Money for Nothing – it Sounds Like a Utopia

Money for Nothing – it Sounds Like a Utopia

The London-based Apolitical website’s article on basic income (BI) opens with “Money for nothing – it sounds like a utopia” and then looks at some examples of BI concepts that have already been applied around the world.

This phrase, “money for nothing” represents a commonly held bias that, when there is no commodity returned for the money, whether that commodity is a thing or someone’s labour, then there is no tangible value returned for the monies. This bias is widely held and promoted by many adherents of modern-day economic theories – a bias which too often dismisses, or simply ignores, the numerous personal and societal benefits that others have evaluated and documented as attributable to BI models.

The article does a fairly good job of maintaining its organizational claim of being “apolitical” in that it does not overtly favour any particular side in the issue. Yet that does not mean it has escaped the narrow-minded focus that so many politicians, their handlers, and media commentators alike have grudgingly adopted regarding the BI. In fact, the Apolitical article offers a wonderful example of the very limited ways in which the BI idea is being appraised, namely as simply a response to job automation and/or carrot-and-stick welfare programmes.

Apolitical does, occasionally make mention of the fundamental roots of a BI, roots that run far deeper than simply jobs and poverty. Yet to emphasize that a BI is simply about addressing poverty or unemployment is to overlook the very foundation of a BI – namely that such a policy is meant to be an expansion upon, and commitment to, something that should never be commodified, namely personal freedom. All other aspects of a BI flow from this fundamental premise. That is, if a nation and its people are sincerely committed to the idea of freedom itself.

The five points made by Apolitical in the above article are all legitimate and commonly discussed around the world. Yet the shallowness of these points is intricately tied to the same old penny-pinching issues that surround welfare, as well as the easy access to cheap human labour that employers have enjoyed for far too long.

Yes, a BI can help eliminate the stigma and overbearing bureaucracy associated with welfare programmes. It would also force employers to be truly competitive regarding employee wages and hours. However, the most valuable asset each and every person possesses is our time in this life. We should be the stewards of that time – not employers and not bureaucrats. It is the personal freedom provided by a BI that is truly important to everyone, not just the workforce and welfare recipients.

A BI would allow individuals to tend to family and personal concerns without the anxiety of how to survive without a “job” income during these times of personal need. For example, if a family member severely injured as the result of a car accident. The family of this person may be too young for jobs, or on very low income as they had been relying upon the injured family member for income and cannot afford a carer to help in these times. In this case, a BI would help tremendously. Some might say that they can seek a uber accident attorney Glendale or a personal injury lawyer in order to seek compensation and financial security. Indeed these cases can bring great compensation, but court cases can take time, what will the family do in the meantime? Again, a BI would allow individuals to tend to family and personal concerns should anything happen. There may be no greater freedom than to have the time and economic stability necessary to order our lives as we, ourselves, see fit, rather than as employers demand, as is becoming far too common these days.

Politicians are slowly coming to accept that individuals are the best stewards of their monies, not bean-counting governments who tend to value the beans over the people the beans are intended for.

Let us examine each of Apolitical’s five points to see how personal freedom is addressed here.
1. Governments are not thinking the same as tech optimists

Apolitical is right about this and politicians are notoriously slow to respond to social changes of any kind, never mind one of this magnitude. Yes, the tech optimists foresee an evolutionary step in human time management when robotics and automation take over the monotony and the drudgery of the repetitive and injury-prone tasks found in so many labour-intensive “jobs”. Of course, these robotic inventions will not come soon enough to stop so many of our hardworking population from getting injured. In the meantime, if you’ve been injured at work, you will likely be entitled to personal injury compensation. Hopefully, the workforce of tomorrow will mean fewer people will have to take legal action in the future. If at all an employee needs to take some legal action but do not know where to head out for the same, check for firms similar to Douglas Beam, P.A. We should create a new workforce that is far more reliable (never taking time off), disposable (without regrets or complaints), and economically more efficient than human beings.

From the technologist’s viewpoint, a BI becomes an essential aspect of employment and personal advancement because of the accelerating pace of technological advancement. Every new innovation requires that the humans who will be utilizing those innovations undergo time-consuming training and up-skilling. These advances can even lead to whole new careers for which a BI would be the springboard to pursue those educational and up-skilling goals. To tech experts, this is not “money for nothing” but instead an investment in the future of the nation, its economic infrastructure, its people and its economy.

But there is also a very real need to understand how a BI frees workers – especially those who only have labour, rather than any marketable skills or training, to sell – from the spectre of destitution and homelessness if they are unable to find work, or simply to feed and/or shelter themselves on the meager, subsistence wages offered today to unskilled labourers.

