Dear all,
This is an interesting combination of the circular economy (renting rather than owning) and a new form of consumption. It would be interesting to know what the lifespan of the rental goods is under these arrangements.
From The New York Times:
They See It. They Like It. They Want It. They Rent It.
Owning nothing is now a luxury, thanks to a number of subscription start-ups.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/style/rent-subscription-clothing-furniture.html
Reid Lifset
Research Scientist, Resident Fellow in Industrial Ecology
Editor-in-chief, Journal of Industrial Ecology
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Yale University
195 Prospect St
New Haven, CT 06511
+1-203-432-6949 (tel)
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“I feel the
possibility of a frugal and protective love for creation that would be
unimaginably more meaningful and joyful than our present destructive and
wasteful economy.” Wendell Berry
suezwrites.com Pithy Prose for a Purpose
suezwrites.wordpress.com Creative Meanderings
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Some good news worth letting people know about: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/8/18656710/new-zealand-wellbeing-budget-bhutan-happiness
New Zealand is breaking new ground here.
John de Graaf
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"...UBI ... could break the link between work and consumption."
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Actually, Tom Abeles, with all due respect for your many great contributions to this listserv, I believe you are being the over-critical academic here, and the one disconnected to practice. The article really only spends the first half on the problem--or less--then discusses donut economics and makes a good case for UBI and re-wilding, two things that could actually have a practical, not theoretical impact. What is it about us that we so quickly rise to criticize. thanks, Robert Rattle for sharing this. I do think GBI can help cut the consumerism/work link. And reforestation/rewilding must be a key part of the Green New Deal.
best,
John
John de Graaf
On June 13, 2019 at 6:42 AM Tom Abeles <tab...@gmail.com> wrote:
this article spends 90% of its text to reviewing the problems and spends no time in dealing with how a UBI will change consumptive patterns to effect a positive direction towards climate change and sustainability in general. It is another example of the disconnect between academic theory and practice and why academics wonder why.tomtom abeles
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 8:19 AM 'Robert Rattle' via SCORAI < sco...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
"... UBI ... could break the link between work and consumption."
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Apologies for my short and abrupt sentence yesterday. I think the simplest way of elaborating some of the arguments I alluded to is to reprint a section from my 2017 book Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing (Edward Elgar):
A growing number of social movements, such as the Basic Income Earth Network, are calling for a universal unconditional basic income (UBI) for all citizens or residents of a territory. Not all of these are motivated by environmental concerns, but it is notable that UBI has been promoted since the early 1970s by green parties and degrowth advocates (Daly ; greens ; Schneider et al 2010). This section briefly reviews the case for and against a UBI and how it may or may not fit with degrowth scenarios.
A UBI is an unconditional payment made regularly to every individual as a right of citizenship. It would aim to provide ‘a basic amount on which every citizen can survive’, usually excluding highly variable expenses such as housing or extra costs for disability living. A UBI would ensure a minimum income for all citizens as of right rather than in response to their particular circumstances, or as a benefit earned by paid work and social contributions. There are several arguments made in its favour with a link to sustainability and post-growth. First, it would provide more freedom of choice over citizens’ life courses; it would promote a better work-life balance, enhance gender equality and expand choices between paid and unpaid work. It might enable more people to contribute to the ‘core economy’. Second, it is claimed it will provide a solution to the labour market disruption that, it is assumed, will be caused by automation and will address intensifying precariousness, especially for young people. Third, it is ‘minimally presumptuous’: a UBI entails no official enquiries into a person’s activities or household arrangements, in sharp contrast to assistance benefits in many welfare systems (Goodin, Robert, 1992). Consequently, it could reduce division and stigma and enhance social solidarity (Torry etc).[1]
Yet, all extant proposals for UBI envisage a supplemental benefit well below national poverty lines and minimum wages, let alone the decent living standard promulgated in Chapter 7. This is because of the arithmetic: a full UBI would absorb a tremendous share of national income and require big increases in taxation. As the economist Tony Atkinson explains, if a 20% tax rate is needed to pay for all other government spending, then to provide a basic income set at only 30% of average income would require additional taxation of 50% of average income - a total tax take of 70%. This level of fiscal exaction would be still greater in a postgrowth economy.
The recent upsurge in interest in UBI is partly due to a renewed concern that digital automation will destroy large numbers of jobs and intensify the precarity of life for millions of people. Yet this vision of a surge in labour productivity is precisely the problem according to Jackson (2009) and other advocates of post-growth. An equally likely future scenario is one of low economic growth or ‘secular stagnation’.[2]
There are powerful normative arguments against UBI stemming from a wider conception of wellbeing. Liberal and libertarian arguments for UBI stress its role in achieving real freedom for all by enabling all to choose freely between work and leisure (van Parijs 1995). But from a human need perspective, participation in productive and reproductive activities, as well as contributing to collective welfare, is a crucial component of self-respect, contributes to cognitive development and provides a site for purposeful socialisation. These benefits from participating in socially significant activities are sidelined when the argument is framed as a simple calculus of choice between work and leisure. It is for this reason that most participants in experimental research value both need and desert, and favour the provision of a guaranteed minimum income but not unconditionally (Brock 2009, ch.3; Frohlich and Oppenheimer 1992; Gough 2000, ch.9). Partly in response to this the economist Tony Atkinson (2015) has suggested a universal participation income.[3] This is much closer in spirit to the concept of active wellbeing argued in this book. On the other hand it resurrects an administrative challenge absent from pure UBI, that of deciding what and how much constitutes participation.
