Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network. He has been promoting universal basic income — a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement — for thirty years. As the COVID-19 pandemic is laying waste to people’s livelihoods in countries across the globe, the idea is at last gaining traction. We spoke on March 17, the day the White House and U.S. Congress said they were crafting a $1.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package to bolster the U.S. economy in the wake of the pandemic. Key components: checks for $1000 sent to every American adult, but also, more substantially, bailouts for the airline and hotel industries.

So the federal government in the U.S. is finally, finally taking coronavirus seriously. The Trump Administration just floated a proposal for a bailout, mostly targeted towards specific sectors of the economy in which he and his cronies have sizable investments. It mostly just seems like more of the same.

The monetary policy that they’re doing, it won’t have any success. You can guarantee it will enrich a small number of people in the financial markets but it won’t really address the problem. So they’ll have to do something more. And the only silver lining is that this could finally finish [Trump] because he’s been so incompetent on it that that surely nobody can take him seriously after this.

I’ve felt that many times previously.

Yeah, no, that’s right. We’ve been here before, the last four years.

So where in the world is the conversation about UBI further along than it is here in the United States?

I think it’s very interesting that today, just in the last hour, I’ve had two calls from the BBC, from London, and there are various international organizations that have been contacting me from around Europe, where there’s a real feeling that this is a turning point, that there is the possibility that the panic is so great, and the unfolding disaster so great, that there will be an opening of minds so that what was regarded as peripheral myopia, mildly utopian, as it were, will suddenly become almost obvious and essential. And I’m getting that feeling.

I mean, you know, mainstream politicians are contacting me and suddenly having a backbone about it. For many years I’ve had meetings with leading politicians from various countries. And they would say, “Oh, the trouble is, Guy, we don’t know how we can come out in favor. We don’t know how to sell it.” Well, now, I think they’re gonna have their backbone strengthened, and they’ll suddenly find basic income obvious.

One of the things that has certainly made the case for UBI a tough political sell here is the idea, most prevalent on the political right, that you needed to conduct means-testing, and ideally not only means-testing, but something like virtue-testing. There was — is — this fear that if you simply give people money, without proving to the government that they’re worthy of receiving it, that you invite some sort of moral and economic decay.

I think all the evidence shows how stupid that is. All the evidence shows that if you have security, then you make better decisions. Even certain people on the right like Milton Friedman came to accept that. And you know, a number of libertarians, whose politics I hate, they too have come around to saying, “Well, if you’re going to have a state at all, then at least have one that gives people freedom.” And they come to embrace UBI by that way of reasoning. I don’t mind how they get there.

And that’s why I found it quite amusing that I’ve been invited to talk about it in Davos, and invited to Silicon Valley to speak at the Singularity University about it. It does have a resonance and there’s an opening of minds around basic income from different perspectives. I don’t approach it as a libertarian. I approach it as a person who believes in republican freedom — not the American-style Republican — but from the sense of building solidarity and giving a base to society.

My reasoning for supporting it over the years and now working on it for 30 years, is profoundly ethical. I believe in Universal Basic Income because I believe that it would enhance freedom. It would enhance basic security, which is a public good and a human need. And it would be a matter of common justice, so that we share public wealth.

So I come at it from those perspectives, but instrumentally it has advantages also and we’ve seen that in the pilots that we’ve been doing around the world and in the evidence from various types of study. We’ve seen that it in fact leads people to make better decisions, have less stress, improve their education, work more productively and cooperatively, and have better altruistic views and be more tolerant of strangers and so on. So it has a wide range of positive qualities.

Can you tell me more about this? The more altruism and more rosier views of strangers?

What we found is that the people who have basic security are more likely to have favorable views about migrants, about racial minorities, people with different identities — sexual or whatever — and different religions. People tend to be much more tolerant of “the other.” And I think that is hugely compromised at the moment, because millions of people are in the Precariat, and in other situations where they are faced with chronic insecurity. And the psychologists have taught us that insecurity breeds resentment, it breeds prejudice, it fans populism, and so on. The evidence is overwhelming that the more insecurity we get, the more likely people without much education, particularly without much civil knowledge, are going to vote for people who play on their fears. They’re prepared to listen to such voices and go along with them. And we know where that leads from the 1930s.

And Trump is sort of like a Napoleon III: the first time tragedy the second time farce, except that he’s doing absolute tragedy at the same time. He is doing exactly what the fascists did in the 1930s. And playing on those fears and mobilizing opinions in favor of authoritarianism. Have you read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here?

I’m familiar with the book but haven’t read it, no.

It’s worth going back and having a look at it because it’s about a man who is a multi-millionaire who decides to stand against Franklin Delano Roosevelt to become president. And his speeches and the use of extremism? You read it and you say, “Well, where have I heard these speeches before?” And then you think, “I know where I’ve heard them before. It’s called Donald Trump.” That book is uncanny. Absolutely uncanny. And Lewis wrote it in seven weeks, and in a state of range, because he was trying to say to Americans, don’t think that you’re immune to avoiding Hitler and Mussolini, because it could happen in the United States. And he was right and now you’re getting it, and it’s spreading like a virus because more and more people think that going along the lines of Trump will lead them into office.

It’s striking to me that the platforms that help spread extremism, that distract us, perhaps, from the conversation we need to have about basic security, have features of what I think of — hardly originally, I know — as an extractive economy: They take the uncompensated labor of millions, even billions, of people creating content that they can in turn sell advertising for and profit wildly from, profits which are not shared or shared only in the most miserly way. Millions of people — even my good friends! — happily do all this free labor for Facebook and other platforms all the time.

Well, there’s a word for it. And I discussed it in my books because I think it’s going to gain more traction and the word is heteromation. Heteromation is the opposite of automation. Automation is the replacing of labor by machines. And everyone’s talking about the robots and AI and so on.

Heteromation is precisely what you’ve just been talking about, which is that the electronic revolution is generating much more work that is not labor. In other words, it’s unpaid. It’s real work; you and I, whenever we go on to a computer or mobile or whatever it might be, are actually doing work for those advertising companies — for Facebook, for Amazon, and so on.

And we’re contributing billions of dollars to their coffers and they’re basically rentiers and that’s why my book was called Corruption of Capitalism. It’s about rentier capitalism, because more and more, the income being generated around the world, not just in the United States, is going to the owners of property—of physical, financial, and intellectual property—and your Facebooks and your electronics companies are like big landlords, sucking from renters. And part of it comes, as you just said, through us doing an enormous amount of work for them that they get advertisers to pay them for, and then they target their messages and manipulate us, or open the doors to actors like Cambridge Analytica or the Russians and all the others who are doing it….