The 17th BIEN Congress took place in Lisbon, Portugal from the 25th to the 27th of September. The focus of the congress was on “Implementing Basic Income.” The 150 presenters represented 33 countries, with more countries represented in the additional 380 audience members. According to Karl Widerquist, Vice-Chair of BIEN, this may have been the largest BIEN Congress since Brazil in 2010. The Congress included keynote presentations by BIEN co-founders Guy Standing and Philippe Van Parijs, in addition to keynote presentations about several Basic Income pilot programs, reflecting the congress’s focus on implementation, and from several political figures who are advocating for Basic Income in their respective countries.
The first day of the congress took place at the Portuguese Parliament (Assembleia da República), and as Standing said: “I am sure I speak for many of the co-founders, and many of them are here, that when we set up BIEN 31 years ago we never anticipated that we would be in a place like this in 2017.” The second and third days were held at ISEG, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, a beautiful venue that used to be a convent (Convento das Inglesinhas, restored by architect Gonçalo Byrne) that has kept many of its original architectural features and now hosts the university’s post-graduate programs.
Starting the keynote session on Basic Income pilot programs, Evelyn Forget’s presentation was about the differences between the narratives attached to several Basic Income experiments. She underlined that different narratives will create different criteria of success. For example, Finland’s narrative is about long-term unemployment and incentivising return to work. In this case, the experiment will be successful if people return to work. Ontario’s narrative is about social justice and a gap in benefits for adults because of the new reality of precarious work and poverty issues. Their goal is to expand the welfare state. Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator’s narrative started out as an utopia put forward by private individuals who wondered what would happen once automation freed people to do what they want. Forget stressed that “context matters” in pilot programs, and she suggested that when we bring together all these shared experiences, we can create newer and richer narratives.
After Forget’s insights, there were several presentations about specific pilot programs being developed. Karen Glass, from the experiment in Ontario, Canada, described the pilot program as a type of Negative Income Tax program, since the payments decrease as the recipients start working. The Ontario project applies to households and encompasses individuals aged 18 through 64, who have been residents of the region for one year. The pilot provides a guaranteed annual income of $17,000 dollars per individual and $24,000 per couple, which is 75% of the low income measure. The success criteria are not focused primarily on work incentives, but on recipients’ improved health, reduction in anxiety and the ability to make ends meet. Elizabeth Rhodes from Y Combinator, a seed investment company, talked about the contours of what this private experiment wants to achieve. Y Combinator has already financed a feasibility study in Oakland. and now plans to select 3000 participants who will receive 1000 dollars per month, some for three years and others for five. There is an income cap in the selection and they will be undersampling higher incomes. Presently the program is considering selecting subjects 21 to 40 years in age. The pilot intends to evaluate well being, mental and physical health, social and civic engagement and social networks effects as well as effects in the children of the participants. The research team has been piloting and testing their methods with a smaller group of participants.
Joe Huston spoke about the experience of GiveDirectly in Kenya. GiveDirectly has raised funds privately and has been distributing them to around 100 people, but once the project is fully launched there will be up to 26,000 people receiving some type of cash transfer. The pilot is divided into three groups, one group will receive a monthly payment for 12 years, another for 2 years and yet another will receive a one time cash grant of the same amount. The 100 people who are receiving a monthly Basic Income already have reported on their experiences, and, as Huston says,many have reported they did not reduce their work efforts; instead, many have several projects that need to be completed (such as paying for school and building a house), so they need to work. Others have pulled their Basic Income payments together in something called “table banking” and give a larger sum to each member at a time so that more can be achieved. Giving to individuals as opposed to households has had the emancipatory effects that are often theorized: because each person receives an equal amount of money, it is easier to solve household disputes. Regarding how the money is spent, Huston says that Basic Income debates seem to oscillate between saying that people will become lazy bums or startup engineers; however, both extremes are inaccurate and do not apply to what is happening in the village so far. Huston explains that when walking from house to house in Kenya one can see a diversity of life choices: “Irene spent some in purchasing a goat for about $12 and kept some of the money as savings. Eric spent most of his money in a fishing net, saved some of the money and bought small fish like anchovies for a snack. Frederick spent most of the money in school fees.” So far, each person used the money as is more adequate in their particular circumstances.
On the political arena there were several important participants. From Germany, Cosima Kern spoke about the new Basic Income single issue party, and explained that since Germany has no direct democracy (in contrast to Switzerland) this is a way to force Basic Income into the political arena. The Basic Income party had almost 100,000 votes in the election that took place on day before the Congress, which Kern said is a good result for a new party. Enno Schmidt talked about the referendum in Switzerland and also underlined that the 23% vote for Basic Income was a great first result, reminding everyone how it took 17 years of discussion in Switzerland for women to have the right to vote. Lena Stark spoke about the new political party in Sweden in the same vein as the German party; they plan to run for elections in September 2018. Ping Xu presented the situation in Taiwan with the help of Tyler Prochazka. Taiwan has the highest housing costs and the lowest birth rates, and would be an ideal site for a full implementation of Basic Income. From Japan, the ex-Minister of Agriculture, Masahiko Yamada, spoke about the importance of Basic Income in his country, which is facing new economic challenges that urgently need to be addressed.
