by Karl Widerquist | Nov 26, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This post is one of several previewing the book I’m writing on Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments, and it is the second of two reviewing the five Negative Income Tax (NIT) experiments conducted by the U.S. and Canadian Government in the 1970s. This post draws heavily on my earlier work, “A Failure to Communicate: What (if anything) Can We Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments.”
Last week I argued that the results from the NIT experiments for various quality-of-life indicators were substantial and encouraging and that the labor-market effects implied that the policy was affordable. As promising as the results were to the researchers involved the NIT experiments, they were seriously misunderstood in the public discussion at the time. But the discussion in Congress and in the popular media displayed little understanding of the complexity. The results were spun or misunderstood and used in simplistic arguments to reject NIT or any form of guaranteed income offhand.
The experiments were of most interest to Congress and the media during the period from 1970 to 1972, when President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which had some elements of an NIT, was under debate in Congress. None of the experiments were ready to release final reports at the time. Congress insisted researchers produce some kind of preliminary report, and then members of Congress criticized the report for being “premature,” which was just what the researchers had initially warned.[i]
Results of the fourth and largest experiment, SIME/DIME, were released while Congress was debating a policy proposed by President Carter, which had already moved quite a way from the NIT model. Dozens of technical reports with large amounts of data were simplified down to two statements: It decreased work effort and it supposedly increased divorce. The smallness of the work disincentive effect hardly drew any attention. Although researchers going into the experiments agreed that there would be some work disincentive effect and were pleased to find it was small enough to make the program affordable, many members of Congress and popular media commentators acted as if the mere existence of a work disincentive effect was enough to disqualify the program. The public discussion displayed little, if any, understanding that the 5%-to-7.9% difference between the control and experimental groups is not a prediction of the national response. Nonacademic articles reviewed by one of the authors[ii] showed little or no understanding that the response was expected to be much smaller as a percentage of the entire population, that it could potentially be counteracted by the availability of good jobs, or that it could be the first step necessary for workers to command higher wages and better working conditions.
The United Press International simply got the facts wrong, saying that the SIME/DIME study showed that “adults might abandon efforts to find work.” The UPI apparently did not understand the difference between increasing search time and completely abandoning the labor market. The Rocky Mountain News claimed that the NIT “saps the recipients’ desire to work.” The Seattle Times presented a relatively well-rounded understanding of the results, but despite this, simply concluded that the existence of a decline in work effort was enough to “cast doubt” on the plan. Others went even farther, saying that the existence of a work disincentive effect was enough to declare the experiments a failure. Headlines such as “Income Plan Linked to Less Work” and “Guaranteed Income Against Work Ethic” appeared in newspapers following the hearings. Only a few exceptions such as Carl Rowan for the Washington Star (1978) considered that it might be acceptable for people working in bad jobs to work less, but he could not figure out why the government would spend so much money to find out whether people work less when you pay them to stay home.[iii]
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was one of the few social scientists in the Senate, wrote, “But were we wrong about a guaranteed income! Seemingly it is calamitous. It increases family dissolution by some 70 percent, decreases work, etc. Such is now the state of the science, and it seems to me we are honor bound to abide by it for the moment.” Senator Bill Armstrong of Colorado, mentioning only the existence of a work-disincentive effect, declared the NIT, “An acknowledged failure,” writing, “Let’s admit it, learn from it, and move on.”[iv]
Robert Spiegelman, one of the directors of SIME/DIME, defended the experiments, writing that they provided much-needed cost estimates that demonstrated the feasibility of the NIT. He said that the decline in work effort was not dramatic, and could not understand why so many commentators drew such different conclusions than the experimenters. Gary Burtless (1986) remarked, “Policymakers and policy analysts … seem far more impressed by our certainty that the effective price of redistribution is positive than they are by the equally persuasive evidence that the price is small.”[v]
This public discussion certainly displayed “a failure to communicate.” The experiments produced a great deal of useful evidence, but for by-far the greatest part, it failed to raise the level of debate either in Congress or in public forums. The literature review reveals neither supporter nor opponents who appeared to have a better understanding of the likely effects of the NIT and UBI in the discussions following the release of the results of the experiments in the 1970s.[vi]
Whatever the causes for it, an environment with a low understanding of complexity is highly vulnerable to spin with simplistic if nearly vacuous interpretation. All sides spin, but in the late 1970s NIT debate, only one side showed up. The guaranteed income movement that had been so active in the United States at the beginning of the decade had declined to the point that it was able to provide little or no counter-spin to the enormously negative discussion of the experimental results in the popular media.
