by BIEN | Dec 24, 2016 | Bios & background Info
Kate McFarland has been a writer and editor for Basic Income News since March 2016 (after having began her volunteership as a content reviewer in November 2015). She was appointed as a member of the Executive Committee at BIEN’s Congress in July 2016. Additionally, she was appointed as Secretary of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network in November 2016.
At the time of this writing, Kate is nearing the end of her final(?) temporary paid appointment at The Ohio State University, where she has been employed in some fashion since 2002.
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Kate grew up in the town of Lancaster, Ohio, until she moving to Columbus to attend school at (The) Ohio State University.
In college, Kate flirted with various social science and humanities disciplines, before eventually majoring in mathematics (with a minor in sociology) and then enrolling in graduate school in statistics.
Kate as statistician (you can tell from the earrings)
During her first year as a statistics PhD student, however, Kate realized that she would never truly challenge herself intellectually if she failed to get a PhD in philosophy. Thus, on a whim, she started enrolling in graduate-level philosophy classes while completing her masters degree in statistics. She went on to complete a PhD in philosophy of language, remaining at Ohio State for the length of “professional student” career (primarily due to convenience).
Kate’s philosophical research focused mainly on the semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of disagreement. She did not work in political theory, and dissertation was unrelated to basic income. However, it would be true, if misleading, to say that her dissertation dealt with the “power to say ‘No'”: she wrote about the conditions under which it is conversationally appropriate for speakers to use the word ‘No’ when replied to something someone else said.
Never pursuing a career as a professional philosopher, Kate accepted a one-year teaching position at Ohio State, focusing on the teaching of ethics to engineering students, as a stopgap after her 2015 graduation.
In the summer of 2016, she was offered what could have become a full-time, permanent position at Ohio State’s Department of Philosophy. By the time, however, she was finally discovered that a world existed outside of Ohio State–thanks mainly to her growing involvement in the Basic Income movement. Not wanting to close other doors, she turned it down.
In 2017, she plans to continue leading her life as a open-ended journey, just the way she likes it.
INTEREST IN BASIC INCOME
Kate has actively followed the basic income movement only since late 2015. However, the seedlings of her support for the cause had developed at least by her teens.
Kate in high school, living in a bubble
As early as middle school, Kate adamantly rejected the notion that the main function of education should be to prepare students for jobs and careers; she insisted, on the contrary, that the attainment of knowledge and the development of one’s cognitive faculties were ends in themselves–and that education ought to be devoted to this end. Also in her early teens, she developed a fondness for underground music (e.g., especially, obscure 1970s prog rock) and an deep skepticism of the mainstream. Whether talking about education policy, music, or any other subject matter, she used “sell out” as a term of derision.
When she learned of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income, sometime around her freshman year of college, it immediately resonated with her as way as to preserve freedom and individualism without forcing individuals to conform to the demands of the marketplace. She saw it, in short, as a possible basis for a society in which no one needs to sell out. However, she did not further pursue the idea for many years.
Kate in mid-2015
Kate finally became re-attracted to basic income in mid-2015, when looking for a more radical, post-work alternative to the “Fight for 15” memes that her friends were sharing on Facebook. For her, promotion of the idea of basic income was a means to challenge societal assumptions about the function and value of work and jobs.
That said, most of Kate’s present work is not activism at all, but reporting. She maintains that, qua Basic Income News editor, she is not an advocate for basic income per se but instead an advocate for intellectual responsibility and integrity in discourse about basic income.
Her primary mission is not to convince people to that basic income is desirable but, rather, simply to disseminate accurate information about the contemporary movements for it. She approaches all of her research, writing, and reporting for BIEN with the same standards of intellectual honesty and rigor as she would have applied to any scholarly work.
For all her utopian visions of a post-capitalist society, Kate is still a pedantic academic at heart–a trait she hopes to wield for the betterment of the basic income community.
Top photo by Josh Diaz Photography
by BIEN | Dec 22, 2016 | News
Earlier in the year, Basic Income News reporter Scott Jacobsen spoke to Basic Income News reporter Kate McFarland about her background and influences. This is a continuation of Part One.
You mentioned valuing clarity of writing, for readers to have correct inferences. Any advice for BI writers? That is, those that want clear writing and to avoid the statistical probability of readers making wrong inferences.
