Tag: Universal Basic Income

To judge from my Facebook news feed and Twitter updates, the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is gaining traction on the political left and centre-left. The extraordinary measures being undertaken by governments to prop up economies hit by Coronavirus and associated lockdowns somehow make it look less outlandish. In Britain the idea is getting closer and closer to being official policy for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats; it is already there for the Greens. I have always been a sceptic, and I still am.

The attraction is easy to see, and the crisis has highlighted its virtues. It is one answer to the massive information gap that lies between governments and the citizens they serve. This makes it impossible to target aid accurately to those in need. Government schemes like the furlough scheme leave many gaps, are subject to administration delays or injustices, and doubtless pay lots of money to those who don’t really need it, including fraudsters. On the other hand, attempts to target better involve humiliating procedures to verify need, which are often administered by officials that seem to take pleasure in the exercise of petty power for its own sake – and who are not empowered with discretion to use common sense nor accountable for the human results of their work.

This information gap has two main causes. The first is privacy, whereby we deliberately limit the information we make available to the authorities, or anybody else. The is one of the core aspects of what we understand by freedom, and all psychological benefits that come with empowerment and autonomy. But there is also the sheer scale and complexity of the information problem. Even in countries unworried by the idea of privacy, like China, face colossal problems trying to understand individual people’s needs, and often resort to arbitrary rules.

UBI is income that everybody is entitled to, on the minimum possible qualifications (such as nationality; there would likely be some form of age-based entitlement too). This would eliminate the need to provide targeted help in most cases, its advocates argue. In particular it would not depend on whether the citizen is working, and could replace unemployment benefit, or, in the UK, Universal Credit. There is no need for the state to gather data on income and work status in order to check entitlement.

Some support for this idea has recently come from Finland, where a randomised trial was carried out between UBI and unemployment pay. It was found that UBI did not reduce the incentive to look for work, while significantly improving the wellbeing of those receiving it. One worry about UBI, especially if it is substantial enough to replace entitlements to benefits, is that a significant number of people would give up the search for work, because they would not need it. But advocates point out that the incentive to work is improved because people keep all the extra earnings (subject to taxes), rather than having benefits withdrawn. The Finnish study provides some interesting evidence here.

But if the incentives argument falls away, there remains the question of how the state manages to pay for it. There is a dilemma here. The higher the rate of UBI, the more it can replace other benefits, and so deliver the advantages advocates want to see. In the UK Universal Credit is an obvious target, and so is the basic state pension. And yet as soon as it reaches this sort of level, the state outlays required to cover it become massive. Of course there are savings. Since the state pension is already a more or less universal entitlement, there may not be much extra outlay. Tax free allowances on pay could be withdrawn. But the gap remains massive.

Some on the left wave all this away, based on the insights offered by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which basically suggests that budget deficits can be funded by borrowing or printing money, and so traditional ideas of balancing budgets are old hat. Now I’m not as rude about MMT as most conventional economists seem to be, but it does seem to have encouraged the sort of magical thinking I last remember being widespread at the time of the tech boom in the late 1990s (“losses are the new profits”). The problem is that UBI would potentially unleash a wave of extra consumer demand across the economy, which could lead it to overheat and break down, through inflation or a debt crisis (because of the need to borrow foreign currency to buy imports sucked in by the excess demands). That is unless demand could be dampened down in some way, i.e. taxes raised. This is not a question of just taxing wealth, and top pay either. This may be a good idea anyway, but it is not likely to have a big enough impact on demand to head off trouble. Some combination of increases in basic income tax, national insurance and VAT will be needed too. This needs to be discussed more openly by the idea’s advocates.

But my reservation goes deeper. To me UBI seems to be trying to shortcut the sort of interventions that our society needs. It is an attempt to give people money in the hope that their problems will go away. That may work for a lot of people, but we will still be left with a vast residue of people with more complex needs, which a basic UBI does not begin to solve. I prefer solutions based on a highly devolved interventions by empowered professionals, able to tailor solutions across the whole range of public services from health, to housing, to law enforcement. The way to bridge the information gap is through people intelligently examining individual needs and crafting complex solutions. This will entail a judicious mixture of conditional and unconditional benefits. Our public services have been going in the opposite direction for two decades or more, as successive governments have sought to take the humanity out of public services and replace it with targets that turn out to be meaningless. By focusing so much on UBI, we are distracting attention away from the real crisis in public services.

The craze over UBI illustrates one of the biggest failings in a our politics. The search for simple, if radical, ideas instead of trying to understand the humanity of our society, and going about the messy and painful business of adjusting to this reality.

Slowly but surely Universal Basic Income (UBI) is becoming a totem policy on the left. Longer standing readers of this blog will know that I am sceptic. But should I be reluctantly reconciling myself to the idea in some form?

Recent impetus for UBI has come from the US, where it is favoured by high tech businessmen worried about the implications of progressive automation. They worry that there is a great hollowing out going on, with mid-skilled jobs disappearing, and the workforce being divided between a very well paid elite of professionals and business owners, and a majority of low skilled proletariat in ill paid and insecure jobs. If the latter can have their income topped up by some form of UBI, then they will be able to afford a higher standard of living, and they will be less beholden to the elite. Many businessmen think that the latest advances in artificial intelligence are about to make the problem much worse – hence the need for such an intervention.

