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This structural inequity, coupled with decades of cruel immigration policies, has made it harder for immigrants to obtain economic stability. States have an opportunity to provide needed support and progress toward economic and racial justice for immigrant communities excluded from the social safety net by ensuring robust immigrant eligibility for state-funded cash transfer programs. Some states provided benefits both before and during the pandemic, to try to address some of the shortfall of federal programs and federal relief passed in response to COVID-19. California established a $125 million fund to help undocumented workers who cannot access unemployment insurance. Oregon added $20 million to the Oregon Worker Relief Fund which was created to provide temporary financial relief to undocumented workers. Connecticut provided a total of $3.5 million to aid undocumented families with rent relief and direct financial aid. Lastly, in Fiscal Year 2021 Illinois began providing Medicaid coverage for low-income seniors regardless of immigration status, making it the first state to cover older undocumented immigrants.102 Nothing in federal law would prevent states from providing state funds to immigrants in the form of a guaranteed income or other cash transfers, and offering long-overdue support to immigrants who are critical to the success of our communities. The legacy of so-called “welfare reform” and decades of disinvestment have resulted in a social safety net that perpetuates racism and is fundamentally incapable of allowing people to meet their basic needs and live with dignity. It is time to boldly reimagine the social safety net, eliminate deep poverty and provide stability to middle income households by implementing a guaranteed income. Ultimately, a federal program should be vigorously pursued, but a mass movement needs to be built to overcome gridlock at the federal level. States have a vital role to play as leaders in building public policy. Through creation of state-level guaranteed income programs funded through equitably raised revenue, states can progress toward economic justice for their lowest-income residents regardless of employment status, supplement the existing safety net, and build necessary momentum toward a federal program needed to meet current and coming economic challenges.

— Louis Weathers had a stable job and was married when he decided to buy a home in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in 1959 – but high interest rates and White real estate agents who seemed adamant about keeping him and other Black residents out of certain neighborhoods nearly discouraged him. More than six decades later, the 87-year-old received a payout to make up for the discriminatory housing practices that he and other Black residents experienced between 1919 and 1969. After three years in the making, Evanston gave Weathers and 15 other Black residents $25,000 each in May to put toward a down payment on a home, mortgages or home repairs. Like Weathers, generations of Black Americans have faced disparities in housing, transportation, business and other areas. And as descendants of enslaved people many say they have not been compensated for their labor and the lingering effects of systemic racism. Recent federal reparations efforts have stalled in Congress, but cities like Evanston are working to atone for the harms caused by slavery and institutional racism – and address the racial wealth gap. Last week, Detroit’s city council unanimously approved how it would structure the city’s first reparations task force. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the Amherst Town Council approved the creation of a fund to allocate a total of $2 million in reparations over the course of about a decade. The push for reparations has gained momentum on the heels of the national uprising in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, which rekindled the Black Lives Matter movement. Kamilah Moore, of the California Reparations Task Force, said she sees reparations “as fulfilling the promises made to her ancestors” in the mid-19th century following the abolition of slavery. The federal government now has the chance to live up to those commitments, she said. “You can’t talk about a racial reckoning in this country without mentioning reparations,” she said. “Reparations are comprehensive enough to address all of the ills that still impact the African American community.” From cash payouts to issuing extensive reports and building a bureaucratic system to examine what reparations could look like, here is what some local and state governments have done so far: Evanston, Illinois Robin Rue Simmons, a former Evanston alderman who introduced the idea to the city in 2019, said the Restorative Housing Reparations Program was created to remedy some of the harm caused by the city’s historical anti-Black housing policies. When it was approved last year, it was considered the country’s first reparations program. Since it was founded in 1860s, the city “created systems to segregate, limit, deny, and control Black citizens,” who were denied equal access to many areas, including schooling and housing. In the early 20th century, real estate agents developed a practice of informal racial zoning, almost exclusively offering Black residents housing on the city’s west side, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the city that details how the city perpetuated discriminatory practices toward Black residents. The report also highlights that Evanston banks typically refused mortgage loans to Black residents seeking to buy homes in predominantly White neighborhoods. When the city’s Restorative Housing Reparations program opened online applications in September, officials received more than 600 applications. In January, Weathers and 15 others were chosen at random from the first 122 applications submitted by eligible Black residents. The program’s payments were funded by donations and money collected by the city from cannabis sales taxes. Weathers says he was “elated” when he learned that he would receive a payout and decided it could help current and future generations of his family. Instead of using the money for himself, he transferred his payout to his 60-year-old son, Michael Weathers, to put toward his mortgage. “It was a no brainer,” he said. Rose Cannon, a long-time Evanston resident, said she was initially excited when she heard about reparations efforts coming to Evanston, but grew to be against them once the conversation shifted from direct cash payments to a housing program. For her, conflating housing equity efforts with reparations minimizes the larger reparations movement. “When you use the term reparations, we would like for it to be associated with the full repair of human beings, to close the racial income gap,” Cannon said. “Housing can only be a portion of it, maybe a silo of it.” The current program, Simmons said, is the city’s initial reparations effort and was informed by a mass of research that led them to identify the legacy of discriminatory housing practices. Following more work to address housing disparities, Simmons said the city is expected to focus its reparations efforts on economic development and education initiatives. A committee has recommended grants for Black businesses and the establishment of a Black history museum in the city, she added. “It’s not so much that the initial 16 recipients are going to completely transform the life circumstances for all of Black Evanston, but the fact that it has happened means that we can expand it and we can build on it and do more,” Simmons said. “Not just in housing, but in other areas as well.” St. Paul, Minnesota Cities like St. Paul have taken steps to build a bureaucratic system to examine what a reparations package for Black Americans could look like. After the city apologized last year for its role in the institutional and structural racism experienced by its Black residents, officials established an advisory committee to create a framework for a reparations commission. A year later, the advisory committee has released a report recommending direct cash payments to eligible Black residents and the establishment of a permanent reparations committee focused on implementing reparations to address racial disparities in housing, healthcare, education, employment and more. As far as funding, the report identified various sources, including the city’s funding under the American Rescue Plan, sales taxes and philanthropic donations. Trahern Crews, a member of the St. Paul city council’s reparations legislative advisory committee, partially influenced reparations efforts in Minnesota’s capital city. “The fact that [Evanston] led on [reparations] and they were so bold to actually do it, let our city council know that this is something that can happen, and it can happen in our lifetime,” Crews said. Although Minnesota was a free state, Black Americans were enslaved at St. Paul’s Fort Snelling and used for free labor by the US Army. Following the abolition of slavery, they faced forced segregation, redlining, housing discrimination, and the destruction of Saint Paul’s Rondo neighborhood – the city’s center of Black business and cultural life. It was destroyed to give way for the construction of an interstate highway, the advisory committee’s report says. Yohuru Williams, another member of the committee, said the task force decided to take a more “holistic approach” to reparations because the damage of institutional racism is uneven and impacts different descendants of slavery in varying ways. “It may be inflicted in one way for one set of descendants,” said Williams, a history professor and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. “It could have been unfair labor practices that resulted in unequal acquisition of wealth. For others, it was outright slavery.” California One of the largest reparations efforts in the nation is taking place in California, where a statewide task force is expected to become “a model for partners across the nation.” In 2020, California became the first state in the country to establish a state reparations task force and nearly two years later, the panel released its first report last month outlining the state’s involvement in slavery and how it continues to harm Black Americans. In the 500-page interim report, the task force detailed how California perpetuated institutional racism in connection to slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination, as well as how the federal government perpetuated these harms. Chairperson Kamilah Moore said the report is the most extensive issued by the government on the African American community in more than 50 years. One of the report’s main goals, Moore said, was educating California residents about the state’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery. The task force’s report outlines how Black Americans have been harmed, including by slavery and political disenfranchisement, and in labor, housing, education, the criminal justice system, and arts and culture. The panel included preliminary recommendations for each category but said a final report will be issued next year. Some of those recommendations include updating language in the state’s Constitution; removing racial bias and discriminatory practices in standardized testing; compensating people deprived of profits for their work; investing in and creating free healthcare programs; and apologizing for acts of political disenfranchisement. Brandon Greene, the director of the racial and economic justice program at the ACLU of Northern California, said the report is extremely comprehensive and hopes officials consider direct cash payments as the center of their reparations efforts. “Reparations to me explicitly is giving money for harm,” Greene said. “If reparations is giving me a million dollars, I can do whatever I want with it. If I want to buy a million dollars’ worth of Jordan’s, I can do that.” With several state and local governments leading the push for reparations, Moore and others said they hope the federal government is empowered to advance H.R. 40, which was first introduced in Congress in 1989 and proposes the creation federal commission to study reparations and recommend remedies for the harm caused by slavery and the discriminatory policies that followed abolition. “The federal government is not off the hook,” Moore said. “I hope that people use this report as leverage to fight for reparations on a federal level.”

