by Timothy Roscoe Carter | Jan 9, 2016 | Opinion
Before beginning this essay, let me describe the people about whom I am speaking when I use the term “liberal”. In the American 21st century context, I am essentially describing the people you would likely find in the leadership of the Democratic party. Despite the conservative view of mainstream liberals as radical socialists, they are, at most, cautious reformers. Even that probably goes too far. The way they depict themselves, and probably actually see themselves, is as people who believe in the system, but want it to be fairer, more compassionate, and more efficient. When viewed systematically, the most important of those is efficiency. A look at policy reveals that the primary aim of liberals is using the government to make capitalism work better and more efficiently. This also applies to seemingly non-market concerns like welfare benefits, civil rights, and education.
Let us look at equal pay and anti-discrimination labor laws for women. Some economic theorists on the right argue that such laws are unnecessary. According to them, the market would automatically correct any form of discrimination. If sexist employers refused to hire women or paid them significantly less than their equally skilled male counterparts, other employers would exploit the opportunity to hire the women at higher wages. The productivity gains of the fairer employers would lead to emulation and competition for women workers until parity with men is achieved.
Liberals usually respond by appealing to empirical reality. If this argument were true today, it would have also been true in 1910. We know there was sex discrimination then, as there continues to be today. If markets corrected inefficiencies by themselves, there would never have been any gender discrimination. But liberal arguments do not contradict the claim that sex discrimination is inefficient. Laws preventing gender discrimination may be just and compassionate, but they also make markets work more efficiently. Eventually, laws against gender discrimination turned out to benefit employers as much as they benefited women. In the documentary Inequality For All, Robert Reich showed that employers took advantage of the growing numbers of women in the workforce competing with men for the same jobs, and this was one of the factors that eventually lead to the leveling off of real wage growth that began in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s .
This analysis applies across the range of policies pushed by liberals. Consumer protection laws and tort laws may protect and compensate consumers, but they also encourage trade by making it easier to trust strangers in the market. Public health care and education saves and enriches people’s lives, but they also produce a skilled and healthy workforce for employers. Laws that support strong unions help the workers themselves, but they also increase workers’ wages so that they can spend more as consumers. Infrastructure projects provide public goods that are used by all, but they notoriously prioritize the needs of businesses over the needs of the disadvantaged communities where they are inevitably built.
What about same-sex marriage? It is crucial for social justice, but does it help market efficiency to allow people to marry whom they wish? No, it does not, and that is why same-sex marriage provides a useful counter-example. The fact is that same-sex marriage was never really a mainstream liberal goal. Nor was it really a goal of the large mainstream gay rights organizations. The main goal was just for more acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. If straight people can partake in hookup culture on apps like Tinder then why can’t gay people go on Discreet Gay Dating without being judged for it? If dysfunctional heterosexual couples can have a baby why can’t stable same-sex couples adopt one? Both the politicians and the organizations focused on the acceptances of the community and getting anti-discrimination laws passed, which do serve market efficiency as previously noted. Same-sex marriage as a goal arose from the gay and lesbian grass roots and was pursued more through the courts than through legislation. As late as 2008, all three top contenders for the Democratic nomination for President declared their opposition to same-sex marriage. The speed and enthusiasm with which virtually all of the top Democrats reversed their positions the moment same-sex marriage polled over 50% could certainly cause a person to doubt the sincerity of their previous opposition. But to blame that insincere opposition on political cowardice would be to miss the point. Professional politicians fight uphill battles against initial public opposition a lot. But they also have to pick their battles. And however much powerful liberals may have secretly sympathized with the plight of their gay and lesbian friends who wished to marry, and may have even supported them with donations towards items to help them consumate such a marriage (be it a feeldoe or helping with the ceremony itself), they were simply not going to prioritize a political battle for social justice that would not increase market efficiency, grow the economy, and enrich their campaign donors.
