- 1 year ago
- #considerthis
Around the world, anxiety is rising. Incomes are stagnant, jobs are unstable, the cost of living keeps climbing. And into this moment of instability and uncertainty, comes an idea that’s been dismissed, debated, and now increasingly taken seriously: a basic income for all. On this episode of #ConsiderThis Melisa Idris speaks with Professor Guy Standing, labour economist, author, and founding member of the Basic Income Earth Network, an NGO that campaigns for basic income for all as a right. Professor Standing was an economic adviser in the Prime Minister’s Department in Malaysia in the 1980s, and has worked as a social and labour policy adviser with various other governments around the world, including the US and South Africa.
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00:00Hello and good evening. I'm Melissa Idris. Welcome to Consider This. This is the show
00:15where we want you to consider and then reconsider what you know of the news of
00:18the day. Now around the world, anxiety is rising. Incomes are stagnant, jobs are
00:25unstable and the cost of living keeps climbing. And into this moment of
00:30instability and uncertainty comes an idea that's been debated and dismissed
00:36but now is increasingly being taken seriously. A basic income for all. Now my
00:42guest tonight is someone who has spent decades at the forefront of this
00:46conversation, Professor Guy Standing. He's a labour economist, an author and a
00:52found and the founding member of the Basic Income Earth Network which is an NGO
00:56that campaigns for basic income as a right for all. Professor Standing was an
01:02economic advisor for the Prime Minister's Department in Malaysia in the 1980s so
01:07we'll talk to him a little bit about that. He's also worked as a social and labour
01:11policy advisor with various other governments around the world including
01:15the US and South Africa. So Professor Standing, thank you so much for being on
01:19the show with me today. It's a pleasure. You had a fantastic keynote session
01:23earlier today at the International Social Wellbeing Conference in which you
01:29touched on several things. So about a decade and a half ago you warned of an
01:33emergence of a new class, a new social class. You called it the precariat and they
01:40are not defined by just financial insecurity or financial precarity but also the fact
01:45that there's chronic uncertainty, there is a lack of agency and instability in the world. So I'm
01:53curious to know, is it 14 years now since you first coined the term, has that group
01:59changed? Has the precariat changed, that precariat today does it look different from
02:04when you first coined it 14 years ago? I wrote this book, the precariat, the new
02:10dangerous class. It was published in 2011, right? So at the time I was analysing how it
02:19was growing all over the world. People not only in unstable, insecure jobs but with low
02:28volatile earnings, in debt and not having a narrative to give to their lives. They're
02:38living bits and pieces lives and they know it and their level of schooling or
02:44education is often above the level of job they can expect to get and they're
02:49losing the rights of citizenship. Now when I wrote the book I was aware that this
02:56is mainly about the young, mainly about women, mainly with people minorities and I
03:01wrote on page one that unless politicians woke up to it, there would be the emergence of a
03:08political monster. Now I think since then, and the book has been translated into 25 languages,
03:18including Chinese, but not sadly so far Malay, it's gone into a number of additions and the
03:25composition has been changing. To start with a large part of the precariat were people falling out of
03:36old working class communities and traditions. Many of them didn't have a lot of formal education and
03:44these people feel they've lost yesterday. They feel that yesterday is better than today and they listen to
03:54populists. They listen to Donald Trump or the equivalent in Europe or Modi.
03:59Make America great again. Yeah. Now the second group in the precariat I call the nostalgics. Now this group
04:08doesn't have a sense of the present. They're the migrants, the minorities. They don't have a sense of home.
04:16They feel they've lost a present. Now this group won't vote for fascists or populists, but they are disenfranchised.
04:29They feel cut off from society and they're demonized by the first group and by some others as the cause of the problem.
04:37But of course they're not. They're not. And there's the third group, which are the young, with more women than men,
04:45who go to college, go to education and their parents and their teachers said if you do that you will have a future.
04:52And they come out and they haven't got a future. And they are very angry and annoyed and they often have debt.
05:03And they are looking for a new politics, a new utopian type of ideas to lead them.
05:11Now the composition you asked me about has changed. But unfortunately, we've got to the point where it hasn't changed enough.
05:22And the atavists, that first group, have just re-elected Donald Trump in the United States.
05:30Because there's been an alliance between the plutocracy, the plutocrats, the Elon Musk and everything, who sold a false agenda to the insecure part of the precariat, who voted for them.
05:45But the progressives, the people who've lost the future, they didn't vote for Trump. They didn't vote at all.
05:53And so this composition is changing. But so far, we're in a dangerous period.
06:03Did you anticipate the composition changing?
06:05Yes. You did. Oh, yes.
06:06So what is it that you think the political class or politicians do not understand,
06:14governments fail to understand about this political monster that you've described?
06:20Well, I think for a start, the far right have understood the precariat.
