by Kate McFarland | Jan 12, 2017 | News
Economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, expressed optimism about unconditional basic income (bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen) in an interview with Hamburger Abendblatt, a daily newspaper in Hamburg, Germany. Schwab called the idea “basically plausibly” and predicted that discussion about it would develop over the next decade.
The Hamburger Abendblatt interview covered a range of topics related to globalization and digitalization. At one point, the reporters asked Schwab about his assessment of US President Donald Trump’s contention that he will bring back jobs from Asia and Mexico. In reply, Schwab pointed out that some industry might return to the US in the form of “digitized factories”.
Schwab then broached the idea of unconditional basic income in response to a follow-up question about the future of work: if industry is becoming digitized, what should be done for “those for whom there is no longer any work”?
In Switzerland, there was recently a referendum about the unconditional basic income. At least 23% of the citizens voted for it. Even I assent the idea for a basic income is basically plausible. Furthermore, I believe in 10 years the discussion about it will be far more ahead than now.
In response to a question about the effect of a basic income on attitudes toward work, Schwab asserts that a basic income could be seen as recognition for certain types of work, such as care work, that are important to society but currently paid relatively low wages:
I deny that people would then put their hands in their lap and sit lazily at home. A nurse in Germany with 2000 euros gross pay might today feel worn out. If, however, she were to receive a basic income, she might see it as recognition, and she would have a different basic attitude towards her work. In the future, if jobs are swept away due to digitalization, we need on the other hand a humanization of society. Industrial jobs will be gone, but there will be more social work to be done, like medical and health care.
The World Economic Forum is best known for its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Held each year in January, the Davos meeting brings together approximately 2,500 invited guests, comprising top business executives, political leaders, and distinguished academics, for a series of panels and discussions of pressing global economic, political, and social issues.
The Davos meeting itself has already proven receptive to discussions of basic income. This year, the event will include a panel on basic income, featuring BIEN cofounder Guy Standing. Last year, the event held a forum on a “world without work”, in which Nobel laureate Sir Christopher Pissarides expressed support for a basic income guarantee, and was the site of the dancing “robots for basic income”.
Full interview with Schwab (in German):
Hannes Koch and Jörg Quoos “Schwab: ‘Gewinner müssen mit Verlierern solidarisch sein’,” Hamburger Abendblatt, January 9, 2017.
Translation assistance by Ronald Heinrich. Reviewed by Danny Pearlberg.
Photo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 World Economic Forum
by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Julio Linares – “My Short Journey in BIEN”
I first heard about BIEN at a conference in Switzerland about the future of work and basic income. I went to that conference because of a hunch. I had finished reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and was in the midst of a brainstorm, thinking about how to change the system we find ourselves in. It came to me that if in the past humans commodified fictitious commodities (Land, Labor and Money), then we can also decommodify at least one of them. The question was how. When the basic income idea came to my head, I thought I had discovered the wheel.
I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I needed to tell somebody. My wife didn’t quite get my crazy mumbling at 2 A.M. and told me to go to sleep. I quickly found that others had already thought of this long before me and had developed the idea further. I couldn’t be happier. I checked social media the next day and found out about the Swiss referendum and the event that was happening before it, gathering academics, entrepreneurs and others interested in basic income. Not looking back, I bought the cheapest ticket I could find and went.
At the conference I had the opportunity of meeting Guy Standing and many other inspiring people involved in the network. I knew I had made the right choice in going. I met young scholars there, who told me about the congress happening in Korea in July 2016. Originally from Guatemala, I had been living in Taiwan for 5 years. Living so close to Korea, I thought I should go as well. Applications were long past the deadline but I still sent an email asking if I could present a paper. When I got accepted I went without glimpse of doubt, this time accompanied by my wife. She and I met in Taiwan while having a full scholarship so we can empirically attest to the transformative benefits of a basic income.
My paper was about alternative ways of funding a basic income. Specifically, I thought of creating financial funds that could make a basic income scheme sustainable in the long run. In this way, I theorized, it could be possible not only to provide a basic income to people but at the same time start changing the greedy ways that finance is used in our time. I received a lot of constructive feedback from the people who attended the talk and learned a lot from the experience.
