Loading summary
Transcript97 lines
- [00:04]
A
No migrants more in no Europe without Christianity.
- [00:09]
B
An alliance also with Russia.
- [00:14]
C
Welcome to EU Scream, the podcast that guides you through stories coming from the eu. We talk about the news a bit differently and with people who really know what they're talking about. This is episode 126, Freedom in the Age of the Algorithm with philosopher Philippe van Paris. We recorded this one live at the Flaget Theater in Brussels. Hello everyone. So big warm welcome to this event with the Brussels Times and Flager. It is our debut EU Scream live show. I'm James Kanter, I'm the host of EU Scream and we are recording this evening and we're going to want your questions and insights. And that'll come a bit later on. And once we're done, please do stick around. Be at the bar. We can carry on the conversation now for tonight, some long arc thinking. We'll be talking about universal basic income UBI what it actually refers to. We'll speed through some history, through 16th century Flanders, and then we'll take a detour through 1930s America. We'll ask why a universal basic income matters so much to the Tech Bros in this new age of the algorithm and artificial labor. And most importantly, we'll do all of that with the world's most influential advocate for universal basic income. He's a philosopher, he's a brucelleur, he teaches at the universities of Louvain and Leuven, he's taught at Harvard and Oxford, and he's the author of a landmark book on basic income, a Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Please give a big round of applause for Philippe van Paris.
- [02:27]
B
Philippe.
- [02:29]
C
So Philippe, welcome. So nice to have you here. Now we want to start with why a universal basic income inspires and even thrills so many people. Why does this idea generate so much enthusiasm? I think you'd say it's about freedom,
- [02:50]
B
yes, but also about equality. So one of the reasons why it became so popular is that it's so simple and at the same time so radical. You give an income to every single member of a particular society. And that seemed attractive, at least to some people on the left. On the left. What defines left? Equality. But equality of what? Not not only equality of income, of purchasing power, but also of bargaining power. And if you give an income unconditionally, that's what empowers people. And people on the right, meaning the pro market right. They say we are in favor of freedom, but what freedom? Not just the sheer right to do things. You also need the resources to exercise your rights. That's real freedom. And if you are in favor of real freedom, then the idea of basic income is attractive. So both from the left and from the right, people should be attracted to the idea. But then I thought, oh my God, giving an income to everyone, isn't that too much?
- [03:51]
C
And we'll definitely get to that. So let's do your formal definition for a universal basic income. Can you briefly lay out the components?
- [04:01]
B
Yes. So I think the most useful way of presenting it is by indicating how it differs from what we know, namely the guaranteed income systems that we know in what in Belgium is called the Revenue d' Anne des Grations or the Leif Loan. A universal basic income or sometimes unconditional basic income. First, it's strictly individual. Whether you get it, how much you get it is independent of your household situation. Secondly, it's universal in the sense of not being means tested. Whether you are rich or poor doesn't matter, you get the same amount. And thirdly, it's also obligation free in the sense that it's not work related. You get it if you work, but you get it also if you are unwilling to work. So no obligation is linked to it.
- [04:54]
C
Fantastic. And let's. Philippe, take that quick spin through history and I first want to place our conversation in Flanders, 16th century Florida. Flanders. On screen we have images of Juan Luis Vives. He's a Spanish scholar and humanist who spent much of his adult life around Bruges. He was the author of a treatise called On Assistance to the Poor, which he prepared for the city of Bruges and published in 1526. Why is Vives important in the evolution of ideas around ubi?
- [05:28]
B
Vives was a friend of Thomas More and of Erasmus. He was one of the first people, or the very first person that Erasmus hired at the University of Louvain when he created his College of Three Languages, as it was called. And Vives wrote this little book, which was regarded as very sort of provocative at the time, which advocated for the first time a minimum income that was not unconditional. But what was new is that he said that poverty needed to be addressed not by private charity, not by Christian institutions, but by municipalities. And he said in his little treatise of 1526, he explained first why it was justified on theological grounds as sort of public charity. But also he went into the details and explained why it was better for the municipalities to organize it so as to reach all the poor and only the poor, not the people who fake to be poor in order to receive almond.
- [06:39]
C
And if we fast forward to the 19th century still in Belgium, in Brussels in fact. This time. Let's talk for a moment about Joseph Charlier. Charlier was, by your own description, an enigmatic intellectual. And at some point he lived next to the Place des Libertes, so just a few hundred meters from where Karl Marx was living when he first came to Brussels in 1845. Recalling here that Marx eventually writes the Communist Manifesto in Brussels in 1848, and that same year, 1848, is when Charlier publishes his Solution du problem Sociale. Now, this treatise marks another first in the evolution of ideas around.
- [07:21]
B
Yes, because there, for the first time, we have a real proposal of an unconditional basic income, at least at the level of a country. There had been at the very end of the 18th century, there was an English teacher called Thomas Spence, not to be confused with Thomas Paine, who advocated a basic income at the level of each parish. But the first one to propose it at the level of a country, namely Belgium, was this Joseph Charlie. Completely forgotten. It's only many years after had been talking about universal basic income, that thanks to a British scholar who discovered that book in Amsterdam, that I realized that the first person, the real forerunner, but completely forgotten, was this Joseph Charlier.
- [08:09]
C
And so we have this remarkable link between 16th century Flanders and 19th century Brussels. And we'll come back to Belgium as well. But if we move into the 20th century, we can move the UBI discussion to the US and one key figure here is Huey Long. Now, Long was governor of Louisiana in the 1920s. He was a leftist populist. He was highly controversial, accused of corruption and demagoguery. And by the early 1930s, in the great Depression, he's famous nationwide. This is the age of radio and he's got millions of listeners. Huey Long's catchphrase is every man a king. And he turns this into a song against poverty and inequality and in favor of wealth redistribution. And it becomes something of a Depression era anthem. And now, with your permission, Philippe, we'd like to perform that song. And here I want to bring up Mr. Howell Jones. And how we're going to perform this, I dare say, proto UBI anthem from the 1930s. And it goes something like this. Why we both slumber America land of brave and true there's castles and clothing and food for all all belongs to you Every man a king Every man a king for you can be a millionaire if there's something belonging to others there's enough for all people to share when it's sunny June and December too or in the wintertime or spring there'll be peace without end Every neighbor a friend and every man a king.
- [10:55]
A
James, I couldn't help but notice that there's a lot of talk about men
- [10:58]
C
in that song, but there's no mention of women. Yeah, I think this may come up in the Q and A, I hope. But Huey Long clearly struggled with the feminist and gender issues of the day. And to that point, here we see Huey Long speaking with Ina Ray Hutton, the conductor of an all women's orchestra. It's probably 1934 and I'm going to play this movie. But the only thing here you have every man a king. And you repeat, every man a king. Where did the girls come in?
- [11:36]
D
Well, never mind. A king.
