The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: The pandemic has proven UBI’s time has come

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Starting point is 00:00:40 to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, the pandemic has proven UBI's time has come. American starting to see financial help from Washington. Some of those direct $1,400 payments laid out in President Biden's COVID relief package already landing in bank account. Almost a year ago, no one had ever heard of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. A two thousand monthly assistance program became a lifesaver for millions of Canadians out of work and out of pocket because of the pandemic. Certainly one of the big stories we're tracking for you, Finance Minister Tieton-Boweni, allocating 27 billion RAND to ensure that the most vulnerable in society are able to receive a 350-Rand social grant every month. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Well, the conversation around a universal basic income, a government program which would provide every adult with regular cash payments, Has gained popularity in recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic turned UBI into a reality for millions of people around the globe. Facing skyrocketing unemployment and an impending housing crisis, some governments decided to act swiftly and without conditions. They transferred cash directly into the hands of their citizens, regardless of age, income, or geography. Tens of millions of American families have seen their incomes, either reduced or in some cases completely taken away by the pandemic. And now tens of millions of us are getting these $1,400 stimulus checks that are helping

Starting point is 00:02:19 provide a lifeline for millions of families. It makes us stronger, healthier, more secure. That's Andrew Yang, an early proponent of UBI. Like many supporters of a universal basic income, he argues that these handouts must continue after the pandemic. Direct cash payments have been instrumental in providing financial security to some of society's most vulnerable people, and have helped transform the at-time's broken relationship between individuals, their skills, and the labor market. Critics, however, worry that UBI

Starting point is 00:02:53 disincentivizes work and is an assault on human dignity. The reality is, like, the 25-year-old me might have just said, look, my thousand bucks, I've got five roommates, I don't need to work. And, you know, then the product of me might not have been in society. Critics of UBI, like entrepreneur Mark Cuban, point to pandemic recovery rehiring challenges as proof that giving cash handouts without strings attached encourages people to stay out of the workforce altogether. Remaking government into a cash payment vehicle for individuals supposedly threatens personal autonomy, self-reliance, and ultimately undermines our personal self-esteem. On this installment of the Monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, the pandemic has proven that UBI's time has come. Arguing for the motion is Scott Santons, Senior Advisor to Humanity Ford and editor of Basic Income Today. Arguing against the motion is Orrin Cass, executive director of American Compass, an author of The Once and Future Worker, a vision for the renewal of work in America.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Scott Oren, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Very much looking forward to this conversation today. You know, ever since the pandemic started and its effects were felt throughout advanced economies around the world. The idea, the concept of universal basic income has really come to a fore like never before. This was a debate that was obviously simmering pre-pandemic, but we've now had, in a sense, a massive, some would say global experiment in the idea of the principles,

Starting point is 00:04:45 not all of them, but some of the key ones of a universal basic income. So the opportunity to debate and discuss with you whether UBI should be part of our planning toolkit for our economies, for social policy, for how we create a kind of a humane society that allows people to maximize their full human potential. This is just a privilege for our Monk Debates community. So thank you, gentlemen, for both agreeing to be part of this debate today. Our resolution, simple to the point, be it resolved. The pandemic has proven UBI's time has come.

Starting point is 00:05:25 Scott, you're speaking in favor of the motion. I'm going to put a couple minutes on our show clock and turn the program over to you. All right, thanks. to argue in favor of a fully universal, unconditional basic income, I just want to start off by even just going through a short list of all the failures of our existing system due to the lack of unconditionality, universality of cash for everyone. So first of all, I think many of us remember the massive food bank lines that went on for miles,

Starting point is 00:06:01 and we saw people getting evicted during a pandemic. and we also had rental assistance for those, and hardly any of that was dispersed. To this point, it's still only 11% dispersed as of today. Then we had our UI application issues as far as their unemployment system. Old systems require people to call and call again, be on hold forever, and that process took weeks and perhaps months for people. Then many people who qualified didn't get that for months on end and perhaps through the whole pandemic. At this point, like 9 million people who were unemployed didn't receive any unemployment income. And then there's the failures of the unemployment system itself, which is that you can't quit to get it. Besides that, there's the fact that people

Starting point is 00:06:52 had maybe two jobs. And if you lost your big job and not your smaller job, then you did not get to apply for unemployment insurance. And there was the matter of people who were who actually were not unemployed. They got to keep their job, but experienced reduced hours and pay cuts. So they didn't get unemployment income. Stimulus checks helped with that. But that also goes to show the problem with the existing unemployment setup.

