by Sara Bizarro | Jun 6, 2018 | News
The 2018 NABIG (North American Basic Income Guarantee) Congress happened in Hamilton, Ontario, from May 24th to May 27th at McMaster University. There were around 120 people presenting and attendance between 270-280 people. The conference was notably diverse, with attendees from across the income spectrum, from people who have prospered in business, to people living in poverty. There were representatives from legislatures, civil services, business, academia and faith organizations, unions, agriculture, community service groups, advocacy groups, and First Nations communities. There were participants with long and deep knowledge about Basic Income, as well as people who were new to the concept. There was also a large number of young people, attending and presenting. There were participants from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, the USA, and the UK, among others.
Guy Caron, Evelyn Forget, Art Eggleton, Sheila Regehr, Ian Schlakman and Laura Babcock.
The conference opened with welcome remarks from Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger, followed by a panel that included Guy Caron, a federal Member of Parliament (MP) from Québec with the New Democratic Party; Art Eggleton, a Canadian Senator and former MP, and former long-serving mayor of the City of Toronto; Evelyn Forget, Manitoba health economist that uncovered the effects of Mincome on health and wellbeing; Sheila Regehr, chairperson of the Basic Income Canada Network and Ian Schlakman, Basic Income Action activist from the National Welfare Rights and Poor People’s Campaign. The moderator for that section was Laura Babcock, President of POWERGROUP Communications and a national current affairs commentator. Guy Caron spoke about his Basic Income proposal, a way to combine existing benefits such as the Canadian child benefit and tax credits into one policy that guarantees that no one would fall under the poverty line. Senator Eggleton also said he would be for an incrementalist solution to rolling out Basic Income in Canada. At the end of the panel, each speaker was asked to say one inspirational phrase that summed up their views and MP Guy Caron said: “Putting a man on the moon was a huge achievement. If we could end poverty in Canada, we would be the first country in the world to do so!”
Living Proof, Hamilton Basic Income Speakers: Jodi Dean, David Cherkewski, Lance Dingman, Jayne Cardno, Rhonda Castello.
The conference also had the participation of the group Living Proof, a select group of speakers that are participants in the Hamilton Basic Income Pilot. The Basic Income recipients stood up, one by one, and told their stories. Each of the participants spoke of how they went from having a comfortable middle-class life to living in poverty and about the challenges they faced on a daily basis. Jodi, one of the Basic Income recipients, said that she had a normal middle-class life before a divorce left her and her children in a dire situation, especially since one of her children has Brittle Bone disease. She talked about a night when she had a child with a broken leg and had to worry about taking her to the hospital because she had no money to pay for parking. Others spoke about mental health and disability challenges and referred to several difficulties with the current social security system whose job is more felt as policing rather than helping them find exit strategies for their situation. Interestingly, all recipients said they started volunteering in their communities since they have been receiving the Basic Income and this has inspired them to try to change their situation of poverty and of those around them.
Living Proof, Hamilton Basic Income Speakers: Margie Gould, Jayne Cardno, Lance Dingman, Tim Button, Dave Cherkewski, Jodi Dean, Rhonda Castello and John Mills (Living Proof group coordinator).
The event was entitled, Basic Income: Bold Ideas, Practical Solutions, and the main plenary talks were on two themes, Convergence and Reality. The Convergence topic intended to presenting Basic Income from different perspectives, from social justice to health, human rights, faith, technology etc. The Reality theme, which goes beyond the reason why we need a Basic Income, included implementation issues on how a Basic Income should operate, e.g. how to fund it and how to gain public support.
The complete program can be downloaded here and the paper and presentations will be available at the Basic Income Canada Network website after June 17th.
More information at:
Nicole Smith, “Canada Could be the First Country to Eliminate Poverty”, Raise the Hammer, May 29th 2018
by Claire Bott | Jun 5, 2018 | News
Johann Hari, a successful non-fiction writer, has used his latest book, Lost Connections, to explore the topic of depression, looking at certain possible solutions to the debilitating condition.
Although most traditional solutions for depression are individual and aimed at the depressed person, Hari, who suffers from the illness himself, suggests that solutions for depression could include radical social change in order to avoid bringing about the conditions under which people tend to become depressed. Although, this is sometimes said to be difficult to control so many will opt to seek professional advice or try products like this penis envy dosage in order to uplift their mood.
