What Scotland can learn from the world’s first UBI

January 6, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” – Confucius

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
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(Image Source: Wikimedia)

I like to say that in politics everything seems impossible right up until the moment it becomes inevitable. What this means is that in hindsight, it’s easy to see how something happened even though the campaign had to fight through a mire of “it’ll never happen” almost all the way.

Few campaigns exemplify this maxim for me better than the campaign I’ve been a part of for more than a decade for Scotland to introduce a Universal Basic Income. What began as a campaign so outlandish and so seemingly utopian that we may as well have promised the Moon and the stars has reached the point where, in theory at least, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in favour of the principle of a UBI (The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems all support one in principle and Scottish Labour supports the weaker idea of a Minimum Income Guarantee though I do not believe they’d vote against a UBI if it came to it), even if the barriers to actually implementing one largely prevent it from happening quite yet (barriers largely within the power of the UK Government to remove…we’ll come back to that in a bit).

But still, elsewhere in the world, the impossible truly has become inevitable. This year, a news story happened that has been covered extensively outwith the West and Global North but which you almost certainly haven’t heard about. In November, the Marshall Islands became the world’s first UN Member Nation to announce the implementation of a full Universal Basic Income.

It’s still not “a lot”, even for the local economy, but it will be enough to make a meaningful difference. The UBI is set at 200 US dollars per quarter plus a system of additional rates for people who live in the more outlying islands in the state as well as for retirees, people with disabilities and others who qualify for a top up. It is expected that the system will have a gross cost around 8% of the state’s GDP for the foundational UBI. The payment can be made in the form of paper cheque, direct bank transfer or via cryptocurrency – the latter garnering some attention in crypto circles despite only a dozen or so people opting for this method of payment.

The UBI is largely being funded externally. The Marshall Islands are a sovereign state that is in a “free compact” with the USA – the UK equivalent would be something like an Overseas Territory like the Falkland Islands, albeit with more power over foreign affairs than the UK allows its former colonies – and the bulk of the money will draw from a trust fund set up by the US as part-compensation for the damage wrought by nuclear weapons testing.

We don’t (yet?) have a wealth fund like that but let’s consider what a UBI could look like if Scotland followed the example of the Marshall Islands.

At 8% of GDP, Scotland’s UBI would translate to around £3,200 per person per year or about £60 per week. This is around half of the maximum amount of Universal Credit so it probably strains the definition of “basic” at this level. And yet, we’ve seen in Scotland that even smaller payments, like the £27/week Scottish Child Payment, has already made a massive difference to those who receive it.

The gross cost of an 8% of GDP Scottish UBI would be £40 billion per year or about a third of the total Scottish public sector expenditure budget. But this is misleading on the face of it for the same reason that it would be misleading to judge the Marshall Islands’ UBI on its gross cost.

In Scotland’s case, the implementation of a UBI would require an overhaul of existing social securities. An independent Scotland would be free, of course, to design the system from the ground up but a devolved Scotland would have to renegotiate the Block Grant and devolved Fiscal Framework with the UK Government so that the UBI could part-replace Universal Credit or the state pension without being unfairly clawed back (the failure to agree this scuppered plans for a Scottish UBI pilot scheme a few years ago). Transferring, say, a third of the existing social protection budget into the UBI would reduce the gross cost by around £11 billion.

And then there’s the Scottish tax system. The principle of universality underlying a UBI states that it’s much easier to ensure that no-one who needs it doesn’t get it and that no-one who doesn’t qualify for it doesn’t cheat the system if everyone gets it unconditionally – from the poorest to the richest. Of course, those who “don’t need it” can simply have their total income tax increased to tax it back off them. A simple way of doing it would be to set a line – perhaps at the UK Minimum Income Standard level of around £31,000 per year for a single person with no children – and tax the UBI back off those who earn more. As this would cover around half of Scottish income tax payers – 1.5 million people – this would reduce the gross cost again by another £5 billion or so.

We could close the gap further by making the tax progressive and by targeting wealth as well as income via a land tax and reformed property taxation so that those who earn and own much more than most of us could “pay for” the UBI of several people.