Starting point is 00:07:26 And then there are problems with the lack of paid leave impacted the pandemic itself. and also vaccines. People are not getting vaccines because they're afraid to miss work. Stimless checks used old data, and so people who should have qualified for it didn't, even know that they needed it. And of course, unpaid workers received nothing except for the stimulus checks. They don't get any unemployment insurance or anything. And I think these are the most essential workers of all of those doing unpaid care work. And of course, also automation has been accelerated as a result of this as well. And we're going to be seeing those impacts. That's just a small list of, I think, reasons where we should now see that UBI makes even more sense than otherwise.

Starting point is 00:08:08 Thank you, Scott. We're now going to get the con argument in our debate today on UBI. Our resolution, be it resolved, the pandemic, has proven UBI's time has come. Oren, you're speaking against our motion. Let's have your opening statement. Well, I think there are two questions really embedded in the resolution. One is whether UBI is a good idea at all, whether it's time should ever come. And then second, whether the pandemic has really proven anything, I think we'll probably get into a lot of depth on the question of whether the UBI makes sense at all.

Starting point is 00:08:48 I don't think it does. But to start on the question of the pandemic, I think it's really important to say that it is generally a mistake to say that the pandemic has proven anything. I mean, the pandemic is a sort of once-in-a-century crisis that prompted the need for a number of extraordinary measures to say, well, that shows how we should be doing things on a regular basis, I think, is a very misguided approach to policymaking. And I think when it comes to the problems that Scott has rightfully identified, UBI is just a very strange response to them. So Scott has identified a number of administrative challenges in how the safety net works that certainly came to the front during the crisis of a pandemic. But of course, if we tried to implement a UBI through our existing safety net, we would have the same problems. So the first question is, do we need better administrative systems?

Starting point is 00:09:49 And I think the answer is, yes, we do. I would be all for having an in-depth discussion of what we've learned about how we need to improve, how our UI system works, how our safety net delivers benefits, making sure it can be as responsive as possible in the event of a crisis. None of that is an argument for the idea that every year, forever, we should now mail all Americans' checks. And I think actually it is quite politically dangerous to take the fact that we were generous in the instance of this crisis and say, well, there you go, that just shows we should always do it. I think what that is going to produce is just a lot more hesitancy to be as generous as we need to be when future crises arise.

Starting point is 00:10:34 And so I think the way that we should approach this is to say there are a lot of important lessons to be learned from the pandemic. The U.S. fiscal response actually was quite good compared to a lot of countries in terms of helping people make ends meet. We learned a lot of things we could do better in our administrative systems and we should try to be better when the next crisis strikes. but good Lord, that is not an argument for spending trillions of dollars sending everybody money every year indefinitely. And for reasons I think we'll discuss, that really just isn't a good idea anyway. Thank you, Warren. We're now going to have a chance for rebuttal, so this is the opportunity for both of you to react to what you've just heard from each other. We'll move this debate along.

Starting point is 00:11:17 So, Scott, which of Orrin's kind of key argument statements do you want to take exception with and why? Well, I pretty much take exception with all of it, except for the fact that I would agree that the United States did actually respond quite well compared to all the countries, even around the world. We really did get the most money out there, not perhaps as universally as some others did, but quite a lot. And we did see actually a reduction in poverty, market reduction of poverty because of it. And also we did see a much shorter recovery time than I think that we would be seeing right now compared to what we did see during the last financial crisis. But yeah, aside from that, I think that basic income is this missing foundation that I think should always be there because it's an acknowledgement that everyone always has basic needs and we should make sure

Starting point is 00:12:18 that those absolute most basic needs are met at all points so that you don't see these people standing in lines for food banks when they just need money to buy food. And the problem is, as Orrin pointed out with these, you know, the problems with our bureaucratic systems, that's endemic to conditionality. As long as you always require people to do something in order to get something, there is going to be these problems.

