public amenities instead of basic income

Dear SCORAI’ers,

Some of you may find the attached document about the public alternative to Big Pharma interesting. It is a fine report issued by the Next System Project in the US. The proposal in it focuses on the US but it can be just as well applied in other advanced economies with a strong research sector.

https://thenextsystem.org/medicineforall?mc_cid=9bc87732e4&mc_eid=e81c2d3d7d

I find this proposal to be an important alternative to guaranteed basic income proposals. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of guaranteed basic income because I see it as a massive indirect subsidy for the private sector that wants people to spend money on more and bigger stuff. This sector will surely devise the cleverest of ways to extract that extra income from citizens.

At the risk of sounding awfully patronizing, I believe that many people will spend that extra income not on better housing, live necessities, education for their children or other such “wise” choices, but on other things.

A better solution, other than distributing cash, is to create access to affordable high-quality housing, high quality free education, low cost or free healthcare, and low cost or free medicines, etc. This is why I find this report interesting.

Halina S. Brown
Professor Emerita of Environmental Science and Policy
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610
http://halinasbrown.com

Associate Fellow
Tellus Institute
2 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02438

http://tellus.org

Co-founder and Member of Executive Committee
Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative, SCORAI
www.scorai.org

Halina,

Yours is an interesting line of thought.

Do you (or does anyone) know of formal work that sets out, thinks through and compares/contrasts the two approaches?  I do not.  I know of work that argues for/assesses each line of thought separately, both not together.

Ruben

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Dear Joe, and all,

With the danger of being labeled as a retro 60s or 70s adept, I’d like to discuss the drive for more and more innovation. First, I think that it would be useful to consider public-private partnerships with strong and clear rules as to profits and ethical research. Next, biomedical research takes us with the speed of light towards cloning humans and gene-editing and whatever these new technologies are being called, without a viable discussion about the desirability of that all, and about possible negative side effects. That takes me straight to Joe’s point about innovation. While I see the benefits of biomedical innovation and we all benefit from it in our personal lives, I would like to propose that we do not take “more innovation is better” for granted; just like we are questioning economic growth and unbridled consumerism. Innovation should be led by social consensus, not by profit making.

I agree that most innovation comes from smalls start-ups; and it is not easy to regulate that; but the implementation comes through buying up of small start-ups by large corporations; and there is the possibility for public intervention and regulation.

Warm regards,

Philip

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Michael,

Reducing my reflections to this single question: “do you really want to address the climate crisis by keeping people in poverty?” misses the point of my reflections or, worse, is disingenuous. And comparing the idea of public ownership of the pharmaceutical industry to providing slabs of third grade cheese is ridiculous.

My point is that right now poor people (and not only the poor) in this country spend a large proportion of their income on corporatized healthcare, including medications as well as other basic amenities such as housing, etc. Giving them cash does nothing to change the system that produces these exorbitant prices and transfers wealth from the poor to the well-to-do and the rich. To the contrary: it indirectly subsidizes that system and keeps it more stable. It treats the symptoms, not the cause. And it is the system that needs to be fundamentally changed.

This is why (among other reasons I articulated earlier) I do not think that basic income is a good idea.

If these basic amenities become easily affordable (or perhaps free for the poor of this country) will allow these people to buy whatever they wish with the meager income they have and thus regain some dignity of which poverty strips them.

Halina

Thank you Philip, for these comments. I would go a step further with my critique of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. We all take the concept of innovation as an absolute good. But is it really an absolute good if it bankrupts the economy? Do we really have enough money as a society to pay a million or two dollars per person for the future yet unknown cures to some yet unidentified diseases? This is not a new question among moral philosophers but I do not hear it being discussed at all in the public forum. There is a reason why most of the costs of bringing new pharmaceuticals to the market is covered by venture capital: the expectation of quick and huge returns to the investors and shareholders.

Halina  

Hi Tom, Philip and all at SCORAI

If I may add something here, I think we need to take care with innovation.

I see many state and corporate interests evoke innovation in an undifferentiated way, which creates all sorts of problems, including those mentioned in this thread. Scepticism and critique are important here. However, I think that to do so in a similarly indiscriminatory way will be just as problematic. It is more a matter of what kinds of knowledge, ideas and novelties societies wish to cultivate and how: the directions of innovation to be taken. Clearly, the implications for consumption should be one guide. I like the way my colleague Andy Stirling put it recently:

“Innovation is about more than technological invention. It involves change of many kinds: cultural, organisational and behavioural as well as technological. So, in a world crying out for social justice and ecological care, innovation holds enormous progressive potential. Yet there are no guarantees that any particular realised innovation will necessarily be positive. Indeed, powerful forces 'closedown' innovation in the directions favoured by the most privileged interests. So harnessing the positive transformative potential for innovation in any given area, is not about optimizing some single self-evidently progressive trajectory in a 'race to the future'. Instead, it is about collaboratively exploring diverse and uncertain pathways – in ways that deliberately balance the spurious effects of incumbent power. In other words, what are needed are more realistic, rational and vibrant 'innovation democracies'.

