Cheap promises

‘Stop whining. Everyone should be rich. Vote for the Tegenpartij (Opposition Party), together for ourselves.’ It was the motto of the fictional Opposition Party, run by two shady characters of the second-car-saleman type, Jacobse and Van Es. The creators of the fiction, Van Kooten and De Bie, intended to mock populist politicians and their promises. An opinion poll revealed that the party could have won a few seats in parliament in 1981, had it not been a prank. But why can’t everyone be rich? Perhaps it is because poor people don’t have enough money. It can’t be that simple, or can it? Some think it is. So, why not hand out money for free? It is a scheme known as Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Perhaps machines and computers will soon do all the work. And if we lose our economic purpose, how can we remain alive? The wealthy, who own most capital, have no reason to let us live. We must distribute that money more fairly, the proponents of a UBI argue, by taxing the rich to pay the poor. Until now, these schemes have never worked as intended, with the wealthy evading taxes and the middle class paying for social benefits. Yet, that can change once we live in a global society where tax evasion is impossible. Some countries have a dole for those who don’t work. And if there are no jobs, everyone may have to go on the dole. That could end the relationship between humans and work that has existed since time immemorial. And so, it is a profoundly disturbing idea.

Proponents of UBI argue that handing out money can improve people’s lives. Research has shown that not having to worry about making ends meet greatly improves the quality of your life. However, many working poor struggle to make ends meet, and if you erode the benefits of working by handing out money to the lazy, you demoralise them from doing useful work. Without an incentive, many, if not most, wouldn’t contribute to society and definitely not take up unattractive jobs. On top of that, many people can’t make ends meet because of lifestyles that people in wealthy countries consider normal, but that are, in historical terms, outliers and, above all, untenable. So, ideally, we work less, but also have less, while those who do useful work are rewarded for it. We somehow have to figure out an economic system that produces enough, but not too much.

You may think that a UBI is a crazy scheme, most notably, the idea that you don’t have to work for a living. Yet, what we are doing now is also insane. We are engaged in a rat race to transform energy and resources into waste and pollution to make the rich richer and create technologies that will terminate humankind. We would be better off if most people in advanced economies stopped doing their jobs. And we are handing out money for free to the rich. At present, we have helicopter money. Central banks hand out money to the wealthiest in the hope that it will eventually trickle down to the working class and the poor. And that is necessary because we pay interest to the rich. So, if governments stop going into debt and central banks stop printing money, the usury scheme collapses.

Game of Monopoly

To illustrate the point, we can look at the game of Monopoly. The game is a model of capitalism, a simplification highlighting specific aspects of the system, not reality itself, but it highlights why capitalism fails. If you have played the game more than once, you may have noticed it usually goes like this. Initially, players purchase streets and generate capital by constructing houses and hotels. You can get rich by making the right investment choices. You also need luck and to be at the right place at the right moment. The game ends when nearly all players are bankrupt, except one. At that point, there are more houses and hotels than players, so a lot of wealth, but few can afford it. The merit of the model is that it explains why billionaires get richer while many others can’t afford the rent.

Monopoly comes with a UBI. Every time you finish a round, you receive a fixed sum. It keeps the game going. Otherwise, players would soon run out of cash. If the game ends, the players can wipe out all the houses and hotels and start anew. In the real world, it would be akin to collapsing the economy, which is a highly inefficient way of reducing wealth inequality. The alternative is to tax the rich and distribute that money to the poor. Capital income makes wealth accumulate in the hands of a few. Without it, there is less need for redistributing income. Had there been no houses and hotels, the game could continue indefinitely, even without handing out money every round. Returns on capital are the source of the trouble, but without capital, there would be no homes.

Likely, the game could continue without losers if you could build only one house on every street. That would be enough, as you wouldn’t have to sleep rough. Having just enough capital helps to alleviate the issue. Most billionaires today have become rich by providing services we do not need, not by farming or building homes. If the streets are evenly divided, you do not need to hand out money to keep the game going. In the real world, some people save their money, while others waste it, and some are lucky while others are not. Economic forces must run their course to build capital. Yet, you need mechanisms to balance it out. And interest on capital is the dole for the rich. The justification for it was that capital must be allowed to grow. Only, we now have too much capital.

Bullshit jobs

For most of history, most people worked an average of a few hours per day, but they were dirt poor. The Industrial Revolution changed that. Factory owners wanted labourers to work long hours in regular schedules to increase production. That is still how the economy operates today, even though we now produce far more than we need with only a fraction of the workforce, so we must entertain the remainder by wasting energy and resources on non-essential activities. In ‘advanced’ economies, less than a third of the workforce may do things that we need. The remaining jobs are pointless bullshit jobs. These occupations range from trading securities to taking orders at a fast-food restaurant. Once resources are gone and the Earth has become a wasteland, these jobs will be gone.

Working is doing something useful for others or society. While performing our jobs, we consume energy and resources. Therefore, if our jobs aren’t essential, they aren’t work but entertainment. We drive our cars to heated or air-conditioned offices. We work hard, so we believe we deserve a holiday and consume energy and resources for relaxation. If we eliminate all the pointless jobs, we can divide the remaining work, relax more, and thus avoid wasting energy and resources on holidays. The anthropologist David Graeber estimated that at least one-third of all jobs are pointless.¹ It is much more than that.

