WCW - Episode 3

Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.

Guy Standing: The basic income would enable more of us to shift from labour to work. To work like care, like volunteering, like community work, like ecological work, which is currently unpaid and unvalued in our national accounts.

Natalie Foster: It is so clear that work in America is fundamentally broken. That what we once called low wage workers are now called essential workers and they are literally risking their lives to keep the service sector of America running and yet on minimum wage in America, you couldn't feed a family. You have to supplement with another type of work.

James Suzman: If we start digging into our deep history, to the origins of homo-sapiens 300,000 years ago, when we look at them, the general sense is that it's unlikely they had the kind of heavily hierarchical societies that we associate with inequality today. Inequality is a pretty recent thing.

Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.

I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking ,’who cares who wins?’

In the first two episodes of this series, we explored how the personal choices we each make every day, how we travel, how we eat, have a profound impact on our environment, but it is hard to promote choices like organic food and electric cars without addressing the uncomfortable truth that sometimes these choices are prohibitively expensive, which brings us to this episode’s central question, can you afford to be green when you're not rich?

There are exceptions of course. Second hand items, eating less meat, wasting less are all cheap ways to reduce one's impact. Meanwhile, paradoxically wealthy communities have significantly higher carbon footprints than poorer communities. For example, the richest 10% of the world are responsible for half of all emissions.

And to put that in perspective, that includes the majority of people in countries like the UK. Meanwhile, the average person in the USA has a carbon footprint equivalent to 150 people from Ethiopia. The title of this episode pays homage to an article written by the American novelist, Alison Stine in 2019, when she studied the financial and time cost of trying to make green choices in rural America.

Alison Stine: I’m a writer and a novelist from rural Ohio in Appalachian in the United States. I've lived most of my adult life in Appalachian, Ohio. It's one of the poorest counties in the country. My parents did teach me love of the earth and my parents have tried their hardest, even though we didn't come from much and it hasn't always been easy in the places where we lived to be environmentally conscious and to be green. I think that affordability for all should be one of the first concerns, but it's usually often the last. More than 730 million people live in poverty, according to the United nations in 2015. So I think that helping all people really does help the environment too. Going green is often not just a matter of money, but a matter of time. It takes longer to wash things by hand, to wait for the bus rather than drive. In some ways we have to go back to realise love of the earth. And I think that something that we've seen a resurgence from recently. How important it is to have fresh food close by and to walk places rather than drive. So sometimes the way forward is to look to the past and to look to art in nature for how we can go on.

LC: Yet when it comes to consumption, why are sustainable options often more expensive and who is really paying for them. As Stine wrote in her article, ‘it's overwhelming to think that the burden of keeping the world alive rests on the shoulders of consumers and frankly it shouldn’t,' which takes us from personal choices to political policies. In reality, sustainably produced goods should be the cheaper options as they are reducing the bills to taxpayers now and in the future to deal with the impacts of climate change and pollution. Indeed in 2006, the British government commissioned the Stone Report, which found that the cost of dealing with climate change was already higher than the cost of stopping it.

Most economists argue, we are operating in a false economy in which the true cost of things is not being shown because we aren't charging companies to pollute. The International Monetary Fund calculated that by not pricing for the environmental and social costs of pollution, we are essentially globally subsidising the fossil fuel industry at a cost of $5 trillion a year.

Meanwhile, by paying people low wages to produce cheap goods, we perpetuate poverty and inequality. As the old adage goes, if it's cheap, someone else is paying. So how do we get out of this bind? Almost everyone I interviewed for my book, advocated rigorous carbon pricing as a way to quickly remedy the economy to show the real cost of goods  Here for example is Elon Musk on the topic.

Elon Musk: Energy for future generations will either be renewable or it will collapse. Essentially the price of carbon is not zero, there’s a real cost to it. But it's currently, especially in the US, effectively priced at zero.  

LC: Put simply carbon pricing would make destructive business practices more expensive and more sustainable options would have a fairer chance to compete. This would incentivise companies to reduce their pollution and allow more sustainable options to scale and potentially get cheaper by scaling. But carbon taxes have a fundamental issue as economist Guy Standing told me, presenting an interesting solution to it.

