Universal Basic Income, Degrowth, and the Future of Work
Exploring alternative and complimentary approaches to the growth mindset
The future of work is rapidly unfolding in front of us.
Transformation has been accelerating over the past decades, and the massive disruption of the global COVID-19 pandemic added a further boost to these changes.
From a rise in digitization and remote collaboration to an ever-increasing number of people entirely rethinking conventional employment and opting for more freedom and flexibility over higher salaries, traditional models are being challenged everywhere.
Personally I have spent a large part of my professional career working on one of the major drivers behind transformation: artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The first reaction many people have when thinking about the impact of AI and automation on the future of work is fear — fear of being replaced by the machines.
But I have a much more positive outlook on this. I’m not denying that AI will have a huge impact on the job landscape, but I am hopeful that this impact will be largely positive.
Rather than being replaced by machines, handing over the busywork to them will free us up to focus on our uniquely human gifts — such as empathy and creativity — which right now are greatly underutilized.
Our constant busyness and “hustle culture” are actually at odds with human productivity, and it’s time we hand them over to technology that’s much more suited to the kind of work that benefits from tirelessly grinding things out.
The increasing capability of AI and other automation technologies is one of the most obvious sources of transformation over the coming decades (and I have written about it extensively in other places).
But it is far from the only one.
The Degrowth Movement
One alternative (or potentially complementary) scenario to the rise of AI, but with a similar conclusion for the importance of empathy and creativity, is the Degrowth movement. Its roots in economic theory go back at least to the 1960s when an MIT team led by Donella Meadows published The Limits of Growth. But the degrowth movement was properly born in the early 2000s, starting in France (under the original name décroissance).
In his book Degrowth, environmental scientist Giorgos Kallis describes the early movement as an “amalgam of research and action — a mixture of researchers, professors, activists and downshifters, who lived as they professed.” From there it has since grown into an active community of academics, with a research conference every two years. In 2014, over 4000 scholars from different fields attended the conference.
At the core of degrowth is a “ruthless critique of the dogma of more — the dogma of economic growth.”
The Growth Paradigm
Our current economy is so deeply rooted in growth that any suggestion otherwise may be seen as crazy.
Kallis calls this underlying assumption “‘the growth paradigm’: the idea that perpetual economic growth is natural, necessary and desirable.”
But growth needs fuel, and this fuel comprises human and non-human resources. Both these will eventually run low.
Our current population growth cannot be sustained forever (and has already started reversing in some countries). And natural resources get depleted. Our current renewable energy technologies have a very low energy return on investment (EROI): lots of energy needs to be invested in getting energy back out.
Supporters of “green growth” believe that the EROI of renewables will eventually improve to a point where they can by themselves sustain growth, but, while not impossible, Kallis believes the green growth scenario to be implausible. At first, changing the infrastructure to renewables would come at a huge cost, dampening growth. And eventually, we would need more and more surface area covered with e.g., wind or solar farms.
Unless we assume that we can constantly improve technology, sustained growth is physically impossible. The only way to achieve this would be if we discovered a third “Prometheus technology,” a fundamentally new energy technology like fire and steam engines before it.
We cannot rule this out (fusion, for example), but relying on it is foolish. As Kallis notes,
“by logical necessity economic growth must come to an end, independently of what one measures or how. Constant compound growth of anything quickly runs to infinity.”
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Growth generally focuses on GDP as its main metric. But supporters of degrowth believe this to be a grossly inadequate measure.
What do we actually care about as humans? At the most fundamental level, many would argue happiness and well-being.
But despite growing GDP, most objective measurements of well-being (such as the Genuine Progress Indicator GPI or the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare ISEW) have all been stagnant over the last few decades.
Above a certain GDP per capita, we can find no increase in these metrics. GDP is a bad measure of welfare, but it seems to correlate rather well with carbon emissions and environmental damage.
So while “green growth” focuses on increasing GDP while staying environmentally positive, degrowth doesn’t care about GDP. Its aim is welfare.
“Degrowth,” writes Kallis, “refers to a trajectory where the ’throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decrease while welfare, or well-being improves.” Crucially, this is not the same as negative growth or recession.
The focus is on reducing throughput, the use of resources, while improving living conditions. Whether output and GDP decrease in the process is a different but rather irrelevant matter.
“The problem is not only that the economy cannot or should not grow. Our very ideas of what an economy is are wrong.”
We are simply measuring the wrong thing.
Safe Transitions
The problem is, we have been measuring growth in this way for a long time and built a system that relies on the continuation of this kind of growth.
