to British values’ that so many people were living in poverty in the world’s fifth-largest economy; it was not an inevitable consequence of economic forces, he said, but the choice of a government committed to ‘radical social re-engineering’.2 The United States and the United Kingdom may have moved further in this direction than other rich countries, but there have been comparable shifts in government priorities, public attitudes and spending patterns across the rich world.
The case for UBS is about choosing another direction. It rests on two key principles: shared needs and collective responsibilities. These don’t belong to the neoliberal ‘common sense’ that has shaped our politics for too many decades. But they strike such a deep chord in our everyday experience and familiar feelings that, when you get to thinking about them, they are altogether more common and more sensible. They are also soundly anchored in political theory.
All human beings have the same set of basic needs that must be satisfied in order to survive and thrive, think for ourselves and participate in society. Theories of capability and human need converge around this point. Martha Nussbaum describes three ‘core’ capabilities: of affiliation, bodily integrity and practical reason.3 Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify health and critical autonomy as basic human needs that are prerequisites for social participation.4
These basic human needs are universal across time and space. Of course, the practical detail of how they are satisfied will vary widely, as norms, resources and expectations shift and change between generations and countries. But there are certain generic categories of universal ‘intermediate needs’ that are more enduring. These are the means by which we meet our basic needs. They have been listed by need theorists as water, nutrition, shelter, secure and non-threatening work, education, health care, security in childhood, significant primary relationships, physical and economic security, and a safe environment.5 Unlike basic needs, intermediate needs may evolve over time. For example, recent efforts to identify ‘a set of universal, irreducible and essential set of material conditions for achieving basic human wellbeing’ have found that access to motorized transport and to information and communications could be added the list.6
Needs are not like wants. Wants vary infinitely and can multiply exponentially. If you don’t get what you want, you won’t die or cease to be part of human society, but that could happen if you don’t get what you need. Needs cannot usually be substituted for one another (a lack of water and shelter cannot be offset by more education or health care). They are part of an essential package. And needs are satiable: there are limits beyond which more food, more work or more security are no longer helpful and could even do you harm. There comes a point where sufficiency is reached in the process of meeting needs. By contrast, there will never come a time when we all have everything we want.
Understanding the difference between needs and wants or preferences provides an enduring, evidence-based and ethical foundation for making decisions about what things are truly essential for the survival and well-being of everyone, now and in future. It doesn’t trap us in any kind of uniform determinism because we acknowledge that history, geography, politics and culture shape the specific ways in which needs are satisfied. But it helps us to set priorities that are more, rather than less, likely to be fair and sustainable.
As individuals today, we can meet some of our needs through market transactions, depending on our circumstances. Food and clothing are examples here: most of us expect to be able to buy these ourselves, and having enough money to do this is clearly important. There are other needs that most of us cannot meet without help and we depend on others for our capacity to do so. Health care and education are the most common examples but, as we shall argue, the range of needs requiring a collective response is much wider. If we are to live together in society, we are all responsible for ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met – through a combination of measures to support income and provide services. As the sociologist Emile Durkheim observed, people ‘cannot live together without agreeing and consequently without making mutual sacrifices, joining themselves to one another in a strong and enduring fashion’. This is not just a worthy option, but the ‘fundamental basis’ of social life.7
Roosevelt’s New Deal and post-war welfare states involved pooling resources and sharing risks through the institutions of government. Most post-war settlements aimed to achieve full (male) employment, to provide income support for those who could not earn and to supply necessities that people could not afford to pay for individually in the form of public services that were free at the point of use. The political philosopher T. H. Marshall summed up the collective approach in the concept of ‘social citizenship’, which held that every member of society had positive economic and social rights as well as the more traditional ‘negative’ rights that protected us from harm and maintained our civil liberties.8
Social citizenship is anchored in both ethical and practical considerations. People are to be helped by their fellow citizens, rather than blamed and punished if they fall on hard times; and a thriving population is good for the economy. Civil and political rights cannot be realized unless people have sufficient social and economic means to live and act. Collective responsibility implies mutual obligations as well as rights. It’s a dynamic process where everyone gives and receives. Yet people cannot fulfil their obligations unless their basic needs are met.
This interdependence provides the moral foundation for every human society. The ‘moral economy’ underpins the material economy and ‘embodies norms and sentiments regarding the responsibilities and rights of individuals and institutions with regard to others’.9
The collective provision of services to meet shared needs is worth as much or more to us than the money we earn through employment. Most simply, it is a virtual income that replaces out-of-pocket expenditure, leaving us more disposable cash. This is the virtual income or ‘social wage’ we referred to earlier. It’s a notion that can be traced back many decades, but it is too rarely discussed today. The economic historian R. H. Tawney observed that ‘the standard of living of the great mass of the nation depends, not merely on the remuneration which they are paid for their labour, but on the social income which they receive as citizens’.10
The full worth of the social wage is even greater than its monetary replacement cost. It yields value indirectly and over time through the effects of services on others, not just ourselves, and on society as a whole. Furthermore, there is an important dimension of its value that does not feature in the theories of Durkheim, Marshall or Tawney but is inescapable today.
This is the imperative for human activity to remain within the ecological constraints of a finite planet. Unless we heed the scientists’ predictions, there is real danger that, within a matter of decades, there will be no recognizable human society for which to plan or deliver public services. Therefore any policy proposal that aims to improve human well-being must be designed to reduce harmful emissions, safeguard natural resources and stay within safe planetary boundaries.
As we shall argue, the fact that UBS is rooted in shared needs and collective responsibilities makes it far better placed to achieve sustainable practice than any welfare system based on market values and individual payments. It provides value not just for today but into the future, for generations to come. This accords with the most frequently quoted definition of sustainable development, in the 1987 Brundtland Report, as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.11
Notes
1 1. P. Alston (2017), ‘Statement on Visit to the USA’, Geneva: United Nations.
2 2. P. Alston (2018), ‘Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom’, Geneva: United Nations.
3 3. M. Nussbaum (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University
