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Joe Williams, "Inequality in the Digital Economy: The Case for a Universal Basic Income" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
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- [00:01]
Joe Williams
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Joe Williams and today my guest in the studio is Andrew White, author of the book called Inequality in the Digital Economy. Hi Andy, thanks very much for being here.
- [00:19]
Andrew White
Hi Joe, thank you very much for inviting me.
- [00:21]
Joe Williams
Okay, great. So as we talked about, as I've just said, the focus of the conversation today will be your recent book, available from Palgrave Macmillan. But before we get into that, could you please just introduce yourself to our listeners, Explain a lot about, explain a little bit about your research and so on.
- [00:37]
Andrew White
Yeah, so at the moment I'm a senior lecturer at King's College London, senior lecturer in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries. I did previously work in China for about 13 years, from 2007 to 2020 as a professor of creative industries and digital media. And I left China because of the outbreak of COVID And I guess some of my experiences of the last years have kind of informed some of my research as well. Because I was living the kind of precarious life that I talk about in the book in that I didn't have a job for a short while after I left China, before I got the job at King's College in 2022. So I have had this kind of long term interest in the universal basic income. And it just so happened that also I had this kind of precarious existence for a few years which kind of, I think, kind of informed my research and that I had started writing the book then, but that encouraged me to kind of finish it. And as you know, it was released last, well, 2024.
- [01:42]
Joe Williams
Great. Yeah. So thank you. So before we get into the conversation then, let's just start with some definitions of terms then. So the book's title is Inequality in the Digital Economy. So without getting too technical, what is the digital economy for people who aren't necessarily economists? And how does that differ from what sometimes is called the information economy?
- [02:05]
Andrew White
Yeah, I would say that it's pretty similar to the information economy. I guess what I'm trying to think about is the extent to which almost all aspects of economic activity these days are digital. Now when I first started thinking about this about 10 or 15 years ago, that wasn't really the case. You would clearly have, you know, what we refer to as the industrial economy. And then we would have the digital economy kind of bolted on. So we would think of companies like Google, kind of search engines, stuff like that, online commerce and things like that. And you would think of those as quite separate to a Certain extent. I guess some of those are kind of extensions of the old industrial economy. If we think about online shopping, you can go back to the 1980s or 1990s and you would have mail order kind of shopping. But there was this sense they were kind of separate. But I think increasingly the digital economy is kind of taking over both in terms of the infrastructure, the way in which things are organized in our economy, but also the kind of products that we see now. It is the case of course, that we're both sitting in front of a computer and you still need manufacturing. So. So I'm not suggesting for one minute that manufacturing is not still important, but increasingly we're very much dependent on the digital or on the information for driving our modern economies, as it were.
- [03:36]
Joe Williams
Great, thanks. And I left out the subtitle of your book and I think it's crucial we look at this too, because your book is subtitled the Case for Universal Basic Income. So I'm sure most people will have a kind of idea of universal basic income. But just for the sake of clarity, could you please just sketch, sketch out what Universal Basic income is as you define it?
- [03:58]
Andrew White
Yes, at first it's universal, which means everyone should have it. And there's a debate whether everyone should include children, of course, but basically it's, everyone should receive that income. It's unconditional, so it's not based on behavior or anything. Everyone should get it and it's unconditional. And also if it's a basic income, it has to be what we refer to as a subsistence level of income. So just to give an example, in the uk, if we think about the highest level of income for those who are not working, it would be the state pension, which is about 12,000 a year. So I'm not suggesting, by the way, that universal Basic income in the UK should be 12,000, but it probably should be at least that because it would, if not the kind of medium income, to make sure that it is a subsistence level income, not just, you know, an income that cannot support or sustain your life, as it were.
- [04:47]
Joe Williams
So then what is it about the digital economy and the way that it's impacted society which kind of raises this discussion about universal basic income and makes it kind of, you know, perhaps a necessary policy proposal?
