by Kate McFarland | Sep 17, 2017 | News
Malcolm Torry, Director of the UK-based Citizen’s Income Trust, Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, and General Manager of BIEN, has signed a contract with the publisher Palgrave Macmillan to edit An International Handbook of Basic Income.
Torry is currently recruiting authors of each of the book’s chapters (listed below). The publisher has issued the following the call for authors:
Palgrave Macmillan is planning to publish An International Handbook on Basic Income, which it intends to be a definitive guide to the current state of the debate.
The editor, Dr. Malcolm Torry, is seeking chapter authors who will represent the best available scholarship from around the world.
A few of the chapters will be commissioned: but for most of them the editor is seeking expressions of interest.
If you would like to express an interest in writing one or more of the chapters then please contact him at generalmanager@basicincom.org or info@citizensincome.org with a CV and a list of publications on Basic Income. Bids for individual chapters from two or three authors from different parts of the world will be particularly welcome.
Dr. Torry will be at the BIEN Congress in Lisbon from the 25th to the 27th September, and he would very much welcome discussions with prospective authors or groups of authors.
The table of contents is as follows:
Part I: The concept of Basic Income
- The definition and characteristics of a Basic Income
- The history of Basic Income
- The anatomy of a global debate
Part II: The effects of Basic Income
- Employment market effects
- Social effects
- Economic effects
- Ecological effects
- Gender effects
Part III: Implementation of Basic Income
- The anatomy of a Basic Income scheme
- The administration of a Basic Income scheme
- Costings for Basic Income
- The framing of Basic Income
- The feasibility of Basic Income
- Alternatives to Basic Income
- The funding of Basic Income
- The implementation of a Basic Income scheme
- Objections to Basic Income
- An illustrative Basic Income scheme
Part IV: Pilot projects and other experiments
- Canada and the USA
- Brazil
- Iran
- Namibia
- India
- Switzerland
- Finland
- The Netherlands
Part V: The political economy of Basic Income
- Libertarian arguments for Basic Income
- Left wing arguments for Basic Income
- Neoliberal arguments for Basic Income
- Human rights arguments for Basic Income
- The justice of Basic Income
- The ethics of Basic Income
Blank book photo CC BY 2.0 kate hiscock
by Kate McFarland | Sep 17, 2017 | Research
The Polish political philosophy journal Praktyka Teoretyczna (“Theoretical Practice”) has published a special issue on the relative merits of a basic income and job guarantee.
The contents of the issue are freely available online, although only in Polish.
Contributors contain a mix of supporters and critics of each of the two policies.
Mariusz Baranowski and Bartosz Mika compare basic income and job guarantee programs with respect to a variety of metrics, including funding and cost, impact on existing social security systems, impact on income inequality, and emancipatory effects, ultimately favoring a job guarantee. Pavlina Tcherneva investigates the relative macroeconomic impacts expected from the two types of policies, arguing that a job guarantee possesses an economic stabilizing effect not possessed by basic income. Further, Tcherneva argues that a job guarantee has a greater potential to contribute to sustainable development and ecological goals.
Angelina Kussy and Félix Talego Vázquez, on the other hand, argue for a basic income as a component in a new understanding of work. The authors use ethnographic research of the communitarian Spanish village of Marinaleda to critique contemporary notions of “work”. Zofia Łapniewska also questions the assumptions that form the foundations of current economic institutions–developing a proposal for an alternative economy based on the ethics of care. She uses this as a basis for further consideration of policies including basic income and employment guarantees.
In addition to original articles, the issue also includes a review of BIEN cofounder Guy Standing’s 2017 book Basic Income: And How Can We Make It Happen, as well as a review of the work of economist Mariana Mazzucato.
The edition was edited by Maciej Szlinder, who is Praktyka Teoretyczna’s political philosophy editor as well as an active participant in Poland’s basic income movement.
Praktyka Teoretyczna is an open-access peer-reviewed journal, with new issues published quarterly. Its content focuses on “continuously question[ing] the relation between theory and practice”, and is especially aimed at fostering the development of young researchers.
Reviewed by Caroline Pearce
Photo: Worker in Poland, CC BY 2.0 Chris
by Kate McFarland | Sep 15, 2017 | News
Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), an affiliate of BIEN promoting basic income in Europe, will be holding a meeting on Sunday, September 24, in Lisbon, Portugal, one day before the start of the 2017 BIEN Congress.
This is the first time that UBIE has organized a meeting to coincide with one of BIEN’s congresses. UBIE’s goal is to increase interaction between its members and other members of BIEN.
The meeting will be held at Casa dos Direitos Sociais (Rua Ferreira de Castro, 1950-315 Lisboa) from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, beginning with the General Assembly.
From 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, workshops will be held on UBIE’s projects and activities. At the end of the meeting, participants will report on results from these workshops. The afternoon sessions will be open to all Congress attendees and members of BIEN and its affiliates.
