Pre(r)amble

On two recent evenings, I have had the pleasure of engaging in conversations with friends who are compassionate and thoughtful. On both occasions, they raised the idea of a Universal Basic Income, an idea that in our circles is well enough known to be just referred to as the UBI. Saving my friends from a diversion from our main conversation I let the UBI references pass without comment. This was, however, a prompt to remind me that I have some thoughts on the issue which I wish to put down.

Let me show my cards at the outset: As Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". I believe underlying the UBI is an extraordinary claim, that governments can give huge amounts of money away and doing so will only lead to positive outcomes; this article may be seen as my request for proportionate evidence. I believe the UBI is a nebulous idea taking up intellectual room without actually providing a clear or sensible path forward. There seem to me to be better and more achievable incremental changes we could make that would lead to more directly to the right outcomes.

Radical ideas

At fairly regular intervals ideas will enter the Zeitgeist and consume intellectual space for a while. Often these ideas will kick around, be passionately argued for or against, and then disappear of their own accord, perhaps to reappear later as intellectual fashions and contexts change. Every now and then, however, an idea will escape beyond the chattering classes and capture enough momentum and power to be implemented. This is not to say whether they are good or bad ideas, often new ideas are improvements, and sometimes they set us back; ideally, as a society, we should learn from either outcome. Commonly we exaggerate the level of change of new ideas, as they result in neither the scale of positive change advocates promise nor the apocalyptic problems naysayers predict. Modern societies are juggernauts that roll along in a mostly familiar shape, thrown off course occasionally by large exceptional events few predicted or intended.

It is all very well for a political class to have grand ideas, but if they inherited a system that provides reasonable stability and justice, it is preferable that they see to the good maintenance and improvements of that system over radical change. There is a lot of heat and noise in the systems of our world, and it is not easy to know where changes will lead; for all the people who confidently predict the future, it is rare that history looks back on any prior prognosticators with even a passing grade. We must therefore do our best to implement the positive change our world needs while avoiding hubris and being prepared to learn from our inevitable mistakes. We can revere somewhat vague ends, whilst acknowledging ends are distant and uncertain and means are the things that most surely inhabit the world. An expedient cruelty in service of some noble end generally results in cruelty being performed for an end that never happens; the only resulting change is to make the world worse and perhaps provide a cautionary lesson.

Often in times of crisis or stagnation people hunger for new ideas and, as has been pointed out by various thinkers, will take any "lying around at the time", ideas that offer some hope of forging a different path. Indeed sometimes the first task undertaken by advocates for new ideas is to convince enough people that the current state of affairs is so terrible that a new idea, their new idea, is desperately needed. Reform, people invested in an idea will say, is not enough, the old way or system was so bad that we should burn it all down and start again; this is almost always wrong.

The classic quote of this type of thinking, attributed to Einstein, is "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them". Like all pithy sayings we should not expect it to map too perfectly to reality, certainly, not all change is necessarily progress, but there is some perspective worth thinking about in the quote. Sometimes progress does come from revolutionary new technologies and ideas, but not necessarily the majority of progress, probably quite the opposite. Progress most often comes from long processes of subtle trial and error; from incorporating and building upon the learning of the past; from adopting ways of thinking that are expansive enough to see both the good and bad in previous systems, and to admit error, reform and improve.

It is generally the incremental changes, indeed even the unheralded maintenance of things, that provide the most stable and lasting foundation for a better society. It is worth having your plan for when the masses wake up to your version of truth and the revolution comes, but revolutions are rare, and often stir forces which don't end up creating the hoped-for results. It is generally more prudent to have a plan for making what progress you can without massively upsetting the world as it is. If you live in a country with low levels of absolute poverty, with universal suffrage, decent health care, education and human rights, what some might consider the highest point of human civilisation, your desire to burn it all down may say more about you than the systems you want to upend. Admittedly, promises of incremental change aren't sexy, they may not stir many people to the barricades, but perhaps that is something we have to change rather than accept. Burning it all down may appeal to the irrational, but once irrational destructive forces are unleashed, they can lead to dangerous and unpredictable places, in society and within ourselves.

Irrationality can also make us wish to subsume ourselves in an ideology. In improving society one of the primary things that obstructs us from learning from our mistakes and those of others is ideology, which will make us accept or reject ideas without giving them a due hearing. Let us in this discussion, dear reader and I, try to quiet our instinctive voice of ideology, of what we would like to be true about people and the world. Let us give the Universal Basic Income a rigorous and fair inspection, as much as we are able to from first principles.

UBI 101

The Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been an idea whirling around in the intellectual ether for some time. A simple outline of the UBI would be that all people above a certain age are given a significant amount of money every month. There are partial UBIs where everyone gets a subsidy, and the full UBI is sometimes referred to as a "living wage". The UBI has proponents on all sides of economics, and one of its undoubted attractions is that it seems radical. Certainly, at higher levels, the UBI would make immediate changes to national budgets as well as personal incomes and lifestyles, though the long-term changes are less certain or considered. The radicalness of the UBI seems to be an appropriate response to the scale of the problems facing our society such as garish inequality. An idea being radical, however, should not necessarily recommend it to us and allow us to sidestep rational judgement of it.

Perhaps one interesting or confusing thing about the UBI is the strange political bedfellows who support it; those tending away from the centre, towards that radicalness, on both sides of politics.

UBI Right

The simplified main conservative and libertarian case for a UBI is that we have large publicly funded institutions within government and therefore major parts of national budgets dedicated to welfare. To reduce the size of government and achieve cost and efficiency savings, they would replace a complicated welfare system with a UBI. This would be to hand everyone a standard amount of money each month and everyone would then make their own decisions on how to spend it. People they say are in the best position to understand their own needs and desires, not a centralised bureaucracy. Whether this would leave the people who most need help better off, however, is of less concern to this sector of UBI advocates than its fairness and efficiency. If people make bad decisions with the money, then that is their lot.

UBI Left

The simplified main progressive case for a UBI is that being poor is bad on many levels, so we should give people enough money so they are no longer poor. It's difficult to argue with this logic from a moral viewpoint; in the previous sentence try replacing the word poor with thirsty or hungry or replacing money with water or food. Progressives believe that largely holding people back in life is an unfair economic system, and by rebalancing that system and giving people more of the opportunities that material security provides, they will lead better lives and contribute more fully to society. Many progressives tend to think of our unequal economic system as essentially a scam perpetrated by elites, and therefore are not overly concerned with where the money to fund a UBI will come from or any negative changes in an economy such a radical change in taxation will make; they believe redressing inequality will only have positive benefits.

Money is a different thing from water or food, healthcare or housing, it is an abstraction; like holding a token of unformed power. Money is not just about needs, it embodies desires, hopes, status, self-creation, self-destruction, success, failure and so much else. Changing our relationship with money is no simple thing, its consequences will be wide-ranging and hard to predict. A UBI may also not be the best way to achieve the outcomes we hope for, especially progressive outcomes. So let us delve into that, but first, we should even at a high level discuss maths.

The maths have to work

A phrase I often repeat to friends of mine who might typify themselves as "ideas people" is that the maths of ideas has to work. Embodied in this is, as Galileo said, the language of the universe is mathematics. It matters little how beautiful our ideas are if they don't conform to the laws of mathematics and physics.

I might like my friend's new business idea of making a beautiful space in the middle of town where people can hang out without having to buy something, where they give homeless people free meals on a Sunday. If my friend had spare money lying around, I would say go for it, free stuff will be popular, make the world a better place. For an idea to be self-sustaining, however, we need to do a lot more work before we can say whether it is a practical idea; in a phrase - we need to do the maths. Ultimately in a capitalist system, making economic sense is the first step in any idea becoming a sustainable reality. If the economics of your ideas don't work, it doesn't matter how beautiful or true they seem in other ways, capitalism will thoughtlessly end them. If your idea can't pay its bills, the longer it runs the worse things will be; debt will pile up which you might get away with for a while but eventually, a reckoning will come.

We should first note there are people who don't think debt is a problem, especially government debt. Some people, highly trained economists amongst them, believe that nations can and should rack up endless debt without worrying about how to pay for it. Some of these people call themselves Modern Monetary Theorists, a theory that may be so modern it will probably only make any sense in some distant and unforeseeable future. When questioned, these endless debt proponents will say that people are naive in thinking about government debt the same way they think about personal debt. I am probably naive about something as complex as national finances, but someone must explain to me why I am naive, not just state it as fact. I can accept a condescending truism only if it is followed with something that proves their point.

