Delhi for Karachi as to what message he wanted to give to the Muslims who would remain behind he said that they should become loyal Indian citizens and he expected the Indian government to treat them fairly. His line of argument had thus changed fundamentally - it acknowledged that a Congress government (upper-caste Hindu dominated) could treat them fairly.
As I said in my previous article, only three per cent of the Muslims from the Muslim-minority provinces of northern India, mainly the intelligentsia migrated to Pakistan. The RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and many Hindu and Sikh refugees who had lost family and property in what became Pakistan wanted each and every Muslim driven out of India. Mahatma Gandhi's last fast-unto-death was not only to press the Indian government to pay Pakistan Rs 550 million as its rightful share of the colonial treasury, but also to insist that the campaign to expel Muslims should cease. It culminated with his assassination at the hands of Nathu Ram Godse, but it compelled the Indian government to adopt strict measures to prevent attacks on Muslims. I must give full credit to Jawaharlal Nehru that while he was prime minister he tried his best to protect the Muslims.
It is not possible to explain in detail in a media column why Congress governments after Nehru deviated from their protective policy towards Muslims. Suffice it to say that after Mrs Indira Gandhi came to power Nehruvian secularism became less of a matter of principle and more of expediency and electoral calculation. Later Congress governments were led by men of straw and the Babri Mosque attack by BJP goons in December 1992 could take place because the Congress government of Mr Narasimha Rao remained passive. It is only after Mr Manmohan Singh came to power that the sad plight of the Muslim minority was given some attention. The Sachar Committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 submitted a 403-page report which stated that the status of Indian Muslims was somewhere between Hindu OBCs (other backward castes) and the scheduled castes and tribes. No doubt this has happened because discrimination takes place against the Muslims in a systematic manner even though formal (constitutional) secularism does not discriminate between citizens on the basis of their creed or ethnicity.
However, here too we need to consider some complications. The Muslims of northern India have always consisted of two distinct groups: the high-born ashraaf who claim descent from forbears of foreign origin and the vast majority who are converts from the lower rungs of Hindu society. I have seen reports which name Muslim zamindars and taalukdars of northern India who were active in the struggle for Pakistan, but when partition took place they stayed on to retain ownership of their properties. Some of them later sold off their land and other assets and then migrated to Pakistan or to the West. Some devised novel ways of having the best of both words. Nothing compares to the genius of Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, famous as the financier of the Muslim League and one of the closest associates of Mr Jinnah. He left his son and wife in Mahmudabad while he shifted to Pakistan with his daughters. The Indian government had impounded his vast property worth currently Rs 30,0000 million on grounds that it was 'enemy property' since he had migrated to Pakistan. His son contested the case saying that he was the rightful heir as his father had transferred his property to him before he shifted to Pakistan. In 2005 the Indian Supreme Court restored the properties to him. So, the rich and powerful were not hit by the calamity of the partition. Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan did lose his estate in eastern Punjab as did Nawab Mamdot but that happened because the Sikhs and Congress joined hands to force the partition of Punjab on the same lines on which the Muslim League had demanded that India should be partitioned - on the basis of contiguous religious majorities in some parts of the subcontinent and its provinces. The same happened to Muslim-majority Bengal.
It is therefore the Muslims from artisanal and landless working backgrounds - Muslim Dalits - who potentially would suffer most from a partitioned India. Historically they were always despised by the ashraaf. I have read both Barelvi and Deobandi texts where the superiority of the ashraaf has been justified on grounds that they alone represent true Islam. Of course there are exceptions especially in Deobandi writings. In this regard I might as well add that traditional Shia social and political theory is even more hierarchical than that of the Sunnis. In Pakistan we practice caste prejudices but pretend that since Islam has no caste there is no caste oppression among us. Moreover, caste-like discrimination and persecution in Pakistan has also taken a sectarian form and our wrath is directed against all those we classify as non-Muslims.
