On UBI (guest post)

In which my friend Laurence says some things I agree with and some things I don't.

Universal Basic Income is an Anti-Feminist Proposition

Universal basic income (UBI)—the idea that the government should emit regular payments to all citizens—feels a little played out in 2024. The idea has been debated at length for over a decade now; sympathetic governments have conducted their basic income experiments (Everywhere basic income has been tried, in one map: Kenya; Iran; Alaska; Stockton, California; and more - Vox), and the results of those experiments have been collected and analyzed (Removing Welfare Traps: Employment Responses in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment - American Economic Association (aeaweb.org)). The data is in: UBI works.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Western politicos have put UBI back on the shelf despite the accumulating evidence of success, labelling it as a probably good but ultimately impractical idea that carries with it the faint whiff of utopian idealism. This consensus soft-pedals a dark reality that was underappreciated during the UBI debates of the 2010s: namely, UBI structurally reinforces the neoliberal move towards privatization and alienation, it buttresses income inequality, and it degrades social institutions. It is, at its core, an anti-feminist policy proposal.

I hear the smug, nasal voice of the policy wonk: ‘What are you talking about it? UBI reduces poverty, it allows people to live more comfortable, secure lives, and it has no impact on employment. How could a policy that makes lives easier for people and families (Manitoba’s Mincome experiment | CMHR (humanrights.ca)) possibly be an anti-feminist policy?’

That’s a great question tiny technocrat in my brain.

Allow me to explain.

First, we’ll have to figure out exactly what we’re talking about here. There are so many ways UBI could be deployed, some certainly better than others. Which version of UBI is antifeminist? Is the best-case version of UBI that I’ve fantasized about late on Sunday nights as I stew in my own dread about Monday morning also antifeminist?

(Yes. Yes, it is.)

To be fair to the UBI idea I’ll take a broad look at the breadth of UBI policy, including the untested, best-possible models we all hope for.

Let’s start with the least-promising version—the one was constructed by thinkers on the neoliberal right; this is the most popular version of UBI, the one that’s been broadly discussed by mainstream economists and trialed by governments all over the world.

We can take our cues from one of the original architects of UBI as a policy proposal, Milton Friedman. Friedman was a free-market fundamentalist and the father of the far right ‘Chicago’ school of economics (Friedman’s economic vision was implemented under the guidance of the bloody Pinochet regime in Chile). He advocated for a form of UBI called the ‘negative income tax’ which would see payments made by the state to any citizen whose income fell below subsistence levels – this was the version of UBI trialed in Finland in the late 2010s (they skipped the ‘U’ and called their policy ‘Basic Income’).

Fellow right-wing free-marketeer Friedrich Hayek endorsed a similar position years before Friedman:

“The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”

That may seem counter-intuitive. Why would neoliberal economists endorse a national ‘mincome’ project? How does that align with their commitments to small governments, low taxes, unregulated markets, and free trade?

What excited these folks about UBI was the unspoken consequences of such a policy. For neoliberals UBI is appealing because it has the potential to replace most (if not all) social services. They envision a society where instead of massive government providing education, health, housing, water, or anything else, the state would provide all citizens with a cheque; citizens would then use this money to meet their various needs on the open market.

For neoliberals UBI has the potential to create a world where individuals are free from all entanglements with massive government bureaucracies, where everyone is empowered to make decisions about the services they receive, and where the forces of market competition are unleased to ensure that the best possible services are available. It is first and foremost a mechanism to facilitate privatization (which, not for nothing, was the cornerstone of Nazi economic policy. (Microsoft Word - NaziPrivatization VERSFINAL per EEA.doc (ub.edu)).

Let’s pause for a moment and ask a purely pragmatic question: would it work?

Direct cash payments, while an incredibly important policy option in a well-regulated economy, do not interface well in economies dominated by the market. It’s just too easy for the forces of capital to take the money straight out of citizens pockets by increasing prices. Big business would have to do nothing more than raise the rent and your UBI payment is suddenly going straight into their pockets.

This is the problem with the ‘universal’ element of a ‘universal basic income’. With targeted financial supports like disability payments or employment insurance, rentiers find themselves unable to respond in the same targeted fashion: they can’t raise the rent for just the people using wheelchairs. But when everyone gets a few thousand dollars a month it’s easy for bourgeoisie to double their prices and simply take the lion’s share of UBI payments for themselves.

This fundamental instability is compounded by the fact that UBI is a politically weak program. Unlike other social programs, UBI is an easy target for big business and their operatives in right wing politics: without any unionized workers to defend it, with an easy-to-demonize based of service users (Drug addicts! Single mothers! Students! The horror!), and a multitude of backdoors open to degrading the quality of the program (decoupling UBI payments from inflation, for example) any UBI program would be easily neutralized in the parliaments and congresses of the world.

In the context of a country like Canada a UBI would 1) be used as an excuse to further privatize public services, 2) lead to the elimination other sources of financial benefits, and 3) quickly degrade to the point of uselessness. Without any additional legal and economic supports UBI would result in worse services and greater precarity for all non-rich Canadians.

