by Faun Rice | Aug 15, 2018 | News
This summary of Basic Income programs in Sri Lanka was written by Sarath Davala (coordinator of India Network for Basic Income) and Selvi Sachidanandam (coordinator of Basic Income Sri Lanka). All images are courtesy of Basic Income Sri Lanka.
The beginnings of a formal Basic Income movement in Sri Lanka
Basic Income Sri Lanka (BISL) was founded two years ago by Selvi Sachidanandam and colleagues based in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Initially, the group’s activities were to meet from time to time and discuss what Basic Income meant and how it was relevant to the Sri Lankan context. The Basic Income developments taking place in neighbouring India in 2017 also acted as stimulants. In India, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) conducted a pilot project on Basic Income between 2011 and 2013 and brought out a report and a book in 2015. The India Network for Basic Income was also formed in 2015. In February 2017, the Chief Economic Advisor to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, authored a full chapter on Universal Basic Income for discussion in the Indian parliament.
In 2017 and 2018, BISL made overtures to the Sri Lankan government to organize a workshop to raise awareness about Basic Income and its desirability as a policy direction in Sri Lanka. Despite attempts made to reach out to political leaders and bureaucrats, BISL has thus far only been able to work within civil society, building awareness among NGOs and within the art community.
As of August 2018, there have been two important articles in the Sri Lankan press. The first, by Talal Rafi in the Sri Lankan Daily Financial Times, is a piece intended to provide general information about the global UBI movement; it invokes automation and rise of artificial intelligence. The second and more significant article by Sri Lankan sociologist Laksiri Fernando (based in Australia) appeared in both the Colombo Telegraph and Daily Mirror. This article delves deeper into the question of UBI’s relevance to Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan context
UBI discussions often begin with burning local issues and contextual priorities, and Sri Lanka is no exception in this regard. Thirty years of war in Sri Lanka left deep scars on the entire society. Many parts of Sri Lankan society bore immense suffering, and they continue to do so. Today, war widows experience insecurity and isolation across the country: in the Northern and Eastern Provinces there are numerous Tamil widows, and in the south there are also the widows of soldiers who died in the war. Nearly ten years after the end of the war, there still is no coherent state policy to address this social calamity. According to a report by the International Crisis Group submitted (2017), there are more than 90,000 war widows in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. This estimate does not include the families of ‘missing persons,’ and the wounds of war are much deeper than what these statistics show. According to one estimate, in the northern region, there are about 58,000 households headed by women (one quarter of total number of households).
Women in Sri Lanka (picture credit to: UNDP, Palmyrah Processing Centre, Naruvilikulam, Mannar, Sri Lanka)
BISL grants and work with the Government of Sri Lanka
It was in this context of providing aid to war widows that BISL brought forth the idea of basic income. BISL believes that giving an unconditional basic income to these widows for a period of 10 or more years could be an effective policy approach. Instead of waiting for the government to adopt this idea, BISL decided to award basic income to some war widows from the north and east through donations from private individuals, as a symbolic gesture. Simultaneously, a study has been initiated to examine the efficacy of Basic Income in this context.
In addition to the war widows from the North, BISL selected two other categories for the basic income awards: an artists’ community in Colombo, and women from a Muslim fisherpersons’ union in the East. These three groups were chosen to maintain a geographical balance; BISL took a cross section of Sri Lankan society to demonstrate the universality of vulnerability across the socio-cultural spectrum, as well as the potential universal applicability of Basic Income. On July 18th 2018, BISL organized a ceremony for five awardees chosen randomly from the first two communities. Three Tamil war widows from Kilinochchi and two artists from Colombo were given the Basic Income grants. Awards to the third category will be distributed once sufficient funds are collected; BISL can raise money for only five awardees at the present time.
Currently, each award is 10,000 Sri Lankan Rupees per month for a period of two years (roughly US$63 per month). This calculation is based on the World Bank’s definition of the poverty threshold as US$1.90 consumer expenditure per person per day. The ceremony was attended by about 40 people including civil society actors, government officials, artists, and students. BISL also invited Sarath Davala, the coordinator of India Network for Basic Income to share the results of the Indian pilot study and the policies pertaining to basic income in India.
