Unconditional Basic Income (part 1)

I propose to consider the idea of an unconditional basic income from what I might call a philosophical standpoint. While I think that such a proposal does have practical value, given how “radical” it appears in current American political terms, I think it might be more interesting to consider it as a thought-experiment. Indeed, the first question that begs to be answered is why—both on the left and the right—such an idea appears so radical.

Like all radical ideas, the proposal of an unconditional basic income forces us to confront the assumptions that underlie the values that guide the formation of political positions. We tend to consider our values as logical and therefore immutable, but if that were the case, there would never be any significant policy shifts. On the contrary, the same value paradigms that have been operating in America for generations have birthed a variety of different policy approaches. So in a sense there is a separability, a gap between one’s values and the policies one chooses with which to implement them. In this gap is where the assumptions live. One easy way to discuss these assumptions is to talk about the meaning of the terms used in any given debate. And there appear to be many, many terms that the notion of an unconditional basic income forces us to reconsider.

In this first post, I will start by examining the term work.

In today’s America, work is understood as both a necessity and a means of contributing to society. Work has a general positive connotation in the political sphere: we want people to be able to find work. Americans work hard, and that is a good thing.

Certainly work is seen somewhat differently by conservatives and liberals. Conservatives tend to see work as conferring dignity on a person who engages in it, and this dignity is related to the fact that someone who works is earning his keep rather than living off another person’s work. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to believe that humans possess dignity inherently, and while work is a necessary part of life, it is essential that people not be lowered by it—i.e., it must not be undignified.

It may help perhaps to have two terms to distinguish between work that confers dignity and that that threatens it. Hannah Arendt, in her philosophical examination of the ancient Greek city-state, used the terms labor, work, and action in order to describe the relationship of different social classes to their work. Arendt defines labor as the kind of work that is necessary for survival. The products of such work are impermanent, i.e., one cannot stop growing food after each harvest, for humans need food constantly. In the Greek city-state, labor was reserved for slaves, a fact that expresses the Greek view that the further a man could be from the necessary, the more dignified were his activities. In between labor and action there was work, whose products left traces because they were not produced merely for immediate consumption. Tools, books, and buildings all fall into this category. Freemen could perform such work, but if a man was obligated to perform these activities in order to maintain himself, he was still not free in the ultimate sense, because only men who had none of these obligations could take part in political action. And political action was viewed as the highest form of human activity because it was through great words and great (political) deeds that a man could make a permanent name for himself. In short, the kinds of human activities were put in a hierarchy with the most ephemeral at the bottom and the most immortalizing at the top.

While this overall framework is not applicable to modern America, it is helpful to borrow the idea of a distinction between labor and work. The use of the term labor implies the threat to dignity that the obligation to activity implies. The power of necessity (whether it is the necessity of the harvest or of the factory’s machines) can be in fact degrading: that’s the value implications behind the term labor union (protecting the worker) and the holiday Labor Day (celebrating him). Work, on the other hand, carries the positive sense of a willing and dignified industriousness; it has meaning and human beings can take pride in their activity—the expressions creative work and body of work highlight this meaning.

But there is always a tension between work and labor in a capitalist economy, generated by the fact that a) the worker is constrained by the necessity of self-support to enter the market (the labor market) and b) the value of the worker’s activity is not in his own control, but is set either by his employer or by the overall market itself. (An easy example: I can take as much pride in this blog as I want, but it isn’t “worth” anything, economically speaking.)

What conservatives and liberals differ over today is precisely the source of pride (dignity) of work. Conservatives tend to believe that unless people are properly incentivized, they will refuse to work; the only way to instill dignity (the work ethic) is to insist that people work. The kind of work is not at issue; just the submission to the necessity of it confers dignity. Therefore they tend to be against a robust welfare system, believing that it will only discourage people from working.

On the other hand, liberals tend to believe that certain conditions must be met for work to be dignified. They tend to assume that most people have an innate drive to pursue some activity or another, and also a willingness to participate in society and provide for themselves and their families. In short, they view programs such as tax credits and unemployment benefits as necessary corollaries to a market-based system that does not offer jobs or decide salaries based on needs, but on its own profit-based criteria.

It is actually kind of remarkable that these understandings of work have remained this stable, considering the incredible shifts in the global economy over the last several decades. Obviously, the first shift is that of globalization itself: America used to make a lot of things, but we really don’t anymore—and even if we started to once again, it isn’t going to look like it used to in the glory days of the factory. The reason for this is the second shift in the economy: technology. Computers and their mechanized body equivalents, robots, have simply made it unnecessary for humans to do many tasks.

It is worth dwelling on the implications of this second shift. One take on a machine being available to do something boring and repetitive instead of a human is a sense of liberation: humans are ‘freed’ by the existence of machines for higher-order activities. The notion that dignity is achieved through such a liberation from strictly necessary, mundane labor is very much in line with distinctions that Arendt draws, although in a different political context. Indeed, this idealist strain of liberation is a hallmark of communist theory/philosophy; it was truly believed by many that technology would set humans free from the necessities of labor. While that notion may seem naive these days, it is not without truth that we owe to machines and other technological infrastructure the fact that we don’t all have to farm in order to eat.

Philosophical notions of liberation aside, most liberals react with concern to the notion that mechanization is reducing the need for human labor. Since they understand that a market-based system will only employ as much labor as is absolutely necessary, the most likely result is poverty for people whose labor goes unused. This is a social rather than an economic problem; even if it is felt that the current levels of income inequality slow down the rate of economic growth, the bottom line is that the rich really do not need to employ more people to keep getting richer. The reason is that they don’t need labor because their money works for them to make more money.

This is the third shift I want to mention: the fact that money can now be used by itself to make money. In my mind, this upsets the work-renumeration equation for good. Sadly, neither political party is doing a good enough job acknowledging this: progressives characterize the income canyon between a cashier and a CEO as “unfair” and thus propose band-aids on the market system (caps on CEO pay or minimum wage laws); conservatives argue (against all evidence) that the super-rich are "job creators". But the fact is that neither one of those stances really captures what work has become in the here and now, which is the fact the the wealth currently produced in today’s economy is no longer recognizably proportional to a particular individual’s expended effort.

The fact is, wealthy people who use financial instruments to make money are not working—nor, in most cases, are they even using the labor of others—but they are nonetheless getting richer. In light of the increasing wealth of the financial industries, we should all be questioning the legitimacy of the old assumption that people who earn more have necessarily worked harder or smarter. This idea that more effort (or greater skill) generates a greater return is merely the improper extension of a metaphor that originated in the physical domain of human experience: agriculture. It was certainly true that those who better prepared the fields and weeded more got a better harvest (all other factors like weather and soil quality) being equal. But Wall Street isn’t like that—it resembles a Vegas casino way more than it resembles a family farm.

This is why the notion of a guaranteed basic income is so powerful: it actually takes into account the way that work functions in today’s society. Think about it: if you award every adult citizen the means with which to live, you can simultaneously honor two core principles (one liberal, one conservative): 1) the dignity of a human being is inherent and is not a product of the compulsion to work; 2) excessive regulation is the enemy of the free market.

In the next post, I will discuss how the institution of a basic guaranteed income scheme promotes both these principles.