That’s a good question. I feel like this is something I do based on instincts from my training in analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of language. It’s hard to codify that—those instincts—right off the bat.
I do want to stress that one thing that’s special about Basic Income News—sorta in our mission statement, as it were—is that we are clear to make the distinction between straightforward factual reporting and opinion pieces. If you just want the facts, you read one of our news reports, and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of the writer’s own analysis and commentary to get to them. You’ll see a lot of writing that conflates opinion and persuasive writing with reporting the facts, in a way not always conducive to the reader being able to figure out exactly what’s going on. Too often the factual reporting seems like an afterthought.
As much as I can, and as much as BI News can, we try to give people the bare facts. We don’t want to gloss them over with a bunch of fluff about what we think about basic income. It is not our job in news reporting. Our job is to disseminate the latest information about the basic income movement. It is not to make every one piece a persuasive one. It is not to write exciting stories, fluff, and propaganda.
I would also urge other writers to stick with primary sources whenever possible. When you use quotes, be sensitive to the context. When you talk about data from experiments or surveys, be sensitive to the design of the study and what you can actually infer from it.
Never, ever selectively misquote or misrepresent information by presenting it out of context! Some people do that, which is why I say always stick with primary sources—the original research reports, the full transcripts, and so forth.
Otherwise, my advice is to learn a lot, do you research from the primary sources, but also read some of the fluffy, superficial, often misleading stories on BI in mainstream media. Pay attention to the awful clickbait headlines. Read the comments sometimes even; notice how people are confused. Let it irritate you. You’ll develop instincts, I think, to write in a way that strives to avoid that. I think it helped me, anyhow.
Some things you said suggest mainstream news sources on BI want to persuade one way or another. Does this seem to be the case? It would be in contradiction to journalistic virtues of objectivity and neutrality insofar as they can be achieved.
Well, I see a lot—I see a lot that’s not necessarily to persuade, but where there might be, I think there are, values that conflict with just straightforward objective reporting. It might not be to persuade people on whether to support BI. It might be just to excite people, hook people, or write a catchier piece… As I say, I’m a philosopher, not a journalist; the ideals I have for prose come from there. Maybe journalists want to engage the reader at the expense of laying out the facts in a clear and complete manner. We’re just trying to concisely summarize the facts and make everything as clear as possible.
So, for example, if you read a journalistic report on a sample survey—this has just happened recently—you almost never get the details you want to know in order to really know what conclusions to draw. The sample size, sampling frame, selection method, response rate—you don’t often get all that. I would want to know that. And I don’t really care what a survey says about people’s attitudes on basic income if you don’t give me the details of the questionnaire design. What exactly is being asked? How it is phrased? I want to know all that before I make conclusions; I think you should make that info available to the reader if you’re gonna bother to report on an opinion survey at all. ‘Course, I should say I was a statistician before I became a philosopher.
Another thing is quoting out of context. There was an example that comes to mind—I won’t name names—of a famous basic income advocate being asked his opinion on when BI would actually happen. The gist of what he said was that we can’t predict, but in saying it, he said something like “It could as soon as 5 or 10 years, but it could be much longer.” It was clearly just this fragment of a larger point about how we just can’t know. But then the journalist just quotes him as saying that BI could happen as soon as 5 or 10 years! Just that! Entirely misleading. Entirely misrepresented his point.
A related phenomenon—a sub-phenomenon, maybe—is jumping on any use of the phrase “basic income” and then quoting the speaker as making a point about what you and I and BIEN call “basic income”. But that’s really too hasty. There was a recent case of a famous businessman who allegedly came out in support of UBI—he said he supported “basic income” (or “Grundeinkommen”, being German)—and people in the media just assumed he meant the unconditional thing. Later, he tweets that he didn’t mean the unconditional thing, but by then, the damage is done, as it were.
Sometimes this is [a] tough one, I have to be honest. Maybe, that’s another thing for the advice: If you’re not 100 percent positive someone means basic income when they say “basic income”, then leave what they say in quotes. Say “They said these words…” But don’t necessarily disquote if you’re not sure what they mean. I mean, equivocation on the phrase “basic income” is a whole other issue—it’s becoming a real big thing, I think, with the Canada movement versus US commentators—but maybe we’ll get back to that.