06:26This far better. Far better than the old left.
06:30OK. The old left wanted to put the bottle back in shape.
06:35OK. And their agenda is essentially social democratic.
06:41They wanted jobs, more jobs, more full time jobs, more decent wages. OK.
06:48Well, that's not going to happen.
06:51Not going to happen in the sense that more and more jobs don't pay enough to give a person a dignified living. OK.
07:00And in a sense, it shouldn't be, if you took a sensible approach, that wouldn't be too worrying.
07:07You could adjust. Because what I've described as rentier capitalism. OK.
07:12It means that more and more of the income being generated in production and in the markets is going to the owners of property.
07:21OK. They're taking it all. The financiers, the people who are owning the intellectual property, patents and so on, they're taking more and more money.
07:29The precariat is doing jobs and having to do much more work than ever.
07:36Much of the work that the precariat do is not recorded. It's not recorded.
07:41They're searching for short term jobs. They're applying for jobs. They're doing more retraining.
07:47And this is exhausting. More care work, more care work, more volunteering, but they don't get income.
07:54Now, we have a crisis because the old left groups, if you like, haven't woken up to the fact that you need to change your social protection system
08:09to give security to people to recycle the income being generated in the rentier economy in order to give a share
08:22and encourage people to adopt a new way of living. OK. Which involves a lot of work. A lot of work. OK.
08:29We all want to work. 99% of us want to work. Because we want to improve the lives of our loved ones, our communities, ourselves.
08:37And you don't need to force people to want to work. But the jobs that are being offered are not sexy, to put it mildly.
08:47Many of the jobs, people say, I don't want to do it. Right. They just do it because they have to.
08:52Could you explain a little bit or elaborate a little bit more about rentier capitalism and its unfortunate consequence of inequality?
09:01And how you think basic income for all would be the, you described it as a social vaccine, which I'm thrilled with this phrase.
09:11So talk to me about this basic income as a social vaccine. How might it work?
09:16And why do you think it's a necessary correction from rentier capitalism?
09:20Well, I think that if you go for conventional economic growth, as most governments are, GDP growth,
09:28by now they should have learned that almost all the extra income generated goes upwards into the plutocracy and the elite
09:41and some coming down into salaried, high-level jobs.
09:46It's not going down. It's not trickling down.
09:49It's not trickling down. No.
09:50It's not trickling down. And in that context, you say, let's, let's realize that jobs have only been a fetish for a hundred years.
10:03A fetish?
10:04A fetish. Because before that, most people in the 19th century, the 18th century, or going back throughout history,
10:13would have done anything they could to avoid being in jobs. I'm serious.
10:18They, and all the rebellions in my own country, Great Britain, all the rebellions throughout our history
10:25were about trying to stop having to be in jobs so that they could be doing work on their own
10:32and commoning and doing other activities. Now we have to, we have to have an imaginative approach to this.
10:40Now the problem we have today is not just inequality and inequalities, but chronic insecurity. Okay?
10:50Which of course for the precariat is the number one phenomenon. Now insecurity is, is a pandemic at the moment.
11:00But it's mainly about uncertainty. Now I'm an economist and uncertainty for an economist is not like ordinary risk.
11:09Yes.
11:10Or, or a contingent, what we call contingency risk. If you have a job, you have a probability of becoming unemployed.
11:19So I can work out what's the probability of people becoming unemployed. And then I can work out how much the loss might be.
11:28I could work out a social insurance system that you could give people security.
11:34Right.
11:35Today we have a different situation. We have a situation where any of us could be hit by systemic shocks.
11:43A classic case was the COVID pandemic, right? It hit whole communities. It hit people who never thought they would be at risk.
11:52The same with natural disasters. The same with financial crises. These are systemic crises.
11:58Now, we don't have a social vaccine. And therefore, when these shocks hit, millions of people are affected.
12:10And what I was arguing in my books and things, not only are they affected in the process, but people are fearful all the time of that happening.
12:21So, it plays on stress. And that stress induces ill health, morbidity. And what we've seen is a rising number of deaths of despair.
12:34That's the term. Deaths of despair. Particularly among the young. Okay? Young women in rich countries.
12:43The suicide rate has gone up tremendously. And the attempted suicide rate. And it goes all the way through life.
12:52But the point is that if you mean that young people in the precariat have illnesses, have cardiac problems, have mental problems,
13:06that shortens their life span and their active life span. So, it's something that's cumulative through their lives.
13:16So, it's not just the young. It's a whole thing.
13:19Okay. So, basic income as a social vaccine to this chronic instability that you talked about.
13:26Can I ask you about how mainstream this conversation has become in the time that you've been working on this?
13:36Has it become more acceptable now? And I'm curious to better understand where that resistance is coming from.