- [11:38]
B
Everman.
- [11:38]
C
A king.
- [11:38]
D
What's your complaint?
- [11:40]
C
Well, my officer is composed of 18 girls and there's 62 million more women in the United States.
- [11:46]
D
My mistake, my mistake. Little lady, let me make the correction for you. Well, now, that ought to suit you.
- [11:55]
C
Oh, that's great. Every man a king Every girl a queen that's fine.
- [12:02]
B
Every man a king Every girl a queen or you can be a millionaire but there's something belonging to others there's
- [12:13]
C
enough for all people to share. We'll see Howell again, so he'll get another round of applause, too. Now, let me just say this. Huey Long was expected to challenge FDR Franklin Roosevelt for the 1936 US presidential election. But Long was assassinated at age 42 in 1935. It seems the assassin acted because his father in law, who was a judge, was being pushed out of his job by Huey Long. As I said, it was a fairly corrupt situation down in Louisiana at the time. And inevitably, perhaps there are all kinds of alternative theories about the assassination. But what I want to zoom in on is the following. That Huey Long, before his assassination, while he was in the US Senate, defined a version of what a basic income might be. And here he is in December 1934 talking about just that.
- [13:20]
D
I propose a limitation on the size of port both ways. I propose a limitation on how big a fortune can get and a limitation on how little a fortune can get. I propose that a third of the average is the smallest. One third the average is the smallest. We start from the bottom. Not every citizen in the United States shall have a homestead up to $5,000. One third the average wealth per family.
- [13:57]
C
Okay, so, Philippe, thank you for being patient with our musical interlude. Is Huey Long going in the right direction for how a universal basic income might be calculated size wise? He's talking about a third of the Average? No.
- [14:19]
B
So first of all, what he's talking about here is about wealth. So homestead a fortune. And he wants to have a maximum wealth, a minimum wealth. Okay, he may want to have that, but it's quite different from basic income. Basic income is something that's given on a regular basis in terms of what size should it be. So in my philosophical book under the title Real Freedom for All, I advocate or I say that what follows from my conception of justice is the highest sustainable unconditional basic income, part of which could be given in kind rather than in cash. In our book 10 years ago, so the book you showed on the slide, we say, well, in order to have an idea of what it might look like once it's implemented and scaled up, think about 1/4, 25% of GDP per capita as a strictly individual unconditional basic income. But that's of course not something for immediate implementation because to get there you'll need to go step by step. So it's quite far away from long proposals, which, I mean, he was a sort of left wing populist without, like Major Douglas at about the same time in England. And he didn't work out in detail how all this would be realized.
- [15:52]
C
It is striking though that he is already trying to define something that would be a floor for people.
- [15:59]
B
Yes, but floor of wealth is harder to maintain than a floor of income because it constantly fluctuates depending on how much people consume, how much they save, how well they invest, etc.
- [16:14]
C
Now getting a little bit closer to the present era and back to Belgium, showing again how Belgium really is an important center of gravity for universal basic income. Enter the university town of Louvain LA NEUVE. It's September 1986. And Philippe, you convene what is the first international conference on basic income. That's you in the striped shirt.
- [16:44]
B
Yes.
- [16:45]
C
And now 1986 is bang in the middle of the era of privatization, deregulation, the chipping away at social welfare. It's the era epitomized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Why this conference then? Any connection?
- [17:03]
B
Well, what I did at the time is that I spotted step by step. This was before the Internet. It wasn't easy. A number of people in Europe who defended something like what is now called a basic income, but I defended it under different names and that didn't know each other, that didn't know what happened in other countries. So I proposed to call basic income what at the time in the UK was radical social dividend. In America it was called democrat mostly. And we founded then a network which was beyond the Basic income European network, which later became the Basic Income Earth Network. It's now a worldwide network. The next congress was supposed to happen in Philadelphia, but because of a number of things that happened in the United States, instead it's going to happen in Toronto. But it's really a worldwide network now. Why at the time it was indeed the beginning of the so called neoliberal era. And the way I saw it, and the way of a number of other participants saw it, is that we needed to provide something that was an alternative to the neoliberal utopia, but also something quite different from the old socialist utopia, which at the time, it was three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, was already discredited. But we felt we had to do it in a way that challenged the neoliberal utopia on its own foundation by saying, yes, we are in favor of freedom. So Friedman's book was called Capitalism and Freedom. MILTON Friedman the Constitution of Liberty we say, okay, let's take freedom seriously, but real freedom and real freedom for all. And if you take that ideal seriously, what you need is something like a universal basic income.
- [18:58]
C
Philippe, now let's come to the present day. There are tectonic changes underway in our economy. And this, Philippe, is a chart that you shared with me. It shows the world's largest companies by market value. The colors represent different sectors. The chart compares 1997 with 2025. And there is an astounding shift in 97. Two tech companies, Microsoft and Intel are in the top 10. Last year, eight companies out of 10 are tech companies, with Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta taking the top six spots. Why does this matter for UBI discussions that all of this money is in tech?
- [19:46]
B
Yeah. One of the striking things about this chart is that on the right hand side you no longer have any European company, which is of some importance for discussion. But the fact that technology companies are so important is relevant to our discussion for two reasons. One is that probably all of these technology business represent a very large value production and very large wealth, but with very few employees. If you compare that to what were the top companies quite a long time ago, like General Motors or Ford or in this country, Coquerel sombre, which had 100,000 employees. But compared to that, these companies have far less employees compared to the value of their assets, what they represent in terms of wealth, that's one. And many of these companies are also involved in a business that will tend to replace human beings by tools, so by software, by algorithms, et Cetera. So for these two reasons, it's relevant to discussion of basic income. But and that for me is very important. A universal basic income must not be seen as it's sometimes presented by Elon Musk as a way of enabling all the people who will never get a job, enabling them to survive, and perhaps convincing them that they shouldn't revolt against the system.
- [21:19]
C
The inequality that is being created in is vast.
- [21:22]
B
Yes. So what I do think answered, I think robotization, all the rest is not leading to a society in which many people will be forever out of work, but it leads to a society where the polarization is far higher because it's not only the people who own these companies that become very rich, but also a number of highly skilled employees who then can share in the rents that are associated with the place of these companies in the market. So it leads to polarization on the one hand, and it leads to a lot of insecurity because it leads to turmoil in the labor market. The number of jobs will no longer exist. Even if those people can find another job, there will be a lot of insecurity. And so in this context, a basic income is crucial for two reasons. One is that it provides some basic economic security. You are no longer dependent in order to get that income on whether you satisfy conditions in terms of meansness, willingness to work, et cetera, et cetera. So it's absolute security, very important, not only for the people who are unemployed, but also for the people who are in fragile situation one. And secondly for me, even more important is that a basic income is something that is a natural complement to lifelong learning, the way forward for our societies consistent in having this easy back and forth between employment, education and unpaid activities throughout one's life. And we need to revolutionize our higher education system by making the beginning shorter and having a far more expanded lifelong system.
