by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Sylvia Pantel, CC BY-SA 4.0 Foto-AG Gymnasium Melle
Sylvia Pantel, Member of the German Parliament from the Christian Democratic Union (the party of Angela Merkel), has introduced a proposal for a fixed monthly payment for parents with children younger than school age. The amount (not yet fixed) would be tied to child care costs, and all parents would receive the same benefit regardless of means.
Pantel’s “family pact” has some similarities with basic income: it is paid in cash, at a fixed rate, without means-testing or other conditions. Moreover, it is universal for parents.
However, Pantel herself does not want the proposal to be confused with basic income–nor does she see it as a step towards one (as some US policy researchers have suggested regarding a universal child benefit)–since she sees the beneficiaries as receiving the subsidies in exchange for work, albeit a form of work traditionally unpaid.
In an interview with DW, Ronald Blaschke of BIEN-Germany explains the difference between UBI and Pantel’s proposal. As he says, “Basic income is not a payment for a service, and that includes raising or caring for children.”
Reference
Ben Knight, “German MP proposes ‘free basic income’ for parents,” DW, November 28, 2016.
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
Photo: Mannheim children, CC BY 2.0 Picturepest
by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Raising the Floor, the new work on basic income by former SEIU President Andy Stern, has made the Wall Street Journal’s list of top books from 2016.
Andy Stern resigned as President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), then boasting 2.2 million members, in 2010. In part, his resignation was driven by the belief that he had, as he says, “lost his ability to predict labor’s future”. Having left the SEIU, Stern embarked on a “four-year journey to discover the future of jobs, work, and the American Dream”.
By the end of this journey, he concluded that only a universal basic income could protect Americans against job disruption caused by new technology and the changing nature of work. Stern lays out this solution, along with a description of his journey, in his book Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, which was published in June of this year — almost immediately garnering much publicity in the media.
Now, Raising the Floor has been selected as part of the annual Wall Street Journal feature “Who Read What”, with reporter and author John Donvan choosing it as his book of 2016:
For a policy book by a union guy, Andy Stern’s cautionary prediction of a world without work is surprisingly haunting. “Raising the Floor” follows the former labor organizer through a self-education tour to meet and learn from the inventors, tech entrepreneurs and venture-capital guys pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. No Luddite, Mr. Stern is dazzled by the robots and the data-mining and the just-around-the-corner driverless cars. But he grows increasingly dismayed that almost no one leading this disruption gives much thought to the tens of millions of jobs that such innovations will destroy. And it’s not just cabbies and truck drivers at risk. Mr. Stern warns that doctors, lawyers, accountants, financial planners, teachers and many others will be vulnerable. He doesn’t want to stop progress, but he does want us to be ready for it when it arrives. His radical solution? It’s in his subtitle.
According to the most recent Cision data (2014), The Wall Street Journal is the third most widely circulated newspaper in the US.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Andy Stern photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Third Way Think Tank
by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, announced on December 14 that the Finnish Parliament has passed the act authorizing an experiment of basic income. The experiment is set to begin on January 1, 2017.
Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health drafted the legislative proposal for the experiment in August, and submitted the proposal to Parliament after hearing public opinions on the draft proposal. The proposal elicited some controversy, in part due to the relatively small size of the basic income (560 EUR) as well as the choice of sample population, which will consist only of recipients of the country’s unemployment benefits. However, the basic design of the experiment remains unchanged: a random sample of 2,000 individuals, drawn from current working-age beneficiaries of unemployment benefits, will receive an unconditional basic income of 560 EUR per month for a two-year period. (Brief responses to the objections are included in the most recent version of Kela’s report on the experiment.)
The primary objective of the experiment is to assess whether an unconditional basic income promotes employment. Experimenters will compare the employment rate among basic income recipients to that within a control group of individuals who continue to receive traditional unemployment benefits. As Kela’s website states, the Finnish government is interested in basic income due to its potential to “reduce the amount of work involved in seeking financial assistance” and “free up time and resources for other activities such as working or seeking employment”. The experiment will also provide data used to estimate the cost of implementing a nationwide basic income.
The 2,000 experimental subjects will be chosen by a random-sampling algorithm and contacted by the end of December. Participation is mandatory for those selected.
The first payments will be distributed to subjects on January 9, 2017. Automatic payments will continue through December 2018.
More information about the experiment is available on Kela’s newly-launched web page, Basic Income Experiment 2017–2018.
