About Virginia Eubanks

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s,and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

Reposted from the Laura Flanders Show

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But can we really end scarcity?

We believe that the post-scarcity vision of the future is problematic because it reflects an understanding of technology and the economy that could worsen the problems it seeks to address. This is the bad news. Here’s why:

New technologies come to consumers as finished products that can be exchanged for money. What consumers often don’t understand is that the monetary exchange hides the fact that many of these technologies exist at the expense of other humans and local environments elsewhere in the global economy. The intuitive belief that technology can manifest from money alone, anthropologists tell us, is a culturally rooted notion which hides the fact that the scarcity experienced by some is linked to the abundance enjoyed only by a few.

Many people believe that issues of scarcity can be solved by using more efficient production methods. But this may overlook some of the unintended consequences of efficiency improvements. The Jevons Paradox, a key finding attributed to the 19^th century British economist Stanley Jevons, illustrates how efficiency improvements can lead to an absolute increase of consumption due to lower prices per unit and a subsequent increase in demand. For example, the invention of more efficient train engines allowed for cheaper transportation that catalyzed the industrial revolution. However, this did not reduce the rate of fossil fuel use; rather, it increased it.  When more efficient machines use less energy, they cost less, which often encourages us to use them more—resulting in a net increase in energy consumption.

Past experience tells us that super-efficient technologies typically encourage increased throughput of raw materials and energy, rather than reducing them. Data on the global use of energy and raw materials indicate that absolute efficiency has never occurred: both global energy use and global material use have increased threefold since the 1970s. Therefore, efficiency is better understood as a rearranging of resources expenditures, such that efficiency improvements in one end of the world economy increase resource expenditures in the other end.

The good news is that there are alternatives. The wide availability of networked computers has allowed new community-driven and open-source business models to emerge. For example, consider Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia that has displaced the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta. Wikipedia is produced and maintained by a community of dispersed enthusiasts primarily driven by other motives than profit maximization.  Furthermore, in the realm of software, see the case of GNU/Linux on which the top 500 supercomputers and the majority of websites run, or the example of the Apache Web Server, the leading software in the web-server market. Wikipedia, Apache and GNU/Linux demonstrate how non-coercive cooperation around globally-shared resources (i.e. a commons) can produce artifacts as innovative, if not more, as those produced by industrial capitalism.

In the same way, the emergence of networked micro-factories are giving rise to new open-source business models in the realm of design and manufacturing. Such spaces can either be makerspaces, fab labs, or other co-working spaces, equipped with local manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing and CNC machines or traditional low-tech tools and crafts. Moreover, such spaces often offer collaborative environments where people can meet in person, socialize and co-create.

This is the context in which a new mode of production is emerging. This mode builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies.  It can be codified as “design global, manufacture local” following the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes application that is small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled. DGML could recognize the scarcities posed by finite resources and organize material activities accordingly. First, it minimizes the need to ship materials over long distances, because a considerable part of the manufacturing takes place locally. Local manufacturing also makes maintenance easier, and also encourages manufacturers to design products to last as long as possible. Last, DGML optimizes the sharing of knowledge and design as there are no patent costs to pay for.

There is already a rich tapestry of DGML initiatives happening in the global economy that do not need a unified physical basis because their members are located all over the world. For example, consider the L’Atelier Paysan  (France) and Farmhack (U.S.), communities that collaboratively build open-source agricultural machines for small-scale farming; or the Wikihouse project that democratizes the construction of sustainable, resource-light dwellings;  or the OpenBionics project that produces open source and low-cost designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the RepRap community that creates open-source designs for 3D printers that can be self-replicated.  Around these digital commons, new business opportunities are flourishing, while people engage in collaborative production driven by diverse motives.

So, what does this mean for the future of tomorrow’s businesses, the future of the global economy, and the future of the natural world?

First, it is important to acknowledge that within a single human being the “homo economicus”—the self-interested being programmed to maximize profits—will continue to co-exist with the “homo socialis”, a more altruistic being who loves to communicate, work for pleasure, and share. Our institutions are biased by design. They endorse certain behaviours over the others. In modern industrial capitalism, the foundation upon which our institutions have been established is that we are all homo economicus. Hence, for a “good” life, which is not always reflected in growth and other monetary indexes, we need to create institutions that would also harness and empower the homo socialis.

