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Premium: Rutger Bregman - From The Archives · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
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  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
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  Imagine going out to your mailbox once a month, maybe even once a week,
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  and finding in it a crisp check from the government, which would cover all of your basic needs.
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  This is not utopia. This is an idea that is increasingly getting bandied around. You have
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  probably heard about it. It's called a universal basic income. And people have asked me to do a show
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  about UBI for quite some time. How would it work? How would you pay for it? Is it really feasible?
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  Why is it getting currency now? Why does it seem to appeal to people on both the right and the left
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  of politics? But I wanted to find the ideal person to talk about it and not just it.
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  A whole grab bag of audaciously out there progressive policies that could reshape the future.
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  The left, the left is in a weird place. You know my thoughts about this. If you're a regular
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  listen to the show, obsessed with identity politics, freaking out about Donald Trump,
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  a little bit lost on what it believes in terms of economics, split between the Bernie Sanders wing
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  and the sort of centrist bipartisan, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, wing.
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  One person who's trying to shake that up is a young gentleman from the Netherlands
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  who lives in Utrecht. His name is Rutger Brighamon. He gave a speech at TED last year,
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  which has been viewed millions of times. It was on the front page of the official TED page.
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  This is not TEDx. This is the actual TED. And the speech was entitled Poverty is not a lack of
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  character. It's a lack of cash. He says that ideas can and do change the world. And he's making
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  the case for a guaranteed basic income. He says this is an idea that's been around for 500 years.
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  And it could revolutionize the planet. And the end of the reason we're not doing it is because
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  we're not courageous enough to do it. Rutger has a lot of other ideas as well. I mean, we didn't even
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  get onto his opinions about open borders and immigration, which is another subject that I'd
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  like to talk to him about at a future date. He's a historian and an author. He's only in his 20s,
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  a little bastard. I mean, seriously, can people just stop being brilliant at such young ages,
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  please? He's published four books on history and philosophy and economics. His latest book is
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  called Utopia for Realists, how we can build the ideal world. And it's really interesting and
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  refreshing to have a conversation with someone who is thinking big and who is, yeah, as I say,
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  as audacious in when he wants to take on regardless of whether or not you agree with him.
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  He's just elevating the bar of things to talk about rather than constantly talking about
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  the orange president or Brexit or whatever else it might be.
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  Bregman, the book has been translated into 24 languages. He's been nominated twice for the
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  European press prize for his journalism work at the correspondent. He's been in the in the
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  Washington Post and the Guardian. He can be seen on the BBC. The Guardian calls him the Dutch
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  wonder kind of new ideas. All right, enough blowing smoke up his ass. Without further ado, I hope
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  you enjoy this conversation between me and the one and only Rutger Bregman. This is We, The People.
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  Rutger, thanks for being on the show. Well, thanks for having me. One of the things that we talk
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  about quite a lot on this show and that I think people talk about quite a lot in general is the
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  decline of the centre, the fact that the left and right seem to be going a little bit crazy in their
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  own ways and that the things that we perhaps took for granted as being the reasonable middle
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  for the past few decades are fracturing with Trump and with Brexit and with the rise of
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  right wing parties in Europe and in Australia. You would seem to put the light of that. Your
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  vision is not one of accommodating some kind of centrist vision, but how would you describe it if
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  you needed to place it along a political pole? Well, that's. I think that many of the ideas
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  that I advocate in my book move beyond the old fashioned distinction between the political left
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  and the political right. I think that many people are simply fed up with all the old debates about
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  socialism versus capitalism or market versus state and that these are often decultamies that
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  just don't really make sense anymore. So if you think about it like one of the ideas my book is
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  obviously basic income, completely eradicating poverty, is that left or right? Well, it's quite
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  leftist in the sense that, well, as I said, it's completely eradicating poverty, many on the left
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  would like that, but it's quite right wing in the sense that it's about individual freedom
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  and the individual right to decide for yourself what you want to make of your lives. It's very
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  anti paternalist. Yeah, and you make the point that Milton Friedman was one of the people who was
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  who was in favor of this originally and indeed Ronald Reagan implemented the what do they call it the
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  alternative minimum tax or negative negative taxation rates? Where basically if you're poor,
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  then you will actually get you'll get money from the government if you're earning below a certain
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  amount so that as you start earning money, you don't you don't make it not worthwhile because you start
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  which is a very watered down version, but I mean in the book I tell the story of how of all people
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  Richard Nixon actually almost implemented a modest basic income and the reason was actually quite
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  simple is that at the end of the 60s in the United States and in Canada almost everyone believed
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  that some form of basic income was going to be implemented, you know, everyone was in favor of it.
