Basic Income For Writers

Everyday, writers are struggling to make a decent living. The 2018 Authors Guild Survey found that the median pay for full-time writers in the United States fell to $20,300. They also found that the median income for part-time writers fell to $10,500, which represents a 42% drop since 2009. To put things in perspective, the Pew Research Center wrote in 2018 that middle class income ranged from $45,200 to $153,600 for families of three, and from $26,093 to $78,300 for individuals. Last year, the U.S. government found that the poverty threshold for families of three was $21,720, and $12,760 for singles. Given these statistics, it is clear that most writers are not in the middle class, and that many more are below the poverty line. The most probable effect of this is that writers we will write less and that fewer people will pursue writing. This will not only be detrimental to writers and readers, but also to our wider culture and society. It is my belief that one of the simplest ways to counter this decline would be through passing a universal basic income.

Writing is an invisible labor, so it’s unsurprising that their work often goes underappreciated and exploited. Joanne Harris, a representative at the UK-based Society of Authors, knew of many writers who lost publishing contracts because their book sales were driven into oblivion by e-book piracy. Disney has used a copyright loophole to cheat Lucasfilm authors out of their royalties since buying 20th Century Fox. Out magazine has been accused of refusing to compensate several of its freelance writers. With such wide-scale theft, on top of the shrinking incomes, writing as a career path will inevitably diminish, and you should care, too.

Imagine a world with less writers. A world with less novels, less short stories, less essays, and less poetry. That is a world of stunted language, where we will be deprived of the complex metaphors to speak of our lives and our society. When we warn of totalitarianism, we more often refer to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four than do to Stalin or Mao. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, emboldened the abolitionist movement through its brutal depiction of slavery. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle led to the regulation of the food and drug industries after its grotesque descriptions of meat-packing plants. Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” gave young women a new way to speak about their sexual experiences. How many were moved by Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration? With less of these stories and poems around, the world we are approaching might be more impulsive and less contemplative, as the Authors Guild member Nicholas Weinstock said:

“Reducing the monetary incentive for potential book authors even to enter the field means that there will be less for future generations to read: fewer voices, fewer stories, less representation of the kind of human expression than runs deeper and requires and rewards more brain power than the nearest bingeable series on Netflix or Amazon or GIF on your phone.”

Let’s say, though, that you don’t care about books and haven’t read one since your teacher assigned Catcher In The Rye in English class. Fine, but consider this. Many of your favorite TV shows, Game of Thrones, The Queen’s Gambit, and The Handmaid’s Tale, all came from books. Many of your favorite movies, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and The Wizard of Oz, all came from books. Even video games, like The Witcher III, Suikoden, and Parasite Eve, were based on books. Less writers will not only affect literature, but have reverberations through our popular culture as a whole.

Now, imagine if we passed a universal basic income (UBI), where every citizen received a monthly stipend of $1000 to $1,200 a month, no questions asked. The purpose of UBI is to give our citizens enough money to prevent them from falling into poverty. I understand that $1,000 a month isn’t enough for everyone (rent in some places costs three times that), but it’s a reliable cushion that will keep many people afloat in any circumstance. Even with UBI, many writers will still have to find other jobs, but that added income will allow them to do those jobs less. They can devote more time to honing their craft, and less time away from their passion.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t push for higher royalties or mitigate e-book piracy, but that UBI would be a flexible safety net amidst constant changes in the literary space. You can’t always predict what new challenges writers might face (like the current pandemic), and developing strategies to counter them takes time and effort. These strategies don’t always work, and in the mean time, writers still have to eat. UBI would not only let them eat, but also let them live as writers while they wage these fights.

Now, because writers are in such an awful position, UBI may not be enough. We might need to consider the possibility of a Federal Writers Fund (FWF), which would be a government-run version of PEN America’s charity, the Writer’s Emergency Fund. Started in response to the economic fallout of the pandemic, the fund distributes grants of $500 to $1000 to writers based on financial need. In my version, though, small and indie publishers would also be eligible for such funds to recuperate from piracy.

My fear about a possible FWF is that it would be too divisive. As I said earlier, writing is an invisible labor, so many people view it as easy work. It would be seen by many as a handout for failed English majors. Not to mention the fact that many blue collar workers, such as plumbers, janitors, and sanitation workers, may begin to wonder why there isn’t a federal fund for them. Instead of bringing attention to the necessity of writers, a FWF might provoke a lasting resentment against them. This is why we should try UBI first. It doesn’t draw arbitrary lines of worthy and unworthy. Everybody gets it.

Being a writer is only going to be more difficult in the coming years. They have to compete with streaming services, superhero movies, video games, podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media apps for people’s attention. With every print magazine and local newspaper that goes out of business, another writer loses an opportunity. There’s a limit to how far we can pressure publishers, especially smaller ones, and not all publishers bow to pressure. UBI may be the key to the survival of writing as a career in the 21st century, and the sooner we delay, the more we might lose.