Whether the low information content of the discussion in the media resulted more from spin, sensationalism, or honest misunderstanding is hard to determine. But whatever the reasons, the low-information discussion of the experimental results put the NIT (and, in hindsight, UBI by proxy) in an extremely unfavorable light, when the scientific results were mixed-to-favorable.
The scientists who presented the data are not entirely to blame for this misunderstanding. Neither can all of it be blamed on spin, sound bites, sensationalism, conscious desire to make an oversimplified judgment, or the failure of reports to do their homework. Nor can all of it be blamed on the people involved in political debates not paying sufficient attention. It is inherently easier to understand an oversimplification than it is to understand the genuine complexity that scientific research usually involves no matter how painstakingly it is presented. It may be impossible to communicate the complexities to most nonspecialists readers in the time a reasonable person to devote to the issue.
Nevertheless, everyone needs to try to do better next time. And we can do better. Results from experiments in conducted in Namibia and India in the early 2010s and late ’00s were much better understood, as resulted from Canada’s Mincome experiment that sadly did not come out until more than two decades after that experiment was concluded.
The book I’m working on is an effort to help reduce misunderstandings with future experiments. It is aimed at a wide audience because it focuses the problem of communication from specialists to non-specialists. I hope to help researchers involved in current and future experiments design and report their findings in ways that are more likely to raise the level of debate; to help researchers not involved in the experiments raise the level of discussion when they write about the findings of the experiment, to help journalists understand and report experimental findings more accurately; and to help interested citizens of all political predispositions see beyond any possible spin and media misinterpretations to the complexities of the results of this next round of experiments—whatever they turn out to be.
[i] Widerquist, 2005.
[ii] Widerquist, 2005.
[iii] Widerquist, 2005.
[iv] Widerquist, 2005.
[v] Burtless, 1986.
[vi] Widerquist, 2005.
by Guest Contributor | Nov 22, 2017 | Opinion
Portuguese basic income activist Miguel Horta is pushing for a basic income “for all.” Horta wants to ensure that the people control their basic income, not the government.
Horta is an employee of Portugal’s Finance Ministry, where he deals with tax avoidance issues. He originally heard about the “gratuity of life” from Agostinho da Silva. Eventually he came across basic income, and believed there was a close connection between the two ideas.
From there, Horta developed a financing scheme for Portugal.
In October, Horta was interviewed by Basic Income Korea Network’s Hysong Ahn. The interview was originally published in Korea’s The Times. The full interview can be found below.
Miguel Horta, on left. Hyosang Ahn , on right.
First, can you tell us about your previous employment, and your current role in the UBI movement?
I worked as a tax inspector for the Portuguese government since 1995.
My position in the movement Basic Income of All for All is that of a member equal to all the others. Our movement does not assign specific functions to its members, nor does it have any kind of hierarchy.
What are your personal and group activities since you adopted the basic income idea in the early 1990s?
Despite being ready for it since the 1990s, as I said before, personally I had no activity related to basic income before 2013. That’s when I heard about an organized activist group on the internet for the first time, and I joined it.
In the first two or three years of activism, my activity was essentially to participate in public discussions about basic income, especially on the internet, and to study the question of its financing.
Later, we founded our local movement in Lisbon and began to organize public events to discuss the idea; to get in touch with other organizations and activist groups from other causes, to show them the basic income proposals; and, whenever we have the opportunity, organize debates on basic income with students in secondary schools.
