7

Growing Pains

Five minutes later and it wouldn’t have mattered so much. It was a quite shocking cock-up … The mice were furious.

Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The mice were ‘protrusions into our dimension of hyper-intelligent beings’ who had commissioned the construction of Earth as the site for a big and long-running experiment that involved a semi-intelligent species called human beings, for obscure purposes known only to themselves. They were furious because five minutes before the experiment was due to end and deliver its results, the Earth was demolished by Vogon contractors to make way for an interstellar bypass.

Adams’s masterwork is one of the funniest and cleverest books of the 20th century, but the point (as he well knew) is that the Earth is indeed the site of a big and long-running experiment involving human beings. It’s called civilisation, and its purposes, if any, are obscure. But we are all caught up in this experiment, and its outcome certainly matters to us and to the biosphere we now dominate. To understand where that experiment is now, and where we might choose to take it next, we need a narrative (though not one with hyper-intelligent mice in it).

Narratives are important. The world does not come with a script, and narratives are the main way that human beings reduce the daily avalanche of political, social, and economic events to a manageable story. They are never completely accurate, mainly because they have to omit so much of the detail, but they are indispensable — and they are the most valuable service (or disservice) that journalists and historians can provide. Here, in a rather large nutshell, is the narrative of this book. It is about how human beings order their societies, and in particular about the idea of equality.

The obsession with equality is the primary social distinction between homo sapiens and the other great apes, and it derives pretty clearly from our superior reasoning and language abilities. Only human beings (and perhaps others of our immediate lineage, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans) could have reached the subtle but immensely important conclusion that ‘All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule they prefer to remain equal’ — and then acted on that insight in the first great rebellion. The revolt of the underdogs probably dates back to the time when language became complex enough to allow a ‘large, well-united coalition of subordinates’ to ‘deny political power to the would-be alphas in their group,’ but we do not know when that was. Probably not much more than a hundred thousand years ago, because if human beings had been capable of such complex coordination during the previous inter-glacial warm period (130,000–115,000 years ago), it’s likely that the agricultural revolution and the rise of civilisations would have happened then. (They certainly didn’t waste any time when the next inter-glacial warm period began around eleven thousand years ago.)

The rebellion that overthrew the alphas had to be repeated ten thousand times in ten thousand scattered bands to produce the hunter-gatherer world of universal, vigorously enforced egalitarianism between adult males that existed before the rise of civilisation. (Gender equality was not part of the original package, but it is the logical and irresistible extension of it.) The revolution may have spread quickly once the first successful examples of an egalitarian society emerged, so it’s quite possible that this state of grace lasted as much as 50,000–100,000 years, long enough (2,000–4,000 generations) for some genetic changes reinforcing the human preference for equality to occur. Or maybe there have been no such changes. Maybe any social species with a strong dominance drive and the intelligence to see that unless such a drive is curbed, it will leave the losers in the race (that is, almost everybody) in a subordinate position, would have taken the same action to enforce equality. We don’t have to choose between these possibilities. All we need to know is that strict equality between adult males is a human tradition of long standing. The dominance drive was not removed, but it was thoroughly suppressed.

And then at the end of the last major glaciation came the rise of agriculture and a very rapid growth in the total human population. The average size of human groups rose even more steeply, and by five thousand years ago there were already a number of early civilisations that included hundreds of thousands of human beings. By now, the alphas had already escaped from their long containment and taken over: all of these civilisations were tyrannies, because they could not be run any other way. No doubt some early mass societies tried to preserve the egalitarian principle, but in the new conditions they could not successfully compete with more efficient, centrally directed tyrannies. The egalitarian societies must have been winnowed rapidly and ruthlessly, because they survive only in foundation myths of a lost Golden Age.

For the great majority of human beings, the rise of civilisation was a disaster. Not only did they lose their independence, being reduced from free men and women to slaves and serfs, but they were worse off in material terms. Their diet, mostly grain, was so poor in nutrition that the average height of adults in the early civilisations was at least 10 per cent below that of hunter-gatherers. They suffered from many epidemic diseases that had not troubled their ancestors, because the disease vectors easily transferred from their domesticated animals, most of which lived in herds and flocks, to human hosts who now also lived in herd-like conditions. Their numbers went up, but their average lifespans probably went down, and they were certainly having much less fun.