These efforts are likely to struggle with the challenges that have hindered reparations programs globally for decades. In particular, the line can blur between social policies offered to people because they are in need — or simply because they are citizens — and reparations for those whose rights have been violated. Such blurring reduces the potency of reparation as a material and symbolic act of justice. Reparation or relief? Reparations programs generally fall into two categories: judicial reparations, ordered by a court; and administrative reparations, provided by a government through legislation. Reparation and relief blur far more easily in the latter. As the United Nations outlined in its 2005 Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation, reparation means more than financial compensation. Reparations measures are intended to be an act of justice that not only addresses harm but also recognizes that recipients’ rights were violated. Along with several key differences, this separates reparation from social policies like welfare and from international humanitarian assistance and development aid. Relief, assistance and aid are clearly important in contexts where poverty, inequality and violence are linked. Scholars and practitioners have argued for blended approaches. But it’s problematic when the two are indistinguishable or when relief replaces reparation. Countries where the line has blurred, all through administrative programs, include South Africa, Indonesia, Nepal, Peru and Colombia. Colombia, for example, has been lauded for its recent and historic efforts to provide reparations to millions of victims of an internal armed conflict that had pitted government forces, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing armed groups against one another since the 1960s. Worried about the cost of such a program, however, the government tried to reclassify as “reparation” its existing subsidies for displaced people, who today constitute 90 percent of the conflict’s 9 million registered victims. Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that such repackaging violated the rights of victims to true reparation. In practice, many Colombian reparations recipients have had trouble differentiating the compensation they receive as victims of the armed conflict from other forms of financial support they receive from the government because they are poor. For them, what could be the government’s history-defining act of contrition for a half-century of bloodshed is just another check or financial transfer. Does Yale discriminate against Asian Americans and Whites? It's the wrong question. Why it matters Making generalizable claims about reparations’ impact is difficult. Most arguments for a distinction between reparations and relief have relied on theory, morality or law to make the case. But research among diverse groups, including torture survivors, victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and those who have provided their testimony to truth commissions, offers evidence that harm is compounded when victims do not receive justice that they are promised. This is especially important in cases such as Colombia (or the United States) where the scale of harm far exceeds a judicial system’s capacity to carry out justice — putting more pressure on reparations to deliver. Sometimes, when harm has been less widespread or when there are resources to deliver, administrative reparations programs have been more easily distinguished from relief — and it has mattered. For instance, Germany’s reparations programs for Holocaust victims have fostered healing through long-term support and generous financial compensation. Chile and Argentina also have been well regarded for comprehensive and long-term measures such as pensions and scholarships to repair the harm of their brutal dictatorships, while also undertaking truth-seeking efforts, accepting responsibility, investigating crimes and reforming institutions. Government support vs. government responsibility Under the U.N.'s Basic Principles, governments have an obligation to provide effective remedies to victims of gross violations of international law, even where countries did not commit these violations themselves. But governments have been actively chipping away at enforcement of such responsibilities. At the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for example, countries had to agree on rules about who would be responsible for reparations awards issued by the court, which prosecutes individuals for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Early proposals actually left the door open for some form of government responsibility for reparation, but that was shut down by a group of countries that included the United States. But what happens when the government is directly responsible for harm, and when this harm stems from centuries of violence? The challenge is daunting. Internationally, reparations programs have often failed to account for long-term harm, tending to focus more on physical or “spectacular” violence than on less visible forms that are linked to economic crimes or structural disenfranchisement. If reparations programs can actually be implemented in the United States, it will still be difficult to articulate — and communicate — that these efforts are targeting generations of economic harms perpetrated against Black people, not just the present-day needs that such harm has fostered and perpetuated. This work is just beginning. In Asheville, for example, the city council apologized for its history of slavery and discrimination and established a commission to identify investments and policy priorities in which Black residents have been systematically disadvantaged. The city seeks to repair these disadvantages by identifying resources to fund reparations, boosting Black economic mobility and opportunity, and increasing Black families’ wealth across generations. True reparations measures recognize that people’s rights have been violated, ideally accompanied by the offender’s acknowledgment of culpability. They specifically target the harms that victims suffered. True reparation is not a panacea, but it is possible in the United States.

However, Warren goes on to acknowledge the limitations of the universality of basic income when understood as reparations. He points out that all too often, nominally universal policies exclude minorities, for instance by excluding formerly incarcerated populations. Yet even if a universal basic income were to be designed to be truly universal, Warren wonders if a UBI is simultaneously too broad and too narrow to address issues of racial injustice in a post-slavery society. It might be too broad in its universality — its net beneficiaries would be anyone below a set income level,8 which would include those that might be economically disadvantaged, but do not face racial discrimination and the injustices of living in a post-slavery society. Warren also worries that a universal basic income would allow the US to evade the question of direct investment in Black communities. In many ways, this point mirrors the feminist debates around basic income. While some feminist UBI advocates argue that a UBI would disproportionately benefit women and those engaged in unpaid care, others point out that it would also support men who chose to ignore or evade care work responsibilities, and make the case that there should be either special or additional support for carers.9

At the same time, Warren argues that a UBI's benefits could be too narrow because of its typical focus on citizenship rights. As he points out, many UBI models propose that the income goes to all of a country's citizens. However, what happens to immigrants who are not citizens, including immigrants who face racial discrimination? And what about incarcerated populations, who are frequently deprived of some citizenship benefits (such as voting rights)? Yet while Warren is correct that many UBI proposals have traditionally focused on citizens, this has recently shifted. James Ferguson's work on rightful shares has made the case that a universal payment should be disbursed not on the basis of citizenship, but rather on presence (or, to put it more practically, residence) within a nation state (Ferguson, 2021).

This structural inequity, coupled with decades of cruel immigration policies, has made it harder for immigrants to obtain economic stability. States have an opportunity to provide needed support and progress toward economic and racial justice for immigrant communities excluded from the social safety net by ensuring robust immigrant eligibility for state-funded cash transfer programs. Some states provided benefits both before and during the pandemic, to try to address some of the shortfall of federal programs and federal relief passed in response to COVID-19. California established a $125 million fund to help undocumented workers who cannot access unemployment insurance. Oregon added $20 million to the Oregon Worker Relief Fund which was created to provide temporary financial relief to undocumented workers. Connecticut provided a total of $3.5 million to aid undocumented families with rent relief and direct financial aid. Lastly, in Fiscal Year 2021 Illinois began providing Medicaid coverage for low-income seniors regardless of immigration status, making it the first state to cover older undocumented immigrants.102 Nothing in federal law would prevent states from providing state funds to immigrants in the form of a guaranteed income or other cash transfers, and offering long-overdue support to immigrants who are critical to the success of our communities. The legacy of so-called “welfare reform” and decades of disinvestment have resulted in a social safety net that perpetuates racism and is fundamentally incapable of allowing people to meet their basic needs and live with dignity. It is time to boldly reimagine the social safety net, eliminate deep poverty and provide stability to middle income households by implementing a guaranteed income. Ultimately, a federal program should be vigorously pursued, but a mass movement needs to be built to overcome gridlock at the federal level. States have a vital role to play as leaders in building public policy. Through creation of state-level guaranteed income programs funded through equitably raised revenue, states can progress toward economic justice for their lowest-income residents regardless of employment status, supplement the existing safety net, and build necessary momentum toward a federal program needed to meet current and coming economic challenges.