Certainly, government spending without being able to manage repayments has caused major problems in both the developed and developing world. World governments spend large portions of their budgets on debt servicing, the US government alone is approaching a trillion dollars per year in debt repayments; over one-eighth of its spending disappears into this void every year. Globally there is an almost inconceivable amount of money spent servicing debt, money that could be spent on social services, infrastructure, environmental improvement and so on. Some of this debt was accrued by providing services, but often in an unsustainable and much more costly way than governments funding smaller projects from taxation income would have provided. Certainly, it is well known that corrupt corporations and governments prefer larger-scale public projects because of the large sums of money floating around which can be lucratively skimmed from more easily. High levels of debt can reach a point where a country's credit rating on international markets can suffer, which means the debt you have becomes more expensive. High levels of debt are fine when everything is going well, but if there is a large shock to a country from whatever source and it is forced to accrue major debt simply to survive, having existing high levels of debt will make the situation even more precarious. There is, of course, a case for intelligently managed debt, with a well-balanced risk and reward outcome, but too often debt takes the place of intelligent money management, providing short-term benefits and long-term drawbacks.

The economist Keynes was a genius, and the world would have been better off listening to him more often than not. Perhaps the most annoying thing about some people who call themselves, at least partly, followers of Keynesian economics is that they just parrot Keynes' about government spending being needed to stimulate economies at times when the markets are unable to. What they don't acknowledge, however, is the equally important part where Keynes said that in good times, in times of relative economic prosperity and growth, countries should be building resilience; ensuring their national accounts are in a position that when the inevitable downturns come they have some resources in hand. The quip that everyone is a Keynesian in times of economic crisis has been shown in a number of difficult times in recent history to be accurate, with governments of all persuasions jumping on the spending bandwagon, but you miss the point if you are only a Keynesian when it suits you, when it's time to spend.

Conservatives, or perhaps more accurately Corporatists, have practised what has been called "starving the beast", for many decades; the "beast" being democratic government that people struggled and bled for in order to protect themselves from the tyranny of elites. Conservatives actively want to undermine government finances to limit its ability to do things that might interfere with elite power and corporate profits such as providing services they would rather see privatised, or regulating industry. This is part of the reason that Conservatives sometimes seem to have a single policy measure for all ills: individual and corporate tax cuts aimed at undermining the resource basis of government limit its ability to do good and garner public support. This might make some sense if Conservatives also had a coherent strategy for dealing with regular and inevitable economic downturns other than turning into Keynesians and saddling governments with crippling debt. Conservatives just can't seem to acknowledge that the market they profess to love might have terrible flaws until those flaws are staring us all in the face and have to be acknowledged.

If we are all Keynesians in times of crisis, then we need to listen to Keynes in a more responsible manner. We should be asking governments what their plans are to prepare society for the next unforeseen shock in the national or international economy. We should remember that elites often don't suffer from financial shocks like everyone else; during the 2008 financial crisis, there was a shortage of luxury accommodation in Caribbean resorts as financial elites waited out the market instability. Huge profits are often made by elites in times of crisis, they can benefit from the swinging fluctuations of international markets and have the resources that shield them personally from the effects of downturns. For the majority of the population, however, it is stability and incremental improvements that are of most sustained benefit and to protect them it is the inevitable recessions that capitalism entails that governments should be most prepared for; if they are honest in their claim to care about all people.

Inflation

We must also talk about inflation. In 2015 I had a rather difficult conversation with a very intelligent friend, where he tried to convince me that national inflation caused by putting too much money into the economy wasn't a thing. He had this analogy about bits of coloured paper being used to swap for things, and what did it matter if there were more or less bits of coloured paper, that it was probably good if there were more. I on the other hand pointed towards the instances of inflation, stagflation and hyper-inflation in human history. I talked about unstable pricing, how people dependent on savings were at greater risk of inflation than the asset ownership class, and the corrosive effect inflationary volatility had on people's ability to plan for the future. That some increase in money supply was fine if there was suppressed demand in the economy, but beyond that history showed it would cause inflation and so we would need to be very careful. With absolute certainty, he kept returning to the coloured pieces of paper, as if I was just not getting the depth and power of his analogy.

Within less than a decade, exacerbated by the COVID crisis, the ever-increasing, debt-funded, monetary injections into major nations' economies completely predictably caused high levels of inflation in countries that had pursued these policies. This led to instability, political radicalisation and governments of all descriptions being turfed out of office. I deserve no credit in foreseeing that this would happen if nations continued "printing" money as they were, this was just standard economic theory based on the lessons of history. As has been said, the most expensive phrase ever uttered is "This time it is different". The inflationary crisis, as they always seem to do, helped populist "strong" men and women into power.

There are a few ways to fund a UBI such as appropriating wealth, taxing the wealthy, taxing the wealth-producing sectors of the economy, reducing government spending, going into debt or printing more money. None of these are without potentially negative consequences. If you are talking about injecting hundreds of billions of additional dollars via a UBI into an economy every year, especially if it is financed by debt, you are intervening in the economy in both predictable and unpredictable ways. If you are talking about taking those billions from one part of the economy and giving them to another which will do very different things with them, it is also a radical change. You need to have a plan for the predictable problems it will cause and have some humility and resilience towards the unpredictable ones. The certainty with which people say "I support a UBI" doesn't give me any confidence they are thinking in this way.

I should probably pause here to say that government debt and finances, especially given the different financial systems of governments, are an incredibly complex economic conversation that I am barely a novice in. The experts on the topic, of course, violently disagree so it is a topic which could consume many more words than I would wish for this article. It is enough that we agree that sustained and ever-increasing high levels of government spending and debt are likely to cause a major problem for an economy. If you think this isn't true, that governments have an endless supply of money and we don't need to look at the economic feasibility of this or any other idea, then we are perhaps on very different and irreconcilable pages. I will be discussing the UBI from within the bounds of standard logic and economics, or in other words, from the viewpoint that the maths has to work.

As I used to say, I am so left that I walk in circles, but I consider myself part of the data-driven, rational left. The most prominent advocates of UBI I have discussed the idea with are also progressives, no doubt because I lean so heavily this way myself. One thing that emerges from these conversations is that many passionate advocates for the UBI don't have the sums clear in their heads. There is a stereotype of progressives that we are all heart and neither know nor care much about economics. Of course, there are numerous and numerate progressive economists, including ones who have won prizes in honour of Nobel, but I don't think the stereotype is entirely unfair; though we should note economic rationality is not exactly universal on other sides of politics either. As progressives, we can all do our bit for our ideals by learning enough about economics to avoid confirming this stereotype.

A basic understanding of economics is important because much of what is and is not done in our world, what is politically feasible and infeasible, is justified on the basis of economics. It is therefore something to which we must all pay some attention. If you want to advocate for an economic idea like a UBI, even if you don't want to learn about economics generally then perhaps at least have some idea of the economics of that idea. It shouldn't be someone else's job to disprove the ideas you bring up enthusiastically. People should be able to assume you are serious enough to have done some intellectual work before you support an idea. If it is at root an economic idea, well you should be able to justify its economics.

You may assume that clever people who agree with you have done all the necessary calculations for the idea you are supporting, but I think this is optimistic. To begin with, although people talk about it loosely, the UBI isn't a single monolithic idea that you either support or don't. It has come to the point where people should put some qualifying terms before saying "UBI" to give a clearer indication of what they are supporting. Some versions of UBI, called a partial UBI, advocate for relatively small amounts to be given to people, without major change in other parts of the economy. These sums would not be large enough to radically change their behaviour, but enough to make getting the basic necessities in life a little easier. Other people advocate for a substantial wage, called a full UBI or Living Wage, which lifts all people up to at least the poverty level but often more, essentially lifting a large section of society into a different class. These are radically different proposals, with entirely different economics behind them.

Although it is not entirely clear, I think most people are talking about the UBI where we replace the welfare system by giving everyone enough money to at least lift them above the poverty line, the full UBI. Given that UBI has the word income in it, and not, subsidy, I think this is a fair enough assumption. So let's look at the maths of giving everyone in a country like Australia a government-supplied wage.

Rough calculations

In order to do our sums we need to start somewhere. I tried to engage a couple of people in the Australian Greens discussion group online who were strongly advocating a UBI for Australia. I should note I have been a member of the Greens for a long time and support most of their policies while not always agreeing with their strategies. The people I discussed the UBI with were doing what most people do, using phrases to support their ideas rather than figures. When I tried to pin them down to a sum for the UBI, someone suggested $500 a week, and I have heard this sum before in similar discussions.

Firstly a figure like $500 per week for a full income in Australia shows people's basic lack of knowledge about the current welfare situation. People who are single on the Old Age Pension or the Disability Support Pension are already getting more than this amount. Single people on unemployment benefits who get the full rent assistance payments are just slightly below it. For the unemployed, it would be a minor improvement rather than a revolutionary change, which is what I think UBI advocates are hoping for. Still, $500 is a reasonable amount to suggest; it is just slightly above the poverty line for a single person in Australia. Indeed, ignoring the UBI discussion, we should make this minor improvement and raise the minimum public benefit to this level; a wealthy country such as Australia should be ashamed to have any of its citizens living in poverty.