- [05:03]
Andrew White
Yeah, I first started looking in a previous book, actually. I first started looking at these so called digital companies and the way in which they kind of differed from what we might refer to as manufacturing companies in the kind of so called Fordist era. So a classic example would be Ford itself Ford Motor Company. And when you looked in the Fortune 500, I can't remember who publishes these lists, but it's basically the largest companies on Earth, or I think probably in the US but by extension probably on earth as well. And you saw that Ford made sizable profits and it employed something like 100,000 or 200,000 people. This is when I was looking at this 10, 15 years ago. And if you in a sense divided the profits or even the income by the number of people, you would see that it was quite reasonable. It would become something like 150,000, 200,000American dollars. And once you take out administration costs and all that, that's a kind of reasonable cost for a large number of people. When you start to look at these tech companies, what you see is huge profits and small number of people being employed. So Google back at that time, probably 20 odd thousand, but huge profits. Apple again, similarly, huge profits, small numbers of people. So what I thought then was that if you look at these kind of companies then we see that if this pattern of working is replicated across the economy, this is going to lead to greater inequality. Because what's happening is you have a small number of people earning huge amounts of money and either a lot of people are not being employed or if they are being employed, they're being employed on kind of zero hours contracts. Because if you think of Amazon, Amazon does employ a lot of people. The core employees of full time employers might be low, but it employs a lot of people on zero hours contracts and they, as you know, are treated quite badly. So when I. So back then, you know, we still had this, we, I mean we still have a strong industrial sector, but I think it's fair to say that these tech companies have become even more powerful. And that I think has led to this kind of great inequality where there's a greater divide between the rich and poor. But also I think it is starting to lead to the loss of jobs because we don't need as many people to work in those industries. If you look at the figures for worldwide employment, employment levels from about the mid-1990s up until about five or 10 years ago is actually dropped from 62% of the working age population to 58%. So there is this kind of trend and I think then that's exacerbated by AI, because AI is kind of amplifying these things. It is kind of or it has a potential to eliminate quite a few jobs, especially at entry level. I think there was a recent report by some researchers at, I think it was at MIT that said a lot of entry level jobs are being wiped out. So a lot of young people now find it difficult to get jobs because the machine can actually do these jobs better than they can. So I guess what we're seeing over the long term is people struggling to earn a living wage. And the question we should ask then is, is the modern economy able to create good, well paying jobs? Because we assume that it is. And that's the basis of the kind of social contract, as it were. But if that kind of breaks down, then we have to find ways of paying people who cannot work. And I think this is where the universal basic income comes in. And I should finally say then that one of the ways that you would have dealt with this in the so called industrial economy was to essentially create jobs. And this could be through public works. We create public works and then we give people jobs that way, or it is through increased economic activity of the kind of neoliberal kind, through the market, as it were. But I guess what I'm thinking is, and this is a significant aspect of the book, is that for environmental reasons, I think we cannot keep doing that. We cannot just create jobs, create economic activity for the sake of it. If a job is not needed, then we probably should just be honest and say, well, it's not needed and therefore we need to find some kind of alternative to that. And I think that's where arguments about the basic income are kind of resonating these days.
- [09:36]
Joe Williams
Great, thanks. There's a lot there that I really want to get into. Let me start then by talking about something you mentioned early on in your answer. When you've talked about the kind of digital economy seems to kind of be a bit of a winner takes all kind of thing to create a small group of extremely wealthy people who are very well served by that economic model and create employment which is not particularly well remunerated and not particularly
- [10:06]
Andrew White
favorable in
- [10:07]
Joe Williams
its working conditions and so on. It doesn't necessarily create meaningful, well paid work. So your argument around ubi, around universal basic income is more than just a policy proposal. It's kind of a measure, a transformative measure towards a different kind of economic model, isn't it? You're not clearly not saying let's, you know, let's prop up the status quo using universal basic income so that people have just about got means to get by. You've got a more kind of transformative progressive agenda and envisaging a different kind of economy. Could you talk a little bit about that, please?
