by Yannick Vanderborght | Sep 4, 2011 | Opinion
Anniversaries are poignant human moments, points on a journey, never an end in themselves. Twenty-five years ago, on September 4-6, 1986, a small group of us held a workshop on basic income, and on September 6 decided to set up a network, BIEN. The memory is blurred; the documentation is scattered. However, this 25th anniversary is a testament to several aspects of BIEN, and it is perhaps acceptable to reflect on the journey so far.
It is intriguing that a core of the group that set up BIEN has remained active in its cause. Many of the original group, including this writer, had written papers advocating and justifying a basic income before we established BIEN. At the time, and for long afterwards, we were regarded by many of our colleagues and friends outside BIEN as quirky, idealistic, stupidly utopian or naïve. I recall the Director of the ILO’s Social Security Department using the expression ‘bad, mad and dangerous to know’. We have always had members who had a talent for giving some credence to that simplistic denigration. But neither they nor the insults have dimmed the light.
I doubt if any of us would have imagined that BIEN would last more than a couple of years, if that. The longevity is a tribute to many in that group, some of whom moved out after playing important roles, some played leading roles before retiring to the ranks, some moved out and then returned, refreshed. Some of the early figures have died; they are not forgotten. Some of the fresh-faced, long-haired youths who were at the inaugural meeting have shamelessly gone on to become grand-fathers and grand-mothers. It happens.
In BIEN, it has always been true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It has always had distinguished social thinkers, some of whom have gone on to become distinguished names in their field. Yet we have always recognised that it is the collective network, not individuals, which makes BIEN special. In a sense, at a personal level, a network such as ours is an exercise in associational freedom, in that the voluntary unpaid nature of what we have been trying to do together has strengthened each of us, to a greater or lesser degree. Would we have held the line if we had worked individually? I doubt it.
What has also been invigorating is that BIEN has always been ecumenical. Many who have added to its vitality have been profoundly religious and spiritual, many others have been atheists or agnostics. Politically too, we have avoided sectarianism. Some have been on the political right, others have been solidly on the left. It is testament to our charter and the many individuals who have steered the network that BIEN has always been a ‘broad church’. Nobody has been turned away or been subject to insults or disdain because of their personal views. If they have wanted to join the conversation, they have been welcome.
From the outset, there has been at least two lines of thinking that have dominated our conversation, one that is broadly philosophical and libertarian, stressing the appeal of a basic income as a right and as a stand-alone matter, the other that basic income should be seen as one component of a redistributive political and economic strategy. A third line has always been there as well, but has become increasingly important, the potential of a basic income as a means of enhancing a more gendered and ecologically viable future. Perhaps it is this third line that will prove decisive in the next few years.
In sum, a fundamental defining feature of BIEN members is that they have been and will remain inherently non-conformists, in the great tradition of thinking that defines humanity. We all believe there is an alternative.
That leads to what has been the primary means by which BIEN has flourished, our national networks and our Congresses. Those networks have tended to fluctuate, sometimes depending on the energies of one or two people, to the extent of making them fragile as their leading lights move through busy lives. But it has been particularly invigorating to see how new networks have emerged in recent years.
This has partly been associated with the great change we made to our name, going from BIEN to BIEN in Barcelona in 2004, when after some background wrangling, we opted to formalise reality by changing the “E” from Europe to Earth, recognising that an increasing proportion of our members were from outside Europe. Looking back, it seems obvious that the name change should be made.
For some in our ranks that was not obvious at the time. Some worried that we would lose our focus; some worried that if, as was felt appropriate, we alternated our Congresses between a European city and one outside Europe that members would only be able to afford to go to one Congress every four years. The former fear has proved unfounded; the latter fear has meant we have a greater responsibility to raise funds to enable as many people as wish to come to be able to do so.
As for the networks, it has been impressive that the second generation have been daring and invigorating. It is invidious to single out particular networks, but besides our wonderful members in Brazil and Argentina, it has been exciting to see the emergence of BIN-Italia, BIKN in Korea, BIJN in Japan and USBIG in North America. My dream at the moment is to see one in India. In this huge and wonderful country, the debate about income security has suddenly become very topical.
As for our Congresses, I am sure many of us proverbially pinch ourselves from time to time in wondering how we have done them. Every single one has started with a sense of trepidation among the nominated organisers. Who is going to do the work? Where are we going to obtain the money? What should the themes be? Who will be our plenary speakers? Will there be enough quality papers?
