by Citizens' Income Trust | Jul 12, 2013 | Opinion
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.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jul 5, 2013 | Opinion
Nicola Jones and Andy Sumner, Child Poverty, Evidence and Policy, Policy Press, 2011, xii + 250 pp, pbk, 1 847 42445 7, £23.99, hbk, 1 847 42446 4, £65
The authors’ purpose isn’t entirely described by the title or subtitle. They claim in their introduction that the book ‘is about children’s visibility, voice and vision’ (p.1): that is, about children as agents. Even that isn’t accurate, because we don’t in fact hear children’s own voices and visions in the book. What we hear is adults formulating ways in which we might experience children’s visibility, voice and vision. The questions that the authors ask are these: ‘How can we understand child poverty and well-being? What types of knowledge are being generated about the nature, extent and trends in child poverty and well-being in developing-country contexts? How can this evidence catalyse change to support children’s visibility, voice and vision? Finally, how do these questions play out in different contexts?’ (p.1).
The first part of the book studies concepts of child poverty and well-being, how knowledge about these is generated, how policy is formulated, and how knowledge informs policy. Well-being is understood in relation to a child’s relationships and subjectivity as well as in material terms; there is a detailed discussion of the diversity of evidence available; and policy-formation is understood as a complex process from which children’s voices are frequently excluded.
The second part of the book contains chapters on Africa, on Asia, and on Latin America and the Caribbean. For each continent there are sections on material, relational and subjective well-being; a section on knowledge generation (mainly in relation to information-gathering institutions); a study of the interaction between knowledge gathered and policy formation; and a case study. A concluding chapter emphases the importance of a child-centred approach if child poverty is to be abolished. Throughout the book there are tabulated literature reviews which will be immensely useful to future researchers.
It would have been interesting to have heard the voices of children, particularly in relation to the case studies. It would also have been educational to include a chapter on child poverty in so-called developed countries, and on how visible and audible children are in those countries’ policy processes. Perhaps these areas could be tackled in future publications. It would also be educational to see research findings on how effective particular policy initiatives have been in tackling child poverty as defined in part I of the book, and on how children experience those initiatives – in their own words.
In particular: Does the gradual shift away from service provision and towards conditional cash payments (such as Brazil’s bolsa familia) improve children’s material, relational and subjective well-being? And would a Citizen’s Income improve children’s well-being further? (See our report on a Namibian Citizen’s Income pilot project in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, issue 2 for 2009). In evaluating the outcomes, children’s voices will be crucial, as this book rightly suggests.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 28, 2013 | Opinion
Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, The Change Book: Fifty models to explain how things happen, Profile Books, 2012, 1 78125009 9, hbk, vii + 167 pp, £9.99
For each of the fifty models there is a page or two of text and a page or two of diagrams. To give a flavour: There is a page about the ‘m=3 and n=1’ model: that is, we experience three dimensions of space and one of time. The text points out that the mathematics of quantum field theory can be formulated in rather more dimensions than that, but that more than three dimensions of space would offer too little stability, fewer than three insufficient complexity (and so no gravitation), and only a single time dimension permits causality inferences. (Readers beware: the authors have muddled up their ms and their ns.) The final paragraph theorises about a multiuniverse in which universes with different numbers of time and space dimensions are uninhabitable. The following page explains the situation with a diagram: and that’s wrong, too, because the text does foresee a universe with three spatial dimensions and more than one time dimension.
To take another, more successfully executed, example: a page of text explains why economic booms and busts occur (rising share prices attract investors, falling share prices prompt selling); and a diagram usefully portrays how expected share price varies more than earnings per share (which more nearly reflects economic reality).
The models are divided into ‘Explaining our world’ (the section containing the examples above), ‘Explaining my world’, ‘changing my world’, and ‘changing our world’. The divisions are somewhat arbitrary. Take the example in which we might be most interested in this Newsletter: the Basic Income Model is located in the ‘changing my world’ section, but could equally well have been included under ‘changing our world’.