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Andrew White
Yeah, I think Modern economies have to be more sustainable, and I think this is mainly because of the environmental crisis, as it were. And the hope is that we can see the need for this change before there is some kind of crisis. So if we think about COVID as an example, pretty quickly governments around the world realized that they would have to step in and support workers, or not necessarily workers, because a lot of people weren't working at the time, but they would have to support people financially, directly with money from the state. So there is this sense that if there is a crisis, we need to move quickly. But I would hope in terms of the environment that we start to do it sooner rather than later, because it might be the case when we reach a tipping point that it's just too late, as it were. So I think there has to be greater sustainability. I have looked at the literature on growth and degrowth because there is this argument that we should move towards degrowth. I did have some sympathy for the degrowth agenda, but I've become convinced that that is not necessarily the answer, because I think it was Hannah Ritchie's book that I was reading that argued that if you look at some of the most developed economies, actually their carbon emissions have gone down in the last 20 or 30 years, despite the fact there's been economic growth. So it does seem possible to have economic growth without and still being sustainable. But I think there has to be that sustainability both in terms of the environment. So we must make sure we're not just creating jobs for the sake of it. Looking at gdp, for instance, because whether you're a polluting industry or not a polluting industry, you're treated the same way in terms of gdp. But I would suggest we need to think about GDP in a different way, such that we're thinking about the value of work towards society. So things like childcare, for instance, which is not measured in gdp, it is, of course, if you employ a babysitter, it is included in gdp, but if you do it yourself, it's not. So I think that's something we need to think about as well. And I think economically, if we think about sustainability, it's not really sustainable to have people feeling that they can't get a job and also that they have kind of no hope and that they're stigmatized, because of course, we do have not a universal basic income, but we do have things like universal credit, where people do get paid not to work effectively. But also then they get stigmatized and told that, as you know, in the tabloid press in the uk, they're kind of vilified. But it might be the case as we say, that the economy just cannot support those jobs and therefore clearly it's not that it's not their fault. And we see this not just in Europe, in the uk we see it in places like China and Japan as well. So I think I talked in the book about some trends amongst young people in China and Japan where people have just kind of switched off and decided, well you know, I'm not going to play this game anymore, I'm applying for all these jobs, I'm not going to get them, so therefore I'm just going to. I think in China it's called tangping, which is lying flat, which is I'm just going to not necessarily lie in bed all day. But I'm not worried too much about economic activity. So I think there does need to be this honest conversation and say, well, there are a variety of things we can do. If people want to do very little, that's fine as well. But actually what you find, and you find this with the basic income experiments is that most people don't want to be idle. So if they're paid a basic income, they will go out and do something. You know, they might go up and clean up the community, they might spend more time looking after their children, which as I said is very important even in terms of economic activity. So I think that's the kind of model I'd be looking towards essentially.
- [14:36]
Joe Williams
Yeah. Another answer there that I would like to kind of get into and discuss in various ways. I'll start with the environmental dimension because that's, you know, foundational throughout your entire argument really isn't it, that it's kind of urgently necessary from any ecological perspective that we start kind of reconfiguring economic models because the current levels of consumption, of productivity is simply not sustainable. So there's this kind of environmentalist logic which is running through your whole argument making the case for less consumption, lower levels of consumption, which speaks to that kind of inherent contradiction in kind of mainstream economic thinking where you can kind of have infinite growth on finite resources and so on. So I'll just mention I was actually interested to hear you say you're slightly lukewarm then about, about de growth because I was, I'm quite interested in the post growth sort of literature as a model that we could perhaps benefit and we should be dethroning decentering economic growth and productivity as a kind of indicators, as a measure of economic well being. I'm not an economist but I take an interest in these things. So I was interested to hear you kind of nuance that, that degrowth argument there and then coming back then to this kind of idea about the kind of parameters, the kind of criteria we use to determine productivity and so on. And you've got some specific ideas for policy recommendations in this regard. But before we get into that, you've kind of said in the book, and you've alluded to in your answer just there, that there's a kind of more abstract philosophical discussion that needs to be had about the role of work in a society, its function in configuring a person's individual identity and their relationship to a society. So before we get on to like kind of policy, specific policy proposals and so on, can we discuss then this kind of more philosophical aspect of work, the distinction between work and labor, how do we measure and define productivity, and so on and so on. So good.
- [16:44]
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- [16:45]
Andrew White
So good.
