I’m convinced the solution to the social ills of our society is a universal basic income, and a peer reviewed study in Canada confirms my instinct.
The study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, gave fifty homeless people in the Vancouver area a lump sum of $7,500 and tracked what they did with the money.
As part of the study researchers also asked eleven-hundred people to predict how the money would be spent. Most thought recipients would waste it on “temptation goods” like alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.
They were wrong. Recipients of the cash increased spending on essentials like food, clothes, and rent. They also managed to save money to help with the year ahead.
Ask anyone who is or has been poor and they’ll confirm what Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman has been saying for years.
Poverty isn’t a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.
Rutger Bregman – The Correspondent 2020
For me the Foundations for Social Change study blows to smithereens the right-wing narrative that poverty is a choice, or that poor people are lazy, or “bad at rational decision-making and self-control”.
Poverty isn’t a lifestyle choice, something that can be changed at will, it’s a consequence of our profoundly stratified society. Millions trapped in low wage jobs because they lack the familial wealth to ensure a decent education. Millions more held back because they lack the nepotistic connections to advance. More still hobbled because they reject the ruthless instincts so prized by a society that revels in the binary of winners and losers. And what of those made sick by the toxic conditions of a society that demands participation in the unending grind?
Poverty is a mountain and escaping it is like trying to dig out from under it with a plastic spoon.
As we hurtle towards ecological collapse, the ensuing chaos will hit the poorest hardest. We’re already seeing hundreds of thousands fleeing social and ecological collapse. Also consider the rise in the use of artificial intelligence. Technologies created to remove the need for and cost of workers are not new, but this iteration feels altogether more final. Perhaps because it coincides with environmental collapse. It will make hundreds of millions, billions, surplus to requirements. What happens to all but the few billionaires able to buy a valley in New Zealand with a fresh water supply?
We the poor are not responsible for these problems or advances, but I have no doubt we will be the ones to pay. As things worsen, and without a universal basic income, will we be abandoned on a hillside as carrion?