On the left: Eran Wickramaratne. On the right: Sarath Davala and Selvi Sachidanandam.
The event received wide publicity in Colombo. The next day in Parliament, a women’s caucus met to discuss policy related to war widows and disabled persons. Selvi Sachidanandam was invited to make a presentation on BISL’s proposal concerning a policy for rehabilitating war widows. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Selvi and Sarath both attended the meeting and made presentations to the honourable Members of the Parliament. Also present was Sri Lanka’s State Minister of Finance (Hon) Eran Wickramaratne. After the presentations, the Minister assured BISL that the government would study the idea of unconditional basic income in depth. Assurances were given on behalf of BISL and INBI to the honourable Minister that assistance would be provided in every possible way to the government process.
Subsequent to this meeting, Selvi, Sarath and the BISL Co-Coordinator Visakha Tillekeratne met the Deputy Director General of the Department of Planning of the Sri Lankan Government. A detailed presentation was made to the deputy director and his colleagues. Following this work with government officials, BISL will undertake a brief study of current welfare policy delivery in two districts and examine the schemes that are implemented by the government of Sri Lanka. This study will analyze the comparative efficacy and relevance of unconditional basic income to specific groups in different parts of Sri Lanka.
The developments described in this report are a major leap in the basic income movement in Sri Lanka. BISL is keen to build on this momentum.
More information at:
Talal Rafi, “Universal Basic Income: A solution to automation?“, Daily FT, April 27th 2018
Laksiri Fernando, “Universal Basic Income (UBI): Conceptual Background & Possible Implementation In Sri Lanka?“, Colombo Telegraph, May 25th 2018
“ASIA/SRI LANKA – War widows are the most affected by the conflict which lasted over 30 years“, Agenzia Fides, August 1st 2018
Tracy Holsinger, “Basic Income for thriving cultural sector“, Daily Mirror, July 23rd 2018
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 1, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in August 2014.
The right-libertarian journal, Cato Unbound, has published a 4-party debate on Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) this month. Matt Zwolinski started it off with a second-best or pragmatic argument for BIG. He doesn’t say outright that BIG is better than many right-libertarians most favored policy of eliminating of all redistribution of property, but he argues that BIG is far superior to the complex and inefficient system that characterizes the current welfare system.
Manzi’s response stems from standard for the property-rights-with-no-exceptions version of libertarianism. In a nutshell, BIG would probably reduce how much propertyless people work for people with property; therefore, necessarily, it is bad. He dismisses Zwolinki’s argument that work disincentives can be a good thing by labeling it “subjective” and “value-laden,” without noting that a subjective and value-laden argument can only be countered by another subjective and value-laden argument, which he does not offer. He just assumes any and all work disincentives are bad. So, he doesn’t actually lay a glove on Zwolinski’s argument.
The closest he comes to explain the values that led him to the belief that all work disincentives are bad is to say that BIG has always been unpopular in the United States. Yet, to say something is unpopular is not say whether it is a good or bad thing. It doesn’t say whether we should try to change people’s minds about it. At any time in American history up until five or maybe ten years ago, he could have made the same argument against same-sex marriage. Now it’s popular; thanks to people worked hard to change other people’s minds. Is BIG or anything else worthy of a similar effort? Manzi implies that nothing that is currently unpopular is ever worth the effort to change people’s minds.
Manzi mentions my article, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn From the Negative Income Tax Experiments,” but doesn’t actually engage with its arguments about work disincentives. One argument is that any decline in work effort would—by standard theory—cause an increase in wages partly counteracting the decline in work effort and further increasing the incomes of the working poor—presumably the people a BIG is supposed to help.
