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Antti Kasvio (FIOH): Some heretic thoughts about basic income & new forms of work. Basic income – basic rights symposium 24.11.2014 Kela, Helsinki.
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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!