At any rate, when the Muslim intelligentsia left for Pakistan the ulema, whose standard refrain has always been that Muslims should not integrate into mainstream society because that would dilute their Islamic identity, took over the leadership of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Instead of encouraging them to get a modern education they fostered a siege mentality and tried to insulate the Muslims from modernizing social trends. Consequently the level of education among these poor Muslims is very low, even lower than the Dalits, who because of the reservation system, have been helped to get education and jobs. A movement has now started gaining pace among Muslims of artisanal and Dalit backgrounds demanding that they too should be included in the reservation system. It remains to be seen if the Indian government would extend them that 'privilege'. The Sachar Report stopped just short of recommending it; it instead recommended special educational inputs from the government to help the Muslims. I need not overemphasize that the RSS and other Sang Parivar groups are always opposed to Muslims being included in the reservation policy. The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were also masterminded by these groups.
Here, I pose a moral question: are we in Pakistan prepared to help such vulnerable Muslims? All I know is that we have not even accepted the Biharis who sided with Pakistan during the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan. Unlike Israel which welcomes all Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel, because it is a state created for the Jewish people, we have no open-door policy for oppressed Indian Muslims. So our moral concern for them is hypocritical. There is a way to bring to an end their agony: let us open our arms and welcome them. Let us declare that the 180 million Indian Muslims are entitled to enter Pakistan and become its citizens because Pakistan was created to protect them from Hindu domination and discrimination. The fact is many won't because I know the secular-minded Muslims find Pakistan a difficult proposition as they are used to a less conformist lifestyle than what exists in contemporary Pakistan. Still millions might want to migrate to Pakistan because they may believe that as an Islamic state it would be fair to them.The Sindhis would assail my solution, saying that they have had bitter experience with an open embrace to the Mohajirs - it resulted in them (Sindhis) effectively being sidelined and marginalized in the towns and cities of Sindh, including Karachi and Hyderabad. On the other hand, the Mohajirs now realize that given their smaller numbers they would in the long run be swept away by the much bigger nationalities of Pakistan. They feel beleaguered and threatened. Consequently, if there is no scope for Indian Muslims to find refuge in Pakistan then we can only hope that enlightened Indian rulers would protect the Indian Muslims just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted and Nehru tried. I see no other option to this sad legacy of a partitioned India.
In my article dated 20 September 2012, I had inadvertently given February 1940 as the date for the fall of Singapore. It was February 1942. That mistake, however, does not detract from the fact that the British were determined from the very start of WW II, and especially after the Congress ministries resigned in September 1939, to crush any challenge to their hold over the Indian empire which was a matter of great pride for them and a major supplier of troops for the war. These resignations were a major Congress miscalculation whose damage to their political influence was second only to the even more disastrous Quit India movement they launched in August 1942. These two decisions greatly undermined their ability to influence the course of the freedom struggle as all their cadres were incarcerated from August 1942 to June 1945.
During that absence from the political arena the Muslim League swept the key north-western provinces of Punjab and Sindh and made inroads into NWFP with their message that the creation of Pakistan would bring to an end the tyranny of the caste system and the economic exploitation of the moneylender. Thus the creation of Pakistan appeared to be a rational choice to the Muslims and they expressed it in the 1946 provincial elections when they voted overwhelmingly in favour of Pakistan. The Congress got the general votes including those of Hindus, Christians, Jains and others for a united India and the Sikhs of Punjab voted for the Panthic parties that wanted the Punjab partitioned, if India was partitioned. Such polarization meant that negotiations on the future of India were headed for a deadlock and the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946 confirmed that. Nehru's ill-considered July press conference in Bombay saying that the Congress would 'enter the Constituent Assembly unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise' provoked an angry reaction from Jinnah who gave the call for direct action. The violence that broke out in Calcutta in August 1946 followed by more violence in Bihar, Garhmukhteshwar in UP and then Hazara district of KP finally engulfed the Punjab in March 1947.
Under the circumstances, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten's 3 June 1947 Partition Plan to which Nehru, Jinnah, Baldev Singh and others tamely acquiesced was premised on an entirely false assumption: that the transfer of power would be peaceful. The warnings of Punjab's Governor Sir Evan Jenkins did not warrant such complacency at all.
