For those of you who’ve avoided all the politics around it, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is supposed to be something like a perfect unicorn of a policy. In simple terms, it is just the idea to give every living person some amount of money, without means-testing or questions, to use as they see fit.
It keeps the capitalists happy, because all those protests about low wages, and suppressed unions, and zero-hour contracts, and outsourcing, ricochet cleanly off them, and hit the State right in the goolies: “If the people are starving, just bump up the UBI!”… Plus, there’s the whole ‘more money in poor people’s pockets = more potential for Capitalism!®’
And, it keeps the socialists happy, because it all seems pretty socially good: Giving people an income floor – no matter how their life cartwheels out of control – means they should always have something to keep a roof over their heads and a little food in their belly.
Of course, we do live in a world where people pretend to be unhappy about things to get #Likes and #Subscribes, so there’s a bunch of folks (on both sides) who financially benefit from being deliberately antagonistic about a UBI. And a lot more who are too disadvantaged, lazy, or despairing to put actual thinking-time into understanding it.
So, for example, some amount of people don’t understand how tax works, and think we can’t afford to just “give money away willy-nilly” (if this is you, stay tuned for some future newsletter where I’ll probably get a bit shouty about tax). Some other amount of people just think “inflation”, because they believe we’re still living in the 1970s. And some further group are worried about landlords and supermarkets just upping prices to extract all that juicy-UBI-goodness from the ‘newly enriched’ recipients (see also: inflation circa. 2023), to the extent a UBI becomes a pointless exercise.
Frankly, despite any of the invalid protests – and some valid hesitancy – I’m near-certain it will happen. It will start somewhere a bit brave (or somewhere with a growing cottage industry of guillotine manufacturing), and then snowball to other places with astonishing speed. Because it will tick most of the boxes and, more importantly, we’re starting to need it. We’ll need it because, eventually, we’re going to open our collective eyes and realise all the various ad-hoc subsidies and energy rebates and pensions and unemployment benefits and accommodation top-ups we’re doing are inefficient and stupid.
But we’ll also need it because we’ve actually already moved on from the conventional idea of money; we flicked the rod on that decades ago and it’s just taking a bit of time for the hook and sinker to catch up. A UBI will simply validate what money actually is now, and put it on a piece of nice textured paper with a government letterhead at the top.1
What I think money is – the day-to-day money we spend on groceries and mortgage payments and petrol and movie tickets and iPhones – is something more akin to ‘life tokens’. It’s just something we have to have, or we stop living.
We can’t even just go and survive off the land, because everything is ‘property’ now. (Not to mention, most of us would suffer terribly without any means to interact and participate with the rest of humanity – Money, Baby!)
I’m not saying people have no agency over their lives – you can earn a lot of money and bribe lobby politicians; or go activist-mode and protest and petition and draw attention to whatever cause. You can, of course, pay money directly for things you like – Substack or Patreon subscriptions for example – but even then, your ability to support someone is predicated on trillions invested in platforms and regulation which you have no control over, and which increasingly could – at the whim of a few billionaires – be switched off. In theory, Substack gives me a database of my readers. But even that database is filled with ways to reach people that only exist because of impenetrable money flows.
What this all tells me is, up to a point, money operates as these life tokens. Beyond that point, it becomes power tokens: things you can spend on gaining health, time, adoration, and access. But at no point are any two dollars the equally-democratic thing they were designed to be.
Consider the modern business model of Uber-like disruption, or the rush of Private Equity buying-up in entire industries. In both cases, their intent is not to create value, but power.
See, fundamentally, value is a thing we all share in, but power inherently requires a status imbalance.
I’m not saying Uber’s app isn’t a handy innovation. But it wasn’t so unique that traditional taxi companies, even operating inside their regulated employment models, couldn’t have also come up with. Many already had apps for ordering cabs; they just didn’t have huge Private Equity investment to crush their competition with. And, indeed, it’s not even something that can’t be (and isn’t) just copied anyway.
Uber’s investors sunk billions into taking control of the transport narrative – squashing traditional passenger transport and any energy building behind public transport – in order to gain power. It certainly wasn’t done to create long-term value, because Uber has still not made a profit. But what the power did was give those early investors a nice return, built on the power to write ‘The Story of a Captured Transport Future’. They’ve since sold shares to more naïve investors – based entirely on the pretence of value that was never there. And now, with even more money, the original investors can just spend it on extracting power from other industries.
It works the same even in the public sector. That’s how we’ve ended up with huge amounts of money going out to private sector consultants. This is money that is mostly buying the government the power to do nothing except say “it wasn’t our idea” when things go wrong. Taxpayers are not getting better results – after all, most of the private consultants hired are ex-public sector employees anyway – we’re just spending public money on more retention and growth of private power.
Our roads and schools may be falling apart, and our hospital waiting lists may be growing. These are things that could be easily fixed, if money was spent for value. But, when you’re spending for power, you get far better results by spending on tax cuts and consultants. That way you also always have a collection of broken things to fix - “important issues" to power future political campaigns.
So, in the end, what this all really adds up to is a kind of key-jiggling exercise by the people who already have power, to distract the rest of us, by keeping up the pretence of the sanctity of money – “Look, over there, a Private Jet!”…“Look at that mansion!”…“Caviar!”…“Fiji!”… “Imagine your life with money!”. But, meanwhile, they entrench their power over how our lives work, by locking us into their self-serving ‘formula for success’.
I don’t want this to get all conspiratorial. I just want to help you think about the relative equity of different dollars, so you can understand how a UBI’s importance goes beyond the typical justifications thrown up for it. A UBI is important because, without it, money can’t do the thing promised on the tin.
So, next time, we’re going to look at what it is that money actually needs to do for us.
I should add, because I know you’re thinking about it, my belief is any discussion about needing a UBI because “AI will take all the jobs” is a distraction. Yes, AI will make some jobs redundant (like other technology, immigration, culture etc), but it will also create new ones as well (John Connor’s Resistance?)… More importantly, it won’t fundamentally change the way we interact through money, which is my (unemployment-level-extraneous) point… Don’t worry, I’ve got lots to say about AI, but let’s save it for another day.