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

Allow me to introduce myself.

I’m a writer, journalist

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, firsthand.

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 difficult

if your mind is thinking about those unpaid bills.

Or knowing, with the fullness of your heart,

that when you go to the cashpoint,

it's going to respond "Insufficient funds."

Now, while I was going through all this --

which, I have to say, happened 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 unfold is you.

There’s no higher authority, certainly not the state.

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 as 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,

require socialist means.

The state must get involved.

Now, we live in a world where capitalism has completely prevailed.

It's won.

I was asked, behind stage, "What are you wearing?"

I said, "Chanel Allure." And I'm the communist.

(Laughter)

OK? So I'm under no illusions --

it has completely prevailed.

And the ideas 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 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 un-freedom.

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 used food stamps --

13 million more than in 2007, before the global financial crisis.

Clearly, something is broken.

You can 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 accident away from penury.

17 million people of working age.

And on the thing that capitalism asks to be judged by,

global growth,

it says, "All this terrible stuff happens, inequality, 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 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 term 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

is surely to be joined by the climate crisis,

and then, demographic aging, a crisis of elderly care.

It turns out that the opening decades of the 21st century,

as bad as they were, for many,

are 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."

(Laughter)

The c-word.

(Laughter)

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.

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 and now, in 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.

For some, the answer is a universal basic income,

a UBI.

Now, despite being a millennial,

and still petrified when 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 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,

a bit like the NHS in the UK.

I propose four of these universal basic services --

health care, housing, transport and education.

Why these four?

Housing, 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.

Health care, because the basis of everything else

is physical and mental 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, you might agree with me so far,

you might say, "Aaron, I get it.

Market failure exists, it's a thing.

And yeah, OK, the state should intervene in some areas, fine.

But why universal?

Surely, we should focus scarce resources on those that need help the most."

It turns out that two academics gave a pretty good answer to that,

20 years ago.

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 commanded the broadest possible consent.

If you want to see the citation, it's Walter Korpi and Joachim Palme.

Go on Google Scholar, find it.

Now, how does that work? Why is that the case?

Well, it turns out that universal welfare systems,

because of the nature of how they work,

have less bureaucracy.

Because they don't employ means testing, there's less stigma attached,

so the people accessing resources actually use them,

as opposed to what we get with means testing,

where you feel like you shouldn't be doing that.

And importantly,

they have the buy-in of that political class

that is all-important in democracy,

the middle class.

There's a reason why the NHS in Britain

is still around after 80 years, and it's so loved.

It's because everybody gets to use it.

It's part of the 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 address hardship,

reduce inequality,

are effective, efficient and broadly liked,

make them universal.

"OK, 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 rate of tax was 60 percent.

Today, it's 45 percent.

Dwight Eisenhower and the Iron Lady -- hardly two radical Marxists.

And then, there's things like financial transactions tax.

All the outrage, in fact,

that we tax work more than we tax wealth,

which is astonishing.

In the UK and the US,

capital gains are taxed lower 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 like universal basic services.

If I'm right,

then the trends in the 21st century are deflationary.

Energy, information, labor are getting cheap,

they're deflationary,

and they'll remain deflationary for a very long time.

Hard 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,

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, health care, 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 labor-intensive industries that's still around.

Afterwards, you go for lunch, you see your friends

and you talk about taking that holiday in some rewilded forest somewhere,

go see some bison and some bears.

And you talk about wanting to study for that third college degree,

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 Literature,

gave you a whole new perspective on life.

You really loved Japanese poetry after that.

Pretty good, right?

You get a notification as you leave that lunch.

Your local health care 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 supply is needed at what time

for optimal efficiency and effectiveness.

Compare that to rush hour in LA or London.

Big difference -- I know which I prefer.

You end up at the local health clinic.

They say, "Look, it's time for 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 point of consumption

and paid for through progressive taxation.

Now, this might sound utopian.

Personally, I think it's technically easier to do

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 out of love.

Often, falling in love is worse, 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 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, the state --

to the center stage of our economic and social lives.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: Thank you, Aaron.

I think we have a secret questioner somewhere,

in the form of Maja Bosnic, who is a public finance expert.

She spoke recently at TEDWomen.

Maja, what's your question?

Maja Bosnic: Yes, thank you very much.

So my question is basically related to resistances.

I work with public services,

and I work towards making them 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 one, or maybe some of these four

that you are mentioning?

Thank you.

Aaron Bastani: 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 --

the Canadian property market is probably quite similar --

we need to have something akin to what Japan has seen

over the last 25 years,

which is, effectively, flat house price increases.

Sorry, I should phrase that better -- zero percent growth in house prices.

So wages can 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.

Why would you want your house to gain in value?

All it means is you buy another house,

which has relatively gone up as well.

And I think people acknowledge that this isn’t working

for people who rent, who don't own the assets.

And I would rather keep that price flat,

and, you know, have more people included in our economy.

But that's, I think, the big structural challenge --

we would have to take on speculative investment in housing.

CA: Thank you, Maja.

Aaron, I'm really taken by this argument for UBS,

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 compare US health care capitalism with something like the NHS

or the 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 have you cost it out?

To roll out all these four, that's a massive investment.

Have you costed it?

AB: I haven't costed it.

University College London has costed universal basic services,

and they had six -- they included food, which is pretty ambitious.

In the US private health care system, 16 percent of GDP's spent on health care.

In the UK, it's 10 percent.

And we have longer life expectancy,

fewer women dying in childbirth,

lower infant mortality.

So clearly, something is going right.

And you might say, "The NHS is underfunded."

Bump up by one or two percent. And of course, we have universal coverage.

So there's a strong argument there for public health care,

from an efficiency perspective --

(Applause)

AB: Thank you.

(Applause)

And I would respond with this, in regards to elderly care.

If you look at the crisis of demographic aging,

and elderly care that’s coming down the line

because of lower birth replacement rates of an aging population.

And I want one of these geniuses to come up with us living to 200.

But if that happens, we then create a crisis of elderly care,

and the reality is, it's not that we can't afford to do UBS,

a UBS of elderly care, if that happens --

we can't afford not to do it.

Because I then return to the NHS point about efficiency,

particularly in elderly care.

If you don't have that as a UBS, you're in big trouble, in my view.

CA: Aaron, thanks for an incredibly compelling contribution to the debate.

AB: Thank you, cheers.

(Applause)