All research has shown that few to no people would simply give up productive work if given a UBI. People on low incomes have a dizzying array of benefits and top ups today. UBI eliminates all that overhead.
Advocates of UBI do so, not because we want less work but work that is more productive, creative and satisfying. And the evidence is that this is what happens with the additional security that UBI provides for working age people. I don’t disagree about Universal Basic Services though!
As you point out, trust is a significant element to the functioning of a healthy economy and together with the acknowledgement of the need for economic systems to meet the needs of all citizens and that economics is anyway a social construct it seems a little like looking through the telescope from the wrong end to construct an economic theory from a purely economic pov.
An economy that truly works (as much as any economy would!) surely has to start with people. How do we provide for everyone if we rightly revile the dog-eat-dog paradigm that currently prevails? The answer is, of course, that it is not an economic but a human problem. An economic model should be no more than an assistive tool designed to facilitate our desire to thrive whereas we currently have a system that raises money to a status above that of humans and gives it an embodiment beyond its incorporeal limits. We were lost as soon as it became a thing, a commodity in itself instead of a symbol of something more important - that trust you mentioned.
UBI and UBS are not opposing ideas. The world is messy and there is always the tendency to tie things down that should be more fluid. These are tools that can be configured in multiple ways and in combination with each other and a host of other tools from the economic, social and political lockers.
I don't think it is possible to design a new system and substitute it for what we have but the starting point for something different should be at the village level where everyone knows everyone else and can see and feel the consequences of the tools they use.
Hmmmm... perhaps my thinking is skewed by now being longtime resident in an English Shire which was once a hotbed of militant Luddism, but: given that "caring capitalism" is such an egregious oxymoron, can this Silicon Valley Oligarch proposed UBI gesture also be seen as pious palliative to hopefully placate we-the-unruly-masses?
Sending warmest solidarity wishes from this, ever unruly, prole. 😃🏴☠️
In the recent UBI study undertaken in Germany, most participants continued to work:
"One of the key findings of the three-year experiment is that people who received the basic income kept working an average of 40 hours a week, dispelling the myth that basic income would make people lazy.
However, a significantly higher percentage of the participants in the basic income group changed jobs compared to the control group. Knowing they had a financial backup plan presumably helped them make the move.
It was also found that more people in the basic income group started studying, sometimes on top of their job."
But I'm not surprised, Rosie; inactivity - enforced or incidental - can corrosively strip your entire existence of meaning. The idea that swathes of our working class can become purely consumers and observers but no longer participants in our world, is as wrong as it is inordinately dangerous.
Yes indeed, this is a topic I'm very interested in: I've written a fair bit about the crossover between precarity & creativity. The other side of the coin is that some leisure is necessary for creativity, so people who are compelled to work too much (/ at bullshit jobs) don't have much energy left over for enterprise or invention...
Like Kropotkin says, "Somebody said that dirt is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of 'idlers' among them. They were lazy as long as they had not found the right path, and afterwards laborious to excess...
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to make all his life the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere."
I have not heard the Kropotkin quote before, so: thank you. The criminally misappropriated K H Marx seemed to be informed by uncannily similar sentiments when writing about worker alienation.
(Confessedly, I have largely lifted my own concept of meaning from Viktor Frankl!)
One thing which I cannot unsee now and which keeps constantly slapping me in the face is how: modern capitalism seems to employ only fractions of human potential: everyone having so much more to offer to our world than the humanly limiting drudgery which they are bound into in order to achieve remuneration.
Another irony which I have observed interminably - largely here in the UK public or post-public-privatised sector - is that: the conscientious worker is the one who psychologically suffers the worst when, whatever hellish collusion of capitalism and bureaucracy inveighs from some disconnected strata high above to make their role increasingly unworkable and absurd. This seems even more pertinent now that we here largely work in a largely non-unionised economy where we are expected to grovel ever lower and lower to employers, for them to accept the trade of our labour at a loss to ourselves in order to gift them the concomitant profit.
You are seeing the Capitalist "army of reserve labour" as described by Marx. Capitalism wants unemployed people or people in unhappy situations to keep pay and conditions to their liking .
It also places value on certain things. A stock broker is valued more than a paramedic who saves lives or a teacher who prepares the next generation.
