Virus fallout could usher in the UBI era

Guy Stand­ing says he is strug­gling to keep his feet on the ground, pun unin­tend­ed, pre­sum­ably. The pro­fes­sor of devel­op­ment stud­ies at the School of Ori­en­tal and African Stud­ies, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, is the world’s pre-emi­nent author­i­ty on uni­ver­sal basic income, or UBI, a mod­el for pro­vid­ing every per­son with an uncon­di­tion­al sum of mon­ey, regard­less of employ­ment sta­tus or resources.

Indeed, pro­mot­ing the con­cept of UBI, which is designed to enable a base­line stan­dard of liv­ing and address wealth inequal­i­ty, has been his life’s work. And now, aged 72, after strug­gling to be heard for the best part of half a cen­tu­ry, he is sud­den­ly inun­dat­ed with media inter­est and his decades-long toil is vin­di­cat­ed.

Hordes of oth­ers, cru­cial­ly across the polit­i­cal divide, are join­ing the UBI con­ver­sa­tion, owing to the finan­cial dire straits many mil­lions of peo­ple are in because of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. “I had eight inter­views yes­ter­day, from eight dif­fer­ent coun­tries; it’s just mad,” a weary but will­ing Stand­ing, who last year, at the behest of for­mer shad­ow chan­cel­lor John McDon­nell, wrote a basic income report designed to inform the Labour elec­tion man­i­festo, reveals over Skype from Gene­va.

“It’s hard to keep up with all the requests, but it feels like a piv­otal moment. I would say the prob­a­bil­i­ty of basic income being imple­ment­ed has gone from 20 to 50 per cent. It’s time for humil­i­ty, though, rather than hav­ing a ‘I told you so’ atti­tude.”

A pivotal moment: radical goes mainstream

The coro­n­avirus out­break and its fall­out, which experts agree will be long and painful, has shift­ed pol­i­cy pro­pos­als that a month or two ago were dis­missed as rad­i­cal and fringe, such as UBI, into the main­stream.

“I believe the eco­nom­ic cri­sis that is going to come will cause more death and mis­ery than the coro­n­avirus out­break itself,” says Stand­ing, who co-found­ed Basic Income Earth Net­work in 1986. He pre­dicts “wide­spread chaos” if prime min­is­ter Boris Johnson’s gov­ern­ment “throws lots of mon­ey wild­ly into job-reten­tion schemes”, most­ly because the cash won’t reach “where it needs to get”.

Atti­tudes towards UBI are chang­ing rapid­ly. For exam­ple, at the end of March, a 170-strong, cross-par­ty group of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans called for UBI to be intro­duced in the UK. That was before Spain, in mid-April, became the first coun­try to agree to roll­out nation­wide UBI. Many oth­er coun­tries, includ­ing Japan, Aus­tralia, the Nether­lands, New Zealand, Brazil and Sin­ga­pore, have expressed their inten­tions to fol­low Spain’s lead.

UBI is gen­er­at­ing great inter­est in Amer­i­ca, too, with Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans increas­ing­ly view­ing it as a viable solu­tion to the sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic chal­lenge.

“Every day that goes by with­out UBI means more pre­ventable deaths and more unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing,” argues New Orleans-based author Scott San­tens. “UBI is impor­tant every­where, but it is espe­cial­ly impor­tant in the Unit­ed States, where before this pan­dem­ic even began to over­whelm what we call our safe­ty net, 13 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing under the pover­ty line were already get­ting no assis­tance what­so­ev­er from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

Can blockchain accelerate UBI?

He con­tin­ues: “I’ve always want­ed to get UBI imple­ment­ed to save lives, pre­vent suf­fer­ing and upgrade every­one’s well­be­ing through a vast­ly improved sys­tem ori­ent­ed around pros­per­i­ty and human thriv­ing. Right now, all of those things have gone up an order of mag­ni­tude in impor­tance. I’m hap­py to see more peo­ple final­ly tak­ing UBI as seri­ous­ly as it always should have been, but at the same time, it’s hard to cel­e­brate any­thing, when the stakes are now high­er than they’ve ever been.”

Sir Thomas More, the Lon­don-born Renais­sance human­ist, hint­ed at the man­i­fold ben­e­fits of an uncon­di­tion­al basic income in his con­tro­ver­sial 1516 mas­ter­piece Utopia, about an imag­i­nary, ide­al island state. And although there have been some small UBI pilots, notably in Fin­land and India, the tran­si­tion from the­o­ry to prac­tice has been hard to nav­i­gate, not least because ques­tions linger around how such schemes should be fund­ed.

Now, how­ev­er, at a time when an esti­mat­ed 1.7 bil­lion adults are unbanked and with­out access to a bank account, blockchain tech­nol­o­gy, which promis­es immutabil­i­ty, decen­tral­i­sa­tion and trans­paren­cy, could be the answer to build­ing a UBI mech­a­nism at scale. Dozens of organ­i­sa­tions are seek­ing to both deliv­er and finance UBI through blockchain tech.

“From a prac­ti­cal stand­point, blockchain offers the pos­si­bil­i­ty of finan­cial inclu­sion to every­one,” says Yoni Assia, chief exec­u­tive of invest­ment plat­form eToro. “In con­trast to the tra­di­tion­al finance sys­tem, it pro­vides a fric­tion­less way to trans­fer wealth to those who need it.

“Take, for instance, when the US gov­ern­ment announced it will issue mon­ey to all cit­i­zens via so-called heli­copter drops. It has to work with a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent banks that each have their own process­es and infra­struc­ture to trans­fer mon­ey. It can also only reach those with a bank account. If every­one were giv­en a cryp­to ‘Fed wal­let’, though, they could instant­ly cred­it peo­ple with tokens to use to pur­chase goods and ser­vices.”

A project explor­ing blockchain-backed UBI is Good­Dol­lar, a decen­tralised, not-for-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion sup­port­ed by Assia’s eToro. “The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, every­one can receive a Good­Dol­lar token into a cryp­to wal­let, not need­ing to jump through the reg­u­lar hoops of open­ing a bank account and effec­tive­ly help­ing to reach the unbanked,” he says.

Assia, who believes “wealth inequal­i­ty is a crit­i­cal chal­lenge of our time”, con­cludes: “The cur­rent glob­al cri­sis high­lights the need for a new eco­nom­ic order, and I believe it will inevitably advance and accel­er­ate efforts to deliv­er UBI.”