We are also active on the internet, with a blog, a YouTube channel and a Facebook page.
Explain the differences between the movement “Basic Income of All for All’ and the other groups or persons in the basic income movement in Portugal.
Other groups and individuals generally conceive of basic income as the demand for a “right” made by the people from the State or, if not from the State, from central banks, the financial sector, or large corporations. This is a conception of basic income as a “top-down” program, a program of power, be it political, monetary, or economic power.
In contrast, our movement conceives of basic income as a construction of ordinary people, who will emancipate themselves and make a different society happen, by their own efforts and for their own good.
So, our basic income model is different because it is a people’s program. This has important implications. One is this: we are convinced that a basic income made by any of those “powers” I mentioned will probably end up being put to the service of that same power. In a matter of time, a basic income offered by a government will eventually be used by that same government, or, if not the same, by other future governments, for their own electoral purposes or, in a worse scenario, to keep population under its control. Similarly, a basic income offered by an economic power will likely be put at the service of the economy; one offered by a monetary power will most probably be used as a mere tool to manage inflation rates, and so on. The basic income we propose, on the contrary, being directly financed and controlled by ordinary people, is much more likely to remain at the exclusive service of the people.
Moreover, the basic income models other groups and individuals advocate are often shaped to fit in and to be friendly to their previous ideologies or causes. For instance, that’s the case of a basic income financed with taxes over capital, as a way of favoring the working class; or with taxes over speculative financial operations, as a way of favoring a moralization of financial practices; or with taxes over alcohol, as a way of favoring people’s health, and so on.
Our movement is different here too. For us, basic income should not be the way to serve any other cause apart from everybody’s freedom and dignity. For that purpose, we focus only on people, not on particular population groups (such as the rich and the poor, workers and capitalists, “good consumers” and “bad consumers”, etc.), and the goal is everyone to be treated absolutely the exact same way, as equal peers, through the process of solidarity we conceived, which requires the same effort from all and gives the same benefit to all.
So, the idea that animates our movement differs from others also in this: we do not want basic income to favor one social or economic group over another. We want to benefit all individuals, and we like to see our proposal as a way to reconcile interests and promote the best for absolutely everyone in society.
Is the Portuguese government likely to accept the plan your group proposed?
The Portuguese government doesn’t seem ready to accept it at the moment. I hope that will happen in the future, but it will depend on the support we can find within the Portuguese society, and perhaps abroad.
Of course, we are aware that it will probably be easier for a government to please their citizens by offering them some sort of “helicopter money”, without requiring any active role or effort from them, than to allow a scheme that assigns such role and demands such efforts, as ours does.
Either way, we will be doing our best to present our idea and to encourage people to consciously decide the solution they will support.
What began your interest in Basic Income?
I was ready to adopt the idea since the early 1990s, when I heard an old man declaring on TV: “Men were not born to work, but to create”. The man’s name was Agostinho da Silva, a Portuguese mystic and poet, who used to talk and write a lot about a future in which machines would do all the work, while people would create, contemplate, improve themselves or do whatever they wanted. His message made total sense to me, and so, many years later, when I first heard the name “basic income”, I understood it immediately as the path to the future that Agostinho da Silva used to talk about, and I joined the cause that same minute.
What aspects of Basic Income do you focus on?
When I first started working on the idea, my first focus was on the financial question: how to finance a basic income, from what source, and what financial effects it would have, both for people and for the State sphere.
But I’ve shifted my focus since then. Now my main interest is to understand the profound implications of different models of basic income on people’s freedom, sense of purpose and attitude towards material goods.
Explain the current situation of basic income movement in Portugal. And what is your evaluation?
The movement seems to be growing slowly but steadily. The number of activists and the public actively involved in the discussion, both on the internet and in face-to-face events, have grown in recent years.
And the movement is growing not only in numbers but also in maturity, as people involved become aware of the wide variety of different things “basic income” can potentially become (being possible to classify as “basic income” not only different but even opposite schemes, in their essential features).