Starting point is 00:12:52 Let's say someone goes to the process of qualifying for unemployment insurance income and they have to wait weeks. Maybe they get it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they get it months later. And with the basic income, at least you have that. If you fall from, say, $3,000 a month because of unemployment, you never fall to zero. And that's what I think is really important.

Starting point is 00:13:17 because, again, there are crises that happen all the time. Like, this is a pandemic. Sure, this pandemic is a once-in-a-century thing. But we have witnessed crises repeatedly, and we will continue to receive crises, especially at a more localized level. I mean, I live in Louisiana. I experience hurricanes all the time.

Starting point is 00:13:37 I experience flooding. And these things are just increasingly happening. Like, I just think it's really important that no matter what, you've always got something, and then all these other conditional systems, these failures don't impact people to the same way. Thanks, Scott. Orne, your chance now to rebut Scott's opening statement or what you've just heard. Sure, I think I'll try to pick up on three things quickly.

Starting point is 00:14:02 You know, one is the point that Scott made that we wouldn't have had these problems if we already had a basic income because we would have known where everybody is. And I think it's really important to disaggregate two concepts here. One is the concept of a better administrative system through which we can provide benefits to people, and the second is a policy of using that system to provide large amounts of cash to everybody every month forever. I agree with Scott on the point that we need better administrative systems, and before his basic income would work, we would also need to find a way to put in place those better administrative systems. So by all means, let's find a way to create those systems.

Starting point is 00:14:45 even in the mold of the kind of thing you would need if you were going to deliver in basic income. But that is a separate question from the question of whether our baseline policy, not in a pandemic, is to be delivering cash unconditionally to everybody. And to argue that the pandemic showed that proved, in fact, that that's what we need to be doing, I think is quite facetious. The second point I want to make, and this goes to Scott's observation, that crises are happening all the time is to really emphasize what made the pandemic so unique as not just a public health, but economic crisis. And that was that we were facing a challenge that was not first and

Starting point is 00:15:27 foremost economic. It was health related. And as a result, the policy response we were emphasizing was one that actively sought to shut down economic activity. That is, we actively wanted people to stop going to work. And so the economic policies that you would employ in that context, for instance, providing very generous support to people who are not working, are not the ones that you would want to employ in a more typical economic situation where the problem is we don't have enough people working and we want to get more people working. And I think we could have a very long discussion about what are the best policy responses in, say, a typical recession. But it's really important to recognize that those kinds of crises or the crises associated with a natural

Starting point is 00:16:13 disaster, all of those in economic terms are the opposite of a pandemic. And so taking the economic response we used in a pandemic saying we need to get money to people because we don't want them at work are not lessons that we should be extending to other crises or certainly to regular life. And then the last point I'll just make quickly is to pick up on Scott's comment that the problem is that our traditional systems require people to do something to get something. And I think that really gets to the core of the ultimate debate about basic income. Do we want to have a system based on reciprocity, a safety net that does expect things of people, and ultimately a society that says people are expected to be contributors?

Starting point is 00:17:01 Or do we want to reject that attitude and say people should not be required to do anything to get something? It has always been the American tradition to say we do want reciprocity. and I think it's an incredibly important principle. And as Scott rightly says, the universal basic income runs directly against that. Thanks, Warren. My opportunity to now join the debate and think of some questions that are top of mind for our listeners.

