by Andre Coelho | Dec 20, 2018 | News
Rebecka Le Moine. Picture credit to: SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
The Member of the Swedish Parliament (MP), and Green Party representative Rebecka Le Moine has submitted, on the 30th of November 2018, a motion for the deep investigation of basic income in Sweden. Rebecka, a 28 years old ecologist particularly dedicated to natural conservation issues, is a member of both the committees on Taxation and Environment and Agriculture.
The motion itself doesn’t go into a large detail about basic income itself, although it does provide a firm justification to pursue with deeper studies related to it. For instance, it refers to John Maynard Keynes’s predictions of a 15-hour working week, and the generalized usage of automation to replace most repetitive and/or too demanding (or dangerous) jobs. It also names Martin Luther King, particularly his voicing on eradicating poverty through the introduction of unconditional cash transfers. The most notorious basic income experiments around the world – Namibia, Finland, Canada, India – are also mentioned, as a way to contextualize the motion and show-reel some of the advantages of basic income (on an experimental setup).
The motion also draws on a human-rights approach to basic income, by referring to the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. Concretely, it appeals to article 22, where it says that all members of society shall have the right to a dignified life, according to each country’s capacity. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are also referred to, since these call for poverty eradication and equal rights to financial resources for all people.
On a more personal level, the motion justifies studying basic income deeper on the experimental fact that people get more creative and less risk-aversive when given unconditional money. It also testifies for the relation between freedom and civility, democracy and conscious environmentalism. More secure and less needy people are also more amenable and generous. It goes on to add that unconditional money equates to a power shift from society’s main institutions – governments, corporations, churches, ONG’s – to the individual, who gets a higher ability to say no to oppressive work and life conditions, or yes to tasks or life paths which are not sufficiently valued nowadays. That, of course, leads to major disruptions in the labour market and generalized social constructs.
As for financing, the motion swiftly mentions international prized economists who affirm basic income is affordable. That affordability can come from cost savings, with the reduction or elimination of certain conditional social benefits, together with increased taxes on the extraction of natural resources, carbon emissions, fortunes and on the financial sector.
More information at:
[in Swedish]
Rebecka Le Moine, “Basinkomst”, Motion till riksdagen, Sveriges Riksdag, November 2018
by Andre Coelho | Dec 18, 2018 | News
Picture, from left to right: Artem Demidenko (sociologist, psychologist), Nataliya Protasova (Board Chair of Basic Income Ukraine organization), Artem Kuharenko (Podolsk village council), Kateryna Drei (Head of Basic Income Ukraine organization)
After Pavlograd, there is another basic income experiment being assembled in Ukraine. This time it was announced, on the 15th of December 2018, by Artem Kuharenko, the head of the Podolskoe village council, in the Cherkasy region. Along with Natalya Protasova, who chairs the Board of the Basic Income social organization in Ukraine, Kuharenko informed that the pilot will involve all of the village’s inhabitants (550), over a two-year period.
This basic income experiment will disburse a regular, unconditional cash transfer of 200 €/month to all Podolskoe villagers. Funds are being collected, from budget surpluses and crowdfunding. Kuharenko, the youngest village mayor in the country, with only 25 years of age, aims to raise his village’ inhabitants standard of living, increase the attractiveness of rural life and bring in more people, especially young ones.
There is no information, at the moment, about how the experiment is to be conducted, namely if there will be a control group (e.g.: another village), or how recipients will be monitored (e.g.: measurements of income, social activity, health, work load, etc.).
More information at:
André Coelho, “Ukraine: Basic income experiment has started being prepared in Ukraine”, Basic Income News, December 12th 2018
Euromaidan Press, “Youngest mayor in Ukraine gives village a second life”, 20th May 2017
by Andre Coelho | Dec 16, 2018 | News
Basic income is going to be tested in Germany. The setup of the experiment will be similar to the one now ending in Finland, which means there will be an unconditional cash transfer to 250 randomly selected people among those already receiving benefits (250 others will act as the control group), and evaluate the impact in terms of labor market behavior, health and social relations.
Behind this initiative, to be initiated in May 2019, is the Sanktionsfrei organization, a non-profit managed by volunteer professionals from administration, IT-tech, communications and law. Sanktionsfrei (meaning “free from sanctions”), with headquarters in Berlin, specializes in helping sanctioned citizens by the Hartz IV social security system in Germany. It will conduct this experiment in Berlin, for a 3-year period, accepting volunteers who may apply for it through their website.
The basic income pilot, named HartzPlus, will be conducted as a scientific experiment, led by professor Rainer Wieland, from the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. The Sanktionsfrei team and professor Wieland are about to test a different approach to social security than the one applied in Germany at the moment (Hartz IV system), which has been reported as intrusive, bureaucratic and aggressive (sanctions). Those characteristics, contrary to what is considered by the system’s defenders, do not lead to increased willingness to pickup paid work (the objective of the program), but to resistance, decreased motivation and a generalized discredit in the social security system. Throughout the experiment, people will be checked for variations in mental health, life control, self-efficiency, sociopolitical values, among other indicators. No initial hypothesis will be considered; the experiment aims to offer scientifically informed insights to future social policy in Germany.
As for financing, Sanktionfrei is relying on private donors as the sole financing mechanism. Participants will receive unconditionally the amount from whatever sanctions they will be subject to by job centers (e.g.: by not responding to certain job offers or refusing to get suggested training actions); Sanktionsfrei will always try to recover the sanction money through legal action, and if it does, the participant will transfer the contested amount back to Sanktionsfrei. Otherwise, each participant gets, for the whole time period of the experiment, the full amount of their social security benefits, no questions asked.