Let us take this amount of $500 per week or $26000 annually as a basis for our UBI calculations. For an age limit, we will take 16, which is the age at which people can start receiving the Youth Allowance, a less generous version of the standard unemployment benefits. Australia currently has roughly a population of about 22 million people at the age of 16 or over. So to fund the UBI in these terms, excluding administration costs, would mean:

$26,000 x 22,000,000 = $572,000,000,000

That's a huge sum, but we are talking about huge sums here. In the 2021/2022 financial year, the Australian Government's spending on welfare and benefits was $212,400,000,000, which included administration costs. This is the largest item in Australia's national budget, double the size of health and four times the size of education. So to add to our national budget of $715,000,000,000, we need to find an additional $360,000,000,000 every year to fund a UBI at just above the poverty level, adding over an additional 50% to the national budget.

To give you an idea of these sums in our current political discourse. One of the current hot budget topics is the purchase of US-made nuclear submarines Australia is planning as part of its long-term defence strategy. Many Australians have baulked at the price tag of $368,000,000,000 for these submarines, spread out between now and 2050. For a UBI just above the poverty level, however, we are talking about funding at a similar level to that, not once between now and 2050, but every year for the indefinite future. These are not incidental sums to be thrown around lightly.

Even before we accept this rough calculation of the cost of the UBI, we should ask whether we can actually replace all of our current welfare spending with a $26000 per person UBI. As mentioned, currently a single person on either the pension or disability support pension gets more than $26000 a year. That is not the end of the money we spend on welfare and disability support recipients by any means. $26000 a year is not going to guarantee people good housing, employ carers, provide specialised equipment, education, medical care and so on. I knew someone whose daughter's rare blood condition cost the government over $250,000 a year just for the drugs required to manage it. We could go on for some time here, but the idea that any sensible level of UBI would replace all existing welfare spending is a non-starter unless we want levels of welfare to drop dramatically for those who most need help. The Australian government for instance justifiably spends much more money on people with disabilities, Indigenous Australians, refugees and other Australians with different levels of disadvantage; a UBI provides none of this subtlety. There is a reason we need public servants assessing people's level of needs because different people need different levels of support at different times in their lives. So even the extra 50% on top of the existing national budget listed above is an underestimate, as it unrealistically assumes a UBI could replace existing welfare spending completely.

Evidence

There have been many, many studies of different kinds to try to understand how a UBI will affect people's behaviour. Most of them show positives and negatives. So how much store can we place in these studies?

People advocating for the UBI may not be aware that all academic studies of the UBI in developed countries are subsidy-based. They are a partial UBI rather than a full UBI. The amounts people are given aren't anywhere near enough to live on, often the amounts are more in the vicinity of an extra day's pay every week. As you can imagine this leads to very different study outcomes than people receiving a full wage might. Something else we need to be aware of in evaluating existing research is that most of the studies, especially in the developed world, run for very limited periods, some months, most one or two years, and only a couple of longer studies. If participants know from the outset that this additional income is temporary, why would they make long-term changes to their lives, such as giving up employment? Most studies generally point out that while often there is a small reduction in working hours, few people completely withdraw from the workforce, but this makes perfect sense given that the subsidies are for a limited period of time. What a short-term subsidy might be useful for is making life less stressful by reducing debt or allowing people to invest in their future via education and business ventures. A short-term subsidy doesn't really tell us much more than what people would do if they had a little more money for a while.

The short-term nature of these studies is also unhelpful because as we know people's lifestyles adjust and their material expectations grow as their wealth increases. A phenomenon called "money dysmorphia" results in many people who earn well above the average wage feeling they don't earn enough to meet their basic needs. People in high-income brackets find ever more things to spend money on that they consider "essential" such as luxury holidays, garish consumption and fashion that needs endless updating. Many people may externally seem to be doing well financially, but behind the scenes have ever higher levels of stress, and debt and are living pay-cheque to pay-cheque. We have experience in Australia of one-off government payments to households resulting in increasing sales of big screen televisions and so on, money which largely left the country and provided only minimal benefit to the recipients. In the United States an increase in drug overdose deaths correlated with the COVID payments the government sent to households, the payments certainly did little to address inequality.

If we want to encourage education, the idea that we give everyone in society a lifelong benefit in order to target a relatively small portion of people temporarily would seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Many 3 to 5-year university degrees currently run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually they often cost more than our proposed UBI. A targeted subsidy could reduce this much more effectively than inefficiently giving everyone in the country enough money to do so for their entire lifespan. Free or much reduced further education could even significantly pay for itself if it was focused on vocationally desirable educational fields. I have yet to see a progressive case for how a UBI could pay for itself.

To continue the theme of asking how useful studies that provide a short-term subsidy have been, many countries already have versions of this. In Australia for example we have a subsidy given to all parents according to the number of children they have. It seems we could learn just as much about the change to people's lifestyles from looking at these subsidies as we could from limited UBI studies, especially as existing government subsidies are given over much longer terms.

There is a hint of the unaffordability of a full UBI in the fact that no one can afford a widespread developed world study of it. To study it in Australia at levels above that already provided by the welfare system would cost at least 2.6 million annually for every 100 participants, hardly a large sample size. To properly study a full UBI properly would require large and ongoing financial commitments that few universities or institutions can or would want to expend. This leaves us in a difficult place to accrue evidence for and against it, but often we have to accept that partial information is the best we can do. When people quote the successes of UBI studies, however, they should be clearer about the limitations of these studies.

Opinion polls showing that a lot of people would like a UBI, tell us little more than asking "Would you like it if you and everyone else were given more money?". We certainly don't learn much that we couldn't already guess at by asking people who have been involved in a UBI study questions like "Did you like getting free money?" or "Was life better with more money?". Perhaps the more important and honest questions would be "What do you think the effects would be if we dramatically increased taxes on productive parts of the economy?" or alternatively "Do you think it is sensible to run massive and increasing government deficits forever?". The average person is less selfish and more sensible than some might think. Centuries ago during the Enlightenment when democracy was being discussed as an idea, many of the wealthy thought the first thing the poor would do if given democracy was vote to take everything the wealthy had. The fact that they didn't, and left most economies largely as they were, shows that people have a sense of fairness and caution with such changes. The average person does not resent the rich per se and knows that wealth can be earned by making positive contributions to society. Most progressives advocate for a society where providing wider social benefit is the only legitimate way to earn and maintain wealth.

For all its flaws, our current economic system has delivered some of the highest average living standards in human history. Along with its environmental destructiveness, one of our economic systems' greatest flaws is that it is grossly unequal. An equality where everyone was worse off, especially the poorest in society, would seem to be no victory, however. Advocates for any economic policy, especially one as significant as a full UBI, have a duty to ensure their policies do not risk destabilising the shared material basis upon which all levels of our society depend.

King Solomon's Mines

There is a part of the progressive movement that sees the economy as largely a scam perpetrated by undeserving wealthy elites on everyone else. When questioned about the financial feasibility of any idea such people will point to corporations or the wealthy as a limitless source of money that can simply be taken without wider consequences and put to better purposes; like a never-ending pinata that refills itself once beaten. Many people who identify as radicals at the same time also don't think that corporations or the wealthy should exist. Somehow the wealthy section of society is both the financial solution to all problems and something we should put an end to as soon as possible.

Fixing poverty, inequality, the environment, treating animals better, helping people with disabilities, doing more in the third world, funding education, the arts, social sciences, public transport, immigration and refugee issues, making more beautiful cities, we could go on for quite some time with all the things we could with limitless resources. We desperately need more equitable societies and taxation reform, but taking money from the wealthy isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for justifying the economic basis of any idea. If you are a proponent of such a consequential economic idea as the UBI, you need more than social theory and class analysis to justify it, you need economics that make wider sense. Taxing any section of society isn't an action without consequences. Part of sensible political change is understanding that you change the motivations and behaviour of sections of society by taxing them in different ways. The behaviour of the wealthy, or the ownership class, could respond in a number of ways to increased taxation. We need to avoid falling into Rand-ian style "productive class" mythologies that end up entrenching privilege, while also remembering the starvation and malnutrition that happened in the 20th century under Marxist-inspired regimes who thought they could simply upend major sections of their economies and implement their perfectly thought through ideas.

We can start by acknowledging that wealthy people sometimes pay very little tax because they hire smart accountants who specialise in avoiding tax. The ability of wealthy people to avoid tax partly stems from the international nature of finance, with companies shifting money around the world according to how the laws favour them. There was an accounting technique called "The double Irish, double Dutch sandwich", that companies in Europe used to switch money around so they could avoid paying appropriate taxes in the countries where they earned income. In the USA because the money that corporations earn internationally is only taxed upon being transferred into the country rather than when it was earned, some corporations have hordes of money sitting dormant in offshore accounts. These stockpiles sit awaiting a future administration that will allow the corporations to bring it into the USA without paying tax on it; something they lobby politicians heavily for. The world is awash with shadowy tax havens, where people above a certain class store their wealth, as evidenced in the Panama Papers. Some tax havens are also in wealthy countries. In the USA individual states compete for investment by giving ever more generous business and investment incentives than their neighbours. The fact that the USA as a whole is less well off from this competition doesn't matter to a state pursuing its singular interests. Taxation reform, including tiered taxation schemes and national and international agreements to avoid tax avoidance, may not sound as sexy or radical as advocating for a UBI, but they are more sensible and achievable. The financial basis for a UBI will probably not be able to happen without taxation reform either; it is good to know how you are going to get the money before you spend it.

