There's a fantastic book called "The spirit level"

by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which I'd recommend anyone reads,

which tells you about just how damaging inequality is.

It does things like driving up murder rates, assault rates,

it increases early deaths from things like heart attacks

and other chronic health conditions.

If we coud move away from that inequality, we'd live in a better society.

And that's the prize here: let's deal with inequality,

let's give everybody a basic level of income and a basic level of dignity.

That's universal, that that doesn't require them

to jump through hoops, to turn up to appointments, to do things

that they aren't necessarily able to do.

And then you get the prize of a society that is healthier and happier.

And if you can do that through taxing,

and I would argue that you should tax ourselves,

because you tax extraction and we have extractive industries.

I think that's a really good place to go and raise taxes,

because those things are an one-off,

you can't dig things under the ground more than once and use them.

That's a really good place to get these resources as well,

and of course in the UK we've seen over the past 50 years

how we've largely wasted the resources we got from North Sea oil and gas.

That's an interesting point that you're making,

but to go back on the opening statement about taxing wealth and unearned one,

it's highly politically loaded, right?

When on the back of that you're pushing basic income,

do you shoot yourself in the foot

by putting it into one specific political camp more so than another?

And then I'll go to you, Almaz,

because that must be completely unpalatable in the US at the moment.

Yeah, I think it is unpalatable in the US at the moment,

but let's remember that there was a time when income taxes

were completely unpalatable in the United States,

and were the subject of quite strong disagreements between different parties,

and we eventually got income taxes in the US moving away from tariffs,

because we had increasing income,

particularly in the northeastern part of the country, from industrial.

So that is taxation who needs to go to where the money is.

When money is in the society,

is mostly to have contributions from people online to the states,

funding the governments.

We can move to an industrial economy

with taxes from income funding the government.

And when you move to a post-industrial, something like we have

with the tremendous amounts of income inequality

and lots of wealth accumulation on top five or ten percent of society,

then that's where you go for the money that you need to fund your government.

I think that one of the problems in the basic income conversation

is that we often start with "How would it pay for it?

There's not enough money, so we can't do it".

I think instead we should think about the new society that we want

and then think about how we pay for it.

And that's what we would do as a family, think about what kind of life you want,

what kind of job, and then you set out to try to make those things happen.

I think we should start with the vision of the society that we want

and I very much agree with the one that Peter described.

You know a lot of the conversation in the United States is about

the robots are coming to take away all the manufacturing jobs

and the low-skilled service jobs and even some higher skilled service jobs.

We don't have to wait for that future, we already have that that future now.

We've seen in the United States that increases in economic growth overall

have not been shared with all workers deeply,

they've won disproportionately to the top income and wealth holders.

We're not taxing wealth or high incomes because we hate the rich

or we're jealous or envious of them, that's just where the money is.

Let's stick to that idea of getting the society we want

because it's also important to recognize that the narrative of basic income

is hitting a psychological wall

which it's been extremely entrenched over the past 200 years.

Industrial Revolution created an industrial model of Education,

the narrative is about:

"Go to school, get a job and contribute with something",

and your worth will be measured not against the amount of money you have,

but how meaningful your job is for the society.

Does the ideas stand a chance

if we don't challenge those fundamental principles as well, Peter?

That's a really good point.

and I just want to pick up on one thing from the last section.

In 1945 we decided in the UK

that we wanted a free National Health Service,

and it's the most cherished institution in the country.

Do a poll and ask people what they like, NHS finishes top in almost every poll.

At that time, Britain was absolutely saddled with war debt,

it had a smashed society,

and yet it was able to do what people really wanted to do,

which was to create a National Health Service.

That shows that you can do what you want to do

when you need to do it, if you've got the will.

And then it becomes possible.

Everything in history is impossible until it happens,

and once it's happened, it becomes inevitable.

And that's a really important thing to hang on to.

And to go back on the fundamentals of what we get taught,

what we get raised with in terms of narrative,

is there a way for basic income and the idea to integrate that?

Can it be bolted on the system without challenging those preconceptions?

Does it stand a chance if we don't go to the philosophical debate,

and how do we go to the philosophical debate

without shutting everybody off and actually making it engaging?

I think that those are really important points,

and I think there's a thing here about what it is that we love doing,

what is it that humans love doing.

And a lot of critics of universal basic income say people will be lazy.

I did a media interview once,

where a tabloid journalist described as a layabouts charter.

Quite a colorful way of describing why many people's fears are here.

But when you look at what people do, what they do in in their own time,

is things that are creative, so they do craft, they create things.

They make normally beautiful items or they spend their time learning music

or learning foreign languages or how to do something that they can't do,

or consuming art and other things.

And those are the things that actually make us more human,

they relate very much to what our humanity is.

And what we've been forced into doing is productivist jobs,

that are about creating things to be consumed,

when that consumption is not necessarily what it is that makes us human.

And I think that this is one of the ways that we can throw off the shackles,

and I think we live in a world that's absolutely full of alienation.

Everybody feels incredibly alienated,

they hate the jobs, they hate work, they hate the system that they're working,

and that's why we have people voting for things like Brexit, for Donald Trump.

We need to find a way to get away from that,

and I think a universal basic income isn't all of that,

but that's one of the key planks to this.

It's one of the ways in which we can really get people

to focus on what it is that makes them happy

and that makes those around them happy.

And when we have happy people we have a better world.

So, could we simplify to the extreme and say

we're coming to the certain end of the industrial society?

Of course it still has a lot of a profit to extract

and it still can go quite a long way,

but we could say that most of it has been built,

what we need we have, in terms of material comfort.

Isn't it time now

to let the machines take over the boring and degrading work

and move to a society which is more about innovation, creativity

and basically trying to do good, rather than do less bad?

There's also an analogy with the material world here.

Do you think that it's something that would be palatable, Almaz?

Yes, I think it's instructive to think about the different kinds of values

that underpin different sorts of societies.

We think back to the feudal societies that we said goodbye

due to the intensity of industrial capitalism.

They were based on authority and loyalty.

You had a duty to your king, to your landlord, to your church.

Those were fundamental values in society,

and in industrial society we moved to one where the value of competition

and individual incentive was really prioritized.

Now, in this service economy

and in the post-industrial economy that we find ourselves in

and the creativity economy that we should be moving into,

value should really be on cooperation and collaboration.

So we need an economic structure that supports that.

Maybe one way to move beyond some of the polarization that you find

when you talk about basic income to non-experts

is to think about the ways in which our economy has already built on

cooperation and collaboration, and think about not completely eliminating

competition and incentives to individual game,

but to think about shifting the balance more in the direction of cooperation.

When you look at this income from gender and this perspective,

you've seen as Peter's been alluding to you from the beginning,

one of the very important works in society is caring work,

and that's not paid for at all in the markets.

We all already belong to families, communities and societies

with unconditional, individualized

universal care provided to each other,

and that's what allows us to participate in the more competitive market economy.

We still remain a team as we move forward into the new economy of the future,

but it's it seems like weI'll be better off if we move