Another argument in that article is that the “decline” in work effort was only relative—the experimental group vs. control group. But the experiments also found whether people were in the experimental or control group was not the primary causal factor determining whether they worked or not. The macroeconomic health of the economy was more important in determining how much a person worked than whether or not they received a BIG. Therefore, the experiments indicated that if you have a strong macroeconomy, you can have both BIG andhigh employment. People who received a negative income tax took more time to find the right job, but in all the experiments, if good jobs were available, people took them. If you want propertyless people to work for the owners of property whether or not jobs pay decent wages or provide good working conditions, then the absence of BIG or anything like it is what you should favor. If you want all jobs to be good jobs, BIG is the policy to favor.
Cato Unbound
Another of the main arguments in my article was that, without foundation, many people responded to the evidence of a relative decline in work effort by making a subjective and value-laden assumption that all reductions in work effort are necessarily a bad thing. Manzi makes that very assumption and does not explain—much less defend—the subjecctive foundations underlying his assumption.
It’s what he leaves out, what he doesn’t call attention to, that is the real problem in Manzi’s article. Typical of some brands of right-libertarianism, it’s from a tradition of newspeak. He’s for slavery and he calls it freedom. It’s perhaps unfair to hang all of the rest of what I have to say on Manzi, but it is a common position running throughout a great deal of right-libertarian literature from Nozick and Rothbard and many, many others. Manzi’s essay, by the absence of its foundations, is a good example of how successfully this argument has become taken for granted—not just among right-libertarians but in mainstream political dialogue.
In the rights-based libertarian tradition, a situation in which one group of people has no other option but to work for another group of people is called “freedom” as long as that other group of people are called “property owners” and the working class is propertyless. I call it slavery, but to right-libertarians the opposite is slavery. Any redistribution to relieve people from forced work is supposedly reduces freedom; it’s even “on par with forced labor,” in Nozick’s words. If property owners give jobs or charity to the propertyless, that’s “voluntary” and consistent with freedom, but if the government taxes and redistributes property that’s “force,” “coercion,” and “interference” which supposedly violates negative freedom.
How did these propertyless people get into the position in which they have to work for the propertied? Over a long history, property owners use the force of the legal system to force, coerce, or interfere with other people, establishing “property rights” without the consent of or compensation for the people they thereby force into a state of propertyless. Before property rights, all were free from interference to use the resources of the Earth as they wished; under the type of property rights we have today and under the ideals envisioned by right-libertarians, “property owners” are free to interfere with any use the propertyless might make of the Earth’s resources. When everything is owned by someone else, the propertyless lose so much liberty that they’re unfree to work for themselves. They’re effectively born in debt, owning their labor to the to at least one member of the group that owns property. They face interference with anything in the world they might do for themselves unless and until they accept a subordinate position to a property owner? Doesn’t that make them unfree in the most negative sense of the term?
Right-libertarians usually get around this question by definitional fiat. The interference the rich do to the poor, when they say “We own the Earth and you don’t,” simply doesn’t count. It’s not interference because it doesn’t violate your rights. You have no right to the land; therefore, you have no right to be free from laboring for the people who do, and so we don’t even call it a loss freedom when use the force of the legal system to maintain that situation. The poor are always born in debt, every generation owing their labor to the propertied group, but that doesn’t make them “unfree” because they have no right to be free from being born into debt. I hope this makes my allegation of right-libertarian “newspeak” clear.
Of course, right-libertarians tell us that they defend property rights because they believe in freedom. Now we see that they’re simply defining freedom as the defense of the property rights system they want to see. This is why I think it is fair to use to term tautological libertarianism to describe versions of it that simply define freedom as the freedom do what you have the right to do. They argue we must have libertarian property rights so we can be free, but libertarian freedom turns out to be defined as nothing but the exercise of property rights so defined. Or they argue that we must define property rights this way so that people can be free. And around and around the logical circle we go. Not all libertarians (or even all right-libertarians) take the tautological shortcut, but far too many of them do. A circular argument can appear very powerful if you don’t reveal the whole circle at once. One paper argues this: we must have the definition of property rights because freedom is important. Another paper argues this: we must have this definition of freedom because property rights are important. If you show only one argument at a time, it appears powerful. You put both arguments together, and you have no argument at all. The less of the logic you see, the more powerful the argument appears to be.