Living in a more globalised world does mean that corporations and individuals can move money and production around according to where the greatest profits are on offer. This is often overplayed by the corporate classes who use it as a threat to avoid greater taxation and regulation, but that does not mean it is entirely fictitious. Some industries are largely geographically bound, you can't move a mining operation wherever you wish, but large companies can often move parts of their businesses overseas, including the money-generating parts of their operations. When car manufacturers in Australia wanted large subsidies to keep their operations in Australia, the conservative government essentially dared them to move their operations away and the companies took them up on the offer. Whatever the wider merits of this case, it shows the power the transnational nature of corporations now has; Australia now imports its automobiles, leaking billions from its economy. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, half of them are corporations that wield tremendous power over the nations they act within. If something like a UBI were to significantly affect the interests of corporations, many would be able to shift operations overseas which would at some point start to reduce the tax basis on which the UBI would depend.

One way governments can respond to such threats, especially for things like resource extraction, is to nationalise or partially nationalise industries. Partial nationalisation is where the government remains a significant player in a market that is too important to national welfare to be entirely at the whims of market forces, but where they would like to encourage choice and innovation; the paradigmatic cases where it is essential to provide government failsafe would be healthcare, education and social housing. We are all familiar with the regular crises of capitalism, but governments are not infallible either and so having them involved in industries is not without risks. Still one must always consider if one acts what the reaction to that action might be. Many advocates of UBI say that the benefit of the Universal part of it is that everybody would receive the money. Wealthy people, and certainly their accountants, are not stupid, however. They will notice if you massively increase their taxes with one hand whilst handing them a poverty-level wage with the other. In thinking about the financial changes necessary to introduce a UBI you will also need to think about how the parts of society who don't feel they will benefit from it will react, and the parts of society in this case are the wealthiest and most powerful.

In funding a UBI one tax people have talked about, a tax with which I am in profound agreement, is a superprofits tax. If an already successful resource extraction company suddenly benefits from a doubling of the price of some mineral, much higher taxes should be applied to the windfall profits. This may apply to other countries as well, but as Australia has a large, profitable and largely foreign-owned mining sector, it is of particular relevance to us. I feel this is the sort of occasional benefit from an asset that should benefit all Australians, that should be used to pay down debt, fund limited projects which have long-term benefits or be added to a sovereign wealth style fund to become a more sustainable long term source of income for the country. We have to remember though that a UBI is an ongoing expenditure. A sporadic tax like a super profits tax that, even more so than other taxes, rises and falls according to uncontrollable market conditions, is an unstable basis to fund an ongoing expenditure like a UBI.

We need to fully realise why planning for the future is so complex because things not only change by themselves, but they change as a response to what we collectively do. You cannot step into the same river twice as Heraclitus said about our ever-changing reality, and after your step into it the river will not be the same river it would have been either. Financial subsidies sometimes work, but other times they are just absorbed into the snowball of capitalism as it rolls downhill. Take for example programs that aim to provide housing for a wider section of the population by providing large subsidies to help with house deposits, the initial upfront payment to secure a home. What often ends up happening to these subsidies after a period of the market settling is that housing prices rise to match the subsidy; it essentially just disappears into the pockets of sellers, still a substantial cost to taxpayers but raising prices for everyone and providing little benefit to target communities. Wealthy people, such as property investors, can often pay more than they do for things, what really matters for them are profit margins and so long as they are reasonable they will continue to invest regardless of prices. Giving poorer people assistance in the form of money can drive prices higher for everyone, which will continue to disproportionately favour the rich. Markets would in some way adapt to the influx of capital that a UBI would entail. There is little doubt that some of the largest expenses of poorer households, such as costs for housing including rents, would go up. When a property investor bids on a house they are going to renovate or knockdown, the price isn't really relevant, and the profit they can make is; this is why rezoning land is such a potent source of political corruption because it massively increases the profits developers can make on land. Indeed the wealthy classes may even benefit from price rises on housing because it makes home ownership less achievable and increases the likelihood people will be forced to rent a home. Someone who owns a single house doesn't benefit in the same way from price rises as investors or companies who own many houses; if your home rises in price and you sell it to move somewhere else you will still need to buy another which will now also be more expensive, you haven't really gained. If someone is selling an investment property, however, price rises are pure profit like any other asset. Homes are an example where the primary change following a UBI might be to increase prices without fundamentally changing the existing class structures. It is also possible this won't be the case, but advocates for a UBI have to explain why not.

A Regressive UBI

Both progressive and libertarian/conservative advocates of a UBI should look over at the other side of the UBI supporter base with some suspicion. Why is it that support for the UBI tends to increase the further away people sit from the centre of politics?

Progressives see the "give everyone free money" side of the UBI and don't ask many more questions. On the other side of politics, however, many are motivated by their belief that the welfare state is a terrible thing; they resent their money being taken away by governments and given to undeserving people. Why would people with such opposing opinions of the welfare state support a UBI then? The answer is that they don't support the same kind of UBI.

Actually the right-wing UBI case, what I call the regressive UBI, is often less mathematically incoherent than the left-wing one. They believe we should take something like the current welfare budget, divide it up and then allocate an equal portion of it to everybody directly. This would remove all the administration and government necessary for a needs-based welfare system.

It is almost like right-wing libertarians have given up on trying to convince the rest of society that the welfare state is a terrible thing. Their current focus is now on undermining the government and shrinking its size of it to achieve a similar end. The great flaw of government in their eyes is that it responds to democratic demands over corporate needs, something private enterprise rarely does. If a corporation can make a service slightly more profitable, but also worse for its end users, that is what its shareholders should demand it do. If you decide to hang yourself capitalism will gladly sell you the rope. Tobacco, gambling, alcohol, automobiles, junk food; many of the most profitable large industries make their money encouraging people to live unhealthy and unsettled lives. Animal agriculture is a prime example of a business that, by industrialising the lives of animals, has caused an immense amount of suffering for profit. It is the role of governments, by responding to community concerns, to try tolimit the social ramifications of negative industries; this interferes with profits and this is why wealthy people abhor them under the euphemism of "red tape".

Corporations also see governments as competitors. Governments have large responsibilities and budgets, and any service they provide is something private industry sees as a potential source of profit if it could be privatised. Government workers are often a target for corporate enmity as well, given they are often more ideologically motivated, strongly unionised and politically progressive than workers in private industry. As a side note some of the laziest people I worked with in government and education voted conservative, one quote that sticks in my mind, said after I outlined a new project idea was "I didn't come to the City Council to work hard".

To understand the underlying reason that the right-wing is hostile to democratic government we should look at their history. They are the ideological descendants of the nobility and wealthy elites who oversaw tyrannies and resisted popular democracy in the first place. Given this, we need to understand the psychology of elites. Elites saw their position in society as handed to them by God or some other universal law, once Darwinism came along they then merged that into their justifications with phrases like "might makes right" and "survival of the fittest". They wanted to believe it was right for them to have disproportionate resources and advantages; that their power and riches were a reflection of their superiority to other people. We ask for instance how elites could live in absolute luxury while outside their walls people lived in crushing poverty, even to the point of starvation or selling themselves or their children into slavery and prostitution. The answer is in the ability of the human mind to creatively justify almost anything with a simple turn of thought. This particular turn of thought is that the world is a fair meritocracy where people get what they deserve, a world it is difficult to believe in if it is not favouring you. It is motivated reasoning of the most evident kind to believe "I am rich because I am better".

Elitists also often have compatible beliefs about the lower classes, that they are simple, stupid and easily, even wilfully led. For a stereotype of this, we can look to the proles in Orwell's 1984 or Ayn Rand's novels with their division of society into productive and unproductive classes. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, and there was no doubt it was used as such by elites throughout history, merging the violent power of the state with the spiritual meaning within. Such elites will talk about "useless classes" of people, and this talk only becomes more common as technology marches ever forward. They see the lower classes as essentially having nothing to offer other than their labour, and once that is no longer needed, they will be left to consume. Elitists both disrespect and fear the unwashed masses. A UBI would be a way to keep them quiet, to stop political agitation that might upset the established order. We should remember that embedded in the term conservative is not so much nostalgia for the past, as for the maintenance of the structures of power from which they benefit. So, progressives need to look at these fellow UBI supporters and ask themselves some deeper questions. They should question the UBI, if only because it is supported by people so ideologically incompatible with them.

Most sides of politics believe in some sort of equality, they just differ strongly on how they define it. There is the sort of equality we all tend to agree on, the equality of opportunity, sometimes called theoretical equality. This sort of equality says that someone should not have legislative or societal barriers in the way of achieving their potential by anything other than their level of skills and intelligence. Then there is the sort of equality that tends to be of more concern to progressives, equality of outcome. Progressives believe that just legal or administrative equality isn't enough if it leads to an intolerably unequal society, and that indeed the more economically unequal a society is, the more theoretical forms of equality will be undermined, through mechanisms such as money and status altering the scales.