Another example with the reporting, I guess, is just being misleading through superficiality or vague weasel words. Like, to make basic income seem exciting, maybe a journalist will give a long list of countries that are “pursuing” BI or “considering” BI or something—but what does that even mean? Or maybe they’ll talk about a long list of people who “endorse” or “support” it just because they said something vaguely favourable at one time.
Then you see things—I’ve been seeing this a lot lately—like “Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are beginning pilots.” The problem there a little subtler, but you see it? That suggests, I think, that the governments of Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are all planning pilots. Kenya? They must be thinking of GiveDirectly, a private charity based in New York that happens to be operating in Kenya. I think it’s important to keep those private efforts distinct from the government-sponsored ones. That’s an important distinction. It’s one sort of thing you often see just casually elided.
I could go on—those are just some examples off the top of my head—but I hope you get the idea. I think that, with most journalism on BI, it’s about saying the bare minimum to be interesting and provocative—don’t bore readers with too many facts and details and distinctions, maybe—at the expensive of saying enough, and saying things clearly enough, to really give a good and accurate sense, knowledge, of what’s going on in the world.
Your background in philosophy at the graduate and doctoral level seems relevant to me. It obviously helps with your clarity, rigour, and simplicity to the point it needs to be to present ideas. For BI, it can come along with different terms and phrases, for different ideas associated with, but not the same as, BI.
Yeah, that’s definitely—that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I try to point to it when it’s relevant. And I try to be consistent in my own terms, and of course to keep my uses consistent with the official definition agreed upon by BIEN—a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
The US BIG site actually has a pretty good primer on some of the different terms, and I tend to follow its usage for BI and UBI versus BIG and so on. But sometimes it’s tricky, especially with the BIG versus BI distinction, which you see conflated a lot these days.
“BI” and “UBI” are both often used to refer only to policies where everybody gets a check of the same amounts—no clawbacks with additional earnings—but sometimes people use them more generally to include policies that include what you might otherwise hear called “guaranteed minimum income” or a “guaranteed annual income” or a “negative income tax”; these are policies where everyone’s assured a minimal income floor, unconditionally, but the amount you receive is clawed back as you earn more and more on top of this floor. That’s what Ontario’s almost certainly gonna pilot next. It won’t be everyone in the pilot getting money. It’ll be that everyone’s guaranteed money if their income drops low enough—but, assuming Hugh Segal’s advice is followed, it won’t be the rich people in the sample also getting the check.
But sometimes you’ll see things like “Ontario plans to give all its residents an income boost”—because people hear “basic income”, and elsewhere they hear “basic income” to mean “checks to everybody, even then rich”, and they put two and two together, incorrectly. Sometimes all these policies together are referred to as a “basic income guarantee”, a “BIG”, with the GAI/GMI/NIT and the UBI (or “demogrant” as it’s sometimes called) being different types.
I can see this becoming a real problem—confusing these types of “BIGs”, equivocating on the term “basic income”—for people’s understanding and interpreting past and present pilots, and understanding how they revolve around the current debate, and I do hope to write a full-length article about it in the new year, if it keeps being problematic.
I’m realizing that what I’m talking about is not so much too many phrases for BI—but the term “basic income” being used to mean too many things. That might actually be the bigger problem, in fact, especially in the States. In addition to this equivocation with “does it entail giving money to the rich”, there’s this issue with some people, it seems, thinking that anything called “basic income” by definition replaces the whole rest of the welfare state. But that’s not true. But writers sometimes talk that way, and it leads to confusion and misconceptions.
And there’s also an issue about whether a “basic income” is, by definition, enough to live on. I think writers occasionally go in both ways. They probably sometimes equivocate, which would be bad… There’s been some controversy in BIEN caused by precisely this last concern, in fact. I think you can read about it some in Toru’s report on the controversy about the definition at the last BIEN Congress.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 21, 2016 | News
On November 29 and 30, the White House, the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-hosted the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity.
Held at Stanford, the event brought together “275 high-level players in technology, philanthropy, community service, government, and academia” to listen to and participate in a series of panel discussions on social and economic policy and the role of technology and big data.
The conference included a 40-minute panel on “The Future of Jobs and the Question of a Basic Income”:
PANELISTS (from viewer’s left to right)
– Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, and the initiator of its plan for a basic income experiment. Y Combinator is currently running a pilot study of a basic income in Oakland, with plans for a larger scale experiment in the future.
– Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and (as of this month) a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, which will be distributing $10 million in grants to support basic income projects in the US.
– Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Philosophy who specializes in political theory and public policy. Bidadanure will be teaching a graduate seminar on the philosophy of basic income in winter 2017.
Future of work expert Natalie Foster moderated the discussion.
All four participants are supporters of universal basic income.
PANEL OVERVIEW.
Bidadanure, Hughes, and Altman, respectively, begin the panel by describing how they came to interested in basic income and outlining their reasons for supporting such a policy. Following these introductory remarks, discussion turns to past and present basic income experiments: Altman talks about Y Combinator’s newly launched pilot study, Hughes describes the work of the charity GiveDirectly, and Bidadanure lays out the results of past experiments in Manitoba, Namibia, and India. Altman additionally stresses the ability of a basic income to alleviate financial anxiety for people who currently live paycheck to paycheck. Finally, panelists present their thoughts on the question of how to finance a basic income. Due to concerns about feasibility, Hughes proposes beginning with a small basic income of $100 or $200 per month; Bidadanure and Altman, however, raise concerns with the implementation of a basic income that is it not sufficiently large to allow for freedom and security.
Additional press on the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity:
Nitasha Tiku, “Stanford, The White House, And Tech Bigwigs Will Host A Summit On Poverty”, BuzzFeed News, November 28, 2016.
Reviewed by Jenna van Draanen
Photo (Stanford University) CC BY 2.0 Robbie Shade
by Kate McFarland | Dec 13, 2016 | Opinion
This fall, BIEN celebrated 30th anniversary of its founding. Video recordings of its founders’ reunion are available online.
On October 1, several founding members and other past and present BIEN leaders — comprising three generations of basic income advocates — united at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium for a conference held in commemoration of the occasion in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of UCLouvain’s Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics and the retirement of BIEN cofounder Philippe van Parijs as its director. (See also a Basic Income News interview in which Philippe discusses the past, present, and future of BIEN.)
Reflecting on the event and the history of BIEN, Belgian entrepreneur and long-time basic income advocate Roland Duchâtelet said:
What impresses me most is that during the 30 years of BIEN many different personalities expressed many different views regarding UBI models, implementation, and the way the organisation should behave… and yet, I do not believe there have been any defectors. Moreover, despite the highly diverse background of the members and their desire to succeed, the organisation managed to keep its harmony.
To me this was the prevailing feeling of the 30th anniversary event: we are a (strong) group of friends.
Roland Duchatelet (credit: Enno Schmidt)
For Jose Luis Rey Pérez (Adjunct Professor of Philosophy of Law at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid), BIEN’s 30th anniversary event rekindled memories of studying with van Parijs and others at UCL years earlier:
I was in Chair Hoover [in UCL] two months in April and May 2003, while I was writing my PhD. I learnt a lot from Philippe van Parijs during that time, and I had the opportunity to read everything that was published about basic income in that time. (In those years where books and articles were not on internet like now.) I had also the opportunity to share coffees, time and discussions with Axel Gosseries, Hervois Portouis, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere and Myron Frankman who were in the Chair at that time.
It was nice, 13 years later, to listen and learn again from some authors that I have studied deeply. I wish Philippe a very rich retirement. I know that he will continue through his conferences, books and articles to enrich the philosophical thought. We have a lot of things to learn from him yet. Because he is one of the best philosophers of this XXI century.
Two other attendees, Bonno Pel and Julia Backhaus of the TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory (TRANSIT) research project, have written an extended feature article on the event (“BIEN Celebrates Thirty Years: Basic income, a utopia for our times?“), looking at the 2016 UCL event as a reflection of (a photo of) the founding meeting in 1986.
Video Footage
Belgian filmmaker Steven Janssens videotaped six conference sessions: (1) BIEN’s improvised birth, (2) Basic income implemented in the short and the long run (note: a parallel session on the history of basic income was not recorded), (3) Lessons from the Swiss referendum, (4) Promises and limits of past and future experiments, (5) Moving forward, (6) Final reflections.
(Janssens is also the driving force behind the documentary about a basic income pilot in a Ugandan village, with a planned launch date of October 2018.)
