The social activity fee

The challenge faced by every society in the world, whether economically developed or not, is how to ensure a majority of its population generates household-sustaining purchasing power^[1] with dignity, in an environment where most economic activity is undertaken by machines, while not bankrupting the State or rendering its economy internationally uncompetitive^[2].

The solution to permanent and pervasive unemployment and poverty, if the solution is to be viable and lasting, needs to not only provide those out of work with adequate purchasing power and a sense of purpose, but also to replace the social functions of work.

A Dual Society

To address these two challenges a dual society is proposed comprised of a competitive but modulated^[3] economic sector, and an off-market social activity sector.

Any individual would have two broad and mutually exclusive options for sustaining themself and their dependants:

• They can earn income by participating directly in the labour and capital markets;  or,
   
• They can earn sustenance by participating directly in the social activity sector.

 

The Economic Sector

In the economic sector, as now, the level of income earned would vary considerably from one individual to another and would depend on:

• The individual's abilities and skills including negotiating and bargaining skills;
   
• The individual's personal connections, including access to privileged information and favoured treatment by individuals with power^[4];
   
• The effort and time put in by the individual;
   
• The individual's luck; and,
   
• The individual's wealth.

 

In the economic sector the individual would be involved in economic activities traded in markets where price is determined by supply and demand and modulated by an independent third party such as the State to ensure prices include the social costs and benefits of the production of a good or service.

Income in this sector of society may far exceed need, and may be driven by greed.

The Social Activity Sector

Within the social activity sector people would have the lifestyle option of earning a sustaining fee by engaging in goal-directed activities of their choice to an annually agreed personal plan.

In contrast to the economic sector, in the off-market social activity sector of society the level of sustenance (as opposed to income) received would vary little from earner to earner, and household to equivalent household.

The level of sustenance would be determined according to the basic needs of the individual and their dependants, and would be independent of the individual's abilities, skills, connections, or luck.

In the social activity sector of society sustenance would be determined according to one's need - need that is objectively verifiable by a reasonable and independent party within regional guidelines to reflect regional variations in the cost of living.

The level of sustenance would not vary according to the individual's level of effort except that if the individual persistently did not undertake the activities agreed to by them under their social contract with the State, then the fee would cease to be paid.

A Stick As Well As a Carrot

The social activity fee would not be paid as of right.  It would not be part of a social safety net, and neither would it be an income support measure.

Dependence on State welfare as we presently know it would cease.  The social safety net now provided by benefits paid as a matter of right to the economically marginalised would be removed.  The individual would be primarily responsible for sustaining themself and their dependants, and the options for shirking that responsibility would be limited.

Upon losing entitlement to the social activity fee the former recipient and their dependants would have limited options.  They could become dependants of another person, or they could attempt to survive on private charity.  The State would also offer residential institutions where those incapable^[5] of or unwilling to abide by their social activity contract would be able to obtain food and shelter for themselves and their dependents, but again, only in return for compliance with the routines and disciplines of such institutions:  out of bed by a certain time, showered and fed by another and the performance of specified chores.  Only from trash cans on the street would there be a free lunch^[6].

This may appear harsh^[7], but the social activity regime is both a carrot and a stick.  Without the stick, and a real stick at that, it would rapidly degenerate into a generalised and unsustainable sub-culture of mind-numbing, spirit-sapping sloth.

A Permanent and Positive Lifestyle Alternative

The social activity fee regime would provide a clear lifestyle alternative for any citizen.  It is not intended as a temporary refuge for those out of work; it does not aim to prepare or encourage individuals for a return to work; it is not a second-best lifestyle option; it does not place paid employment and consumerism on a pedestal.

The social activity fee regime recognises that there will not be enough work for all^[8], and that more and more people will become permanently unemployed or underemployed in the economic sector.

Individuals able to partake in the economic sector might well choose to live within the social activity sector.  In doing so they would deliberately be sacrificing a consumerist and materialistic lifestyle, with all its attendant values, in favour of a lifestyle that emphasises community, consensus, and an appreciation of others on their own terms.  They would forego material luxuries, they might even endure some physical deprivation, in return for the privilege of being able to pursue their own creative goals and their own curiosity, without having to `make a living', and without having to worry about where the next meal was going to come from.

The social activity fee is intended to allow earners a viable and on-going lifestyle alternative^[9] to the pursuit of a materialistic and work-centred lifestyle.

Goal-Directed Activity Generates Self-Esteem and Self-Esteem Has Social Value

Underlying the notion of the social activity fee is the premise that any regular self-driven goal directed activity by an individual that boosts that individual's self-esteem^[10] is beneficial to society as a whole.