You would need a powerful argument to explain why interfering with the propertyless in such a way as to put them effectively in debt to the upper class simply doesn’t count as a violation of freedom. And such an argument could only be subjective and value laden. But if the treatment of property ownership as synonymous with freedom is pervasive enough, you never have to make that argument. You can take it for granted.
Manzi expects his readers to take that kind of argument—or some other subjective and value laden argument—for granted when he assumes that any reduction in the number of hours the propertyless are forced to work for the propertied group is necessarily a bad thing. That’s slavery caused by the application of force, interfering with negative freedom of individuals to do things for themselves. He can call it freedom if he wants, but it’s still slavery.
-Karl Widerquist, Virginia Beach, VA (revised Roanoke, VA), August, 2014
by Andre Coelho | Jul 10, 2018 | News
Picture credit to: The Conversation.
Approval of a universal basic income (UBI) has risen sharply in the United States. Karl Widerquist cites a 10-year-old poll showing that only 12% of Americans approved an UBI at that time. Now that number is 48%, according to a Gallup poll, conducted at the end of 2017 (on around 3000 adult US citizens).
The cited poll also shows that women show more support than men (52 and 43% respectively), age strongly correlates with that support (54% for youngsters from 18 to 35 years-old down to 38% for people with more than 66 years of age), education level also has an influence (51% for people with less than a bachelor’s degree versus 42% for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher), as well as political orientation (28% for republican voters up to 65% for democratic voters). That same report finds that 73% of Americans think artificial intelligence (AI) will suppress more jobs than those it creates, which might in part justify these results, compared to those 10 years ago.
However, Gallup’s poll shows that, for those in support of UBI, more than half (54%) wouldn’t be available to pay higher taxes in order to finance it. This is more evident in women (57%) then men (51%), and there is a strong educational effect: the higher the educational degree, the more willing supporters of UBI are to pay higher taxes to have it implemented (64% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher versus 38% for those with less than a bachelor’s degree). Democrats are also more likely (55%) to pay higher taxes to get UBI than republicans (29%). In spite of this result, 80% of all supporters think companies benefitting from AI should pay more taxes (than they do now) in order to finance the UBI policy.
This results for the United States are, in a way, similar to those from a recent survey in Finland, ran by researcher Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo. In the latter, support for UBI, based on the definition by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), was also very close to the 50% mark (51%), which clearly shows that the public remains divided when it comes to UBI. Not only in Finland, but also in the United States, even though the survey questions were posed somewhat differently in these two surveys (note 1).
Note 1 – in Gallup’s survey the exact question was “Do you support or not support a universal basic income program as a way to help Americans who lose their jobs because of advances in artificial intelligence?”. In the Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo survey there was no reference to jobs or artificial intelligence.
More information at:
RJ Reinhart, “Public split on basic income for workers replaced by robots”, Gallup News, February 26th 2018
Annie Nova, “Universal basic income: US support grows as Finland ends its trial”, CNBC, May 1st 2018
André Coelho, “Finland: Finland shares unconditional money, but the public view remains polarized”, Basic Income News, February 12th 2018
![Wayne Lewchulk: “We could use [basic income] as an opportunity to discover the potential of humans”](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/B88239635Z.1_20180618205505_000_GPK7LDBK.3-0_Super_Portrait.jpg?resize=1%2C1&ssl=1)
by Andre Coelho | Jul 2, 2018 | News
Wayne Lewchulk. Picture credit to: The Halmilton Spectator
“This isn’t your grandparents’ labour market”. Wayne Lewchulk, a professor at the McMaster University and specialist in labour markets, precarious employment and health, says it crystal clear on an interview given on May 24th 2018.
Lewchulk, who has been teaching labour issues for more than 35 years, is completely aware that his stable job as a professor at McMaster is becoming the exception, rather than the norm. This is aligned with the line of reasoning professor and writer Guy Standing also advocates in his latest book on the subject. As a Canadian, and resident in Hamilton, Ontario, he is a co-founder of the Poverty and Economic Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) project, which joints with the McMaster University and more than other 30 universities, community organizations, labour unions, government and media outlets, to advance research and policy debate around labour and particularly precarious employment.
