In my last essay I tried to describe a plausible and attractive vision of the future, one shaped by a movement toward “economic independence.” The basic idea is to make it possible for families, neighborhoods, and communities to reassume some responsibilities now outsourced to the market and the state, giving them independent control over important aspects of their lives and revitalizing their personal relationships by imbuing them with practical functions. In sum, more independence from the impersonal system made possible by greater interdependence at the face-to-face level.
Again I would turn attention to care work as being at the core of the typical work taking place in more-independent communities. The more we make decentralized automation of other kinds of work feasible, the more central care work becomes by process of elimination. How do we ensure people engaged in that work have a reasonable level of material compensation for it? The obvious answer is a child allowance, with perhaps similar allowances for e.g. people caring for elderly relatives. It seems to me this provides the vast majority of a UBI's benefits with few if any of the downsides: you are compensating real work, hard work at that, so there is no incentive to idleness; and decreasing child poverty pays dividends in increased productivity and agency throughout the supported kids' future lives.
Jun 17, 2023·edited Jun 17, 2023Liked by Brink Lindsey
Thanks for mentioning care work. It extends beyond the family: No one is going to care for me as an "elderly relative" - I'm learning Spanish for that (which may end up being the wrong language but at least the possibility keeps me motivated.)
Paid care work has the potential of being meaningful and rewarding to caregivers (taking into account some of the recent ideas-in-the-air about exploitation of "emotional labor".) A UBI might provide for a more comfortable relationship between me and my caregivers, maybe even to the extent of participating in each others' communities a bit.
(Just discovered this essay today, June 17: my email provider has been hiding everything from substack.com in the Spam folder out there on the browser.)
Brink, you are right that technology and capitalism are essential to a productive and dynamic future. There can't be any "going back" to a romanticized bucolic past with the planet's population closing in on 8 billion people. Socialism and Communism have often left a trail of environmental disaster worse than any greedy capitalist. The problem, however, is that many capitalists are hard to convince when it comes to environmental protection or replacing fossil fuels with carbon free alternatives. Certain sectors of the business community have fiercely fought the science of anthropogenic climate change and oil companies like Exxon have only recently even acknowledged the problem of carbon emissions. A legion of zombie think tanks continue to churn out propaganda undermining legitimate climate science. Here's looking at you Heartland Institute. In Florida, climate change is regularly denied, dismissed, or minimized by significant parts of the business community. All out development along the coastlines continues unabated and even devastating hurricanes can't slow it down. Giant pickup trucks rumble menacingly through traffic. Florida has remarkably little solar power generation because of dogged resistance from private utilities unwilling to invest in grid modernization. The Texas legislature, egged on by fossil fuel interests, is now attacking windmills, solar power, and other green alternatives. My question is: I know there has been some progress, but when will enough capitalists let go of short termism and start thinking along the lines you have outlined? Why the continued resistance in the face of strong scientific evidence? Too much capital seems to be behaving emotionally and irrationally given all the economic opportunities associated with renewable technology and carbon reduction. "Don't Look Up!" hits a bit too close to home.
We have traded MONEY for philosophy and religion as a tool to give life MEANING. Money is at best a salve to be applied to a wound. It doesn't address how one was wounded. Meaning often evolves from destitution, pain and sacrifice. Money is a salve that offers temporary relief. We are trying to fix temporal problems with temporal answers while the solutions reside in the abstract.
May 30, 2023·edited May 30, 2023Liked by Brink Lindsey
Brink, I love this quote, "I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat.... Rather, I see this as essentially a technological problem, and the solution to the problem of dirty technology is clean technology. Recognizing the reality of serious environmental harms doesn’t lead me to give up on progress; it shows me the direction that progress should take."
This is precisely the kind of thinking that needs to take root. As I noted at Risk+Progress, we are bearing early witness to a kind of environmental Kuznet's curve. As development proceeds and technology marches forward, environmental dangers from deforestation, ozone depletion, and greenhouse emissions don't get worse...they improve. The fastest path toward protecting the environment is not to "degrowth" but, perhaps paradoxically, accelerate growth and progress.
