Free to Dream: Mental Health and Basic Income
Transcript of a talk given at the 2017 Mental Wealth Festival at City Lit. For those of you who read my 2017 Oxford Disability Lecture talk, feel free to skip the opening paragraph or two.
Imagine a world where it is always winter, though even in this putative permafrost two precious crops have flourished, pomegranates and cotton. And instead of weaving the cotton into coats and feasting on pomegranates the inhabitants of this world have decided to keep warm by burning all their pomegranate trees until one day the last flames flicker out and they wonder how they can feed themselves in a world where the only thing that grows is cotton.
In the coming century we will live through a winter of challenges that will affect us on a global scale, from artificial intelligence to automation, climate change to food security.
To see us through the cold we have the cotton of prosperity unparalleled in our history, and the pomegranates of human potential. And yet we continue to burn through lives as though they were nothing but a commodity to stoke growth, and those who will be left are fast approaching the day they look at their swollen bank accounts and wonder what nourishment they will bring.
We will only meet our challenges and take advantage of the wonderful opportunities they also represent if our full intellectual, creative and innovative potential as a species is unlocked. That will mean many structures we regard as essential and inevitable, and the many gateless walls that support them, must be torn down, and others built in their place. One such structureis the adoption of a universal basic income.
The social model of disability holds that the current way we have arranged our world inhibits the flourishing of those with mental differences. I believe there is no single reordering of society that would do more to remove these inhibitions than the provision of a universal basic income.
The idea of a universal basic income is very simple, although the ways it could be implemented are as many as the number of people who advocate it. It would ensure everyone received a regular payment, with no strings and no qualifications, that was sufficient to mean their basic needs were met.
It is an idea that is just starting to enter mainstream conversation. Most frequently, this is because people are realising that we are about to enter an age where automation will force us to reevaluate everything we thought we believed about paid employment.
But a basic income is so much more than a reactive force, a dam to stem the negative flood of progress. It is, as Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, puts it, venture capital for the people, a key foundation in helping build a better future.
Let’s have a look at some of the ways it could do this by examining some of the main barriers keeping the mentally different among us from flourishing.
Let me begin by saying something about the relationship between debt and mental health. I have been privileged to be part of some fabulous pieces of work on this, with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Money Advice Liaison Group, the Personal Finance Research Centre and others. What is clear from every piece of research is the insidious relation between debt and mental ill health. Mental ill health can lead to difficulties accessing and managing finances, be that wages or personal finance, or those products that might save money if one has the executive function to access them. And debt, and the associated problems it brings, in turn, exacerbates mental ill health.
The impact of this relationship is devastating, in three key ways.
- A lack of access to finance kills entrepreneurialism. It doesn’t matter how good the idea you have. It doesn’t matter how resourceful you are with what you can find for free. By and large an idea needs money to bring it to life. And even if you can use freely available resources to do everything yourself, from scratch, doing so requires time and headspace that those of us struggling to keep a roof over our heads whilst also battling mental ill health just don’t have.
This is something I have experienced with my own attempt to create something that will both improve people’s lives and have enough financial value to enable me to use what talents I have on a day to day basis rather than wasting hour on hour at administrative busy-work I don’t do very well. I combined the research I was carrying out before I had my big breakdown — which touched on early modern memory systems, and accompanying tales of heresy and intrigue, and monks being burned at the stake for summoning demons when all they were trying to do is more efficiently memorise their shopping lists — with my hobbies in the world of mind sports, to create a card game that helps make creative thinking not only fun but also easier, by preparing precisely the parts of the brain most involved in being creative.
The idea had been there for years. But I didn’t know what to do with it. No matter how much I can play with a computer in my spare time the fact remains a great card game needed me to work with a designer and an illustrator and then to actually print some packs of cards. Most months I struggle to figure how we are going to eat — my wife is autistic and has bipolar disorder. She has just managed to get the headspace together to get the help to fill out the forms to get PIP. I have bipolar disorder and various comorbid conditions and can just about hold down a low level admin job. Both of us have debts built up over years of ill health. There is no money to invest in my idea, no matter how good it might be, not even the money to produce a prototype to show potential investors.
I have been ridiculously lucky. In my admin job in Higher Education I am often sent things to circulate to our academics. One such thing I was sent earlier this year was the details of the Humanities Innovation Challenge, which asked academics for ideas of how to use their research innovatively to create an impact in the world. The prize was support in turning your idea into a real thing.
