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All over the globe now there are cries for a Green New Deal. What constitutes the GND is another matter. Like the concept of the Job Guarantee, there are now countless versions springing out of various groups, some that only seem to offer a short-term, short-week job or other arrangements that fall short of the way Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) constructs the concept. There is only one Job Guarantee in the modern parlance and that is the MMT concept. Other job creation programs are fine but they should stop using the term Job Guarantee, which is a comprehensive macroeconomic stability framework rather than a job creation program per se. In the same vein, all manner of proposals seem to have become part of the GND. The problem is that many of these proposals sell the idea short and will fail to achieve what is really required – a massive transformation of society and the role the government plays within it. The imprecision is exacerbated by progressives who are afraid to go too far outside the neoliberal mould for fear of being shut out of the debate. So we get ‘modest’ proposals, hunkered down in neoliberal framing as if to step up to the plate confidently is a step too far. This is Part 1 of a two-part blog post series on my thoughts on the failure of the environmental Left and climate action activists to frame their ambitions adequately.

If every person received the same basic income “floor” regardless of income, class, race, location of residence, or other status, the stigma of receiving support could be eliminated.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Basic income is a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement of other conditions.

A stable and predictable basic income, paid come rain come shine, is thus different from a minimum income guarantee, which tops up low incomes to a given level, usually requiring complex means tests. And it is different from a negative income tax or tax credits, which are withdrawn as income rises.

Nevertheless, these variants are often referred to in the same breath as basic income, and they do have in common the idea that everyone should have some sort of basic income security. While this book reserves the term ‘basic income’ for schemes that conform to the definition given at the start of the chapter, readers should be aware (and beware) that commentators often confound these diverse approaches under the ‘basic income’ label. Sometimes this may be done mischievously; more usually, it is a sign that they do not know what they are talking about.

The term ‘basic’ causes a lot of confusion. At the least, it means an amount that would enable someone to survive in extremis, in the society they live in. It could be more. However, the underlying purpose is to provide basic economic security, not total security or affluence. Total security would be neither feasible nor desirable.

Deciding what constitutes basic security is a challenge, but intuitively it should be easy to understand. Basic security in terms of being able to obtain enough to eat and a place to live, an opportunity to learn and access to medical care surely constitutes what any ‘good society’ should provide, equally and as certainly as it can. Most advocates of a basic income believe it should be provided as a ‘right’, meaning that it cannot be withdrawn at will. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 3.

The basic income would be paid to each individual as an individual, regardless of marital, family or household status. Thus it would not favour or discriminate against any type of household arrangement. And, unlike benefits paid according to ‘family status’, there would be no presumption of automatic sharing of income within a household, let alone equal sharing, which is often not the case.

The basic income should also be uniform, that is, paid equally to every adult, whatever their circumstances. Some existing state benefits, being family-based, in effect give members of large households a lower amount, assuming economies of scale within families. A basic income makes no such assumption and so avoids unintended discrimination.

There are many other options available, as Table 1, provided by Kearney and Mogstad, shows. These include, but are not limited to, an annual transfer and conditional Basic Income:

TABLE OMMITED

A UBI true to its name would be unconditional and have no means test for eligibility. It would be given to every individual, regardless of their own or their family income. A related, but quite distinct, policy would be a conditional basic income program, or a Negative Income Tax (NIT), as it was named by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. Under a conditional basic income scheme, the government would provide every individual a guaranteed income level, or a stipend, which would gradually be reduced as their earned income increased. This type of scheme was considered by the Nixon administration and evaluated in randomized controlled trial (RCT) social experiments in the 1960s and 1970s (discussed below).

We view a UBI to be related to a negative income tax, albeit much more expensive and with a very “leaky bucket,” to use the metaphor coined by Brookings scholar Arthur Okun (1975). to describe the “socio-economic leakages” of redistributive policy that arise from administrative costs, reduced savings or investment, or work disincentives. One of our main objections to a UBI is that by making the payment universal and unconditional, the government would be paying a lot of money to well off families, which would not serve any useful redistributive purpose but would divert public funds away from programs that could usefully advance human capital development and economic opportunity for truly needy Americans.

Basic income. This has the virtue of simplicity and familiarity. It differs from ‘minimum income’, a term usually denoting means-tested schemes, where the state ostensibly guarantees the poor some income if they can prove they are poor and ‘deserving’ in some way. And it differs from ‘guaranteed annual income’, a term that has figured prominently in debates in Canada and the US, which seems to signify a means-tested income guarantee, a form of negative income tax. Basic income also differs from the ‘minimum wage’, a statutory amount usually expressed as an hourly rate, that employers are meant to pay to those in jobs.