The left is worried by similar issues. The more thoughtful are concerned by a breakdown of consent for the welfare state, where state aid is doled out based on need. If everybody is entitled to the same level of state aid (with allowances for age and disability, perhaps), then there will be less resentment by the slightly better off members of the working class against those receiving aid. Since the left is generally bereft of ideas that are not simply reinventing the 1970s, this one is getting a lot of support. The Green Party in Britain has adopted it; many in Labour (and the Lib Dems) are sympathetic.

Various small-scale pilots are being set up in America and Europe. In fact something like it has been in operation in various places in the US for some time. Alaska pays all its citizens a dividend from its natural resources wealth (the Alaska Permanent Fund). The amount is modest and variable: since 2010 it has ranged from $878 to $2,072 a year – but it is popular. Meanwhile a number of Native American reserves pay a fixed income from gambling concessions. The social effects of this are not so benign, which is no doubt why so few UBI never mention them. The money does not make up for a lack of decent jobs and social infrastructure, and the money is spent on things that do not engender long-term well-being, though enriching unscrupulous salesmen.

One thing should be very clear from any but the most superficial analysis. If the level of UBI is to be set high enough to deal with basic human needs, so that it can replace the bulk of state benefits, then taxation will have to be unfeasibly high. So high that instead of fostering consent it is just as likely to breed resentment as the current system, and a massive drive by businesses and rich people to smuggle their profits abroad to evade payment. That is before recipients of UBI start complaining that the system is unfair because their circumstances (living in a high-cost area, educational needs, health problems, disabilities) create greater need. The idea that UBI can replace a whole series of benefits with a massively simplified system is for the birds. I also think such a system would lead to alienation which would exacerbate social ills. Alienation results unless people are engaged in genuine dialogue resulting in some form of contract; the idea behind UBI is to reduce the need for dialogue and contract.

If UBI-max – the replacement of most state benefits -is ruled out, what we are left with is  much more modest. It might replace the personal tax allowance and extend it to those who aren’t working, and re-badge the basic state pension, removing it from the contributory principle (something that the Coalition advanced in the UK in 2010 to 2015). This would effect a modest level of redistribution and ease life slightly for some groups of hard-pressed. No doubt it would mean higher taxes, though some benefits might be clipped to help pay for it. I’m not sure that this is worth it – and it is hardly very radical. The tax free allowance is only worth a couple of thousand pounds a year.

But there is another approach that is worth mentioning – suggested by the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. This goes back to the Alaska Permanent Fund. The state acquires stakes in major businesses, and especially the big monopolistic businesses that are increasingly dominating our daily lives. A dividend would be distributed annually from the income generated by this fund. Over time this fund would grow and start to produce respectable sums.

Mr Varoufakis is a socialist; the idea of states taking over chunks of privately held capital will not bother him. Others might be nervous; the state has not proved to be an effective shareholder on the whole, the less so the more management is politicised. It might also create public acquiescence with monopoly profits, compared to more efficient models. But it is an intriguing idea. It does go to the heart of the problem – the excessive accumulation of capital in the hands of relatively few people, and its control by corporations that funnel disproportionate rewards to a few. It also starts to tackle another often-overlooked problem: how hard it is for people on modest incomes to accumulate savings without them being eaten up by transaction costs. This is why so many private sector pension plans are so ineffective, and why a state-funded basic pension is such a good idea.

How would the state fund its capital acquisitions? There are broadly three ways: appropriation, taxation or borrowing. Appropriation is simply tax by another name – maybe businesses could be forced to offer shares to the state instead of corporation tax; and by the same process a minimum distribution might also be forced. There a couple of problems with this, though. First of all it would confine the fund to domestic assets, when so much of the surplus capital is held by international businesses. Second, businesses come in all sorts of legal structures, some of which are more conducive to income distribution than others. Any attempt to appropriate shares could cause businesses to evade by changing legal structures.

But a sovereign wealth fund funded by taxation or borrowing gets around the need for direct appropriation. The problem is that it would take an awful lot of money before it reached a size that it could generate an income that the public would notice. Take the UK. One thousand pounds for 60 million people is £60 billion. At a 2% yield that is £3 trillion capital value – getting on for twice the level of the national debt. Even a New Monetarist might that feel state borrowing on this level carries risks. Of course the idea is that capital growth will help to fund this over time, and if built up slowly, it would be easier to accommodate – but cash distributions would also be tiny for a long time.

All this leaves me thinking that UBI is a symptom of the problem, and not the solution. The world is becoming too dominated by big institutions, such as companies like Google or governments and state agencies. These try to simplify processes in order to make them manageable – and this leads to excessive accumulation of power by elites, in government and business – and the alienation of the majority. UBI is just another simplified solution designed to fit this general pattern. It is advocated by people that support such one-size-fits-all approaches – be the monopolist businessmen or advocates of a mighty central state (such as socialists) .What we actually have to do is tackle those excessive concentrations of power. And that is much harder.