Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Riaki Poništ
So, if there was one word that you could use
to describe current society,
what might it be?
For me, it's the word "polarity."
This is the idea that people are pulling apart in politics and culture
in terms of their economic opportunities, in terms of their identities.
And it's deeply concerning to me. Why does it matter?
So, we've been told that diversity is a good thing, right?
People from different backgrounds, perspectives, different experience
coming together to solve common problems.
But that's diversity.
Polarity is different.
Diversity is when people pull together; polarity is when people pull apart.
And this is one of the big challenges facing modern society.
Why is this?
I think there's lots of reasons,
but one stands out for me - it's becoming increasingly prevalent -
and that's the spread of digital connecting technologies.
And when connecting technologies spread,
they start to distribute power in different ways.
Power, wealth, opportunity -
it matters who you are, your skills, your luck
and the geography you're in, the place that you live in.
And it goes in all sorts of different ways,
and we've got to be alert to this.
And so what does it look like, this spread of connecting technologies?
Well, people are connected, which is a good thing.
But then power, wealth and capital start to accumulate.
Places benefit, some places:
Millions flock to new skyscrapers;
headquarters are built; thousands flock to them.
There are a huge accumulation of wealth.
But there's a great swell of insecurity and precariousness alongside this.
And in fact you can see financial crashes as instability starts to increase,
and then the cracks in society start to become exposed.
What happens then?
You see the rise of populist movements;
people start to challenge the status quo.
And then we're stuck for answers: what can we do?
This is the world of the Internet
and spread of global financial capital, surely.
But no, that's not the world I'm talking about.
It's the world of the railroads in nineteenth-century America.
And we saw, then, the spread of connecting technologies,
and the enormous impact they could have on society.
Some benefits enormously, the robber barons,
in what was called the Gilded Age,
and some suffered mass insecurity and inequality.
It was very similar to the current time:
suddenly people were connected in new ways,
but then power was distributed in new ways as well.
And the simple point is this:
if we are not alert to what happened then,
we may be doomed to replicate the mistakes of the past.
Now, I'm worried about one thing in particular.
I'm worried most particularly about economic insecurity.
What is economic insecurity?
It's when your access
to economic opportunity, income, skills today
means you can't have confidence
you can maintain a standard of living and well-being in the future.
And for too many, they can have too little confidence
they can maintain their standard of living and well-being in the future.
And at the Royal Society of Arts,
we've been looking into this and what it means.
We've been looking at the current state of modern work.
We were doing survey work, but we're speaking to people too.
So take, for example, the young woman
who had taken postgraduate qualifications in pharmaceuticals.
She couldn't get a job in the pharmaceutical industry
so she went into retail,
temporarily, or so she thought.
But then she started to raise a family, and she had responsibilities.
Her husband had insecure income, volatile income;
it went up and down.
Suddenly, she couldn't use her qualifications
to get into the career she wants; she became stuck.
And too many people have become stuck.
She wants to go back and replenish her qualifications and move on up.
But it's too difficult to do so
because the hit on the family finances would be too great in the short term.
This stuckness is a feature of economic insecurity.
We discovered that only 40 percent of people
think that they have good opportunities to progress.
She's precarious.
Or think about the care worker we spoke to.
She's got a secure job; it's just low paid.
She doesn't get paid in between visits to her patients.
It's extraordinarily, mentally, and physically stressful.
She's had some training,
but she's increasingly monitored and controlled
in the work that she does.
By the way, as digital technology spread,
the opportunity for monitoring workers will become far greater.
If you work in an Amazon distribution center,
you know exactly what this means.
But she can't move on
because actually she doesn't have access to any savings
to change jobs and take the risk.
The welfare state doesn't support her.
If you go to the welfare state today,
you have to actually just get into a job, any job.
That's all it cares about.
It doesn't care whether it's the right job or not.
This is the reason that increasing numbers are going to food banks,
that there's increasing on-street homelessness,
and people are increasingly precarious.
So, she's stuck.
And we found that 32 percent of people have access to less than £500 of savings.
When you have access to less than £500 of savings,
you can't say no.
You have to take what's on offer to you.
You are just one redundancy or a washing machine breaking down away
from being in a very difficult situation in terms of debt and credit.
But it's not just the precarious who are facing challenges.
We spoke to a flexi worker,
a guy who was setting up a photography business.
You'd think he'd be better off, but something went wrong.
He just started setting up his photography business,
and unfortunately his family had a bereavement.
And he was left in a situation
where he had to choose between his family and his business.
No one wants to be in that position; he had nothing to fall back on.
There was no basic foundation on which he could make decisions.
So we're seeing a spread of economic insecurity all around.
The big risk
is that this state will become persistent
as digital connecting technologies spread.
We know digital connecting technologies
can create enormous accumulations of wealth and power.
And just last week,
we had Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook,
appearing before Congress.
And he described Facebook as a series of tools,
which sounds pretty benign.
But it's far more than that.
It actually is a way of distributing power and relationships
and access to jobs, income, wealth, in vastly different ways.
Increasingly, digital connecting technologies
are becoming tapestry of our lives.
They're woven into our personalities,
our personal, economic, political relationships.
