Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian philosopher and social scientist who teaches at the University of Louvain and the University of Leuven. He is co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network and co-author of the book Basic Income. He is one of world’s foremost proponents of universal basic income (UBI).
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS): What do you think are the major challenges encountered when trying to increase political support for basic income in developed countries, and particularly in countries with a strong neoliberal sense that a free lunch – especially for the poor – is almost a sin?
Philippe Van Parijs: The first job is really understanding where the opposition comes from. What is it based on?
There may be this idea that the poor who are not working are sinners, but that’s hardly the only source of opposition. One of them, and perhaps the most powerful, is that people find it absurd to give money to people who don’t need it. So it could be less a question of giving money to people who don’t deserve it because they’re not willing to work, and more the fact that you’re giving it to people who don’t need it.
There is a constant job of explaining again and again that giving money to everyone, even the rich, is not better for the rich but it is better for the poor. That is not obvious, but it’s true. Why?
Because the UBI needs to be funded, and the high earners will pay for their own UBI and more.
Because the automatic nature of universal transfers increases the chance that the poor will actually get what they are entitled to. Universality makes it much harder to be excluded or to fall through the cracks.
Because those just below the cut-off line won’t be trapped into poverty by the threat of losing means-tested benefits if they find a job.
And because a universal transfer does not stigmatise the poor in the way a targeted transfer does.
To get around this impression, however, sometimes we must realise that the best way to reach a basic income is to present it as a refundable tax credit rather than as a paycheque. As simply reducing the taxation of the rich and poor alike, with a cash transfer to those whose tax liability is less than the credit.
The rules that should govern the distribution of income are not about rewarding people according to some notion of deservedness. They are about justice
There is a second source of opposition which is of a more ethical nature. This says that if you are able to work and you don’t want to, then you are not entitled to an income. It’s a position adopted by people on the left no less than on the right. It’s not only a neoliberal objection – it’s a typical labourist objection that you find inside the trade unions and social democratic parties.
There are various ways of answering that objection. One is simply asking if they truly believe that many people will stop working if they are given a modest amount of money unconditionally. And before they answer, remind them that, unlike with existing means-tested benefits, there would be no trade-off between accepting a job and losing access to the support under a basic income scheme. A mentioned earlier, because it’s given to people whether they have a job or not, nobody can end up ‘stuck’ in unemployment because they fear losing access to the benefit.
So that’s part of the response: being able to show why basic income is not something that would discourage people from working.
Of course, basic income would give people more options and enable them to choose between a wider range of activities. That’s the point of it. But, all in all, it would likely increase people’s employment over their lifetime. Some will choose to invest in further education. Some will spend more time looking after their children. Some will use it to search for a job that better fits their skills and tastes and which they will be able to hold for longer, without being sacked or burned out.
A further response consists in saying: “Well, so what?” The rules that should govern the distribution of income are not about rewarding people according to some notion of deservedness. They are about justice. Justice is fundamentally about giving people equal opportunities or real freedom. Some inequalities can nonetheless be tolerated in a society if they help make sure that the people with the least opportunities or the least real freedom have as much of it as is sustainable, economically and ecologically.
These are the answers to the ethical objection.
BTS: How important do you think pilot programmes, civil society initiatives, and the production of evidence are to forwarding arguments and raising the level of broader understanding among policymakers and different social groups? When it comes to policy demands like this, I often wonder how much evidence of what works and what doesn’t work actually matters. It often seems like other factors, which have nothing to do with the evidence, carry more sway.
Philippe: I think pilots have three impacts that are relevant. One is simply publicity. There is some experiment somewhere and people talk about it. The people directly involved in it, people in municipalities where it happens, and wherever notice is being taken of what’s happening.
That was the case with the 2017-2018 Finnish experiment – people talked about it from India to California. So that makes people aware of an idea they’d never heard of before. And people who have heard of it are induced to think more about it, etc.
The second effect of pilots, which can be counterproductive, is that people immediately look at employment. And as soon as they see that the impact on employment is negative, they say it’s a bad idea. It’s therefore very important to actively frame the discussion about it, preparing and interpreting the results in such a way that you can say: “Yes, of course. That should be expected. That’s a good thing.”
In the Finnish case there was actually a positive impact on employment. One reason was simply that the experimental group consisted entirely of unemployed people at the start. There were no employed people who could reduce their working time more than in the control group. But if you have a lot of people who are currently employed in a sample, then it is normal to see at least a short-term increase in voluntary unemployment once a basic income comes into effect.
Why? People are simply deciding to use the additional freedom they have to do other things – look after their kids, quit a job that had become too burdensome (and therefore avoid burnout), get further training, or try self-employment. That will show as a reduction in the total numbers of formal hours of work being performed, but not in a way that is a cause for concern. Proponents need to be prepared to argue that.
