Upstream - Documentary #7: Universal Basic Income Pt. 1 – An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A radio documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Join us as we journey upstream.

Starting point is 00:00:38 To the heart of our economic system. And discover cutting-edge stories. Of game-changing solutions. Based on connection solutions based on connection resilience and prosperity for all what's your name Michael Michael thank you and how old are you Michael and where are you from 22 from Monterey Wonderful. So the question we're asking everyone is if you were given $1,500 every month from now for the rest of your life, unconditionally, so no strings attached by the government, as a universal basic income for you, how would your life be different? How would it be impacted? Well, I mean, honestly, I probably wouldn't be working right now if I got a universal income, or at least working full-time, that is. I could focus a little bit more on school

Starting point is 00:01:29 and the things that really, I think, would be a little bit more grounding to me. However, because we don't have that, I have to currently be working full-time in order to make ends meet. So it would definitely benefit my life in the fact that I could put my energy towards so many different things than just this one outlet that I have right now. And what do you feel about other people getting this basic income too? I feel like it's a basic human right to have a roof over your head, honestly.

Starting point is 00:01:57 And people shouldn't have to worry about that month to month. So, yeah. What's your name? Vadim. Vadim. Yeah, you can name? Vadim. Vadim. Yeah, you can call me Vadim. Vadim. And you said you just arrived from Russia, from near Moscow.

Starting point is 00:02:11 And what type of work do you do in Moscow? I'm not working. Ah, in Moscow. I work in my own bakery. Oh, Russian bread? Yep. Why not? Wonderful.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Yeah. So the question for you is, if you were to get an income from the Russian government for $1,500 a month every month for the rest of your life, no conditions, how would your life be different? I will help for people who is more needed than me. Who is more needed than me. So you would continue to work at the bakery, and you would take the 1,500 a month, but you would give it to homeless people? Yep.

Starting point is 00:02:52 That's right. What if everybody got it? What if everyone got it? It's going to be some chaos. Chaos? Yes, yes, yes. It's going to be chaos? Mm-hmm. In what way?

Starting point is 00:03:04 Why would it be chaos? I have some problems in English, so this guy is going to be my... Translator. Translator, okay. When everyone's going to have money, everyone's going to be greedy and not so helpful to each other. Okay, so you're saying that if you were given, just you, 1,500, you would be generous, you would give it to other people. But if everyone was given it, you think everyone would be more greedy.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Would you be okay just saying your first name and your age? Oh, now you've gone too far. Your social security number. My age? I'm a lady. Whatever you're comfortable with saying. My name is Emma and I am 32 years old. Great. And so we're out here in Palo Alto. We're asking people what would they do if they were given $1,500 every month from the government and no strings were attached. How would that change or impact your life? Well, you say that's $1,500 you can just be generous with. $1,500 you can just be generous with. I guess the thing about living here in the Bay Area is that everything is so much more expensive than what we're used to. And I'm here on a

Starting point is 00:04:31 European fellowship, so I get paid the same salary I did when I was working back in Europe, but everything else is insane. So it limits your life, it limits what you can do. That would be rent every month. It frees you up to go out, but also just, I don't know, do other things. I'm lucky enough to enjoy my work. It just doesn't pay that well. It would definitely change life a lot. Is that going to happen? Well, it might. And in some ways, it actually already is.

Starting point is 00:05:12 In this episode of Upstream, we'll take a close look at the idea of universal basic income and ask the question, what would it mean if people received money just for being alive? Versions of this idea have been talked about for hundreds of years. Dozens of pilot studies and experiments have already taken place, and today it's on the discussion table in many different communities. As you might imagine, this is a contentious topic. There's a lot of debate around how much it would be, who would get it, where the money would come from, and even whether it's a good idea in the first place.

Starting point is 00:05:49 As we tackle these questions, we'll explore some of the deeper, bigger issues tied to this radical concept. What might be some of the unintended systemic consequences of a universal basic income? What effect would it have on the future of work? Would civilization fall apart because people would just hang out on the couch all day? These are just a few of the themes we'll get into in this first of our two-part series on universal basic income. We're here right now on Stanford University's college campus, and we're here because there's a course being taught in the philosophy department called The Philosophy of Universal Basic Income.

Starting point is 00:06:37 Let's go find out more. My name is Juliana Bidadanoué. I am an assistant professor in philosophy at Stanford University. I'm French. I grew up in the suburbs of Paris. And I lived in England for about 10 years where I did my studies in philosophy. And I moved to the U.S. about a year and a half ago. So how would you describe universal basic income? Universal basic income is what has been described as a disarmingly simple policy.