The danger lies in the diminishing returns on research productivity and science. It is costing more and more, in terms of both human and financial capital, to make the required technological breakthroughs. This trend is becoming more salient against a backdrop of global population, which simultaneously threatens to stifle our ability to supply this "capital." We risk stunting progress while it is hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels.
Where does open immigration fit into all of this? It seems to me that an expensive open UBI is antithetical to an open borders immigration policy. Yet, an open borders like immigration policy is exactly what has distinguished the United States from the rest of the developed world.
From a top view, it seems like many of these policy proposals would be better fits to be first tried in Europe, or even say Japan, where the big safety net mentality and policy is already in affect. Moving from an open border economic system to one of large UBI payments, would seem like a much bigger cultural change to the USA than anywhere else. It would also make the United States like most if not all of the other developed countries, one less economic model to play with.
First, I don't think it's correct to say the US has an open borders policy. We effectively did for the first 150 years or so of our history, but now we have, by comparison, very strict limits on immigration that we then enforce somewhat haphazardly. At this point, many other rich countries (Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Germany, etc.) have more foreign-born residents as a percentage of total population than we do. I agree that highly permissive immigration and unconditional income support are in real tension. Also, the fervent anti-immigration sentiment now so prevalent on the right would surely intensify what would already be fierce conservative opposition to a UBI.
Thanks for the comment Brink, love your substack. A small quibble if I may, I agree that our immigration count has dropped precipitously, and other countries now outnumber our immigration levels, but we still have a culture and economic system based on open borders: without safety nets, one needs cheap labor to fill in the gaps. I agree that its slipping away, but its still a large part of the basis for our current economy.
We also stand out in different way: the USA tends to let in more lower income immigration. Canada has a point system, the Turks/Syrians in Germany tend to educated, etc I also dont see this changing, with Mexico covering a large part of the US border.
Add these together, and it makes an expensive UBI system nearly impossible if not impractical in the USA. Given this tension, i would argue that the Matt Yglesias method of moving forward is likely the better one: moving back to a more aggressive open border system.
For many reasons, including our immigration system, I'm likewise very bearish on the prospects for enacting a UBI in the US. And I'm also with you on favoring an increase in immigration.
Jun 1, 2023·edited Jun 1, 2023Liked by Brink Lindsey
Great overview of the main strategies to fix capitalism. I really like the idea of 'economic independence'.
Perhaps it is not either/or when it comes to a UBI.
You are right, a UBI deals only with the demand side. However, this is as important as the supply side, as it gives people who cannot participate in the job market a 'voice' to signal their basic needs. Without money, they are invisible to the market, so the market can never respond.... even though society has the resources to fulfill everyone's basic needs.
At any time, around 50% of the population cannot do paid work: young, disabled, aged, their unpaid carers, and those between jobs. This is not a static group: the young grow up, the disabled age, and the aged die, and their unpaid carers and those between jobs find other paid work. Some are trapped much of their lives in this group, or move back and forth as circumstances change. But they are the minority, most who can work get a new job within 2 years (depending on the state of the economy). Though, ultimately, everyone dies.
While in this group, people gets money from savings and family, if lucky; and welfare, charity,... and crime, if not.
While welfare is supposed to bridge the gap, it is deliberately set below the poverty line to force people who can work to take the available jobs. Unfortunately, this has the effect of forcing those who cannot do paid work, and who have no savings or family support, into poverty. This leaves around 50 million people in the US destitute (mostly women with kids, disabled and aged, including more than 15% of all children). This is an indictment on society.
More jobs cannot solve this problem, except at the margins.
It is a system problem.
A UBI provides a system solution by providing the money people require to signal their basic needs to the market. It also allows them to earn more to better themselves and their family without the risk of losing their base. Evidence from around the world is that given the chance, most people don't want to 'exist' on the base. They strive to do better by taking on education, or caring for their family to give the next generation a boost... when they can.
