Universal basic income: prescription for disaster?

I have written over and over again about the necessity of socialism in order to achieve anything like real civilization in human life, and about the gross evil of extreme and growing economic inequality all over the world – the latter, I am pleased to see in a rather weary and cynical way, is beginning to grasp the attention and stir the anxiety of a lot of thinking people even in positions of wealth, power and responsibility lately – and I am much exercised by the spreading idea of putting some sort of ‘universal basic income’ (UBI for short) guarantee into place within the short- or medium term. A lot of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Nobel Prize-winning economists to the long-serving chief minister of the tiny Indian state of Sikkim are rooting for the idea. 

Many people are claiming, very plausibly, that UBI will not only go a long way in reducing inequality, but will prove to be much simpler and cheaper overall to implement than the plethora of complex and leaky social welfare schemes that most governments currently run, give the average citizen greater choice about the way s/he wants to live life, and could perhaps be the best protection against the sort of widespread social chaos that could arise out of very large scale unemployment stemming from increasingly universal automation – something that is inevitable within the next half century, and something that is unravelling the social fabric as nothing else has done since the first Industrial Revolution began more than 250 years ago.

Why am I not too keen on looking at UBI as a panacea, then?

Firstly, because I do not think that a genuinely meaningful UBI scheme will ever be feasible within the existing capitalist order. As the professor in this article calculates, trying to guarantee a measly $12,000 a year to every US citizen – hardly a guarantor of a decent standard of living at current prices! – will call for transferring something like $3 trillion from the rich to the poor: aiming for a higher per capita figure could raise the figure to ten trillion. Does anyone believe even for a moment that the richest 1%, who control nearly 50% (or more) of the country’s wealth (conditions are more or less the same in India) could be ‘gently persuaded’ to give up that sort of money to help the vast majority live in security and decency?

Secondly, because as an ‘elitist’ from lifelong experience who cares more for other people’s welfare than most people seem to care about their own, I am convinced that giving people free money to spend as they wish is not a very good idea: it is pretty well established that a very significant chunk of the populace would spend the money on drink, gambling and buying basically useless gizmos (like new smartphones or motorbikes every year) than on food, shelter, healthcare or education for their children. Call me names if you like, and I don’t like the situation one whit myself – but it hardly changes reality.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I think that UBI addresses only a small part, the economic part, of the crisis looming over us. And I believe (I may be wrong) that far too few people are yet worrying about what worries me. To put it very briefly: how will a society filled with vast hordes of unemployed people with money enough in their pockets survive for long? That is not wholly an imaginary dystopia, it is already a (though not-yet-all-pervasive) reality for those who have eyes to see with. I wrote in a post titled Technology in a demented age that ‘I know there are many hundred million people in the world today with too much money, too much time hanging heavy, too little responsibility, too empty brains and no real passions of any kind, who need to be kept constantly engaged and entertained…’ and you can check this out for yourself, really, though schoolchildren are still writing trash in their essays about people being ‘busy’ all the time. What on earth are they busy with? I see folks swarming in shopping malls even on weekday mornings whenever I care to go and look; enormous numbers are going to wedding- and other feasts or attending noisy picnics and festivals of one sort or the other all the time, still bigger numbers are dressing up for hours or glued to their TVs or mobile phones for many hours a day, or zooming around aimlessly on bikes; so many parents chat vacuously before my house every day dropping their kids to the tuition and waiting to pick them up again, obviously because they have nothing better to do… one has to be determinedly blind or stupid not to notice. Of course some people are really very busy, but they certainly do not make up a majority. And remember, this is already true in an age when not all – far from all – are assured of a decent, guaranteed, unearned income lifelong! Trying to imagine what is going to happen when everybody is so assured boggles the mind.

I have a great faith in proverbs – remember they represent wisdom about human nature gleaned and distilled over thousands of years, and human nature does not change significantly over a few generations – and I constantly worry over the proverb ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop’. Imagine a society where the vast majority of minds are always idle, and bodies too, because they never have to think of making a living. Colin Wilson wrote in his monumental Criminal History of Mankind that much of the worst kinds of crimes all through history have been committed by people who were bored stiff with a too-easy life. And that was in the days when most people had to keep their noses to the grind from early childhood to old age just to survive. Look around yourself, see how many crimes and offences are committed already by people (even supposedly educated people) whose primary problem is time hanging heavy in their hands, from drug-sodden teenagers screaming and swooning at rock concerts and football games to louts harassing women on the streets to gangs ready to be whistled up by any political party to create a riot just because it relieves the unbearable monotony of their empty lives with a few moments of violent, gory ‘fun’.  Then imagine a whole society full of such semi-humans…

Shall we acknowledge reality before we go ahead with well-intentioned but harebrained schemes which can bring about disaster? How many people, given what we are mostly like, use well-provisioned leisure to become Thomas Jeffersons, Lord Kelvins and Rabindranath Tagores? How many are much more likely to turn into pigs and wolves instead? (In case that last line sounds harsh or far-fetched, I suggest you look up Tolstoy's short story The imp and the crust).