Second, the hidden social and environmental costs of technologies will have to be recognized. The so-called “digital society” is admittedly based on a material- and energy-intensive infrastructure. This is important to recognize so as not to further jeopardize the lives of current and future generations by unwittingly encouraging serious environmental instability and associated social problems.

Finally, a new network of interconnected commons-based businesses will continue to emerge, where sharing is not used to maximize profits, but to create new forms of businesses that would empower much more sharing, caring, and collaboration globally. As the global community becomes more aware of how their abundance is dependent on other human beings and the stability of environments, more and more will see commons-based businesses as the way of the future.

Vasilis Kostakis is a Senior Researcher at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and he is affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Andreas Roos is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary field of Human Ecology at Lund.

Originally published at HBR.org

Photo by longan drink

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The Caliph of the Ahmadyya Muslim Community spoke about how we need world leaders to prioritize helping the poor out of poverty in the same urgent manner as acting on climate change. He said that the world’s poorest do not worry about the latest greenhouse gas figures because they’re too busy worrying about whether they can feed their children today.

This comment hit me hard because it simultaneously rang true yet also seemed to contradict what I know about climate change hurting the poor most.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that people won’t care about longer term problems or global problems when they are focused on basic survival today.

#Climatechange will affect the worlds poorest the most. We must transition to sustainable energy sources to prevent increased poverty and inequality. #EarthDay https://t.co/4mQVv4xbBF

— Oxfam Canada (@oxfamcanada) April 22, 2018

But people prioritize, and all problems are relative.

Even if the global poor know climate change is affecting their community in a serious way, they probably won’t have it top of mind if they are struggling to feed their children and their only water source is contaminated and miles away, or their family are sick and they can’t afford healthcare. These urgent problems are naturally going to take precedence. And I think it’s important for Western environmentalists like myself to understand that.

So, do the global poor care about climate change?

I was very curious, so I decided to dig into some research. I found four surveys comparing attitudes to climate change across countries. Shall we dive in?

The research: what the global poor thinks of climate change

I’m going to summarize each of the four studies I looked at before going on to my own analysis and conclusion. I encourage you to read these studies yourself if you’re interested, as they are all packed with fascinating detail that I don’t have time to go into here.

1. UN survey 2014

• Huge survey asked citizens to rank global issues by importance
• Covered a good range of countries from rich to middle income to poor
• You can see the data here and a good analysis by Vox here
• People in rich countries rank climate change #9 on the list
• Middle income countries rank climate change #14 on the list
• Poorest countries rank climate change last on the list
• Global average placed education first and climate action last

2. YouGov survey 2015

• Smaller survey of citizens asked to rank global issues in importance
• Covered 17 countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East plus the US and Australia
• None of the poorest countries were included – none from Latin America or Africa
• You can see the data here, with a really cool interactive datavis
• Developing countries China, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia were included
• China and Thailand among the most concerned about climate change
• Indonesia and Malaysia among the least
• Global average places climate action third behind poverty and terrorism (which was the top by miles – likely influenced by the timing of the survey just after the December 2015 attack in Paris, but note climate has gone from last to third place compared to the UN survey)
• UK and US among the least concerned about climate change

3. Pew Research Centre survey 2015

• Large survey covering a good spread of 40 countries
• Asked citizens a number of questions about their views on climate change
• Majorities in every country said it is a serious problem, but wide variation between countries
• Citizens in Latin America and Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, are most concerned about climate impacts
• Citizens in higher emissions countries are less concerned
• You can see the data here

4. Gallup survey 2007-08

• Using older data but huge sample size covering over 119 countries
• Claims to be biggest pubic survey on climate change to date, representing 90% of the world population
• Asked citizens how much they know about climate change and if they know of it, how much of a threat is it to them and their family
• Over a third of world’s adults do not know about climate change at all
• This figure was as high as two thirds in many developing countries
• Education level was biggest determiner of climate awareness
• When people in poor countries are aware of climate change they are very concerned about it
• Perception of climate risk very high in South America and many African and Asian countries
• You can see the study in Nature journal here and a good analysis on Carbon Brief here

Analysis: What is the data telling us?

So, as you can see these four surveys show mixed results. The UN survey is very clearly aligned with the Caliph’s comment that people in the poorer countries are not concerned about climate change as they have more urgent problems to worry about.

The YouGov survey shows a much more mixed picture. But it is also the least relevant for our question because it only asks people from 17 countries, only four of which are developing countries (that’s if you count China) and none of the world’s poorest countries are included. So while fascinating in other ways, let’s set that one aside for now.

