The Philosophy of Enough: In conversation with the people Doing The Work for UBI
Original image credit - Priscilla Du Preez
Josien Piek is a macroeconomist, the area of economics dedicated to grappling with money on a global, international scale. To people outside the world of high finance, the whole business can seem sterile, impenetrably technical, almost a beast unto itself that relentlessly churns away without us. Josien brings some warm-blooded humanity into discussion of the global numbers game. “My professional life has always been all about money, and I think money and energy are the same. Money and love are actually very comparable in our western world.” Her grasp on macroeconomics has thrown the concept of universal basic income into the spotlight as an obvious answer to many questions. Professionally, Josien started out in the world of wealth and investment management. It’s a seriously lucrative industry, but biweekly international flights became undesirable enough to see her leaving it behind. She left because it was at odds with her worldview.
As a child in Kenya in the 70s, it struck her as completely illogical that her father’s World Bank salary provided herself and her family with luxury while there were children in the streets who couldn’t afford food or clothes. “We were the so-called good guys. I said to my dad, I understand we’re the good guys but we live in richness, but there’s poverty and, at 7, I realised this does not make sense. We’re the rich guys, and the rich guys are often the bad guys.” The mindset of that 7 year old remains, driving Josien’s work towards financial security for all, or rather away from the very inequality that struck her as so unfathomable.
““We were the so-called good guys. I said to my dad, I understand we’re the good guys but we live in richness, but there’s poverty and, at 7, I realised this does not make sense. We’re the rich guys, and the rich guys are often the bad guys.”
Prefaced with a ‘this is very macro’ qualifier, Josien highlights the prevalence of negative production externalities in high value industries. “Petrochemicals and animal agriculture are the biggest generators of capital in the Netherlands but are also the biggest polluters.” If people are going to leave jobs like that, they require financial security outside those industries. UBI is a major potentiator of people moving from the negative production industries.
One way to help people calm down is to give financial security and no longer rely on the existential threat of abject poverty to motivate people to do jobs they don’t want to do. A lot of jobs are outright negative production, because of all the externalisation. Petrochemicals and animal agriculture are the biggest generators of capital in the Netherlands but are also the biggest polluters. People don’t have the security to change and remove their contribution from those industries if they are reliant on the salary from jobs that exist within them. The net zero plans are often a one-sided exchange, with people being asked to compromise and change but not being awarded any security or benefit for doing so. There’s no trade.
We’re in unstable times and chaos is what gave rise to the universe, so there is a lot of hope in a crisis.
Mythology is such an important part of the equation as things get tougher. There is no hero and there is no journey according to Charles Eisenstein, an American author and orator. We need a much more collective transformation story, one that is less centred on the idea of one young man’s journey and more centred on the collective progress of society.
Universal Basic Income, to Josien, is self-explanatory; Universal - for everybody, we exclude nobody. Basic - we focus on the basics. Income - money is the level through which we insure freedom and equality.
People get so wealthy that they feel invincible, and their relationships become insignificant in comparison. It becomes about power, when money is simply a medium of exchange. The UBI Lab is a very human and kind hearted way of working together, so Josien is bringing that informal and personable element into her own work in the Hague.
She describes the social operation of hyenas, referring to a particular element as something we should perhaps seek to emulate - the females ensure that the babies eat first before anyone else is able to. "I want to make sure I do everything I can that means young people have good lives at the start, which means having basic needs met; having food, having parents who aren’t stressed." Another motivation is acknowledging the enormous hardship that lies in the hearts of the rich people - while UBI is often talked about and seen in relation to poverty, Josien’s experience has offered her a fairly unusual and perhaps controversial perspective on the benefits it would have outside the sphere of poverty and scarcity. We focus on the more visible and traumatic hardship of not having enough, but comparably the hardship of not being able to give or to connect to one's own feelings and to others. Rates of depression are higher in rich nations. The rich would benefit from a more basic lifestyle in the same way that impoverished people would benefit from having their basic needs unconditionally and constantly met.
One of the main points made by those opposing the implementation of UBI is that it isn't economically viable. The great question of 'who will pay for it' is a particularly frequent flyer. How does a macroeconomist navigate that argument? The numbers and data speak for themselves, in Josien’s highly educated opinion. “Quantitative easing has cost 25 trillion, which is an astonishing amount. 1 million seconds is 11 days, but 1 trillion seconds is 31,000 years. That alone proves that the system does not work, and that the idea that we don’t have the money for UBI is simply not true. Academically and emotionally, this way of thinking is going to be forced to come to an end.”
“Quantitative easing has cost 25 trillion, which is an astonishing amount. 1 million seconds is 11 days, but 1 trillion seconds is 31,000 years. That alone proves that the system does not work, and that the idea that we don’t have the money for UBI is simply not true.”
Josien likened this kind of conversation to sales - people don’t see the necessity yet, but they will. ‘No’ is viewed as a question from a sales point of view, and in the face of the big arguments against UBI, compassion and gentle conversation are the most effective tools.
UBI gives people the basic reassurance that liberates their ability to do good stuff with their own lives, but also for society. You don’t need to give people the fear of death for them to do the right thing. It’s quite the opposite, the fear of death can make people do some really weird stuff. UBI gives people back their own time and autonomy, giving them the opportunity to choose what potential they live up to.
“Parenting is one of the most important jobs in the economy, we know that as economists,” Josien explains. Every hour you put into a kid in turn helps society in enormous ways, so supporting childcare is the best money that you can spend. There is something quite evil about a system that keeps people separated and small. "The people doing it are badly deluded, not necessarily evil; I can feel compassion for the stupidity, but it is stupidity," Josien expressed, perhaps controversially. The male and female divide is important to see, the money and power lies in the hands of older white men. A statistic that ended Nixon’s near-hit with a UBI system was false, but it was that UBI caused a 30% rise in divorce rates. “Money has rarely been put in the hands of women,” she tells me. That fact encapsulates the thinking that preserves that imbalance and inequality. Money flowing to women is something that terrifies something very archaic in the hearts of men. "The beauty of the western model is that it’s one of the first societies that gave full education access to women." Josien likens the educated western woman to the Trojan horse; a demographic finally able to infiltrate the systems that have historically been instrumental in maintaining the power gap between men and women.
Josien started meditating when she was about 18. May all be happy, may all be free of suffering, may all be exercising themselves happily and freely - the misconception that people wouldn’t do anything if they were given money is not something that people fighting for UBI want, and some of the evidence gathered from existing trials implies that almost the opposite would be true.
Original image credit - Priscilla Du Preez
“In essence, I believe that there’s enormous possibilities for people to do things. I can very humbly recognise that I can only oversee less than 1.5% of human possibilities, and we are a wonderful substance on the earth. We’re making a terrible mess now, trashing things and making ridiculous arguments amongst each other like obnoxious two year olds, but we have great potential.
The indigenous Americans say that humanity is only 200,000 years old, we’re the youngest species, and all the other species are looking at us and thinking we’re making all the mistakes in the world. There’s an interconnectedness of species, and our ancestors are probably just ensuring that we don’t fall off a cliff. We’re the youngest and possibly the most stupid species, because the other ones have already had time to figure things out. Our possibilities are endless but we’re having a tense moment that we have to get through.”
More about the author
AJ Whittle - Linked In
Mature student at University of Sheffield's School of English starting a career as a journalist with a deep interest in social issues.