Of course, time management in this case refers only to the workplace. What is overlooked here is the personal freedom that a BI introduces into the optimist’s time management scheme. A BI would provide an individual with the economic freedom to then choose to acquire more skills or education, or to spend more time with family, or to take a much-needed break. This freedom is of great value to the individual, as well as their future prospects, but has little or no meaning to many economists.

Apolitical, however, does make a very good point about welfare reform. It is true that eradicating the expensive and needlessly patronizing welfare bureaucracies would entail huge cash savings for governments at national, provincial/state and municipal levels everywhere – savings that could be utilized far more efficiently and effectively when incorporated into a BI.

2. People already get money for nothing

Actually people get money from their government because they are deemed, by their government, to be in need and it is a government’s principal responsibility to succor to its citizens in times of need. While Apolitical talks about how “money for nothing already exists in the state pension” system, it ignores a number of other social safety net programmes such as health care, welfare, student loans, disability, make-work projects, employee subsidies, food banks, and shelters, to name a just a few of the most common.

Social safety net programmes always incur infrastructure and staffing costs associated with the policing and distribution of these monies. A BI removes the stigma associated with so many of these programmes via its universality but it cannot ignore the special needs associated with people such as the disabled, seniors, and the unemployed. Their special circumstances can easily entail more than simply a “free money” infusion involving things such as in home support, accessibility of public buildings, mobility aids, wheelchair-friendly streets and curbs, and emotional and mental supports to deal with chronic and acute complications, to name just a few.

Apolitical also mentions the Alaska Fund, a decades old statewide “free money” programme that, today, is surrounded by much controversy, with some demanding the money be used, instead, to fund state social programmes while others are happy for the money to be put directly into the hands of the people themselves.

This is a very good example of how the assets of a community – its resources, both natural and human – are the heart and soul of its economy. However, the Alaska Fund’s greatest feature is that it offers good, sound support for the premise that some of the wealth flowing from a community’s resources should be returned to the people that comprise the community.

The debate here is not whether “free money” should be distributed to the citizenry, but rather how much and in what manner.

3. The schemes in the developing world aren’t really analogous

Apolitical is absolutely right to point out that the drastically modified BI programmes implemented in Namibia, India, and Brazil cannot be directly applied in more developed areas. These programmes are largely a response to severe destitution and poverty in those countries, while here in North America the BI is framed as a response to automation and welfare inequities.
However, Apolitical does recognize that there is a self-empowerment and entrepreneurial spirit that blossoms within the poorest individuals in the above-mentioned countries once they have been freed to make their own choices of how best to utilize their time and abilities to address their own needs and interests.

These observations correlate well with Canada’s own Dauphin Manitoba Mincome BI programme, which ran for five years. Mincome was well monitored and documented at a variety of levels and interests. Documentation that highlighted the many personal advantages derived from a BI. These advantages included the reduction of both individual and family stress levels, greater ability to cope with family issues and, most importantly, noticeable improvements in children’s health and growth due to better nutrition which lead to higher learning evaluations. While some people did indeed leave the workforce, they did so to upgrade their education and skills, to attend to personal and family issues, or simply to take a much needed break.

All of these findings amount to huge social and personal savings that invariably strengthen and improve communities, yet, once again, they are not benefits that economists are able to quantify or put a monetary value on and are too often deemed to be without value.

4. It actually all comes down to incentives

Here Apolitical addresses the commonly held fear that a BI would act as a disincentive to “working,” as if “paid employment” should be every person’s preoccupation rather than the management of their lives. However, Apolitical cites Hugh Segal, a Canadian senator who has been a long-time advocate for BI programmes and who laments the very real disincentives to improving one’s life that have been built into Canada’s social programmes. This is why Senator Segal has long applauded the personal empowerment that a BI could provide to all Canadians.

It is here that Apolitical acknowledges Sam Altman of Y Combinator – a US private investment firm – who sees a BI as the seed money necessary to provide the personal freedom allowing individuals to be economically empowered to address the rapidly changing education and training demands of a technologically driven economy. Of course, Altman seems far more interested in employing a BI to address the demands of technology and its impact upon production and the workforce than in actually addressing personal freedom per se.

Apolitical is absolutely right to acknowledge that BI differs from existing, welfare-style social programmes and highlights the divide as between those who insist upon “incentives” used coercively to promote job seeking and those who support the “freedom to choose” as incentive enough for anyone.

5. It’s not utopia or bust

Apolitical wisely concludes that, if supporters of a BI succeed, “…they will establish the principle that you can simply give people money and trust them to use it in a way beneficial to themselves and, indirectly, to society.” This is a sentiment long-shared by those who advocate for BI and wonderfully demonstrates that this sentiment is central to personal freedom and the creation of an empowered population. For Apolitical and the rest of us only time will tell.