As people spend their UBI, they will pay VAT and companies that receive extra custom due to people being able to afford to buy things will pay corporation taxes (both are currently reserved taxes and therefore raising complications around fiscal transfers under devolution). We could also look at using devolved taxation powers to target Scotland’s keystone exports of energy, whisky and salmon (sectors which are highly foreign-owned and therefore also export their profits from Scotland, contributing to a loss of more than £10 billion per year from Scotland).

Taking these into account reduces the total actual bill for a Scottish UBI from “impossible” to a scheme that starts to look just about possible even under devolution (so long as Westminster abstains from its effective veto over implementation). But there’s one final aspect of a UBI to consider. The cost of poverty within the current system.

If we consider the cost of healthcare resulting from poverty-related conditions, the loss of productivity from poverty (the chronic stress of poverty makes for less productive workers and blocks the ability to take risks such as entrepreneurship), the cost of delivering expensive services such as crisis care for homeless people rather than simply making affordable housing a human right, the additional costs of administering “means-tested” social securities which sometimes exceeds the cost of the benefits being withheld because the punitive nature of the system is part of the point.

This kind of poverty may well be more expensive than the overall net cost of a UBI sufficient to eliminate it. At this point, we see that a UBI isn’t an impossible utopian dream, but becomes a moral imperative that must happen if we are to continue to call ourselves a civilised nation.

The Marshall Islands have proven that the impossible can become inevitable. I look forward to the day that Scotland inevitably does the same.

How to profit from not-for-profit care

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Just because brokerages disclose a convoluted web of profiteering doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. It just means they are hiding these questionable practices in plain sight with a mountain of compliance language that no one will ever read.” – Christopher Manske

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I would like you to imagine the following scenario: You are a company owner or shareholder. Like every ‘good’ Capitalist, you want to leverage your assets to make as much money as you can. The issue is that you work in a sector where making a profit has been deemed by the Government to be unacceptable and they have banned you from making one. How do you extract as much as you can?

As a bit of background, this thought experiment stems from the conclusions of our latest policy paper, Why and how the Scottish Government must end private provision of children’s care, which has found that private companies, including ostensibly ‘not-for-profit’ companies, that deliver children’s care services are extracting an average of £28,000 per child per year from care services. This includes an average of £9,000 per child per year from foster care specifically where, in Scotland, it is explicitly illegal to make a profit..

These findings have come off the back of the Scottish Government making a pledge to eliminate profit from children’s care and they themselves have described our findings as “shocking”, though they are sticking by their current action plan to merely “limit” profit in such care. The problem as we see it though is that there are various mechanisms open to companies to allow them to extract money from the system in ways that wouldn’t be counted as ‘profit’.

This is because ‘profit’ has very narrow meaning in this context. It’s just what a company has left over after all of its expenses are subtracted from its income. In a for-profit company, this is often distributed to owners and shareholders as a dividend (see my recent article on the financialisation of housing and why that is costing you an average of £67,000 in extra mortgage payments for an example of this in action).

It would be perfectly possible for the Scottish Government to ban the sharing of such dividends for children’s care services and to legislate that only not-for-profit companies can bid for care contracts. However, this is not enough to prevent people from making money from children’s care. To that end, we’ve concluded in our paper that the only way to avoid profit extraction from children’s care is to bring the whole sector into public ownership.

If we don’t, then we’ll just end up with ‘profit’ being shifted into some of the following means of making money without making a profit.

1. Pay yourself as much as you need

The simplest and easiest way of extracting money now that your company has been banned from giving you a dividend, is to simply pay you more. Whatever the company’s surplus was last year, you can just pay to yourself as a salary. There will be tax implications for this – you’ll be paying income tax instead of Capital Gains tax so, especially in Scotland, the tax on your earnings will be substantially higher than if you were paying yourself a dividend, but that might still be worth it.

We found examples of children’s care companies in Scotland where the Director was being paid almost £350,000 per year – and we’ve found similar examples in other ‘not-for-profit’ care sectors like social work. This is more than twice the annual salary of the Scottish First Minister. Note that these high levels of pay often do not filter down to the front-line care staff who are, in fact, often paid less than their public sector counterparts as well as losing out on benefits and rights such as better conditions or union representation. While it is important to ensure that expenditure matches income to avoid ‘profit’, it’s clear that some expenditures are more worthy than others…

This is one area that might still be an issue if the sector is brought into public ownership – a prominent current example is the dispute over the pay rises granted to Scottish Water executives. However, this is still a better idea than the current system allows for. Partially because the Scottish Water scandal is a scandal precisely because it is public owned.