That said, we need to ensure the supply of housing, health, education, and the other necessities of life in a modern economy (among which I'd include access to mobile communications and computing). Government has a role to play, especially in building the housing by buying land and building it where needed (close to where people work). The money can be borrowed as the debt would be offset by the value of the land and housing it purchased. If it causes a switch in trades from supplying the next holiday home or second home, so be it!
And, we need to ensure that people have the skills and local social and productive structures to participate fully in society. This includes not only work skills, but also social and life skills (such as budgeting). It would seem that 'economic independence' has a big role here.
As for the risks entailed in a UBI, in Australia we have developed a policy to mitigate the risks by starting at just $10/week/person, increasing the rate over 5 years to the poverty line (currently $620/week). This will allow the supply chain to adapt to the new pattern of demand without causing shortages that drive inflation. It will also allow us to monitor any potential negative effects, halting the increase until they can be rectified. It is a low-risk strategy.
Once the UBI reaches the poverty line, it could become a new tool to keep the ever-changing labor market in 'dynamic balance'. As automation, virtualization and AI radically change the job market, the UBI rate can be raised until the market is again in rough balance. It would never be perfect, but it would allow people to make their own decision (based on their own circumstances that the time) to drop out of the job market, or cut back their hours, leaving an opening for those who want the work.
The UBI would not be funded through tax. It would be funded by money printing, with a number of 'offsets' that would take money back out of the system to limit its inflationary impact.
The rich will also benefit, as the money is spent boosting their business turnover and profits.
Finland has trialled UBI in the sense of running a small scale pilot. I don't think it lived up to its proponents' hopes, but there must be information about it. Italy also introduced some sort of citizen income (reddito di cittadino) that was a plank of the M5S (Movimento 5 Stelle) that formed part of the former coalition government (before Meloni) but it was more like a universal welfare payment.
I also read this week (in an Italian magazine) that the Meloni government is considering discontinuing the reddito di cittidinanza to "encourage" young people to take up work especially in tourism as there's a post lockdowns boom and a worker shortage! Having just been there can confirm that tourism is booming!
You cannot go back especially to those three authors; they were wrong when they wrote Small is Beautiful, the Making of a Counter Culture and the Greening of America. And their solutions are even less appropriate today. The world is more complex than their models and at least from my perspective I think trying to regress on things like powering all the new gadgets that we use today is just silly.
Does that mean we should not try to think carefully about how to better use energy and protect the environment? Of Course not. Think of the condition of the environment when each of the authors wrote and then think about how much progress we have made by ignoring their prescriptions. Does it make any sense to try to harken back? I think not.
I'll just assume that you haven't engaged with any of the actual literature on Job Guarantee's and point out that you only get paid if you do actually show up and do actually work. And that it is actually a feature, not a bug that it fills up in a recession. Or maybe you just haven't actually seen that it does actually solve all the problems you seem to be complaining about, in practice not in theory. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/f4c1a3_a41dc8241e4e482591b513791ef17a2e.pdf
It’s important to be clear by what is meant by capitalism in practice in contemporary society. It is the extraction of monopoly rents for commodity goods in the economy for tangibles and the application of pychosocial engineering to create monopoly rents for intangibles. The allocation of those monopoly rents internally within organizations is itself organized to defy principles of market competition. Since monopoly rents are definitionally the highest that can be extracted from the market, the concomitant trend is to reduction of costs. This is done by placing labor in competition with the lowest cost labor pool in combination with replacing labor with technology. In both cases “any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.” (Norbert Weiner). Without impeding labor pool arbitrage and recycling wealth concentrated by contemporary wealth, the mass of humanity cannot live a fulsome life. The problem has never been the lack of capital to deploy in the economy. Rather it has been the unwillingness of the capital heavy classes to put capital into ventures that do not provide opportunities to extract monopoly rents. Instead it accumulates in the safe haven of sovereign debt for the purpose not of public investment but almost solely for liquidity management. These have been trends of increasing strength since 1870 that have been only light channeled by public policy and then mainly in times of great economic distress or grave dangers to national security. No political rework of these arrangements is in prospect and the only social organizational change engines coming up to speed are those driven by the engineers of retrograde nativism. I see no scope for attainment of greater local economic independence in these circumstances.