Practically every Congress has had its moments of crisis during the organisational phase. And yet all have taken place, and an assessment of their evolution and contents would make a fascinating topic, perhaps for a Ph.D. Let me just recall the places where we have held our Congresses since our inauguration in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986. In chronological order they have been held in Antwerp, Florence, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Geneva, Barcelona, Cape Town, Dublin and Sao Paolo. The names trip off the tongue as great cities. In each case, those who did the incredible amount of preparatory work deserve tremendous credit.
In every Congress, there were wonderful contributions, often from newcomers, sometimes from distinguished politicians or personalities. Who could forget the moving speech made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the Cape Town Congress? Of course, no BIEN members had anything to do with the content of his speech. It was the delivery and the commitment shown by him that moved us. It is almost unfair to single him out, since over the years there have been numerous fascinating contributions.
At the Sao Paolo Congress, I recall a private chat with a fellow founder member in which we both remarked how extraordinary it was to find that we learned new ideas and interpretations at every Congress. Only a small fraction of the papers presented over the years have ever been published; I have a volume from the Geneva Congress in front of me now. However, probably over 600 papers have been presented at the thirteen Congresses.
What then of the cause? Twenty-five years is a long time to have been refining our thinking without success. Well, progress has been substantial. In an early paper in the 1980s, I predicted that social policy would drift to workfare before an unconditional universal basic income became part of mainstream thinking, essential for responding to the growing inequalities and insecurities. Regrettably, workfare has been ushered into reality, in the United States, in the UK and in various ways elsewhere. It runs counter to any legitimate idea of freedom, and is divisive. It may grow uglier before there is a revolt against it. Then, I believe, our time will come.
In that regard, we might reflect on three quotations that have stayed with me during the twenty-five years. The first is a nice aphorism from Barbara Wootton:
“It is from the champions of the impossible
rather than the slaves of the possible
that evolution draws its creative force.”
We all know the feeling of being told a basic income is an impossibility. Usually, it is said by people who either presume it is impossible because it has never been done or do not wish it to be possible, because it might mean less for themselves or for their kind.
The second comes from William Morris, one of the early advocates of a basic income in his News from Nowhere. It was not from that book that the saying comes, but seems hugely relevant today.
“I….pondered how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
Those words were written in 1886. What is in a name? Probably, most of us in BIEN have toyed with terms that might work better than the familiar basic income – ‘social dividend’, ‘citizen’s income’, ‘basic income grant’ (BIG), and so on. In the UK at the moment, the government’s new universal credit is not a basic income, but could be seen as a major step in creating a basis for moving towards what we might regard as a basic income.
The third statement is from a stranger fellow traveller. In 1947, a small group of 36 mavericks, led by Friedrich Hayek, convened a meeting in Montreux and set up the Mont Pelerin Society. Their ideology would not appeal to most BIEN members. However, for the best part of thirty years they met and wrote and lobbied, mostly ignored or regarded with disdain by conventional circles. In his preface to his 1982 edition of his famous Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman, who had been a young economist at that 1947 meeting, wrote:
“Our basic function is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the political impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Perhaps he was being a little cute, since his thinking had become part of the Washington Consensus by then. None of us think we are analogous to the overtly political Mont Pelerin Society, but after decades of neglect, no less than eight of its 36 founders went on to receive Nobel Prizes in economics. My nominations go in on Monday!
More generally, the view that ideas go from being disregarded to being mainstream only after 30 years has, not surprisingly, appealed to me during the past 25 years. One could say that basic income is one of those ideas that Albert Hirschmann had in mind in saying that whenever a new progressive idea comes up it is subject to three reactions – the claim of futility (that it would be ineffectual), the claim of jeopardy (that it would endanger other goals), and the claim of perversity (that it would have unintended consequences). We have certainly faced those claims, and still do. But fewer people are being convinced by them.
As for the 30 years before an idea comes into its own, I feel quietly optimistic that we are ahead of the curve.
Why is that? First, in the so-called rich countries social policy is in disarray, while insecurity and inequality have become pervasive and threatening to the social stability of society. In this, the precariat has become pivotal, growing angrier and more alienated by the day and filling the squares of cities in numerous countries.
Second, we have seen a remarkable development in developing countries in the past decade. Here we have to admit that back in the 1980s we did not anticipate the extraordinary progress the debate on basic income would make in the near future. Yet in the past decade in particular, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, forms of non-contributory cash transfer have become hugely popular. We have seen the spread of so-called conditional cash transfers in Latin America and elsewhere.
These are not basic income schemes, being selective, targeted and conditional. However, they have legitimised the payment of cash in monthly payments as a vehicle to overcome poverty and insecurity. The task now is simpler – to show conclusively that targeting, selectivity and conditionality are profoundly wrong. Each day one can find more evidence and each day one can find that prominent policymakers have lost their confidence in one or other of the three. Conditionality is the worst of the challenges before us. It is pervasive and part of the new orthodoxy among politicians and some international financial agencies, notably the World Bank.