We place even less value on those who look after the old and vulnerable as a job and NO value on the work that family members do in that capacity.
This is also the source on which Ursula K. Le Guin based her imagined Anarchist society in The Dispossessed, with regard to how / whether people would work without wages.
It's all pretty idealistic, but not simple-minded, I don't think, & besides, it's interesting to try to imagine societies without profit motive. Humans functioned without money for most of history & prehistory. (Sorry Ann for hijacking your thread, I know this is an economics blog & I'm talking about abolishing money ha ha)
I am aware that a UBI is considered Utopian, & I concede people's points that it would be open to misuse & hard to implement without a massive overhaul of society (especially re. the point about it all getting sucked out via rent without counterbalancing disincentives, as that's what happens to benefits now, effectively the State lines the private pocket). But something's got to give
Yet literally it is only UBI opponents that say this. No UBI research or proponents say this.
There is no meaning or dignity in wage slavery. UBI gets people out of jobs they don't want to be doing and into a path and work they DO want to be doing. That frees up the other jobs for people who do want to do those things.
We pay unemployment benefits. Being unemployed is detrimental for health and wellbeing on so many levels. We pay benefits and top ups to low income earners. We then take them away the monent people pass a threshold of earning that is quite low.
Ann, thanks for sight of the article very interesting. A couple of thoughts.
Guy Standing has been a passionate and articulate supporter of UBI across the globe not just for first world economies. He preferred UBI to a Job Guarantee (the latter more loved by US economists eg S Kelton) because of the freedom it gave people. I can't speak for Guy but I'm sure he reasoned that most people would still need to work and not pursue leisure solely as the monetary amount of income could not fully replace a standard wage.
On the credit/investment income cycle I see the power of this argument but arguably much of our so called investment isn't productive, doesn't improve main street productivity, wages, public services, etc and arguably fuels speculative investing/rentier class activities. So much of the cycle you refer to is actually leaking money or returns that are not economically or socially useful/ productive.
This made me think the cycle might behave more like a whirlpool instead!
Eric, Thank you for this comment…and you’re absolutely right about 'much so-called investment' not being productive…indeed most investment (e.g. in housing) is highly speculative. Productive investment means taking risks, engaging with land and labour and settling down to long-term returns….Speculative investment in financial assets bypasses land and labour…and expects short-term returns.
Dealing with your points would require another long post about how to return our financial system to the hard graft of productive investment, in order for the system to be stable…But thank you all the same.
I've read the article and the comments, and as usual, the most important word is not mentioned at all: land. We keep talking about "employing" people like they are slaves, and they are, because we've removed any option for them to choose their own life, living by their own wits. That might sound a bit Jurassic, but it's a fundamental principle that's critical if we're really serious about economic justice. With our currently enclosed system, any UBI would be quickly soaked up by the rent-seekers, through prices, rents and so on. It's a hopelessly flawed idea, as silly as putting an athlete in chains and then offering him crutches to help get around.
Agree with much of what your write…Work should be meaningful (and for millions of the more privileged, work is meaningful) …But ‘living by their own wits’ seems to me to imply that we are not all in need of collective provisioning…If we all enjoyed the basics - health, education, a safe home, clean water - we could then live by our wits, and choose a fulfilling life.
Perhaps a more modern way of saying “living by their wits” is “the choice to do their own thing on the margins (commons)” rather than having to submit to the lord of the land and/or the lord of the workplace. That needn't exclude involvement in community and all it offers, as it almost inevitably creates new communities (think settlers “heading west” for an obvious historical example).
My concern would be...who owns the government that's issuing the UBI? The potential to twist UBI- to replace its universality with conditionalities, e.g. enhancements for remaining childless so as to reduce the stock of 'unnecessary' population, ultimately leaving just the owners of capital, their robot-servants, and perhaps a few tribes of 'wild humans' as an anthropological curiosity.
This article demonstrates both a fundamental misunderstanding of money and disregards all evidence so far on UBI.
It's the exact opposite to what is suggested here. UBI frees up jobs for people who want those jobs and allows others to get on an do the things they want to do in life.
