A Socialist Perspective on the Pursuit of Happiness | Aaron Bastani | TED Talks

(1) A Socialist Perspective on the Pursuit of Happiness | Aaron Bastani | TED - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6aq2SH-xVo

Transcript:

(00:00) foreign myself I'm a writer journalists and a socialist I also used to be broke I did for a long time being a student trying to make a name for myself in the media industry and starting a media organization I had to move 15 times in 15 years because the rent in London just kept on going up now this taught me an important lesson first hand namely you can want to study public policy or astrophysics you can want to make a name for yourself you can want to do an honest day's work but all of that is extraordinarily

(00:47) difficult if your mind is thinking about those unpaid bills or knowing with the fullness of your heart that when you go to the cash point it's going to respond insufficient funds now while I was going through all of this which I have to say happened for a little bit too long for my liking I agreed with the ideas that I was reading from the liberal tradition namely that individuals are uniquely placed to determine how their lives should unfold nobody else is for everybody in this room the best person to decide how your life should

(01:21) unfold is you there's no higher authority certainly not the states but what was equally clear was that in the absence of access to certain resources education transport Health Care and housing that capacity for self-authorship is clearly limited for many people we clearly live in a society where what we view is Liberty the pursuit of happiness is limited for the majority of the global population for many it's illusory it turns out that liberal ends of self-authorship of determining how your life should unfold requires socialist

(01:59) means the state must get involved now we live in a world where capitalism has completely prevailed it's one you know I was asked behind stage oh you that smells great what are you wearing I said Channel Allah and I'm the communist okay so I'm under no illusions it is completely prevailed and the idea is driving it are those of economic liberalism economic liberalism says what I've just said to you the individual is uniquely placed to determine how their life unfolds and that this should happen

(02:29) through the market but there's a problem while the market can be an extraordinary resource to get the things you need to get to be who you want to be for many it's the opposite it's a source of unfreedom it's a constraint it's more akin to a system of rationing than of prosperity we know this is the case for an increasing number of people because the numbers don't lie in 2018 40 million Americans use food stamps 13 million more than in 2007 before the global financial crisis clearly something is broken You can

(03:09) disagree with me about everything else but those are the facts in the UK a much smaller country in 2016 17 million people of working age had 100 pounds or less savings they are one minor accent away from penury 17 million people of working age and on the thing that capitalism asked to be judged by global growth it says all this terrible stuff happens inequality and you know we can have poverty in work poverty whatever but we've still got growth well actually the story isn't so great there either despite the rise of China Global growth

(03:52) is in secular decline so to be clear the global economy is still growing but at a smaller slower rate decade on decade 20 years ago if you said the term lost decade you were talking about Japan my apologies to anybody here of Japanese heritage today it's an appropriate sum for much of the global economy from Britain to Italy South Africa to Brazil as one lost decade becomes two and it gets worse this economic malaise we've seen over the last 15 years has surely to be joined by the climate crisis and then

(04:27) demographic aging a crisis of elderly care it turns out that the opening decades the 21st century as bad as they were for many and merely the Leading Edge of a hurricane now despite everything I've just said to you I'm an optimist I believe that humans have the Ingenuity to address all of these challenges and reach unprecedented prosperity and liberty for all that can happen by employing the state and leveraging the technology Revolution I wrote a book about it it's called fully automated luxury communism

(05:08) the c word fully automated because we need an economic system which reduces the necessity of human labor in the production process luxury because we need to expand the sense of Liberty and Leisure Time For All a communism because what I believe is heading our way this Century Maybe could see the end of production for exchange and the necessity of humans to sell their labor for a wage but in politics Big Ideas only get you so far that's been a problem for the left historically I don't know if you know and what matters in the here are now in

(05:43) 2022 are concrete proposals so how do we leverage the technology Revolution how do we employ the state to address all the challenges I've just spoken about which I'm pretty sure everybody in this room would acknowledge Rising inequality the climate crisis demographic aging but for some the answer is a universal basic income a Ubi now despite being a millennial and still petrified whenever I look at my bank balance I'm not a fan and the reason is an affordable Ubi is ineffective and an effective Ubi is