Kallis admits that directly switching our current economy to the degrowth mindset would lead to economic disaster and collapse. Instead, we need small steps to rebuild a new economy from the ground up.
The push for this comes from two directions.
From the outside, as a criticism of economic thinking itself, but also from inside economics, considering the risk and cost of growth, which can outweigh the benefits.
The agenda of the degrowth research program is to find out how and under what conditions such a transition can happen without disaster. Even if such conditions can be found, everyone involved knows that achieving political change will still be difficult.
“Unlike ecological laws, however, political systems can change. It was hard to end slavery, but it was not impossible. It is impossible, though, to change the law of entropy.”
Overall, the degrowth proposition looks positive, according to Kallis: “A transformation of society with a concomitant reduction in economic activity and throughput is not only necessary, and desirable, but also possible.”
A Society of Noble Leisure
If we achieve a transition to degrowth, we might find ourselves once again in a society that values time off as one of its highest virtues.
French economics professor Serge Latouche, one founder of the degrowth movement, has a concept called the “eight Rs” of degrowth.
One of the Rs he describes as “reevaluating, that is, valuing the ‘pleasure of leisure,’ for example, or the ‘ethos of play’ instead of material possessions.”
Similarly, Ph.D. researcher Aaron Vansintjan at Birbeck, University of London, imagines a society after degrowth with, among other things, “surpluses expended in popular feasts, philosophy or leisure, instead of invested for more growth; and conviviality and caring for one another, and for non-human living beings.”
It sounds a lot like the positive aspects of ancient Rome or Greece, bringing us full circle to a culture of noble leisure that Aristotle advocated for. Previous civilizations have flourished under this kind of model, and potentially we can do so once again.
UBI — Enabling Humans to Do Human Work
Just as in a society where AI is replacing most routine jobs, so too in a degrowth society will creative, emotional, and care work play a central role.
One tool that could support this is the introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Currently, a large fraction of care work goes entirely unpaid, such as the work of a stay-at-home mother, or someone taking time off to care for their elderly parent.
UBI would support these people and remunerate them for their work. It would also generally facilitate wealth redistribution to those who decide to contribute to society through currently unpaid “jobs” like care or creative work.
In practice, UBI would be financed as an additional tax. For those above a certain wealth or income threshold, this tax will be higher than the benefit they receive from UBI. As such, it could serve to shrink the wealth gap.
According to Kallis, “Spain suggests that a basic income of €400–600 per month could be funded through increased taxation, leaving the after-tax income of the middle classes unchanged, redistributing from the very rich to the very poor.”
Boosting Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
A universal basic income is also not necessarily an incentive to be lazy and not work, as many people think.
Unlike unemployment benefits, you still receive UBI even if you work. As most of us have probably realized at one point or another, doing nothing gets boring quickly, and many people opt for much more active — and productive — forms of leisure if given a chance.
UBI takes some risks away from trying an uncertain and challenging pursuit.
In situations of scarcity, whether that’s money or time, we lose the big picture view and only see the very next thing. The scarcity places a high cognitive load on us. Our focus narrows to solely the next item on our to-do list. Creativity and big breakthroughs become impossible.
The support of UBI would help alleviate this. It is very likely that the arts, entrepreneurship, and moonshot thinking would flourish as a result.
The Pitfalls
Of course, such a drastic proposal comes with many challenges, most of which are beyond the scope of this article.
But as some examples, we can think of the issue of lower-paid jobs potentially disappearing since employers don’t see any reason to pay their employees minimum wages anymore.
Similarly, people would be increasingly reliant on the government under UBI.
And the question of immigration and who exactly is and who is not entitled to UBI is yet another can of worms.
Questions We Can No Longer Ignore
UBI is only one of the many ideas currently pursued by academics studying the possibilities of degrowth.
While optimistic, Kallis concedes that a transition to degrowth is unlikely to be easy or smooth.
But it might still be our best option.
The end of fossil fuel is coming, whether we want it or not. Under the current growth economy, this will lead to disaster. Implementing degrowth early enough could lead to a less dramatic outcome.
In Kallis’s words,
“it is unlikely that technology will allow the economy to grow while resources and energy use decrease to the level necessary. […] If this is right, then the future will by necessity be one of lower throughput — the question is whether it will be by design or by disaster. The spread of the degrowth imaginary creates the conditions needed to turn the disaster into a desired future.”
He concludes his book with the following statement:
“You may agree or disagree with the degrowth prognosis and diagnosis, but you cannot deny that they raise inconvenient questions that we can no longer afford to ignore.”
And I would certainly agree with this last part.
