If the government gave you $1,000 a month with no strings attached, you might have higher standards for the jobs you’re willing to take.
In her new book, “Give People Money,” economics journalist Annie Lowrey explores the concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, a set sum of government cash provided to all residents or citizens.
Thanks to its utopian promises, the UBI policy proposal has gained supporters across the political spectrum. There are UBI experiments running in developing countries like India and Kenya, as well as in Western areas such as Ontario, Canada, and Oakland, California.
In the following interview, Lowrey explains how a universal basic income could alter career prospects, shift work-life balance and change social attitudes toward work.
[See: How to Quit Your Job.]
What is a universal basic income?
The easiest way of thinking about it is as a Social Security payment that everyone would get. Instead of receiving it if you’re qualified after 65, money would go to everybody. People debate how much money that would be, whether it would go only to adults or also to children and whether it would be for just U.S. citizens or also people domiciled in the U.S.
What conditions have popularized this idea?
There are a few strands of interest. One is this concern about artificial intelligence and automation and that future recessions might keep reducing the need for human labor. The second generally has to do with low wages and low-earning trajectories that even educated people are facing, and the persistence of poverty in the U.S.
There’s other interest in it abroad, in developing countries. It might be a more efficient way of doing social insurance and aid there.
You write that we’re currently experiencing a “good jobs crisis.” What do you mean by that?
Unemployment is actually pretty low right now. Most people who want work have it. The number of job openings is higher than the number of unemployed people for the first time since the government’s been recording the statistic.
But wage growth has been stagnant. Median incomes have been stagnant. A lot of the jobs that have been created are not that great. They don’t pay that much. They don’t come with insurance or other protections. Workers are not unionized so they can’t bargain with employers for better working conditions. It’s a great economy if you’re a highly educated professional on the coast. But a lot of people are really struggling, [and it’s] almost 10 years since the end of the Great Recession.
Why isn’t the economy working for most working people? We have some answers to that, but we don’t necessarily have the policies in place that would help to ameliorate it.
How would a UBI change the power dynamic between workers and employers?
Hypothetically, if you were receiving $1,000 a month from the government, it would probably make you less inclined to accept a job with bad working conditions and bad pay.
If you have that happening economy-wide, then you have put workers in a position where they have more bargaining power than employers. Employers would have to increase wages and improve working conditions.
A UBI isn’t the only way to do that. Obviously, we can do that through any number of policies, including things like requiring employers to provide health care or raise the minimum wage or requiring paid family leave for larger employers. But a UBI is another tool that would help get you there.
You write that “part of the promise of a UBI would be for society to compensate people for their unpaid labor.” Tell me about this unpaid labor, and how you think a UBI would especially benefit women and caregivers.
Even now, as women have surged into the workforce, they provide the lion’s share of unpaid care work in the U.S. economy. Taking care of a baby, taking a couple months off to have a kid or if your kid is sick or your parent is dying, that’s really, really important work.
But it doesn’t show up in our economic statistics. It would if, for instance, you paid somebody to act as a nanny for your kid. But if you drop out of the labor force yourself, there are zero dollars being spent and zero dollars being earned.
A UBI would, on a philosophical level, compensate people and provide them with the choice to do that. It touches on a strand of feminist thought that’s been around for a long time: What would happen if women were paid for their work, given that they tend to do so much more unpaid work than men do? How do we, as a society, acknowledge really important unpaid labor worth trillions of dollars a year to the U.S. economy?
A common criticism against UBI is that it would decrease people’s incentives to stay employed. What does your research reveal about that claim? Would a UBI induce Americans to stop working?
It would certainly induce some Americans to stop working. What we’ve seen in studies of negative income taxes and UBI pilots is that some people stop working. Those people tend to be students who stay in school longer, young parents who take more time for their kids and older workers who decide to retire or scale back their work. But we don’t see a lot of primary breadwinners putting their feet up.
The work effect is real but it’s pretty modest. It’s kind of an overwrought criticism, I think. If you had a mom who was a single parent and had a couple kids and she decided not to work and take some time with her kids, would that be a bad thing? Right now, we kind of say, ‘Yes.’ Through our cash welfare program, we expect parents to work. This would provide them with more choice.
Surely there would be some people who just decide to live off of it and not do much work, but the idea is you’re not giving people so much money that they would stop [working].
What about the famous American work ethic? How would that intersect with a UBI?
It’s one of the main forces of resistance against it. Americans really valorize work. Even very low-income Americans want to work and do, if they can. We’ve predicated our social safety net in no small part on work. We expect it of people.
It’s problematic to say that people derive dignity from work, necessarily. Lots of people do dangerous, degrading jobs just because they have to. But it’s also true that Americans love working; they’re happier working. There’s a great study that takes people who are almost retirement age, and when they switch from saying they’re unemployed to saying they’re retired, they get markedly happier. I think for people who are working, it’s not just the money. It’s also the social benefits of having a place to go, having colleagues, having structure to your day [and] being able to say, ‘This is what I did.’ It’s good for people.
In the U.S., there is this persistent idea that folks who are poor choose to be poor, that they’re lazy, that they just haven’t found their way out. As a general point, it’s absolutely not true. People in Europe are much more likely to say that people who are in poverty are unlucky, as opposed to lazy, for instance.
Let’s think ahead to the future. You propose a UBI as a solution to “a world with far less demand for human work.” Why is demand for human work decreasing? How would a UBI help?
This is much more of a prospective, dreamy, sci-fi thing. If you’re thinking 100 or 50 years from now, when and if AI has become so rapid that it really is eliminating the need for a lot of human labor, that would be really great. If we could get people out of dangerous and degrading work, that would be wonderful.
