Name: 【TEDx】The instrument of freedom | Philippe Van Parijs | TEDxGhent
Uploaded: 2017-08-10T14:59:44.000Z
Duration: 13 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća

I had two problems, two worries, two nightmares,

that prevented me from sleeping, one night after another.

There was then massive unemployment, especially for young people.

The right and the left agreed: only one solution, growth.

Of course, one expected productivity to go up,

jobs to be lost as a result of technical change.

growth that would outpace the growth of productivity

Surely, there must be something else to address involuntary unemployment

It subjects us as individuals, and as political communities,

The replacement of private ownership of the means of production

We were then a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

for reasons that didn't seem to be just contingent,

were not doing too well in terms of economic efficiency.

Their record was disappointing, even with regard to equality.

And as regards to freedom, they were really disastrous.

So surely, I thought, \"There must be something else

as an alternative to capitalism, as we knew it.\"

as I was washing up and looking through the window,

I hadn't seen it anywhere, so I had to coin a new expression for it.

I was thinking in French, so I called it \"allocation universelle.\"

Universal benefit, in analogy to universal suffrage.

One, unconditional in the sense of strictly individual.

One doesn't need to see who you live with

in order to determine whether you're entitled to it.

One doesn't need to see how much you earn

in order to determine whether you are entitled to it.

And three, duty free, in the sense that one doesn't need to check

whether you are able or unable to work, willing or unwilling to work,

These three unconditionalities make it clear that this is something

that's quite fundamentally different from social assistance,

as born in the beginning of the 16th century,

and still existing today in the form of what is here called life loan,

It's also fundamentally different, even more obviously, from social insurance,

which forms now the bulk of our welfare states,

born at the end of the 19th century, and covering a number of specific risks:

involuntary unemployment, old-age pensions, etc.

from these two older models of social protection,

which doesn't mean that it's not combinable with them.

In fact, any serious proposal for a basic income today

consists in fitting a modest unconditional floor

under the whole of our distribution of income,

linked to social insurance or to social assistance.

Basic income is not there to replace them,

But that is the connection with my initial two problems?

Suppose we have such an unconditional basic income.

Will it be necessary to pay work more than now,

or will it be possible to pay work less than is the case now?

Who among you thinks that as a result of a basic income,

Who thinks that, as a result of it, wages will go down?

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【TEDx】The instrument of freedom | Philippe Van Parijs | TEDxGhent

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