All this went on for a very long time, and there were only two consolations. One was that the toll of lives exacted by war went down. Among the hunter-gatherers, every man was a warrior, everybody lived on the front line, and inter-band warfare was virtually constant; in civilised societies, warfare was sporadic and was generally waged by a specialised class of soldiers. The other consolation, almost invisible at the time, was that gradually (but very, very slowly) knowledge was accumulating in a way that it could not have done before the invention of writing. The rate at which it accumulated was also accelerating, though that too was so slow as to be almost imperceptible.

The principle that human beings are fundamentally equal in status vanished utterly from the material world for all of this time — yet it remained alive in the new religions of the ‘axial age’, and also in the non-hierarchical friendship circles, of about the same size as a small hunter-gatherer group, that almost everybody in the mass societies created for themselves. Encoded in our genes, or just remembered in our dreams, equality continued to have a strong hold on our imaginations — and eventually, nine or ten thousand years after the first unwitting pioneers drifted into part-time farming, the accumulation of knowledge finally achieved critical mass and exploded into the modern world.

By the 14th–16th centuries CE, the global population had risen to around half a billion, most of them concentrated in four major Old World civilisations. The Indian civilisation was in the course of being conquered by Muslim invaders, however, while the heartlands of the Islamic civilisation had been severely damaged by the Mongol invasions. China’s technological innovations — such as the printing press, paper, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and ocean-going ships —were more impressive than Europe’s, but it proved less adept at putting them into practical use than the Europeans.1 There was also an intellectual revolution underway in Renaissance Europe that ultimately resulted in the adoption of the scientific method, which gave Europe a big technological, industrial, commercial, and military lead over the rest of the world. It was therefore the Europeans who colonised three of the six inhabited continents, largely supplanting the indigenous inhabitants of North America, South America, and Australia, and who ultimately conquered most of Africa and Asia as well.

It could have been just another replay of the tawdry old tale of imperial expansion, followed eventually by imperial retreat and collapse — indeed, that scenario did play out again, in the end — but there was something else going on at the same time. What Europeans called the Enlightenment was a broad shift in values and sensibilities that elevated reason above faith, and advanced the ideas of liberty, tolerance, and ‘fraternity’ (for which read ‘equality’) — and the printing press, cheap paper, and mass literacy allowed these ideas to spread through entire populations. The first democratic revolutions happened in the late 18th century in countries with mainly European populations, precisely and solely because of the early European lead in adopting the one potential mass medium of the time, the press.

There was little in pre-Renaissance European history to suggest that Europeans cared more about equality than did Arabs, Indians, or Chinese. The West was actually resurrecting values that were the common political heritage of all human beings, but the people of these countries came to believe that human rights, equality, and democracy were exclusively Western cultural values. (Nevertheless, the principle that everybody is equal eventually destroyed the European overseas empires, because it turned out that the non-European subject peoples demanded it, too.)

The industrial revolution got underway at about the same time, and it was one hell of a ride. Between 1750 and 2010 the human population increased tenfold, and the proportion of the world’s land area devoted to raising food and therefore withdrawn from natural systems increased from 7 per cent to 40 per cent.2 Over the same period, the Sixth Mass Extinction got underway, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from 280 parts per million to 400 ppm. Wars continued as before, but with far more destructive weapons: the Second World War killed at least 40 million people, and by the end nuclear weapons were dropped on cities. None of this should be seen as surprising or particularly wicked: the industrial and scientific revolutions put the human species on a very steep learning curve, and there was bound to be a lag between the new realities and our comprehension of them.

The multiple environmental and technological threats that face us today were implicit in the pattern of our development from the start, and there is no sense in flagellating ourselves about it. Any other intelligent species that suddenly gained mastery over its environment would probably have behaved in much the same way, and would face the same threats at this point in its career. A population explosion was inevitable. The over-exploitation and degradation of natural systems long before we realised the implications of what we were doing was inevitable. Tribalism, death camps, and nuclear weapons were inevitable.

But we didn’t do all that badly, given where we started from. In less than three hundred years, we have virtually eradicated the ancient institutions of slavery and serfdom, ended all the traditional empires, and made a start on gender equality. We have even abolished the death penalty in most countries, and torture is illegal everywhere (though in practice it survives in many countries). In 1750, there were no democracies in the world; now almost every country gives at least lip service to the principle that everybody has equal rights and value. About half the world’s population lives in countries that are formally democratic, although all democracies fall short of their ideals, some by a very long way. Wars continue, but no great powers have fought each other directly since 1945. (They used to fight each other all the time, and it was perfectly legal to start a war whenever you felt like it.) There are even global organisations such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice that try to create a system of international law which bans aggression and protects human rights. It’s all very much a work in progress, but the progress has been significant. We are a long way down the road from where we started, although there is still a long distance to cover.