Such activity is beneficial because it enables individuals, otherwise at risk of marginalisation and alienation^[11], to develop cores of competence that they might use as the basis for subsequent explicitly productive contributions to society.  It is also beneficial because of the reduced demands on the criminal, judicial, and health-care systems that may be expected as a result of the inclusion in mainstream society of many individuals who would otherwise have been marginalised.

To have any self-esteem individuals need to feel that they have some control over their lives: that they are able to set goals for themselves, and work towards those goals, and that they have only themselves to blame if they do not reach those goals.

This is part of growing as a human being.  Setting goals, working towards them, failing or succeeding in reaching those goals, and setting new goals - perhaps greater, perhaps lesser.  Learning your limits; stretching your limits; learning to live within your limits; learning not to grasp beyond your reach; taking risks.

Choice in the way ahead^[12]; the prospect of bettering yourself (not in the least just materially) or even being able to choose among the lesser of several evils; this is prerequisite to self-esteem and to giving life its hope^[13], and therefore its purpose.

The social activity fee regime would provide individuals with a wide range of choices and with the external discipline to follow through on their choices and realise their goals.

Social Activities at the Earner's Option

The activities that the earner chooses to engage in to become entitled to the activity fee would be activities that do not usually have sufficient value in exchange in the marketplace to sustain the earner and their dependants.

The activities might have nil value in exchange because they have no direct value to anyone except the earner.

Such activities could include academic study, caring for dependants, learning a musical instrument, or undertaking a physical fitness programme.

Other activities might have some value in exchange and might generate some income, but not enough to sustain the individual and their dependants.

For example, an individual might start up a business that takes some time to become sufficiently viable to sustain them and their dependants.

In some cases it might never become sufficiently viable.  It might be a craft hobby of which some output is periodically sold.
 

Unfair Competition and Market Distortion?

Paying a social activity fee for marginal economic activity might drive out of business businesses that were just on the other side of the viability margin until they were undercut by those in receipt of a social activity fee.

Such businesses would have had to be very precarious in the first place.  Their being drawn out of the economic sector and into the social activity sector is an unavoidable price of this social regime.

A Sustainable Burden

Clearly, there would be no future in the progressive undermining of a society's economic sector by the social activity sector.  There is no question that the former is required to sustain the latter, and that the stronger and more vibrant the economic sector, the greater the scope of the social activity sector and its positive impact on society as a whole, including the economic sector.  There is an undoubted symbiosis between the two sectors, but the economic sector is the host.

Because it must be funded from taxation, and because payment of the social activity fee must be balanced against the economic need to keep the burden on the taxpayer as low as possible, the objective is to keep the social activity fee paid to each earner as low as is possible.

Materialistic Sacrifice in the Social Activity Sector is Necessary

For the proposed dualism of society to be serviceable, membership of the social activity sector needs to entail clearly evident materialistic sacrifice.  The closer that the material wealth of the members of the two sectors approach each other, the less stable the regime becomes.

If the lifestyle alternative offered did not involve material sacrifice it would undermine the driving force of any economy:  the prospect of material betterment by participants in the labour and capital markets.  Too many people would opt out of the economic sector if the "price" of social activity sector membership was too low; the price of labour would become internationally uncompetitive, and the economy as a whole would move into a downward spiral.

The price of social activity sector membership needs to be relative material sacrifice, though not debilitating deprivation.

The relative poverty of members of the social activity sector is consistent with the need to maintain a `potential' gap^[14] across society, like the potential gap between the positive and negative poles of a battery, to keep life and creativity flowing.

For the long term viability and equity of the social activity regime there needs to be a significant income differential between those living under the regime and those active in the labour and capital markets of the economic sector.

The Two Sectors Need to be Mutually Exclusive

To avoid a blurring of the two sectors at the margins, and the encroachment of the social activity sector on the economic sector, it is necessary that they be mutually exclusive.  You can belong to one or the other; you can move from one to the other and back; but you cannot belong to both at the same time; you cannot receive the social activity fee, or be supported by someone who receives it, and also keep income of any kind from the economic sector.

Where your social activity generates value in exchange, you would be expected to give up all of that income to the funder of your social activity fee, the State.

For example, in the circumstance where your activity involved the establishment of a new business with the intention of making you self-sufficient within the economic sector, the payment to you of a social activity fee would be equivalent to receiving start-up assistance for your small business.  In such a context, the requirement for you to yield up all other income to the State would ensure that as soon as the business became viable you would elect to go off the activity fee.  From that point on there would be no further State subsidy of your economic activity, and you would be able to live off the fruits of that activity, instead of the more modest social activity fee that had sustained you and your dependents previously.