— Louis Weathers had a stable job and was married when he decided to buy a home in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in 1959 – but high interest rates and White real estate agents who seemed adamant about keeping him and other Black residents out of certain neighborhoods nearly discouraged him. More than six decades later, the 87-year-old received a payout to make up for the discriminatory housing practices that he and other Black residents experienced between 1919 and 1969. After three years in the making, Evanston gave Weathers and 15 other Black residents $25,000 each in May to put toward a down payment on a home, mortgages or home repairs. Like Weathers, generations of Black Americans have faced disparities in housing, transportation, business and other areas. And as descendants of enslaved people many say they have not been compensated for their labor and the lingering effects of systemic racism. Recent federal reparations efforts have stalled in Congress, but cities like Evanston are working to atone for the harms caused by slavery and institutional racism – and address the racial wealth gap. Last week, Detroit’s city council unanimously approved how it would structure the city’s first reparations task force. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the Amherst Town Council approved the creation of a fund to allocate a total of $2 million in reparations over the course of about a decade. The push for reparations has gained momentum on the heels of the national uprising in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, which rekindled the Black Lives Matter movement. Kamilah Moore, of the California Reparations Task Force, said she sees reparations “as fulfilling the promises made to her ancestors” in the mid-19th century following the abolition of slavery. The federal government now has the chance to live up to those commitments, she said. “You can’t talk about a racial reckoning in this country without mentioning reparations,” she said. “Reparations are comprehensive enough to address all of the ills that still impact the African American community.” From cash payouts to issuing extensive reports and building a bureaucratic system to examine what reparations could look like, here is what some local and state governments have done so far: Evanston, Illinois Robin Rue Simmons, a former Evanston alderman who introduced the idea to the city in 2019, said the Restorative Housing Reparations Program was created to remedy some of the harm caused by the city’s historical anti-Black housing policies. When it was approved last year, it was considered the country’s first reparations program. Since it was founded in 1860s, the city “created systems to segregate, limit, deny, and control Black citizens,” who were denied equal access to many areas, including schooling and housing. In the early 20th century, real estate agents developed a practice of informal racial zoning, almost exclusively offering Black residents housing on the city’s west side, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the city that details how the city perpetuated discriminatory practices toward Black residents. The report also highlights that Evanston banks typically refused mortgage loans to Black residents seeking to buy homes in predominantly White neighborhoods. When the city’s Restorative Housing Reparations program opened online applications in September, officials received more than 600 applications. In January, Weathers and 15 others were chosen at random from the first 122 applications submitted by eligible Black residents. The program’s payments were funded by donations and money collected by the city from cannabis sales taxes. Weathers says he was “elated” when he learned that he would receive a payout and decided it could help current and future generations of his family. Instead of using the money for himself, he transferred his payout to his 60-year-old son, Michael Weathers, to put toward his mortgage. “It was a no brainer,” he said. Rose Cannon, a long-time Evanston resident, said she was initially excited when she heard about reparations efforts coming to Evanston, but grew to be against them once the conversation shifted from direct cash payments to a housing program. For her, conflating housing equity efforts with reparations minimizes the larger reparations movement. “When you use the term reparations, we would like for it to be associated with the full repair of human beings, to close the racial income gap,” Cannon said. “Housing can only be a portion of it, maybe a silo of it.” The current program, Simmons said, is the city’s initial reparations effort and was informed by a mass of research that led them to identify the legacy of discriminatory housing practices. Following more work to address housing disparities, Simmons said the city is expected to focus its reparations efforts on economic development and education initiatives. A committee has recommended grants for Black businesses and the establishment of a Black history museum in the city, she added. “It’s not so much that the initial 16 recipients are going to completely transform the life circumstances for all of Black Evanston, but the fact that it has happened means that we can expand it and we can build on it and do more,” Simmons said. “Not just in housing, but in other areas as well.” St. Paul, Minnesota Cities like St. Paul have taken steps to build a bureaucratic system to examine what a reparations package for Black Americans could look like. After the city apologized last year for its role in the institutional and structural racism experienced by its Black residents, officials established an advisory committee to create a framework for a reparations commission. A year later, the advisory committee has released a report recommending direct cash payments to eligible Black residents and the establishment of a permanent reparations committee focused on implementing reparations to address racial disparities in housing, healthcare, education, employment and more. As far as funding, the report identified various sources, including the city’s funding under the American Rescue Plan, sales taxes and philanthropic donations. Trahern Crews, a member of the St. Paul city council’s reparations legislative advisory committee, partially influenced reparations efforts in Minnesota’s capital city. “The fact that [Evanston] led on [reparations] and they were so bold to actually do it, let our city council know that this is something that can happen, and it can happen in our lifetime,” Crews said. Although Minnesota was a free state, Black Americans were enslaved at St. Paul’s Fort Snelling and used for free labor by the US Army. Following the abolition of slavery, they faced forced segregation, redlining, housing discrimination, and the destruction of Saint Paul’s Rondo neighborhood – the city’s center of Black business and cultural life. It was destroyed to give way for the construction of an interstate highway, the advisory committee’s report says. Yohuru Williams, another member of the committee, said the task force decided to take a more “holistic approach” to reparations because the damage of institutional racism is uneven and impacts different descendants of slavery in varying ways. “It may be inflicted in one way for one set of descendants,” said Williams, a history professor and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. “It could have been unfair labor practices that resulted in unequal acquisition of wealth. For others, it was outright slavery.” California One of the largest reparations efforts in the nation is taking place in California, where a statewide task force is expected to become “a model for partners across the nation.” In 2020, California became the first state in the country to establish a state reparations task force and nearly two years later, the panel released its first report last month outlining the state’s involvement in slavery and how it continues to harm Black Americans. In the 500-page interim report, the task force detailed how California perpetuated institutional racism in connection to slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination, as well as how the federal government perpetuated these harms. Chairperson Kamilah Moore said the report is the most extensive issued by the government on the African American community in more than 50 years. One of the report’s main goals, Moore said, was educating California residents about the state’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery. The task force’s report outlines how Black Americans have been harmed, including by slavery and political disenfranchisement, and in labor, housing, education, the criminal justice system, and arts and culture. The panel included preliminary recommendations for each category but said a final report will be issued next year. Some of those recommendations include updating language in the state’s Constitution; removing racial bias and discriminatory practices in standardized testing; compensating people deprived of profits for their work; investing in and creating free healthcare programs; and apologizing for acts of political disenfranchisement. Brandon Greene, the director of the racial and economic justice program at the ACLU of Northern California, said the report is extremely comprehensive and hopes officials consider direct cash payments as the center of their reparations efforts. “Reparations to me explicitly is giving money for harm,” Greene said. “If reparations is giving me a million dollars, I can do whatever I want with it. If I want to buy a million dollars’ worth of Jordan’s, I can do that.” With several state and local governments leading the push for reparations, Moore and others said they hope the federal government is empowered to advance H.R. 40, which was first introduced in Congress in 1989 and proposes the creation federal commission to study reparations and recommend remedies for the harm caused by slavery and the discriminatory policies that followed abolition. “The federal government is not off the hook,” Moore said. “I hope that people use this report as leverage to fight for reparations on a federal level.”

