Basic income &ndash; an unconditional, universal and periodic cash transfer that all people belonging to a political community receive &ndash; has been a long-advocated measure and emergent human right (Van Parijs, 2004; Ravent&oacute;s, 2015; Standing, 2017). For at least a couple of decades, dedicated literature has presented this policy as a break from the usual failures and traps of conditional schemes, providing not only less poverty and more economic security, but a different sense of political equality and freedom (Widerquist, 2013). It has also been pushed as a feminist policy, in particular in its potential to transform and re-signify the unpaid care work women are mostly burdened with (Cox, 2019; Zelleke, 2009; Weeks, 2011; Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga-Fajuri et al., 2022).
While still controversial and certainly unconventional, basic income has gathered political traction in the last decade. With some pilots and trials in different contexts, there is now growing evidence that supports that much of the prejudices against this policy are unfounded&nbsp; including fears of &lsquo;laziness&rsquo; among the recipients (Davala et al., 2015; Silva &amp; Lima, 2019). Still, most of the reluctance to commit to a full-on implementation of basic income comes back to the wider transformation it would entail to our understanding of social integration (Caba&ntilde;a, 2019), and the role of work, in particular.
I would like to frame this commentary precisely from this perspective. We need to work less. This is, at least, if we want to avoid crossing the climate emergency thresholds of 1.5&ordm;C of global warming above pre-industrial times. The crisis is not just about emissions: our carbon economy is an extremely damaging one at all levels of ecological impact. Keeping the economy growing demands staggering amounts of raw materials, energy, and labor hours. This is why some have proposed that reducing working hours can be a practical way of reducing the carbon intensity of our economies (Nieto et al., 2020; Antal, 2018). Indeed, most of the policy proposals on the need of reducing &ndash; and therefore sharing &ndash; work to the level needed to actually sustain good livelihoods for everyone have been at the centre of many degrowth and post-growth agendas (Jackson, 2017; Koch, 2021). These proposals recognize that often the jobs people are forced to take are not beneficial, and indeed can be harmful, to the wider society. Some jobs are soul-crushingly pointless, even in the eyes of those performing them (Graeber, 2018), who often may be people employed in highly-paid white collar jobs and pointless bureaucratic positions in which the employer herself sees no contribution &ndash; or even harm &ndash; to society.
Our obsession with work also puts a heavy toll on our bodies. The extremely long working weeks we undertake to gain access to money reduces our life expectancy and increases the likelihood of diseases like strokes (Pega et al., 2021), among other acute and cumulative deteriorating effects. This damaging dimension of work is usually overlooked or considered inevitable, as it is taken as unquestionable that work is always a good in itself. This is usually diagnosed as one of the core cultural elements that sustain the political economy of our growth-oriented economies (Kallis et al., 2020). But it does not have to be that way. The promise of full employment and the perspective of working your way out of poverty have shown their limits, and it is time to look at the problem with fresh eyes.
&nbsp;What would happen if we lived in a society where everyone had a basic income? A modest amount that would allow us to build our lives without fear of destitution. In practice, I suggest, this would mean an unprecedented space of freedom to transform our personal lives, but also our collective arrangements. More than just an economic fix, it would challenge the moral and social grounds of our capitalist relations.
First, it would most obviously support more, and most likely better, forms of consumption. It is known that being poor is very expensive, and the purchasing options we get when we live in economic insecurity tend not to be the best, either for us or for the environment. Basic income could offer, for instance, better and more nutritious food &ndash; together with more time to prepare it and enjoy it &ndash; or buying more durable, better quality goods that are often a prohibitive expenditure when income is unpredictable or very low.
Beyond these initial effects in our purchasing choices, basic income would allow what has been called &lsquo;the ability to say no&rsquo;. That is, the capacity of rejecting abusive or degrading jobs. At an environmental level, many of those jobs are also environmentally noxious. In Latin America and Chile, the places polluted and made toxic for life due to unrestrained economic activity are often called &lsquo;sacrifice zones&rsquo;. For the communities trapped in such employment arrangements, implementing a basic income can be an emergency exit, allowing people to reconstruct sacrifice zones in which corporations have become feudal lords. In those contexts, dependency comes often in the form of regular wages. Notoriously, wages in these zones of extraction can be very low, but they bring a certainty that is highly valued by the workers and their families. I suggest basic income could break that toxic bond and make people realize that the whole of society is committed to their well-being, not just the particular owners of corporate capital that happen to be interested in their territories (Caba&ntilde;a &amp; Glatz, 2021).
Another example of the affinity between basic income and our urgent need to act rapidly for social-ecological transformation is the idea of a &lsquo;conservation basic income&rsquo; (Fletcher &amp; B&uuml;scher, 2020). Proposed by the authors as an unconditional basic income given to people in areas critically affected by biodiversity loss, this, they argue, could replace current means-tested policies of conservation like REDD and REDD+ (reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and forest degradation). These programs have aimed at using market mechanisms to avoid biodiversity loss by monetary compensation to the people in certain sensitive areas, but have failed to deliver their promise. Moreover, they share the same problems of means-tested social policy so often pointed out by basic income advocates. In contrast, while it is not strictly universal, a conservation basic income can serve as opening a path for the wider implementation of a truly universal basic income. For Fletcher and B&uuml;scher, a conservation basic income follows the wider principles of convivial conservation as an approach that addresses the ecological and social crisis as intimately intertwined.&nbsp;
The possibility of touching on several dimensions of our lives is probably the more attractive quality of basic income. And while &ndash; as it is often said &ndash; it is not a silver bullet; nor should it be expected to solve all of our most pressing problems on its own, certainly the unconventionality of basic income is what can make us have faith that it might succeed where other approaches have failed. Undeniably, there is no guarantee that a secure, unconditional income will bring most people to behave in ways that do not increase the extraction and processing of raw materials and energy. But certainly the current situation of poverty, exploitation and precarity lived by the majorities of the world is no better scenario. A basic income can give a floor to start thinking about the wider civilizational transformations we need to undertake in the following years and decades to avoid worsening our ecological crisis. We need more freedom to experiment and adapt without fear of us and our families going hungry.
In this realm of social justice, the affinity between degrowth and basic income provides a useful perspective. Crucially, at a conceptual level both degrowth and basic income change our diagnosis and starting points. While the neoclassical economic principles that shape traditional policies &ndash; based on measurement of impact, conditionality and efficient allocation &ndash; relate to scarcity and the need to grow, degrowth starts from the political diagnosis that there is already enough to support everyone&rsquo;s well-being. The problem, degrowth points out, is the hoarding and the sustenance of a dilapidating way of life by a small wealthy majority, in a form of living that Brand and Wissen call the imperial mode of living (Brand &amp; Wissen, 2018). Basic income makes a similar diagnosis: the money for paying it will come from the redistribution of the significant proportion of the collectively created wealth, currently owned by the richest 1% (Ahmed et al., 2022; Piketty &amp; Saez, 2014).&nbsp;
In sum, basic income offers a provocative, unconventional and still unexplored path to sustainability and regeneration, through the way of providing all of us with unconditional economic security. It remains to be seen, in more experiments and trials, if these possibilities are to be materialized.&nbsp;
<hr>
References
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