Again I would turn attention to care work as being at the core of the typical work taking place in more-independent communities. The more we make decentralized automation of other kinds of work feasible, the more central care work becomes by process of elimination. How do we ensure people engaged in that work have a reasonable level of material compensation for it? The obvious answer is a child allowance, with perhaps similar allowances for e.g. people caring for elderly relatives. It seems to me this provides the vast majority of a UBI's benefits with few if any of the downsides: you are compensating real work, hard work at that, so there is no incentive to idleness; and decreasing child poverty pays dividends in increased productivity and agency throughout the supported kids' future lives.
Thanks for mentioning care work. It extends beyond the family: No one is going to care for me as an "elderly relative" - I'm learning Spanish for that (which may end up being the wrong language but at least the possibility keeps me motivated.)
Paid care work has the potential of being meaningful and rewarding to caregivers (taking into account some of the recent ideas-in-the-air about exploitation of "emotional labor".) A UBI might provide for a more comfortable relationship between me and my caregivers, maybe even to the extent of participating in each others' communities a bit.
(Just discovered this essay today, June 17: my email provider has been hiding everything from substack.com in the Spam folder out there on the browser.)
Brink, you are right that technology and capitalism are essential to a productive and dynamic future. There can't be any "going back" to a romanticized bucolic past with the planet's population closing in on 8 billion people. Socialism and Communism have often left a trail of environmental disaster worse than any greedy capitalist. The problem, however, is that many capitalists are hard to convince when it comes to environmental protection or replacing fossil fuels with carbon free alternatives. Certain sectors of the business community have fiercely fought the science of anthropogenic climate change and oil companies like Exxon have only recently even acknowledged the problem of carbon emissions. A legion of zombie think tanks continue to churn out propaganda undermining legitimate climate science. Here's looking at you Heartland Institute. In Florida, climate change is regularly denied, dismissed, or minimized by significant parts of the business community. All out development along the coastlines continues unabated and even devastating hurricanes can't slow it down. Giant pickup trucks rumble menacingly through traffic. Florida has remarkably little solar power generation because of dogged resistance from private utilities unwilling to invest in grid modernization. The Texas legislature, egged on by fossil fuel interests, is now attacking windmills, solar power, and other green alternatives. My question is: I know there has been some progress, but when will enough capitalists let go of short termism and start thinking along the lines you have outlined? Why the continued resistance in the face of strong scientific evidence? Too much capital seems to be behaving emotionally and irrationally given all the economic opportunities associated with renewable technology and carbon reduction. "Don't Look Up!" hits a bit too close to home.
We have traded MONEY for philosophy and religion as a tool to give life MEANING. Money is at best a salve to be applied to a wound. It doesn't address how one was wounded. Meaning often evolves from destitution, pain and sacrifice. Money is a salve that offers temporary relief. We are trying to fix temporal problems with temporal answers while the solutions reside in the abstract.
Brink, I love this quote, "I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat.... Rather, I see this as essentially a technological problem, and the solution to the problem of dirty technology is clean technology. Recognizing the reality of serious environmental harms doesn’t lead me to give up on progress; it shows me the direction that progress should take."
This is precisely the kind of thinking that needs to take root. As I noted at Risk+Progress, we are bearing early witness to a kind of environmental Kuznet's curve. As development proceeds and technology marches forward, environmental dangers from deforestation, ozone depletion, and greenhouse emissions don't get worse...they improve. The fastest path toward protecting the environment is not to "degrowth" but, perhaps paradoxically, accelerate growth and progress.
The danger lies in the diminishing returns on research productivity and science. It is costing more and more, in terms of both human and financial capital, to make the required technological breakthroughs. This trend is becoming more salient against a backdrop of global population, which simultaneously threatens to stifle our ability to supply this "capital." We risk stunting progress while it is hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels.