This is what enabled us in Lisbon to create an organized group to defend a single one of all these possibilities, something impossible two or three years ago. I’m talking, of course, about the movement “Basic Income of All for All”.
What is the political and philosophical background of your basic income scheme?
It is the conviction that solidarity among people is the right foundation for a society.
A community where people are bound by mutual solidarity will promote the best possible life for all. Although you might say that this is a mere personal inclination – in the sense that I just prefer to believe in this rather than the opposite – the idea is nevertheless reinforced by the recognition that all ancient human societies were based on solidarity. In the tribe, the hunted animal did not belong to its hunter, but to all in the group. In the tribe everybody shared the same luck and resources, and looked after each other. This is how humankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years – the most of our time on Earth – until the rise of the first sophisticated civilizations and empires, and, mostly, before the emergence of the “empire” of capitalism; which now rules everywhere, shaping human societies with the values of competition rather than cooperation, and accumulation instead of sharing. Clearly, this is not fostering our freedom or happiness as the “old” solidarity would.
Do you have any strategy to introduce the basic income scheme in Portugal?
In fact, I developed a plan for that purpose a few months ago, and together with my fellow members of the movement Basic Income of All for All, we took the plan to the Portuguese Minister of Labor, Solidarity, and Social Security.
In very simplified terms, the plan is to create a governmental pilot program, allowing small local communities to apply and, in those accepted, exempt voluntary members from national personal income tax, provided they begin to share a part (half) of their income between them.
So, this would begin to be applied in voluntary communities and, in these, by volunteer persons. In these communities, a common fund would then be created, and the volunteers would start putting half of all their incomes, of any source, in it. At the end of each month, the fund’s accumulated total would be equally and unconditionally distributed by them, creating for the participants a basic income based on local solidarity.
The government would manage the scale of the pilot program at will. It may start with one or two communities and then, if the results turn out to be good and there are other communities willing to do the same, expand the program in succession until, in the limit, it becomes a nationwide program.
In the Portuguese reality, the impact on the State budget of such a scheme should not be negative, mainly because the creation of the universal income guarantee would render a wide range of social programs useless, thus allowing savings of amounts close to the lost revenue of the personal income tax for the State.
As for the Portuguese government’s response, we are still waiting for it…In any case, the plan does not depend exclusively on that answer; it can be applied anywhere in the world.
Interview by:
Hysong Ahn, Basic Income Korea Network
Edited by:
Tyler Prochazka
André Coelho (contributed to introduction)
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The devil’s in the details is a common saying about policy proposals. Perhaps we need a similar saying for policy research, something like the devil’s in the caveats
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. By this, I mean that the evidence any particular piece of research can provide is only a small part of the evidence people need to fully evaluate policy proposals. Non-specialists involved in the debate over that policy are often unable to translate caveats about the limits of research into a firm grasp of what that research does and does not imply about the policies they want evaluated. Therefore, even the best scientific policy research can leave nonspecialists with an oversimplified, or simply wrong, impression of its implications for policy.
For example, popular media reports about medical research often leave people in the United States today with the impression that the medical professionals make widely swinging recommendations about prevention and treatment of diseases, when medical consensus is actually slow to change and even slower to reverse a change once made. It is possible that the misperception of an erratic medical consensus exists because nonspecialists don’t have the background to understand the difference between a medical consensus and an oversimplified or sensationalized report of one study.
Whatever the problems of this type are with medical research, they are likely to be much greater with social science research in general and Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments in particular. At least some medical research is fairly straightforward. Many medicines affect people only on an individual basis, and all we might want to know about a medicine is whether it is safe and effective. In many cases, medical research can address that question directly in a controlled experiment, and hopefully, it’s not too difficult to communicate the results to nonspecialists.
Although medical experiments might not always be this straightforward, UBI experiments can never be straightforward. I believe this problem is so big that I’m working on a book, provisionally titled Basic Income Experiments—The Devil’s in the Details, to discuss the enormous difficulty of conducting a UBI experiment that successfully raises the level of political debate over UBI.