An example of the limits of theoretical equality might be the freed slaves, who might share forms of legal equality with their former masters, but do not have the family wealth, education, social status, connections and other things needed to express something like their innate potential. In most wealthy societies, the USA is a prime example, there is not a lot of movement between classes over generations in a way that talent, IQ, motivation and other variables say there should be. Elite children get elite educations, elite resources and…well it would be hard to list every advantage elite children have even before we get to money and inheritance. For every exceptional person who manages to work their way out of poverty through luck, talent and diligence, there are a hundred unexceptional people who will never know poverty because of the family they were born into.

Their quote about equality embodies the progressive perspective on theoretical equality:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” - Anatole France

Equality is not fairness. The idea of theoretical equality over practical equality is the purpose that a regressive UBI would serve. In this version of the UBI, once you have given the $26000 dollars in our example, the state will be deemed to have fulfilled its obligations to you. It is now completely up to you, or at least your guardians, how to spend the portion of the state's budget allocated to you. If you or your dependents have special needs, or your guardian or partner manages to spend your money on their substance or gambling problem, then that is not the state's responsibility and you must hope for some charity to be willing to help you. Unlike the progressive UBI this version of the UBI would fundamentally replace the welfare, pension and disability support systems, so it would be more likely to be affordable. I could even see people who would be disadvantaged by this style of UBI voting for it, preferring $26000 in the hand over the spending on shadowy government services they never see. A marketing campaign telling less financially literate people you are giving them free money, money they can decide how to spend rather than pointy-headed bureaucrats could be quite popular. If people aren't currently having expensive medical or other problems, or even if they are but don't really comprehend how much the government is spending to help them, they may find it easy to vote for their short over their long-term interests.

A UBI would not be tantamount to instituting communism as some progressives think. It could even strengthen the capitalist system, with all its apathy, destructiveness and competitiveness, while at best altering its balance slightly or temporarily. For many advocates, this reinforcing of personal responsibility and defunding of the state that versions of a UBI would entail is the main part of its attraction. They want to starve the beast; the UBI for them is not about taking care of people, it is about removing our collective social obligations and reducing government power in favour of other forms of power. They also want money being spent on things they can own and invest in, that they can make a profit from. For all the flaws of governments, corporations have just as many, with the primary one being that they often put the pursuit of profit over all other concerns.

AI and UBI

Some people claim that with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)), machines will be doing most human work. This would be a major change to human society, and in the more science fiction versions of AI with very humanoid robots that can replace people in almost any task, would potentially create a class of very wealthy people who own and operate the AI and a vast irrelevant poor who aren't much use for anything. I love science fiction and imaging things too, maybe we'll all live in castles under the sea one day and wouldn't that be great, but expending resources on a problem we don't yet have, which may be decades or centuries away, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense given the urgency of the problems we currently have. AI-driven mass unemployment is something we can worry about when it is a more imminent reality. We aren't currently seeing any major AI-driven shifts in unemployment, and we will have some warning if and when we are on the verge of it happening.

Keynes famously said in the 1930s that people would be working a three-day week by our time due to technological and productivity improvements. Karl Marx believed that a communist utopia would be so productive people would work less and want for nothing. They weren't the only ones that predicted that with increasing productivity a new utopia of human leisure, or a dystopia of greater inequality, would come into being. What they didn't understand is people's desire, manufactured or innate, for ever more. This desire people have to progress isn't wholly negative, even though too much of it is consumerism driven by the desires implanted or exploited within us by marketers who study our psychology intimately, especially our weaknesses, fears and flaws. There are a lot of things in society that have repressed demand that would make us healthier, happier and be good for the planet. I go to see my doctor who he rushes me through in a few minutes, and then onto the next patient. This is good for his bank balance, maybe even society using the resource of a doctor optimally, but it is not optimal for my individual health. Especially as I am getting older and my issues multiply fractally, I'd actually like to spend a lot more time and talk through things with him. Better and more attentive healthcare is something we would all benefit from at various stages in our lives. It doesn't take much imagination to think about other services we would like much more of. The market however doesn't give us what we want, it instead offers us a list of things it is able to provide while making sufficient profit, and we can choose from within that.

One thing people predicting one aspect of the future often understandably miss is that the world is in a state of flux, and many other aspects of the world will change around your prediction. Predictions about the automobile didn't include millions of people spending large portions of their lives in traffic jams, because they weren't able to see all the aspects of how cars would fan out into the world. We can't predict all the new things that don't exist now that people will be doing in the future. We don't know what future jobs might be or entail, but we expect things will change from our experience of a significant portion of the workforce in wealthy countries now employed in jobs that didn't exist 50 years ago. We are limited by a presentism bias in predicting the future, we think of the world now with some changes and simply can't comprehend what radical things people are going to invent, or ideas will take hold, in the world of the future. Maybe robot slaves will allow us more time to exercise, maybe a pill will be invented to replace exercise, maybe the robots will exercise us, maybe we'll have medical advances that reduce the negative ramifications and stigma of obesity, maybe plastic surgery will advance so we can all look and feel like gods, maybe looking like a god will become passe; maybe or probably, something else, who knows?

We should also remember that just because a technology theoretically exists, doesn't mean it is practically implementable or desirable. Look at something like flipping burgers or making coffee that millions and millions of people are employed in around the world. What is so difficult about this that it should have to wait for high-level artificial intelligence to replace the human labour involved? There are probably a few reasons we don't have robot-made fast food. The first is that it's kind of nice to be served by a human being, even if some people exaggerate their own level of misanthropy, it is a small interaction with another soul with a high chance of a successful conclusion. Secondly, technology is complex and unreliable. The Internet memes about the ice cream machines at fast food chains always being broken are evidence that in some ways humans can be more reliable than machines. Humans clean, educate, feed, house, repair and even replicate themselves. Humans are actually kind of like a pretty great robot in many ways, if only we could take away their individual agency, and it will take a pretty amazing robot to generically be able to replace them. Humans also handle a wide range of ambiguity without much trouble, subtly adjusting and working around problems, even improving upon things. Currently to get a robot to do something in the physical world, even what we think of as simple tasks, takes a lot of study and careful implementation by very highly paid people, who will also be needed in the future to maintain it, fix bugs, upgrade it and so on. AI might change this cost and difficulty of implementation, but it's not obvious that is happening soon. Ask yourself why we don't have robots already doing many simple tasks that don't seem to require a cavernous human-level intelligence and you will understand something about the limitations and realities of how AI will be implemented, at least in the near term future. Experts have been telling us human-type robots are just around the corner for many decades, eventually, they will be right, but I won't be jumping to attention every time they repeatedly that prediction until I see some better evidence it is on the horizon.

Anyway, the world is full of urgent problems. Worrying about robots taking all our jobs is not one we should put much mind to until it starts to become a problem. I'm more worried about the military applications of even fairly stupid AI. If you are really worrying about robots taking all the jobs, go to the regular exhibitions where the latest robots are on display, and it will put you at ease. This might help you discern a little better between the science fiction stories people tell and the reality of our current technologies. Certainly, this isn't yet any justification for anything much, including rushing towards a UBI.

Motivation

Some people ridicule anyone who says that if people had enough money to live well without working, this would mean they might contribute to society less. I've had things said to me as if they were self-evident like "Do you really think people would work less?" And actually, yes, yes I do, and I would be surprised if it were otherwise.

Going back a little further in history, this was one of the concerns of the ruling classes who needed their subjects to work so they could fund their military campaigns and luxuries. Modern economies are highly specialised, where people offer a few skills to the market and this means they don't need to know all the other skills necessary for their lifestyles, such as building a house or growing food. For most of human history, the vast majority of people grew or foraged most of their own food, with some sharing or bartering with neighbours if they had a surplus. If people paid taxes it was often a portion of what they grew, rather than some abstract currency. Before modern transport and supply lines, people lived locally and regionally. They had to be largely self-sufficient, so they didn't need to work for most things in their life in the same way most people in modern societies do. If you could motivate these self-sufficient people to work, it might only be temporarily, to get them over a bad harvest or to procure something specific. There might be something like a metal tool that would be useful, but once it was procured they could easily stop working and go back to their self-sufficient lifestyles. Keeping people in work was a problem for the upper classes who needed their labour to enrich themselves further.

Self-sufficiency was a problem confronting many later colonialists, probably more accurately called capitalists. For the colonialists, especially after some countries stopped allowing open slavery, there was a problem in procuring the ongoing supply of cheap labour required for their enterprises. In already fairly densely inhabited islands like those of Fiji, the local people had little interest in swapping their seaside, self-sufficient lifestyles for long hard days cutting sugar cane and other commercial crops. The British turned instead to a system of immigrant indentured servitude, bringing thousands of Indians to Fiji to work in conditions we might call very similar to slavery today. The Indian workers came from a country with higher levels of absolute poverty, land scarcity, hunger and a market culture where poor people were used to selling their labour. The immigration during this period is still causing political and social instability in Fiji to this day. Indentured labour of this style was used in the Fiji Islands, the Caribbean, Mauritius, South Africa, and even internally within India.

