Would the world be better off with a higher basic income?

Sadly, today we can't even start dreaming before we wake up. There is an old saying that dreams often turn into nightmares. Utopia is a breeding ground for conflict, violence and even genocide. Utopia eventually becomes dystopia; In fact, utopia is dystopia. "Human progress is a myth." There is also an old saying that goes like this. Instead, we've created a medieval paradise.

Yes, history is full of terrifying utopian forms, fascism, Nazism, just as every religion spawns several fanatical sects. But if one fanatic incites violence, should we ban an entire religion? So why kill utopianism? Should we simply stop dreaming of a better country?

No, of course not. Yet that is exactly what is happening. Optimism and pessimism have become synonymous, differentiated only by consumer confidence. Radical ideas about another world are simply unthinkable. Expectations of society have faded dramatically, leaving us with the cold fact that there is no utopia, only the rule of technology. Politics has been reduced to problem management. Voters are wavering not because the parties are so far apart but because it is almost impossible to tell them apart, with right and left now separated by income tax rates of one or two percentage points.

We know from the news media that politics is a game in which the cause, not the ideal, is played. We see that in academia, everyone is too busy writing and publishing books to read and debate. In fact, universities in the 21st century are nothing short of factories, as are our hospitals, schools and television networks. The most important thing is to achieve the goal. Whether it's growth in economics, ratings or circulation -- quality is indeed slowly but steadily being replaced by quantity.

There is a force pushing all this forward, and it is sometimes called "liberalism", an idea that has almost been hollowed out. The most important thing now is to "be yourself" and "do what you love". Freedom may be our highest ideal, but our freedom has become a hollow freedom. Morality has become a taboo in public debate for fear of lecturing in any form. After all, the public arena is supposed to be "neutral" -- but its performance has never been so arbitrary. On every street corner, we encounter temptations to drink, party, borrow, shop, toil, stress and cheat. For all our talk of free speech, our values are suspiciously close to those preached by companies that can afford prime time advertising. We will rise up against a political party or sect that affects us and our children even a fraction of what advertising does. But because it was a market economy, we were "neutral".

The only thing the government can do now is to settle the dispute. If you are not a meek citizen, unwilling to go in the direction specified by that blueprint, then the authorities will be only too happy to oblige you. What are their means? Control, monitor and suppress.

At the same time, the welfare state's attention is gradually shifting from the causes of our discontent to the symptoms. We go to the doctor when we're sick, to a therapist when we're depressed, to a nutritionist when we're overweight, to prison when we're criminal, to a career counselor when we're unemployed. All these services cost a lot of money, but they are ineffective. Healthcare costs in the US are among the highest in the world, yet life expectancy is actually falling in many places.

Markets and commercial interests have always enjoyed complete freedom. The food industry has provided us with cheap junk food full of salt, sugar and fat, which soon sends us to the doctor and nutritionist. More and more jobs are being destroyed by the rapid development of technology, and we have to see the career counselor again. Advertisements encourage us to spend money we don't have in our pockets on junk we don't need, just to impress people we can't stand. Then we can go to a dietitian and cry on his shoulder.

Yes this is the dystopia we live in today.

The spoiled generation

This is not to say - and I cannot stress this enough - that it is not good at all. Far from it. If anything, today's kids are struggling with too much coddling. Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has studied the attitudes of young people today and in the past, has found a significant increase in self-esteem since the 1980s. The younger generation sees themselves as smarter, more responsible and more attractive than ever before.

"Every kid in this generation has been told, 'You can do whatever you want,'" Twenge explains. You are unique '." We grow up with narcissism, yet once we enter this vast society filled with countless opportunities, more and more of us lose badly. The world turned out to be cold and harsh, full of competition and unemployment. The world is not Disneyland. You can't wish on a star and see all your dreams come true. It's a competitive society, and if you don't measure up, you have only yourself to blame.