Yet conventional innovation policy and regulation tend simply to assume that whatever products or technologies are most energetically advanced, are in some way self-evidently beneficial. Scrutiny tends to be through narrow forms of quantitative 'risk assessment', focusing only on particular direct risks and asking merely whether they are 'tolerable' –often at a time too late for significant change. Technologies are typically privileged over other innovations. Attention is directed only in circumscribed ways at the pace of innovation The result is a serious neglect for the crucial issue of the direction of innovation in any given area–and increased vulnerability to various kinds of 'lock in'

… Together, qualities of participation, responsibility and precaution help ‘open up’ scrutiny and accountability beyond anticipated consequences alone, to also interrogate the driving purposes of innovation.They allow societies to exercise agency not only over the rate and riskiness of innovation, but also over its direction. And they offer means to enable hitherto more distributed and marginal forms of innovation –which presently manage only rarely (like renewable energy or ecological farming) to struggle to major global scale. Together, these qualities celebrate that innovation is not a matter for fear-driven technical imperatives, but requires a democraticpolitics of contending hopes.”

https://steps-centre.org/wp-content/uploads/Innovation-Democracy.pdf

Of course, disagreeing with this argument, and seeing innovation as something to be resisted per se rather than its directions, is to contribute to the kind of democratic deliberations being encouraged here …

All the best

Adrian

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Unless we can be clear about what UBI actually entails, confusion will reign.  There are indeed many different versions, as Lanchester concedes.  But there is also a core idea: UBI is a programme to give every citizen or resident a regular income for life with no strings attached which is enough to live on and provide ‘security’.  It is not Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme. It is not even Alaska’s Permanent Fund, since $1400 a year is not enough to starve on, let alone enjoy security. Nor is it any of the various plans, from the UK Royal Society of Arts scheme or Andy Stern’s US plan or van Parijs’ start-low-and-see-how-it goes €200 idea.

All extant pilots, experiments and plans are partial.  They give money to selected groups of people or they give a little bit of money to everyone and usually payments cease after a limited period.  Insofar as there is evidence that any of these ‘work’, it is only on their own, limited terms. So what is all the fuss about? The key is that they are all promoted as way stations to a Big Idea that will transform our lives and politics. But then we encounter two fundamental issues: cost and the very desirability of this as the end-goal of progressive politics.

Lanchester’s arguments around cost are specious. He concludes that ‘many forms of UBI are more affordable than you might think.’ But the most affordable are those he correctly labels as ‘dystopian Mad Max’. It is not ‘odd’ that the origins of UBI lie with Hayek and Friedman, quite the opposite. Eliminating all collective infrastructure and services whilst giving the poor just enough money to survive and expecting them to purchase all life’s necessities in the market is a perfectly rational neo-liberal project.

Interestingly Lanchester provides no estimates of the costs and benefits of the ‘full fat’ welfare state plus UBI option.  Yet they exist. The 2016 Compass scheme for the UK is admirably honest here: despite raising income tax rates by 5p, abolishing personal tax allowances and extending NICs to all employees, the BI achieves tiny falls in pensioner and working age adult poverty and reduces the numbers reliant on means-testing by only one fifth. Luke Martinelli after exhaustive modelling concludes: “an affordable UBI is inadequate and an adequate UBI is unaffordable.”

So in truth we cannot have a full UBI and at the same time safeguard and build the social infrastructure of a generous welfare state. This crucial insight has led some of us to argue for universal basic services (UBS), a collective programme for meeting needs we all share.  This offers a radical alternative that is far more affordable and effective.

Most serious is the political vacuity of UBI as a progressive slogan for greens and the left. The overriding tasks today are keeping within planetary limits – addressing climate breakdown, species extinction and other existential challenges, whilst at the same time shifting from a greed-driven to a need-driven economic system. The central slogan should be a ‘just transition’ from the present to a future green, equitable and sustainable world. There are other movements and programmes out there to help realise this vision, such as a Green New Deal.  To spend all our political and fiscal capital on a dream that cannot be realised is irrational and perilous.