UBI has complex economic, political, social, and cultural effects that cannot be observed in a controlled experiment. Researchers conducting experiments know that experimental evidence alone cannot fully answer the big questions about UBI: does it work? Is it cost-effective? Should we introduce it on a national level? They have to be content with making a small contribution to a large body of knowledge about UBI. When research is conducted of, by, and for specialists, mutual understanding of the limits of research usually requires no more a simple list of caveats, many of which can go without mention in a group with a great deal of shared, specialized knowledge.
The same is not true when policymakers and citizens make up part of the audience of research—as they do for research on major policy issues such as UBI. Citizens and policymakers want answers to the big questions mentioned above; they understandably try to interpret experimental results in light of those questions. But as I will argue throughout the book, they have great difficulty understanding what UBI experiments do and do not imply about those big questions. The devil is in the caveats.
Most academic specialists are professionals at writing for other academics within the same specialty but amateurs at communicating with nonspecialists. The book argues that these communications barriers affect not only how specialists report their research to nonspecialists but also how they design and conduct it.
It is no coincidence that UBI experiments are getting underway just after an enormous growth in the discussion of UBI in many countries around the world. In that environment, one of the goals of UBI experiments is—or ought to be—to raise the level of debate over UBI. The book will argue that past experiments have a mixed record in raising the level of debate over UBI: although all of them have provided valuable evidence, some have succeeded in raising the level of debate, and some have been so misunderstood that they might well have had an overall negative affect on the level of debate. This effort to raise the level of political debate (like the UBI debate) requires knowledge and skills that researchers have no special training to do and creates risks that research aimed purely at other researchers does not have, including the vulnerability to spin, misuse, sensationalism, or oversimplification.
The goal of the book is help researchers, policymakers, citizens, journalists, and anyone else interested in UBI experiments bridge gaps in understanding between them to help the experiments succeed in the goal of raising the level of debate. I hope that this effort will be valuable to researchers designing, conducting, and writing about UBI experiments, to policymakers commissioning and reacting to experiments, to journalists reporting on experiments, and to citizens involved in the debate or simply interested in the topic of UBI.
To help people bridge these gaps, the book has to explain how many significant barriers there are to conducting experiments that successfully raisr the level of debate. So, I will have a lot of negative things to say, but that should not distract readers from my overall enthusiasm for UBI experiments. They are worth doing, and worth doing well in all relevant ways. And to readers who are unenthusiastic about UBI experiments, I say, they are coming; it’s important to make the best of them.
A meeting during the Indian pilot project, c. 2011-2013
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 15, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in December 2001.
As I was putting this newsletter together, the National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that the U.S. economy has been in recession since last March. The delay in the diagnosis is nothing unusual because a downturn is not considered a recession unless it lasts for a significant period of time. But the point at which a recession is recognized is a good moment for reflection on the performance of the economy. Even though the United States is in a recession right now, the long-term performance of the economy as a whole over the last 20 years has been quite good. The expansion that ended in March lasted for exactly 10-years—the longest in U.S. history—and it came after a short and mild recession in the early 1990s, which followed a long, stable expansion during the 1980s. The last 20 years have had the most stable growth in U.S. economic history. The growth was not particularly rapid, but there is a lot to be said for stability. The economy may decline by a few percentage points over the course of the recession, but an economy that grows by 2 or 3 per year during economic expansions can weather the occasional downturn. Thus, although there are worrying signs on the horizon (such as a persistent trade deficit and a high and growing level of indebtedness), the verdict on the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole over the last 20 years has to be largely positive.
Good performance of the economy as a whole does not necessarily mean that it has performed well for all individuals. If one judges the success of an economy by the well being of its less advantaged individuals the performance of the U.S. economy has been terrible over the last 20 years. Real wages at the low-end of the wage spectrum have stagnated or even declined slightly. Usually, poverty declines slowly during expansions and increases quickly in recessions, but there has been no lasting progress in reducing poverty since the early 1970s. The official poverty rate has been stuck in a range between 11% and 15% since the early 1970s. There was an extremely rapid decline in poverty in the 1940s and again in the 1960s, but it has not been repeated since. The ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were marred by frequent recessions, but individuals across the economic spectrum were able to count on gains during the expansions that would more than make up for losses during recessions. The ’70s were a period of instability in which the less advantaged lost ground, and since then there has been no return to the progress experienced earlier.