We are a young species on the make, and we are in the midst of a vast, millennia-long experiment called civilisation that we never actually signed up for. It may succeed if we can adapt our traditional attitudes and behaviours to our new circumstances. That means mutual respect, global cooperation, limited intervention in natural systems, and a democratic political culture that puts a high value on equality and restraint — all the things that the cynics sneer at. Alternatively, we may fail to adapt and thereby bring our civilisation down around our ears, either in a single orgy of destruction (for example, worldwide nuclear war and nuclear winter, or truly runaway climate change), or in an extended series of lesser calamities — military, political, and environmental — that destroy most or all of the major centres of civilisation.

The survival of the human race is not at stake. As James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the leading contemporary contender for Charles Darwin’s crown, once said to me, ‘Human beings are tough. A few breeding pairs will always survive.’ A much-diminished human race would presumably just go back to the old ways that served us well for more than 100,000 years. (There would be little chance for a ‘second-generation’ industrial civilisation to arise later on, because we have used up the easily accessible sources of fossil fuels the first time around.) Lots of other species would become extinct, but mass extinctions are just business as usual: the only unusual aspect this time is that the agent driving it is a single dominant species. The biosphere has gone through mass extinctions much more destructive than the one that is currently getting underway, and within one or two million years the survivors diversified into a plethora of new species that filled all the available ecological niches.

But that is only one of a range of possible outcomes. There could be much better ones if we have the time and the political will to stop the damage we are doing to vital natural systems before it undermines our ability to sustain the current global civilisation. How much time we have is unknowable, but a serious and concerted global effort to restore the self-regulating systems that used to maintain a stable environment would probably still stand a fair chance of success. As for the will, don’t look to dictators to provide it. They have to devote most of their energy to staying in power, and have little left over to devote to larger issues. Totalitarian political systems are particularly bad in this respect, even when their declared goal is equality. There have been few environmental and ecological disasters as extreme as the Soviet Union after seventy years of communist rule, or China today.

There were some extremely destructive attempts to achieve complete equality in the 20th century. The communist experiment, drawing more on Rousseau than on anthropological evidence — ‘man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’ — set out to recreate an idealised world of equality, possessions held in common, and no state. It discovered, after some tens of millions of deaths, that complete equality could only be obtained in a world of varying individual abilities and many material possessions by rigidly enforced political, social, and economic controls on everything and everybody — and even then the enforcers were more equal than the others. The conclusion that was drawn from that long nightmare was that a certain degree of inequality must be tolerated in an industrialised mass society in order that liberty and general prosperity may flourish. But we have never agreed on how much inequality is tolerable.

The political will required to deal successfully with great issues such as war and environmental destruction is far more likely to be available if most countries can hang on to their democracies, retain the rule of law at home, and continue to expand it in the international domain as well. The current outbreak of angry populism is a threat to all that, but it is actually about equality. The anger is growing because inequality has become too great, because too many people feel they have been left behind and forgotten. It could even be seen as a kind of regulating mechanism whose function is to keep democratic political systems with capitalist economies from toppling into hugely unequal oligarchies.

A populist backlash that goes unanswered may end up creating an authoritarian regime — a ‘fascist’ regime, in the common parlance. Generally nationalist and often racist, these regimes claim to defend the interests of those who have been betrayed and victimised (the Common People or the ‘left-behinds’), and demand absolute power in return. The ideology is usually pretty rudimentary, but there are almost always villainous foreigners and treacherous domestic ethnic or religious minorities who must be kept down or out, or in extreme cases simply destroyed. A number of such regimes have appeared recently in fledgling democracies with shaky economies — such as Sisi’s Egypt, Erdoğan’s Turkey, and Duterte’s Philippines — but there are no Western democracies that are currently fascist or even near it. Nevertheless, many people in the West fear that the current of events is flowing in that direction.