Basic income is a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement of other conditions. 

If every person received the same basic income “floor” regardless of income, class, race, location of residence, or other status, the stigma of receiving support could be eliminated. 

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME 

Basic Income is an income paid by the state to each full member or accredited resident of a society, regardless of whether he or she wishes to engage in paid employment, or is rich or poor or, in other words, independently of any other sources of income that person might have, and irrespective of cohabitation arrangements in the domestic sphere.

Although it is somewhat long, this is the definition I prefer because it is clear (and also provocative). The Basic Income Earth Network definition is as follows:

We need to start by defining what is meant by a basic income. Although there are a number of variants, which will be discussed in due course, a basic income can be defined as a modest amount of money paid unconditionally to individuals on a regular basis (for example, monthly). It is often called a universal basic income (UBI) because it is intended to be paid to all.

American capitalism is kind of like that. You can invent fables about how America is in economic decline. You can rail against “neoliberalism.” But the American economy doesn’t care. It just keeps rolling on.

The Economist magazine published a report on American economic performance over the last three decades. Using an avalanche of evidence and data, the main thrust of the article is that far from declining, American capitalism is dominant and accelerating.

For instance, the Soviet Union’s decision to install a wasteful irrigation system to grow cotton in an arid region of Central Asia dried up the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea. In parallel, large quantities of pesticides and fertilizers flowed into the sea’s basin. In 2010, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the destruction of the Aral Sea “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” The Soviet Union’s record on carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution more broadly is no rosier. As science writer Leigh Phillips rightly said, even had the whole world been socialist in the 20th century, the planet would still be heating up.

What capitalism and socialism share is the fact that, for a very long time, global warming was simply not considered a very pressing issue. The general public was not aware of climate change or considered it an abstract threat in a distant future. Politicians, who knew their job approval depended on shorter-term concerns, eagerly fostered industrialization and job creation to the environment’s detriment.

Capitalism doesn’t have a foundational document or a philosophical magnum opus enshrining its confessions of faith. Rather, it’s a set of historically evolved practices including, but not limited to, competition, growth, private initiative, individual choice and property rights.

Abandoning these principles and replacing them with degrowth, the redistribution of diminishing wealth, and comprehensive government control to manage a permanent state of emergency would be guaranteed to make a dire situation worse and undermine civil liberties. Competition would be replaced with unprecedented battles for resource allocation — not to mention, any attempt at implementing such changes by way of democracy would be unlikely to survive electoral challenges, regardless of efforts to celebrate the alleged virtues of enlightened post-materialism

Here's the reality: We're messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of colonizing another orb when we're done with our own are wishful thinking. That's according to Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system.

"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say, 'OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on Earth.'"

Many of the space capitalists who champion space colonisation do so because they were inspired by science fiction. There are countless creatives who inform their visions, but one whose work is frequently cited is author Kim Stanley Robinson, who has published several well-researched novels that imagine various scenarios for human life in space.

After all that research into the science of space travel and settlement, though, Robinson has little time for the colonisation visions being advanced by billionaires like Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In 2016, he compared Musk’s plan for Mars colonisation to ‘the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to the moon in his back yard.’

We do not currently know whether intelligence, biological or artificial, exists beyond Earth, but it is not implausible to assume so. Coming into contact with as well as refraining from seeking contact with extraterrestrial intelligence poses risks, as I discuss in section 4. In addition to these risks, extraterrestrial intelligence also poses a conflict risk: If an extraterrestrial intelligence has moral values that are sufficiently different form humankind’s, the intelligence could de facto react to humankind and other forms of intelligence with hostility.

At first glance, the prospect of a hostile extraterrestrial intelligence, be it biological or artificial, might seem far fetched. Isn’t some baseline of altruistic moral behavior to be expected of any kind of intelligence? We might intuitively associate intelligence with prosocial behavior of one kind or the other, but from an evolutionary perspective, greater intelligence is not necessarily correlated with prosocial and altruistic behavior towards other species [44]. Intelligence is the generalized capability for achieving goals, regardless of moral underpinnings and considerations. After all, that is why artificial intelligence as superintelligence is an existential risk today: Superintelligence is a threat precisely because it is much more intelligent than humans but lacks any inherent sense of human preferences and moral values.

This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. For decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of intergalactic explorers and the untold habitable worlds they find. Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream.

Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.