It should come as no surprise that narcissism masks the vagaries of the world. Twenge also found that we have become less daring over the decades. Comparing 269 cases from 1952 and 1993, she concluded that the average child living in North America in the early 1990s was more anxious than the mentally ill in the early 1950s. Depression has even become the biggest health problem for adolescents and will be the world's number one disease by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

It's a vicious circle. Never before have so many young people been seeing psychiatrists. Never before have so many people become bored with their careers so early. And we're gulping down antidepressants like never before. We repeatedly blame individuals for collective problems like unemployment, dissatisfaction, depression. If success is a choice, then it is failure. Out of a job? You should work harder. Is sick? You must not have a very healthy lifestyle. Not happy? Take some medicine.

In the 1950s, only 12 percent of young people agreed with the statement "I am unique." Now it's 80 percent, and in fact, we're becoming more and more alike. We're all reading the same bestseller, watching the same blockbuster, wearing the same sneakers. Our grandparents still obey the rules of family, church and state, while we are surrounded by media, marketing and paternalistic government. Yet even as we become more and more alike, we become more and more distant from the era of the great collective. Church and trade union membership are collapsing, and traditional lines between left and right no longer mean much. All we care about is "problem solving", as if politics can be outsourced to management consultants.

Sure enough, some people are trying to rekindle faith in development. Is it any wonder that the cultural ICONS of our time are nerds? The apps and gadgets they invent represent the promise of economic growth. "The smartest people of my generation are figuring out how to get people to click on ads." "A former math whiz at Facebook complained recently.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, it is important to clarify here that capitalism opens the door to a land of plenty, but capitalism alone is not enough to sustain it. Development has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the 21st century will require us to come up with other ways to improve our quality of life. Young people in the West have largely entered an apolitical technocracy, but in search of a new utopia, we will have to return to politics again.

In that sense, I am heartened by our discontent, which is far from apathy. People all over the world are homesick, longing for a past that never existed, which shows that we still have ideals, even when we bury them ourselves.

Progress begins with something that has nothing to do with economics: wisdom about the good life. We have to do what John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes advocated 100 years ago, Think "value over means, like what is good, rather than what is useful". We have to think about the future. Opinion polls and relentless news coverage full of bad news must stop consuming our discontent. Other ways must be devised to form new collectives. We must rise above the zeitgeist that binds us and recognize that we share the same dream.

Maybe then, too, we can look beyond ourselves and re-examine the world. We will see the kind of development that was good before moving forward happily. We shall see that we live in a glorious age, a time when hunger and war are declining, when life expectancy is soaring, when prosperity is everywhere. But we're also going to see how much more we -- the top 10 percent, or 5 percent, or 1 percent of the population -- can do.

Return to Utopia

It's time to rethink utopias.

We need a new North Star, a new map of the world with a distant and unknown continent -- Utopia. I don't mean the kind of theocracy or five-year plan that utopian zealots try to ram down our throats - they only make real people succumb to fanatical dreams. Think about it: The word "utopia" means both "land of peace" and "land of nothing." What we need is some alternative vision that captures our imagination. And I do think there's more than one vision; After all, the existence of conflicting utopias is the lifeblood of democracy.

As usual, our utopia started small. Dreamers long ago laid the foundation stones of today's civilization at their own pace. The Spanish monk Bartolome de Las Casas (1484-1566) argued that the colonists in Latin America were on an equal footing with the natives and tried to establish colonies where individuals could live comfortably. Factory owner Robert Owen (1771-1858) supported the emancipation of workers in England. He paid fair wages to his workers and prohibited corporal punishment. His cotton mill was very successful. The philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) even believed in equality between men and women. (This may have something to do with the fact that half of his books were written by his wife.)

But one thing is certain: Without this generation of naive dreamers, we would still be poor, hungry, dirty, scared, stupid, sick and ugly. Without utopia, we will lose direction. Not that it's that bad; The opposite is true. But if we don't have any hope of getting better, our lives will be barren. "Man needs not only comforts for his own happiness, but also hope, cause, and change." The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said so. He continues elsewhere: "We should look forward, not to a perfect utopia, but to a world alive with imagination and hope."

