Speaker 2: 0:15

Hi, this is Umid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone. This week, our guest is Guy Standing. He is a British labour economist and also a professor of development studies at SOAS and the co-founder of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network. He is best known as a long-standing and prominent advocate of basic income for everyone, and he is also responsible for redefining and revitalizing the term the precariat.

Speaker 1: 0:42

Guy has written extensively about capitalism and labor market policy. Among his many books are Basic Income and how we Can Make it Happen. A Plunder of the Commons, a Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, the Corruption of Capitalism why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay, and the Blue Commons Rescuing the economy of the sea.

Speaker 2: 1:03

We talk about a brief history of capitalism Rentier capitalism the emergence of a precariat Plutocracy and Trump. Will AI liberate us after all?

Speaker 1: 1:15

The dignity of basic income for everyone.

Speaker 2: 1:18

The success of his real-world basic income pilot schemes.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Let's debate. Hi, this is Omid.

Speaker 2: 1:28

Ashtari and Natasha McElhone and with us today we have.

Speaker 3: 1:31

Guy Standing. Hi, guy, very nice to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:37

Thanks for taking the time. We're going to talk about capitalism today. You have written at length about its shortcomings and failings. Today, you have written at length about its shortcomings and failings, and I would like to focus on a term that you have brought to the fore, which is the precariat. Can you tell us a little bit about what this means?

Speaker 3: 1:56

Well, I'd like to start by talking a bit about the nature of capitalism today, because what has happened is that more and more of the income and the wealth has gone to the owners of property.

Speaker 1: 2:13

What we call shareholder capitalism.

Speaker 3: 2:15

nowadays it's not shareholder capitalism, because in fact it's moved away from shareholders altogether. Away from shareholders altogether. It's moved to private equity, where they buy into firms and turn the firms into commodities themselves, which allows for conglomeration and therefore more and more rents going to monopolists. And what we've seen in that process and I've developed it in a book called the Corruption of Capitalism I wanted to call it Rentier Capitalism and my publisher said Guy, no one will understand Rentier Capitalism. He read the publisher, read the book and he said it's about corruption. I said no, it's not about corruption as such. But then I thought about it and I said well, it is in a sense about corruption because they say they're promoting free markets, people keep talking about free markets and yet this is the most unfree market system ever conceived, let alone implemented. And what we've seen is an international architecture of institutions and systems whereby more and more of the income has been sucked into these owners of big property and that, of course, means that less and less income is available for people who rely on labor and work. Ok, so what we've seen in the world and statistics show this without doubt is that the share of national income all over the world, every country in the world. Even in China, share going to people who work and labor has gone down and down and down. The share going up to capital has gone up and up and up, and the share going to people who've got rents that means above what would be the case if there was a free market have been going up. Most of all. That's the first stylized fact. If you like, it's a reality.

Speaker 3: 4:13

I don't think any economist worthy of the name would question that trend. And what it's done is usher in a new globalized class structure. And this globalized class structure is fundamentally different from the old Marxist claims Marx wrote in the 19th century, don't forget. Or the class structure associated with Max Weber, the famous sociologist. It's a class structure where the top groups are gaining from property income more and more. The plutocrats at the top, the Elon Musks, the Zuckerbergs, and you name them. We all know them and we wish we didn't.

Speaker 3: 5:00

In many respects, they're getting more and more rental income. In many respects, they're getting more and more rental income. Then there are the elite who serve their purposes, who are multimillionaires and flatter their big bosses, and then there's the old salariat, the people who have employment security, pension prospects, paid holidays, paid medical leave and all those things. Now, when I was at university I remember labor economics it was expected that by the end of the last century, the end of the 20th century, the majority of people would be in the equivalent of the salariat. But it's not true. The equivalent of the salariat, but it's not true.

Speaker 3: 5:44

When I present my book on the precariat, often elderly people will be if they're there. Mostly they're not, but if they're there they often would say I'm a member of the salariat, but my son and daughter are not. Can I have a copy of your book? Okay, so below the salariat is the old proletariat. Now the welfare state and the trade unions were built for the proletariat. Those are the industrial workers, the people with trade unions and labor rights, etc. It's underneath them that's the precariat that's growing and the precariat consists of millions and millions of people now all over the world.

Speaker 3: 6:32

I get invited to speak literally all over the world about the growth of the precariat. And you define it. I'm giving you a long answer in this, but I think it's important to see the context, given what we're going to be talking about afterwards. It's defined in three dimensions. The first dimension is unstable, insecure labor, casualization.

Speaker 3: 6:58

People in the precariat don't have a sense of occupational narrative to give to their lives. They don't feel they're going anywhere. The gig economy the gig economy is sometimes used, but it's much more than the gig economy, much more. A lot of online. And people in the precariat this first dimension have to do a lot of work for labor, work that doesn't get counted by anybody, it's not in our national statistics, it's not remunerated, but they have to do it Work for the state, work for retraining, work waiting around, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3: 7:31

And this is why, in my new book on the politics of time, I've identified these various forms because we need to understand that in order to have policies to free up people's time. Understand that in order to have policies to free up people's time. Now, that first dimension is what most commentators who comment on my books and most people think is what it's all about. For me, this is the least important of the three dimensions that I'm talking about to define the precariat. The second dimension is that if you're in the precariat, you have very volatile incomes Okay. You have no access to non-wage benefits paid holidays, prospects of pensions, anything like that and you have no access to rights-based state benefits Right based state benefits Right. But more importantly than any other aspect of this second dimension is that if you're in the precarious, you know that you're living permanently on the edge of unsustainable debt, precarious living.

Speaker 3: 8:39

Unsustainable, because any accident, any illness, any mistake, you could be out in the streets. I call it the bag lady syndrome.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Right.