Closer inspection revealed that the terms and conditions specified entrants had to work in the Humanities. They didn’t specify you had to be an academic. So I did the obvious thing. I chanced my arm and sent in my idea. Two weeks later I found myself pitching, Dragon’s Den style, to a room full of venture capitalists and senior managers. Some of the latter recognised me. They did not look pleased that I had crashed the party. Fortunately they weren’t the ones making the decisions, and I beat off 14 academics and teams of academics, many of them senior professors. Shortly after, as part of my prize, I was given the money to pay a designer and a printing company to produce a prototype of Mycelium, which I have here. In November I will be testing it with hundreds of people in Oxford’s Natural History Museum, and then I will be given access to the funding to pay an illustrator and produce a first run of thousands of packs.
I have been incredibly lucky. The chances are that nothing will come of it, but I have been given a chance. And that is all I am asking for. Without access to money, most people will never get a chance to make their dreams real. They lose out. We as a society lose out on the great things that may have resulted. And the economy loses out. A universal basic income would give many more people a chance. People would not get into as much debt. They would not be forced into less affordable means of finding electricity or food because they could afford the bulk buy and the direct debit options. And if someone could work just a few hours in addition, they would have the means to fund the results of their creativity.
- Second, there is the problem of scarcity. In his TED talk, Rutger Bregman asks the controversial question “why do the poor make bad decisions?” It sounds really insulting, but research shows that people who have little money spend it on things that do not benefit their long term wellbeing. To those of us who have been there, why that should be is obvious. But now research by Eldar Shafir, cited by Bregman, confirms what we always knew was true. When you don’t know how you will eat tonight, you don’t have the headspace to make decisions about what will benefit you 20 years down the road. It’s not that you prioritise the present over the future, it’s a question of mental resources not being able to stretch to making that kind of decision. The same research also shows that the answer to this problem is as straightforward as we have known it was all along. It is not providing incentives to make good choices; it is not about disincentivising bad choices; and it is not about giving us more knowledge so we can make better choices (it is fairly obvious that overloading our already overloaded systems with even more will do the opposite). Itreally is as simple as this. The problem with poverty is that people have no money. The answer to poverty is to give them money. That is precisely what a universal basic income would do.
Furthermore, because a universal basic income is unconditional, there are not the endless humiliating draining forms and hoops that sap what energy you might have, leaving you not only unable to follow your dreams but unable even to dream at all.
- Finally, Adam Grant, whose book Originals is a marvellous study of what factors coalesce in the people who change our world for the better, identifies one key factor that all great creatives have in common. They fail more than others do. It is that simple. And yet the freedom to fail is a privilege denied disproportionately to those with mental ill health.
Suppose, for example, I had done the thing we are always reading about in the biographies of “successes”. Suppose one month I had said “I won’t pay the rent and the bills this month, I’ll take a gamble. I’ll” to use that awful, vulnerable-shaming phrase, “bet on myself”. Suppose I had used the rent money to pay a designer and a printer to produce my prototypes of Mycelium.
Well, several factors would come into play. I’d be so keenly aware that it had to work I’d almost certainly do it wrong. I would be so mentally take up with what would happen if it went wrong I wouldn’t be able to think straight. I may even get ill again and the debt would be called in before I ever got a chance. Most innovative ideas fail — that’s part of the process. And the psychology of staking money I couldn’t afford on this one would have made an already unlikely to succeed venture even less likely to succeed.
And if it did fail? Simple. Eventually my wife and I would lose our home and face dealing with whatever that meant as well as our mental ill health. I simply could not afford to fail. Knowing that the money will come in whatever life throws at you gives you that freedom. It does not matter if you fail. You can do so and try again, and fail again. You can follow the pattern of experimentation that “successful” people invariably follow. That doesn’t mean that your ideas will make you rich or change the world. But it does mean that your idea has as much chance of doing so as someone else’s. And that is a quantum leap ahead of where we are right now.
And the provision of a universal basic income would not just address those situations in which our ideas need money in order to give them wings. If we think again about the problem of scarcity, we see how easy it is for creativity in all its forms to be squashed by the narrow horizons that scarce resources create. Poetry, art, music — these things can and often do emerge in times and places of extreme hardship. But to imagine that such hardship makes them easier, to imagine that facing uncertainty and fear on a daily basis do not so preoccupy our minds that creativity is forced into hibernation — that is romanticism of the worst kind.