- [23:06]
C
And I think it's important to note that those vast technology company market caps, they are being supercharged to a large degree by AI. These recent clips are from an AI chief Executive Dario Amadai, the chief executive of Anthropic. Just as a reminder, Anthropic has one of the leading generative AI models, Claude. And Claude competes with the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini. I'm going to roll this video.
- [23:38]
B
My view is the signature of this technology is it's going to take us to a world where we have very
- [23:45]
E
high GDP growth and potentially also very high unemployment and inequality. You've said AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. Yes.
- [24:01]
C
That's shocking.
- [24:02]
B
That is the future we could see.
- [24:04]
E
It's hard to imagine that there won't
- [24:06]
B
be some significant job impact there. And my worry is that it'll be
- [24:11]
E
big, broad, and it'll be faster than what we've seen with previous technology.
- [24:17]
C
Now, I, and I know many others, sense that this inevitability narrative that Amadi is channeling here is more about propping up the high valuations of these AI companies and about fending off any sort of regulation. Philippe, what do you think about what Amodi is saying, especially about the pace at which he thinks labor replacement is coming? Essentially, we're entering into zero artificial labor.
- [24:48]
B
Yeah. So who am I, as sort of a little Brussels philosopher, to deny what the big bosses predict? What my own convictions are, of course, fed by what I read, but also by daily experience. I'll give you a couple of examples. So last week we had this first Brussels Multilingualism week. One of my sons produced the website, and then at some point I thought, oh, I'm going to ask him to do yet something else on this website. We have about 100 activities taking part in Brussels. And I want him to put little buttons so that you can filter which are organized in the various communes of Brussels, which are public, which are internal, and also which are happening in the Palais de la Bourse and which et cetera. And so it looked a complicated business. And he said, no problem. And then he showed me that with the help of AI, to do all this business, he just needed two line. I didn't understand in line you need to be able to talk to AI. But he said, it took me just a couple of minutes, whereas in the past it would have taken a. A whole day to do these things. And so you can see how in some businesses, in particular programmers, the people with whom they will be most closely involved with there, there will be a sort of shock because all these things can be done much faster. But at another event last week, there was one of the bosses of Novotel, through the hotel chain. He was asked, do you feel the impact of AI? No, he said, marginally in administration, but do you think robots will ever make beds? Do you think that our clients want to be welcomed by robots? And he said, I don't fear it, for in our sector, on the contrary, there is more and more people traveling, in part because AI makes something cheaper. And then finally, the final example is translators, interpreters. There were the director from the European Parliament who Said, oh, we don't feel it so far because we need really, these juris linguists need to be very detailed. That couldn't be done by machine translator. But there was freelance translators in the room who said, frankly, the demand for our job is decreasing. But then someone else said, fantastic, because what we need is language teachers. You are ideal to do that. And so this illustrates the way in which the whole system, the labor market will adjust. Because in part, there are some domains where the substitution by robots by machines is really very difficult. And there are other domains where people will shift from one sort of job to another, where there is a shortage of qualified people.
- [27:37]
C
So if it's as fast as Amadi is making out, you don't see the dystopic scenario that a lot of us
- [27:47]
B
see, providing we have this basic security, a firm basic security in the form of cash, but also in the form of public services that are universally available. And if at the same time we really have this lifelong learning going on so that people can shift from one profession to another before it's too late, and then they'll be able to work for longer and we'll have more people at work than is currently the case.
- [28:14]
C
Let's advance again and move on to Sam Altman. He's the chief executive of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT itself. Altman, of course, is this leading figure of the AI boom. He's been a big sponsor of research into universal basic income. And we'll get to that. But first, let me run this July 2025 clip from an interview with Altman. Altman is asked, how will people survive financially under more generalized, more widespread AI. In particular, he's asked, will there still be money?
- [28:51]
E
Well, I'll say two guesses. One, I think it is possible that we put, you know, GPT 7 or whatever in everybody's chatgpt. Everybody gets it for free and everybody has access to just this like, crazy thing such that everybody can be more productive, make way more money. It doesn't actually matter that you don't like, own the cluster itself, but everybody gets to use it. And it turns out even getting to use it is enough that people are like, getting richer, faster and more distributed than ever before. That could happen. I think that really is possible. There's another version of this where most of that value is accruing to the, like, cluster owners, us, just so that I'm not dodging the question here. And then I think society will very quickly say, okay, we got to have some new, some new economic model where we Share that and distribute that to people. I used to be really excited about things like ubi. I still am kind of excited. Like Universal Basic Income, where you just give everybody money. But I think people really need agency. They really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not going to feel good. And I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just. If we're in this world where we're not just distributing money or wealth. I don't just want a check every month. What I would want is an ownership share in whatever the AI creates so that I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like Universal Basic wealth better than Universal Basic Income. And I think I don't like basic either. I want universal extreme wealth for everybody.
- [30:36]
C
Philippe, ownership rather than redistribution and Universal extreme wealth. Does what Altman is describing sound like Universal Basic Income to you?
- [30:48]
B
Well, I think universal extreme wealth, that's pure cosmetic. It's not to make people fear that there will be poverty all over the place. I say we'll have greater productivity. So fantastic, everyone can become wealthy. He's shown through the years a lot of interest for Universal Basic Income. But he said maybe that's too passive. And that's what he says in this passage. And it would be better if we gave a share, sort of, so that they are co owners of his business and all the other businesses. But I think he hasn't thought this through because what would it mean for people to have this share? Would they really have a voice if they have a share? No, they would have more insecurity because some of these companies will go bust, some, some will develop, etc. So I think after a little bit more thinking, it go back to Universal Basic Income.
- [31:43]
C
Yeah. And what's so interesting, there is no state in what Altman is describing.
- [31:50]
B
Yeah. But there will need to be some state if everyone is to be reached. It's not the companies themselves that are going to pick who is going to be a shareholder of this co owner of this wealth. So you need some sort of public authority, whether it's at the local level or at the national level. Or the global level. Yes.
- [32:14]
C
I mean, this is what really strikes me as being so remarkable about what we often hear from The Silicon Valley tech pros, there really isn't a state as we would know it. So like him or loathe him, Altman has funded important real world, at least one important real world experiment into universal basic income. This experiment is called ORIS. 1000 people in Illinois and Texas were given $1000 per month payments. This was between 2020 and 2023. There was also a very large control group. Philippe, you've examined this. What did that experiment reveal? Did the universal basic income that Altman oversaw here, did it do the things that we would want a universal basic income to deliver, like increased employment, giving people more options, benefits for health and education?