Busyness and the culture of overwork have been deeply entwined with a culture of growth, as the rhetoric of almost any early-stage startup shows. So the questions raised by the degrowth movement also directly touch on the issues of work and leisure.
Maybe, as Kallis suggests, it’s time to take some of our resources, material as well as mental, out of the constant growth cycles, and reinvest them instead into leisure and culture, creative pursuits without and direct output, and spending time with family and friends.
Conditional Basic Income
Universal Basic Income is one idea on how to respond to the growth of automation, but many criticize it, including experts in the field of AI.
Andrew Ng believes we should be paid to learn. Rather than a Universal Basic Income, he believes in a Conditional Basic Income.
Ng was the former head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, the creator of Google’s deep-learning team, Google Brain. He also founded Coursera.org to help people learn emerging skills remotely.
With Ng’s practical exposure to where technology is evolving humans’ relationship to work, he believes we need an updated version of the New Deal, the Depression-era economic program that invested in getting unemployed Americans back to work.
Ng supports a model known as conditional basic income (CBI), where the government subsidizes the education to retrain individuals to fill these new types of jobs. With this model, Ng believes we maintain the dignity of work and purpose.
Incentives for Personal Growth
At the heart of Conditional Basic Income is the approach of paying displaced workers to learn new job skills that will be in high demand.
Ng spotlights that “there are lots of jobs for which society cannot find enough employees. Everything from healthcare workers to teachers to wind turbine technicians and deep learning researchers.”
According to him, an unconditional basic income would likely urge people who are “trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work.” So rather than compensating people to not be contributors to the economy, we should incentivize them to study and develop relevant skills.
Ng elaborates on why he is skeptical of Universal Basic Income:
“Silicon Valley has a lot of excitement about unconditional basic income. I don’t support that. There’s a lot of dignity to work. For someone that’s unemployed, I really support the government giving them a safety net with the expectation that they’ll do something to contribute back, such as study, so they can gain the skills they need to re-enter the workforce and contribute back to the tax base that is hopefully paying for all of this.”
Thriving or Learning
Take a moment to imagine what would happen if we were paid to learn? What if that was the lowest you could go in terms of opportunity and survival?
In this scenario you could either be thriving in the marketplace, as an above-average salary worker or leading as an entrepreneur, or at worst if you failed as an entrepreneur or couldn’t get the above-average salary in the marketplace, your default job and compensation would be as a student learning a relevant skill that is an upcoming demand in the marketplace.
It would be a refreshing reality if nobody had to say, “I am currently unemployed” because they would say, “I am currently learning X.”
Andrew Ng’s idea of a conditional basic income will be met with its fair share of criticism, but he reminds us that learning is at the core of our evolution and creation of abundance.
“In this brighter future I want to build, you wouldn’t go to school for four years and then code for the rest of your life. You have to be a lifelong learner. Even when you’re employed by a company, the company now has a higher responsibility to support you to keep your skills current. And with the rise of digital content businesses, [we] actually have the ability to do that at low cost and with very high levels of efficiency. Education is needed to create a stream of talent to really support business and government, as well as to have a well-educated electorate which is crucial to having a well-functioning democracy.”
The Future of Work Looks Bright
Whatever the future holds, the words of Heraclitus still ring as true today as they did 25 millennia ago: “Change is the only constant in life.”
Whether we continue on our current growth trajectory, maybe aided and upheld through contunuing rapid advances in AI and automation technology, embark on an alternative journey that entirely abandons growth as an objective, or settle somewhere on a middle path, potentially with UBI as one of its fundamental pillars, transformation will continue and likely accelerate.
Whichever path we chose, it is worth exploring and objectively considering the different options, instead of unconsciously falling into one of them.
I encourage you to think for yourself how you would reallocate your time, energy, and attention if the above scenarios would come into effect. Even without them actually unfolding in this way, the exercise might bring you new-found clarity and self-awareness in the present moment, and greater resilience along the unpredictable path ahead of us.
Personally I am not advocating for or against any of the approaches above (nor do I believe I’m qualified to do so). I am however strongly supporting their proclaimed effects on work, leisure, creativity, empathy, and our collective humanity — whether we achieve them through these programs or otherwise.
Regardless of the direction we will eventually take, I am cautiously optimistic for the future of work, and our society at large.
This article started its life in an early draft for my bestselling book Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress, as part of the chapter on the future of work. While it didn’t make it through the final editing process (mainly to keep the chapter as concise as possible), I hope you enjoyed it in this standalone form. And if you liked this piece, I’m sure you would love the book.