The Pew survey appears to show the opposite of the UN one: people in the poorest countries are actually the most concerned about climate change. Meanwhile, people in the countries that have the highest emissions (i.e. richer ones) are not as concerned.

Young woman gathers water from Mwamanongu Village water source, Tanzania. Image credit: Bob Metcalf / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The Gallup survey has two big points relevant for our question. On the one hand a high proportion of people in the poorest countries do not even know what climate change is. Clearly you can’t worry about something you don’t know exists. (Although I bet they do worry about the impacts of climate change likes floods, droughts, storms etc). But when they are aware of climate change, they tend to be very concerned about it.

The studies with the most clear-cut results are the UN one and the Pew one – which suggest opposite conclusions. Why is this? It’s possible that the Pew one, timed very close to the climate summit where the Paris Agreement was signed, could have picked up on rising awareness and excitement around that. But to be honest I doubt that the citizens of the South American and sub-Saharan African nations were so engaged in that process as to shift the results so dramatically.

What I think is much more relevant is the nature of the studies and how people think about risk.

The UN one, that said the global poor are least concerned about climate change, asked people to rank a list of global issues from most to least important. While the Pew one, that said the global poor are most concerned about climate change, asked people about their views on climate change in isolation. The Gallup survey, which said when the global poor know about climate change they are very concerned about it, was similar to the Pew study – i.e. it asked about climate in isolation.

So, my conclusion from this is that the global poor are very concerned about climate change, more so than we are, but they don’t prioritize it because they are even more concerned about other problems they face. Such as feeding their children, like the Caliph says.

This makes sense intuitively and is backed by the data. So, what does this mean for global climate action, poverty alleviation and development?

What this really means

Looking into this has made me even more convinced that tackling global poverty has to be done in tandem with tackling climate change. They are intricately connected. I think it’s important that we remember climate change is a historical injustice: the poorest countries suffer the worst impacts yet have done least to cause it and have the least capacity to address it.

Yet it is vital that they do address it. Vital for them, as they face the most serious risks, and vital for all of us as we simply can’t afford for poor countries to start polluting as much as we have. That may well be unfair but it’s tough – nature doesn’t care what is fair between humans. But we do, or should, care about fairness and justice, so it is the responsibility of the richer nations to help the poorer ones develop in a sustainable way, leapfrogging over the polluting stage of development to a clean economy.

I also think it is totally unreasonable for us to expect the poorest countries to reduce their consumption of energy and resources. Yes, efficiency gains should always be made where possible, but the reality is they are consuming way too little to meet their basic needs while we are consuming way too much.

How women in Kenya are improving their families’ food security through simple land-restoration technology https://t.co/QWZZsQnQ2G #GenderInAg #SDG5 Photo: World Agroforestry Centre / Ake Mamo pic.twitter.com/DQPr5aEeX5

— GREAT Agriculture (@GREATAgResearch) April 23, 2018

Luckily, there are many forms of climate action that the poorest countries can take that both improve their people’s lives today while also helping to fight climate change. These include conserving forests and wetlands, sustainable forestry, agroforestry, composting, offgrid renewables and others. Along with climate adaptation (such as flood defences, drought-resistant crops etc) these forms of mitigation are what they should be focusing on, because they can be done while improving livelihoods.

I’m excited to delve into each of these topics on this blog at some point. For now, please share this post and subscribe to catch the next ones. And be thoughtful about global inequality and poverty when discussing climate change solutions.

To be effective, the climate movement needs to be inclusive and intersectional.

Header photo: Children going to gather water from river, Lao PDR. Image credit: Asian Development Bank / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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 To help transform our economy over the last few years, Stir to Action has organised national workshop programmes to support communities. Now, we are now planning to launch a year-long programme of practical workshops, 3-day residentials, mentoring, and live crowdfunding to build a new economy that works for everyone.

For this to be successful — and with your support — we are hoping to raise the £12,500 we need to cover programme costs. Pledges on our campaign over the next five weeks will support subsidised workshop places, local workshop venues, programme design, our mentoring network, and provide the resources to engage new communities with these ideas. This is our first programme at this scale, but we aim for it to be an annual programme!

