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I also used to be broke. I did, for a long time. Being a student, trying to make a name for myself in the media industry, and starting a media organization, I had to move 15 times in 15 years, because the rent in London just kept on going up. Now, this taught me an important lesson firsthand. Namely, you can want to study public policy or astrophysics, you can want to make a name for yourself, you can want to do an honest day's work.

But All of that is extraordinarily difficult if your mind is thinking about those unpaid bills, or knowing, with the fullness of your heart, that when you go to the cash point, it's going to respond, insufficient funds. Now, while I was going through all of this, which I have to say happened for a little bit too long for my liking, I agreed with the ideas that I was reading from the liberal tradition, namely that individuals are uniquely placed to determine how their lives should unfold. Nobody else is. For everybody in this room, the best person to decide how your life should unfold is you. There's no higher authority, certainly not the state.

But what was equally clear was that in the absence of access to certain resources, education, transport, health care and housing, that that capacity for self-authorship is clearly limited for many people. We clearly live in a society where what we view as liberty, the pursuit of happiness, is limited for the majority of the global population. For many, it's illusory. It turns out that liberal ends of self-authorship, of determining how your life should unfold, require socialist means. The state must get involved.

Now, we live in a world where capitalism has completely prevailed. It's won. You know, I was asked behind stage, oh, that smells great, what are you wearing? I said, Chanel Allure, and I'm the communist. Okay?

So I'm under no illusions. It has completely prevailed, and the ideas driving it are those of economic liberalism. Economic liberalism says what I've just said to you. The individual is uniquely placed to determine how their life unfolds, and that this should happen through the market. But there's a problem.

While the market can be an extraordinary resource to get the things you need to get, to be who you want to be, for many, it's the opposite. It's a source of unfreedom. It's a constraint. It's a constraint. It's more akin to a system of rationing than of prosperity.

We know this is the case for an increasing number of people, because the numbers don't lie. In 2018, 40 million Americans used food stamps. 13 million more than in 2007, before the global financial crisis. Clearly, something is broken. You can disagree with me about everything else, but those are the facts.

In the UK, a much smaller country, In 2016, 17 million people of working age had 100 pounds or less savings. They are 1 minor accident away from penury. 17 million people of working age. And on the thing that capitalism asks to be judged by, global growth, it says, all this terrible stuff happens, inequality and, you know, we can have poverty, in-work poverty, whatever, but we've still got growth. Well, actually, the story isn't so great there either.

Despite the rise of China, global growth is in secular decline. So to be clear, the global economy is still growing, but at a smaller, slower rate, decade on decade. 20 years ago, if you said the term lost decade, you were talking about Japan. My apologies to anybody here of Japanese heritage. Today, it's an appropriate term for much of the global economy, from Britain to Italy, South Africa to Brazil, as 1 lost decade becomes 2.

And it gets worse. This economic malaise we've seen over the last 15 years is surely to be joined by the climate crisis and then demographic aging, a crisis of elderly care. It turns out that the opening decades of the 21st century, as bad as they were for many, are merely the leading edge of a hurricane. Now, despite everything I've just said to you, I'm an optimist. I believe that humans have the ingenuity to address all of these challenges and reach unprecedented prosperity and liberty for all.

That can happen by employing the state and leveraging the technology revolution. I wrote a book about it. It's called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The C word. Fully automated because we need an economic system which reduces the necessity of human labor in the production process.

Luxury, because we need to expand a sense of liberty and leisure time for all. Communism, because what I believe is heading our way this century, maybe, could see the end of production for exchange and the necessity of humans to sell their labor for a wage. But in politics, big ideas only get you so far. That's been a problem for the left historically, I don't know if you know. And what matters in the here and now in 2022 are concrete proposals.

So, how do we leverage the technology revolution? How do we employ the state to address all the challenges I've just spoken about, which I'm pretty sure everybody in this room would acknowledge. Rising inequality, the climate crisis, demographic aging. For some, the answer is a universal basic income, a UBI. Now, despite being a millennial and still petrified whenever I look at my bank balance, I'm not a fan.

And the reason is, an affordable UBI is ineffective, and an effective UBI is unaffordable. My proposal instead is universal basic services, UBS. These are services which are universally available, free at the point of consumption, and paid for through progressive taxation. A bit like the NHS in the UK. I propose 4 of these universal basic services.

