This is the 20th installment in a series about extending the Green New Deal to confront multiple global crises. Read Part I (Deconstructing environmental racism), II (Rural renewal), III (Upcycle the war machine), IV (GND manifestos), V (No oil bailouts), VI (No corporate ecocide), VII (Defund the police), VIII (Zero Covid approach: NZ), IX (Finnish equality lessons), X (Denmark stops drilling), XI (Costa Rica rewilding), XII (Indigenous justice), XIII (Free public transport) XIV (No borders), XV (Chile's democratic revolution), XVI (Undermining neoliberal dogma), XVII (Climate Litigation), XVIII (Degrowth) and XIX (Bullshit Jobs).
Stockton, California, adds to the list of places that have conducted a successful trial showing the social value of a universal basic income (UBI). Named the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, 125 residents were given $500 a month with no strings attached in a two-year trial that ended in February 2021. Results were positive.
Impacts from the city’s experiment with UBI included improving people's mental health, reducing financial precarity, decreasing people’s falling into debts, and increasing those in full-time secure employment. The trial was the first of its kind in the U.S., pushed by then-Mayor Michael Tubbs to revitalize his Bay Area after it was devastated financially by the 2008 financial crash and Great Recession.
Universal Basic Income works
Previous trials of UBI show similar results the world over:
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A Canadian trial in 1970s rural Manitoba, called Mincome, showed impacts that included health improvements, less hospitalizations and more students completing school.
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In Madhya Pradesh, India, during an experiment with UBI between 2011-12, positive outcomes included empowering women and reducing impoverishment.
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A nationwide Finnish trial, conducted in 2018-19, was reported to boost participants' well-being, confidence and life satisfaction.
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In Kenya, recent UBI trials show similar positive outcomes, including fewer participants who caught Covid-19.
On the news site Vox, Sigal Samuel showed that by 2020, UBI trials had happened or were happening in almost every corner of the planet.
In the time since, and especially due to the pandemic, interest and further trials are spreading. This includes trials in the U.S. cities of Baltimore and New Orleans, and in Los Angeles County – three among a growing list of places in the U.S. that have signed up with Mayors For a Guaranteed Income, founded June 2020.
Universal Basic Income schemes can differ immensely. On one end of the spectrum are market-orientated versions, which compensate for cutting government spending on welfare and public services with a regular payment that is not necessarily enough to live on.
Yet the revolutionary potential that UBI offers is exactly in the opposite context: where the measure is provided alongside high quality welfare provision and universal public services. This way it offers to redistribute wealth, something that needs to be central within a green and just future.
With all the positive implications of this model, it’s worth asking: after so many successful trials why have we not yet seen a massive roll-out of UBI? As a UBI campaigner once told me, it is not as if governments trial and test other new economic ideas such Quantitative Easing (QE), bank bailouts, or massive financial deregulation.
We can afford Universal Basic Income
In many ways the potential of UBI explains why it has not yet happened on a widespread scale. It offers a chance to redistribute wealth from the richest and most powerful. For those opposed to it, the most frequent argument boils down to: is it affordable, and can we live in a society where the working classes are not compelled to work wage labor jobs?
The latter question was dealt with in this series’ last segment on “bullshit jobs.” As David Graeber identified, there are many jobs out there – involving administration, or information jobs – that if they disappeared, nobody would really notice. One example would be the costly bureaucracies that act as gatekeepers on whether people get benefits. If these disappeared, the money could instead be spent on UBI.
In addition, there are many “batshit jobs,” ones that are deadly for the planet or people and which do not need replacing. These include jobs in the prison industrial complex (Part 4) and military industrial complex (Part 8).
There are many other ways nations could pay for Universal Basic Income. These include progressive taxes (where the rich pay proportionately more) and making sure that instead of using loopholes and tax havens, everyone pays their fiar share of contributions towards society.
Secondly, ending massive corporate subsidies, especially to dangerous and deadly industries such as fossil fuels. Through Quantitative Easing, countries already pump money into economies, which benefits richer people with assets. Instead, UBI could be used to ensure everyone has the means for a good life.
There are other options as well. In the current banking system the majority of money is created when people take out loans, especially mortgages. The customer takes on the debt from money that banks essentially “create” from thin air.
Instead, governments (or municipalities or other public institutions accountable to the public) could take control of money creation and distribute it to everyone more evenly.
When it comes to affording something, it basically comes down to deciding what we think the thing is worth. We need to ask: is a system designed to extract wealth for the ever-richer 1%, and a system based on ecological extraction, affordable? Or should we try something else?
Instead, we could redesign the financial system around the values of sharing and not exploiting people or the planet. Towards this, Universal Basic Income offers a good starting point.
We cannot afford not to do UBI
Another way to consider UBI is that in the face of ever worsening financial and political inequality, we cannot afford not to structurally alter everything – for everyone's sake.
UBI offers a way to build an ecologically just future because, for the sake of the planet, there are jobs that will need to disappear. UBI can ensure that people working, for example, in the fossil fuel industry are offered a just transition, whether they can find work in renewables in their area or not – and whether or not they choose to take on that work.
On a broader level, UBI offers the chance for people to re-evaluate what they value most in life, something that is traditionally reserved only for the well-off since most people are forced into jobs.
Bringing in UBI alone does not necessarily predicate an ecologically sound future. Yet it could be brought in among a wider swathe of degrowth policies. UBI could be a centerpiece of measures where people share more, work less, and are able to consume less. Imagine cities without the impact of the rush-hour, or where community gardens spring up everywhere.
Imagine people being freed to do the things that they love, care for who needs caring for, and so on, rather than being tied to work.
