by Karl Widerquist | Jul 11, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. I reproduce it here because the original source is not available online.
“The written word is alive…” but the book is dead, at least the bookstore anyway, and so is the CD, the record store, the VCR, and the video rental shop.
Recently I heard that record stores will soon manufacture CDs on the spot. It’s already possible for record stores to access a database through the internet that has the digital code for any CD in existence. All retailers need to do to generate a CD on demand is “press” the disc, laser print the cover, and insert both into a jewel box. Instead of walking around a store looking at covers, you’ll sit at a computer terminal browsing cover art on a screen and listen to music samples on headphones.
And this is only the beginning. It would not be much more difficult to put together a do-it-yourself CD using a home computer and a color laser printer. Assuming your computer will have enough memory, you can download the music (the digital information) from a central database onto your hard drive, and, if you feel like, you can print the cover–or maybe not. Just call it up on the monitor whenever you want. Or, you could sign up for an online service that lets you play any song ever recorded without having to download the information onto your hard drive. The digital information would come from that same database directly to your speakers. Many people take their activities in the realm of music downloads over to sites like Avoidcensorship which gives them access to Pirate Bay proxies so they can tap into a near limitless supply of on-demand music and film.
The CD as we know and collect it today is dead. By this same logic, the video is dead; newspapers and magazines are dead; the book is dead. Barnes & Nobles, Blockbuster Video, the corner newsstand-all dead.
As the bass player for one of New York’s most underground bands, my immediate reaction was, “Great, this means it will be as easy as to get world-wide music distribution as it is to post something on the internet.” Right now an artist who wants to get his work to the public has to find someone to risk the cost of inventory and shipping. The internet would eliminate these costs. Every book, movie, and song ever made will be compiled on one big database and available to anyone with the hardware and the cash. 
Since most of these books, movies, and songs will be crap, how will you find what you like? Aside from randomly browsing through the voluminous compost heap of information, I can think of two ways: hype and word of mouth. Hype–corporate advertising–creates superstars; word of mouth creates the underground scene. Hype has and always will be around, but the internet, by reducing barriers between artists and listeners, will help the small-time, underground, niche-market, limited-appeal, sub-alternative artist, or whatever you want to call it, flourish.
But then I thought about it some more. “Sure it’ll be great for subversive artists but what will all of this accessible information do for society at large?” Long ago people were born into a culture; now you choose your culture. What is the impact of each person customizing his or her cultural diet? I call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture.
In the stone age, the tribe was isolated from each other and members of a particular tribe knew the same songs and stories and shared common knowledge, experiences, and reference points for communication. More recently, a few centuries ago, every European who could read had read the same books: the Bible, the Greek Classics, and the major local authors.
Today we all read different things–the sports column, romance novels, sci-fi–you name it. There’s so much information available that you can’t possibly learn it all, so we go after whatever catches our attention. Whatever niche you choose has its own shared knowledge, vocabulary, and even a canon of literature. I bet there are more Star Trek books in print today than all books on all subjects in print 500 years ago. But, the more we pursue our niche, the less we share with people in our immediate vicinity.
Some Jesus-Freak-Sci-Fi-Geek translated the Bible into Klingon; his professor might not even know (or care) what Klingon is. A teenage girl in Turkey killed herself when she heard about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Her neighbor who spends his time studying the Koran–like the guy sitting next to me on the subway–probably never heard of Kurt Cobain. A thirty-year-old single woman producing the local TV news in Minneapolis probably has more in common with a newswriter in Seoul, Korea, than with the family in the apartment downstairs.
Just when it looked like global communication would join the world into one monolithic culture, we’ve started to split into smaller cultures again, this time based on what you know instead of where you live.
New age, environmentalism, Gay rights, Socialism, entrepreneurialism, right to life, right to death, turning fifty-ism, natural law, wicken-ism, and thousands of other categories–there are people who make these things their identities, while their next-door neighbors know nothing about them. These categories may not define a person as much as race and nationality do, but they’re getting more important all the time. The buffet is open: Choose your culture.
None of this is good or bad; it’s a fact of life. Regional cultures were the result of isolated communities. Niche-culture is the result of a world with abundant information and sophisticated communication. In some ways, it’s better. We can learn about each other and learn from each other–we don’t have to retreat into our own niche-cultures or lose all sense of shared experience. We don’t have to evolve into a society of strangers. We need a balance between the niche and the community–some common denominators that everyone gets. But what? The first task is to get people from all niches to agree on what these denominators might be. I’ll start by posting this question on the net.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 4, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. I reproduce it here because the original source is not available online. The Magzine’s format was to ask a musician to write on a theme other than music. The theme of this issue, which initially perplexed me but which led me into some very emotional areas, was “Toys.”