Starting point is 00:07:08 It consists in giving people cash on a monthly basis with no strings attached. And that may sound like a crazy idea, but there are very strong reasons why we would want something that ambitious. Before we get into those reasons, let's take a closer look at what we mean when we talk about a universal basic income. First of all, a basic income would go to individuals, not households, as some benefits often do. It would also be an income that is unconditional, meaning there's nothing one would need to do or not do in order to receive it. That means it would be separate from and in addition to any income from paid work. You might hear unconditional and universal used interchangeably, but they actually mean very different things. Universal refers to who gets the basic income,

Starting point is 00:07:59 and there's actually still a lot of debate around how universal is defined. Would it go to all legal residents or just citizens? Would minors receive it? And would it be regional, national, or even global? And lastly, another key term is the word basic, which is also under debate. What is a basic income? Is it enough to keep you from starving? Or is it enough to allow you to live a comfortable life? We'll carry these questions with us throughout the episode. But first, we asked Juliana to tell us what sparked the interest in a whole course on the topic in the first place. So initially, the idea was that there's more and more interest within the tech community for basic income as a policy.

Starting point is 00:08:45 community for basic income as a policy. And that's, you know, because there is an increased concern that current technological developments might lead to a very bleak future for jobs and that we should start worrying about what we are going to do when robots are taking over. The age of robots has been anticipated since the beginning of the last century. Are the droids taking our jobs? The list of companies planning to replace human jobs with machines is growing. 47% of jobs in America are at or will be at risk of automation over the next two decades. This is the single biggest job category in America. That's correct.

Starting point is 00:09:19 And it could go away within the next two decades. That's the fear. If you've already heard about Universal basic income, or UBI, it was likely in this context as a way to respond to job loss due to increasing automation. This is where most of the interest in UBI from Silicon Valley, where Stanford is based, comes from. Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, for example, have come out in favor of basic income because they claim to see it as the most sensible way of avoiding inevitable mass unemployment. Turns out this perspective is just one part of the story.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Here's Juliana again. The kind of automation-driven interest in basic income is really the dominant one right here, right now. And so the idea of the course was to bring computer scientists, mechanical engineers, people getting interested in basic income because they are kind of realizing the social responsibility they have, to bring them to see that the basic income debate can't be reduced to the automation debate. And that there are many, many different arguments for basic income coming from a variety of different perspectives. And in fairness, I mean, I lived in Europe for a long time, for most of my life, just really recently here in the U.S. And I've actually been writing on basic income, reading on basic income.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And automation was like a very, very small part of the puzzle. So the idea of the class was to show that, you know, there is an interesting discussion on the freedom-based argument for basic income, right? So some libertarians, some neoliberals have argued that basic income is the instrument of freedom. It will free people to do whatever they might want to do with their time. And so there is a debate within kind of more liberal-leaning theories of justice. And then we do kind of a week on the egalitarian arguments for basic income and also the egalitarian concern that, you know, basic income might not be enough and basic income might not in itself be sufficient to reduce inequalities. And so it might even be, in some kind of cynical critiques,

Starting point is 00:11:20 it might even be a Trojan horse of neoliberalism. By a Trojan horse of neoliberalism. By a Trojan horse of neoliberalism, Juliana is referring to the questionable intentions behind the push for a basic income that comes from the right of the political spectrum, predominantly from neoliberals and libertarians. The idea behind these versions of a basic income is that we should abolish public services entirely and simply give people the cash instead

Starting point is 00:11:46 so that they can purchase all their services on the market. Things like welfare programs, public housing, health care, and in some extreme cases, even public education spending would be cut entirely and replaced by a basic income. On the other hand, a progressive or egalitarian UBI would likely replace some services because things like unemployment benefits or food stamps may become redundant, but most public services would still remain intact. A progressive version would also be high enough to ensure that the policy would create a truly free labor market where workers could freely choose the work they want to do or even whether or not to engage in paid work at all. If the income level was not high enough to ensure this freedom, UBI might actually serve as a subsidy for employers who could get away with

Starting point is 00:12:37 paying lower wages by relying on the basic income to make up the difference. As you can see, the left-wing and right-wing versions of basic income are quite different and would have radically different effects on society. Here's Juliana again with the rest of the course. We also have a week where we discussed whether basic income can help foster a more gender-just society. We have a week on racial justice in basic income. Black Lives Matter has endorsed basic income as part of their manifesto. And that's, I think, something that doesn't really get discussed very much. But there are very, very strong reasons to believe that basic income will benefit those who are least well off in this society. And so it might have an important impact on racial justice. And so we do almost seven weeks of that, and then we arrive at automation. And so they see that automation is actually, it's an important part of the puzzle that needs to be taken seriously and needs to be studied. But it's definitely not the entire debate.

