The ancient Greeks had three Gods of Time, and on the auspicious occasion of the 80th birthday of one of our most loyal and outstanding BIEN members, it is a delight to be able to congratulate Eduardo Suplicy, and to say that he defies one of those Gods, Chronos, while being a poster child for the other two, Aion, who represents time as eternity, and Kairos, personified in the ability to take advantage of moments of opportunity.
Following his long, dignified and impeccably moral period as Senator for Sao Paulo, in which millions of people voted for him with smiles on their faces, knowing that he was a good man, many still refer to him as ‘Senador’. But we in BIEN love him for his eternal commitment to basic income, and his constant willingness to seek out any and every moment to promote the values that motivate most of us to want basic income as part of the future.
There is a story of Eduardo flying from Mexico via Miami to New York. A lady sitting next to him asked him about his politics, after which he spoke to her on and off (probably rather more on than off) all the way to New York. When they prepared to leave the plane, she said to him, no doubt with a slightly jet-lagged smile, ‘I don’t know what the questions are, but I do know now that the answer is basic income.’
Eduardo is a living example for all of us, having passion for a cause tempered by a sense of patience, of being on a hard journey. Few great changes come easily. But Eduardo knows we are much closer to where we want to be than when he joined BIEN in the late 1980s. Although this writer is a stripling by comparison, I still recall those early discussions late into the evenings. There is not a single sinew of cynicism in Eduardo. He constantly reminds us that moments when the God Kairos stirs can come anytime and anywhere. The day will surely come when the song he so loves to sing will have a mighty resonance in reality.
Eduardo, on behalf of every BIEN member, we wish you well for the journey ahead.
The event features guaranteed income researchers and advocates from around the world to discuss lessons in messaging and framing to build support for guaranteed income or UBI in varying political and cultural contexts. Speakers include Anne Price, President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development; Barb Jacobson, Co-ordinator of Basic Income UK; Tatiana Roque, Professor at UFRJ and Brazilian Basic Income Network member; and Catherine Thomas, Stanford University PhD Candidate and Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. They will be joined by experts from across the globe.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. We welcome you to have your camera on as we hope to allow for discussion across many guaranteed income advocates and researchers in attendance.
About the speakers:
Barb Jacobson
Barb Jacobson has experience on both sides of the welfare system, as a claimant and advisor, as well as working in a variety of other jobs. She has organised around women’s, health, welfare, and housing issues for over 30 years. Barb is Co-ordinator of Basic Income UK, and was the founding Chair of UBIE (Unconditional Basic Income Europe) from 2014 to 2017.
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Tatiana Roque
Tatiana Roque is a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Basic Income Network. Her work examines traditional political movements and the ways in which new mobilization strategies may be employed at universities, unions, and wider political movements. She will speak about the movement for basic income in Brazil, and particularly surrounding the Maricá Basic Income.
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Anne Price
Anne Price is the President of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. The Insight Center is a U.S. racial and economic justice organization working to ensure that all people become and remain economically secure. She also serves as a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and was one of the first US thought leaders to examine and push for narrative change in addressing racial wealth inequality.
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Catherine Thomas
Catherine Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology and an Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Stanford University. Her research examines the integration of economic and social inclusion within cash-based policies, and in particular with regard to public opinion on cash policy in the U.S. as well as perspectives of cash-transfer recipients using varying narrative frames. Her research on cash-based policies includes work in East and West Africa with the nonprofit GiveDirectly, the World Bank, and the Government of Niger. She co-authored Stanford Basic Income Lab’s guide for cities conducting basic income pilots.
Mark Drakeford, Wales’ new First Minister, announced soon after the Senedd elections in May that the government will launch a basic income trial in the country. As Basic Income News mentioned over a month ago, the support for trialing basic income in the country has greatly increased and Drakeford has confirmed that a pilot will be launched soon.
Jane Hutt, recently appointed as Minister for Social Justice, will be in charge of the supervision of the project. There is still no definitive information regarding the funding and date of implementation of the pilot, but the government’s commitment is firm. “A basic income pilot is one of the specific responsibilities of our new social justice minister. It will have to be carefully designed, it will draw on the experience of attempted pilots in Scotland, but I have a very long standing interest in basic income”, Drakeford said. “We’ll do it on a cross-party basis. There are 25 members of the Senedd in different parties who have expressed an interest in it,” he added.
The Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, Sophie Howes, said that the launching of the pilot shows an “incredibly significant commitment by the First Minister to tackling Wales’ poverty and health inequalities,” and that this trial shows that small countries can lead big policy changes.
Jonathan Rhys Williams, from UBI Lab Wales, said that “this is a huge moment for the basic income movement in the UK and around the world.”
A new guaranteed income program has just been announced in the US, this time in the country’s second largest city, Los Angeles. In his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2021-2022, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti included a $24-million guaranteed basic income project that would see 2,000 families in the city receive an unconditional $1,000 per month for one year. Dubbed “BIG: LEAP” (Basic Income Guaranteed: L.A. Economic Assistance Pilot), the program is one of the biggest of its kind in the US. The announcement was made at the end of April when the city budget proposed for the financial year starting 1 July 2021 was unveiled, the budget is usually approved by the beginning of June.