Micombe in Canada

In the attic of a warehouse in Winnipeg, Canada, nearly 200 dusty boxes are piled up. It was filled with material -- photographs, forms, reports, transcripts of interviews -- related to a fascinating postwar social experiment: Mincome.

Evelyn Forget, a professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2004. She spent five long years searching for them before finally finding the boxes in the National Archives in 2000. "The archive staff are considering whether they can throw the boxes away because they take up too much space and no one seems interested in them." Fugate later recalled.

When Fugate first entered the attic, he could hardly believe his eyes. It's a treasure trove of information about Thomas More's dream 500 years ago in the real world.

Among the nearly 1,000 interviews contained in those boxes was a transcript of an interview with Hugh and Doreen Henderson. When the experiment began 35 years ago, Hugh was a janitor at a high school and Doreen was a stay-at-home mom with two children. The Hendersons were not financially comfortable. Doreen keeps chickens in her garden to keep her family nourished. Their days are so tight that they wish a penny could be broken into two halves.

Until one day, two well-dressed men appeared at their door. "We filled out the forms, and they wanted to know our income." "Doreen recalled. Then their financial problems were in the past. Hugh and Doreen took part in Micombe, Canada's first major social experiment and, to date, the world's largest basic income experiment.

In March 1973, the premier of Manitoba allocated $83 million for the project. He chose Dauphin, a small town northwest of Winnipeg with a population of just 13,000, as the site for his experiment. Everyone in Dauphin receives a basic income to ensure that no one lives below the poverty line. In fact, this means that 30 percent of the town's residents -- 1,000 households in total -- will receive a check each month. A family of four would receive roughly $19,000 a year in today's money, and no questions would be asked.

As the experiment began, a large group of researchers arrived in town. Economists look at whether residents are working less, sociologists look at the impact on family life, and anthropologists sit in communities to see how residents react up close.

Four years into the program, things are going well, but the election issue is a big obstacle. The Conservative Party won the election and came to power. The new Canadian cabinet is not keen on such an expensive experiment, three-quarters of which is paid for by the federal government. After learning that the new government would not even fund an analysis of the results of the experiment, the researchers decided to pack all the documents into 2,000 boxes.

Residents of Dauphin feel a great sense of loss. When it first began in 1974, Micombe was considered a pilot scheme that would soon be rolled out nationwide. Now it seems destined for oblivion. "Government officials opposed to Micombe no longer wanted to spend money analyzing data and coming to a conclusion they already knew: It doesn't work, "says one researcher." And those who approve of Micombe are worried because if the data comes out bad, it means they've spent another million dollars on the data, which will only embarrass them more."

When Professor Fugate first heard about Micombe, no one knew for sure what, if anything, the experiment had proved. Coincidentally, however, around the same time, in 1970, Canada introduced its Medicare program. The Medicare files provided Fugate with a wealth of data to compare Dauphin with nearby towns and controls. For three years, she worked on various statistical analyses of the data. No matter how she tried, the result was the same every time.

"Micombe" was a huge success.

From experiment to law

"There is a political concern that once you have a guaranteed annual income, people will stop working and start having children in large numbers." "Fugate said.

The opposite is true. Young people are delaying marriage and fertility rates are falling. Their academic performance improved significantly: the Micomans worked harder and more efficiently. As a result, total hours worked fell by only 1% for men, 3% for married women and 5% for unmarried women. Men who are the breadwinners are doing little less work, new mothers are taking months off on cash grants, and students are staying longer in school.

What surprised Fugate most was the 8.5 percent drop in hospitalization rates. Given the rich world's huge spending on public health, the financial implications would be profound. Over the years, domestic violence also declined, as did mental health problems. Micombe made the whole town healthy. Fugate can even see the impact of accepting the minimum wage on the next generation, both in terms of income and health.

Dauphin -- the town without poverty -- is one of five income-security experiments in North America. The other four experiments were conducted in the United States. Few people now know that the United States came close to having a social safety net at least as extensive as most Western European countries. When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his "War on Poverty" in 1964, both Democrats and Republicans supported basic welfare reform.