1. BIEN’s Improvised Birth: Testimonies by Some Co-founders
Featuring Philippe van Parijs, Paul-Marie Boulanger, Annie Miller, Guy Standing, Claus Offe, and Robert van der Veen.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference1
2. Basic Income Implemented in the Short and the Long Run
Featuring Philippe Defeyt (“An income-tax-funded basic income of EUR 600”), David Rosseels (“A micro-tax on electronic payments”), and Karl Widerquist (“Sovereign funds and basic income”).
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference2
3. Lessons from the Swiss Referendum
Featuring Nenad Stojanovic and Enno Schmidt.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference3
4. Promises and Limits of Past and Future Experiments
Featuring Yannick Vanderborght (overview), Guy Standing (on India), Jurgen De Wispelaere (on Finland), Alexander de Roo (on The Netherlands).
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference4
5. Moving Forward
Featuring Louise Haagh, Stanislas Jourdan, Roland Duchatelet, Yasmine Kherbache.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference5
6. Final Reflections
Featuring Claus Offe, Gérard Roland, Joshua Cohen, Erik O. Wright.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference6
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka.
Cover Photo: BIEN’s 30th anniversary renunion , credit Enno Schmidt.
by BIEN | Dec 3, 2016 | Bios & background Info
Karl Widerquist in 2014
Karl Widerquist was vice-chair of BIEN from May 2017 to August 2018, after serving as co-chair from October 2010 to May of 2017, and as a member of the executive committee from 2004 to 2010. He is a political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University-Qatar. He is the co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network, which he chaired from 1999 to 2008.
Widerquist is best known as an advocate of Basic Income. But he is also an interdisciplinary academic writer who has published in journals in fields as diverse as economics, politics, philosophy, and anthropology. He is a consistent critic of propertarianism (also known as right-libertarianism or libertarianism), Social Contract Theory, and the Lockean proviso. 8, and he cofounded in 2011. He has been a commentator on several television, radio, and print networks.
Contents
- Biography
- Advocacy of Basic Income
- Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory
- Other political and economic theories
- Bibliography
- Media appearances
Biography
Karl Widerquist as a grad student-musician in 1993
Karl Widerquist was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1965. His family moved to Cassopolis, Michigan in 1969, and he grew up there. He completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics at the University of Michigan in 1987. For several years Widerquist pursued both music and economics. He was the original bass player for Michael McDermott, and play in several indie bands in New York in the 1990s.[i]
Widerquist completed a Ph.D. in economics at the City University of New York in 1996, later working at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and the Educational Priorities Panel. He was a Hoover Fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain where he worked with Philippe Van Parijs.[ii]
Widerquist received a second doctorate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford in 2006, and then worked as a Fellow at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Since 2009, he has been an Associate Professor at Georgetown University-Qatar.[iii]
Advocacy of Basic Income
Widerquist claims to have been a supporter of some form of Basic Income Guarantee since he heard the topic discussed on an episode of Milton Friedman’s television show, Free to Choose, in 1980, when he was only 15 years old.[iv] But he did not start writing, working, or publishing on the topic until the late 1990s.[v]
Michael A. Lewis, of Hunter College and USBIG
Widerquist has worked on Basic Income as an economist, a political theorist, a public policy analyst, and organizer. In 1999, Widerquist cofounded the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network along with Michael A. Lewis, Fred Block, Charles M. A. Clark, and Pamela Donovan. Widerquist chaired the organization until 2008 and edited its email NewsFlash until 2014.