This means that such pay is democratically accountable and Ministers can be challenged for their oversight and the executive salaries are all public knowledge rather than being hidden or woven through opaque company accounts (in our report we couldn’t track down the executive pay of more than a couple of companies because some simply do not disclose it). Also though, Scottish Water has a near-monopoly on service provision in Scotland because it is public owned. In the care sector it’s not just the Director of one company whose salary is under question but multiple companies all working all across the care sector.

2. Lease yourself to yourself

If your care company is banned from making a profit then you can split that company into two. The ‘not-for-profit’ company that actually provides the care services might be banned from making a profit but the for-profit company that is also owned by you is the one who owns the building that the not-for-profit uses. This company charges a lease to the not-for-profit for the use of the building that just so happens to be high enough to eat their operating surplus.

‘Management Fees’ are another way of making these kinds of transfers from a subsidiary to a parent company and come with the added benefit of not being tied to a physical asset like a building and thus there’s no risk of someone noticing that you’re charging far higher rents than would be expected in the local market.

This is also a common tactic amongst multinational companies who want to shift money into tax havens or ‘tax friendly’ institutions. Coffee company Starbucks is well known for buying its coffee beans via a subsidiary company in Switzerland and charges its UK and other branches just enough for those beans to conveniently make sure that their UK outlets never make a ‘profit’ and thus pay little tax in the UK.

3. Give out a loan, and make them pay it back

One of the touted advantages of being owned by a larger company is that they can bring investment cash your way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible to get. Of course, investments always demand a return and the money your parent company loans to your subsidiary (remember, in this scheme you own both companies) should be paid back… with interest.

Even better, because this is an internal company loan rather than one via a regulated bank, you can charge whatever level of interest that you like and easily tailor the repayments to ensure that the not-for-profit company never makes a profit. If you ever wonder why profitable companies end up completely loaded with debt just a few years after being bought out by a global equity fund, this is very likely what has happened.

4. Receive a loan, and keep it.

It doesn’t need to be the parent company passing debt down, of course. This kind of financial transaction can happen the other way too. If the not-for-profit finds itself with a substantial surplus that it can’t get rid of before tax day, then it can loan that cash to the parent company or its Directors (e.g. you). The difference here is that you don’t charge above market rates for this upwards loan.

Maybe you don’t charge any interest at all. Maybe you don’t even expect the parent company to repay the loan ever. Sure, it’ll appear on the parent company’s books as a debt and that could be a problem in certain circumstances but there’s an easy way to deal with that. Simply wind up the not-for-profit company and the debt can be written off and the parent keeps the cash.

How to avoid profit in children’s care

The Scottish Government’s response to our paper was that the figures involved – £28k profit per child, per year – are “shocking” but also that they are not going to deviate from their paradoxical position that while any profit in children’s care is unacceptable, they are merely going to legislate to “limit” it.

As I hope we’ve seen here, that isn’t going to be enough. Even if the ‘limit’ on companies making a ‘profit’ from children’s care is set to zero, it won’t prevent those companies from extracting money from care or – by dint of paying workers as little as they can get away with – from carers. The only solution we can see is to bring the entire children’s care sector – both residential care and fostering – into public control.

This would, of course, be easier if we had a National Care Service to oversee the whole process but the failure of that Bill this year means we’ll need to take a more roundabout way of doing things. We still support an NCS and want to see it created in the next Parliament but children and carers can’t wait till then when we have opportunities now.

The next stage for our work on this will be to try to work out how much it will cost to bring that care into public ownership. We’re stymied by lack of data in this respect but early figures indicate that it might not be as huge of a problem as some fear – possibly on the scale of tens of millions of pounds rather than hundreds of millions. In this respect, it’s probably not dissimilar to our per capita estimates for nationalising all care in Scotland. After all, once we accept that it’s not acceptable to make a profit from caring for children, why should we treat adults any different?

Post-script – The Scottish Parliament’s report on the consultation on profit in children’s residential care can now be read here.

What Scottish Independence Could Deliver For The Welfare State

July 6, 2025July 7, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.” – Marcus Aurelius

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Back in the early days of Common Weal, while we were still finding our feet and building our reputation, we had an informal rule when it came to policy-making. We had to be able to show the policy working somewhere else.

