by Sandro Gobetti | Jun 22, 2017 | News
Basic Income Network – Italy has just released a new book: “Guaranteed income and technological innovation, between algorithms and robotics“, which will be available in bookstores on the 22nd of June, 2017. In addition, the book is available online through publisher Asterios Editore.
The book opens up a global topic of interest: the links between the fourth industrial revolution, robotics and artificial intelligence, platform capitalism, and basic income rights – to the Italian populus. The publication documents a debate that involved a large group of academics, scholars, researchers and activists who were ready to make a say in favor of basic income as a social guarantee. This is particularly important at the time of technological innovation, which requires new mental and cultural paradigms, even before political and institutional ones.
Within the book fifteen authors reveal variant perspectives, beliefs, and views on basic income. The contributors agree that social protections and its mechanisms need rethinking, in order to bring forth a guaranteed basic income.
A fil rouge runs through the words and ideas of the books essays: in the digital age, look at the present and toward the future in order to recognize a collective right that allows each individual to participate in the redistribution of wealth produced by social networking, among other rights. The political and social pushor a basic income is thus understood to challenge social injustice and enable an individual and collective self-determination within a new type of society.
Because, most probably, as is quoted by Philippe Van Parijs in this book: “One day we will wonder how we could live without a basic income…”
Authors / articles in the book:
Gianmarco Mecozzi, Mutanti senza reddito garantito (Mutants without guaranteed income)
Giuseppe Allegri, Re UBI per una nuova società. Reddito di base, innovazione, tempi di vita (King UBI for a new society. Basic income, innovation, time of life)
Franco Berardi Bifo, Come attualizzare il possibile, ovvero: per l’autonomia progettuale della Silicon Valley Globale (How to update the possible: for the autonomy of the Global Silicon Valley)
Luigi Corvo, BIM – Basic Income Matters. Reddito di base e innovazione sociale (Basic Income Matters. Basic income and social innovation)
Giuseppe Bronzini, Reddito di base, lavoro, automazione: appunti per un nuovo garantismo sociale (Basic income, work, automation: notes for a new social security)
Francesca Bria, Reddito di cittadinanza nell’economia dei robot per dire no alla precarietà (Basic income in the robot economy to say no to precariousness)
Benedetto Vecchi, Il reddito di base oltre l’algoritmo digitale (Basic income beyond the digital algorithm)
Sandro Gobetti, Google al governo e reddito per tutti? (Google to the government and income for everyone?)
Silvano Cacciari, Potere deflattivo, tecnologia, (de-)globalizzazione e reddito di cittadinanza (Deflating Power, Technology, (de-) Globalization and Citizenship Income)
Franco Carlucci, Soft Machine 2.0. L’operaio sociale e l’uso capitalistico delle macchine (Soft Machine 2.0. The social worker and the capitalist use of machines)
Roberto Ciccarelli, Nel capitalismo digitale il reddito di base non si trova sugli alberi (In digital capitalism basic income doesn’t grow on trees)
Fabrizio Fassio e Giuseppe Nicolosi, L’aumento del tempo di lavoro nell’epoca della sua riducibilità técnica (The increase in working time in the era of its technical reducibility)
Mariano Di Palma, Robot n. 18, senza articolo. L’urgenza di un reddito minimo dentro la quarta rivoluzione industriale (Robot n. 18, without the article. The urgency of a minimum income in the fourth industrial revolution)
Andrea Fumagalli, Umani, macchine e reddito di base (Humans, machines and basic income)
More information at:
[In Italian]
“Guaranteed income and technological innovation, between algorithms and robotics”, Basic Income Network – Italy, Asterios, June 2017
by Kate McFarland | Jun 4, 2017 | News
A Special Rapporteur of the United Nations will hold a panel discussion on universal basic income and the future of human rights on Thursday, June 8, 2017.
Organized by Professor Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the event will explore the potential for basic income to mitigate global economic insecurity. The panelists include two cofounders of the Basic Income Earth Network — Professor Philippe van Parijs (University of Louvain, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and Guy Standing (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) — in addition to Isabelle Doresse (People’s Universities in Northern Pas de Calais, ATD Fourth World) and Alex Praça (Human and Trade Union Rights Officer of the International Trade Union Confederation).
The panel will discuss a report prepared by Alston and submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council. Alston’s report addresses the concern that “the human rights movement needs to address and respond to the fundamental changes that are taking place in economic and social structures at the national and global levels,” including precarious employment, automation, increasing inequality, and the obsolescence of traditional forms of labor market regulation.
As Alston describes the idea, a basic income “is explicitly designed to challenge most of the key assumptions underpinning existing social security systems”:
Rather than a system where there are partial payments, basic income guarantees a floor; instead of being episodic, payments are regular; rather than being needs-based, they are paid as a flat rate to all; they come in cash, rather than as messy in-kind support; they accrue to every individual, rather than only to needy households; rather than requiring that various conditions be met, they are unconditional; rather than excluding the well off, they are universal; and instead of being based on lifetime contributions, they are funded primarily from taxation.