There is a stereotypical picture of Europeans oppressing non-Europeans in recent colonialism, but most of the schemes European colonialists implemented abroad were first perfected at home before being exported. The English upper classes had long pursued schemes to extract labour from the lower classes of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Forcing people into the urban workforce was one of the side benefits of what was called "The Enclosing of the Commons". Land has always been one of the foundations of prosperity. Since time immemorial there had been large areas in Britain that communities shared and collectively managed for farming and grazing, often called commons or greens. The British upper classes began a process of privatising these once public shared lands which forced local people to abandon the land and subsistence lifestyles they had maintained for generations. Divorced from the land that they required for self-sufficiency, people were forced to migrate into the cities. In the days before social welfare systems, this resulted in terrible living conditions, with high levels of crime, poverty, prostitution, child mortality and so on. These internally dislocated people became part of the ready, captive workforce for the factories that helped England become the economic powerhouse of the world during the Industrial Revolution. In later political discourse, it is common to pit the interests of people in colonising nations against those in the colonised nations, but it is important to understand the class aspect in who benefitted from these processes. Records in England during the times when colonisation and the Industrial Revolution were at their peak and Britain was emerging as the richest country in the world, there was a reduction in the average height and weight of people being admitted to prison. This is a clear sign that the lower classes weren't those benefiting when Britannia ruled the waves. Colonialism was class-based capitalism, and for all the disrespect the English upper classes had for the native peoples in their colonies, they had little more respect for the lower classes in their homelands.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw a continuation of these processes, though the agitations of working people through social movements from the mid-19th century onwards forced the upper classes to soften the system. People's relationship to work was dramatically changed, so much so that Marx would now talk of a "working class". Where once the majority of people contributed to a small family or community-centred enterprise, something more like cooperatives than modern businesses, by the end of the 20th century in most countries the vast majority of people worked for someone else. After just a few generations of this style of employment, people have become so accustomed to this way of things that they find it difficult to imagine anything else. Given no real alternative but to sell their labour, lacking the ability or land required to sustain themselves, people have now forgotten there was ever another they didn't choose their circumstances voluntarily. They don't even see the nature of the coercive, undemocratic and rigid hierarchical structures in which they spend their working lives, it is just the water in which they swim. They are unable to imagine living a decent self-directed life, pursuing their own ideas and dreams. People are most likely to sell their talent and life energy to the highest bidder when they see or have little viable alternative.

There is of course some choice in our system, we can cycle between employers or even careers, but we must choose from the limited options the market presents us. You can be anything you want to be, so the saying goes, but only if the market agrees. Limiting our choices isn't always a bad thing; some things are more important than others to be done in a well-functioning society. The capitalist system of supply and demand may work much better in the imagination of economists than in the real world, but it at least ensures that what we wish to supply to the world has some value to others, that it is fulfilling some desire or need beyond ourselves. For all the ills of capitalism, it powerfully motivates people by loosely tying the material quality of their lives to what service they can provide that others value.

One of the naive things progressives believe is that all work is of roughly equal value. We see this in the bartering schemes repeatedly set up in communities around the world trying to create alternatives to capitalism (and avoid tax) where they often use an hour of work as a basis of exchange. No lesser person than the father of modern economics Adam Smith would approve, as he wrote of the labour theory of value. There is something to this, however, valuing each person's hour of labour equally doesn't always deliver a balanced system. Exchanges that use an hour of time as the base unit of value usually end up with a surfeit of people offering massages, art classes and dog walking, and a deficit of people offering plumbing, surgery and engineering. It takes years of study or experience to be competent at some things, and some jobs are both harder and less enjoyable than others. If we decided to pay everyone an equal wage, what motivation would there be to pursue less pleasant or more difficult industries? This is where capitalism works best, in that it provides different levels of remuneration according to the competence and availability of people wanting to do a task. This is not to say capitalism doesn't also do toxic things like reward tobacco executives better than childcare workers, or hand some people riches for doing very little, but it does generally utilise people's self-interest to create productivity.

Motivation is one of the underlying currencies of our lives that many people don't think much about. The material quality of our collective lives is governed in large part by how many productive and useful things people are motivated to do. Look around you, at all the things other people made that are part of your world. In providing us with the material goods we require or desire, the main creative force is human endeavour.

Personally, I advocate degrowth and minimalism, but even in my imagined environmentally friendly utopia we will still need a lot of work to be done and material things to be made. In order to have these things, we will often need to motivate people to do things they wouldn't naturally want to do. Here we get into collective action problems, and capitalism is the most reliable way we have figured out so far to resolve this, or more accurately the least worst system. You may not want to clean sewers, but how about we gave you a reliable income so you could have a decent house and lifestyle for yourself and your family, while at the same time providing a valuable, honourable service to your community? I once saw an interview with a man who cleaned sewers for a living, he said he used to work in a high-powered corporate office, but he was much happier doing his new work because as he said "I got tired of dealing with other people's shit". People talk a lot about the improvements to our health and lifestyles of the last couple of centuries, and sewerage is one of the primary reasons behind what has been called "the modern miracle". Few children say they want to be a sanitation worker when they grow up, but they are some of the most important and essential workers in our society.

Motivation is an incredibly complicated question, but it is fundamental to the material basis of our lifestyles. We want to motivate people to do the things which provide the most benefit to society. Many believe that the reason communism failed in many places is because communism didn't provide the same motivation as capitalism. As I heard a Chinese man say "No matter how hard we work, we get the same, so why should we work hard?". If we are discussing giving everybody a living wage with no obligations, making assumptions about people's motivation levels in such a system could be disastrous.

In discussing motivation I should start with a confession. I am one of those people who, if a full UBI that provided a minimal dignified standard of living was available with no stigma, probably would have happily sat on it for most or all of my life. I'm just not someone who has been bitten by the consumerist bug. I was raised in a working-class environment and never spent much time around wealthy people, so accumulating wealth was never something I put much mind to. I remember hearing that someone was mortified that their father drove them to school in an inexpensive car. I don't actually remember ever being driven to school, but if I had been, the idea that people would judge the car I was in never occurred to me. I remember a kid who got kicked out of a nearby private school and enrolled at our public high school. He hung out with our friend group and I noticed he used the word "povo" when he was talking about other people. It was a term that I hadn't heard before so I asked him what it meant and he told me it was short for "poverty"; he used it to insult someone by saying they were poor. Even then I still didn't really understand it; why was saying someone was poor an insult, especially a young person who had no control over their circumstances? Many of the people I knew were fairly poor, certainly, none were opulently rich, and money was not a way I felt I could tell anything about other people that was particularly important.

When I finally got into the workforce, the modest income I earned wasn't revolutionary to me. Indeed given the unhealthy lifestyle I led when I was a young man it might have been good that my income was limited and put a brake on my excesses. I spent two relatively long periods on unemployment benefits, and I enjoyed the freedom of my lifestyle much more than the additional income I got when I was working. When I was working I would often think to myself "I'd rather not be here". A lot of my friends were unemployed too, so there was little stigma and I didn't feel left out of anything by having little money; we pooled our resources, lent each other small sums to get by till "dole day" came around and made do.

When I did work it was more about feeling I should be contributing to society than the pursuit of material concerns. Also when I finally decided to enrol in university, the change was motivated not by earning money but rather by having a stable career that wasn't as dangerous as the sawmill work I had a short stint doing. I was also tired of looking through the job ads for statements like "no experience necessary", and how terrible or difficult those jobs often were, like door-to-door or telephone sales, labouring etc. When I got some experience in IT, somewhat to my own astonishment, my income more than doubled quite suddenly. The first thing I did to celebrate was sign up to be a monthly donor to Greenpeace. Little else about my lifestyle changed other than using the greater income to buy a modest home so I could choose where to live, save money rather than give it to someone else and not fear being evicted at someone else's whims.

I see high levels of luxury material possessions, fancy cars, watches, designer clothes, multiple houses and so on, as garish attention-seeking. It seems less reliably a display of success, such things are often bought with debt or money other people in their family have earned, as it is of a shallow and self-absorbed character. In my career, I worked with a number of people who earned good incomes, but because they had been sucked into consumerism, lived pay-cheque to pay-cheque and had high levels of personal debt. They lived in rented houses, drove cars bought with loans and wore clothes bought on credit. They were trying to impress other people, maybe even themselves, by displaying a level of affluence that was mostly fake. I have worked with people who told me shopping was their hobby, and after an instinctive shiver of disgust, this always made me think of Aldous Huxley's quote that the ultimate system of slavery is one where the slaves love their slavery. The work-consume cycle seems like a system of bondage. Let's say three imaginary people get a significant bonus at work, the first uses it to pay down their home loan, the second saves half and makes a donation to charity with the rest, and a third uses it on some display of conspicuous materialism, only the third one will probably be obvious or noticeable to other people. They will be the person you can point to and say they are wealthy, and thus many people have a strange idea of wealth. Conspicuous consumption is usually more about attention seeking to make up for what people lack, than what they have.