This was because we felt that Scotland simply wasn’t ready for some of the radical ideas that we wanted to implement so being able to show it already working was a good way of building confidence in a nation too often told “we cannae dae it” (by which our opponents often mean “we shouldnae dae it” which is a different thing entirely).

We’ve since dispensed with that rule and we sometimes broke it even then (one of Common Weal’s very first policy papers, “In Place Of Anxiety”, was an advocacy for Universal Basic Income (UBI) long before it became one of the “cool” policies) but this isn’t to say that we can’t learn lessons from elsewhere.

Just this week, I was asked by a researcher which of our neighbour nations I’d like Scotland to copy if I could. My answer was that we shouldn’t copy any one but that I take a lot of inspiration from Germany on local democracy, from Denmark on energy strategy and from Norway for public ownership. Somewhere else we could do with taking inspiration from our neighbours is on social security.

The scenes this week from the UK’s attempts to hammer the poor and disabled and only backing down after shambolic chaos in the Parliament should be a lesson not just in humanity but in policy-making as well. Never fight a battle you haven’t won in advance. Never assume a large on-paper majority means certain absolute power.

With many of our neighbours basing their politics on proportional representation and coalition politics, this kind of legislation would have undergone a lot of negotiation and compromise long before arriving at the voting chamber.

The way that many of our neighbours deal with the issue of social security is markedly different from the UK in several ways. The first is that the systems are a lot more generous in general. Norway, Denmark and Sweden rank in the top three OECD nations for spending on disability protections at above 3% of GDP while the UK is well below the OECD average at less than 2%.

Many more social securities like unemployment protections follow a different model from the UK when they are calculated. In particular, instead of the flat rate paid under the UK’s Universal Credit, many countries follow a model where the protection you receive is based on a percentage of your previous income.

There are consequences to each of these models. A flat rate tends to be more redistributive if it is generous enough (which Universal Credit isn’t) whereas a proportional rate tends to be less disruptive to an individual who is already going through the shock of losing their job while still having bills to pay.

We’ve seen these impacts in the UK too. During the pandemic, the Covid furlough scheme was paid at a proportional rate to people who were employed but was often paid at a flat Universal Credit rate to self-employed people. This exposed a lot of people who were previously on the side of denigrating poor and vulnerable people as lazy slackers to just how meagre and cruel the UK “benefits” system is.

We had an opportunity then to get some serious change off the back of that and maybe we still see echoes of it in this week’s chaos but largely the Powers That Be wanted to make us forget that moment of reflection as quickly as possible.

On the other side and as tempting as it might be to copy a European-style unemployment insurance based on previous income, and as beneficial that would be to people in well-paid but otherwise insecure jobs, we have to remember that many people are not in well-paid jobs and that wage suppression has been rife in the UK for decades. Receiving 60% of your previous income when you were being paid poverty wages won’t protect you from poverty in unemployment.

So maybe rather than Scotland – particularly an independent Scotland – copying existing social security policies from our neighbours, we need to look to them for inspiration in another way and look back at that paper I mentioned at the start of this column.

Last year, the EU think tank the Coppieters Foundation published a paper called “A European Universal Basic Income” which found that a UBI sufficient to eradicate poverty across the entire union could be entirely paid for by relatively modest changes to income tax and the savings found from the reduction of poverty itself.

Its model called for a UBI of €6,857 per year for adults and half that for children under 14. This is the equivalent of £113 per week for adults and £57 per week for children. The paper claimed that the increase in income taxes to pay for this level of UBI would themselves be relatively modest and the “breakeven” point for people who’d pay more income tax than they’d receive in UBI would be at around the 80th percentile.

In other words, eight out of 10 people would be directly better off with the UBI. And, to repeat, while this is still a relatively small sum per person if you have no other income, it would be enough to eradicate poverty across the entire EU and would be cheaper overall – after the health, crime and social inequality costs of poverty are factored in – than the current systems.

When this paper came out I argued that this meant a UBI was now a moral imperative because it was cheaper than the cost of poverty, but there’s clearly a financial imperative too. Whether we’re discussing an independent Scotland seeking to create a better country for all of us or even just a cynical UK trying to save money in the face of a humiliating attempt to crush the poor, here is a solution we should all support. Eradicate poverty, save money, implement a Universal Basic Income.

