Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 28, 2022 | 41 Comments
Here’s the final instalment in my series on health and welfare in a small farm future.This one started life as a draft book chapter, subsequently unpublished, and is herewith being put out to grass unamended as a blog post. Let me know if you’d like a full citation for any of the references at the end.
As previously related, I’m currently hard at work on a small writing project, so please forgive me if my activity on this blog takes a downturn over the next couple of months.
As proverbially social animals, humans look to each other for support through the vicissitudes of individual and collective life – sickness and disability, childhood and old age, mental and social needs, poverty and indigence, legal justice. Different political traditions or ideologies offer competing and often somewhat idealized visions of the good life, and how these vicissitudes can best be negotiated through it.
My account of a household-based small farm future is no exception. As I see it, household farming can bring multiple benefits to those that live it. The provisioning of healthy wholefoods through often vigorous activity promotes physical health. Working with intimately-known others within a wider community gives a sense of purpose and agency that promotes mental health. A carefully-constructed small farm society creates opportunities for almost everyone. Its norms of work and sharing help minimize indigence and squalor and promote care across the life-course. In this view, small farm society is almost its own welfare system. But, as with every political vision, no doubt the reality falls somewhat short of the ideal. And in any case, we need to attend precisely to those processes of careful construction in order to approach the ideal. How would people take care of each other in a small farm future?
Historically, the main institutions people have developed for collective welfare are:
In the wealthy countries today, centralized states have gradually come to assume extensive responsibility for the welfare of their subjects, arguably eroding the capacities of other, non-state institutions to do the job. Recent years have seen rising criticism from the political right of statist approaches to welfare, which has manifested in pushing back the responsibility for welfare onto families and civic organizations precisely when other demands and erosive forces have weakened their ability to assume it. Still, the truth is that the greatest burden of social care has always fallen outside the state onto kinsfolk – women in particular. Yet despite the conservative move against statist welfare, government welfare expenditures in the rich countries have only increased in recent years[i]. In fact, modern states are sometimes called ‘welfare capitalist’ to capture their dual role of fostering the capitalist economy and disbursing a portion of its product as social benefits.
In most plausible scenarios for humanity’s future it seems likely that there’ll be less financial capital available to pay for formal state welfare services, and probably less extensive networks of state infrastructure able to provide them. Certainly, this would be the case in the kind of small farm society that I’ve been advocating – a potentially troubling fact to reckon with. On the upside, it’s possible that while consumer demand in ‘welfare capitalist’ societies for both welfare and capital goods are almost unlimited, those in a small farm society would be more modest. This is partly because the demand for welfare is a function – potentially a ‘dysfunction’ – of all a society’s other activities. The self-reliant welfarism of a small farm society may therefore reduce its demand for formal welfare services. Another possible upside is that, like small-scale farming, human service jobs are generally high in labor-intensity and low in capital or carbon-intensity, and would therefore be especially complementary to a sustainable small farm future.
These upsides don’t short-circuit difficult questions – Who would pay for welfare? How, and how much? Who would provide it, who would receive it, and who might miss out? And what purposes would it serve, exactly? I can’t answer those questions in detail, but hopefully I can lay out some grounding principles and visions, which are most easily broached through reviewing the nature of state and non-state forms of welfare, as laid out in the table below.
Table: Welfare regimes, their strengths and weaknesses
| State Welfare Provision | Private welfare provision | |||
| + | – | + | – | |
| 1. Sharing, community building | 2. Closure around specific communities | 3. Strings attached – affordability – ‘big man’ patronage – closure of commons – philanthro-capitalism – patriarchy – violent/criminal | ||
| 4. Civic efficiency | 5. Erosion of personal responsibility/market signals | |||
| 6. Removal from sphere of personal experience | 7. Individual – family – household ‘self-welfare’ | |||
| 8. Collective ‘self-welfare’ (community organizing/commons) | ||||
| 9. Working-class activism | 10. Excessive (& gendered) burden | |||
| 11. Disciplining of working class (‘undeserving poor’) | ||||
| 12. Surveillance & discrimination | 13. Individualism, identity-based activism | |||
| 14. Rationality, fairness | 15. Poor coverage | |||
| 16. Arbitrary, unfair, abusive | ||||
| 17. Unresponsive, abusive | ||||
| 18. Middle class capture/flight | ||||
| 19. Client & worker stigma (2 tier service) | 20. Personal relationship between known client & provider | |||
| 21. Shared professional expertise | 22. Colonization by ‘closed’ professions (cult of the expert) | |||
| 23. Bureaucratic empire-building | 24. ‘Self’-expertise | 25. Poor quality, unprofessional |
The strengths and weaknesses identified in the table aren’t simply facts. To some extent, they represent characteristic political ideologies – broadly speaking, with the left in favor of state solutions and conservatives disfavoring them against non-state or private solutions. The right-hand side of the table conflates various non-state forms of welfare, which should probably be separated – private (family), community or commons, private market, religious and charitable – though arguably these do have some shared characteristics. Political views are such that there’s no universal agreement on the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of welfare, but most people will probably appreciate there’s at least some force to all the views encapsulated in the table. Below, I briefly review them before attempting a synthesis in the context of a small farm future.
Universal state provision of welfare can (#1) build a sense of shared community and participation within the political community. In Britain, for example, the National Health Service (NHS) is widely cherished for making healthcare available to all freely at the point of delivery based on need rather than ability to pay, standing in an important sense for what unites people as a nation. But in practice welfare is rarely universal, usually involving some kind of (#2) closure based on citizenship, insurance payments or other entitlement criteria. If this is true of state provision, it’s even more so with non-state welfare, which invariably comes with (#3) strings attached. This encompasses ability to pay in marketized welfare, or with the quid pro quo expectations of charitable donors like churches or individual ‘big men’, whether it’s a local landlord helping defray a tenant’s welfare costs or global ‘philanthrocapitalists’ like Bill Gates or Bono mobilizing for human welfare within conservative models of the capitalist status quo. Sometimes, especially where the writ of the formal state doesn’t run, welfare services are provided by criminal or terrorist organizations as a way of building local support, but with clear and troubling expectations placed on recipients. Within families, the provision of welfare can replicate existing power structures, often to the disproportionate benefit of senior men.
