At the party’s congress on December 17th, members of Dutch political party Green Left (“Groen Links”) were given the opportunity to vote on amendments to its election program. This document will be released soon, in advance of the country’s parliamentary elections, which will be held on March 15th, 2017.
In the draft version of the election program, a basic income was only mentioned as a possible means to reform the social welfare system.
Two amendments concerning a universal basic income (UBI) were voted on at the party’s congress:
Implementation of a UBI
“Green Left supports the (eventual) implementation of an unconditional basic income for everyone, high enough to live decently from. Unconditional economic security will lead to possibilities for a fairer distribution of paid jobs, caregiving, volunteer work and income. In addition to that, it will facilitate entrepreneurship. Starting point is that the lowest incomes will not decrease and the basic income will be co-financed through progressive income taxes. Existing additional financial support for citizens in specific circumstances can continue to exist.”
Experimenting with a UBI
“Implementation of a national representative experiment of a universal basic income, to be conducted on a large-scale and over several years, aimed at a better understanding of the effects on people’s behaviour.”
Before the voting took place, the board of the party advised members to reject both of the amendments, arguing:
“an unconditional basic income is a bridge too far, as an unconditional basic income uses tax money to support people who don’t need it”.
But the members decided differently: approximately 80% of those present, voted in favour of the second amendment: to start a nationwide experiment of a universal basic income.
The first amendment, concerning the implementation of a UBI failed in a much closer vote: 53% rejected this proposal.
“We now are working hard to make changes in the text of the election program and the definite version will be available soon”, Christel Kohlmann (Head Strategy and Information of the party) explains. It could not be confirmed whether the experiments would really be aimed at a UBI for everyone, however.
For comparison, the currently planned experiments in The Netherlands, although they will test elements of basic income, are not examining a representative sample of the entire population. The social security experiments expected to start this year, for example, will examine only a group selected from people currently receiving welfare benefits.
Green Left is now the second Dutch elected political party that is already in Parliament and now in favour of experimenting with a real UBI. (That is, its members are in favour, and with a convincing majority). The Party for the Animals (“Partij voor de Dieren”) is also in favour of a serious experiment with a UBI and has formulated that in their program. In addition to these two parties, sitting Member of Parliament Norbert Klein will participate in the upcoming elections with the Cultural Liberal Party (“Vrijzinnige Partij”). Klein is now in Parliament as an individual member, having left the 50plus party after the last elections. The Cultural Liberal Party is also in favour of research with a universal basic income, and has even produced a rough calculation on how a UBI should be financed.
Compared to the former elections, support for a UBI has clearly spread and grown in The Netherlands. More than 65.000 people already signed a petition and this number is still growing. In the upcoming month, more political parties will have their members voting for amendments to their party programs in advance of the upcoming elections in March.
Info and links
The amendments on a universal basic income can be found on page 75 of the Green Left congress paper (in Dutch).
The election program of Green Left can be found here (when ready and in Dutch).
Information about the upcoming experiments with social welfare can be found here and here (in Dutch).
Rudy Karsan, co-founder and former CEO of the former human resource software company Kenexa (sold to IBM in 2012) recently held a TEDx talk in Calgary where he advocated a universal basic income as a means of stimulating innovation.
“We are in the golden age of our species,” Karsan begins his talk. He argues that we already have multiple solutions for the lack of food, water, and energy, and even for global warming; thus, our number one risk is none of these. Instead, he argues, “Meaningful work is about our choice of who we are,” and the lack of it is going to be the number one risk.
Karsan continues by explaining that this problem will not be solved by jobs:
“Jobs are getting decimated in an accelerating pace and they are not coming back.” […]
“We have to break the mental construct that jobs equal work.”
“No!” Karsan continues firmly. Jobs do not equal work. “Meaningful work has been with us forever and will be with us forever. It is not jobs. Jobs are simply a subset of work.” Jobs have created money for us since they came into our lives at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago. “But work can exist without jobs.”
The second mental construct we have to break, according to Karsan, is about entitlement:
“We need to discard all forms of social programs and replace it with one: Universal Basic Income, which is the individual right for every citizen to unconditionally get an income from the state on a regular basis.”
“UBI is not about creating dependence; it is about the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at the lowest level. […] The notion that this entitlement to a UBI makes us smaller and weaker is absolutely untrue”, Karsan states. It is also not a new idea, and the data that came out of Manitoba in the seventies already showed that minimal income had many positive effects.
Karsan even takes it further and states that a UBI is not only something we can afford, but it will also make us greater. “Innovation did not start with homeless people.”
Karsan encourages his public to demand a UBI from their leaders, because he is convinced that our species in the golden age can move a lot further and he hopes and dreams that “we may find a way, not only to find meaning in our lives, but meaning in the universe itself.”
“The Earth offers enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed” is the opening sentence of the election-program of the Party for the Animals (“Partij voor de Dieren”, PvdD). This document has been released in advance of the Dutch parliamentary elections, which will be held on March 15th, 2017.
One would expect huge attention to be paid to environmental issues in the election-program of the PvdD, but economic issues also receive extensive attention. In fact, its first chapter is titled “Economy and Labour, Your Money or Your Life?”
According to the PvdD, the economic crisis was not caused by scarcity, but by flaws in the economic system. They argue that we are capable of producing all we need very efficiently – with ever decreasing demands on labour – which offers great opportunity to spend more time on caring for each other, our environment and ourselves. However, we have organized our economy in such a way that spending time on these latter goods is in fact increasingly difficult. People are forced to work more rather than less. Many people are excluded and production and consumption are forced to grow, regardless of the demands of the people. Labour is very expensive due to taxes which employers as well as employees have to pay, while at the same time being abundantly available. In contrast, raw materials are scarce but cheap and their mining causes imbalances in nature.