At the BIEN congress I met Anja and other life members of the BIEN network. Inspired by their clarity of vision and positive attitude I decided to join on the spot. I am proud member number 252. Right now I find myself in the process of setting up a network in Guatemala, looking for funding in order to do a pilot project. So far we have contacted one of the municipal mayors of Guatemala. He and his team were very interested in the idea and have agreed to cooperate with us.
Although I just joined the network, I hope to help as much as I can in spreading the word about the importance of basic income and getting other people involved in my own country. I believe basic income can help in reducing poverty and increasing the livelihood of people in Guatemala and the rest of the world. The movement is only beginning!
Photo: Participants at 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul, South Korea.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
“Toward Basic Income and a Peaceful Democratic Revolution”
By Steven Shafarman
My drive to enact a basic income – and most of my ideas about how to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize allies – arose from exploring the way young children learn to walk and talk.
I first wrote about these ideas, though without the term basic income, in the mid 1980s, inspired by the analogy of “the body politic” and Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” Young children, as they learn to walk, outgrow crawling and leave it behind. Their basic needs are provided by parents or other adults. Thus, when everyone’s basic economic security is guaranteed, I believe our society can “outgrow” pollution, racism, war, and other problems.
In 1998, while enrolled in a doctoral program in system science and human development, I self-published a book about how to heal our political system. With that book, I was hooked. I moved to Washington D.C. in the fall of 1999, seeking support for these ideas. I heard about USBIG in 2000, went up to New York for one of the earliest meetings, and presented at the first conference in March of 2002. That’s when I learned about BIEN, and decided to attend the Congress in Geneva. My paper, on how to build a mass movement, was selected and published.
Over the following years, I presented at most USBIG meetings; wrote three more books; started an author mailing list to update my readers; self-published or with micro publishers; gave talks at BIEN meetings in Dublin in 2008 and Montreal in 2014; worked with the Green Party of the U.S., adding basic income to their platform; and made several attempts to launch nonprofit organizations to support our efforts. Yet I was always thinking about young children, and how they learn naturally, spontaneously. My primary profession is teaching people, all ages and any health condition, to breathe freely and move easily, to outgrow back pain, breathing troubles, stress-related disorders, and other difficulties.
While promoting basic income, I’ve been actively thinking of myself as a healthy curious young child, pursuing my dreams, goals, and interests. At the same time, though, I’ve been anxiously wishing I had a basic income; regardless of the amount, that would have been immensely valuable.
The “Tax Cut for the Rest of Us Act of 2006,” H.R. 5257, would have created a small basic income through a fully refundable tax credit. It was introduced in the U.S. Congress, though never debated. Al Sheahen and Karl Widerquist wrote the initial paper, with a title I suggested, and Al and I arranged a series of meetings to lobby for it. After lunch in the basement cafeteria of a House office building, on our way to a meeting on the third floor, we were in an elevator with a dozen congressional staffers. I used that moment to say, loudly, “The reason I’m lobbying for basic income, Al, is that I want to live in a true democracy, without leaving the country.” Several staffers laughed. One said, “Good luck.”
Living in Washington D.C., I’ve had many conversations with people who work at political think tanks, lobbying shops, and similar organizations. Everyone has a specific issue, project, or other focus, and limited interest in new ideas. Liberal Democrats typically respond with a variation of “I love that idea, but … ,” and then explain why it’s politically impossible. Conservative Republicans tend to instantly state a moral or emotional objection; when we have time to discuss it in detail, however, they often agree that it makes sense.
Before autumn 2013, most people had never heard of basic income, although a few recalled ideas from the 1960s and ’70s about guaranteed income, negative income tax, or Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan. That October, our friends in Switzerland filed for their referendum and held their event with the coins, and their campaign was widely reported in the U.S. media. I saw a huge breakthrough. My conversations became far more congenial and productive.
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a book that, I expect, will attract, excite, and unite people from across the political spectrum and outside it. My title is “Basic Income Imperative: for peace, justice, liberty, and personal dignity.” It’s nearly finished. I have queries out to a number of literary agents, and hope to have a publisher soon.
I now believe – more than believe, actually, I’m confident – that within the next few years we can have a peaceful democratic revolution for basic income. Let’s make history and make it happen.