Finally, the Scottish MP Ronnie Cowan inspired the audience with his privileged viewpoint regarding how politicians tend to operate and the heartfelt way that Scotland is pursuing their Basic Income pilot programs. Mr. Cowan said that politicians rely on experts, but experts and academic often disagree, and politicians need facts and figures, which is why experiments are so important. With pilot schemes, we can monitor outcomes; they can be used to tell if “people are happier, more socially engaged, eating healthier, if kids are doing better at school, we can measure the benefits against the cost.” Mr. Cowan concluded: “Basic Income really comes alive for me when we consider it’s for everyone. It is not means tested. It is not subject to the disability test. It removes stigma. It creates choice and it’s absolutely dripping in humanity.”
The two main keynote speakers, Guy Standing and Philippe Van Parijs, also captured the audience’s interest with their presentations. Standing celebrated the 800 year anniversary of The Charter of the Forest, a piece of legislation that was valid for 754 years, only repealed in 1971. Standing argued that the commons defended in The Charter of The Forest have been plundered upon for hundreds of years, and Basic Income is a way to bring back the commons. He defended the position that Basic Income should be seen as a social dividend based in the commons and land tax, not something that will send income tax through the roof. Van Parijs spoke of the right to work and the duty to work. He argued that even though many see Basic Income as an attack on these, it actually facilitates both. Basic Income can organically encourage part-time work and therefore job sharing, thus promoting the right to work. Basic Income can also allow for the duty to work to be expressed in a meaningful way that includes paid and unpaid jobs. According to Van Parijs, the duty to work cannot mean simply doing something for a salary; it should be viewed more widely as a duty to participate in society in a meaningful way. Basic Income can liberate people to participate in such a way by either allowing them to chose paid work that is more meaningful, or by choosing other unpaid useful work. If we eliminate the idea that people have to work in whatever they can to survive, the morality of what one chooses to do will come to the forefront, allowing the duty to work in a more meaningful way to become center stage as far as human activity is concerned.
The keynote presentations wrapped up with Eduardo Suplicy from Brazil, ex-Senator and long time defender of Basic Income, and Francisco Louçã, member of the left wing party Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal. There were also many other local Portuguese participants, as well as a slew of media attention related to the congress (which will be discussed in a future Basic Income Newspiece). The congress also included 37 parallel sessions, among others, Malcolm Torry’s presentation on Defining Basic Income, sessions on Degrowth, Digital Economy, Communicating about Basic Income, and many other topics, as well as two films, Christian Todd’sFree Lunch Society and Rena Masuyama’s Film Project, the first fiction film about Basic Income produced in Japan. Summaries of all the sessions provided by the chairs should be available in about one month at the Portuguese Basic Income Site, for now there are papers and presentations and videos of the event available of the site.
The group Basic Income Los Angeles has started fundraising for an educational project, a campaign to spread the word about Basic Income. The purpose of this campaign is to convey the benefits of Basic Income to a wider Los Angeles audience. The audience targeted by the education-based campaign will be not only the general public but also educators, grassroots organizations, non-profit organizations, churches, local government leaders, policymakers and neighborhood councils. Neighborhood councils will be particularly important in this project, there are about 96 Neighborhood Councils in Los Angeles and they each represent an average population of 38,000 people.
The education-based project proposes to select three recipients of a Basic Income grant of $1,500 a month for one year. They will then tour the city telling their own personal stories. These recipients include people in three different groups: 1) an individual living at or around the poverty line; 2) an individual who is part of a couple (can be male-female, male-male, female-female); and 3) an individual who is part of a family with children. These recipients will then be able to tell their personal stories about how having a Basic Income has improved their lives and how it has the potential to enact a transformational change in their communities.
Basic Income could have a crucial role in alleviating several issues specifically connected to Los Angeles. We spoke to mayoral candidate Frantz Pierre, who is also involved in the project and is an advocate for Basic Income and he named several issues that affect Los Angeles that would greatly improve with a Basic Income, including homelessness, gentrification, and support for the self-employed Angelenos. Regarding homelessness, Frantz said: “Homelessness, among vets and non-vets, is a concerning problem that affects a great number of people in Los Angeles. We have identified the problem root causes and we can reverse its effects. If we implement the Housing First model and provide them with a basic income to meet other basic needs, such as food and clothing, we would accomplish a lot as a society.”
