The Trouble with Basic Income Trials

In various places around the world, ‘Basic Income trials’ have been proposed, announced and sometimes actually implemented. But whilst I’m a big supporter of introducing a Basic Income system, I’m not a very enthusiastic supporter of these ‘Basic Income trials.’

Why not? There are a number of reasons. They include:

1. Few, if any, of these trials actually involves a genuine Basic Income.

If the money is only being paid to unemployed people or other people on low incomes, it’s not really a Basic Income scheme. If the money isn’t enough to pay for essentials, it’s not really a Basic Income scheme. If payments are reduced as people earn more, it’s not really a Basic Income scheme.

Basic Income is a hot term at the moment — but the term is being misapplied to trials that aren’t really Basic Income trials at all. Just calling something a Basic Income trial, doesn’t make it a Basic Income trial.

And if it’s not a genuine Basic Income trial, what’s the point of it?

2. ‘Basic Income Trials’ can easily be subject to sudden cancellation — and that can have very negative consequences.

There’s no guarantee a trial will complete its full proposed term. Any time the relevant authority has a budget crisis, they look around for things to cut. And any such trial becomes an all-too-tempting target for those cuts — especially for politicians who didn’t like the idea in the first place.

And what happens to the people on the scheme who are suddenly left in the lurch — the people, for example, who invested in a new business, expecting to be supported by Basic Income, only to have the rug suddenly pulled from under their feet?

And when a trial is cancelled or cut short, opponents will likely claim it was cancelled because it was too expensive — and that creates a black mark against Basic Income, even if the claim is untrue.

3. What will a trial prove anyway? Not much probably!

Trials are usually so limited in scope and scale, that few if any clear conclusions can be reached about what will happen if a full-scale Basic Income scheme is launched.

Many of the potential advantages of a Basic Income system just aren’t likely to materialise in a short-term, small-scale trial.

For example, Basic Income could boost the negotiating position of many workers. However, you can’t really expect workers to be able to negotiate better working conditions on the foundation of only a small sample of people getting Basic Income. Employers can just continue exploiting the many other workers who are not on the Basic Income trial.

And if a trial only lasts for a few months, that’s not going to give people the sort of financial security a permanent Basic Income scheme would provide — so it won’t really empower them to make better long-term career choices.

And almost whatever happens in the trial, opponents of Basic Income will claim it was a failure. And supporters of Basic Income will claim it was a success, or that it was deliberately sabotaged (which might, unfortunately, be true!).

And the truth will probably be that the trial really doesn’t prove very much either way. It may not tell us anything substantial that we aren’t already aware of.

4. These trials may actually be delaying, rather than hastening, the implementation of a real, full-scale Basic Income scheme.

We propose a Basic Income scheme. Opponents say we’ve got to prove it will work first. But no matter what happens in a trial, they’ll claim it shows Basic Income ‘won’t work’ or they’ll claim the trial was too small or too unrealistic to be considered reliable — even though they may have been the very people who opposed allowing enough funds for a bigger scheme in the first place.

To some extent, trials may be pandering to people who want to delay implementation of a proper Basic Income. Such people may hope that if they can cause enough delay, the idea may go out of fashion and never get implemented at all.

I’m not opposed to the whole idea of Basic Income trials — and I’m sure many of the people involved in setting them up have very good intentions.

However, if a trial is not a true Basic Income trial, or if it is underfunded and too lacking in scale and scope and duration to be able to produce reliable results, then there is the very real danger that it might do more harm than good.

And whilst we tentatively consider trials that probably won’t prove very much anyway, millions of poor and disadvantaged people continue to struggle and continue to be denied the financial security that could enable then to plan better futures for themselves and their families.

We should have a full-scale Basic Income system rolled out to everyone. I don’t want us to waste the next few years waiting for and then arguing over the results of misnamed, underfunded and inconclusive trials.