Starting point is 00:17:28 And Scott, let me start with you and pick up on something that Orrin just touched on. And this is the contention that, you know, we have seen as a result of the significant direct cash payments to individuals hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of jobs going unfulfilled on the basis that people comparing the cost-benefit of returning to work, possibly in a minimum wage job, versus staying at home and receiving a subsidy isn't something that is particularly appealing to them. So as such, the economy struggles. We potentially face an outbreak of wage price inflation.

Starting point is 00:18:10 people are, in a sense, denied the dignity of work. Give us your response, your reaction to, you know, what we're seeing in the economy right now as a result of this incredible experiment in direct cash subsidies to individuals during a time of economic crisis and public health anxiety. Yeah, I think it's really important to look at unemployment. versus UBI, it really helps understand the difference between the two. So Oren mentioned reciprocity as an issue with basic income. And I just want to emphasize that UBI isn't money for nothing, it's money for anything.

Starting point is 00:18:55 And so if you understand that, you can understand that unemployment income is essentially money for nothing. You're saying that you only get this income as long as you maintain an unemployment status. And then if you start and you accept a job, then you lose that. income. Basic income doesn't work that way. There is no work disincentive with basic income. It enables and supports all work. So if someone is only receiving the basic income and they're unemployed, and then they get a job offer, the incentive is to take the job offer because now they get to increase their income. It doesn't exist with unemployment insurance. It's a different set of incentives. It also recognizes unpaid work. Again, this is very essential work. And actually, a lot of

Starting point is 00:19:39 people needed to shift to that, especially women during the pandemic, where a lot more unpaid work was going on in the home. They don't get unemployment income. The only thing that reached them potentially was stimulus checks. And so that's a better example of what a basic income is, because it wasn't tied to work. It was just provided. If you say that we care about reciprocity, then obviously there's a problem if unpaid work is unrecognized. It's not suddenly work if someone starts taking care of each, two people start taking care of each other's kids versus taking care of their own kids.

Starting point is 00:20:15 That's still important work. It's important that basic income does create this bargaining power that we do actually provide people the ability to refuse low wages. That's a good thing. It's a good thing to create pressure for employers to offer high enough income in order for people to accept that job.

Starting point is 00:20:35 It's not a free labor market, if people feel that they can't refuse a job and they have to suffer poverty as a result of it if they refuse it. The incentive lies on the employer to offer a sufficient income. Okay, Orrin, come back on that. So an argument here that, look, these people are contributing.

Starting point is 00:20:54 They may not be contributing by being formally on the payroll of a corporation, but they're part of a community, part of a society. Just because they're receiving UBI doesn't mean And they're, you know, lying on the couch watching Netflix. And in fact, isn't that a somewhat, I don't know, pejorative, biased view of the reality of the lives that people are facing when it comes to systemic, possibly intergenerational poverty? Well, look, first of all, I think the money for anything description of UVI is a quite dishonest bumper sticker. It is money for anything, including money for nothing.

Starting point is 00:21:37 I mean, we can stipulate that many people will be doing something useful, but they don't have to. So in formal terms of what we mean by reciprocity, UBI simply fails the test. It is money for anything, including for nothing. And so I think we need to be straightforward about what that is. Now, will people use it for useful things? Sure, I'm sure many people will. But of course, we also have many mechanisms for compensating when they do people when they, when they do useful things through the labor market. And people also do many useful things as hobbies alongside the work that they do in the labor market. So this idea that we should provide unconditional money to people and that that is how reciprocity. works, I at least find quite incoherent. I do think the care work is an interesting subset that we should focus in on a little bit. I think that the way Scott framed the uncompensated work of, for instance, caregiving in the home is just incorrect. If you think in terms of reciprocity,

Starting point is 00:22:53 when people turn their efforts inward to their own families, for instance, a parent, raising their own children, that is something that they do where they expend effort in their family, but it is also for the benefit of their family. So they and their family are both the essentially producer and consumer of the service. And so the reason that we don't compensate caregivers from an external source is the same reason that a farmer that grows crops for his own family, doesn't get to turn around and say, I demand reciprocal payment from someone else. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits,