That could starting a business, it could be dedicating oneself to reading books to the elderly. Without it wage slavery is the only option. UBI drives competition for workers (something capitalists hate of course but is actually good for them). To drive innovation we actually *want* rising wages and competition for labor. We wouldn't have automation and machinery and robots if were it not for that competition.
On the tired old trope of "printing money". Governments spend all currency into existence in the first place. Banks do not create net new money with loans as its equity neutral (loan is an asset and a liability). Only public spending does not create a liability for anybody.
As entry level jobs dwindle away we will have no alternative to a Job Guarantee or a UBI.
The UBI will effectively be provided by a) state borrowing and b) by the employed who, by paying taxes, and generating tax revenues for the state, help pay for the government’s expenditure on UBI. And yes, those on UBI will spend it on goods and services produced by employed people, and may pay VAT etc on those purchases…which would also help pay for UBI.
This sounds like a public good, especially since recipients of UBI are likely to recycle all of it into the local economy. Is that fair? What is the downside?
Why do we forget the barbaric attacks russia has been undertaking against Ukraine's diverse society since 2014? Every day, including today, russian army kills Ukrainians. Also, russia's so-called "president" well qualifies as one of "old, white and embittered capitalists" if the vast inequality of russia's society and its paranoid militarism are taken into account.
We do not forget the barbaric attacks Russia has undertaken against Ukraine; just as we do not forget the genocide of the Palestinian people. But whereas Russia was penalised, Israel’s sovereign assets are protected.
We also do not forget that the United States is guilty of violating international sovereign immunity rights and confiscating financial assets deposited in good faith in U.S., UK, and EU central banks. Whereas Afghanistan’s $7 billion in reserves frozen in American institutions caused concern, the immobilizing of Russia’s $300 billion in reserves “represented a whole new category of economic combat,” as investigative journalist Stephanie Baker explained....2 For more, read this article...: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/12/the-case-for-an-african-payments-union-lessons-from-the-european-experience?lang=en
In the 1940s the US dollar was not the world’s reserve currency, and the world’s governments had not deposited their surpluses in the vaults of the Federal Reserve for safe keeping.
I 100% agree with you that there's important work that needs doing that's not getting done. We should absolutely pay for that. All else equal, of course, the less labor people have to sell, the better off they are. Obviously, whatever projects we undertake "to protect the biosphere that sustains human life," we should want to use only as much labor as necessary to achieve our desired outcome. We want to minimize the waste of people's time and effort.
Now, I don't think the "Silicon Valley oligarchs" really understand UBI.
"To ensure the workless have income, Silicon Valley supports a system of Universal Basic Income - whereby the state ‘prints’ money to sustain the unemployed."
You could try to use UBI for that, but then you wouldn't be fully addressing the underlying problem that UBI solves.
Technologists make the mistake of imagining that their labor-saving technology will actually save labor at the level of the economy as a whole. It won't. Not as long as we use economic policy to keep the economy somewhere in the neighborhood of maximum/full employment.
UBI solves the problem of make-work. Instead of generating jobs for the purpose of pushing money to consumers, we can hand people a portion of their money directly. In a world with a properly calibrated UBI, wages are only ever an incentive for useful work.
UBI isn't about ensuring income for the workless or unemployed. It's about distributing money into the economy in a way that bypasses the financial sector and the labor market. It allows us to keep the system going without having to stimulate private-sector credit creation or job growth.
Here's an excerpt from your Vishnu R Nair quote:
> "Instead of investing in productive capacity that creates jobs and prosperity, sovereign wealth is being buried in vaults."
Productive capacity is good. Prosperity is good. Are jobs good? Only if they do something useful. The fact that we glorify job creation and full employment in and of themselves suggests that there's something very wrong with our economy.
"Finally for promises, obligations, (credit) to be upheld requires inclusion in the system of income-generating employment (to guarantee repayment of the credit)."
The question isn't whether we should have employment. We'll always have employment. The question is how to achieve optimal labor allocation. Or, at the very least, how to eliminate obvious sources of waste.
"Instead I vote for a system of Universal Basic Services - which ensures everyone’s basic needs are met."