“The current economic system causes growth-and-debt slavery, on account of which everything will jam. We will have to organize this differently,” PvdD states in its program.
PvdD proposes making labour cheaper and non-sustainable goods more expensive. Shorter working hours should be available for everyone, they argue, which will help to tackle unemployment and create possibilities to combine paid labour with other activities, such as care work, parenting or voluntary work. PvdD strives for “a society in which paid labour is no longer seen as the only or most important goal in life”.
Party for the Animals sees an unconditional basic income as a possible solution:
“A basic income for everyone will have to be seriously investigated. With such an income we can perform work and activities that today remain untouched because we don’t have time for them or because they are too expensive. […] A basic income could allow a lot more activities that are beneficial to society to be developed.”
According to the PvdD, polls say 19% of Dutch voters are considering voting for the party in the upcoming elections.
Info and links
The election program of PvdD can be found here (in Dutch)
In a recent IMPAKTER interview, as part of a series exploring the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Ian Bassin (Chief Operating Officer, Domestic, of GiveDirectly), explains how his organization is moving from unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) towards unconditional basic income (UBI) in Kenya.
GiveDirectly traditionally provides UCTs to the extremely poor, operating in Kenya and Uganda.
“We started our program in Kenya because they had a very robust mobile money payment system there, and that’s the means by which we transfer cash to poor households”, Bassin says.
The primary goal of GiveDirectly is to help demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of cash transfers. The research done so far shows that giving money to poor people works.
“Poverty in its simplest terms is a lack of money and resources. It is not a lack of capacity or ability”, Bassin notes. “If we’re not doing more with our dollar than the poor could do for themselves, we should probably just be giving them the dollar.”
Recipients of UCTs don’t spend the cash transfer on vice consumption, like alcohol or tobacco, nor does the transfer discourage people from working, Bassin explains. He refers to a recent World Bank Study that has shown UCTs are in fact more likely to reduce than to increase the consumption of vice goods.
“Our recipients use the funds incredibly wisely. […] They tend to spend it on positive goods and what we saw in our original RCT was that after the transfer had ended our recipients saw their incomes rise by thirty-four percent and saw their assets increase by fifty-eight percent.”
Bassin highlights that this research can “help drive cash as a benchmark for decision-making in the aid sector.”
From unconditional cash transfers towards unconditional basic income
GiveDirectly is now planning a major implementation and evaluation of a universal basic income, to launch shortly in Kenya. Instead of giving money to the poor only, a program by which everyone receives cash will be implemented and evaluated.
“A ‘guaranteed basic income’ or ‘basic income guarantee’ is the idea of providing a minimum floor for all members of a community. It’s enough to meet basic needs, so it would be enough to live on without work or other forms of income. It’s guaranteed over the long term so that you can make decisions about major life plans with a minimum level of basic security. And it’s universal in that everyone gets it.”
(…)
“We’re going to be providing whole communities with a regular basic income for 12 years. And we have three of the world’s leading researchers on board to rigorously evaluate it: J-PAL co-founder Abhijit Banerjee, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Alan Krueger, and MIT professor Tavneet Suri. We’ve raised $22 million so far for the project and need to raise another $8m to run the full randomized controlled trial”
(…)
“Six thousand individuals in Kenya will receive a full basic income for twelve years and around 20,000 individuals will receive cash for a shorter period of time.”
In a recent review, the World Bank estimates that around 150 countries in the ‘developing world’ have implemented cash assistance programmes, which together reach approximately 800 million people.
The impact of such programmes in sub-Saharan Africa was thoroughly evaluated, using experimental data from two Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programmes implemented by the Government of Zambia, where each programme is accompanied by a randomized controlled trial (RCT).
A UCT is similar to an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) in that beneficiaries are paid directly in cash with no requirements on their actions. The main difference between the types of programmes concerns the inclusion criteria for participation. A UBI is targeted at every citizen, regardless of (for instance) socioeconomic status, whereas the UCT’s are often available for the poor population only, often with specific inclusion criteria, such as the presence of children of a specific age in a household or geographical criteria.
In 2010, the Zambian government began testing two different UCT-programmes. The programmes are still on-going. One of them is targeted at households with a child under age 3, while the other is targeted at households with various types of vulnerabilities (female or elderly headed households taking care of orphans or disabled children). Neither of the programmes is explicitly poverty targeted at the household level, but the (geographical) inclusion criteria resulted in 90% of beneficiaries below the Zambian poverty line. The outcome-parameters are identical in the two programmes. In each case, the annual amount transferred to a household is $144 ($24 every two months).
The effects after 2 and 3 years were compared to baseline. Far-reaching effects were reported in both groups, not only on the primary objective, food security and consumption, but also on a range of productive and economic outcomes.
A relatively simple flat cash transfer, unconditional and paid every two months, is shown to have wide-ranging effects on ultra-poor households in rural Zambia, significantly raising consumption and increasing food security, children’s schooling and material well-being, while at the same time strengthening economic capacity and assets.
After three years, household spending was -on average- 59% larger than the value of the transfer received.
A Basic Income News article by Tyler Prochazka about a recent meta-analysis (of 165 studies) on the effects of Cash Transfers can be found here.
cover photo (published with permission) and full citation of the paper:
Handa, Sudhanshu; Natali, Luisa; Seidenfeld, David; Tembo, Gelson; Davis, Benjamin. Can Unconditional Cash Transfers Lead to Sustainable Poverty Reduction? Evidence from two government-led programmes in Zambia, Innocenti Working Papers no. IWP_2016_21, UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, Florence
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Kate McFarland for reviewing this article.
