Should Leftists Support UBI?

March 1, 2018 9:29 AM

“The rogue’s gallery of right-wing supporters, from Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, is often unambiguous in its desire to use basic income as a knife to eviscerate the expensive insides of the welfare state. To different degrees, recent support within elite tech-chauvinist circles, from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg, might be similarly understood. How on earth could Marxists form a political alliance with the boy-king of Silicon Valley? Perhaps some elites see basic income as a pragmatic means to avoid the radicalization of a population that has seen little improvement in living standards in recent years, but others envision a Trojan horse designed to raid the citadels of Social Security, Medicare, and education spending.“ Debating Universal Basic Income - David Calnitsky (Catalyst)
posted by The Whelk (57 comments total)

Point #1 for me is whether this is means tested or not. If it's used to divy up constituencies, they can go screw.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:56 AM on March 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

An instructive comparison here is the call for guaranteed work. If a jobs guarantee were implemented in the contemporary context, it is easy to imagine a version that is far from liberatory, where the jobs would be backbreaking and the breaks would be few.... This is not to claim that a progressive vision of a jobs guarantee is unimaginable; to the contrary, a workable scheme of that sort has a great deal of potential, and if implemented successfully would be a vast improvement on the current configuration of social policies. But the forces that might sabotage a basic income would operate similarly in the case of a jobs guarantee. There is, moreover, a well-known historical example of an ugly implementation of the jobs guarantee; it was called the workhouse.

Thank you! To see the same people saying that a UBI would be a move to gut the welfare state also advocating for a jobs guarantee is mindbending for me. If the one would be implemented as a tool of control, so would the other.

Point #1 for me is whether this is means tested or not. If it's used to divy up constituencies, they can go screw.

"Universal" in this context almost always implies no means testing - the means tested version is typically referred to as a "Guaranteed Basic Income."
posted by PMdixon at 10:02 AM on March 1, 2018 [10 favorites]

Should Leftists Support UBI?

Yes. Next question.
posted by Talez at 10:11 AM on March 1, 2018 [18 favorites]

The issue of cash vs goods & services brought me back to my favorite book/TV series "The Expanse". On an overcrowded Earth 200+ years in the future the welfare state is called "Basic", and it's bare-minimum goods, services, & housing. It's also paper jumpsuits & kibble from the kiosks, and you're assigned housing is in Chicago, here are your 3 other roommates. It is not UBI.

"The Expanse" is the bad, dystopian, and all-too-possible route for policy-makers to choose. "Do we want The Expanse, Star Trek, or Mad Max?"
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:19 AM on March 1, 2018 [12 favorites]

Marxists are not the entirety of “The Left”, or a representative sample of it. They're one (admittedly sprawling) sect of left-wing thought, and one committed to an unfalsifiable teleological belief system (dialectic materialism) which is not in itself essential to a left-wing agenda.
posted by acb at 10:21 AM on March 1, 2018 [15 favorites]

Should Leftists Support UBI?

Yes. Next question.

Given that TFA, in fact, spends quite a lot of time asking and debating those next questions, I don't think a reflexive one-line hot take is a very productive response.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 10:22 AM on March 1, 2018 [29 favorites]

Odd that the article references previous Canadian experiments with Mincome/Basic Income and fails to mention that another trial is underway in Ontario right now.

Ontario launches basic income pilot for 4,000 in Hamilton, Thunder Bay, Lindsay

From ‘barely surviving’ to thriving: Ontario basic income recipients report less stress, better health
posted by Secret Sparrow at 10:22 AM on March 1, 2018 [16 favorites]

Neoliberals are not the entirety of the left, or even actually a part of it at all.
posted by entropicamericana at 10:23 AM on March 1, 2018 [11 favorites]

The way things are going, UBI will end up being implemented as Amazon Gift Cards.
posted by octothorpe at 10:23 AM on March 1, 2018 [23 favorites]

Leftists should support UBI as long as the terms in which it operates are those of allowing a comfortable life with occasional luxuries and without forcing anyone in the prospect of personal bankruptcy over a broken leg or rent-seeking and price-gouging, not to mention, no vouchers, no payment-only cards, actual cash. As a way to completely dismantle what remains of social services while giving a pittance to the people, fuck off, even understanding some of these services would operate differently.
For example, free schooling. With a proper UBI, public schools could be mostly funded by tuition based on a fixed value of their students UBI (so technically, not "free"), one that would still allow the purchase of materials, transportation and lunch, which is arguably more than what we may have now. The worst case scenario is that after UBI, the vultures decide to privatize all schools and allow them to set their own tuition, meaning some kids could be overpriced out of school or forced to go to the arse end of nowhere where there's a school cheap enough for them.