What do I know about toys? I haven’t thought about toys in years. But, there was a time they were a big deal to me. What’s that line from Puff the Magic Dragon,
Dragons live forever not so little boys,
Pirate ships and dragon’s tails make way for other toys.
Growing up is a series of giving up the toys of one age for the toys of the next age.
The first toys I can remember playing with when I was about 3, when I wasn’t pretend playing, were stuffed animals, Matchbox cars, and wooden blocks. This was after I had already given up the toddler’s toys I don’t even remember. I loved to build things with blocks. I built roads and entire cities, and I’d push my Match Box cars around my building-block roads, imagining what the drivers were doing. The urban planning might have been simple but there was a complex story behind it.
Some psychologists believe that boys build towers and girls build forts and other enclosures. If that’s true, it took me a while to grow into my masculinity. After a prolonged road period, I started erecting towers, once I started, I just wanted more blocks so I could build bigger towers with RC excavators similar to what you could find more information about at hereon.biz.
In elementary school, bats and balls became toys of mine; I learned to play football and baseball. But, playing sports and playing with toys are two different things. Sports doesn’t involve pretending, which was the only kind of playing I knew as a preschooler. In elementary school, sports and make-believe toys had a peaceful coexistence. I played with Lego blocks, toy guns, learned to ride a bike and how to swim. Even swimming was a make-believe game. I pretended I was a diver searching for sunken treasure. When I was 7 or 8 years old I built model ships. A few years later I blew them up with firecrackers. This was about when I gave up the stuffed animals. I also drew maps of imaginary places, with imaginary stories behind them. This might sound strange, but there are a lot of kids who draw maps. It’s just another way to pretend.
In this Nov. 21, 2016, photo, a boy clutches a toy duck as he views a sculpture depicting the classic children’s story “Make Way for Ducklings” at an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The new exhibition is devoted to Robert McCloskey, the award-winning author of 1941’s “Make Way for Ducklings” and other children’s classics. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
By the time junior high came around, sports edged out make-believe. I stuck with the Legos ‘till eighth grade, and I still drew maps, but, by that time playing mostly meant playing sports. I preferred backyard disorganized sports to the organized kind because they were less pressure-filled and competitive. But I played organized sports anyway, just ‘cause that was what you did. I still swam, but that had become a sport too. No more deep-sea diver, my friends and I played a vicious brand of tennis-ball tag.
By the time I started high school It was clear I was no jock, and I lost interest in most participation sports. I skied, played board games, cards, euchre, dungeons and dragons, and video games. Correspondingly, although board games like risk were always my favorite, I was happy to play a wide range of different board games! My life changed in my sophomore year when the car and the guitar became my toys. We got a band together. I even knew every part of the guitar parts infographic that I was shown a while back. It may come in handy one day, just like it did back then.
We drove a half an hour to the nearest big city: South Bend, Indiana. Remember when going out for a movie and a pizza or just driving around, was just so cool? It seems so childish now, but compared to what we had been doing up to this point it was just so adult. Only a few years earlier getting together with friends meant playing. Now getting together with friends meant going out for dinner and sitting and talking. For me, there was still one imaginary toy, maps. I drew them throughout high school, whenever class got boring I’d whip out my pencil and draw a world. I finally stopped in college when I had to take notes in pen.
In college, the car became less of a toy and more of a tool. Still the guitar, video games (more than ever), board games, and now beer. I suppose drugs and alcohol are the toys of choice for big kids; a poor substitute for all the imagination we used to play with. This brings me back to “Puff the Magic Dragon” which is about a boy outgrowing his toys. Although Peter Paul and Mary deny it, on another level it’s about a marijuana smoker going on to harder drugs [puff the magic drag, on Jackie’s Papers], but in one way those are the same thing.
Now I’m Thirty-one. I still play the guitar, drive a car, ride a bike, daydream, and I still drink, but not like I did in college. Not long ago I was visiting my five-year-old nephew and he wanted me to play with him. I showed him how to build a road for Matchbox cars out of wooden blocks, and that was fun. When the road was built, I thought we were done, but he wanted to play with it. He told me to, “Take this car and pretend you’re going to work.” But, I couldn’t do it. I was bored. I could still build, but I couldn’t play. I tried to draw a map – couldn’t do it. Right now, I could build a tower or a model, and I could play football or baseball, but somewhere along there I lost my ability to pretend.