UBIE will also host a workshop titled “How can basic income activism and research support each other?” on Wednesday, September 27, as part of the BIEN Congress.
Additionally, UBIE plans to organize social events on Saturday, September 23 for those who arrive early to the congress.
More information can now be found on UBIE’s (brand new and improved) website: https://ubie.org/join-us-in-lisbon-on-24-september/.
Reviewed by Caroline Pearce.
Photo: “European Panorama” CC BY-NC 2.0 NASA, International Space Station, 01/25/12.
by Kate McFarland | Sep 11, 2017 | News
The 10th annual international Basic Income Week will be September 18 to 24.
Basic income organizations throughout the world have organized events and activities in honor of the advocacy and awareness week. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
- In Canada, BIEN’s affiliate Basic Income Canada Network, is collecting answers to the question “How might a Basic Income Guarantee affect your life and/or your loved ones?” to compile and send to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other federal cabinet members. Responses will be sent during Basic Income Week.
- In Germany, political comedian and basic income supporter Anny Hartmann will deliver a series of performances of her routine “NoLobby is perfect!”. Basic Income Week advertises “Grundeinkommen inside!” in describing her solo show.
- BIEN’s Dutch affiliate, Vereniging Basisinkomen (VBi), is hosting a workshop on the first day of Basic Income Week, featuring talks by VBi chairperson Alexander de Roo, independent researcher Sjir Hoeijmakers (who was an advisor for the Dutch social assistance experiments), and others.
- In Melbourne, Australia, the Kevin Club will host “A Conversation About Basic Income”, in which supporters of the idea will gather to discuss the possibilities for basic income in Australia.
- Rutger Bregman will present his book Utopia for Realists in Oslo, Norway, where he will also join a panel discussion on basic income.
- In Denmark, Erik Christensen (Aalborg University) will hold a presentation of his new book, På vej til borgerløn (“On the way to basic income”) and, on the following day, debate “Basic Income: Emancipation or Cost-Savings Measure?” with Kristian Kongshøj, a postdoc in political science at Aalborg.
- In Brussels, Belgium, a debate will be held between representatives across the political spectrum–Liberals, Christian Democrats, Socialists, and Greens–who profess “a minimum of sympathy” for basic income. Although the debaters all claim to be sympathetic to basic income, one question at stake in the debate is whether these individuals of diverse political views are really talking about the same concept when they speak of “basic income”.
Interested individuals may subscribe the calendar on the official site of Basic Income Week to see new events as they are added, and interested groups may add new events to be seen.
Basic Income Week is independently organized and not affiliated with BIEN, although many BIEN affiliates choose to participate. (In fact, Basic Income Week defines ‘basic income’ in a stricter manner than BIEN; Basic Income Week’s definition, unlike BIEN’s, stipulates that a basic income must, by definition, be high enough in amount to “prevent material poverty and provide the opportunity to participate in society and to live in dignity”.)
Photo: “Globes” CC BY 2.0 Jayel Aheram
by Kate McFarland | Sep 9, 2017 | Research
Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, authors of the new book Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press), have contributed a chapter to the book The Good Life Beyond Growth: New Perspectives, a collection of essays published as part of Routledge’s series Studies in Ecological Economics.
Their contribution, titled “Basic income and the freedom to lead a good life,” is based on the first chapter of Basic Income, in which the authors detail the distinguishing characteristics of a basic income (e.g. universality, lack of means test, lack of work obligation, payment to individuals rather than households), providing motivation for each of these features.
Van Parijs and Vanderborght introduce basic income as a way to address poverty and unemployment without reliance on sustained economic growth. Summarizing their position near the end of the chapter, they state:
Involuntary unemployment is a major challenge. But activation and growth, routinely offered as self-evident remedies, are both unrealistic and undesirable. An unconditional basic income offers a way of addressing this challenge without relying on an insane rush for keeping pace with labor saving technical change through the sustained growth of production and consumption.
They contend that a basic income would “mak[e] it easier for people to choose to perform less paid work at any given point in their lives” and “subsidiz[e] paid work with low immediate productivity”. Further, they claim, such lifestyle choices would result in lower material consumption in developed nations. In this way, the “freedom to lead a good life” supported by basic income would promote sustainability goals.
The collection The Good Life Beyond Growth originated with a conference by the same name, which was held in May 2015 at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, and convened by the university’s Research Group on Post-Growth Societies. At this conference, which presented interdisciplinary perspectives on questions of “what a good human life is about, what its subjective and objective conditions are, and how it may be reframed for a post-growth society,” Van Parijs presented “Good Life and the Welfare State” with another founding member of BIEN, Claus Offe.
Van Parijs and Vanderborght’s contribution is the only chapter in The Good Life Beyond Growth to deal specifically or at length with the idea of basic income. Another contributor, the social theorist and political economist Andrew Sayer, mentions the idea, but expresses doubt that it is the best means to achieve societal well-being without growth.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo CC BY 2.0 Giuseppe Milo
