by Kate McFarland | Sep 24, 2017 | News
Economist and BIEN cofounder Guy Standing (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) will deliver a lecture on basic income at the University of Copenhagen on Tuesday, October 3.
Danish journalist Per Michael Jespersen, opinions section editor for the daily newspaper Politiken, will moderate.
Standing’s lecture is part of the series Det vi ved – det vi kan (“What we know – what we can”), a collaborative project of Politiken, the University of Copenhagen, and Carlsberg Foundation, which features experts from varied disciplines speaking on topics of contemporary relevance.
Founded in 1884, Politiken is one of Denmark’s most popular daily newspapers. According to Wikipedia, the print newspaper had a circulation of 88,597 copies in 2013, and its website experience traffic of approximately 800,000 users per month in 2011. Its design has earned the paper international awards in recent years. Politiken has a social liberal and center-left stance, and is historically associated with the Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre), although no longer partisan.
More information about the event with Standing, “Borgerløn – Utopi eller Nødvendighed?” (“Basic Income: Utopia or Necessity?”), is available on the website of Politiken Live.
Reviewed by Dave Clegg
Photo (Copenhagen’s Nyhavn canal) CC BY-NC 2.0 Nico Trinkhaus
by Peter Vandevanter | Aug 25, 2017 | News
Guy Standing. Credit to: Lighthouse.
Guy Standing, co-founder of Bien and a University of London professor, in an interview for the Moon magazine says people with a precarious future are preyed upon by right-wing politicians.
Neo-liberal economic policies, “globalization, automation, and outsourcing” have, according to Standing, created a large and rising number of precariats (estimated as 40-50% of world population), who compete for low wages so much so that they can’t “pay off student loans or consumer debt, qualify for mortgages, save for retirement, or make plans for the future.”
The Moon magazine reports that Standing, in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class “argued that if governments failed to satisfy the precariat class, their societies would witness increasing violence and the rise of far-right politicians – scenarios that appear to be playing out in many countries around the globe,” including the UK and the US.
Standing, whose latest book Basic Income and How We Can Make It Happen is quoted in Moon magazine saying “Right-wing politicians are playing on the fears and insecurities” of precariats by demonizing other groups, such as migrants. In this book, the precariat sits below the 62 richest people in the world (who own as much as the poorest half of the rest of the world). Other population groups are economically divided into an elite (5%, who serve the richest), the salariats (20%, who have long term employment security), the proficians (10%, who don’t necessarily want long term employment, freelancers in the gig economy), the classic proletariat (10%, who a generation ago inhabited unions), and at the bottom an underclass (5%, who are dying in the streets from social diseases).
A universal basic income would eliminate this class breakdown in favor of an economy that works for all.
Standing believes that basically the income distribution system of the 20th century has broken down. He says that societies, if they are to survive, must reduce “the inequalities and insecurities that are the terror of the precariat”.
More information at:
Leslee Goodman, “Guy Standing on an economy that works for everyone”, The Moon Magazine, Interview with Guy Standing, 2017
by Kate McFarland | Aug 24, 2017 | News
On August 30, BIEN cofounder Guy Standing will speak at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, as part of an event on economic precarity facing the Māori.
In influential books like The Precariat and A Precariat Charter, economist Guy Standing postulates the existence of a new social class that he calls the “precariat,” characterized by unstable and insecure employment. Although the status of the precariat as a “class” is a matter of some dispute among social scientists, the rise of precarious forms of employment, such as short-term and gig labor, is a commonly cited concern among proponents of basic income.
According to researchers at University of Waikato, precarity in employment is a particularly pronounced concern among the Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesian people.
On August 30, at a public event titled “When Work Hardly Pays: A Conversation with Guy Standing,” Mohi Rua (lecturer in Psychology), Darrin Hodgetts (Professor in Social Psychology), and Ottilie Stolte (lecturer in Psychology) will present their research project “Connections and Flows: Precarious Māori Households in Austere Times.”
As the researchers summarize the project:
We draw on recent scholarship on the precariat as an emerging social class comprised of people experiencing unstable employment, unliveable incomes, inadequate state supports, marginalisation and stigma. Our focus is on the Māori precariat, whose rights are being eroded through punitive labour and welfare reforms. While we document issues of employment, food, housing and cultural insecurities shaping precarious lives, we also develop a focus on household connections, practices and strengths.
After this research overview, Bill Cochrane (National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis) and Thomas Stubbs (lecturer in Sociology) will sketch a “demographic silhouette” of the Māori precariat, one of the key components of the “Connections and Flows” project.