Another potential benefit of state provision is (#4) efficiency. For example, making books and magazines available to the public on a short-term or shared basis via a library is – in addition to the other benefits of public study space – a more efficient resource use than a system based on individualized purchase. A counter-argument from the right is that such collective provision (#5) erodes personal responsibility for self-care and distorts market signals for the efficient matching of supply with demand – as, for example, in the stereotype of the ‘welfare mother’ having too many children and doing too little work in response to child support payments. The evidence for this counter-argument generally is weak, and in any case neglects the wider contexts that condition human behavior[ii]. But it’s surely true that universal provision (#6) can remove welfare from the sphere of personal experience, which has potential downsides. For example, having lived for portions of my life with the responsibility of collecting my own water and generating my own electricity I’d suggest there’s an economy of scale to public provision of these utilities, but self-provision does tend to concentrate the mind regarding unnecessary use. More widely, inasmuch as we decide, for example, that care of children or elders is best left to paid professionals there are dangers in dividing people from one another across the life-course, whatever the other benefits.
As I’ve already suggested, the (#7) ‘self-welfare’ of the household or family farm can substitute for a good deal of formally-provided state welfare services, albeit with the danger of unequal internal power relations (#3). But it can’t provide everything. Often, wider (#8) local communities organize to self-provide welfare in a similar way, and with similar potential drawbacks.
It’s arguable that formal, state-provided welfare services themselves constitute a form of community self-organization achieved by predominantly (#9) working-class and minority activism to shape the nature of the modern state – for example maternity and childcare benefits that make child-bearing and rearing a public responsibility rather than a private burden that falls (#10) disproportionately on women and poorer families. On the other hand, it’s arguable that putting private welfare in the hands of the state makes people – working-class people in particular – subject to (#11) disciplining and regulation in state hands, and to increasingly pervasive and totalizing regimens of (#12) state surveillance that are often discriminatory. Historically, the distinction between the so-called ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor has been endlessly recycled. Those defined in the ‘undeserving’ category have often been subjected to punitive regimes of welfare or its withholding that amount to blaming the victim[iii]. In early modern England, for example, widowed mothers of young children resident in a parish (sometimes known as ‘goodies’) were identified as worthy recipients of parish relief, while penniless male vagrants wandering in search of work or succor got shorter shrift, without much attention to the processes that had divorced them from land and sustenance[iv]. Perhaps the most stigmatized ‘vagrants’ or ‘undeserving poor’ in the rich countries today are undocumented international migrants – often represented negatively in much the same way as their early modern counterparts as aggressive young men on the move.
State discrimination extends into other kinds of ‘deviance’. For example, the 1988 Local Government Act in the UK forbade local councils from promoting homosexuality or teaching it as a “pretended family relationship” in schools. The act was fully repealed in 2003, and legislation enabling same-sex civil partnerships and later marriage was in force across most of the UK by 2014. No doubt this reflects changing social attitudes, but arguably the impetus for the partnership legislation had its basis in a conception of property-holder rights grounded in (#13) non-state, individualist identity activism. So ‘progressive’ change can come from market-based claims against the state rather than attempts to wrest control of state disciplining from within[v] – a point that fits with my arguments earlier in favor of inalienable private property rights. But it must be emphasized that whether we’re talking about working-class activism within the confines of state welfarism, individualist identity-based activism against it, or any other kind of claims-making within or against the state, people always jockey for position within the parameters of whatever socioeconomic structures they find themselves in at a given time. However obvious this point is, it’s easy to drift into arguments about the inherent advantages of ‘the market’, ‘the family’, ‘the state’ or ‘the commons’ as if these are invariant things with fixed characteristics that operate outside history. The truth is that in differing historical circumstances it may make the most sense to press claims for maternity care, say, or poverty relief within different combinations of any of these state or non-state structures.
Despite the disciplinary motivations of the state, one claim that’s often made in favor of state welfare is its superior potential for (#14) rational and fair universal coverage – as in the support for the British NHS. By contrast, welfare in the hands of more limited non-state actors can suffer from patchiness and (#15) poor coverage (‘postcode lotteries’), or come with (#3) strings attached. At worst, non-state welfare can be (#16) unfair, arbitrary or even abusive. Consider a situation in which children are viewed essentially as the property of their fathers, or in which local ‘justice’ is dispensed by vigilantes. On the other hand, the same accusation can be leveled at state welfare services – at best, (#17) unresponsive ‘one size fits all’ solutions, at worst flagrant abuse such as children’s homes rife with physical or sexual abuse, or police departments acting as paramilitary enforcement agencies for (#12) discriminatory surveillance and punishment[vi].
The universalism of state welfare can be compromised by (#18) both middle-class capture and middle-class flight. Examples of middle-class capture include locational advantages for accessing state services (such as the gentrification processes underlying the coincidence between ‘good’ schools, ‘good’ areas and ‘good’ students, or the similar ‘inverse care law’ in healthcare, where medical services are concentrated where they’re least needed[vii]) or the tendency for social policies favoring wealthier people (like low inheritance tax) to gain greater political traction than those favoring poorer ones (like high unemployment benefit). Examples of middle-class flight include market purchase of superior services (like private schools or health services) leaving state provision in the form of poorly-funded ‘Cinderella’ services with (#19) stigmatized clients and overworked, low-status employees. This contrasts with (#20) the more personalized client-focused services available within the private sector.