So where does this leave us with basic income? To answer this, we need to examine how liberals approach welfare in general. It is certainly true that they support much more generous benefits than conservatives, they also tend to be even more concerned with separating the deserving poor from the undeserving poor than conservatives, whose main concern is turning whatever welfare spending that does exist into a way to funnel that money into corporate coffers. Liberals usually support robust Earned Income Credits, a kind of negative income tax limited to low wage earners, dropping off quickly above the poverty line. They support benefits for children and the elderly as well as the disabled, although they can be extremely strict about whom they consider disabled. They will give welfare benefits to unemployed single parents sparingly, on a temporary basis, and require education or employment search conditions designed to get the parents back to work as soon as possible. Drug and alcohol abuse are seen as reasons to cut off benefits. For unemployed working age adults, liberals sponsor “Care Not Cash” initiatives, which replace cash benefits with direct services, in the few localities that offer any benefits at all.
The pattern is clear: liberals believe that humans have value primarily as engines of production and consumption. Within this view, welfare is a legitimate tool to push people into the labor market. This ensures that goods and services can be produced. Those who do work and those incapable of working are to be given a sufficient income to take them slightly above the poverty line. This appears compassionate, but the systemic reason is to ensure that they have just enough money that they spend all of it. This way there is sufficient demand for goods and services to be produced, but people can not save enough money to become capitalists or be able to leave the workforce. Indeed, virtually all public assistance programs cut off recipients with any significant savings. While conservatives fight for the direct interests of the capitalist class, liberals fight for the interests of the capitalist system.
I understand that few liberals consciously believe and support the goals and beliefs which I ascribe to them here. They believe they are compassionate people who want to make the system work better for the unfortunate. That is probably true. But it does not matter. Like with institutional racism, the conscious intent of the participants does not matter; it is their actions and the results that matter. And the fact is, if you assume that the primary concern of liberals is market efficiency, you will predict their actions better than if you assume that their primary concern is uplifting the downtrodden or achieving economic and social justice.
Let us look at one more example before we turn to basic income: the minimum wage. One obvious way that the minimum wage fits the pattern I have described is that you have to be employed to benefit from it. A less obvious way is that it looks free, but it is actually a tax that is passed on to consumers, so it is the middle class that pays for it, not the capitalist class.
But the most striking way that the minimum wage fits this pattern is when you look at its amount. Democrats pick a new number every seven to twelve years. They refuse to index it to inflation so they can have at least one winning issue against Republicans every decade. Opponents of raising the minimum wage always mock the arbitrary nature of the new number picked and ask something like, “Why not $100 per hour?” Liberals typically dismiss this mockery with empirical evidence, pointing out that raising the minimum wage has almost never resulted in a loss of jobs, and sometimes results in increased employment due to increased demand.
But as with anti-discrimination laws, just because right-wing critics are empirically wrong does not mean that they do not have a point. What criteria do liberals use to determine how much the minimum wage should be? $100 per hour likely would wreck the economy. But if $10.10 per hour, the current consensus goal of the Democratic Party, would have no ill effects, why not fight for $15, or $20, or $25? Why not commission a study to determine the maximum sustainable minimum wage? Applying the principle that liberals are working to support the capitalist system, we can see where they get their numbers. Liberals pick a minimum wage that puts workers near the edge of the poverty line, where they can be good consumers but never save enough to exit the workforce.
So what can we expect from liberals in the fight for a basic income?
We can start with two broadly optimistic points. First, since liberals are concerned with efficiency, evidence can sway them, and the scientific and empirical evidence is strong that a basic income is cheaper to administer, raises health and education outcomes, and does not cause people to quit working and live an idle life. Masses of healthy and educated people working and spending money churns the economy, and this is good for the capitalist system.
Second, liberals will join the basic income cause with little hesitation when the technological unemployment crisis starts receiving mainstream media attention. While liberals will tolerate significant unemployment because it keeps down labor costs, they will see too large a number of unemployed as wasted potential consumers. This will be especially true if more workers are not actually needed to produce the goods and services that the unemployed could otherwise buy.
Now the caveats.