So, which jobs can we do without? Graeber mentions a receptionist at a publisher in the Netherlands. She had nothing to do except for taking up an occasional telephone call. Another employee could have done that alongside other tasks. But without a receptionist, no one would take the publisher seriously. And so, the publisher needed a receptionist. It made economic sense. Still, we can do without the publisher and over 99.99% of the books ever published. Graeber has vastly underestimated the inefficiency of the modern economy in terms of the energy and resources it consumes relative to our needs.

In our economic system, a job has economic value when someone is willing to pay for it. I could hire you to dress as a rabbit and hop on the street. Perhaps that brings a few smiles to a few faces, so who is to tell this job is pointless? Okay, the cost of making the rabbit suit could have saved a few children from starvation, but that has less economic value because these children had no money. And that is precisely the problem. Think of consultants, managers, salespeople, lawyers, and financial advisors.

They don’t produce anything we can eat or use to keep us warm. A small percentage of what they waste on frivolous consumption could feed those who still go hungry. These highly peculiar views stem from a belief that money is the supreme measure of value and that we must engage in a rat race to produce and consume as many non-essential items as possible to prevent businesses from becoming unprofitable, as that would lead to economic collapse. And so, they keep telling us, like Jacobse and Van Es, that if we work harder and waste more energy and resources on senseless production and consumption, allowing capital owners to make more money, everyone will end up rich.

Making it work

Doing a job is about making yourself valuable to others, not about doing what you like. Essential jobs are often unattractive and uninspiring. In wealthy countries, most notably those with social benefits, immigrants do most of the unattractive jobs, also because the pay is low. These include vital jobs, such as harvesting crops. Meanwhile, the indigenous population went on to create value by performing redundant activities in the bullshit economy. The production of essentials, such as commodity goods like farm products, suffers from intense competition, so that jobs in these sectors are often hard work for low wages. Breaking up markets and producing for local consumption could change that. If one thing can help to make that happen, it is high transport costs.

Since time immemorial, humans have lived in groups. Most contributed to the group. That was how they survived. If we plan to survive, it must be rewarding to do essential jobs like harvesting crops and building homes. In ‘advanced’ economies, most people entertain themselves in the bullshit economy, transforming energy and resources into garbage and pollution, while not producing anything we need. That is worse than being on the dole if you look at the bigger picture and make the survival of humankind our primary directive. And so, we need to take the redundant labour off the market. It may well be that the economy reorganises itself, so there may be more people to do tasks like caring for the elderly, education, cleaning up the planet, and policing. Yet it is also likely that many remain on welfare. At the very least, the universal basic income should include food, clean drinking water, shelter and basic medical assistance.

An alternative to a UBI is an income guarantee. Why hand out money to people who have enough? And there should be an incentive to work. The income guarantee can include a work requirement, such as doing community service. Existing welfare schemes often make it financially unattractive to take on a low-paying job. A simple example can explain what an income guarantee scheme might look like. Assume there is an income guarantee of €800 per month and a 50% income tax.

gross income	tax	net income
€ 0	+ € 800	€ 800
€ 1000	+ € 300	€ 1300
€ 2000	– € 200	€ 1800
€ 3000	– € 700	€ 2300
€ 5000	– € 1700	€ 3300

The income guarantee gets settled with the income tax, so you receive assistance when your income is low. You may not receive money, but you may receive food or shelter. If your gross income is €2,000, you pay €200 in taxes, and your net income is €1,800. There is an incentive to work as you gain financially from doing a job. The income guarantee can replace existing welfare schemes, reducing red tape.

Welfare schemes require funding. To finance the scheme, you need more people making €3,000 or more than people making €1,000 or less. And so, the income guarantee can’t be fixed, and it may not be sufficient to live off if not all essential job positions are fulfilled. Even then, an income guarantee can improve workers’ bargaining position, as it can allow workers to work fewer hours, removing labour from the market, resulting in higher pay that attracts more workers, most notably if the guarantee is insufficient to live on.

Denmark has an income guarantee, combined with a duty to seek employment. It helps to make the Danish labour market flexible. Corporations can adapt their workforce to market requirements. Employment security, education and the income guarantee compensate for the lack of job security.² Denmark is, in many ways, an ideal society, with a functional social contract and a competent government. That doesn’t come out of nowhere. Such a society requires particular cultural values, such as a sense of duty, that make people seek employment, and if necessary, education to fit into a new job.

This scheme is far from ideal. It will bring new problems, some of which we may not be able to fix. Yet the way the economy is organised at present is suicidal. There is no alternative. We must find something better. Faced with the high efficiency of the production of essentials and the vast overproduction and marketing of non-essentials, and the impossibility of directing the superfluous workforce to produce essentials at short notice, there appears to be no choice but to take a daring step and seriously consider handing out essentials for free, which we already do, so that the change is likely less than we imagine. From there, we may start building the economy of the future.

Latest revision: 5 May 2026

Other images: Monopoly game.

1. Bullshit Jobs. David Graeber (2018). Simon & Schuster.
2. Danish Employment Policy. Jan Hendeliowitz. Employment Region Copenhagen & Zealand, The Danish National Labour Market Authority (2008). https://www.oecd.org/employment/leed/40575308.pdf