I forgot how to play with toys.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 1, 2018 | News, Opinion, The Indepentarian
[This article is a draft chapter of my book, A Critical Discussion of UBI Experiments, adapted as a blog post]
Like the experiments the 1960s and ’70s, the current round of experiments appears at a time when concern about poverty and inequality is rising and people are rethinking the existing redistributive strategy. The context is otherwise very different. The welfare state has been under attack and greatly pared back in many countries since the 1970s while it has been gradually expanding in many countries from the 1930s to the 1970s. The concern that automation disrupts the labor force that played a small but significant part the 1960s BIG movement, now plays a far larger role in the debate today. The two U.S. experiments are both largely funded by tech entrepreneurs who are particularly concerned this issue. One might think that the increased concern with automation would decrease the concern that UBI might decease work effort, but this does not seem to be the case for all of the experiment. Many still seem tacitly to assume that decreased work effort is necessarily a bad thing.
The current round of experiments is taking place in a much wider context. Including the Namibian and Indian projects that were completed several years ago, the current round involves experiments in four different continents, in very wealthy and much less wealthy countries, and in countries with very strong or with rather weak welfare systems. The different contexts make different testing opportunities possible, but they also bring in new constraints, because researchers have to comply with local laws which can significantly constrain the project. This is particularly important in Europe where experiments have to comply with national and European Union law.
Researchers in different political contexts are understandably interested in very different questions, but they should be aware of the experience in other countries for at least three reasons. First, they might learn how to defend their experiments from criticism that they had not expected in their political context. Second, researchers might consider attempting to replicate each other’s findings with different methods and/or in different circumstances. Third, researchers might try to look for things that other experiments have neglected to examine.
Researchers today obviously have access to much more sophisticated computer statistics programs, but the logistical and financial difficulties of distributing cash to hundreds or thousands of people remain. Therefore, the experiments today are, for the most part, comparable in size and scope to the 1970s experiments. Only in less wealthy countries have significantly larger experiments become feasible.
The next several sections give a brief overview of several current or proposed experiments on or closely relating to UBI.
GiveDirectly in Kenya
At the home of recipient Rispa Atieno Okoyo in Koga village on 22 October 2014. Rispa used the cash to build this goat pen, she bought 2 cows, and planted maize and beans. Rispa with her children in front of their house.
GiveDirectly is a U.S. non-profit organization that has recently established the world’s largest UBI experiment in Kenya. The project is motivated largely be the desire for an evidence-based approached to international charity and development aid, and the belief that evidence so far indicates that the poorest people in the world find cash is extremely helpful. The experiment will involve tens of thousands of people across dozens of villages for several years. It will combine the techniques of RCTs and saturation studies with a significant number of control and experimental villages. The project is able to be so large both because GiveDirectly has raised a lot of money and because Kenya has such deep poverty. Some villages will receive a UBI of as little as US$0.50 per day. Others will receive $1 or perhaps more.
The low level of the UBI in the GiveDirectly project is necessary because of the great poverty and inequality in Kenya. Many of the villages where GiveDirectly operates have average incomes less than $1 per day. If GiveDirectly were to give everyone in one village $2 per day, they could easily make that village four-times-richer than the control or non-participating village down the road. This could create animosity and resistance to the program. Until they can afford the give the grant to everyone in Kenya, it has to be small.
But the small size of the grant makes a very large study possible. Researchers for GiveDirectly are able to combine RCT and saturation techniques and to run a fairly long-term study that is like to produce a great deal of valuable data about how UBI affects various quality-of-life indicators. Although the effects of a very small UBI on severely impoverished villages in Kenya might not tell us a lot about low a large UBI will work in wealthier nations, this study promises to provide a great deal of useful information about how UBI will work in lesser developed countries.
Finland
Olli Kangas of Kela
As I write, Finland is in the middle of a small-scale, two-year UBI experiment, which is being conducted by Kela, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution. It involves about 2,000 participants between ages 25 and 58, selected by a nationwide random sample of people receiving unemployment benefits. The experiment replaces unemployment insurance benefits of €560 per month with a UBI of the same size. The Finnish parliament rewrote the law to make participation in the experiment mandatory for unemployment benefit recipients who were selected.