Let me start off with a particularly American concern. Despite the significant libertarian origins of and current support for a basic income, many people hear the idea of the government giving everyone free money and they think, “socialism”. And in America, this is a problem. Despite the good arguments that could be made that the United States in the 1950s and 1960s had the most socialist economy that has ever existed in human history, America during the Cold War defined itself in opposition to “socialism”. For many, fear of the label has stuck. Conservatives still use “socialism” as an epithet for economic policies they oppose, and many liberals will do or say whatever is necessary to avoid being associated with socialism. If you ask prominent liberals, they will point to surveys showing the unpopularity of socialism in America. This could be a chicken and egg problem: why should most Americans not be afraid of socialism if even liberal leaders oppose it? Fortunately, this also appears to be a generational problem that is going away. Recent surveys of Americans under 30 show support for socialism to be equal to support for capitalism, and the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders may be showing that fear of the label “socialism” is overblown.
The next problem with liberals will be to educate them. The facts being on our side will not help if establishment liberals do not know them. The specific problem here is that the misrepresentations of the work participation and family stability effects of the Negative Income Tax experiments that were spread in the mid 1970s are still believed by many establishment liberals. We will have to work hard to correct those misbeliefs.
Another problem will be that if technological unemployment does not reach a crisis point, liberals will simply not prioritize basic income on their own. They will have to be dragged into taking action by political pressure. This will be similar to the example of same-sex marriage, except that instead of claiming opposition up until the public changes its mind, look for liberals to vocalize general support for the concept of a basic income, but not do anything about it. An example of this strategy was how, in the years following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a lot of politicians of all stripes, including President Bush, voiced support for setting up an Alaska style trust fund to pay oil dividends to all Iraqis, but it never happened. This will be because, even if liberals come to agree that a basic income would be a better policy than the current welfare system, the efficiency benefits to the capitalist system are not great enough to put it on their priority list. Just as the suffering of gays and lesbians who wanted to marry was not sufficient cause to make same-sex marriage a priority, neither is the suffering of the poor. It never has been in the past. Again, this will change when technological unemployment becomes a crisis, and there will not be enough consumers to buy goods and services without a basic income.
The final, and biggest challenge with liberals as allies will be their attempts to dilute the idea of a basic income. While they may become far more generous with the cash amounts, it will be difficult for them not to attach strings and conditions. The reason is that it will be difficult to change their belief that they know how to run the lives of the poor better than the poor themselves. But a bigger danger is that they will try to insist on means-testing. They will try to make the middle-class believe that means-testing will make it cheaper for them. The reality is that means-testing will make the financial burden of a minimum income fall on the middle-classes. This, again, is because the goal for liberals is not economic justice, but making the current capitalist system run better.
In order to relieve the immediate suffering of the poor and establish the principle that poverty is not tolerated in our society, it may be necessary to agree to means-testing to pass an initial guaranteed minimum income. Liberals will trumpet that the job is done. Those of us who count justice as one of our goals need to be prepared to continue the fight.
by Guest Contributor | Dec 22, 2015 | Opinion
By Tom Streithorst
The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is back in the news. The Finns are considering implementing it, as are the Swiss, replacing all means tested benefits with a simple grant to every citizen, giving everyone enough money to survive. Unlike most current benefits programs, it is not contingent on being worthy or deserving or even poor. Everybody gets it, you, me, Rupert Murdoch, the homeless man sleeping under a bridge. Last seriously proposed by Richard Nixon in 1969, more and more economists and bloggers are suggesting that the Basic Income Guarantee may ultimately be the salvation of capitalism. The BIG will eliminate poverty, lessen inequality, and vastly improve the lives of the most vulnerable among us. But that is not why we need it. It may seem impractical, even utopian, but I am convinced the BIG will be instituted within the next few decades because it solves modern capitalism’s most fundamental problem: lack of demand.