The 20-page report describes each of these characteristics of a basic income, overviews the history of the idea, and describes various types of basic income and related policies, such as a negative income tax and cash transfers. Alston also lays out some examples of the possible cost of implementing a basic income scheme.
Alston holds that “the basic income concept should not be rejected out of hand on the grounds that it is utopian” and encourages further discussion of the policy as a means to alleviate economic insecurity and promote human rights and social justice. He additionally urges that the debate on basic income be united with that on social protection floors.
Further Viewing and Reading
The June 8 panel discussion will be broadcast live online here.
The full report on universal basic income of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is available in the UN’s document repository or can be directly downloaded as a PDF here.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Human Rights Council during 15th Session, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 UN Geneva
by Kate McFarland | May 21, 2017 | News
Boston Review, an American political and literary magazine, has published a forum on basic income as the periodical’s spring 2017 print edition. It is also freely available online.
The forum begins with a lead article by Temple University law professor Brishen Rogers (“Basic Income in Just Society”), with responses from Roy Bahat, Peter Barnes, Annette Bernhardt, Juliana Bidadanure, Diane Coyle, Patrick Diamond, Philippe van Parijs, Connie Razza, David Rolf, Tommie Shelby, Dorian T. Warren, and Corrie Watterson.
Introduction to the special edition:
Technology and the loss of manufacturing jobs have many worried about future mass unemployment. It is in this context that basic income—a government cash grant given unconditionally to all—has gained support from a surprising range of advocates, from Silicon Valley to labor. Our contributors explore basic income’s merits, not only as a salve for financial precarity, but as a path toward racial justice and equality. Others, more skeptical, see danger in a basic income designed without attention to workers’ power and the quality of work. Together they offer a nuanced debate about what it will take to tackle inequality and what kind of future we should aim to create.
Boston Review has published articles about basic income occasionally in the past, and published several recent articles on the topic outside of the forum (including “No Racial Justice Without Basic Income” by the California-based social justice group The Undercommons and “Basic Income Works” by Paul Niehaus and Michael Faye of GiveDirectly).
According to Wikipedia, the magazine has a circulation of about 62,000.
Reviewed by Dave Clegg
by Karl Widerquist | May 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
All posts from my blog, the Indepentarian
My books and research articles
Indepentarianism is the political ideology associated with the political theory called “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA). I (Karl Widerquist) defined JPA and outlined its theory of freedom in my 2013 book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. It argues that the promotion of freedom in a society with private property requires, among other things, an unconditional basic income in part, on grounds that it is wrong to put conditions on anyone else’s access to the resources they need to survive. A worker needs the power to say no—not just to any one job, but to all jobs—to enter the market place as a free person and not as a forced laborer. Although this theory is drawn from principles stressing freedom in the most negative sense of the term, it is not associated with theories that use freedom to justify economic inequality. It is committed to the idea that economic and politically disadvantaged people in every society are the least free and that the promotion of freedom in the most meaningful sense requires far greater equality of income, wealth, and political power; greater respect for political dissenters, better stewardship of the environment, and other policies. I am planning to layout the JPA theory of property rights more fully in a future book entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.
The name, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord,” comes from the belief that most prevailing theories of justice in political philosophy today are utopian in the sense that they ignore the problem of reasonable disagreement about the basic principles of justice. Social contract theory imagines all the reasonable, rational people in the world agreeing to a hypothetical social contract outlining what justice is. Anyone who doesn’t agree in practice can be dismissed as irrational or unreasonable. Natural rights theorists do not believe that justice comes from any hypothetical agreement. It is just whether anyone agrees or not, but they believe that any rational, reasonable person can discover the true principles of justice by observation and contemplation and anyone who doesn’t agree can be dismissed is irrational or unreasonable. Even the best philosophers are not good at recognizing the difference between reasonable and unreasonable dissent.
These utopian aspects of the leading theories have produced dystopian consequences. Philosophers have misled people into the belief that everyone shares in the benefits of modern society. No matter how disadvantage a person maybe, we are told to believe that they are better off because the government and the property rights system exist. The truth, as Grant S. McCall and I argue in our 2017 book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, is that our institutions harm people. Many disadvantaged people are probably worse off than their ancestors were 20,000 years ago.
JPA makes no statement whether there might be a theory of justice to which all rational, reasonable people should or would agree, but it is based on the belief that we are far from the point of discovering such a theory. A true accord exists only if all people are fully autonomous and all literally agree to the social contract or some other basic structure such as a set of natural rights. The essential political problem in the world today is severe disagreement between reasonable people about the most basic principles of justice. We must always pursue that accord, but we should be aware we are unlikely to reach it. Therefore, whoever makes the rules always forces them onto reasonable dissenters. The ruling coalition’s right to make the rules stems both from the agreement of the majority and from their effort to create the minimum negative interference with dissenters. This constraint, of course, requires the governments of the world to treat the disadvantaged and disaffected people of the world much better than they do now—including a payment by those who are most advantage under the existing structure to compensate those who are most disadvantaged under it.