So the warning signs are there, but we know it can be different.
How do we know?
We know because we've taken this on before.
In the Gilded Age that I described in 19th century America,
in the early 20th century,
a group of visionary journalists, writers, activists, trade unionists, politicians
started to campaign against it.
Visionary presidents started to use the power of the state
to take on economic power,
to put resource and income in the hands of people,
to put in fair taxation,
and started to reverse the polarity.
We need to learn from that today.
And the picture of the current world,
as we go into a wider spread of digital technologies,
is one of polarity.
The wealthiest 10 percent earn half of the wealth.
The bottom have access to less than £500 of savings.
And only 40 percent of people have good opportunities to progress.
This is what a polarized society looks like.
But we know it can be different.
This is a time for ideas, for big ideas and action,
and I'm going to share one idea with you today.
One idea is not enough, by the way.
But I'm going to share with you the idea of the universal basic income.
Universal basic income is a really simple concept.
It's giving everyone access to a small amount of resource
so that they have a base level of security as of right.
Everyone gets it, it's unconditional.
It's universal.
So you have that bedrock of security
on which yuu make better decisions to learn, earn, set up a business, care,
whatever it may be.
Now, will this work?
The answer is emphatically yes.
How do I know?
I know because it's been tried.
It's been tried in Alaska.
They've had a basic-income-style payment for the last 30 years.
The critics say, about basic income, "People get lazy. It won't work."
No evidence for that in Alaska.
People carry on working,
but they manage their household finances better.
It's been tried in India and Kenya.
And rather than social collapse,
it's led to a spread of entrepreneurialism,
of civic activity, of women leaving the home,
of greater equality.
It's been tried in North Carolina.
The critics said,
"Basic income? Well, people will just sit back, kick back.
They'll drink more, take drugs, have a good time, whatever."
The evidence? Drug addiction and alcohol addiction went down.
Mental health improved.
Health outcomes are improved.
Educational outcomes are improved.
Wherever it has been tried, it has worked.
The same happened when it was tried in the province of Manitoba in Canada.
It's now being tried in Finland.
So we know wherever it has been tried,
it has worked.
It's a big step to a universal basic income,
but there's things that we can do now to move toward it.
At the Royal Society of Arts,
we have proposed what we are calling a Universal Basic Opportunity Fund,
which is something that we can do right now.
And the idea here is that we would give a fund,
a 200-billion-pound endowment from government,
borrowing, using the low interest rates available to us,
and with that endowment, we would invest:
invest in our economic and social future,
and invest in digital, transport, housing, energy infrastructure.
And when those investments delivered a return,
we'd then make payments to people
so they could have two years of basic income
to make different decisions about their lives.
So they could invest in their training.
They could assume care and responsibilities.
They could try a new business.
They could change their work if they wanted to.
This could be an enormous step up, a helping hand rather than the slap-down
that the current welfare state too often delivers.
And how would we replenish this fund over time?
Well, we'd look at those high flyers,
and we'd say, "You could make a bit more of a contribution."
We'd look at some of the digital platforms and we could, by the way,
levy the data that we provide to those big digital platforms.
Some people have called this a "Facebook Levy."
And we would look for corporates
who have had a 20-billion-pound tax break in the last 10 years
to make a contribution as well.
Then this fund becomes sustainable.
But this is a step that we can make today.
Does this sort of fund work?
Well, yes.
They've tried it in Norway.
And it's delivered a return and invested in public infrastructure,
it invested in the social infrastructure, on the back of it.
We can do it here, too.
The payments are made from this fund.
The basic opportunity dividend can make all the difference
to that retail worker I talked about.
It can enable her to step away for a year or two
to replenish her qualifications and improve her opportunities.
To the care worker who's at risk of being monitored
and is stuck and can't make a different decision to change work -
even though her job is secure, she's not economically secure -
she could make a different choice.
The flexi worker setting up a new business
could have had a better platform or foundation for his business
as he went forward.
They wouldn't have had to choose between his family and his business.
The high flyer, well, they may have to contribute more.
But you know what?
That's a small price to pay
for a society that is more economically and socially stable.
These are things that we can do today.
We don't have to accept polarity.
We know from history what happens if we don't act.
We can reverse polarity.
We can think of new ways of connecting.
We can invest in people in different ways.
And there are cities across the world
that are volunteering to have basic income experiment
because they know it can make a difference.
There's some in the UK.
North Ayrshire, Fife, Edinburgh and Glasgow
all want to have basic income experiments.
The Scottish government is supporting them and exploring that.
In Finland, in Barcelona, in the Netherlands, in Canada,
in Stockton and Oakland in California, in India,
there is a movement behind trying this because people believe it can be better.
We can give people a more secure footing.
Greater Exeter could volunteer to host a basic income pilot here too.
That's a sort of action you can take to say,
"We want to do things differently here."
We can do the things differently.
We can look at the past and learn from it.
We can act now.
Let's not wait the decades it took after 19th century to act.
Let's learn from that and let's do it now.
Let's put more power back in people's hands.
And let's cultivate a society,
a society where opportunity, creativity,
security, freedom are shared.
(Applause)