- [33:10]
B
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting experiment that has all the limitations of these experiments. So it lasted for three years. It was only for people between 20 and 40. It didn't incorporate the impact it would need to have on taxation. Of course this basic income needs to be funded. It's just the 1,000 people spread all over these two states received $1,000 every month in addition to all other income. And then because there was a control group, there was a way of assessing what was the impact of this particular measure on most of the variables that were checked. There was no statistically significant impact. It doesn't mean that there was no impact, but because the sample is so small, especially once you start to divide it to think about women with children, et cetera, the samples are very small. And so you need to have a big difference between experimental group and control group in order to be able to regard it as significant. I'll just give one example which is particularly interesting. So there is all over, but also in these samples, a very strong correlation between the level of income and the health situation of people. And so you give $1,000 more to everyone. So some people say naively, or then we are going to see an impact on health. But this could not be expected. Why? Because this correlation is largely explained by the fact that health has an impact on income, not the other way around, or that both bad health and low income are the joint consequence of, for example, having a very miserable youth. And so that is not affected if you give suddenly $1,000. So it was mostly no significant, except for mental health, where the level of anguish anxiety was far higher in the control group than the experimental group, but only in the first year. What happened, in fact, the impact on mental health of basic income or the level of stress is due to the security it provides. And of course, if you start receiving it and you know you are going to receive it for three years, it can have an impact on your level of anxiety. But the closer you get to the end of this period, of course, the more anguished you become, especially if you've changed your way of living, you've reduced your working time, et cetera. So what you can learn from these experiments is limited because it's only for three years, it's only for people spread all over, not etc. But from each of them you can learn.
- [35:56]
C
Fascinating. And just to say it's not just the Americans, of course, conducting UBI experiments, there have been significant experiments in other countries, including the Netherlands, Finland and Germany. What is your take on these? And I think the Finnish experiment for you is really the only one, that
- [36:16]
B
the Finnish one is the only serious one among these because it was a real unconditional basic income, but with a big limitation. It was only given to people who were long term unemployed and it was only for two years. But all the other experiments were either very sloppy with a bias in the control group, or no control group at all, or they were not really about an unconditional basic income because they remained means tested, et cetera. So the only two experiments that are relevant to, that are good enough, I would say, and that are relevant for developed societies are the Altman experiment and the Finnish experiment. But there are more experiments going on in the world, and particularly one in Kenya that is the longest in terms of the number of years involved and a 12 year long experiment, and some of them are done quite rigorously with control group. But it's really not relevant to our situation because in those places there is often, for the people of working age, there is no safety net at all. So it's not really.
- [37:22]
C
And what was the political reaction to some of these experiments? I mean, does it sort of break along standard political lines that right wingers are like, no, this is free money, we don't want to do this. And left wingers are like, no, no, no, let's keep going with this. Or is that sort of what we're seeing, especially with the Finnish?
- [37:43]
B
Yes. So of course the way you interpret an experiment depends on what you expected from it. And so if you had unreasonable expectations, like what I said about the impact of a higher income on health, then you can say, oh, this was very disappointing. And in particular, I can see there Brechtmann, who is a remarkable communicator and propagator of the idea, but he reacted to the results of the Altman experiment. Oh, I was wrong. I mean, this is a bit disappointing. I was wrong, but he made in his own books, popular books, he made sort of sensationalist assertions on the basis of very sloppy evidence. And so unavoidably, you can be disappointed. So some of the effects can only be, as the economists put it, general equilibrium effects, which you can only perceive if the measure is really introduced at the level of a whole population. The impact of the labor market, for example, the improvement in the quality, the average quality of the jobs. You can't observe that if you only give it to 1,000 people in a population of several million. And so experiments are interesting also because it raises awareness about the ide and you can learn a few things from them, but they'll never give you the information you need in order to go forward. The way to go forward will be what we did for social assistance and for social insurance. We introduced it at a very modest level in the beginning of the 16th century for social determination assistance at the end of the 19th century for social insurance, unemployment benefits, and all the rest very modestly for part of the population. Then you gradually expand it.
- [39:40]
C
So let's see how much closer AI takes us to that moment, because later in that same interview, Altman is asked whether universal basic wealth would be just American, just for Americans. Altman kind of shrugs this off, and he goes straight for a global scenario. And I'm going to roll this tape.
- [40:02]
E
If the world can generate like 8 quintillion tokens per year, if that's the world. Actually, let's say the world can generate 20 quintillion tokens per year, making up a huge number here. We'll say, okay, 12 of those go to the normal capitalistic system. But 8 of those 8 quintillion tokens are going to get divided up equally among 8 billion people. So everybody gets 1 trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally. And people can sell those tokens. Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some new art project we want to do. But instead of just getting a check, everybody on Earth is getting a slice of the world's AI capacity. And then we're letting the massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's like a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one. But that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more.
- [41:01]
C
So I think I'd prefer my pension to be managed by the state rather than held by Altman in tokens or crypto. This Aside, I think there is something interesting here. This is about a global vision and the question I'd put is could Altman, could truly global AI be capable of solving one of the age old issues of social assistance, which is that states offering social assistance can face migration pressure that can affect the wages, benefits and services of the least advantaged locals. This, you know, has caused tensions all throughout the history of socialist society.
- [41:41]
B
Yeah, so I'm, I mean I'm a globalist. I think that social justice should be thought at the level of the whole world. So I have some sympathy for these sort of gestures made by Altman. But of course, even if it were implementable administratively is first of all, if it's wealth and as he said, tokens which you can sell and et cetera, it wouldn't give the security because some people will be left with nothing because of bad deals they are going to make. But even if you give it in the form of a stable income, the level of it will never be so significant that it will really slow down the immigration flows from the poorer countries towards the richer countries.
- [42:25]
C
But there is this sort of cruel dilemma that we tend to have to decide who it is that we assist when it comes to social assistance. Whether it's going to be people, broadly speaking, within our own countries, within our own regions back in the 16th century, within their own communities versus kind of excluding people. And there is something about that that is, as you say, you know, being a globalist. There is something to what Altman is saying.
- [42:54]
B
Yes, and I think it's a real dilemma for our countries here, for Europe as a whole, even irrespective of whether we have a basic income or not, but we have a level of social welfare that's so much better than in many other places in the world. And then there is this sort of tension between protecting our people as well as possible versus being as hospitable as possible for all the people who would like to join us. And what's interesting, as you point out, is that at the time of Vives and at the time of the first experiments, the first forms of social assistance, this was explicitly addressed where they said, well, you know, this will be for our own poor people, not for the people who come from elsewhere. Except they said, and that's also in Vives, except if they come from places where there is a war and then you have to treat them as your own citizens. And he said, whether they are Jews or Greeks, Flemings or Walloons, and that's in 1526. But you have that dilemma and then they were taken to court, as it were, to the Faculty of Theology in the Sorbonne, because the theologians say, no, there is a universal destination of all goods, and so you cannot discriminate against the people. And then the magistrates of the city of Ypres, where the things were introduced.