It does feel like a current at the moment, but it may actually be more like a pendulum. There was huge unemployment in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the inequalities became intolerable, and several fascist states did emerge in developed countries as a result. They caused a terrible war, but after they were defeated the pendulum swung the other way for thirty years: the democracies spent the period 1945–1975 building welfare states, in large part to stop the inequalities from widening again. They had learned their lesson.

And then, of course, they forgot it again (the same old story of generational turnover erasing societal memory), and inequalities multiplied unchecked for more than four decades. The existence of the welfare states slowed the build-up of resentment the losers felt as they fell further and further behind, but eventually it boiled over. And so we come to the present day and the election of Donald J. Trump. As a wake-up call, it’s a lot less terrifying than the Second World War, and it may even have come in time.

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Fox and the Hedgehog, 1953

Apart from his role as the canary in the coalmine, how does Donald Trump fit into the narrative of human history that I have sketched above? He has only a bit part, really. Trump is an inconsequential person who discovered one very important political fact — that there is a large reservoir in the United States of angry people who feel that they have been cheated of their birthright of good jobs and left to rot by the neo-liberal economy — and he has exploited that fact to boost himself into the presidency. But that is the only big thing he knows. He doesn’t know how to rescue those angry people from their plight, or even seem very interested in trying. He is only a messenger, and after delivering his message he might as well leave.

He won’t do that, of course. He still seems to be enjoying the ride, although at some point he might tire of it and simply resign. But Trump is essentially purposeless. His two major political goals, as measured by the volume of his tweets, are the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) and the abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the multilateral agreement that stops any Iranian work on nuclear weapons for the next ten years.) But he is curiously ill-informed on both issues, as he was also about the Paris climate agreement that he has already withdrawn from. (He talked about ‘re-negotiating’ it, when it was not negotiated in the first place. Each country simply made a voluntary offer to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by an amount it determined for itself, and the sum of those promises was the agreement.) What really seems to motivate Trump in all three cases is just a desire to destroy Barack Obama’s political legacy, for reasons known only to himself.

In every case, he can hope for at best only partial success. The Republican majority in Congress is so divided on what should replace the Affordable Care Act that it has so far proved incapable even of repealing it. And all one hundred and ninety-three other signatories of the Paris climate accord have stated that they will fulfil their commitments, despite the defection of the United States. Other countries are already used to making international treaties that the US either refuses to ratify or subsequently withdraws from because of the vagaries of American domestic politics. They just carry on regardless, on the assumption that the US will eventually catch up when the political situation at home is more favourable.

In the particular case of the climate-change agreement, probably the most important of the deals at risk, the damage done by the American withdrawal may turn out to be slight or even non-existent. The US is responsible for 14 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, but Trump’s decision to withdraw from the accord cannot legally take effect until November 2020 (when he might be seeking re-election, but might even have already withdrawn from the race.) Moreover, many American cities and states have pledged to maintain or expand their planned cuts in emissions, despite the failure of the federal government.

Donald Trump’s antics are endlessly fascinating to the media, and to some extent he has even colonised our minds — despite my best efforts, I find it hard to get through a day without a conversation with somebody about his overnight tweets — but his actual influence on events is turning out to be surprisingly small. The United States is very little different today from what it was when Trump first entered the White House, and his impact on American affairs may ultimately rank with that of Warren G. Harding and Millard Fillmore. This is not so surprising, really, as his great success in life has been not as a ‘deal-maker’, but as a TV host and entertainer. Besides, it is hard to get much done when you have a really short attention span. The only way Trump could have a large impact on history is by stumbling into a war somewhere.

Well, no, there is one other impact. Without his election victory in November 2016, it might have been many years more before we really awoke to the fact that democratic political systems are losing support among large minorities of our own populations. Fixing that problem will be a task that spans a generation, but at least we now know what the job is — and we even have some notion of where the solutions (partial and temporary, as always) might lie.

Before I ran for President, I read a book called With Liberty and Dividends for All: how to save our middle class when jobs don’t pay enough, by Peter Barnes, which explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like how the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year … Once you capitalize the fund, you can provide every American with a modest basic income every year … I was fascinated by this idea, as was my husband, and we spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign. We would call it ‘Alaska for America.’ Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the numbers work … We decided it was exciting but not realistic, and left it on the shelf. That was the responsible decision. I wonder now whether we should have thrown caution to the wind and embraced ‘Alaska for America’ as a long-term goal and figured out the details later.