The project introduced the idea of Basic Income to a homeless man, Ronald Troy Collins, and after thinking about it, this is what he had to say:
The three individuals picked by the project would tell their personal stories regarding how Basic Income affects their lives. The project believes that powerful personal stories have a great impact in changing people’s hearts and minds and that the impact of this education-based campaign could be decisive for Los Angeles, and if successful, it’s example could be a beacon for the rest of the United States as well.
Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath was interviewed on August 7th by Truthout, a nonprofit web-based news and commentary site whose aim is to provide “a platform for transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis.” In this interview, he makes several important points regarding some of the issues in the current debate and research on Basic Income.
De Wispelaere’s key position is that Basic Income’s aim should be first and foremost about relieving poverty and social exclusion. Poverty is fundamentally a lack of money and Basic Income offers a solution to that problem. Compared to other forms of welfare, Basic Income avoids the well-known poverty trap, where earning wages leads to a loss of benefits, while also reducing the need for some of the bureaucracy associated with contemporary welfare states. De Wispelaere also says that welfare states already dispense some amounts of cash or quasi-cash, with Basic Income the main difference is really about how the money is distributed. As he says, “it is not just about whether or not you have more cash with a Basic Income, but also about how you get your cash.” Basic Income is characterized mainly by its unconditionality. De Wispelaere also mentions the Mike Leigh movie, “I, Daniel Blake” as an illustration of how current welfare policies can cause significant problems and how an unconditional Basic Income could make a big difference.
De Wispelaere also speaks about the value of Basic Income experiments, stressing that conclusions reached from one experiment may not be valid elsewhere due to limitations of time and location. Nevertheless, he argues that the experiments are worth pursuing and he identifies three key reasons for performing Basic Income experiments: implementation, politics, and philosophy.
There are a number of aspects of implementation that can be identified and fixed through running a limited experiment, things that are difficult to predict from a theoretical standpoint alone. Basic Income, although it is often presented as such, is not a simple policy; it will interact with other policies such as housing benefits, disability assistance, the tax system and pension rights. When doing an experiment, these interactions can also be tested, along with other parameters. Another great motivation for Basic Income experiments is politics. Risk-averse politicians may like the idea of a Basic Income but be reticent to propose implementing it in full. A limited trial can help gather more political support for a wider implementation. Finally, philosophical considerations reflect the different viewpoints as to whether we can trust people to play by the rules, or whether they are fundamentally lazy. Or, as De Wispelaere puts it, “do we think that the whole range of people to which Basic Income applies all are going to turn into Homer Simpsons?” According to De Wispelaere, “in many cases, evidence alone can’t solve these issues. It’s a philosophical and moral argument that has to be fought and won.”
De Wispelaere also says in the interview he is not convinced by the “Robots Are Coming” narrative. First, because we need Basic Income now to alleviate poverty, job fluctuation, and insecurity. Second, because when the robots do come there will be other significant issues that arise and Basic Income is not enough to solve those. Regarding the Silicon Valley positions, De Wispelaere says: “It is a bit of a caricature, but what they are effectively proposing is a very polarized, divided society. They talk about Basic Income as a necessary part of the solution but don’t mention other important social and economic struggles between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. For me, Basic Income may be necessary, but it’s certainly not enough.”
Hillary Clinton just released a new memoir, What Happened, about her 2016 campaign for US President. In the memoir, she claims to regret not embracing a type of Basic Income proposal, which she dubbed “Alaska for America”, as part of her platform.
Hillary endorses Peter Barnes’ idea of a national dividend and, like Barnes, she suggests that it should be financed in part from the revenue of shared national resources such as “oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies” and the “same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing.” Clinton goes even further, however, saying that she would additionally view “the nation’s financial system as a shared resource” and implement a “financial transactions tax”. She suggests there could be a capitalized fund financed by these resources which would not only provide a “modest Basic Income” every year – which appealed to Clinton as a way to increase incomes – but also “make every American feel more connected to our country and to one another-part of something bigger than ourselves.”
Hillary says that she and her husband were fascinated by this idea and spent weeks working with her policy team to see if the idea was viable and could be included in the campaign. The proposal would be called “Alaska for America.” The campaign did not pursue this proposal because, according to Clinton, “we couldn’t make the numbers work.” In the book, Clinton also quotes Republican former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson who proposed a nationwide carbon dividend that would “tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American” as an alternative to government regulation. Again, however, Clinton claims she looked at the proposal but couldn’t make the “math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families.”
If we look back, Basic Income was seldom mentioned during Clinton’s Presidential campaign, and, when it was, she was dismissive. Asked about the idea by LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth, during a discussion of education and job training, the Democratic nominee replied, “I’m not ready to go there,” and proceeded to discuss the need to create new jobs. At the time of this interview, she viewed Basic Income as an undesirable alternative to full employment, concluding, “[W]e’ve got to help create better opportunities … without just giving up and saying, ‘Okay, fine, you know, the rest of us who are producing income, we’ve got to, you know, distribute it and you don’t really have to do anything anymore.’ I don’t think that works for a democracy and I don’t think it works for most people.”