Basically, it boils down to one thing: if the proposed implementation is seamless into the existing platforms, and people are able to support themselves properly even without additional income, yes, the left should support it because it is effectively redistributing wealth. If working class people are worse off, then no, because it's another scheme to siphon money out of the public treasury.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:03 AM on March 1, 2018 [17 favorites]

Given the results of both the Mincome and the early data from the Ontario trial right now, I can't see how the answer could be anything but yes, if done faithfully. Certainly very promising. Devil in the details and all that, but yes, it seems to greatly improve the recipients' lives without demanding their dignity in return.
posted by bonehead at 11:16 AM on March 1, 2018 [7 favorites]

As long as we get to call it the purple wage, I'm down.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 11:40 AM on March 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Marxists are not the entirety of “The Left”, or a representative sample of it. They're one (admittedly sprawling) sect of left-wing thought, and one committed to an unfalsifiable teleological belief system (dialectic materialism) which is not in itself essential to a left-wing agenda.

Er, the person that wrote this article and the people -- many, if not all, of them Marxists -- that are behind Catalyst are not fans of teleology or dialectics. In fact, I would think it would be quite difficult these days to find a Marxist who believed in the inevitable victory of the worldwide socialist revolution (although there are certainly still many fans -- Marxist or otherwise -- of dialectics and/or materialism).
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 11:45 AM on March 1, 2018 [6 favorites]

Yeah I think the part of the Left that is influenced by Marx is now substantially bigger than the part that treats him as a prophet.
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 AM on March 1, 2018 [7 favorites]

The way things are going, UBI will end up being implemented as Amazon Gift Cards.

QFT

Amazon is going to supplant the government sooner than anyone expects.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:27 PM on March 1, 2018

This was an interesting and well-reasoned article. I'm very sympathetic to the goals of UBI, and as a concept it's extremely attractive, but I'm also very aware that well-intended policies can have unintended consequences. The apparently-uncritical endorsement of UBI without consideration of its possible effects has always bothered me. This article went a long way to addressing many, though not all, of my concerns.

One thing I'd still like to see addressed is how UBI would affect prices of food, rent, etc. I can imagine a possible scenario in which UBI leads to a sort of "selective inflation" on these goods and services, leading to unintentionally regressive outcomes.
posted by biogeo at 1:31 PM on March 1, 2018 [8 favorites]

Amazon is going to supplant the government sooner than anyone expects.

Democracy Dies in Darkness is available as part of an annual Amazon Prime subscription
posted by entropicamericana at 1:35 PM on March 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

In America, where all political discourse is sanded down to one second sound bites, a UBI is an easier program to sell than more nuanced solutions to poverty.
posted by Beholder at 1:37 PM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think we have to be at least this nuanced: UBI as a new entitlement: great. UBI as a way to dismantle old entitlements: terrible.

My impression is that right-wing support for UBI is either the latter, or a pretense. Peter Thiel "supports UBI" in some alternative science fiction world; in this world, he supports Trump and his massive tax giveaway to the rich. Talking up UBI with journalists, while acting against it in reality, is just a way to maintain the support of the 10%. They get credit for being worried about income equality while their actions increase it.

The article mentions $14,000 per person as a reasonable UBI. That'd be great; and the only way we'd get it is to return to 1950s levels of taxation. Which we should! Again, UBI without redistribution is just libertarians pretending to care when they don't really.

One quibble I have with UBI: giving people money is superior than giving them things... except in some important areas where it's not: housing and health care. Health care should be a separate entitlement. And you can't address housing by paying potential tenants... even $28,000 per couple isn't enough to get a good apartment in New York. Housing has to be addressed, well, by building housing.
posted by zompist at 2:12 PM on March 1, 2018 [14 favorites]

I don't understand why people aren't using all this UBI energy to advocate for the conversion of the stupid food stamp program into a cash payment. And I don't see a UBI as even vaguely plausible until you can get people to support that conversion, instead of the current "fuck it food stamps provide too much personal dignity let's send them a box of cheese".
posted by the agents of KAOS at 2:20 PM on March 1, 2018 [6 favorites]

You'd end up with payday lenders fifty times the size of Citibank in a few years.
posted by jamjam at 3:29 PM on March 1, 2018

You'd end up with payday lenders fifty times the size of Citibank in a few years.
Payday lending is already illegal in 14 states and DC. Compared to pie-in-the-sky legislation like UBI I think switching food stamps to cash and outlawing payday lending seems fairly modest.