Heavy metal may have come from the ashes of a dying manufacturing industry; punk from mass unemployment and a generation that had hope stripped from them; blues from the poverty and humiliation of a segregated nation. But those environments destroyed many more lives, left many more shells of people living from meal to meal and pittance to pittance.
A world alive with creativity is a better world for all of us. And a precondition for a world in which we can each sew our thread into the exquisite tapestry of our future is the provision of a basic income that will allow our minds to wander through ever wider horizons.
It is more than this, of course. There are many ways in which the most vulnerable would benefit from a basic income. Improved mental health would not just allow us to achieve more with our lives. It is a good in itself. The link between poverty and suicide means that lives would be directly saved. And the access to education for people who were no longer forced to work the moment they were legally able to would increase the pool of talent from which the scientists and surgeons of tomorrow are drawn so that lives would be indirectly saved. Victims of domestic abuse would be free to leave, secure in the knowledge their needs would be met. More money would come into the economy as those we know are most likely to spend the money they have were able to spend it. Health would improve as no one ever fell below the level where they could afford not just to subsist but to afford more nutritious ways to obtain the calories they needed, and could afford the electricity and the mental resources required to cook fresh ingredients. More people could afford the products with lower carbon footprints. More people would have the time to volunteer, to undertake caring roles, for activism, to articulate the needs of their communities and ultimately to engage in the political process. It is hard to think of an area of life key to our wellbeing where the provision of a universal basic income would not bring massive beneficial change.
Basic income is not the whole answer to our problems. But it is a precondition. If we, as a species, are going to emerge from this century looking forward to a better future or, indeed, at all, I would argue that it is one of four preconditions. The others are universal open access to the sum of human knowledge; universal access through education to the skills to use that knowledge; and universal access through social justice to the freedom to do so.
These are doors that are all too often closed to the neurodivergent and those with mental ill health. A universal basic income would be the first step to throwing those doors wide open, to the benefit of us all.
We began with a dystopia. Let’s end by imagining another future.
The year is 2217.
It is one hundred years since humans came to Enceladus to build what has finally become the staging post to the stars. As the ship finds its final trajectory its captain stares out into the darkness hurtling towards her. Already growing inside her is the first human who will be born, live a full 200 year span, and die without ever setting foot on Earth.
Among the few remnants of her species’ past she carries with her is the book she reads again and again to her unborn child to pass their endless empty days. The book, simple elaborations of the enquiring minds and open hearts that have fuelled this journey from its first step, provides a single cord connecting her back in time past the first landing on Saturn’s moon, past the moment a human being set foot on Mars, all the way back past the moment the last border control on Earth came down, past the release of the last living creature born to be slaughtered, past the point of singularity when humanity enacted its decision that artificial intelligence would be used to hasten the freedom of the planet’s most vulnerable citizens…all the way to another single mother looking out on a cold Winter Tuesday night at the same stars, ones she has seen thousands of times, but this time seeing something she has never seen before. For the first time she simply stands at her window and looks, not dreading the decisions the cold has always brought in the past, knowing that there will be no more brown envelopes dropping through her door, her vision no longer blurred by tears from watching her child’s dreams disappearing day by day down the same track that has stolen her own. What she sees rushing towards her through the heavens is this: the future. Not her future. Not her child’s future, but the steps that will take us to the stars, a future seen through the eyes of another woman, a woman she knows she will never meet, who gazes out at those same stars. As her thoughts take their beautiful, daring shape she opens her computer and begins to type.
We talk a lot about inclusion, and there are so many simple and immediate steps we must take to adapt our world so that all can flourish within it. But we must not limit our horizons. Inclusion has to mean this as well — that we all, including those sidelined by mental ill health, play a part in asking the questions that will shape the challenges we meet in the decades to come, and that we are all given the opportunity to use the talents we have to contribute to finding and implementing the answers to those questions. Inclusion must mean precious portions of unfettered space to think, it must mean time to nurture our abilities and excel, and it must mean the financial security that provides the freedom to fail. And the provision of a universal basic income is a crucial first step towards achieving that.
