by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 28, 2013 | Opinion
Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, The Change Book: Fifty models to explain how things happen, Profile Books, 2012, 1 78125009 9, hbk, vii + 167 pp, £9.99
For each of the fifty models there is a page or two of text and a page or two of diagrams. To give a flavour: There is a page about the ‘m=3 and n=1’ model: that is, we experience three dimensions of space and one of time. The text points out that the mathematics of quantum field theory can be formulated in rather more dimensions than that, but that more than three dimensions of space would offer too little stability, fewer than three insufficient complexity (and so no gravitation), and only a single time dimension permits causality inferences. (Readers beware: the authors have muddled up their ms and their ns.) The final paragraph theorises about a multiuniverse in which universes with different numbers of time and space dimensions are uninhabitable. The following page explains the situation with a diagram: and that’s wrong, too, because the text does foresee a universe with three spatial dimensions and more than one time dimension.
To take another, more successfully executed, example: a page of text explains why economic booms and busts occur (rising share prices attract investors, falling share prices prompt selling); and a diagram usefully portrays how expected share price varies more than earnings per share (which more nearly reflects economic reality).
The models are divided into ‘Explaining our world’ (the section containing the examples above), ‘Explaining my world’, ‘changing my world’, and ‘changing our world’. The divisions are somewhat arbitrary. Take the example in which we might be most interested in this Newsletter: the Basic Income Model is located in the ‘changing my world’ section, but could equally well have been included under ‘changing our world’.
The two pages of text on a Citizen’s Income (pp. 84-5) begin with a paragraph on problems facing our society (‘the death of the social’), and then describe a Basic Income as a ‘polemical as well as fascinating concept based on the idea that those who want to work should not be hindered and those who do not want to work should not be forced to do so’. The advantages of a Citizen’s Income are well described (‘There would be no more unemployment nor the social stigma attached to it’, ‘The job market would be “freer”, etc.), and possible disadvantages are faced: for instance, ‘a restrictive immigration policy’. The authors finally offer some questions: ‘Would people become lazy …?’
The authors are clearly rather taken with the idea of a Citizen’s or Basic Income, and their enthusiasm is welcome, but the fact that the book is all about ‘change’, and preferably change as radical as possible, a Citizen’s Income is described throughout as a world-changing policy. Rather than calling the pages ‘Basic Income’, they use the title ‘What would turn our society upside down’ (without a question mark); and in the text the idea is called ‘polemical as well as fascinating’. This might not be helpful. Another way of describing a Citizen’s Income is as a minor administrative change that would deliver appreciable economic and social benefits, and it is by framing the proposal in that way that we might be more likely to see movement towards establishing a Citizen’s Income.
The following two pages offer a very useful, and rather less polemical, diagram, showing the connections between the current benefits system and a system based on a Basic Income (wage labour, money, and social status) and the differences: minimal bureaucracy in place of lots, freedom in place of stigmatisation, a focus on potential rather than a focus on need, and good wages for bad jobs rather than bad wages for bad jobs. The only problem with the ‘Basic Income’ side of the diagram is that’s entitled ‘utopia’. It wouldn’t be.
In the edition of The Big Issue for the 14th to the 20th January Mikael Krogerus has written a two page article about The Change Book. The three models featured are about the pain that results from change, about how world governance might evolve, and about ‘What would turn our society upside down?’ (this time with a question mark) – and here he repeats the full text and diagram from the four pages in the book about Basic Income.
There is much food for thought in The Change Book, and particularly in the pages on a Citizen’s Income.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jun 24, 2013 | Opinion
In April 2012, grassroots organizations and citizens of 15 EU member states united their strengths to promote Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) in the EU and started the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) for UBI. It was a hard job to introduce this ECI, to get it registrated and accepted, to translate it in the several EU languages, to contact the relevant national authority and publish the certificate on their website. But on 14 January 2013, the organizers of this initiative finally obtained the green light of the EU commission!