Technology and capitalism have largely solved the problem of supply. We are able to make more stuff, with fewer inputs of labor and capital, than ever before. We have the know-how, we have the resources, we have the trained labor, we have the money. The only thing businesses lack is customers. Making stuff has become easy. It is selling it that keeps entrepreneurs (and central bankers) awake at night. Stagnant wages tell us that the supply of labor exceeds demand. Microscopic interest rates tell us that we have more capital than we need. Since the Great Depression most economists have recognized that demand is the Achilles heel of the modern economy.
Over the past 80 years, we have solved the problem of demand in three very different ways. The first is war. In 1938, US unemployment was almost 20%. In 1944 it was barely 1%. Everybody knows World War II ended the Great Depression. But it is worth remembering that it wasn’t the slaughter of civilians or the destructions of cities that reinvigorated the global economy, but rather the massive fiscal stimulus of government borrowing. Had we borrowed and spent as much on building schools, homes and roads as we did on defeating the Axis powers, the economic effect would have been even greater. The advantage of military Keynesianism is political: conservatives who loathe government spending are able to overcome their distaste when it comes to war.
The second, during the post war Golden Age, was rising salaries. Between 1950 and 1970, the average American worker saw his real wages double: since then, they have barely gone up at all. Back then, productivity improvements translated almost immediately into wage gains. As workers’ wages went up, so did consumer spending. Productivity increases meant each worker was able to make more stuff. Wage increases meant he was able to afford to buy it. Advertising transformed luxuries into necessities. Productivity gains combined with wage hikes gave the Golden Age the greatest GDP growth the world has ever seen.
In our most recent era, from 1982 until the financial crisis, the engine of economic expansion was ever increasing levels of private debt. After Reagan and Thatcher, median wages stopped going up, even as productivity maintained its inexorable rise. With wages stagnant, only by taking on more debt were consumers able to keep spending enough to buy all they produced. As long as banks were happy to lend, the economy managed to grow (albeit much more slowly than during the Golden Age) and the party could go on. But after the financial crisis, both household willingness to incur more debt and bank willingness to lend contracted, leaving us with the stagnant economy we are trapped in today.
These three old methods of stimulating demand have passed their sell by dates. Global war would reinvigorate the economy, but at an unbearable cost. Rising wages, unfortunately, are unlikely, with more and more of us replaceable by robots, software or much cheaper foreign workers. And higher levels of debt not only increase inequality, they also engender financial instability. What is to be done?
Every year, technological progress allows us to make more goods and services with fewer inputs of labor and capital. As consumers, this is wonderful. We can buy better and cheaper goods than ever before. As workers, however, productivity increases threaten our jobs. As we need fewer workers to make the same amount of stuff, more of us become redundant. And it is likely to get worse. The rise of the robots may eliminate 47% of existing jobs within the next two decades. Unfortunately, even though a robot can make an iPhone, it cannot buy one. If we are hurtling towards a post scarcity future, only a Basic Income Guarantee can ensure sufficient demand to keep the global economy ticking over.
It is not just the poor that profit. The rich get exactly the same payment, in the form of a tax cut. Corporations also win. With more money in consumers’ pockets, sales increase, raising profits. And since firms no longer need provide a living wage, labor costs could go down, which would give employers reason to hire. Meanwhile, workers, with a guaranteed income, no matter what, will have the freedom to tell an unreasonable boss to “take this job and shove it.” These benefits suggest that a Basic Income Guarantee could command considerable support from diverse sectors. But these are all merely side benefits.
If technological progress continues to eliminate jobs, the BIG may well be the only way we will be able to maintain demand in a post-work future. By giving every citizen a monthly check, a BIG will be as fiscally stimulative as World War II without requiring the murder of millions. The BIG is economically sensible and politically practical. What then stands in its way?