The whole thing was based on a woefully flawed concept: while civil and military officialdom would have the choice to opt either for India or Pakistan the ordinary people would stay put! Mahatma Gandhi alone among all the leaders could sense that rivers of blood would flow and warned about it. On the other hand, Sardar Patel was prepared to let the Sikh leaders have a free hand in driving the Muslims of East Punjab out, though he probably did not realize that they were planning to use it to create, for the first time in history, a compact Sikh majority in some parts of East Punjab. Later, the Khalistan movement, which emerged in the 1980s, came to haunt the Indian state. Equally, since March 1947, local and Punjab-level Muslim League leaders were complicit in the attacks on the Hindus and Sikhs in the western districts. Neither Jinnah nor Liaquat Ali Khan took any steps to warn the Muslims of East Punjab that on 23 June 1947 the Punjab Assembly had voted to partition the province and a grave possibility existed of rioting. It is impossible to believe that they were not in the know of what was happening in the Punjab. On the other hand, the Congress leaders kept telling Lahore's Hindus and Sikhs to stay put as that city would be given to India, even when the Muslims were in a majority of 60 per cent there. All these details, along with extensive interviews with survivors are fully covered in my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
In this regard, let me address a major criticism some readers have made of my argument that the partition of India was not necessarily the best option for Muslims. They have pointed out that the Indian Muslims have remained one of the poorest groups in secular India. Therefore the creation of Pakistan was necessary to save the Muslims from permanent Hindu domination. In principle this is a compelling argument in favour of creating Pakistan, but it needs to be put into perspective.
Mr Jinnah had prepared his brief on a separate Pakistan on the basis of categorical rejection that a Hindu-majority government could ever be fair to the Muslims. When he was asked what would happen to the most vulnerable, deprived and poor sections of Muslims from Muslim-minority provinces if they were left behind in India, he had asserted that one-third of Muslims should not prevent two-thirds of them escaping Hindu domination. It was a typical utilitarian argument deriving from the notion of the greatest good of the greatest number rather than the greatest good of all. However, in August 1947 when some reporters asked him before he left Delhi for Karachi as to what message he wanted to give to the Muslims who would remain behind he said that they should become loyal Indian citizens and he expected the Indian government to treat them fairly. His line of argument had thus changed fundamentally - it acknowledged that a Congress government (upper-caste Hindu dominated) could treat them fairly.
As I said in my previous article, only three per cent of the Muslims from the Muslim-minority provinces of northern India, mainly the intelligentsia migrated to Pakistan. The RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and many Hindu and Sikh refugees who had lost family and property in what became Pakistan wanted each and every Muslim driven out of India. Mahatma Gandhi's last fast-unto-death was not only to press the Indian government to pay Pakistan Rs 550 million as its rightful share of the colonial treasury, but also to insist that the campaign to expel Muslims should cease. It culminated with his assassination at the hands of Nathu Ram Godse, but it compelled the Indian government to adopt strict measures to prevent attacks on Muslims. I must give full credit to Jawaharlal Nehru that while he was prime minister he tried his best to protect the Muslims.
It is not possible to explain in detail in a media column why Congress governments after Nehru deviated from their protective policy towards Muslims. Suffice it to say that after Mrs Indira Gandhi came to power Nehruvian secularism became less of a matter of principle and more of expediency and electoral calculation. Later Congress governments were led by men of straw and the Babri Mosque attack by BJP goons in December 1992 could take place because the Congress government of Mr Narasimha Rao remained passive. It is only after Mr Manmohan Singh came to power that the sad plight of the Muslim minority was given some attention. The Sachar Committee appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 submitted a 403-page report which stated that the status of Indian Muslims was somewhere between Hindu OBCs (other backward castes) and the scheduled castes and tribes. No doubt this has happened because discrimination takes place against the Muslims in a systematic manner even though formal (constitutional) secularism does not discriminate between citizens on the basis of their creed or ethnicity.
