For young hungry entrepreneurs, the future of work seems bright indeed.
The internet of things is gonna allow us to do things faster, smarter and more efficiently.
But for the rest of us, the idea of not having a job can seem absolutely terrifying.
It raises serious questions about 'how will I pay my rent?'
'How will I pay my mortgage?' 'How will I even pay for my next meal?'
Malcolm Torry seems to think he has the answer to these questions.
We asked Charles Barthold to go talk to him
about his promotion of a citizen's basic income.
What is basic income?
Basic income is a very simple idea, it's sometimes called
by the name 'citizen's income', 'universal basic income' now some times 'citizen's basic income',
they all mean the same thing, they mean an unconditional income
for every individual. An unconditional means that the amount you get wouldn't
depend on your income, or your wealth, or your employment status, or your
relationships with anybody else, it will be exactly the same amount of money for
everyone of the same age. It could vary with somebody's age, so somebody who's
older might get more, somebody who's younger might get less, a child would get
less, but otherwise it remains entirely unconditional.
how much are we talking about in there in this country in the UK?
That's a very interesting question because all kinds of different suggestions have, of course, been made.
The research that we've done suggests this, if you had a large citizen's basic
income, the tax rates required to pay for it would be quite high. That might not be
politically feasible. What we have proved is that a citizen's basic income of 61
pounds a week can be paid for by reducing to zero your
income tax person allowance and the lower earnings threshold for national
insurance contributions and raising all national insurance contributions to 12%
and income tax rates would only need to rise by 3%.
By doing that we could provide every single working age adult with a citizens basic income a 61 pounds a week.
Why is it important for you and why is it important in general?
After I left university, I worked for two years on the public counter in a means-tested
benefits office, it was called the supplementary benefit office then, and it
was part of what was then called the Department for Health and Social Security.
So for two years I was facing some quite often angry members of the
public and some quite stressed members of staff behind me trying to manage a
really difficult means-tested benefit system.
And the system was clearly bad for everybody.
It was bad for the claimants in front of me, it was bad
for people behind me, and, at the same time, I realised just how useful child
benefit was, because the child benefit is an unconditional income for every child
it goes to the child's carer and it just kept on coming for everyone who was in
front of me complaining about mistakes in their means-tested benefits.
And so back then, I'd begun to think, well why can't we do things generally rather differently,
so that it all looks a bit more like child benefit.
You mentioned in basically a number of problems connected to administering benefits and that this
basic income would sort out, but there are probably as well benefits for
people and not only from the perspective of the government.
Perhaps you could mention a few things about this.
Although ministrative problems affect the claimants of benefits just as much as
they affect the government and the administrative simplicity of a citizen's
basic income is one of the most important things about it. Because of
its simplicity, you could completely computerise it, so it would start at your
birth, it would end at your death and nothing would need to be done to it
between those two points in time, it would just keep on coming. Very unlike
our present means-tested benefits system, which is complex, it requires constant
administration, it requires vast amounts of time and effort being put in by
claimants and by the staff administering it, and it's full of errors, their error
rates are huge and fraught as well, and because fraud can happen within such a
means-tested benefits system. Sometimes the difference between error and fraud
is quite a difficult line to find, because what is simply an error can in
fact legally be a fraud and so both the staff and public
suffer a great deal from the administration means-tested benefits and
none of that would apply to a citizen's basic income. For 400
years we've been means testing benefits, and therefore, we intuitively believe that
if the poor need money you should give money to the poor, which means that you
then take it away from them if they become less poor, which means it's quite
difficult for them to earn their way out of poverty. So that's something
that's deeply embedded in our minds and it means that an unconditional
income sometimes finds it quite difficult to lodge in our minds as a
sensible idea, because it's not something we're used to, it's counterintuitive
giving money to everybody, because people say 'the rich don't need it, why give it
to the rich, the poor need the money', but unfortunately, if you give money
just to the poor it becomes an inefficient means-tested
benefit. It is far more sensible to give money to everybody and then you're
taxing the rich more than they receiving in their citizens basic income anyway, so
what's the problem? Especially if it's very efficient to give everyone the
money. But there is still a problem with psychological feasibility. It seems to me
that this is connected, this psychological feasibility is related to
the fact that we tend to associate income with work and then this basic
income would be huge cultural and perhaps even anthropological change,
because then people would have to start realising that income is not necessarily
connected to work. One of the reasons why opinion may start, may now be shifting,
and it does seem to be, is that the employment market is becoming much more
problematic for more people. And so it's beginning to be understood.
How could basic income empower people? How could it be an opportunity for
people? One of the important effects of citizen's basic income would be to
increase people's choices. And that is an empowering thing of course,
so if you've got more choices in the employment market you might decide that
if you're in a couple one of you who's currently
working full-time may well work part-time or you may both get part-time
jobs instead of one of you getting a full-time job, for instance, you
would have choices to make. And, it's when people have choices that they start to
look at what they're doing with their lives, and so, yes you may well find that
people with caring responsibilities can put more time into them. You might also
find that because your marginal deduction rates have reduced, some people
might seek more paid employment, so it could go either way and the way it went
would be actually largely up to you, again so what I'm saying is that the
choices would be there, and we may see an increase in voluntary activity in the
community, I hope we would and there will be the option the opportunity for that,
we may see more people putting more effort and time into caring
responsibilities in relation to children, older parents, and so on, and there would
be people more able to make those choices. How they make choices, of
course, we don't know. It's up to them, that's the whole point of a citizen's
basic income, it gives people choices.
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