Starting point is 00:13:37 And that's really important to separate it out, simply because we might want to say, well, look, we still need to resist some technological changes anyway and fight for basic income. It's not that we have to accept those changes and then support basic income. We might want to accept those changes and go for basic income, but it's not necessary. They don't necessarily work together. And I think that message is very important. Confining the discussion of basic income to a debate about job automation is unnecessary and limiting. And in fact, it may actually be harmful. We met up with economist

Starting point is 00:14:12 and author Doug Henwood, who weighed in about his thoughts on automation and how it connects with the idea of a universal basic income. People have been talking this way about automation resulting in the end of employment for decades and decades, centuries probably, and it just hasn't happened yet. But if I'm just looking at, for example, the last few years of this business cycle is that if automation was coming in and replacing employment, we would be seeing very rapid productivity growth, and by all the conventional measures, we're not. In fact, we're seeing some of the weakest productivity growth in the history of the American economy over the last couple of years. And that is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect to see if the robots were really taking

Starting point is 00:14:54 over. Now, you know, there's the driverless car coming and all that. Who knows? Maybe it's different this time. But there's really just basically no evidence looking at all the conventional economic statistics that jobs are disappearing in that way. And I think some of that talk actually is counterproductive. I think that the notion that jobs are disappearing makes people more scared than they have to be. It makes them less likely to make demands on their boss or less likely to make demands on the political system. Moderately bad times tend to make people more conservative.

Starting point is 00:15:26 They pull in and want to protect what they have. So I think making things sound worse than they are probably is not politically constructive, even though I think a lot of people say these things with good intentions. For example, if jobs are disappearing, we need a universal basic income. I, we need a universal basic income. I think we need a universal basic income

Starting point is 00:15:48 even if jobs aren't disappearing. So I think you should make the argument on the principle and not tell stories that may not be true. Thanks to my mechanical engineers and computer science students, I've really realized that we have no idea what we are talking about when we are starting speculating about the future of work.

Starting point is 00:16:05 And I think the plurality of futures that we might have to consider in order to answer the question, would basic income help at all, is something that I not realize the extent to which we are struggling and the extent to which even those who are at the center of those changes, so working on robots and the softwares of the future, don't know either. I think what philosophers have been quite good at, political philosophers, is that saying, well, let's worry about feasibility concerns later. Let's have visions. Let's have utopias.

Starting point is 00:16:40 Let's push them forward and then see if we can indeed get there. utopias, let's push them forward and then see if we can indeed get there. And I think that the past 20 years have been wonderful in showing that actually those really big, transformative, radical ideas can start becoming more and more feasible when people take them seriously. Speaking of envisioning utopias, here's Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, the case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek. We asked him about one of the first questions that came to our mind when we first heard about basic income. If everybody was simply given more money each month, wouldn't that just cause inflation and the prices of everything to go up? If you would finance the basic income with just printing additional money, then almost all economists would agree that at some point we're going to get inflation.

Starting point is 00:17:54 Actually, there are some economists right now and some other people who say that we should do that. It's called helicopter money or quantitative easing for the people because we don't have enough demand right now. And I mean, we're also giving a lot of free money to banks right now. So why not give it to the people instead? And sure, in the short run, you can do that. But obviously, in the long run, you won't be able to finance a basic income in that way. So almost all serious proponents I know of a basic income agree that we would have to finance it with taxes. And in that way, inflation is only going to be a problem if everyone is going to be lazy with the basic income. I mean, then you would have fewer goods and services, but the same amount

Starting point is 00:18:31 of money chasing those goods and services. And obviously, then you'll get inflation. But if that's not true, if people keep their jobs and may even do some more socially valuable work, paid or unpaid, then inflation is not a problem. There's one other thing, though, is that some people worry about the rents. Won't house lords just raise the rent? Well, let me first say that UBI is not a panacea that will suddenly solve all problems. If houses are too expensive, you need to build more houses, or you need to cap the rent or get more social housing or whatever you know you always need additional policies basic income

Starting point is 00:19:10 is never going to be enough although you should remember that a basic income will enable many people to move to a different area with lower rents a risk that they now won't dare to take because you know they can't afford to stop working for a few weeks and move somewhere else. But with a basic income, they could. So it'd be interesting to see what kind of dynamics would start with a basic income also on the housing market. And if people start moving and leave those expensive neighborhoods, And if people start moving and leave those expensive neighborhoods, well, then house lords might want to let their rents go down again. I think that you probably need other policies as well, but we already need them right now.

Starting point is 00:19:56 I mean, it's already a problem, but it's not an unsolvable problem. You might have noticed that Rucker's optimism regarding the inflation question was based on an assumption that people would remain productive if they received a basic income. But would people still be productive if they got a basic income? What's to stop them from just not working anymore? There's a lot to say in response to this question, but before exploring the answers, it's actually quite interesting to first explore the question itself. When you ask people what will you do with a basic income, most people aren't worried about themselves, right? They say, I've got dreams, I've got ambitions, I'll put the money to good use. But always if you ask them what will other people do with a basic income, they're really worried. You know, they'll probably waste it on drugs or alcohol or they'll watch Netflix all day. So that's why many people are, at least in

Starting point is 00:20:47 the first instance, skeptical of a basic income. And a big reason here is the news. Because I mean, the news is always about exceptions. It's always about things that go wrong, corruption, crisis, terrorism. Now in the US, people watch like five hours a day of television. So they are being inundated with the message that most humans are corrupt and lazy and want to wreck the systems, etc., etc. It's such an interesting question, you know, that we would assume that if we were not engaged in wage work, that we would just sort of lie around as if wage work becomes the very epitome of what it means to be active. This is Kathy Weeks, professor and author of the book The Problem with Work, Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics, and Post-Work Imaginaries.