While the struggle goes on to show that conditionality is paternalistic, divisive and contrary to ideas of freedom and equality, a quiet revolution is taking place – basic income has been accepted as a legitimate option in development discourses. And we are seeing several countries where something like it is ‘on the cards’ or being tried. All BIEN members know of the law of 2004 in Brazil committing its government to a basic income. All BIEN members have been thrilled by the Namibian experiment. Now, we are in the middle of a pilot scheme in villages in India and in part of Delhi. Others in Brazil and elsewhere have lifted our spirits.
At national level, what amount to short-term basic income schemes have become integral to relief programmes following ecological and social shocks. And we are seeing national moves towards our goal in some unexpected places, including Mongolia and Iran. We should not be carried away by these. However, they may turn out to be harbingers of a breakthrough. The evidence piles up that if the financial constraints are lifted, people everywhere act rationally in the interest of their families and their communities. The essential optimism that lies in the heart of all BIEN members is being supported in wonderful ways.
All of this is for more considered analysis on later occasions. A point on a journey is one for lightness, for reflecting on what drives us. At core, it is a sentiment that goes back thousands of years – a sense of social justice. In that regard, I am reminded of Aristotle’s wondrous words about philia. As I look back at our modest efforts, I can only think right now that BIEN has been, is and will remain a tribute to the virtues of friendship. For what has kept it together is a spirit of philia cemented by a common bond of wanting to make the world of inequality and exploitation a little better for all those who are economically insecure.
La lotta continua!
BIEN’s very modest birth. Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), September 6th, 1986:
by Yannick Vanderborght | Aug 1, 2011 | Opinion
India might seem an infertile ground for basic income. For decades, social policy has been about the bureaucratic raj, through which subsidised items have been supposedly supplied directly to ‘the poor’, mainly through ration shops, and where subsidies in general have become deeply ingrained in the society, accounting for over 5% of GDP. However, within the past two years an extraordinary change has occurred. Suddenly, the whole of the political establishment is talking about the desirability or otherwise of “cash transfers” instead of subsidies.
The timing of this new political prominence is fortuitous, since we had been planning a pilot cash transfer scheme since 2008, effectively a basic income pilot, albeit called a ‘universal, unconditional, individual cash transfer’. It had its origins in a seminar in Ahmedabad at the headquarters of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, where I laid out the principles of a basic income and reviewed the arguments for universalism against selectivity and targeting, and unconditionality against conditionality. Initially, there was some resistance to the idea that each man and each woman should receive the cash transfer independently. SEWA leaders were inclined to push for it to be paid to women only. To their credit, they eventually agreed that it should be paid to men and women independently, with the children’s cash being given to the mother or principal child-carer. Initially too, some argued for conditionality, but in a subsequent meeting representatives from local SEWA branches came out vehemently against conditionality. This was wonderful.
It took a year to raise funds, during which time a team of researchers and SEWA leaders was formed to plan the work. It was decided to operationalise the pilot in villages in Madhya Pradesh. But as we were planning, another opportunity came up to operate a second smaller pilot in a district of Delhi. This was instigated and supported by the Delhi Government, and the design reflected that. The Delhi pilot involved giving households a ‘choice’ between continuing with the existing PDS ration scheme, based on what are called the BPL (Below Poverty Line) cards that the poor are supposed to possess, and taking a monthly cash transfer instead. Many opted for the cash.
Shortly after this small pilot was launched, local opposition was mobilised, with a street campaign based on a claim that we wished to take away food and other essentials from the poor, currently provided to some people through the BPL cards. This misrepresentation led to riots directed at our team and pressure being put on those residents who had opted to take the basic income cash to revert to the rations. The ration shop owners were involved in this, although the action was led by a so-called Right to Food group.
As of July 2011, the Delhi pilot has been maintained, thanks in part to behind-the-scenes support of the local government and to the courage of local SEWA members. There is even evidence that more residents are wishing to shift to the basic income. We are in the midst of the second round of a monitoring-and-evaluation survey of the impact of the basic transfers. And there has been a request from the Delhi Chief Minister to conduct a second pilot in another area.
Meanwhile, the pace of political debate has been rapid. There has been a press furore, with prominent critics, such as Jean Dreze, claiming those pushing for cash transfers are wishing to dismantle the social state. I have responded to that in several newspaper articles and interviews, and in mid-July addressed the National Advisory Committee responsible for advising the Congress Party leadership, and thus the Government, on social protection policy. I have also given several presentations to UN organisations, including a long seminar that was teleconferenced in seven cities of India.