We need politicians who are intelligent enough to see how much sense it makes, and who have the courage to take a risk
The third sort of impact, which in a way is the most interesting, consists of looking at the fine grain of the outcomes. For example, the most sophisticated experiment ever made about a real basic income is the one recently done in Texas and Illinois.
There was, overall, a modest fall of employment, both in households with children and without. But one intriguing result was that, in households with children, there was a decrease in the average amount of time spent by the recipient on childcare. You might have expected the opposite. So what happened there?
First, the reduction in childcare by the recipient was partly compensated by an increase in time spent on what the researchers called ‘social activities’ – which in all likelihood were also partly with their children. So childcare was likely continuing to happen, just in a less exclusive format. Second, the partner of the recipient also reduced their employment on average due to the basic income, and might therefore have devoted more time on childcare. Third, more childcare might have been outsourced.
Only a fine-grained analysis of the data can tell us exactly what’s actually happening there. But
what looked on first glance like a negative result was more likely a rebalancing of childcare duties across the parents and an expansion of the family’s social activities – not an absolute drop.
A second intriguing result is that in households without children, there was also a significant reduction – in fact a larger reduction, at least for the category between 20 and 30 – in formal work. Where did that time go? Mostly it went to an item that was described as ‘solitary leisure’. So what is that? Jogging? Reading? Games? TikTok? Scrolling endlessly?
Is that drop worrying? The answer is, perhaps. There are more productive uses of time than many sorts of formal work, but there are also activities that are not so good, either for the individual or for society as a whole. If that is the case it’s important to know.
Pilot studies can help us focus on some possible difficulties and therefore on the accompanying measures that need to be taken if unconditional basic income is introduced.
BTS: It sounds like the movement has gotten much better over the years at telling the stories of how basic income succeeds in many different ways. But what are the major challenges for the movement now?
Philippe: What you need is to design and implement short-term measures that are administratively feasible without creating havoc in the whole system. Measures that really improve the situation of some of the worst-off members of society and are politically defensible by enough of the people who share power, while also being significant steps in the direction of a genuine UBI.
The circumstances will be different in each country – demographic, economic, political, cultural etc. So there is no general answer to your question. But in every context we need the right coalition of people. We need visionaries. We need people who provide the energy to push forward. We need tinkerers who can see how the current system can be changed without creating havoc. And we need politicians who are intelligent enough to see how much sense it makes, and who have the courage to take a risk.
In countries like the UK, or in continental Europe, the best way forward in my view is to have a modest basic income that would, at the beginning, be far from sufficient to live on one’s own in a city. This can then be gradually increased.
You need to allow time for the labour market to readjust, because even at a fairly modest level it will have an impact. Some of the least rewarding jobs will be more difficult to fill, and employers will need time to improve their conditions and pay. The whole market economy needs to adjust gradually to the new constraints that arise as a structural result the UBI empowering people at the bottom of the skills hierarchy.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at the specific challenges that campaigners face when arguing for universal basic income in highly individualised and neoliberal contexts like the United States and the United Kingdom, and how they work to overcome them.
Part 1 | Getting on with it
- UBI in the US ‘not just an idea’ – it’s achievable
Shafeka Hasash, Economic Security Project - 'Hope goes a long way': BI as a lifeline for ex-prisoners
Kevin Scott, Community Spring - Could a guaranteed income pave the way for racial justice?
Rachel Pyon, Deon Hodrick and Matthew Harvey, Equity and Transformation - Direct cash transfers 'could halve child poverty' in Oregon
Antonio Gisbert, Oregon Rebate - What can end the suffering of Black mothers and children in the US?
Zea Malawa, University of California, Berkeley Public Health
Part 2 | Widening the politically possible
- UBI could mean justice for everyone. How do we get there?
Philippe Van Parijs, UCLouvain - Basic income ‘won’t stop people working’: lessons from Canada
Ben Earle and Sheila Regehr, Basic Income Canada Network - Basic income could put food banks out of business
David Beck, University of Salford and UBILab Food - Basic income: why we need to start talking about money
Cleo Goodman, Autonomy and the Basic Income Conversation - Can cities do what national governments won’t on basic income?
Leandro Ferreira, Brazilian Basic Income Network
Part 3 | Getting the policy mix right
- It's time for a welfare revolution in the UK
Vibhor Mathur, University of Bath - Put the whole government to work rebuilding Britain
Matthew Johnson, Elliot Johnson and Kate Pickett, Northumbria University and University of York - Does Labour dare to renew the welfare state?
Cleo Goodman, Autonomy - Will Scotland be the first to guarantee a minimum income?
Ruth Boyle and David Eyre, Poverty Alliance - Sustainable welfare for a sustainable planet
Nicholas Langridge and Milena Büchs, University of Bath and University of Leeds - From dogma to data: a centrist case for pragmatic welfare reform
David Westlake, Cardiff University
