by Yannick Vanderborght | Mar 11, 2013 | News
Following an interdisciplinary perspective (law, history, philosophy and sociology), this international symposium aims to clarify the relationships between activation policies, right to work and freedom of work. One prospective session will discuss two alternatives to the current “activation model”: the basic income guarantee and the employment guarantee (with Yannick Vanderborght from Louvain University, and Phil Harvey from Rutgers University respectively).
Further details and registration at: https://www.uclouvain.be/431261
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 20, 2012 | Opinion
Hartley Dean, Social Policy, 2nd edition, Polity, 2012, xi + 157 pp, pbk, 0 7456 5178 1, £12.99
Hartley Dean’s passion for social policy is rooted in twelve years spent working for an advice centre in Brixton. This reviewer’s passion for the subject stems from just two years working in Brixton’s Supplementary Benefit Office around the same time, but the question that has stayed with both of us is the same: How can we most effectively make provision for diverse human need? This second edition of Dean’s ‘short introduction’ on social policy is even more focussed on this question than the first edition, and although it retains the structure and much of the content of the first edition, it fully recognises the social and social policy change that has occurred during the last six years: for instance, the increasing expectations of the voluntary sector in relation to service provision.
Rather than being structured around such topic areas as education, health, and poverty, as some introductory texts in social policy are, this book is structured around a series of questions: What is social policy? Where did it come from? Why on earth does it matter? What does human wellbeing entail? Who gets what? Who’s in control? What’s the trouble with human society? Can social policy solve social problems? How are the times a-changing? Where is social policy going? A topic approach offers the student an understanding of discrete social policy fields, but will not necessarily enable them to grasp what social policy is or why it matters, whereas reading Dean’s book, and grappling with the questions that it asks and attempts to answer, will hammer home for the student that social policy is about the systematic meeting of human need. (The new edition has benefited from Dean’s recent work on human need, published in 2010 in his book Understanding Human Need.)
If there were to be a third edition then I would ask for two additions:
As an advice worker, Dean would have grappled with the administrative complexity of the means-tested benefits administered by the office for which I once worked. The code of regulations filled a bookshelf, and knowing one’s way around those regulations was a major task in itself. But whilst means-tested benefits are discussed in the book, there is no mention of the administrative complexity which they impose on individuals and households. ‘Administration’ is not in the index. A general long-term shift in academic interest is in evidence here. If Dean had been a professor at the LSE during its earlier years, then he would have worked in the Department of Social Policy and Administration, rather than in the Social Policy Department. To include material on the administrative complexity of means-tested benefits in the next edition of his book would help tor reinterest social policy departments in such important administrative matters.
Dean helpfully distinguishes between Social Policy (capitalised: the academic subject) and social policies and social policy (lower case: policies enacted, and the category to which they belong). What would be helpful in the next edition of the book would be more discussion of the policy process: that is, how do social problems come to be recognised as such, how are political considerations in practice involved in the process, and how do policy ideas become legislation and regulations? Perhaps in the next edition we shall find ‘civil service’ and ‘think tank’ in the index.
But having said all that, this is a most useful book, and it is good to have an updated edition. Social policies matter, and therefore Social Policy matters. The book will give to undergraduate social policy students a good grounding in the questions at the heart of their discipline, and will remind them why they are studying the subject. What would be even more interesting would be for an examinations board to establish an A level in social policy ( – a social policy module already exists within a sociology A level) and for a new edition of Dean’s book to be written in a format appropriate for sixth formers. This would do wonders both for Social Policy and for social policy.
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 29, 2012 | News
“Pathways to a Basic Income,” Munich, Germany, September 14-16, 2012
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the parent organization of USBIG, will hold its 14th biennial Congress in Munich Germany on September 14-16, 2012. It will have an additional “host-nation” day on September 13. According to the conference website, “Every other year researchers, scholars, policy makers and politicians from different parts of the world get together to discuss alternatives that could lead to the promotion and implementation of an elementary principle of social justice: the guarantee of a monetary income. Ideas, experiences and new designs for public policies will be addressed by specialists and several guests for three days.” The 14th BIEN Congress will take place at the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus in the Munich suburb of Ottobrunn.