A silent mass extinction is occurring in lakes, rivers and wetlands. Freshwater species are rapidly disappearing in North America and throughout the world. Conservation-minded people might be unaware of this, because of the media’s longstanding focus on land-based ecosystems and charismatic animals. The United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), to be held in Montreal in December, is an opportunity to reassess priorities. The goal of the summit is to advance the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework that aims to bring about “a transformation in society’s relationship with biodiversity.” Such a transformation would require citizens to have a clear understanding of what is at risk in freshwater ecosystems, which are both disproportionately rich in species and disproportionately threatened. Freshwater ecosystems outperform terrestrial and marine ecosystems in terms of the amount of biodiversity they support. Lakes, rivers and wetlands account for less than one per cent of the Earth’s surface area and yet hold nearly 10 per cent of all living species, including one-third of all vertebrate animals and more than half of all fish species. North America itself is a freshwater biodiversity hotspot. Our continent contains more species of fish, molluscs, crayfish, amphibians and aquatic insects than most other regions of the world. Much of this biodiversity is rapidly declining. During the past century, there have been at least 120 extinctions of North American freshwater animals. Several hundreds more species have become endangered and some of these, too, may already be gone. The true magnitude of this biodiversity loss is unknown, as there have almost certainly been species that went extinct before anyone realized they existed. North American freshwater animals are disappearing five times faster than those on land. If current trends persist, our continent will lose as much as four per cent of its endemic freshwater species every decade—a rate of extinction similar to that of tropical forest ecosystems, which are thought to be the most threatened on the planet.

Climate change and overexploitation of natural resources drive the need for innovative food production within a sustainability corridor. Aquaponics, combining the technology of recirculation aquaculture systems (RAS) and hydroponics in a closed-loop network, could contribute to addressing these problems. Aquaponic systems have lower freshwater demands than agriculture, greater land use efficiency, and decreased environmental impact combined with higher fish productivity. Rainbow trout is one of the major freshwater fish cultured worldwide, which, however, has not yet been commercially developed in aquaponics. Nevertheless, research conducted so far indicates that the trout species represents a good candidate for aquaponics. The impact of climate change on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems tends to become more progressively pronounced and devastating over the years. The sector of aquaculture is severely affected by natural abiotic factors, on account of climate change, that lead to various undesirable phenomena, including aquatic species mortalities and decreased productivity owing to oxidative and thermal stress of the reared organisms. Novel innovative technologies, such as aquaponics that are based on the co-cultivation of freshwater fish with plants in a sustainable manner under the context of controlled abiotic factors, represent a promising tool for mitigating the effect of climate change on reared fish. The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) constitutes one of the major freshwater-reared fish species, contributing to the national economies of numerous countries, and more specifically, to regional development, supporting mountainous areas of low productivity. However, it is highly vulnerable to climate change effects, mainly due to the concrete raceways, in which it is reared, that are constructed on the flow-through of rivers and are, therefore, dependent on water’s physical properties. The current review study evaluates the suitability, progress, and challenges of developing innovative and sustainable aquaponic systems to rear rainbow trout in combination with the cultivation of plants. Although not commercially developed to a great extent yet, research has shown that the rainbow trout is a valuable experimental model for aquaponics that may be also commercially exploited in the future. In particular, abiotic factors required in rainbow trout farming along, with the high protein proportion required in the ratios due to the strict carnivorous feeding behavior, result in high nitrate production that can be utilized by plants as a source of nitrogen in an aquaponic system. Intensive farming of rainbow trout in aquaponic systems can be controlled using digital monitoring of the system parameters, mitigating the obstacles originating from extreme temperature fluctuations.

Thirty percent of residents within the city of Dayton have incomes that fall below the poverty line, and twenty percent meet the requirements to be considered food insecure. Food insecurity is defined as the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate food sources, a critical societal problem with detrimental impact on both the mental and physical health of those who are suffering. Through a federal job guarantee, laborers would have the ability to farm food through agricultural projects aimed at feeding those in greatest need of sustenance. The job guarantee could be structured to use abandoned properties for aquaponics, creating an urban food source while also employing laborers in a variety of jobs with a variety of skill sets. To create such a program, it will be essential to have unskilled laborers tasked with caring for plants and animals, cleaning and restoring both residential and commercial real estate, and harvesting the crops. Through a job guarantee, this food will be created without a profit incentive, meaning crops could be sold at the cost it would take to maintain the program, and provided to local food banks free of charge to provide for the community. Aquaponics is a sustainable farming method, a method of indoor farming that raises both vegetables and fish. It requires far less land and water than traditional farming methods, perfectly suited for urban environments and a perfect candidate for a federal jobs guarantee. Through the combination of aquaculture, the raising and breeding of fish for consumption, and hydroponics, the growth of plants in fortified water as opposed to soil, these two agricultural techniques are combined to create a closed-loop agricultural system. Aquaponics creates a system using the waste of fish to supply nutrients to the plants, which purify the water. This system reduces inputs, needing no fertilizers to sustain the nutrient rich soil for the plants, and reduces all inputs to simply food for the fish. Using this system, there is no need for fertilizers and pesticides, the use of which come with a host of environmental problems largely from the run-off polluting local waterways. Aquaponics is an indoor farming method, making it unaffected by the environment, with the farmer in complete control of the environment in which the plants are grown. This allows the growth of a wide variety of plants year-round, regardless of the outdoor climate. Through a federal jobs guarantee, the renovation of vacant properties will provide the opportunity for a variety of projects aimed at improving the living conditions of everyone within the community. Aquaponics are simply one way in which these renovated properties can be utilized for the societal benefit of the city. Using once abandoned properties as agricultural hubs providing food to those who need it, as part of the federal jobs guarantee, represent one way in which this massive renovation project could act as a major positive force in the communities that are currently most affected by abandoned properties.

A revival of FDR’s Tree Army and the formation of a 21st century Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would create JG jobs in close proximity to the unemployed. Since all communities have acute environmental needs, the camp-based CCC model from the New Deal is not appropriate or desirable. Instead, jobs will be created where the workers live. The Community Jobs Bank will include a list of monitoring programs, rehabilitation programs, and public investment programs. The jobs will tackle: soil erosion, flood control, environmental surveys, species monitoring, park maintenance and renewal, removal of invasive species, sustainable agriculture practices to address the “food desert”2 problems in the United States, support for local fisheries, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, community and rooftop gardens, tree planting, fire and other disaster prevention measures, weatherization of homes, and composting. Communities are best rebuilt from within. Many communities throughout the United States experience urban blight, poverty, and crime. The JG can employ existing best practices to mobilize the human potential within a community to revive it and make it more resilient. Jobs can include: cleanup of vacant properties, reclamation of materials, restoration of public spaces, and other small infrastructure investments; establishment of school gardens, urban farms, co-working spaces, solar arrays, tool lending libraries, classes and programs, and community theaters; construction of playgrounds; restoration of historical sites; organization of carpooling programs, as well as recycling, reuse, and water-collection initiatives, food waste programs, and oral histories projects.