(06:20) unaffordable my proposal instead is universal basic Services UBS these are Services which are universally available free at the point of consumption and paid for through progressive taxation below the NHS in the UK I propose four of these Universal basic Services Healthcare housing transport and education why are these four housing well because you can't focus on long-term problem solving or making something of yourself if you have to move every 12 months believe me I know healthcare because the basis of everything else is physical and mental

(06:59) well-being education because you can't be of service to your community if you don't have skills and we need to start acknowledging that an educated Society is a public good people training as dentists as midwives as Engineers hey as accountants we need those people Society needs those people with those skills to not just Thrive but to survive and we all benefit from them having those skills transport because you can have the skills you can have the housing but location can remain a constraint on access to opportunity so

(07:37) you might agree with me so far you might say Aaron I get it market failure exists it's a thing and yeah okay the stage should intervene in some areas fine but why Universal surely we should focus scarce resources on those that need help the most well it turns out two academics gave a pretty good answer to that 20 years ago a surprise surprise they were Swedish and they found that countries with universal welfare systems saw the lowest rates of hardship the lowest rates of inequality and Universal welfare systems

(08:07) actually commanded the broadest possible consent if you want to see the citation it's a Walter scorpion yakum Palmer and go on Google Scholar find it now how does that work why is that the case well it turns out that uh Universal welfare systems because of the nature of how they work uh have less bureaucracy because they don't employ means testing there's less stigma attached so the people accessing resources resources actually use them as opposed to what we get with means testing where you feel like you

(08:40) shouldn't be doing that and importantly importantly they have the buying of that political class that is all important in democracy it's the middle class there's a reason why the NHS in Britain is still around after eight years and is so loved it's because everybody gets to use it it's part of a national fabric it's part of our shared social conversation and space it's something that belongs to all of us in the UK and we're very proud of it so if you want Welfare Services which

(09:12) address hardship reduce inequality are effective efficient and broadly light make them Universal okay I like Universal Services but how do we pay for this in a word tax hardly Reinventing the wheel I know in the United States in the 1950s the top rate of tax was 90 percent today it's 37 percent in the UK for much of Margaret Thatcher's Premiership the top bread of tax was 60 today it's 45 Dwight Eisenhower and The Iron Lady Harley to radical marxists and then there's things like Financial transactions tax all the facts the

(09:54) outrage in fact that we tax work more than we tax wealth which is astonishing in the UK and the US capital gains attacks the lower rate than incomes how the hell does that work talk about a rigged system then there's the issue around the technology Revolution and this is a big reason why I uh I like Universal basic Services if I'm right then the trends the 21st century are deflationary energy information labor are getting a cheaper they're deflationary and they'll remain deflationary for a very long time hard

(10:33) to believe I know in 2022 when you're filling up at the tank but Renewables Trends are clear and that will be the case for a very long time now do we want those Trends to underpin Universal basic services or prop up shareholders or create the basis for new monopolistic models finally on the climate crisis another reason for Universal basic services a Ubi would be an extraordinary amount of money to spend and yet I don't see quite what it would do in terms of transitioning our economies away from fossil fuels which again

(11:09) I'm sure everybody in this room acknowledges we have to do pretty damn quickly meanwhile with universal basic Services we can put a post carbon agenda at the heart of Education Healthcare transport and housing rapidly decarbonizing our economies and look to move away from fossil fuels we need to do the one thing that market fundamentalists hate and that's called planning so cast your minds to 2100 and a world after capitalism as we know it you go to your job four hours a day in an elderly care center one of the few

(11:44) labor intensive Industries that's still around afterwards you go for lunch you see your friends and you talk about taking that holiday and some rewildered forests somewhere go see some bison and some bears and you talk about wanting to study for that third college degree at this time in medicine because you're working with older people and you're fascinated by the sphere the area the growth industry of radical life extension and hey your first two degrees didn't cost a thing and that second one East Asian

(12:16) literature gave you a whole new perspective on life you really love Japanese poetry after that pretty good right you get a notification as you leave that lunch your local Healthcare Clinic's saying you need to go for a quick checkup you go down there you take a bus free electric self-driving the local bus Co-op uses a powerful predictive algorithm to determine how much suppliers needed what time for optimal efficiency and Effectiveness compare that to Russia or in LA or London big difference I know which I prefer