13:43What do you think makes people balk at it? Is it ideological? Is it political? What is it?
13:50I think we're winning the debate. Okay. More people now? More acceptable.
13:56I'll come to that. I mean, I think that it's been a long journey. But let me, for your listeners, your viewers,
14:05let me define what I mean by a basic income before we discuss the evolution of the idea.
14:12The idea of a basic income is that every individual citizen, a usual resident citizen in Malaysia or any other country,
14:23has periodic modest payment per month. It's an amount which gives some basic security.
14:33It's not a high level. It's paid individually, so that it's paid equally to each man and each woman
14:40with a smaller amount per child given to the mother, the surrogate mother.
14:44It's unconditional in behavioral terms. In other words, you don't have to do X, Y and Z in order to get it.
14:52And it's unconditional in terms of marital status, work status or age,
14:57with supplements paid for people who've got disabilities because they've got extra costs of living.
15:03So you would want everybody to have an equal material base.
15:09Now, the simplest rationale is that it's a matter of common justice.
15:18Okay. Every society I've ever worked in, and I've worked in many, many countries,
15:26except private inheritance of private wealth. If I'm not mistaken, that's a lot of something for nothing.
15:35The persons receiving it have done nothing to deserve it, other than being born in a particular bed.
15:43The right family.
15:44Now, if you allow private inheritance of private wealth, why don't we have public inheritance of public wealth?
15:54We know that, and people like Warren Buffet have the sense to recognize it,
16:02the income and wealth of every single one of us is far more to do with the efforts and achievements of the many generations before us
16:11than anything we do ourselves, right?
16:14But I don't know if your mothers and your father, your grandfather, etc., did more than mine, right?
16:21We don't know that, and we can't know that.
16:24And therefore, if you accept private inheritance of private wealth, you should say shared inheritance of public wealth.
16:31Public wealth.
16:32So, for me, that's the first justification.
16:35Second justification, if you're religious, if you're religious, you can say,
16:41look, God, Allah has given us unequal talents, unequal capacities to make money, unequal capacities to be clever, all right?
16:52And in a sense, a basic income is a compensation paid to everybody for those who don't have that capacity.
17:01Now, I believe it should be universal in the sense that every person who's a resident in a community should be paid equally.
17:11And the reason I do that is that targeting has huge exclusion errors.
17:17In other words, if I say I'm only giving it to the poor, I've got to identify the poor, prove that they're poor, do the paperwork.
17:26And we know, we know from hundreds of policies all over the world that there is high exclusion errors.
17:35In other words, targeting on the poor results in many of the poor not getting anything.
17:40Yeah.
17:41And high inclusion errors, a lot of the people who actually get it are not actually poor.
17:46And then you have a poverty trap.
17:49A poverty trap means that if you are getting something because you're poor, if you try to become non-poor, you lose the benefit and you hardly get any extra.
17:59It's the benefits cliff.
18:01It's called a poverty trap.
18:03You lose what you've been getting before, yes.
18:05A poverty trap.
18:07In addition, with the modern labour markets that we have, we have what I've called in my books a precarity trap.
18:15Now a precarity trap means this.
18:18If you're unemployed, the sort of job that you're likely to get to get back into a job is going to be short term, casual, low paid and last for a very short time.
18:32Okay.
18:33Now you may spend months trying to get some benefits and then they tell you, you've got to take a short term job.
18:40You could be out of a job, again, applying to get it and be in the queue.
18:47Yeah.
18:48So you could actually easily end up with much less by taking that short term job.
18:54Now this is stupid.
18:55Okay.
18:56So we create our existing schemes, not only poverty traps and precarity traps, but moral hazards.
19:05A moral hazard is you don't do something that you would otherwise do because you'd be penalized.
19:12Hmm.
19:13So you don't do it.
19:14You don't take that short term job even though it would actually give you some nice extra money.
19:18Yes.
19:19But it also encourages an immoral hazard.
19:21If you're poor and you know you're going to lose the benefits and you take a job on the side, you wouldn't declare it, would you?
19:28I mean, come on.
19:29I mean, we'd all behave like that.
19:31Okay.
19:32But then you risk becoming criminalized.
19:33Right.
19:34Which is crazy.
19:35So for me, a much better system is you give people a low basic income with supplements for disability and then you have an insurance system built on top of that for things like unemployment, for accidents, for frailty and so on.
19:51So you have a multi-tier.
19:52But you give everybody this social vaccine.
19:56Now, what we found in our pilots, in our experiments, in places like India, Southern Africa, in Brazil, in Canada, in the United States, in Finland, in Wales, we just completed a pilot.
20:10Oh, wow.
20:11So many places.
20:12So many places.
20:13What happens is that when you give people a modest basic income, their mental health improves, their mental bandwidth improves.
20:21The stresses you talked about.