Lewchulk has also helped to organize the latest North America Basic Income Guarantee Congress, this year hosted at McMaster University. He has also been influential at the Ontario Basic Income pilot project, as a member of the evaluation panel. Even though this pilot project is not quite a basic income as far as the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) definition goes, it may still be an important step towards a real implementation in Canada.
Despite a rise in employment in the last decade, in Canada, this has been mostly for part-time, Uber and Mechanical Turk style kind of employment. These forms of employment, Lewchulk explains, are very insecure, limiting workers ability to “form relationships or settle in one spot, let alone buy a house”. That also means lack of labour benefits, which can mean less health-related coverage. More employment with less money will also mean less opportunities for children, since parents cannot afford development activities for them. Moreover, expenses with gaining qualifications and learning throughout life also diminish. Capital and business owners have been, successfully, passing on labour costs to workers themselves, as technology and economic change agitate and deteriorate working conditions worldwide.
Asked about technological disruption, however, Wayne Lewchulk remains optimistic: “I think it’d be fantastic to have machinery doing a lot of the things we do, so we could focus on the things that we let fall by the wayside right now: being good to each other; creating art; spending time with our families”. According to him, basic income can be a powerful instrument to attain this goal, “but we have to figure out how to pay for it”.
More information at:
Sonia Verma, “This isn’t your grandparents’ job market”, McMaster University Brighter World, May 24th 2018
Guy Standing, “The Precariat – The new dangerous class”, Bloomsburry Ed. 2011
Sara Bizarro, “Canada: NABIG Congress 2018 in Hamilton, Ontario”, Basic Income News, June 6th 2018
André Coelho, “CANADA: Quebec is implementing a means-tested benefit, not a basic income”, Basic Income News, January 24th 2018
by Kate McFarland | Jun 23, 2018 | News
What’s the Buzz from Rheinau?
Earlier in the month, headlines made such proclamations as “Swiss municipality to offer guaranteed income” (SWI), “Swiss village considers a crowdfunded basic income for all inhabitants” (Toronto Star), and “Swiss town set for universal basic income experiment” (The Local Switzerland), referring to Rheinau, a town of about 1300 people in the north of the country.
To preclude misunderstanding about what is happening in Rheinau, it should be stressed that the village is not enacting a basic income, nor is its government deliberating an implementation of the policy, nor is it running a state-sponsored trial. Moreover, to avoid possible confusion, it is specifically worth noting that this latest news from Rheinau is unrelated to previously reported discussions of basic income pilots by Swiss political bodies, such as the investigation of municipal basic income pilots initiated last year in nearby Zurich.
Instead, the news is this: the city council has agreed to permit an independent filmmaker Rebecca Panian to make the village the site of privately funded one-year trial of a program similar to basic income, involving at least half of the town’s population, which would serve as the basis for a documentary. The project’s main purpose is to provoke interest, discussion, and further research into the idea of basic income.
While the village’s council has given the green light to the documentary project, the ultimate execution of the project remains contingent on enrolling the desired number of participants and raising sufficient funds. Moreover, the design and duration of the trial remains liable to change during the course of discussion with the local council and inhabitants of Rheinau.
The Payment Scheme: Unconditional, Subject to Repayment
If the trial does come to fruition as currently planned, it will not, strictly speaking, test a basic income: participants in the trial over the age of 25 will be given a cash payment of 2500 Swiss francs (CHF) (about 2151 EUR) at the start of each month, with reduced amounts given to minors and young adults, irrespective of income, household status, work, or need; however, if participants receive additional income during the month, they will be expected to repay this money in part or full.
Stated otherwise, participants over age 25 will be granted 2500 CHF at the start of each month, but will be permitted to keep only as much as necessary to ensure that their total income for the month is at least 2500 CHF (with lower amounts for younger age groups). If they earn above 2500 CHF, they will repay the entire amount of the grant.
