Why do you support UBI? Answering at the BIEN Congress in Montreal 2014
One cut with Chinese subtitles:
https://www.facebook.com/ping.shyu/videos/1013110892156223/
An overlap clip with German subtitles:
One cut with Chinese subtitles:
https://www.facebook.com/ping.shyu/videos/1013110892156223/
An overlap clip with German subtitles:
In the process of cowriting a book about the upcoming Unconditional Basic Income Trials, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of the claims that tend appear in the debate. Below are two lists: first a list of supporters’ claims and then one of opponents’ claims. I gave each claim a name to make it easier to talk about them, but these names do not reflect any standard definition. I tried to order the claims in each list from the relatively more important or more common to the relatively less important or less common.
To say that a claim appears on the supporters’ or opponents’ lists is not to say that all supporters or all opponents agree on it. In fact, some of the claims contradict each other, which is to be expected, because different people support or oppose UBI for diverse reason. They might have little in common but their support or opposition to one policy proposal.
Supporters have claimed:
Opponents have claimed:
I compiled this list from general knowledge accumulated over years of reading about the UBI debate. It is bound to be incomplete. Many more claims (of various levels of relevance, certainty, and testability) are undoubtedly circulating in the academic and nonacademic literature on UBI. But I hope it captures a significant range of what is being said. This list is enough to demonstrate the difficulty of designing a trial and communicating its results in a way that successfully raises the level of debate over these claims. Some are things that can’t be tested. Some are things that can only be tested indirectly, partially, or inconclusively. Few if any of these claims can be directed tested with any accuracy in a trial.
I’m interested to know how comprehensive people think it is. Did I include all the relevant claims you can think of? Did I overblow any claims that don’t deserve to be on the list?
The crowdfunding campaign for “The Mincome Experiment” can be found here.
The Mincome Experiment is a documentary that is as much a story about basic income as it is about human socioeconomic evolution throughout the years. Vincent Santiago, the director for the documentary, first heard that University of Manitoba professor Dr. Evelyn Forget was looking for volunteers to digitize the results of the 1970s Mincome experiment. While Santiago did not consider himself an experienced social activist, he was nevertheless keen to study possible measures to prevent government excesses that he believed could lead to growing social inequality and injustices. Santiago was convinced that basic income and open government were foundations that could help prevent social inequality and injustice.
The Mincome experiment and the concept of basic income caught Santiago’s imagination, and he took a passionate interest in seeking out more information. He finally talked to Dr. Forget on April 2014. Another opportunity arose soon after to interview then-Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, a very vocal and strong basic income advocate in Canada. Vincent Santiago read about and researched basic income and talked to economists and others. In the process, he discovered several interesting side stories not widely known, even within Canada.
Santiago wanted to make the Mincome experiment into a documentary. He soon realized there was so much story to be told. He looked into the various forms of basic income and decided the film should be told as an engaging narrative about human socioeconomic evolution. Intertwined into the historical and visionary backdrop is the concept of basic income and its role. Of the film, Santiago said:
While the Mincome experiment is very much the central theme of the documentary, the documentary also looks into other basic income experiments and the various forms and possible implementation. I’ve started calculating the various ways to pay for it and how to implement them.
The promotional trailer created for the crowdfunding campaign asks various questions typically uttered by people who are cynical or against basic income. That is because Santiago did not want to make a film only for those already familiar with basic income. He wanted to create an entertaining and fun documentary that also draws in the skeptics by presenting facts, without shying away from common ridicule and prevailing concerns.
Another project that occupies Santiago’s time is creating a low-cost, no commission fee platform for crowdfunding, curating, and showcasing creative works. With this platform, which first went into development in 2012, Santiago is now launching the crowdfunding campaign for his documentary. The Mincome Experiment project is still a long way from reaching the stated fundraising goal, but the team remains confident the amount can be reached. Efficient use of the funds would allow the project to include more engaging footage and animation for the documentary, ensuring that it will capture and convince audiences worldwide.
The crowdfunding runs until June 15, 2017 and can be found here.