Speaker 3: 8:49

All your belongings in two paper bags. Existentially, it's terrifying. It's terrifying, but of course big finance wants us all to be in debt. That's where they make their money. That's where they make their money, damn it. So we shouldn't expect that this is an accidental feature of reality. Many people in the precariat are trying to maintain a previously attained level of living, but the wages are declining in real terms. They're trying to maintain a living standard, so they borrow more they have to, so this feature is existentially threatening terms. They're trying to maintain a living standard, so they borrow more or they have to, so this feature is existentially threatening.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Right.

Speaker 3: 9:31

Right. The third dimension for me is actually the most important, and that is if you're in the precariat, you are losing the rights of citizenship, are losing the rights of citizenship. You are losing entitlement to social benefits, social rights that were gained by the proletariat in the past 50, 100 years. You're losing cultural rights. You can't participate in the cultural living that you aspire to live. You're losing economic rights. You can't practice what you're qualified to do. This is the first mass class in history where the level of education, formal schooling, is above the level of labor they can expect to obtain. That is an extraordinary development. It never used to be the case, okay.

Speaker 3: 10:24

And you're also losing political rights, because you look around the political spectrum and you do not see any party that represents the precariat the old social democrats, the Labour Party, the democrats in the United States. They represent a combination of the old salariat with the old proletariat. They don't understand the precariat. The same with Labour here, the same with the social democrats in Europe, and they haven't adjusted their agenda. And if I talk to a precariat meeting in any country, as in Spain recently, when I say this, they all say yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. They don't understand us and they don't have an agenda for us. So for me, the most important feature of being in the precariat is you feel like a supplicant. You feel like you have to ask for favors all the time, to rely on others for their discretionary decency. That is humiliating.

Speaker 2: 11:38

And that's how many people feel. I don't want to drill into this for a long time, because what I really want to get into is universal basic income and how we can execute that, but we have to accept an awful lot of what you've said in order to move on to that. I do feel that there's been a precariat and it hasn't been given that name, but I don't think it's a new thing. I think that's how immigrants have always felt in societies and they've done a ton of the work that that society is reliant upon and not received recognition, not received received social support and been in a very, very precarious situation can I?

Speaker 3: 12:10

can I correspond to that? Yeah, before we go on in my books and in my talks, what I say is that the precariat in the last 15 years has been what mar, marxists and sociologists have called a class in the making, not yet a class for itself, and what that means in plain English is that people in it know what they're against.

Speaker 3: 12:40

They know what they're fighting against, but they don't know yet, have a unified agenda for a future Right. And the precariat has been divided into three factions. First faction I call the atavists. Now, the atavists are people who feel they've lost yesterday. Now, the atavists are people who feel they've lost yesterday. They've lost a sense of what their parents had or their communities had, or what even they had, and they listen to the neo-fascists, they listen to the Donald Trumps, they listen to the Nigel Farages, they listen to the Victor Orbans, the Malonis, the Marine Le Pen who promised to bring back yesterday MAGA, make America Great Again, or whatever the equivalent elsewhere.

Speaker 3: 13:30

This group votes for the far right. The second group I call the nostalgics. Now, these are the migrants who don't have a present, they don't have a home anywhere. You're absolutely right. There's always been migrant groups, but nothing like today the number of people who are migrant. I'm a migrant, I'm a migrant, I live in Europe, but many millions of people are migrants and it used to be the case that a migrant would enter a country as what called in one of my books a denizen and becomes a citizen. Okay. Now, more and more, millions of people feel they're going the other way. They're going the other way. They're going the other way, whether they're migrants or others, and this sense of nostalgia means that people feel disengaged from the politics that they see around them. Typically, they don't vote. Typically, they don't participate. The recent American presidential election, for example, only 64.5% of the electorate voted and if you look at the figures, a very high percentage of those who didn't vote at all were migrants or descendants, immediate descendants, of migrants.

Speaker 3: 15:00

It's the same in this country. We had a very, very low turnout in the recent July general election and many of the migrants they stay out of politics so they don't see a politics that's relevant to their experience.

Speaker 3: 15:15

But every now and then the pressures become too great and there are days of rage. That's when you see the arson or something like I saw in Stockholm once when I was there talking about this, and this happens. Okay, they are looking for a politics of paradise too. Okay, a future. The third faction is the faction I typically find I'm speaking to when I do my talks, invited talks and that is the young mainly young more women than men who was going to college, going to university, and their teachers and their family promised them a future. If you go there, you'll have a career etc.

Speaker 3: 15:59

Etc. And they go to college and university and they realize they bought a lottery ticket. And they come out they've got debts, they've got disillusion, they don't see a politics of paradise that's offering a solution to their combination of problems and loss of aspirations. And this group I call the progressives. Now, if we are to have a progressive transformation, a future society driven by ecological concerns, security concerns, a slow-down society, a different type of society. It's got to be led by the young members of the progressive part of the precarious.

Speaker 2: 16:44

But the young members of the progressive part of the precarious? But the young members of the progressive part of that? You're only talking about the losses and the idea that they want the same things as their parents had.

Speaker 3: 16:54

No, no, no, they don't.

Speaker 2: 16:55

There's a group of those people who embrace their digital natives and they embrace all the opportunities that are afforded to them through the digital revolution that we've had. That's a massive factor. Anyway, as I said, if we get stuck in the definition of precariat.

Speaker 1: 17:09

No, I think we can dwell a little bit. We're moving out of the definition issues here.

Speaker 3: 17:15

What you've just been saying summarizes some of the downsides of being in the precariat right. But as I've said in my books and I say in my talks they're not just victims. The progressive part in particular do not suffer from the false consciousness that labor and full-time jobs and the nirvana of life.

Speaker 2: 17:40

They reject that. Well, because you talk about the enslavement and the downside of that as well.