With good universal state provision, again there’s (#4) an efficiency argument for (#21) public sharing of expensively-trained and expert services (surgeons, for example) and directing them where they’re most needed. But there’s the counter-argument that (#22) professions tend to colonize aspects of life that ordinary people previously took care of themselves, thereby regulating them through closed ‘expert’ knowledges that often deliver more benefits to the expert or the state than the client[viii]. Similarly, (#23) welfare bureaucracies can become overly concerned with the size of their budgets and their political influence rather than staying focused on their service aims. Against this, there are strong arguments for (#24) re-empowering individuals or publics as their own experts, who are best placed to know what they need or want. The counter-argument to that counter-argument is perhaps made most forcefully in relation to various ‘alternative’ health therapies, which are dismissed for their (#25) lack of professionalism, lack of rigor, or outright quackery in respect of expert knowledges where, the argument goes, people aren’t best placed to know what they need.
It’s plain from this account that here, as ever, we face a range of trade-offs, compounded by differences of opinion that push the favored option one way or another according to one’s politics. So the notion that we can construct an idealized welfare system to tick all boxes is a non-starter. But perhaps we can say that welfare systems scoring high in columns 1 and 3 of Table 3.3 and low in columns 2 and 4 are preferable. And we can also say in view of the other arguments in this book that the ‘self-welfare’ system of household farming (#7) will likely loom large in the future, with support from collective self-welfare (#8). The future shape of the state is uncertain – we’ll consider it in more detail in Part IV – so the crucial relationship between localized ‘self-welfare’ and the wider state is difficult to construe. It seems likely that states will have less money to spend on welfare, and will therefore cede ground to local self-welfare of the kind that emerged, for example, in the wake of Greece’s financial crisis[ix]. So the biggest challenge may be in avoiding the outcomes in column 4 of the table.
In an influential book, sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen described three kinds of welfare regime in modern rich countries that provide food for thought in contemplating a small farm future[x]:
To my mind, the social democratic option is preferable, at the potential risk of some of the negatives in column 2. But in a small farm future, the fiscal capacity to provide extensive welfare would be lessened (as would, hopefully, some of the need for it compared to the capitalist present). So affordable levels of provision may look more like the limited safety-nets of the liberal and conservative regimes. In fact, the state in a small farm future might function more like some of the earliest states, primarily as a risk-pooling mechanism in times of dearth. I’d argue that a universalist public sphere or sense of shared community in which all people are valued equally as individuals and not differentially according to statuses (men or women, rich or poor, immigrant or indigene) is worth trying to preserve from the modernist social-democratic regimen, even if in practice it’s manifested locally in a mixed commons/private property regime with limited fiscal capacities which would push it toward more direct forms of support. This potentially cuts against the private power of families, households or communities to determine their own self-organizing circuits of welfare.
But a universal sense of shared community needn’t be the same as a pervasive regimen of disciplinary state power that determines minutely what is, so to speak, politically ‘correct’ – as is the case with the conservative regimes Esping-Andersen describes and their emphasis on particular kinds of family structure with gendered and sexual norms. Instead, the bounds of state universalism would be up for debate politically – as in the idea of the public sphere discussed earlier. What matters most is who’s able to participate in that debate. In a small farm future, the primary unit of welfare would most likely be the family – just as it still is in today, despite a long history of state centralization and pervasive political/feminist criticism – but ‘the family’ would hopefully be a contested idea, rather than a touchstone of traditional (male) authority.
I’d like to think that a small farm society constructed in this way wouldn’t feel the need for punitive forms of welfare. In a farming society of small proprietors the incentives to pull your weight are strong, and people who are unable to do so through illness, injury or more hidden injuries of the soul would inspire empathy of the ‘there but for grace of God go I’ variety more than censure. I’d like to think, too, that in such a small farm future we could carry with us something of Amartya Sen’s conception of ‘capabilities’[xi]. A fair society isn’t one that simply arranges for equality of access to service provision – so many years of schooling for all, so many doctors per capita population and so on – because for cascading reasons people have differential capabilities in turning that access into wellbeing. I think small farm societies can do a better job of equipping almost all their members with the capability to prosper in their own terms than modern capitalist ones, though they generally have less money at their command for doing so. What they have instead is land, and also – if they present their best face and find ways to avoid the narrow circle of status battles we examined earlier in F.G. Bailey’s ‘tragedy of approved mediocrity’ – empathy, labor and directed skill.
One way to mobilize these qualities in a money-poor, labor-rich small farm future is through (compulsory) civic service, with which various countries have experimented. In Western Europe, it often figured as an alternative to military conscription primarily for young adults in countries aiming to build national and civic identities as a bulwark against perceived Cold War threats from the communist east. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism its impetus has faded, but green thinkers have revived the idea in the form of ‘compulsory civic sustainability service’[xii]. I commend the idea for its ability to extend some of the benefits identified in columns 1 and 3 of Table 3.3 and limit the drawbacks in columns 2 and 4. In particular, I’d make the following points:
On the face of it, my arguments for welfare through access to inalienable private property rights in farmland and to civic service diverge from the case for universal basic income (UBI) which has been slowly building in recent years in the face of the many failures of existing welfare capitalism[xiii]. I won’t delve into UBI here, but my proposals are similar to the more ‘social democratic’ forms of it inasmuch as they emphasize using scarce resources as efficiently as possible to enable people to generate their own wellbeing within the structures of a wider society that recognizes individuals won’t always succeed in doing so alone, and therefore mobilize further resources to assist them. The difference is that small farm societies have difficulties generating large reserves of symbolic capital like money, so they have to provide welfare benefits mostly in kind rather than in cash.