Health care, housing, transport and education. Why these 4? Housing. Because you can't focus on long-term problem solving or making something of yourself if you have to move every 12 months. Believe me, I know.

Health care, because the basis of everything else is physical and mental well-being. Education, because you can't be of service to your community if you don't have skills, and we need to start acknowledging that an educated society is a public good. People training as dentists, as midwives, as engineers, hey, as accountants. We need those people. Society needs those people with those skills to not just thrive, but to survive.

And we all benefit from them having those skills. Transport, because you can have the skills, you can have the housing, But location can remain a constraint on access to opportunity. So, you might agree with me so far. You might say, Aaron, I get it, market failure exists, it's a thing. And yeah, OK, the state should intervene in some areas, fine.

But why universal? Surely we should focus scarce resources on those that need help the most. Well, it turns out 2 academics gave a pretty good answer to that 20 years ago. Surprise, surprise, they were Swedish. And they found that countries with Universal welfare systems saw the lowest rates of hardship, the lowest rates of inequality, and universal welfare systems actually commanded the broadest possible consent.

If you want to see the citation, it's Walter Corpian-Yacoui and Palme. Go on Google Scholar, find it. Now, how does that work? Why is that the case? Well, it turns out that universal welfare systems, because of the nature of how they work, have less bureaucracy, because they don't employ means testing, there's less stigma attached, so the people accessing resources actually use them, as opposed to what we get with means testing, where you feel like you shouldn't be doing that.

And importantly, they have the buy-in of that political class that is all-important in democracy, the middle class. There's a reason why the NHS in Britain is still around after 80 years and is so loved. It's because everybody gets to use it. It's part of the national fabric. It's part of our shared social conversation and space.

It's something that belongs to all of us in the UK, and we're very proud of it. So if you want welfare services which address hardship, reduce inequality, are effective, efficient and broadly liked, make them universal. OK, I like universal services, but how do we pay for this? In a word, tax. Hardly reinventing the wheel, I know.

In the United States in the 1950s, the top rate of tax was 90 percent. Today, it's 37 percent. In the UK, for much of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, the top rate of tax was 60 percent. Today, it's 45 percent. Dwight Eisenhower and the Iron Lady, hardly 2 radical Marxists.

And then there's things like a financial transactions tax, or the fact, the outrage, in fact, that we tax work more than we tax wealth, which is astonishing. In the UK and the US, capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than incomes. How the hell does that work? Talk about a rigged system. Then there's the issue around the technology revolution, and this is a big reason why I like universal basic services.

If I'm right, then the trends of the 21st century are deflationary. Energy, information, labor are getting cheaper. They're deflationary, and they'll remain deflationary for a very long time. Hard to believe I know in 2022 when you're filling up at the tank, but renewables trends are clear, and that'll be the case for a very long time. Now, do we want those trends to underpin universal basic services or prop up shareholders, or create the basis for new monopolistic models.

Finally, on the climate crisis, another reason for universal basic services. A UBI would be an extraordinary amount of money to spend. And yet, I don't see quite what it would do in terms of transitioning our economies away from fossil fuels. Which, again, I'm sure everybody in this room acknowledges we have to do pretty damn quickly. Meanwhile, with universal basic services, we can put a post-carbon agenda at the heart of education, health care, transport and housing, rapidly decarbonizing our economies.

And look, to move away from fossil fuels, we need to do the 1 thing that market fundamentalists hate, And that's called planning. So, cast your minds to 2100 and a world after capitalism as we know it. You go to your job, 4 hours a day, in an elderly care center, 1 of the few labor-intensive industries that's still around. Afterwards, you go for lunch, you see your friends, you talk about taking that holiday in some rewilded forest somewhere, go see some bison and some bears, of that third college degree. This time in medicine, because you're working with older people and you're fascinated by the sphere, the area, the growth industry of radical life extension.

And hey, your first 2 degrees didn't cost a thing, and that second 1, East Asian literature, gave you a whole new perspective on life. You really love Japanese poetry after that. Pretty good, right? You get a notification as you leave that lunch. Your local health care clinic is saying you need to go for a quick checkup.

You go down there, you take a bus, free, electric, self-driving. The local bus co-op uses a powerful predictive algorithm to determine how much supply is needed at what time for optimal efficiency and effectiveness. Compare that to rush hour in LA or London. Big difference, I know which I prefer. You end up at the local health clinic.

