by Kate McFarland | May 8, 2016 | News
Last Wednesday, May 4, billionaire bond manager Bill Gross (of Janus Capital) made waves when he endorsed universal basic income in his Monthly Investment Outlook – or, perhaps more accurately, declared a UBI to be inevitable.
Mr. Gross, like many other commentators on current economic trends, foresees massive job loss due to automation:
Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models. Transportation is a visible example as computer driven vehicles soon will displace many truckers and bus/taxi drivers. Millions of jobs will be lost over the next 10-15 years. But medicine, manufacturing and even service intensive jobs are at risk. Investment managers too! Not only blue collar but now white collar professionals are being threatened by technological change.
He is critical of the idea, currently en vogue, that the appropriate response is to make higher education more accessible and affordable — submitting that a college degree might “better prepare students to be contestants on Jeopardy” but not necessarily lead to better jobs or more economic growth.
What, then, should be the alternative? Well, here’s what Mr. Gross says:
Instead we should spend money where it’s needed most – our collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI – Universal Basic Income. If more and more workers are going to be displaced by robots, then they will need money to live on, will they not? And if that strikes you as a form of socialism, I would suggest we get used to it.
Indeed, he later goes so far as to assert, “The question is how high this UBI should be and how to pay for it, not whether it’s coming in the next decade. It is.”
On the question of how to financial a UBI, Mr. Gross recommends that central banks print more money – the idea popularly referred to as “helicopter money” and promoted in Europe as “QE for the People.”
Within hours, Mr. Gross’ proclamations led to a proliferation of news stories on basic income – including reports in Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and CNN Money, to mention only a few.
Matt Levine (in his Bloomberg View column “Money Stuff“) drew upon some personal anecdotes from Bill Gross to common on the common objection-cum-question “Would people stop working if they had a basic income?”:
Imagine a young Bill Gross, offered a basic income, free of the constraints of needing to earn a living. Would he still have become an obsessive bond manager? Yes of course he would have, come on. Gross has been open about the fact that he’s not in bond investing for the money; he’s in it for the fame. And there is no universal basic income of fame, though I guess Twitter is getting us pretty close.
Meanwhile, other authors and commentators took a skeptical stance. Fortune columnist Chris Matthews, for example, questioned the political feasibility of UBI in present day America, and Myles Udland, writing for Business Insider, claimed that a UBI would not be welcomed because “in the US we have attached a stigma to receiving certain types of government assistance, and the sociopolitical hurdles to a basic income program are very high.”
To be fair, Udland probably penned this criticism before he had chance to the read David Calnitsky’s article in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, “‘More Normal than Welfare”: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” reported upon in Basic Income News last week. Calnitsky’s article provides empirical support to what many have already expected: since it is given to everyone — “obscuring the distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor,” as Calnitsky writes — a basic income should substantially diminish the stigma associated with the receipt of government monies.
Is basic income nonetheless too radical to be accepted in the States? At the very least, given the quickly burgeoning interest in the idea — and more and more prominent endorsements like that of Bill Gross — it seems premature to rule out its eventual widespread acceptance, which perhaps might happen sooner than we think.
Image Credit: Sequence Media Group
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (Click the link to see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News.)
by Kate McFarland | Apr 19, 2016 | News
Rutger Bregman in June 2015
Source: Victor van Werkhooven (Wikimedia Commons)
Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, the latest book by the award-winning Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman, will be published in English on Tuesday, April 19. The book was originally published in Dutch, and met immense success in the Netherlands — where it not only became a national bestseller but also helped to spearhead the movement for municipality-level basic income experiments.
Early in the book, Bregman transports the reader back to a long-gone time of utopian fantasy — to visions of “Cockaigne,” a land where “rivers ran with wine, roast geese flew overhead, pancakes grew on trees, and hot pies and pastries rained from the skies,” and all people danced, drank, and lounged together as equals. A new vision of utopia, he argues, is sorely needed in modern societies.
A century ago, influential thinkers like John Maynard Keynes predicted that automation and improved efficiency would render work all but gone in the not-so-distant future. Instead, here in the early decades of the 21st century, we citizens of developed nations find ourselves working longer hours than ever — all too often in jobs that we ourselves find meaningless. (On the last point, see Bregman’s lucid discussion of “bullshit jobs” in hist chapter entitled “Why it Doesn’t Pay to be a Banker.”) Technology has brought great improvements in living conditions — at least for a few — but dreams of a paradise of leisure seem lost to the wind.
Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Luilekkerland” (“The Land of Cockaigne”), 1567
How, then, can we reclaim our visions of utopia? How can we turn our modern “Land of Plenty,” as Bregman often calls it, into a land of plenty for all — and plentiful leisure and life-fulfillment as well?
No doubt, many skeptics and naysayers will find Bregman’s solutions — his visions of a universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek — to be fanciful as the mythical land of Cockaigne. Bregman himself concedes that, to many, his proposals will sound like “crazy dreams.” But it can’t be over-stressed that this “crazy dream” is, indeed, a “utopia for realists.” Far from being a woolly-headed dreamer, Bregman proposes and describes specific steps en route to utopia — from disincentivizing overtime to taxing banking transactions to developing alternative measure of progress to the GDP — and thoroughly backs his claims with diverse historical and experimental evidence.