In view of that limitation, it’s unlikely that expensive, high-tech welfare such as healthcare of the kind we’re used to in the rich countries will be widely sustainable in the future. Social equality, clean air and water, wholesome food, sound hygiene, good primary healthcare and basic secondary care may be as good as it gets. But in fact those things get us a long way – probably further than we currently are, since the ‘average’ global person lacks most of those things, creating a large additional burden of ill health[xiv]. I’m sure that when my time comes I’ll crave access to all the marvels in the book of modern medicine, but I’m equally sure that this isn’t the future that’s in store for humanity as a whole and it’s vain to pretend otherwise. It may be better to invest in dignified palliative care and a realistic philosophy for life’s end.
With social services and social security, the first and second port of call across the life-course will be kinship or friendship – the farm family (kinship) or the farm household and wider community (friendship). Again, the capabilities instilled through civic service, civic education and a farm upbringing are a fine prophylaxis against many troubles but not, of course, a foolproof one. In this section, I’ve tried to construe possibilities for a plurality of wider interventions into this household core – from the local community, civic servitors, charitable patrons, professional experts and from the centralized state – while being aware of their respective drawbacks. In a small farm future, affordable social services would most like tend toward the residual or ‘safety-net’ end of the spectrum, but hopefully not with discriminatory or disciplinary intent.
Likewise with policing. The kind that delivers public safety and the rule of law rather than the questionable self-welfare of the gun-toting householder or local vigilantism is a prime example of civic efficiency (Table 3.3, #4) and rational fairness (#14). Current policing delivers that for some (especially the white and wealthy), but for others it involves too much surveillance, discrimination, unresponsiveness and abuse (#12, #17). Police officers, like human service operatives, are ‘street level bureaucrats’ whose capacities and delegated decisions instantiate the state in our everyday lives[xv]. Ultimately, then, with policing and with all other areas of welfare, questions of how we would take care of each other, or fail to do so, in a small farm future devolve to how the state would interact with wider society and its different elements.
[i] See https://ourworldindata.org/government-spending.
[ii] E.g. Armstrong 2017; Ryan 1988.
[iii] Ryan 1988.
[iv] Laslett 2000.
[v] Fraser 2013; Linklater 2014, 89.
[vi] Vitale 2018.
[vii] Hart 1971.
[viii] Illich 2005.
[ix] Varvarousis and Kallis 2017.
[x] Esping-Andersen 1989.
[xi] Sen 2006.
[xii] Barry 2012; Smith 2004.
[xiii] Standing 2017.
[xiv] E.g. Marmot 2015.
[xv] Lipsky 2010.
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[…] welfare, government welfare expenditures in the rich countries have only increased in recent years[i]. In fact, modern states are sometimes called ‘welfare capitalist’ to capture their dual role of […]
I wonder how a community arranges compulsory civic service in the context of a supersedure state and a sharp drop off in energy availability. I think the closest non-state thing to it that I know about might be the LDS church’s missionary programme, where young men and women spend two years or eighteen months (respectively) doing missionary work (either proselytising or humanitarian work; those involved in humanitarian work are not supposed to be proselytising), most often involving travel. They do not get to choose where they are sent, or the duration of the mission, or their mission partner (unless they are already married), and communication with their family of origin and home community, friends etc is limited to one day per week. It is unpaid, and “self-funded” except for the travel, though clearly there is widespread community support in terms of the training and accommodation needs of the young people involved; in the LDS communities I have been adjacent to it is very much seen as a rite of passage, a normal part of growing up, especially for men. If there are negative views of the whole thing from LDS members, I haven’t encountered them (but I probably wouldn’t; and I haven’t gone looking). Their own overview is here: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/missionary-program
I’m aware that VSO does something much more secular and focused on humanitarian work, but targeting adults toward the middle or end of their careers; this is all well and good, but it’s basically only an option for people with a certain amount of wealth. Similarly the phenomenon of voluntary service during “gap years” is limited to people who are pretty well off to begin with, it isn’t really a cultural thing where most people try to do it as a matter of course. At the darker end of things there is humanitarian tourism.
I think the way to go about organising something like this without being the religious monolith that is the LDS church might be to start with a program of volunteering at hospitals and other places where basic care is necessary, and then tie that into community outreach programs run from those same centres. Include dormitories of some sort (like the ones my mother stayed in when she was in nursing college — she didn’t, in the end, complete her training), and some kind of training, preferably something that’s recognised after the period of voluntary service is over — NVQs or similar? I do think it would need to be a year or two long in order to have a good training:benefit ratio.
I also think that it might be worth opening up the option of older adults, particularly childless adults, participating should they wish to, particularly given the precarity and uncertainty many people today face or will face in the ongoing transition to a much lower-energy economy. Lost your job and can’t make rent, and don’t currently have access to the sort of land or skills that would let you start a small farm? Go sign up with the Regional Voluntary Service (or whatever), stick your stuff in storage (or sell it off), and do some good in the world while you think about what to do next. I have been told that in the UK from about the end of WWII to the late 1970s or early 1980s the local council was, in some ways, the “employer of last resort”: if you couldn’t find work doing anything else, well, there was always a job cleaning the streets, which had better pay than the dole; and this ended up acting as a sort of floor for wages in at least some places, where employers had to pay at least that well if they wanted to keep their employees. I don’t know how true this is, but it’s an interesting thought. It strikes me that in a society where coin is scarce, a civic service scheme of some kind could act similarly, putting an absolute floor on living standards.
It would be necessary to protect against such a scheme becoming exploitative, though: unhealthy accommodation, insufficient or poor quality food, unsafe working conditions, lack of accountability and so on could be horrific. (I’m not sure how the LDS deal with these issues for their missions.) But those problems also exist under current models of social care, we just externalise most of them in the form of low pay to casualised workers.