But we don’t have the policy system in place that would support livelihoods. That raises the fear that even in that awesome world, people wouldn’t be able to participate. I don’t think UBI is the only policy you’d need to make that world look great as opposed to terrifying. You would need a real change in our sense of what work was, but a UBI could certainly help.
I think it’s more urgent now. With universal policies, you could do a lot to eliminate poverty, eliminate deprivation [and] provide a true safety net where we really don’t have one in this country. But it’s interesting thinking about really far in the future. If there is less demand for human work, what would our policies have to look like?
[Read: How Workers Can Adapt to the Technology Revolution.]
Your book distinguishes between “a future without work” and “a future without jobs.” What’s the difference? Which do you think would result from a UBI?
Even people without jobs tend to do a lot of work. Child care is the most obvious thing. That’s absolutely work. It’s really important work; the economy does not function without that work. But it’s not a job for many parents and caregivers and grandparents.
If you play that out, what jobs are actually necessary in the economy? A lot of them are really unnecessary. There’s a really great book called ” Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber on this phenomenon.
We can kind of imagine a world in the future where there’s a lot of work to be done: There are people to take care of, there’s artistic expression, there’s innovation to make, there’s an environment to try to save [and] there are other countries to work in. Who knows what human ingenuity will come up with?
If our jobs as narrowly defined are getting eliminated by robots or AI at some point in the future, how do you make it so a job in that world is not actually the thing that is necessary to get your family supported?
You write that some jobs could never be outsourced to a computer or a machine, like teaching preschool, doing archival research, or writing poetry. What’s stopping these jobs from being automated? Is there something innately human about them?
Look at places where technological innovation hasn’t changed the picture very much. Child care is a great example of this. Has technology changed how we’ve provided child care at all in the last 100 years? Maybe a little on the margins, but really not much.
Economists acknowledge that there are just some sectors where technological innovation is less important. Education is another one. Despite all of the computers in the classroom and the growth of digital media, school is still fundamentally somebody standing in front of a room of kids. It hasn’t been transformed even with the great promise of MOOCs and things like that.
There is work that is more human and less human. Maybe there will be AI systems that will be really great at providing cognitive behavioral therapy and it would mean everyone could have cognitive behavioral therapy for free. It seems a lot less likely than that you will have your groceries picked for you by a robot and the box delivered by a drone.
What fictional worlds are relevant to the idea of a UBI? What do they tell us about the future of work?
In ‘Star Trek,’ people work and have jobs but you don’t have to necessarily work for a living. They have really advanced AI for service work. They have systems of replicators for good. They are in this environment of absolute abundance. There’s no more money, for instance. Society just provides for everybody because there’s so much.
How much are we already in a space of abundance? Certainly in the United States, we have more than enough calories to feed everybody and gas to drive everybody’s car. The question is one of distribution. We are in a world of abundance, but nevertheless for a lot people, it still feels like a world of scarcity.
I think these big dreamy economic ideas like UBI are a way of saying, ‘Screw scarcity. Let’s focus on abundance and let’s be abundant.’
What’s a jobs guarantee and how might that help workers?
A jobs guarantee is an idea that the government would act as the employer of last resort. It would use workforce development offices, where you could walk in and walk out with a job.
There are a few justifications for this. One is you get rid of residual unemployment that you have even in a very good economy for people who are detached or not very well attached to the labor force, maybe because of addiction issues, a skills gap, a disability, language or literacy barriers or because they’re discriminated against or have a criminal record. The government could actually take those folks and say, ‘Nope, you’re still really useful. We’re going to help you work.’
The second is, in the event of a recession, when you start to see unemployment go up a lot, instead of providing unemployment insurance and other kind of safety-net benefits, the government just absorbs the workers, keeps them productive, keeps them happy [and] pays them. It’s a good thing for workers: It would help wages; it would help working conditions on the low end.
In some ways, it’s more complicated and difficult than a UBI. You’d have to figure out how to create work for all those folks, which is something the government hasn’t done outside of wartime.
[See: 25 Best Jobs That Don’t Require a College Degree.]
The book contains just a passing reference to the possibility that prices might rise with a UBI. If everyone received $1,000 a month, what would prevent stores from raising prices accordingly?
There are not really good studies about UBI and inflation. There are some small studies that seem to show a relatively muted inflation effect, but I don’t think they necessarily tell us too much about a UBI granted to the whole of the economy.
If everybody had $12,000 more to spend per year, you’d have a large number of people who had more purchasing power. There was a time in the American economy when a lot more people had a lot more purchasing power. It was the ’90s. Inflation was higher, but it certainly wasn’t out of control.
Where would the money for this theoretical UBI come from?
It’s a good question. Would you want to swap other programs out? Would you get rid of Social Security, food stamps [and] the earned income tax credit? What’s the actual price tag once you subtract those other programs? You’d probably still be left with some number in the trillions of dollars. The federal government doesn’t necessarily have to pay for every penny of it; it runs deficits in perpetuity.
If you’re looking for the most efficient and equitable taxes, imagine some kind of VAT like European countries have. You could raise money through the income tax code. People talk a lot about carbon taxing. Financial transaction taxes would probably be a good idea.
Do you think a UBI would be a good idea? How optimistic are you that the U.S. could implement a UBI?
It’s really hard to imagine a UBI coming into place, but there are a lot of other ideas that could have really powerful effects for people, and I could imagine them happening much sooner. I certainly think there’s a case for having a more progressive government that does more for people who are middle income all the way down to the deeply impoverished.
A UBI is not a magic bullet. It’s not going to work for all situations. To alleviate housing costs on the coasts, you probably need regulatory reform. To address education issues, you need education spending. But this would be a good way of increasing the purchasing power of lower-income folks.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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How Universal Basic Income Could Change Your Job originally appeared on usnews.com
