Forbes article on UBI includes quotes from BIEN members
Guy Standing, Carl Widerquist and Evelyn Forget are quoted in this article dated July 17.
BIEN Members: Register for the August 30 General Assembly!
We have the pleasure of inviting you to our annual General Assembly (GA), scheduled for 30 August at 1pm British Summer Time (UTC+1), taking place online and on the sidelines of BIEN’s Annual Congress.
We kindly ask you to register online through Eventbrite to be able to attend the meeting: Eventbrite registration link
This registration is required to ensure only members participate in the voting procedures. Once registered, an access link will be emailed to you a few days before the GA.
GA participation is for BIEN members: to register as a BIEN member go to the membership page.
To see the full invitation, click here.
2024 BIEN Congress Program is now available
Congress Full Booklet Download
This booklet aims to answer every question you may have about the congress, from location, to schedule.
To access the BIEN Congress 2024 site and download the 52-page booklet, click here.
Four years of U.S. Mayors for a Guaranteed Income
“MGI was founded in June 2020 with 11 members. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), which was announced in 2017 and implemented in 2019, had proven Mayor Michael Tubbs’s assumption that low-income residents would use the money on basic necessities, and independent research showed that full-time employment increased, mental and physical health improved, and more people were able to save enough money to afford life’s unforeseen emergencies. Mayor Melvin Carter of Saint Paul, MGI’s Co-Chair, joined Mayor Tubbs and nine other mayors to create MGI and begin advocating for guaranteed income pilots in their cities.
In just four years, we’ve grown to 160 mayors, with members in almost every state. Building off of that momentum, we launched Counties for a Guaranteed Income (CGI) in February 2023 and we’ve doubled the number of county elected officials who are part of the movement since then. All together, we’ve supported 60+ pilots, delivering $300 million in direct, unconditional relief to everyday Americans.”
To read the full MGI/CGI June Newsletter, click here.
Online Open Forum: The BIEN working group on Clarification of Basic Income Definition, July 24
Date: 24 th July 2024
Time: 11.30am -1.00pm GMT
To register click here.
The information on zoom link will be shown in the form.
Speaker: Annie Miller
Topic: Adequacy, poverty benchmarks and a maximum feasible level of BI
ABSTRACT
The introduction of the concept of needs into utility theory specifies deprivation,
subsistence, sufficiency, and satiation at infinity, together with strong separability. An
extended indifference curve map for labor and consumption is created. Both
variables are dependent on real wages and endowments of unearned consumption
(including cash benefits) and diagrams of their derived demands and Engels curves
are created. ‘Survival’ and ‘subsistence’ are key levels of endowments, but how do
these relate to ’adequacy’, or to distributions of income and the OECD poverty
benchmark? Does ‘adequacy’ imply welfarism. And is there a maximum feasible
level of BI?
BIEN contribution to UN Peacebuilding Support Office (UN PBSO): Call for endorsements
BIEN has been invited to submit a proposal to the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) for the 2025 Review of the global Peacebuilding Architecture. The work of PBSO, is to, among others, support the Peacebuilding Commission, an intergovernmental advisory body that supports peace efforts in conflict-affected countries. PBSO also aims to enhance system-wide coherence and partnerships with UN and non-UN actors toward sustaining peace.
Through this proposal, we present PBSO and the UN Secretary-General with input on basic income’s transformative potential as a complement to traditional peacebuilding and development efforts. The UN-Secretary-General will use such input from a wide spectrum of civil society organizations in writing his report and recommendations to the Peacebuilding Review.
Please join us.
We are going to submit this proposal (click the link to view/download the proposal) by the end of July and would be grateful for your support. If you would like to add your organization to the list of entities endorsing this proposal, please reply to BIEN Secretary Diana Bashur (diana.bashur@basicincome.org), including the name of your organization as you would like it to appear and attaching a high-resolution logo we can add to the final version of the document.
Also: Since we have had a broader variety of organizations in support of our submissions to the UN before, please help spread the word and inspire other organizations in favor of BI to add their name to the list of BIEN affiliates and partners endorsing this proposal. The more global support we are able to garner for this initiative, the greater weight our proposal can have and the higher the likelihood for its consideration for the mentioned Peacebuilding Review.
It would be wonderful if we can get close to 100 partner signatures as we did with the letter four years ago! Such an amount of endorsement will be pivotal in increasing the impact we can have, and if we do, this will be significant. Indeed, we are engaging at a really high-level within the overall UN structure.
Olaf Michael Ostertag (BIEN EC)