One expedient way of making the Job Guarantee a reality is to connect job creation to environmental conservation and other social care needs. As I have argued elsewhere 18 , the Job Guarantee is inherently a green policy, not only because of its organic connection with the climate conservation movement, but also because it remedies the neglect and squander that come with economic distress, unemployment, and precarious work. Arguably a green policy is one that aims to address all forms of waste and devastation, including both natural and human resources. The Job Guarantee is also part of the US Green New Deal Resolutions, which recognizes that environmental justice cannot be delivered without economic and social justice. Although the Job Guarantee predates the Green New Deal movement, it has always been green in practical terms too – from the days of Roosevelt’s Tree Army to modern proposals like the one outlined here – prioritizing environmental conservation and community renewal. The Green New Deal is a comprehensive and ambitious policy strategy designed to transform the economy and deliver a habitable planet to future generations. The Job Guarantee is the bridge in that transition, the safety-net and preventative macroeconomic stabilization policy, which ensures that while we work to protect the environment and transform the economy, we have a policy that protects working people and transforms the work experience itself. The Job Guarantee matches unmet needs with available resources. Because it aims to address the social deprivations of people, communities, and the environment, it is not only a green policy, but can be viewed more broadly as a care policy. Large swaths of the population, even in developed countries, face shortages of vital goods and services. Food deserts, where millions of people lack access to healthy and affordable food, blanket the US. So do medical deserts – nearly a quarter of all residential areas lack acute-care hospitals and 80% of rural areas are designated as medically underserved 19 . This is typical for European nations as well, even though many provide nationalized healthcare. Sustainable agriculture, community health centers, and other basic services are needed even in the wealthiest regions of the world, while in the developing world, these problems are worsened multifold by the lack of basic infrastructure. All the while, the planet is burning. Perennial fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts are intensifying. Air, soil and water pollution are preconditions for the accelerating and at an unprecedented rate of species extinction, according to a recent UN report 20 . Environmental work is endless and urgent. It includes investment and rehabilitation projects that are small and large. The Job Guarantee is one key mechanism for ensuring that the work is being done. A global tree army can repair the lungs of the planet, provide green infrastructure in dense urban areas, and help restore biodiversity. Rural areas can benefit from sustainable agriculture investments, drought prevention, and other public services. The examples are many. Global recycling programs can help save the oceans from plastics and other polluters. The climate crisis is an existential threat to fishing communities that help feed the planet. Meanwhile, mangroves, wetlands, tidal marshes, seagrass, seaweeds sequester carbons effectively and up to five times more than tropical forests 21 . Restoring them is an urgent and labor-intensive task. The Job Guarantee can be a springboard for implementing sustainable fishing and regenerative ocean farming practices. Reef reconstruction and habitat restoration can reverse the impacts of coastal development on coastal marine ecosystems and vulnerable (and often indigenous) communities. Wetlands are natural embankments that often provide better protection than seawalls. Coastal communities often suffer mass unemployment and underemployment. The Job Guarantee would employ the unemployed and underemployed to do these critical tasks. And the program would be well targeted, as coastal communities often have some of the highest unemployment and underemployment rates nationwide. A similar approach would help impoverished rural communities, who have born the ill effects of commercial agriculture. Firm concentration in agriculture (known as Big Ag) has led to some of the most abusive labor market practices of any industry (wage theft, dangerous working conditions, substandard housing for workers) and has consistently produced environmental hazards (methane emissions, water crises, soil erosion), public health concerns (antibiotic resistance, food born illnesses, dwindling nutritional content), and unfair competition wiping out small family farms (raising monopoly pries of patented seed and equipment, while lowering purchase prices for crops and cattle for sale). As noted above, despite the increased agricultural output, food deserts are ubiquitous around the globe. But corporate farms have been especially detrimental for working people. Agriculture has reliably produced some of the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. Big Ag often relies on cheap migrant labor that in many countries is exempt from basic labor protections like minimum wages, work contracts, or collective bargaining. Yet sustainable agriculture is critical from a strategic point of view (communities need to know where their food comes from), from an environmental point of view (sustainable agriculture relies on regenerative farming) and from the point of view of workers (community supported agriculture CSAs create more and better paid local jobs). The Job Guarantee can help multiply CSAs, farm cooperatives, and community garden initiatives. Because it is a program that creates jobs where they are most needed, by focusing on sustainable agriculture, it can be an effective method for wiping out food deserts while creating living wage employment opportunities.

In fact, can you imagine what UBI would be like if it were rolled out by this government, which only yesterday promised to fight a ruling describing the benefits cap as inflicting “real misery to no good purpose”? Despite the fact that the families who brought a case against the government had children too young to qualify for free childcare, the Department for Work and Pensions still perversely insisted that “the benefit cap incentivises work”. It’s not hard to imagine UBI being administered by the likes of A4e (now sold and renamed PeoplePlus), which carried out back-to-work training for the government, and saw six of its employees receive jail sentences for defrauding the government of £300,000. UBI cannot be a progressive initiative as long as the people with the power to implement it are hostile to the welfare state as a whole. In their incendiary book Inventing the Future, the authors Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek argue for UBI but link it to three other demands: collectively controlled automation, a reduction in the working week, and a diminution of the work ethic. Williams and Srnicek believe that without these other provisions, UBI could essentially act as an excuse to get rid of the welfare state. What’s needed is not the arbitrary adoption of UBI, but an entirely different conversation about what a welfare state is for. As David Lammy MP said, after the Grenfell Tower disaster: “This is about whether the welfare state is just about schools and hospitals or whether it is about a safety net.” The conversation, in light of UBI, could go even further: it’s possible for the welfare state not just to act as a safety net, but as a tool for all of us to do less work and spend more time with our loved ones, pursuing personal interests or engaging in our communities. UBI has this revolutionary potential – but not if it is simply parachuted into a political economy that has been pursuing punitive welfare policies for the last 30 years. On everything from climate change and overpopulation to yawning inequality and mass automation, modern western economies face unprecedented challenges. These conditions are frightening but they also open up the possibility of the kind of radical policies we haven’t seen since the postwar period. UBI could be the start of this debate, but it must not be the end.

UBI is expensive. Very expensive. As an add on, without simultaneously trimming government programs, it would require a significant tax increase. Following the Finnish study results, Kari Hamalainen, chief researcher at the VATT Institute for Economic Research, said implementing a universal basic income for all citizens “would be expensive. If we had a universal basic income, we’d have to incorporate taxation”, and based on these results, “it would be unsustainable.” Bridgewater Associates conducted a study in 2018, which found the cost of a $1,000/mo stipend to every adult in the U.S. would run approximately $3.81 trillion per year. This amount represented 21% of US GDP or 78% of tax revenue in 2018. (Source: CNBC) Yes, the stipend would help to make people feel more financially secure, but as the Finnish study proved, it would not meaningfully increase employment or production. It would merely be an enormous expense, one that would likely cripple the U.S. economy. A UBI program will require a massive tax overhaul and an in-depth evaluation of existing social programs. Some believe the cost would be partially offset by the removal of other social programs and the diminished administration costs that come from running a program without a “means test.” This would be a concept that requires program administrators to ensure recipients meet specific qualification standards. While in the pure UBI, the payment goes to all citizens. DISADVANTAGES OF UBI Naval Ravikant, co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of AngelList outlines other reasons we should be avoiding Universal Basic Income. He believes that those who are down on their luck don’t want handouts. “The moment I start giving money to you, I’ve lowered your status. I’ve made you a second-class citizen.” Naval Ravikant Naval believes that it is better to help lower-income individuals gain meaningful lives through education and success. “You have to teach a man to fish, not basically throw your rod and leftover carcasses at him and tell him ‘here, eat the scraps,'” he continues. Others believe that there are better uses of government funds than the “handouts” of UBI. In a recent Financial Times article, Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, claims that “Individuals gain not only income but also meaning, status, skills, networks, and friendships through work. Delinking income and work, while rewarding people for staying at home, is what lies behind social decay.” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at the Columbia Business School, and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute believes that people have a desire to work and gain dignity from doing so. This previous statements strike a chord with me. Self-sufficiency is an essential aspect of well-being. Steve Taylor, Ph.D., says, “Self-sufficiency is the quality of feeling secure and content with oneself, a deep-rooted sense of inner completeness and stability.” What would be the knockoff effects if we take this away from an entire populace? Will we see a drop in production? Would there be higher levels of unhappiness and self-worth? WILL REDUCE PAY While some economists argue that UBI could drive up wages, others believe it will drive them down. Why would an employer pay more if UBI gives citizens enough money to live on? They will most likely try to get away with paying them less, as these individuals have another source of income. What is happening in the gig economy is proof enough that this can be the case. Many gig workers are willing to work for low wages as they have other sources of income. AUTOMATION WILL NOT REDUCE JOBS As stated earlier, Andrew Yang believes that robots and automation will purge America of countless jobs. Will automation replace some jobs? Yes. It is almost guaranteed that some jobs will be phased out. But other, more meaningful jobs will be created in its place. This has been the case since the rise of humanity. Automation is not a new concept. Since the earliest times, tools and machines have been invented to make a task easier. In 1722, the lathe was invented, a tool designed to hold a section of material to be carved, cut, or shaped. The lathe is credited with being the first machine tool that led to the invention of all subsequent machine tools. Think of the invention of the automobile (an automated mobile). The need for relying on horses to do the heavy lifting of daily work, pulling trolleys, carriages, delivery carts, etc., severely diminished with the rise of the automobile. Many industries collapsed as a result: streetcar operators, carriage manufacturers, blacksmiths, horse breeders, stable keepers, etc. However, the number of new jobs created because of the rise of the automobile more than made up for this. Workers were needed for assembly lines, road construction, oil and steel industries (including vulcanized rubber), and even motels for long trips. Today, there is little need for blacksmiths, cobblers, VCR repair shops, or milk truck delivery drivers. Yet jobs for computer programmers, online security specialists, plumbers, and HVAC repair workers continue. Although retraining may be needed in certain fields to counteract the changing economy, implementing a UBI is like a societal band-aid, perhaps a drag, and not a viable solution to economic disparity. Societal and economic change is constant, and allocating free money to the public won’t change this fact. INCREASES TAXES OR FEDERAL DEFICIT? In the U.S., the Roosevelt Institute think tank says that a $1,000 a month payment would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025 if paid for by increasing the federal deficit. On the other hand, if the UBI were paid for with taxes, there would be no net benefit to the economy. However, net wealth is not created by simply redistributing money from one class of people to another. Wealth is created by increased labor, trade, and innovation. As such, I have difficulty believing that UBI could grow the economy by $2.5T. As stated earlier, Bridgewater Associates conducted a study in 2018, which found the cost of a $1,000/mo stipend to every adult in the U.S. would run approximately $3.81T per year. The simple math of taxing Americans $3.8T annually to gain zero economic boost does not add up. PESKY INFLATION If UBi were to be financed by increasing the federal deficit, it would most undoubtedly fuel inflation. As a reminder, inflation is caused by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than the quantity of goods or services produced during the same time period. In other words, if the nation’s printing press produces money at a greater rate than its economy can produce, the result will be higher inflation levels. Printing an extra $3.8T yearly will surely cause inflation to roar. If our irresponsible fiscal spending habits during 2020 and 2021 taught us anything, it is that handing out money to anybody and everybody does not contribute to low inflation levels.