…but then, the laws of supply and demand are in play there. My understanding is that from WWII to the early 1980s there was a relative shortage of labour in the West because the economy was expanding fast enough that even the concurrent expansion in fossil fuel use couldn’t keep up. So what happens to labour conditions when fossil fuels are scarce? Will the economic shrinkage/degrowth/collapse result in a surplus of labour due to lack of funds for investment in enterprises that have employees? Or will the need to rely on much more labour intensive methods of acquiring our basic living requirements (food, fibre, fuel, maybe communication…) lead to a shortage of labour, and hence a situation where workers can choose their terms to a greater extent? Overall I suspect eventually the latter happens, but as with all transitions the process is uneven and messy. So it is that my church is chronically short of volunteers but also provides various services to people who might best be described as “surplus labour” — able enough to do the sort of work that feeds people, but unable to find work that will pay them enough to live on.
How about a UBI of only a several hundred a month? After all not everyone should work as a smallholder in a small farm future. Colin Tudge and Charles Eisenstein both support UBI aka a social dividend as far as I know. Once money is earnt it is always spent in order to justify the work, especially so if the work is not particularly meaningful or rewarding…hence the proliferation of SUVs and all kinds of other tech toys that we could probably do without in a resource scarce future.
I like the idea of UBI, but I have concerns about how it would work in practice.
1) Without rent controls, UBI (and many other benefits, to be honest) just becomes a transfer of funds from taxpayers to landlords. There’s no strong financial incentive to build more housing when you can just charge more for the housing that’s already built. I’ll just go and cry in Londoner for a bit now.
2) If enough people are practising some form of subsistence agriculture — growing the majority of their own food, plus a bit extra to sell — collecting taxes out of which to fund any kind of monetary welfare payment (including UBI) becomes quite a bit more difficult. Admittedly, it can be done with cereals and pulses, which store well enough that requiring a tithe is possible, but that’s still much harder to administrate than cash, which is in turn much harder to administrate than… electrons, essentially. And requiring a tithe of things like cereals also creates an incentive for people to grow potatoes instead, but in response to that there might be a tendency to increase the tithe requirement, possibly to the point that people can no longer subsist on what they can grow on the land they have access to. I think this is what Chris meant when he said “small farm societies have difficulties generating large reserves of symbolic capital like money, so they have to provide welfare benefits mostly in kind rather than in cash.”
3) If one region has UBI and another does not, then the “universal” part of it starts to cause difficulty fairly quickly. This is also true of all other welfare provisioning. Chris’s point about the treatment of male vagrants (compared to widows resident in the parish) in early modern England, and the resemblance to current attitudes toward undocumented international migrants, is pertinent here.
None of this is to say that UBI can’t work; but I think that in a small farm future, it probably wouldn’t look like a cash payment.
Kathryn, I have similar concerns about UBI being a wealth pump to the rich.
Universal Income may increase environmental damage.
This is Charles Eisenstein’s take on this subject:
https://charleseisenstein.org/videos/video/the-case-for-a-universal-basic-income/
Like I said I don’t think it is possible to create several billion jobs for the world’s poor who are often already living within a small farm future context. David Graeber also mentions basic income in his Bullshit Jobs book. A lot of jobs like making water bottles or building more and more roads are simply environmentally damaging and unnecessary.
Where’s the money come from to pay UBI ?
Graeber’s 2021 book with his co-author Wengrow, ‘The Dawn of Everything’, is interesting too. Much heavier going than ‘Bullshit Jobs’; well, to a non-historian anyway. Inspiring though for its discussion of societies which were both free and equal … the exact opposite of China, pre-1789 France or the ghastly World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ … which they’re trying to impose on the entire world from the top down.
Other books I’ve found useful in the past few years:
J M Greer, ‘The Long Descent’ 2008
J H Kunstler, The Long Emergency’ 2005 and ‘Living in the Long Emergency’ 2019
R Heinberg, ‘The Party’s Over’ 2005.
P Phillips, ‘Giants: The Global Power Elite’ 2018.
Meanwhile, based on my food yields, I’d have thought a competent 2-3 person household could be self-sufficient using a large suburban garden, say 800-1,000 m2. Skilled ones could probably do it using nearer 100-150 m2 per person although that would need quite a bit of learning. If correct, there are some people who don’t necessarily need a ‘small farm’.
Rather than UBI, there is also the possibility of some sort of Universal Public Service allowances eg the right to a certain amount of electricity/water/transport etc at a fixed price
Scotland still doesn’t pay for domestic water, or prescription charges; Wales doesn’t pay prescription charges either, and in England they are at a fixed price per prescription. Care on the NHS is free at point of use, though the Tories resent so much that they cannot abolish “free” that they are abolishing “at point of use” instead. And there aren’t many toll roads in the UK, so we all pay for provision and maintenance of roads (despite very uneven impacts in terms of wear and tear).
The largest expense for most households is rent, though. Housing didn’t need to be in this kind of crisis, but bundled with Thatcher’s “right to buy” for council housing was a provision preventing councils from using money from those purchases to build more social housing. It was essentially an enormous transfer of assets from public use to private landlord use.
Maggie also worked out that the majority of people in social housing tended to vote Labour were as , homeowners tended to vote conservative. In 1979 a third of all housing was social. “Right to buy” and not allowing councils to build more was as much about changing the political landscape than asset redistribution.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/04/oxfordshire-council-to-trial-a-climate-lockdown-starting-2024/
Looks like in Oxford it’s stay in your patch .
That’s a very misleading and inflammatory article on what is actually a measure to reduce car use. It’s not in any way a “lockdown”, climate or otherwise, it’s just some roads being closed to non-local traffic.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/12/05/no-joke-climate-change-professionals-now-provide-goals-and-individual-allowances-for-transportation-food-and-clothing/#more-240593
NEVER mind the website , download the pdf ( can’t figure out how to get/post the direct address ) , from the university of Leeds UK , this is what they have in mind for your welfare / you and yours . ( 60% cut in available clothing by 2050 )
So what, though? If we do nothing we’re still not going to be able to buy as much clothing as we do now, or eat as much meat as we do now, or travel as much as we do now. Millions, maybe billions, of people in the world already live like this today. So are you afraid of what you see as poverty, or just offended at the idea of rationing affecting you personally?