But surely this isn’t the end of our discussion. What about the left-wing supporters of UBI? Don’t they have anything to contribute to this conversation? Surely they have a way to separate the baby from the bathwater and create a liberatory UBI that would improve material conditions for all. Anarchist sociologist and pop-intellectual David Graeber has long been an advocate for UBI. Here’s Graeber from his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs:

“[A]ny UBI payment would have to be enough to live on, all by itself, and it would have to be completely unqualified. Everyone has to get it. Even people who don’t need it. It’s worth it, just to establish the principle that when it comes to what’s required to live, everyone deserves that, equally, without qualification. This makes it a human right, not just charity or duct tape for lack of other forms of income. Then if there are further needs on top of that, say someone is disabled, well, then you address that, too. But only after you establish the right of material existence for all people.

[…]What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work. Its immediate effect would be to massively reduce the amount of bureaucracy in any country that implemented it.”

This polished version of UBI looks a lot like the model envisioned by Milton Friedman: recurring payments to individuals allowing them to have their needs met in places other than state bureaucracies (presumably the market).

The explicit commitment that payments be high enough for everyone to sustain a dignified life is a nice addition though.

Let’s take Graeber impulse to refine UBI and push it even further. Let’s peg it to inflation, let’s make it a supplement to existing services and not a replacement, and let’s enshrine it in charters and constitutions to give it every possible protection from hostile parliaments.

That should do it, right?

Under these conditions business’ attempts to capture UBI payments through increased prices will create inflationary pressures which will result in the increase of UBI payments. This cycle of inflation will reduce the value of the wealth hoarded by business without reducing the quality of life of citizens. As a result, the gap between rich and poor will decrease, and a more egalitarian society will emerge.

This Keynesian euthanasia of the rentier class might seem positive. However, even under inflationary conditions UBI is still just cycling currency back to massive corporations and increasing their power. Under these circumstances UBI contributes to the ongoing centralization of capital into fewer and fewer hands. This is the fundamental issue with UBI in all its forms: it is a massive redistribution of public wealth straight into the hands of big business. If deployed, this version of UBI would hasten movement of late-stage capitalism towards monopoly. It would empower big business at precisely the moment when all our energy should be directed at weakening it.

‘Okay,’ the tiny technocrat in my head is saying, ‘we can fix that too’.

Capitalism’s move towards oligopoly, monopoly, and cartel is not new; it’s a well-known bug that’s been observed and commented on since at least Marx. Good liberals have taken these concerns seriously and come up with politico-legalistic solutions that try to prevent the centralization of capital while preserving the core economic framework of capitalism. These efforts primarily take the form of antitrust laws.

For the purpose of building up the best possible UBI, let’s assume it comes into effect in a world with effective antitrust legislation as well as protective regulations like rent control that prevent profiteering by businesses both big and small. The high tax rates necessary to enact these policies will offset the rate at which the business-types hoard the wealth that UBI funnels into their hands (addressing the Piketty r>g problem Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” explained | (ted.com)). Let’s also assume we can count on successive governments to carry these policies forward and combat capitalism’s tendency towards monopoly. Under these circumstances we can even imagine a UBI without inflationary cycles; if markets are competitive, if cartels and oligopolies aren’t coordinating price increases, if the falling rate of profit is addressed through market regulation… Well, UBI could be a balancing force in a stabilized economic system.

Surely we’ve cracked it now. Surely a Keynesian economy backed by a Millibrandian politics could create a liberal society where UBI can help families and communities thrive. Surely this is a feminist UBI.

But is it though?

Even in this fantasy economy of benevolent capitalism backed by a Thousand Year Reich of parliamentarians immune to the varied corruptions of merchant’s lucre, UBI remains dependent on the commodity form. It structurally reinforces the commercialization of goods and services that have no place in commerce (i.e. housing, food, water, energy, internet, childcare, education, healthcare, transportation, clothing, etc.). In taking the essentials of life and forcing them into the realm of business even the most fantastically progressive version of UBI separates us from one another and presses us into living as alienated individuals fending for ourselves in the maelstrom of the market.

Even at its best, UBI supports the neoliberal illusion of separation; the fiction that we stand alone without dependencies on the networks, the care, and the technologies that we build and sustain together. It reifies the individual as an island and weakens the bonds from which we build community. It is this core impulse that makes UBI profoundly anti-feminist.

Okay…

So, if UBI is out, what can replace it?

The alternative is for us to accept the responsibility we’ve always had, the responsibility to care for one another. The alternative UBI is UBO: universal basic outcome. (Also known as a universal basic needs guarantee or the radical expansion of public services). Everyone must given housing, food, clothing, water, internet, healthcare, childcare, hygiene products through well funded and administered social programs. By decommodifying the essentials for a dignified life, by taking large sections of the economy out of private hands, and by backing these projects with unionized labour, we make the concept of care our shared responsibility and our shared strength.

Unlike UBI, UBO is an example of a feminist economic policy. It is an example of a broader economics built not on some supremely alienated homo economicus, but on relationality. This feminist economics would recognize the obligations we have to each other: the obligations we have to care for one another, to nurture the world that sustains us and our children, to bring greater ease and dignity to all.

An authentically feminist economics would make it impossible to hoard wealth at the expense of the health and wellbeing of the rest of planet. It would strengthen the interstitial tissue that connects us. It would prioritize the care necessary for women, families, colonized peoples, people of colour—for all of us—to live healthy, dignified, joyful lives.

In short:

Laurence and I will record a follow-up podcast-style conversation about this idea sometime this month. If you have a question, or something you’d like us to discuss, put it in the comments!