Hillary Clinton, What Happened, Simon and Schuster, 2017, p. 239

Yes, she should have, although she might have lost the election anyway. Universal Basic Income was still an unfamiliar idea for most ordinary Americans at the time, and few people in the ‘lower 48’ states even knew what the Alaska Permanent Fund is. It is a state-owned investment fund that was created from the Alaskan government’s oil revenues, and it pays out a dividend each year to every man, woman, and child living in Alaska. The dividend goes up and down depending on how the investments are performing and what the oil price is, but in recent years the cheques that are sent out have varied from $800 to $2,000 per person (that is, $8,000 for a family of four). It is a real Universal Basic Income, though not one big enough to sustain a person who has no other income, and half a million Americans in Alaska, rugged individualists though they all undoubtedly are, seem to be very happy with it.

Could such an arrangement work at the national level? Why not? It might be of benefit in every country in the world, but it certainly looks like a promising solution for all the developed countries. The wealth is there: the United States has lost 7 million industrial jobs since 1980, but industrial production has more than doubled in the same time: the robots are doing a great job. It’s just a question of finding an acceptable way of distributing the wealth more equally. Given the scale of the damage that automation is probably going to do to the job market in the relatively near future, finding such a way is an urgent political priority, not just in the United States but in every developed economy.

The objections to UBI come in two quite distinct categories: fiscal, and what you might call moral. The sums of money required to pay everybody in the society enough money to live on are clearly very large, and opponents of the concept have a field day calculating how much income tax would have to go up to cover it. John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of The Independent, recently estimated that the standard British tax rates of 20, 40, and 45 per cent would have to go up to 48, 68, and 73 per cent to pay for a universal basic income of £8,320 ($US11,290) a year.3 But this is nonsense: nobody is proposing to finance UBI solely or even mostly out of income taxes. Much of the cost would be met simply by funnelling the government money that is currently spent on state benefits that would no longer be needed — from unemployment and welfare payments to old-age pensions — into the UBI system.

Let’s take the province of Ontario as an example. It has set the basic income for its pilot project at CAD$1,400 per month, on the calculation that this is the minimum amount needed to provide an acceptable (though not lavish) standard of living. That’s CAD$16,800 per person per year, although it would obviously have to be more for people living in very expensive places like Toronto and for many people living with disabilities. There would be other exceptions, too: the monthly payment for couples living under the same roof might be less than twice the individual amount, and there would have to be extra money for people with dependent children. But bureaucracies exist precisely to deal with that sort of complications. For now, let’s stay with the basic figure.

Multiply $16,800 by the number of people aged eighteen and over who would receive it if there were a nationwide Universal Basic Income (29 million in Canada’s case), and the annual bill for UBI in Canada would come to about $487 billion a year. The Canadian federal budget in 2017 projected government spending of $330 billion, and the ten provinces together spend about another $320 billion: total $650 billion. One-third of that amount is currently ‘social spending’,4 so say $200 billion a year nationwide on old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, child benefits, welfare payments and the like. All of these programmes would be replaced by a universal basic income, and the money that was formerly spent on them would be funnelled into the UBI instead. That would cover about 40 percent – two-fifths – of the cost of a national UBI paid at the rate of the current Ontario pilot programme. Where would the rest come from?

Some would come from income taxes, but not necessarily by raising them. If everybody, rich or poor, has an additional $16,800 of annual income, it will boost a large number of people into a higher tax bracket for the last proportion of their income. They would nevertheless wind up with more income than before (but they’d still complain anyway). That extra tax revenue would still leave a gap in the funding, but more creative solutions can be imagined.

Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level … I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s OK.

Bill Gates, February 20175

Gates, like other leading Silicon Valley figures (Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes; SpaceX co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc. Elon Musk; and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), believes that the spread of automation and artificial intelligence will make the adoption of a Universal Basic Income inevitable, and they are taking a personal interest in it. The one UBI pilot in the United States is in California, but it’s not being funded by the state government. Instead it’s being financed by the moguls of Silicon Valley, maybe as penance for having created the automation that caused the problem in the first place — or maybe just to avoid being strung up from a lamp-post when the revolution comes.6 If the alternative to UBI is a generation of people living on welfare because automation has destroyed their jobs, and a level of anger and political alienation that threatens to destroy democracy, ways will be found to fund it.