Starting point is 00:21:36 We called her in her office at Duke University in North Carolina. I think it's also just sort of a symptom of how many hopes and expectations we pin onto wage work. That is, if we didn't have access to wage work, we would never get off the couch or get out of bed. And I think that's patently false because obviously there's many people who are not engaged in wage work, right? Traditionally, many women who have had only partial access to wage work, but who have been engaged in enormously productive kinds of activities, even if they haven't been rewarded with a wage. I think that that worry is itself a kind of revealing symptom of how many expectations we pin on this very fragile thing called waged work. We imagine that if we're excluded from it, that we would no longer be able to engage in any kind of meaningful activity. Well, I mean, if you look around, people are

Starting point is 00:22:40 engaged in meaningful activities all of the time. In fact, people are struggling in the few hours outside of their wage jobs to engage in all kinds of practices of care and creativity and sociality. People are constantly struggling to have more time outside wage work to engage in a myriad of activities. It might be helpful to explore this concept of waged work a bit more before we move forward, since it's so central to some of the assumptions around productivity that are deeply embedded in that question about whether people would just stop working if they received a UBI. It's a strangely difficult concept, the wage system. You could think of it also as a job system, but it's the system part that's a little harder to grasp because I think we're really good at thinking about jobs,

Starting point is 00:23:32 particularly our jobs or the jobs of our friends, but we're not really used to taking a step back to look at work as a kind of system. Why is work the main way that we gain access to income? Why are so many of us required to work? Why are we required to work for so long? Why is, you know, 40 hours the standard of full-time work? And these are kind of bigger questions about the relationship between work and life in our country. So I think you do have to kind of take this step back. And when you do that, you can kind of see that a capitalist economic system fulfills these two tasks simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:24:17 And one of them is to generate profit, right? So to give people returns on their investment, to kind of, you know, stock up more investment capital. That's one of them. It's doing pretty well on that score. And the second function is to distribute income to the rest of us, right? And how are the rest of us going to get the income that we need to live? Well, the idea is that we gain access through waged work. And I think that, you know, that's what I'm trying to get at when I think about a wage system.

Starting point is 00:24:49 Now, in a pre-industrial economy, wage work wasn't the primary way that people earned their livelihood. They might have been working on a family farm or trading various tasks for food or other kinds of things. With industrialization, wage work came to be the primary way that people made access to income. And that made people who were engaged in other kinds of activities, I'm thinking of unwaged household workers, for example, all of a sudden their work was no longer seen as work, because then work attached to this idea of waged work and anyone who was doing other kinds of productive activities that was no longer coded as work. And so you've talked about how the UBI

Starting point is 00:25:38 debate might actually help to start a dialogue about the failures of the wage system? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's one of the important things about the fact that we're talking about a basic income now is it's really an opportunity to stage some really important public discussions about, you know, is the wage system working or not? What does it mean to have, as people have described the post-2008 recovery, a jobless recovery? And what does that mean for the future of work as a system of income distribution? It forces us to ask, well, why are some contributions to the social good attached to a wage and why are some not in some ways? And even, you know, why is this the best way to distribute income? You know, is wage work really robust enough of a system to deliver on that promise that it'll allow people the means to live in a society. piano plays softly Thank you. Part of the reason the myth exists that people would instantly stop working the second they had a chance

Starting point is 00:28:03 is because our whole economic system is based on the idea that work is a disutility and that we're all driven by the rational, self-interested motive to do as little of it as possible. But actually, we're conflating the separate concepts of work and of jobs. Is it work that we have a problem with or is it actually jobs? Just think of all the things that we could do if we weren't completely stuck in that, for me, backward looking perspective on work and the life course where, you know, you study for a number of years, then you're on the job market, then you work and you have a job for your entire life and then you retire. I think that entire structure needs to be rethought. I think education should be lifelong. I think job should also be lifelong

Starting point is 00:28:50 if you want to, but work should be part of it all. That's for sure. And then just a life where the centrality of jobs is challenged. The centrality of work, I don't think should be challenged. I mean, people disagree on that. But from a more social democratic perspective, I do think that work is the backbone of our communities. It's the thing that gives us link. And so I'm really in favor of a society where people are, you know, encouraged in various ways to contribute, to do volunteering work, to look after each other. I think that just our conception of work is so narrow. And I think that we shouldn't make an income depend on what work you end up doing,

Starting point is 00:29:29 what activity you end up doing, because there'll always be an oppressive way of choosing and picking out the occupation that we think matter. We're so deeply embedded within the wage system that we find it difficult to even think about ways to meet our needs without it. And we don't even realize when we're making grand assumptions about human nature and what actually counts as productivity based on this very narrow and relatively recent way of organizing a society. I really do believe that people's reactions to basic income are mainly ideological, while just people's first reactions. People are just going to not want to work anymore.