The two pages of text on a Citizen’s Income (pp. 84-5) begin with a paragraph on problems facing our society (‘the death of the social’), and then describe a Basic Income as a ‘polemical as well as fascinating concept based on the idea that those who want to work should not be hindered and those who do not want to work should not be forced to do so’. The advantages of a Citizen’s Income are well described (‘There would be no more unemployment nor the social stigma attached to it’, ‘The job market would be “freer”, etc.), and possible disadvantages are faced: for instance, ‘a restrictive immigration policy’. The authors finally offer some questions: ‘Would people become lazy …?’
The authors are clearly rather taken with the idea of a Citizen’s or Basic Income, and their enthusiasm is welcome, but the fact that the book is all about ‘change’, and preferably change as radical as possible, a Citizen’s Income is described throughout as a world-changing policy. Rather than calling the pages ‘Basic Income’, they use the title ‘What would turn our society upside down’ (without a question mark); and in the text the idea is called ‘polemical as well as fascinating’. This might not be helpful. Another way of describing a Citizen’s Income is as a minor administrative change that would deliver appreciable economic and social benefits, and it is by framing the proposal in that way that we might be more likely to see movement towards establishing a Citizen’s Income.
The following two pages offer a very useful, and rather less polemical, diagram, showing the connections between the current benefits system and a system based on a Basic Income (wage labour, money, and social status) and the differences: minimal bureaucracy in place of lots, freedom in place of stigmatisation, a focus on potential rather than a focus on need, and good wages for bad jobs rather than bad wages for bad jobs. The only problem with the ‘Basic Income’ side of the diagram is that’s entitled ‘utopia’. It wouldn’t be.
In the edition of The Big Issue for the 14th to the 20th January Mikael Krogerus has written a two page article about The Change Book. The three models featured are about the pain that results from change, about how world governance might evolve, and about ‘What would turn our society upside down?’ (this time with a question mark) – and here he repeats the full text and diagram from the four pages in the book about Basic Income.
There is much food for thought in The Change Book, and particularly in the pages on a Citizen’s Income.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 21, 2013 | Opinion
Karl Widerquist and Michael Howard, Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its suitability as a model, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xvii + 267 pp, hbk, 0 230 11207 0, £62.50
In 1967 oil was found in the relatively new state of Alaska; in 1976 a constitutional amendment established the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) to receive 25% of oil royalties; and in 1982 the fund paid out the first Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) to every Alaskan citizen: the same amount to every individual. The world had its first Citizen’s Income.
This important edited collection tells the political and legislative story of the APF and PFD, explains their operation, and discusses the dividend’s economic impacts ( – from being the US state with the most unequal net incomes in 1980, Alaska is now the state with the least net income inequality: p.53). Chapter 5 shows how distributing a dividend from a permanent fund generates political protection for resource revenues; chapter 6 explores the trade-off between higher average dividends and lower volatility facing any permanent fund administrators; and chapters 7 and 8 ask what will happen when the oil stops flowing: Will the Alaskan economy be in sufficiently good shape for the Permanent Fund to remain a political possibility?
In the second part of the book a number of authors debate the ethics of the Alaskan model. They find that Left-Libertarianism requires the collection and distribution of the natural resource components of all privately owned wealth; that the PFD constitutes a kind of Citizen’s Income (though the fact that it fluctuates compromises its ability to behave like one); that if the dividend were to be transformed into a capital sum for every citizen at the age of majority, then citizens would become genuine stakeholders in the economy (with the temptations that that would bring); that the dividend only ambiguously coheres with a republican ‘freedom-as-nondomination’ perspective; that registering for the PFD makes the individual citizen complicit in the oil industry’s contribution to climate change (though if Alaskan citizens were at the same time to prevent the same amount of climate change as Alaska’s oil industry causes then they would escape this charge); and that a Citizen’s Income can be consistent with a variety of moral theories. Finally, Widerquist and Howard draw a number of lessons: that resource dividends work, that they are popular, that they can be established anywhere politicians are willing to look for opportunities (as Governor Jay Hammond did); that governments need to assert community ownership of resources; and that coalitions need to be built if resource dividends are to be established and then defended.