And how does enforcement of rationing work in the supersedure state of a small farm future, anyway?
Well I get thru about 12 pairs of gloves a year at least two pairs of boots / rubber shoes , the sun rots shirts and hats out every two years , to feed and sell my livestock I drive 3000 miles a year , in season my tractor ( which is small and old ) burns 40 gallons a week , I fenced a few years ago and used 12 miles of barbed wire + clips and staples , I buy drums of bailer twine and many assorted ” consumables ” to meet government requirements on produce .
These proposals will send me back to around 1870 production , there will be nothing to feed the bugs on to feed the cities , the ranches and farms will go back to being near self sufficient but there will be a catastrophic fall in production , the banning of meat and dairy will take around 75% of Texas out of food production most of rural taxes comes from ranchers , no cattle no income no services , it’s as simple as that . Texas is semi desert it grows grass and not much else without irrigation , no electricity means no pumps accept wind pumps which are still used and pump 2 or so gallons a minute , enough for a small farm but not for towns and cities , turn London’s water treatment of and see how long it takes for cholera to break out .
My lifestyle is as self sufficient as I can get , the rationing they are proposing will hardly affect me ,I certainly will not wear clothes out at the same rate I do now just homesteading , my largest single cost is county taxes and again no money no taxes no services plus no food for the cities , I pity those that live in cities once the ration books appear , out here we will become peasants while the cities starve .
Folks, I’ve come across the “climate lockdown” story a few times and the phrasing is very similar, which leads me to think it was put out by a pro-car lobby group via various blogs. I really think it is important to go to first sources: what did they actually say, not what someone (often anonymous) said they said.
With UBI, government would print money and give it to people. They would spend it on things, the profits of which would go to shareholders offshore bank accounts where it is safe from the taxman. The government would then tax people to get the money out of circulation to prevent inflation. Trickle-up economics.
Universal basic services requires a large body of administrators and technicians to manage it. Cobbett called them Tax Eaters.
Universal basic ownership means you are responsible for your own wellbeing, admin is minimal, and you are legally in posession of the fundamentals of life, which means less power is in the hands of corporate bodies, landlords, etc. This is why it will not happen in the current system. UBI might because it creates a further dependancy on those who are in power, while making them richer. The current energy bill payment scheme is a bit like this.
As I said go to the pdf download , from the horses mouth .
I broadly agree. This is creeping totalitarianism, one quote in Oxford being, ‘whether people want it or not’.
There are lots of good websites, and some less good, that analyse the policies and statements of governments and elite groups and often give translations of what they really mean.
Try the Daily Sceptic, Left Lockdown Sceptics, Off-Guardian, UK Column, and so on. But I shouldn’t have to cite these after nearly three years of a so-called ‘pandemic’ and faked figures galore … should I?
An awful lot of people who think the pandemic is fake are also climate change deniers. It’s also remarkably easy to tell people what they want to hear and dress it up as scepticism.
I know enough people who have died of covid that I’m pretty certain the pandemic isn’t fake. If anything, the seriousness of sars2 has been repeatedly minimised in order to turn a profit. If you don’t see that, I have to conclude that you either aren’t paying much attention or you lead a pretty privileged existence. But ultimately a virus doesn’t care whether you believe in it, and I’m not interested in debating that; I’ll get on with doing what I can to keep myself and my household safe and build resilience in my community.
Similarly, the energy constraints and climate catastrophe that we face are real, whether you believe in them or not. The attempts at totalitarianism that I’m worried about aren’t measures to encourage individuals to use fewer resources: we are all going to have to do that anyway, and the only question is how bad we let things get before we do it. If you drive and you aren’t already thinking about how to reduce the amount of driving you do, I would advise you to start now. Likewise it’s prudent to consider now where and how you will get the things you need for daily life in the absence of a fossil-fueled continuous-growth economy. If you don’t think it will be necessary, then we aren’t even having the same conversation. Chris has written a book about how this might work, though. It’s worth a read.
I’m much more concerned about ongoing attempts to scapegoat some groups of people, and as a result I’m not willing to support any publication which uses dog-whistle racism terms such as “elite groups”.
But even if I’m wrong and the litany of crackpot publications you list as informing your views are right: so what? If there is some kind of global conspiracy to encourage people to live lives that are more environmentally sustainable, how is that so terrible, compared to the actual reality on the ground now, which is that a third of children in the UK live in poverty and many families cannot afford to heat their homes and are dependent on foodbanks? Or that people are dying trying to escape actually violent totalitarian regimes, persecution, warfare and famine? Or that disabled people are being encouraged to consider euthanasia rather than be given the community support they need to live meaningful and comfortable lives?
Ok but what concrete actions are the powers that be taking , apart from hot air virtually nothing , and in fact they are adding to the problem , 400 private jets at the Cairo summit , the U.S. Climate ” tzar ” contributing 300 tonnes of CO2 with his private jet in the last two years . Hypocrisy is rife ! China produces the same amount of CO2 in 7 years as the UK did between 1750 and 1980 , and China is building 500 more coal fired power stations , anyone complaining about that ? Crickets !
If you are unable to counter an arguement, you will tend to defend, deny, distort or displace logic, facts, or whatever. “Yeah but what about China?” is a classic because it is true, but also moves the arguement away from a subject you were uncomfortable with. The UK is 1% of the problem, and that is still too much, and that is only co2. Whaddabout the Pentagon?