The Finnish effort has been criticized because the UBI is so low and because, being drawn from people receiving unemployment benefits, it incorporates the conditions of eligibility attached to those unemployment benefits. Kela responded that it simply does not have the budget to conduct an experiment across a large selection of low-income individuals.[i]
The make-up of the Finish experiment has at least two advantages as a UBI test. First, the low-level of the grant makes it comparable to the existing program, eliminating problems of distinguishing the effects of the size and type of program under investigation (as discussed in Chapter 4 of my book). Second, even though people had to be eligible for unemployment benefits to be selected for the study, once they were assigned to the experimental group, all or most conditions were eliminated. Therefore, although the study is not designed to examine how a large UBI would affect a large cross-section of the public, it is well designed to examine how a small UBI would affect people currently on unemployment benefits. And that kind of study reveal a great deal of useful information about UBI.
The stated goal of the Finnish experiment is, “To obtain information on the effects of a basic income on employment.”[ii] This concern is very similar to what became the focus of the four U.S. experiments in the 1970s, but the design and focus of the study makes it very different. One of the motivations of the experiment is the fear that Finland’s long-term unemployment insurance eligibility criteria created significant disincentives to work.
Because the Finnish project tests UBI only on people currently receiving unemployment benefits (that is, people currently not working), and because UBI eliminates eligibility criteria that might inhibit unemployed people from taking jobs, the study might find that UBI increases employment among study participants. The study does not increase marginal tax rates for participants and so it will provide a much higher overall income for low-income workers in the study,[iii] but it will be expensive to replicate that program design on a national scale.
Canada
Issues such as poverty, inequality, and the complexity of the social insurance system have inspired the Canadian experiment. The Ontario government is conducting an experiment at three sites in Ontario: Hamilton, Thunder Bay, and Lindsay, and might later include an additional study at a First Nations community. The study so far involves an experimental group of up to 4,000 low-income people aged 18 to 64. One of sites has been described as a “quasi-saturation site,” but I have been unable to clarify that that means. Researchers hope to examine the NIT’s effects on quality-of-life indicators as well as work behavior, education, and entrepreneurship.[iv]
Evelyn Forget of the University of Manitoba
Although the people conducting the study call it a “basic income,” it is a negative income tax that is conditional not only on household income, but also on household size. Single people receive a maximum of C$16,989 per year while couples receive a maximum of C$24,027 and both face a take-back rate of 50% of earned income.[v]
The 6th Chapter of my book explained that the inclusion of a marginal tax rate is an element of the NIT model, but it is needed to approximate the impact of marginal tax rates on recipients. The fact that the maximum benefit for a couple is not simply double the maximum benefit for an individual is a form of conditionality that departs from the UBI model in a way that is not strictly necessary for the purpose of conducting experiments. That is, unlike the UBI model in which individuals receive the same amount regardless of whether they live in small or large households, in the Ontario study two people living together receive considerably less than two people living separately. The motivation for this conditionality is probably to save money. Two people living together can live more cheaply than two people living apart. By including this condition the program can provide a poverty-level BIG at a lower cost, but they create an incentive for people to live apart, and might create a situation in which recipients pretend to live apart.
Y Combinator in the United States
Y Combinator Research (YCR) the nonprofit arm of Y Combinator—a private venture capital firm in the United States. It is run by tech entrepreneurs who are very motivated by the automation issue. Basic Income has become a major focus of YCR’s research, and it has taken on the effort to fund a large-scale UBI project with purely private funds.
Originally planned for Oakland, California, the organizers decided to move the experiment to two other states not yet announced. The experimental group will involve at least 1,000 people who will receive $1,000 per month for 3-to-5 years. More subjects will be included if funding allows. The experimental group will involve people aged 21 and 40 with total household incomes (in the year before enrollment) below the median income in their local community. Although researchers will gather data on how participants use their time and money, they will focus on the impact of UBI on social and physiological well-being—using both subjective and objective measures. The initial project proposal makes no mention of phasing out the grant as income rises.[vi] Therefore, YCR is testing a true UBI, but like the Finnish study, the YCR study implicitly assumes that recipients will face no higher marginal tax rates under a UBI system than they do now.