Of course with the current batch of reprobates in charge our best bet is that they never learned what a gulag is and therefore can't force us into one.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:46 PM on March 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Peter Thiel is a fascist and I assume wants to dismantle welfare specifically to kill poor people. There's also lots of engineer's-disease sincere libertarians who believe the Milton Friedman argument -- that the UBI is a way of giving us the magic of markets without morally unacceptable poverty, or alternately it's a way of doing modest wealth redistribution without distorting market forces.

but there's another contingent of like Democratic-Party-donor billionaires out in SV. they don't particularly mind welfare and even low-key wealth redistribution, and still support the UBI. for them it's motivated by a sincere belief that they are actually going to automate away everybody's jobs. I'd guess this is where Zuckerberg sits, and certainly Musk.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:07 PM on March 1, 2018 [10 favorites]

i agree with the article wholeheartedly on this point: There are vastly different visions for what a basic income would look like

indeed. so much so, that overarching philosophical discussions of it really arent the best way of talking about it at all. forget capitalism vs socialism.
just tell me, how will it be funded? what will it replace? how generous will it be? what protections against graft and exploitation will accompany it?
it's such a broad topic that without a bullet pointed list setting forth all the parameters, thinking about it is like saying, "do you like things? discuss."
posted by wibari at 6:48 PM on March 1, 2018 [6 favorites]

the most credible non-depraved plans for it that i've seen involve a set of many sovereign wealth funds collectively owning a ton of assets, and paying out dividends as UBI, like the Alaska Permanent Fund on a much larger scale.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:59 PM on March 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't understand why people aren't using all this UBI energy to advocate for the conversion of the stupid food stamp program into a cash payment.

That service has been privatized to the guy at the bodega who will sell you cash for EBT for a fee.

But "food stamps, but in cash" would be "welfare" and the problem is means testing.

Firstly, it is demeaning, forcing the would-be recipient to grovel before some functionary and display the details of their impoverishment in supplication.

Secondly, it is divisive, inspiring resentment among many who are not impoverished enough to receive the benefit.

Darkly, note that means-tested welfare supports two groups - the recipient gets some money, while the functionary gets some money and the status of "employed". If a switch to UBI is made, the former welfare recipient gets some money, and the former functionary gets some money. And a degree of division among the subjects can be quite useful to the rulers, through frankly they've rather overdone it around these parts recently.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 7:26 PM on March 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

But "food stamps, but in cash" would be "welfare" and the problem is means testing.

Yes. It would be exactly like today, except giving out cash instead of limited use tokens. Are you arguing that this change would be worse?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 8:03 PM on March 1, 2018

For those who object to the compulsory nature of the capitalist labor market, basic income is appealing because it ensures that people not only have the abstract right to freedom, but the material resources to make freedom a lived reality. It gives people the power to say no — to abusive employers, unpleasant work, or patriarchal domination in the home.

Absolutely. More on this, please! There's a great deal of talk (especially in tech circles) about UBI in relation to self-driving cars and robots taking jobs, but there's comparatively little discussion of the potential of a UBI to challenge the Puritan work ethic and the norm of compulsory wage labor for survival. Kathi Weeks is one of the few who addresses this:

"One of the reasons I am so attracted to the demand for a basic income is because of the way that it challenges some of the basic tenets of the work ethic— what I would describe as that cultural overvaluation of work that sings the praises of hard work as an inherent value, highest calling and individual moral obligation. This longstanding ethic of work remains a crucial ideological support for an economic system that accumulates great wealth for a few and lifetimes of poorly paid and all-consuming waged work for the rest. […]

"As I conceive it, the political movement for a basic income can be advanced as a way to open conversations about what counts as work, about the value of different kinds of work, and also about what else besides work we might want to do with our time, what other models of care, creativity and cooperation we might want to build."

I agree, Kathi, but I'm afraid the UBI movement as it currently stands isn't doing so well with that.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes' new book Fair Shot and Andrew Yang's 2020 presidential bid, for example, have both received attention in basic income news circles recently. While both support some form of basic income, both of them also reinforce the capitalist work ethic. “As long as you’re working, your country would take care of you,” says Hughes. And what about those who can't work? He says:

"...we have to expand the definition of work to encompass people who work but who are in jobs that are traditionally unpaid and ignored by the law, like people who take care of young children or the elderly or students. This would qualify an additional 30 million people for the expanded Earned Income Tax Credit I propose, providing a modest form of stability to many of our country’s hardest workers."