Guy Standing: Carbon taxes have one drawback, which is that they're regressive. In other words, if you have a carbon tax, that's going to be a higher percentage of a poor person's income than of a wealthier person's income. And therefore, the only way that politically carbon taxes and eco taxes will be acceptable, is if you guarantee that the revenue gained from those taxes is recycled to everybody as carbon dividends, as part of the basic income payments, as an equal payment to everybody. But the essence of a carbon tax system and this revenue redistribution goes with another beautiful advantage. One of the reasons we are seeing a depletion of nature is that we focus far too much on labour as resource depleting activity.

The main way by which the vast majority can earn an income today is through labour. And we have a crazy statistical and economic accounting system that is woefully out of date and says the only labour that is involved in the labour market is work. So if, for example, I pay someone to look after my elderly mother, that increases national income. If I look after my elderly mother, myself, that doesn't increase national income. It's not counted as work. And it doesn't count. And the basic income would enable more of us to shift part of our time from labour to work, to work like care, like volunteering, like community work, like ecological work, which is currently unpaid and unvalued in our national accounts. And we have to have a future where we overhaul our concepts of work.

LC: For me, I mean, there's lots of reasons I'm attracted to basic income, but the way that you articulate it in terms of a carbon dividend, I find interesting because it seems to me that sustainable options often appear more expensive because the unsustainable versions aren't being priced correctly i.e. we aren't pricing for pollution, we aren't pricing for damage. But also you need to create more equality so that people can afford better choices. So I love the dovetailing of essentially pollution taxes with a basic income, as you've done by talking about a carbon dividend as a way to potentially address the different complex aspects of this issue of affording basically a sustainable life and a sustainable system.

GS: Yeah. I would like to add to that Lily. In recent years, particularly after the financial crash, the governments have facilitated the loss of our commons, our institutions , our public amenities, our health services, social housing. They’re all part of our commons and a good society needs a revival of the commons. And we should be taxing the profits being made from certain commercial interests being given in effect our commons. If you have beautiful public parks, beautiful public libraries, that enables you to have a better standard of living.

And I would not accept the arguments, that having a more ecologically balanced lifestyle would be more expensive, on the contrary. If more of us had allotments, if more of us had access to the land to grow crops, vegetables, fruit and so on, we would have greater respect for nature, greater connectivity with the simple beauties of life and more control of the way we use our time.

But as I said earlier, the stupidity of our statistics is that if I go and work on my allotment, I wish I had one, I would not be counted as doing work. In fact, they would say, why aren't you doing a job. But that's actually the sort of activity that we should be encouraging. And I noticed some figures recently that the number of people applying to have an allotment has just ballooned since the pandemic began, because people are trying to connect better with nature.

LC: Universal basic income or UBI as it's often called is an idea that's been voiced since the 16th century, which in a present day world of automation, rising inequality and the ever looming threat to recession is seeing an intellectual and political renaissance in a formidable way. In California in the US, Mayor Tubbs, the youngest and first African-American mayor in Stockton's history, was originally inspired by the concept of UBI when he read Dr. Martin Luther King's last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, in which Dr. King wrote, ‘I am now convinced that the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure, the guaranteed income.’

Mayor Tubbs:  So Stockton is actually much more like other parts of America than when you think of California. Stockton is in the Central Valley. Incredibly diverse. It's a city of about 320,000 people. It's 35% Latino, 35% white, 20% Asian and 10%. African-American. The oldest Sikh temple in the country is in North America. At one point we had more Filipino people in Stockton than in any place in the world outside of the Philippines.

The median household income is $45,000 very strong working class roots. It’s actually a 58/ 42 Dem/Republican split.I think that's important because the conversations we have in Stockton about economic inclusion, economic security, aren't happening in the liberal bubble or silo. They’re happening across party lines. Half of my council is Democrat. Half my council's Republican. It's really forced us to lean in in some of these conversations and figure out how do we talk about a policy that's seen as liberal, that’s actually good for everyone, in a way that everyone can get behind.