- [44:24]
C
Yes, because the experiment was taken to
- [44:25]
B
Ypres rather than Bruges, which was smaller than Bruges at the time. And I explained that. Sorry, but if we open it to everywhere, it will have all the poor from everywhere coming in. And then, as Michel Rocart said a number of centuries later, du Monde. And that's precisely the dilemma between being as hospitable as you feel you should be and as protective of your own population as you feel also that it's your duty to be.
- [44:59]
C
So let's assume that we are not on planet Altman, but in today's world. On today's planet, as we've been discussing, there's obviously still massive wealth inequality globally, and there's significant wealth inequality within the European Union. Here there's a chart showing that in Belgium, the average income in 2024, around €41,000 per capita. Romania still as low as 25,000. So taking today's world, Philippe, it's sort of putting you on the spot here. What is the right sized perimeter for ubi? What is the right size jurisdiction for ubi, if somehow it were to be granted tomorrow?
- [45:48]
B
Well, there you have a trade off, because between economic sustainability and political achievability, because the smaller the size, I say basic income at the level of Flanders says, the stronger the political support is likely to be because of the common identity, because of solidarity between people who feel they belong to the same community, to the same people. But the smaller the size, the more vulnerable to selective immigration, to tax competition with neighboring communities, neighboring policies. And so you have this trade off. And so at the moment, given that most of taxation, most of redistribution, happens at the level of a nation, of a state, it is at national level that we must think primarily about where basic income should be introduced. And then it will need to be protected against, let's say, selective immigration, in the same way as our social assistance system need to be protected. And as you know, in Europe, we have this rule that you can come in from another European country, member state of the European Union, but you can stay for three months looking for a job, and you haven't found a job, and you don't have a means of subsistence, then you are no longer welcome. And with the basic income, you would need to have similar measures in order to protect those countries that would introduce one before the others introduce one at the same level at the same time. I propose, and other people did too, to have something like a euro dividend, something like basic income at the level of the European Union. But in my proposal, it would be funded by vat, which is the most Europeanized of all the forms of taxation. So it would not be a substitute for what needs to be done at the European level. It could have a number of advantages, but it would essentially form a common basis, on top of which would come not only all the incomes that people can earn from their work, from their savings, but also the national Social Security systems.
- [48:07]
C
Yeah, and presumably that VAT would have the effect of reducing the cost for governments in some areas of paying social
- [48:15]
B
assistance, there would need to be also the adjustments in the funding of the various sort of expenditures.
- [48:23]
C
So, to wrap up our chat, Philippe, I want to reflect a bit on one of the leitmotifs that runs throughout the history of social assistance and throughout the debates on ubi, the fear of indolence. That is the idea, in simple words, laziness, especially among the poor. Now, here's John Kenneth Galbraith, the celebrated Canadian American liberal economist and intellectual, addressing this very the reflexive idea that a ubi, that a universal basic income, is going to generate idleness.
- [49:02]
D
Over the 60 years I have been teaching at Harvard, I have often, while crossing Harvard Yard, been stopped by one of my colleagues with the question, aren't you working a bit too hard? Leisure is essential for the affluent and also for those of us for whom work is pleasant, relaxing, mentally rewarding. For those who must truly toil, however, leisure is an escape from social virtue in the fortunate lands. Poverty, urban poverty, remains the most evident and painful of the economic and social legacies from the centuries past. The answer, or part of the answer, is rather everybody should be guaranteed a decent basic income. A rich country such as the United States can well afford to keep everybody out of poverty. Some, it will be said, will seize upon this income and want work. So it is now, with more limited welfare, as it is called. Let us accept some resort to leisure by the poor as well as by the rich.
- [50:24]
C
So, Philippe, that was from Galbraith's Unfinished Business at the End of the Century speech at the London School of Economics in 1999. What Galp Raith seems to be saying is, get over yourselves. Your moral panic about the poor is misplaced. It's wrongheaded. Philippe, how successful have you been in your work in dealing with this hardy, perennial this fear of indolence of people in the UBI debate. And can you sort of take us back to where we began with this idea of freedom?
- [50:56]
B
Well, first of all, people who are in favor of universal basic income are not against work. They do believe, as I do, in the importance of access to work, to paid work, for all sorts of reasons, not only the additional income it gives, but also because of the human relations it enables people to have because of the sort of recognition it gives, et cetera. And so with a basic income, precisely because it's not means tested, because it doesn't create an unemployment trap, should enable more people to get access to work, but because of the unconditionality not to any sort of work there, and they're also given some bargaining power. That's the first response. Second response consists in saying, look, what a basic income does is not a redistribution from the hard, from what's created by the hard workers to anyone, including the lazies, who choose to do nothing. No, it's essentially taking part of what we've inherited from the past thanks to technological progress, thanks to capital accumulation, thanks to the organization of our societies, and distributing that more equally than is the case now. The income I've been earning throughout my life, including now in the form of a pension, is only due to a very small extent to my own efforts, to my own merits. I mean, compare what I've been able to earn to what people doing similar efforts in Calcutta or having done the same efforts 100 years ago. So because of the luck of being born in this country at this particular time, because of all the luck I've had throughout my life, I've been able to have that level of income. And so it's unfair because there were all these advantages, and it's only the part that's really due can be attributed to me is very small. And so what is being done by basic income is taking part of all that thing that we've inherited in order to give people the freedom to choose a sort of life they would have, rather than be forced to do jobs which the people crossing Harvard Square wouldn't like to do themselves. That is the second element, but the third element, and something on which I've been forced to reflect more recently, which is that I believe that justice is a matter of combining equality and freedom. Equality and freedom are not in conflict with each other. Justice consists in distributing the resources needed for the exercise of freedom in a fair way, not quite an equal way, but in a way that maximizes the real freedom of those with at least real freedom. But a good society is more than a just society. There's liberty, there is equality that can be combined into freedom. But we also need fraternity. That is, in a good society, you need people who make a particular use of their freedom, not just to try to indulge themselves, not just to try to earn as much as possible, to consume as much as possible. But a good society is also a society in which people devote their energy, devote their time to other people within their family, within their local community, within their country as a whole, or for the benefit of the whole world.
- [54:28]
C
And that should be rewarded to some degree or supported.
- [54:31]
B
That should be rewarded. But it is being rewarded by the appreciation, the respect, the admiration of the others, by the social norm, by social sanctions, not by the institutions, the legal system. That must be just, that must distribute freedom or the resources for freedom in a fair way.