Starting point is 00:30:06 Why would you work if you don't have those incentives anymore? And so I think that it's ideological in the sense that, well, it's not based on evidence. It's just this profound distrust in human nature. And actually what's interesting there is that there is absolutely no evidence that that's what people end up doing when they get cash. And I think that can't be stressed enough. So what does the evidence say? To find out, let's travel back in time to a small town deep within the prairie lands of central Canada.

Starting point is 00:30:49 A place called Manitoba. Now, just what is Manitoba? It's a province in Canada, the Keystone Province, right in the center. And it's becoming the holiday target for more and more vacationers every year. It's only 400 miles from Minneapolis or Regina, less than 1,000 miles from Toronto or Regina, less than a thousand miles from Toronto, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City. Manitoba is still the center, whether you come from Montreal or New York, Vancouver or San Francisco, by plane, train, bus, or car. Okay, right now, my name is Eric Richardson.

Starting point is 00:31:33 I'm a carpentry instructor at Community College here in Winnipeg, and I've been here about four years, originally from Tawson, Manitoba. And, yeah, we lived a few other places, but always end up back in Manitoba. Yeah. When Eric was a child, his parents were the recipients of a form of basic income that the Canadian government experimented with in the 70s. They called it mincum. Mincum wasn't a UBI in the classic sense, but instead it's what's known as a negative income tax, which is basically a top-up if your income dips below a certain amount.

Starting point is 00:32:10 The experiment occurred in a few towns in Manitoba, but Dauphin was the only saturation site, meaning that everyone in town was eligible. We asked Eric to tell us a little bit more about what he remembered. When I grew up, okay, my parents' children were seen but not heard. So they didn't really tell you what they were doing. You were just a kid and you did what you were told and, you know, stuff like that. But years later, my mom started doing interviews about MNCO. And then I found out that we were on this program. So over the course of

Starting point is 00:32:49 time, I realized that when certain things happened in our household, it was largely in part to do that program. So what happened as a result of MNCAM? What were some of the impacts that it had on your family? Okay, my parents were, my mom was a hairdresser, my dad, he was, he was many things, but he was like a handyman when I was growing up. But he had a bad heart, so he didn't work a full-time job, so to speak. He sort of worked here and there, like nothing, steady employment. And basically what happened was that the government set up this program that if your family income was under a certain amount, you would get extra dollars. So we always had enough to eat and everything, but there was no extras.

Starting point is 00:33:37 Your clothes were hand-me-downs or whatever that you went out to restaurants maybe once a year. My parents grew a garden. They canned stuff, and it was all, I guess now you'd say it's all natural food, but back then it was because you didn't really go to the store that much. So when some extra money showed up, a few different things happened. What happened differently? What changed in the household? different things happened. What happened differently? What changed in the household?

Starting point is 00:34:14 Well, my parents went out and bought a brand new table and chairs. And we never had any new furniture in the house, say, that I can remember. And then all of a sudden, this new table and chair shows up. We lived in an older two-story house. It had hardwood floors, and it was kind of off-level. So the chairs were caster chairs with bucket seats, so they rolled around on the hardwood, but they would roll away from the table because the floor was sloped. So my mom and dad went back, and they bought an area rug to go underneath the table so the chairs wouldn't roll away. So it was quite a big red-letter day in my family

Starting point is 00:34:43 when this new furniture showed up. Most of the people I've talked to reported that, in fact, Minkum made a big difference in their lives. It made it possible for them to, if I can quote one of the participants, to add some cream to the coffee. This is Dr. Evelyn Forget, and that quote that she mentioned is actually from Eric's mother. Dr. Forget is the researcher famous for uncovering the data behind the Mincom experiment decades after the program had ended. I was an undergraduate between 1974 and 1978 when the Canadian experiment was taking place.

Starting point is 00:35:20 So it was always something that was sort of sitting at the back of my mind. And I would go into my economics classes and my professors would say, there's this wonderful experiment that's taking place way out west somewhere in Canada that's going to revolutionize the way we deliver social programs in this country. I went on to graduate school and this just sort of dropped off the radar. It was sort of sitting at the back of my mind, but nobody talked about it anymore. And I went on and did a lot of other things. And about 15 years ago, I started to do a lot of work in the area of health and poverty. And this old experiment sort of came back to mind. And I wondered at that point whether we could find anything about what happens if you actually have an effective way of alleviating poverty. Does it improve people's health? Does it improve their quality of life?

