Why UBI is so Important

Saw this on YouTube and it made me smile. Reminded me a of a cartoon I saw once where a kid turns up at his parents' door after graduation with a massive sack of debt on his back. His dad greets him with no sympathy, saying "I left school with nothing!", and the kid replies, "I wish I'd left with nothing."

I mentioned Universal Basic Income briefly in my TEDx talk. For those who don't know what it is, here's the lowdown.

Finland joined the list of countries to trial a UBI payment. The experiment recently finished and I was a bit annoyed by the coverage. One of the key complaints was that it didn't lead to significantly more people starting businesses.

Well, would you, if you knew UBI was an experiment lasting for two years, and after that the money would stop? You're hardly going to behave in the same way as you might if you knew the money was guaranteed for life. One woman gave a heartfelt panic as the year drew to an end, because she wasn't sure how she'd make up for the loss of UBI. There were also strongly influential restrictions to the study, which you can read about here, that discouraged people from taking employment. Many people involved in the study had been living with financial insecurity for a long time, you can't just ask someone to trust in a stable income and behave with confidence.That takes time.

All that considered though, I think the emphasis is on the wrong thing. Leading opinion compellingly suggests that we're facing a fourth industrial revolution and that 9-5 jobs are not the way of the future. The other thing we're seeing is a global mental health crisis brought about by financial stress and a growing lack of purpose. As the video above shows, you can have someone physically in the office eight hours a day, but that doesn't mean they're productive.

One thing that has come out of UBI studies is their positive effect on mental health and boosting self-worth. This is absolutely what we need to focus on. We need to stop talking about work and the simple act of living in terms of how much money it equates to. The crux of it should always be quality of life. Whatever that means for each individual.

Happy people are also more productive people. When you care about what you do, and enjoy doing it, you usually do it well. When you don't give a crap and see no point to it, why bother?

For me, as a writer, it's of particular interest. Recent research shows that the average writer in the UK earns around £10,000 a year. I'd suggest that's optimistic for many. Most writers work several other jobs to get by and financial tension, as shown above, leads to increased mental stress. This is true for other arts too, from circus performers and dancers through to musicians and painters. Art takes time to develop and mental space to conceptualise. Yet the pay off is significant, with a recent report showing the arts industry contributes more to the UK economy than agriculture.

Not that farming escapes the ravages of austerity either, with Brexit and climate uncertainty leading to a spike in suicides among farmers. These are people who love the land. Who want to raise animals, grow crops and put food on people's tables. Often farms that have been in families for generations, or a person's life-long dream of escaping the city, now rendered unsustainable because of our obsession with financial worth. Although I'm viewing this from an artistic perspective, because it's my perspective, nobody in any profession is unaffected by the times. For a developed country, we're backwards when it comes to income inequality.

Here's an excerpt from the above report which sums things up well.

Another popular assumption about employment is that all employment is better than no employment. Finland’s experiment did not break employment down to the granularity of the nature of the work itself. If they had done so, and the results showed that 50 basic income recipients quit their jobs as telemarketers to pursue their doctoral degrees in biotechnology and quantum computing, would that loss of employment reveal a failure of basic income, or its success? Existing research also shows that going from unemployment into a bad job is worse for your mental health than staying unemployed.

We need to start asking some important questions about employment. How much employment actively hurts society? How many people have jobs that are the opposite of contributing to society, and instead drag society down? How many people have entirely unnecessary jobs that don’t need to exist at all? How many people have jobs that could already be done more cheaply and with higher quality and dependability by existing technologies? How many hours are we clocking that could be reduced without accomplishing less?

None of the above questions were investigated in this experiment, because for the most part, these questions aren’t being asked by society in general because of a mass delusion that all employment is good. That assumption is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong with exponential technological advancement. - Understanding Finland's Universal Basic Income Experiment

Capitalism is a financial feudal system. Money only travels in one direction unless we're willing to redistribute it. UBI is a way to redistribute it. Whereas I'd love to think governments would do this out of the goodness of their heart, to benefit the mental health and well-being of their populations, you know that's never going to be the reason.

The reason it is most likely to happen is to save economies. If people have no money, they don't spend anything. If they don't spend anything, you don't have an economy. You need to give just a little back to the people, so that the people can give it back to businesses - and the wheel keeps turning.

And you know things are getting bad, because the UK are mooting this point right now. It's been suggested that every adult in the UK gets £48 in UBI each week. Whereas this does sound like a ridiculously small amount given the current cost of living, the horrific thing is that almost four million people rely on food banks in the UK and that money would actually make a significant difference to their lives. 