Whilst both the Universal Basic Income and the Job Guarantee seek to resolve the same problem the macroeconomic consequences of each would be very different. The Job Guarantee is a public sector option for employment paid at a living wage to anyone willing and able to participate. Funded by central government and locally administered as a permanent scheme, it provides the non-profit sector with additional labour, acting as a buffer stock in either the standard public sector or private sector. See GIMMS’ factsheet on the Job Guarantee. Whilst MMT establishes that the government has the ability to finance both the UBI and the JG as stand-alone programmes, the UBI is an income for doing nothing, whereas the JG is a participatory income in exchange for contributing one’s time to public purpose. This is important as a mechanism for the government to preserve the value of its currency, as ultimately, the currency is worth, at the margin, what one must do to obtain it from the government. If a UBI were to be paid at a high enough rate for people to live on and pay their taxes, directly or indirectly, it would introduce moral hazard as it removes the monetary need for anyone to work. This would mean that the government would no longer be able to use its currency to provision itself with the workers it desires to provide the public services necessary for it to fulfil its mandate to provide public infrastructure to serve the public purpose. Nor would the economy be able to hire workers to produce goods and services for people to purchase with that currency or, said another way, if supply capacity in the economy were to decrease due to a lack of workers and incomes increase it would create hyperinflationary pressures. Firms would raise wages (and prices) in an attempt to attract workers who have no immediate need to work. The universal basic income would not ultimately give the desired standard of living and would instead erode the value of that income. As Warren Mosler says, ‘If you (the economy) don’t have to do anything to earn the currency, it’s worth nothing.’ A JG, on the other hand, serves two very important macroeconomic functions; it acts as a price anchor to subdue inflation as it promotes the transition from unemployment to private sector employment and also provides a wage floor for the labour market, below which nobody can fall. It sets a conversion rate for what the labour is worth in currency. For example, a JG paid at £10 an hour would provide six minutes of labour time per £1, connecting the power of the currency and the power of labour thus anchoring the value of the currency in people. Furthermore, whereas the JG resolves the problem of involuntary unemployment and disciplines inflation, a country that had a UBI at a living wage would risk facing the need to either reduce its spending or raise taxes to control inflationary pressures which translates into reducing the UBI income to a level sufficiently below a living wage. This would create unemployment, so that some of those who want to work would have to be unable to find employment (and thus have a reduced income) in order to keep inflation under control. In contrast to the UBI which doesn’t help control inflation, the JG also provides a counter-cyclical mechanism for maintaining total demand for goods and services in the economy in response to changing economic conditions. It helps to smooth out demand over time and enables nations to weather the cyclical downturns which are an unavoidable feature of modern economies. The societal cost of unemployment and low incomes is already substantial and damaging. A UBI has the potential to increase those costs as it would put families under tremendous pressure to find additional income from precarious part-time work. The empirical evidence of the advantages of having a job are well researched and charted and are also not just related to having an income.

In a large economy like the United States, every action has a corresponding reaction. This axiom is true for everything from price manipulation and taxation to the concept of reparations. As a term, reparations are the political effort to make amends or provide restitution to individuals or groups of people who have suffered historical injustices, systemic discrimination, or harm as a result of actions taken by a government, institution, or society. For example, on May 6, 2023, the California Reparations Task Force recommended several payments to the state's Black residents, including payments for those affected by bank redlining, i.e., denial of service, over-policing, and nineteenth-century slavery. To many, this recommendation seems fair and feels good. Newton's third law of motion is familiar to nearly everyone. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." While physics and economics are certainly different fields, there is a sense in which Newton's law also holds true for money. If government policy impacts the supply of money or the private sector's ability to produce goods and services, that policy will have corresponding consequences elsewhere in the economy. Think about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts to help farmers during the great depression. President Roosevelt saw how farmers were suffering and sought to help them with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which meant to stabilize the prices farmers received for the food they produced. But it ended up with the U.S. government buying food products and destroying them while many in America did not have enough to eat and were going days without a meal. Actions in one part of the economy had a corresponding consequence in another part of that same economy. Reparations will have an impact too. If the United States —as individual states or collectively as a nation— is going to give reparations serious consideration, the government should at least consider two likely outcomes, inflation and uncertainty. Inflation erodes buying power. A $1,000 is still a $1,000 in the sense of the numerals printed on the paper, but in the face of inflation, it buys fewer things. Reparations will almost certainly lead to more rapid inflation for two reasons. First, the policy might inject, if you will, large amounts of money into the economy, encouraging the prices paid for goods and services to rise. For example, according to some published reports, the California Reparations Task Force's recommendation would payout between $640 billion and $800 billion to the state's Black residents. A 71-year-old Black Californian might get as much as $1.2 million if the recommendation became law. That is a significant amount of liquidity and is likely to cause inflation. The government will also be incentivized to encourage inflation. Economist Thomas Sowell refers to inflation as an invisible tax since inflation is one of the ways politicians offset expenses. When the real value of money as it relates to buying power is diminished, so too are political outlays like reparations. This is necessary because of the scale of this proposed government redistribution. If we take the lower estimate of $640 billion in California reparation payments and divide it by the number of adults in California —24,621,819, according to Infoplease on May 9, 2023— we find that the liability is nearly $26,000 each. Reparations will also lead to economic uncertainty. At almost the same time that the California Reparations Task Force made its recommendation, Denver City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca said that all White business owners in the city should be charged an additional tax as a form of reparation. The taxes collected would be redistributed to Black and Brown business owners in the city. Cdebaca later added that her comments were taken out of context, which could be correct. Our point is that contextually correct or not, they cause uncertainty. If you were an ethnically White business owner in Denver, would you think twice about renovating your building in the city? What if new taxes made it difficult for your company to survive? Would you want to have a significant and unmovable investment located where business conditions might change rapidly? Or what about California? Knowing that the state could need to increase taxes to pay for more than $640 billion in reparation payments, would you invest in infrastructure there? Whenever the future of tax or monetary policy is unsure, businesses are less likely to invest, potentially stifling the economy. Reparations can feel like they are righting some wrong. But it is important to remember that they will have an economic impact. As various states or the nation discusses reparation policies, we need to consider these impacts. Even if we do not find it absurd to hold people responsible for things that happened before they were born, we might find it impractical to implement policies that could significantly harm the economy as a whole.

