“Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services: the case for radical change” is the title of the podcast hosted by Robin Archer, Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme, a prestigious lecture series on the spirit of free social inquiry at the London School of Economics.
What are the arguments for Universal Basic Income and for Universal Basic Services? How do they relate to each other and what might the difficulties be?
From the event’s page at the LSE website, it can be read:
This presentation will draw on a new book to show how all forms of commons have been taken in the neo-liberal era, through enclosure, commodification, privatisation and, most shockingly, colonisation. It will highlight how this has increased inequality. It will conclude by outlining the key components of a 44-Article Charter of the Commons that could be an integrated part of an ecologically progressive politics in Britain and elsewhere.
Steffen Hertog, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has published a paper in Energy Transitions (Hertog, 2017) which relates the efficiency in wealth sharing and basic income.
The paper makes the case that hydrocarbon producers with higher rents per capita make a unique category of the rent-dependent nations. Those that face specific development challenges not present in mid-rent nations.
With a look into the patterns of rent distributions in high-rent countries, excessive public employment, and energy subsidies, Hertog argues that these lead to lower labor productivity and the exclusion of the national population from the privatized labor market.
Hertog proposes unconditional cash payments in high-rent countries as a means to minimize the distortion patterns in the hiring of nationals for the private labor market and in labor productivity resulting from rent distribution.
The London School of Economics (LSE) will host a Basic Income day event on Tuesday, 20th of February 2018.
This event will join several experts to discuss political feasibility, funding mechanisms and costing of basic income, in the morning session. On the afternoon, a roundtable will take place, featuring representatives of several basic income pilot projects and experiments worldwide. Among these pilot projects, findings from the Namibia, India and Kenya cases will be discussed, as well as analysis from the US and Canadian experiments in the 1970s. Other initiatives, ongoing or in preparation, will also be referred, such as in the Netherlands and Scotland.