So part of that, we realised that my first year in office, that poverty was probably the crux of a lot of issues we're facing not just in Stockton, but in this country. So I had a research team. I said, I need you to find the most radical interventions for poverty. Then give me a program, give me the craziest policy you can come back with. And they came back a week later with a Basic Income. I said, okay, well, so you just give people money and that's going to solve all these issues that we're facing? And I told him, I said, I remember Dr. King talked about this before he passed. I think it's an interesting conversation. I just got elected. I'm not about to lose reelection. My first eight months in the office talking about we're going to give people money and they see that just bounce back from the current bankruptcy.

But then serendipitously, I met Natalie Foster on the conference. We're talking about the work ESP was doing and how they're looking for a city. And I said, you know in Stockton we have a task force that's looking at how we create a basic income in the city. And a match made was made in heaven.

So for the past year, we've been having conversations about the dignity of work, about opportunity, about this idea of the commons, about this idea of should people work as hard as they work and not have time with their kids and be sick and they still can't pay bills in that  type of community where they live in. And we piloted the Basic Income demonstration called Seed. So starting in February, 125 families are given $500 a month and tomorrow they actually get their second disbursement.

But it's been really interesting for Stockton to be ground zero for the conversations, because for our history, we've been ground zero for bankruptcy, for crime, for foreclosures. And now we're ground zero for lifting up again, the stories that people who are working and working incredibly hard, sometimes working themselves to death, filled with stress and anxiety and worry, and not working for yachts or not working for mansions, but working to pay for lights. Working to pay for water, working to pay for medical bills. And it's really caused me to be more of an advocate and realise that I don't want to live in a society, and I don't wanna live in a community where folks don't have at least the basics taken care of because they are contributing and they are part of this common good.

LC: I spoke with Natalie Foster co-founder of the Economic Security Project who were working with Mayor Tubbs and other American leaders to create UBI pilots across the US.

Natalie Foster: So young mayor Tubbs in, you know, 2017 reads this book and says, I want to do this. I want to make this a reality. He and I actually met at a conference. I was at the time running economic security project and we had, we were looking for a city to demonstrate the idea. And so we teamed up and he launched the first city led demonstration of a guaranteed income. So 125 families in Stockton were randomly chosen. It was originally 18 months where these families would receive $500 a month with no strings attached.

It's been extended. Mayor Tubbs has extended it, raised the money and did it because of COVID so that people wouldn't be kicked off in the middle of a pandemic, to, I think 24 months now. And we know a lot, right. We know that people use the money in very basic ways. The largest expense is goods. They're purchasing things that they've needed.

Then it's, you know, energy and utilities. It's groceries. They're putting food on the table, but almost more importantly than how people are spending the money is what the money means in people's lives. So we know, one, that folks are buying time and this doesn't show up on the ledger, but when you have $500 a month, you know, there are a number of people who have been able to quit a third gig or a second job and spend time with their families.

The second thing that I think is really worth noting is there's early indicators, that something as simple as an income floor also has impact on people's sense of belonging to a community. Do I feel like I belong and I can connect in a deeper way with people around me? And their sense of hope. Do I feel like I want to wake up each morning? And just knowing that $500 a month is coming in, may make a difference in something as profound, as mattering and hope.

LC: And what about, so somebody, you know, maybe listening and thinking, it's a nice idea, but how do we afford it? And does it breed apathy and what are the different criticisms and obstacles you feel set in the way right now? And are any of them valid? Are there any issues that you think we should be mindful of?

NF: You know, I think there were a lot of criticisms before COVID that have fallen away. Like it is so clear that work in America is fundamentally broken. You know, that what we once called low wage workers are now called essential workers and they are literally risking their lives to keep the service sector of America running. And that on minimum wage in America, you couldn't feed a family, you have to supplement with another type of work.

And that has just been laid bare in this crisis. And so I think that, will people still work? The answer is yes. The answer's always been, yes. All the data shows that people continue to work, but they have more agency in how they work. And that is something that I think is important to everyone. That's certainly the biggest criticism.

And the other one that you allude to is, well, how will we pay for it? There's so many different policy choices of how you would implement a guaranteed income. There's some versions that are means tested by income. So families who make under a certain amount in the United States would get it, families that make over would not. There’s other ways you could do it, where you would give a Universal Basic Income to everyone in the country, but then you'd claw back through taxes.