That is why I predict UBI will come into effect. Not for our well-being, but because the government need it as a way to placate growing civil unrest. You can only control people for as long as they feel they have something to lose. Take everything from them, as is happening now: homes, pensions, health care, self-worth, dignity and financial security, and, well, this beautiful individual right here explains what happens:

Sali Bracewell

This is my incredibly talented cousin Sali, with her latest song Cwch Bach Coch (Little Red Boat). And yes, she really is underwater! Llongyfarchiadau, cous. You can find her on Facebook and SoundCloud.

Pride, Prejudice and Pianos

Huge thank you to Bugesera Lodge for this fine spread. I went to take a look at their piano the other day and Jocelyne and her husband fed me a four-course spread. Included blue cheese and rhubarb, two things I can't remember the last time I ate.

They have an American Hamilton piano which came with them from Tanzania. It was a little worse for wear but mostly just issues with the action, so I've spent the past few days working on that. I've been really unwell for about three weeks so just finding my feet again. Got through a lot of movies whilst sitting on the floor, surrounded by whippens and jacks. Nice listening to the piano playing on Pride and Prejudice whilst physically putting one back together. More about pianos on the project page.

Love, Death & Robots

Been hooked on this the past couple of days. It's on Netflix. An anthology of animation, mostly futuristic sci-fi and fantasy delivered in bite-sized 15-20 minute helpings.

It was one of those things that sat on my list for a while, then I ran out of other things and clicked play. I was hooked from the first episode. It's a tour de force of animation styles from super-realistic CGI through to more manga-looking characters. 

What I liked was just the sheer originality of many of the stories. They were all really quirky. If I had to pick one, I think my favourite was probably Zima Blue. It took real imagination to come up with something like that. 

It's not for everyone - lot of blood and gore in some of them - but wonderfully artistic.

A Tonne of Confusion

I do a lot of editing for various organisations. It can be really interesting, you learn a lot as an editor, reading through information on many different topics. I've covered gender-based violence, the refugee crisis in Europe, cancer treatment in East Africa, global immunisation efforts, and the lives of famous science fiction and fantasy writers, to list but a few. At the moment, I'm working on water management and soil erosion.

Not only do I learn a lot about these subjects, but I learn even more about language. It's only over the past couple of years that I've felt confident enough to edit in both British English, my native English, and American English. My confidence in American English has grown through reading pages of reports and learning common American variants of words.

It's actually come to the point where I've started automatically spelling some things in an American way, which is something my younger self would have been horrified at, but my older self is quite at home with. I mean, honestly, when did program ever need that extra me?

The thing is, just when you think you know exactly what you're doing, something mad hits you in the face, like the fact that you spell enrol with one l in the UK and two in the US, but travelled with two in the UK and one in the US.

Often, second-language English authors learn English switching between different education systems. People growing up in many parts of Africa, for example, have been through education systems developed using both American and British sources. So they see both spellings on a regular basis, but don't always know why the spelling is different or that they belong to two different spelling systems. Because of this, both spellings seem acceptable in all situations. It's really common to edit a report where the author writes organization and organisation in the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence. So, you really have to be on the ball and remember which particular brand of English the report is supposed to adhere to.

The one that had me stumped this week was tonne v. ton.

I'd like to simplify my findings.

At first, I thought it was another US/UK spelling variant, but it became more troublesome when I read that it actually relates to two separate units of measurement.

The bottom line is, one is metric and the other imperial. Only three countries in the world still use the imperial system, and none of those are England, where it was invented. The three countries as of 2019 are the US, Liberia and Myanmar. If the US didn't use imperial, there'd probably never be a reason to discuss this, but because America and Britain dominate the spelling of English, it's important to know the difference.

UK

US

Metric

Imperial

Tonne

Ton

1,000 kg

2,000 lb

So, you either need to know the country you're quoting your statistics from, or you need to know the exact weight of your object in order to work out which spelling to use. One tonne is roughly equivalent to 1.2 ton, as 1,000 kg equals 2,205 lb. 

This was all rather upsetting to me, as I grew up in the British education system in the 1980-90s. Although the UK went metric in 1965, before I was born, I grew up talking about my height in feet, my weight in stone, and recipes in pounds and ounces (lb/oz). This is because both my parents and teachers talked that way. I still understand height much more easily in feet than metres and I have no idea what stone translates to in kilos. However, I did grow up using the spelling tonne. So, I was using the metric spelling but understanding the imperial system. 

Just to confuse matters further, if you're just referring to something that is very heavy, rather than a specific weight, you can use ton in both systems. Even a British person could say: That elephant weighs a ton. Meaning that elephant is very heavy, rather than that elephant weighs exactly 2,000 lb.

And the final nail in the coffin of reason, tonne is the metric spelling, but can also be called a metric ton. When you precede tonne with metric, you drop the ne. So, a ton is different to a tonne, but a metric ton is also not a ton.

And with that, I leave you to your breakdown.