The ECI is not only new for the UBI movement. It is new to the European Union as whole. A little background is in order.
The ECI had to be a huge step forwards towards democracy and more European citizens participation in allowing 1 million European citizens to participate directly in the development of European policies, by calling on the European Commission to make a legislative proposal. An ECI is a form of petition created under the 2009 Lisbon Treaty to encourage grassroots involvement in European lawmaking.
Citizens all over Europe can launch an ECI in order to invite the European Commission to propose legislation on matters where the European Union has competence to legislate. A citizens initiative is possible in any field where the EU Commission has the power to propose legislation, for example environment, agriculture, transport, public health.
(for more basic facts, https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/basic-facts)
The European Commission launched the ECI on the 1st of April 2012. An April fool’s day joke, some must have thought, and maybe they were right?
The ECI is now a one year old child. And of course baby’ first footsteps always are difficult…
Nevertheless, is there something to celebrate? The promise of a significantly higher level of citizens’ participation has not yet been fulfilled. Many ECIs were launched, signatures collected all across Europe…So far for the “better news”
But… ECI reality is gloomy. Of the nearly 30 proposed ECIs, only 14 have successfully registered and just one – focusing on water rights – has gathered the required one million signatures. But it falls short of requirements because the signatures come only from five EU States, two short of the minimum needed: a citizen’s initiative has to be backed by at least one million citizens coming from
at least 7 out of the 27 member states!
From the beginning, difficulties piled up for all ECIs. It started with the failure of the online open source software for collecting statements of support provided by the EU commission: it simply didn’t work and now it only does so through an incomplete and temporary solution.
The ECI for UBI had to deal with all the ECI initial problems and could only start with a delay because of the failure of the open source software. So, instead of 14 January 2013, this initiative only could start later in March 2013, a loss of three months. One might think and hope, the EU commission would move the deadline of 14 January 2014 to 14 March 2014. Unfortunately, this proves still impossible today.
Moreover, there are still too many people in the EU who just do not know that they can influence European politics by launching an ECI! So, the organizers of an ECI have to do a double job: explain about the ECI’s possibilities and explain the own ongoing ECI, in our case the ECI for UBI.
Fewer and fewer people believe in Europe. So one can imagine, how difficult it is for grassroots campaigners to explain to their public that the ECI is a ‘tool’ for more participative democracy in Europe and how even more difficult it is to motivate the same public to give their statement of support for UBI in Europe: Europe does not listen to its citizens, doesn’t know any longer its needs and hopes, so why would the EU commission develop something that’s no more no less than a utopia? These are some of the answers the ECI for UBI grassroots campaigner hears every day!
Technical and practical requirements are complicated too and some Member States administrations are busier erecting barriers than bringing them down: they dress a big wall in front of the citizens, (especially when they hear about unconditional basic income: it seems to bother them in their comfortable positions of policy and law makers) and answer the questions of ECI campaigners with: sorry, this is not within our competence, you’ll have to ask the EU commission, your national authorities, your regional or local political representatives…a never ending story!
Moreover, millions of European citizens are denied their rights to support an initiative, either because they don’t have one of the identification documents that is accepted on the online form or because they reside outside of their home country.
And what to think about the “homeless” citizens: I met some of them in my city, and they want to support the ECI for UBI, but nobody informs them, not the NGO, neither the organizations supposing to help them. It’s a dilemma: are they European citizens, or are they not? And yet, the ECI for UBI isn’t it supposed to combat poverty and social inequality? So when they give me their signature on the paper form, shall this signature be approved by the EU commission?
So many questions…so many difficulties. How long will the ECI for UBI grassroots campaigners still remain motivated to attract the streets and proclaim the message?
Let’s have a nearer look to the ECI for UBI campaign:
https://basicincome2013.eu/ubi/counter/
Total signatures on 7 June 2013 – 08:00 (day 78 of 299): 47.645
We have 217 days to go! We need to reach at least 1.000.000 EU citizens.
