(Nimue)
I'm not a great believer in magic bullets, but in terms of interventions that could radically improve everything, Universal Basic Income (UBI) has always struck me as a likely candidate.
If we gave everyone enough to live on, many issues would simply disappear. Every study of UBI in action has shown all kinds of benefits, including increased earnings from employed work too, reduced crime, reduced hospital admissions and more. It's easy to find information about this online if you are curious.
At the moment, the 'labour market' is badly skewed by the far that most people are a paycheck or two at most from utter disaster. That means workers can be forced to accept poor pay and conditions and jobs they hate. Give everyone UBI and unpleasant jobs would need to be a lot better paid to get anyone to do them. That's basic supply and demand economics, only turned around so that workers are more valuable and jobs less essential. We'd all benefit from that.
Having UBI would change everyone's relationships with money, time and resources. How exactly this would play out is something we can only guess at, but it would be fair to say that it would cause a radical shift in how consumptive capitalism works. Scarcity is key to capitalism as it stands. What would happen if we instead based out systems on sufficiency? If no one was afraid of becoming destitute, how would our buying and consuming habits shift?
It's interesting to think about the work you would choose to do if you had UBI. So much essential work is unpaid for, and carried out by volunteers. Would you do more of that if you could afford to? Would you invest in study, or start your own business, or grow food, or something else entirely?
One of the things we know from studies so far is that most people don't just take the money and do nothing. Most people with access to UBI explore ways in which they can flourish. It creates the scope for more people to fulfil their potential and be of more benefit to others. It creates the possibility of kinder, fairer societies where no one is running flat out just to survive. My guess is that it would also lead to us doing the planet a lot less harm because our lives would not be dominated by consumerism in the same way.
The social justice aspect of UBI has always appealed to me. I believe strongly that no one should be obliged to suffer and struggle – we have the resources to house and feed everyone, we just lack the political will. I think if we gave more people the opportunity to choose how they want to live and what they want to do, that we'd have happier, healthier people leading lives they found more meaningful, and that we'd be better placed to work together to meet everyone's needs, and take restorative action for the planet as well.
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