The details of the plan are being finalised, but the Mayor has confirmed that the payment would be truly unconditional with participants in the program able to use the money however they please. There will be eligibility criteria however such as being at or below the federal poverty line (annual income of $12,880 for a single individual / $17,420 for two persons) and, most likely, supporting a child under the age of 18 and demonstrating financial or medical hardship connected to COVID-19. Immigration status, on the other hand, will not constitute a selection criteria. It also seems that the income will go to households and not individuals.
If approved, BIG: LEAP will be the latest in a series of city-led guaranteed income programs in the country. Jackson, Mississippi in 2018 and Stockton, California in 2019 with the launch of “SEED” (Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration) paved the way and over the past two years, cities as diverse as Oakland (CA), Patterson (NJ), Denver (CO), Chicago (IL), Gary (IN) and many more across the country have announced or implemented some form of guaranteed income programs.
And these efforts do not occur only at a city level. In Southern California alone, in addition to BIG: LEAP or the pilot implemented in Compton (Compton Pledge), the L.A. County Board of Supervisors has just passed two separate motions asking relevant staff in the administration to design a guaranteed income program for targeted county residents. These first designs are due within 60 days of the motions, i.e. by the third week of July (motion 1; motion 2). Within the city of Los Angeles there are also specific guaranteed income pilots in the South LA and Downtown districts.
Map: main city-led guaranteed income pilots in the US and network of “Mayors for a Guaranteed Income”
Note: programs vary from one city to the next (eligibility criteria, payment amount, duration). Some of the programs that have been announced are yet to be formally approved and started. The map also does not include other initiatives such as, for instance, the payment under the Alaska Permanent Fund which has sometimes been compared to a basic income. (Map by the author, sources: Mashable.com and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income)
Eligibility criteria vary in each city as do the amount of the cash payment or the duration of the experiment but at any rate, the multiplication of the number of programs in progress is indicative of the growing interest for basic income in the US. The COVID crisis is certainly a factor behind this growing momentum. One of the potential eligibility criteria outlined by Mayor Garcetti in his proposal for the experiment in L.A. directly relates to the pandemic. San Francisco has designed a program targeted at artists hit by the crisis and other cities have referenced the impacts of COVID-19 on the economic situation as one of the factors behind their interest for basic income.
Many of these city-led efforts are being supported by Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), a nation-wide network of mayors founded by former Stockton Mayor and initiator of the SEED program, Michael D. Tubbs. It is supported by various foundations and non-profit organisations such as the Economic Security Project (involved in the Stockton experiment) or the Jain Family Institute (involved in Compton or in a proposed scheme in Newark, NJ). Indeed, whilst these various programs are first a way to alleviate poverty in specific communities and are only local in nature, they are also seen as experiments that will add to the debate around basic income at the federal level.
A Pew survey conducted in August 2020 concluded that 54% of Americans oppose or strongly oppose a federal universal basic income.* Proponents of these programs are hoping that the experiments they are conducting will add to the growing body of evidence that unconditional cash transfers not only help to alleviate poverty, but also improve physical and mental wellbeing and, importantly, that they do not remove incentives for people to work. More generally they are hoping that they will contribute to changing the narrative around poverty and economic insecurity.
*Online survey of 11,001 US adults conducted between July 27 and August 2, 2020, results vary across age groups, ethnicity, political affiliations, and income groups.
On 23 April 2021, Diana Popescu, Otto Lehto, and Emil Panzaru from Department of Political Economy, King’s College London – organized a full-day online academic workshop called “The Ethics of UBI in a Changing Economy” that tackles the normative justifications and practical feasibility of UBI.
The program and rough times: 00:00:00 Otto Lehto Opening words 00:08:45 Guy Standing (SOAS) Battling Eight Giants 00:56:10 Christian Schemmel (University of Manchester) Just Workplaces: Asset equality vs workplace democracy? 01:32:46 – Martin Sticker (Bristol) Is a merely national “Universal” Basic Income just? 02:05:34 – Otto Lehto (King’s College London) UBI as a Discovery Procedure 02:41:23 – Deryn Thomas (St Andrew’s) Basic Income and the Collective Good of Work 03:18:47 – Nika Soon-Shiong (Oxford) Cash, Citizenship, and the Contemporary Politics of Belonging in India 03:44:48 – Jim Pugh (Universal Income Project) and Jamie Morgan (Brandeis) Accelerating Equity and Justice: Cash transfers and generational wealth 04:17:30 – Diana Popescu (KCL) How much Dignity is enough: Appearing in public without shame and UBI 05:07:30 – Bernhard Neumärker (Freiburg) UBI in Times of Crisis (Note: Due to technical difficulties, Prof. Neumärker’s presentation is missing the first few minutes. The presentation finishes in Part 2.)