Source:
Kela (December 14, 2016) “Preparations for the basic income experiment continue”
Photo (Helsinki) CC BY-NC 2.0 Jaafar Alnasser
by Kate McFarland | Dec 17, 2016 | News
Photo: Results of “ball poll” at UNISON West Midlands Regional Games in Birmingham (credit: Becca Kirkpatrick).
The trade union UNISON has called on West Midlands mayoral candidates to commit to running a basic income pilot in the region.
UNISON, a major public service employee union, has released a 20-point manifesto, calling on candidates in the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) mayoral election to declare which of the 20 “asks” they would implement if elected.
The election, which is to take place on May 4, 2017, will decide the first mayor of England’s West Midlands region. The WMCA was established to the govern the seven-authority area in June 2016.
One of the points of UNISON’s manifesto, which has been published in full on the West Midlands political blog The Chamberlain Files, is a demand for a “micro-pilot” of universal basic income (no further details of the pilot have been specified):
WMCA to run a micro-pilot on the use of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A UBI could have many benefits including helping the long-term unemployed get back into work via part-time work and providing a basic income that would allow people to undertake entrepreneurial activities.
Unemployment is a pressing concern in the West Midlands. A new report from the Resolution Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, reveals that WMCA has an employment rate of 64.5%, as compared to an overall employment rate of 71.6% within UK city regions other than WMCA.
The UNISON manifesto also calls for a range of improvements in education, transportation, housing and development, and government accountability in the WMCA.
UNISON has approximately 1.3 million members across the UK. It has over 120,000 members in the West Midlands, making it the largest union in the region. Members in the region comprise employees in eight main types of work: local government, health care, education services, water, energy, community, police and justice, and private contractors.
Sources
Kevin Johnson, “Nationalisation, seats for unions and free public transport – Unison unveils mayoral manifesto,” The Chamberlain Files, December 15, 2016.
Neil Elkes, “Call for universal basic income trail [sic] in the West Midlands,” Birmingham Mail, December 15, 2016.
Becca Kirkpatrick, personal communication.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 16, 2016 | News
Universal basic income (UBI) has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in India–including from the national government, with the Chief Economic Adviser having announced that UBI will be examined as part of the country’s next Economic Survey.
Within the government, UBI tends to be viewed chiefly as a way to overcome the inefficiencies and corruption that plague existing programs of social welfare. Some academic economists, including Abhijit V. Banerjee (MIT) and Pranab Bardhan (UC-Berkeley), have also emphasized the efficiency of UBI in comparison to India’s current welfare state.
One critic of this approach to UBI is Nimai Mehta, Academic Director of Global Economics and Business at Washington DC’s School of Extended and Professional Studies. Mehta maintains that UBI should not be seen only–or even primarily–as a way to make India’s welfare system more efficient, but should instead be conceptualized as a route to other reforms.
In an article published in October, Mehta argues that a UBI alone would not suffice to solve the most fundamental problems faced by the poor in India. Indeed, the adoption of a UBI could threaten to leave many worse off if the government were to take it as a license to make substantial cuts in its spending on health, sanitation, education, and other public goods:
Where entrepreneurship and job creation continue to face formidable challenges, and public sector failures in education, health and sanitation severely degrade the poor’s expenditure on human capital, a UBI will prove insufficient or even wasteful. This is not because, as many fear, the poor would spend it unwisely, but because, without wider reforms, the poor remain handicapped in their ability to “buy” themselves out of poverty, whether through entrepreneurship or investments in their human capital. Worse, a UBI handout could reduce the political incentive for these reforms.
Mehta proposes what he calls “UBI-for-reform” programs as a way to address further handicaps faced by the poor. Crucial to his proposal, these programs would be organized within individual Indian states rather than nationwide. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has preferred that states take the lead in initiating reforms, and has promised support for states undertaking difficult but important reforms. Thus, Mehta suggests that the national government provide money to a state to help fund a UBI for its residents, while making its renewal contingent on the state’s carrying out additional reforms aimed at, for example, improving educational quality and access, removing barriers to entrepreneurship, or helping laborers to find more secure and stable work.
Reference
Nimai Mehta (Oct 28, 2016) “A universal basic income to step up economic reform” Ideas for India; originally published as “A UBI to step up economic reform” (Oct 18, 2016) Mint.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Cover Photo CC BY 2.0 Trocaire