- [16:46]
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- [16:56]
Joe Williams
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- [16:58]
Andrew White
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Andrew White
Yeah, so I think we're kind of stuck with this industrial mode of working, which we, I say we often people in Western Europe see as kind of natural, as it were, but in a sense it's not natural. You know, the 40 hour week was arrived at through a series of negotiations between trade unions and the governments of the day and kind of factory owners in the 19th century. So it just so happens that that's the figure we arrived at kind of 40 hour week. But before then, people would work a variety of hours. If you're working in agriculture, for instance, it might be the case that on some occasions you'll be working around the clock certain seasons of the year, other times you'll be working not very much. So it's a kind of your hours are attuned to the task at hand, as it were, rather than saying, well, we had to fill in this 40 hours. Even if something only takes three hours for me to do this week, I'm going to have to drag it out for 40 hours. So I think that we need to start thinking a little bit about that mode. And people have started to talk about four day working weeks and stuff like that. And I think the reason I'm talking about this is because this is something that on the left and the right, you know, there's almost kind of agreement on the left and the right that, you know, we should give people these kind of full time jobs because it's worthwhile on the right in the sense that, you know, it's a kind of negative thing in the sense that we don't want people to be lazy or we don't want them, as they would see it, taking money from the state. But also on the left, and again, it's more positive, but it's a similar kind of idea that, you know, a job is worthwhile. If someone doesn't have a job, then their life in a sense might be meaningless. And we think about that in terms of, you know, if you think about the coal mining industry in the 1980s, now we're talking about the steel industry in South Wales today. And you know, there is a debate. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that those jobs should have been lost and should be lost today. But I think one of the arguments is it goes beyond the economic. It's to say that, oh, well, if those jobs are lost, then the community will be broken, as it were. And I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes we have to be honest and say, I mean, if we think about this debate over Grangemouth in Scotland, where the government is not going to issue new oil drilling licenses for obvious reasons, and of course then people in the oil fields will start to say, well, what if we lose our jobs? Think of the effect on the community. But I think sometimes we have to be honest with people and say, well, sometimes those jobs are going to go and they're not going to come back, but then we have to provide an alternative. And the alternative is not just a universal basic income. But I think it's to think about this philosophically. So to develop other forms of community interactivity or activity, sorry, which is not dependent on the job in the local factory, as it were. So, you know, it could be things like environmental work, cleaning up the environment. It could still be, you know, often you would get in those mining communities, you would get the local band or something. Well, the local band could still continue even if the factory, the local factory is no longer there, the local coal mine was no longer there. So I think we do have to give a sense to people that we have to detach work from meaning to your life, as it were, which, as I say, is quite difficult because both on the right and the left there is this sense that a good well paid job for 40 hours a week does provide meaning to your life. And what I'm suggesting is we can think of other things. We can think of how we redefine work. So things like, as I say, childcare is work, but we don't call it work. And of course, as you know, sometimes people are stigmatized if, you know, I'm actually a parent, but not a single parent. But if I was a single parent and had to give up my job and went on universal credit, I would probably be stigmatized and people would say this guy in the tabloid terms is scrounging off the state or whatever. But actually that's useful. It has a useful social utility. But also economically, what can be better economically than developing a child? So I think it is a reconfiguration of the way in which we think about work and indeed not to stigmatize non work. I think that's important as well. If someone wants to go off and learn to play a musical instrument or learn a language or something, I think that's absolutely fine. I think that should be encouraged.
