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 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
by Kate McFarland | Sep 1, 2017 | Research
Teppo Eskelinen and Johanna Perkiö have published “Micro-investment perspective and the potential of the universal basic income” in Development Policy Review (June 2017).
Eskelinen and Perkiö analyze basic income as a tool to promote micro-investments by poor individuals and households, hypothesizing that a basic income would impart to such households a “greater confidence to undertake more risky activities, knowing they will have a minimum income to fall back on.”
As they explain in the abstract, the authors “aim to estimate potential impacts of the BI by synthesising existing knowledge. This estimation will not be quantitative, but rather show likely outcomes of a BI scheme. We will complement existing knowledge by exploring cognate cash transfer policies and other experiences that bear similarity to the BI.”
As a core part of their analysis, the authors examine the pilot studies conducted in the Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara (2008 to 2009) and the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (2011 to 2013), looking especially at the effects on “labour, behavioural impacts, psychological impacts, and investment in human capital.” Regarding psychological impacts, they point out that, in the Madhya Pradesh experiment, “households receiving cash grants were three times more likely to start a new business or production activity than control group households,” which appears to affirm their conjecture that “the availability of money combined with a sense of security is what eventually determines the occurrence of micro-investment.” Regarding behavior, they note a “recurring observation” that part of recipients’ additional income was “invested in income-generating activities.”
Eskelinen is a philosopher and social scientist who has published on political theory, political economy, global justice, and development theory. He is senior lecturer at University of Jyväskylä.
Perkiö is a doctoral candidate in the social sciences at the University of Tampere, writing her dissertation on the history of the basic income debate in Finland (see her November 2016 presentation for Kela). Many of her previous articles and blog posts on basic income available online, including the Transform! Network discussion paper “Basic Income Proposals in Finland, Germany and Spain,” the International Solidarity Work report “Universal Basic Income – A New Tool for Development Policy?,” and a response to the OECD’s recent critical report on basic income, published on Kela’s blog.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
Photo: Store in Madhya Pradesh, CC BY 2.0 Brian Gratwicke
by Kate McFarland | Aug 30, 2017 | Research
Inequality in the UK has been rising for some time as gaps between the lower and upper classes increase. But, there are movements such as levelling up the north east that are looking to reducing this inequality to ensure everyone gets good healthcare, education, job opportunities, etc. And now, the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex has released a paper titled “Reducing poverty and inequality through tax-benefit reform and the minimum wage: the UK as a case-study” as part of its EUROMOD working paper series.
The paper uses the EUROMOD microsimulation model to examine the impact on poverty and inequality of the proposals put forth in economist Anthony Atkinson’s most recent–and final–book Inequality: What Can Be Done? (2015). Atkinson, himself a co-author of the ISER study, passed away on January 1, during the final stages of preparation of the working paper.
The proposals considered include a “significantly more progressive income tax structure,” a “major increase in the minimum wage” (i.e. a “living wage”), and an increase in the amount of the nation’s universal child benefit, and two types of programs of social transfers: a strengthening of the UK’s social insurance system, and a “participation income”. A participation income–an idea developed and promoted by Atkinson–is similar to a basic income in that it guarantees all members of society a stable and secure livable income. It differs from a basic income, however, in that it is not fully unconditional: as its name suggests, a participation income is subject to a participation requirement. According to Atkinson, however, fulfilling this requirement should not require paid work or looking for paid work; it should also be able to be met through caregiving, community volunteer work, full-time education, or other unpaid but socially valuable activities.
In the simulation study, the authors note that “this participation condition cannot be imposed in our simulation exercise due to lack of data” and thus carry out the study “on the basis that everyone is entitled.” In other words, for the purposes of the working paper, they have chosen to simulate what is effectively an unconditional basic income.
The authors simulate a basic income at the level of £75 per week (or £3,902 per year), which replaces many means-tested programs.
One conclusion of the study is that, in comparison to strengthened social insurance (SI), the set of reforms introducing a participation income (PI) “produces a larger immediate impact on both inequality and poverty”. As the authors summarize, “[i]n achieving this greater impact the PI-focused package affects considerably more households, both positively and negatively: 43% of all households see a substantial gain and 21% a substantial loss, compared to 34% and 10% respectively with the SI-focused alternative.”
Other researchers have also recently used the EUROMOD microsimulation method to model the effects of basic income policies–including Malcolm Torry of the Citizen’s Income Trust (“A variety of indicators evaluated for two implementation methods for a Citizen’s Basic Income“) and, to more skeptical conclusions, the OECD (“Basic Income as a Policy Option: Can it add up?“).
The full working paper is free to download from ISER’s website:
Anthony B. Atkinson, Chrysa Leventi, Brian Nolan, Holly Sutherland and Iva Tasseva (June 2017) “Reducing poverty and inequality through tax-benefit reform and the minimum wage: the UK as a case-study,” EUROMOD Working Paper Series.
Reviewed by Caroline Pearce.
Photo: “The Poverty Trap…” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Neil Moralee (taken in Taunton, England)
by Kate McFarland | Aug 29, 2017 | Research
Ville-Veikko Pulkka, a public policy researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki, has published his paper “A free lunch with robots – can a basic income stabilise the digital economy?” in European Review of Labour and Research.
Pulkka was previously employed as part of the research team at Kela, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, responsible for the design and preparation of the nation’s two-year experiment replacing conditional unemployment benefits with an unconditional basic income.
The Finnish experiment has been the topic of most of his previous published work and presentations related to basic income (including presentations at conferences in Switzerland, Poland, Finland, and Ireland).
Pulkka’s research at the University of Helsinki, including his doctoral dissertation, centers on the implications of the digital economy for labor and public policy.
“A free lunch with robots,” his latest publication on basic income, moves away from focus on the Finnish experiment to explore the latter topic in more general terms:
The discussion on the possible implications of the digital economy for labour continues unabated. An essential dimension of the discussion is the widely shared view that a basic income could guarantee sufficient purchasing power for unemployed, underemployed and precarious workers should technological unemployment and labour market insecurity increase. A budget-neutral basic income has serious limitations as an economic stabilisation grant, but if financing proposals are revised, these limitations can be tackled. Even though guaranteeing sufficient purchasing power for unemployed, underemployed and precarious workers does not necessarily require an unconditional universal benefit, it seems clear that traditional activation based on strict means-testing and obligations will not be a strategy flexible enough to guarantee sufficient consumer demand in fluctuating labour markets. An economically sustainable solution might be to reduce means-testing gradually and to study carefully the effects.
The full article is available behind a paywall here.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram.
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Helen Taylor
by Dave Clegg | Aug 21, 2017 | Research
This paper represents a massive undertaking by both University of Melbourne Australia faculty and an independent agency called the the Brotherhood of St. Laurence dedicated to social Justice. It looks at a collection of BI pilot projects, as well as other projects which can be considered close approximations of a BI, from around the world. Government projects which have been run in the past as well as private and government projects currently being implemented.
The paper provides a number of graphs and and analyses aimed at comparing and contrasting the examined projects while underlining the incredible number of variables affecting both the design and the outcome of any such project that must be attended to. But the main focus of this paper is to determine how a BI can ensure equity of income, improved efficiency of governance and an end to the stigma of social supports.
While considering the concept of a BI to be attractive for a host of reasons, not the least of which are equity and the automation of the workplace, the paper is decidedly cautious and suggests careful consideration of “… broader issues and the intersecting domains and policies” which one can only assume refers to the social and economic ramifications of such a project. A very bureaucratic summation of some extremely crucial social concerns.
