Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Robert Tucker
Goedenavond Haarlem. [Good evening, Haarlem]
Feeling good, yeah?
So, who here, today, of you,
had lunch or breakfast or any meal whatsoever?
Great, we're lucky.
Because there is about a billion people on the planet
who live in absolute poverty,
and they don't have this privilege.
Getting a meal is maybe a fanciful thing.
And even industrialized nations, with very developed countries,
there is about 15 percent who live below the poverty line,
like in the United States, or even Italy.
Now, the story that we tell ourselves to justify these kinds of things
doesn't really -
it's compelling to hear, because it's reassuring,
but it's not real.
And it's no surprise that we like stories, we evolved by listening to stories,
and that's how our brains have developed for hundreds of thousands of years.
And some of these stories became bestsellers,
one of them was the great epic of capitalism versus socialism.
And of course we all know the story -
well, depends whom you ask or who told you the story.
And it also works the other way around.
(Laughter)
And these stories, if you really dig deep, they're just fairytales,
because the reality is very different:
There is not a single truly 100% capitalist country in the world,
as there is no truly socialist country in the world.
They're all many variations of the two and other ideological systems
and other types of societies.
But the wealthiest and the healthiest of countries
are those that have learned to actually combine the best of them
by looking at the evidence and the results
instead of just sticking to an ideology and telling themselves a reassuring story.
We have some of the prime examples of these
in the Scandinavian and some of the more continental European countries,
and I could even include the Netherlands to some respect.
It's important that we tell ourselves credible stories, and not fairytales,
because fairytales are very dangerous
and can lead to unnecessary suffering or deaths
of hundreds of millions of people as we've seen in the past.
Now we have many challenges, and one of them is unemployment.
But instead of telling you a story, or a fairytale,
let's have a look at the data.
So here is a graph
showing the employment to population ratio in the US -
and in the OECD countries the statistics are very similar.
And this is corporate profits over the same amount of time.
Now, if you put the two things together, and you look at the recovery rate -
the gray lines are recessions,
and [from] the recovery rate you see the degree of recovery -
you see very, very astonishing results.
We have corporate profits at an all-time high,
unemployment is at a multi-decade low,
and if you take into account
that women entered the workforce only around that period,
we're actually at the lowest point ever,
and we're in the shallowest period of recovery.
We are in what, in economic terms - it's almost called the jobless recovery.
Now, there is some studies
coming out from the Oxford Martin School, and MIT, from my colleagues,
that suggest that half of all jobs in the US
are subject to automation -
robots and other artificial intelligence and smart programs.
And research just coming out in Europe also suggests the same results.
Now I've actually performed the same thought experiment,
and I've done my own research
two years before the Oxford Martin School and MIT,
and I had the exact same predictions.
And one of the big criticisms that I received was:
Sure technology displaces jobs, robots steal jobs,
but in the end you always create new jobs
because you have new opportunities, new sectors,
and there is always time to recover and find new ways of doing things.
I said: "Okay, that might be true, but let's look at the data,
let's look at the historical perspective and the timeframe."
So I took all the occupations, and I listed them by number of workers,
from the top to the bottom.
And I asked myself a very simple question:
What kind of occupations were invented within, let's say,
the next fifty or sixty years?
Because if technology only displaces temporarily jobs,
then there should be a bunch of new occupations
that are invented in recent times.
Actually I had to scroll down quite a lot: number 33, computer programmers.
It was invented actually 65 years ago.
So the reality is that new jobs are very few,
highly skilled, very sophisticated, very difficult to do,
and very few people can do them.
And certainly not the 45-year-old truck drivers,
maybe 70 or 80 million of them,
who are going to be totally displaced within the next five to seven years.
And other hundreds of millions of people in other professions.
So think about a 45-year-old truck driver
having to compete with a 17-year-old Ukrainian whiz kid
who writes four apps a day on his computer.
Not very credible.
And if you look at another trend,
the multi-billion dollar companies of today
employ fewer and fewer people,
and they have a bigger revenue per employee.
If you take Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, and you combine them,
they are worth more than a trillion dollars together,
but they only create 150,000 jobs.
And the newest companies create even more revenue per employee
because they're worth billions and billions
in a very short amount of time,
and they employ a few dozens or at maximum a few hundreds of people.
So this is the new economy, this is the reality,
and what it leads to is more inequality.
Now, I'm not stating that this is the only reason for inequality,
but it certainly exacerbates
whatever level of inequality you might have.
And if you look at the global picture of inequality,
the situation is quite dire.
You divide the population in 25 percentiles,
and you see that the 75% on the bottom owns less than 20% of all the wealth.
And the richest 2% has about 55% of all the wealth.
And the richest 85 people, not 85% or 85 million, 85 people,
own as much as the bottom 3 billion.
This is the reality, and it's only getting worse and worse.
This is worse than the medieval time during the feudal era.