The first problem is that it sounds too good to be true. We have been told to be suspicious of anyone promising a free lunch, and giving people money for doing nothing certainly seems like a costless gift. Fear of scarcity is built into our DNA. For the BIG to seem viable for most people, they need to learn that demand, not supply, is the bottleneck of growth. We need to recognize that money is something humans create, not something with fixed and limited supply. With Quantitative Easing, central banks created money and gave it to the financial sector, hoping it would stimulate lending. Today, even mainstream figures like Lord Adair Turner, Martin Wolf and even Ben Bernanke recognize that “helicopter drops” of money into individuals’ bank accounts could have been more effective. Technocrats are beginning to recognize the practicality of Basic Income. We in the economic blogosphere need to bring this message into the public eye. The rise of the robots, ever declining prices for goods and services, and disappearing jobs may ultimately teach this lesson more effectively than any number of well-meaning essays.
The second problem is sociological. Most of us are still in employment. We feel, in some fundamental way, that our work makes us more worthy than lazy layabouts on benefits. This simultaneously makes us disinclined to raise benefits for others (or increase the number of people on benefit) and equally disinclined to think of ourselves as the kind of people that receive money from the state. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (the book he considered his masterpiece), said that we humans are motivated primarily by the regard of others. We want people to think well of us, and we want to think well of ourselves. The psychological pleasure of considering ourselves better than welfare recipients can trump genuine economic benefit. To overcome this objection, we need to recognize that defining ourselves by our jobs is very 20th century. If technological progress continues to kill traditional jobs, this objection too will eventually dissipate. As full-time jobs become harder to find, more of us will recognize the need for a BIG.
The third problem is perhaps the most central. By stimulating the economy and pushing it towards its production possibilities frontier, the Basic Income Guarantee will be growth enhancing, but it is undeniable that it will also be redistributive. The pie will be larger, but it will be sliced differently. For the past 30 years, we have stimulated the economy by shoveling money towards rich people. A BIG shovels money towards poor people. And for many in the top 1%, that is anathema.
Conservatives generally favor tax cuts as a way of stimulating the economy. Although they do not like to admit it, this is textbook Keynesianism. As long as the government does not cut spending, more money in consumers’ pockets will inevitably increase demand. Unfortunately, tax cuts generally favor the richest among us, and they, unlike the poor, are liable to save rather than spend their windfall. Stimulating savings is a waste of a tax cut. Today, we have an over-abundance of saving and a shortfall of investment and consumption. A BIG can be thought of as a tax cut targeted to those most likely to spend it, which is what the economy needs.
The Basic Income Guarantee solves the problem of demand, stimulates the economy, increases corporate profits, gives workers more freedom, and provides a safety net to the most vulnerable. It is economically sound and politically savvy. But the very rich do not fear unemployment, they fear redistribution and they will be the most significant force against the implementation of the BIG.
Related reading:
Frances Coppola, “The changing nature of work,” Coppola Comment, August 5, 2012.
Francesc Coppola, “The wastefulness of automation,” Pieria, July 8, 2013.
Tom Streithorst, “The central paradox of the 21st Century,” Pieria, June 25, 2014.
Anna Hedge, “Basic income and a room of one’s own,” Pieria, February 26, 2014.
Anthony Painter, “In support of a Universal Basic Income: introducing the RSA basic income model,” RSA, December 16, 2015.
Tom Streithorst has been a union member, an entrepreneur, a war 
cameraman, a promo producer, a journalist. These days, he mostly does voiceovers and thinks about economic history. An American in London, he has been writing for magazines on both sides of the pond since 2008. He is currently working on a book on post scarcity economics, and how the incredible productive power of capitalism and technology has the potential to bring us all prosperity and happiness but so far, we keep screwing it up.
This piece was originally published in Coppola Comment.
by Tyler Prochazka | Dec 19, 2015 | News
Interest in the Universal Basic Income (UBI) is sweeping across Europe, with British think tank RSA coming out in support of the UBI in a new report launched on December 17 at a public debate. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts Manufactures and Commerce, also known as RSA, is a prestigious institution founded in 1754 and granted Royal Charter in 1847.
Report authors Anthony Painter and Chris Thoung said the current approach to welfare “is no longer fit-for-purpose” and requires a new approach.
