Almost 400 people interested in basic income are currently taking part in the 14th BIEN Conference in Ottobrunn, near Munich, Germany. Some of the sessions can be followed by Live Stream from the Conference website at https://www.bien2012.de/en
Several papers presented at the conference can also be downloaded from the same website.
For several years now, Palgrave Macmillan has been putting together a book series on the basic income guarantee. The series, “Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee,” has just released a new book edited by Richard K. Caputo (Yeshiva University, US) on the political feasibility of basic income. Further details about the contents are available at: https://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=524019
Full references: CAPUTO Richard K. (ed.) (2012), Basic income guarantee and politics. International experiences and perspectives on the viability of income guarantee, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
International Conference: “Universal Basic Income: For a New Social Contract in Europe”
We live in a time when the circumstances in the global economic and political market make it necessary to examine new models not only of the welfare state, but the entire concept of labour in postmodern society. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is just such an idea, which offers questions, answers, suggestions and solutions that do not dependent on an individual’s work requirements, but place the individual, equality and freedom at the very heart of understanding the state.
The international conference “Universal Basic Income: For a New Social Contract in Europe”, which will take place between 11 and 12 October at the Ljubljana (Slovenia) Exhibition and Convention Centre, will be an excellent opportunity to exchange opinions about the challenges of the postmodern world and hold an important discussion on the possibility of introducing UBI in Slovenia.
The conference will bring together leading theoreticians on UBI and the social welfare state and open the space for an international discussion and an exchange of global experiences on this topic. Among the keynote speakers will be: Prof. Philippe Van Parijs, world’s authority on UBI; Prof. Guy Standing, co-founder of BIEN, and Klaus Sambor, BIEN Austria. Slovenian experts and academicians will also present their views, among them Prof. Jože Mencinger and Dr Igor Pribac.
The international meeting is organised by the Novum Institute (Slovenia) and the European Liberal Forum with the support of Projekt: Polska. It is funded by the European Parliament.
Attendance at the conference is free of charge; participants can register online (there is a limited number of seats). You can find the draft programme at https://www.inovum.si/ubi/. For all other information, please contact the organizers at info@inovum.si.
Drawing thousands of participants, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association took place in Denver (Colorado) on 15-21 August 2012. At the initiative of its current President, Erik Olin Wright (University of Wisconsin Madison), the theme chosen for this years’s plenary sessions and for a sequence of thematic sessions was “Real Utopias”. The idea of a universal basic income was given a prominent place. Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain and Oxford) gave the opening plenary lecture on the importance of utopian thinking and the ways in which sociologists could contribute to intelligent utopian thinking on basic income. Erik Olin Wright’s massively attended presidental address emphasized the special importance of basic income in supporting the sustainability of other real utopias. And the idea of basic income kept coming up at other sessions, for example in Claus Offe’s (Berlin) intervention on “What does it mean to be a progressive in the 21st century?”, or in Yochai Benkler’s (Harvard) session on “Practical anarcism in networked societies”.