20:22Exactly.
20:23Their physical health improves, both short term and long term.
20:27They behave better.
20:29And please listen to this, because this is the biggest prejudice that we hear all the time by people who don't know what they're talking about.
20:38They say if you gave a person a basic income, they would become lazy.
20:42They won't want to work anymore.
20:43They won't want to work.
20:44They won't want to work.
20:45We find that if people have a basic income, they work more.
20:50M-O-R-E.
20:53And they're more productive in their work.
20:55And the reason is they often have more confidence.
20:58They can often buy clothes.
20:59They can often pay for commuting.
21:01They have more energy.
21:03They take more risks, entrepreneurial risks.
21:06One of the things with the basic income scheme in part of South Korea is that the young people became much more entrepreneurial.
21:15They took more risks.
21:16Wow.
21:17Isn't that what you want?
21:18Yes.
21:19Now, for me, and the same with schooling.
21:23You know, it often leads to say, okay, now I've got a basic income.
21:27I can take a risk of going to college and going, taking more.
21:32So, it's wrong, that prejudice.
21:36The other prejudice is that we can't afford it.
21:38Okay.
21:39Yeah.
21:40That it's not fiscally sustainable.
21:41Now, I've just told the prime minister that I salute what his government is trying to do in raise the share of the total income in the country.
21:54It's going to people who do labor and work from 32% to over 40%.
22:01I think that's a laudable objective.
22:04Very good guideline.
22:06One way of doing that is to take the subsidies that are being given in this country.
22:13Okay.
22:14Huge number of subsidies.
22:16And have a rationalization.
22:19But we know that subsidies are regressive.
22:23In other words, they increase inequalities.
22:25They are inefficient.
22:27They are subject to cronyism and all sorts of corruptions.
22:32But if you don't recycle them in a way that improves income security of the precariat, people will be very angry.
22:43Right.
22:44And they will be right to be angry.
22:46Really?
22:47And this is an opportunity to reach out so that Malaysia can be a leading example of combating the drift to populism,
23:00combating the drift to morbidity, more short-term active lives because people are suffering from internal illnesses, cancers and things.
23:13And there are various ways I've explained in my book.
23:16Building up capital funds and then paying a gradually rising amount that makes it feasible.
23:23And I believe it enhances freedom.
23:26Let me give some example.
23:29An example was in southern Africa, in Namibia, where we did a pilot.
23:34And at the end of the pilot, I called some young teenage women across.
23:39They were wearing nice new t-shirts.
23:41I called them across.
23:42I said, what's been the best thing for you for having a basic income?
23:47What's been the best thing?
23:49And they were giggly and, you know, they were teenagers.
23:54And then one of them had the courage, talking to me, I was a foreigner and all right.
23:59One of them said, excuse me, but before, when the men came down from the fields at the end of the month, with their money in their pocket, we had to say yes.
24:12Now we have our own money.
24:15We say no.
24:16That's freedom.
24:17That's freedom.
24:18And for women to be able to walk out of abusive relationships or to be having a sense of agency is vital.
24:32And that's why I've found that even though sometimes women's groups are, you know, caught suspicious of these schemes,
24:42once they see ordinary women who've got it and how, ah, it gives me power.
24:48And I can afford this for my child and you can't go off with it because the child are mine.
24:55Okay.
24:56It empowers.
24:57Now, you don't have to be Einstein to work out that this is how human beings behave.
25:06And if everybody in the community suddenly has some basic income security, what it does is induces solidarity.
25:15Ah, sense of community.
25:17Sense of solidarity.
25:18Yes.
25:19And what you see, I remember another thing we saw in another African pilot is that once everybody had basic income,
25:28they formed a local committee to advise on children's education.
25:34And what they were doing was they were going to families who were not sending the children to school and saying,
25:41now you have your basic income.
25:43You can.
25:44You can send it.
25:45You must.
25:46Okay.
25:47And it had changed everything.
25:48So you had 99% attendance rate in the primary school.
25:53Now, that sort of change, as I was saying in my speech with the prime minister, has feedback effects.
26:02In other words, it means that the efficiency of your public schooling is improved.
26:07Your efficiency of your public health is improved.
26:10It saves public money and improves economic growth in the longer term.
26:16So you have a multiplier effect and you liberate.
26:24And that's why when I see that sort of thing, I break down sometimes.
26:29You just say, this is what a basic income can do.
26:34That's right.
26:35Professor Standing, I could talk to you for another hour or so, but I won't keep you here.
26:39Thank you so much for sharing some of your insights and the work that you've been doing in this area.
26:44I appreciate your time.
26:46It's been a pleasure.
26:47That's all the time we have for you on this episode of Consider This.
26:49I'm Melissa Idris, signing off for the evening.
26:51Thanks so much for watching.
26:52Good night.