So if you do it that way, you'll have one price tag, but then an actual price tag at the end. So it's actually, you know, it's really hard to put one price tag on the idea. If you do well by the economy, you should do well by society. So, you know, a wealth tax has a lot more support now than it ever has before. The financial transaction tax, which is a small tax on high-frequency trading would generate billions of dollars a year.

So there are a number of ideas for revenue and candidates like Elizabeth Warren have articulated them. You know, folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has articulated some of them. So it's not a question of, is there enough money. It's a question of political will. It always has been. And that's where I see more room for optimism, is in the political will.

LC: I don't know if you've come across this idea of carbon dividends? So the idea that you could pay for Universal Basic Income in part through carbon taxes, which are increasingly necessary in some ways .

NF: Yeah, that was an original idea that piqued our interest in my economic security project, when we launched four years ago in part, because we have a natural experiment in the US in Alaska where you almost have the inverse of it.

So 40 years ago, the oil companies wanted to come in and drill for oil in Alaska. And a very forward-thinking Republican, which is our right of centre party, said all right, you can do that,  and we'll, we'll put a tax on it and we'll put the royalties into a permanent fund in Alaska that all people of Alaska will own. And as that fund grows, it will pay out dividends to Alaskans.

So now every year, every man, woman, and child who's a resident of the state gets paid out with no strings attached a dividend that is around 2000 US dollars. So for a family of four or six, that really does start to be significant. And I always loved the poetry of a carbon tax sort of building on Peter Barnes’ work, who wrote a book called Dividends for All, that says it doesn't have to be about drilling. What if we put a tax on usage and returned those funds to Americans?  

Hillary Clinton, after her 2016 bid for president, said in her memoir, you know, we looked at this idea. We actually even built a program. We were going to call it Alaska for America. And it would have been a carbon tax with a dividend, but we never ran on it. And that was one of her regrets.

So yeah. That idea, I think has a lot of power and promise and, you know, it would have to be supplemented with future revenue sources, right. Because ultimately we all hope the carbon usage goes down, but I think it would be a great way to start the pipes,. You know because here's the thing about something like a guaranteed income or, you know, like social security in the United States is a useful example. It's hard to create something new. People are skeptical. There's the psychology of creating something new is so much harder than the psychology of taking something away. People will fight tooth and nail to make sure that something isn't taken away. So I really feel that once the pipes are laid and once a bit, you know, even a small form of a guaranteed income is created, it will be much easier to build on than it will be to take it away.

LC: The data seems clear that financial inequality is growing. For example in the US the medium household income has grown at about a 10th of the rate of GDP in the last four decades. Sometimes it might appear that inequality is somewhat inevitable and natural consequence of our system. Yet has it always been there? Are human societies naturally wired to be unequal or is another way possible, in the past, and d perhaps the future? According to Dr. James Suzsman, the anthropologist you met in our last episode, equality is not inevitable and there is a lot we can learn from the most enduring and sustainable human societies that earth has ever known.

Do you think the inequality has an origin? And if so, where would you place that? Obviously as an anthropologist, you have a probably fairly expert unique perspective on it.

James Suzman: We often have quite the idea of inequality and equality with similarity and sameness. And of course, people are born with different abilities, different skills, different capacities and so on, but the question is whether you put a value on that. And I think if we start digging into our deep history and when I say deep history, I mean, going really right back to the origins of homo-sapiens 300,000 years ago. When we look at them, the general senses that it's unlikely they had the kind of heavily hierarchical societies that we associate with inequality today.

Inequality is a pretty recent thing. And I think it's a recent thing because the reason our species were so successful as hunter-gatherers was the fact that they had societies where the real aversion to hierarchy. During the 1950s and 60s there was a period where anthropologists were able to work with these societies. And the most important of which of course was the Ju/‘hoansi, a group of what are more commonly known as Kalahari Bushmen, or San. And they live in the Northern Kalahari and they are the group that I started working with in 1991. But what we know about them is that these societies were hugely egalitarian and there were fiercely individualistic as well.

