Basic income empowers local communities

Basic income is not “paying people to do nothing” — it’s paying them to do anything

Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash

For decades since the 1970s, social capital has been in decline within our local communities. Researchers such as Robert Putnam, and David Halpern have put forward various explanations for this, but perhaps the least discussed is the way that scale of economy for centralised manufacturing and services has taken away self-sufficiency and responsibility from ordinary citizens. Basic income provides a golden opportunity to re-empower the “forgotten” towns and places where so much human potential today is simply wasted.

Basic income can empower these communities to become connected and sustainable centres of social capital in three important ways:

Reduced marginal labour cost makes all kinds of new cooperative ventures and local enterprise more economically viable. Part-time or reduced working hours gives citizens time to invest in activities which develop their own skills, lead to greater connection, and build social capital. Financial security for every citizen replaces purely selfish and aggressive behaviours, with the confidence and security needed to grow more connected and supportive communities.

Developing Specialisation

The most commonly agreed test of social capital is to assess the degree of trust within a community — the idea that “most strangers can be trusted”. However, another equally important characteristic of highly developed social capital, is the degree of specialised skills found within a local community. It’s very easy to list any number of specialist roles that can be found today in our biggest cities, and centres of wealth, but which simply don’t exist in smaller towns and poorer economic regions. These range from professional journalists to scientific researchers, from personal tutors to sports coaches, professional artists and musicians, agricultural biologists, or start-up finance agents, just to pick a few.

These highly specialised skills, and many more besides, aren’t missing from our local communities because they are not needed. Good local journalism, for example, could make a huge difference in helping to connect people together with local news and ideas, create a greater sense of community, and develop a shared vision for future projects and investments. The only reason that these professional roles don’t exist at a local level today is that, without a basic income, it’s simply not possible to make a living from doing them, anywhere other than in our biggest and richest cities.

Basic Income can transform our local communities, by reducing the marginal cost of labour, which prevents these investments in social capital today. So just how different might a more connected and inclusive local community look, if we chose to educate and empower all our citizens with a universal basic income?

Education would change to become more focused on personal development of the child, than simply on knowledge acquisition to pass standard tests. The objective must be to develop and prepare confident and resourceful young people who can become their own ‘job creators’ within local communities, instead of schools churning out yet more ‘job seekers’ for traditional jobs that will simply not exist by the time they graduate. Personal coaching will require higher teacher pupil ratios, and a flexible curriculum that can be tailored to the individual learning styles and abilities of students.

Interestingly, this approach is not unlike the private Ad Astra school recently set up by Elon Musk for his own children, but it also calls for much greater connection to the local business and social community, with programs that might range from craft apprenticeships to ecology studies in local community farms.

More local enterprises and social businesses could also support adult education with everything from business classes to technology up-skilling. Basic income would enable part time working, or even whole years out, to take on new skills, while personal coaches supported by a basic income, could make a viable living improving the skills of others.

Citizens could choose to work in creative arts enterprises, from live music and and local theatre, to community film making, local radio, or collaborating to produce entertainment, stories, or art for wider markets. This would help revive local cultures that have been all but driven out of business today by cheap centralised mass entertainment.

Local manufacture and craftsmanship could be revived, but in new ways, following the trend already set by local craft breweries and regional food producers. Re-investing in local enterprise would create the potential to create craft apprenticeships and empower a whole new generation of talented young people. By using the internet, these creative skills-based micro-enterprises could then expand to serve specialist niche markets at a local, national, or even Global level.

Local recycling, upcycling, and reuse would all become more affordable as a key step towards a self-sufficient circular economy. We all know we have to end the insanity of shipping millions of tons of goods all around the World, and then shipping equal quantities of waste from high-income countries to China, or other centres of low labour cost for disposal. We must instead create new circular designs to maximise local sourcing, minimise waste and turn redundant materials into new inputs for re-use within our own local economies. Today high labour costs preclude much of this work, but with a basic income we can create viable businesses that focus on local recycling and reuse of materials.