The second practical question is: would a Universal Basic Income destroy people’s will to get up in the morning and go out to work? It’s an important question, because even if automation does kill 47 per cent of existing jobs in the next twenty years, this means that 53 per cent of them will still need to be done by human beings. Finding an answer to this question is the main purpose of the various experiments with UBI that are now underway, but there is some encouraging evidence from the few places where it has already been tried. There is no detectable decline in the willingness to work of Alaskans who get their cheques from the Permanent Fund Dividend each year — and inequality among Alaskans fell in the 1990s and 2000s, while it increased in every other American state.7

There is considerably stronger evidence from Iran, which has been providing a universal basic income to its citizens for the past eight years. When former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut bread and energy subsidies in late 2010, he replaced them with a cash payment for all Iranians that amounted to 29 per cent of the median household income, free of all strings — a genuine and quite substantial Universal Basic Income. Indeed, it initially amounted to 6.5 per cent of Iran’s Gross Domestic Product. Its value has subsequently been eroded by high inflation (which was mainly due to the tightening of international sanctions on Iran in 2011, but was widely blamed on the UBI by the middle class). These cash payments have had a major impact in terms of reducing income inequalities in Iran, and a recent research paper found that they did not lead to a fall in the average hours worked or in the likelihood that recipients would be employed, even in the poorest sections of the population. There were many press reports that workers were abandoning their jobs and farmers leaving their farms because of this modest increase in their incomes, and the Iranian middle class, as convinced as any other middle class that the poor are just lazy, mostly believes these reports, but the researchers found no evidence for these allegations.8

And then there is intriguing evidence from the past: historical data from an experiment in the Canadian province of Manitoba in 1974–79, known at the time as Mincome (minimum income). Sponsored jointly by the Manitoba government and the Canadian federal government under prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, it conducted a randomised controlled trial in the city of Winnipeg and in one rural town, Dauphin, in which groups of lower-income families were given sums ranging from CAD$3,800 to $5,480 a year ($16,000–$24,000 in today’s money). The research focussed on whether such payments would be a disincentive to work for the recipients, but the results were skewed by the fact that it was not an unconditionally guaranteed income: payments were reduced by 35 per cent, 50 per cent, or even 75 per cent for every dollar they earned by working. As in some similar experiments in New Jersey, Seattle and Denver when the Nixon administration was considering introducing a guaranteed income for all poor Americans, working or not, in the early 1970s, the Mincome research revealed that the impact of the basic income on employment choices was minimal: family size, the availability of jobs, and other extraneous factors had a much bigger effect on whether the men and women in the study were working or not. There were some interesting non-employment effects, though: later studies showed that the basic income caused less social stigma than conventional welfare, that more teenagers finished school because they were under less pressure to support their families, that new mothers stayed at home longer with their babies, and that hospital visits dropped by 8.5 per cent. (In Canada, they also found that the divorce rate went up, as women suddenly had the financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.)9

And that’s it: all the data we have on how UBI might affect willingness to work. It’s quite positive, as far as it goes, but much further research is needed. And much is being done: in addition to the American and Canadian pilot programmes, there are others underway or scheduled in the Netherlands, Finland, Italy and Scotland. At the other end of the wealth scale, a universal basic income scheme in Kenya, launched by a New York-based non-profit called GiveDirectly, has started giving ninety-five people in a village in western Kenya the less-than-princely sum of $22.50 a month each. It almost doubles their cash income, they are free to save or spend it as they see fit, and the payments will last for twelve years. The charity plans to expand the programme to some two hundred villages eventually, and to monitor the decisions people make over the full twelve years.10

Most of these early experiments with a guaranteed income are aimed only at poor people, or even only at unemployed poor people, and the stated measure of success is generally how many of them get back into paid work. Meanwhile, however, the researchers will be gathering valuable data about the actual behaviour of people who have a guaranteed basic income, so that when the supporters of UBI come back with concrete proposals for national systems in five or ten years’ time, they may have much more solid arguments than they do now.

Finally, the moral objection to UBI, if that’s the right word, is that people deprived of work will suffer from existential angst because all meaning and purpose will have vanished from their lives. Without work, they will suffer a paralysing identity crisis and find it impossible to fill their days, and having to rely on a UBI will only make matters worse. Their sense of meaninglessness can only be cured by jobs – even if we have to invent them. There are a number of possible responses to this, some of which are polite enough to be printable.

