Ontario, Canada: Reactions to Ontario Basic Income Pilot Cancelation

Ontario, Canada: Reactions to Ontario Basic Income Pilot Cancelation

Anonymous recipient of the Ontario basic income experiment. Photo credit: Jessie Golem, photographer responsible for the Humans of Basic Income project

 

The Ontario Basic Income Pilot, started by a liberal government, was canceled on July 31st 2018, by the newly elected Ford administration. The conservative government has announced that the last payment to the 4000 recipients that were part of the pilot program will be on March 31, 2019. This date was announced by Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod, claiming this is a “lengthy and compassionate runway” to closing the project. On why the project was canceled, MacLeod said: “A research project that helps less than 4,000 people is not the answer and provides no hope to nearly two million Ontarians who are trapped in a cycle of poverty.” The general justification of the new government is that the program was failing, although a clear explanation of what is meant by that has not been given. MacLeod says that Ontario should develop a “sustainable social assistance program that focuses on helping people lift themselves out of poverty”, while also characterizing Basic Income as a  “handout” that does not break the cycle of poverty, even though she did not share the study results that led to this conclusion. MacLeod did not mention that 70% of the Basic Income Pilot recipients are working and that, apart from the baseline data, no surveys were completed, so there is nothing to support the idea that the pilot was failing.

 

The reactions to the cancelation announcement have been many, including a class action suit filed by four Lindsey residents, represented by lawyer Mike Perry, who is launching a lawsuit based on anticipatory breach of contract and administrative law. The Basic Income recipients claim they “made plans to improve their lives when they signed up for the pilot in April last year, providing the government with detailed personal information to be approved and expecting the pilot to run its three-year term.” Tom Cooper, of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, said that the six-month wind down still leaves many Basic Income recipients in “impossible situations.” Mr. Cooper says: “Many have signed one-year lease agreements with landlords and they can’t get out of those leases and they can’t afford their new rent. There are many people who plan to go back to school in September. Whether that will still be a reality for them with a longer wind down is questionable.”

 

Other reactions included a protest at Queen’s Park on August 9th in Hamilton, and another one in Lindsay, were around 100 people participated. The Queen’s Park protest had about 30 Basic Income recipients asking questions as to what the future holds for them. Since the cancelation decision was made and announced before the participants were notified, they found out via the public media and were anxious about what was in store for them. In the Scott Thompson Radio Show, Tom Cooper says that “conservatives promised them not once but twice, during the election, that it would run for the full three years.” He also mentions the case of a young woman, as an example of how canceling the Basic Income Pilot before term can cause havoc to the recipients life: “A young woman who is trying to get her children back from children’s aid, she did everything she was supposed to, getting a new apartment, so that her children could live with her, she signed a lease about a month ago, and now finds out the program has been canceled and she can’t even afford the lease anymore.”

 

The Mayors of Hamilton, Lindsay, Thunder Bay and Brantford have all signed a joint letter to the Federal Government asking it to consider a federal adoption of the pilot. Hamilton Mayor, Fred Eisenberger, just joined the other four Mayors on September 5th.

This idea is also defended by  Sheila Regehr, chair of the Basic Income Canada Network, when she said: “If Ottawa completed Ontario’s $50-million-a-year pilot, the results would either support or dismiss the feasibility of a national basic income.” Also, according to Sheila Regehr, “Ethics complaints have been made by a few people to Veritas, the company the previous government hired to ensure ethical standards are met in the conduct of research involving human beings.”

 

There was also a piece by Prof. Gregory Mason, an associate professor of economics at the University of Manitoba. Prof. Mason argued that these experiments have limited use and that there were flaws in the “random assignment of participants”. Prof. James Mulvale wrote another piece, The cancellation of Ontario’s basic income project is a tragedy, where he answers some of Prof. Mason’s points while Evelyn Forget, also a professor at the University of Manitoba, sent a letter to the editor rebutting Prof. Mason’s criticisms.

 

The Basic Income recipients also expressed their reactions. There is a website, Basic Income Voices that according to Tom Cooper, “is a site exclusively for pilot participants to share their thoughts, hopes, and fears. The testimonials are both heartbreaking and soul-affirming.” Jessie Golem, of the Hamilton pilot participants, who is also a photographer, launched a project to develop a portrait series of Basic Income participants called Humans of Basic Income, which is garnering a lot of attention.

