9UNP0137SD_Erik Olin Wright_WordPress

- 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)