Does this need more comment?
So we call up the European Commission to turn in a common, high-visibility appearance to Europe’s citizens and explain to them that the ECI is an excellent opportunity to determine the EU’s political agenda and to declare they will undertake all efforts needed to support each initiative that was registered by the EU commission in giving more information about this initiative in the press or in the media all over Europe and to encourage the member states to inform their citizens about an ongoing ECI and explain the challenge of it too. Each citizen in every member state should be allowed to participate in an ECI with sufficient knowledge about it! The ECI is a legal right of European citizenship. The failure to inform European citizens about an ongoing ECI is a democratic deficit!
The ECI can be a win-win operation to both the European Commission and her citizens. But as long this EU institution sits in her ivory tower and only pops out her nose to impose us with austerity measures, the ECI’s won’t work and the EU commission loses all her credibility with her public.
But maybe we, the European citizens, can help the EU commission to descend from her ivory tower: just make it happen by supporting the ECI for UBI with a tsunami of signatures of support across the European Union and remember the words of the US president Barack Obama: YES WE CAN!!
Lambrecht Christina
Representative ECI for UBI in Belgium
More about the ECI and the ECI for UBI:
https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/basic-facts
https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/ongoing
https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/ongoing
https://basicincome2013.eu/
https://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/initiatives/ongoing/details/2013/000001
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 21, 2013 | Opinion
Karl Widerquist and Michael Howard, Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its suitability as a model, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xvii + 267 pp, hbk, 0 230 11207 0, £62.50
In 1967 oil was found in the relatively new state of Alaska; in 1976 a constitutional amendment established the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) to receive 25% of oil royalties; and in 1982 the fund paid out the first Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) to every Alaskan citizen: the same amount to every individual. The world had its first Citizen’s Income.
This important edited collection tells the political and legislative story of the APF and PFD, explains their operation, and discusses the dividend’s economic impacts ( – from being the US state with the most unequal net incomes in 1980, Alaska is now the state with the least net income inequality: p.53). Chapter 5 shows how distributing a dividend from a permanent fund generates political protection for resource revenues; chapter 6 explores the trade-off between higher average dividends and lower volatility facing any permanent fund administrators; and chapters 7 and 8 ask what will happen when the oil stops flowing: Will the Alaskan economy be in sufficiently good shape for the Permanent Fund to remain a political possibility?
In the second part of the book a number of authors debate the ethics of the Alaskan model. They find that Left-Libertarianism requires the collection and distribution of the natural resource components of all privately owned wealth; that the PFD constitutes a kind of Citizen’s Income (though the fact that it fluctuates compromises its ability to behave like one); that if the dividend were to be transformed into a capital sum for every citizen at the age of majority, then citizens would become genuine stakeholders in the economy (with the temptations that that would bring); that the dividend only ambiguously coheres with a republican ‘freedom-as-nondomination’ perspective; that registering for the PFD makes the individual citizen complicit in the oil industry’s contribution to climate change (though if Alaskan citizens were at the same time to prevent the same amount of climate change as Alaska’s oil industry causes then they would escape this charge); and that a Citizen’s Income can be consistent with a variety of moral theories. Finally, Widerquist and Howard draw a number of lessons: that resource dividends work, that they are popular, that they can be established anywhere politicians are willing to look for opportunities (as Governor Jay Hammond did); that governments need to assert community ownership of resources; and that coalitions need to be built if resource dividends are to be established and then defended.
We have waited a long time for a thorough book-length treatment of the APF and PFD, and Widerquist and Howard have served us well by pulling together such a relevant and coherent collection of essays. The one weakness is not of their making: As Scott Goldsmith suggests in chapter 4, there has been too little research on the economic and social impacts of the APF and the PFD. The research needs to be done and a second edition of the book then published so that we can all benefit from the results.