Steven Shafarman is a co-founder of Basic Income Action, and the author of four books about basic income, with another forthcoming. He also teaches FlexAware and the Feldenkrais Method. He lives in Washington, D.C.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Photo taken by Stefan Pangritz at a solidarity meeting for the Swiss
referendum in January 2014 in Basel.
Toru Yamamori (Basic Income News editor)
1. Encounter to the idea
My encounter to the idea of a basic income was around 1991-2. I was involved in solidarity activism with a casual worker’s trade union, in which many of the members were homeless construction workers. Some left leaning intellectuals also came to show their solidarity from time to time, and one of them told me that what we need is the idea of ‘unconditional social income’ that was articulated in the Italian autonomist movement.
I wasn’t impressed by the idea at that time, mainly because the movement with which we were in solidarity demanded an end to unfairly unpaid or underpaid wages. For me asking ‘income’ in that context sounded like that we are getting amnesty when we want to be proved not guilty.
It took several years for me to digest why we need an unconditional basic income. Then it become a secret joy to read Bertrand Russell’s Roads to Freedom, or Philippe van Parijs’s Real Freedom for All, borrowed from a university library. Because the majority of my friends either from activism or academia didn’t like the idea, it remained a personal relief by dreaming a totally different world.
2. Joining BIEN
In 2002 I travelled to the U.K. to visit to Malcolm Torry, Philip Vince (both from Citizen’s Income Trust), and Bill Jordan (a founding member of BIEN). Malcolm and Philip showed me that the idea was being spread widely from a small alternative sphere. Bill introduced me to the working class people who demanded a basic income in 1970s, which made me remind my old friends with who I wanted to be in solidarity. (So I started to organize public events on UBI outside academia.)
In 2004 I attended the BIEN congress in Barcelona where the network changed from ‘European’ to ‘Earth’. I was fascinated by the unique atmosphere, where established, well-known academics talked with anyone in equal and friendly terms, and where many young activists brought enthusiasm. I immediately became a life member.
Then I attended almost every congress except 2006. The one in 2014 Montreal was special occasion for me, because I presented my 13 years of oral historical research on the working class feminists who demanded UBI in the 1970s Britain, which was started when Bill introduced me some of those people in 2002. Local and international feminists in the congress encouraged me with positive comments, and I felt relieved that finally I succeeded to convey their forgotten struggle to similar minded contemporary feminists.
3. And now…
I was the only participant from Asia in the 2004 congress. The number has grown and this year the congress was held in Korea, and we have five national or regional affiliates in Asia.
People in BIEN keep encouraging me to engage both activism and research on UBI, which means a lot for me. In 2012 I was elected to the Executive Committee. At that time it was out of blue, but since then I have tried to expand this unique broad-church organization, especially by writing news for the Basic Income News, and by exploring communications between Asian members.
Toru Yamamori is a professor of economics of a Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 24, 2016 | News
Catherine Clifford, senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC, wrote the CNBC article announcing Elon Musk’s prediction that automation would make universal basic income (UBI) necessary. In a subsequent article, titled “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” Clifford
In the article, Clifford portrays the automation of jobs as the main motivation for UBI, continuing to highlight Elon Musk’s remark that he’s “not sure what else one would do” but implement such a policy. (This focus on automation as the sole or main motivator is arguably misleading; many historically important arguments for UBI do not turn at all on worries about automation. Unquestionably, however, the threat of technological unemployment has recently been the driving force behind much of the media attention to UBI in the United States.)
Clifford goes on to note some highlights of the global UBI movement: the impending pilot in Finland, Basisinkomen 2018’s campaign for a basic income referendum in the Netherlands, and Switzerland’s vote on a basic income referendum earlier in 2016.
One passage in the article is especially noteworthy for BIEN: Clifford discusses the resolutions on the definition of ‘basic income’ made at BIEN’s 2016 Congress. In doing do so, she emphasizes that the definition of ‘basic income’ does not entail that basic income must be replacement for other programs and social services, and she point out that BIEN recommends that it not be viewed in this way–quoting BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist as saying that UBI “is not ‘generally considered’ as a replacement for the rest of the social safety net”:
“Some see it primarily as a replacement. Others see it as a supplement, filling in the cracks. Some people who want it to be a replacement try to create the impression that it is generally considered to be so. But that’s not accurate.”
Reference
Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” CNBC, November 18, 2016.
Article reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation.