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  Milton Friedman as you said on the right, but John Kenneth Galbraith, the great left wing progressive
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  economists thought it was a great idea as well. So I'm more interested in sort of how we can
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  change the whole landscape of ideas. Margaret Tetscher, the British Prime Minister was once asked
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  what our biggest victory was and she replied, well my biggest victory was new labor. So the fact
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  that she had been able to change the minds even of her opponents, you know, that was her biggest
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  victory and I'm more interested in that kind of change. Just to transpose that example from the
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  British to the Australian or American, the idea being there that prior to Tetscher and Reagan,
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  the left was a hard socialist left. They've very union dominated, rigid kind of
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  doctrinaire status left. And then after Reagan and Tetscher, the left became this mushy squishy kind
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  of clintonian triangulating third-way layerite, essentially conservative centrist party.
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  One of the things when we talk about, let's just stick with universal basic income because I think
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  it's a subject that a lot of people are interested in, one of the things that may appear to be a
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  consensus, I fear is actually not, in the sense that when libertarians talk about it, they envisage
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  scrapping Medicare and scrapping Medicaid and scrapping all kinds of social welfare systems and food
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  like food stamps and so on and just replacing them with a simple one-size-fits-all. Everybody
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  gets a certain amount of money. In your model, I think you're talking about $12,000 a year, which is
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  about $20,000, $21,000 Australian dollars, $17,000 US dollars. So still a very small amount of money
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  to live on, but enough to kind of get by if you didn't also have to pay for, for example,
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  healthcare in the United States. If you had to pay for healthcare in the United States, then 12,000
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  pounds a year would be absolutely nothing, that would just be your healthcare presumably. So is
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  there something of a false consensus here in that the left thinks that this would be in addition
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  to something and the right thinks this would be a great way to demolish everything that the left
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  has been working towards in the past century? Well, I completely agree with you that you have to be
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  a bit suspicious if suddenly there's a policy out there that Elon Musk likes and Bill Gates likes it
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  and Mark Zuckerberg likes it and then the left and all the progressives are supposed to like it as
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  well. I mean, there are some things suspicious isn't there? But I think that the position of,
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  there are some people out there, mainly in the US, libertarians who say, well, let's just abolish
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  the whole welfare state. You know, let's get rid of universal healthcare or whatever we have
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  Medicare and Medicaid and let's just implement one small cash transfer and that will be it.
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  Now, let me be clear, that will be a disaster. I think that from a European perspective or from
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  an Australian perspective, it's quite clear that something like healthcare, you know, public
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  healthcare is a pretty great thing, you know, is it one of the milestones of civilization we achieved
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  in the past couple of decades and obviously, you know, something that's working relatively well,
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  you don't want to abolish that. I really see the basic income as a supplement, as the crowning
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  achievement of both socio-democracy and capitalism and therefore I do think there is something
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  that there are some good right-wing arguments, business arguments that you can make in favor of
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  basic income. I always like to call it venture capital for the people, you know, it gives you
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  the freedom to start a new company to move to a different job. I think it will unleash a lot of
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  entrepreneurial energies and will make a lot of people much more creative and help them to follow
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  their ambitions. So that sends there is some overlap between left-wing and right-wing thinking
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  here, but you're absolutely right that we have to be suspicious of some of the versions out there.
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  So what is your vision of a UBI of universal basic income? For people who have only sort of vaguely
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  heard about this idea, what would it look like in your world and how would you pay for it and what
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  would you be able to do with the money and who gets it? Well, let's start with the umbrella concept.
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  And the umbrella concept is, well, simply basic income and there are two versions of that. There are
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  two ways to implement that. So a basic income is a way to introduce a floor in the economy,
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  basically. It's a platform on which everyone can stand that the life without poverty becomes
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  right instead of the favor. So you can always fall back on that. Now, the version that we talked
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  about most throughout history into 60s and 70s in the US and Canada, for example, was the idea of a
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  guaranteed basic income. Now, what you do in that scenario is just top of the income of everyone
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  who lives in poverty and then face the income support out. Now, it's absolutely unconditional.