Where does open immigration fit into all of this? It seems to me that an expensive open UBI is antithetical to an open borders immigration policy. Yet, an open borders like immigration policy is exactly what has distinguished the United States from the rest of the developed world.
From a top view, it seems like many of these policy proposals would be better fits to be first tried in Europe, or even say Japan, where the big safety net mentality and policy is already in affect. Moving from an open border economic system to one of large UBI payments, would seem like a much bigger cultural change to the USA than anywhere else. It would also make the United States like most if not all of the other developed countries, one less economic model to play with.
First, I don't think it's correct to say the US has an open borders policy. We effectively did for the first 150 years or so of our history, but now we have, by comparison, very strict limits on immigration that we then enforce somewhat haphazardly. At this point, many other rich countries (Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Germany, etc.) have more foreign-born residents as a percentage of total population than we do. I agree that highly permissive immigration and unconditional income support are in real tension. Also, the fervent anti-immigration sentiment now so prevalent on the right would surely intensify what would already be fierce conservative opposition to a UBI.
Thanks for the comment Brink, love your substack. A small quibble if I may, I agree that our immigration count has dropped precipitously, and other countries now outnumber our immigration levels, but we still have a culture and economic system based on open borders: without safety nets, one needs cheap labor to fill in the gaps. I agree that its slipping away, but its still a large part of the basis for our current economy.
We also stand out in different way: the USA tends to let in more lower income immigration. Canada has a point system, the Turks/Syrians in Germany tend to educated, etc I also dont see this changing, with Mexico covering a large part of the US border.
Add these together, and it makes an expensive UBI system nearly impossible if not impractical in the USA. Given this tension, i would argue that the Matt Yglesias method of moving forward is likely the better one: moving back to a more aggressive open border system.
For many reasons, including our immigration system, I'm likewise very bearish on the prospects for enacting a UBI in the US. And I'm also with you on favoring an increase in immigration.
Great overview of the main strategies to fix capitalism. I really like the idea of 'economic independence'.
Perhaps it is not either/or when it comes to a UBI.
You are right, a UBI deals only with the demand side. However, this is as important as the supply side, as it gives people who cannot participate in the job market a 'voice' to signal their basic needs. Without money, they are invisible to the market, so the market can never respond.... even though society has the resources to fulfill everyone's basic needs.
At any time, around 50% of the population cannot do paid work: young, disabled, aged, their unpaid carers, and those between jobs. This is not a static group: the young grow up, the disabled age, and the aged die, and their unpaid carers and those between jobs find other paid work. Some are trapped much of their lives in this group, or move back and forth as circumstances change. But they are the minority, most who can work get a new job within 2 years (depending on the state of the economy). Though, ultimately, everyone dies.
While in this group, people gets money from savings and family, if lucky; and welfare, charity,... and crime, if not.
While welfare is supposed to bridge the gap, it is deliberately set below the poverty line to force people who can work to take the available jobs. Unfortunately, this has the effect of forcing those who cannot do paid work, and who have no savings or family support, into poverty. This leaves around 50 million people in the US destitute (mostly women with kids, disabled and aged, including more than 15% of all children). This is an indictment on society.
More jobs cannot solve this problem, except at the margins.
It is a system problem.
A UBI provides a system solution by providing the money people require to signal their basic needs to the market. It also allows them to earn more to better themselves and their family without the risk of losing their base. Evidence from around the world is that given the chance, most people don't want to 'exist' on the base. They strive to do better by taking on education, or caring for their family to give the next generation a boost... when they can.
That said, we need to ensure the supply of housing, health, education, and the other necessities of life in a modern economy (among which I'd include access to mobile communications and computing). Government has a role to play, especially in building the housing by buying land and building it where needed (close to where people work). The money can be borrowed as the debt would be offset by the value of the land and housing it purchased. If it causes a switch in trades from supplying the next holiday home or second home, so be it!
And, we need to ensure that people have the skills and local social and productive structures to participate fully in society. This includes not only work skills, but also social and life skills (such as budgeting). It would seem that 'economic independence' has a big role here.
