Home » Healthy Communities » Basic income and ‘consensual capitalism’: an interview with Tim Ellis

Basic income and ‘consensual capitalism’: an interview with Tim Ellis

Tim Ellis

Roderick Benns recently interviewed Tim Ellis about a basic income guarantee. Ellis is a writer, producer, and communications consultant living in Toronto, Ontario. He serves on the executive committee of the NDP in his riding, and also leads the communications team for Basic Income Canada Network. Views expressed here are his own.

Benns: How did you come to be involved with the issue of a basic income guarantee? What drives you to advocate for it? 

Ellis: I spent the first 30 years of my life in the US, and I was heavily involved in the health care debates of Obama’s first term. When I moved to Canada in 2012, I knew I wanted to get involved politically on a similar level and I was looking for issues to get behind.

I’m fascinated by economics and have worked in finance, and I’m also a Millennial and living with the consequences of what we’ve been left by previous generations, so I’m keenly aware of how trends such as automation and outsourcing (aided by decades of neo-liberal policies) are reducing the value of labour on the market and driving a decoupling of wages from productivity.

In my quest for a way to address that issue, I stumbled across an article by former Conservative Senator Hugh Segal in which he explained a basic income. It piqued my interest, so I wrote to his office and he put me in touch with BICN, with whom I volunteer to this day.

I advocate for a basic income because I recognize that it makes both ethical and economic sense. An economy that is widely split between the haves and have-nots is bad for both classes; without sufficient demand from the consumer base, even the most successful capital-holder can’t earn on his or her investments. With the declining value of labour on the market, wages are no longer sufficient to get money into the hands of consumers. A basic income addresses that issue in the simplest, most effective, and most equitable fashion. Ethically speaking, of course, it’s perfectly aligned with Canadian values. We build a better society for all when we take care of each other. This is fundamental to the Canadian experience. Humans are a social species; taking care of each other has been the foundation of our success for thousands of years.

Benns: What about a basic income guarantee makes it a social justice issue? 

Ellis: Any labour market that is predicated on the threat of suffering for failure to work is inherently coercive – and when that market then fails to deliver sufficient jobs, we all share in the blame for the suffering those results. A basic income gives people real agency in their own lives, and real leverage when negotiating with employers. On top of that, one of the great virtues of capitalism is that it drives efficiency; however, one person’s efficiency is another person’s layoff slip. These are very real, very human costs that we all bear. Basic income is the key to building a truly consensual capitalism that allows us to retain the virtues of the market side of our economy while still looking after the human beings that are, after all, the reason for the whole thing.

A basic income also reprioritizes what we mean by “work.” As it stands, you’re only compensated for work the market values and that can deliver a profit for somebody. This means such essential and cherished human endeavours – parenting, leisure time with family and friends, engaging in art or play for the sheer joy of it, and so on – are tallied up as costs, not assets. These are the very heart of the human experience, and a basic income allows those who wish to contribute these essential assets to our society to do so without being punished for it.

Finally, I think there’s a huge mental health cost that our current structure imposes on our children. We’re creating a society that is adapted to constantly competing to take everything possible and to live in constant fear that it could, in turn, all be taken away. Kids go into deep debt to attend university for degrees that might not even get them a job, almost certainly not a job in the field they want, and all the while they know that the penalty for failure is grinding poverty and constant suffering. I don’t know what percentage of my peers suffer from crippling, daily anxiety, but it’s substantial. I refuse to believe that we simply need to accept constant fear and anxiety as the price of progress. I am so incredibly proud of our species. We are more than workers. We are more than consumers. And we need not live in fear.

Benns: The most common concern is about implementing a basic income guarantee is that too many of us would choose not to work. Why do you believe this won’t be the case?

Ellis: The simple answer is the evidence. Unpaid work is fundamental to the human experience. Hobbies, volunteer hours, church and community groups, raising families – that’s all work! It’s just not valued by the market because there’s no profit to it. But it’s valued by people, and so it gets done. Financial compensation is far from the only motivation for human endeavour. We already have several examples of a basic income being secured – the most relevant and most frequently cited in Canada is the “Mincome” pilot project in Dauphin, Manitoba – and the results routinely indicate that people either continue to work or choose to spend more time on valuable investments in the future such as education and child-rearing.

But let’s dive a little further on this one for a moment. When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone at my house. Today, my smartphone has more power than the entire Apollo project – all of NASA’s computational power, in my pocket! People in my generation view total automation as an inevitability. Maybe it will take a thousand years, maybe a hundred, but it’s coming. And when it does, what then? Are we going to have the machines assign us busy-work so we can keep earning paycheques to scrape out a minimum-wage living? We’re already seeing a huge decoupling between productivity and wages, we’re already seeing ten or twenty people being able to do the work that used to take thousands. In any rational society, the premise “less work that people need to do” would be a good thing and should free up people to pursue their own dreams. Instead, because we’ve tied survival to an outdated wage-based model, we get people “freed” from their careers and immediately forced to chase after whatever work remains, no matter how bad it is, just to stay alive. Why is that a smart arrangement? How does society benefit from that?

Benns: When you imagine Canadian life with this policy in place — say 10 years of the basic income guarantee — what does the country look like? How has it changed?

Ellis: Existing trends towards contract labour rather than traditional employment have greatly accelerated, as the precariousness that used to be associated with these more efficient models has been drastically reduced. Small businesses have flourished – a reliable supply of capital to the consumer base has created a much more viable environment for businesses to work within at the same time that freedom from the coercive need to work in highly demanding yet extremely underpaid positions has allowed individuals to go into business for themselves as entrepreneurs. The result is a dynamic local economy.

Public health outcomes have begun to improve sharply, as people are able to access preventative care and as they live without constant anxiety imposing a draining and damaging “fight or flight” mentality. As a result, health care costs have begun to swing downward, just as predicted by the health care organizations that led the way in recognizing a basic income as a crucial investment.

Political engagement has increased, as people feel more directly invested in the political and social system. Basic income is one of the few issues that unites the political spectrum (something that is already true). Political activism remains lively, but without the same sense of alienation and desperation that had for so long set upper and lower classes artificially against one another. Where so many for so long had seen only a ceiling, now there is a firm floor on which to stand for themselves – and the sky is the limit.

Leaders and Legacies is conducting an ongoing campaign for the elimination of poverty in Canada, through this news program. From interviewing well-known Canadians, to researchers, to community support workers, to average people across the country, we will work tirelessly for a more equitable Canada through advocacy, policy change, and the power of stories. 

If you are an organization and would like to speak to us about funding or participating in this campaign, contact us here. If you are an individual and can support our campaign, please use the PayPal button on the front page of this news site. 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>