To many, this feature of the design might cause the project to seem not a test of basic income at all; after all, according to the Basic Income Earth Network, a basic income is by definition delivered without means test. For the project’s initiators, however, the repayment requirement is a way to attempt to more accurately simulate what a basic income would feel like if actually implemented in Switzerland, where many individuals, earning high salaries, would presumably “repay” any amount paid out as a basic income in personal income taxes. “[It] is important to us not to spread the illusion that an unconditional basic income simply means more money in your pocket,” Panian tell Basic Income News, “It just means that the basic income is unconditional. Everybody gets it so nobody needs to fear angst (existenzangst) again.”
Since the cash allowance is paid upfront, the plan is distinct from a negative income tax or top-up scheme in which individuals are “reimbursed” if there earned income falls below a certain threshold. One might say it loosely resembles a basic income accompanied by an increase in individual income tax.
That being said, this provisional design has not been set in stone, and documentary team will consult with residents of Rheinau later in the year to produce a finalized design.
Motivation: “Too Many Questions Unanswered”
Like many in both Switzerland and abroad, Panian first heard about basic income when a referendum to enact the policy was put on the ballot in the 2016 Swiss general elections. Although the referendum left open the amount of the basic income — it stated only, “Legislation will determine the funding for the system and the actual amount of the basic income” — a monthly payment of 2500 CHF was often discussed during the campaign.
Celebrating 23% Yes referendum vote, CC BY 2.0 Generation Grundeinkommen
Panian was intrigued by the idea as a possible solution for challenges posed by the future of work. In her view, a society based on the goal of full employment is unsustainable in the face of accelerating automation, and attempting to maintain such a system will result in “mass unemployment and lots of people with no money, no support, and no perspective.”
At the same time, she was not surprised that the referendum failed at the ballot box, telling Basic Income News, “there were too many questions unanswered, and in the mind of many people this idea remained a crazy, non-realistic vision.”
Panian herself does not express certainty that basic income is the new system needed by Switzerland and other nations facing the threat of automation, but she believes that “we better test it as well as we can before we throw it in the bin and do nothing.”
This goal — opening people to the idea of basic income as a serious proposal — provided the motivation that would ultimately lead the filmmaker to Rheinau: “I figured out that in order to become more open to the idea, people need more time, and they need to ‘see’ it happening. That’s how I came up with the idea to start a test it in a village. … Everybody who watches the experiment going on in a village can sympathize with the villagers and with that get more connected with the idea.”
The Village: A “Mini-Switzerland”
Other privately financed and administered “basic income” projects, including Germany’s lottery-style Mein Grundeinkommen and the in-progress US documentary Bootstraps, have focused on individual-level effects of unconditional monthly cash grants.
Like the directors of Bootstraps, Panian hopes to document the lives of individual participants in the Rheinau project. But Panian is also interested in the community-level impact of a basic income, and for this reason decided to situation her study in small village in which the majority of residents would be able to take part.
Rheinau Abbey, CC BY SA 3.0 Hansueli Krapf
Panian first announced her plans in January of this year, putting forth a call for Swiss municipalities to serve as the site of the documentary. In some cases, city councils placed bids to be the site of the basic income test. In others, individual residents wrote to Panian to nominate their own communities.
Panian ultimately selected Rheinau out of more than 100 applicants, in part on the basis that its demographic structure reflects Switzerland as whole. As she describes it to Basic Income News, the community is “small but like a mini-country.”
According to Panian, Rheinau was also a favorite due “fantastic communication with the local council” and the council’s “real interest in the experiment.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that the village rejected the country’s basic income referendum with 72% no vote in July 2016, but that its mayor and councilors have been receptive to involving the community in a small-scale test of a similar program. In a statement quoted on the official website of the planned documentary, the council declares that basic income “deserves to be tested” and “encourage[s] the population to participate” in the trial and film project.
The Research Team
In addition to Panian, a team of social scientists — including an economist (Jens Martignoni), organizational psychologist (Theo Wehner), linguist (Aleksandra Gnach), and sociologist (Sascha Liebermann) — is fronting the basic income project in Rheinau.