Usually, the most sensible and ethical uses of money are to provide freedom, financial security and to do more good in the world. If financial security and freedom were guaranteed regardless of what I did, I don't think I would have spent years earning an IT degree and contributing to projects useful to many other people. I might have done what self-sufficient people used to do, done periodic work in order to buy some specific things, but I wouldn't have worked as much as I have. The idea that I would spend so much of my life working because I didn't have anything better to do or because I wanted "To buy things I don't need to impress people I don't like", as the quip goes, makes no sense to me at all. Time, beauty, health, freedom, creativity, love, intimacy, pleasure, depth of thought, compassion, and connection; the deep things in life money can't guarantee, indeed a materialist mindset often gets in the way of us experiencing the more worthwhile things in life.

I once had someone tell me they had slept with thirty prostitutes as if they thought I would be impressed. Sex workers play a valuable role in society, but being paraded almost as luxury goods, to be depersonalised by being referred to only as part of a number, is not part of that. I'm not sure what percentage of people would be impressed by how many people someone had paid to have sex with them, I'm imagining low single digits if any, but the person saying this to me had somehow convinced themself it was some sort of enviable achievement to be bragged about. I think a lot of those who flaunt their wealth live in this kind of delusional world, thinking all other people envy their gluttony when it is only a sliver of society. When I think of the garish wealthy, I always think of the pigeons surrounding some dead thing on the ground, who will fly away if I walk nearby, perhaps thinking they are in danger from this big creature who is coming to steal away their prize. The wealthy need to think everyone else covets what they have, and while many lesser souls may envy them, many others look upon opulent selfishness with an instinctive disgust.

Many people need to think everyone else thinks the same way they do, to support their fantasies of having status. A couple of times I have met people who had some measure of fame in some small part of the world, but I had no idea who they were and they seemed to resent me a little for it. A good life to most people is not about engaging in some endless game of material one-upmanship where everyone is judging everyone else. A good life is about spending quality time with people who like you, sharing experiences, enjoying nature, pursuing creative hobbies, practising compassion and contributing to the world. People who think status comes from job titles, perfect houses, bragging about your children and what lavish things you do with your free time may not understand this. Most sensible people, having once attained a sustainable level of material comfort, will not keep hoarding ever more but will instead look to other things in life.

Judging how generous welfare benefits should be in order to balance motivation with dignity is not simple. The way current welfare societies work is by trying to balance the carrot and stick of human motivation. For most of human history before the welfare state, the stick was often hunger and destitution. It would be nice if people only needed positive motivations, but we have to ask how realistic this is. Like current levels of welfare, a UBI might need to be judged at a sufficient level to allow people basic dignity, but not so high that it reduces their motivation to contribute to society via work. Even if it were affordable or sensible, visions of a UBI where everyone is suddenly middle class, are probably not desirable.

Earthlings

Cosmopolitan is a word that has fallen out of general usage but refers to someone who considers themselves not someone tied to any specific nation but rather a member of humanity, a citizen of the earth, an earthling. When advocates speak for the UBI, what is often unspoken is that they are talking within a purely nationalistic framing. This makes intuitive sense given our state and country-based systems of taxation and administration; whether it makes sense from the perspective of justice, what we might call the point of view of the universe, is another matter. Maybe we have to take the Universal part of the UBI seriously.

In some developed countries the common refrain when people talk about sending charity overseas is "We have our own problems here". This sentiment has always been stronger on the conservative side of politics, and one of the first things particularly egregious conservative governments will do to save money is cut foreign aid, improving the budgets of wealthy nations at the expense of some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people on earth. It is generally true enough that all countries have problems: we haven't yet achieved a modern equitable society anywhere, indeed the word utopia aptly means "no place". Australia has high average standards of living and social welfare, but we also have homelessness and disadvantage in many places. The worst of this has causes much deeper though than a lack of financial resources.

The main causes of homelessness and severe disadvantage in Australia are mental health issues, deeply entwined with disability, violence, abuse and drug and alcohol dependency. The disadvantaged do disproportionately come from the lower rungs of the financial classes, but some additional combination of disadvantage, bad luck or poor choices is often necessary for them to fall through the cracks. These aren't easy issues to solve; certainly, if it was as simple as temporarily providing cash or a bed and food to get over hard times the problem would have been solved by our social welfare state and charities long ago. There might be a percentage of homeless people whom relatively small interventions would help return to wider society, who have been thrown into a bad situation such as homelessness by some singular unfortunate circumstance, but for the most disadvantaged it requires a more holistic, long-term and managed solution.

If we look at disadvantage in different regions it often wears a very different face. In the vast slums of the world live many who are unlikely to transcend their circumstances no matter how hard they work. Children in these places will fail to get a good education not because they have parental, behavioural or learning difficulties, but because they don't have access to a classroom, teachers and learning materials, or the child's work is needed to help provide sustenance for their family. In developed nations it is different, a child not attending school is usually the result of multi-generational dysfunction, not a lack of finances. In places where the barriers to attending school are predominantly financial, we would expect cash interventions to have an immediate positive impact. Helping a child who wants to learn to do so is relatively inexpensive. Studies of one-off or short-term direct cash giving in poor regions have shown very positive results, with most recipients using it to make long-term improvements to their and their children's lives. How much we can extrapolate from these studies should be clear though from the level of disparity, the average annual income in Burundi is less than the weekly disability pension in Australia. It is possible that direct cash giving in disadvantaged Australian communities would increase school attendance, but it is likely it would only have a minor, if any, effect. Certainly, it would probably pale in comparison with that same amount of money given in a poorer country.

We need to be clear-eyed about the economic context of charitable giving. We would only expect direct cash giving to change the lives of people roughly in proportion to the percentage of their income they receive. If we can double someone's income we might expect dramatic changes in behaviour, whereas if we increase their income in the area of 5-10% we would only expect minor changes. A recent UBI study funded by Sam Altman from OpenAI was quite illustrative. The amount they were given was perhaps an extra week's income each month, and of course, most people on a limited wage were happy to receive it. In the first year of the study, there was a marked improvement in people's mental health outlook, but it faded away in the second and third years. Being given additional cash might lead to initial feelings of positivity and hope, but in time it is likely to be dashed by the realisation that it often takes a more significant amount to really change someone's circumstances. A percentage of people might leverage small improvements in their finances to make long-term improvements in their position, such as investing in education, but people who don't aren't like to see a radical difference in their lives from relatively modest amounts. Financial problems in social welfare states are almost as often a reflection of something rather than a cause of it. Do people lack education because they are poor, or are they poor because they lack education? In a developing society, it is usually the former, but in a developed society it is often more complex. The same amount of money that in a poorer nation would lift someone out of absolute poverty, in a wealthy nation would obviously be welcome but can't alter someone's class.

When we think about many things, including helping people, we can fall into what is called an "availability bias". This is our tendency for the things that come to mind being the things we most often experience. When we think about disadvantaged people for instance, those that would come to mind are those we see in our daily lives. This instinctive empathy is to be encouraged as it is one of the better parts of our nature, and we often understand more about local situations and therefore can help in a more intelligent way. To help the most people most effectively, however, wherever in the world it is most needed, we also need to temper our empathy with rationality. If we treat our moral duties as extending no further than individuals we encounter in some way and therefore can feel direct empathy for, we leave aside the much larger and more consequential moral landscape of the world. We see echoes of this in animal welfare, where people donate much more money to help the animals that they experience as pets, such as dogs and cats, than to help the far more numerous and cruelly treated animals out of sight and mind in our farming systems. Such giving can be beguiling because we still get all the benefits of feeling good about ourselves as a caring or generous person, we are often still giving the same amount of money or time away to help what is actually a good cause, but unless we put some thought to how we can donate our money or time most effectively, it is likely we aren't doing anywhere near the amount of good we should be doing.

Taking a wider perspective on compassion, including a less localised or nationalistic one, can allow us to help those who most need it. It can help us maximise the good we do with whatever we donate. While it can almost feel callous to bring compassion down to monetary calculations, while there are so many problems in the world that need attention, it seems necessary and somewhat unavoidable.

Providing food, education or housing in a poor country can be done at a fraction of the cost of doing so in a rich country. The Fred Hollows Foundation which works on eye health in the developing world estimates they can perform a surgery to save an individual's eyesight for 25 AUD whereas in Australia this might not be enough to sterilise the required tools. If we can save the eyesight of 2, 10 or 100 people with the same resources, then it's hard to make a case against doing so. If we value human life equally we should help the most people. It gets philosophically complex here, we are allowing the differential economic values of capitalism to decide who gets helped. It would almost never make sense to do anything good in a developed country, because the same thing would always be cheaper in a developing country, or any country where wages were lower. I haven't really come up with a way to resolve this difficulty, for myself I try to weight my donations using cost-effectiveness, without having it completely rule my giving, though I suspect this might be wrong.