Plenary speakers include the following people: Mylondo Baptiste is a French philosopher and political scientist. He is the founder of the nonprofit association “Conso-age.” Bruna Augusto Pereira is cofounder of the non-governmental organization ReCivitas, which runs a unique project paying a basic income to every resident of the Brazilian village Quatinga Velho. Claus Offe is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. Gotz W. Werner is a German entrepreneur and founder of the drugstore chain, “dm.” He is a prominent basic income advocate in Europe. Guy Standing is an economist and professor at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath in Great Britain. Min Geum studied law in Seoul and Gottingen. He was candidate of the Socialist Party for president in South Korea in 2007. He founded the Basic Income Korean Network, the BIEN affiliate in South Korea. Philippe Van Parijs is professor at the faculty of economic, social and political sciences of the University of Louvain. Renana Jhabvala is one of the best-known representatives of women’s interests working in the informal sector in India. She has held several positions at the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India, which represents the interests of self-employed women at risk of poverty. Rolf Kunnemann is the Human Rights Director at the Secretariat of FIAN International (FoodFirst Information and Action Network) in Heidelberg. He has been working on human rights to adequate food, especially in rural areas of the Global South, since 1983. Tereza Campello is Minister for Social Development and Hunger Alleviation in Brazil.
The language of the main conference will be English, but some plenary sessions will have simultaneous translation into German. The language of the host-nation day will be German. Organizers recommend that people register for the conference early because of the limited number of available places available.
More information is available on the conference website:
https://www.bien2012.de/en
Even more information is available from the conference organizers at:
office@bien2012.de
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 25, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The Eleventh North American Basic Income Guarantee (NA-BIG) Congress took place at the University of Toronto on May 3-5, 2012. I had the privilege of attending this conference. It provided an unusual opportunity for me to go to a NA-BIG Congress purely as a participant, because I had almost nothing to do with the organization of it this year.
The theme of the Congress was “Putting Equality Back on The Agenda: Basic Income and Other Approaches to Economic Security for All.” It began—unusually for a conference primarily dedicated to examining basic income—with two skeptics explaining what was wrong with the basic income as a solution to current problems in the United States and Canada. I applaud these participants for speaking their mind in an auditorium full of basic income supporters. It was kind of strange to begin with the skeptics—rebutting an idea that hadn’t yet been presented at the conference—but it worked very well to keep the basic income supporters on their toes throughout the conference.
The organizers invited two speakers to focus on the problems of poverty and inequality rather than specifically on basic income as a proposed solution: Charles Karelis (Research Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University and author of The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor) and Richard Wilkinson (Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better). Even though these speakers’ remarks were not directly about basic income, they were valuable to the conference, because they show the need to do something about poverty and inequality in the world today. It’s the work of a conference like this to see if basic income can help solve the problems researchers like these have identified.
One featured speaker, Erik Olin Wright (of the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, author of Envisioning Real Utopias, and American Society: How it Actually Works), brought the congress back to focus on basic income, but he did not support the common version of the basic income proposal—a basically unregulated economy with basic income as its one central progressive reform. He argued that basic income would only succeed if it were part of a major reform of the economic system.
One of the most pertinent presentations was given by Evelyn Forget (Professor, University of Manitoba Faculty of Medicine, author of a major forthcoming study on Mincome: the Manitoba minimum income experiment). She has been working for several years to recover and analyze data from the Canadian Negative Income Tax experiment, known as Mincome. The experiment was conducted by the Canadian Federal government in the late 1970s, but it was cancelled before the data was analyzed. Only now, thanks mostly to Evelyn Forget, are the findings of the experiment becoming fully available. She finds that the experiment had many benefits for recipients including, for example, improved school attainment among children and improved health outcomes for all family members.
Senator Art Eggleton, former mayor of Toronto, concluded the conference with a practical discussion of how to put BIG on the political agenda in North America.
The parallel sessions provided a wide range of discussion about BIG. These sessions were especially valuable for me because I was able to attend two sessions and a dinner dedicated to providing feedback to me on chapters of the book that I am currently polishing for publication. The book makes a freedom-based argument for an unconditional income from the perspective that the imposition of rules, including the rules of property, make the poor unfree in very important ways. Basic income is both compensation for the imposition of these rules and a necessary institution (in modern industrial society) to maintain each individual’s status as a free person with the power to accept or reject active cooperation with other willing individuals. The sessions I participated in helped me formulate this argument and to present the book as a work of political philosophy.
For me, the Congress was also an opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I have now been to six BIEN Congresses and all eleven NA-BIG Congresses. I believe there are only three of us who have been to all eleven Congresses (the other two being Jeff Smith and Al Sheahen). Every Congress is a little different. Some themes recur every time, but I’m always confronted with new ideas.
One welcome addition to this Congress was the presence of a significant number of people who are on disability or other forms of public assistance. This group brought the discussion back to practical issues every time, providing a skeptical view of nearly all the ideas presented. I hope we can get someone from this group to be a featured speaker at an upcoming NA-BIG or BIEN Congress.
The North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is a joint project of the USBIG Network and the Canadian Basic Income Guarantee. It takes place in Canada and the United States on alternating years. Next year’s Congress will be in New York City in February (see announcement above).