However, here too we need to consider some complications. The Muslims of northern India have always consisted of two distinct groups: the high-born ashraaf who claim descent from forbears of foreign origin and the vast majority who are converts from the lower rungs of Hindu society. I have seen reports which name Muslim zamindars and taalukdars of northern India who were active in the struggle for Pakistan, but when partition took place they stayed on to retain ownership of their properties. Some of them later sold off their land and other assets and then migrated to Pakistan or to the West. Some devised novel ways of having the best of both words. Nothing compares to the genius of Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, famous as the financier of the Muslim League and one of the closest associates of Mr Jinnah. He left his son and wife in Mahmudabad while he shifted to Pakistan with his daughters. The Indian government had impounded his vast property worth currently Rs 30,0000 million on grounds that it was 'enemy property' since he had migrated to Pakistan. His son contested the case saying that he was the rightful heir as his father had transferred his property to him before he shifted to Pakistan. In 2005 the Indian Supreme Court restored the properties to him. So, the rich and powerful were not hit by the calamity of the partition. Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan did lose his estate in eastern Punjab as did Nawab Mamdot but that happened because the Sikhs and Congress joined hands to force the partition of Punjab on the same lines on which the Muslim League had demanded that India should be partitioned - on the basis of contiguous religious majorities in some parts of the subcontinent and its provinces. The same happened to Muslim-majority Bengal.
It is therefore the Muslims from artisanal and landless working backgrounds - Muslim Dalits - who potentially would suffer most from a partitioned India. Historically they were always despised by the ashraaf. I have read both Barelvi and Deobandi texts where the superiority of the ashraaf has been justified on grounds that they alone represent true Islam. Of course there are exceptions especially in Deobandi writings. In this regard I might as well add that traditional Shia social and political theory is even more hierarchical than that of the Sunnis. In Pakistan we practice caste prejudices but pretend that since Islam has no caste there is no caste oppression among us. Moreover, caste-like discrimination and persecution in Pakistan has also taken a sectarian form and our wrath is directed against all those we classify as non-Muslims.
At any rate, when the Muslim intelligentsia left for Pakistan the ulema, whose standard refrain has always been that Muslims should not integrate into mainstream society because that would dilute their Islamic identity, took over the leadership of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Instead of encouraging them to get a modern education they fostered a siege mentality and tried to insulate the Muslims from modernizing social trends. Consequently the level of education among these poor Muslims is very low, even lower than the Dalits, who because of the reservation system, have been helped to get education and jobs. A movement has now started gaining pace among Muslims of artisanal and Dalit backgrounds demanding that they too should be included in the reservation system. It remains to be seen if the Indian government would extend them that 'privilege'. The Sachar Report stopped just short of recommending it; it instead recommended special educational inputs from the government to help the Muslims. I need not overemphasize that the RSS and other Sang Parivar groups are always opposed to Muslims being included in the reservation policy. The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were also masterminded by these groups.
Here, I pose a moral question: are we in Pakistan prepared to help such vulnerable Muslims? All I know is that we have not even accepted the Biharis who sided with Pakistan during the 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan. Unlike Israel which welcomes all Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel, because it is a state created for the Jewish people, we have no open-door policy for oppressed Indian Muslims. So our moral concern for them is hypocritical. There is a way to bring to an end their agony: let us open our arms and welcome them. Let us declare that the 180 million Indian Muslims are entitled to enter Pakistan and become its citizens because Pakistan was created to protect them from Hindu domination and discrimination. The fact is many won't because I know the secular-minded Muslims find Pakistan a difficult proposition as they are used to a less conformist lifestyle than what exists in contemporary Pakistan. Still millions might want to migrate to Pakistan because they may believe that as an Islamic state it would be fair to them.The Sindhis would assail my solution, saying that they have had bitter experience with an open embrace to the Mohajirs - it resulted in them (Sindhis) effectively being sidelined and marginalized in the towns and cities of Sindh, including Karachi and Hyderabad. On the other hand, the Mohajirs now realize that given their smaller numbers they would in the long run be swept away by the much bigger nationalities of Pakistan. They feel beleaguered and threatened. Consequently, if there is no scope for Indian Muslims to find refuge in Pakistan then we can only hope that enlightened Indian rulers would protect the Indian Muslims just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted and Nehru tried. I see no other option to this sad legacy of a partitioned India.
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