The Netherlands
The Netherlands experiment is a bit unusual for the times. While politicians in Greece, Italy, Spain, and several other places today are promoting proposals that are called “basic income” even though they share little with the basic income model, the Netherlands is experimenting with something that they do not call “basic income” even though it takes a significant step in the direction of basic income. The experiment seems to be motived in part by dissatisfaction with so-called “active labor-market policies” that are in place in the Netherlands and several other countries. These policies allow people to keep some benefits while in work, but subject them to harsh sanctions if they fail to search for work or to remain in work if they find it.[vii] These policies have proven to be cost-ineffective and often allow employers to capture some of the benefit intended for low wage workers.[viii]
Although the Dutch experiment is limited to welfare recipients under the current system, it frees people from job requirements of the current system and allows them to keep some of their benefits as they earn. These are two important features of a UBI. Because the cost-effectiveness record of active labor-market policies is so poor, this experiment could show that these steps in the direction of UBI will prove to be a more cost-effective means of achieving some of the ends of active labor-market policies.[ix]
The Dutch experiment is sometimes conceived of as a “trust” experiment because the existing system makes caseworkers responsible for enforcing rather draconian sanctions on recipients fostering distrust on both sides. Yet, this experiment conceptualizes “trust” in terms of fulfilling the obligations of a recipient of conventional social assistance—primarily to take work if they find it. In that sense they are not directly related to UBI, which is often conceived as a rejection of such obligations.
The Dutch experiment is actually several experiments that will take place in several different municipalities across the country—made possible by a 2015 law allowing experimentation at the municipal level. The experiments, launched in late 2017 and expected to last for two years, will study the effects on labor market and social participation, health and well-being of allowing social assistance claimants to maintain at least some of their benefits as their income rises while exempting them from the legal duties of seeking work and/or participating in training activities. The experiments involve several different experimental groups eligible for slightly different policies. Recipients are randomly assigned to the control group or one of the experimental groups in their municipality.[x]
Stockton, California
The city of Stockton, California has secured funding from private non-profits to launch a small-scale UBI project with about 100 participants receiving $500 a month for approximately 18 months. Like Y Combinator, major funders of the Stockton project are also largely involved in the tech industry and motivated by the automation issue.
Although the project has received a great deal of media attention, it is in the early planning stages and few details have been announced. The project is not called “the Stockton experiment” but “the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration” (SEED). The organizers do not claim to be planning a “scientific experiment,” but a “a guaranteed income demonstration,” which could be taken as indication that it is aimed not to gather rigorous data but to present useful but possibly anecdotal evidence to further UBI politically.[xi] There is nothing wrong with conducting a smaller-scale and/or a less-rigorous study, and all the difficulties of clearly communicating what it does and does not say about the implementation of a full, nationwide UBI still apply.
Other experiments
Jamie Cooke of RSA, Scotland
The Scottish government has committed funds to conduct a full-scale UBI experiment, and is working with the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and other institutions to design the project, but it is currently in the planning stages and few if any details about the experiment have been announced yet.[xii]
Barcelona, the principle city in the Catalonia region of Spain is conducting an experiment it calls “B-Mincome” in honor of the 1970s experiment in Canada. The projects literature draws inspiration from the UBI movement. The experiment involves about 1000 people group into ten small experimental groups and a control group of 1000 people. The various experimental groups will receive a NIT, some unconditionally and others attaching various conditional programs designed to encourage labor, entrepreneurship, community service, and so on.[xiii]
The government of British Columbia, Canada recently announced that it will conduct a UBI experiment, but it is only in the planning stages, and few details have been announced yet.[xiv]
There are many small UBI projects that aren’t necessarily intended as experiments. Small-scale charities, such as “ReCivitas” in Brazil and “Eight” in Uganda have been using the UBI model to help people for some time.[xv] A group of filmmakers have raised enough money to give a UBI of $231 per adult and $77 per child to about 20 people across eight states. The filmmakers will follow the recipients for two years, eventually producing a feature film or a television series, entitled “Bootstraps,” to document how the grant affects their lives.[xvi] Because these projects are so small and because they are not primarily focused on data gathering, they seldom make the list of experiments.
Other experiments of varying size and connectedness to UBI are being discussed or at least rumored around the world, in places such as France, Korea, and Iceland. Some of these initiatives might well come to fruition, but I have little definitive information about them at this time.
Will we re-fight the last war?
Earlier chapters of my book showed, in the 1970s, BIG opponents focused on two findings of the UBI experiments: the relative decline in hours worked and possible but controversial finding of a correlation with increased divorce rate. Opponents framed those issues in very extreme ways to make the findings appear definitive against BIG: any decline in work effort, no matter how small and no matter that it might be counteracted by other policies was taken not only as a “bad” thing, but bad enough to be a definitive reason to consider the policy a failure. Any decrease in the divorce rate was considered “good,” even if divorce was inhibited by keeping unhappy women financially dependent on men.