- [54:52]
C
Thank you, Philippe. Can we have a big round of applause for Philippe. And before we get to the Q and A, Philippe, again, with your kind agreement, it's my pleasure to welcome back to the stage Mr. Howell Jones. So, Howell, on these assumptions about what happens when the poor are suddenly a little bit better off. Here on the screen we can see a couple of paintings depicting mythical lands of plenty. And the results, of course, sloth and Gluttony. On the right, the Land of Cocaine by Brueghel the Elder, 1567. You've got a clerk, a peasant, a soldier sprawled on the ground overfilled with cakes and pork and goose. On the left, a painting by Roger Medeiros, an American regionalist artist. And that painting is called the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Ah, so it is. It's from 1948. It's basically a more modern depiction of Bruegel's mythical carefree paradise. Hams hanging from trees, cigarettes sprouting on bushes, booze flowing from the rocks and hills made of sugar, and this time a hobo type character sprawled on the ground. And this painting was directly inspired by a song called in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Very good, very good. Big Rock Candy Mountains. And that was first recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock. Shall we do it? In the Big Rock candy mountains There's a land that's fair, bare and bright where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night where the highways all are empty and the sun shines every day on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees in the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings in the big rock candy mountains. I'm a gonna stay where you sleep all day. And they hung the jerk that invented work in the big rock candy mountain. That is really very kind. Time for Q and A. But if you don't want to be recorded, just say so and we'll take it out of what will eventually become the podcast, if that's what you prefer. So I'm going to take a seat. Your questions are for Philippe. We have one over there.
- [58:08]
F
Thank you. My name is Joanna Maycock, long term resident of Brussels and general feminist agitator and organizer. I love this discussion, so thank you so much. It's great to have a long historic arc and to sort of see about, think about in a, in a critical way about some of the real alternatives we might be able to introduced today globally. But however, listening to the discussion, you'd be perhaps might think that women had played no role in discussing any of these ideas. And I wanted to perhaps share a little bit about very healthy debates really amongst feminists about the UBI and also going right back to feminists thinking about wages for housework, for example, back in the second, second wave feminism. And there's arguments for and against. I'm not going to rehearse them all here, but I thought I'd give a couple of the critiques just to see if you could respond to those. Philippe, I'm sure you're very aware of them. You said already about the first thing we need to have in place is really high quality, universally accessible public services available and accessible to all. And that has to be there before anything else. And we know very well that not everybody accesses public services even equally already, even in a place like Belgium. Also that if you give a single income level, that suggests that everybody is equal. But obviously there are structural inequalities that are quite deep and particularly around race, gender, class. I think for example, here of the ways in which, and perhaps the strongest arguments against in the feminist circles relate to how this will reinforce very entrenched gender stereotypes, especially around care, domestic labor and unpaid work. And you talked yourself about the importance of unpaid work actually in contributing to society, including volunteering, civil society and politics. But we know that women have less access to those because of the unpaid domestic labor that still is disproportionately on women's shoulders, especially single mothers, but not only. So I just thought it'd be useful to bring one perspective from feminist debates and to hear a little bit what you think about some of those. Thank you.
- [60:34]
B
Good questions. First of all, however, you fund a basic income, whatever the level of it is, it will Always be a redistribution in net terms from men to women. And that is the combination of three things. That on average, men have an hourly wage that's higher than women. Two, the labor market participation of men is higher than that of women. And three, men own more wealth than women. So however you fund the basic income, it will be a redistribution of income from men to women because it's strictly individual. So it's given to each member of the family. That's one thing. But it's not only a redistribution of income, it's also a redistribution of bargaining power. When there were these experiments in the 1970s, not of a basic income, but of a negative income tax, which has some similarities and would have some similar effects. So there were two main outcomes. One was that there was some slight reduction in the labor market participation of women. And two, there was an increase in the divorce rate. And I talked about that with the man, one of the people who inspired the reform, namely the economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin. He said he wasn't surprised by the results. Because what this reform enabled women to do is to have a wider choice in what to do with their lives and in particular, to reduce the double shift to which many of them were subjected. Having to work hard, in addition, looking after their kids. So it enabled them to have a better life. One and two, it enabled them to chuck, to dump the partners with whom they were. I mean, they were obliged to say, as long as they were dependent. And so the key point is that a basic income will empower people in general, the people who are at the bottom of whatever economic hierarchy there is. And women are overrepresented there. But the reason why it is controversial in feminist circles is that it will tend, at least as a first partial equilibrium effect. It will reduce women's labor market participation. There is no doubt about that. The first effect will be that. But if you have less women willing to sell their labor power in jobs that are heavily feminized, the only way of getting enough people to do these jobs will be to increase the work quality, including in terms of time structure, et cetera, increase the quality and. Or increase the wages. But the key point, which is a philosophical point, is that who are we, highly educated people, to tell these women who are going to reduce their working time that they are making a bad use of the greater liberty there, the greater freedom they are given. And so they are best placed in order to determine whether they should continue working as much as they did, whether it's better for them to reduce their working time, looking more after their kids and above all use some of this additional leeway in order to get further training and improve their skills. So basic income is not only, and not mainly the redistribution of purchasing power, it's a redistribution of the bargaining power that's given to each individual. And proportionally it's women who will benefit. But of course not highly educated women, but less educated women, more vulnerable women who will most benefit from this sort of redistribution.
- [64:44]
A
Hi, my name is Jan, I'm a
- [64:46]
B
graduate philosophy student from Utrecht. Yeah, my question is fairly simple. Why should we give money to those who are already well off to those to whom it doesn't really mean much? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Well, giving a basic income to the rich is not better for the rich, it's better for the poor. Paradoxical. But let me briefly explain. So when you have a system that is as our social assistance is, that's targeted to to the poor, it has two disadvantages for the poor. One is related to the rate of take up, that is, if you have to satisfy some income conditions in order to benefit from it, many of the people who are entitled to it don't get it. It varies from country to country, from system to system. But the general conclusion from the empirical work is that if you have a universal system, like universal child benefits, in many countries there is nearly a 100 rate of take up among the poorer people. Whereas if it's means desert given only to the poor, there is a lower rate. That's one reason. And the second reason is so called poverty trap. That is if you are given an income only if you are poor, as soon as you find a little job and manage to get out of of poverty, you lose this benefit. And therefore it's not only that you think is it really worth for me to take this job if it doesn't make much of a difference, but there's also the uncertainty that is created. Then you take the job, but you don't know whether you stick it out. You may be kicked out of the job after a while. It may take some time before you get your benefit back. And so you say, well, I prefer to remain safe, and so on. So there is an unemployment trap or poverty trap that's due both to the lack of a differential with actually working, especially part time work, which for many people who are currently unemployed is the only really feasible one sustainable one for them. And that's one aspect and the uncertainty that's related to it. And that means that if you give it universally to the rich and to the poor, you don't have that problem and you don't have the stigma also that is attached to getting it, because everyone gets it. But it's not better for the rich, of course, if the rich pay for their own basic income. The introduction of basic income needs to go hand in hand with a reform of the personal income taxation in such a way that the income of the rich will not go up as a result of the introduction of the basic income that receives the basic income, just as they receive now a tax exemption on the lower part of their income, which is also a sort of present that is unnecessarily given to them. So they receive the basic income like everyone else, but they'll pay for their own basic income and for part of the basic income of some of the other people. So that's why it may sound paradoxical, but giving this income to all, including the rich, is not better for the rich, but it's better for the poor. Hello, I'm Tatiana. My question is very simple. Why did the Finnish government consider that their UBI experiment was not successful? Well, the Finnish experiment was successful in the sense that it taught what it could teach. Some people said after the finished experiment, they said they stopped it after two years. So it showed that it wasn't working, but it was meant as an experiment, just as the Altman experiment was meant to last for three years. But the Finnish experiment was very different from the Altman experiment and it can teach us some things which the Altman experiment could not teach us because what they did there, they took 2,000 people who were on long term unemployment, but they were on the basic social assistance and so they were no longer entitled to a short term unemployment benefit. So they had been unemployed for at least two years. In that capacity they received before €560 per month. And they were told, these 2,000 people, now you are going to receive the same amount, but unconditionally. That means if you go and live with someone, you keep it, if you get a job, you keep it.
