Keynes and the Universal Basic Income

One of the most famous Keynes' predictions is that people could afford to work less hours   and have more spare time for leisure. His Essay 'Economic Possibilities for our grand-children" was written before the Great Depression and published in 1930. But his point seems to be misinterpreted bymainstream economists. His prediction was that, in the long term, say a hundred years, living standards in 'progressive countries' would be between four and eight times as high. The main arugment is that the society would be more productive with technological progress and resulting increased productivity. Hence  "mankind would  have resolved its economic problem".   

A book published  eight years ago by some of the world's leading economists explores the reasons Keynes was mistaken about a new era of leisure. One argument is Keynes' forgetfulness about distribution.  The trend in recent years, though, has been towards more income inequality, between and within groups. The gap between the top 1% of earners and the rest has widened, but so has the gap   among all other sub-groups of society. The rich  spend more as they get richer, which leads to others wanting to spend more as well. Not all of them can afford to maintain the spending habits of those better-off  , and as a result they borrow. The result, contrary to what Keynes may have imagined, has been a collapse in savings ratios in the US and Britain, and a rise in debt levels and bankruptcies. The other main argument is about working hours. There is no country that conforms to Keynes's ideal of a 15-hour working week. However, France has introduced the 35 hour week that right wing governments wanted to scrap and ask people to work longer. Recently, Sweden has voted for a six hour working day for all workers.  The question is why with sustained technological progress, people still work longhours,  in the US 30% more than in Europe.

Over the last 50 years, living standards in developed western economies have seen rapid growth; by 2030 it is likely that they will have risen at least eightfold if there is a strong recovery from the financial crisis.  But rising living standards have not seen people deciding to satisfy their material needs.  People with low wages have no choice but to work long hours. In his essay in 'Revisiting Keynes" , Richard Freeman notes that more Americans than Europeans say that they want to increase hours worked than to decrease at given wage rates, and that's probably a function of a lower minimum wage and stagnant real incomes for all but the highest earners. Furthermore, widening gap in earnings may create an incentive to work longer hours. 

Keynes's  failure might be  to recognise that distribution matters. The economic problem will not be solved while a quarter of the world lives in abject poverty, nor while a good slice of those living in developed countries are not sharing in economic prosperity or feel they need to spend longer and longer on the workplace.

Keynes' view might be ethnocentric but his argument referred to progressive societies such as France or Sweden. It had to be put in context, bearing in mind the accumulation of capital and the wide variety of goods that technological progress offers. What he had in mind is the ' good society' that Galbraith attempted to lay out twenty years ago.

 In our unequal societies,  a greater degree of income equality would indeed help to improve the welfare of low earners. The new frontier is the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI)whatever the form it takes. Y. Varoufakis made convincingly this point :  "A universal basic income allows for new understandings of liberty and equality that bridge hitherto irreconcilable political blocs, while stabilizing society and reinvigorating the notion of shared prosperity in the face of otherwise destabilizing technological innovation". His proposal is to fund UBI not with taxation but from returns on capital, i.e.. profits. This could be an important step up towards a more equal society.