Mandatory Participation Series Contents
UBI skeptics might point to psychologists who say humans have a strong, deep-seeded desire for a meaningful life, to work and contribute to their fellow humans. People who fail to find such meaning tend to be miserable. We have all heard stories of unhappy trust-fund babies who never seem to be able to get their lives together. A critic of UBI might point to this observation and say “why offer people the opportunity to idleness, an opportunity that makes no one happy?” They might argue that the introduction of UBI would lead to a nation full of unmotivated, directionless, and miserable people.
Although I believe the psychologists who say that people have a desire to do something meaningful with their lives, I don’t think this observation provides any reason to oppose UBI.
To connect this observation to a reason to oppose UBI, one has to add two additional claims. First, people are weak-willed. Although contribution makes them happy, many won’t do it unless someone forces them. Second, the threat of homelessness, malnutrition, and destitution is the best motivator for people who don’t know what’s good for them. These beliefs involve the same self-serving, paternalistic double-standards I discussed in earlier posts in this series. We don’t apply this reasoning to privileged people, but we imagine that disadvantaged people don’t know what’s good for them, and we decide that what is good for them is to take jobs serving more advantaged people. We need to have more respect for disadvantaged people.
If disadvantage people don’t take your job, maybe your job doesn’t involve a very meaningful contribution. Most of the jobs disadvantaged people can get involve no more than serving the whims of people wealthy enough to hire them. In some jobs, one can see a connection to serving the greater society; in others, it’s not so clear. Say I’m a janitor in a telemarking firm that tries to fool old people into buying bad investments. This job won’t give meaning to my life. A system that forces people to take whatever jobs they can get just to remain housed is not one likely to channel them into jobs that involve a great deal of life satisfaction.
A UBI provides not just the opportunity to refuse jobs but also resources that the individual can put toward any project they believe is meaningful to them. Many workers are so busy keeping themselves alive that they can’t plan their lives. This constant necessity of taking the first bullshit job that comes along is often a barrier rather than a bridge to life-satisfaction. There are many things people with a UBI can do to build a meaningful life. They can improve their education, enhance their skills, create art, care for someone who needs help, volunteer, or look for a simple, working-class job that actually does something beneficial for society rather than taking whatever job keeps them off the street no matter how meaningless it might be. Respect for the disadvantaged means respect for their choices.
I doubt that the stories about the misery of trust-fund babies are representative of all people who are freed from the threat of homelessness. For every story you can tell me of a poor-little rich kid, I can tell you stories of rich kids who went on to become captains of industry, excel in the arts, become great scientists, or even become President of the United States of America. It’s not just one or two presidents, senators, and governors who came from wealthy families: it’s most of them. Who are they to lecture the disadvantaged about how bad idleness is?
To the extent that the stories of miserable trust-fund babies are true, maybe the problem is that not they have a trust fund, but that their trust-fund is too large. UBI is basic. If you live entirely off of your UBI, you will be tied for the lowest living standard in the country. Literally any job at any wage will improve your living standard, and many jobs will greatly improve it. That’s a powerful incentive. That’s not true for a lot of trust-funders. Many of their trust-fund incomes are much higher than they can foresee themselves making in business. Therefore, the incentive for the trust-funder to get a job or start a business is much weaker than the incentive of the UBI beneficiary.
What if I’m wrong? What if a significant number of people actually do become directionless when UBI is introduced? There are a lot of things we can do without forcing people into the workplace. These include counseling, better schooling, listening to their complaints, responding to their needs, a year of mandatory service for all, guaranteed job for everyone who wants one, and so on. But whatever solution we choose, we should have the same solution for rich as we do for the rest of us. If we care enough about the 99% to use the threat of homelessness to get them into the labor force because we believe it’s the only way they’ll be happy, then we need to show the same care for the children of the wealthy by exposing them to the same threat. If we don’t care enough about the children of the rich to save them from their own weak will by doing them the favor of forcing them into the labor market by threat of homelessness, we shouldn’t do that favor for everyone else either.
I’ve considered the question of whether I’m wrong, so now I ask readers to consider: what if the UBI opponents are wrong? What if the mandatory-participation economy leads to tens of millions of people living in poverty and destitution? What if it leads to millions of children growing up in poverty and suffering for the rest of their lives because of it? What if it leads to millions of preventable premature deaths? What if it leads to many members of the middle class feeling like they’re stuck in meaningless, bullshit jobs? We already have a mandatory participation economy (for the 99%) and it has already proven to be consistent with all of these enormous problems. I don’t think it’s a good idea to pass up a program that could reduce or eliminate these problems because of an imagined paternalistic fear. We’ve lived with the side effects of mandatory participation long enough. Let’s give voluntary participation a try.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the posts in this series were written with the intention of going into my forthcoming book, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge for MIT Press, and many, if not most, of the ideas presented here did make it into the book, but the publisher suggest I soften the wording and some of the arguments, because as is, in this version of it, “the anti-UBI crowd seems like a bunch of mustache-twirling robber barons,” and she rightly thought that the antagonistic stance would be less convincing than more confrontational one here. So, for the book, I made those changes, but I liked what was left out as well. I thought there must be a place for it. And I decided that place was on my blog. I refer everyone to the book because it has a different approach; because it benefits from peer review, copyediting, and more extensive proofreading; and because it has important ideas that aren’t here. Also, many of the arguments here are developed more fully in other books and articles of mine, most of which you can find on my website: www.widerquist.com.
Karl Widerquist, Karl@Widerquist.com