Speaker 3: 17:44

Yes, there is the downside. It's the downside and that's shown in mental illnesses and ADHD problems and a whole lot of things that we'll perhaps come back to, but a large part of the progressive part. They've got education. They understand the ecological crisis global warming, pollution, loss of species. They understand the intensification of capitalism and the inequities of it and they don't want the same thing as their parents or whatever. There isn't a atavistic orientation in the young who are in the precariat, all right, or think they're going to become part of the precariat. They're looking for a new politics of paradise and they are the people who are going to define this new progressive. We come back to some of the themes that I tried to put in the final chapter of the politics of time imagining what a good society would look like if the progressive party and innovating for that which I think a lot of people are.

Speaker 2: 18:46

I think exactly.

Speaker 1: 18:48

The point is that they're not all victims. I think that's your main thrust in the argument you brought up the US election. Let's dwell on that for two seconds. It'll be a painful two seconds.

Speaker 3: 18:58

I know.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Well, we can make it.

Speaker 2: 19:00

It'll be a bit two seconds, I know Well we can make it. It'll be a bit more than two seconds. We can make it. Unfortunately, it has to be more than that probably.

Speaker 1: 19:04

But your point is that there is a story that's currently missing to unify these three groups that you're identifying right, the nostalgics, the atavists and then the progressives. This is exactly what happened in this election outcome. Right, you have this group that has actually very similar interests in the end, but they split across the culture spectrum and across the spectrum of this election, with the progressives ending up probably more on the Democrat side, right, and everybody else ending up on the other, the atavists and nostalgics ending up on the other side of the spectrum.

Speaker 3: 19:37

What's the story here? What is the story? I've written a piece in Prospect magazine on this, and I think that what's happened on the Democrat side is they didn't appeal to the precariat right. Their Bidenomics, as it's called, modern supply side economics if anybody is interested in its definition is putting everything, all the emphasis on raising long-term economic growth, gdp growth, use of tax subsidies and everything like that. And if they were boasting about creating some high-paid jobs, it didn't reach the precarious. You've still got chronic insecurity experienced by millions and millions of Americans right, just as we have in this country and all over the world. Insecurity is not being addressed.

Speaker 3: 20:31

So you had a situation where Trump got roughly the same number of votes as he did in 2020. There was a huge collapse in the number of people voting for the Democrats. Okay, the real story is a collapse of people supporting the Democrats. The Democrats did not offer a future. You know, bernie Sanders said that they betrayed the working class and then the chair of the Democrat Party said no, they didn't. We've done more for them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think there was a dialogue of the deaf, because Bernie was half right and half wrong. They didn't appeal to the precariat. They did appeal to the old proletariat, but they're shrinking and they were listening to the Trump type masculinity and all of that identity stuff and they don't like the excess identity focus of the Democrats.

Speaker 3: 21:43

Democrats and Democrats in the US are wedded to an orthodoxy of social democracy, just as the Labour Party is in this country. Is that they didn't have a class-based politics Right, they didn't have a. They had an identity-based politics, and that puts a lot of people off. Yeah, okay, so we got meddled, whereas Donald Trump comes along with his lies and lies and lies and his terrible record as a misogynist. He's a crook, come on, and he's been proven that. I'm not saying anything that all your listeners don't know.

Speaker 3: 22:15

But he offered certainty Okay, even though most people know he couldn't deliver on certainty. He's going to settle war, he's going to settle this on day one and all that stuff, right. But he, he, he offered something, whereas the other side, what were they offering? Well, we will look at it when we're trying where they had an atrocious record. You know the atrocious foreign policy. Biden will go down in history as having had one of the worst foreign policies in the history of US presidents, leaving the Middle East in terrifying genocidal situations. Okay, I would. If I'd been an American, I would have found it extremely difficult to vote for Bidenomics and Biden Democrats. I would have had to in the end, because Trump is a threat to the world. But a lot of people said I'm sorry, I'm staying at home. And that, I think, is. And, of course, musk with his negative scheming to suppress the votes of different groups. That story will come out too. Europe, and then it'll be Germany early next year is that the so-called left are not offering a vision. They're not offering a transformation.

Speaker 1: 23:50

I think this is the biggest problem, yeah.

Speaker 3: 23:52

That is the biggest problem.

Speaker 1: 23:53

That is the biggest problem, the issue, I think here is that one. I don't know if it's the worst foreign policy record, but you know there was George W Bush who started a war, and then you know there's the stories of the 70s, where you have I mean I live through that.

Speaker 3: 24:10

I live through that. But I mean we know the Vietnam War, but I mean single things. He's left office. Genocidal situation in the Middle East.

Speaker 1: 24:20

I think it's ironic that they lost both the Arab vote as well as the Israeli vote in the Middle East. I mean, this is just weird, how you can lose both sides. Point being, let's agree that among the worst. Yes, he's up there, maybe. Let me say this it feels like Bernie has been sidelined and I think that the corporate Democrat agenda always takes the driving seat in these elections, rather than, I would say, the social Democrat agenda.

Speaker 2: 24:53

I was just looking up the seats.

Speaker 3: 24:55

The Democrats got 48.3% and I was going to say 49. And the Republicans?

Speaker 2: 25:02

got 49.3%. I was going to say 49. And the Republicans got 49.9%. So people did vote Democrat.

Speaker 3: 25:10

No, but she got fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. She definitely did.

Speaker 2: 25:15

Sure, but we're talking about it as if no one voted Democrat, I mean.

Speaker 3: 25:20

No.

Speaker 1: 25:21

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 25:22

Let me put the figure a little differently. Okay, let me put it differently Because if you look at the turnout, what it means is that Trump got approximately 33% of the electorate supporting him. In other words, not a majority of Americans supported him. Okay, the Democrats got approximately 30. Right Now, if you are the two main parties and you are the so-called progressive part and your opponent is telling lies and lies and has a record of atrocious record, and you can only get 30% of the electorate to support you, I don't think you can be very boastful about how well you did. It's the same in this country. You see, we just had an election in July and in this country, labour won a landslide.