Written by the team behind “The Mincome Experiment.”
I just completed some simple, “back-of-the-envelope” estimates the net cost of a UBI set at about the official poverty line: $12,000 per adult and $6,000 per child with a 50% “marginal tax rate.” They are in a paper entitled, “the Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations.” It’s currently under peer-review at an academic journal and available in un-reviewed form on my website.
Here are some of its most important findings:
-Karl Widerquist, Begun in New Orleans, completed at Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, May 21, 2017
The publisher of a paper I wrote in 2015 has now given me the right to share the published version of my own article without charge. (That is, without them charging me for sharing my own work with you.)
The title is, “The Piketty Observation against the Institutional Background: How Natural is this Natural Tendency and What Can We Do about it?” Here’s the abstract:
Thomas Piketty’s recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, provides a great deal of empirical support for the observation that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the growth rate of the economy as a whole (g); i.e. “r > g”. From this observation, Piketty derives two important insights: entrepreneurs eventually become rentiers, and except during unusual circumstances, inequality tends to rise over time. This paper views Piketty’s observation against the institutional setting that has prevailed over the period of his study and makes two additional observations. First, whether Piketty’s two insights follow from his observation depends not simply on whether r is greater than g, but on whether the difference between the two is greater than the consumption of the capital-owning group. The relative size of capitalists’ consumption and capital income is not obvious, and therefore, more evidence is needed to confirm the connection between Piketty’s observation and his insights. Second, the statement r has been greater than g is more accurate than simply r is greater than g. Whether r continues to exceed g depends crucially on the political and institutional environment in question. Economists tend to view one specific institutional setting, a version of laissez faire, as natural. But there is no natural set of property institutions, and those that have prevailed over the two centuries of Piketty’s observations are extremely favorable to capital owners. Awareness of the flexibility of potential property institutions raises many ethical questions and makes many tools available to address inequality – one of the most obvious being the taxation of rent on capital distributed as a basic income
Citation Information: Karl Widerquist (2015), “The Piketty Observation against the Institutional Background: How Natural is this Natural Tendency and What Can We Do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10(1): 83–90.
Joe Huston, the CFO of GiveDirectly, speaks with the UBI Podcast about the largest basic income trial in history.
The trial is in its earliest stage and will expand later, giving entire communities a basic income in Kenya.
A 12-year basic income will be provided to 40 villages, 80 villages will receive basic income for 2 years. A lump-sum payment will be given to 80 villages. There will be 100 villages that will act as control groups.
One interesting takeaway is that Huston said they are already seeing some “spillover benefits.”
“I expect there will be spillover benefits. We kicked off in one pilot village, and already the surrounding villages have mentioned people are buying more services and goods,” Huston said.
When discussing pilot programs, the environmental impact of basic income is often overlooked. Huston said that GiveDirectly does not take a position on this, but he said developed countries should take the lead on the environment.
“My personal view is for these environmental goals you’d want to solve through other means, international treaties or the developed world stepping up, verses trying to slow down development of very very poor areas,” he said.
As the research begins to come out about basic income, Huston said he hopes it can inform the debate about how to best form the social safety net.
“I think evidence from the UBI study showing those who are just poor but receive money and put that toward investment that have big life-changing effects, I think that could change how social protection is done in those countries,” Huston said.
Previously, even after cash-transfer pilots end, Huston said that they continue to see positive effects.
“GiveDirectly’s first study measured effects up to a year after payments stopped…and you still saw pretty strong effects on earnings, assets, food security, reduction in stress levels,” Huston said.
Stress was measured through looking at cortisol levels, which saw significant declines after cash-transfers were administered, Huston said.
Once the 12-year study ends, Huston said he expects they will continue to follow up with these villages to see if there are permanent effects of basic income on these areas.
“We have the potential to end extreme poverty globally, many countries have the potential to end whatever they consider their national poverty line. And that potential…is extraordinarily exciting. It is a huge opportunity for our generation,” Huston said.
“Then the question is, ‘why wouldn’t we test this?'”