These presentations will lay the ground for Standing’s lecture, in which he will discuss his theory of the precariat and its implications.
See the event flyer from the University of Waikato for details.
On the following day, Standing will head to Auckland to speak at an event on basic income convened by the New Zealand Fabian Society.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
Photo: Māori rock carving, CC BY 2.0 Tom Hall
by Kate McFarland | Aug 13, 2017 | News
On August 31, the New Zealand Fabian Society will host a panel discussion on basic income, led by BIEN cofounder Guy Standing, as part of its seminar series in Auckland.
Standing, who has recently published Basic Income: And How We Can Make it Happen, will be delivering a lecture titled “Basic Income: the case for a significant new policy.”
Two commentators will respond to Standing’s talk: Sue Bradford, a former Green MP, political activist, and founding member and former coordinator of Auckland Action Against Poverty, and Keith Rankin, an economic historian who has written extensively on basic income.
The event will conclude with a 20-minute debate on the issue of whether an income guarantee policy should be targeted or universal.
Details and registration are available on the NZ Fabian Society website here.
The New Zealand Fabian Society, a policy forum devoted to exploring progressive policy and economic reforms, has been active in promoting discussion of basic income.
In February 2016, the organization initiated its 2016 series of events with a presentation titled “A UBI for New Zealand: on the cards, but is it the answer?” by Rankin and economist Susan Guthrie. (Guthrie is the coauthor of The Big Kahuna and other work with Gareth Morgan–the economist and businessman whose new political party, The Opportunity Party, has recently made a basic income for elders and young children part of its campaign platform.)
The NZ Fabian Society has also collaborated with BIEN’s affiliate Basic Income New Zealand (BINZ) by helping to organize some of events held in connection with BINZ’s basic income roadshow for Basic Income Week 2016, and supported past lectures by Guy Standing in Auckland. In March 2016, the NZ Fabian Society hosted Standing at an event in Christchurch, where he spoke on the theme of his previous book, “rentier capitalism and the coming precariat revolt” (video below).
Phil Harington, an active member of NZ Fabian Society and lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Auckland, explains that a key object of the Fabians is strengthen public confidence in progressive reforms. The arguments for basic income, he states, “make a plausible argument for rethinking the very principles we need to apply in core policy and economic creativity alongside a concern to rethink the tax side of the income pool to increase social equity and participation.”
Thanks to Phil Harington for information about the upcoming event as well as past efforts of the New Zealand Fabians.
Cover photo: Auckland Skyline
by Kate McFarland | Jun 4, 2017 | News
A Special Rapporteur of the United Nations will hold a panel discussion on universal basic income and the future of human rights on Thursday, June 8, 2017.
Organized by Professor Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the event will explore the potential for basic income to mitigate global economic insecurity. The panelists include two cofounders of the Basic Income Earth Network — Professor Philippe van Parijs (University of Louvain, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and Guy Standing (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) — in addition to Isabelle Doresse (People’s Universities in Northern Pas de Calais, ATD Fourth World) and Alex Praça (Human and Trade Union Rights Officer of the International Trade Union Confederation).
The panel will discuss a report prepared by Alston and submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council. Alston’s report addresses the concern that “the human rights movement needs to address and respond to the fundamental changes that are taking place in economic and social structures at the national and global levels,” including precarious employment, automation, increasing inequality, and the obsolescence of traditional forms of labor market regulation.
As Alston describes the idea, a basic income “is explicitly designed to challenge most of the key assumptions underpinning existing social security systems”:
Rather than a system where there are partial payments, basic income guarantees a floor; instead of being episodic, payments are regular; rather than being needs-based, they are paid as a flat rate to all; they come in cash, rather than as messy in-kind support; they accrue to every individual, rather than only to needy households; rather than requiring that various conditions be met, they are unconditional; rather than excluding the well off, they are universal; and instead of being based on lifetime contributions, they are funded primarily from taxation.
The 20-page report describes each of these characteristics of a basic income, overviews the history of the idea, and describes various types of basic income and related policies, such as a negative income tax and cash transfers. Alston also lays out some examples of the possible cost of implementing a basic income scheme.
Alston holds that “the basic income concept should not be rejected out of hand on the grounds that it is utopian” and encourages further discussion of the policy as a means to alleviate economic insecurity and promote human rights and social justice. He additionally urges that the debate on basic income be united with that on social protection floors.
Further Viewing and Reading
The June 8 panel discussion will be broadcast live online here.
The full report on universal basic income of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is available in the UN’s document repository or can be directly downloaded as a PDF here.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Human Rights Council during 15th Session, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 UN Geneva