“The major concern is ultimately people: the lives we are able to lead, our ability to have a sense of security so we can pursue our ambition, and our ability to contribute to supporting one another, innovating, and developing the creative potential of society,” the report said.
“That is where Basic Income has the potential to be so much stronger than our current welfare state.”
The RSA endorsement follows another high-profile British think tank, the libertarian Adam Smith Institute. They published a report earlier this year also advocating for a basic income in the form of a negative income tax.
The RSA proposal for a British basic income
The RSA report suggests replacing the current welfare state with a UBI that would cost an additional 1 percent of UK’s GDP. RSA’s proposal is modeled after the Citizen’s Income Trust (CIT), an affiliate of BIEN, and derives most of its figures from this framework – read the CIT proposal here.
Under the RSA, citizens between 25 and 65 would receive an annual income of 3,692 British pounds, or £308 per month. People between 5 and 24 would get an annual payment of £2,925, or £244 per month. Citizens over 65 would receive an annual pension of £7,420, or £618 per month. Parents of children under 4 would receive an additional annual payment of £4,290 for their first child, or £358 per month. They would fetch £3,387 annually, or £282 per month, for additional children under 4.
It suggests potentially gradually rolling out the basic income to different demographics, such as those above age 55 and those below age 25. At the same time, a small basic income could be introduced while gradually reducing other benefits.
Regarding housing, the report notes that housing benefits should not be folded into a basic income because of the high cost of real estate in the UK. It proposes a Basic Rental Income. The idea is to utilize property taxes as a means to ensure universal housing income, but the report does not delve into the specifics. Nonetheless, this novel approach does deserve more discussion in UBI circles.
In offering these policy specifics, the RSA illustrates that a UBI is not simply a utopian ideal, as some of its critics claim. In fact, the report points out that far more radical changes to taxes and benefits have been implemented in the past.
Painter and Thoung note that a UBI would help society confront challenges created by rapidly improving technology and an aging population, a point that most other UBI proponents stress as well.
One of the attractions of the UBI, and why even conservatives and libertarians have been drawn to the policy, is its simplicity compared to the current system. Substituting current welfare policy with a UBI would eliminate its “perverse incentives, intrusion and complexity entirety.”
Since the UBI is universal there would be less fraud, they contend. And it would not undermine relationships and families because a UBI would not punish individuals for cohabitating as the current system does. This “strengthening of the family” aspect will likely win over more conservatives to the UBI cause over time.
More entrepreneurship and more time for family and community
From an economics perspective, the report argues that a UBI is the best system to incentivize work and avoid the welfare trap. In the current system, benefits quickly diminish as incomes rise, discouraging beneficiaries from taking up work. The report also claims that a UBI’s safety net allows individuals to pursue risks and creative endeavors. Instead of taking the first menial job available, a worker can spend more time searching for the work most suited to increasing their productivity.
This argument has been borne out by empirical studies on the UBI, such as the basic income trial in India that substantially increased entrepreneurship.
One of the criticisms of a UBI is that it lets some individuals take more time off from work. The key is whether their free-time activities are more valuable to society than their work hours. “Basic Income is a foundation for contribution. It incentivizes work but supports other forms of contribution too,” the report said. It suggests that the UBI would allow individuals to care for the elderly and other vulnerable individuals, which is especially important as society ages.
The actual work disincentive effect has been found to be small. The report briefly reviews evidence from experiments with a negative income tax carried out in the US and Canada between 1968 and 1980. The loss of labor hours for men was minimal. Women did lower their workload more substantially. They chose to spend more time with their family or newborns, activities of high social value. In Alaska under the Permanent Fund Dividend, a policy similar to a UBI, inequality fell in the 1990s and 2000s, while it increased in every other American state.
Another key issue is who qualifies for basic income and whether it would be extended to migrants. RSA’s proposal states that EU nationals should have first “contributed to the system for a number of years” before receiving the basic income. International migrants would be subject to current rules to access benefits. Individuals serving custodial sentences would have benefits restored once their sentence was concluded.