Starting point is 00:23:43 including a 10-plus year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world, and you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. So, Scott, let's go a little bit deeper here and talk a bit more about, you know, another argument that's deployed off against UBI and we're exploring it, but I want to push it a bit further, which is this concept of, you know, the dignity of work and what people derive from work in terms of purpose, in terms of

Starting point is 00:24:44 coherence in their lives, in terms of feeling part of some larger collective enterprise, and that UBI by creating, in a sense, a permanent subsidy that allows for people to make different choices, maybe a greater range of choices about how to spend their time or what they might, a priori, define as work or, you know, their engagement with their society or their community, somehow devalues this important, this essential function that work gives individuals in the form of purpose, dignity, and meaning. We need to just, you know, look at the dignity of paid work. and, you know, is it true that it's always dignified? Is it dignified to work for poverty wages across multiple jobs, just barely getting by? Is that dignified? Whereas if you have a basic income, again, you have more choice.

Starting point is 00:25:43 You actually, you can choose to demand higher pay for a job that lacks dignity. You can refuse that job. Or you can actually better choose a job that you really enjoy. So basic income was both the power to say no and the freedom to say. say yes, and that creates a better, more dignified labor market. It's just one example, too, and this is from the Stockton experiment, is that someone who was receiving a basic income had a part-time job, they were able to take time off work that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to take off thanks to the basic income. They were able to go to another job interview

Starting point is 00:26:19 and actually get a better job because of it. And as a result from the Stockton experiment was that the recipients of basic income were twice as likely to be, full-time employed than the non-recipients. So it's not that basic income somehow reduces work. That's obviously ridiculous in all the experimental data and even what we know. It's just that basic income is essentially boots for everyone. We're talking about bootstraps and picking yourself up by your bootstraps.

Starting point is 00:26:48 You can't say that to a bootless man. Basic income actually enables people to find the work that's most meaningful and dignifying to them. Thank you, Scott. Really interesting answer. So, Warren, come back on that. I want to hear a little bit more from you as to why you, I assume, believe that there is something essential that happens beyond the economics, just in terms of how people search out and find meaning and purpose that you feel, I assume, happen somehow through formal work, through being an active participant in the economy. Well, you know, I certainly agree with Scott's point that all people, by virtue of being people, have inherent dignity. I think it's important to be specific when we're talking about the dignity associated with work that we talk about essentially what are the different kinds of benefits that come with work and with in many cases paid work, but also in some cases unpaid work. that is productive and provides real value to others. And so, you know, if you're sort of listing those benefits of work, of course, one of them is the paycheck. And obviously, people like paychecks and they like getting paid more rather than getting paid less.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Others are, as sort of Scott alluded to, some of the things associated with enjoying the work, having it be something that the person happens to find fulfilling. But there's also a critical element that comes along work most of the time, which is that it's actually the means by which people support themselves and their families. That is that for many people, the job that they do is not the main sort of purpose of their life. To the contrary, the job is something they do to allow them to do the other things in their life. but that job still has meaning and purpose in that it is the thing that they do for someone else out there in the world in return for which they earn their own sustenance. It is reflected in a paycheck, but ultimately it means their right to make claims on the rest of society. And I think one of the real problems with the basic income is that it fundamentally erases that connection between work and providing for your society.

Starting point is 00:29:18 and your family. It says actually it is the government's responsibility to provide for you and your family. And work is something you do to the extent that you want to earn more money, you find it fun and fulfilling and so forth. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think first of all, it's a real misunderstanding of how a huge swath of the population order their lives and their priorities and where they find that dignity to which they are entitled, where they get that self-esteem, where they demonstrate their value to others. And so, again, if we had some crisis,

Starting point is 00:29:58 if robots had taken all the jobs, if the pandemic was permanent and no one could ever work again, you could conjure up a scenario in which you would say, okay, we need to reboot these fundamentals of the functional society. but to go and do that without the need to as a sort of incredibly overbroad remedy to some problems in the safety net that I think we could do a better job addressing.

