by Kate McFarland | Jun 27, 2016 | Research
Rasmus Schjoedt is the Social Policy Specialist at Development Pathways, a UK-based consultancy firm that “brings together a group of social policy experts with extensive international experience of working on social protection, social development, gender, financial inclusion, and livelihoods.”
Development Pathways states that its vision is the “global adoption of transformative social and economic policies that guarantee the realisation of the rights for all,” and its mission is to “provide creative evidence based and context specific solutions to social and economic policy challenges.”
Schjoedt wrote the April 25, 2016 edition of the Pathways’ Perspective blog on the topic of basic income experiment conducted in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh from 2011 to 2012.
Despite a short implementation period and relatively low benefit levels, the effects were impressive: by the end of the project it was possible to see significant improvements in living conditions, nutrition and education.
With almost half of the world’s poorest living in India, how the country approaches social protection in the coming years will be very important for the global efforts to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. A universal basic income could be an important part of the solution.
Schjoedt describes the experiment and its results in some detail in a paper available for download here.
Reference
Rasmus Schjoedt, “India’s Basic Income Experiment,” Pathways’ Perspectives, April 25, 2016.
Image Source: Yann via Wikimedia Commons
by USBIG | Jun 22, 2016 | Research
Book Cover
This book only mentions Basic Income once, but it’s on the last page of the book, and in a way, the entire book leads up to an argument for Basic Income. The name, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, refers to the belief that everyone is better off in a society with government and/or private land- and resource-ownership. The book shows that this claim is an essential premise in the social contract justification of the state and most Lockean, liberal or libertarian justifications of private property. It shows how theorists have repeated this claim for hundreds of years, but they seldom if ever provide any evidence of it. The widespread belief in this claim seems to stem from the colonial prejudice that all “civilized men” are better off than all “savages.”
Grant S. McCall
This book then examines anthropological and archaeological evidence to show that this claim is false. Some people in contemporary capitalist states are worse off than they would likely be in a small-scale society with neither government nor private landownership. The promise of the social contract and the so-called “Lockean proviso” is unfulfilled, not because people in small-scale societies are well off—their lives are poor and difficult—but because the lives of the most disadvantaged people in capitalist states are even poorer and more difficult. As long as this is so, the state and the property rights system are unjust in terms of the main theories that have been used to justify them for the last 350 years. The book concludes that the best way to right this wrong and to justify government and property rights is to introduce a basic income.
This book will be released in January 2017 by Edinburgh University press. But a preliminary draft is online now.
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
Karl Widerquist
by Toru Yamamori | Jun 22, 2016 | News, Research
The Productivity Commission of the Australian Government has released a research paper entitled ‘
Digital Disruption: What do governments need to do?‘ on 15th June 2016. The paper looks at the role of government in the face of ‘potentially disruptive technological change.’ A universal basic income is refereed as a long term consideration:
While Australia’s tax and transfer system will continue to play a role in redistributing income, in the longer term, governments may need to evaluate the merits of more radical policies, including policies such as a universal basic income.(p. 69).
by Kate McFarland | Jun 13, 2016 | Research
Finland’s University of Tampere offered a course on basic income, titled “Universal Basic Income: New Avenues in Social Welfare Policy,” which ran from February through May of this year. (This is the second time that a course on basic income has been taught at the university.)
According to the course outline,
The purpose of this course is to offer students a thorough introduction about basic income as a social policy instrument. The course outlines the main characteristics of basic income and explores how it differs from traditional income support policies. In addition, the course provides a critical overview of the reasons for and against a basic income as well as reviewing a number of practical and political challenges that need to be overcome. Finally, the course offers a series of lectures that focus on basic income in the Finnish context, including an updated account of the ongoing preparation for the basic income experiment scheduled to start in January 2017.
The course was led by University of Tampere Professors Jurgen De Wispelaere and Antti Halmetoja, and also featured a series of expert guest lecturers.
The presentations and video recording of (most of) the lectures are now available on the course’s website (in English), as are reports from students.
Check them out — and give yourself a university-quality education in basic income, sans tuition and grades!
Image: University of Tampere (Tiia Monto via Wikimedia Commons)
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (To see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News, click the link.)
by Kate McFarland | May 23, 2016 | Research
Basic Income in Australia and New Zealand, a collection of 10 essays, is the latest addition to Palgrave Macmillan’s “Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee” series.
From the publisher’s description:
“This book is the first collective volume of its kind to ask whether a basic income offers a viable solution to the income support systems in Australia and New Zealand. Though often neglected in discussions of basic income, both countries are advanced liberal democracies dominated by neoliberal transformations of the welfare state, and therefore have great potential to advance debates on the topic. The contributors’ essays and case studies explore the historical basis on which a basic income program might stand in these two countries, the ideological nuances and complexities of implementing such a policy, and ideas for future development that might allow the program to be put into practice regionally and applied internationally.”
Mays, J., Marston, G., and Tomlinson, J. (eds.), 2016, Basic Income in Australia and New Zealand: Perspectives from the Neoliberal Frontier, Palgrave Macmillan.
Photo: Milford Sound in New Zealand CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Loïc Lagarde
by Karl Widerquist | May 22, 2016 | Research
This article, originally published in 2007, has been re-released on the author’s website because of the increasing likelihood that basic income implementation trials are on their way.
Abstract: A basic income (BI) experiment (or a pilot project or an implementation trial) is worth doing if it focuses on the right question. Some of the problems with the U.S. negative income tax (NIT) experiments of the 1970s stemmed from a focus on the wrong question—focusing on the side effects rather the effects of the policy in question. A European BI experiment should focus on the question of policy effectiveness. The question of policy effectiveness should be formulated follows: What policy (basic income, the current system, or any other alternatives to be tested) produces the greatest increase in welfare for the poor (or the greatest decrease in poverty) per Euro of cost (both in terms of tax cost and efficiency loss)? Effectiveness is not the only important concern, but it is perhaps the most important question that an implementation trail can enlighten.