Starting point is 00:36:09 So that's essentially why I started working in this area. A change in Canada's government in the middle of the Mincom experiment caused the program to end somewhat abruptly when the new administration pulled the funding. The researchers were left with a vast amount of data that was never analyzed. It wasn't until Dr. Forge recently uncovered the 1,800 dusty boxes of paper files that we really began to learn anything about the findings. Before Dr. Forge's work, the only data that had been published was a single labor market analysis of some of the results. We asked Dr. Forge about that study and how she got involved. The researchers found that primary earners, that is adults with real jobs, didn't have much of a labor market effect at all.

Starting point is 00:36:57 If you offered them a basic income, they didn't really change their behavior very much. But there were two groups of people who did reduce the number of hours they worked. Married women, secondary earners, reduced the number of hours they worked in an interesting way. When they left the labor market to give birth, they tended to stay out for longer periods of time. So they effectively used the income stipend to buy themselves longer maternity leaves, longer parental leaves. The other group of people who reduced the number of hours they worked really dramatically were tertiary earners. And here the language you use is really, really important. If you're not a supporter of basic income, what you report is that young, unattached males reduce the number of hours they work really dramatically. And if you are a

Starting point is 00:37:40 supporter, you look a little bit more closely at the data and realize that what you're talking about are teenage boys. Teenage boys, adolescent boys, reduce the number of hours they worked. So really, my work started when I went looking for those adolescent boys because I had a pretty fair idea of where I'd find them. So I called the provincial Department of Education and I got high school registration figures. of Education, and I got high school registration figures. And it turned out that there was a nice increase in high school completion rates, exactly coincident with the period of the Mincombe Project in Dauphin. So those young unattached males who were fleeing their labor market responsibilities were in fact in high school. I tracked down some of the participants

Starting point is 00:38:20 in the experiment and talked to the families. And what we were told was that young boys in particular in low-income families had previously been under a fair amount of family pressure to become financially independent as quickly as possible so that the family money could be spread among the younger children. And when income came along, some of those families decided that they could support their sons in high school a little bit longer. So those boys were working fewer hours because instead of leaving school at the age of 16 and taking a job, they were staying in high school and some of them were graduating during that period. So I think that was the first finding of my work that excited me a little bit. Let's face the more people you have that are educated

Starting point is 00:39:05 with more skills, the better society you're going to have. So it's an investment in your society. So, like a lot of people just right away, oh, everybody's going to get lazy or write it off or whatever, nobody's going to work. Well, it's exactly the opposite, eh? Because people who work want to work, you know, and

Starting point is 00:39:20 they'll just do other things. If you've never had new furniture, you'd buy new furniture. If you needed training, you'd go for training. The money was just given to you, and you could do what you want with it. It was completely no strings attached. So it's whatever suited your needs most, that's what you used it for. As Dr. Forge started to dig through the data, she reached out to the local paper and radio stations to ask for people to come forward to speak with her about how MNCUM had influenced their lives.

Starting point is 00:39:51 She wanted to give life to the data that she had found and get a sense of the legacy of the program. This is how she connected with people like Eric's mother. I also heard from a librarian, and I think this is the story that comes to my mind most often. When I met her, she just retired. And she told me that when Mincom came along, she was at that point collecting welfare, and she was a single mother of two young daughters. And she kept going to her welfare caseworker and asking to take some job training because she wanted to become independent. And here's an indication of how different the world was in the 1970s than today. She was told by her caseworker that she should stay home and take care of her kids and that the system would take care of her.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And she wasn't very pleased with that response. her. And she wasn't very pleased with that response. And so when MNCUM came along, families were given a choice. They couldn't both collect welfare and be on the MNCUM's team. So she withdrew from welfare and registered for MNCUM. And under MNCUM, she could spend the money any way she wanted to. So she went and took some job training at a local community college and got a part-time job that eventually turned into a full-time job. And as I said, when I spoke to her, she just retired after many years as a district librarian in the public system. And she was incredibly proud of having modeled a different kind of a life for her daughters. So in her house, there are graduation pictures of both her daughters, both of whom had become

Starting point is 00:41:19 professionals and gone on to live good lives. And she was very grateful to Minkham for giving her that opportunity. The Dauphin experiment dispels the myth that waged work is the only incentive that people have to be productive contributing members of a society. Most people didn't quit their jobs to spend more time doing drugs and, well, whatever the equivalent was of Netflix back then. And those who did stop working did so only to take care of their family or to further their education. Here's Rutger with another experiment that took place in the city of London in 2009

Starting point is 00:41:55 that also supports these findings. So what they did is they gave 13 homeless men who had been living on the streets for years in the air, some of them more than 40 years they gave them three thousand pounds in spending money and they were completely free to decide to spend it on whatever they wanted you know and even at that organization that charity organization that did that you know they're even there there were quite some people skeptical like is this is this really going to work out but then it turned out that the men put the money to really good use.