 

There are several petitions: one was created partly by Basic Income recipients, Jodi Dean helped create Leadnow, others are North99 and the Council of Canadians. According to Sheila Regehr, actions will continue when the legislature resumes on September 24th, activists are planning events coinciding with the fall session of the legislature, including a presentation of the Leadnow petition.

 

More information at:

Mary Riley, “Class action lawsuit filed against Ontario government over basic income pilot cancellation”, The Hamilton Spectator, 27th August 2018

Kate McFarland, “ONTARIO, CANADA: New Government Declares Early End of Guaranteed Income Experiment”, Basic Income News, August 2nd 2018

Shawn Jeffords, “March 2019 to mark end of Ontario’s basic income pilot”, Global News, August 31st

Laurie Monsebraaten, “Save Ontario’s basic income pilot, advocates urge Ottawa”, The Star, August 3rd 2018

James Mulvale, “The cancellation of Ontario’s basic income project is a tragedy”, The Conversation, August 20th 2018

Chicago, US: Chicago moves forward with UBI proposal

Chicago, US: Chicago moves forward with UBI proposal

Chicago’s City Hall building green roof. Picture credit to: Urban Matter

 

Earlier this year, the city of Chicago hit the news by introducing a resolution that would summon a taskforce to run and study a basic income trial within the Municipality. That resolution, put forth by Alderman Ameya Pawar, included the summoning of stakeholders, foundations, philanthropists and academics, to develop a basic income trial model providing an unconditional $500 /month to one thousand families in Chicago. This was in addition to the restructuring of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which will in itself be a subject of study.

 

That initiative received opposition from the Chicago Tribune, the most popular newspaper in the city. The paper published an editorial where it argued that the basic income trial was unaffordable and that Chicago officials should instead be finding ways to “raise incomes among working-class and poor residents”. Among the alternatives (to a basic income, experimental or full-fledged), the editorial referred to the deregulation of the private sector, which would “generate employment and boost incomes”.

 

Despite this opposition, Chicago leaders, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Ameya Pawar, just announced (through the Economic Security Project (ESP) the formation of the taskforce to which the resolution referred, having been called the Chicago Resilient Families Task Force. This cutting-edge group will explore and coordinate the basic income trial in the city, relying on an EITC modernization, which is how they will provide the monthly benefits to recipients.

 

The referred Task Force, in which the ESP is also investing, will be co-chaired by Tom Balanoff (Service Employees International Union President in Canada) and Celena Roldan (CEO of the American Red Cross of Chicago and Northern Illinois), and will include “civic, religious and community leaders in addition to elected officials and academics”. It will produce a report with specifications on the basic income trial, and put forward policies to reduce poverty and rise middle-class citizens incomes.

 

After Stockton, Chicago is now paving the way for furthering basic income in the United States, amidst a choir of opponents (including the above mentioned Chicago Tribune editorial and others).

 

More information at:

Kate McFarland, “CHICAGO, US: City Considers Resolution to Investigate Basic Income Pilot”, Basic Income News, July 24th 2018

Kate McFarland, “US: Chicago Tribune against basic income for the City”, Basic Income News, August 12th 2018

Peter Kotecki, “Chicago could be the largest US city to launch a basic income pilot — here are the other major experiments around the world”, Business Insider, July 23th 2018

Kate McFarland, “STOCKTON, CA, US: New Details Revealed in Planned Basic Income Demonstration”, Basic Income News, August 23rd 2018

Rowena Itchon,Basic income comes to Stockton”, Pacific Research Institute, February 5th 2018

Annie Lowrey: New book “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World”

Annie Lowrey: New book “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World”

In her recent work Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (W.H. Allen), Atlantic writer Annie Lowrey offers a new account of the universal basic income (UBI) rooted in her experience as a global observer of geopolitics, economics, and social policy.

Lowrey approaches UBI as a potential tool to redress a variety of issues, including inequality, poverty, and technological unemployment, which have become increasingly divisive in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent boom in AI research.  By viewing human action rather than impartial circumstance as the primary driver of socio-political change, Lowrey concludes that UBI represents an “ethos” of universality, unconditionality, and inclusion as much as any concrete policy proposal.