We’re continuing to build our inspiring mentoring network during the campaign — would you like to join?!
Get in touch via [email protected]

Click here to support our crowdfund

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In a unique investigation of the subject, Share The World’s Resources (STWR) founder Mohammed Mesbahi has set out a strategic vision for how to realise the very highest ideal of a basic income worldwide. He argues that a truly universal and unconditional basic income is ultimately feasible within each nation, coordinated under the auspices of the United Nations. Yet this will initially depend on an unparalleled degree of public support for the cause of ending hunger and needless deprivation, based on a fairer sharing of the world’s resources.

That is the only path, writes Mesbahi, for a basic income policy to uphold the fundamental human rights of all. And if pursued with this motivation, it is a pioneering and honourable path that inherently says: ‘above all nations is humanity’.

STWR’s latest publication is closely related to Mesbahi’s two recent works that also examine popular intellectual discourses in a similarly holistic way, in relation to the contemporary ideas of the ‘commons’ and the ‘sharing economy’. Yet the emergent discourse about a universal basic income is perhaps closest to the heart of STWR’s principal concerns, as reflected in the slogan for the 10th Basic Income Week: “Redistribute the wealth, here and everywhere!”

However, few advocates for a basic income contemplate its implementation in a definitively universal or planetary sense, as Mesbahi sets out to investigate in this inspirational treatise for activists and concerned citizens.

While the publication is principally aimed at advocates within the basic income movements across the world, it is also hoped that lay readers can easily read and benefit from the author’s intuitive observations. With this in mind, a number of explanatory and contextual notes are included at the end to help clarify where STWR stands on some of the technical issues, and also to help provide some introductory material for interested newcomers to this important (although somewhat controversial) policy proposal.

An excerpt of our new book, ‘Towards a universal basic income for all humanity’, is available online here.

To purchase a copy of the book, please contact [email protected]

Further resources: 

Towards a universal basic income for all humanity

Heralding Article 25: A people’s strategy for world transformation

17th BIEN Congress on “Implementing a Basic Income”

10th international Basic Income Week 18-24 sept. 2017

Image credit: Andrew J. Nilsen, Fast Company

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We are told everyday that unfettered economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is desirable, yet, though we may not always have the words to challenge it, we know the mantra ‘greed is good’ cannot be true: we see everyday and everywhere the toll it is taking on our lives, our communities and our environment.

Thanks predominantly to the overconsumption of natural resources by rich countries, the entire planet faces ecological collapse. We are overshooting the Earth’s biocapacity by 62% each year, and, as a result, species are dying off between 1,000 and 10,000 times the normal rate.

Corporations and states continue to treat people as commodities, our suffering and deaths are considered “negative externalities”; sacrifices at the altar of GDP growth. Inequality continues to rise, leading to social breakdown and vast waves of migration. Just 5 men have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3 billion people.

If human imagination and potential are boundless, why must we believe, when it comes to our economic model, that ‘there is no alternative’? Is this really the best we can do – continue to wait for wealth to trickle down?

At The Rules we believe that we are living within a system that by its very design values profit over people and planet. Capitalism stems from the same logic that saw it fit to sell people as slaves across the Atlantic; a logic that has given us sweatshops, and conflict minerals; farmers’ suicides and oil spills;.

The Rules is here to help midwife the transition to a post-capitalist world. As a time-bound project, we will exist until 2023, working to expose the core logic of our global system.

We are here to connect the dots between various local struggles, and between the millions of us who are feeling the pain of this failing system.

Stories are powerful. The status quo is set by the stories we have been told for decades, and so to challenge it, we must tell stories of beautiful alternatives and amplify those told by others.

Together, we have the power to change the stories, change our cultures and change the rules.

The post Postcapitalism & Beautiful Alternatives: A brief introduction to The Rules appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and gray conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.

These old “isms” lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”–one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.

There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clearheaded conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even postwar Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record-high levels of health, education, and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.

The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered Earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.

Fortunately, there is already a wealth of language and ideas out there that stretch well beyond these dusty old binaries. They are driven by a hugely diverse community of thinkers, innovators, and practitioners. There are organizations like the P2P (Peer to Peer) Foundation, Evonomics, the Next System Project, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking reimagining the global economy. The proposed models are even more varied: from complexity, to post-growth, de-growth, land-based, regenerative, circular, and even the deliciously named doughnut economics.

Then, there are the many communities of practice, from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the barter economies of Detroit, from the global Transition Network, to Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness index. There are even serious economists and writers, from Jeremy Rifkin to David Flemming to Paul Mason, making a spirited case that the evolution beyond capitalism is well underway and unstoppable, thanks to already active ecological feedback loops and/or the arrival of the near zero-marginal cost products and services. This list barely scratches the surface.