Depression can happen to anybody, and it can occur for a number of different reasons. This is why no one ever fully understands what is going on in someone else’s head. For example, you might see someone enjoying Organic CBD Nugs, or another form of cannabis, and assume it’s purely recreational. However, that person could be using the substance to calm their feelings of anxiety and depression. It could be because you’ve been subjected to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, you’ve experienced a death, or you could’ve been diagnosed with a serious illness. Unfortunately, the list goes on. People are able to seek out remedies in the form of marijuana, which they can get from online retailers like get kush, which may treat their symptoms of depression and help them to fight off the low moods – but only if they can afford it. Plus, they will need to obtain a medical marijuana card, which you can receive from places like Green Health Docs, to help relieve the symptoms this way, the same can’t be said about what happens socially. What happens in the environment around us is out of our control, so this could be the reason why people are experiencing depression, like Hari.
In the final chapter of the book, Hari explores the concept of universal basic income (UBI), including interviews with Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and author who wrote Utopia for Realists (by giving people money to meet their everyday needs, Bregman argues, we can improve their well-being, free them from pointless jobs, and allow everyone to engage in meaningful activity again), and Dr Evelyn Forget, the Canadian economist. In an interview about Lost Connections, Hari referred to UBI as “a really potent anti-depressant”. Research, though limited, seems to back up this idea, which includes the large basic income trial which happened in Manitoba, Canada, in the 1970s.
Edited by: Patrick Hoare
by Andre Coelho | Jun 3, 2018 | News
Image credit: La Razón.
BONOSOL is a mandatory, non-contributory, central government social security program in Bolivia. It is unconditional in nature and started in 1997, having endured to this day, having risen more than 220% from 2008 through 2016. It disburses, at the moment, 404 €/year per adult over 60 years of age who does not benefit from a State pension, and 323 €/year for those in that same population cohort who benefit from a State pension. BONOSOL is, thus, a universal but cohort restricted non-contributory pension programme.
Although the programme targets people older than 60 years of age, its coverage includes all people older than 21 in 1995 (at the moment 44 years of age). It has also been suspended, soon after its start in May 1997, re-introduced with a different name (BOLIVIDA) on a 51 €/year value and then re-established again as BONOSOL in 2002, with a value of 206 €/year.
Nowadays, around one million people in Bolivia benefit from BONOSOL (with or without a state pension), also called Renta Dignidad, or about 9% of current population. There is no monitoring or evaluation processes for this programme, although the total fund from where payments are made is subject to annual audits. The annual cost is 0.25% of Bolivia’s GDP, and has been originally set up as a way to redistribute collected funds by the State, derived from the privatization process. However, despite, its longevity and growth along recent years, “studies have shown that at current levels of benefits in payment, the fund will run out much earlier than expected”. This might indicate a need to diversify the fund’s financing streams into the future.
More information at:
Jesus Paco, “Diputados aprueban suba de la Renta Dignidad”, El Deber, May 5th 2017
International Labour Organization, Social Security Department – Bolivia, Bonosol
Autoridad de Fiscalización y Control de Pensiones e Seguros: Requisitos Renda Dignidad
by Claire Bott | May 29, 2018 | News
The BBC has made a half-hour radio programme exploring the current universal basic income (UBI) experiment taking place in Kenya. The programme was originally broadcast on 31th of March 2018, as part of the BBC World Service.
The experiment, funded by American charity GiveDirectly, is due to run for 12 years and is now in its second year. It involves 20,000 people in more than 200 villages, and includes a number of groups including a large control group. The villages used in the main experiment have been sequestered from outside visitors, as there are concerns that these could be disruptive to the experimental conditions. However, a “test” village is open to visitors, and the programme-makers conducted interviews with a number of people living there.
These included Edwin, who had spent the extra money ($22 per month) to buy much-needed furniture for his family, and Evelyn, who had invested part of it in her business selling fried fish at the market, and had saved the rest. Irene, a teacher, says that children from the village which is being given money are much more likely to attend school regularly. Joseph, the head teacher, added, “Previously, we had a lot of absenteeism from the village children during market days.”