“Climate lockdown” is a meme. You need a permit to drive an ugly, dangerous, polluting powered wheelchair across a city not designed for them. Sorry, I seem to have mislaid my tiny violin.
Was rationing in WW2 “totalitarian” or just common sense when food was in short supply?
ummm … on the stregnth of some previous postings, “diogenese” is not a troll, but he is posting in a trollish manner.
The ususal advice in these circumstances applies?
ummm … on the strength of some previous postings, “diogenese” is not a troll, but he is posting in a trollish manner.
The ususal advice in these circumstances applies?
Yeah but what about China?” is a classic because it is true, but also moves the arguement away from a subject you were uncomfortable with”
We nope I live in the US where fossil fuel use is far higher than the UK , that is how the powers that be set it up with the help of oil companies and civil engineering .
I just detest hypocrisy , claiming to be green while burning more energy than I could ever even afford by the ” green tzar’s ” is hypocritical to the power 10 , sending the West back in the middle ages while giving China / India a pass kinda sticks in my craw plus taking us back to the middle ages would mean fossil fuiled powers would just walk in and take over .
The West is dying , it’s Reliance on fossil fuels is self destructive and will lead to a nasty collapse unless someone in power gets serious about the problem , how many people have stoped driving because someone glued themselves to a road ?
It needs massive reorganization to head off the problem , insulation of all property for a start , building gas ( petrol ) or electric cars is ridiculous , building bug barns is just as crazy as has been proven on this blog . England should be rebuilding the rail Dr Beaching closed plus a crash investment in breeding heavy horses ( the prime mover of pre industrial england / west + it takes four years to breed and train a heavy horse to work , ya don’t walk into a showroom and buy one ) !
So no I am not trolling I am pointing out facts , all the ” climate tzars ” are adding to the problem not solving it , there is such a thing as the internet they could use instead of a private jet , as for the greens they should be running a ” don’t buy Chinese ” campaign for a start . The idea that the West cut its emissions is false it just offshored all its dirty polluting heavy industry to the east , near every car produced in the USA is made of steel from China , lithium comes from child labour , hypocrisy !
Something WILL have to be done we can’t kick the can down the road anymore , continuing the status quo can only lead to disaster .
Chris’s s small farm future is the only way to go if we intend to feed the planet but small farmers world wide are fighting a very rich status quo , by the time the big machines run out of diesel it will be too late , going organic overnight does not work just look at Sri Lanka , it will take years to get some ” heart ” into the soil , I know I have been working on my bit if TX for twenty years no pesticides no fertilizers and a lot of bloody hard work !!
I could go on …….
@Diogenese.
But I think you are trying to hold onto a way of life that is no longer possible.
Sure, Russia may have access to fossil fuels for longer than anyone else, but it too, will run out. China isn’t immune from the coming de-growth. It’s in deep as any of the developed countries.
The freedom’s we have due to an abundance of cheap energy are coming to an end and it won’t be because of a totalitarian regime imposing them on us. It will be because the energy won’t be available to keep the show on the road.
As you say they will have energy longer , in the history of man has a strong state ever left a poor state alone ?
Poor States? Not sure these ever existed. There was always resources to exploit.
Was North America a poor State? Not really a “State” at all but full of vast amounts of untapped natural resources and space/land.
Not sure what Russia would gain from invading the UK? Be more of a burden rather than an asset.
All the resources have been used up.
Russia isn’t short of space.
The interior of the Arabian peninsula wasn’t desired by the West until oil was discovered for a reason. There wasn’t much there.
Sounds like you’re worried that the US, etc, cutting itself off from oil power and industry will tempt China to take over?
Agree about the Green’s hypocricy. And mine, typing on this. Anyways…
This culture will use up all the resources it can, until it can’t, then it will shed technology and people until it stabilises. Poorest and weakest will be first, followed by everyone else until the ecology restabilises at some point in the future. The more complex technologies will go first, followed by others until it stabilises at what can be sustained.
Well meaning people have tried since the beginning to change course or stop and they have failed. I have failed. I have not been able to change anybodies mind, not even people who know me.
Might as well enjoy life and quietly cultivate your garden.
I agree with all of that.
It’s how we collectively adapt to the changing circumstances that will be key.
I say “collective” deliberately. There are too many of us for us all to “go it alone”. Having a nice little homestead won’t protect me from the hungry masses as I won’t be able to fight them all off.
Yes there is a lot of hypocrisy out there,, especially regarding “green” issues but then I’ve done my fair share of I’ll informed preaching in the past.
I think people just want life to go on as it is and will latch onto anything that promises to maintain the present. Me included, but I’ve come to realise that the game is up and the changes coming are going to be huge. I’ve given up telling people. What’s the point? They can’t do anything about it and how it plays out is anyone’s guess?
Live a day at a time and see what happens.
The whole idea of having to “fight off” the hungry masses is weird to me.
My neighbours all know what will happen if they run out of food and I still have some. I’ll feed them, and hand them a trowel. There are three households between ours and the next person on this street who has an allotment, and for the last three summers, all of them have grown some food.
Will that be enough? No, unfortunately we can’t live on tomatoes, and between us we just don’t have access to enough land. It’s going to be a rough ride, for sure. But I think that with so much labour, including that of industrialised food production, currently being done by fossil fuels, one of the first effects of their lack of availability will be that demand for human labour rises.
I don’t think there’s much at this point that individuals can do to avert profound changes in the way we live, but I do think there is a case to be made for preparing for those changes as much as possible now, while we do still have some resources. We can learn new skills, and maybe more importantly, get used to learning them. We can find ways to drive less (or not at all), find ways to eat more locally, mend our clothes instead of buying new. We can get to know our neighbours, so they are people first rather than a hungry mob. We can start regenerating soil now, whatever small patch of it we have access to.