Poor Show Swinney

May 15, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

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John Swinney claims to support the elimination of child poverty from Scotland, but he has admitted that he also believes – without actual evidence – that social security payments discourage poor people from working.

John Swinney’s only tangible policy on which he was elected as leader of the SNP and then First Minister of Scotland was a promise to eliminate child poverty. Note that he didn’t promise to reduce poverty or even to move faster than previous reduction targets (that he is so far failing to meet). He didn’t even, as his predecessor did, celebrate that child poverty in Scotland was merely a little lower than in England. He promised to eliminate child poverty. He has yet to explain “how”.

At the weekend, Swinney appeared to close down one of the tools that the Government has been using effectively to bring down child payment. The Scottish Child Payment is offered to adults who look after one or more children (the payment is on a per child basis – without the two-child limit seen in England) and who qualify for certain social security payments such as Universal Credit (if you think you might qualify you can check here). Frankly, the payment was brought in at a time and in a manner that stretches the devolved Scottish budget to its limits without the introduction of new taxes (such as our Land Tax) to pay for it but its impact on child poverty has been significant. The Scottish Government claims that the payment has contributed – along with their other poverty reduction policies – to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.

Last weekend, Swinney announced that he was not considering further increases to the payment. Not, as might actually be reasonably defensible, on the grounds of budget constraints but because he believed that the payment was now high enough that a further increase would “reduce the incentive to actually enter the labour market.”

In other words, he believes that increasing the child payment to £40 per week – something that the IPPR believes would lift another 20,000 children out of poverty – would discourage poor people from working.

This is, in short, complete crap. It is a claim that is not backed up by any data. In fact, if you have read my UBI article from the other week, you’d know that it is a claim that is completely countered by the facts. Giving people enough money to live on regardless of their life circumstances does not discourage people from working. In the most recent long-running study it was found that the total number of hours worked by UBI recipients did not change compared to their peers in the control group but that may did take the opportunity of the financial safety net to take a chance on a better paid, more worthwhile or more enjoyable job. Where studies have noticed UBI recipients dropping out of work it is almost universally not because “poor people are lazy and want to sit on the sofa” but because people use their safety net to study, to reduce hours as they run up to retirement or – pertinent to this article – to spend more time looking after their children.

With his comments, John Swinney is repeating the Conservative prejudice that the poor only work because it is marginally preferable to starvation and so any attempt to increase the number of workers in the economy can only be done by ramping up the costs of not working.

What Swinney is essentially saying is that while we shouldn’t have child poverty in Scotland, just bringing people to a penny over the poverty line would be enough for him, regardless of what that means for the people involved.

Cutting off the possibility of increases to social security because of self-imposed fiscal limits or rules (self-imposed even in this case not just because of slavish adherence to the philosophy of the 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission but due to a refusal to look at alternative mechanisms within devolution to increase revenue – see, again, our Land Tax) would be bad enough, but Swinney is making his case based on poverty being somehow the consequences of a lifestyle choice or moral failing. The poor, he apparently thinks, deserve their poverty unless they prove they are willing to not be poor.

This is a far cry from just a few years ago when there was a demonstrable majority across the Scottish Parliament for a guaranteed minimum income for all or a true Universal Basic Income (which probably explains the lack of push to bring in those policies).

The 2016 Holyrood elections are looming to the point of candidates being selected and manifestos being written. Swinney is obviously concerned enough about the rise of the far right to hold a summit about it (ineffectual as it was) but he surely must realise that the means of defeating the far right does not lie in gaming the political system to lock them out (see Germany), or in adopting their policies to try become them (see the UK) but in offering a real, credible alternative to Centrist Austerity and policy failure that leads to those populists gaining a base.

Instead of poor showmanship, Swinney could be providing leadership and actually taking action to meeting the goals he has set himself. The Scottish Government already has a poor track record of cancelling “inconvenient” government targets like climate emissions or reductions in car miles. Let’s not see the target of eliminating child poverty in one of the world’s richest nations become another one.

Work To Live

April 18, 2025April 21, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[W]hen your politics no longer have room for empathy, things spin into an amoral chaos. Not only the desperate suffer. Who gets hurt and who stays safe becomes hard to predict.” – Luis Alberto Urrea

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A new German study into Universal Basic Income publishes its final report, showing once again why UBI is a moral imperative. To illustrate those results we could imagine a world where we already have a UBI, but someone wants to study the effect of taking it away and creating the world we live in right now.