The programme also included a brief summary of the history of UBI, including brief references to both Thomas More and Thomas Paine. There are quotations in support of UBI from celebrities such as Richard Branson (“It will come about one day, out of necessity”) and Elon Musk (“Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to have some form of basic income”).
Michael Faye, Director and Co-Founder of GiveDirectly, said on the progamme, “When I’ve gone to some of the surrounding villages, things I will hear are ‘Well, of course we wish we had gotten the transfer, but we’re doing meaningfully better than before the transfer started.’ I’ll ask, ‘Why are you doing meaningfully better?’ And they’ll say, ‘A lot of people in the village [which is getting the transfer] decided to rebuild their house, or they go to the market more. Well, somebody needs to build the house for them, someone needs to sell things in the market. So our businesses are booming because of the capital that the village next door has received.’”
The programme-makers intend to return to the village at regular intervals, in order to see how the situation is developing as the experiment continues.
Edited by: Caroline Pearce
by Guest Contributor | May 26, 2018 | News
Scott Santens published on Medium the transcription of a speech he wrote for a keynote session he presented in Sweden in 2017, with the title “It’s time for technology to serve all humankind with Unconditional Basic Income.”
The speech revolves around the impact of automation on society, acting as a disruptor in the labour market, making many jobs obsolete without creating more and better jobs for humans. This is a trend that goes on since the ‘90s: “Yes, it already happened. It’s not in the future. It’s in the past”.
Technological unemployment is a reality, he says, and it’s observable from the decline in occupation of the US population since 2000, the year in wich human labour peaked. Ephemeralization made a lot of middle-skilled jobs obsolete, creating an occupational vacuum filled by low-skilled jobs, as jobs are automated “from the middle out”. This translated in income stagnation for the middle class, growth in incomes monthly variance and rising income inequality. All factors which ultimately affect the wellbeing of individuals and society as a whole, producing a costant sense of insecurity in the population. But, according to Santens, we shouldn’t fear automation:
“We have the opportunity to forever free humanity from drudgery and toil, but as long as people require money to live, and jobs are the primary way of obtaining money, people will fear automation.”
Technologic unemployment ends up hindering productivity itself, because automation of the medium skilled jobs makes workers shift toward the low skilled ones, increasing the offer of low paid work and thus making automation less convenient and postponable.The answer resides in decoupling work from income, through the introduction of an Unconditional Basic Income, a solution which would make income circulate from top to bottom. It would eliminate the necessity to work in order to survive, thus driving very many undesirable jobs out of the labour market and making automation more impellent. With a better distribution of wealth, full automation could be reached, eliminating many unnecessarry and unsatisfactory jobs, and society would be ultimately able to floursih. Scott Santens puts this clearly:
“…how much are we holding civilization back by allowing impoverishment to continue? How much more could we accomplish as a species, if we made the choice, that’s right, THE CHOICE, to abolish poverty and extreme inequality forever, by simply investing in humanity — in each other?”
More information at:
Scott Santens, “It’s Time for Technology to Serve all Humankind with Unconditional Basic Income”, Medium, April 13th 2018
by Andre Coelho | May 24, 2018 | News
Next week – 1 through the 3rd of June – Universal Basic Income Europe (UBIE) activists will be at the EYE2018 event, in Strasbourg. This event is an annual gathering of young Europeans at the European Parliament premises. There, they “come up with ideas for the future of Europe”, “discuss with European decision makers”, and join/meet other interested young people around Europe.
In an attempt to fuel the debate around basic income, UBIE aims at having 20 participants from 10 nationalities, at the EYE2018. There will be activities centered around equality/inequality (named “rich and poor”) and basic income will be discussed, at least, at a roundtable named “Basic Income: Return of Robin Hood?”. This roundtable, happening on Friday, at 11h am, will be organized by the European Parliament and will feature Harro Boven (Economist, Young Democrats (The Netherlands)), Aurèlei Hampel (UBIE), Ilkka Kaukoranta and Daniel Zamora, moderated by Petra Prešeren (RTV Slovenija).
Other event themes are:
- Young and old: keeping up with the digital revolution
- Apart and together: working out for a stronger Europe
- Safe and Dangerous: Staying alive in turbulent times
- Local and Global: protecting our planet
The event’s full programme can be found here.
More information at:
UBIE website
European Parliament, European Youth Event website
