by Peter Knight | Feb 10, 2023 | News
“We need a new approach to addressing poverty in South Africa. The current system is not working and we can no longer pretend that there will be enough jobs for everyone. By bringing visibility to the benefits of a digital basic income transfer, we’re expanding the possibilities for South Africans and nourishing the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit present in the country ”, says Karen Jooste, Founder of RightfulShare.
The project began as a policy proposal in the South African parliament and has since moved into an independent initiative. Every month for one year, beneficiaries receive a digital basic income in GoodDollar to use as they choose.
Read the details in the full press release.
by Peter Knight | Feb 10, 2023 | News
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has a new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, in which he dismisses UBI very superficially.
Geoff Crocker has posted a review in which he argues that Wolf’s “summary dismissal of proposals such as basic income, which he calls a ‘delusion’ (p278)” lacks depth. Crocker writes: “Stating that a UK basic income of £11,200 per adult would cost £580 billion or about 25% of GDP, and is therefore unaffordable and that ‘that is all there is to say about this idea’ (p283) is superficial and trivial. He equally dismisses his colleague Martin Sandbu’s more refined proposal. In static analysis, writers like Malcolm Torry and Stewart Lansley have shown that basic income schemes can be revenue neutral and achieve progressive redistribution. The further dynamic case that automation reduces labour income per unit of output, requiring increased non-labour income is equally ignored. Recent macroeconomic modelling by Cambridge Econometrics has demonstrated the stability of a basic income proposal funded by debt-free sovereign money.”
Read the full review here.
by Peter Knight | Feb 2, 2023 | News
One of BIEN’s founders, Philippe Van Parijs, has published a review of new book by a distinguished Indian economist, Pranab Bardhan. Bardhan argues that insecurity and not inequality is the source of our worldwide democratic malaise. And in poor countries even more than in rich ones a basic income is required in order to reduce not poverty but insecurity.
Van Parijs concludes: “Whether in India, Europe or America, Bardhan does not claim that basic income constitutes a magic potion to guarantee security, let alone a magic bullet to kill populism. But it is part of the battery of security-enhancing policies that are needed if the root causes of the worldwide disenchantment with democracy are to be addressed.”
To read the review, click here.
by Peter Knight | Jan 29, 2023 | News
A group of Russian professors led by Vyacheslav Bobkov of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, Scientific Centre of Labour Economics, Moscow, has published a 371 page monograph in Russian with an English language summary.
“Goals of the study presented in the monograph are to develop theoretical provisions of the concept of an universal basic income (UBI); to summarize and systematize the results of the survey of the Russian experts and citizens about the potential UBI key principles and possibilities of its implementation in Russia; to identify primary foreground categories of the population for its testing; to assess the feasibility of expanding UBI tools, taking into account the development of it’s transitional forms (the definition of “basic income (BI)” is used below for them), especially during the COVID–19 pandemic; to model the pilot projects (experiments) on the UBI implementation for the most vulnerable groups of the population.”
You can read the English summary here and the full Russian text here.
by Peter Knight | Jan 27, 2023 | Opinion
In a blog post entitled “Re-engineering our fragile economy and democracy”, Geoff Crocker argues that UBI “addresses ethical issues of income inequality, gender inequality, precarity, and security” and should be at least in part financed by “central bank monetary funding of government expenditure, or ‘debt-free sovereign money’, by which the central bank would directly credit the government account with money it had created.”
To read the blog post click here.