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 17, 2013 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
While voters of the United States were loudly debating gun control, the deficit, the debt, taxes, immigrant rights, the filibuster law, health care, and a host of other issues, the Obama administration quietly did something that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. It ordered the military to allow women to serve routinely in combat units. Other changes that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago also seem to be underway. Nine states now have same-sex marriage, when as recently as 1976, the Democratic National Convention refused to pass a resolution doing no more than recognizing homosexuals as human beings. After thousands of years of prohibition, Britain, and France seem to be on the verge of legalizing same-sex marriage at virtually the same time. Now anyone who identifies as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and of non-binary sexuality can be just as happy as any heterosexual couple out there.
Big changes often feel far away until they come. Few people in 1926 could have guessed that the United States was within ten years of introducing a near-universal system of old age pensions that would eventually almost eliminate poverty among the elderly. Few people in 1856 could have guessed that the United States was within ten years of the end of slavery–in fact support for slavery in the north was still very high.
Supporters of the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) should remember this lesson. BIG is far from mainstream politics in America today. But there are many people who want to see a fairer distribution of property and who would be interested in a new and better way to make it happen. Movements such as “Occupy” have turned people’s attention to how unequal our society has become in recent decades. If BIG remains a viable, well-thought-out option, the possibility that might suddenly become a political reality remains.
-Karl Widerquist, waiting for Proteus to roll down Napoleon Avenue, Lundi Gras, 2013
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 14, 2013 | Opinion
Götz Werner and Adrienne Goehler, 1000€ für Jeden: Freiheit, Gleichheit, Grundeinkommen [€1000 for each person: freedom, equality, Basic Income] Ullstein, 2010, 267 pp, pbk, 978 3 548 37421 5, £6.56
It is unusual for us to review foreign language books in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, but an exception surely has to be made for this German book which has been a consistent bestseller, significantly in the ‘business’ category. 1 (Because the book’s content is so tightly tied to the German context it is unlikely to be translated into English, which is why we are reviewing the German text rather than waiting for an English translation.)
The first part of the book discusses the German political context and the Citizen’s Income debate within it. This is followed by sections on what the authors take to be essential elements of the definition of a Citizen’s Income: large enough to cover subsistence needs; for every individual; without means-test; and without work-test. Objections are then answered, particularly in relation to labour market participation. An interesting section uses the fact that most lottery winners remain in the labour market as important evidence. The concept of ‘work’ is then broadened beyond the labour market, and a variety of imagined personal situations show how a Citizen’s Income would promote diverse kinds of work.
Werner is a successful entrepreneur, so perhaps it is not surprising that rather too much space is then given to how workplaces have changed during the past few decades and how they might be further humanised with the help of a Citizen’s Income. Even more space is then given to the German education system and how it might be reformed.
The authors discuss implementation of a Citizen’s Income scheme, and suggest that it should be paid first for children and young people and then to older people (largely because women’s historically low labour market participation means that they are often ill-prepared financially for old age). An interesting section suggests that the income security we need was once provided by the family but now cannot be, and that only a Citizen’s Income will be able to fill the gap.
A chapter on the results of the Namibian Citizen’s Income pilot project contains too much about microcredit.
1000€ per month is a lot of money. The authors intend to pay for a Citizen’s Income this large through taxing consumption rather than income and by abolishing most other government expenditure. They write rather too much about consumption taxes and are somewhat unrealistic about the level at which they might be collectable. Whether we would wish to abolish other public expenditure to the same extent in the UK, in which we already have a universal National Health Service and universal free education based on the same principles as a Citizen’s Income, is rather doubtful.
But the authors are right to ask for radical change. We are no longer a ‘self-help’ agrarian society. We now rely heavily on other people’s work, and therefore belong to a ‘stranger-help’ society. This is a huge paradigm shift, and it suggests that a welfare system based on self-help, as social insurance is, really does now need to be replaced by a system based on ‘stranger-help’, the purest form of which can only be a Citizen’s Income.