Okay. But then you still haven't solved the problem of how to distribute money into the economy without over-employing people. UBI isn't about meeting people's basic needs. It's about distributing money efficiently. When the way we get people money is broken, it causes lots of downstream problems. It causes us to fear technological advancements that should only make us freer.
There's nothing wrong with Universal Basic Services. But without UBI, I think an important service will be missing.
Thanks for this critique of UBI. I agree that “money printing” is a misleading metaphor and that the monetary system can’t be understood outside of institutional structures of obligation. But I’d push back on the framing of value as something necessarily tied to income-generating employment.
There’s a wide field of non-market contribution (care work, ecological repair, civic coordination, etc.) that doesn’t generate income but clearly sustains the system. If we want institutional coherence and fiscal legitimacy, these forms of value can’t remain invisible just because they’re not monetised.
I’ve proposed a recognition-based framework to that end, with mechanisms for registering non-monetised contribution without commodifying it. If of interest: https://zenodo.org/records/15366879
Additionally, I see money as an information system backed by the state’s ability to enforce tax obligations - more of a governance technology than a reservoir of trust.
We may use different framing at times, but I'm grateful for the provocation in your article.
Ahem…have just had a little edit of some repetitive content..Sincere apologies readers...
I find that this generally is an effect of writing upon any topic with a burning passion, Ann.
All power to you! 😃🏴☠️
UBI militates against the government's desire to provision itself.
How so? We literally pay people to be unemployed.
All research has shown that few to no people would simply give up productive work if given a UBI. People on low incomes have a dizzying array of benefits and top ups today. UBI eliminates all that overhead.
Advocates of UBI do so, not because we want less work but work that is more productive, creative and satisfying. And the evidence is that this is what happens with the additional security that UBI provides for working age people. I don’t disagree about Universal Basic Services though!
As you point out, trust is a significant element to the functioning of a healthy economy and together with the acknowledgement of the need for economic systems to meet the needs of all citizens and that economics is anyway a social construct it seems a little like looking through the telescope from the wrong end to construct an economic theory from a purely economic pov.
An economy that truly works (as much as any economy would!) surely has to start with people. How do we provide for everyone if we rightly revile the dog-eat-dog paradigm that currently prevails? The answer is, of course, that it is not an economic but a human problem. An economic model should be no more than an assistive tool designed to facilitate our desire to thrive whereas we currently have a system that raises money to a status above that of humans and gives it an embodiment beyond its incorporeal limits. We were lost as soon as it became a thing, a commodity in itself instead of a symbol of something more important - that trust you mentioned.
UBI and UBS are not opposing ideas. The world is messy and there is always the tendency to tie things down that should be more fluid. These are tools that can be configured in multiple ways and in combination with each other and a host of other tools from the economic, social and political lockers.
I don't think it is possible to design a new system and substitute it for what we have but the starting point for something different should be at the village level where everyone knows everyone else and can see and feel the consequences of the tools they use.
Hmmmm... perhaps my thinking is skewed by now being longtime resident in an English Shire which was once a hotbed of militant Luddism, but: given that "caring capitalism" is such an egregious oxymoron, can this Silicon Valley Oligarch proposed UBI gesture also be seen as pious palliative to hopefully placate we-the-unruly-masses?
Sending warmest solidarity wishes from this, ever unruly, prole. 😃🏴☠️
In the recent UBI study undertaken in Germany, most participants continued to work:
"One of the key findings of the three-year experiment is that people who received the basic income kept working an average of 40 hours a week, dispelling the myth that basic income would make people lazy.
However, a significantly higher percentage of the participants in the basic income group changed jobs compared to the control group. Knowing they had a financial backup plan presumably helped them make the move.
It was also found that more people in the basic income group started studying, sometimes on top of their job."
(From this article: https://www.dw.com/en/free-money-germany-basic-income-experiment/a-72223009 )
Nice one! 😃
But I'm not surprised, Rosie; inactivity - enforced or incidental - can corrosively strip your entire existence of meaning. The idea that swathes of our working class can become purely consumers and observers but no longer participants in our world, is as wrong as it is inordinately dangerous.
Warmest solidarity wishes! 😃🏴☠️
Yes indeed, this is a topic I'm very interested in: I've written a fair bit about the crossover between precarity & creativity. The other side of the coin is that some leisure is necessary for creativity, so people who are compelled to work too much (/ at bullshit jobs) don't have much energy left over for enterprise or invention...