In 2015, the YouGov polling organisation conducted a quite serious poll in the United Kingdom about the meaning of work. It was triggered by a rash of anonymous signs that had greeted London commuters one day earlier that year saying things like, ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working,’ and ‘Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.’ The poll revealed that 37 per cent of working British adults already believed their job was not making a meaningful contribution to the world. Only 50 per cent thought that it was, and the rest were unsure. (In terms of their trades and professions, by the way, those who felt pointless were more likely to be consultants, bankers, lawyers, accountants, etc. than care workers, teachers, or bus drivers.) So there’s one quite large part of the population who are definitely not relying on their work to give meaning to their lives. And here’s another clue: a different YouGov poll in the previous year found that 57 per cent of British people supported the introduction of a four-day work week.11

You can take this attitude to extremes, of course. There is an irreducible minority of people — maybe 5 per cent, maybe less — who will choose to sit around and drink beer all day (or the female equivalent, which my wife suggests is watching daytime television). They would certainly do it under any imaginable form of UBI because they are already doing it now, living off welfare payments or their spouses or boy/girlfriends. UBI would let them do it more comfortably, but it is doubtful that it would substantially increase their number. Nevertheless, the thought that they would get away with it enrages many people. There is a very strong popular belief that people should work for a living, even if the society as a whole is very rich and the work doesn’t actually need to be done, and this prejudice applies especially strongly to the poor. As Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once put it, ‘Leisure is very good for the rich, quite good for Harvard professors — and very bad for the poor. The wealthier you are, the more you are thought to be entitled to leisure. For anyone on welfare, leisure is a bad thing.’12

There’s not much you can do about people who hold this prejudice except to wait for them to age out of the population, but the fretting about what people will do when they no longer have paid work is greatly overdone. A large minority of the adult population in every country is not working already — some because there are no jobs for them, others because they are the parents of small children, or disabled, or too rich, or retired, or just lazy and feckless. For the most part, they find ways to pass their time to their own satisfaction (if they have any spare time). Some do voluntary work, some travel, some drink beer or smoke dope while watching Netflix, some write unpublished novels, and some tinker with their cars or tend their gardens, but we are not currently faced with a crisis of mass anomie. There are undoubtedly workaholics who would suffer greatly if deprived of work, but such people are probably a small minority of the population.

At a guess, there are just as many people today who hate the jobs they are compelled to do by harsh economic necessity as there would be people who would hate their lack of paid work in an automated future where they were sustained economically by UBI. Most people would probably be fine, particularly if UBI took the shame and humiliation out of not having a job. There are the inevitable predictions about a not-too-distant future when the robots have taken all the jobs and human beings spend all their time playing enhanced virtual-reality games, of course, but we’ll cross those bridges if and when we get to them. For the moment, at least, we can file these predictions in the same bin as the ‘Singularity’, when the AI takes over and humanity becomes redundant. In the real, flesh-and-blood future of the next two or three decades, the task will be to keep democracy from being overwhelmed by the speed and scale of change – and there is a little understood side-effect of UBI that could be very helpful in this regard. By reducing income inequality quite radically, it would also reduce almost all the social ills that might otherwise overwhelm a society where many or most of the jobs have suddenly vanished.

[A]mong the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator … per capita GDP is much less significant for a country’s life expectancy, crime levels, literacy and health than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest in the population.

David Cameron, The Guardian, Hugo Young Lecture, 10 November 2009

Cameron was still six months away from the UK election that made him prime minister when he delivered that lecture for The Guardian, but he was clearly reading up on the things he would need to know if he won the job — and the one book that a ‘One Nation’ Conservative politician like him needed to read in 2009 was The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone. The authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two epidemiologists with a flair for statistics (a necessity in that trade), had set out by trying to explain the big differences in life expectancy — the ‘health inequalities’ — between people at different levels in the social hierarchy. As they wrote in their preface, ‘the focal problem initially was to understand why health gets worse at every step down the social ladder, so that the poor are less healthy than those in the middle, who in turn are less healthy than those further up.’13

In the United States, the answer might be ‘because the poor cannot afford good medical care’, but Britain, like most rich countries, has a free National Health Service available to all. Yet life expectancy in the United Kingdom is barely a year longer than in the United States. The one common factor that seems to drag them both down to the bottom of the life-expectancy table for rich countries is the fact that they both have a very high degree of income inequality by comparison with most other developed countries. It makes no difference how high a given country’s per capita income is: Japan’s is around $10,000 per person less than the US, but the Japanese live on average four years longer than Americans. (The Japanese have the lowest level of income inequality of any developed country.) It doesn’t matter how much they spend on healthcare, either: the US spends half again as much per person as the United Kingdom, but Americans still die younger. (Income inequality in Britain is not quite as great as it is in the US.) The only measure that matters, it seems, is how big the income gap is between the rich and the poor inside any given country.