I don’t do all of this as successfully as I’d like, either. I don’t think any of us do; the impossibility of self-sufficiency is such that we are all embedded in a system that is undergoing change.
I think maybe what Diogenes and I have in common is a strong feeling of trying our best to do the work in front of us, and an uneasy sense that government efforts are probably going to make things worse rather than better. That’s frustrating. But I don’t have a strong illusion of choice in all of this, so scare stories about people having to pay extra to drive on streets that weren’t built for cars in the first place, or obviously unworkable studge rations, or whatever other dystopian threats people see in centrist attempts to change things without actually changing the underlying economics, don’t really scare me.
I recognise that some power and privilege that I enjoy now will be taken from me; I won’t say that I expect to like it, but I am somewhat reconciled to it. I also recognise that the small autonomies-from-capitalism that I try to incorporate into my life now are not easily quantified and so not necessarily so easy to take away with a stroke of legislation, but that this doesn’t necessarily make them robust, either: my crops are still vulnerable to drought or flood or fire, and if (when?) my spouse loses his job we are in for a very bad time until we figure something else out. I can’t be 100% prepared for every potential disaster, but that isn’t the same as being unable to do anything at all.
I found myself watching a YouTube video at 1.00am this morning on how to make sauerkraut! Keen to give it a go
I guess it’s a form of prepping????
The “fighting off” the hungry masses is one of many possibilities. I’ve never been in a situation where there just isn’t enough food to go round and people are actually dying of hunger. Not sure how I or the rest of my community would respond????
(On that point, how do people in places that suffer famine actually behave? When the NGOs go in to deliver aid, has all order broken down? Are people resorting to cannibalism? The footage usually just shows people sitting around totally exhausted.)
Where do you live, John? It’s almost certain that there are hungry people there, but you might not realise.
I encounter people every week who are facing food poverty and hunger, as well as people who can’t afford any electricity or gas for cooking, light or heating. One of the things I do in response is grow vegetables in the churchyard for the soup kitchen.
And yes, in a prolonged famine a lot of people are going to be tired and listless. Certainly our food bank and soup kitchen guests are frequently exhausted. Most of the time they prioritise feeding their kids, if they have any, over feeding themselves. I don’t currently volunteer at a night shelter, but when I did several years ago on the occasional nights that there weren’t enough places the arguments over who got to stay were the opposite of what you might expect: “You stay, you’ve been out more nights than I have,” “no, you take the spot, your leg is bad and you shouldn’t be out in the rain.” It was quite heartbreaking.
That isn’t to say there’s never conflict (breakfast at the shelter certainly got exciting once or twice; historically, bread riots and looting have been a thing, though it is extremely rare for private homes to be targeted); rather that in my observation, most of the time most people who don’t have enough try to share what they do have.
As far as prepping is concerned, well, making sauerkraut is a great skill to have if you like it and cabbage grows well where you live. Even in this drought year I gave away some of my produce because I simply didn’t have time and energy to preserve it all. It’s probably not a bad idea to keep a well-stocked pantry, either; I was certainly glad of it in spring 2020, for example, when having the option of just not buying anything or going anywhere for a month was extremely helpful (and we could have managed much longer). But realistically there is a point at which it doesn’t matter: a bad enough famine will outlast what you can store; interruptions to water supplies are also seriously bad, and tend to cause acute problems much sooner than lack of food will.
The best way to prevent your desperate starving neighbours from attacking you for your food is to get to know them long before that point. Maybe make some sauerkraut and if it’s good, take a jar around and share it.
I take your points Kathryn. My New Years Resolution is to try and have a more positive outlook.
Perhaps I have been reading too many Cormac McCarthy novels!!!!
I might hold fire on handing out the sauerkraut until I have perfected the process, otherwise it might sour relations with the neighbours rather than enhance them.
I’ve also been building a rocket stove as part of my “prepping”. It’s a thing of beauty, even though I say so myself!!! I’m trying to get to the “holy grail” of getting it to run on wood chippings acquired from a local tree surgeon. I think I’m there! Fields trials will hopefully commence later this week. If it works, forget nuclear fission, rocket stoves will be the way to go.
Have a good Xmas, one and all.
Rocket stoves are great, have fun! I’d love to put a rocket mass heater in my home but as a renter it isn’t going to happen. Ho hum.
Wood chippings are great too, though they may need considerable drying out to be useful in a rocket stove But every time I use them I’m mindful that getting them from the “tree” stage to the “chipping” stage uses fossil fuels.
I use them anyway, because the tree surgeon is going to chip them whether I use them or not, but I’m also definitely interested in things like coppicing for firewood.
On sunny days, I spread the wood chippings out on a tarp. They seem to dry out quick, as they aren’t very thick.
Sad, I know, but I have also taken to cutting all the smaller twigs I generate, into pellet size chunks with a pair of secateurs. Find it quite therapeutic and it’s surprising how quickly I can fill up a sack. They too, dry out quick if let out on a sunny day and no fossil fuels required. Probably my preferred method, but the chippings from the tree surgeon are free and a whole lot less time consuming.
It wouldn’t take many coppiced hazel trees to provide enough wood to run the rocket stove. It uses much less wood than a wood burning stove.
I’d love to have a go at a rocket mass heater. Alas, I might struggle to get the concept passed other members of the family!
Mine is made from old gas bottles and my own refractory cement recipe. Plenty of experimenting and modifications. Hours of fun.
I used the word poor I should have used weak .
” This culture will use up all the resources it can, until it can’t, then it will shed technology and people until it stabilises. Poorest and weakest will be first, followed by everyone else”
Watching European news from here looks like it’s all ready started .
I could say similar watching US news from here.
Yep , o favourable thing is people are figuring it out that things are a changing and not for the better .
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bZks2Jwsw2U
A video of you have nothing better to do .