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  So you don't have to fill any, you know, dozens of forums. You don't have to do lots of
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  interviews with government bureaucrats or whatever, but it's not a universal basic income. That's
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  the second way, basically, to introduce that floor in the economy. And we're talking a lot
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  about that now, the universal basic income, which is just to give everyone, you know, the rich
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  and the poor, a monthly grant that's enough to live on, you know, enough to pay for food,
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  clothing, and just the basics. Right. So what's the advantage of making a universal because a
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  person who earns $100,000 a year doesn't need 12,000 pounds a year to buy food and clothing. They've
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  already got that. So the additional 12,000 pounds, why bother giving it to them? Yes, very good point.
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  Well, actually, most of the rich, obviously, in my preferred scenario of introducing basic
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  basic income would, you know, receive one basic income, but pay for five or 10 or 20, you know,
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  it all depends on how you finance it, obviously. So I'd like to finance it in a way that it would
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  reduce inequality. So I think that's important to keep in mind. But it's all about framing,
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  basically. I mean, if you make it universal, the whole stigma is removed, and then you can
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  present it as something that everyone deserves no matter what, you know, it's just your birthright
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  or your citizens' right. Simply because you have the right passport as an Australian citizen,
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  you get it no matter what. And you don't have to do anything for it. You can decide for yourself
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  what you don't want to do with it. And we know from international comparisons that the countries
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  with the most universal systems of social security are in the long run most effective in reducing
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  poverty, simply because you remove the stigma. If you have a very targeted system of welfare,
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  as they have in the US or in the UK, at some point, the middle clause is going to think like,
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  what's in it for me? Why do I pay for these policies that don't benefit me? So this is one of the
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  the old arguments that already, you know, in the 40s beverage in the UK said, a policy for the
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  poor is a poor policy. You have to make these policies broader if you want to have more income
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  support. Now the most radical thing obviously would be to give it to everyone. So that's one
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  important argument in favor of universal, to make it universal. There are important other
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  arguments, but there are kinds of arguments as well. You can certainly see that just in terms of
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  the policies that we have at the moment, the ones that are the most popular. I mean, the reason why
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  Medicare and Social Security are beloved in the States in a way that food stamps are not,
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  is because everybody uses them. I mean, you know, once you turn 65, you will get Medicare. It
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  doesn't matter how rich you are. It doesn't matter how poor you are. And similarly, in Australia,
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  where we have Medicare for all, everybody loves it because everybody gets it. And even in Britain,
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  where they hate the NHS because it's so underfunded, they still deeply cherish the fact that it's
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  universal. So you can imagine an appeal to a universal basic income that would be greater than
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  that of one that is means tested and only for the poor. But I wonder whether you've thought also
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  about the possibility of sort of smuggling it in because I think if you told people that it was
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  that it was a universal basic income, the marketing of that, I think, might be problematic for
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  people who are deeply individualistic. And you could like Alaska, for example, doesn't don't they
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  give, if you're an Alaska resident, don't you get $1,000 in oil revenue a year, which is essentially
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  just a universal basic income. I mean, if you were a mineral rich country like Australia,
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  and the government just said, okay, we're going to have a mining dividend that goes to every
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  family of $5,000 a year. Everyone gets a cut of the fact that we're making huge profits from mining.
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  That had somehow been easier to swallow than for people to feel like their dignity is being impugned
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  by receiving welfare from the government. I agree with you 100%. I think this is one of the
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  main waves forward. You could argue that the biggest problem with basic income is the ward basic
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  income because we associate income with work, deserving it, while the whole idea of a dividend is
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  obviously that you get it no matter what. And that's really what I like about what they do in Alaska,
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  which is hugely popular, by the way. Of course, as a politician trying to abolish that is just
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  the end of your career. So once we have a basic income, it's going to be very hard for other people
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  to get rid of it, I think. Where else has this been tried? Well, the full idea of like a universal
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  basic income for everyone that's enough to live on, which is absolutely unconditional, has never
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  been tried anywhere on a national scale. So we don't know. What we do have are dozens of experiments
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  on the local level. We've got lots of different systems of social security that look a bit more like
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  basic income and that look less about it. So we've got lots of pieces of evidence that we can
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  look at and learn from. And that's what I try to do in my book. I just go over all those experiments
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  that happened in the 70s that happened in the past couple of years. We now are actually living
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  in a golden age of basic income experiments. You know, they started one in Finland. There's a much
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  bigger one actually that has just started in Canada. But the biggest one there is the one they're
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  doing right now in Kenya with more than 10,000 people participating. So yeah, those are the things we
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  can look at. But if you want me to be like really honest, we never really tried the full thing.