The name, “indepentarianism,” stresses the central role that freedom as independence plays in JPA. The book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, argues that an individual’s status as a free person is best understood as “Effective Control Self-Ownership” (ECSO freedom, pronounced “exo-freedom” as in external-freedom). In essence: status freedom is the power to say no. An independent person is free from all direct and indirect force to actively serve the interests of others. You can tell a person: go do what you want over there, but if you make it impossible for them to do live as they want without serving some other group of people, you have taken away their status as a free person.
In this sense, most working people in the world are not fully free. If they had direct access to resources, they could hunt, gather, fish, farm, invest, or start a business or start some manufacturing venture by themselves or with whoever wanted to work with them. Instead, the rules of property create “propertylessness,” which in turn indirectly forces the vast majority of people to ask for a job from someone who controls enough resources to give them one. That is, it forces one group of people into become a subordinate of at least one member of another group of people—because we have robbed them of the power to say no to whatever jobs are on offer.
There’s nothing wrong with employment—as long as you choose it freely. Just like there’s nothing wrong with sex—as long as it’s not rape. A choice of bosses without the freedom to say no to all of them is not freedom from forced labor just as a choice of sexual partners without the power to say no to all of them is not freedom from rape.
One of the main reasons I defined indepentarianism as a new ideology is the lack of attention that most of the prevailing political ideologies pay to the injustice of indirectly forced subordination.
The book argues that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the best way to support ECSO freedom in the modern economy. But UBI support is not synonymous with indepentarianism. Someone could conceivably support indepentarian principles without believing they are best upheld by UBI or a similar policy. Although I hope all UBI supporters will have some interest in indepentarianism, I expect that most of them are not indepentarians. For example, one of the architects of the UBI movement, Philippe Van Parijs, argues for UBI on the theory of justice and/or the ideology he calls “Real Libertarianism,” which is based on very different principles than JPA.
JPA also differs from other political theories in its treatment of property rights in external assets: that is, assets external to the human body including natural resources and the things humans make out of them. Egalitarians tend to assume external assets are naturally collective property. Left-libertarians tend to assume that external assets should naturally owned individually in equal shares. So-called “libertarians” tend to assume external assets are natural unowned, but ownable by the first person to “appropriate” them by some procedure that tends to lead to highly unequal ownership. JPA assumes resources are “naturally” unowned and unownable. The only way to create a truly justice property rights system would be through a property rights accord, which is probably impossible. In the absence of that accord, the ruling coalition is always forcing a system of property onto reasonable dissenters. Therefore, they have to minimize the negative interference that their system of rights imposes on dissenters and future generations. This, responsibility, I argue motivates both a strongly egalitarian and environmentalist property rights system.
I plan to layout JPA property theory more fully in a future book, entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord. It will argue that this responsibility for an egalitarian property rights system requires a UBI high enough not only to maintain ECSO freedom but a UBI set at the highest sustainable level. However, I suspect that not everyone who agrees with the basic principles of indepentarianism will agree with this part of the argument.
I’m very interested in what people think—for and against indepentarianism. I’m especially interested to know whether there are other indepentarians out there. You don’t have to agree with all I’ve said here to call yourself an indepentarian. If you’re in agreement with enough of it to use the term, please say so in a comment. If you’d like to know more about it, please contact me at karl@widerquist.com. I am not interested in creating an echo chamber. I’m interested in respectful dialogue with people taking these ideas in their own directions. I’m also greatly interested in people who criticize any aspect of valetudinarianism.
All posts from my blog, the Indepentarian
My books and research articles
-Karl Widerquist, Begun in New Orleans, completed at Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, May 21, 2017
by Kate McFarland | May 20, 2017 | News
On Monday, May 22, 2017, the European Business Summit will hold a discussion of the European basic income debate as part of its annual event in Brussels, Belgium.
The hour-long session will feature two cofounders of BIEN–Philippe Van Parijs (Université catholique de Louvain) and Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London)–in addition to Olli Kangas (Kela), who is leading the research team behind Finland’s basic income experiment, and Mark Smith (Grenoble Ecole de Management). It will center on the question “The basic income debate is coming to a head in Europe, but is it really feasible?”
The discussion will be moderated by the Belgian freelance journalist Chris Burns, who has previously interviewed Standing about universal basic income and the precariat.
Now in its 17th year, the European Business Summit draws more than 2000 participants annually– business leaders, policymakers, researchers and academics, and others–to debate economic, social, and political issues facing Europe. This year, the conference will host 150 speakers over the course of two days. A full schedule is available here.
Photo: “European Business Summit” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 European Wind Energy Association
