The Challenge of Universal Basic Income

Americans have been discussing the possibility of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in one form or another on and off for many decades. Recently, prompted by hype, fear and hope about the implications of artificial intelligence even Establishment figures not exactly famed for their concern for working people have talked about such a program as possibly becoming a necessity.

Of course, down to this latest resurgence of interest this discussion has been rather light-minded. After all, in an era of economic stagnation (and maybe worse), and neoliberal domination of the agenda hostile to even the endurance of the social safety net that exists, never mind its expansion in the manner that UBI would represent, the actual realization of such a program is extremely implausible--all as just about every detail of everyday life is a reminder of how hard it would be to make such a program actually work. After all, if a Universal Basic Income is to truly live up to its name it must afford the individual the means to actually live, however simply--with all that implies for its necessary correlation with the cost of living, which is no small feat in anything remotely resembling the prevailing economic model.

Simply put, we live in a society where the cost of living has done nothing but rise, and precipitously, in that way summed up by how even with a per capita Gross Domestic Product orders of magnitude higher than what humans had in pre-industrial times, or the effectively pre-industrial "Fourth World," genuine hunger and homelessness still exist, and those who escape at least these most dire of physical hardships feel themselves hard-pressed in managing to avoid them. All of this is a direct result of an economy in which public poverty makes private affluence a necessity for any secure, healthy, dignified, even minimally comfortable existence ; the "waste making" character of consumer culture and industry a Vance Packard described to the public in such detail so many decades ago; and the financialization of the economy that makes even the humblest of essential goods an object of speculators' profits and pressures; have had exactly that consequence, with the highly touted "innovation" strictly servicing these ends rather than making it easier for people to "live on less."

It is impossible to picture any UBI scheme ever being able to keep up with all of that, implying that for it ever to work there would have to be other interventions in the economy making the most essential goods available at relatively low cost--UBI much more likely to be a genuine Basic Income in a situation where there is a stock of decent low-cost housing for rent commensurate with the demand, walkable cities well-equipped with inexpensive or even free public transport, and free-at-point-of-service health care, than in any economic world we have ever seen in the United States, or for that matter, just about anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile making this all work as well as it might would mean diverting all those forces for "innovation" away from built-in obsolescence, meaningless product changes, consumer surveillance and the rest of the waste making and worse in favor of making the goods we use in everyday life as inexpensive, robust, low-maintenance and long-lasting as possible. (How about this for an ideal--being able to move into a home and live your whole life there without ever having to "call a professional?" because everything works just that well with only a little maintenance or repair work that any reasonably intelligent layperson can easily do by themselves, for themselves? And maybe not even that much work, because everything is just so well-designed and durable?)

Of course, you can imagine how business would revolt against the smallest part of such a program as that--at even its mere suggestion--and from their standpoint with very good reason because it would spell the end of the status quo that has served them so well for so long. Yet anyone talking about UBI without considering these matters is simply not to be taken seriously--with this going for the Establishment figures who profess to be for such a program at some indefinite later date as cover for the destruction-without-the-creation version of capitalism we have in the here and now, another diversion of the public from its real problems and their possible solutions with an "It ain't ever gonna happen" reform idea of the kind that centrists who think false hope one of the great virtues of their preferred brand of politics are so practiced at using to make sure the grubby, grifting oligarchs to whose interests they are so devoted are never truly discomfited.