Starting point is 00:30:25 That, I think, is a serious mistake. And by the way, an extremely costly one. I mean, I think we do need to get into how on earth this would actually work and how we would pay for it. I want to make sure that from, you know, my sense of what Scott's proposing is it's roughly $3 trillion a year.

Starting point is 00:30:44 And if that's correct, where is that coming from? And is that the best use of $3 trillion? Well, there you go, Scott. So is that what you're proposing? And where do the cost savings come in that kind of justify that potentially massive public outlay at the front end of a national UBI program for an economy as large as the United States? Sure.

Starting point is 00:31:09 So, first of all, I have to say that describing, basking them as a costly mistake is just kind of, I think, kind of laughable, especially when I look at poverty. I think poverty is a costly mistake. The fact that we essentially manage poverty and let it continue is extremely costly. Child poverty costs over a trillion dollars a year. That is the cost. A child allowance of even what we just did is, again, $100 billion. dollars per year. Like this is, how are we looking at that cost equation and then thinking that a child allowance is a costly mistake, but child poverty isn't. And so then we have to look beyond just child poverty too and look at all of poverty. And the costs of crime alone has been calculated at, was it, $2.6 trillion, I saw one study say. And multiple other studies, looking at say how much are we spending on our health care? Like we're spending twice as much on our health care as essentially the rest of the world

Starting point is 00:32:19 thanks to our ridiculous health care system. And what are we doing? 80 to 90% of health outcomes are determined by the social determinants of health and not medical care. And so here we are essentially utilizing like a strategy of iron lungs for all to combat polio instead of events.

Starting point is 00:32:39 vaccine. You know, basic income is a vaccine for poverty. By preventing it, instead of treating it, it is much less costly. We can save trillions of dollars per year if we just make sure to invest in everyone as human beings and individuals, and we would see so much less of what we're spending. And this is borne out by experimental evidence from basic income experiments. The Manitoba experiment showed an 8.5% reduction in hospital utilization. The Stockton pilot just showed that that was as effective as antidepressants. And I encourage Orrin, and he's been at this for a long time,

Starting point is 00:33:23 and I just don't understand how we can look at all the evidence as a result of all we've witnessed as far as unconditional cash transfers, base income experiments, and everything, and come away with this thinking that it's somehow expensive. basic income allows self-employment in a way that we just don't see. It's capital for everybody. It's also consumer income for everybody. And again, we're in a consumer economy. So if you put money into people's hands and enable them to actually start up businesses, thanks to even reduced risk aversion and more customers, then you're looking at a much bigger economy. Yeah, I just reject this argument that it's somehow extremely expensive. I think what we're doing is far more expensive than anything we would spend on basic income. Okay, Orne, your opportunity here to rebut what you just heard. This, in fact, UBI is a way to take a whole bunch of costs out of our system. It's actually about efficiency.

Starting point is 00:34:18 It's not about financial excess. Well, look, I think the reality is that if you're having a policy debate about a proposal that costs, you know, three trillion dollars and for context, the entire federal government, putting aside COVID relief, on the order of $4 trillion a year. So when you're talking about a program that is the nearly doubling the size of the federal government and just dismissing it as not costly and paying for itself, that's hopefully a lot of sort of listeners and antennas are going up about that. If you think about the money that we actually spend in terms of public spending, our entire safety net is about a trillion dollars.

Starting point is 00:35:08 But most of that is Medicaid. So if you're talking about cutting roughly half a trillion dollars of safety net spending and replacing with three trillion dollars of new spending, you are talking about certainly the largest expansion of government ever anywhere and the need to raise enormously more tax revenue. I think if you're going to propose a $3 trillion, program. It's really important to explain where the money's actually going to come from. And one reason UBI proponents don't tend to go there is because it quickly becomes obvious that those proposals

Starting point is 00:35:47 would be dead on arrival. The last point I want to make quickly is just on the definition of poverty and the idea that if you send people in poverty money, they are no longer in poverty and will no longer have the ailments or social costs associated with poverty. I just don't think that's true. Poverty is a condition that is certainly in part financial. Obviously, we define it by measuring how much income people have. But ultimately, the condition of poverty, the reason it's a concern and the reason it generates all those costs, Scott is talking about, are much broader than that. they have to do with family breakdown in a lot of cases. They do have to do with employment opportunities and whether people are sort of investing in their own futures and moving up the economic ladder.

