A game-changing idea for society

Every so often we can put two or three big trends together into a melting pot and come up with an idea that could enable progress in many areas at once. Here is one – let people be paid for work they traditionally are not paid for.

Four big trends are facing society together. Each constitutes threats and opportunities.

The first trend is the changing nature of work. Before the industrial revolution, nearly all work was within a community, domestic and unpaid. Then the concept arrived that men should work a job, away from home, from about 18 to 65, Monday to Friday, while women looked after the family.

Now this concept is breaking down. Automation means there are not enough of such jobs to go around. Many people do several jobs, some more like gigs, some at home, and with more flexible boundaries concerning retirement. Consequences include unwelcome idleness, feelings of worthlessness, rising inequality, and straining tax and welfare systems. One partial solution gaining credence is a universal basic income. The candidate of the ruling party in the upcoming French presidential election has this on his platform, so the idea is no longer considered marginal. But it is hard to see how it could be affordable.

The second trend is demographic. We are all more healthy and living much longer. This helps to feed the first trend, because people want or need to work longer. But the bigger impact is social. While healthy, these old people need activities. Then as they gradually become less healthy they create an unmet demand for minor forms of care, more like companionship than medical support. Finally, they do need medical care. Consequences are packed and unpleasant nursing homes, strains on relatives pressed into caring, and unsustainable pressure on health care costs.

The third trend is social. The paradigm that men go out to work and women stay at home has broken down. But residual consequences of the former system linger. Women do most housework. Women are paid less for the same work. Young kids become expensive in terms of lost income or caring costs, yet still often receive insufficient early learning. Much of what women used to do remains undervalued and often barely visible. Consequences include lingering gender inequality and disrespect, and unfair disadvantages for kids of poorer and single parents.

The final trend is technological. Much more is possible nowadays as a result. That feeds the other trends, for example through firms like Uber. But technology also offers a chance to revolutionise what we now call welfare. A billion Indians are now registered in a scheme allowing benefits to be paid with far less waste and corruption. Technology could also monitor domestic and community work, making it possible for it to be paid at affordable costs of administration, safely and with minimal abuse.

Now put all these trends together, and consider the simple idea of enabling payment for many of the things we currently do for free. I do some paid work, but I also look after the kids and help maintain the household. My parents are dead but I volunteer at an old folks home and could do more with more incentive and training. Most of us do these things, and could do more. Our communities could benefit from more of such things being done, and done better.

I envisage a series of roles for segmented groups of recipients. The recipient groups would be pre-schoolers, elementary school kids, older children and adults with mental health issues, people with physical disability, people in forms of rehabilitation or deprivation, independent but lonely elderly, less dependent elderly and fully dependent elderly.

The roles would be tiered, starting from companionship, errands, and moving through group activities towards psychological and educational support and reaching medical monitoring or even limited medical intervention. There are also some civic roles providing things like park maintenance. All roles would require (free) some training before application with any recipients beyond immediate family (and recommended even for that group).

Recipients would carry a personal budget depending on need, and roles paid hourly rates starting at minimum wage and growing with responsibility. Administration would be via something like care.com, with local staff monitoring needs, opportunities and abuses. You can self-report roles carried out within your own family, so for example young kids and aged parents living with or near their children would usually have most of their budgets claimed by their own family. But recipients can’t pocket their own budget – if it is unused it is lost.

Many people would object to this plan, and indeed there would be sure to be teething problems and complicated details to work through. I can envisage three main objections, beyond the group that simply things these things are family responsibilities (usually men thinking their wives should stay at home).

Objection would come from teachers and care workers, fearful of losing their jobs and reductions in quality standards. There are legitimate concerns here, even though the goal is to radically expand provided care rather than to replace existing expert provision, and the scheme would offer supervision opportunities to these groups. One way to win over this group is to demonstrate that the scheme would add perceived value to their expertise and contribution to society.

The second objection would be cynics pointing to abuse and corruption. This would surely exist, no matter how smart the technology. But my heart tells me that in the vast majority of cases the opposite effect would happen. Rather than claiming for shoddy work or work not done, most of us would become some fulfilled by helping society that we would develop bonds with those we are serving, and end up offering much more time and love than we would claim for. This would perhaps be the biggest change and greatest transformative benefit from the idea.

The last and toughest objection would be affordability. For those who think that GDP is the only legitimate goal, this scheme would indeed seem unattractive. I would counter mainly by challenging the primacy of the goal, suggesting a happier and healthier society might be more important, and that indeed such a society would be more productive even by the narrow GDP measure.

But I have practical arguments too. A lot of the funding would actually replace parts of existing schemes, such as child, maternity and disability benefits and even pensions. I would also reduce personal tax allowances. The idea is not to eliminate such things, but create a situation where we earn some of the benefit. As an example, we receive less child benefit, but then claim part of the budget allocated to the child by caring for it. Similarly, a pensioner would receive some services directly instead of money to buy services.

The bigger benefits would come through reductions in budgets for healthcare and other budgets such as prison rehabilitation. More people could live functional lives within their community because of the scheme, reducing needs for things like hospital stays.

No doubt these mitigations would not provide all the funding, though the remainder would be no more than the cost of a universal basic income, for example. The difference I would make up through income taxes on high earners and the old staples of financial transaction and carbon taxes. The net effect would be to redistribute towards those that need it most, and a massive increase in provision of services that society needs.

Of course there is little prospect of anything resembling this idea coming to fruition, certainly not in the so-called land of the free. Watch the Nordics as usual for the first movers. But if you look at the objectors listed above, those are the ones with the power. Taking on chauvinists, protected public sector workers, cynics and corporate apologists all at the same time would be a big challenge. But look at the four trends and what this scheme could achieve, and maybe something like this could gain some momentum. I hope so.