Speaker 3: 26:19

Okay, but actually Labour got fewer votes this year than under Corbyn and I was an advisor to Macdonald and Corbyn in 1990. And they got a landslide. But they got a landslide with the support of only 19% of the British electorate. That's not democracy. That's crazy. We need a fundamental recalibration of our democratic system.

Speaker 2: 26:48

If you had, oh well, that part I yeah. I think we're all on the same page. I'm very aligned, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean we need proportional representation of some sort.

Speaker 3: 26:58

I mean, it's something I've been arguing for for many years, like others and for me, that these two elections demonstrate how vitally important for the future of democracy the louder of two megaphones who? Can ever manipulate the digital technology and the social media and lie more effectively will win.

Speaker 2: 27:33

It's a recipe for, as ancient Greece knew, it's a recipe for tyranny and whoever can get the funding, which, as we know, is corporate. What about Musk putting in 175?

Speaker 3: 27:44

I mean a million or it's.

Speaker 2: 27:47

It's loaded, loaded, whole thing is loaded there's one existential anxiety that you address in your thesis and in in the book that I read, the politics of time. I bring it up because you say that the security however untruthful and non-fact-based the promises were from Trump, the narrative that was received was this guy has certainty, he's going to give us an outcome. We can rely upon it. Of course, we can go into that for hours and we won't, because none of it makes any sense. It's an emotional response, but you talk a lot about how insecurity, and the insecurity of being in a precarious economic predicament and not knowing whether you're going to work from one week to the next, takes up so much of your bandwidth and your mental health is deeply affected by this. So the ability to then make rational choices you're not able to function on all cylinders. This idea of universal basic income would take away some of that deep stress.

Speaker 2: 28:52

I just want to address something that I feel that we're all dishonest about, which is certainty, the idea that human beings have ever had the luxury of certainty. The one thing we don't know is how long we're going to live for, or when we're going to die, or if we're going to survive. I mean, our very nature of our being is riddled with uncertainty. So, and yet you talk all the time about security and certainty and knowing. Is this a fallacy?

Speaker 3: 29:24

No, I think we've got to be talking about tolerable uncertainty. You're right, obviously, that there's always been uncertainty and there always will be uncertainty. But for an economist, the key point is this that there is different forms of insecurity. Okay, you can have a risk situation where you have a risk of ill health, you have a risk of unemployment, you have a risk of house burning. I think you can get an insurance against that. Okay, you can get an insurance against that. Okay, you can get a vaccination against many things. Now, a vaccination gives you a sense of robustness, an immunity to certain range of shocks. Okay, insurance system gives you a sense of resilience. You can recover from those shocks.

Speaker 3: 30:22

And then during the COVID I hope I'm not name-dopping in this respect, but during the COVID I got a strange call one day from Massive Attack, and the Massive Attack wanted me to do a video and podcast and song about this, because COVID represented a huge shock, right.

Speaker 3: 30:53

And basically what we've been seeing is that in the post-war, post-1945 war era, the social democratic era, the welfare system gave a sort of social insurance to the main forms of insecurity Okay, whereas what's been happening with the development of rentier capitalism and the growth of the precariat is that more and more of the insecurity has been associated with much greater uncertainty.

Speaker 3: 31:29

Now, for an economist, uncertainty is about unknown unknowns Okay, and unknown unknowns are you can't predict the probability of being hit by a shock, or the cost of something or the you know and you can't insure against it. So the balance of what has been happening is that we are facing far greater uncertainty. It's partly to do with globalization and we're exposed to much greater uncertainty where the ability to cope with them has been reduced, because people don't have the means of support, they don't have the means of security and a weaker capacity, as I've been arguing, and a weaker capacity, as I've been arguing, to recover from them. And that, I think, is so that the depth of uncertainty and the consequences, and we don't have a social network system, strong families, strong communities, strong cultural institutions, because they've all been destroyed or weakened.

Speaker 1: 32:52

I think the point is when a health issue can bankrupt you and make you homeless. It's a different quality of a health issue hitting you and you recovering from it. I think that's basically what you're saying. It's something.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Tom Friedman uses this wonderful metaphor about the mangroves or not just a metaphor literally as well, when they ripped out the mangroves in various Indonesian islands. Those islands sank because they no longer had the resilience and the protection and he talks about state institutions being dissembled that there's something fundamental and I and then I use a different metaphor because what has been happening?

Speaker 3: 33:35

something like 80 of the world's mangroves have been severely depleted and I've written a book called the blue commons about the sea, yeah, and the mangroves. The mangroves have been taken away by finance, the, the World Bank, the big private equity companies have been converting those into export-oriented for prawn farms and things like that, depleting the security of the environment.

Speaker 2: 34:03

However, I still think that the reason why someone like Trump can win with lies is because he's selling the lie of certainty and security. If we are in acceptance of the fact that we're not robust enough to accept these slings and arrows that keep coming at us, and all of this uncertainty and technological revolution, the floods, all of the disasters that we're beset with, it was ever thus.

Speaker 3: 34:34

No, but the point about your argument is that when it's got to a crisis point in the past, there has emerged a new progressive agenda to address the worst successes.

Speaker 2: 34:49

But I think that's maybe what we're in the unhappy value of now. That's my argument. That's what we're on the eve of. That's exactly.

Speaker 3: 34:57

The old left are dead men walking. Okay, I had a debate recently in the European Parliament with Beppe Grillo, who is the head of the Movimento Cinque Stelle movement in Italy, and he coined that phrase and I told him. I said I really like it because that is correct, this definition of the old social democrat. They were the progressives in the mid-20th century and early part of the 20th century, when they did promise greater security and after all, it's an ontological thing. It's something about moving towards a better situation, away from Progressing.