In 2021, 122 volunteers had their Universal Basic Income withdrawn from them in pilot project to study the impact of forcing people to work to earn enough money to survive. The participants in the “Work to Live” (WtL) programme were followed for three years alongside 1,580 people who retained their Universal Basic Income of €1,200 per month, regardless of their circumstances, spending intentions or any income they earned on top of their UBI. In 2025, the project published its final report.

Proponents of the “Work to Live” scheme claimed that inducing the fear of starvation, destitution and homelessness in workers would have multiple positive impacts on economic growth including increased work productivity and an increase in the number of hours worked as those without a UBI would be motivated to ensure that they could afford to keep a roof over their head. They also claimed that removing the UBI would increase people’s freedom to choose how to live their lives, without government oversight.

Now, finally, after three years of study, we have some evidence around those claims.

Jobs

Perhaps the most cited claim of “Work to Live” proponents is the idea that UBI makes workers lazy and idle – happy to coast along in their job knowing that they don’t need to earn enough to pay their bills or, in some circumstance, are content to sit completely idle on their sofa existing entirely on their UBI. The study found some surprising results in this regard. The group who had their UBI withdrawn worked essentially the same number of hours as the control group – both working an average of 40 hours a week – but the WtL group reported a substantial decrease in job satisfaction compared to the control. Satisfaction with the income they did receive also dropped markedly with the largest drop coming shortly after the withdrawal of their Basic Income and the gap only marginally closing again as they adapted to their new income levels.

While WtL proponents claimed that the motivational impact of taking away €1,200 a month would spur people to move out of their dead-end jobs or to try to improve their situation through education and training, the opposite was found to be true with the WtL group less likely to change their job and more likely to drop out of education to seek work. Satisfaction within work also dropped for the WtL group, both for those who did seek different employment and for those who stayed where they were at the start of the study.

Autonomy and Self-Determination

“Freedom” is at the heart of the Work to Live campaign, giving people the choice of how to live their life by choosing how to maintain that lifestyle. Those too poor to live a certain way have the freedom to seek those means or to choose to give up those dreams and live within more modest means.

The Work to Live study again confounded those expectations by noting a significant decrease in perceived autonomy compared to the group who retained their Universal Basic Income, with women in particular feeling more constrained by their life without a Basic Income than men. Paradoxically, participants reported that they felt like they had less “free time” in the day after losing their UBI, despite working similar hours to the control group. WfL participants spent notably less time doing non-productive activities outside work such as “volunteering”, “visiting friends” and “sleeping” with an average WtL participant sleeping on average 75 minutes less per week than a control group peer who retained their UBI – despite not spending that extra time in productive work.

Wellbeing

Work to Live advocates often claim that earning money rather than getting it “for free” would increase the sense of satisfaction of holding it and that this would translate into greater life satisfactions as one could look around at the lifestyle bought with that earned money rather than gained via a “handout”.

The pilot programme found once again that these expectations were not backed up by the lived experience of the participants. Life satisfaction dropped markedly shortly after the withdrawal of the UBI and remained more-or-less static in the three years after. This pattern was shared across other satisfaction metrics such as satisfaction with social interactions, the quality of sleep and satisfaction with the money participants had (even when controlled for the total amount of income). Overall stress levels – stress being a significant causative factor in many chronic health conditions – was higher in WtL participants than in the control group.

Finances

The philosophy of Work to Live teaches that money is a precious commodity and must be used wisely. Proponents have claimed that UBI encourages wasteful spending. The study found instead that withdrawal of UBI caused participants to cut their spending on a wide variety of items, including those vital to living comfortably. The largest cut came to vacations, with WtL participants spending almost 60% less on holidays than their UBI peers despite having the same amount of time off work. They also cut spending on clothing by 25%, 5% on everyday needs like food and 2% less on electricity and heating.

Unexpected Effects

Not all of the assumptions about the Work to Live pilot were borne out and some results were completely unexpected. One of the claims against UBI is that as it is an inherently Socialist idea (despite some Libertarian proponents) and thus those who receive a UBI are highly motivated to vote for left-leaning political parties. The study found that WtL participants did not substantially change their voting intention between parties but were less likely to vote at all whether for their preferred party or another.