The four scientists are currently designing a study about of the effects of the program on the community. However, as Martignoni stressed in correspondence with Basic Income News, the research project is in an early stage of development, and it is too early to tell what can be learned from the trial.
In addition to assessing the effects of the program on the well-being of participants and the community, the researchers hope to examine its effects on their opinions on basic income itself. Liebermann tells Basic Income News, “I am curious to find out how the people in Rheinau think about the basic income and how their thinking about it might change during the trial and in what direction,” which he plans to investigate through in-depth interviews.
Like Panian, both Martignoni and Liebermann emphasize that cooperation with the local community is an important aspect of the Rheinau experiment, in contrast to other past and ongoing trials of basic income and negative income tax, with the people of Rheinau to themselves be included in the development of a final model. The researchers also emphasize that the Rheinau project is unique in that its goal is not to fight unemployment or poverty.
Basic Income in a “Rich Country”
In regions where governments are currently sponsoring or overseeing trials of basic income or other income guarantees — including Finland, the Netherlands, Ontario, Barcelona, and Stockton — the main objective is to address unemployment or poverty.
Generation Grundeinkommen demonstration, CC BY-NC 2.0
While Switzerland is not without poverty, it is known as a relatively wealthy nation. The median salary was reported in 2015 as 6189 CHF per month, and the average household income was reported in 2017 at 6957 CHF per month. According to the Federal Statistical Office, only 10% of people living in Switzerland have a monthly disposable income below 2243 CHF — suggesting that relatively few might stand to benefit from a monthly 2500 CHF grant subject to repayment.
Panian herself believes that, for this reason, a Swiss experiment would have the potential shed a fresh perspective on the basic income debate, “Switzerland is famous as a ‘rich’ country. If we test it, we don’t do it primarily to fight unemployment or poverty.” Martignoni also points out that the trial planned in Rheinau would be unique among basic income experiments as one that is “not restricted to a poor part of the population but to all in a developed (‘rich’) country.”
That said, if the filmmaker believes that main reason to implement basic income in rich nation like Switzerland would be as a sort of insurance against future automation and digitization, then one might wonder what impact she hopes or expects to observe during a one-year trial in 2019. Indeed, if it most Swiss workers are already earning well above 2500 CHF per month, one might wonder if the trial will have any effect on participants (except, perhaps, the minor inconvenience of the required monthly repayments). Asked about this concern, Panian noted that, while very few Swiss men have monthly salaries below 2500 CHF, a significant proportion of women still lack their own income. Since the benefit will be paid on individual rather than household basis, women without a personal income will be able to keep the entire monthly payment. Thus, Panian predicts that families with children and stay-at-home mothers will be prime beneficiaries.
She adds, however, that individual monetary benefits are not, in her view, the only “benefit” of basic income: “I talked to many people, and it became obvious that most of them only think about how they could or would not profit on a monetary basis from the basic income. What they seem to forget is that if you live in a society where people don’t have to fear for their basic needs, they might get more content, and this will have a positive effect on the whole community.”
In any case, the discussion of potential benefits to Rheinau itself should not obscure the fact that, for the team behind the trial, the major goal is not to produce measurable results but to reinvigorate discussion of basic income in Switzerland and beyond. According to Panian, the best case scenario is one which the project “inspires others to organize more experiments on their own in their communities and motivates people to think about what future they want.”
Enno Schmidt, the filmmaker behind an earlier basic income documentary and cofounder of the referendum campaign, agrees that the greatest promise of the project is to catalyze further discussion: “it is one first fresh new activity after the referendum; it keeps the topic in Switzerland a little awake. It encourages other communities to think about whether or not they will also introduce a basic income on a trial basis.”
For more information and updates on the Rheinau basic income project, see https://www.dorf-testet-zukunft.ch/page1.html.
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Article reviewed by Patrick Hoare.
Cover image: Rheinau, CC BY-NC 2.0 Wisi Greter