We have waited a long time for a thorough book-length treatment of the APF and PFD, and Widerquist and Howard have served us well by pulling together such a relevant and coherent collection of essays. The one weakness is not of their making: As Scott Goldsmith suggests in chapter 4, there has been too little research on the economic and social impacts of the APF and the PFD. The research needs to be done and a second edition of the book then published so that we can all benefit from the results.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 14, 2013 | Opinion
Götz Werner and Adrienne Goehler, 1000€ für Jeden: Freiheit, Gleichheit, Grundeinkommen [€1000 for each person: freedom, equality, Basic Income] Ullstein, 2010, 267 pp, pbk, 978 3 548 37421 5, £6.56
It is unusual for us to review foreign language books in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, but an exception surely has to be made for this German book which has been a consistent bestseller, significantly in the ‘business’ category. 1 (Because the book’s content is so tightly tied to the German context it is unlikely to be translated into English, which is why we are reviewing the German text rather than waiting for an English translation.)
The first part of the book discusses the German political context and the Citizen’s Income debate within it. This is followed by sections on what the authors take to be essential elements of the definition of a Citizen’s Income: large enough to cover subsistence needs; for every individual; without means-test; and without work-test. Objections are then answered, particularly in relation to labour market participation. An interesting section uses the fact that most lottery winners remain in the labour market as important evidence. The concept of ‘work’ is then broadened beyond the labour market, and a variety of imagined personal situations show how a Citizen’s Income would promote diverse kinds of work.
Werner is a successful entrepreneur, so perhaps it is not surprising that rather too much space is then given to how workplaces have changed during the past few decades and how they might be further humanised with the help of a Citizen’s Income. Even more space is then given to the German education system and how it might be reformed.
The authors discuss implementation of a Citizen’s Income scheme, and suggest that it should be paid first for children and young people and then to older people (largely because women’s historically low labour market participation means that they are often ill-prepared financially for old age). An interesting section suggests that the income security we need was once provided by the family but now cannot be, and that only a Citizen’s Income will be able to fill the gap.
A chapter on the results of the Namibian Citizen’s Income pilot project contains too much about microcredit.
1000€ per month is a lot of money. The authors intend to pay for a Citizen’s Income this large through taxing consumption rather than income and by abolishing most other government expenditure. They write rather too much about consumption taxes and are somewhat unrealistic about the level at which they might be collectable. Whether we would wish to abolish other public expenditure to the same extent in the UK, in which we already have a universal National Health Service and universal free education based on the same principles as a Citizen’s Income, is rather doubtful.
But the authors are right to ask for radical change. We are no longer a ‘self-help’ agrarian society. We now rely heavily on other people’s work, and therefore belong to a ‘stranger-help’ society. This is a huge paradigm shift, and it suggests that a welfare system based on self-help, as social insurance is, really does now need to be replaced by a system based on ‘stranger-help’, the purest form of which can only be a Citizen’s Income.
This is a somewhat rambling book. There are long sections on matters with only oblique relationships to the Citizen’s Income proposal, and the authors frequently return to issues already discussed. A forceful editor might have prevented the authors from expatiating on their rather irrelevant enthusiasms, and could have helped them to create a more concise, more connected, and better ordered book: but what is really interesting is that this holdall of a book should have become such a best seller. I suspect that this is because within it the magnitude of the changes facing our society are expressed with some feeling, and a proposal radical enough to respond to those changes, and sufficiently feasible for implementation to be conceivable, is expounded with equal feeling. This is above all an enthusiastic book by authors who believe that real change is possible.
Thoroughly recommended to anyone with enough German to read it.
1https://www.buchreport.de/bestseller/bestseller_einzelansicht.htm?tx_bestseller_pi1%5Bisbn%5D=9783430201087