Meanwhile, the bigger pilot in Madhya Pradesh has moved ahead. We have been doing everything possible to maintain a low profile, which is one reason for my reluctance to present a description to BIEN members. Some of those who oppose cash transfers refuse to accept the legitimacy of pilot tests, and want to disrupt them.
Anyhow, although we certainly do not want any publicity about where the pilot is being conducted, the essence of the methodology and objectives are worth noting, partly because they might be relevant for pilots in other countries.
First, we decided to conduct a variant of a randomised control trial (RCT), in which all residents in 8 villages were to be provided with the basic cash transfer while all residents in 12 similar villages were not. Note that the full randomista model would provide the “treatment” (i.e., cash transfer) to a sample of households selected at random from within each village, to be compared with similar households not provided with the “treatment”. In the case of cash transfers that would be fraught with practical and moral drawbacks. So, we opted to provide the cash transfer to every individual in 8 villages and to none in the 12 ‘control’ villages.
Partly for pragmatic reasons, or funding constraints, and partly because the amount represented about 40% of bare subsistence, the pilot opted to provide each adult with 200 Rupees a month and each child under the age of 14 100 Rupees a month. Again because of funding constraints, it was decided to run the pilot for 12 months, although we had initially planned to do so for 24 months.
In accordance with a long-advocated theoretical position, we designed the experiment with one innovative feature. My perspective – shared by many within BIEN – is that a basic income would work better if combined with existence of ‘basic Voice’, i.e, a collective body able to represent the interests of the vulnerable. After all, particularly in low-income areas, a person with cash is vulnerable to losing it to more powerful individuals or groups unless there is a body able to represent and defend their entitlements.
With this in mind, it was decided to design the RCT experiment so as to compare the outcomes in places where there was no Voice body with those where there was such a body. Fortunately, we had a good way of doing this. For SEWA is operational and embedded in some of the villages and not others. So, from a sampling frame of all ‘SEWA villages’ and a sampling frame of all ‘non-SEWA’ villages in the district selected, we drew a sample of four SEWA and four non-SEWA villages in which the basic cash transfer would be paid.
Once the design principles had been worked out, the first practical phase was the drawing up of a full listing of all households in the 20 villages, not an easy or speedy process. That done, we conducted a comprehensive baseline survey of all households, and launched the cash transfer in the following month. But while that was going on, one further obstacle had to be overcome. It was desirable to control for ‘financial inclusion’, by universalising the way by which individuals received the cash transfer and by ensuring everybody had a bank account. This is a major issue in India today. The majority of the population are ‘unbanked’.
Rolling out bank accounts has been ongoing, with a record of when they were opened being kept for all individuals. For the first two months, the cash transfers were made by direct transfer, with teams from the project going to each village on a designated day. The process has been time-consuming but fortunately without incident. We hope to switch to paying through bank accounts shortly.
While a baseline household and individual survey was conducted, a Community Survey was also conducted to obtain macro-level data. Both the baseline and community surveys will be repeated, with modifications to suit the new period, six months after the start of the pilot, defined as the time of the first cash transfer. These will be called the midline surveys. Then, six months after that the endline surveys will be conducted.
Before the pilot was launched, we drew up a list of hypotheses associated with basic income or cash transfers, all of which are familiar to members of BIEN. We will be testing each of those, and hope to produce a public report and a series of technical papers over the next 18 months.
During that time, we expect the public and political debates in India to evolve dramatically. It is unlikely that the project team will stay out of those debates, even if it wished to do so. The Government has set up an official committee to review basic subsidies and two Food Security Bills are currently the focus of political attention. Numerous economists and other social scientists have taken up positions for or against cash transfers, and no day goes by without at least one newspaper article adding to the debate.
All that can be wished at this stage is that reason will triumph over emotion, and that dispassionate analysis can lead to better social policy. The importance cannot be over-stated. After all, there are more people in India – over 300 million – who are in absolute poverty than in any other country of the world. If a basic income could be part of the way to cut that number drastically, that would be a wonderful contribution. But we must keep our feet on the ground as we grind out the difficult fieldwork and analysis before us.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jul 30, 2011 | Research
In a new book, Guy Standing develops a theme that has underpinned his advocacy of a basic income since the 1980s. There are many rationales for supporting a basic income, but effective political pressure may emanate from the emergence of a new mass class, the precariat. It is a dangerous class; not yet a class-for-itself, in the Marxian sense, but a class-in-the-making, in which distinctive groups are torn politically in different directions.