Widerquist has been the co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2008. In 2011, Widerquist and Yannick Vanderborght cofounded BIEN’s news website, Basic Income News, and severed as its principle writer and editor until 2014, and he still writes for it occasionally. He and BIEN’s other co-chair, Louise Haagh chartered BIEN as a non-profit organization in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of BIEN’s activities.[vi]
Widerquist’s writing on Basic Income includes several articles reexamined the results of the Negative Income Tax experiments conducted in the United States and Canada in the 1970s.[vii] He and Michael Howard co-edited two books on Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, addressing it as a small model of a Basic Income.[viii][ix]
Michael Howard holding umbrella and Karl Widerquist in the rain, New York in 2017
He has been critical of the “reciprocity” or “exploitation” objection to Basic Income. Under these objections people who receive Basic Income without work are said to fail in the duty of reciprocity by accepting social benefits without contributing to their production and thereby they are said to exploit workers who do produce those benefits. Widerquist’s responses hinge on the distribution of ownership of resources, which according to him, violates the principle of reciprocity because the law gives ownership of the Earth’s resources to a limited group of people without compensation for the loss of the commons for others. Therefore, Widerquist argues, to be consistent with reciprocity those who hold resources must make an unconditional payment to those who do not.[x]
If this argument works, instead of violating reciprocity, Basic Income is required by that principle. Widerquist further argues that Basic Income, so conceived, does not not exploit workers because it does not matter how one gets control of resources (through work, inheritance, or any other means). What matters is that anyone’s ownership of resources must not be part of a system that imposes propertyless on others.[xi] The absence of propertylessness is important not only to ensure that the privatization of resources is consistent with reciprocity but also to protect all workers from vulnerability to exploitation by their employers.[xii]
This view of property rights as something that both protects owners from interference and imposes interference on nonowners is a running theme throughout much of Widerquist’s writing and his arguments for Basic Income. This idea is closely related to left-libertarian or Georgist views of property, which are based on the principles of self-ownership and some principle of equal access to natural resources.[xiii] Left-libertarians argue that this view of resource rights is more consistent with negative freedom than any other view because the establishment and enforcement of property rights inherently interferes with non-owners in very substantive ways and in a very negative sense of the term.[xiv]
The first of two books laying out Widerquist’s theory, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.”
Widerquist does not endorse the whole of either of those theories of justice. Instead he presents his theory of justice as a separate ideology, which he calls “justice as the pursuit of accord” or “indepentarianism.” The central difference between this theory and more mainstream left-libertarianism is that it rejects the left-libertarian view that equal access to resources entitles people to an equal share of the market value of natural resources.[xv] Widerquist instead argues that disadvantage might be entitle to greater redistribution larger than what would be required to equalize the income generated by natural resources.[xvi]
He makes several arguments for this position, the most important of which is that respect for equal freedom requires that any legitimate authority protects individuals from the most substantively important interference. This principle, Widerquist argues, requires respect for individuals’ status free individuals, which in turn requires economic independence. They need access to enough resources to ensure that they are not forced by propertylessness to serve the interests of people empowered to give them access to resources. Widerquist calls this concept, “freedom as independence,” or “freedom as the power to say no.” He argues that respect for independence in the present socio-economic context requires redistribution to come at least in part in the form of an unconditional Basic Income and that it must be at least enough to meet an individuals’ basic needs. He also argues that Basic Income protecting vulnerable individuals from exploitation and other forms of economic distress better than traditional conditional welfare state policies.[xvii]
Philippe Van Parijs at TEDx Ghent
Widerquist is not the first to recognizing the poverty effectively forces individuals to work in service to more advantaged individuals, nor is he the first to argue that Basic Income can relieve that effective force. The unique feature of his theory is the central role that it gives to “the power to say no” in an individual’s status as a free person.[xviii] This line of argument seems to have recently become more important to the movement for Basic Income with even Philippe Van Parijs, one of the movement’s long-term leaders, arguing along these lines in his recent TEDx Talk, “The Instrument of Freedom.”
Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory
Prehistoric Myths, this book mentions Basic Income only once–on the last page
Widerquist’s criticism of right-libertarianism began in 2009 when he published both an encyclopedia entry on libertarianism and an article criticizing libertarianism. The article argues that the central principles that are meant to determine the just distribution of property in a right-libertarian economy can justify government ownership of the powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute property just as well as they can justify private ownership of property. It argues that there are no historical or principled reasons to believe that private owners holdings of their powers are any any better justified than government holdings of their powers.[xix]
Karl Widerquist began collaborating with anthropologist Grant S. McCall with the publication of two articles in 2015 and a book entitled Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy released in January of 2017.[xx][xxi][xxii] The book uses anthropological evidence to debunk claims in contemporary political theory. It shows how, since the 1600s, most forms of social contract theory and natural property rights theory—especially those in the propertarian or right-libertarian tradition—have relied on the false empirical claim that Widerquist and McCall identify as “the Hobbesian hypothesis. That is, everyone is better off in a state society with a private property rights regime than everyone is, was, or would be in a society with neither of those institutions. The book shows how this claim became a central feature in the social contract justification of the state with Thomas Hobbes’s publication of Leviathan in 1651. Very much the same claim entered property rights theory a few decades later when John Locke made the fulfillment of his famous “proviso” central to his justification of the private property rights system. The book shows how the Hobbesian hypothesis has reappeared throughout the history of political thought since then and that it continues to be passed on in twenty-first century political theory.[xxiii]
Grant S. McCall of the Center for Human Environmental Research
The book argues, few of the philosophers who pass on the Hobbesian hypothesis offer any evidence to support it. Early philosophers relied on the colonial-era prejudice that any civilized man must be far better off than any savage natives. Later philosophers have simply relied on how commonly this claim is repeated to give it the air of obviousness. Yet, it is not the type of claim that can be obvious. It involves a comparison between the least advantaged people in modern, capitalist states with people who live in small-scale, stateless societies very remote to most modern writes in time and/or in place.[xxiv]
Widerquist and McCall present several chapters of evidence making that comparison and showing that the Hobbesian hypothesis is false: contemporary society has failed to fulfill the Lockean proviso. The least advantaged people in contemporary state society are actually worse off than the remaining native peoples who live outside the reach of the authority of the state or the property rights system. Therefore, if either of the two theories is to successfully justify the state and/or the property rights system, societies have to treat their disadvantaged individuals much better than they do now—whether that be by providing a Basic Income or by some other means.[xxv]
Other political and economic theories
Widerquist coauthored a textbook entitle, Economics for Social Workers.[xxvi] He has argued that Piketty’s observation that the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the growth rate in the economy should be seen as an outcome of the institutional setting rather than as a natural law of capitalism.[xxvii] Widerquist has also examined the effect that relaxing public choice theory’s assumption of self-interested behavior. He shows that many public choice problems exist as long as political actors are rational and disagree about what government should do, even if their disagreement stems from adherence to competing ethical theories rather than from competing self-interested wants.[xxviii]
Although Widerquist’s work uses some sufficientarian assumption, he criticized other aspects of sufficientarianism.[xxix] He has done historical work examining the many different (and often contradictory) ways that Lockean appropriation theory has been interpreted and revised.[xxx] He has written critically about wage subsidies as a redistributive strategy.[xxxi]
Media appearances
Karl Widerquist has frequently appeared in print, radio, and television news networks, including:
Click here for an updated (hopefully updated) list of Widerquist’s media appearances.
Publications
Books
Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press
Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis, and Steven Pressman (eds.), 2005. The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist, Jose Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere (eds.), July 2013. Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell
Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
Journal Articles
Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401
Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part I” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (3): 749–757
Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part II” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (4): 1019-1030
Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278
Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81
Michael Lewis, Steven Pressman & Karl Widerquist, 2005. “The basic income guarantee and social economics,” The Review of Social Economy 63 (4): 587-593.
Karl Widerquist and Jurgen De Wispelaere, 2006. “Launching a Basic Income Journal” Basic Income Studies 1 (1): 1-6
Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis, 2006. “The Basic Income Guarantee and the goals of equality, efficiency, and environmentalism,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2 (1): 21-43.
Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464
Karl Widerquist, 2006. “The Bottom Line in a Basic Income Experiment” Basic Income Studies 1 (2): 1-5
Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339
Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480
Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44
Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.
[i] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html
[ii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu
[iii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu
[iv] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html
[v] “Selected Works of Karl Widerquist”, at works.bepress.com/widerquist/
[vi] “About BIEN”, at basicincome.org.
[vii] Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81
[viii] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[ix] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[x] Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401
[xi] Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464
[xii] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103
[xiii] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000), The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An anthology of historical writings. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
[xiv] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000b), Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave
[xv] Vallentyne, P. (2000). “Left-Libertarianism – A Primer,” in P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner, Eds.). Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave, 1-22
[xvi] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xvii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xviii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xix] Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72
[xx] Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44
[xxi] Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.” Analyse & Kritik 37 (2), August
[xxii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxiii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxiv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxvi] Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press
[xxvii] Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90
[xxviii] Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278
[xxix] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480
[xxx] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26
[xxxi] Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339
Karl Widerquist in speaking in front of (a painting of) the Danish Parliament