OK, well, at least you're on the right track with recognizing the need to expand the definition of work to recognize unpaid labor, Chris, but this...

For people who can't work, that's exactly what the social safety net (food stamps, housing vouchers, disability benefits, Social Security) is for.

...tells me you haven't a clue about how the "social safety net" actually functions - i.e., how difficult it is to live on the meager benefits, how difficult it is to get them and keep qualifying for them, how the policies currently in place keep people stuck in poverty no matter how hard they work, and how many people fall through the cracks and are left to fend for themselves. They're not so much "cracks" as "gaping canyons." UBI would be a literal lifesaver for many of these people.

I've been a leftie supporter of UBI for over 20 years, but this sort of rhetoric makes me feel more and more alienated from the BI movement as it continues to grow. I'm more convinced than ever that anticareerism or un-jobbing needs an organized movement of its own.
posted by velvet winter at 8:55 PM on March 1, 2018 [22 favorites]

There are vastly different visions for what a basic income would look like

indeed. so much so, that overarching philosophical discussions of it really arent the best way of talking about it at all. forget capitalism vs socialism.

That's a misconception. If there are different visions for implementations, then there's no guarantee that working on the level of implementations will help people decide which one is qualitatively better or more appropriate. That's why theories and hypotheses and concepts are needed. It's also a fundamental part of the scientific method, i.e. theory and experiment go hand in hand in order to tackle real complexities, and I sure as hell hope the world isn't going to attempt UBI policies unscientifically. And third, the very notion that philosophy and concepts like capitalism/socialism are inapt abstractions is literally a kind of theorizing, it just tries to disguise itself as non-theory via rhetoric (intentional or not). Actually, neoliberal ideology tends to encourage that sort of thought process.
posted by polymodus at 9:31 PM on March 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

One thing from the essay that is obvious in retrospect but only hit me now is that a UBI would create a permanent strike fund for all workers - and this was apparent enough to bosses that they wanted to exclude anyone participating in a labor action from getting it.


I'm still at the same place I was before the essay, that a UBI is a good idea but only if implemented in a certain way (Universalize, no means testing) and not at the expense of other programs, but I feel like I have a better rhetorical and philosophical basis for being okay with it, provided it comes along with a program of decommodification for things like housing and healthcare and education. Things that should not be at the whims of the market.


(My weird thing is I think food is a separate issue cause you need it to live so a separate Universal SNAP appeals and plus you could say, well if you want to take part in this huge give to you farmers you have to take part in some carbon sequestering, climate change stuff and use less water and do free range herding and such. )
posted by The Whelk at 9:39 PM on March 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

(I'm Enthusiastic for the elimination of personal debt along side stuff like this. Student Debt Jubilees, removing medical debt via Medical For All, and replacing payday lenders, who should all be in jail, with a postal banking system that provides cheap and easy banking systems including savings accounts, checking, and small, short term loans at a minimum interest rate. )
posted by The Whelk at 9:45 PM on March 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

The article mentions $14,000 per person as a reasonable UBI.

Which would translate into approximately 4.2 trillion dollars, or approximately 23% of the US economy. This would expand the government slice of the economy up to 42%. Not that I object, but I think this would have more effects than simply raising taxes. I'm honestly uncertain what the results of making the government have a near-majority of the economy. I'm not sure anyone in the BI debate can do an accurate prediction of what would happen.

There's other questions as well: would only citizens qualify? Or would permanent or temporary non-citizens qualify as well? If they don't, that's basically creating an economic underclass where it would be the benefit of unscrupulous employers to delay citizenship for their employees. If they do, that creates huge incentives for immigration. Again, not something in against, but it needs to be brought up.
posted by happyroach at 10:13 PM on March 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

polymodus i totally disagree! granted, we both have to agree on the basic premise that a society should give its citizens a subsistence. and granted, i have been called a "neoliberal" plenty, whatever that means. and i'll even grant you that, say, 100 years ago, we could have had a nice discussion about marxism versus capitalism. all that is in the past. theoreticians arguing about philosophy doesnt mean shit. (yeah ok i got a C in college in 2001 for my shitty essay about gramsci, i admit it). what matters in the age of constant, unceasing information is what you can DO for people right NOW and, perhaps more importantly, how well you can explain it. so tell me what your ideal vision of UBI actually does and how to get it done, and please stop using the word neoliberal.
posted by wibari at 11:15 PM on March 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Well, if we're playing with numbers... first, good news, the economy is bigger than you thought: it's expected to reach $20 trillion in 2018.