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Joe Williams
Yeah, absolutely. So all of this kind of compels us. All of these things that you're talking about here really require kind of us to revisit our values. And what are the highest order objectives that we're pursuing? One, to what ends do we grow the economy? What do we do with the wealth that we create? What kind of societies do we want and what kind of activities do we want to, you know, encourage? Do we, you know, prioritize growth as a kind of abstract, higher order value in and of itself to be, you know, kind of pursued kind of, you know, as an end that's valuable in itself or other objectives which we should subordinate economic growth towards? You know, do we want to, you know, continue creating wealth and material and satisfying material needs beyond a certain threshold where that no longer really seems to feel like it's benefiting people? So these are all very vital conversations which we need to have. And within all of that, UBI starts to kind of have quite a broad appeal across the political spectrum. I suppose as you've mentioned there, there's kind of left wing and right wing kind of ways of looking at work and kind of configuring the kind of value and the social utility of work as you've. But that can be shifted, those can be reconfigured as you've talked about. And I think a lot of that conversation really needs to start from or at least needs to factor in the reality that, you know, markets you know, market mechanisms sometimes reward very antisocial and you know, irresponsible behaviors, you know, risky hedge fund investments and so on, which cause economics, what's the word I'm looking for, volatility and kind of destabilize economies in a way which damages people's lives. Yet these are very well paid activities, these are viewed as productive and these are viewed as, you know, meaningful and productive kind of activities. So I think there's something gone seriously wrong in our values and our kind of objectives. And this is something which I feel is inherent, is kind of very apparent in a lot of mainstream economic thinking is there just seems to be. They posit things which should be at the center. They posit as kind of externalities, as kinds of less important, as if raising children, caring for the sick or the elderly, participating in community work, supporting people as they're kind of pursuing interests and so on, as non productive, as less important than certain activities which are actually very quite destructive environmentally and socially and so on. So it's kind of all pointing to this very sort of higher order, kind of almost abstract debate about is our economy fit for purpose? You know, is it? And you know, in order to answer that question, we've got to kind of decide what are our values and what are we trying to promote with economic activity? What is the kind of driving force, what purposes do we, you know, do we want to promote with, with economic growth? So on that note, the universal basic income argument is quite an easy argument to straw man I something which can be, you know, critiqued usefully and not so usefully from, you know, a variety of perspectives. So how do you contend then the kind of, the classic kind of rebuttal to an argument for universal basic income, perhaps from a more right wing conservative perspective, in that it will foster idleness, you'll be rewarding people for, for being lazy and so on. And also how do we fund it? Like, you know, where does the money come from? As Theresa May would have said, there's no magic money tree. How do you contend these kind of, you admittedly not particularly robust arguments?
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Andrew White
Well, I think the funny thing is that there is a kind of libertarian support for UBI because they will say, well, the welfare system is very bureaucratic and complex. We're spending a lot of money on bureaucracy, therefore let's just replace it with a UBI Now. I guess we need to be careful with that. We wouldn't want to support something that simply completely eliminates the welfare state because of course you would still need things like housing Support. But certainly that's one of their arguments. And I think that is one argument that can be used with the caveat, of course, that you wouldn't go the whole way and agree with them that everything should be eliminated. So you could say, yes, that's quite useful. One of the things, it's interesting because I had a conversation with someone recently who works in finance, and I think he'd been at Davos and what interested me was he said there was a lot of interest in the universal basic income at Davos. And the basic argument was that a lot of very rich people think that there's going to be the potential for significant social disorder if AI really takes off, generative AI takes off and loads of jobs are eliminated. So in a sense, they're kind of looking over their shoulders and thinking, well, in order to stave off this social disorder, then we need something like a universal basic income. So I think from their perspective, some of them would think in that regard that it is useful for that reason, I think in terms of funding it, well, I'll go to idleness and then funding. So in terms of idleness, when you've looked at most of the pilots around the world, it seems to be the case that rather than being idle, what people have done is they've used the money to improve their position within the labor market. So let's say, for instance, there was a universal basic income scheme in rural India about 10 or 15 years ago. What happened there was that a lot of women who were marginalized, if not downright discriminated against, they were able to. To take on more kind of entrepreneurial activities, as it were, because they could take a risk because they