OHIO, US: “The Future of Work, Automation, and a Basic Income” workshop announced (April 2017)

OHIO, US: “The Future of Work, Automation, and a Basic Income” workshop announced (April 2017)

The Seventh Bowling Green State University (BGSU) Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy, to be held at the BGSU campus on April 7-8, 2017, will be organized around the theme “The Future of Work, Automation, and a Basic Income”.

The two keynote speakers are Matt Zwolinski, a political philosopher at the University of San Diego who has developed a libertarian justification of basic income, and Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba who is known in the basic income community for analyzing the results of Manitoba’s “Mincome” experiment.

A call for abstracts has been released (submissions due December 1), and additional information will become available at BGSU’s website.


Photo CC BY 2.0 Anthony Crider

NEW LINK: Basic Income Manitoba website

NEW LINK: Basic Income Manitoba website

Basic Income Manitoba has launched a new website: basicincomemanitoba.ca

The group can also be followed on Facebook: www.facebook.com/basicincomemanitoba

Basic Income Manitoba, a volunteer-run organization based in Winnipeg, describes its goals and activities as follows: “educates Manitobans about basic income, its benefits and effects; promotes and develops public support for basic income in Manitoba and across Canada; seeks to influence public policy with regard to basic income; and encourages and shares research on basic income.”

Manitoba has a distinguished history in the basic income movement: from 1974 to 1978, the “Mincome” experiment–one of the most discussed trials of a basic income guarantee–was held in Dauphin.  

The province was also the site of the most recent North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress, held in May 2016 in Winnipeg.

Basic Income Manitoba is currently led by its two co-chairs: Donald Benham, who has experience in municipal politics and is currently the Hunger and Poverty Awareness Manager at Winnipeg Harvest, and Ursule Critoph, who has decades of work in the Canadian union movement.

The organization receives support from local organizations including Bounce Design, Winnipeg Harvest, and the University of Manitoba.


Reviewed by Dawn Howard

Manitoba photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Valerie

 

An Interview with Dr. Kate McFarland (Part One)

An Interview with Dr. Kate McFarland (Part One)

Interview by Scott Jacobsen

*Transcribed from informal Skype chat, content not quoted in full.*

How’d you get an interest, and how’d you get involved, in basic income?

There were two phases. My initial interest came from early on, when I was in my late teens.  My involvement started one year ago.

As a teenager, I was interested in Ayn Rand and Libertarianism. I believed in freedom, free markets, no restrictions on the pursuit of self-interest –but I noticed a tension between this view and other things, as a teenager, such as underground music.

I was into certain bands at that time. If bands went to make money in the marketplace, it wasn’t something for them to do without becoming ‘sellouts’. If you want music artists to pursue their own interest, you expect them to not really ‘give a rat’s ass’ and to make great music. This conflicts with selling to the public.

In this one area, I was concerned about it [Libertarianism]. I could see places for people to not make a profit. These ideas conflicted with the Libertarian ideals –this free-market framework.

For a while, I had cognitive dissonance and unresolved tension. That is, a conflict between a ‘morally correct economy’ and my deeply held conviction of people pursuing art and knowledge for its own sake. They shouldn’t have to worry about profit.

At some point, in a random Libertarian publication, I learned about the basic income experiment in Manitoba –the Mincome experiments. This didn’t seem like a bad idea: give people enough money for their basic needs, and with these met, people have the freedom to pursue whatever they want to pursue.

I stuck with this for a while. This fulfilled the need for believing in something morally decent to me. It wasn’t relevant to college or graduate work. I wasn’t politically active at all during my 20s. However, I had this shoved away in the back of my head.

My involvement came about a year ago. The circumstances of this were finishing my PhD in early 2015. I became involved in late 2015. One thing that influenced me was not having a basic income. For the first time in my life, I did not have economic security.

All through college and graduate school, I was paid through stipends from scholarships and fellowships, and graduate assistant positions. There were either no work requirements or the connections to jobs (like teaching and grading) were at best rather nebulously defined.

All of a sudden, without ever thinking of education as job training or working a normal job, I was left on my own post-graduation. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I very much did not want to look for a standard job. Obviously, a basic income would have helped me.

At the same time, we have the rise of the Bernie Sanders movement. Many friends were followers and part of the Fight for ’15 Movement. I didn’t understand how a living wage would help someone like me.

That is, I work on things that interest me; it seems like a good idea. [But] a $15/hr minimum wage does not help if you’re not in a waged position. There is plenty of good work that needs to get done which is not necessarily suitable for wage labour.