But first, some experiments are needed. In the first large-scale social experiment ever conducted to separate experimental and control groups, tens of millions of dollars in government budgets were allocated to provide a basic income to more than 8,500 Americans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Indiana, Seattle and Denver. The researchers wanted to find answers to three questions :(1) do people work much less now that they have a secure income? (2) Is the plan too expensive? (3) Is it politically feasible?

The answers are yes, no and yes.

The overall reduction in hours worked has been very limited. "Our findings do not support the 'lazy' theory at all," said the lead data analyst for the Denver experiment. "There has been no dramatic reduction in workload as predicted by the pessimists." Paid work per family fell by an average of 9%, and the decline in workloads in every state was mainly among twentysomethings and women with children.

Later research suggests that even that 9 per cent figure may have been exaggerated. In the initial study, this figure was based on self-reported income, but when we compared it with official records, we found that a significant amount of income was not reported. After filling in that gap, the researchers found that people were working almost no fewer hours.

"The search for a better job, or other beneficial activities such as working from home, no doubt partially compensated for the decline in paid hours." "A summary of the Seattle experiment wrote. For example, a mother who dropped out of high school cut her job so she could get a psychology degree and get a job as a researcher. Another mother is studying acting: her husband has started composing music. "We are now self-sufficient and earning artists." "She told the researchers. For the young people in the experiment, almost all of their time outside paid work was spent studying. Among New Jersey subjects, the percentage of high school graduates increased by 30 percent.

So in 1968, as young protesters took to the streets around the world, Five famous economists -- John Kenneth Galbraith, Harold Watts, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson ) and Robert Lampman -- wrote an open letter to Congress. "The state's responsibility will not be fulfilled until every citizen receives a wage that is not below the official poverty line." So they say in an article published on the front page of the New York Times. The cost, according to the economists, would be "high, but more than sufficient for the country's economy and finances".

The letter was signed by 1,200 economists.

Their appeal did not go unnoticed. The following August, President Nixon introduced a basic income bill that he called "the single most significant piece of social legislation in our nation's history." The baby boomers, according to Nixon, will do two things that their forebears could not have done. In addition to putting a man on the moon, which has already happened, their generation will finally eradicate poverty.

A poll by Bai Guan showed that 90% of newspapers responded enthusiastically to the plan. The Chicago Sun-Limes called it a "giant leap forward," and the Los Angeles Times called it a "bold new blueprint." The National Council of Churches, labor unions and even the business sector supported the bill. One cable sent to the White House said: "Two upper-middle class Republicans who will pay for this plan shout out." Experts are even quoting Victor Hugo -- the idea of the time has come, and it will prevail."

It seems that basic income's time really has come.

"The welfare program passed... The Reform movement has won a battle, "read the headline in the Covenant Times on April 16, 1970. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved President Nixon's Helping Families Program (FAP) by a vote of 243 to 155. Most experts expect the Senate to pass the bill as well, with an even higher percentage in favor than the House. The Senate Finance Committee, however, has doubts. "This is by far the deepest, most expensive and most extensive welfare bill we have ever dealt with." So says one Republican senator. But the fiercest opposition came from Democratic lawmakers. They argue that Bolsa Familia does not go far enough and that basic income should be raised even higher. After months of back and forth between the Senate and the White House, the bill was abandoned.

The next year, Nixon resubmitted the bill to Congress with minor tweaks. The House passed the bill again, this time as part of a package of reforms. This time there were 288 votes in favour and 133 against. In his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon called the plan "a secure income for every American family with children" the most important item on his agenda.

However, the bill hit the rocks again in the Senate.

Still, basic income was shelved for good until 1978, when the final results of the Seattle experiment revealed a fatal flaw in the plan. One finding in particular stands out: the divorce rate has soared by more than 50 percent. Interest in this data quickly overshadowed all the other gains, such as improved academic performance and improved health. The basic income clearly gives women too much freedom.

A decade later, a re-analysis of the data revealed errors in the previous count; In fact, the divorce rate hasn't changed at all.