felt, well, you know, I have my own independent source of income. Whereas before the tendency was for them to rely on their husband's income, and then they would say, well, I want to go off and set up this business. And essentially, because it was a kind of, you know, in those kind of rural areas, it was quite a kind of patriarchal society. They wouldn't be allowed to government set the business. Whereas if they had independent income, as they did with the universal, with a basic income, then they could do that. And this is what's happening in many different parts of the world. If you look at the basic income in Ireland for artists at the moment, a lot of artists in Ireland have, as artists all over the place, have a second job because they don't make enough work from their artistry. So they have to then take on a job, you know, in a bookshop. Or something for 20 hours a week. A lot of them then were just giving up that second job and just focusing on their artwork, and they're becoming a lot more productive. So I think that's what's happening. In actuality, the kind of pilots are showing that people are not becoming idle, they're just improving their position within the labor market. And then finally, in terms of funding, I suppose there's no getting away from the fact that there would be quite significant tax rises to fund a universal basic income. Now, the way this would work, and I guess the best way to describe this is to think about this in UK terms. There's a population of 70 million in the UK, as you know, if you set the level to £12,000 a year, which is the level of the pension, that would be something like, I know, was that 840 billion a year, I think. But if you think about it, if you take. If you take a lot of the welfare, offset that or offset a lot of the welfare bills. So I think 2 or 300 billion pounds is spent on universal credit and the pension, you probably would have to find about 4 or 500 billion pounds. Then the question is, do you pay all children? If you didn't pay all children, that figure would drop even further. You would still have a lot, find a lot of money, of course, potentially hundreds of billions of pounds, 200 billion pounds or whatever. What you would then have to do is, if you think about that, divide that by the number of taxpayers. It might be something like each taxpayer has to pay £6,000 a year. Now, of course, the way in which that we paid would be in percentage terms. So it's not everyone is paying 6,000, it's just that's the median figure. So what it basically means that if you're on a medium income, your tax might go up by 6,000, 8,000, 10,000 a year, but you receive 12,000 back in return. So actually you would gain, or it would be cost neutral, as it were. If you are lower than the median income, you would gain. Where people would really get hammered, of course, is if they were above median income, people might be paying huge amounts. If you're on a million pounds a year, you might be paying an extra £100,000 in tax a year. So there would be an element of redistribution. And I guess that is one area where I guess those on the right would be quite critical and would say, well, why should I pay all this money to fund other people, as it were? So I think that is one of the difficulties with making the argument. But, but to me, I think there's no reason why we shouldn't go ahead and make the argument. To me, I would say to people that even if you're very rich or quite well off, you don't know what's going to happen in terms of AI. If you're a computer programmer, your job might not be there in 20 years time. If you're a financial trader, if automated trading takes off, then your job might not be there in 20 years time. So that's how I would make the appeal to say that, you know, no one can assume that their job is going to be safe in 20 years time. Again with the environment. We all will lose out. If, you know, you can talk about the financial sector in London, but if the seed levels rise by a meter in 20 years time, then half of London's gonna be wiped out. So I think that's really how you make. And I'm reluctant to make those arguments because I don't think it's good to make an argument by kind of invoking the apocalypse, as it were. I think you need to make more positive political arguments. But it is nonetheless the case. But when it comes to things like the environment, we are all in it together. I would say New Year, new me.
- [32:40]
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Joe Williams
Experian Great. Okay, so thanks for that answer. What I'd like to touch on at this point then is kind of going back to something we said earlier on is how do we stop kind of UBI as a policy measure for just propping up status quo without attending more structural inequalities and so on. Because as you've talked about here on the political and economic right, there is a kind of neoliberal, libertarian, economic libertarian argument which would quite like UBI which kind of supports that agenda. So how do we stop UBI becoming? Because if UBI was implemented today with the way that the economy is configured, there's a danger that it might just become a means of transferring wealth from the public sector to the private sector. We take taxpayer money, public money, which give it to people, and they have to pay energy bills to energy companies and so on and so on. And it feels like it could even be like a kind of transfer of wealth. It could be quite a regressive measure which might, if anything, kind of concentrate existing power imbalances and economic inequalities then. But as you mentioned at the beginning, you've got a kind of more comprehensive, kind of overarching vision. So how do we then attend to that kind of. That danger of UBI becoming kind of an instrument for entrenching and kind of legitimizing current economic and political inequalities?
