The idea may seem radical, even naïve – like warmed over Marxism, or Rousseau’s egalitarian fantasy, or Thomas More’s Utopia. In fact, it’s a deeply conservative idea that is eminently practicable. Properly understood, it fulfills an enduring human aspiration, and it already has broad public support. So, what does a basic needs guarantee actually mean, and why don’t we have one already?
First some background. As I describe in detail in my new book, Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation Has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind, our species evolved over several million years in small, closely cooperating, egalitarian groups where leadership was mostly based on experience, skill, and prestige rather than on raw power and wealth. Every modern society represents an extension of this pre-history. From an evolutionary perspective, the basic, continuing, inescapable challenge for each of us is biological survival and reproduction. Life is quintessentially a contingent “survival enterprise,” and any organized society, whether it be in social insects or humankind, is fundamentally a “collective survival enterprise.” It involves a tacit social contract for the joint purpose of meeting our ongoing survival needs.
As it happens, this is a challenge with many facets. There are no less than fourteen distinct categories, or domains, of basic needs – absolute requisites for the survival and reproduction of each individual, and of society as a whole over time. Furthermore, we spend most of our daily lives involved in activities that are either directly or indirectly related to satisfying these needs, including (not least) earning a living and contributing in various ways to help sustain the collective survival enterprise. (All this is discussed in depth in my 2011 book, The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice.)
These fourteen basic needs domains include a number of obvious categories, like adequate nutrition, fresh water, physical safety, physical health, mental health, and waste elimination, as well as some items that we may take for granted, like thermoregulation (which encompasses many different technologies, from clothing to blankets, fire wood, heating oil, and air conditioning). Our basic needs even include adequate sleep (about one-third of our lives), mobility, and healthy respiration, which can’t always be assured these days. Perhaps least obvious but most important are the requirements for reproducing and nurturing the next generation. In short, our basic biological needs cut a very broad swath through our economy and our society.
Many societies these days fall far short in serving what I call our prime directive. It’s estimated that about half of the world’s current population live in varying degrees of poverty, and that perhaps one-quarter of them (or 1.9 billion), including many millions of children, are undernourished or malnourished. In some dysfunctional countries, like Syria and Venezuela, the situation is desperate. It is also estimated that over 2 billion people world-wide lack adequate fresh water supplies. A similar number of people do not have sanitary waste disposal systems, while many millions more suffer from preventable diseases and do not have access to health care, mental health services, safe housing, basic education, or safe streets. Even in the United States, an estimated 15-20 percent of our people are living in poverty. Some 5.3 million Americans survive in appalling third world conditions, while tens of millions more of our working poor are severely deprived economically.
So, a universal basic needs guarantee would require the U.S., and many other countries as well (though there are also many exceptions), to address an already very large basic needs shortfall. To make matters worse, over time the impact of climate change will produce a growing number of extreme weather events – prolonged droughts, severe floods, violent hurricanes, raging forest fires, and more. The long-standing desire to put an end to global poverty must also be proactive about the many life-threatening challenges that lie ahead.
What a universal basic needs guarantee brings to the table is a clearly-defined global goal with a specific shopping list for how to fulfill it. Some countries have already achieved it. For instance, the so-called Nordic countries, like Norway, Finland, and Denmark, have already found a balance between a free enterprise economy and a commitment to provide for the basic needs of all their citizens. Many other countries, like the United States, have more than enough resources, technologies, and wealth to achieve this objective but lack the collective political will to do so. But there are also many countries that will need further outside assistance of various kinds – from digging wells and pit latrines to increasing agricultural production, installing electrical power grids, augmenting health care services, upgrading the housing stock, and more. A guesstimate for the overall price tag for implementing a global basic needs guarantee suggests that it might require a reallocation of about 5-10 percent of our existing global GDP. We could start with reducing military budgets.
This is hardly a radical political agenda. In fact, it is a very old and very conservative idea. Even Plato, in the Republic, more than two thousand years ago recognized that the fundamental purpose of a society is to fulfill our basic needs, and he warned us about the extreme threat to the viability of any society, and its political regime, if its citizens are severely deprived. A modern-day poster-child for this is Syria, where a tragic civil war was almost certainly provoked by a prolonged drought, a global spike in food prices, and the indifference of the Assad government. And this is only one of many examples in our day of bad political choices that have led to disastrous outcomes.
The idea of a government-run social welfare system is also fundamentally a conservative policy. In fact, it was the conservative Otto von Bismarck, the founding father and “Iron Chancellor” of a united Germany in the 19th century, who pioneered the idea of creating a broad government-sponsored social insurance program (a safety net) as a way of building public support for his new nation. Likewise, in the 20th century many capitalist countries embraced the idea (especially after the Great Depression in the 1930s) of providing social welfare programs as a complement to a free market economy and as a way of ensuring public support for the economic and political system. (To the extent that ideologically-driven 21st century conservatives are actively seeking to undermine the safety net in these societies, they are laying the base for future political firestorms.)
Nor is the idea of a universal basic needs guarantee politically unpopular. In fact, the general idea has received broad public support in poll after poll over the years. For instance, a famous series of social experiments first conducted by political scientists Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer in the 1990s (and replicated many times since) found that some 78 percent of the participants overall favored ensuring a basic economic “floor” for everyone. A more recent survey by researchers at Harvard University found that 47 percent of young people in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 29 agree with the proposition that our basic necessities should be treated as “a right that government should provide to those who are unable to afford them.”
There is also a growing interest these days in the convergent idea of providing everyone with a “universal basic income.” It’s an old idea that has enlisted many prominent advocates over the years, although it would still fall far short of achieving a universal basic needs guarantee. (For one thing, many of our fourteen basic needs domains are served by an extensive public infrastructure – water systems, sewage systems, electrical grids, hospitals, public roads, schools, and, not least, fire brigades, policing and the rule of law.)
Finally, and not least, a universal basic needs guarantee undergirds rather than threatening the capitalist free market system (and its corollary of strong property rights). It does not call for a radical, ideologically-driven redistribution of wealth, and it’s compatible with both democratic and authoritarian political systems. Unlike the alternative idea of a universal basic income, moreover, it would not abandon the fundamental social principle of reciprocity by decoupling the benefits from various forms of work or public service — for those who are able. (A full-employment program should also be included in the package.)
So, why don’t we already have a universal basic needs guarantee? The answer is complicated; it would require a Ph.D. dissertation to unpack all the reasons. But at heart it boils down to a combination of greed and self-interest coupled with political ideologies that have been self-serving, or wrong-headed. As the distinguished economist Geoffrey Hodgson shows in his important new book, Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, our Western European intellectual class, and many of our political leaders, have been enshrouded in a theoretical fog, literally for centuries, and it has obscured their view of the real issues. In effect, they have taken our fundamental biological survival problem for granted; progress has been an article of faith in Western societies ever since the Enlightenment. Even a powerful social critic like Karl Marx, while recognizing the importance of our basic needs, went way off track with his fixation on class struggle, revolution, and a radical (unrealistic) change in the basic structure of societies.
In this century, as the threat to our very survival as a species becomes an inescapable imperative, it’s time to shed the blinders and re-orient our ideology and political agenda to focus on the biological fundamentals. The alternative could well prove fatal.