More information at:
Tobias Kaiser, “Grundeinkommen wird in Deutschland getestet [Basic Income is tested in Germany]”, Gründerszene, December 6th 2018
André Coelho, “Finland: Going through a basic income experiment”, Basic Income News, April 20th 2018
HartzPlus website
by Daniele Fabbri | Dec 15, 2018 | News
The Concluding Conference of the German Research Foundation-funded research team “Landnahme, Acceleration, Activation. On the (De)-Stabilisation of Modern Growth Societies” and the Second Regional Conference of the German Sociological Association will be held in Jena from September 23 to September 27, 2019.
Even as the scars left by the economic crisis began to heal, societal division and polarization are rampant, and there is reason to believe that the “Great Transformation”, conceptualized by Karl Polanyi as “a period of profound change, most likely including the abandonment of dominant growth patterns, forms of production, and lifestyle that have been maintained over decades” is occurring.
The double conference in Jena wants to address where such “journey” will bring us and who should set its course.
Event Program:
- 23 September: opening evening with Branko Milanovic and others.
- 24 September: presentation and discussion of research findings from the Jena Centre of Advanced Studies, the general theme is “After Rapid Growth”, the main topic addressed are the “contours of future post growth societies”.
- 25 September: main topics of discussion will include global finan-cial markets, class and social structure, sustainability, gender relations, migration and flight, mobility, labour relations, and social movements.
- 26 September: individual examples of alternative development options.
- 27 September: the topic of digitisation, and thereby a key future project of neo-capitalist expansion will take centre stage.
“The conference seeks to provide a platform for ‘Experimental Utopistics’. The well-founded (case- based) debate around diagnoses of time and distinct future trajectories of society shall take place not exclusively among sociologists, but in an interdisciplinary forum and enriched by the expertise from social practice. In this sense, the formal-organisational frame of a double conference is part of the attempt to test possibilities and limitations of such sociological utopistics, to explore, as well as question, its usefulness.”
More information at:
University of Jena’s website (event)
Klaus Dörre, Hartmut Rosa, The board of the German Sociological Association; “The Great Transformation: On the Future of Modern Societies”, abstract
by Andre Coelho | Dec 12, 2018 | News
The City of Pavlograd, in Ukraine, has decided to perform a basic income experiment, in order to measure the effect (on the individual level) of unconditional cash transfers on the labor market, objective and subjective well-being, financial health, changes in mental and physical health, among other social indicators. This decision was made on the 29th of November 2018, the day when the Head of the City, Mr. V. Movchan, proclaimed: “The city administration is interested and supports the proposal of the social organization “Basic income” (Ukraine) on the joint implementation in [the] city [of] Pavlograd a pilot project for the introduction of basic income, the purpose of which is to ensure a decent standard of living for the city’s residents”.
The experiment is presently in the beginning of its preparation phase. A working group is being assembled, comprising elements from Pavlograd executive bodies, social society, sociologists from several countries, public organizations and researchers. The plan, for the experiment, is to disburse the equivalent to a 100 €/month to each of the 2000 randomly selected Pavlograd adult citizens (the average monthly salary in Ukraine is around 9000 UAH, or 286 €), for a 24-month period.
City officials have communicated that the City is not yet capable of contributing to the experiment’s financing, but will cover the immediate costs of communications and announcements, physical work spaces and guaranteeing crucial human resources to start the experiment assemblage. For now, the money for the cash transfers themselves is being considered as a fund-raising initiative among public and private charitable organizations in Ukraine, as well as foreign organizations.
More information at:
In Ukrainian:
“У якості експерименту дві тисячі павлоградців посадять на безумовний дохід”, дHIпPOГPAд, November 30th 2018
by Daniele Fabbri | Dec 11, 2018 | News
Nature 2.0 will hold a series of events in Berlin and Amsterdam, exploring blockchain technology in preparation for their participation as one of the tracks at the biggest blockchain hackaton in the world: the DutchChain Hackaton 2019 in Groningen.
What is Nature 2.0?
Nature 2.0 is an open community who wants to explore the use of cutting-edge technologies in order to create a better society. Taking advantage and combining Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain technology and autonomous assets, “Nature 2.0 aims for an ownerless layer of natural resources and intelligent agents that promote sustainable public utilities in a world of abundance”.
In an article on Medium, “Nature 2.0 The Cradle of Civilization Gets an Update”, Trent McConaghy illustrates their mission, inspired by the natural world, were flora and fauna coexist in ecosystems exhibiting features of resilience and anti-fragility, and are based on commons.
Technology allows to replicate the symbiotic relationships presents in nature, and will help design a post-scarcity society, one functioning as a positive-sum game rather than a zero-sum one.
Through the use of AI, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and autonomous assets, it becomes possible to design Public Utility Networks (PUN) that are self-owned and that self-manage.
Think about self-driving cars: once they become a reality, there would be little use for privates in owning them. It would rather be better to make them autonomous assets, managed by an artificial intelligence, and allow them to receive payments via digital currency.
Nature 2.0 and Universal Basic Income
Cars would then provide an Uber-like service, but there would no drivers to pay, no management, no corporation. It would be a swarm of cars, self-regulating, with no concept of identity or scarcity, and autonomously using part of the payment they receive in order to maintain (repair, upgrade) themselves. And the remaining will be used to finance UBI.
And cars were just one example, the same could work for trucks, electric grids, wind farms, roads, etc. Then the UBI extracted from those redesigned PUNs would be distributed through blockchain, the only requirement proving to be human (an example of blockchain based UBI is that of Manna).
“The abundance from machines gets transferred to humans”
More information at:
Nature 2.0 website
Trent McConaghy, “Nature 2.0 The Cradle of Civilization Gets an Update”, Medium, June 6th, 2018