Another serious problem within a post-growth scenario is that UBI focuses on money income, whereas we have demonstrated above that collective public provision of several need satisfiers is superior on grounds of efficiency, equity and sustainability.
The coupling of UBI with degrowth reveals a dilemma at its heart: an expanded and fiscally more demanding state is superimposed on a shrinking economy. This is of course a general dilemma, facing existing welfare states and publicly guided climate mitigation states. But the pressing need will be for a radical investment strategy: to decarbonise production and consumption, for climate adaptation programmes, for social consumption rather than individualised consumption. If it diverts attention from collective goods, services and investment, a partial UBI could end up recommodifying elements of existing welfare states (which is precisely the aim of its neocon advocates such as Charles Murray (n.d.)). A needs-based approach supports a more mixed package of policies. Policy analysis shows that there is no one-to-one relationship between policy instruments and outcomes, and that one-size-fits-all policies rarely succeed (Gough 2000, ch.9).
My conclusion is that UBI cannot provide a realistic transition strategy from the present to a post-growth society. UBI requires a one-off, top-down transformation: the abolition of numerous entitlements, acquired social insurance benefits, and tax reliefs. The idea of a citizen’s income resembles a ‘silver bullet’, a transformative shift that could distract attention from the complex underlying causes of inequalities, ill-health and social conflict, for example. These require ‘upstream’ systemic changes, rather than a single downstream intervention.
[1] Most current proposals are not for a full UBI at all, but for variants which undermine its core rationale. These include ‘partial’ BI, payable to certain groups in society, such as children (there is nothing new in this), or ‘supplemental’ UBI that provides a small universal benefit alongside existing social security benefits (Piachaud 2016) cf (Reed and Lansley, 2016).
[2] Some economists argue that productivity will continue to fall, for several reasons: the shift to low-productivity services will continue though at a reduced rate and the debt overhang will remain (Gordon 2012; Demailly et al 2013).
[3] Participation can be broadly defined as making a social contribution – for example by full or part time waged employment or self-employment, by education, training or active job search, by home care for children or the elderly or disabled, or by regular voluntary work in a recognised association, or a portfolio of activities equalling around 35 hours per week.
UBS or UBI?
Public services have a greater potential to pursue sustainability goals than programmes to disburse funds for consumer expenditure. In particular they could play a greater role in prevention: ‘action to reduce the probability of a risk occurring’. The case for preventive public policy is essentially twofold: it is better for human wellbeing to prevent harm than to deal with its consequences and it promises financial savings to expensive and hard-pressed welfare states.
This is most apparent in facing the most profound, indeed existential, threat to contemporary public policy - climate collapse and extreme environmental stress. The urgent necessity to move away from unsustainable economic, social and environmental practices provides a novel justification for extending universal public services, in three directions. First, public provision of services strengthens the capacity of communities to adapt to or cope with severe climatic and environmental stress. The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the poor and black populations of New Orleans (in contrast to the population of Cuba, affected by the same hurricane) demonstrated the importance of collective services. Second, public services can play a vital role in decarbonising the economy in a just way. For example, Green New Deal programmes to retrofit the vast bulk of the housing stock will require public planning, finance and management. They will be needed to ensure a ‘just transition’ to lower carbon living, not simply a green capitalist transition that will load costs onto the poorest people and communities.
Third, UBS can play a vital role in switching the entire economy from an obsession with growth to a concern for human wellbeing within planetary limits. Public provisioning systems for healthcare and education are better able than market systems to promote sustainable consumption, to implement national strategies for reducing GHG emissions and to coordinate sustainable practices such as active travel and local food procurement. For example, the mainly privately-funded US healthcare system directly accounts for 8 per cent of emissions in the US, compared with 3 per cent of UK emissions directly stemming from the NHS. This is due both to the greater macro-efficiency and lower expenditure shares of health in the UK, and to lower emissions per pound or dollar spent, presumably as a result of better allocation of resources and procurement practices. There is some cross-national evidence that more extensive and generous welfare states are better suited to adopting and implementing pro-environmental policies, especially where they embody ideas about shared needs and collective responsibilities.....
Of course this leaves open the question, why not advocate both UBI and UBS? There is not the space here to confront that question properly but it embraces consequential and ethical arguments. A universal unconditional living income would require punitive levels of taxation. By focusing wholly on individual income, UBI would threaten public provision of collective consumption, which of course is why many on the libertarian right support it. UBS is fiscally more modest and discriminatory. Common human needs recognise the social foundations of life and the role of contribution to a collective cause: ‘from each according to their ability’ as a well as ‘to each according to their needs’. In this and other ways UBS embodies quite distinct, and I would argue ethically superior, ideas of economy, society, sustainability and social solidarity.
[i] IGP (Institute for Global Prosperity) 2017. Social prosperity for the future: A proposal for Universal Basic Services.
Zamora, D. (2017). “The Case Against a Basic Income”. Jacobin Magazine.
Martinelli, L. (2017). “The Fiscal and Distributional Implications for different Universal Basic Income Schemes in the UK”. Bath: Institute for Policy Research.
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