It would be entirely conceivable that there might be a period of uncertainty, during the infancy of your business, where you elected to remain on the social activity fee, even though your business was generating an after-tax income higher than the fee.  In that event there would be a net transfer of resources from you to the State; you would have chosen the certainty of the social activity fee over a possibly higher but less reliable income from the market sector.

An Individually Customised Fee

The social activity fee would be tailored, within specified limits, to fit the particular circumstances and minimum needs of the individual earner and their dependents.  The challenge in each case would be the definition of an earner household's minimum needs.

The social activity fee would need to be set at a viable sustenance level.  Households living under the regime should not be expected to endure deprivation and stress for exercising the lifestyle option offered.  They would be expected to manage tight budgets and to abandon materialistic aspirations setting aside the values of the consumer society, but they should not be stretched so tautly that they would be forced to seek paid employment or to moonlight to meet basic human needs, including adequate education and health-care.  There would be a presumption that public transport would be used by household members.

The social activity fee would not fund any addictions of earners or their dependents.  If there was addiction within a household, agreed activities would include getting addicted household members off their addictions.  It is unlikely that the social activity fee would be paid to an addict – whether food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, idleness, shopping or prostitutes.  Obesity would be prima-facie evidence of food addiction and the fat would not get the fee.  Identified addicts in a household would be classed as dependents of those receiving the social activity fee for that household.

A household could have more than one social activity fee earner with the earners providing shared care for their dependants.  The minimum needs would be determined at the household level, and the fee payable to that household would be shared equally among the members of that household who were social activity fee earners.

An able-bodied person over the age of 18 who was of sound mind and not an addict could not be the dependent of an earner, but would be an earner in their own right.  They would receive an equal portion of the social activity fee for their household subject to their own social activity fee contract.  If they did not enter into a contract or meet their obligations under their contract they would stop receiving their fee, and the household’s total social activity fee would reduce.  This would give the entire household an incentive to motivate all earners within it to contract in, to meet their obligations and to pool their social activity fees, or to evict the non-performing and non-contributing earner from their household.

The social activity fee would need to be set at a level that would allow the earner and their dependants to sustain themselves, and, within defined limits, enable the earners to undertake the agreed activities in return for which the activity fees became payable in the first place.

If, for example, an agreed activity involved study at a tertiary institution, then the earner would need to be funded for the incremental costs they would incur in carrying out that activity, such as course fees, textbook purchases, and public transport costs to and from the institution.  If the agreed activity involved learning to play a musical instrument, the earner's purchase of a suitable instrument would need to be funded.

Living to an Agreed Personal Plan

The social activity fee is not a hand-out^[15].  It is a fee payable periodically in exchange for the independently verifiable performance of specified regular activities agreed in advance between two people: a coach and a fee earner.

For the regime to work it needs to be tightly managed; it needs to be transparent and auditable; there have to be clear lines of accountability for the achievement of well-defined objectives; and there need to be significant penalties for non-performance.  If you don’t turn up to your job you get fired and stop getting paid.  If you don’t turn up to perform your social activities you stop getting paid.

A significant `price' of, and therefore disincentive to membership of the social activity sector is its intrusiveness into the private lives of members.  Underpinning the regime would be a detailed personal planning system, not unlike those used in contemporary corporations for staff development and assessment.

Anyone in receipt of the social activity fee would, each year, be expected to prepare an annual personal plan and to live broadly within its boundaries^[16].

The annual personal plan may be developed alone or with the assistance of the coach.  However, the plan would be approved by the coach before it was finally adopted.  The coach would review the plan for reasonableness.  Is it achievable?  Is it too easy, given the potential of the particular earner?  Is it too costly?

Each personal plan should represent a challenge to the earner for whom it was developed and approved.  There has to be significant effort during the year, and a sense of achievement by the earner at the end.  Clearly, the objectives set, and tasks identified for a person who is in poor health and borderline intellectually handicapped may be expected to be significantly more modest than those for a healthy, highly intelligent individual.

The plan might have to be significantly revised following review by the coach.  Several iterations might be required before a plan is developed that is acceptable both to the earner and the coach.  If no mutually acceptable plan was developed within a reasonable period of time, payment of the activity fee to the earner would cease.

The Coach, the Earner and the Auditor

Each earner would be assigned to a coach.  The coach themself would be an earner, selected for their ability to guide others within the social activity sector.

Coaches would not be related to or associates of the earners they coached but should live in the same neighbourhood.  Ideally coaches and their earners would belong to different ethnic groups or tribes^[17].

Coaches would need regular training.  In the annual personal plans of earners who acted as coaches for other earners would be specified the coach courses they would need to attend and pass, the number of earners they would coach, and what the objectives and responsibilities of such coaching would be.  An earner, who acted as coach to several other earners, would themself be assigned to a coach.