So these were acephalous societies, which had no formalised structures and institutions such as chieftainships or priesthoods. There were individuals who were shamans. There were individuals who were good hunters, but there were fiercely egalitarian. And if people didn't agree with what was happening within their particular group, which was usually between sort of 10 and 30 individuals, they'd vote with their feet and go and join another group.

Part of the reason why foragers were so egalitarian is because, as I talked about, they have this system of demand sharing. And the reason that demand sharing existed was because they took the view that their environment shared with them. So if their environment shared with them, then of course they share it amongst one another. It's sort of seen as this sort of logical process.

When you start producing your own food, the relationship with your environment, ceases to be a sharing relationship. It becomes a productive relationship. One where people invest time and energy into planting a field, nurturing it, weeding it. So on and so forth. You putting quite literally all your eggs in one basket. If that harvest fails, your risk is existential. So it produced a sort of whole new emphasis on the creation and management of surpluses. And the minute you start creating and managing surpluses, demand sharing ceases to be a functional way of redistributing things.

And people obviously are sort of starting to look after and focus more on themselves. So you invite hierarchy into the space. It’s an almost organic product of that kind of scarcity. So hunter-gatherer has never really endured that kind of scarcity, and if they did, it was a shared scarcity.

With farmers there was this sort of induced scarcity because of the nature of the productive cycle. And so it placed a premium, not only on working hard, but also on the ability to manage and secure and control surfaces. And with that came an ability to basically exercise power over others.

LC: And what do you make of universal basic income? Do you think that that's an interesting concept? Are there any others you think we should think about in terms of pushing against inequality and towards less hierarchal communities?

JS: I think universal basic income is sort of short term and practical and sensible thing to do. I'd like to think of it probably as a transitionary step to a different way of thinking. It may be something that manifests or something that pushes us in that direction. My sense is that the way we have organised our society now is we're tied into a whole bunch of economic structures and institutions. And those economic structures and institutions all have their origins in the scarcity that was associated with the early agricultural societies.

So there was this kind of constant fear, this constant obsession with scarcity. We no longer live in that era. We now live in an era of such astonishing abundance, you know, at a cost to our planet as well. Yet all our economic institutions are based on this fundamental assumption of scarcity. You know, look at it, the basic definition of economics, the study of how we distribute scarce resources, but what if resources aren’t scarce?

The Ju/‘hoansi didn't think resources were scarce. They thought they lived in a generous environment, which fed them pretty much everything that they needed. And I think the fundamental shift we need to do is to transition effectively to an economics, which recognises that scarcity, the kind of scarcity that shaped our economic institutions actually no longer exist. And that requires a fundamental reshaping of the economy. I think taking steps like universal basic income, I think is a really good way of going about it. Improving redistributive mechanisms ultimately begins to take the steam out of hierarchy.

In fact, by simply giving everybody universal basic income, the amount of money you'd save, administering convoluted and ridiculous social grant systems that we have at the moment, would be huge. I tend to think that greed tends to be more of a cultural phenomenon and in the same way that Ju/‘hoansi de-value greed, a matter of fact, that you don't devalue it, it’s just a cause for ridicule and mockery. So I think it is a cultural phenomenon and therefore I think it is eminently changeable.

LC: Universal basic income seems to be an idea whose time has come. Whilst I believe it is essential for us to make the personal choice as we can every day to try and help push towards an environmental future, it is also important to recognise our own limits, and the political and social reality we sit within. So what are the policy ideas we can get excited about? Personally I'm inspired by the concept of universal basic income, carbon dividends and different manifestations of the green new deal that are seeing political voice now.

Like any bold political idea, all of these ideas have different ways of manifesting. Different risks, different opportunities, but it's only by piloting testing and learning, we’ll see what works. Indeed, flexibility was central to president Roosevelt's original approach to the New Deal, after which the Green New Deal is often muddled. He said it is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it, frankly, and try another. But above all, try something.

You can hear more from Professor Guy Standing, James Suzman, Natalie Foster, Mayor Tubbs, Elon Musk, as well as many others in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book narrated by me. Join me on the next episode of this podcast, where I'm going to explore the fundamental question of whether we can create system change from the inside.