Beveridge, Keynes and their contemporaries recognized the uncertainty, instability and anti-social tendencies that are generated by capitalist processes. And they designed the welfare state as an apparatus that would manage these risks, stabilize these booms and busts, and establish a framework of collective economic security in which individual risk-taking might proceed. But that welfare state is constantly being put under pressure by the capitalist processes and market forces that it seeks to constrain. Capitalist economies and welfare states have, to repeat a point made earlier, a “contradictory unity”. They require each other; they sustain each other; but they also undermine each other. Profitable capitalist action requires a supportive social environment and an enabling material infrastructure. At a minimum it needs socialized, educated, healthy workers—and the functioning families, schools and healthcare systems that produce them—as well as a dependable supply of resources, a transportation infrastructure, a population of consumers, and a politically stable, business-friendly environment. But left to its own devices, capitalism tends to erode and destroy these vital social and natural environments (Hobsbawm 1996). Its tendency is to commodify, consume, and expand in a competitive drive to accumulate—and these processes produce disastrous side-effects, as witness the current threats affecting the climate, the environment, natural resources, family life, and the physical and economic health of populations. Market capitalism is, in other words, an inherently “self-destructive social formation” which is protected from these dangers by the operation of anti-market and market-moderating processes. The paradoxical—one might say dialectical—consequence is that “capitalism depends vitally on the presence, essential but never guaranteed, of effective opposition to it” (Streeck 2012: 25). The result is that a resurgence of the power of capital and of free market forces is an ever-present danger to the social system within which capitalism exists. The neo-liberal project of dismantling collective institutions and regulatory frameworks in the name of untrammeled competition and market freedom may, as its critics insist, be pursuing an impossible ideal (Polanyi 1944; Peck 2010), but it carries the real dangers of economic and social collapse nevertheless, as the global crisis of 2008 has shown. To avoid self-destruction capitalism needs a set of countervailing forces. And “the welfare state” is the collective name we give to these forces. The social regulation of markets, the social insuring of workers, and the public provision of social services and protections—in short, the welfare state in one or other of its variants—is our established means of restraining the rampant opportunism and untrammeled pursuit of private gain that are the essence of free-market capitalism. Critics of this arrangement often describe the welfare state as a hindrance to economic vitality. From a sociological point of view, this is the exact opposite of the case: the welfare state is an essential means of sustaining that vitality. As my Durkheimian analysis is designed to indicate, the welfare state is an essential basis for human flourishing in capitalist society and an essential basis for capitalist flourishing in human society.

The UUBI is a very well-meaning idea but I would like to point to a number of problems that are not taken into account. First, such a reform would be unsustainably expensive and would thereby jeopardize the state’s ability to maintain quality in public services such as healthcare, education and care of the elderly. The effect of declining quality in such public services would be that many who can afford it would start buying these services on the private market. This would imply that this group’s (let’s call it the middle class) willingness to pay taxes would decrease substantially because they would ask themselves why they should “pay twice”. The decline in taxes would further reduce the ability to maintain quality in these services which could escalate into a downward spiral where the public service that would be available for those who cannot pay their own way would be of an even lower quality. Fewer and fewer would support such programs with their taxes and their votes. There is substantial empirical support for the notion that a public service that only addresses the “poor” becomes “poor service”. In other words, ​​an UUBI is most likely to be a death sentence for most universal welfare state programs. Another problem for the UUBI concerns overall political legitimacy. According to its advocates, the basic income would be awarded to all citizens over the age of 18. With £800 a month, a young person can manage quite well for a while. However, thereafter many will realize that this income is insufficient for their needs. There is a risk that a sizeable portion of those who started adult life living on the UUBI will seek to increase their standard of living with various kinds of “irregular” income (drug trafficking, prostitution, etc.). Cases like these, even if they are relatively few, are likely to get a lot of negative publicity. The UUBI will lose legitimacy from media reporting about people who have a high living standard by combining income from various irregular activities and the UUBI. In addition, with Additionally, on £800 a month you can live a pretty enjoyable life surfing on the beaches of Bali. The political logic that ensues is most likely to be a downward pressure on the level of the UUBI. A third problem concerns the need for work. During the 19th century, English textile workers formed what was known as the Luddite movement. They are best known for attacking and destroying the new steam-driven weaving machines because these were seen as cutting the number of jobs on offer. The argument that we face a reduced demand for labor due to technological development is, in my opinion, as bad today as it was then. On the contrary, we have an increased need for labor in many areas of care. The population in Europe has been ageing and, while many elderly people are taken good care of when it comes to their physiological needs , they are often very lonely and there is no time for the personnel working in elderly care to go shopping with them or take them to leisure activities. Families with small children often suffer from severe stress and need support. The examples can be multiplied. With an unconditional universal basic income, people will ask why they should pay wages to people who can work but choose not to work when there is a need for many more “hands” in such areas. They will ask why they should pay a monthly wage to someone on safari while their elderly and frail mother has no one to help her take a walk in the park. The basic error with the idea of ​​unconditional basic income is its unconditionality. If people are going to continue to pay taxes for the welfare of others, several conditions must be met. One of them is the principle of reciprocity: people contribute productively to the common good as far as they can. The main body of the welfare state was never built on altruism but on reciprocity. Breaking with this principle is most likely to lead to the dismantling of the type of broad-based social solidarity that built that welfare state.

Whilst both the Universal Basic Income and the Job Guarantee seek to resolve the same problem the macroeconomic consequences of each would be very different. The Job Guarantee is a public sector option for employment paid at a living wage to anyone willing and able to participate. Funded by central government and locally administered as a permanent scheme, it provides the non-profit sector with additional labour, acting as a buffer stock in either the standard public sector or private sector. See GIMMS’ factsheet on the Job Guarantee. Whilst MMT establishes that the government has the ability to finance both the UBI and the JG as stand-alone programmes, the UBI is an income for doing nothing, whereas the JG is a participatory income in exchange for contributing one’s time to public purpose. This is important as a mechanism for the government to preserve the value of its currency, as ultimately, the currency is worth, at the margin, what one must do to obtain it from the government. If a UBI were to be paid at a high enough rate for people to live on and pay their taxes, directly or indirectly, it would introduce moral hazard as it removes the monetary need for anyone to work. This would mean that the government would no longer be able to use its currency to provision itself with the workers it desires to provide the public services necessary for it to fulfil its mandate to provide public infrastructure to serve the public purpose. Nor would the economy be able to hire workers to produce goods and services for people to purchase with that currency or, said another way, if supply capacity in the economy were to decrease due to a lack of workers and incomes increase it would create hyperinflationary pressures. Firms would raise wages (and prices) in an attempt to attract workers who have no immediate need to work. The universal basic income would not ultimately give the desired standard of living and would instead erode the value of that income. As Warren Mosler says, ‘If you (the economy) don’t have to do anything to earn the currency, it’s worth nothing.’ A JG, on the other hand, serves two very important macroeconomic functions; it acts as a price anchor to subdue inflation as it promotes the transition from unemployment to private sector employment and also provides a wage floor for the labour market, below which nobody can fall. It sets a conversion rate for what the labour is worth in currency. For example, a JG paid at £10 an hour would provide six minutes of labour time per £1, connecting the power of the currency and the power of labour thus anchoring the value of the currency in people. Furthermore, whereas the JG resolves the problem of involuntary unemployment and disciplines inflation, a country that had a UBI at a living wage would risk facing the need to either reduce its spending or raise taxes to control inflationary pressures which translates into reducing the UBI income to a level sufficiently below a living wage. This would create unemployment, so that some of those who want to work would have to be unable to find employment (and thus have a reduced income) in order to keep inflation under control. In contrast to the UBI which doesn’t help control inflation, the JG also provides a counter-cyclical mechanism for maintaining total demand for goods and services in the economy in response to changing economic conditions. It helps to smooth out demand over time and enables nations to weather the cyclical downturns which are an unavoidable feature of modern economies. The societal cost of unemployment and low incomes is already substantial and damaging. A UBI has the potential to increase those costs as it would put families under tremendous pressure to find additional income from precarious part-time work. The empirical evidence of the advantages of having a job are well researched and charted and are also not just related to having an income.

