“There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that must encourage progress towards others still better. Without effort and change, human life can not remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”
Bertrand Russell
In 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote a book called “Utopia” on a fictional island society’s religious, social, and political stance. Utopia has been discussed since then up until today. Now, in 2021, after an unexpected virus attack, humanity is in a search for proofing Sir More’s imagination, not only as a philosophical point of view but as the “better normal” reality. Sir Thomas More, a 16th-century philosopher, had outlined a guaranteed income for everyone living on the island as they breathe, some 500 years ago. This may be considered as the first basic income utopia in the history of society. Today we are much closer to this utopia more than ever, well, at least in monetary terms.
Here is why?
1) During the pandemic, an estimate of 400 million full-time jobs have been lost, and this equates to more than 13% of the world’s workforce, according to the International Labour Organisation. Nobody knows if these people will be ever employed again.
2) As a result of technological progress and demographic changes, more than 6 million people in the UK currently employed in occupations that are likely to change radically or disappear entirely by 2030. There was a tremendous change in the skills, abilities, and knowledge requirements in the work environments even before Covid-19. After the pandemic is over, it will even be faster and bolder. The world is no different than it is in the UK. I am leaving you with the thought of artificial intelligence and singularity ahead. The necessary skills of the 20th-century worker are significantly below the needs of the 21st century. It seems there is no quick fix to this social thunderstorm that we are stepping into.
3) Inequalities are a growing problem more than ever today. The gap between the poor and the rich widens. As crucial as the gap’s depth, more than half of the world’s population has an income level of fewer than 10 dollars a day. In the post-Covid-19, this low-income class do not have any path to recovery soon. Maybe, extreme poverty is not the only problem anymore. We know that it is getting better in the last 200 years. Now, we have another question. Mid-level income class is unexpectedly melting by the pandemic, and the data-society transformation is threatening millions of jobs permanently. I may argue the pandemic is a wake-up call for humanity, but not the real problem itself. The floating iceberg has a deeper bottom part below the surface.
What can we do to save humanity?
Actually nothing! If we insist on the same game plan, it is getting tougher to cope with the changing needs of the marketplace with the crowning mindset of the industrialised world’s norms and policies. How about the crawling majority? Life seems to offer a modern type of slavery for many people. And more bitter part is that most middle-class people are losing their hope for their needs and desires. Maybe it is the right time to think about a 500-year-old utopia and co-create a better future on sharing economy at large. Rather than the robust rules of the market economy, some flexibility may create a better and fluid collaborative culture. How about giving people money without asking anything in return? This is called Universal Basic Income (UBI), as described at More’s island.
“Give people money.” Annie Lowrey
Universal basic income has many forms. This may be subject to another article. In any case, they all have the same purpose: giving money to people as long as they live on planet earth. In these terms, it is more like a born-right dividend given to humans as they have a share in the commons. I like the idea to provide every citizen, regardless of means, a sum of money, regularly and for life – usually enough that they do not need to work. This is a daring call and may have as many challengers as supporters, especially when you start to think about the funding. However, I do not have a massive solution for the unrest in the minds of billions, either. I do also like the wild idea of the amount of the universal basic income – enough for no need to work! Would it ruin society, or would it serve as a new medium to productivity?
Weak signals in the past
Rutger Bregman highlighted a remarkable experiment at Speenhamland at the beginning of the 19th century in his book, “Utopia for Realists.” Speenhamland is a village on the west side of London in England, and the so-called Speenhamland system intended to mitigate rural poverty in England and Wales. What happened there? Well, nobody knows the real story. However, political economist Karl Polanyi describes the unwanted parts of this experiment in his book “The Great Transformation” in detail. According to his studies, the villagers at Speenhamland produced inefficiency and social chaos when they had outdoor relief as a UBI form. Poverty, population growth and unrest increased. The people had lost their will to work and all their social values as he described the pauperisation of the masses, who almost lost their human shape. The result was terrible.
Many years after this experiment, in 1969, the President of the USA, Richard Nixon, was eager to follow Thomas More’s utopia for the American people. Guess what! His advisors, of course, brought the Speenhamland case as described in Polanyi’s work into the President’s view. UBI did not introduce a floor for people but a ceiling. No need to say, the USA has grown as an outstanding capitalist player of the market economy with extreme examples of conspicuous consumption in the following years. What would it be like if the advisory team had known the Polanyi’s interpretation of Speenhamland had been proven wrong as of today by many respectful historians? Would it make any difference? I would not say so…
Stroger calls today!
UBI has received increasing attention recently. Finland has trialled UBI, while Spain said it would introduce a version to lessen the economic pain of Covid-19. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg backs the policy to reduce poverty. After the pandemic has been under control, the economies will take a longer time to heal. Moreover, humanity is at the crossroads for a better next. Today, many countries have set experiments on basic income practices. There have been exciting findings in a recent study by Manchester University. A society with a UBI scheme has:
- Households spend money for good reasons.
- Poverty declines.
- In the long run, state finances may be at a better balance.
- The cost of the scheme is not an unbearable amount. Especially, the researchers consider the big budgets that the governments must cope with extreme poverty and under education. In this sense, UBI is even an equaliser to solve this social burden on state budgets.
What if UBI is available to you?
Think for a moment; you have such an income. Let me help you with this. Imagine you will receive seven thousand pounds (£7,000) from the state as an adult citizen. Your children will have half of it (£3,500). We are a family of five. We have three children. So, in our case, our household will receive twenty-four thousand and five hundred pounds (£24,500) annual UBI from the state. You keep on doing your job, if you have one, and have earnings. You pay your taxes. Your investments and savings are as usual. Everything is as you get used to other than this additional UBI. You have the right to this UBI because you are a human! How would you feel? What would you do? Would you skip working and start to sit on your chair all day long, or keep on working?
Waves of UBI are at shores.
Data-focused companies have a strategic advantage over traditional business models. This advantage is nothing related to the Covid-19 or any other adversity. It results from digital transformation, and it has an immersive destruction power on today’s markets. I would expect the sharing economy as the new norm of the next decade. It is not easy to transform mass society overnight. It is not easy to adapt to the sharing economy, either. In any case, steady income for billions of people is and will remain a significant problem. I do not know precisely how Nixon came out with the idea of the basic pay for the American people some 50 years ago. But I do know the power of the market economy that made this call a dream. Today, humanity is ready for such a bold scheme more than ever. Whether it is a 500-years old utopia or 50 years old idea, one thing I am sure of is, in 5 years, we will have a chance to see this happen somewhere in the world for some people. We just need to be aware of this and think of UBI as a fuel that may empower humanity in these unprecedented times. The details may follow when we adjust to this mindset.
What next?
It is almost impossible to predict the future. However, we must prepare for it. In a social sense, UBI is one of the hypotheses that I will follow in detail. For now, it is one of the weak signals that will transform our lives radically if humanity dares to step into collaboration rather than competition, sooner than expected. It seems nothing will be the same in the post-Covid-19 era.