Will something like this happen again when these seven experiments start releasing their findings? It will probably not happen in the exact same way. Much of the discussion of the 1970s experiments was particular to the time and place: supply-side economics was on the rise within academia; the War on Poverty had decline in popularity politically; and politicians who vilified the poor were on the rise. But it is almost certain that less conscientious supporters and opponents will attempt to seize on whatever findings they can, framing them in whatever way necessary to spin the discussion in their favor. More conscientious participants of the discussion—whether directly involved in the experiments or not—with the benefit of past experience need to be ready this time.
I doubt the divorce issue will come back, but because the vilification of any non-wealthy person who balks and long hours for low pay is such a perennial favorite of the opponents of virtually any redistributive measure, people need to be ready for this sort of framing of the work-effort issue even if they do not expect it in their political context. It was not a major issue in India or Namibia because in those areas UBI was associated with increase work time. Similar results are expected in Kenya. The Finnish and Dutch experiments draw their samples in a way that is less likely to show a negative correlation between UBI and labor effort and may even show a positive correlation. This is so because conditional programs have a poverty trap that discourages people who don’t meet the conditions from leaving the labor force but encourages those who do meet the conditions to remain out of the labor force. By relieving the conditions, UBI is likely to be correlated with less work for those who had not been eligible and more work for those who had been eligible for redistribution under the conditional system. Most U.S. NIT experiments of the 1970s focused on people who had not been eligible for the largest redistributive programs, and so they were correlated with decreases in labor effort. The Finnish and Dutch experiments focus on people who are eligible for redistributive programs and so they might be correlated with increased work effort.
The other four experiments might now negative correlations and people involved should be consider ways to preempt or counteract any spin based on that correlation. Later chapters of my book consider how.
Of course, there are many other issues that people might use to spin the results of new UBI experiments. The issues will vary significantly by time and place. Knowing the specific political context and the international experience will help people preempt and/or counteract spin.
Dauphin, Manitoba: “the town without poverty”
Notes: contact me for full references:
[i] {Kangas, 2017 #1424}; {Kangas, 2016 #1425}
[ii] {Kangas, 2017 #1426}
[iii] {Kangas, 2017 #1426}
[iv] {Ministry-of-Community-and-Social-Services, 2018 #1433}; {Forget, 2016 #1427}
[v] {Ministry-of-Community-and-Social-Services, 2018 #1433}; {Forget, 2016 #1427}
[vi] {Y-Combinator-Research, 2017 #1428}
[vii] Loek Groot and Robert van der Veen, remarks made and the workshop on Basic Income experiments held at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown-University Qatar, March 26, 2018
[viii] {Bouquin, 2005 #303}
[ix] Loek Groot and Robert van der Veen, remarks made and the workshop on Basic Income experiments held at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown-University Qatar, March 26, 2018
[x]{McFarland, 2017 #1431}; {Groot, 2016 #1429};
[xi] {SEED, 2018 #1432}
[xii] {McFarland, 2017 #1431}
[xiii] {Colini, 2017 #1435}
[xiv] {British-Columbia-Government, 2018 #1438}
[xv] Recivitas.org; Eight.world
[xvi] Bootstrapsfilm.com
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 27, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in February 1997. I reproduce it here because the original source is not available online.
“Ever since I was a young boy” I dreamed of doing the simple stuff while the guitar player
Karl Widerquist, about 1995
shows off. Being the stable one while the drummer does the drugs. Negotiating with the club owner while the singer negotiates with the waitress. Being on stage but…in the back.
Actually, I started when a guitar player told me, “learn bass & you’re in the band, we have everything else.” It was easy to play: only 4 strings, and you don’t have to play chords. Bass isn’t easy to play good, but it’s easy to play. It’s so easy that on your first day you could lean enough to play a song with a band. And you can be a good bass player, if you can do one thing really good:
Count to four.
Counting is not supposed to be something you’re good at. In school, after you learn to count to four, you learn five and so on, and then you learn math, but you never stop to get good at counting. In music, you don’t usually need to count any more than four, but you need to do it over and over again, for your whole life, and only a few master it. You have to be able count at any speed over and over again at exactly the same speed. This is kind’a technical, but it suffices to say that a band that can’t do it sounds bad.
Once you’re passable at counting, you can start doing interesting things. Just don’t call attention to yourself. As long as you’re simple and you count one when you’re supposed to count one, you can do anything you want. There’s nothing in the low end but you.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY, 1997
Remember Alice? in Pittsburgh, 1996