- [69:19]
E
If you.
- [69:20]
B
And you are not going to be pushed into accepting a job and there will be no sanction if you refuse a job, et cetera. So it was really unconditional. And their behavior over the two years was compared to the control group, the people who remained with the same amount in the conditional system. The main lesson from the experiment was that the people in the experimental group in the second year worked on average six days more than the people in the control group. Now, if the people who hoped that the experiment would fail were hoping that there would be a clear decrease in labor market participation. That didn't happen, on the contrary, but it is misleading. And so there shouldn't be a sort of triumphalistic conclusion saying, look, basic income makes people work more than other would otherwise be the case. Because like the Altman experiment, the tax implications were not taken into account. And so the people could combine these €560 with whatever income they could get from a job. But this income from a job was not taxed to the extent that it would need to be taxed if the system was introduced for the whole of society. But it was certainly not an experiment that. It's an experiment that revealed certain things. In particular, that there are always intriguing things that happen. For example, the increase in working participation was attributed entirely to recent immigrants, the people who had either Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongues. For them there was no significant difference between the two group. But the people who had a different mother tongue increase their labor market participation by 14 days compared to the control group. Why? And so this leads then to further questions and all these experiments are interesting because then you may see there is some mechanism that's interesting and on which you can play a role. But it was never the intention to say we'll try it for two years. If it works, we'll continue forever.
- [71:31]
A
Thank you very much. My name is David. Thank you. First of all, Philippe, the organizers. It's a lovely, lovely event. I've been in the tech workforce development and employment space for the past 10 years. Five in big tech. So I've drank the Big Tech koolaid and the last five in an NGO that is focused on helping vulnerable people find jobs and also reskills them in the process. So I had the front row seat to this AI transformation. I've been very active in this space and I have two short notabenes or addendums to what was discussed and two even shorter. I'll try questions so the two nota business. Because as much as I know from my buddies back in the tech space, both here in Europe and in the US, some of the changes that the CEOs are raising are already happening. So the latest Bureau of Labor statistics in the US just published their, I think Q4 sort of a review last month and it showed for the first time in actually almost a century, a decoupling between GDP growth and the labor share. So how much people get of this GDP growth in worker compensation? So whilst we obviously are in a much different situation in Europe, we have better labor protection, these changes are already happening in the US and AI is one of the reasons, not the only one, the other one which I'm bringing back things to home here in Europe. I know you mentioned the, the UBI studies that, that were on the, on the PowerPoint maybe were not all of them as, as sort of a successful or maybe not all thoroughly done methodologically. For me personally, as somebody who's also been following this space for the past six years, one that was particularly encouraging and maybe the only one which had albeited small sample size, but some positive results was the German study for two very important reasons. First, one of the things that everybody agrees, Both the tech CEOs and also many people in the room, AI will lead to job transformation, but you need to change a job. When I work with people who change jobs in my day to day job is some sort of safety net and you know, this sort of a mental headspace to actually look for jobs which you cannot do if you're stressed, if you have, you know, a mortgage to pay and so on. So one positive result of the German pilot was that people change jobs more often, which I found was very positive. And the other is that after the money was retracted, after the three or four years that the pilot ran in Germany, the people who did get the ubi, there were some measurements done and apparently they were more willing to give back to others and to society, which for me was very, very heartwarming because it showed that UBI can also help with behavioral changes at the time in which we should be, I believe, better to each other and more willing to give back to society. So we spoke a lot about why UBI is good and I think many in the room here would probably be pro ubi, but how do you fund it? And for me maybe I would love to get from your experience your take on two models both connected to one idea. The sovereign wealth fund model, the Norwegian model, and also on the Alaska Permanent Fund as ways to basically potentially fundraise for the ubi. And the last question is regarding, and before you laugh, because it is called the Trump account and I'm not a fan and I'm not a supporter of this individual, it was obviously not his idea, but it's basically every child born in the US as of this year receives $1,000 that it's automatically invested in the S&P 500. So not open air and antropic, which are risky investments, but the whole S&P 500. Isn't this a viable solution potentially for Europe in the future?
- [75:00]
C
Thank you.
- [75:01]
B
Okay, so I think there are things to be learned also from the German experiment. But as you know, the sampling was, was more problematic. I mean, there were significant bias in the sampling more than in the two experiments I mentioned before. And on your first remark, yes, I mean, one major preoccupation is the fall in the labor share because that's related, in fact to the graphs we saw before. So as workers are being replaced by machines, more of the value that's being created by a business goes to the owners of the machines, to the investors, and a smaller part to the workers. And so the value created through these workers, their families, to the local shops, whatever. And this happens far less if the labor share is less. On the question of the funding. So yes, some people say, well, the best way of funding it would be if you have sovereign fund. So the only part of the world where there is a sort of stable basic income, even if the level fluctuates from year to year, is Alaska, where they created a so called Alaska Permanent Fund that was fed by the exploitation of oil in the north of the state. And every year part of the revenues from this fund that is now involved, invested in the whole world, is redistributed to all Alaskan residents, whether they are US citizens or not, from age 0 to when they die. But the amount fluctuates because it's related to the returns on this fund over the last five years. And so when the stock exchange is booming, the level goes up, etc. But you could say that's a model. But of course you need to create this fund. And even when there are sovereign funds, like in Norway, they decided not to use it to fund a basic income. And there are also sovereign funds elsewhere. But it would be a model. But you need, if you don't have resources, natural resources you can use in this way, you need to create it by saving by taxing people from year to year in order to fund a future basis. So in most cases it's not really an option. So by now, I love the second question.
- [77:27]
C
Well, there was this idea that Trump had created a tracking stock for every kid.