IN HIS 1944 STATE of the Union address – forwarded to the Hill at midday and then delivered by radio to the American public because he’d taken to bed with the flu — Franklin Delano Roosevelt pressed for an Economic Bill of Rights. “We cannot be content,” he said, “if some fraction of our people […] is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” To Roosevelt, freedom from want and fear would cement the core civil and political rights then so cherished by a nation at war. As he put it, “Necessitous men are not free men.” First and most fundamental among his list of entitlements was “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.” In a time when unprecedented collective labor — often designed and guided with a visible federal hand — was displacing a global threat, Roosevelt wanted to spirit into the future with the best of New Deal progressivism in tow. To guarantee a decent job, he reasoned, would not only ensure a peacetime focus on “new goals of human happiness,” it would also “spell security” — inaugurating a thriving domestic body and preventing a future slide from home to homefront. In invoking the Bill of Rights, Roosevelt was developing a lexicon of economic entitlement that bridged the Founders’ bitter correctives and a ripening postwar idiom of human rights. FDR’s language, or a less decorated version of it, appears in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23(1), which reads: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” Scores of political economists and development scholars — Amartya Sen, Sandy Darity, Amit Bhaduri, among others — have since depicted full employment as the economic fundament of participatory democracy, a policy that underwrites “the right to regular income for a decent living” alongside “the duty to contribute to social production.” Two decades after the New Deal, proposals for a federal job guarantee (FJG) were at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign led by an increasingly radical Martin Luther King Jr. In 1965, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin’s “Freedom Budget” demanded, in the name of poverty eradication and racial equality, “full and fair employment for all.” Coretta Scott King — who in 1974 co-founded the National Committee for Full Employment/Full Employment Action Council (NCFE/FEAC) — christened the movement’s next phase, offering a more transformative vision of what the “job” in “job guarantee” might be. Scott King wanted to angle our conception of work toward “jobs that would serve some human need” — spotlighting health care, education, arts, and cultural workers in the spirit of FDR’s “new goals of human happiness” over jobs “created with the profit-making motive.” While the profit-making motive in FDR’s day co-occurred with — and in many senses gave rise to — war and economic depression, today the twin catastrophes of insecurity are unemployment and environmental decay. Even before the pandemic, joblessness affected millions of Americans, with underemployment touching millions more. By some Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, nearly 20 million Americans, at any given time, are unable to secure adequate work. The pain of joblessness is immense, whatever disciplinary tally we call up — from sterile neoclassical models lamenting dips in aggregate demand or bedraggled “human capital”; to rising “anti-social” behavior and crime; to spiking rates of depression, reports of uselessness and a narrowed sense of dignity, disrupted and sometimes ruptured family and friend dynamics, and amplification of gender asymmetries and racial tensions. (Citing telework and job loss, Japan, in the isolation wrought by COVID-19 as all of us make cubicles of our homes, has become the latest country to appoint a Minister of Loneliness.) Were instrumental reasoning enough, you would expect economists to have jettisoned unemployment from model and policy alike; instead, macroeconomists peddle a measure called the “natural rate of unemployment” that, so the toy model goes, beats back inflation. Happily, a recent chorus of heterodox thinkers have argued fears of inflation are consistently overblown — materializing only to consolingly pat the invisible hands of elites and muzzle the labor movement. Just as happily, some economists are beginning to challenge the premise that joblessness is a “natural” phenomenon at all. As Pavlina Tcherneva suggests, the same way we might squint at similar economic neologisms — imagine a “natural rate of homelessness” — so should any rights-centered approach denaturalize involuntary unemployment. If unemployment is unnatural, perhaps employment need not despoil the natural either. This notion, too, has roots in a deep lineage of scholars, artists, and activists envisioning an economy centered on “care work,” with care construed as stewardship that might secure — indeed, help heal — the personal, the public, and the environmental at once. Whether it’s teaching, tending public parks, or elder care, care work has the benefit that it’s often low-carbon. And from Scott King to today’s proposals from segments of the eco-socialist left to the abundance preached by Modern Monetary Theory, a key demand is working less (which would, say, reduce emissions from commuting) without reduction in pay. But beyond its greener ends, grounding economic life in care — and changing our orientation toward work, more than just tweaking the number of care jobs on offer — might also help lift our politics up from the neoliberal muck that’s gridlocked environmentalism for decades. It’s no coincidence that Coretta Scott King, and the Black working-class movement behind her, advocated for guaranteed jobs that were “meaningful,” that “[served] some human need.” The other side of the crisis in unemployment is invisible, unpaid caretaking labor often done by women of color. Climate activists and writers like Naomi Klein, particularly amid a pandemic, have pushed a similar concept of “repair work,” where repair is tangibly civic (“battalions of tree planters”) but also “intensely inward”: “[T]he practice of connecting, or re-pairing, those many crucial connections that our culture so systematically severs.” Repair, then, must also mean reparation: to repair inner narratives means dissolving false national myths — Klein imagines, drawing on demands from contemporary Black and Indigenous activists, a Truth and Reparations Commission — and toppling the false idol of the border wall, including proposals for an Indigenous Land Back program. But what of the “remunerative” part of FDR’s Bill of Rights, and what of his assumption that this work will take place in shops, farms, mines? The reparative possibilities of a job guarantee have another forebear in Silvia Federici’s 1975 essay, “Wages Against Housework,” an intellectual lodestar of the Wages For Housework campaign and a call-to-arms against the injustice of women forced into roles as unpaid care workers. “They say it is love,” the piece began, in a riotous slice of collective prosody: They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident. […] More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile. Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational hazards of the housewife. Federici sought to “refuse that work as expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.” Naturally, her detractors claimed “Wages Against Housework” would inevitably fuse homo economicus with home ec., dragging the capitalist’s ledger into the home in a way that would further dig women into a cultural trench of cooking, cleaning, and consoling. But this misses Federici’s point. She wanted an entanglement of for and against, arguing recognition and compensation of care work were shifts that could augur both its refusal and renovation: throw sand in the capitalist gears whose teeth only ever turned to nominate a gendered and racialized class for the task of social reproduction — but do so in a way that acknowledged the creeping traumas that care might answer. It seems fitting that Federici’s essay should open with a kind of choral protest in unattributed verse, capacious and transpersonal enough to stress this dual noncompliance: as Leigh Claire La Berge, author of the Federici-inspired Wages Against Artwork, writes, “Wages are needed and wages are not enough.” True remuneration alone will go a long way — for the precariat, the federal guarantee is the legal backstop that allows for a foundation in care work to begin with.

The three characteristics that defined people as monetary individuals also marked them as a distinct race: First, they had demonstrated superior intelligence by tacitly consenting to money, enabling them to produce more than they could use, and creating conditions under which they could multiply the stock of wealth available to humans. Second, they took part in social wealth creation as acquisitive and rational people who attempted to enrich themselves.24 And finally, they embraced whatever inequality emerged from monetary dynamics, and considered it just. These three characteristics set monetary individuals ontologically apart from those who remained in a state of nature, and gave them a sense of social cohesion through racial belonging.

Locke contrasted what he considered monetized spaces with those that remained in a state of nature: in Europe, where “people under government . . . have money and commerce,” it was no longer justified to claim land by working it. But where current inhabitants had not consented to money, Europeans could “mix” their labor with “uncultivated” land, for instance, in the “vacant places of America,” whose “inhabitants haven’t joined with the rest of mankind in the consent of the use of their common money.” The alleged absence of money from Native societies meant that “wild Indian[s]” had not yet developed their productive capacities: the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America . . . left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry,” were available for Europeans to take. It is in this context that Locke wrote a famous sentence in which he defined a new era by inventing a past in which, he claimed, Native societies were still trapped: “In the beginning all the world was America . . . for no such thing as money was any where known.”25