- [34:33]
Andrew White
Yeah, I think there is this argument that some people advance that UBI is like a sticking plaster. It's kind of mitigating, but it's not really dealing with the structural problems in the global economy. So I think that simultaneously you would continue to have those debates and push for those kind of structural changes. So I guess you could say that, yes, we're bringing ubi, but this is not the whole picture, as it were. We do need to think about the structural inequalities that will make UBI in a sense, less relevant. Although I would still say not completely irrelevant, because if we are losing jobs, then we do need to find ways of paying people a living wage, as it were. I guess what I would say is that if you introduce a upi, it might start to change behavior. You know, it does have this redistributive aspect. So it gets people used to the idea of redistribution, that the richest in society have to transfer a lot more of their taxes to funding a universal basic income. So redistribution becomes. Is back on the agenda again. I would say another thing that it could do, and you saw this during COVID is again, we're thinking about the usefulness of certain jobs and we're thinking that why should bankers be paid a fortune, whereas people who are doing very useful jobs like cleaning the streets and that are getting paid a kind of pittance? And I would say that kind of idea is propped up by the current system in the sense that the free market isn't working as well as it should. And this sounds a little bit paradoxical, but what I mean by that is the kind of state is interfering because the state is essentially saying to people that if you don't take this menial job for a basic wage, then we're going to take away your unemployment benefit, as it were. So in a sense we're saying this is a free market, but actually it's not because the state is intervening in the market. If you could say, well, I'm not going to take that job because I have a universal basis income. So if you want me to do this job, delivery job or whatever, I'm just going to refuse because I still have enough money. What it would mean is the salaries in those kind of roles would start to go up. And we saw this during COVID We really needed delivery drivers in Covid. We needed people to stack the shelves in supermarkets in Covid. What then happened was that wages started to go up. So in a sense the market was working much better than it does at the moment. So is something positive that I see in a ubi? Because one of the questions that people have about UBI is to say, well, who would do all these jobs if you're paying them to do nothing, why would they do all these jobs? And my answer would be, well, actually, because we're going to pay a lot more for those jobs, you know, and so I think it'll be positive in that sense. So yes, you can say, well, it's a stick in plaster. It's mitigation. It doesn't deal with the structural problems as much as it should. But I would say that to a certain extent it does. It does kind of bake redistribution into the system. It does value or price those so called low skilled jobs, which I don't actually think are low skilled. It gives them a kind of more realistic price, as it were in the market.
- [37:58]
Joe Williams
So then coming at it from the other angle, then from a more kind of left wing perspective, you've kind of talked about this already a little bit, but I'd like to come back to it is from the left wing perspective a criticism of UBI is that it strips people of dignity, of kind of purpose and meaning and so on and so on. But a lot of that kind of your takes as a given works from certain, you know, specific premises which we've kind of universalized at least in specific places, you know, perhaps where there's, you know, an influence of what Max Weber might have called the Protestant work ethic, where we attribute kind of moral value to toil and labor and hard work as an indication of kind of merit and virtue and in one historical moment divine providen, maybe. So without wanting to sound like a kind of loopy lefty hippie, how can we kind of address that? How can we kind of talk about different ways of configuring meaning and value and purpose, decoupling that from work? And just to mention in the book you kind of cite, this is slightly different dimension, but I'd like to include it here. You cite a hunter gatherer society in what is now South Africa who work about 15 or 20 hours a week without wanting to kind of, you know, make any kind of, you know, romantic kind of pleas to return to some kind of pre industrial Eden. You say that that model has something to teach us in industrialized economies. We're obviously not going to go back to hunter gatherer societies, but there's something about the way that they configure work which you think is relevant to us. So could you talk a little bit about that, please?
- [39:36]
Andrew White
I think Hannah Arendt makes this distinction between work and labor. So she says a lot of what we talk about in terms of work is actually labor. And labor I guess has a. Not necessarily on the left, but in her perspective it has a more negative connotation, we're laboring for someone else. Whereas if we work it implies a degree of autonomy. And so it's a case of promoting work rather than labor. So in a sense, even if we do less work, that's good if it reduces the amount of labor we're doing, if you see what I mean. And again, we shouldn't be wedded to this idea of a 40 hour week. We should do whatever needs to be done in the time that it takes. And you're probably familiar with David Graeber who talks about the late David Graeber who talks about bullshit jobs and that basically we don't need a lot of these jobs is what he says. They're creative for the sake of it, they're existing for the sake of it. It's labor, it's not work. He also talks about the bullshitification of jobs, which means that let's say I'll give my own example rather than talk about someone else's job. But as an academic, I guess about 50% of what I do, possibly more hopefully is worthwhile. Teaching, research, doing things like this, but probably about 40% is not so worthwhile. It's taking registers, you know, doing a lot of kind of admin, a lot of self promotion actually, which you kind of think, well we don't really need to do that. And so we do need to think about work in that sense. You know, let's try to get do stuff that is worthwhile rather than thinking, well, you know, andy is working 25 hours a week on teaching and research, but we need to bump him up to 40. So let's, I mean this people don't say this explicitly, but this is the organizational logic, isn't it? We need to bump them up to 40 hours. Therefore let's get all this kind of admin. And what I often find as well in organizations, not just in academia that I've worked in, is that people will say, well, there's too much admin. Let's employ another administrator. And actually the admin goes up. And why is that is because the administrator creates yet more admin because the administrator is justifying his or her or their own existence. So creating more. So again, I think if we can get away with this sense of the need to create work for the sake of it, and we've all done it, if I've been in a job where I kind of feel that I'm idle for a short while, I start going around trying to do something because I think, well, the boss will say, what is this point of this person? If he can't find work for 40 hours, we might as well just get rid of him. So I think we do need to think about work in that way. It'll be difficult, but you know, we do have experiments like the four, four day week. A lot of people, you know, I know some of my colleagues now in academia are working three or four days a week. They don't get paid the same wage. But you know, so it is becoming increasingly common. I think we should encourage those kind of modes of work, as it were.