This leads to the disappearance of the middle class,
which is very bad because a thriving society has a very strong middle class,
for example in the Netherlands.
And we know from Thomas Piketty's groundbreaking research
that the return of capital
- essentially, money that you've just sitting there because you have it,
or you have real estate or other properties -
makes a lot more money than labor.
So those who have more capital will only make more in this kind of system.
And it's a problem that works at the structural level.
This creates structural inequality,
which is very different from temporary inequality or cyclical inequality;
it means that it's in the system.
So the story we tell ourselves, or better yet the fairytale,
is that this process is not only inevitable,
but it's the nature of capitalism, and there is nothing to do.
Because things are just the way they are.
Now, of course, we all know that this is nonsense
because there are countries that have successfully redistribute wealth
through policies and through all sorts of innovations,
such as Germany and South Korea,
who have redistributed quite successfully wealth,
and have a very strong middle class,
but they're doing also quite well financially and in the global market.
So it's not impossible, but it's very difficult.
Even so, nobody has a long-term solution for structural technological unemployment,
which is just on the horizon,
and actually we are already experiencing some of it in some countries.
One of the proposed solutions is an unconditional basic income.
So, first of all, what is it?
Well, very simply, it's free money for everybody.
That's the simple version.
The more elaborate is a lump sum of income
that is distributed unconditionally, without any strings attached,
to every person in a country, every month.
Now, I realize that we might be plagued by selection bias
- this is a TED crowd -
but I'm going to ask this question anyway.
So if you think having a basic income, giving free money to everybody,
is a good idea,
raise your hand.
Okay, perfectly 50/50 almost.
Great.
Now, there is a lot of public debate, luckily, on this subject,
and it's good because this is a very old idea,
and now it's been rekindled in the imagination
and in the spirit of the people.
The problem with the public debate that I've noticed
is that it's very much based on ideology and the moral argument.
So whether you agree or not - I'm not very much interested in that.
I'm interested in the fact that nobody is having a real discussion,
very few are having a real discussion about this topic.
They either agree because of some ideological reasons,
some idea that they have about what people might do,
or whether its morally right;
or you might disagree because you think it's atrocious, not going to work,
or you can't just give people money for whatever reason.
We are all forgetting the most important thing,
which is asking the right questions, questions such as:
How much will it cost? and: How will you pay for it?
How can you finance it?
Would people stop working if they just receive an income?
and: Will it actually solve the problem?
This is the main question.
And, what is the problem that we're trying to solve?
Because we should focus on the goal,
not the story or the fairytale that we tell ourselves,
and we are very attached to, and we defend.
We should think about what the goal is.
So: What is the goal?
Otherwise it's going to be
just like the discussion with capitalism and socialism
all the way round for another hundred years.
We don't have that time.
So what is the goal?
It's difficult to reach a consensus,
but I think a good starting point is to start
from Article 25 of the International Declaration of Human Rights
from the United Nations,
which states that everyone has the right to a standard of living
adequate for the health and well-being of himself [and] his family,
including food, clothing, housing, medical care,
and necessary social services and so on.
So the question is:
Does a basic income fulfill this goal or not?
Because if it does,
I don't think it really matters, your ideology,
because you're actually fulfilling the goal.
And if it doesn't, it doesn't matter how good the idea sounds:
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work!
So the only way to know if it actually works
is to look at the experiments,
and nobody actually cites the experiments or the results,
they just pass it along and say,
"Oh, we've done the experiments,
and we know that it works, and it's settled."
No, it's not settled -
because these are the countries where we've run the experiments, okay?
It might sound promising, but [it involved] 14 countries,
[while] there is actually 200 countries on the planet,
so that's a reality check for everybody.
Only three of those were actually an unconditional basic income,
and only two had more than 1,000 people in the study.
Okay, so this is the reality:
We don't have a lot of evidence either for or against the basic income.
We just don't know, because we haven't done enough experiments.
So let's have a look at these two experiments.
In Canada, in the 1970s, for five years,
about 10,000 people received around $500 a month.
They wanted to know if people would stop working.
And it turns out: Not really, no, people worked just as much.
Only two categories worked a little less:
Women who took extended maternity leaves,
which I think is good, spend more time with your kids;
and young boys worked less,
but there was a higher completion rate in high school for young boys,
meaning they stayed more in school instead of going to work right away,
which also I think is good.
And then an unexpected result: a lower hospitalization rate.
This is one of the things that you discover when you actually -
run the experiments and see what happens in the real world,
instead of just making everything up in your head.
The second experiment was in India, much more recent, three years, 2011-13,
about 6,000 people, with a control group of another 6,000,
received about $4 a month.
May not sound like a lot,
but in rural India this is actually 40% of your subsistence.
Yeah, not everybody has 1,000 euros just laying around like that.
Results were very promising.