Community food production could become the centre of more self-sufficient, circular supply chains based on local farm cooperatives. World class expertise in high-tech farming, such as that being widely applied in Holland today could dramatically improve yields from such small operations, while removing packaging, shipping, waste and labour cost from the supply chain, could all combine to make local production economically competitive again.

The low marginal cost of labour could make public or community funding affordable to establish new centres of local journalism. Ideally these would be based in regional universities or colleges, where full time professional journalists, supported by students, could establish online public spaces for news, investigative journalism, and ideas for local projects. By connecting together business leaders, scientific researchers, politicians, and community members, these centres could create a new shared vision for more connected communities to drive innovation and change.

Affordable research and development could help drive local SMEs and new community cooperatives to the forefront of Global technology. Supporting communities with applied research is a massively overlooked opportunity, except in Germany where they have been gaining competitive advantage from their local Fraunhofer Institutes for years. After several decades of investment these community based research units now employ over 24,000 scientists and engineers spread across 69 co-funded institutes throughout the country.

This model has helped to make local SMEs in Germany amongst the most successful in the World, but to build this kind of investment is very expensive. The costs to local communities of technology leadership could be dramatically reduced if local salaries for researchers and consultants had only to be funded on top of a nationally paid basic income.

Local banks, cooperative building societies, and micro-finance start-up funds, modelled on the Grameen banks, could be set up to further support the growth of local business innovation. Connecting local investors to projects that make a real difference in their own communities would be one of the best ways of creating a dynamic local culture of start-ups and innovation.

The mostly risk-averse owners of capital today are simply pushing more and more of their money into housing and property. This not only drives up house prices beyond the reach of normal working families, but leaves communities starved of enterprise capital. It’s interesting to note that in the United States over 80% of start-up capital goes into just three states. With the right incentives, we could choose to fund new small business ventures through local investment in every town and region around the country.

Cooperative house-building groups could dramatically expand the number of new homes built every year, with workers co-creating strong local partnerships to build affordable and sustainable housing for their own families and communities, rather than simply to profit rich investors. Local mortgage funding would also provide a low risk local investment to keep more of this money circulating within the community, rather than continually flowing back to national banks.

Because basic income is universal it will greatly accelerate the end of gender income inequality, especially for those (mostly women) who’s unpaid work in childcare, care for the elderly and disabled, or voluntary work within the community, currently goes unrecognised. Social capital will grow at double the rate in communities where women are paid to play an equal role with men in shaping the future.

Economic security, backed up by more inclusive community engagement programs, will lead to lower levels of crime, drug addiction, exploitation of others, and mental health issues. Studies all agree that isolation from the community leads to very negative life outcomes. Giving all citizens the security, confidence, and time needed to connect with others will build a far more secure, happy, and mutually supportive society.

Health and well-being will be greatly improved by better diets based on locally produced fresh produce, and by increased opportunities for physical activity and exercise. One of the best ways to achieve community interaction is through sports, fitness, or dance classes that motivate people to maintain healthy habits, and connect in shared activity with others. Basic income removes two of the major barriers to this hugely undervalued opportunity. It takes away the time pressures of excessive working hours that have squeezed out meaningful community interaction today, and it reduces the cost of professional coaches to train and motivate team or club members in new social groups.

Nothing suggested above should be considered radical, as all these ideas and approaches are already being successfully applied in our biggest national cities, but only big corporations and a wealthy elite can afford to pay for them today. Basic income would make these kind of investments in deep social capital affordable for every small community all around the country, and ultimately around the World.

In the end, the very best innovations that would come from investing in a basic income, are bound to be changes that we cannot conceive of today. Yet all these developments are based on a core model that combines the power of individual enterprise and creativity, with social partnership in a more deeply connected local community. Imagining the ways in which UBI can advance our social capital, will be key to restoring community prosperity in the 21st century. As we do so, we will quickly come to realise that basic income is not actually a cost at all, but is in fact a critical long term investment in our own people and communities.

Once we learn this lesson, will we finally understand that basic income is not about “paying people to do nothing” — it’s about paying them to do anything!

Robert Bruce, author of ‘The Global Race’.