Why were the experiences of the less advantaged so different during the good economic times of the ’80s and ’90s than they were in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s? The difference is largely one of government policy. The earlier period saw the GI Bill, the fruition of Social Security, the expansion of AFDC and Medicare, increases in the minimum wage and the creation of Food Stamps and Medicaid. Since the early 1970s, many of these programs have been canceled or allowed to lapse or have been effectively cut by not being adjusted for inflation. These programs were not the best possible programs for fighting poverty, but they were all we had, and rather than being reformed, they’ve largely been cut with little or nothing to replace them aside from TANF, which seems to make welfare so unpleasant that jobs without living wages are preferable. TANF has been declared a success simply because it has reduced the number of families on welfare. The success of TANF should be measured instead by whether it reduces poverty and whether it makes children healthier and happier and whether it helps them grow into better-adjusted adults. Should it be any surprise cutting nearly every program designed to aid the poor should slow or stop the progress we had been making toward the reduction of poverty? Something else is needed if poverty reduction is our goal.
During recessions, people often voice opposition to direct anti-poverty policies, arguing that the best way to help people is to get the economy moving again. During expansions, the argument is usually to keep it moving or to get it moving faster. They say, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and everyone benefits from economic growth. But the lesson to learn from the last twenty years of economic expansion is that these arguments are simply false. The incomes of low-wage workers stagnated during the good economic times of the ’80s and ’90s because policy turned against the redistribution of income, but they increased during the good economic times of ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s because policy favored increased redistribution of income. There is no inherent mechanism in a capitalist economy to ensure that everyone will share in the fruits of economic growth. I believe that a basic income guarantee is essential to ensure that everyone shares in our economic success. This and other strategies for better distributional equity will be discussed at the First Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. I invite you to join us.
Karl Widerquist, New York, NY, December 2001.
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by Aleksander Masternak | Nov 13, 2017 | Opinion
Philippe Van Parijs, co-founder of BIEN and professor emeritus at Université catholique de Louvain, presented a talk about Basic Income and citizen work duties at the Q Berlin conference, held on the 19th and 20th of October 2017. This was the first installment of Q Berlin but it is set to become an annual event where specialists and influencers from various fields present talks and answer audience questions on five broad topics. [1] Van Parijs’ talk concerned the topic, ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
When I heard this question, the first thought that sprang to mind was ‘what should a government faced with an unmanageable level of unemployment do when conventional policy has failed to resolve the issue?’ Perhaps then a seemingly radical solution, such as universal basic income (UBI), becomes plausible.
Van Parijs took a different take on this question: what would human beings do when they need not work to survive? Critics of UBI persistently raise concerns that individuals who are not incentivised to work will become idle because they will apparently have nothing left to do. Van Parijs argued that any reasonable proponents of the policy understand that people will have things to do.
UBI frees individuals from having to work, allowing them to broadly pursue their own conception of the good life. Those who prefer to become employed would hold more negotiation leverage with their employer. In fact, Van Parijs stated that UBI gives individuals the freedom to say ‘yes’ to jobs. Individuals will not have to do that which they do not wish to do. Fewer people will engage in menial and unsatisfying work.
UBI creates a floor (minimum level) on the income distribution curve, alleviates poverty, and gives bargaining power to the ones who have it least. In this way UBI acts as a systematic subsidy for all underpaid or unpaid jobs that are undervalued by the market but which people wish to do. With UBI, the demand for menial, gruelling work is expected to decrease. Van Parijs theorised employers may be forced to increase the wages for such jobs.
