Antti Kasvio, FIOH

Some heretic thoughts about basic income & new forms of work Seminar on Basic Income Kela November 24, 2014

© Finnish Institute of Occupational Health – www.ttl.fi

The incurable crisis of modern social protection systems

• The target: homogenous wage-earner societies with high levels of participation

• social protection as an insurance against all kinds of social risks

• income traps as a key problem

• activation as the standard solution

• Actual situation

• secular stagnation despite exceptionally active monetary policies & extensive public sector deficits

• social polarization & precarisation of work

• harder attitudes towards the poor, less money available for meaningful activation

• Future trends

• the actual goal running further away from one year to the next

• worsening social problems

• policymakers offering more of the same as a solution

© Finnish Institute of Occupational Health – www.ttl.fi

Basic income as an alternative

• Rationale • everybody could feel more secure • real incentives to earn additional incomes • possibilities to do meaningful things instead of having

to participate in senseless & badly organized activation projects

• a creative input to the economy

• Problems • any basic income system far beyond the financing pos-

sibilities of modern societies – except Norway or Saudi Arabia

• how to legitimate the extensive transfer of income from those who work & pay taxes to those who don’t?

• and significant reduction of welfare services? • would create new kinds of poverty traps & isolate

people from the rest of society

© Finnish Institute of Occupational Health – www.ttl.fi

A second thought

• Something new must be tried anyway • because of the incurable crisis of existing social pro-

tection systems

• What has been suggested? • e.g. throwing money from helicopters in order to revitalize

the economy

• A perfect neoliberal strategy? • would create a positive demand shock to the economy

• would legitimate a drastic reduction of welfare services

• and more economic utilization of labour in organizations

• political pressures to achieve full employment would be reduced

• the unleashed creative potentials could be utilized

• many people would become marginalized anyway

• the sharpest edge of protests could be eliminated

© Finnish Institute of Occupational Health – www.ttl.fi

Sustainability is the real challenge

• We live currently far beyond our means • in 2007 the Earth’s biocapacity was ~1,7 ha per capita,

the ecological footprint of AIC’s 6,1 ha per capita

• Three key trends • people in the developing world strive to reach modern

living standards

• the world’s total population increases >40 per cent from 2007 to 2050

• human activities will reduce the Earth’s biocapacity

• the same trends continue also during the latter half of our century

• Our whole existence becomes increasingly precarious

• the enthropic processes are already in motion

• we must build an entirely new type of sustainable civili-zation within a historically very short period of time

© Finnish Institute of Occupational Health – www.ttl.fi

The basic source of our future security • The Earth’s biocapacity will probably be about

1,1 ha per capita in 2050 • the right to extend one’s own ecological footprint should

be distributed as equally as possible among the entire humankind

• A huge amount of human effort & creativity required to satisfy our basic needs & to create the preconditions for good living within this space • how to increase the energy, material & waste efficiency of

all our activities sixfold in only 35 years of time?

• We cannot eat our basic income • but I could very well imagine basic income as the basis for

organizing these work efforts in future

• so far only imagine; serious discussions about ways to save our civilization haven’t even started in mainstream politics

25.11.2014 5 Thanks!