Universal Basic Services

Universal Basic Services

There’s a lot to like about the concept of providing baseline services (the specifics vary, but I personally think of food, shelter, healthcare, internet/mobile phone service, and education as good early goals) to absolutely everyone.

This is a variation on the idea of Universal Basic Income, which riles people who don’t like the idea of providing monetary “handouts” to people they perceive to be lazy, not contributing to society, etc. Some worry that this money will be squandered, so providing fundamental services, instead, helps bypass some (though not all) of those concerns.

By packaging up the necessities of life and growth, we raise the overall floor of society and provide folks with the tools and resources required to lift themselves up (if they choose to do so), while also providing enough that—if you ever chose to do so—you could take a break from work, could recover from a layoff or the disappearance of your industry (due to AI, robots, changes in energy technologies, etc) in relative comfort, and could decide at some point in your life to change careers (or life paths) by stepping away from what you’re doing and picking up whatever new knowledge and know-how you need; it allows us (and our economies) to be more flexible.

It would seem to be a win-win for individuals and society, and there are ways to make it work economically (this has been tested in admittedly quite small experiments globally, but the math also seems to add-up when you scale it to the macro level—though of course it would require the rewiring of a lot of other norms we currently take for granted to get there), but it’s generally politically unviable at the moment for a variety of (mostly ideological) reasons, and thus could happen, but probably won’t for a while longer, if ever.

All that said, here’s a piece about the concept through the lens of how such a system would make us more resilient in the face of all the climate-related changes we’re seeing now, and will see in the future: https://neweconomics.org/2023/02/we-need-universal-basic-services-to-tackle-the-climate-crisis

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