There was improved food nutrition, food sufficiency, improved livestock,
there was no increase in public bads like alcohol, prostitution and drugs,
there was reduced illness,
a lot more people were going to school,
especially girls, who are usually marginalized in society.
So it's great that a lot of girls were going to schools.
And people, very counterintuitive,
were three times more likely to be entrepreneurs
and start their own business.
So people were actually working more, and they were taking more risk,
and there was more innovation.
So this is reality.
Now, these results are promising, but in no way conclusive.
Because they are very small and very few, these experiments.
And to reach our goal we actually have to ask some other questions,
and answer them.
For example: What happens with rent?
So let's suppose that starting tomorrow
each one of us receives 1,000 euros every month.
So 1,000 euros just magically pops in your bank account, every month, the same day.
Well, what happens to rent?
If you're not a homeowner, you have a landlord or a landlady.
What's stopping them, other than policy or other mechanisms,
to raise the rent exactly 1,000 euros?
Because that's what the market dictates,
you're just going to [ask] as much as possible [for] rent,
as much as people can afford.
If you [raise it] the same for everybody,
well, that actually only increases inequality
because you're moving more capital to those who already have capital,
because of Piketty's research.
So this basic income would actually increase inequality and increase poverty,
and destroy the middle class even faster.
Then, if you are getting rid of most social programs,
and you just kind of say
people are free to do whatever they want with their income
so we don't need all this bureaucracy,
there might be a drive to privatize a bunch of things,
because you don't need so much social programs
and government involvement.
Well, we know what happens when you privatize healthcare.
It's a very bad idea, quality goes down, prices go up,
and everything goes to the bin.
So whatever solution we come up with,
we have to remember that it's not going to be a panacea,
because things need to be contextualized,
and if they're implemented, they must be comprehensive,
in a comprehensive package of larger reforms,
to look at the whole ecosystem
and the larger implications of what you're doing.
And they must be different in every country,
because different countries have different social contexts,
social adaptations, and social norms,
and not everybody [has] the same cultural level.
So it's never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution.
And the problem is that we don't have enough experiments.
We need more data, but most of all we need better data.
In particular, we need experiments,
and I make out a call
for everyone who's a policymaker,
or is working at university who has any power whatsoever to influence things,
to start trials,
talk to me, talk to other people in the basic income community.
And let's do them, with at least 10,000 people,
with a control group so you know what you're accounting for.
It must be truly unconditional:
Everybody receives it, no strings attached whatsoever,
otherwise it's not going to work.
It needs to be for more than two years,
because what people do
if they know it'll be in the long term is very different â€“
they make plans about the future.
If they know it's just going to last 6 months,
you're not going to see the social dynamics
that actually unfold in a complex society.
And it must be a true basic income,
not a fraction of a percent, of like 10% or 40% of the poverty line;
it must be, many economists suggest, about half the median income,
or somewhere around that number.
And finally, we need detailed feasibility studies,
because there are now some preliminary studies
that suggest that it might work financially,
but we don't really know because no one has actually done a thorough research
looking [at] all the implications, all the way down,
in the economic activity in the larger sense,
looking at the broader picture.
So we need to get in touch with universities,
with professors, with economists, with policymakers, with experts,
and with entrepreneurs, yes, with entrepreneurs,
because there are new technologies and new innovations
that can help us simplify bureaucracy,
because now it's easier than ever to run a basic income experiment
thanks to technology such as the block chain and cryptocurrencies.
And in developing countries mobile payments are very successful,
like in Kenya.
There are now lots of groups
that are trying to implement basic income through cryptocurrencies
and the Swiss in Switzerland are going to vote this year
on a basic income in a public referendum.
Now, I have a feeling that it's not going to pass,
because they haven't done a feasibility study,
and the discussion is at the ideological level.
So a lot of people are rightly not convinced
because no one has actually taken the time to run an experiment or do a proper study.
So there are some worrying trends that we need to think about.
We have aging population, with fewer people being able to pay taxes
and more people requiring a pension;
rising inequality;
we have the prospect of technological structural unemployment;
and the disappearing middle class.
All of this is very worrying.
And if we just tell ourselves stories and fairytales,
that this is the way things are,
and nothing's going to change, and we can't do anything about it,
it'll just be like the climate change debate,
where we just run around in circles,
and there's not really a debate,
the facts are out the window, and it's just ideology.
It's going to be a disaster if we treat it in the same way.
So we need a serious, real public debate,
looking at the data, looking at the evidence,
getting in touch with experts, civil society, policymakers, everybody,
to have a real public debate, so we can find together solutions,
so we can reach our goal to give a high standard of living to everybody,
all 7.2 billion of us,
who are sharing this amazing experience for a very brief moment,
in this pale blue dot, floating above the sky.
And there is, in the words of the great Carl Sagan,
there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than the distant image of our tiny world.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot,
the only home we've ever known.
Thank you.
(Applause)