Do all children get the full $14K? Being childless, that would keep me relatively poor, so let's just count adults. That's 250m for a total bill of $3.5 trillion, or 17.5% of the economy. That would pretty neatly double the government sector, to 35%. That's about the size of the government sector in Norway. (Other countries with over 28%: Denmark, Latvia, Russia, Sweden, France.)

Other interesting numbers to keep in mind: Social Security total cost is about $1 trillion; health care spending is about the same; defense spending nearly $600 billion.

Another: the total size of all tax cuts since Kennedy: 11.3% of the size of the economy.

Yet another: the total income of the top 1% makes up 23.8% of the economy, which is itself bigger than the size of the government.

Good point about noncitizens. Still, legal permanent residents only add another 13m people.
posted by zompist at 11:16 PM on March 1, 2018 [7 favorites]

I don't understand why people aren't using all this UBI energy to advocate for the conversion of the stupid food stamp program into a cash payment.

One of the big selling points of the food stamp program for a lot of rural politicians is that it's essentially a farm subsidy in the form of social welfare. I'm not sure how strong this argument is in the post-earmarks era, and not sure how much ends up with US-based farmers compared to decades ago, but it sure got a lot of otherwise conservative ag state politicians on board for quite a while.
posted by krinklyfig at 12:27 AM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah I think the part of the Left that is influenced by Marx is now substantially bigger than the part that treats him as a prophet.

But can they call themselves Marxists any more than an atheist who thinks that Jesus was a good man with some ideas we ought to listen to can call themself a Christian?
posted by acb at 3:36 AM on March 2, 2018

But can they call themselves Marxists any more than an atheist who thinks that Jesus was a good man with some ideas we ought to listen to can call themself a Christian?

Yes. That's one of the differences between a philosophy of political economy and a religion.
posted by eviemath at 4:39 AM on March 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think there is a real question about the internal coherence of Marxist-influenced theories that discard dialectical materialism, though it’s not a question with an easy binary answer. I think the closer Marxist theories get to real determinism about individuals and their choices—very crude false consciousness/manufactured consent claims, very simple distinctions between class interests, straight class warfare accounts of social and political phenomena—the harder it is to disentangle them from their roots in dialectical materialism. On the other hand, you don’t have to buy the full Marxist belief-set to concede that power exists and shapes social relations and that politics has to take account of that instead of just blindly focusing on atomised individuals all the time. I consider myself a boring liberal, with zero Marxist credentials, but I certainly use Marx’s insights when I think about my own (liberal) priorities of promoting liberty and equality.
posted by Aravis76 at 4:56 AM on March 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Not that this derail needs to go further, but "Marxian" is also a term that's been around for quite a long while now to describe those on the left who are strongly influenced by Marx but aren't "ists."
posted by aspersioncast at 4:58 AM on March 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

And these days, Marx' influence extends far beyond the boundaries of what one could sensibly consider “the Left”. Even if you discard the unfalsifiable articles of faith (dialectic materialism) and the theories that haven't fared so well (the surplus value theory of labour), if you were to, for example, call anyone who uses the metaphor of capital for a depletable reserve of social/cultural/&c. influence, you'd sound like a Fox News talking-head who has gone off their medication.
posted by acb at 6:07 AM on March 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

(Personal anecdote: one time when I visited Berlin, many years ago, I stayed near Karl-Marx-Allee in Neukölln; I had assumed that that had been east of the Wall, because of course, in the capitalist West, Marx is thoroughly discredited, and surely they'd have renamed it Milton-Friedman-Allee or something by now. But no, I discovered that Neukölln had been in the West since 1945, and that, geopolitical disagreements with his self-appointed heirs notwithstanding, Marx is regarded in the same pantheon of German Grunderzeit thought as Hegel, Schiller and such.)
posted by acb at 6:12 AM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

and please stop using the word neoliberal.

Why does everyone keep talking about this air around us? I don't see anything, so everyone should stop. You're all obviously delusional.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:55 AM on March 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

I can agree neoliberal gets overused but it is a useful term for describing the mainstream politics of the last ...40ish years.
posted by The Whelk at 8:00 AM on March 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

My only objection to "neoliberal" is that somehow because it contains the word "liberal" lazy people don't bother looking into it enough to figure out that it means not "New Liberals" but rather laissez-faire / "the market is god" economic reductionism at the expense of social welfare as espoused by Hayek and Friedman and practiced by Reagan and Thatcher.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:05 AM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I can agree neoliberal gets overused but it is a useful term for describing the mainstream politics of the last ...40ish years.