Speaker 3: 35:35

Today we don't have it. Today we don't have it, and it's a vacuum. But as Isaac Newton said, nature abhors a vacuum. It won't last for long. It won't last for long, but it better come quickly, because we're now in a neo-fascist phase, just as when Karl Polanyi wrote his book the Great Transformation. He basically said you know, once you get to the point where finance is totally in control and the insecurities and inequalities grow, you have a threat of the annihilation of civilization. That was his argument. Okay, until you have a re-embedding strategy. So you bring the economic system back and you produce new forms of social protection, new forms of redistribution.

Speaker 3: 36:21

It won't be the same as the old forms. Okay, but we need that, yes, and for the moment, many on the traditional left, particularly old men I mean sorry, but particularly old men are stuck in the past and they think the answer to this current economic crisis is to somehow go back and recreate the old institutions. And that's not the case.

Speaker 2: 36:48

No which are obsolete, but that's not the case.

Speaker 3: 37:06

That's sustainable and that everyone should have a right to, and let me actually bring it's only the fourth time you've mentioned that this morning, so I think we should turn to it, and I'm happy to do so, I want to put it also into the lens of the reality of technological progress, which I am very attuned to.

Speaker 2: 37:26

And the inevitability.

Speaker 1: 37:28

Let me put it this way. I would say the future is unevenly distributed and I am somewhat living in the future in this sense, and I am seeing what is going to happen here and white collar jobs will go first, as a matter of fact. Right, so it will be a world in which a lot of people will have very little to do because these machines will do that. Now, there's one element of it and I know how you're going to think about this immediately and I agree to an extent is that rentier capitalism is going to be bolstered by this, of course, right, because now you know, you have these big corporations that can do everything without even labor, but, at the same time, what it does is it brings us to a point where we have to head on, focus on this topic of universal basic income, because you cannot have 70% of the people being unemployed, because that doesn't really lead to enough demand for even capitalism to continue to function.

Speaker 1: 38:28

In that case, I think we have to talk about your premise Sure, let's talk about the premise first, before we talk about it.

Speaker 3: 38:34

Sure Okay, your premise is called the lump of labor fallacy, right, okay.

Speaker 2: 38:41

In economics.

Speaker 3: 38:41

Mm-hmm. I believe that this presentation of somehow AI and the technological revolution in general is going to be reducing the amount of work. It's complete nonsense. It's absolutely complete nonsense. Every technological revolution in history, people have come out and said, oh, what are we going to do? It's going to completely remove jobs. It was the same in the 17th century, same in the 19th century and at the end of it, there's more jobs, there's more work, there's more labor. I think this is the same Since the technological revolution began with the electronics and so on. People like me are doing far more work than I've ever done in my life yes absolutely Exactly.

Speaker 3: 39:29

We don't have an absence of work. What this new revolution is doing, as in previous revolutions and this one more so, I think, than any previous one is altering the distribution of benefits. Okay, I mean because we have rentier capitalism. Okay, so if Sam Altman and I was very pleased, I had a discussion with Sam Altman and he's in favor now of basic income.

Speaker 1: 39:54

He's put a lot of money. Yeah, they've done experiments, they've put money into it.

Speaker 3: 39:58

And he understands that with rentier capitalism, any new invention and innovation is going to give monopoly income to the owners of the patents.

Speaker 1: 40:13

Yes.

Speaker 3: 40:13

Okay. Now the patent system has been vastly strengthened by TRIPS passed in 1994, and the Bay Dole Act in the United States, which allows publicly funded research, so we should be getting the benefits to be privatized and the owner of the patent gets everything, and if you're a plutocrat like the Musks and Zuckerbergs, they just buy up anybody who's got patents. They bought up DeepMind in London when the DeepMind people were inventing things. So promptly, google buys them up, and so Lyman is a very good bloke. He backs basic income too, but they recognize that the distributions are the problem, and I think that that is the issue with AI. But we'll come back to this. Let me just comment.

Speaker 1: 41:03

I do think that certain types of jobs will completely disappear, and so I actually think it's an opportunity for us to do more things that are human to human right rather than human to computer.

Speaker 1: 41:16

so I would say being to nature, yeah taking care of other human beings right, and being somebody who, in your community, is a role model to young kids, that is still that there's a lot of opportunity growth there. I mean, if you want to focus on those jobs being even somebody who's in the hospitality industry, that is like serving other people, and these, these are more resilient jobs than being an accountant or being a junior lawyer or being you know, doing certain things?

Speaker 3: 41:43

why? And the book that you've been reading, I mean, I say that we must escape from the jobs fetish A hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 41:51

I agree with that.

Speaker 2: 41:52

And we saw evidence of this in lockdown.

Speaker 1: 41:55

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:57

And I know everyone has very different experiences, but it was extraordinary how people were not looking for approbation but would voluntarily help neighbors get involved in community projects.

Speaker 1: 42:06

That's much more fulfilling than having to, you know, do a nine to five. That gets back to your premise. Yes, it's much more fulfilling than having to do a nine to five. That gets back to your premise, yes.

Speaker 3: 42:11

I believe that this technological revolution is actually offering the world an opportunity to revive world. It's coming at the right time Because we have a care deficit. Yes, we go through life wishing we'd spend more time looking after our children or our elderly parents or our friends or our communities or nature. We go through life wishing we'd grown more vegetables and fruit, I mean whatever we have.

Speaker 3: 42:38

Or we've written more poetry, or we you know. There are so many things that we have to do. I don't buy the thesis that the AI revolution is going to remove or lessen the amount of work that we have. It will liberate work 100%, and that, I think, which leads back to the debate about basic income.

Speaker 1: 42:59

Let's talk about universal basic income, because it is very pertinent at this point in time.

Speaker 3: 43:04

Well, you're listening to a man who's been advocating basic income for 30 years, Actually a bit longer than that, I'm afraid.