Van Parijs presented UBI as venture capital that allowed individuals to do anything they wish to do. Those who prefer to change fields can invest in education and training. The option to retrain is a particularly pertinent concern for those whose job is at risk of automation.
Forgetting about work for a moment (if you can), think about what you should do when your physiological needs are no longer a concern. If you’ve had a passion at the back of your mind then you might finally pursue it. If, on the other hand, you’ve passed life going from one kind of busy to another, then you might have missed opportunities to reflect and figure out what you would like to be doing. The cost of failure may have been too high if it meant putting you or your family’s livelihood at risk.
At this point in the talk, Van Parijs paused and asked the audience a question. Assuming UBI ensures a basic livelihood for everyone in a community, do these citizens have a duty to give back by working? Do individuals have a duty to accept paid, available employment? Some supported the idea, more disagreed. He then reframed the question and drew a distinction between formal employment and work broadly. Do individuals have a duty to do something? Van Parijs asked the audience to think of examples of socially-beneficial work. Most respondents agreed individuals have a duty to do something, apparently if it is socially beneficial.
Van Parijs preferred not to tell others what they should do. When asked off-stage, he said he has his own conception of the good life and was reluctant to share the details. Rather he said there was something about people helping each other for its own sake that makes for a good society. A society is not well functioning if it’s members are not interested in actively improving each other’s well-being. Working for your community takes several forms. Van Parijs drew the example of caring for the those who cannot care for themselves (such as the elderly, children and disabled). One could volunteer for various causes they care about, whether they be social, environmental, tech-related or so on.
Even if you disagree that working for your community (or giving back) is a duty, if you’re not doing anything else, why not try it? In the best case, your efforts will be appreciated. Your recognition that you have alleviated the suffering of others might make you feel like you have done something meaningful. In the worst case, you might think your efforts yielded insufficiently satisfying results, be it for yourself or your target beneficiaries, and you have wasted your time. UBI provides the opportunity for you to try contributing to your community in different ways. This freedom lets you find a way to contribute that is most satisfying for yourself.
Notes:
[1] This year, the topics included: ‘Imagine yourself as the other self. How do we embrace tolerance and difference?’ ‘What will be the next social contract?’ ‘Urban Angst and Stamina. What are the promising concepts to handle the rise and fall of the city?’ ‘How should we govern at the pace of economic, social and technological change?’and ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 7, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
I have just posted a new academic article on my “selected works” cite. It’s called, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord: Toward a non-utopian theory of justice
.” Here’s a brief summary:
The hardest thing for any society to do is to avoid oppressing its least advantaged people. This article argues that well-meaning theories of justice contribute to this problem by employing utopian assumptions that imagine solving unsolvable problems. They eliminate the disadvantages they know and understand, but their overconfidence leads to errors that systematically disadvantage the least powerful people in political, social, and economic terms.
This article previews a theory of justice, I call “justice as the pursuit of accord” (JPA), which by attempting to eliminate these unrealistic assumptions, creates a fundamentally different framework than most prevailing political theories of justice. In this sense, JPA attempts to be an “agathatopian” theory with far more tentative assumptions about what is achievable. The essay introduces JPA as I have outlined it in past works, contrasts it with prevailing theories, and previews JPA property theory as I will outline it in much greater detail in the forthcoming book, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.
The main difference between JPA and more conventional social contract theories is that JPA assumes the impossibly of a contract that all rational, reasonable people will have reason to accept. Social agreements are inherently insider-outsider agreements. Under those circumstances, the article argues, a just society has a responsibility that is unrecognized by either social contract or rights-based theories of justice: to minimize negative impact of social arrangements on dissenters (the outsiders the insider-outsider agreement). Among other things, JPA provides three arguments for basic income: to protect everyone’s status as a free person, to compensate people for unequal duties imposed on them by a property rights system, and to help minimize the negative impact of all social arrangements on dissenters.
The article is online at:
Karl Widerquist, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord: Toward a non-utopian theory of justice,” Unpublished Manuscript available at SelectedWorks. Fall 2017.