The thinking is rich and varied, but all of these approaches share the virtue of being informed by up-to-date science and the reality of today’s big problems. They move beyond the reductionist dogmas of orthodox economics and embrace complexity; they focus on regenerating rather than simply using up our planet’s resources; they think more holistically about how to live well within ecological boundaries. Some of them draw on indigenous knowledge and lore about how to stay in balance with nature; others confront the contradictions of endless growth head on.

Not all would necessarily describe themselves as anti- or even post-capitalist, but they are all, in one way or another, breaking through the dry seals of neoclassical economic theory upon which capitalism rests.
Still, resistance to innovation is strong. One reason is surely that our culture has been stewed in capitalist logic for so long that it feels impregnable. Our instinct is now to see it as natural; some even go so far as to deem it divine. The notion that we should prioritize the production of capital over all other things has become a kind of common sense; the way humans must organize.

Another reason, clearly linked, is the blindness of much of the academic world. Take, for example, the University of Manchester, where a group of economics students asked for their syllabus to be upgraded to account for the realities of a post-crash world. Joe Earle, one of the organizers of what the Guardian described as a “quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching” told the newspaper: “[Neoclassical economics] is given such a dominant position in our modules that many students aren’t even aware that there are other distinct theories out there that question the assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions of the economics we are taught.”In much the same way as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi rebuffed college student Trevor Hill when he asked whether the Democratic Party would consider any alternatives to capitalism, Manchester University’s response was a flat no. Their economics course, they said, “focuses on mainstream approaches, reflecting the current state of the discipline.” Mainstream, current, anything but fresh. Such attitudes have spawned a global student movement, Rethinking Economics, with chapters as far afield as Ecuador, Uganda, and China.

Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.

But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”

One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: With just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living “successful” hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.

It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”–can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.

We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.

Photo by andres musta

The post Don’t Be Scared About The End Of Capitalism–Be Excited To Build What Comes Next appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Okay, if you’re reading this sentence, that means you’ve stopped dreaming and have come back to reality. We have no idea how long you were gone, but don’t worry if it was for a little longer than you had expected. It happens. We understand. There’s a lot to think about there. What a crazy question anyways, right? Getting free money? For the rest of your life? Just for being alive? Crazy.

Or is it? The idea that we’ve been describing has actually been under discussion for centuries, and it has even been experimented with all over the world. In fact, there are actually several versions of it happening right now, at this very moment. Maybe you’ve already heard about it? Chances are you have. Lately it seems as if everybody is talking about it, whether they like the idea or not.

It’s called Universal Basic Income, and it’s the topic of our latest documentary (which is actually a 2-part series, since there’s just so much to cover when it comes to this radical and controversial concept). We spoke with philosophers, economists, journalists, and even random folks on the street, to explore the many questions that come up when you begin thinking seriously about universal basic income. What effect would it have on poverty? What happens when income is separated from work? Would society implode into a dysfunctional dystopia because everybody would just sit on the couch all day and watch Netflix? Or, alternatively, would it be the best thing ever, effectively freeing people from the fear that comes with financial insecurity and enabling them to pursue their most daring dreams and to make their biggest contributions to society?

Join us as we explore these questions and begin to untangle this radical concept. We’ve put together an all-star team of scholars and experts on the cutting-edge of this exciting debate. Whether you’re already an expert or haven’t even heard of the idea, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

Featuring:

• Juliana Bidadanure — Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at Stanford University
• Doug Henwood — Journalist, economic analyst, and writer whose work has been featured in Harper’s,Jacobin Magazine, The Nation, and more
• Rutger Bregman — Journalist and author of “Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-hour Workweek”
• Kathi Weeks — Marxist feminist scholar, associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University, and author of “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries”
• Eric Richardson — A recipient of basic income
• Evelyn Forget — Economist and professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Manitoba Research Data Centre

Music by:

• Face of Man
• Bedrockk
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• Harps

Many thanks to Benjamin Henderson for the cover art / header image.

Part 2 of this series will be out in Sept. 2018 and will explore the long-term effects that a progressive UBI might have on our current capitalist economic system.

This post was originally published by Shareable.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted. 

The post Podcast: Universal Basic Income – An Idea Whose Time Has Come appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

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