For example, in his first chapter on basic income (“Why Everyone Should Get Free Money”), Bregman presents the findings of multiple studies of the effects of “free money.” He discusses the results of “Mincome” experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, and similar concurrent studies conducted in the United States, in some detail — in addition to summarizing the outcomes observed by charitable organizations like GiveDirectly, which deals in no-strings-attached cash donations, and formal studies of cash transfers to the poor. He effectively combines statistics, anecdotes, and theoretical considerations in making the case that a basic income is the most effective means to combat poverty — a realistic approach to utopia-building if any is.
Of course, as Bregman knows, basic income, on its own, is not sufficient to create a utopian future. I will leave it to the reader to discover the other facets and nuances of his “crazy dream” — but, as an educator, I do want to call special attention to Bregman’s critique of our present discourse about education, which he (accurately) notes “invariably revolved around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market?” According to Bregman, this is “precisely the wrong question.” Instead, educators must ask what knowledge and skills we want students to have — to prepare them “not only for the job market but, more fundamentally, for life.” I couldn’t agree more. (Of course, as a philosophy instructor, I also couldn’t agree more when Bregman specifically recommends training students in “philosophy and morals,” but I digress…)
Utopia for Realists is a highly recommended read — but, in the words of Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. Bregman’s book has received widespread praise from noted scholars and thinkers in the basic income movement and beyond.
Nick Srnicek, the co-author of another influential utopian-leaning book (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work), calls Utopia for Realists “a bold call for utopian thinking and a world without work – something needed more than ever in an era of defeatism and lack of ambition,” while noted social theorist Zygmunt Bauman describes it as “brilliant, comprehensive, truly enlightening, and eminently readable” and “obligatory reading for everyone worried about the wrongs of present-day society and wishing to contribute to their cure.”
BIEN co-founder Philippe van Parijs also commends the book, saying, “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions. It can turn allegedly utopian proposals into plain common sense. It can enable us to face the future with unprecedented enthusiasm. To see how, read this superbly written, upbeat, insightful book.”
To learn more about Rutger Bregman and Utopia for Realists, visit the website of its publisher The Correspondent, a crowdfunded online journal for which Bregman has written extensively.
Bregman was recently interviewed by Gawker about basic income, in conjunction with the English version release of his book. The interview covers much ground, including the feasibility of a basic income in the United States (Bregman sees a “natural fit” for a basic income in the US, calling it the “ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics”), and responses to a battery of potential objections, such as the free-rider problem, the threat of inflation, and the worry that an economy in which people work fewer hours could not generate sufficient revenue to finance a basic income.
For a short and accessible video introduction to Bregman’s ideas about a basic income, watch his TEDx talk on YouTube.
by Karl Widerquist | Apr 16, 2016 | News
Could a guaranteed-income program eliminate the hardship low income families face, or would inflation render the poor people just as poor as before? (photo: Joe Wolf via Freakanomics)
The internet radio series, Freakonomics Radio, which uses economic theory to examine everyday life, released an episode on April 13 focusing basic income. The episode is called, “Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?”
According to Feakanomic, the gist of the story is, “a lot of full-time jobs in the modern economy simply don’t pay a living wage. And even those jobs may be obliterated by new technologies. What’s to be done so that financially vulnerable people aren’t just crushed? It may finally be time for an idea that economists have promoted for decades: a guaranteed basic income.” The audio is 36 minutes. The website includes a transcript of the episode.
Stephen J. Dubner, “Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?” Feakanomics Radio, April 13, 2016
by Jenna van Draanen | Feb 19, 2016 | News
Rana Bokhari, leader of the Liberal party in the Canadian province of Manitoba, has come out publicly to say that the party will conduct two basic income pilot projects if they are elected in April 2016.
Their proposed projects bear some similarities to the “Mincome” experiment undertaken in Dauphin and Winnipeg (Manitoba) in the 1970’s. The Mincome experiment, however, was cut short when a new government was elected in 1979, and a final report was never issued. Moreover, the Manitoba liberals believe that those results that were recorded from the Dauphin experiment are now dated, and new data are needed to make accurate policy decisions.
Source: Winnipeg Free Press File Photo of Manitoba Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari
Bokhari has stated that introducing a guaranteed income has potential to be cost-effective and beneficial. Although she acknowledges that the plan has complications, she believes that its potential payoffs make it well worth trying. As she says, “If we want to reduce poverty, if we want to take care of those who are most vulnerable in our society, we need to start taking a much more aggressive approach.”
Indeed, Bokhari believes that the basic income pilots would give Manitoba the opportunity to position itself at the vanguard of an important global movement, stating “Manitoba can and should lead the country and the world in this area.”
For more on this topic, see:
Larry Kusch, “Liberals would launch two projects to study guaranteed minimum income,” Winnipeg Free Press. January 15, 2016
No Author, “Manitoba Liberals to Pilot Minimum Income Project if Elected,” CBC News. January 15, 2016