They say, look, it's time for a liquid biopsy, you missed your checkup last week, you go in, stage 0 cancer, no problem. Some pills will fix that. At every stage of this narrative, the health care, the transport, the college degrees, the elderly care, we've seen universal basic services in action, universally available, free at the point of consumption and paid for through progressive taxation. Now, this might sound utopian. Personally, I think it's technically easier to do than colonizing Mars, but our society somehow thinks differently.

But it's not utopian. In fact, in many ways, this world resembles our own. There are still markets for many, many things. The state isn't involved in making chocolate bars or socks or silk ties. But it is the central player in these 4 things we all need for liberty.

Housing, education, health care and transport. And to say it's no utopia means bad things still happen, yes. There are fallings out, there's personal enmity, there are love affairs, You fall in and out of love. Often, falling in love is worse than falling out of love, it's more dangerous. These things still happen, but they're better than homelessness, than being unable to pay for your insulin, or failing to address the climate crisis as a species.

It's time we lived up to those glorious words life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and recognized that for the majority of the global population, the pursuit of happiness is impossible, It's downright illusory, unless they have access to universal basic services. This is the way by which we guarantee liberty for all and address the great challenges of the 21st century. The climate crisis, inequality, demographic aging, whilst leveraging these remarkable technologies that the ingenuity of our species has created. I don't think there's another way of addressing those challenges. I think anybody who thinks otherwise is delusional, frankly.

But all that means we're going to have to do something which, for the political establishment and status quo thinking, has been anathema for decades. And that means returning the state, yes, the state, to the center stage of our economic and social lives. Thank you.

Applause Thank you, thank you Aaron. I think we have a secret questioner somewhere in the form of Maia Boznik who is a public finance expert She spoke recently at TED Women. Maya, what's your question?

Yes, thank you very much. So my question is basically related to resistances. I work with public services and I work towards making them more gender responsive, so I know a thing or 2 about resistances. So I wanted to ask you, what do you see as the biggest resistances and in which 1 or maybe some of these 4 that you are mentioning?

Thank you. CAO BARROS-LURIES, CFO, G20 Great question, thank you. For me, it's got to be housing, because particularly in the Anglo-American economies, we have a growth model built upon speculative investment in housing assets. The reality is, for the likes of the UK and the US, I don't know the Canadian property market, I think it's probably quite similar, we need to have something akin to what Japan has seen over the last 25 years, which is effectively flat house price increases. I should phrase that better, 0 percent growth in house prices.

So wages can catch up. I saw an amazing statistic, actually, the other day in the UK, which showed that a majority of homeowners in the UK are happy to have 0 growth on house prices. And that makes sense, right? And that makes sense, right? Why would you want your house to gain in value?

All it means is you buy another house, which has relatively gone up as well. And I think people acknowledge that, look, this isn't working for people who rent, who don't own the assets, and I would rather keep that price flat and have more people included in our economy. But that's, I think, the big structural challenges we would have to take on speculating some investment in housing. CAO BUCHANAN

Thank you, Maya. Eran, I'm really taken by this argument for UBS services, partly because just structurally, some of those things naturally get organized better if there's only 1 of them, not a bunch in competition. You know, you compare US healthcare capitalism with something like the NHS or other state things which for all their faults seem to deliver equally good or better health care for like half the money. Transport, you can make the same argument. But have you costed out?

Like, it's still to roll out all those 4, that's a massive investment. Have you costed it?

I haven't costed it. University College London has costed universal basic services. And they had 6, they included food, which is pretty ambitious. And we have longer life expectancy, fewer women dying in childbirth, lower infant mortality. So clearly, something's going right, and you might say, well, the NHS is underfunded, OK, bump it up by 1 or 2 percent, and of course we have universal coverage.

So I think there's a strong argument there for public health care, personally, from an efficiency perspective. And I would respond with this. Thank you. And I would respond with this in regards to elderly care. If you look at the crisis of demographic aging and elderly care that's coming down the line because of lower birth replacement rates, of an aging population.

And look, I want 1 of these geniuses to come up with us living to 200. That'd be wonderful. But if that happens, we then create a crisis of elderly care. And the reality is, it's not that we can't afford to do UBS, a UBS of elderly care if that happens. We can't afford not to do it.

Because I then return back to the NHS point about efficiency, particularly in elderly care. If you don't have that as a UBS, you're in big trouble, in my view.

CAOEURFORTE1 thanks for an incredibly compelling contribution to the debate here.

Thank you.

Cheers. Take care.