‘Hmm. I didn’t expect that’, said Pickett to Wilkinson. (Or maybe he said it to her. I’m imagining this conversation, but it must have happened quite early in their research.) ‘I wonder what else lines up with income inequality.’ And suddenly what had been up to that point a fairly standard piece of epidemiological research turned into a wide-ranging investigation of the global impact of inequality. They looked at rates of mental illness and drug use in 23 rich countries: both correlated very closely with the degree of income inequality. They looked at the rate of obesity and the teenage birth rate: same thing. They looked at educational performance and the violent crime rate: same again. They looked at the rate of imprisonment and the lack of social mobility: everything lined up with the degree of income inequality, to an uncanny extent. And when they looked at the plight of the United States, the country among the 23 studied with the greatest difference between the incomes of the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent, and with the worst outcomes on most health and social issues, they were emboldened to say:

The relationships between inequality and the prevalence of health and social problems … suggest that if the United States was to reduce its income inequality to something like the average of the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland) … rates of mental illness and obesity might each be cut by almost two-thirds, teenage birth rates could be more than halved, prison populations might be reduced by 75 percent, and people could live longer while working the equivalent of two months less per year.14

The ‘income’ in these calculations and comparisons is not relevant as a measure of the resources available for health care. All the countries that Wilkinson and Pickett studied are rich enough that adequate resources for health care should not be a problem. Instead, the differences in income serve as a rough-and-ready indicator of the distance between the various social classes — and it is that distance that makes all the difference. The negative social and health outcomes in societies with major income inequalities, they conclude, are mainly driven by the frustration and resentment that individuals feel at being embedded in what amount to dominance hierarchies: the very thing we have been trying to escape from for the better part of forever. And it is not only the poor who suffer: all but the very rich have worse health outcomes in societies with highly unequal incomes.15

There has been a good deal of further research done on this topic since The Spirit Level was first published in 2009, and most of it confirms Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s observations.16 We have quite suddenly come into possession of a powerful new tool: we now know that most of the social and health problems that we try to treat separately are closely linked to one single economic fact that it is within our power to change. Reducing income inequality radically will not abolish crime or mental illness or addiction or heart disease, but it will make them all far less common.17 The egalitarian hunter-gatherer who still dwells within us all will not be so stressed, so frustrated, so angry, and so we will treat ourselves and others a lot better. The relationship really is that simple and that direct.

My focus in this book has not been on social and health issues, unless they directly affect the stability and survivability of the democratic political order, but I cannot resist pointing out that if we should adopt a universal basic income to protect ourselves from a job apocalypse and runaway populism, it would have the added benefit of healing many of the social wounds opened up by great disparities in income. A UBI that made almost no difference to the income of the highly paid and had only a modest effect on middle-class incomes would almost double the income of the lowest-paid. If you want to shrink the income inequality in society, nothing could have a bigger and faster impact than UBI.

We are all prone to a degree of self-dramatisation, but we are not living through a great crisis of democracy. It’s a rather small crisis, with so far not too many hurt: growing pains, not a terminal illness There have been bigger crises in the past, and there will probably be bigger crises in the future. But this is our crisis, and we do have to get through it.

The rise of Donald Trump is forcing us to analyse the problems that brought him to power: inequality, exacerbated by automation. The world, and particularly the developed countries, will waste a couple of decades in futile political infighting if we don’t deal with those issues successfully, at a point in our history when climate change is looming and we can’t afford to waste time.

We certainly don’t have time for wholesale changes in our economic system, because that sort of thing uses up all the available political energy for decades: if you want to overthrow capitalism, leave it for later. What we need now is a quick fix that reduces inequality to a tolerable level and restabilises our democracies. If UBI is not the right answer, we need some other solution that ticks the same two boxes: ensuring that everybody has a decent income despite the unstoppable advance of automation, and doing it in a way that does not humiliate those who no longer have jobs.

It’s not rocket science. If we can’t solve this problem, we really don’t deserve to get any farther.