Activity fee earners, whether or not they coached other earners, would not be employees of the State.  They would not be competing on the labour market, and would not be paid market rates of remuneration.

The social activity sector would be largely self-managed by activity fee earners, thus avoiding a substantial and costly bureaucratic infrastructure.  This should be possible provided effective audit mechanisms are in place to uncover non-compliance with the spirit of the regime, and provided that the consequences for non-compliance are severe.

Auditors, who would be State employees and therefore remunerated at labour market rates, would periodically review the performance of all social activity fee earners and their coaches.  They would also be responsible for disseminating State policy and guidelines for the social activity fee regime.

The Content of the Personal Plan

Each personal plan would set out a limited number of key objectives to be achieved by the end of the year.  Some of these objectives and tasks would be non-discretionary and common to all personal plans, including:

• Maintaining a detailed household budget that is updated at least weekly, and in support of which all invoices and dockets are kept;
   
• Managing the household budget within the social activity fee;
   
• Meeting regularly with the household coach and keeping them fully informed of the household's circumstances, providing the coach with all the information requested by them; and,
   
• Where the earner is deemed to have the necessary maturity and ability, to dedicate, on average, ten hours a week to coaching other activity fee earners.

 

Each personal plan would also describe in detail the discretionary goal-directed structured activity that would occupy the earner at least twenty hours per week.  As already indicated, there would be no restriction on the nature of the activity.  It could be anything the person wished including: caring for your own or other people's children; caring for elderly, disabled, or sick persons; developing and maintaining a vegetable garden; setting up and operating a small business; undertaking voluntary community work; undertaking a personal fitness programme; studying Phoenician; learning to play a musical instrument; taking up a craft or art; undertaking any course of study at any recognised educational institution; training for and playing in a sports team; getting a low-paying job, whether part time or full time.

As already mentioned, any income generated by an earner would be yielded up to the State as long as the individual is a social activity fee earner.

For example, this might happen in circumstances where the activity was a first attempt by the individual to get into the paid work force after a long absence, and where the individual was unsure of themself or the security of the position.

It might also happen where the income yielded by the paid economic activity (that the individual particularly wishes to undertake) was insufficient to meet the self-sustaining needs of the individual's household. 

If there were any persons in a household earning income from paid economic activity, all of that income would need to be yielded up to the State, for anyone in that household to receive the social activity fee, and then each independent adult within the household would receive an equal share of the household’s total social activity fee.

No Hermits Please

If the earner was not a coach to other earners, and if the primary discretionary activity chosen was a solitary one (such as gardening) or one that did not involve significant social interaction with contemporaries, there would need to be a secondary activity for at least four hours per week that would require active group interaction with adults who were contemporaries, were not members of the same household, were not relations or close established friends, and that required the earner to leave their home.  The members of the group would need to strive towards common goals and objectives in a structured manner.

One of the prime social purposes of paid employment is to give the worker a social reference group, and to allow them to be part of a group working towards common objectives.

This is a very important but understated social function of work.  It meets a basic human need^[18].  Human beings are intrinsically gregarious and need to feel part of a herd or tribe that extends beyond their family unit.

A group working towards a common purpose provides an indirect and "safe" means for the development of new relationships, and for validating your thoughts and values.

For the social activity fee regime to be viable in the long term it is important that it matches the emotional and social functions of work, as well as the purely economic function of providing sustenance for the worker.

A Tactical Plan, Performance Measures, and a Budget

A tactical plan to achieve the objectives of the annual personal plan would be included.  This would need to be quite detailed and might lay out an action plan week by week for the coming year showing exactly how the earner proposes to achieve their objectives.

The performance measures and the auditable means by which performance (both in terms of quantity and quality) would be measured and recorded, need to be specified in the personal plan.  The performance measures would need to be objectively verifiable.

A budget for the planned activities, as well as the subsistence needs of the earner and their dependents, would need to be developed to support each personal plan.  To assist the earner in living within their means it is likely that the budget would need to be quite detailed, probably showing planned expenditure week by week over the entire year.

Adhere to the Plan to Receive Fee

The earner's continued receipt of the social activity fee would be conditional on a reasonable adherence to the agreed personal plan.

The coach would be responsible for regularly monitoring adherence to the plan.  If, despite repeated assurances, the earner does not adhere to the plan without good reason, the coach might stop payment of the activity fee.

In the event of unforeseen material circumstances, or on it becoming clear that the personal plan agreed to was beyond the ability of the earner, the plan might be amended during the year, with the mutual consent of earner and coach.