In the opening chapter, Lowrey explores the relationship between basic income, work, and technological unemployment. After sketching the twinned histories of human advancement and the fear of technological unemployment, she examines why current innovations in AI might be qualitatively different from earlier achievements and why these differences may in fact lead to widespread joblessness.  Lowrey notes that certain Silicon Valley luminaries, whose own endeavours threaten the livelihood of many low-skilled workers, have promoted the UBI as a necessary social policy for a jobless future.

Despite calls by technologists for a UBI as a “social vaccine for the 21st Century,” Lowrey ultimately considers discussion of basic income in relation to future joblessness as premature. Although she grants that basic income could operate as an important vehicle of state provision in the future, Lowrey prefers to consider the UBI’s potential to address current social and economic problems.

These problems range from a labour market with stagnant wage growth in Houston to chronic poverty on the shores of Lake Victoria to the challenges of welfare reform in rural India. In each case, Lowrey unpacks how political choices, bureaucratic structures, and personal circumstance converge to prevent certain people from meeting their basic needs.

Through carefully examining different political, geographic, and economic contexts, Lowrey can assess the benefits and drawbacks of basic income proposals in a variety of contemporary settings. This approach accepts that any form of UBI would affect different communities and individuals in unique and perhaps unpredictable ways.

Give People Money distinguishes itself from other works on the topic through its commitment to personal narrative and Lowrey’s own experience with the people who stand to benefit from basic income proposals. Although she examines the ethical and economic justifications of UBI, her primary focus lies in the human story and the way she came to view UBI as an ethos of transformative social change. Give People Money ultimately advocates for UBI not by advancing specific policy initiatives, but by presenting basic income as an impetus to radically reconsider what humans owe one another and how the earth’s bounty ought to be shared.

India: IMF supports basic income, recognising existing welfare programmes as “inefficient”

India: IMF supports basic income, recognising existing welfare programmes as “inefficient”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published a report suggesting that basic income would be better than their welfare system at supporting low income households in India. Similar evidence has been found for both Indonesia and Peru, where basic income was found to be beneficial compared to current welfare systems.

The report uses 2011-12 National Sample Survey data to analyse the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India, where subsidies for food (wheat, rice, sugar) and energy (kerosene) are provided at different levels according to a person’s position in relation to the poverty line. This welfare system was found to be both inefficient, with leakage in the procurement-transportation-distribution chain, and inequitable, in that around 20% of low income households do not receive any subsidy

The analysis compared PDS to a model of basic income. Their analysis found that a basic income outperforms PDS in terms of coverage, as basic income is universal. However, the analysis showed that the introduction of basic income would mean reduced targeting and generosity for lower income groups. At the lower end of the income scale, some households will gain in terms of relative benefits, whereas some will lose out. In the bottom decile the analysis found a greater share of losing households (58% losers compared to 42% gainers).

The authors noted that basic income would bring about a benefit in eliminating current operational inefficiencies in the PDS. They suggested that savings from this could be used to fund a more generous basic income that could mitigate the losses in lower income deciles. They ran another analysis with a higher basic income and found a greater share of gainers than losers in the bottom decile (60% gainers compared to 40% losers), suggesting a higher basic income would be more beneficial for this group. Alternatively, the authors also discuss the possibility of introducing additional programmes for households in this group, to supplement basic income and ensure they do not lose out.

 

More information at:

David Coady, Delphine Prady, “Universal Basic Income in Developing Countries: Options, and Illustration for India”, IMF Working Papers, July 31st2018

Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, “Universal Basic Incomes vs. Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries”, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Nº24939, August 2018

Debate over universal basic income steps up as IMF weighs impacts”, Development Pathways, August 14th2018

Growing debate around universality” sees diverging estimates of basic income”, Development Pathways, September 3rd2018

Bringing UBI into the Public Discourse, feat. Annie Lowrey

Bringing UBI into the Public Discourse, feat. Annie Lowrey

Annie Lowrey. Picture credit: ComedyCentral, The Daily Show

 

 

AUDIO: Annie Lowrey on Basic Income Podcast

 

Annie Lowrey, policy reporter for the New York Times and author of the book “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would end Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” joined the Basic Income Podcast to discuss her book and its reception.