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  I mean, so we don't know 100% for sure what it would look like on a national level.
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  I can hear people thinking we haven't tried the 100% real thing because it would be just
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  catastrophically expensive. It's easy to do in Kenya because in Kenya people are poor and you get
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  a lot of bang for your buck. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. Give people a dollar a day and
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  it's going to make some kind of a difference to some people in Kenya. But there are very few people
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  in the West for whom even $10 a week is going to make a huge amount of difference. Have you
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  crunched the numbers? How do you fund $20,000 for every adult person in Australia?
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  This is actually one of the reasons why I have become a bit more skeptical about the
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  universal basic income. I'm now more off to my advocating and guarantee basic income.
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  And it's all about framing actually because if you say to people, we're going to give everyone
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  a basic income. They're going to do the numbers themselves. So they think, I live in Holland,
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  we would give it to about 10 million people and we'd say, it's about 10,000 euros a year.
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  Oh, that's 100 billion euros. We can never afford that. That's what the usual response is.
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  Now, there's a big mistake in this argument. That is that we have to distinguish the gross cost
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  and the net costs. If we would do it into the universal variant of basic income,
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  many people would receive that basic income, but pay the same amount in additional taxes.
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  Right. So nothing would really change for that. Would you have a levy?
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  Sorry. Would you have some kind of a levy that was a universal basic income levy?
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  So that an additional tax that was EMR'd on people's tax forms. When you say that they would
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  just pay the same amount as they're receiving back, sometimes when they're gone by back in Australia,
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  they introduced a gun levy. There's a Medicare levy in Australia so you can see it on your taxes.
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  This is the bit that's going towards Medicare. You could imagine having a thing that says,
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  this is the proportion of your income that was going towards the UBI.
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  Exactly. And you could do it in a way like that. But in the end, it has to be fine installed,
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  obviously. We're not going to just print the money and throw it from helicopters or something like
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  that. That would be good politics, though. For one, the levy.
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  Well, there's actually actually Milton Friedman advocated this. He called this helicopter money
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  and he said it was a great way to get the economy started again if there was not enough to
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  don't. And they're actually, you're a, there are some we call him sat vacating.
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  It's true. You would be more likely to spend 50 bucks that have been thrown that you'd caught
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  out from a falling from a helicopter than one that just landed in your bank account from the
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  central bank. Exactly. But obviously there's not a feasible long term way to finance a basic
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  income. Now, if we look at the net cost, how much would it cost to build this floor in the
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  economy? How would it much would it cost to completely eradicate poverty? Well, you know what?
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  It's really cheap. It's really cheap. You know, I've looked at numbers from different countries
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  and know where it's more than one percent of GDP. So if you look at the numbers in the US,
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  which is obviously a country with a lot of poverty, especially for a developed country,
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  it would cost according to a recent paper by three economists. It would cost about $350 billion
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  to implement this guaranteed basic income or as economists call it a negative income tax.
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  Now, is that, is that much $350 billion? Actually, if you look at just the cost of poverty,
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  and in this case, just the cost of child poverty, well, that's already $500 billion in terms of
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  higher health care spending, higher crime rates, you know, kids doing less well in school.
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  So the argument that I've been making a lot in the past couple of months is that it's actually
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  cheaper to eradicate poverty than to combat the symptoms of it. But what's going wrong in the
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  basic income debate all the time is that people confuse the gross costs and the net costs. And this
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  is one of the reasons why I'm a bit more skeptical now about the universal variant simply because
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  it has this huge framing problem. And how are you going to explain this on national television as a