- [77:33]
B
It's a sort of rebirth of an idea that was introduced in the United Kingdom under the name of a baby bond under Blair that was later abolished. But in the Trump version, people have argued it's a tremendous machine that will increase inequality. Why? Because you have a small amount that is given to every child at birth and that can only be used so it will have some, there will be interest on it and so that can be cashed when the child reaches adulthood. But it can be supplemented in tax in a way that's tax exempt or with great tax advantages in such a way that the rich kids will end up with a big starting capital and the poor kids will just have this minute little thing. A similar idea was proposed. There is an interesting book from 99 by two Yale lawyers, Ackerman and Alstott, called the Stakeholder Society, where they have a far more ambitious thing where every American age 18 would receive $80,000, but in fact in four installments. And that would be in part funded by a tax on all inheritances. It's a way of saying, well, everyone gets a sort of basic capital at the start of life. And Thomas Piketty has made similar proposals in the European context. But I think all these basic capital ideas will tend to increase inequality because of the use, very unequal use that is going to be made by people. If you are well advised, you're invested in useful training that will increase lucrative skills, you're invested in a business that will go bust or not, et cetera. And so I think it doesn't beat a universal basic income in terms of the security it gives to all. And it's especially the most vulnerable people.
- [79:37]
C
Yeah, I mean, City of London and Wall street will always like this kind of form. We did have a question here.
- [79:48]
G
My name is Jakub Patocka, I am a journalist, editor in chief of Czech daily Denning Referendum and I'm here as a friend of James. So let me first of all congratulate you to this incredible achievement that is this event, I think, Brussels Times. And you must be proud of what you managed to do here. My question comes from, I think my background in the Czech Republic, where people rather discuss how to obtain a decent income even in quite prestigious professions like teachers, university assistants or journalists for that matter. I think the debate not ignored, but touched very lightly on the subject of how are you going to pay for all this? And before coming here, I did my little research because I taught universal basic income. We published in my newspaper some essays in favor of that idea. To be clear that no opponent, principal opponent. But I thought this idea must be something every leftist has to be for, right? It's something that gives people freedom, gives them basic security. So I did my little research and I found out that there are quite substantial critics actually coming from the left. There is whole book by this man, I think, Daniel Zamora, who published a case against universal basic income. And the principal point is that either the universal basic income is too low so that it rather creates an Incentive for people to accept low paid jobs? Or you just cannot pay for it because the studies show it's 35% of the French GDP. I mean, it's insane, especially if you come from countries like Czech Republic. So what is your response to that? And also I think their point is that the debate very nonchalantly ignores the political dynamics we have. So if we just think that's a great idea, who is going to design how the whole scheme will look like? Will it be the good doers? Good meaning people like you or me or James? Or will it be the guys who are now running the world?
- [82:07]
B
Yeah, well, who is going to decide? We are democratic societies and so it will be the result of negotiation, negotiations, bargaining, et cetera. Just as our systems of social assistance and social insurance have been the result of struggles and compromises. To answer them to you, the bulk of your question isn't there some sort of dilemma between either unacceptable because it will increase poverty and increase exploitation, in fact, or unaffordable because you can't pay for it? The key to any reasonable answer to that question is that the basic income cannot be a substitute for all the other aspects of our welfare state. It's not a substitute for universal public services, for good quality education, for a decent basic health care system, for a decent environment, public health spaces. So all this needs to be preserved. Also universally accessible, not means tested basic income. You have to see it as what it's meant to be, a basis. And that is a lower part of everyone's income that will need to be funded in part through abolition of all the benefits that are lower than the universal basic income that is introduced and a reduction of all the other benefits, unemployment benefits, pensions, et cetera, that are higher, but only a reduction by the amount of the basic income. So you would keep a top up in terms of earnings related, unemployment benefits, earnings related to pensions, but also social assistance related to the fact that you live on your own in a city that is more expensive, you need to pay for your rent. So there would be top ups, but what would be suppressed is the lower layers of all the benefits and all the benefits that are lower than the level of the basic income. At the same time you need a tax reform, which means that the tax exemption which we have in all our systems, so the lower rates of taxation on the lower parts of our earnings, that goes, and everyone receives a basic income, then there remains a net cost, essentially because the part time workers will have a higher net income. That was the case before. But you have this basis that's not a substitute for the whole thing. You keep these more targeted conditional top ups. And that is affordable because it's mainly self financed in these two ways. And it doesn't increase either exploitation or poverty because it's supplemented by these top ups. That's the way one has to see the way out of this dilemma. Because if you wanted to have a basic income that's so high that people would be lifted out of poverty, even if you live on your own in a city, that would be unaffordable. That's what the Swiss proposed in their referendum in 2016, where they said everyone must be able to live a decent life. And they said that means 2,500 Swiss francs, €2,300 per month. I took part in a debate in Switzerland twice, once in Geneva, once in Zurich. I said, of course, if I were a Swiss citizens, I would say yes, but if I were the minister in charge of implementing it, I would resign immediately because this is an unaffordable level. And so what you need to go is get there gradually. And even the step that was decided but is unlikely to be realized in Belgium, that was a principle designed by the current government which consists in lifting the tax exempt basis of all incomes. So that is a step towards the basic income, because basic income is a way of increasing the pay of the people who work and who are at the bottom of the earnings hierarchy. And I'm an opportunistic utopian. You need to have these visions about what a better society would be or a better world with worldwide redistribution, and then use any opportunities that may arise in order to move one step forward. And often the most direct road is not the best road to follow. And you need to.
- [86:47]
C
It's so interesting, Philippe, that actually there is this residual distrust sometimes from the progressive spectrum towards a universal basic income. And often they ask just some of the most penetrating questions, this deep feeling that, number one, is this a pretext for taking away other benefits? And number two, who is going to design this kind of system? And that's a little bit what I wanted to get to in our discussion tonight, because it looks very likely that the main people who are going to be promoting this are going to be these new masters of the universe, or at least masters of the stock market. And that I think is. Is very disturbing. I am going to let everyone get to drinks. There are just three people in particular I want to thank for this evening, which has been wonderful. One of them is Paulo Kotrim from the Brussels Times. He did so much to bring together this evening. So he deserves a round of applause for Paolo wherever he is. Paolo is over there. Another, another, of course is Howell Jones on the guitar. Thank you. Thank you, Howell. Amazing. And of course, our guest of the evening, Philippe Van Paris. Thank you very much.
- [88:13]
B
And.
- [88:22]
C
That's it for this episode. EU Scream is non profit journalism and is produced in association with the Brussels Times. It's your support and your feedback that helps us delve into this new darker era in our politics, into how the EU should be responding and into the thoughts and experiences of people who really know what they're talking about. Small donations to large ones, that's all incredibly appreciated. It also helps when we get a five star rating at Spotify or a review at Apple. Podcasts and passing on episodes to family, colleagues, friends, that's yet another great way to show support. For more details and for more EU scream, do please visit Brusselstimes.com and look for the podcast. Thanks for listening.