cc >> Hi, welcome everybody
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab here at UW-Madison
at the Biotechnology Center. My name's Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the Biotech Center, and also at the
UW-Extension Cooperative Extension.
And on behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the
Lifelong Learning Institute of UW-Madison, I appreciate you
coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab, which we hold here every
Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
I'm delighted to be able to introduce tonight Erik Olin
Wright. He was originally scheduled to
speak about five weeks ago, but we had that 12 inches of snow.
Luckily, spring has sprung here on March 5, in beautiful
Wisconsin. The birds are singing and the
flowers are blooming. ( laughter )
Tonight's speaker is Erik Olin Wright.
He was born in Berkeley, California, in 1947.
He grew up in Kansas, and was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and
the University of California-Berkeley.
He has taught Sociology at the University of Wisconsin since
1976, where he is currently Vilas Distinguished Professor of
Sociology. His academic work has been
centrally concerning with reconstructing the Marxist
position of social theory and research in ways that attempt to
make it more relevant to contemporary concerns and more
cogent as a scientific framework of analysis.
His empirical research has focused especially on the change
in character of class relations in developed capitalist
societies. Since 1992, he has directed the
Real Utopians Project, which explores the range of proposals
for new institutional designs that embody emancipatory ideals,
and yet are attentive to issues of pragmatic feasibility.
He has published several books, and is currently completing a
book entitled "Envisioning Real Utopias."
Please join me in welcoming my neighbor, Erik Olin Wright,
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. ( applause )
As I got on my bicycle this evening to ride here, I was
greeted with more snow. I was wondering if this might be
just a reprise of a month ago, when the evening was canceled.
But of course, it was a light dusting today, in contrast to
the foot of snow that fell roughly a month ago.
What I want to do in tonight's presentation is talk to you
about a project that I've been working on since the early '90s
called the "Real Utopias Project."
That might seem like a rather odd title for a project that
purports to be social science. This is Wednesday Nite at the
Lab. And at least there is a
presupposition that what people talk about has a scientific
standing. But utopias are an imaginary
construction. The word utopia means nowhere.
These are places, ideas, fantasies of human perfection,
outside of time and place. How can that possibly be a
subject of concern for us serious academic social
scientists? Perhaps the philosophers or
literary scholars, but how can we sociologists treat the
question of utopia in a serious way?
Well, that's of course, in part why I put the word real
before the word utopia. This is envisioning real
utopias, not envisioning utopia. But that only adds to the
puzzle. Because isn't real and utopia,
aren't these opposites. Isn't this an oxymoron?
Utopias are supposed to be unconstrained by the petty
matters of feasibility and achievability.
To be real is to be hard-nosed and pragmatic.
Well, that internal contradiction, that tension is
precisely what this project is all about.
It's an attempt to join together discussions that take seriously
our highest ideals for a just and humane world, the kind of
world that we do indeed fantasize about.
To take those ideals seriously, but to also ask what kinds of
real institutions could embody these ideals, and how can we
transform the world in which we live to better approximate those
ideals. The heart of this project
involves investigating a range of empirical cases, that in one
way or another, can be thought of as at least partial
experiments that have been tried out in various corners of the
world at various times and places to accomplish this, to
make utopia real. But the research also involves
looking at theoretical ideas, proposals for alternatives that
have not yet been tried, but nevertheless can be subjected to
systematic theoretical argument and analysis, and in which we
can look at real world examples that in some way or another
might give you clues as to how well certain kinds of proposals
will work. So here's then the basic idea.
That's to explore alternatives to existing social institutions
in terms of two main criteria. Ideals of social justice,
equality and democracy. And the practical problems of
how institutions work and their real effects.
That should be "t-h-e-i-r." That's an embarrassing typo in
a PowerPoint. I think I should get rid of this
slide very quickly ( laughter )
to avoid the embarrassment. When I was in third grade, my
elementary school teacher told me, because I was not a very
good speller at that time, that I shouldn't worry about it.
It was more important to say what you think and be
expressive, and not worry about such details.
Although that was just a typo. I do know the difference between
their and there. Now rather than talk abstractly
about this idea, envisioning real utopias, I think the best
way to give you a sense of what this is all about, is to give
you examples. Examples of some historical,
real things that have happened and some that are more
theoretical. And examples that span quite a
wide range of different sort of institutional arrangements.
So my four examples are going to be first, participatory
budgeting from Porto Alegre in Brazil.
Secondly, and extremely interesting and not very well
known, a recent experiment in Canada, the Citizen Assembly for
Electoral Reform. Third, and maybe surprisingly
for some of you, Wikipedia, which I consider an
extraordinary experiment in real utopias.
And finally, a more theoretical discussion of unconditional
basic income. I think the best way for us to
proceed is for me to give you the gist of each of these, but
for us to immediately enter into a dialogue, rather than for me
to describe all of these and then at the end have a Q&A back
and forth. So interrupt me at any time, ask
any questions. All of these, I think, are
interesting. They're all kind of perplexing
and surprising. And we should just have a
conversation as I proceed. So first, participatory
budgets. Now if I was to say, imagine a
New England town meeting. We all have an idea of what that
is like. A small community of people that
know each other well. And in which the business of
local government is done primarily by citizens actually
getting together and talking about their priorities and what
should be done. And I were to say, imagine a
New England town meeting, do you think that model would work in
a city of about 1.7 million people in the
southeast corner of Brazil? Do you think they could devise a
way of turning a medium size, a large medium sized city into a
form of city government, which would be primarily based on
direct citizen participation in making the decisions?
Not simply electing representatives to make the
decisions for them. And that this would involve
annually, tens of thousands of people engaged in detailed
deliberations and discussions about the city budget.
Well, of course, if I were to say, of course you know it
must've happened, otherwise I wouldn't have posed the question
this way. If anyone had thought of this
before it happened, I think they would have said, "This is really
just not a very realistic Utopia."
It sounds like it would be kind of interesting if it could
happen. But it really just isn't
possible. Well, the participatory
budgeting in Porto Alegre not only did happen, it's an ongoing
process now. The basic idea is that city
budgets in the city of Porto Alegre are generated, not by
city planners, not by the mayor's office, not by technical
budget experts. The city budgets are generated
through direct citizen participation in neighborhood
assemblies. And thus, it is called the
participatory budget. Well, how does it work?
The city of Porto Alegre in Brazil has about
1.7 million people. In 1989, the workers party, a
left wing social movement party with close ties to the labor
movement, managed to win the mayor's election, by accident.
The conservative and populous parties split the vote.
They got about 40% of the vote. But that was enough to win the
mayor's office. They didn't control the city
government, however. They didn't control the city
council. They got elected, not at all
expecting to win the election. And they had to figure out what
they were going to do. They couldn't get anything
through the city council. It was controlled by the
opposition parties. They had to, therefore,
improvise. They came up with the following
idea. The budget in Porto Alegre, like
in many cities, is passed in a procedure in which the mayor
proposes a budget to the city council.
The city council mucks about with it, changes things as they
wish, passes it. And then the mayor signs it.
A standard sort of way in which budgets get formed.
There is nothing in the city charter, however, which says how
the city gets the numbers. Where does the budget come from?
Where does the proposal come from?
The charter doesn't say that the mayor has to ask a bunch of
economists and engineers and city planners to draw up the
budget. It just says the mayor submits a
budget. So the mayor decided to create
a series of neighborhood assemblies that would meet in
schools, and warehouses, civic centers, and other places.
Seventeen neighborhoods in the city of Porto Alegre.
Create these neighborhood assemblies.
And these assemblies would decide on what the budget
priorities were for their region of the city.
They would then make proposals for specific uses of city money.
They would each then choose two delegates to a citywide budget
council that would bring all of these neighborhood budgets
together. And over a three-month period,
fight it out and produce a coherent city budget that would
apply to the whole city in which the items in the budget would
all be derived from the proposals and priorities
established in these neighborhood budgetary councils.
Well that was the idea. The first year they tried it, it
was a complete catastrophe. I mean, you can imagine.
They have no materials. They have no expertise.
There was no training. People came to these meetings,
they didn't know what they were doing.
The budgets were incoherent. The first year was a complete
mess. And one would have normally
expected, after the experience of that first year, that they
would've simply abandoned the project.
But in good, as I would say real utopian manner, they
experimented. They treated it as a trial and
error problem. They engaged in what some people
called democratic experimentalism, where you try
to build-in learning capacity, in your processes, rather than
imagining you can figure it all out from scratch to begin with.
And by the time the third budget came along, after three
years of this cycle, it was actually beginning to work very
well. One of the interesting
innovations they did after the first couple of years, was that
they added what they called thematic assemblies, which were
citywide assemblies on particular themes like culture.
One of the problems with the initial design of these
neighborhood assemblies is that the people in the middle class
neighborhoods, they really didn't have any budget
priorities that they could manage to get through in these
assemblies. And their concerns were not
being met. So the city decided to create
these thematic assemblies, where more affluent and educated
people had particular interests and agendas which they would
like to do. As this has evolved over time,
it's gotten quite complicated. There are interesting
procedures, by which the allocation of the budget across
these neighborhood assemblies is worked out.
And how the priorities within these assembly meetings are
discussed and deliberated. I don't think in this context,
going through all of the details is really necessary.
The results of this process have been really quite astounding in
Porto Alegre. The most striking thing is that
the patterns of city spending were dramatically transformed.
In most cities in Brazil and elsewhere, the amount that the
city spends per capita is inversely related to the
per capita income in a neighborhood.
So the poorest neighborhoods get the least funding.
The richest neighborhoods get the most.
That's why you have nice roads and good lighting in rich
neighborhoods and potholes or no paving at all in poor
neighborhoods. In Porto Alegre, that
correlation has flipped. As a result of this directly
participatory process, one of the big impacts has been a
dramatic transformation of the priorities for how the city
spends its resources. Now one of the reasons for that
is that everything is out in the open.
All budget priorities are discussed in public.
And citizens become extremely well-informed about the details
of each annual budget. They go to meetings and they
vote on what those priorities will be.
And given the distribution of income in Porto Alegre and the
nature of the participation in these assemblies, the priorities
of the neediest parts of the city always ended up getting
greater weight in the final budget than the priorities of
the most affluent parts of the city.
That's one big effect of this, was a re-ordering of the way the
city spends its money, in a way that corresponds more closely, I
think, to most people's notions of social justice.
Whatever else one might think about social justice, most
people would, I think, feel that a city, when spending money on
streets and lighting should spend the money most where it's
needed most, not where it's needed least.
And that's much more the characteristic in Porto Alegre
today than it was in the past. A second interesting
consequence of this transformation in how budgets
were generated in the city, is that corruption has almost
disappeared from Porto Alegre. This is a big deal in a place
like Brazil. The books are open.
Citizens can check to see how the money's being spent.
They know how much they allocated for different
purposes, because they were involved directly in that
allocation process. Committees from these assemblies
go and look at the projects and see what's being done, see if
the actual streets that they wrote down should be paved are
the ones being paved; if the daycare centers that they want
to be built are being built, and so on.
And the, what's called leakage, the leakage in the budget has
basically disappeared. There have been no corruption
scandals in Porto Alegre since this process began.
The United Nations, in fact, has designated Porto Alegre as
an exemplary city, as a model city for its ability to create
clean and good government. And the participatory budget is
one of the pivotal reasons why that's occurred.
And finally, although I don't have strong data to support this
claim, it's a claim that's been made by the people I have talked
to in Porto Alegre about this. I'm told that tax compliance has
improved. One of the problems in Brazil
and in many poor countries is that the capacity of the state
to actually extract taxes from people who can afford to pay
taxes, that capacity to extract taxes is limited.
Not because they can't pass laws that say you have to pay taxes.
It's just that people don't pay their taxes.
And the enforcement machinery is weak, and the ability to hide
income is great. So tax evasion is a chronic
problem in Brazil. In Porto Alegre, tax compliance
has gone up. Now you might think of that as
a kind of peculiar result, given that the benefits of the Porto
Alegre process does not primarily favor affluent and
wealthy people. So if you believe that people
only pay taxes out of selfish motives, either fear that
they're going to get caught if they don't, or the belief that
the government is doing things for them, then this would be a
puzzle. Why would rich people
voluntarily improve their tax compliance when they're not the
primary beneficiary? I think it's because that way of
looking at why people pay taxes is an unsatisfactory way.
People pay taxes to a significant extent out of a
sense of civic obligation. And if they see the taxes being
used for good purposes, without corruption, that are actually
benefiting the lives of people in their communities, then
they're trigger point for where that obligation, that sense of
obligation and responsibility kicks in will be more favorable.
And what is sometimes called voluntary compliance, increases.
If a citizen doesn't want to pay taxes, in the United States,
if most people didn't just grumble about taxes, but
actually decided that they didn't want to do it, then the
level of tax avoidance would go up.
The United States is actually pretty good in this respect.
You may not know it, but we are a relatively honest country,
with respect to willingness of ordinary citizens not to cheat
on their tax returns. Since it's so easy to cheat,
it's a tribute to a sense of civic responsibility that most
people, most of the time, don't cheat.
And if they cheat, it's nickel and diming things.
It's not major tax avoidance. That's my first utopia.
I have some pictures. These are some photographs from
meetings of these neighborhood assemblies, people talking and
arguing, debating about these things.
Roughly speaking, on an annual basis, the estimates are that
somewhere around ten percent of adult citizens participate in
one or more of these meetings. You might think that's not very
high. In an election, a ten percent
turnout would not be considered high.
But ten percent attending these meetings is higher than the
average municipal election in the United States.
Fewer than ten percent of Americans typically even vote in
municipal elections. So even by that standard, this
is respectable. But in a way, I think the way to
think about it is the actual participation of people in this
kind of process, you wouldn't necessarily want it to be much
higher than ten percent. What you'd like is that ten
percent to be a shifting number year after year.
So that over a ten year period, let's say, you'd like 30%, 40%
or 50% of adults to have participated at some point in
that cycle. But the ideal is not for people
to make their lives an endless meeting, but for people to
participate on a regular basis in this kind of process.
And then to talk about it outside of the meetings.
So in a family, presumably, if one adult in a family goes to a
participatory budget meeting and discusses budget priorities,
then over the dinner table and in other contexts, they'll be
discussing these matters with others.
So here are pictures from some of the meetings in Porto Alegre.
And these are two posters. The meetings are extremely well
advertised. The posters are plastered all
over the city. I was very impressed with the
aesthetics of the participatory budget, which is
"orcamento participativo," or participatory budget
in Portuguese. These kinds of posters appear
on buses. Buses would be painted with
announcements about when the next meetings are.
The meetings are staggered so that the thematic meetings don't
conflict with the neighborhood meetings, so people can go to
both. And these all involve, again,
direct citizens formulating the budgets and then voting on what
the budget should be. All right, that's my first
experiment. Yeah?
( inaudible ) I don't have direct evidence
on that. When people report that there's
a greater sense of civic spirit in Porto Alegre, nobody has told
me that the crime rate has changed one way or another with
respect to this. It's very hard.
On a lot of these things, well this one in particular, it's
very hard to isolate the specific effects.
You can look at the effects on city spending, because that's
directly connected to the budget.
You can see that the percentage of houses that are connected to
sewers, the streets that are paved in the slum areas, the
lighting in the city. You know that all those things
have now become more equal around the city.
That can be directly measured. You can measure the decline in
corruption. Whether there are second order
social effects on things like health standards or crime rates,
that's much harder to assess. Yeah?
How has this been developed? >> Okay, it started in 1990.
But I would say the first couple of years were pretty haphazard.
So roughly speaking, I think we can say this has been going for
15 years. In the last few years, it's had
difficulties. One of the difficulties is a
difficulty from its success. So they've done so many projects
that they've locked in more and more of the budget.
So you build daycare centers in the slum areas of Porto Alegre,
and there are lots of daycare centers now in the city of Porto
Alegre. When you build a daycare center,
then you have to pay the staff and you have to fix the roof.
And although each year you do the budget anew, it would be
kind of silly to say, well, we've built a daycare center
last year, but it's no longer a priority, we're not going to
fund it. So you lock in more and more of
the budget. And therefore, you have a
smaller and smaller discretionary amount.
That's also been combined with a reduction in the amount of tax
money that comes from the central government down to the
cities. There's been kind of an
austerity budget from the center to the city.
So the budgets are under more financial constraint and they're
locked in more. So once you get relatively
little discretionary budget, then citizens' interest in
participating goes down. There's not much to distribute.
The incentive for participating has gone down.
That has been a problem in the last few years, although the
structure continues. Yes?
How have subsequent elections, as far as the mayor
gone? >> So the mayor, the party of
the mayor, the mayors change. The party of the mayor won the
next four elections. They lost the last election.
The last election they lost, the interpretation that my friends
there said, is that people in Porto Alegre were annoyed with
the president of Brazil, who is in the same party as the party
that was governing Porto Alegre all these years.
And that the local party lost that mayoral election, not
because of any particular problem locally, but because of
a protest vote against the party of the president of the country.
But the party that did win is continuing the participatory
budget. It's now a fairly
institutionalized part of the city government there.
How long a time frame does this budget process take?
It's interesting. The structure of it, the details
are interesting. As a lot of these things, it is
a devil is in the details kind of story.
The budget cycle starts in March, which is their fall.
It begins in the autumn in the southern hemisphere.
It begins with a meeting of these assemblies.
They'll typically have 500-1,000 people at each assembly.
That's the order of magnitude. At the assembly meeting,
there's a report of what happened with last year's
priorities, when they were enacted and what the status of
the actual projects are. The mayor's office gives a
report about the fiscal conditions of the city, to give
an account of how much money is available for budgeting and for
new projects. So they get sort of this
informational meeting. And at that first budget
meeting, they choose delegates to meet every week for a
three-month period to formulate the budget priorities for that
neighborhood region. They choose delegates at a ratio
of roughly one delegate for every 30 people who come to that
neighborhood assembly. Now what that means is if you
have a problem in your micro-neighborhood, your
immediate corner of Porto Alegre, and you can get 20 or 30
of your neighbors to come to the meeting, you can get a direct
representative for that purpose on the budget council.
That budget council then meets in basements, schools, and
churches, and other places, over the next I believe it's three
months. They get petitions and meet with
neighborhood associations, and soccer clubs, and whatever
organized interests in the neighborhood.
I'm using the word neighborhood to really mean a region of the
city here. They then have the task of
taking in all this information and deliberating and figuring
out what the priorities for the budget are.
This is formalized now. There's a list of categories.
And you first rank the priorities of the categories,
and then projects within categories.
After that's done, after three months, there's another big
assembly, which ratifies those priorities and chooses two
delegates to go to a citywide budget council that then meets
for the next two months to bring all these budgets together.
So it's a five or six-month process all together.
It's only around budget matters. There still is a city council
of an ordinary sense that works on ordinances, and which
ultimately votes on this participatory budget.
The city charter says that the elected city council has to vote
on the budget. But when they get this final
budget document that's gone through this arduous process,
they simply rubber stamp it. Yeah?
It's obviously tremendously exciting.
But it occurred to me that with the structure of the mayor's
office, it could start from any source.
And if the community got really into this, and they developed
this budget and they have support, even one or two people
on the city council, or something like that.
They could introduce, this is the people's budget.
Then it becomes a poisoned pill for anybody on the city council
who dares to go against it. They would be singled out as
somebody who really is not looking out for the interests of
people, as expressed through this long process of people
expressing their wants. >> Absolutely.
I mean, there'd be all sorts of other ways.
Once you see that it works, then there's other ways that you can
get to a system. And one could be by a social
movement attempting to organize a counter-budget, a people's
budget, and then bringing that to the city council with their
allies, to contest whatever the established budget would be,
from the framework of this alternative.
It's obviously helped if you've got the mayor behind it, because
then provided he takes resources to get these meetings going, to
get materials to them, and it has a certain legitimacy if it's
backed by the city from the beginning.
But there are other ways, of course, that this could be done.
This is no longer, by the way, only in Porto Alegre.
It's been copied in dozens of Brazilian cities.
Sometimes with great effect, other times disastrously.
Sometimes it results just in local neighborhood bosses
absconding with the money, and using this as another way of
organizing patronage. Other times, it's worked and
revitalized grassroots democratic energy.
So it's very uneven. And people are now doing
research across Brazilian cities to see where it works and where
it doesn't. Certain European countries are
experimenting in this now. Barcelona has an experiment in
participatory budgeting. Mostly, the European experiments
are advisory budgets, not, you know, hard budgets, the way the
Porto Alegre case is. My view is that it makes a very
big difference whether the citizen participants believe
that they're actually deciding and working on the budget, or
just giving input and then the city council will determine the
budget. This will work much more when
it's fully empowered. That is, when the participants
really have a sense of what they're doing matters.
I think there are some cities in the United States that have at
least some flavor of this that they're talking about.
But I'm not sure. Yeah?
In the United States, at the federal level, where you have
the president who puts in a budget, and it's always dead on
arrival. Then you have what's called
appropriations, where you really have the power to spend the
money, as opposed to just the budget.
Is there that distinction in this city in Brazil, or is the
budget actually also what gets spent?
Well, of course what the Appropriations Committee is
doing is actually rewriting the budget.
So when the president signs the budget that comes out of
Congress, that is the definitive budget of government spending.
The Appropriations Committee isn't actually spending money,
it's just rewriting the budget proposals.
In Porto Alegre, this budget document is the government
budget document. When it's finally passed, it
does drive the city budget. I've simplified it a little bit.
The mayor does, I think, five percent of the city budget, he
doesn't submit to this participatory budget.
So some discretionary funds are kept in the mayor's office to be
used for various purposes. So it's not that absolutely
everything that's done in Porto Alegre is determined this way.
But it is the heart of how the city organizes its spending.
Well, let's move on to the next story.
The citizen's assembly for electoral reform.
Here's the basic idea. Imagine an assembly of randomly
chosen citizens, like a jury, that are empowered to formulate
a constitutional revision of electoral laws, which is then
submitted to the electorate as a referendum.
This is what happened in British Columbia.
The British Columbia premier of British Columbia did not--
His party was unhappy with the electoral rules, which were
standard parliamentary, single member district, first past the
post rules, like we have in the United States.
We don't have a parliamentary system, but still we have one
person per district, and whoever gets the most votes wins.
People were unhappy with that because in British Columbia the
two main parties were very evenly balanced, but not just
for the province as a whole. They were balanced in almost
every electoral district. So a very small change in public
opinion would produce a completely big change in the
state legislature. Imagine Wisconsin, if in the
state Assembly, every district was 50/50 republicans and
democrats and you had a two percent swing each year.
Well, you'd go from 100% republicans to 100% democrats.
No stability whatsoever. Therefore, the give and take,
and compromise, and bargaining aspects of legislatures, which
is one of the important things that legislatures do, would get
undercut because you'd never have enough people from
different perspectives to engage in that kind of bargaining.
So they wanted to revise the electoral rules, but the premier
felt that he didn't trust the parliament to do the revision,
because they will just want to protect their own political
positions. So inspired by some political
science professors at the University of British Columbia.
They decided to go back to Athenian democracy.
See, in Athens, the way the democratic institutions worked
was not by elections, but by lot.
It's like a jury system. The legislative body in Athens
was a randomly selected group of citizens who had to serve, I
believe a year was the term of office, as legislators for the
city. For the city-state in that case.
So the premier of British Columbia basically came up with
the idea. Then the details were worked out
by this group of political scientists at the University of
British Columbia. This idea or creating a citizens
assembly, two people from each electoral district, 160 citizens
all together, plus four indigenous Canadians, what they
call First People, to be sure that they were represented.
They met regularly for a year. They were flown to Vancouver
with expenses paid every third weekend and paid $150 a day
honorarium for their services. You know, that's a pretty
generous payment. And with a lot of hoopla about
it, a lot of social status and prestige around the activity.
The first third of the year, they spent in what was called
the learning phase, where they received a crash course every
third weekend in different electoral systems.
And experts from the political science department at the
University of British Columbia would give them PowerPoints, and
illustrations, and teach them how all the different electoral
systems in the world work. And after three months of that,
it's fair to say these 160 citizens were probably among the
best informed people in North America on the nature of the
different electoral systems. They learned about electoral
systems that I didn't even know existed.
Different variants. We think of it being
proportional representation being one of the variants.
Well it turns out there's four different kinds of proportional
representation. And they matter, which one you
have. It matters whether you have
proportional representation that still connects representatives
to particular geographical places or you have proportional
representation which would be for the province as a whole.
That matters for how citizens get related to their
representatives. So they have these different
systems that they learned about. In the summer for three months,
they held public hearings all over British Columbia, where
these citizen assembly members would go and present the
citizens assembly idea and just hear from citizens who would
come to those meetings and give their views.
That turns out to have been the least successful part of the
whole process. Partially, what happened was
certain political constituencies, such as the
green party, became very well organized and went to all of
these meetings and gave the same speech at all of them.
And it was not only incredibly boring for the citizens assembly
members, who were very excited about this process.
I mean, powerfully moved and excited by what they were doing.
And then they heard the same silly speech time after time.
They were so much more sophisticated than anybody who
was giving these speeches. It turned out that the hearings
part, this middle part, just didn't work very well.
Then in the fall, they had three months to actually come up
with a proposal for a new rule, a new set of electoral rules,
which then would be submitted to the citizens in a referendum.
But the referendum law came out of a citizens assembly, not out
of a bunch of experts proposing something, a bunch of lobbyists
proposing something, or the parliament proposing something.
Now unfortunately, the premier decided that it would be viewed
as interference in the process if the province took an active
role in propagandizing the referendum.
So they basically took a hands-off view.
In order to pass, it needed to get a 60% of the total vote in
the province, plus a majority in at least 90% of the districts.
It got a majority in every district but one.
But it only had 58% of the total vote.
So it didn't pass after all this.
They're going to resubmit it in the next election with proper
information to the electorate. In the polling done afterwards,
the people who knew about it before they went to vote,
because it was a regular election that people were voting
in where this referendum also appeared, so people who were
informed about it voted about 75% in favor.
And people who hadn't heard about it voted a majority
against it. So the feeling is if there had
just been better information it would have certainly passed.
That will be what happens next time around.
Here's a picture of the delegates at the citizens
assembly for electoral reform, sitting around in one of their
sessions, talking and thinking about these issues.
I think this is a very interesting model.
I think it could be applied in many other ways.
Many other ways we could imagine.
I could imagine, for example, when there's some big
legislative issue that needs to be accomplished, like healthcare
reform, so not for all legislation.
But when you're at a juncture and you know you're going to do
something new, why not have a citizens assembly be the
deliberative body. It considers the options, works
through the principles, gains the knowledge through an
educational process, and works on that topic.
I wrote an Op-Ed piece with a colleague, Harry Brighouse in
the philosophy department. He's a British philosopher, but
he teaches here. It was about the reform of the
House of Lords in England. We wrote this Op-Ed piece saying
that the House of Lords should be turned into a citizens
assembly of randomly selected citizens.
So if you want to think about a two-house system.
We have a House and Senate. Well, we have a Senate because
of the need to represent states due to the historical conditions
under which the United States was formed.
And that states were sovereign entities that had to be
represented as states. So we're not just representing
citizens, we're representing states.
But Britain doesn't have that. The House of Lords isn't like
that. The House of Lords used to be a
hereditary assembly of nobility. Then it has become an assembly
of notable, sort of prominent figures that get appointed to
the House of Lords. But an alternative for a second
chamber in a parliamentary system would be to have one
house that's an elected house of territorial representatives, and
another house that's a citizen assembly of randomly selected
citizens who serve, let's say, for a three-year term with a
third replaced every year. And have it be extremely well
paid, so it's a big deal for somebody to be randomly
selected. It wouldn't be a draft.
I don't think you could do a citizens assembly in the form of
a jury. You know, for jury duty
supposedly you have to have some genuinely serious reason to
avoid it. So it's more like being drafted
to serve on a jury. For something that would have
the length of time and commitment that a citizens
assembly, it would have to be voluntary even though you'd be
randomly selected. And that was indeed the case in
British Columbia. People were randomly selected,
but they could say no. If I proposed that as an
alternative to the House of Lords, I doubt very much if the
British would see the wisdom of our proposal.
But I think it's a very interesting way of thinking
about how you can deepen democracy in a large polity, in
ways in which you can enhance the priorities, and values, and
ways of thinking of ordinary citizens rather than
professional politicians. And it avoids completely the
role of money in the selection of people.
It's a random assembly. There's no lobbying.
There's no campaign financing. It's a random assembly.
It's representative in the statistical sense.
That is, you randomize the assembly so it represents the
demography and the qualities of the broader community.
And in many respects, I think a citizens assembly would do a
more sensible job of weighing the trade offs and dilemmas and
the difficulties of many of the kinds of decisions which
legislatures face than do professional politicians,
who are so deeply tied up with particular interests and power
relations. That's my second example of
a real utopia. Any queries and thoughts about
that one? Yeah?
( inaudible ) >> Given the embedded, and
I don't know, even transient power race in this country
for example, how would you sell the idea of people power
versus the top down stuff that we have now?
I think you sell it on two grounds.
One is pragmatic. These devices actually solve
problems. They do a better job.
Porto Alegre has less corruption now.
And the United Nations celebrates it.
The World Bank, actually, named Porto Alegre as an exemplary
city. So one reason to have more
democracy that's bottom up and more egalitarian, more
participatory, is that it actually solves problems in a
more effective way for certain things.
That makes it appealing to lots of people, who aren't in other
respects particularly interested in democracy per se.
They are interested in efficiency.
They are interested in effective government.
So that's one kind of appeal. The other appeal is that the
very value of democracy of the people, by the people and for
the people is a deep value. It's a value that has a very
strong resonance with Americans. The idea that Americans are all
individualists and anti-government and anti-state
has truth to it. But it's only part of the
truth, because I think people equally feel that they value our
collective control of our collective destiny.
And that's what deepening and enriching democracy makes
possible. Now, of course, in the end,
given hierarchy, oligarchy, concentrations of power, you
know, these things aren't going to be given on a plate.
They have to be struggled for. I think states are the right
venue to do this. But whatever advances in
democracy are going to happen in this century in the United
States are going to begin at the state level, not the national
level. There's no reason why a state
can't switch from the kind of electoral system we have now to
some kind of proportional representation, for example.
There's no rules that bar that. And I think our struggles over
that kind of democratic change in the representation mechanism
are entirely possible in some states.
And once they work well in one state, then it's a model to be
copied in other states. That used to be the norm in the
United States. You know, the idea that the
states were the crucibles of democracy.
The sites of experimentation. And indeed, Wisconsin among the
states in the United States in the first part of the 20th
century, was the absolute cutting edge leader in
experimentation. So when the New Deal came along,
programs which were already in place in Wisconsin got copied
and nationalized. And I think that that's the most
promising ways to move on this, is to think in ways in which in
a place like Wisconsin, we could forge new democratic
institutions with more participation.
Including a randomocracy. I think having the idea of a
citizens assembly in Wisconsin that would work on particular
problems is a viable one. I'm not saying that it's
achievable. I don't think the political
forces would make it easy. But there's no reason why it
wouldn't work here. Is there another question?
Yeah. >> These people who were
randomly selected, are they going to have the same clout
that somebody who says that they're elected and they do
represent the people, not in the sense of a random selection, but
in the sense of, "I ran for office and people voted for me.
I owe them. My obligation is to represent
the people who voted for me." Not just represent an
abstract, random sample. >> So my view is that we need a
variety of different democratic institutions, that there's no
one form that solves all problems.
I'm not opposed to representative democracy.
It's not that I want to substitute direct democracy of
ordinary citizens for representation.
I just want to figure out ways in which we can increase the
role of direct participation, or random assemblies, as
complements to the ordinary electoral politics.
Particularly in context where money figures so strongly in the
electoral arena. So as long as we have such
concentrations of power that play themselves out in the
electoral arena, the legitimacy of representation is compromised
by those facts. And this, then, is a
counterpoint to that. So it's a way of thinking of
countering power within the democratic arena itself by
having more principles of democracy in play.
( inaudible ) Yeah, right.
It's a different form. It's in that spirit though.
It's a different form of checks and balances.
Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia, the basic idea I
think is familiar. Has everybody here looked at
Wikipedia at least some time? Does everybody know what it is?
Are there people who don't know anything about Wikipedia?
Okay, well Wikipedia is an extraordinary phenomenon.
Ten years ago, if you had said, Do you think it would--
I'll play this game again. Ten years ago, before the
Internet really took off, do you think it would be possible to
have an encyclopedia that would be produced, in which you
would have 2.6 million topics, you know, roughly ten times
the largest previous encyclopedia, in which all the
editing would be done for free. Nobody gets paid for it.
All volunteer editors. And which anybody in the world
can get access to this encyclopedia for free.
In the poorest countries of the world today, there are libraries
with Internet connections, in which any person who is
literate, you know, you have to be able to read, can go and get
access to the world's biggest encyclopedia for free.
And in which anybody can become an editor.
So anybody in this room, if you have some favorite topic,
something that you really care about, you should check to see
if it's on Wikipedia. And if it's not, you can join
the community of editors and enter and edit and entry.
Then your entry will get revised and added to by others.
You can correct their mistakes. And gradually, this topic that
you decided needed to be available to the world will in
fact become one of the entries in Wikipedia.
Well, for those of you who haven't seen it, here's how it
works. Anyone can revise and edit and
enter an entry. Editors become part of peer
networks within a community of users.
And then there's an elaborate and evolving system of
arbitration of disputes and monitoring of entries, in which
some editors, by virtue of their track record as contributors and
correctors of errors, get a status as kind of peer monitors
of editors. It's not hierarchical in the
sense that anybody can move into that status.
As opposed to it being some center authority that's
selecting people. But that eventually develops a
structure that has a kind of administrative character to it,
including the possibility of adjudicating disputes that occur
in Wikipedia. I have a graduate student who's
now doing research on this. I can't give you the detail that
I really understand, which I don't understand, is how this
dispute resolution process really works in Wikipedia.
And I know that that's something that's been developing over
time. Let me just show you what it
looks like. This is, when you go to
Wikipedia, this is the welcoming page.
It just gives you some, you know, features and particular
newsy things that have happened. Then there's a place over here
which says "search." You can put in any word for
any topic that you're interested in.
I'm not logged on. These are just copied from the
Web. But here's an example.
If you wanted to know about Harry Potter, you can imagine
there's a huge amount of material about Harry Potter.
You know, thousands and thousands of words about Harry
Potter. You can get synopses of every
book. You can get the biographies of
every character in the book. If you look here, this is part
of the content. They have literary analysis and
themes, and cultural impact, and other things about Harry Potter.
Some topics are highly controversial.
I picked an example. The First Intifada in Israel,
Palestine. Now that's a hot topic, highly
disputed. And the Wikipedia page says that
the neutrality of this article is disputed.
And it's an example of an interesting development in
Wikipedia. Most of the items, there are
2.6 million topics in Wikipedia. It's incredible,
2.6 million. Most of them are like
Harry Potter. I mean, I suppose there are
controversies about Harry Potter.
But mostly not. If you look up a topic like
seltzer water, you'll find out that there's real seltzer water.
And I don't think that it's probably a hotly debated topic.
But some are debated. And when there is debate, there
is the problem that people will keep changing it to correct what
they see as errors, or to change it to their point of view.
And you get instability. And when you get instability,
then that topic, that page in Wikipedia gets flagged, which
says that the neutrality of this article is disputed.
Then they have the various procedures for dealing with
this. They way they've dealt with this
is by basically bifurcating the topic, so that there's a kind of
Intifada Israeli perspective and an Intifada Palestinian
perspective in Wikipedia itself. Now that doesn't block the
pro-Israeli Intifada editors from going in and mucking about
with the pro-Palestinian one. So there's still a problem of
how do you stabilize, even the non-neutral sites.
That's the issue that I don't quite understand how it works
yet, which my graduate student is dutifully doing research on.
I do know that they have something called the arbitration
committee, which is an elaborate structure that's evolved
experimentally from within the Wiki community to resolve these
kind of issues in a layered way. But exactly how it works, I
cannot report to you. Wikipedia, I consider to be a
profoundly emancipatory design. It's egalitarian.
It's democratic. It's non-hierarchical.
It's free. It is profoundly
anti-capitalist. Whatever you think about
capitalism, you know, it has its good points, its bad points.
I tend to emphasize its bad points.
But whatever you think about it, Wikipedia is the most antithesis
to capitalism one could imagine. It's distributed free to
everybody on the planet. It's to each according to need
from each according to ability. You can contribute it to express
your love of particular topics, and your interest in sharing
knowledge with other people, for which you get no remuneration.
It's generalized reciprocity. I'm doing this, not for a
particular you, but for the collective you.
And you're doing it not just for me, but for the collective me,
as it were. And it is successful.
I think that Wikipedia will probably destroy the market in
encyclopedias. There will be no point in buying
an encyclopedia with Wikipedia available.
In terms of error rates, there's been studies comparing the error
rates in the Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikipedia.
And on non-controversial topics, so you know, you've got to
bracket that problem. On topics around which there is
a consensus view, the error rates are comparable.
Encyclopaedia Britannica does not have fewer errors per
thousand words, at least according to Science, the
magazine Science, which did a study comparing, I don't know,
30 or 40 different topics. Yeah?
( inaudible ) There's a foundation called
the Wikipedia Foundation, which gets donations.
It gets lots of donations from editors.
That is, people who are part of the Wiki community, and value
this, then contribute to the underlying financial structure.
I assume, but I don't know, that the Wiki Foundation also gets
funding from foundations. That is, I wouldn't be surprised
if the Ford Foundation, for example, gave a grant to the
Wiki Foundation for purposes of underwriting the costs of this.
It has a paid staff to manage the server and the technical
aspects. But it's not an expensive
operation. Because all of the several
hundred thousand editors around the world do it for free.
You can imagine what it would cost to produce an encyclopedia
with 2.6 million entries. This is very cheap
compared to that. Yeah?
Maybe sticky-wiki has a meaning!
But I wonder where Wiki comes from.
It's an Hawaiian word, I understand, originally.
Wiki is an Hawaiian word. If you go to Wikipedia, they'll
tell you exactly the history of the word.
It is an Hawaiian word. And I forget what playful
meaning of that word was. Does somebody know?
Quickly. >> Oh, quickly.
( inaudible ) Yes?
( inaudible ) Yes, I'm sure that there are
phony entries. There is a nice little study
done of what's called vandalism on Wikipedia, which is if you
just go in and maliciously change something.
So you could go in to the discussion of Napoleon and add,
as an editor, that Napoleon marched to the Battle of
Waterloo on an elephant. I think that was the example
that was done in this test. It was corrected within 15
minutes. I mean, there's hundreds of
thousands of editors around the world who are, for whom this is
an important hobby, something that they do and they care
about. They're part of a peer
community. They get notified when changes
in a site that they have edited, and enough of them check it out.
I, of course, in vanity of academics, I checked to see if
there was a Wikipedia entry for me, which I have nothing to do
with, and there is a short one, a few paragraphs.
And I then checked to see if it was accurate.
And what I would say is there were sins of omission.
There were things that if I was writing my own entry, I would
have added. But there was nothing that they
said that was incorrect. So what they said was right.
And it just was an incomplete entry.
There was another hand here, yes.
In reporting on something and using information from
Wikipedia, would you cite it as from Wikipedia?
Yeah, and there are professors who refuse to allow
students to cite things from Wikipedia.
It's a losing cause. I mean, what I tell students is
look, these are edited by ordinary people.
It hasn't been vetted by professionals.
Although most of the people who are writing on sociological
topics are pretty good sociologists of whatever sort.
And that they should check, you know, anything that they find,
they should check it with another source to confirm it's
true. That's good practice in general,
not just in using Wikipedia. But it's probably, at this
point, probably especially important for Wikipedia.
I use it all the time. In my professional work, I use
it all the time as the first place to go when I'm exploring a
topic that I don't know much about, because it's efficient.
It's clear. It gets right to the point.
And they usually have bibliographies.
And they have links to all sorts of other Web sites on the same
topic. So it's a fantastic place to
begin any kind of knowledge search around issues.
But of course, in a way, it's an advantage that you know that you
have to check things out. Because you should do that
anyway. It's just that you know you have
to do it here. But on things I've looked at, I
have not found significant errors, on the particular things
I've looked at. Yeah?
You go to Wikipedia first? >> If it's a substantive topic,
I would go to Wikipedia first. In fact, if you go to Google
first, it's often the case that the first hit is Wikipedia,
because people go to Wikipedia so much.
It's become the first hit that you get even if you're not going
there. That's how a lot of people first
discover Wikipedia. Other queries on Wikipedia?
Well one more example is unconditional basic income.
Now this is an idea which we could certainly have spent the
entire time talking about. My mother, who is in the
audience, and we were discussing what I was going to say.
She suggested that I put this last, because if I put it first,
we wouldn't get to the others because of its controversial
quality. Unconditional basic income does
not exist anywhere. So this is a case of a proposal
for an institutional transformation, which is being
very actively debated and discussed in various places.
It's an active part of the European discussion about
changing the mechanisms of distribution and redistribution.
But no place has actually instituted an unconditional
basic income. The basic idea is very simple.
Give all citizens or legal residents, just a parenthesis,
you have to figure out what the target population is.
That's a detail which I'm not going to worry about at the
moment. Let's say everybody that lives
in a places permanently. Give them all, rich and poor
alike, a monthly stipend sufficient to live at a decent
no frills standard of living, with no conditions attached.
So Bill Gates gets it and a homeless person gets it.
Everybody gets a stipend sufficient to live at what you
could describe as a culturally defined basic standard of
living, the no frills standard of living, at which nobody would
live below the poverty line, because everybody would have the
basic needs of food, clothing, shelter and so on, met.
Yeah? >> Is this cash, or in-kind?
It's cash. Basic income.
This is how it works. Everybody gets it.
The basic income is paid for out of taxes.
So the taxes of affluent people will rise more than the basic
income. So Bill Gates does get the basic
income. Let's suppose in the United
States it was, I don't know, $10,000-$12,000 a year per
person, something like that. You'd have to discuss the level.
But let's not worry about that level of detail at the moment.
But Bill Gates would get his check every month, along with
all the undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin.
But Bill Gates' income taxes would go up probably by $200,000
a year to pay for it. I don't know, $2 million a year.
You name it, the more the better.
But it's paid for out of taxes. At some point, then, people are
net payers. And at some point below that,
people are net beneficiaries. And that's a shifting point.
It depends on economic conditions and tax rates and so
on. Earned income above the basic
income is taxed progressively in the usual manner.
But it always pays to work. So that unlike transfer payments
to poor people in existing welfare states, where if you're
poor and you get a transfer payment, you lose your benefit
if your income goes above the poverty level.
Therefore, you have a disincentive to work.
That isn't true for a basic income.
Everybody gets it. And if you earn above the basic
income, of course, it's taxed on a progressive basis, but you get
net earnings from any additional earnings you earn.
Now there are a number of interesting and surprising
properties of a basic income, which make it very attractive, I
think, even if one is skeptical. So one source of skepticism is
that it just couldn't work. So one criticism of basic income
is that if in fact you gave everybody a minimal but decent
standard of living, then nobody would want to work.
Imagine if it were the case that everyone's highest ambition is
to be a couch potato. You know, contrary to my theory
of human nature and human flourishing, secretly, everybody
just wants to watch television. And if everyone had a basic
income, 85% of the labor force would quit and watch television
all day. Well, the system would collapse
immediately. So it's possible that this is
pie in the sky. That it's not real utopia, it's
just plain ordinary utopia, that this could not work.
So let's, as a little mental experiment, we know that if we
could give everybody in the United States a check for $1,000
a year, and that would not have a dramatic effect on the labor
supply. So we know that that much could
be given to everybody. We know that if we gave
everybody $50,000 a year, the system would collapse, because
the rate of taxation necessary to provide for that much basic
income, and the labor supply that would result from giving
people that much money would be unsustainable.
So somewhere between $1,000 and $50,000, there is what could be
called the maximally sustainable basic income.
It's the highest level that you could give everybody, which
would be consistent with a rate of taxation and labor supply
that would reproduce the income needed to provide everybody with
that basic income. So there's some point.
The question is, is that point closer to $1,000 so that it's
miserable, you can't live on it. Or is it somewhere more or less
around the poverty level, or a bit above.
I think it's almost certainly at or a little bit above the
poverty line. Therefore, a basic income to
provide everybody with those basic needs is possible
unconditionally. Yeah?
The people who are living on the basic income that you stated
here are getting along fine. All of a sudden, there's a
health problem. >> So basic income is not meant
to, for example, eliminate public education.
There'd still be free public education.
I'm in favor of free public health.
I think that we should have universal health insurance as a
separate matter. The point of a basic income is
not to provide everybody with this and only this, and
everything else you have to buy on the market.
I think there should be universal healthcare, and there
should be free public education. But that's an issue.
Charles Murray, the very conservative, I don't know, he's
not an economist exactly, but a popular writer.
He's in favor of a basic income. But he want's to get rid of
every other government program. So he thinks the way to solve
the current problems is to give everybody roughly $10,000 or
$12,000 a year and then for the government to do nothing else
for them. Well, that wouldn't be my mix of
different kinds of programs. But let me just tell you some
of the interesting, unexpected ramifications, just in terms of
how you think about it. One aspect of basic income, it
doesn't probably come to mind immediately, is that this can be
thought of as an alternative to our current agricultural
policies for supporting family farming.
The current way that family farmers get supported are by
price supports of various sorts, subsidies that either go to
them, reducing their production, or supporting the prices of a
particular farm commodity. All of the agricultural policies
we have now that support family farms mainly benefit
agribusiness. I think mostly benefit, not
family farmers, but corporate farmers.
A basic income can be thought of as a standard of living
guaranteed to small farmers, that enables them to continue to
farm because the income from farming only is then used for
discretionary income, income above the basic income.
It means that a family farmer has a guaranteed income, and
therefore can afford to do the farming, even if the prices of
the commodities which they produce are low, so long as they
cover the costs of producing them.
They don't have to also generate their basic standard of living
out of their farming. A basic income has the nice
effect, in my view, of making small farmers more viable.
But big farming becomes more expensive, because agricultural
labor now has an alternative. Agrarian labor can live.
They have the choice of a basic income or they can take the
basic income and also work as a farm laborer.
Since they have that exit option, their bargaining
position with respect to large corporate farms goes up.
And the wage rates for unpleasant and backbreaking work
become more expensive. Essentially what basic income
does is changes the labor supply for the most unpleasant kinds of
work. Unpleasant work becomes more
expensive because people have to be paid more to be willing to do
it, since they have the option of basic income.
In an ordinary labor market, there's this irony that the
worst work is often the worst paid.
So people aren't being compensated for doing the most
unpleasant and dangerous things relative to what they would if
they had the option of refusing to work, which they would with a
basic income. Basic income is also a
fantastic way of subsidizing the arts, performing arts, visual
arts, dance, music. I have a daughter in theater,
who is a very big supporter of basic income.
She has a kind of partial basic income from certain familial
sources. ( laughter )
But you know, it's terribly difficult for people who are
engaged in activities which are not core market oriented.
The reason they're engaging in the activities is to satisfy
some important social or cultural need.
And they have to make a living while they're doing it.
Care giving labor has that quality as well.
Care giving labor is not well organized for markets.
You want people to do it out of commitment and love and caring,
not because they're out for the money.
Basic income makes it possible for people to engage in all
sorts of activities which markets don't do a good job of
providing. I think the arts and the
performing arts are just an extremely good example.
Yeah? >> Raising a family would
qualify? >> Sure.
You don't have to qualify. You get the money without
condition. So basic income also supports
beach bums. One of the most brilliant pieces
of academic work on basic income has the wonderful title,
"Should Surfers Be Fed?" ( laughter )
And it's an argument for why, even if one thinks it's a kind
of socially parasitic thing to do, and you don't have any
particular admiration for people who spend all their time on
the beach, nevertheless, there's an argument that could be made
for why surfers should be fed, and therefore why a basic
income, unconditional, should be made available for everybody,
including surfers. Yeah?
( inaudible ) Could it lead
to over population? So the issue would be whether
basic income would be a highly pro-natalist policy that would
increase fertility. I mean, it's interesting.
In the many, many debates and discussions I've had about basic
income, nobody has raised that issue specifically.
It's not that it's not possible. You know, the incentive
structure. Fertility rates in affluent
countries have dropped so dramatically that a modest
easing of the pressures on families so that they could
choose to have children under less financial constraints might
not be such a bad thing. We're below replacement rates in
Europe. No, I don't see why inherently,
because it is just a basic income, it's not a lavish
income, why it would encourage people to have large numbers of
children. Yeah?
Is this for every person? ( inaudible )
Right, so there are a whole range of details
in a policy like basic income, which on the one hand, have to
be resolved if you were actually going to institute it.
But on the other hand, I don't think are fundamental to the
idea of basic income, and how we should at least initially think
about it. One of the issues is how do you
deal with children. Do children get a scaled back
basic income? That seems reasonable, that a
child should not get a full basic income, because of the
nature of the cost and expenses associated with children are
partially, of course, being carried by their parents.
Exactly how you calibrate that and how you would work out what
the appropriate level of a basic income was for children of
different ages, is of course, an important matter, but not one
that I have any particular views on.
Another really important issue, which I think is of crucial
importance is what's the adult targets.
Are they citizens? Are they legal residents?
Are they everybody who is actually part of the society,
whatever their legal standing might be?
Fundamentally, from an ethical or social justice point of view,
I actually believe in what's called a global basic income.
I mean, from a moral point of view, I don't think it matters
whether you are American or not, you're a human being.
And everybody, since the globe, the world economy is wealthy
enough to provide everybody in the world with basic needs, the
only moral basic income, fully moral basic income, is a global
basic income. Well, there are practical
reasons why there's certainly political reasons why that's not
going to happen, there's practical difficulties in doing
it, even if there was good will. But that's the moral stand from
which I will then talk about the practical constraints, would be
a global, universal basic income for everybody.
Within the United States, I would want it for all people who
are part of the society. So, not tourists, you know, you
come for a summer vacation, you don't get a basic income while
you're here. But anybody who is part of the
collective community of cooperation that we call our
society should be receive a basic income.
Yeah? >> Wouldn't it be a problem
providing basic housing? >> The basic income is meant to
be at a sufficient level that people could afford basic rent.
That is, it would be at a high enough level that it provides
for food, clothing and shelter. Now if in fact there's a
shortage of housing, the actual physical facilities, then
housing would become a social problem similar to the
healthcare issue, where there's another solution needed to deal
with that particular aspect of the supply conditions of
housing. So some kind of publicly funded
housing programs would be, perhaps, needed.
If that was in fact the diagnosis of that particular
problem. Yeah?
Like New York City or San Francisco rents.
Right, so again, that's the kind of detail which one would
have to decide how to deal with. That is, to have cost of living
adjustments. And the problem is, as soon as
you add complications, the administrative costs become
greater. You have to avoid cheating and
scams. If the New York City basic
income is higher because costs are indeed higher in New York
City, well then there's always the risk that somebody
establishes a New York City address in order to get the New
York City level, but then lives, you know, in upstate New York,
in some backwater place. So those are administrative
difficulties. And they could be killer
difficulties. They could be fatal flaws.
So it could be that a basic income will work fine in the
Netherlands, where there is sufficient solidarity and sense
of civic responsibility and cohesion that people wouldn't
scam the system in that kind of way.
But it might not work in a big, heterogeneous country like the
United States, for all the complications.
But it could also be that those complications in the end aren't
such difficult complications. They're just messy
complications. Yeah?
An example of it is in Denmark with higher education.
Not only is the education at the universities there free, but
students are paid to study, because the society places great
emphasis on education. >> That's right.
There are places around the world that have what some people
call partial basic incomes. Partial, because they either
apply only to particular categories of people, or they're
too low. Alaska has a partial basic
income. I'm not sure if everybody knew
that. The royalties from Alaskan oil
are divided equally among Alaskan citizens.
I had a graduate student who had to fly back to Alaska for a week
every year in order to maintain his Alaskan residence so he
could get his $2,000 a year, which every Alaskan resident
gets as their per capita share of the oil wealth of the state.
Well, that's a basic income, basically.
But it's a partial one, because it's not enough to live on.
Yeah? >> Whether the level required
for basic income will get pushed and up and up and up.
It's a matter of definition. >> Sure.
We don't know the experience. The question is, is there any
evidence or experience about a basic income tending to ratchet
up, because after all what we mean by poverty is a culturally
and socially established idea. And what's basic at one point in
time may be considered too low at another point in time.
It's certainly the case that the definitions of poverty have
changed over time. We don't know what would happen
to a basic income over time, because it hasn't been
instituted. The official poverty line in the
United States in terms of which various kinds of social services
are pegged has not creeped up over time.
I mean, it's a dreadfully low standard of living in the United
States. And there hasn't been any
tendency for it to rise over time.
The minimum wage, as we know, has declined over time in the
United States because it isn't pegged to inflation.
So I don't think there's an inherent reason why, if a
universal basic income was established at a decent and
acceptable minimum standard of living, there' no inherent
reason that it would tend to creep up, unless the economy
became sufficiently more productive that it could afford
to do so. And in doing so, would enhance
individual freedom to make more and varied choices.
My personal view is that I would like the basic income to be as
absolutely high as possible. The higher the better.
I see no reason not to make it at that maximum feasible level.
And if that was way above the poverty line, so much the
better. Because so much the greater
freedom that individuals would have to fashion their lives and
to forge relations and to build communities unconstrained by the
necessity of selling their labor on a labor market, and entering
into that kind of activity. In a way, we have basic income
for wealthy people. You know, people can endow their
children, and their children can have this stream of income from
a trust fund. We have in a sense, a
self-financed basic income among people who have lots of assets.
In a sense what I'm saying is that advantage should be spread
equally so that everybody can have a basic income of that
sort. Yeah?
( inaudible ) >> The question is
what this would do for crime. I don't see these as primarily
crime prevention strategies. But I do feel that if, certainly
in a country like the United States, if we moved toward a
more egalitarian distribution of life opportunities.
And conditions under which human beings can flourish, if that was
more equally distributed, that that would contribute somewhat
to a reduction of certain kinds of criminal activity.
People would have more opportunities to live their
lives in other ways, feel less desperate, feel less alienated
and isolated from other people. Now why crime is high in some
places and low in other places is a complicated issue.
There's lots of sociological work on these matters.
It's not as simple as the more inequality, the more crime.
But that's not a bad first approximation for a lot of the
problem. Places that have very high
levels of inequality, rather than just very high levels of
poverty, but very high levels of inequality tend to generate more
crime. Yeah?
What are some of the complications for a larger
geographic area or a smaller geographic area, city or state,
or something like that, and also with immigration and labor
needs? >> So immigration is certainly a
complicating factor. Because particularly when you
have large amounts of illegal immigrants.
And one can imagine a basic income system as creating a kind
of segmented society where you have a class of non-citizens who
don't get a basic income and do all the crummy work, and then
you have a class of citizens who have a basic income.
Saudi Arabia is a bit like that. You know, that is most of the
laboring activity is done by non-citizens.
And most Saudi Arabians participate in the bounty of the
oil wealth. That certainly is an undesirable
society. So my view about basic income is
that anyone who is performing laboring activity gets a basic
income. But that, of course, does mean
that you have to worry, then, about illegal immigrants.
You have to deal with that problem.
And I actually find that an extremely difficult issue to
square with my ethical principles.
The issue of immigration is probably the single-most, as a
sophisticated sociologist, man of the world, with strong
opinions about everything, immigration is the topic around
which I find it hardest to square with my ethical
principles, with the array of policy possibilities.
My ethical principles are for no borders.
I think that all people are fundamentally equal.
We should have no restrictions whatsoever on the movement of
people globally. And anybody who wants to come
here should be able to. And people should be able to
move as freely as anything else. So my sense as to what is right
and just from a social justice point of view, a child born in
Mexico whose life is blocked from flourishing because of the
lack of resources, that's just as much a social injustice as it
is a child born here who lacks those opportunities.
So that's my ethical stance. But of course, that runs deeply
against practical considerations about what the consequences
would be politically in terms of social conflict and other
issues, social solidarities if one actually put into practice
that ethical principle. And that's a topic around which
I find it very hard to sort of square the circle, to figure out
what's the policy that I'm most comfortable with, given that any
policy is going to be against that deeper principle that I
hold. But back to your original
point. It is a problem for basic
income. You have to solve it somehow or
the other. You have to figure out how it
affects migration and how to cope with legal and illegal
immigrants. Yeah?
Has anybody in our government taken this seriously?
Has anybody taken this up in our government?
There are some democrats who have been interested.
They have participated in various forums and discussions.
I think Paul Wellstone had been very interested in basic income
as an idea. There are Europeans, places in
Europe where this is a very active discussion, where it's
seen as a quite reasonable reform of existing institutions.
If you have a very generous redistributive system like in
Sweden or the Netherlands, northern Europe, the cost of a
basic income actually can be pretty small.
That is, shifting from a patchwork of systems of income
support, where you have lots of different programs, you have
your student program, and you have your aging program, and you
have your disability program, and you have your unemployment
insurance. You have all these particular
programs, each of which has their own administrative agency.
They're all monitoring to see if people are cheating or not.
You know, if you have this patchwork, and then you simplify
it and say, okay, enough already.
Everybody gets the basic stipend.
You've saved a lot on administrative costs, because
you don't have to have as much surveillance.
And the added costs in those generous systems is probably not
that great. So there is a big discussion of
it in Europe for sure. In the United States, this is
so far off of the current political agenda, being more
generous to our people, to be more concerned about inequality,
this is not high on the priority list of American politics right
now. You had your hand up.
( inaudible ) >> About basic income
and the cost of living. If we were ever to get a basic
income, you would have to figure out how to peg it in some way or
another to inflation and other things, just as Social Security.
Social Security is a kind of basic income.
The idea of Social Security was that the minimum level of Social
Security was meant to be at a level that a person could get by
on. You know, that may be a fiction,
but that was the spirit of it. It's meant to be a
redistributive system. You know, it's not meant to be
the same as investing from your savings so you have a pension.
It's a different idea. Social Security is security.
It's meant to provide. The social part is society
providing each of its citizens when they're older, the security
of knowing that they will live, at least well enough to get by.
That's what's wrong with the privatization of Social
Security. It's not that people shouldn't
be investing for pensions and whatever, but it's destroys the
whole idea of what that program is about, which is to provide a
guarantee and essentially a kind of unconditional basic income
for the aged. So one can imagine Social
Security creeping to younger people and other patchwork
programs expanding. So it's conceivable that
eventually the United States might be in a position to put
this on the agenda. It's certainly not on the agenda
now. Yeah, in the back.
( inaudible ) Sure.
The question is what the impact of basic income would be on
employment. You said employment services.
( inaudible ) Right, so take a person who
cannot be employed without some kind of social support system,
a person who needs special facilities to be able to work
because of a disability of some sort.
The question is whether those would still exist.
I think they should exist. Employment is a value to
people's life, their sense of meaning, their connection to
other people. It's not just to earn an income.
It's also to be part of a community and contribute.
And we should have, regardless of whether there's a basic
income, there should be all the facilities needed to insert
people into employment relations in the most constructive ways
for their lives. My foundational principle.
I'm sort of stepping back from the details of all this.
All people should have access to the material and social
conditions to live a flourishing life.
The foundation of my social justice concerns around all of
these real utopias are that all people should have access to
both the material and the social conditions to live a flourishing
life. And a basic income is part of a
solution for the inequalities of access to the material
conditions. That is, it guarantees that
everybody has at least the basic material conditions to flourish.
But there are many other conditions, including social
conditions. And employment services is part
of the social conditions for flourishing.
Yeah? >> The distribution of services
and goods in communities like Cabrini Green in Chicago, or
New Orleans, where some of the buildings are being knocked down
in order to cut down the population in the cities.
That kind of tension. If you have income coming into
the poor people in the neighborhood, would that help to
bring services into the neighborhoods themselves?
The question is what would it do to the nature of the services
provided in the community if you infuse more income in the
community through a basic income that the residents would have,
particularly in poor and blighted communities.
And presumably, if people had more--
I'm hitting this. This is probably causing
problems, sorry. If people had more income, and
particularly if you have limited means, most of the income gets
spent locally. And therefore, it would be a
kind of "stimulus package" to use an expression that's in the
news. It's a stimulus package for the
local economy, particularly around services, which would
then also become sources of employment.
Now how much that would work and what the dynamics would be,
you know, exactly what the economic processes that would
get triggered by having this infusion of more resources at
the bottom of the income structure, this is
redistribution. That's a term that's not very
popular in the United States. But this is redistribution.
It's taking resources away from people who don't need it and
giving it to people who do. That, by the way, is the way I
like to refer to redistribution. It's not taking from the rich
and giving to the poor. It's taking from people who
don't need it, you know, and giving it to people who do.
That would have dynamic economic effects, as well.
Yeah? >> I imagine you're aware of the
study where the question was posed, would you rather have
twice the income of your fellow students, even though it was
less income, as opposed to half the income of your fellow
students, even though it resulted in more income.
Most people wanted more than their neighbors, even if it's
less. So what kind of transition you
imagine we would have to go through.
The question for the recording is referring to
research which indicates that people care a lot about their
relative standing compared to others.
And therefore, would prefer to have twice as much income as a
neighbor even if that meant they would less income, than to have
half as much income as their neighbor.
So they'd rather have a neighbor who had half as much income as
they did than twice as much income as they did, even if in
the second case, they would be much better off.
Now one thing to note about this research is the research is a
paper and pencil questionnaire. If you actually came to somebody
and said, look, you have a choice.
You can have $100,000 or $50,000.
But if you have $100,000, you're going to live next to somebody
who has $200,000. And if you have $50,000, you're
going to live next to somebody who has $25,000.
Which do you want, and I'll actually give you the money.
It's not so clear to me that if there was much of a difference
between these two, people would actually choose the lower
income, just so they could feel superior.
So I'm a little skeptical of the power of that research, even
though it is an interesting finding.
But it is certainly true, that people gain status, particularly
in a highly competitive individualistic society, people
gain status from their relative income, not just from their
absolute income. And people are motivated by
those comparisons. They're particularly motivated
by comparisons of people that are just more or less like
themselves. It's called the narcissism of
small differences. Psychologists refer to it that
way. People care a lot about, in
academic departments, people care a lot about the relative
salary among other senior professors who have about the
same number of years at Wisconsin in their department,
the people who are their reference group that they're
comparing themselves to. So that is part of motivation.
And to the extent that that really drives people, that
itself pushes for a more in-egalitarian world.
But it's not the only thing that drives people.
People also prefer a world with less conflict.
They prefer a world where children have opportunities.
You know, people are complicated.
They have multiple values which conflict with each other.
So you're right, those kinds of motivations would undercut the
spirit of a basic income and other more egalitarian
processes. And if those were the only
things motivating people, then the prospects would even be
worse. The prospects are bad enough for
this in our current conditions, but the prospects would even be
worse. ( inaudible )
Thank you very much. ( applause )