In the LinkedIn interview, Hillary suggested that job loss due to automation could (and should) be addressed by skills training and the creation of new jobs. Her memoir, however, seems to treat technological unemployment as a more dire threat, saying that she takes Silicon Valley seriously when they claim “this could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates” – and one which requires us to think “outside the box.” She mentions she was so impressed by this that her staff lived in fear that she’d start “talking about ‘the rise of the robots’ in some Iowa town hall”. She adds: “Maybe I should have.”
Hillary concludes this portion of her memoir by urging us that “we have to think big and think different”, suggesting policies like “taxing net worth instead of annual income” in order to reduce inequality. She says we need to “rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable”.
On August 29, 2017, the Roosevelt Institute released a report where researchers Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, Gennaro Zezza model the macroeconomic effects of implementing Basic Income. (Marshall Steinbaum is a Research Director and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza are both associated with the Levy Institute.)
The Roosevelt Institute, following the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, presents itself as re-imagining “America as it should be: a place where hard work is rewarded, everyone participates, and everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity”, and as building a “new economic and political system: one built by the many for the good of all”.
The report presented by the Roosevelt Institute evaluates three different variations of Basic Income, $1000 a month to all adults, $500 a month to all adults, and a $250 a month child allowance. The researchers also analyzed two different types of funding, increasing the federal debt and increasing taxes on households. The model is designed considering an eight year time period and Basic Income is progressively introduced throughout that period.
From their models of the three scenarios, the researchers conclude that, if funded by increasing the federal debt, each Basic Income policy would have a result of economic growth, the $250 child allowance would increase the GDP by 0.79%, while the $1,000 per adult would increase the GDP by 12.56%. When the Basic Income is financed by household taxes, the model forecasts no effect on the economy if the program was simply giving “ with one hand what it takes away with the other”. However, if the model is adapted using what the researchers call a “distributional model”, it forecasts a beneficial effect on economic growth. As the researchers describe it, “the distributional model incorporates the idea that an extra dollar in the hands of lower income households leads to higher spending. In other words, the households that pay more in taxes than they receive in cash assistance have a low propensity to consume, and those that receive more in assistance than they pay in taxes have a high propensity to consume.” The general idea is that lower income brackets tend to spend everything they earn, therefore consuming more, and higher income brackets tend to save part of their earnings, therefore, consuming less in relation to their potential as consumers. Therefore, if you take from the rich to give to the poor, the money will be flowing more than when it is simply accumulated by the few, and in this way, the economy will grow. The researchers (and this is the official position of the Roosevelt Institute as well) assume that our economy is “not currently operating near potential output” and this is so partly because of current gaping inequality, which is “one of the main reasons why the US economy faces the prospect of secular stagnation”.
Besides assuming that the economy could be preforming better, the model used also incorporates two microeconomic assumptions: “(1) unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply; and (2) increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior.” These assumptions have been promptly criticized in the media. However, the researchers themselves are aware that the assumptions are contentious, and have thus sought to establish them with evidence. They base assumption (1) on a survey of experiments done by Ionana Marinescu in a paper entitled “No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Tax Transfer Programs” that estimates the microeconomic behavioral impact, using several experimental designs, results in labor supply remaining unchanged. Regarding assumption (2), the idea that increasing taxes does not change household behavior, the researchers assume that since the tax increase is progressive, the most affected households are the higher income brackets who tend to save and “hoard” money, so to speak, so they would save less but not change their consuming behavior in a drastic way. In order to justify this assumption, they use data from the Congressional Budget Office.
The report concludes that the researchers’ aim is not to have the final word on how to model the macroeconomic impacts of Basic Income but, instead, simply to have applied a valid model, which has done a reasonably good job of explaining macroeconomic effects so far, and used it to predict the effects of three Basic Income variations; on this model, the introduction of a Basic Income with a distributional component would mostly result in economic growth.
Basic Income could have a crucial role in alleviating several issues specifically connected to Los Angeles. We spoke to 
Hillary endorses Peter Barnes’ idea of a national dividend and, like Barnes, she suggests that it should be financed in part from the revenue of shared national resources such as “oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies” and the “same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing.” Clinton goes even further, however, saying that she would additionally view “the nation’s financial system as a shared resource” and implement a “financial transactions tax”. She suggests there could be a capitalized fund financed by these resources which would not only provide a “modest Basic Income” every year – which appealed to Clinton as a way to increase incomes – but also “make every American feel more connected to our country and to one another-part of something bigger than ourselves.”