Starting point is 00:36:42 Intergenerationalally, they have a tremendous amount to do with the sorts of opportunities that are provided to children. And so I think we really have to cast a skeptical eye on this idea that if you have a bunch of folks who are in poverty and you send them check, you've solved their problems. You've certainly solved one of their problems. And again, I certainly support a safety net and helping meet the material needs of people who need help with that. But, you know, since 1965, we have expanded our safety net from very little to roughly a trillion dollars. It's roughly $25,000 per person in poverty. That's not per family in poverty, per person in poverty. So, transferring resources to those in need is important, but doing it in a smart way that encourages

Starting point is 00:37:32 people to get on their own feet is the right way to do it. And suggesting that just transferring more resources is going to magically solve our problems and pay for itself, I just don't think is a responsible approach to policymaking. Thank you, Warren. Let's go to closing statements. It's a fascinating debate. We've talked about the kind of moral financial dimensions of UBI, pro and con. Our resolution today has been. be it resolved the pandemic has proven UBI's time has come. Oren, we're going to give you the opportunity first to kind of sum up your key arguments against our resolution. What do you want to leave our listeners with when they think about the merits and demerits of UBI as a policy that their government, their country, could, should or shouldn't embrace in the years to come?

Starting point is 00:38:23 Well, I think the debate has really run on two tracks. One is about the sort of technical questions of how to run an administrative safety net well, how much can we spend, how should we use that money. And certainly my view is that sending literally everyone money every month indefinitely is a very bad way to address those issues. But I think we've spent probably more time, and I think Scott as well see the core of the debate, the more philosophical question of what do we owe to who and what expectations do we. we have and what kind of society do we want to have? And that's obviously something it's very difficult to, you know, run an experiment about. But what I really encourage people to think about is their own lives. You know, for the most part, we recognize it's not a good idea to tell young people, here's a, you know, we're just going to give you enough money to support yourself

Starting point is 00:39:18 every month indefinitely, no matter what you do. There are kids like that. We call them trust fund kids, and that's not a compliment. But it's really important to recognize that a basic income ultimately is Uncle Sam showing up at every house in the country and telling every young person their family, I'm going to start paying you, say, $1,000 a month when you turn 18. When we think about the social effects of this policy, that's really where the rubber meets the road. And so I think it's really important for people to think about their own lives and their own judgment about what makes sense for our society to ask, is that that. a good idea. Do we really want every kid in this country raised knowing that no matter what their parents might want? It's not up to the parents. Every kid gets a basic income the day they turn 18 and could probably, you know, well, the definition of basic income is and could live on that for as

Starting point is 00:40:11 long as they want. That strikes me as an extraordinarily bad way to run a society. And the day when parents see that as in fact, what is good for kids is the day I think it will be to take basic income seriously. But as long as we recognize that that is really not the message we want to send to young people, the incentives we want to present to them, and ultimately the cultural norms we want to have in this country, I think a basic income is a very bad idea and certainly not the way to address the sort of more narrow technical issues that Scott has rightly raised in the context of a pandemic, but that our existing safety net is, is, is a very good. much closer to being able to address effectively.

Starting point is 00:41:00 Thank you, Warren. Concise to the point. Okay, Scott, we're going to give you the last word in our debate today, be it resolved. The pandemic has proven UBI's time has come. You've been speaking in favor of the resolution. Wrap up this debate for us. Sure.