For more information on this past conference go to:
https://biencanada.ca/
Papers from the Congress will be online as part of the USBIG Discussion Paper Series at:
https://www.usbig.net/papers.php
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 4, 2012 | Opinion
Graham Room, Complexity, Institutions and Public Policy: Agile decision-making in a turbulent world, Edward Elgar, 2011, vii + 383pp, hbk, 0 85793 263 1, £95
This is one of those rare books which studies the deeper foundations of theory and practice: not just a particular social policy field, and not even the way in which social policy is either made or studied, but rather the nature of the world in which social policy is made – its institutional, social, and personal realities, and the dynamic relationships between them – and the ways in which social policy-making should therefore be carried out. As Room puts the questions which he asks himself:
How can we best conceptualise [the] dynamic processes of socio-economic change? … how can we model these dynamics empirically, as processes that are endogenous rather than merely the response to exogenous shocks? … what analytical tools … can be made available to policy-makers for the purpose of monitoring and steering these processes of transformation? (pp.4-5).
In answer to these questions the book discusses the policy process as a non-linear one which
involves feedback loops which bring into play a variety of actors who set about reshaping the policy intervention in light of their own strategic objectives … This is policy-making played out on a bouncy castle … Any policy is an intervention in a tangled web of institutions that have developed incrementally over extended periods of time and that give each policy context its own specificity. … Policy terrains and policy effects are path dependent. (p.7)
So policy processes can be both non-linear (containing feed-back loops) and path-dependent ( – their history determines to some extent where they go next), and it is in this complex context, which is also a highly turbulent one, that evidence-based policy decisions have to be made.
The first part of the book is theoretical, and Room draws on numerous disciplines to build a conceptual structure. He employs biological and mathematical sciences to understand the economy as a complex adaptive system which is nowhere near to equilibrium; and sociology and political science to understand institutions as diverse and dynamic moral communities subject to change by institutional entrepreneurs when public dissatisfaction opens up new political possibilities. A final theoretical chapter employs biological science to understand the agile agents who operate in far from equilibrium complex systems.
The second part of the book relates the first part’s conceptual structures to the empirical social scientific methods familiar to students of social policy. Room applies the mathematics of complexity, chaos, and emergent order, to combinations of complex social systems and networks, and then to social mobility and inequality. He finds that
egalitarian efforts by the state do not reverse inequalities so much as mute their harshness … As structural change alters the landscape of positional competition, it is … in general those who are already advantaged who are best placed to take advantage of the new opportunities and to avoid the new insecurities (pp.209-210).
Part 3 employs the understanding of the policy context outlined in part 1, and the methods discussed in part 2, to understand the policy-maker as a ‘tuner’, an energiser, and a steward, and to discuss particular policy areas. Of particular interest to readers of this Newsletter might be the chapter on poverty and social exclusion, which employs mathematical modelling to understand social polarisation, understands households as agile institutional entrepreneurs negotiating their way around the social policy landscape (of education, benefits, employment, etc.), and recognises that in the employment market ‘agile creativity accrues disproportionately to the advantaged’ (p.265).
After chapters on the knowledge economy and the current financial crisis, the final chapter offers a policy tool-kit for agile policy-makers, and examples of how the tools might be used.
This is a most fascinating book. Just as Aristotle wrote his Metaphysics (‘after-physics’) after his Physics, so Room has written a ‘metasocialpolicy’ which will act as a groundwork for future study of social policy and for policy-making. But perhaps we also need another layer of analysis. The book is about the evolution of complex adaptive systems, but the first chapter mentions a different kind of change: the earthquake – a sudden shifting of the tectonic plates. Scientific progress is mainly evolutionary in character, but occasionally there is a paradigm shift: the emergence of a new way of seeing, a shift in the conceptual tectonic plates. Our welfare state, in most of its aspects, is still fashioned for modernity: for a stable industrial nuclear-family society; but our world is less and less like that. Social reality is now ‘liquid’ (Zygmunt Bauman), but we are still waiting for the social policy earthquake which will deliver the necessary social infrastructure. It is the science of paradigm change that we require, and a new vision of social policy which will both serve and generate further liquid social reality. Strange though it might seem, the dynamic complexity of today’s social reality requires the opposite kind of social policy, because any complexity in practical policy will create social, fiscal and other boundaries which will prevent social and individual change. Just one obvious example is children’s transfers from primary to secondary school, and another the transfer from Job Seeker’s Allowance to (so-called) ‘tax credits’ on an often small change in the number of hours of employment. Liquid post-modernity requires simplicity in social policy so that no boundaries get in the way of social or individual change. Child Benefit and the NHS are obvious examples.
In complexity science as in politics, prediction is perilous; agile humanity is forever able to devise new challenges to the prevailing order; nothing is incontestable; human beings can in some degree choose their futures. (p.305)