So although I have framed this in the sense of private giving, I don't believe this should be the predominant way that the disadvantaged are helped. Ensuring poor people can live dignified lives shouldn't be up to the vagaries of private donations or wealthy philanthropy. This is a role for the long-term, sustained visions of governments and intergovernmental organisations. The global priorities of our governance and economic systems should be to provide a dignified lifestyle to all citizens of the world within planetary ecological boundaries. This would mean that the first priority of the international economic system should be a basic level of housing, nutrition, healthcare and political freedom for all people while reducing our collective environmental impact.

Many people might agree with such sentiments, without wanting to give up anything significant to make it happen. Whether we are talking about global, national or regional systems to eliminate poverty, however, high sounding statements are only useful if there is something behind them. Many fine speeches have been given at meetings, forums and conferences without being backed by any reasonable means to implement their pronouncements. Telling the population of most countries that, in order to have a sustainable and equitable world, they will have to make do with less is not something any popularity-aware politician in a democratic country will want to say. We need significant resources dedicated to both stabilising our environment and lift the remaining sections of people out of poverty, and pretending this can be done while the wealthy wallow ever deeper into profligate consumerism is simply a fairy tale. Having vague wishes of well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, or the environment may make you feel like a good and kind person but is not enough, we need people to be a bit more hard-headed, to be knowledgeable and opinionated about how we get to a just sustainable global system. We need people to be living in ways that contribute to the world we want, to have them advocating for specific things from their politicians, well-thought-through things that are part of a sensible global plan. The school of thought that has done the best work to integrate global equality, human flourishing and environmental sustainability within a sensible economic framework is the Degrowth movement.

Degrowth

The UBI tries to provide an answer to the question of how we can have greater equality and flourishing among human beings. This framing makes an oversight typical to many economic theories of ignoring wider context, especially the evolutionary system. What are the consequences of the economic growth a UBI will entail on the environment, on other animals and so on?

The Degrowth movement is concerned with the same human inequality questions that the UBI is, while recognizing that the human economic system does not operate within a vacuum. We are in the middle of a planetary crisis that disproportionately affects the poor and marginalised, so how we redress poverty must also include healing and maintaining our environment. Morally, we should also recognise that the earth is a shared space in which all co-inhabitants deserve consideration; this is their rightful home as much as it is ours.

Economic redistribution towards greater equality is essential, but to make such a far-reaching and consequential change to our economies that might worsen other aspects of our global predicament would be short-sighted and counter-productive. Much of the damage humanity has done to our environment, other animals and even each other stems from this sort of disconnected thinking. We must stop asking limited questions, because we are likely to get limited answers from them, that cause or double down on problems elsewhere. To try to state our global predicament that faces humanity in this moment as succinctly as possible is important. Here is an attempt to state it as plainly as possible:

Our unique earth is shared by many species who have an equal claim to call it home. The destruction of shared ecosystems by humanity through a combination of population and affluence is not only diminishing and imperilling for ourselves but for all life. Most humans who are able to do so consume in a way that contributes to this destruction, even as this consumption does not make them happy. Many humans live in absolute poverty and this is morally unconscionable. Were the global poor to adopt polluting and resource-intensive consumerist lifestyles it would exacerbate our already devastating environmental crises; while this would increase justice and make some improvement to levels of well-being, the evidence from already developed countries tells us the gains in well-being will not be as large as we might expect. We must find an equitable way to more reliably increase well-being and live beautiful lives within the environmental capacity of the earth. This task falls on all people but the moral obligation to lead the way lies most heavily on the affluent. Our challenge is to find ways of living that reduce our consumption to a level consistent with the flourishing of life on earth while maintaining or improving our intellectual and emotional experience of existence. Technology and innovation has the ability to assist in this task, but it is uncertain and its record mixed, so we cannot rely on it as our main strategy. Our main strategy must be to live, encourage, coordinate and celebrate ethical communal essentialist lives. We must intellectually inhabit a larger world, increasing our circles of compassion and concern. To live ethically requires committing a significant portion of our personal resources to the tasks of global equity, justice, compassion and environmental sustainability; we must also be productive parts of movements dedicated to the furtherance of these goals.

The words economics and ecology are etymologically similar because they share the root word home. This similarity is emblematic that the time when anyone invested in one of these disciplines could ignore the other has long passed. Figuring out how to maintain a system that provides the material things that substantially improve our lives, while treading lightly on the earth, will take all of our intelligence, subtlety and ingenuity. Various degrowth and environmentally minded thinkers and economists have laid the groundwork for a path forward that we need as many people as possible to engage with. It is not in the interests of our consumerism-funded media, corporations or governments to educate us about such things, so we have to take on the task ourselves. An excellent place to ground our understanding would be in works like the Planetary Boundaries Framework by the Stockholm Institute, Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, and the various Degrowth scholars. If you don't know words like meta-crisis and poly-crisis, you also need to invest some time into learning about them. You need to join yourself somewhere to this movement, or find another you think achieves the same goals in a more sensible way, but we need to pool our voices and resources. Isolated atoms of consumption are excellent citizens of a plutocracy, but not of a democracy.

Returning to the maths of a full UBI, remember we are talking about figures as high as 40% of our existing national budgets, every year now and into the future. Degrowth is unlikely to be achieved by handing that sort of money to the population, indeed even if it would improve justice it would also increase consumerism. We should instead invest these sums in clean energy, better housing, public transport, education, mental and physical healthcare, environmental improvements and the other shared projects and infrastructure needed to improve our collective existence while at the same time improving our environmental footprint.

Conclusion

We are in the midst of a planetary emergency created by our intelligence, by our successful technological adaptation and innovation. This emergency makes many of our old ways of thinking and living obsolete, but once understood it also makes our path forward reasonably clear. If it was ever possible to live an ethical life while only focusing on our small worlds such as our internal life, personality, family and friends, work, hobbies, self-expression and so on, it no longer is. We must think more deeply and more expansively, be more deep and expansive. We must learn; we must understand our planet, history, psychology, evolution and ecosystems enough that we can be a productive intellectual citizen and participant amid the global issues of our time. We must embrace the fact that each of us are important, each of us matters.

It is not enough to like the sound of a UBI, we need people to be deeper and more thought through than that, these issues are too important to be flippant about. Our ideas must be practical, achievable,and flexible and we should be confident that they will not make any of our planetary problems worse. If we don't have any idea about these concerns, then we have work to do on our wider intellectual framework. It is no crime not to know this already, each of us is born in some ways as a blank slate, and we must learn anew all of human history and thought, or at least the important parts; a highly specialised economy doesn't need this from us, it just needs us to be a cog, but to be a participatory citizen of a democracy, we have to build a working understanding of the whole machine. We must hold the ideas we champion to a higher standard because whether it seems so or not, each of us are vitally important. We vote, we influence others, we spend money, we pay attention to things, and we give status to people, in all these ways and many others, we are making and affecting the world. It really matters what we think, that we have fully thought our ideas through, and know what versions of ideas we support and what we don't.

Whether you are an economic libertarian who abhors the social welfare state, or you are a socialist who thinks that collective action is the only way towards a civilised society, then you should be very nervous that you both agree that a UBI is the best way forward. Personally I do not see indiscriminately handing out more money as the way forward on the many issues facing our society. I am not even sure it would do much for poverty if it was universalised; money after all is just an abstraction and increasing the amount of it doesn't physically change that world. If we suddenly went from there being a quadrillion to a sextillion dollars in the world, if there were no more material goods, the main thing that would change would be prices. As the Native American saying goes, "When the last river has been poisoned, the last fish caught, and the last tree has been cut down, only then will we realise that we cannot eat money". The consumerist and competitive economic system we have desperately needs to change, and I don't see how a UBI alters this. Perhaps I do not have an expansive enough understanding of a UBI, perhaps it would somehow fix the equity and environmental challenges facing our society. People have talked about funding a UBI through environmentally focused taxes, but that seems like something we should do anyway, I don't see why it is directly related to a UBI or should only happen if we go down that path. Whatever path we take we need billions more dollars in taxation, so we must first ensure those taxes are effective before we implement a UBI. Indeed tax reform seems like the deeply unsexy step forward we must take regardless of what our plan is for a more just and sustainable world. It makes little sense to spend money until you understand how you will get it. Once a UBI is in place and people are reliant on it, it might be difficult for a democracy to reverse course with it, so the basis for funding it must be sensible, secure and ongoing. It should be noted here that some of the municipalities that have trialled extensive UBIs have faced economic problems because their plans were not properly funded, this is no way forward for countries or indeed our world.

Ultimately a UBI seems profoundly capitalistic, no doubt why it is approved of by so many obscenely wealthy capitalists. They essentially wish to buy off the poor, or at least the poor in their countries, for their consent to the capitalist system. They want to continue having an incredibly unequal and unsustainable society where they do as they will and buy off democratic passivity. I reject this, and want to see a different conception of human happiness; one no longer based on materialism and competition, but one more based on community, self-expression, human flourishing, equality, compassion and a celebration and respect for the systems of life which we and other beings share.

I would finish with one of my favourite quotes from Martin Luther King Jnr

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring"