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to Wednesday Nite at the Lab >> Hi, welcome everybody
at the Biotechnology Center. here at UW-Madison
I work here at the Biotech My name's Tom Zinnen.
UW-Extension Cooperative Center, and also at the
And on behalf of the Wisconsin Extension.
Lifelong Learning Institute of Alumni Association and the
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.
flowers are blooming. The b( laughter )ging and the
Tonight's speaker is Erik Olin Wright.
He was born in Berkeley,
He grew up in Kansas, and was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and
the University of California-Berkeley.
He has taught Sociology at the
1976, where he is currently Vilas Distinguished Professor of
Sociology.
centrally concerning with reconstructing the Marxist
position of social theory and research in ways that attempt to
make it more relevant to
cogent as a scientific framework contemporary concerns and more
His empirical research has of analysis.
in character of class relations focuin developed capitalisthange
societies.
Real Utopians Project, which Since 1992, he has directed the
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,
But of course, it was a light dusting today, in contrast to.
the foot of snow that fell
What I want to do in tonight's roughly a month ago.
about a project that I've been presentation is talk to you
called the "Real Utopias working on since the early '90s
That might seem like a rather odd title for a project that
purports to be social science.
Lab. This is Wednesday Nite at the
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,
outside of time and place. fantasies of human perfection,
subject of concern for us Hserious academic social a
scientists? Perhaps the philosophers or
literary scholars, but how can
question of utopia in a serious we sociologway? treat the
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.
puzzle. Because isn't real and utopia,
aren't these opposites. Isn't this an oxymoron?
Utopias are supposed to be
matters of feasibility and unconstrained by the petty
To be real is to be hard-nosed achievability.
Well, that internal contradiction, that tension is
precisely what this project is
It's an attempt to join together all about.
our highest ideals for a just dand humane world, the kind ofy
world that we do indeed fantasize about.
To take those ideals seriously, but to also ask what kinds of
real institutions could embody
transform the world in which we live to better approximate those
ideals. The heart of this project
involves investigating a range
way or another, can be thought of empirical cases, that in one
experiments that have been tried of as at least partial
world at various times and out in various corners of the
make utopia real. But the research also involves
looking at theoretical ideas, proposals for alternatives that
have not yet been tried, but
systematic theoretical argument nand analysis, and in which weto
can look at real world examples that in some way or another
might give you clues as to how
will work. well certain kinds of proposals
That's to explore alternatives So here's then the basic idea.
in terms of two main criteria. to existing social institutions
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
to avoid the embarrassment. When I was in third grade, my
elementary school teacher told
good speller at that time, that I shouldn't worry about it.y
It was more important to say
expressive, and not worry about whatsuch details.d be
Although that was just a typo.
their and there. I do know the difference between
about this idea, envisioning Now rather than talk abstractly
way to give you a sense of what this is all about, is to givet
you examples. Examples of some historical,
real things that have happened
theoretical. and some that are more
wide range of different sort of Ainstitutional arrangements. a
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
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
to describe all of these and a dialogue, rather than for me
and forth. then at the end have a Q&A back
any questions. So interrupt me at any time, ask
interesting. All of these, I think, are
and surprising. ThAnd we should just have aing
conversation as I proceed.
budgets. So first, participatory
New England town meeting. We all have an idea of what that
is like.
know each other well. A And in which the business ofat
local government is done
getting together and talking primarily by citizens actually
should be done. abAnd I were to say, imagine at
New England town meeting, do you
a city of about th1.7 million people in the in
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
direct citizen participation in woumaking the decisions? on
Not simply electing representatives to make the
decisions for them. And that this would involve
annually, tens of thousands of
deliberations and discussions peabout the city budget.ed
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
just not a very realistic would have sUtopia."is is really
It sounds like it would be
happen. kindBut it really just isn'tuld
possible. Well, the participatory
budgeting in Porto Alegre not only did happen, it's an ongoing
process now.
budgets in the city of Porto The basic idea is that city
city planners, not by the mayor's office, not by technical
budget experts. The city budgets are generated
through direct citizen
assemblies. paAnd thus, it is called thed
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
The conservative and populous mayparties split the vote.ent.
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.
council. They didn't control the city
expecting to win the election. They got elected, not at all
they were going to do. And they had to figure out what
through the city council. TIt was controlled by theg
opposition parties. They had to, therefore,
improvise.
idea. The budget in Porto Alegre, like
in many cities, is passed in a
proposes a budget to the city procedure council. the mayor
The city council mucks about
wish, passes it. with it, changes things as they
A standard sort of way in which And budgets get formed.s it.
There is nothing in the city
the city gets the numbers. charter, however, which says how
Where does the proposal come Where does the budget come from?
The charter doesn't say that the from?
economists and engineers and mayor has to ask a bunch of
budget. It just says the mayor submits a
budget. So the mayor decided to create
a series of neighborhood
schools, and warehouses, civic assemblies that would meet in
Seventeen neighborhoods in the centers, and other places.
Create these neighborhood city assemblies.egre.
And these assemblies would
priorities were for their region decide on what the budget
They would then make proposals of the city.
They would each then choose two fdelegates 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
apply to the whole city in which coherent city budget that would
all be derived from the theproposals and prioritiesld
established in these
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.
they didn't know what they were People came doing.se meetings,
The budgets were incoherent.
mess. TAnd one would have normallye
expected, after the experience
would've simply abandoned the of that firproject. that they
But in good, as I would say real
experimented. They treated it as a trial and
error problem.
called democratic Texperimentalism, where you trye
to build-in learning capacity,
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
they added what they called thematic assemblies, which were
citywide assemblies on
One of the problems with the particular themes like culture.
neighborhood assemblies is that the people in the middle class
neighborhoods, they really
priorities that they could didn't have any budget
assemblies. mAnd their concerns were notse
being met.
these thematic assemblies, where So the city decided to create
people had particular interests and agendas which they would
like to do. As this has evolved over time,
it's gotten quite complicated.
procedures, by which the There are interesting
these neighborhood assemblies is allocation of the budget across
And how the priorities within these assembly meetings are
discussed and deliberated.
going through all of the details I don't think in this context,
The results of this process have is really necessary.
Porto Alegre. The most striking thing is that
the patterns of city spending were dramatically transformed.
In most cities in Brazil and
city spends per capita elsewhere, the amount that the
per capita income is inin a neighborhood. the
So the poorest neighborhoods get
The richest neighborhoods get the the most.ding.
That's why you have nice roads
neighborhoods and potholes or no and good lighting in rich
neighborhoods. paving at all in poor
correlation has flipped. In Porto Alegre, that
participatory process, one of Athe big impacts has been ay
dramatic transformation of the
spends its resources. Now one of the reasons for that
is that everything is out in the
All budget priorities are discussed in public.
And citizens become extremely well-informed about the details
of each annual budget.
vote on what those priorities They go towill be.s and they
And given the distribution of income in Porto Alegre and the
nature of the participation in
of the neediest parts of the these assemblies, the priorities
greater weight in the final budget than the priorities of
the most affluent parts of the
That's one big effect of this, city.
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
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
today than it was in the past. characteristic in Porto Alegre
consequence of this transformation in how budgets
were generated in the city, is
disappeared from Porto Alegre. that corruption has almost
like Brazil. This is a big deal in a place
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
the ones being paved; if the wrote down should be paved are
to be built are being built, and daycare centers that they want
And the, what's called leakage, the leakage in the budget has
basically disappeared.
scandals in Porto Alegre since There have been no corruption
The United Nations, in fact, this process began.
an exemplary city, as a model city for its ability to create
clean and good government.
one of the pivotal reasons why And the participatory budget is
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.
improved. IOne of the problems in Brazilas
and in many poor countries is that the capacity of the state
to actually extract taxes from
taxes, that capacity to extract peopltaxes is limited.to pay
Not because they can't pass laws
It's just that people don't pay that say ytheir taxes.ay taxes.
And the enforcement machinery is
income is great. weak, and the ability to hide
problem in Brazil. So tax evasion is a chronic
has gone up. In Porto Alegre, tax compliance
a kind of peculiar result, given Now you might think of that as
Alegre process does not tprimarily favor affluent ando
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
the government is doing things they don't, or the belief that
puzzle. for Why would rich people be a
voluntarily improve their tax compliance when they're not the
primary beneficiary?
looking at why people pay taxes I tis an unsatisfactory way.y of
People pay taxes to a significant extent out of a
sense of civic obligation.
used for good purposes, without Acorruption, that are actuallyg
benefiting the lives of people
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
If a citizen doesn't want to voluntary compliance, increases.
if most people didn't just pay taxes, in the United States,
actually decided that they grumble about taxes, but
level of tax avoidance would go didn't want tup.o it, then the
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
on their tax returns. oSince it's so easy to cheat,t
it's a tribute to a sense of
people, most of the time, don't civic responcheat.ty that most
And if they cheat, it's nickel
It's not major tax avoidance. That's my first utopia.
I have some pictures. These are some photographs from
meetings of these neighborhood
arguing, debating about these assemblies,things. talking and
Roughly speaking, on an annual
somewhere around ten percent of adult citizens participate in
one or more of these meetings.
high. YIn an election, a ten percenty
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.
is respectable. But in a way, I think the way to
think about it is the actual
kind of process, you wouldn't pnecessarily want it to be much
higher than ten percent.
percent to be a shifting number What yyear after year.t ten
So that over a ten year period, let's say, you'd like 30%, 40%
or 50% of adults to have
that cycle. But the ideal is not for people
to make their lives an endless
participate on a regular basis meeting, but for people to
And then to talk about it outside of the meetings.
So in a family, presumably, if
participatory budget meeting and one adult in a family goes to a
then over the dinner table and discusses budget priorities,
discussing these matters with in other coothers. they'll be
So here are pictures from some
And these are two posters. of the meetings in Porto Alegre.
advertised. TThe posters are plastered alll
over the city.
aesthetics of the participatory I was vbudget, which isth the
"orcamento participativo,"
in Portuguese. or participatory budget
on buses. TBuses would be painted withr
announcements about when the
The meetings are staggered so that the thematic meetings don't
conflict with the neighborhood
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.
a greater sense of civic spirit in Porto Alegre, nobody has told
me that the crime rate has
respect to this. changed one way or another with
On a lot of these things, well It's very hard.
very hard to isolate the this one in particular, it's
You can look at the effects on specific effects.
directly connected to the city spendibudget.ause that's
You can see that the percentage of houses that are connected to
sewers, the streets that are
lighting in the city. You know that all those things
have now become more equal
That can be directly measured. around the city.
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?
But I would say the first couple >> Okay, it started in 1990.
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.
that they've locked in more and So themore of the budget.rojects
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 although each year you do athe 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.
the budget. So And therefore, you have a of
smaller and smaller discretionary amount.
That's also been combined with
money that comes from the acentral government down to thex
cities. There's been kind of an
austerity budget from the center
So the budgets are under more financial constraint and they're
locked in more. So once you get relatively
little discretionary budget,
participating goes down. then citizens' interest in
The incentive for participating There's nhas gone down.tribute.
That has been a problem in the
structure continues. last few years, although the
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.
The last election they lost, the They lost the last election.
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
But the party that did win is ofcontinuing the participatoryy.
budget. It's now a fairly
institutionalized part of the city government there.
How long a time frame does
It's interesting. The structure of it, the details
are interesting.
a devil is in the details kind As a lot of these things, it is
The budget cycle starts in of story.
It begins in the autumn in the March, which is their fall.
It begins with a meeting of sthese assemblies.e.
They'll typically have 500-1,000
That's the order of magnitude. people at each assembly.
there's a report of what At the assembly meeting,
priorities, when they were happened with last year's
the actual projects are. enacted and what the status of
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.
meeting, they choose delegates And at that first budget
three-month period to formulate the budget priorities for that
neighborhood region.
of roughly one delegate for every 30 people who come to that
neighborhood assembly.
have a problem in your Now what that means is if you
immediate corner of Porto Alegre, and you can get 20 or 30
of your neighbors to come to the
representative for that purpose meeton the budget council.ect
That budget council then meets
churches, and other places, over in basements, schools, and
months. They get petitions and meet with
neighborhood associations, and
organized interests in the soccer clubs, and whatever
I'm using the word neighborhood to really mean a region of the
city here.
taking in all this information They then have the task of
out what the priorities for the and delibbudget are. figuring
This is formalized now. There's a list of categories.
And you first rank the
and then projects within priorities of the categories,
After that's done, after three categories.
assembly, which ratifies those months, there's another big
delegates to go to a citywide budget council that then meets
for the next two months to bring
So it's a five or six-month allprocess all together.er.
It's only around budget matters.
of an ordinary sense that works Theon ordinances, and whichil
ultimately votes on this
The city charter says that the participatory budget.
on the budget. elected city council has to vote
budget document that's gone through this arduous process,
they simply rubber stamp it.
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
people, as expressed through looking out for the interests of
expressing their wants. this lo>> Absolutely.people
I mean, there'd be all sorts of other ways.
Once you see that it works, then
get to a system. there's other ways that you can
movement attempting to organize a counter-budget, a people's
budget, and then bringing that
allies, to contest whatever the testablished budget would be,r
from the framework of this
It's obviously helped if you've got the mayor behind it, because
then provided he takes resources
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
This is no longer, by the way, course, that this could be done.
It's been copied in dozens of onBrazilian cities.e.
Sometimes with great effect,
Sometimes it results just in other times disastrously.
absconding with the money, and local neighborhood bosses
organizing patronage. Other times, it's worked and
revitalized grassroots
So it's very uneven. democratic energy.
research across Brazilian cities And people are now doing
it doesn't. tCertain European countries are
experimenting in this now.
participatory budgeting. Barcelona has an experiment in
are advisory budgets, not, you Mostly, the European experiments
Porto Alegre case is. My view is that it makes a very
big difference whether the
that they're actually deciding citizen participants believe
just giving input and then the and working on the budget, or
budget. cThis will work much more whene
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
least some flavor of this that the United States that have at
But I'm not sure. they're Yeah?ng about.
In the United States, at the
the president who puts in a budget, and it's always dead on
arrival.
appropriations, where you really Then you have what's called
money, as opposed to just the have the pbudget. spend the
Is there that distinction in
budget actually also what gets this city in Brazil, or is the
Well, of course what the spent?
doing is actually rewriting the Appropriatbudget.mmittee is
So when the president signs the budget that comes out of
Congress, that is the definitive
The Appropriations Committee budget of government spending.
it's just rewriting the budget isn't actually spending money,
In Porto Alegre, this budget proposals.
budget document. document is the government
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
So some discretionary funds are kept in the mayor's office to be
used for various purposes.
everything that's done in Porto Alegre is determined this way.
But it is the heart of how the
Well, let's move on to the next city organistory.s spending.
The citizen's assembly for
Here's the basic idea. electoral reform.
chosen citizens, like a jury, that are empowered to formulate
a constitutional revision of
submitted to the electorate as a electoral laws, which is then
This is what happened in British referendum.
The British Columbia premier of British Columbia did not--
His party was unhappy with the
standard parliamentary, single electoral rules, which were
post rules, like we have in the member diUnited States.past the
We don't have a parliamentary system, but still we have one
person per district, and whoever
People were unhappy with that because in British Columbia the
two main parties were very
for the province as a whole. evenly balanced, but not just
every electoral district. So a very small change in public
opinion would produce a completely big change in the
state legislature.
state Assembly, every district Imagine Wisconsin, if in the
democrats and you had a two wpercent swing each year.
Well, you'd go from 100%
No stability whatsoever. republicans to 100% democrats.
and compromise, and bargaining Therefore, the give and take,
is one of the important things aspects of legislatures, which
undercut because you'd never that legislatures do, would get
different perspectives to engage have enough people from
So they wanted to revise the in that kind of bargaining.
felt that he didn't trust the eparliament to do the revision,r
because they will just want to
positions. protect their own political
science professors at the University of British Columbia.
They decided to go back to
See, in Athens, the way the democratic institutions worked
was not by elections, but by
It's like a jury system. lot.
was a randomly selected group of The legislative body in Athens
believe a year was the term of citizens who had to serve, I
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
British Columbia. This idea or creating a citizens
assembly, two people from each
all together, plus four indigenous Canadians, what theys
call First People, to be sure that they were represented.
They met regularly for a year.
with expenses paid every third They were flown to Vancouver
honorarium for their services. weekend and paid $150 a day
generous payment. And with a lot of hoopla about
it, a lot of social status and
The first third of the year, prestige around the activity.
the learning phase, where they they spent in what was called
third weekend in different received a crash course every
And experts from the political electoral systems.
University of British Columbia science department at the
illustrations, and teach them how all the different electorald
systems in the world work.
it's fair to say these 160 And after three months of that,
best informed people in North ciAmerica on the nature of thehe
different electoral systems.
systems that I didn't even know They learnexisted. electoral
Different variants. We think of it being
proportional representation being one of the variants.
Well it turns out there's four
representation. dAnd they matter, which one you
have. It matters whether you have
proportional representation that
to particular geographical still connects representatives
representation which would be plfor the province as a whole.l
That matters for how citizens get related to their
representatives.
systems that they learned about. So they have these different
they held public hearings all Inover British Columbia, where,
these citizen assembly members
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.
certain political constituencies, such as thes
green party, became very well organized and went to all of
these meetings and gave the same
And it was not only incredibly speech at all of them.
members, who were very excited boring for the citizens assembly
I mean, powerfully moved and about this process.
And then they heard the same excited by what they were doing.
They were so much more silly speech time after time.
was giving these speeches. sophisticated than anybody who
part, this middle part, just It turned out that the hearings
Then in the fall, they had didn't work very well.
with a proposal for a new rule, ta new set of electoral rules,up
which then would be submitted to
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
as interference in the process decided that it would be viewed
role in propagandizing the if the province took an active
So they basically took a referendum.
In order to pass, it needed to hands-off view.
the province, plus a majority in get a 60% of the total vote in
It got a majority in every at least 90% of the districts.
But it only had 58% of the total district but one.
So it didn't pass after all this.
They're going to resubmit it in the next election with proper
information to the electorate.
the people who knew about it In the polling done afterwards,
because it was a regular before they went to vote,
in where this referendum also elappeared, so people who wereng
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
Here's a picture of the delegates at the citizens
assembly for electoral reform,
sessions, talking and thinking sitting around in one of their
I think this is a very about these issues.
I think it could be applied in interesting model.
Many other ways we could many other ways.
I could imagine, for example, when there's some big
legislative issue that needs to be accomplished, like healthcare
reform, so not for all
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.
through the principles, gains It cthe knowledge through anrks
educational process, and works
I wrote an Op-Ed piece with a colleague, Harry Brighouse in
the philosophy department.
he teaches here. He's a British philosopher, but
House of Lords in England. It was about the reform of the
that the House of Lords should We wrote this Op-Ed piece saying
assembly of randomly selected be turnecitizens.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
represented as states. entities that had to be
citizens, we're representing So we're not just representing
But Britain doesn't have that. states.
that. The House of Lords used to be a
hereditary assembly of nobility.
of notable, sort of prominent figures that get appointed toy
the House of Lords. But an alternative for a second
chamber in a parliamentary
house that's an elected house of system would be to have one
another house that's a citizen territorial representatives, and
citizens who serve, let's say, assembly of randomly selected
third replaced every year. for a three-year term with a
paid, so it's a big deal for And have it be extremely well
selected. It wouldn't be a draft.
I don't think you could do a
a jury. citiYou know, for jury dutyrm of
supposedly you have to have some
avoid it. So it's more like being drafted
to serve on a jury. For something that would have
the length of time and
assembly, it would have to be voluntary even though you'd be
randomly selected.
British Columbia. APeople were randomly selected,
but they could say no.
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
ways in which you can enhance the priorities, and values, and
ways of thinking of ordinary
professional politicians. And it avoids completely the
role of money in the selection
It's a random assembly. There's no lobbying.
There's no campaign financing.
It's representative in the It's a random assembly.
That is, you randomize the statistical sense.
demography and the qualities of assethe broader community.the
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
relations. particular interests and power
a real utopia. That's my second example of
that one? Any queries Yeah?houghts about
( inaudible ) >> Given the embedded, and
I don't know, even transient
for example, how would you power race in this country
versus the top down stuff sell tthat we have now? power
I think you sell it on two
One is pragmatic. These devices actually solve
problems. They do a better job.
Porto Alegre has less corruption
And the United Nations now.
The World Bank, actually, named Porto Alegre as an exemplary
city. So one reason to have more
democracy that's bottom up and
participatory, is that it actually solves problems in a
more effective way for certain
That makes it appealing to lots of people, who aren't in other
respects particularly interested
They are interested in in democracy per se.
They are interested in effective efficiency.
So that's one kind of appeal. The other appeal is that the
very value of democracy of the
the people is a deep value. pIt's a value that has a very
strong resonance with Americans.
individualists and The idea that Americans are all
has truth to it. anti-government and anti-state
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.
venue to do this. I But whatever advances inht
democracy are going to happen in
States are going to begin at the this century in the United
level. state level, not the national
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
are entirely possible in some in the represtates.on mechanism
And once they work well in one
copied in other states. That used to be the norm in the
United States.
states were the crucibles of You know, the idea that the
The sites of experimentation. And indeed, Wisconsin among the
states in the United States in
century, was the absolute thcutting edge leader inth
experimentation.
programs which were already in So when the New Deal came along,
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
institutions with more forge new democratic
Including a randomocracy. I think having the idea of a
citizens assembly in Wisconsin
problems is a viable one. thaI'm not saying that it'sar
achievable. I don't think the political
forces would make it easy.
wouldn't work here. BIs there another question?t
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
in the sense of, "I ran for office and people voted for me.t
I owe them. My obligation is to represent
the people who voted for me." Not just represent an
abstract, random sample.
variety of different democratic >institutions, that there's noa
one form that solves all
I'm not opposed to problems.
It's not that I want to substitute direct democracy of
ordinary citizens for representation.
I just want to figure out ways
role of direct participation, or in which we can increase the
complements to the ordinary relectoral politics.s
Particularly in context where money figures so strongly in the
electoral arena.
concentrations of power that So as long as we have such
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 a different form of checks It's inand balances.though.
Wikipedia.
think is familiar. Now, Wikipedia, the basic idea I
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
Ten years ago, if you had said, eDo you think it would--.
I'll play this game again.
Internet really took off, do you Ten years ago, before the
have an encyclopedia that would thbe produced, in which youto
would have 2.6 million topics,
the largest previous you know, roughly ten times
editing would be done for free. encNobody gets paid for it.the
All volunteer editors.
can get access to this And which anybody in the world
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
if it's on Wikipedia. And if it's not, you can joine
the community of editors and
Then your entry will get revised enter and edit and entry.
You can correct their mistakes. And gradually, this topic that
you decided needed to be
fact become one of the entries available to the world will in
Well, for those of you who in Wikipedia.
works. haven't seen it, here's how it
enter an entry. AEditors become part of peernd
networks within a community of
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
correctors of errors, get a status as kind of peer monitorsd
of editors. It's not hierarchical in the
sense that anybody can move into
As opposed to it being some center authority that's
selecting people. But that eventually develops a
structure that has a kind of
including the possibility of administrative character to it,
in Wikipedia. I have a graduate student who'sr
now doing research on this. I can't give you the detail that
I really understand, which I
dispute resolution process don't understand, is how this
And I know that that's something really works in Wikipedia.
time. Let me just show you what it
looks like. This is, when you go to
Wikipedia, this is the welcoming
It just gives you some, you know, features and particular
newsy things that have happened.
which says "search." Then there's a place over here
any topic that you're interested You can put in any word for
I'm not logged on. in.
Web. These are just copied from the
If you wanted to know about Harry Potter, you can imagine
there's a huge amount of
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.
of the content. They have literary analysis and
themes, and cultural impact, and
Some topics are highly other things about Harry Potter.
I picked an example. controversial.
Palestine. The First Intifada in Israel,
disputed. And the Wikipedia page says that
the neutrality of this article
And it's an example of an interesting development in
Wikipedia.
2.6 million topics in Wikipedia. Most of the items, there are
2.6 million. It's incredible,
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
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
And you get instability. it to their point of view.
then that topic, that page in Wikipedia gets flagged, which
says that the neutrality of this
Then they have the various article is disputed.
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
perspective in Wikipedia itself. an Intifada Palestinian
pro-Israeli Intifada editors Now that doesn't block the
with the pro-Palestinian one. fSo there's still a problem oft
how do you stabilize, even the
That's the issue that I don't quite understand how it works
yet, which my graduate student
I do know that they have is dutifully doing research on.
committee, which is an elaborate something called the arbitration
experimentally from within the structure that's evolved
kind of issues in a layered way. Wiki community to resolve these
cannot report to you. Wikipedia, I consider to be a
profoundly emancipatory design. It's egalitarian.
It's democratic.
It's free. It's non-hierarchical.
anti-capitalist. It is profoundly
capitalism, you know, it has its Whatever you think about
I tend to emphasize its bad good pointpoints.bad points.
But whatever you think about it,
to capitalism one could imagine. Wikipedia is the most antithesis
everybody on the planet. It's distributed free to
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
It's generalized reciprocity. whI'm doing this, not for aon.
particular you, but for the collective you.
And you're doing it not just for
as it were. me, And it is successful.e me,
I think that Wikipedia will probably destroy the market in
encyclopedias.
an encyclopedia with Wikipedia There will be no point in buying
In terms of error rates, there's available.
rates in the Encyclopaedia been studies comparing the error
And on non-controversial topics, Britannica with Wikipedia.
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
magazine Science, which did a study comparing, I don't know,
30 or 40 different topics.
( inaudible ) There's a foundation called
the Wikipedia Foundation, which gets donations.
It gets lots of donations from
That is, people who are part of the Wiki community, and value
this, then contribute to the
I assume, but I don't know, that underlying financial structure.
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.
operation. But it's not an expensive
hundred thousand editors around the world do it for free.l
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,
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.
( inaudible ) >> Oh,Yes?ckly.
( inaudible ) Yes, I'm sure that there are
phony entries.
done of what's called vandalism on Wikipedia, which is if you
just go in and maliciously
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.
that was done in this test. IIt was corrected within 15e
minutes.
thousands of editors around the world who are, for whom this is
an important hobby, something that they do and they care
about.
community. They're part of a peer
in a site that they have edited, They get notified when changes
I, of course, in vanity of and enough of them check it out.
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.
And it just was an incomplete So what theentry. was right.
There was another hand here,
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
It's a losing cause. Wikipedia.
look, these are edited by I mean, ordinary people.ents is
It hasn't been vetted by
Although most of the people who are writing on sociological
topics are pretty good
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.
point, probably especially But it's probably, at this
I use it all the time. important for Wikipedia.
it all the time as the first In my professional work, I use
topic that I don't know much place to go when I'm exploring a
It's clear. aIt gets right to the point.t.
And they usually have bibliographies.
And they have links to all sorts
topic. of other Web sites on the same
begin any kind of knowledge So search around issues.e to
But of course, in a way, it's an
have to check things out. advBecause you should do thatyou
anyway. It's just that you know you have
to do it here.
have not found significant But on things I've looked at, I
I've looked at. errors, on thYeah?ticular things
You go to Wikipedia first?
I would go to Wikipedia first. >> If it's a substantive topic,
first, it's often the case that the first hit is Wikipedia,e
because people go to Wikipedia
It's become the first hit that so much.
there. you get even if you're not going
discover Wikipedia. ThOther queries on Wikipedia?rst
Well one more example is
Now this is an idea which we unconditional basic income.
entire time talking about. could certainly have spent the
audience, and we were discussing My mother, who is in the
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.
not exist anywhere. So this is a case of a proposal
for an institutional
very actively debated and tdiscussed in various places.g
It's an active part of the
changing the mechanisms of European discussion about
But no place has actually diinstituted an unconditionalon.
basic income. The basic idea is very simple.
Give all citizens or legal
you have to figure out what the resitarget population is.esis,
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.
alike, a monthly stipend Give them all, rich and poor
no frills standard of living, swith no conditions attached.t
So Bill Gates gets it and a homeless person gets it.
Everybody gets a stipend
could describe as a culturally sufficient to live at what you
living, the no frills standard defined basic standard of
live below the poverty line, of living, at which nobody would
basic needs of food, clothing, because everybody would have the
Yeah? >> Is this cash, or in-kind?
It's cash.
This is how it works. Everybody gets it.
The basic income is paid for out
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,
person, something like that. $10,000-$12,000 a year per
But let's not worry about that You'd have to discuss the level.
But Bill Gates would get his level of detail at the moment.
all the undergraduates at the cheUniversity of Wisconsin.th
But Bill Gates' income taxes
a year to pay for it. I don't know, $2 million a year.
You name it,
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
on. cEarned income above the basico
income is taxed progressively in
But it always pays to work. So that unlike transfer payments
to poor people in existing
poor and you get a transfer wpayment, 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.
income, of course, it's taxed on And if you earn above the basic
net earnings from any additional a progressive basis, but you get
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.
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
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
all day. would quit and watch television
immediately. Well, the system would collapse
pie in the sky. That it's not real utopia, it's
just plain ordinary utopia, that
So let's, as a little mental this could not work.
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.
everybody $50,000 a year, the system would collapse, because
the rate of taxation necessary
income, and the labor supply to provide for that much basic
people that much money would be that wouunsustainable. giving
So somewhere between $1,000 and $50,000, there is what could be
called the maximally sustainable
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.
The question is, is that point So there's some point.
miserable, you can't live on it. closer to $1,000 so that it's
around the poverty level, or a Or is it somewhere more or less
I think it's almost certainly at bit above.
poverty line. Therefore, a basic income to
provide everybody with those
unconditionally. basic needs is possible
The people who are living on Yeah?
here are getting along fine. the basic income that you stated
health problem. >> So basic income is not meant
to, for example, eliminate
There'd still be free public public education.
I'm in favor of free public ehealth.n.
I think that we should have universal health insurance as a
separate matter.
not to provide everybody with Thethis and only this, ande is
everything else you have to buy on the market.
I think there should be universal healthcare, and there
should be free public education.
Charles Murray, the very But that's an issue.
not an economist exactly, but a conservapopular writer.now, he's
He's in favor of a basic income.
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.
of the interesting, unexpected But let me just tell you some
how you think about it. rOne 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
The current way that family farmers get supported are by
price supports of various sorts,
them, reducing their production, subsidies that either go to
particular farm commodity. or supporting the prices of a
we have now that support family All offarms mainly benefitlicies
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,
farm because the income from that enables them to continue to
discretionary income, income farming only is then used for
It means that a family farmer has a guaranteed income, and
therefore can afford to do the
the commodities which they farming, even if the prices of
cover the costs of producing produce are low, so long as they
They don't have to also generate them.
out of their farming. tA basic income has the niceng
effect, in my view, of making small farmers more viable.
But big farming becomes more
labor now has an alternative. expeAgrarian labor can live.ral
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
And the wage rates for corporate farms goes up.
become more expensive. unpleasant and backbreaking work
does is changes the labor supply Essentially what basic income
work. foUnpleasant work becomes moreof
expensive because people have to
it, since they have the option be paid more to be willing to do
In an ordinary labor market, of basic income.
worst work is often the worst there's thipaid.ny that the
So people aren't being
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, dance, music. I have a daughter in theater,
who is a very big supporter of
She has a kind of partial basic income from certain familial
sources.
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
some important social or the activities is to satisfy
And they have to make a living cultural need.
Care giving labor has that while they're doing it.
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
sorts of activities which markets don't do a good job of
providing.
performing arts are just an extremely good example.e
Yeah? >> Raising a family would
qualify?
You don't have to qualify. >> Sure.
condition. You get the money without
beach bums. One of the most brilliant pieces
of academic work on basic income
"Should Surfers Be Fed?" has the wonderful title,
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
the beach, nevertheless, there's who spend all their time on
for why surfers should be fed, an argument that could be made
income, unconditional, should be and therefore why a basic
including surfers. made available for everybody,
( inaudible ) Could it lead
to over population? So the issue would be whether
basic income would be a highly
increase fertility. prI mean, it's interesting.uld
In the many, many debates and discussions I've had about basic
income, nobody has raised that
It's not that it's not possible. issue specifically.
structure. You know, the incentive
countries have dropped so Fdramatically that a modest
easing of the pressures on
choose to have children under less financial constraints might
not be such a bad thing.
Europe. No, I don't see why inherently,n
because it is just a basic
income, why it would encourage income, it's not a lavish
children. people to havYeah?ge numbers of
Is this for every person? ( inaudible )
Right, so there are a whole range of details
in a policy like basic income,
be resolved if you were actually which on the one hand, have to
But on the other hand, I don't going to institute it.
idea of basic income, and how we think are fundamental to the
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
the appropriate level of a basic and how you would work out what
different ages, is of course, an income was for children of
that I have any particular views important matter, but not one
Another really important issue, which I think is of crucial
importance is what's the adult
Are they citizens? targets.
Are they everybody who is actually part of the society,
whatever their legal standing might be?
Fundamentally, from an ethical
I actually believe in what's or social justice point of view,
I mean, from a moral point of view, I don't think it matters
whether you are American or not,
And everybody, since the globe, the world economy is wealthy
enough to provide everybody in
only moral basic income, fully the world with basic needs, the
basic income. morWell, there are practicalbal
reasons why there's certainly political reasons why that's not
going to happen, there's
it, even if there was good will. practical difficulties in doing
which I will then talk about the But that's the moral stand from
a global, universal basic income practical constraints, would be
Within the United States, I would want it for all people who
are part of the society.
come for a summer vacation, you Sdon't get a basic income while
you're here.
collective community of Bcooperation that we call oure
society should be receive a basic income.
Yeah? >> Wouldn't it be a problem
providing basic housing?
be at a sufficient level that people could afford basic rent.
That is, it would be at a high
for food, clothing and shelter. enoNow if in fact there's aes
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
housing. the supply conditions of
housing programs would be, So some kind of publicly funded
If that was in fact the diagnosis of that particular
problem.
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.
adjustments. That is, to have cost of living
you add complications, the And the problem is, as soon as
greater. administrative costs become
scams. You have to avoid cheating and
income is higher because costs If the New York City basic
City, well then there's always are indeed higher in New York
establishes a New York City address in order to get the New
York City level, but then lives,
in some backwater place. you know, in upstate New York,
difficulties. SoAnd they could be killere
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
But it could also be that those complications in the end aren't
such difficult complications. They're just messy
complications.
An example of it is in Yeah?
Not only is the education at the Denmark with higher education.
students are paid to study, because the society places great
emphasis on education.
There are places around the world that have what some people
call partial basic incomes. Partial, because they either
apply only to particular
too low. categories of people, or they're
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
every year in order to maintain tohis Alaskan residence so heeek
could get his $2,000 a year,
gets as their per capita share which every Alaskan resident
Well, that's a basic income, of the oil wealth of the state.
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
It's a matter of definition. and up and up and up.
We don't know the experience. The question is, is there any
evidence or experience about a
up, because after all what we mean by poverty is a culturally
and socially established idea.
time may be considered too low And what's basic at one point in
It's certainly the case that the at another point in time.
changed over time. definitions of poverty have
to a basic income over time, We don't know what would happen
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
The minimum wage, as we know, has declined over time in the
United States because it isn't
So I don't think there's an inherent reason why, if a
universal basic income was
acceptable minimum standard of established at a decent and
reason that it would tend to living, there' no inherent
became sufficiently more creep up, unless the economy
to do so. pAnd in doing so, would enhance
individual freedom to make more and varied choices.
My personal view is that I would
absolutely high as possible. like the basic income to be as
I see no reason not to make it The higher the better.
And if that was way above the at poverty line, so much theel.
better. Because so much the greater
freedom that individuals would
to forge relations and to build communities unconstrained by the
necessity of selling their labor
into that kind of activity. oIn a way, we have basic income
for wealthy people. You know, people can endow their
children, and their children can
a trust fund. have We have in a sense, a from
self-financed basic income among
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.
in a country like the United But I do feel that if, certainly
more egalitarian distribution of States, if we moved toward a
And conditions under which human life opportunities.
more equally distributed, that beings can flourish, if that was
to a reduction of certain kinds thatof criminal activity.ewhat
People would have more
lives in other ways, feel less opportunities to live their
and isolated from other people. Now why crime is high in somed
places and low in other places
There's lots of sociological is a complicated issue.
It's not as simple as the more work on these matters.
But that's not a bad first inequality, the more crime.
problem. approximation for a lot of the
levels of inequality, rather Places that have very high
poverty, but very high levels of than just very high levels of
crime. inequality tend to generate more
What are some of the Yeah?
geographic area or a smaller complications for a larger
or something like that, and also geographic area, city or state,
needs? with immigration and labor
complicating factor. >> So immigration is certainly a
have large amounts of illegal Because pimmigrants. when you
And one can imagine a basic income system as creating a kind
of segmented society where you
don't get a basic income and do hall the crummy work, and thenho
you have a class of citizens who
Saudi Arabia is a bit like that. have a basic income.
laboring activity is done by You know, that is most of the
And most Saudi Arabians participate in the bounty of the
oil wealth. That certainly is an undesirable
society.
that anyone who is performing Slaboring activity gets a basics
income. But that, of course, does mean
that you have to worry, then, about illegal immigrants.
You have to deal with that
And I actually find that an extremely difficult issue to
square with my ethical
The issue of immigration is probably the single-most, as a
sophisticated sociologist, man
opinions about everything, of the world, with strong
which I find it hardest to immigration is the topic around
principles, with the array of policy possibilities.l
My ethical principles are for no borders.
I think that all people are fundamentally equal.
We should have no restrictions
people globally. whatsoever on the movement of
here should be able to. AAnd people should be able to
move as freely as anything else.
and just from a social justice So my sense as to what is right
Mexico whose life is blocked point of view, a child born in
lack of resources, that's just from flourishing because of the
is a child born here who lacks as much a social injustice as it
So that's my ethical stance. those opportunities.
against practical considerations But of course, that runs deeply
would be politically in terms of about what the consequences
issues, social solidarities if social conflict and other
that ethical principle. And that's a topic around which
I find it very hard to sort of
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.
income. You have to solve it somehow or
the other.
affects migration and how to You have to figure out how it
immigrants. cope with lYeah?and illegal
Has anybody in our government taken this seriously?
Has anybody taken this up in
There are some democrats who our government?
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
If you have a very generous rredistributive system like ins.
Sweden or the Netherlands,
basic income actually can be northern Europe, the cost of a
That is, shifting from a pretty small.
support, where you have lots of pdifferent programs, you havee
your student program, and you have your aging program, and you
have your disability program, and you have your unemployment
insurance.
programs, each of which has their own administrative agency.
They're all monitoring to see if
You know, if you have this people are cheating or not.
it and say, okay, enough patchwork, and then you simplify
Everybody gets the basic already.
You've saved a lot on administrative costs, because
you don't have to have as much
And the added costs in those surveillance.
that great. So there is a big discussion oft
it in Europe for sure.
so far off of the current Ipolitical agenda, being more
generous to our people, to be more concerned about inequality,
this is not high on the priority
now. list of American politics right
( inaudible ) >> About basic income
and the cost of living. If we were ever to get a basic
income, you would have to figure
another to inflation and other out how to peg it in some way or
Social Security is a kind of things, just as Social Security.
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.
redistributive system. It's meant to be a
the same as investing from your savings so you have a pension.
It's a different idea.
It's meant to provide. Social Security is security.
providing each of its citizens The social part is society
of knowing that they will live, at least well enough to get by.y
That's what's wrong with the
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
for the aged. ofSo one can imagine Socialme
Security creeping to younger
programs expanding. pSo it's conceivable thatk
eventually the United States
this on the agenda. It's certainly not on the agenda
now.
( inaudible ) Yeah, Sure.e back.
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
because of a disability facilitiof some sort. to work
The question is whether those would still exist.
I think they should exist.
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
income, there should be all the facilities needed to insert
people into employment relations
for their lives. in the most constructive ways
I'm sort of stepping back from My foundational principle.
All people should have access to the details of all this.
conditions to live a flourishing the material and social
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
life. And a basic income is part of ag
solution for the inequalities of
conditions. That is, it guarantees that
everybody has at least the basic
But there are many other material conditions to flourish.
conditions. And employment services is part
of the social conditions for
Yeah? >> The distribution of services
and goods in communities like Cabrini Green in Chicago, or
New Orleans, where some of the
in order to cut down the buildings are being knocked down
That kind of tension. If you have income coming into
the poor people in the
bring services into the neineighborhoods themselves?p to
The question is what would it do to the nature of the services
provided in the community if you
community through a basic income infuse more income in the
particularly in poor and that the residents would have,
And presumably, if people had blightedmore--nities.
I'm hitting this. This is probably causing
problems, sorry.
particularly if you have limited If people had more income, and
spent locally. means, most of the income gets
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
you know, exactly what the and what the dynamics would be,
get triggered by having this economic processes that would
the bottom of the income infusion of more resources at
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.
and giving to the poor. IIt's taking from people whoh
don't need it, you know, and
That would have dynamic economic giving it to people who do.
Yeah? >> I imagine you're aware of the
study where the question was
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
Most people wanted more than resulted in more income.
less. So what kind of transition you
imagine we would have to go through.
The question for the
research which indicates that people care a lot about their
relative standing compared to others.
And therefore, would prefer to
neighbor even if that meant they have twice as much income as a
half as much income as their would less income, than to have
So they'd rather have a neighbor neighbor.
they did than twice as much income as they did, even if in
the second case, they would be
Now one thing to note about this much better off.
paper and pencil questionnaire. If you actually came to somebody
and said, look, you have a
You can have $100,000 or choice.
But if you have $100,000, you're $50,000.
who has $200,000. And if you have $50,000, you're
going to live next to somebody
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
though it is an interesting power of tfinding.arch, even
But it is certainly true, that
in a highly competitive individualistic society, peopley
gain status from their relative income, not just from their
absolute income.
those comparisons. And people are motivated by
by comparisons of people that Thare just more or less likeed
themselves. It's called the narcissism of
small differences.
way. Psychologists refer to it that
academic departments, people People care a lot about, in
salary among other senior professors who have about the
same number of years at Wisconsin in their department,
the people who are their
comparing themselves to. reference group that they're
And to the extent that that Soreally drives people, thatn.
itself pushes for a more
But it's not the only thing ithat drives people..
People also prefer a world with less conflict.
They prefer a world where children have opportunities.
You know, people are
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
processes. other more egalitarian
things motivating people, then And if those were the only
worse. the prospects would even be
this in our current conditions, but the prospects would even ber
worse.
Thank you very much. ( ( inaudible )
applause )