Starting point is 00:42:27 You know, one of them bought a hearing aid, a dictionary, or one took gardening classes. And most importantly, a year after the experiment, 7 out of 13 of the men had a roof above their head. We should really move away from the very divisive rhetoric that has tended to separate what we often refer to as the deserving pole from the undeserving pole. There is this idea that, you know, those who are on benefits are benefits crowngers, free riders, wealthy queens, people who are just benefiting and

Starting point is 00:42:58 playing the system and benefiting from the system. And so the idea that we should move towards more unconditional benefits is also to kind of refuse the starting point, the assumption that we should distrust the poor and that we should distrust people and what they do with cash. So what we want to do is to kind of shift the paradigm and start thinking about benefits as the safety net that enables you to actually open yourself to the various opportunities for meaningful work that are already available around you. And that might include caring, volunteering, that might include political campaigning, it might include many things that count as work, in some sense, but that are not currently remunerated in the labour market.

Starting point is 00:43:42 So, you know, and also it enables the opportunity to lead a more multi-sided existence where one year you might decide that you want to spend more time looking after an elderly, you know, grandparent or parent. But if you have a full-time job, you just can't possibly spend that time and you feel like that year that's the thing that you want to do and that you have to do. Or another year you might, you know, need to spend more time with a child that needs support right now not tomorrow right now and basic income by being unconditional and not discriminating between different activities enables those opportunities Thank you. The findings from MINCUM and many other similar experiments

Starting point is 00:45:00 give us a glimpse into the short-term consequences of severing wages from labor. But what might the long-term systemic effects be? Here's what we might imagine. We've got a huge waste of human potential going on right now in two respects. So we've got millions of people living in poverty. That's one source of waste of human potential. But the other one is that millions and millions of people are now stuck in jobs that may pay very well, but they don't care about it at all. You know, it's what we call bullshit jobs.

Starting point is 00:45:33 And a recent poll in the UK found that as much as 37% of British workers have a job that they think doesn't need to exist. In finance, in marketing, corporate lawyers, you name it. So what will probably happen is that if you give everyone a basic income, and many people with lower incomes, but the people who are doing incredibly important work, like garbage collectors, teachers, nurses, they can always fall back on their basic income. So they'll have a lot more bargaining power, which means that their wages will have to go up. Now, there are a lot of people nowadays in BS jobs that don't add anything of value

Starting point is 00:46:12 and they won't have additional bargaining power. So what will happen with the basic income in the long run is that the wages will much better reflect the social value of jobs. And think about participation in politics. It takes time, right? Many people can't afford to. They cannot afford to spend time on, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:36 thinking about all these issues, making a difference on a local level, etc. Basic income will make it possible. There are so many examples and ways in which it would empower people to live a more productive, fulfilling life. We should think about the frustration of not being able to do what you want to do with your life, the frustration of not having employment,

Starting point is 00:47:00 all that frustration and the violence that it creates in a society at a given time. And that's also something that we have to think about very seriously. I mean, Guy Standing has written on the precariates and this growing mass of people. We don't have an occupational identity and we don't have occupational security. And we end up, you know, joining neo-Nazi groups, for example, in Eastern Europe. He draws a very clear connection between that violence and the economic insecurity and the frustration that come with it. That's something

Starting point is 00:47:29 that we need to think about. Do we want to kind of demonize those young people and think that they are just radically different from us? Or do we want to think that economic insecurity is the driving anxiety here that is producing all that hatred and all that violence. And it's not just that, of course, but it's a really big part of the puzzle. And so, again, I think we have an opportunity here to do something very radical, something that would take us to the next step, really. And there will be plenty of challenges in that next step that won't solve climate change, that won't solve many, many things.

Starting point is 00:48:02 So there will be so many struggles. solve climate change, that won't solve many, many things. So there will be so many struggles. But at least maybe we'll have more free time to actually contribute to those challenges and do something about those. And that's another thing, the challenge of trying to regain control over our time and over how we use our time. Everyone is overwhelmed. Those who are employed are over-employed and overwhelmed, or they are in precarious employment that do not allow them to take time off. Or they are the underemployed who still end up spending all their time looking for jobs. So the question is, really, can we and should we find ways to regain control of our time so that we can really spend it better? You know, looking after the kids that need to be looked after, looking after the elderly people that need to

Starting point is 00:48:43 be looked after, doing all the political and volunteering and campaigning work that is needed to make our society more cohesive and just really give it a future, because right now it's looking pretty bleak. It seems like you're going sideways. It just takes so much money these days to run your household, pay the cable bill, keep the water, keep the wolf from the door, as they say. It's just a ridiculous amount of money. And you end up with people like Donald Trump, for instance, that are billionaires.

