by Andre Coelho | Nov 25, 2018 | News
India Network for Basic Income (INBI) will host the 19th BIEN Congress in Hyderabad, India, from 22nd to 25th of August 2019. At a time when the welfare state is undergoing major crisis, all around the world, and the discussion around basic income is gaining traction, it is ever more important to give voice to speakers and participants to present and debate this crucial new approach to social security. Being an international Congress, participants and speakers will be coming from different parts of the world, which only adds to the diversity of views and opinions a real global debate like the one referred above needs. Last year’s 18th BIEN Congress was held in Tampere, Finland, organized by the local BIEN affiliate.
The Congress organization results from a partnership between INBI and the NALSAR University of Law, which will house the Congress in its state-of-the-art campus on the outskirts of Hyderabad. INBI is also partnering with SEWA Madhya Pradesh, one of the largest membership-based women’s organization in the world and which played a key role in the Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot study. With SEWA, INBI will be producing short films and planning several campaign events in Madhya Pradesh and other parts of the country in the run up for the Congress. The days running up to the Congress will also host a major Hackathon in Hyderabad, organized by another INBI’s partner organization, the WisoCoLab. This event will also feature discussions around basic income and will feed in the Congress with a sum of its activities. Finally, the Mustardseed Trust is also partnering with INBI, as a financial supporter to the Congress, and in presenting a session at the Congress under “Basic Income and Caring Economy”.
The Congress itself will have plenary sessions, dynamic plenaries (panel of experts, with a moderator) and parallel sessions, in a structure similar to other BIEN Congresses. As in the latest Congress in Finland, there will also be a basic income short film festival integrated into to program schedule. New features planned are the BIEN Civic Forum, and the Basic Income Ideas Bazaar. The former, happening in the 22nd of August, intends to bring together different stakeholders in a given national or regional context to share views and debate basic income. The idea is to bring together policy-makers, corporate leaders and academics at the highest levels in the Indian context so as to strengthen the basic income debate in India. The latter is a space where organizations, artists and groups working on basic income who wish to showcase their work can do so at a nominal cost.
A formal Call for Papers to the Congress will soon be released.
More information at:
André Coelho, “Finland / International: BIEN Congress 2018 (part 2)”, Basic Income News, September 5th 2018
by Andre Coelho | Nov 19, 2018 | News
City Leaders attendees in L.A. at City Summit. Credit to: NLC.
The National League of Cities (NLC), an organization serving the interests of 19000 cities, towns and villages across the United States territory, has released, in a partnership with the Stanford Basic Income Lab (BIL), a basic income report to serve as guide to piloting UBI in cities. Framed as a toolkit, it is directed at city leaders and aims to guide policy rather than blueprint UBI pilots. It is intended to help cities considering introducing basic income experiments, providing historical background, prior experiment reports and results and present-day efforts in that regard.
The UBI is seriously contemplated by the NLC as a possible solution – although not a panacea – to growing automation, labour precariousness and peaking inequality. Basic income is also seen as an effective way to boost entrepreneurship, while providing a solid safety net. City leaders are conscient, though, that cities are limited in their ability to introduce basic income schemes, as they are part of wider nation-state organizations and governments. However, cities can act as experimental grounds to provide results and identify hurdles, both crucial aspects of an eventual nation-wide UBI implementation.
The basic income toolkit for cities is also meant to be a piece in what has been called a Theory of Change (ToC). A ToC is a study built as a roadmap to introduce meaningful change to a complex system such as a city. It is designed to help cities articulate their short, medium and long-term goals, and, within this context, draw important and already available outcomes from unconditional cash-transfer programs. Conversely, the ToC helps in calibrating the UBI experiment, informing on which data to collect, and when.
In a nutshell, the basic income report for UBI experiments in cities issues recommendations on identifying the goals (of the experiment), choosing those involved and when these should participate, defining the choice of recipients, specifying how to measure success and creating an effective communication strategy.
More information at:
Brooks Rainwater, “Yes, Cities Can Pilot Universal Basic Income”, National League of Cities, November 9th 2018
Juliana Bidadanure et al., “Basic Income in Cities – A guide to city experiments and pilot projects”, National League of Cities and Stanford Basic Income Lab, 2018
by Andre Coelho | Nov 17, 2018 | News
The L’Ecole des Hautes Estudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Social Sciences University in France) is organizing and promoting a doctoral series of conferences about basic income. This series of events started on the 10th of October 2018, on a venue at the CEVIPOF (SciencesPo, Paris), featuring Yannick Vanderborght and Télémaque Masson, an EHESS ex-student and founding member of the Movement Francais pour un Revenue de Base (MFRB), and will continue throughout 2019.
On the third Wednesday of each month until June next year, from 6 to 8 pm at EHESS (usually), these conferences are framed as doctoral workshops, and aim to explore questions like “What is a Universal Basic Income?”, “Basic Income, a tool in fighting poverty?” or “Basic income or income for ecological transition?”. These will bring together experts like Jean-Eric Hyafil, Philippe Warin and Sophie Swaton, as well as students and the general public interested in such matters.