I began thinking again about basic income. It accomplishes the basic goal of eliminating poverty.  So, I started mentioning it to people. And it turned out I had friends who had heard of it. I started researching what had been written on it. As it turns out, there were some articles being written, and groups and individuals working on it.

I started subscribing and following these articles and people, respectively. Later in the year, I started following Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) on Facebook. They started putting out calls for reviewers. I reviewed for them and then began writing for them.

From this work from PhD to basic income, it is a passion for you. It takes a lot of time. What is the main passion in this initiative for you to become an activist and devote a tremendous amount time to it? I can look at the number of publications alone.

(Laugh)

There are a few motivations. So, one thing is I enjoy the type of work. It’s challenging. I’ve done work writing for newsletters before. I am continuing to do this. I am doing an annual newsletter for my academic department.

What I do with BIEN is so much more challenging. I learned a couple different software platforms. In addition, I have to keep up on the day-to-day research. I have to do a lot of investigation. I have to find a lead about some topic, new announcement, or new study.

I am coming into this as a non-expert by any means. However, I want to present the information in an accurate way. There is a demand to do research and figure out things that I’m learning for the first time.

Also, I want to represent information without leading readers astray.

(Laugh)

I do not want them to have false inferences or beliefs. I want them to have true beliefs via true information.

I [also] really like the fact that this work is something I can do on my own time in my own place. I don’t have to go into an office. I don’t have bosses looking over my shoulders, at least directly. If I were to have a job, this is embodying my own ideal. I can sit and write. It is variety and a challenge. It is for a good cause. I deeply believe in this. I work with cool people.

I do not work in an office. I interact via Skype and email. I am totally independent. I can work from my apartment, a coffee shop, and at the bar, whatever. It’s like the perfect job, even though it doesn’t pay.

I have multiple aspects of work that align with my values, personality, and work preferences. It seems like the perfect fit. If I can continue to afford doing this without relying on a job, and if I keep doing this for the sake of the movement and myself, and if I stick with this, I want to see where this goes.

I’ll at least do something that I tremendously enjoy that is a fit for a while.


This interview is continued in Part Two, where McFarland discusses her values in news reporting.

Report: “Pilot Lessons: How to design a basic income pilot project for Ontario”

Report: “Pilot Lessons: How to design a basic income pilot project for Ontario”

The Government of Ontario plans to move forward with a pilot study of a basic income guarantee, to begin by April 2017.

On September 20, four researchers — Evelyn L. Forget (Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba), Dylan Marando (PhD Student at the University of Toronto), Tonya Surman (founding CEO of the Centre for Social Innovation), and Michael Crawford Urban (Policy Associate at the Mowat Centre) — released a report called “Pilot Lessons: How to design a basic income pilot project for Ontario”. “Pilot Lessons” offers recommendations to the Ontario government on the basis of previous trials of basic income guarantee programs. It also calls for a greater focus on the impact of a guaranteed income on innovation and entrepreneurship.

The report begins by glossing the meaning of the term ‘basic income’ as it is used by the authors (“basic income is best conceptualized as a policy whereby a government guarantees, to all of its citizens, a regular predictable income sufficient to live a basic but dignified life”), distinguishing between the “demogrant” and “negative income tax” models.

The authors go on to overview past experiments on basic income, especially those conducted in the United States and Canada during the 1970s.

Based on this review of past experience, they identify four lessons:

1. Vary the parameters (e.g. eligibility conditions, amount of income guarantee, tax-back rates), but don’t vary them too much.

2. Communicate the results of experiments through scientific, not political, channels. The authors state that “science and politics don’t mix well”. For example, they point to the politically-driven promulgation of the alleged correlation between receipt of a basic income and increased divorce rates following the United States experiments in the 1970s. This contributed to the deterioration of interest in the policy, especially among Republicans.

3. Don’t overlook indirect benefits of basic income that might be observed in experiments. For example, the authors note Evelyn Forget’s investigation of Manitoba’s “Mincome” experiment: Forget demonstrated that the basic income guarantee in Dauphine corresponded to lower hospitalization rates and increased high school graduation rates.

4. Don’t assume that a decline in the time spent in paid employment implies a decline in the time spent in socially valuable work (e.g. consider whether the time is spent instead in childcare, continued education, volunteer work, etc).

In the next chapter, the authors describe major changes in the labor market that pose important differences between the present context and that of the past experiments, such as the increase in precarious labor and rise of automation. They also argue that, by decreasing the risk associated with leaving a job or starting a business, a basic income could facilitate entrepreneurship and innovation.

The report concludes with 14 recommendations for the design of a pilot study.

The full report is available for download.


Reviewed by Dawn Howard

Photo: Vancouver Science World CC BY 2.0 Franco Ng