Money for nothing? Some idle speculations about Universal Basic Income
Would you like to be paid for sitting at home all day doing nothing? If so, you could try getting in touch with Autonomy, a British-based think-tank currently seeking £1.6m in funding to give away £1,600 per month over the course of two years to 30 lucky British citizens. This is billed as the first small-scale trial of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) ever to be tried out in England, an idea whose time has supposedly now come. As advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are predicted to render us primitive humanoids increasingly irrelevant in the workplace over coming decades, UBI is increasingly cast as the possible answer to potential looming mass unemployment. UBI involves doling out every individual in any given nation a free state-administered handout each and every month or week, no strings attached. Recipients may choose to use it to supplement existing income from part-time work, to pay their way through higher education, to fund themselves performing voluntary work in the local community … or, rather less optimistically, to sit around at home all day eating crisps and watching TV. Simply put, UBI would simplify and universalise all pre-existing state benefits systems, essentially placing everyone on a kind of lifetime state unemployment allowance – without any need for them to necessarily actually ever bother seeking out a job. Some people like the idea, others are sceptical. British Conservative MP Brendan Clarke-Smith scoffed that the Autonomy think-tank would “be surprised to hear there’s a system already in place regarding income, which is widely referred to as ‘employment’.” Personally, I rather like the idea of a UBI in principle. I just doubt whether it could actually succeed in practice. Yet it is not the practicality (or otherwise) of funding or administering UBI we shall consider here, but something which may at first seem like a side issue, but really is not: what would most people actually choose to do with all that new, unearned free time a UBI allowance would gift them? False idles Modern-day advocates of UBI take their place within a long line of thinkers who have had exceedingly unrealistic expectations about just how the liberated proletariat will employ their time, once freed from the bonds of degrading capitalist free-market wage-slavery. Consider, for instance, Karl Marx’s famous words to the effect that less time at work and less specialisation of labour forced upon the individual worker by capitalism would allow people “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, [and] criticise [literature] after dinner … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Put politely, these imaginary, infinitely enlightened Marxian beings are not humans as we currently know them. Recall too the left-wing English philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness, which contains passages like the following, about the likely impact of shorter work hours upon the ordinary people whom Russell had occasionally glimpsed whilst looking out through the windows of his large country mansion. A looming four-hour workday, he said: “… would enable a man to use leisure intelligently … Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature … [Because workers are so tired] the pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinema, watching football matches, listening to the radio and so on … In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving … Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality.” Surely Russell’s own idea is lacking in reality? What he is saying is certainly true for an exceptional minority: miniscule working hours and a UBI doubtless will enable a few genuine working-class geniuses to develop their talents without starving, but I suspect the vast majority of mankind will continue to be satisfied by watching football matches and films (although who precisely will be volunteering to staff and run the actual stadiums and cinemas is more of a moot point).