Like Kropotkin says, "Somebody said that dirt is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of 'idlers' among them. They were lazy as long as they had not found the right path, and afterwards laborious to excess...
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to make all his life the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere."
Very good point: thank you, Rosie.
I have not heard the Kropotkin quote before, so: thank you. The criminally misappropriated K H Marx seemed to be informed by uncannily similar sentiments when writing about worker alienation.
(Confessedly, I have largely lifted my own concept of meaning from Viktor Frankl!)
One thing which I cannot unsee now and which keeps constantly slapping me in the face is how: modern capitalism seems to employ only fractions of human potential: everyone having so much more to offer to our world than the humanly limiting drudgery which they are bound into in order to achieve remuneration.
Another irony which I have observed interminably - largely here in the UK public or post-public-privatised sector - is that: the conscientious worker is the one who psychologically suffers the worst when, whatever hellish collusion of capitalism and bureaucracy inveighs from some disconnected strata high above to make their role increasingly unworkable and absurd. This seems even more pertinent now that we here largely work in a largely non-unionised economy where we are expected to grovel ever lower and lower to employers, for them to accept the trade of our labour at a loss to ourselves in order to gift them the concomitant profit.
Wishing you well in all that you do! 😃🏴☠️
You are seeing the Capitalist "army of reserve labour" as described by Marx. Capitalism wants unemployed people or people in unhappy situations to keep pay and conditions to their liking .
It also places value on certain things. A stock broker is valued more than a paramedic who saves lives or a teacher who prepares the next generation.
We place even less value on those who look after the old and vulnerable as a job and NO value on the work that family members do in that capacity.
It's from The Conquest of Bread: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread
This is also the source on which Ursula K. Le Guin based her imagined Anarchist society in The Dispossessed, with regard to how / whether people would work without wages.
It's all pretty idealistic, but not simple-minded, I don't think, & besides, it's interesting to try to imagine societies without profit motive. Humans functioned without money for most of history & prehistory. (Sorry Ann for hijacking your thread, I know this is an economics blog & I'm talking about abolishing money ha ha)
I am aware that a UBI is considered Utopian, & I concede people's points that it would be open to misuse & hard to implement without a massive overhaul of society (especially re. the point about it all getting sucked out via rent without counterbalancing disincentives, as that's what happens to benefits now, effectively the State lines the private pocket). But something's got to give
(I just LOOOOVE Ursula K Le Guin!)
Ooooops yes: also sorry Ann; for here's myself rambling all over your thread like a mad eejit!
Warmest wishes & solidarity forever! 😃🏴☠️
Yet literally it is only UBI opponents that say this. No UBI research or proponents say this.
There is no meaning or dignity in wage slavery. UBI gets people out of jobs they don't want to be doing and into a path and work they DO want to be doing. That frees up the other jobs for people who do want to do those things.
We pay unemployment benefits. Being unemployed is detrimental for health and wellbeing on so many levels. We pay benefits and top ups to low income earners. We then take them away the monent people pass a threshold of earning that is quite low.
It's madness.
Thank you, as always, for a reasoned and very readable update on stuff I mostly ignore (find boring etc)
Ann, thanks for sight of the article very interesting. A couple of thoughts.
Guy Standing has been a passionate and articulate supporter of UBI across the globe not just for first world economies. He preferred UBI to a Job Guarantee (the latter more loved by US economists eg S Kelton) because of the freedom it gave people. I can't speak for Guy but I'm sure he reasoned that most people would still need to work and not pursue leisure solely as the monetary amount of income could not fully replace a standard wage.
On the credit/investment income cycle I see the power of this argument but arguably much of our so called investment isn't productive, doesn't improve main street productivity, wages, public services, etc and arguably fuels speculative investing/rentier class activities. So much of the cycle you refer to is actually leaking money or returns that are not economically or socially useful/ productive.
This made me think the cycle might behave more like a whirlpool instead!
Great article got me thinking.
Thank you.