On the last event, on the 12th of June 2019, Philippe Van Parijs will conduct a guided study session through his most recent book (co-authored with Yannick Vanderborght), “Basic income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy”.
The full conferences program can be read here.
by Andre Coelho | Nov 16, 2018 | News
Felix Salmon (on Fox Business)
In a television program, live on Fox Business aired on the 12th of Setember, British ex-citizen (now a citizen of the United States) Felix Salmon shocked his TV host, Stuart Varney, and his pundit colleagues on the set (Ashley Webster and Elizabeth MacDonald, both regulars at Fox Business), by unexpectedly bringing up the issue of basic income. Felix, always keeping his good mood and positive posture, was hammered by his co-presenters, especially by Varney, who repeatedly called him a socialist with a pejorative inclination.
The entire three-minute conversation around basic income ended with the expulsion on Salmon from Varney’s TV show (even though he was smiling), and possibly from Fox News altogether. It can be read fully in a transcript posted on Media Matters, as well as the video itself.
by Andre Coelho | Nov 11, 2018 | News
Picture credit to: The Black Detour.
The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is an initiative generated by the Springboard to Opportunities NGO, having been referred to at a recent article on the production of the documentary “Inherent Good“. This initiative aims at supplying to poor families headed by black American women in Jackson, Mississippi, the extra cash they systematically are in need of. Since black women in the United States earn much less, on average, than white, non-Hispanic men (37% less), an inequality that is even more acute in Mississippi (44% less), the experiment is aiming at helping these very disadvantaged families, while studying the effects of supplying unconditional cash.
This cash transfer project, financed by the Economic Security Project, will deposit 1000$ per month, for 12 months, in 16 low-income single black mothers bank accounts. No questions asked. The women in question will be randomly selected from a set of black female adults with children who are considered to live in poverty, in the Jackson area. Projects such as this cash transfer project are supported by establishments like nonprofit organizations in cleveland ohio, who invest in talent and finance. The complete list of names will be known before the end of this month, with payments starting in December 2018. An important feature of this program is that some of the potential beneficiaries have helped to craft the initiative, bringing crucial input that brought, for instance, leadership training, psychological counseling and community service to the package (hence it will not be only a cash transfer program). However, participants will not be forced to uptake these auxiliary aspects of the experiment.
In this region of the United States, economic, social and racial (all aspects intertwine) inequalities are particularly severe, a problem that has not been solved by previous cash transfer programs. These, being conditional, namely on work uptake and income, “leave little room for single black mothers to create opportunities for themselves”, according to Aisha Nyandoro, the executive director of Springboard to Opportunities. Nyandoro adds that “the project is about changing the narrative and dispelling the myth of the Welfare Queen and allowing African American women to show what is possible when we trust low-income individuals”.
More information at:
André Coelho, “United States: “Inherent Good” documentary starts fund-raising campaign“, Basic Income News, November 6th 2018
J. Gabriel Ware, “The First Guaranteed Basic Income Program Designed for Single Black Moms“, Yes!, November 6th 2018
by Daniele Fabbri | Nov 9, 2018 | News
Picture credit: David Pacey
In an article on Left Foot Forward, Karen Buck MP and Declan Gaffney argue for a partial Basic Income as a more practical option than Universal Basic Income (UBI).
With all the different expectations pinned to UBI, arising from its promise to address a wide range of problems going from technological drive unemployment to the income instability typical of precarious jobs, UBI risks to become a divisive topic. Sceptics argue that it ignores the problems of rising tax rates to unprecedented rates and ask if those most in need are the actual beneficiaries.
The idea of an unconditional, universal flat-rate payment could have wide appeal, the authors say: child benefit was not far from it before being taken away from high earners, and also the income personal allowance and the threshold for national insurance can be thought of as universal flat rate payments for those earning enough to benefit from them in full –“So we have UBI-like elements in the tax and benefit system already”.
The problem in the feasibility of UBI, the authors argue, arises when it is pitched at a too high level, has the ambition to replace existing social security and to provide enough to live on. But a less ambitious partial basic income could have a role in the reformation of the tax and benefit system.
The authors suggest as an option to replace income tax allowance with a flat-rate payment (of the same value) of a bit less than £50 per week going to everybody regardless of the income level, this way also those with no earnings would benefit from it.
This kind of partial basic income would not have the same scope of more generous UBI proposals, but it could nonetheless help getting more people off means-testing benefits, addressing the gender imbalance in the benefit system and in dampening income fluctuations.
“… as there continues to be disagreement on ultimate aims and objectives, we need to move the debate on to practicalities. A partial basic income, working with rather than replacing the social security system, is a good place to start”.
More information at:
Declan Gaffney and Karen Buck, “The practical response to our society’s widening inequality? A partial basic income”, Left Foot Forward, September 3rd 2018