Six Months Since TEDx

Can't believe it's been six months since I was standing on a stage in Luxembourg desperately hoping not to fluff my lines.

And just a reminder that Henri, who I mentioned in the talk, has just released his autobiography and it's a stonking good read, so get your eyes around a copy - UK/US.

3 Reasons why you should get it. We have some great reviews on Amazon, check it out. have been working on this project since 1999, This book is more than just a personal story, it is about the challenges we face, the false premise we have about the West.. #books #Myafricandream pic.twitter.com/Rmq0KDj1a7

— Henri Nyakarundi (@HenriNyakarundi) March 22, 2019

@HenriNyakarundi, I just finished #MyAfricanDream and loved every word of it. Thanks for putting your journey out there for us all to learn from and be inspired by. Friends, put this 👍 book on your reading list! #rwot https://t.co/GS5TyxrEtY pic.twitter.com/qi6xeuWKwE

— Julienne Oyler (@julienneoyler) February 11, 2019

World Book Day 2019

For the past few years now, I've been celebrating International World Book Day to the British calendar (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015). So, this year, I've switched to the US/rest-of-the-world date just to spice things up. Because nothing says 'international' like a dozen different dates.

This year has been a year of non-fiction for me. I've gone through a lot of books thanks, in part, to joining Audible, which has allowed me to get through tomes in the shower, whilst cooking and whilst pretending to listen in meetings. I'm not making any distinction between books I've read and those I've listened to.

Because I can get through twice as many books, I've added a lot more non-fiction. Pressed for time, I enjoy the escapism of fiction, but my brain does crave a bit of knowledge now and then. So, here's my top picks. For a more thorough list of books I'd recommend, check out my Juicy Reads section.

Non-Fiction:

Thanks to my friend Emma Lawson for putting me onto this one. The Frighteners by Peter Laws, the Sinister Minister. No, seriously, a priest who writes, and is fascinated by, horror. This book is a lot of fun and explores the human fascination with all things gory and bump-in-the-nighty.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is an excellent in-depth introduction to the history of human kind and our impact on the world around us. Really engagingly written and full of fascinating facts. He's written another, Homo Deus, about the future of human kind, which is on my TBR pile. I think this and The Silk Roads should be mandatory reading in schools.

Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters was an excellent read, I think suggested by my aunty Patsy. Can't remember how we got onto the subject, but certainly remember the story. It charts the life of a homeless man, Stuart, and how he ended up where he did, from childhood to traumatic adulthood. Very poignant read.

A much older biography, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid written by the man who shot him, Pat Garrett. I couldn't help myself, I've always loved Young Guns, and the legend is an enticing one. Sometimes it's also nice to read yea oldey writing, something in a style completely different to today's slick prose. Something with a bit of history behind it.

Finally, this biography is absolutely worth a read. My African Dream was written by my friend Henri Nyakarundi, who you might remember from my TEDx talk. This is his life story, growing up as a Rwandan refugee in Burundi, then moving to the States for 17 years, and about the events and decisions that led him back to Africa. He's led a fascinating life and it's a thoroughly engaging story.

Fiction:

I fell in love with Differently Morphous by Yhatzee Crowshaw. I've read a bit of China Miéville and currently on Ian Banks at the moment, and enjoying them all, but as far as kookie characters and imagination-stretching goes, this one wins out for me. Occult institutions bogged down by bureaucracy and political correctness - and a lot of glitter.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is beautifully written and rather enchanting. Plus, who could ignore the sumptuous cover? Set in Victorian England, it's hard to explain this story, so pick up a copy. By the end, I guarantee you'll be in love with an octopus.

 

I'm including Pretty Little Dead Girls by Mercedes M Yardley because it is highly stylised and therefore completely different to anything else I've read in quite a while. It's one of the few times I've purchased something after seeing the cover on Twitter. Usually, this hasn't worked out well for me and those purchases have never been mentioned again, but this one was a good buy. Told as a living fairytale, rich with imagery.

This book, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, blew me away. Some of the best writing I've read in a long time. I'm a huge fan of Bem Le Hunte and Divakaruni, so stories of India and her histories and mysteries always draw me in. I saw this on the table at a local book swap group and liked the title, so went home to purchase a copy. I would recommend anyone does the same.

Short Stories:

My short story shout out this year is for my friend Dara Passano. I've known her as a Guardian columnist for some time, but she's released a short story in Meridian this year and it's excellent. You can read it for free online as part of a collection of short stories.

Plays:

Finally, I'd like to mention Girls & Boys which is a monologue performed by actress Carey Mulligan and released on Audible. It looks at the complexities of domestic violence, but it's extremely good listening. Some very funny moments, peppered with dark humour, and a thought-provoking finale.

Well, that's my round-up for 2019, see you again in a year for more recommendations. Let me know what you've been reading - and would recommend - in a comment below.