As for the risks entailed in a UBI, in Australia we have developed a policy to mitigate the risks by starting at just $10/week/person, increasing the rate over 5 years to the poverty line (currently $620/week). This will allow the supply chain to adapt to the new pattern of demand without causing shortages that drive inflation. It will also allow us to monitor any potential negative effects, halting the increase until they can be rectified. It is a low-risk strategy.
Once the UBI reaches the poverty line, it could become a new tool to keep the ever-changing labor market in 'dynamic balance'. As automation, virtualization and AI radically change the job market, the UBI rate can be raised until the market is again in rough balance. It would never be perfect, but it would allow people to make their own decision (based on their own circumstances that the time) to drop out of the job market, or cut back their hours, leaving an opening for those who want the work.
The UBI would not be funded through tax. It would be funded by money printing, with a number of 'offsets' that would take money back out of the system to limit its inflationary impact.
The rich will also benefit, as the money is spent boosting their business turnover and profits.
How it would work is explained in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTe8F6qQg5M&list=PLmh_ES7MaUhhlfzPJrqk_1pnNvWiQdOdS
Finland has trialled UBI in the sense of running a small scale pilot. I don't think it lived up to its proponents' hopes, but there must be information about it. Italy also introduced some sort of citizen income (reddito di cittadino) that was a plank of the M5S (Movimento 5 Stelle) that formed part of the former coalition government (before Meloni) but it was more like a universal welfare payment.
I also read this week (in an Italian magazine) that the Meloni government is considering discontinuing the reddito di cittidinanza to "encourage" young people to take up work especially in tourism as there's a post lockdowns boom and a worker shortage! Having just been there can confirm that tourism is booming!
You cannot go back especially to those three authors; they were wrong when they wrote Small is Beautiful, the Making of a Counter Culture and the Greening of America. And their solutions are even less appropriate today. The world is more complex than their models and at least from my perspective I think trying to regress on things like powering all the new gadgets that we use today is just silly.
Does that mean we should not try to think carefully about how to better use energy and protect the environment? Of Course not. Think of the condition of the environment when each of the authors wrote and then think about how much progress we have made by ignoring their prescriptions. Does it make any sense to try to harken back? I think not.
I'll just assume that you haven't engaged with any of the actual literature on Job Guarantee's and point out that you only get paid if you do actually show up and do actually work. And that it is actually a feature, not a bug that it fills up in a recession. Or maybe you just haven't actually seen that it does actually solve all the problems you seem to be complaining about, in practice not in theory. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/f4c1a3_a41dc8241e4e482591b513791ef17a2e.pdf
And while I have no doubt that it would be an amazing accomplishment if we could implement one, I still agree with Kalecki where he predicted ZIRP and NIRP back in 1943 as to why it will never happen. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/kalecki-on-the-political-obstacles-to-achieving-full-employment.html
It’s important to be clear by what is meant by capitalism in practice in contemporary society. It is the extraction of monopoly rents for commodity goods in the economy for tangibles and the application of pychosocial engineering to create monopoly rents for intangibles. The allocation of those monopoly rents internally within organizations is itself organized to defy principles of market competition. Since monopoly rents are definitionally the highest that can be extracted from the market, the concomitant trend is to reduction of costs. This is done by placing labor in competition with the lowest cost labor pool in combination with replacing labor with technology. In both cases “any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.” (Norbert Weiner). Without impeding labor pool arbitrage and recycling wealth concentrated by contemporary wealth, the mass of humanity cannot live a fulsome life. The problem has never been the lack of capital to deploy in the economy. Rather it has been the unwillingness of the capital heavy classes to put capital into ventures that do not provide opportunities to extract monopoly rents. Instead it accumulates in the safe haven of sovereign debt for the purpose not of public investment but almost solely for liquidity management. These have been trends of increasing strength since 1870 that have been only light channeled by public policy and then mainly in times of great economic distress or grave dangers to national security. No political rework of these arrangements is in prospect and the only social organizational change engines coming up to speed are those driven by the engineers of retrograde nativism. I see no scope for attainment of greater local economic independence in these circumstances.