Eric, Thank you for this comment…and you’re absolutely right about 'much so-called investment' not being productive…indeed most investment (e.g. in housing) is highly speculative. Productive investment means taking risks, engaging with land and labour and settling down to long-term returns….Speculative investment in financial assets bypasses land and labour…and expects short-term returns.
Dealing with your points would require another long post about how to return our financial system to the hard graft of productive investment, in order for the system to be stable…But thank you all the same.
Ann, many thanks about coming back so soon with a reply. My comment on UBI and Guy Standings work in both first and third worlds?
I've read the article and the comments, and as usual, the most important word is not mentioned at all: land. We keep talking about "employing" people like they are slaves, and they are, because we've removed any option for them to choose their own life, living by their own wits. That might sound a bit Jurassic, but it's a fundamental principle that's critical if we're really serious about economic justice. With our currently enclosed system, any UBI would be quickly soaked up by the rent-seekers, through prices, rents and so on. It's a hopelessly flawed idea, as silly as putting an athlete in chains and then offering him crutches to help get around.
Agree with much of what your write…Work should be meaningful (and for millions of the more privileged, work is meaningful) …But ‘living by their own wits’ seems to me to imply that we are not all in need of collective provisioning…If we all enjoyed the basics - health, education, a safe home, clean water - we could then live by our wits, and choose a fulfilling life.
Perhaps a more modern way of saying “living by their wits” is “the choice to do their own thing on the margins (commons)” rather than having to submit to the lord of the land and/or the lord of the workplace. That needn't exclude involvement in community and all it offers, as it almost inevitably creates new communities (think settlers “heading west” for an obvious historical example).
My concern would be...who owns the government that's issuing the UBI? The potential to twist UBI- to replace its universality with conditionalities, e.g. enhancements for remaining childless so as to reduce the stock of 'unnecessary' population, ultimately leaving just the owners of capital, their robot-servants, and perhaps a few tribes of 'wild humans' as an anthropological curiosity.
Yeah, giving the power over systems like that to the current lot is concerning
This article demonstrates both a fundamental misunderstanding of money and disregards all evidence so far on UBI.
It's the exact opposite to what is suggested here. UBI frees up jobs for people who want those jobs and allows others to get on an do the things they want to do in life.
That could starting a business, it could be dedicating oneself to reading books to the elderly. Without it wage slavery is the only option. UBI drives competition for workers (something capitalists hate of course but is actually good for them). To drive innovation we actually *want* rising wages and competition for labor. We wouldn't have automation and machinery and robots if were it not for that competition.
On the tired old trope of "printing money". Governments spend all currency into existence in the first place. Banks do not create net new money with loans as its equity neutral (loan is an asset and a liability). Only public spending does not create a liability for anybody.
As entry level jobs dwindle away we will have no alternative to a Job Guarantee or a UBI.
I am afraid we differ. But thank you for your comment.
If the unemployed receive UBI they will spend it on goods and services produced by employed people in a virtuous circle, no? What did I miss?
The UBI will effectively be provided by a) state borrowing and b) by the employed who, by paying taxes, and generating tax revenues for the state, help pay for the government’s expenditure on UBI. And yes, those on UBI will spend it on goods and services produced by employed people, and may pay VAT etc on those purchases…which would also help pay for UBI.
This sounds like a public good, especially since recipients of UBI are likely to recycle all of it into the local economy. Is that fair? What is the downside?
Why do we forget the barbaric attacks russia has been undertaking against Ukraine's diverse society since 2014? Every day, including today, russian army kills Ukrainians. Also, russia's so-called "president" well qualifies as one of "old, white and embittered capitalists" if the vast inequality of russia's society and its paranoid militarism are taken into account.
We do not forget the barbaric attacks Russia has undertaken against Ukraine; just as we do not forget the genocide of the Palestinian people. But whereas Russia was penalised, Israel’s sovereign assets are protected.
We also do not forget that the United States is guilty of violating international sovereign immunity rights and confiscating financial assets deposited in good faith in U.S., UK, and EU central banks. Whereas Afghanistan’s $7 billion in reserves frozen in American institutions caused concern, the immobilizing of Russia’s $300 billion in reserves “represented a whole new category of economic combat,” as investigative journalist Stephanie Baker explained....2 For more, read this article...: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/12/the-case-for-an-african-payments-union-lessons-from-the-european-experience?lang=en
I appreciate very much your remarks on not forgetting the barbaric attacks against Ukrainians!