Speaker 3: 43:15

And we formed a network back in the 1980s 1986 to be precise called BIEN and originally we called it the Basic Income European Network, because it was a group of economists and philosophers and activists and people in Europe and we said look, we want to explore all the dimensions of a basic income and we'll keep in touch. And I came up with a name over a few beers and we all thought it would last for a few months and then we'd all drift to our other activities. And we all thought it would last for a few months and then we'd all drift to our other activities. And we've just held, in the University of Bath, as it happens, the 23rd International Congress. We have people from all over the world who have been working and supporting and joining us and anybody listening is free to join us when the next one is in Brazil next year. The last one was in Korea the last international congress.

Speaker 1: 44:19

I really love the data section. I really love the data section on the site, where you can actually see which experiments are live, how many people are participating, how much money is going into it.

Speaker 3: 44:26

Well, can you imagine how I feel today.

Speaker 2: 44:28

That Can you imagine how I feel today that first of all, I got opportunity at the beginning of this century to experiment with a basic income scheme in Africa.

Speaker 3: 44:43

Which country in Africa? Namibia, Namibia and in South Africa. And since then we've been in Kenya and Ghana and so on, and we did a two-year experiment where we provided a very large number of people with basic income, unconditional. Now I don't use the term universal basic income, I use the term basic income. And the reason I don't is I don't like to set a hair racing, as we say, because you being realistic, we have to say that a scheme would only apply to those living in the community, whether the community is a local community or a national country.

Speaker 3: 45:24

In the long term, in the dreamland, when the whole world has a basic income, that would be a different matter. But you couldn't say that anybody coming into your country could receive it from day one. I mean, if you'd said that you're dead Politically, you're never going to get anywhere. So I never use the term universal basic income. You would have to say yes, any migrant coming into our country legally would be entitled to some sort of help, but not become a recipient of the basic income until certain conditions They've been living in the country for a certain amount of time, paying taxes, etc. Whatever, Then they became recipients. That's not an argument for not giving any help to the migrants that's completely false. But it shouldn't be part of the basic income and in a sense that would help legitimize a basic income, because it would be a weapon to defeat those that you know you're the populace to say all the migrants.

Speaker 3: 46:24

They're going to take advantage of the problem in society they're not but I mean they get away with saying that because people don't have the economics to understand that. That's not true. But let's leave that aside. So for me, a basic income is a fundamental economic human right and it goes back to in this country as I've written a book called Basic Income and I look at that in the first chapter, and it goes back to the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests Sorry, the Charter of the Forest of 1217. And what they did was they said, in effect, that there are different types of property the private property, the state property, there's nobody's property and there's commons, and the commons are what belong to all of us. The commons include the forests.

Speaker 2: 47:26

I love your chapter on the commons. It was great.

Speaker 3: 47:30

I mean the commons, the minerals under the ground, the clay, the wood, the resources that belong to we inherit those.

Speaker 1: 47:39

The air.

Speaker 3: 47:40

The air, the sea, they're all part of the commons and we inherit them. And anybody who makes profit from taking them should be compensating the commoners who are being deprived. And we need to revive the commons. The commons provide the informal, what some people have called the poor's overcoat, the informal situation In extremists. You can rely on the commons. That was the traditional thing.

Speaker 3: 48:09

Okay, and for me that's a very important starting point because I think if we're going to win the fight for a basic income, we must do it not on the basis of envy, but on the basis of this is an economic right that everybody should share, right? Okay, it's a fundamental right of citizenship, of being a human being. Okay, it's a fundamental right of citizenship, of being a human being. Okay, and for me, I define a basic income as it's a modest amount paid individually and unconditionally to every commoner. However you define the commons, okay, and it's paid as a non-withdrawable right. It's not an act of charity. You're, because you are a commoner of this country or this community, you have a right to a share. Now, that definition gets away from all the errors of our social security system, avoids poverty traps. In other words, the current system says we're only going to give help to the poor.

Speaker 2: 49:22

So you mean administratively, it would be less complicated if it was for everyone.

Speaker 3: 49:26

Well, for a start it would be not only less complicated, it would be more economically and socially just. And the moment we have a terrible system in this country and the welfare system in the US has gone the same way. The Democrats took it the same way and the Labour took it the same way. In this country we have universal credit, which the Conservatives pushed beyond what the new Labour had done Means-tested, behaviour-tested, because if you have a means-tested system, you say you only get a benefit if you're poor.

Speaker 1: 49:56

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 49:57

Okay, but if you try to become non-poor, you lose out. You have a poverty trap.

Speaker 2: 50:02

So you have a marginal tax rate of 80% 90%. Yeah, it's a fact. So if there was a magic wand and you were able to implement this tomorrow, what would be the basic income? I never answer that I know, but that's what we're interested in, I know.

Speaker 3: 50:19

I'm going to answer it, but not in the way that the typical journalist wants to answer it, because nobody knows what the ideal amount would be. Nobody knows what the ideal amount would be and nobody knows a priori the exact funding and therefore the feasibility of any particular level. What I would say is this the most important thing at this moment and here we are talking at the end of 2024, at this moment, and here we are talking at the end of 2024, the most important thing is to move in the direction of going towards a feasible basic income and away from the direction which the left and the right have been taking, towards more and more tested schemes and sanctions and all of those things taking away social rights, and that, I would say, depends on building up the fiscal capacity to pay out the basic income. That gets to the question that you hinted on earlier.

Speaker 1: 51:21

You know how do we fund it?

Speaker 3: 51:23

Now some people say you could fund it by replacing traditional benefits or raising income tax, or I think that's the wrong way to go about it. I would do what I call creating a commons capital fund Fund. Yeah, okay, which means that we shift our taxation away, in relative terms, from taxing income and consumption to taxing those who are taking from the commons and depriving and depleting the commons. Okay, so, for example, we are not going to get net zero and a common uh, combat global warming and all of that thing, unless we reduce energy consumption. We need a carbon tax, we need to make fossil fuel energy more expensive, instead of which governments are actually handing out subsidies to the companies that are pumping out the greenhouse gas emissions and the people who are consuming it, because the costs are rising. Ok, we need to raise the cost.

