As the five crises unfold – from societal ageing to climate change and technological unemployment – it won’t be a case of no longer being able to aford systems like the NHS, as many of today’s politicians are all-too-eager to say. Rather it will necessitate a rejection of less-eficient models which aren’t universal or free at the point of use. As well as being the most ethical way of distributing the abundance made possible by the Third Disruption, the five crises also require universalism from the perspective of eficiency.
Far from an idea of marginal interest, UBS has become increasingly central in contemporary conversations about the provision of public services. This is most apparent in a 2016 report titled ‘Social Prosperity for the Future ’, published by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. While the report did not explicitly establish its proposals within the context of the Third Disruption, it did situate them within a set of challenges comparable to those of the five crises, identifying six public goods – besides healthcare – which should be reconstituted to more closely resemble the NHS and Britain’s healthcare model. These are education, democracy and legal services, shelter, food, transport and information.
The IGP report was eager to emphasise that UBS isn’t solely a response to crises whose emergence is relatively recent, but also the means by which citizens can enjoy fuller lives, accessing the resources necessary to be who they want. Thus the broader hope is to mitigate ‘unfreedom’ – the dependence on economic forces beyond our control which, for nearly all of us, determine how life turns out.
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