This is a somewhat rambling book. There are long sections on matters with only oblique relationships to the Citizen’s Income proposal, and the authors frequently return to issues already discussed. A forceful editor might have prevented the authors from expatiating on their rather irrelevant enthusiasms, and could have helped them to create a more concise, more connected, and better ordered book: but what is really interesting is that this holdall of a book should have become such a best seller. I suspect that this is because within it the magnitude of the changes facing our society are expressed with some feeling, and a proposal radical enough to respond to those changes, and sufficiently feasible for implementation to be conceivable, is expounded with equal feeling. This is above all an enthusiastic book by authors who believe that real change is possible.
Thoroughly recommended to anyone with enough German to read it.
1https://www.buchreport.de/bestseller/bestseller_einzelansicht.htm?tx_bestseller_pi1%5Bisbn%5D=9783430201087
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jun 10, 2013 | Opinion
Marina P. Nóbrega – for the Municipal Council for the Citizen’s Basic Income, Santo Antonio do Pinhal, SP, Brazil
Humanity has to rescue the human solidarity that used to pervade tribal societies where wealthy was evenly shared. In our days money has to be used to that effect as great social thinkers have been preaching. In Brazil, President Lula´s law 10,835 from 2004 says that “A monthly benefit enough for the basic needs of a person will be paid equally to all. This basic income is to be instated by steps, taking care first of the most in need.” This law is still unregulated but the government, immediately after, created the successful Bolsa Familia (BF) program. Law 10,835 is unique in the world and needs to be regulated as to the steps to be taken to gradually universalize the benefit.
The Municipal Council for the Citizen’s Basic Income in the city of Santo Antonio do Pinhal has such a proposal.
Our initial proposal was to have a municipal pilot project fueled by a percentage of gross earnings from private businesses and private donations plus 6% per year from the city’s revenue. The idea was to create a fund to operate as the Alaska scheme. The Council analyzed carefully this proposal in the light of basic income principles and the practical attempts made to collect funds. We came to the conclusion that the Alaska way is impossible to succeed in our conditions besides we also do not accept that the annual and variable dividends represent the idea we have about a basic income.
Instead, we suggest that the path to Basic Income should go through 3 stages. We do not think this to be the best way for other countries but, considering Brazil’s situation, with almost 50 million under the support of the conditional BF (average of US$ 17.50 per person), we have a stepping stone to approach the final goal of including all in basic income. The steps suggested are:
Step 1 – Start the unconditional and universal basic income with all newborns in Brazil in the near future. The Council suggested that the caring parent receives US$ 35.00 per month and the same amount is deposited monthly in a savings account in name of the child, to be withdraw when he/she reaches legal age. This will be particularly valuable in two ways: it is financially viable, progressive and amenable to planning, will carry a strong symbolic value benefitting the children of the nation and pointing to a better future. This move will have a crucial educational value by giving people of all social classes time to understand the revolutionary value of a minimum income independent of work.
Step 2 – Next we suggest remove all conditionalities linked to the Bolsa Familia program. This will require that the funds for the almost 50 million involved (about 25% of our population) be doubled. We can predict that the result will be impressive economically and socially. The humiliation of means test, the complexity of the paperwork that opens the opportunity for political manipulation will vanish. The economy will benefit, and the results will be boosted by the possibility of taking regular jobs or opening a small business, both banned under the present conditionalities. These people will be freed from the known “poverty trap” created by the requirements for admission.
Step 3 – The Bolsa Familia bureaucracy can now be directed to monitor people that are still economically vulnerable but outside the government lists or people that fall into the “precariat”. They and their dependents should immediately receive the unconditional basic income.
PS: The Council can be reached by sending mail to maripnobrega@gmail.com
Phones: 55 12 9777 9115 or 55 12 3911 3839