Speaker 3: 52:36

But big problem there is that if you raise, if you have a carbon tax as Trudeau is finding in Canada, where they have it unless you promise, pass down to the consumer. In Canada, where they have a income, unless you promise and pass down to the consumer, unless you pass to recycle the revenue in the form of paying a basic income, then people won't support it because it's regressive. The poor person is paying proportionally more than the rich person. So that's the first thing. Then we need to say look, we know the Elon Musks and the rich plutocrats and the elites are doing most of the pollution. They're super yachts, they're private jets.

Speaker 1: 53:17

Per capita I'd say they're huge.

Speaker 3: 53:20

Whereas the poor are receiving the negative effects pollution, bad air, bad water, bad access to health, recovery from all those things. Okay, we know that, we know that. So therefore we need to tax those people who are depleting the commons by polluting the air, polluting the water, losing, et cetera, and put that into the common capital fund. Okay, so you can think along those lines that I've got in my book 17 things like a frequent flyer, a levy, a water use levy. Okay, the poor person is paying too much for their water and the rich with their swimming pools and blah, blah, blah and you know, are not paying enough. Okay, so you need to have a water use level. There are various things like that. You very quickly show, as I've done, that the revenue that you could get from that would be able to pay out a basic income.

Speaker 1: 54:19

But. But Let me ask you quickly sorry that I'm interrupting the physical world levies would be enough.

Speaker 3: 54:27

I think a lot of the value is created in the digital world right like there's a lot of, I believe in the digital tax yeah, so there's finance screens that are probably much more lucrative.

Speaker 1: 54:37

Yeah, that need a digital every time you and I open our computers yeah, but I mean the data farm tax alone would be sure data centers could could be you know a way to get to that A digital data levy, okay.

Speaker 3: 54:50

Okay, every time we use our computer we all know this the Zuckerbergs and the others are gaining revenue. Okay, they're making their billions from us because they sell the data to advertising, and we know that. Okay, therefore, we need a digital data levy. For me, you can think of it as a way of saying we are recycling the revenue taken illegitimately from the commons, right, okay, and you can build it up. Now.

Speaker 3: 55:19

It's very important at this point to say that you must respect what's called the principle of intergenerational equity, and what that means is that if you're depleting a resource for example, oil or gas or minerals, gold, under the ground and making a profit, and you take a levy on that, a tax on that, and goes into the fund, it would be inequitable to recycle all of that revenue directly to today's commoners, because tomorrow's commoners, the younger generation, the generation after that, also deserve to be sharing in the benefits of our commons, their commons, right?

Speaker 3: 56:11

So you have to say only the revenue created by the fund in its equitable, ecological investments should be recycled. There are certain things that you can recycle the whole of it, okay but there are certain things. If you're taking from natural resources that are a diminishing resource, then only the returns on the investment should be given out to today's commoners as part of the basic income. Now, for me, this is an equitable way. It's a feasible way. This is an equitable way. It's a feasible way and, in a sense, norway has already gone down that direction with its Norwegian pension fund.

Speaker 3: 56:53

Pension fund yeah, okay, basically they said, what the British did was sell off North Sea oil to the multinationals and got windfall gains and they paid out lower taxes with the wealthy. It was a disgrace. Whereas the Norwegians they said, no, we're not going to sell off our North Sea oil gains, and they paid it, paid out lower taxes with the wealthy was a disgrace. Whereas the norwegians they said, no, we're not going to sell off our north sea oil, we're going to get allow royalties, yeah, and rent out, but we put the royalties back into a fund and build it up.

Speaker 3: 57:17

Today, yeah, the sovereign, it's a sovereign wealth, but but it's important that it's a democratically controlled fund outside the control of government yeah yeah, okay, because otherwise Alaska did something similar.

Speaker 3: 57:31

Okay, a member who joined our network. He was the governor, jay Hammond was his name. He introduced this scheme. The trouble was that he allowed it to be controlled by the governor of Alaska, and the governor, who, right-wing, came later cut income tax to zero and then said how do we pay for our education and health service? And they raided the fund. So it perverted the fund.

Speaker 1: 57:58

So you have to avoid that sort of thing. Let me say one thing here just to add a dimension to this, and I think Sam Altman actually has alluded to this I don't know where I read it otherwise we should consider computation to be part of the commons as well, absolutely, and that actually we have to share the gains from computation because ultimately, if you have very powerful agi systems that are doing a lot of the work, every single citizen of a country should own a share of their computational power, and that again can be used as a credit that you can made a pebble of a contribution to a Gibraltar of knowledge.

Speaker 3: 58:52

He added the final bit, if you like, and he gains the whole bazazzle, the whole lot. That is fundamentally inequitable. It is wrong. It's only the result of the intellectual property rights system which is a rigged system, okay which was developed, incidentally, by the chief executive of Pfizer back in 1994. And they've done very well out of it, as you may remember from the vaccines. So for me the commons includes the inherited knowledge. Sam Altman I think he would be the first to admit he's not that arrogant knows very well that he has only been able to make the advances he's made because of the contributions of everybody, and it's the same with Salaman.

Speaker 3: 59:43

The contributions of everybody on the internet, everybody, okay, and it's the same with Salaman, I mean, in Deep Mind, those who are clever enough and still got their feet on real land can appreciate that knowledge is something that's sort of umbilically tied to the whole of humanity History, the whole history of civilization. And for that reason I think people can understand that rationale.

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

Well, particularly now, because of the democratization of access to information, it's available in a way that it never has been before, so there's even more reason for it to be considered. Well, that opens up another. I know exactly where you're going with that.