- [42:47]
Joe Williams
Right, thanks. So the final question then, and this is speculative, what's the likelihood of us seeing UBI implemented in 10, 15, 20 years time? I realize that might be a slightly awkward question to answer, but do you have any thoughts on this? Have you given any kind of interest to this?
- [43:09]
Andrew White
Yeah, I think unfortunately it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. A fully fledged universal basic income. So what I've kind of started to look at are ways in which you can bring in kind of smaller incomes to get people used to the idea. And then in a sense what you might say is once people are used to the idea, then it's easier to increase the level than to eradicate it altogether. So I would look at, and I looked at this in the book, the Alaska Permanent Fund as a model which has been running since 1982 in the state of Alaska. And it's basically funded by a kind of sovereign wealth fund based on oil drilling license or the revenue from oil drilling licenses. So they pay a dividend every year and it kind of fluctuates. It's usually at least 1,000American dollars every year. And it's for every person. So in a family of four that could be 4,000American dollars or even more every year. So it's not a living wage. But it has become so popular that when they had a referendum in 1999 where there was a proposition to abolish it, something like 70 odd percent of Alaskans said that they wanted to keep it. Now bear in mind that Alaska is a Republican state, it's not a democratic state, it's by no means socialist. And I mean even a Democrat in the United States is not really a socialist, as you know. So I think that's the way to go really. I mean, I think if you look in the UK the winter fuel allowance, which, which in many ways you look at it and think, well, this doesn't really make sense because it came in in the late 1990s, it's only £300, hasn't gone up with inflation. And actually a lot of people now who support it and were vehemently against this abolition probably didn't support it back then. But the point is once you start giving people money every year for more than kind of 10 years, then they get used to it and it's very difficult to abolish it. And this is known as kind of path dependency. Once we're on that kind of path, it's very hard to deviate away from it. So that's what I would say about universal basic income, that I wouldn't try to implement something immediately, a fully fledged universal basic income. But if we could bring in something where even if you pay someone a thousand euros a year or something like that, let's say in Portugal, €1,000 a year, I think over time people will get used to the idea and at a certain point you might say, well, let's raise, could be the case there's some kind of crisis and you might say well, let's just raise it for this year. Once you've raised it for that year, it becomes very difficult to bring it back down again. If you think about in the uk the business rates during COVID were reduced quite drastically and now the government is trying to put them back up again. And there have been many and it's been quite politically difficult for them because a lot of people have said, well, the pubs are closing down, the local shops are closing down. So I think that's my hope. Once you get a foothold, as it were, that's something you can build on. So I would say in 20 years time we could get into a position where we have not a fully fledged universal basic income, but something that is universal and that is a good contribution to the household budget, as it were.
- [46:25]
Joe Williams
So a question of kind of getting society kind of acclimatized to the idea via gradual increments, kind of normalizing. The idea that you can get money for nothing. If that's not simplistic, way of putting it. Yeah. That you can kind of, you know, get people kind of used to the idea and kind of familiar with it, which, you know, in a way kind of happened during COVID with. With furloughing. In some ways, that was a kind of, you know, an instance of people demonstrating that actually this is viable, this can happen, can't necessarily be sustained at that level without some kind of drastic kind of reconfiguration of economic distribution and so on. But it did kind of introduce that idea and kind of, you know, showed that there is, you know, a certain viability to that logic and so on. Okay, great. Well, I think we'll leave things here then. So, Andrew White, thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to speak to you.
- [47:20]
Andrew White
Pleasure to speak to you, Joe.