Starting point is 00:41:15 So to wrap this up, I also just want to go back to the cost argument and I just want to emphasize that since the 1970s, we are more than twice as productive as we were. Where did the benefits of that go because wages stagnated during that time? The benefits of that went straight to the top. It was been calculated that had inequality not increased since then, and it was just the same as it was then,

Starting point is 00:41:43 then $2.5 trillion a year would be flowing to the bottom 90% that is currently flowing to the top. So there's ideas of if that amount of money is too expensive to do, obviously it isn't. Our economy can handle it. It's just that inequality increase.

Starting point is 00:42:01 We let that increase. And UBI is saying, okay, the benefits of a more productive economy should flow to everybody, not just the top. To say that poverty is anything but a lack of money is false. Poverty is a lack of money.

Starting point is 00:42:16 When you make sure that people have a sufficient amount of access to resources and make sure that they get that in a secure, monthly, stable way, then that has a lot of positive impacts. What are those impacts? Well, we know that when people are provided capital that they're able to start up their own businesses,

Starting point is 00:42:34 that a lot of times people aren't starting businesses because they lack capital, and these businesses fail because they lack customers. So Bayscan was important for self-employment and entrepreneurship. We know that part-time work increases. We know that there's no negative impact on full-time employment. We know that people outside of essentially mothers of newborns and students continue doing the work that they're doing. They find better work.

Starting point is 00:43:04 And this work that's education and care work is still work. We know that health improves. We know that crime goes down. We know that mental health improves. We know that educational outcomes improve. We know that birth weights improve due to better maternal nutrition. We know that diets improve. People with basic income tend to buy more fruits and vegetables.

Starting point is 00:43:25 We know that actually obesity decreases. Obesity in the U.S. is largely a result of poverty now. We know that actually drug and alcohol use actually goes slightly down. These things are actually basically self-medication behavior. We know that this worrying constantly about day-to-day survival actually is effectively a tax on our cognitive ability to the point that it produces IQ points by a measurable, akin to 13 points. And so UBI would actually essentially increase the IQs of people who are too focused on survival to think about anything else. We know that savings go up and we know that

Starting point is 00:44:03 debts go down. And so just looking at all this evidence, it's clear that basic income improves outcomes across a wide swath of things. And I just want to leave people with a thought of what would you do if you had a basic income? If you started each month, with enough money to live to pay your basic bills, to not have to worry about the bare means of survival, how would that impact you? What would you do differently? Thank you, Scott.

Starting point is 00:44:31 And thank you, Warren, for a thoughtful, civil and substantive debate on a really important issue. I know our many tens of thousands of Monk debate, podcast subscribers are going to be listening to this debate over the weeks and months to come. I really appreciate the time, attention, and thought that you've given to this. conversation. Again, thank you on behalf of the Monk Debates community. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:44:56 This was great. Thank you, guys. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Warren, and Scott, for a fascinating conversation. They've certainly given us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Here's a recent listener note from Ben in Yellowknife about our monk debate on removing statues as a way of recognizing our sometimes troubled collective past. Ben writes, Dear Rudyard, a great episode, an excellent conversation between Cornell Brooks and George F. Will. But as a Canadian foundation, it would have been great to see the monk debates feature some Canadian content in that debate, debating issues around

Starting point is 00:45:53 our own historical figures, from Johnny McDonald to monarchs, to some of the famous five, who fought for women's rights and suffrage while also promoting eugenics. Again, always a pleasure to hear new ideas coming from you, the monk, debates, to us, your listeners each week. Hey, thanks, Ben, and we take that note seriously about Canadian content. We've got some Canadian debaters and Canadian themes on our radar for this podcast feed in the coming weeks and months. And a reminder to all of our other listeners that you can get a big dose of CanCon here on the Monk Debates each Friday.

Starting point is 00:46:30 That's when we come out with our members-only podcast. It's a look at the big issues and events in the news affecting all of us with Janice Gross-Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. You can get that podcast by becoming a free member of the Monk Debates. That's available at www.com, www.com, fort slash. membership. Thank you for lending your time to our effort to restore the art of public debate in our time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers.

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The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: The pandemic has proven UBI’s time has come

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