While the nominal size of the immobilized FX reserves of russia seems unprecedented, in early 1940s the US acted similarly against the nazi Germany's invasions of Europe when about $7.4bn of FX reserves was "occupied." Here is an article about this move: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1941-10-01/freezing-dollars-against-axis
Hence, I tend to disagree with Baker's claim that modern-day russia's case is "a whole new category." For me, russia's is similar to nazi's.
In the 1940s the US dollar was not the world’s reserve currency, and the world’s governments had not deposited their surpluses in the vaults of the Federal Reserve for safe keeping.
Thanks for pointing out this detail.
"For me, russia's is similar to nazi's."
YES!
But Ukraine instead has found herself stuck between such terrible enemies and such perfidious "friends" -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o
God help us all!
In friendship & in solidarity! 😃
Thank you for taking UBI seriously.
I 100% agree with you that there's important work that needs doing that's not getting done. We should absolutely pay for that. All else equal, of course, the less labor people have to sell, the better off they are. Obviously, whatever projects we undertake "to protect the biosphere that sustains human life," we should want to use only as much labor as necessary to achieve our desired outcome. We want to minimize the waste of people's time and effort.
Now, I don't think the "Silicon Valley oligarchs" really understand UBI.
"To ensure the workless have income, Silicon Valley supports a system of Universal Basic Income - whereby the state ‘prints’ money to sustain the unemployed."
You could try to use UBI for that, but then you wouldn't be fully addressing the underlying problem that UBI solves.
Technologists make the mistake of imagining that their labor-saving technology will actually save labor at the level of the economy as a whole. It won't. Not as long as we use economic policy to keep the economy somewhere in the neighborhood of maximum/full employment.
UBI solves the problem of make-work. Instead of generating jobs for the purpose of pushing money to consumers, we can hand people a portion of their money directly. In a world with a properly calibrated UBI, wages are only ever an incentive for useful work.
UBI isn't about ensuring income for the workless or unemployed. It's about distributing money into the economy in a way that bypasses the financial sector and the labor market. It allows us to keep the system going without having to stimulate private-sector credit creation or job growth.
Here's an excerpt from your Vishnu R Nair quote:
> "Instead of investing in productive capacity that creates jobs and prosperity, sovereign wealth is being buried in vaults."
Productive capacity is good. Prosperity is good. Are jobs good? Only if they do something useful. The fact that we glorify job creation and full employment in and of themselves suggests that there's something very wrong with our economy.
"Finally for promises, obligations, (credit) to be upheld requires inclusion in the system of income-generating employment (to guarantee repayment of the credit)."
The question isn't whether we should have employment. We'll always have employment. The question is how to achieve optimal labor allocation. Or, at the very least, how to eliminate obvious sources of waste.
"Instead I vote for a system of Universal Basic Services - which ensures everyone’s basic needs are met."
Okay. But then you still haven't solved the problem of how to distribute money into the economy without over-employing people. UBI isn't about meeting people's basic needs. It's about distributing money efficiently. When the way we get people money is broken, it causes lots of downstream problems. It causes us to fear technological advancements that should only make us freer.
There's nothing wrong with Universal Basic Services. But without UBI, I think an important service will be missing.
Thanks for this critique of UBI. I agree that “money printing” is a misleading metaphor and that the monetary system can’t be understood outside of institutional structures of obligation. But I’d push back on the framing of value as something necessarily tied to income-generating employment.
There’s a wide field of non-market contribution (care work, ecological repair, civic coordination, etc.) that doesn’t generate income but clearly sustains the system. If we want institutional coherence and fiscal legitimacy, these forms of value can’t remain invisible just because they’re not monetised.
I’ve proposed a recognition-based framework to that end, with mechanisms for registering non-monetised contribution without commodifying it. If of interest: https://zenodo.org/records/15366879
Additionally, I see money as an information system backed by the state’s ability to enforce tax obligations - more of a governance technology than a reservoir of trust.
We may use different framing at times, but I'm grateful for the provocation in your article.
Job Guarantee not UBI