Work to Live proponents claimed that UBI would make people inherently lazy, but the study found that, in fact, WtL participants were more likely to procrastinate on tasks or to avoid doing them entirely (perhaps in the hope that a problem they were anxious about would “go away”) though there was little change either way on individual propensities to do a task ahead of a deadline or at the last minute once it was decided that the task could not be avoided.

Finally, the sense of basic risk taking amongst participants was largely unchanged with the exception that WtL participants were less likely to risk changing their current job to take on another, despite the opportunity of potentially achieving higher pay or better conditions.

Conclusion

The Work to Live pilot programme has joined other similar studies in showing that attempting to coerce workers into productivity through the threat of destitution leads to more stress, more anxiety and lower rates of public, social and democratic participation and fails to achieve its goal of leading to more hours worked. It is recommended that participants have their Universal Basic Income restored and that other nations who have not yet implemented a UBI scheme of their own join the rest of the civilised world by doing so as soon as practicable.

And Finally

If you’ll allow me to drop the kayfabe at the end of this piece. This new German study into the impacts of Universal Basic Income joins with and do not contradict the increasingly vast body of all of the other studies that have been done into UBI. The results are as strong as all of the others too but the long term nature of the study adds extra weight to its findings as does the detailed examination of how living without the anxiety that capitalism imposes on us actually improves people’s lives. You can read more about that study here.

Here in Scotland, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in support for a Scottish UBI (the SNP, Greens and Lib Dems both support UBI as party policy and Labour indicate support for a weaker form of Minimum Income) but the UK Government (both Conservative and Labour versions) are ideologically against it, refusing even to facilitate the running of a Scottish UBI pilot despite the success of one in Wales. Studies into the costing of extending UBI schemes across the EU have found that they would be cheaper to implement than is currently being spent mitigating the poverty caused by the lack of one (that is, implementing a UBI would SAVE money, after the costs of poverty are included). The Scottish Government must bring back, as a priority, its plans to test and to ultimately roll out a UBI across Scotland. Much more pressure must be brought to bear on the UK Government to facilitate this rollout as while a UBI would undoubtedly be much easier to implement in an independent Scotland, the costs of poverty – particularly the child poverty that the current First Minister wishes to “eradicate” – are far too high and far to urgent to wait until then. We don’t need more data, or more pilot studies, or more poor people waiting for someone to do something. We just need that action, now, to give us all a Universal Basic Income to allow us to live without the fear, anxiety or exploitation that comes from poverty. Any further argument against UBI has to contend with the data presented in this study and in others and any further argument for delay must accept responsibility for the continued suffering that delay imposes. The time for a UBI is now. Once we have it, I’ll pass over to those who would like to perform a study arguing why it should be taken away.

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Just Work It Off

November 29, 2024December 11, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Work as if you were to live a thousand years, play as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Ben Franklin

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Sir Keir Starmer, Knight of the Realm and Man of the Working People, has declared again that thou shalt work or thou shalt starve.

It’s becoming an increasingly common political line in the UK that the economic woes are all caused by people not working hard enough and there is particular ire being levelled at those who are neither employed nor unemployed (a quite narrow measure of people who are not in but who are actively looking for work) but who are “economically inactive” – who are neither working nor who are looking for work. The other line is that work is the only thing that gives someone’s life purpose and that if you’re not working then you’re a lesser kind of person than someone who is – a failure, or an immoral shirker.

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Billionaire Discovers UBI

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of cataclysmic event that brings about drastic changes. I think Medicare For All and UBI are now inevitable. It’s either that, or complete chaos.” – Oliver Markus Malloy

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Techbro Billionaire and founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has just concluded one of the longest running Universal Basic Income experiments to date. He launched the project after becoming intrigued albeit unconvinced by the idea (and as accusations grew that tools like his AI could become an increasing threat to jobs) and he made a show of personally funding the scheme that saw 1,000 low income people being paid $1,000 a month plus 2,000 people receiving $50 as a control group. All participants had a household income below 300% of the federal poverty line (the limit below which people start to qualify for federal low income support – the various thresholds can be found here) and the average household income of participants was $29,000 (approx £22,500 as of current exchange rates).

The results of the study have been overwhelmingly positive and entirely in line with other studies of UBI.

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