In recent years, the welfare system has lost public support as people demand more rules and conditions for the poor to receive assistance. However, benefit sanctions are becoming increasingly “inhumane,” the authors said. In order to detect tax credit abuse, the system has become overly intrusive into citizens’ lives and activities.
The RSA makes a few recommendations for how the UBI will be applied to the youth, including requiring young adults between 18 and 25 year old to declare how they would use the income. They would sign contracts “with their local community” and not the government, and there should be “no state monitoring” of the contracts, the authors noted. Additionally, those over 18 would have to register to vote in order to receive the UBI.
In suggesting tying the basic income to the community, rather than the government, the RSA report shows precisely the unique potential of the UBI to move away from the impersonal welfare state and toward a more relationship-oriented society. These arguments parallel that of free-market economist Charles Murray in defense of his own UBI scheme.
This report is a serious and comprehensive look at how a UBI could realistically be implemented in the UK. It provides a persuasive look into the economic, societal and moral underpinnings of the basic income. As the debate over the UBI continues to simmer across Europe, the UK will be hard-pressed to ignore this pragmatic approach for a radical overhaul of its welfare system.
Anthony Painter & Chris Thoung, “Creative citizen, creative state: the principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income,” RSA, December 16, 2015.
Anthony Painter, “In support of a universal basic income – introducing the RSA basic income model,” RSA, December 16, 2015.
Citizen’s Income Trust, “Citizen’s Income: a brief introduction,” 2013.
Andrew Walker, “Think tank floats ‘basic income’ idea for all citizens,” BBC News, December 16, 2015.
Tyler Prochazka, “Would a universal basic income be the ‘death’ of civil society?” Basic Income News, November 21, 2015.
Maz Ali, “Money. For free. It’s been tested in Canada and India. Now one Dutch city wants to give it a whirl,” Upworthy, September 4, 2015.
by Vito Laterza | Dec 8, 2015 | News
Guy Standing, renowned economist, noted author and honorary president of BIEN, was recently interviewed by the Equal Times, a global media platform that focuses on work and social justice.
Guy Standing makes a forceful case for basic income that takes into account the current global conditions of the labor market and the economy. He draws on his vast wealth of knowledge and presents complex concepts in a clear and synthetic manner.
Standing argues that:
– Basic income is key to get people out of the poverty trap, as people experience few gains merely by moving from unemployment benefits to low-paying jobs.
– Trade unions’ opposition to basic income is misguided, as unions and workers would actually benefit from a basic income.
– The struggles for a minimum wage are a positive development, but a minimum wage does not guarantee the welfare of the growing number of people who are not formally employed.
– Evidence from projects in Africa and India indicates that people are more cooperative and more productive when given a basic income, contrary to fears that a basic income would reduce productivity.
– An unconditional basic income would be an effective tool to fight poverty in developing countries, whereas conditional forms of social assistance drive down wages and increase dependency and exploitation.
– Basic income is affordable. One way to finance it is to overhaul the existing benefit system, while also cutting subsidies and tax breaks to big corporations and rich people.
– Basic income is not a panacea, but an essential measure to improve the worsening conditions of the “precariat”, the growing class of people who have little or no prospects of finding a full-time permanent job in their lifetime.
Chris Burns interviews Guy Standing, “Most unions have failed to respond to the needs and aspirations of the precariat,” Equal Times, November 26, 2015.
by Josh Martin | Aug 4, 2015 | News
Santens dives into the modern discussion on productivity and automation, showing that while automation has increasingly replaced human labor, those in work are on such low wages that they need to work well over 40 hours per week as a matter of survival. While many argue that technology replaces jobs but also creates new ones, Santens claims that this is not a one to one relationship and that the newly created jobs are rarely as stable as the ones being replaced. In sum, Santens believes that a basic income is the best way to fix this paradox of automation and productivity.
Scott Santens, “Our Paradoxical Economy Courtesy of Technology and the Lack of Basic Income”, Huffington Post, 9 July 2015.