(12:50) you end up at the local Health Clinic they say look it's time for a liquid biopsy you missed your checkup last week you go in stage zero cancer no problem some pills will fix that at every stage of this narrative the health care the transport the college degrees the Elderly Care we've seen Universal basic services in action universally available free at the points of consumption and paid for through progressive taxation now this might sound utopian personally I think it's technically easier to do

(13:23) than colonizing Mars but our society somehow thinks differently but it's not utopian in fact in many ways this world resembles our own there are still markets for many many things the state isn't involved in making chocolate bars or socks or silk ties but it is the central player in these four things we all need for Liberty housing Education Health Care and transport and to say it's no Utopia means bad things still happen yes there are fallings out there's personal enmity there are love affairs you fall in and

(13:59) out of love often falling in love is worse than falling out of love it's more dangerous these things still happen but they're better than homelessness than being unable to pay for your insulin or failing to address the climate crisis as a species it's time we lived up to those glorious words life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and recognize that for the majority of the global population the pursuit of happiness is impossible it's downright illusory unless they have access to Universal basic services this is the way by which

(14:38) we guarantee Liberty for all and address the great challenges of the 21st Century the climate crisis inequality demographic aging whilst leveraging these remarkable technologies that the Ingenuity of our species has created I don't think there's another way of addressing those challenges I think anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional frankly but all that means we're going to have to do something which for the political establishment and Status Quo thinking has been anathema for decades and that means returning the state yes

(15:13) the state to the center stage or economic and social lives thank you thank you thank you Aaron I think we have um a secret questioner somewhere in the form of Maya bosnick who is a Public Finance expert she spoke recently at Ted women Maya what's your question yes thank you very much so my question is basically related to resistances I work with the public services and I work towards making the more gender responsive so I know a thing or two about resistances so I wanted to ask you what do you see as the biggest resistances and in which

(16:01) one or maybe some of these four that you are mentioning thank you great question thank you for me it's got to be housing because particularly in the anglo-american economies we have a growth model built upon speculative investment in housing assets the reality is for the likes of the UK and the US I don't know the Canadian property Market I think it's probably quite similar um we need to have something against what Japan has seen over the last 25 years which is effectively flat house price increases I.E sorry I should

(16:30) phrase that better zero percent growth in house prices um so wages and catch up I saw an amazing statistic actually the other day in the UK which showed that a majority of homeowners in the UK are happy to have zero growth on house prices and that makes sense right why would you want your house to gain in value all it means is you buy another house which is you know has relatively gone up as well and I think people acknowledge that look this isn't working for people who rent who don't own the assets and I I would

(16:58) rather keep that price flat and and you know have more people included our economy but that's I think the big structural challenges we would have to take on spec calculators of investment in housing thank you Maya Aaron I was actually really um I'm really taken by this argument for UBS Services um but partly because just structurally some of those things naturally get organized better if there's only one of them not a bunch in competition you know you could compare U.

(17:27) S Healthcare capitalism with with something like the NHS or other state things which for all their faults seem to deliver equally good or better health care for like half the money transport you can make the same argument but but have you costed out like it's still to roll out all those four that's a massive investment how have you costed it I haven't costed it you know as University College London has costed uh Universal basic services and they had six they included food uh which is pretty ambitious in the US private Healthcare Systems 16

(18:01) of GDP spent on Healthcare in the UK it's 10 and we have longer life expectancy uh fewer women dying in childbirth lower infant mortality so clearly something's going right and you might say well the NHS under funded okay bump up by one or two percent and of course we have Universal coverage so I think there's a strong argument there for public Healthcare personally from an efficiency perspective and I would respond with this thank you and I would respond with this in regards to wildly care if you look at the crisis

(18:30) of demographic aging and elderly care that's coming down the line because of lower birth replacement rates of an aging population and look we want I want one of these Geniuses to come up with us living to 200 that'd be wonderful but if that happens we then create a Christ of LD care and the reality is it's not that we can't afford to do UBS a UBS have only care if that happens we can't afford not to do it because I Then I then return back to the NHS point about efficiency particularly in elderly care

(18:58) if you don't have that as a UBS you're in big trouble in my view Aaron thanks for an incredibly compelling contribution to the debate thank you take care