Those in the precariat – and the millions who fear they could fall into it – are characterised by having insecure lives, in and out of short-term jobs, with volatile and generally low incomes. What stands out most is that they lack a secure occupational identity, and have no sense of control over their work, labour, recreation and leisure.
The relevance for basic income arises because the precariat’s economic insecurity is chronic and is mostly uninsurable. In a globalising market economy, the precariat faces systemic uncertainty and exposure to threatening hazards and shocks. Social insurance cannot provide basic economic security in such circumstances. But in any case governments have increasingly resorted to means-tested social assistance, ‘targeting’ on the so-called deserving poor. Even with tax credits, this has generated well-known poverty and unemployment traps, whereby those in the lower echelons of labour markets face marginal tax rates close to 100%, prompting moral and immoral hazards.
It has also led to a proliferation of precarity traps, whereby anybody losing a job or income must enter a debilitating process of trying to obtain state benefits, during which time they have no income and build up debts. If they do obtain benefits, they will be disinclined to take a temporary low-wage job in case they have to start the process all over again.
The precariat consists of three groups. First, there are progressives, mostly consisting of frustrated educated youth, intellectuals and others who resent the insecurity and lack of occupational opportunity. They embrace various non-conformist lifestyles. It is this group that has been filling the squares in protests against the austerity programmes that have followed the financial crisis. They reject old-style social democracy while looking for a redistributive strategy that would give people like themselves basic economic security in which to build their lives. They openly support a basic income, even if some have to be alerted to the feasibility of it.
The second group in the precariat is anomic, politically detached, including many morally defeated people, as well as migrants keen not to be noticed by the authorities, many of the so-called disabled and many who have been criminalised. This group could be mobilised to support a basic income, but would have to feel they were moving from a denizen status to citizens in order to feel it would be something for them.
The third component of the precariat is what makes it the dangerous class. It consists mainly of those falling from the old working class and the partially educated condemned to a life of insecurity. This disparate group listens to populist politicians offering variants of neo-fascism, a far-right agenda depicting government as against them and strangers, notably migrants, Muslims and ‘liberals’, as the cause of their insecurity.
The far-right is gaining ground in country after country, often at the expense of social democrats. The trouble is that the latter has not offered the precariat an attractive vision, and are paying the political price, deservedly. But here, paradoxically, there is reason for some optimism. Increasingly, we may see that those wishing to be centre-left politicians will have no alternative to offer other than a universal basic income, if they want to foster an economically secure citizenry and to reduce inequality.
That is why the book ends on a mildly optimistic note. However, it goes one stage further, which may be controversial for basic income supporters. The argument is that the commodification of politics combined with the growth of an increasingly angry and active precariat have accentuated the thinning of democracy and the erosion of deliberative democracy. In that context, it advocates a basic income in which every adult on establishing eligibility makes a moral commitment in writing – not a legally binding one – to vote in general elections and to attend at least one local public political meeting each year.
Strengthening deliberative democracy will surely be a vital part of a new progressive politics in which the precariat would feel an integral part of society. That is consistent with the values that have guided BIEN for the past twenty-five years.
Guy Standing, The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class, has just been published by Bloomsbury, and can be ordered online.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jul 8, 2011 | News
According to the article “BIG can benefit orphans and vulnerable children”, which was witten by Johanna Absalom and published on 8. July 2011 in the Namibian Economist, Dr Henry Platt, executive director of the Church Alliance for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CAFO), said:
BIG provides an answer to the national crisis of poverty and unemployment, which in turn, affects the daily lives of orphans and vulnerable children. We call on the government and the citizens of our country, especially to people of faith, to support this initiative, seeing that poverty and unemployment are some of the social concerns that affect the future of children. This is also because poverty is the root causes of vulnerability for many of the issues surrounding children, hence, the intervention has the potential to elevate life chances of OVCs.
It is time to seriously consider the speedy implementation of BIG as a tool to alleviate the poverty trap, though we know it is not a total solution when in isolation. It offers a spread of money into the hands of all people, bringing about a deeper sense of integrity.
The current systems in place do not sufficiently address the large scale trap of poverty. This situation disadvantages children the most. Unfortunately, the wealth is in the hands of a fortunate group, while the greater part of the community is out.
The best investment in the long run is on education. Under the new Minister, great strides towards the right direction have been made. But, there are still many areas to consider on our journey to free our children for a better future, especially the root causes. We need to reach them all, through education, psychosocial support, food and nutrition, to name but a few of core critical services to OVCs.
Full article:
https://www.economist.com.na/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23685:big-can-benefit-orphans-and-vulnerable-children&catid=587:community-and-culture
