The European Citizens Initiative for Basic Income has produced a 3-minute cartoon video (published on Mar 28, 2013) introducing the idea of basic income and encouraging Europeans to sign the petition for basic income in the European Union.
The video is online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zru79jcVTt4
The petition is here: https://sign.basicincome2013.eu
The initiative is on facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/ECI.BasicIncome
In this 37-minute video, Guy Standing explains what the precariat class is, why it is so important to contemporary politics, and why solving the problem of a class of people with a precarious existence requires a basic income.
It’s online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WaA8zqjBSk
The Fifteenth International Congress of the Basic Income Earth Network will take place in Montreal, Quebec on June 26-29, 2014. The Basic Income Canada Network (known in French as Reseau Canadien Pour Le Revenu Garanti) will host the Congress. The theme of the Congress will be “Re-Democratizing the Economy.” More details about the Congress will be released gradually over the coming months. United then, conference organizers recommend, “Save the date.”
More details of the Congress soon appear on the BICN website.
“Are More Jobs the Answer? The ‘BIG’ Bait and Switch” and “How BIG is BIG Enough: Would The Basic Income Guarantee Satisfy The Unemployed?”
L. Randall Wray's "Great Leap Forward"
In two articles, L. Randall Wray compares the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) to the Job Guarantee / Employer of
Last Resort (JG/ELR). A Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, NY, Wray has been writing about the benefits of the JG/ELR approach since the 1990s. He is one of the leading scholars of what is now called “modern monetary theory,” which stresses the need to prevent inflation by using a JG/ELR as an anchor for the currency.
Wray opposes the BIG mostly because he believes it will cause inflation. He simply believes that some of the goals of BIG are unsustainable: attempts to provide everyone with a descent income without requiring them to work will, according to Wray, necessarily cause an inflation spiral. He also argues that many of the goals of BIG are good and sustainable, but that they can be achieved better through a JG/ELR than through BIG.
Wray’s starting point is a response to a recent editorial by Al Sheahen (author of the recent book, Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security), but he cites a wide range of BIG authors including Philippe Van Parijs, Guy Standing, Charles M.A. Clark and others.
L. Randall Wray, “Are More Jobs the Answer? The ‘BIG’ Bait and Switch,” Economonitor, June 25th, 2013
L. Randall Wray, “How BIG is BIG Enough: Would The Basic Income Guarantee Satisfy The Unemployed?,” Economonitor, July 9th, 2013
L. Randall Wray's "Great Leap Forward"
Bernard Lietaer, Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner, and Stafan Brunnhuber, Money and Sustainability: The missing link, Triarchy Press for the Club of Rome, EU Chapter, 1 908009 7 53, pbk, 211 pp, £24
This report, written for a European group affiliated to the think tank The Club of Rome, stands in a long line of publications that identify the creation of money via bank debt as an economic, social, and ecological problem. Money created in this way, and the ways in which we have turned money into a variously packaged commodity, amplify boom and bust cycles, result in short term thinking, require economic growth to sustain the system, concentrate wealth, and damage the trust on which social capital is built. Repeated banking crises are a clear signal of a system in trouble.
The authors identify the fundamental problem as currency monopoly, and propose that the monopoly should be broken by an extension of existing experiments in complementary currencies.
The reason for this review in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter is not because this book is about a Citizen’s Income, or about the structure of tax and benefits systems. It isn’t. But it is an exercise parallel in many respects to the research that the Citizen’s Income Trust and others have done on feasible extensions of universal benefits. The book recognises that the current monetary system has to continue much as it is; it identifies problems with the current system, and argues convincingly that plural currencies at a variety of levels (local, national, and European) would be a partial solution to many of the current difficulties and would reduce the risk of future crises; it studies and evaluates existing experiments in alternative currencies; and it makes feasible proposals on the basis of those evaluations. Similarly, we have shown that a Citizen’s Income would be an adaptation of the existing tax and benefits system, that it would respond to a variety of current economic and social problems, that it would build on existing experience of universal benefits, and that it would be feasible.
This is not the place for a detailed critique of the authors’ nine specific proposals, but to this reviewer they appeared both feasible and desirable: as would be a Citizen’s Income.
This is a good book on how limited economic reforms could make a real difference to both our global society and its environment.
The 24th BIEN CONGRESS in Maricá & Niterói – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 27-29 August 2025
Linkedin, Instagram, X – biencongress25 (at) gmail [dot] com
BIEN2024 was August 29–31 (Pictures and more coming soon)