Speaker 1: 1:00:37

Where do?

Speaker 3: 1:00:38

you think I'm going.

Speaker 2: 1:00:39

Well, you're going to. There's several things.

Speaker 1: 1:00:42

There's the rentier, lens on it.

Speaker 2: 1:00:44

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1: 1:00:45

That's right, because we don't have a democratization of information.

Speaker 3: 1:00:50

I wish we did. I mean, we have Wikipedia and we have.

Speaker 3: 1:00:55

The thing is that the foghorn that Elon Musk can use is not the same as the whisper that most of us can use. We don't have a democratization of information or the media, the social media. That's why we get the Trumps, because they can manipulate from the plutocratics. He's appointing all these multi-billionaires to his cabinet. They can mobilize the resources so that the ordinary person who is not into some of these things, who listens and occasionally sees on their phone and blah, blah, blah it can easily be washed anything out that they don't want to hear.

Speaker 1: 1:01:38

What I love about this debate is that you definitely have a point, and you definitely have a point too. I think it clearly is lopsided, but there's a lot to be gained from this connectivity that exists already as well, because the mere fact that people can be manipulated also allows for a lot of people to be galvanized around a different story, and I believe that you've given us a really great glimpse into an alternative story with the idea of universal birthsick income.

Speaker 3: 1:02:07

Gary, you can't escape from the word universal.

Speaker 1: 1:02:10

Sorry, you're on basic income. I shall take the universal birth-week income.

Speaker 3: 1:02:15

Let me add to this because we were beginning earlier to think about it. I never expected to be able to indulge in doing experiments with the ideas that I believe in. I mean, most of us wish we could have such an opportunity, but you don't get those opportunities. In the last 20 years I've had that opportunity. We did a huge basic income pilot in India.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

That's what I mean, that's what I was trying to extract from you.

Speaker 3: 1:02:46

I know You've done this.

Speaker 2: 1:02:47

It's not just theoretical. That's what I mean, that's what I was trying to extract from you. You've done this. It's not just theoretical, no that's right.

Speaker 3: 1:02:50

I mean, I cry when I think of the results. Okay, because I've been there, I've seen it. Okay, I'm not living a dream, I've seen it. We did this huge experiment in India and before we started, sonia Gandhi herself called us to her house and said are you giving all this money to thousands of peasants? They're going to waste it on alcohol and sex or whatever. And we said, well, I don't think so. They're intelligent people, aren't they? And she said, well, they waste their money.

Speaker 3: 1:03:25

So we did this experiment for two years where we gave 6,000 individuals men, women and children each a basic income and we compared it with people who were not given one. And at the end, and long before the end, we saw the results because we got millions of digits of data, we did surveys and so on. First thing, nutrition improved. People started feeding better, their children's health improved, schooling attendance improved, women's status improved because they had their own individual basic income. Social solidarity improved, sharing in the community, development of new initiatives, new entrepreneurial initiatives that resulted in better sanitation, more reproduction. Income went up beyond the amount paid out by us in the experiment.

Speaker 2: 1:04:22

And tell us the date of this experiment?

Speaker 3: 1:04:24

2010 to 2013. And the book came out in 2015.

Speaker 3: 1:04:29

Now that was a classic case, okay, and we asked people, we said what was the best thing about this? And everyone said the women benefited more than the men and the people with disabilities benefited more than anybody and it had an emancipatory effect that was greater than the monetary effect that we gave. Now, since then, I've been able to be involved in pilots in Brazil, finland, in Barcelona, and we've just finished a pilot. I haven't finished it, it was done by the Welsh government, mark Drakeford, who was the Prime Minister of Wales. He now has stepped down after the loss of his wife and he was very popular in Wales.

Speaker 3: 1:05:25

He introduced, and he told me he said he'd come to a lecturer I'd given some years ago and he said determined, when he became leader of Wales the government, that he would do it. So there's just been a two-year experiment in Wales where every young care leaver leaver from care homes have come out and they've got two years of a basic income without question, without any pressure. They can make something of their life and I'm not allowed yet to tell you the results, but if you could watch me smile, you could. Yes.

Speaker 1: 1:06:04

Yes, we can see it, but isn't it madness that that isn't in place.

Speaker 2: 1:06:10

There you have it.

Speaker 3: 1:06:12

I think you see, I'm delighted, obviously, to hear you say that, but the people who have been most negative in my experience have been trade unionists and people in the Labour parties and the Social Democrat parties. They say, well, if you gave everybody a basic income, that would allow the dismantling of all our social services. You say what? And my answer to them is that if we're strong enough to have everybody having a basic income and moving in, that drain will be strong enough to defend the public social services, people who are economically insecure, uncertain, suffering from the stresses and things. They don't have the courage, and I understand one should understand that. Of course you know if you're fearful, you will. You know you won't put your head above the parapet, as it were.

Speaker 1: 1:07:06

Yes.

Speaker 3: 1:07:07

Only if you have some security and you know that tomorrow I'll have enough for my food and enough for my child, etc.

Speaker 2: 1:07:14

Will you?

Speaker 3: 1:07:14

stand up, of course, and I'm delighted to hear you, but I'm so pleased that, compared with 20 years ago, this is what I wanted to say.

Speaker 1: 1:07:24

As we wrap up, I would say that you, I think I heard you say as you said in a TEDx you know, a few years or 20 years or a decade ago, people would have never invited you to those type of things because you were an outcast with these ideas.

Speaker 1: 1:07:42

And so I am very much hopeful for the future. I think that you've been at this for a long time, guy, and I know, as you said, you're like oh, I wanted to slow down, but I think you're just getting started. So thanks for sharing your story here and telling us a little bit about all your work and thank you so much for your passion, your passionate commitment.

Speaker 2: 1:08:04

It's really inspiring, great Thanks.

Speaker 3: 1:08:07

Pleasure.