Starting point is 00:49:16 And it's like, well, we all work hard. Why does one person get to have a billion dollars and the next guy is just, you know, scraping by. So there's got to be a way of redistributing the wealth somehow. So it's a bit fair. And what would you say might be the root cause of economic inequality? Obviously, the standard answer to that, the root of all evil is the love of money. And money is very easy to measure. So you always think of, oh, this guy has, you know, a million dollars, he must be a great guy, or happy or whatever. But you can't measure a lot of these intrinsic things, like somebody doing what they want, or they're taking care of their family, or they're

Starting point is 00:50:03 looking after their, you know, their parents or their elderly parents or whatever. So it's all these other things that we don't look at. So everything comes down to a cost and it's, oh, it's going to cost so much money and blah, blah, blah. Well, it costs money to not do things. So definitely we've got to get past this money issue and start what do people need and the basic needs of the people. And even if it's the form of housing, too, if everybody has a place to call their own, I mean, that would be a start. And so you're a teacher of carpentry skills, and you also are willing to speak with people like us, and I know you're also on Marketplace. and you also are willing to speak with people like us, and I know you're also on Marketplace.

Starting point is 00:50:45 So has this upbringing for you got you involved in politics or campaigning or political activism or really advocating for policies like this at all? I thought about it, but, oh, man, it seems so hard to change people's minds now. Once upon a time, I thought one person can make a difference, which is true, one person can. They get it, people working minds. Once upon a time I thought one person can make a difference, which is true. One person can. They get it, people working together. But you yourself may have noticed that it's like, the harder you try, it seems like

Starting point is 00:51:17 you can't change things. I have no idea why that is, but I guess maybe an age thing, maybe I'm getting older. I feel like you're being an activist or a political activist by helping us tell stories and by allowing people to interview you and share about the project. So thank you so much for that. It's been great talking with you. Oh, thanks, Stella. Good luck down there. Hi, what's your name? My name's Robin. If you were given a universal basic income for the rest of your life, enough to satisfy all of your basic needs, what do you think you would do with with the money? How do you think

Starting point is 00:52:05 it would change your life? I think that for the first little while I would just kind of catch up on human stuff that I don't get to do because I'm making money. Like I would go visit my nieces and like my cousins and I would like finish reading all my books and like catch up on my shows and take naps and stuff. And I suspect that once I finished the human needs that I have, the connection needs that I have, and once I got tired of like entertaining myself in a shallow way with books and movies, I think then what I would do is my curiosity would take over and I would start learning stuff that I wanted to learn about like I would maybe learn how to play the piano or I would like write and direct a play or like figure out architecture so I think I

Starting point is 00:53:01 would once I settled my human needs out I think I would make a lot more art and I think that I would spend time satisfying a lot of educational curiosity. Okay. Okay, thank you so much. What's your name by the way? Angelica. Angelica, could you just say a little bit about what you do? I'm a medical assistant at Stanford and I've been there for about a year in the orthopedic department. and I've been there for about a year in the orthopedic department. So if you were given $1,500 a month, every month from next month to the rest of your life, with no strings attached, how would your life be different?

Starting point is 00:53:36 I just moved back with my mom, maybe last Wednesday, so it's a week today. And I moved back because I found out I have a garnishment. I have to pay back my school loans. I was paying rent somewhere else. I can no longer afford to pay rent on my own. Car payments, everything. I have to sell my car, so I'm walking home right now to my mom's house. So I got that would help a lot.

Starting point is 00:54:02 So it would help with, you would find a place to live, you would maybe have a car payment, but do you think that you would change your work, or you would continue to work as a medical assistant? I would continue. I'm happy where I am right now. I wish I earned more, but unfortunately that's how it is. But I'm happy where I am.

Starting point is 00:54:21 I think I would just continue my life maybe as it is. Maybe not even get a car. I like walking. People ask why I walk so much. I walk an hour to work and an hour home but I enjoy it and right now it's just a little hiccup in life but hopefully it'll get better. Thank you to all of our guests and to Face of Man, Bedrock, Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Harps for the music you heard in our episode today. Thank you as well to Ben Henderson for the cover art. Make sure that you stay tuned for the second episode in this two-part series on universal basic income, where we'll ask the question, could a progressive UBI lead to the end of capitalism? Or would it actually hinder the transition to a post-capitalist world? Stay tuned to find out.

Starting point is 00:55:21 On the one hand, it's clearly a reformist proposition, not a revolutionary one. So that I think if we did institute a guaranteed basic income, it would not spell the end of capitalism. So I don't think of it in itself as a revolutionary proposition. But I do think of it as opening up a path. In our rush to look at capitalism and how to change business or how to be sustainable, we haven't stepped back and asked ourselves, as a species, as a culture, as a nation, as a tribe, as a family, as an individual, what are we here for? What do I actually want to do?

Starting point is 00:56:12 If I didn't have to earn a living, what would I choose to do? And UBI gives us a step on the way to that. And I think, like the other changes that we're seeing, it's a step that will snowball very fast because if you give people a taste of freedom, they're going to get to like it. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free, and we couldn't possibly keep things going without the ongoing support of our listeners and fans.

Starting point is 00:56:41 So until we all get a universal basic income, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're now fiscally sponsored by the organization Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make to Upstream are tax exempt. You can listen to any of our past documentaries and interviews at upstreampodcast.org, and you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Uppodcast.org. And you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Upstream Podcast. Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

Upstream - Documentary #7: Universal Basic Income Pt. 1 – An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

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