I would claim the term "Washington Consensus," which has seemingly fallen out of favor, works just as well for the purpose of describing the package of specific policy prescriptions and their application in practice ("laissez-faire and then we'll make the outcomes fair after the fact with tax + transfers [except that last part never happens]") that "neoliberal" is typically used to describe without being subject to the same definitional drift/expansion.
posted by PMdixon at 9:34 AM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

“Hayek-Friedman Thought” also works.
posted by acb at 9:47 AM on March 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Lol that owns, next time I run into a libertarian I'm actually going to call it Hayekism-Friedmanism.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:05 AM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Housing has to be addressed, well, by building housing.

Or by changing zoning laws to allow non-related people to live together in groups larger than three, and allow the return of boarding houses and the establishment of intentional communities.

Special bonus classism: Domestic servants are exempt from those limits in some areas.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:29 PM on March 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

But can they call themselves Marxists any more than an atheist who thinks that Jesus was a good man with some ideas we ought to listen to can call themself a Christian?

As with Christians, it's usually the super orthodox Marxists who are really into policing this boundary. I'm not one of them, so I don't see why this guy or Richard Wolff or whoever can't identify with the term if they want to take a stand for Marx's importance, without having to carry all the baggage all the way from the 19th century.
posted by atoxyl at 4:09 PM on March 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm honestly uncertain what the results of making the government have a near-majority of the economy. I'm not sure anyone in the BI debate can do an accurate prediction of what would happen.

Nordic Socialism Is Realer Than You Think
posted by kliuless at 11:22 PM on March 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

A reminder that the stock market gains of the 2% last year could find the entire current social welfare system and more

It’s never been about not having enough money.
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM on March 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

(Also if we’re worried about housing costs going up we should create more public housing re,over from the market. Housing is not an investment, it’s human right.)
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

There's a great deal of talk (especially in tech circles) about UBI in relation to self-driving cars and robots taking jobs, but there's comparatively little discussion of the potential of a UBI to challenge the Puritan work ethic and the norm of compulsory wage labor for survival.

here's an interesting book(s) review, fwiw:

One of the principal objections to a basic income is that it would reward the lazy and devalorise work. It would be “money for nothing”, in the words of the song. But as Andrea Komlosy argues in Work: The Last 1,000 Years, our conception of what constitutes work has changed markedly over time. The professor of social history at the University of Vienna writes that our commonly accepted definitions are too narrow, too European, too male and too modern.

The historical break in our understanding came in the 18th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution. “One hundred years earlier, a separation between productive and reproductive or paid and unpaid work, or between work for one’s own use and work for sale on the market, simply would not have made sense,” she writes.

Komlosy identifies three very different historical attitudes towards work. The first, common in ancient Greece, was that work was a burden that had to be overcome so that we could lead a contemplative life. The second, espoused later by the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths, was that work was not a cursed punishment but a blessing from God.

The third view, championed by the labour and women’s movements in the 19th century, was that work could be transformational, turning toilsome effort into creativity and social alienation into self-actualisation.

The advocates of a basic income sometimes argue that we need to reacquaint ourselves with the contemplative life of ancient Greece — only this time including more than just a small male elite. We have the wealth, knowledge and means to fix the future. But, first, we will need to redefine what we mean by human work in our robot world.

posted by kliuless at 8:53 PM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Funny you should mention Andrea Komlosy's book, kliuless, as earlier today I was eyeing it on the Verso books website after reading Kathi Weeks' latest essay Down With Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work. Very timely. Added it to my book wish list.
posted by velvet winter at 10:38 PM on March 3, 2018

"work ethic" can bite me. For a lot of the one percenters and generally rich people (just not obscenely), a lot of their jobs is going on social events, make a few phone calls to the people that actually work, and wait until the next paycheck from their investment portfolio drops.

A lot of those who can't stop talking "but what about WORK ETHIC??????” wouldn't know what it is to get the ass out of the bed to work and make in a day what they earn in the first seconds of the day. Or what it is to be so beat down nothing is worth doing anymore.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:32 PM on March 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

-"Nordics support extensive social insurance by encouraging dynamic, productive markets. Singapore supports dynamic, productive markets by providing extensive social insurance. They are nothing alike!"
-It's time to give socialism a try :P
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

There's a paywalled article in the most recent issue of the same journal as the OP with what I presume is a response to Calnitsky.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 2:22 PM on March 20, 2018