 

In her interview with the hosts, Jim Pugh and Owen Poindexter, she says that in her book Universal Basic Income (UBI) is approached from a journalistic point of view, so as to benefit a generalized audience, or people who are not yet experts on the subject and may or may not have heard about it. She didn’t try to address only and directly UBI, but her effort was directed toward the ideas that intersect with UBI, creating a book that is intended to be, in her words:

 

like a jungle gym where people could come and think and explore and didn’t feel like they were in a position to be persuaded as or not, so much as they were there to kind of get their minds expanded”.

 

Regarding the book’s reception, she says that while feeling pleased with the attention it received, there are still a lot of knee-jerk type of reactions, with the words “just give people money”, as eye-catching as they are, often hitting rooted believes and eliciting instinctive negative emotions. She believes, however, that there is still room for dialogue, as the movement for UBI has gained tremendous momentum. According to her, the Overton Window is opening, meaning that the vocabulary surrounding the subject is becoming acceptable, and the policy of UBI can be discussed publicly, and even accepted. A factor which could accelerate this process is, in her opinion, a possible recession of the economy: facing the accelerated effects of the great decoupling (when the increase in GDP and productivity is not matched by the increase in wages and occupation) would give a boost to the talk about UBI.

 

In the podcast, Lowrey also comments on the great variety of themes which are connected to UBI, and which make it possible to look at it from a myriad of different angles. From the economic standpoint, what she finds particularly interesting is what is counted and not counted in an economy.  Categories of unpaid work, for example domestic labour inside the household go unnacounted, and that production could be compensated through the introduction of an UBI.

 

Noticing how the United States lack a safety net as robust as some other similar level income OECD countries, Lowrey states that the problem of racism certainly had its weight: “I do think that racism explains a lot of the welfare chauvinism that you have in the United States, a lot of the judgment of lower income folks.” She reasons that UBI, not being about requirements, but universal in nature, would also address the problem of discrimination.

 

Asked how she feels about the UBI movement right now, Lowrey says the United States are both close and far away from the introduction of a UBI. Even with Obama speaking favorably about itand with news of possible upcoming trials emerging every other day, there are many difficulties left such as the requirement of funding, which is not easy to meet at the state level. Nonetheless, some states could take their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs and turn them into an unconditional cash grant for children, she suggests.

 

 “I would love it if you could get some kind of laboratory of democracy effect where you would have something smaller that could scale up that could really convince people it was a good idea”.

 

At the federal level, though, she thinks that it is more probable that some policies contaminated by the idea of UBI are put into practice, like a negative income tax or an Earned Income Tax Credit expansion. While she expects something along these lines to be proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign, she would be surprised if it was actually UBI.

 

 

More information at:

“Bringing UBI into the Public Discourse”, Basic Income Podcast, July 20th,2018

David Graeber: New book “Bullshit jobs”

David Graeber: New book “Bullshit jobs”

David Graeber. Picture credit to: RSA.

David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, has recently published a new book “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory”. This book is an investigation of his ideas previously outlined in an article written in Strike! Magazine in 2013, where he posits the existence of ‘bullshit jobs’, jobs that are primarily or entirely made up of tasks which the person doing them considers to be pointless, unnecessary or even pernicious, being secretly aware of this. He also argues that these bullshit jobs have been created just for the sake of keeping us all working.

 

In the book, the author outlines how bullshit jobs came to be about and how they turned out to be so prolific, investigating their psychological and political effects. Towards the end of the book, the author suggests giving people a basic income, one that is sufficient to live on, as a potential solution to this phenomenon. This, it is argued, would detach livelihood from work, allowing people to work when they want to, in what they wished, or even not at all. This would mean that people could choose not to take on bullshit jobs, which, assuming the former wanted to do something more meaningful with their lives, would lead to the elimination of the latter.

 

David Graeber, “Bullshit jobs – A theory”, Simon & Schuster, May 2018

 

More information at:

Eliane Glaser, “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber review – the myth of capitalist efficiency”, The Guardian, May 25th 2018