Videos of all the plenary sessions are available on youtube. Abstracts of all the concurrent sessions are available here. Full papers and slides of some presentations are available below.
This table contains the papers uploaded to the congress website prior to the congress. If other authors submit their papers then they will be added to this list.
Videos are available of many of the congress sessions. Click here to see them.
BIEN 2016, Seoul
The Proceedings of the 2016 congress are contained in a single document, in which can be found plenary session addresses and parallel session papers. Click here to download the document.
Toward a renovation of economic circulation and institutionsMorley-Fletcher, Edwin (IT) Opening AddressOzanira da Silva e Silva, Maria (BRA) The Minimum Income as a Policy for Increasing Child Education in BrazilPelzer, Helmut (GE) Funding of an Unconditional Basic Income in Germany via a Modified Tax/Transfer SystemPioch, Roswitha (GE) The bottom line of the welfare state in Germany and the NetherlandsQuilley, Steven (UK) Sustainable Funding of Basic Income: Environment, Citizenship & Community, and a Trajectory for Basic Income Politics in Europe (published in Basic Income on the Agenda)
Reynolds, Brigid (IRE), with Sean Healy
From Concept to Green Paper: Putting Basic Income on the Political Agenda (published in Basic Income on the Agenda)
Robeyns, Ingrid (B)
An emancipation fee or hush money? The advantages and disadvantages of a basic income for women’s emancipation and well-being (published in Basic Income on the Agenda)
Roos, Nikolas (NL)
Basic Income and the justice of taxationSalinas, Claudio Caesar (ARG), with Philippe Van Parijs Basic income and its cognates. Puzzling equivalence and unheeded differences between alternative ways of addressing the new social question (published in Basic Income on the Agenda) Scharpf, Fritz (D) Basic Income and Social Europe (published in Basic Income on the Agenda)
Schutz, Robert (US)
More Basic IncomeSerati, M. (IT), with E. Chiappero & F. Silva Basic income: an insidious trap or a fruitful chance for the Italian labour market?Silva, F. (IT) ), with E. Chiappero & M. Serati Basic income: an insidious trap or a fruitful chance for the Italian labour market?Smith, Jeffery (US) From Potlatch to EarthshareStanding, Guy (SWI) Seeking Equality of Security in the Era of GlobalisationTerraz, Isabelle Redistributive Impact of a Basic Income: A Focus on Women’s SituationVan Parijs, Philippe (B), with Claudio Caesar Salinas Basic income and its cognates. Puzzling equivalence and unheeded differences between alternative ways of addressing the new social question (published in Basic Income on the Agenda) Widerquist, Karl (US) Reciprocity and the guaranteed income
Forty years ago today—February 7, 1980—was a small milestone for the Universal Basic Income (UBI) movement: Milton and Rose Friedman dedicated an episode of their television show to a form of basic income guarantee called the Negative Income Tax. This episode might have been the last gasp of the UBI movement’s second wave, which came very close to the centers of power in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and early 70s but had been declining for nearly a decade.
I’m a little embarrassed that this TV show and its accompanying book was my entry into the UBI movement because I disagree with the Friedmans on so many other issues now, but I have to give them credit.
Although Friedman brought his fame and Nobel-Laureate credibility to UBI and related policies, that broadcast did little to stop the decline in UBI’s popularity. It gradually vanished from mainstream politics in the United States and in most countries. It remained an idea for academics, minor parties, fringe activists for decades, only to emerge—seemingly out of nowhere—as a growing worldwide movement over the last 10 years.
So, that day wasn’t a huge milestone for the UBI movement. But it was a big day for me. It was my 15th birthday. I watched the show. I was enthralled with the idea. So, today is my 55th birthday and 40th anniversary as a UBI supporter. That’s probably a good time to write a personal account of what it’s been like following the UBI movement as it fell and rose again.
Movements don’t come from nowhere even if they seem to. I realize now that the groundwork for UBI’s takeoff had been building since the mid-1980s even as it receded from the mainstream political dialogue, and even as the people involved had no way to know at the time. I can’t take any credit for UBI’s rise, but I followed it very closely, so maybe my personal account will be useful.
Although I was a firm supporter from 1980, I couldn’t do much for the UBI movement, because there wasn’t much of one, and I had to go through high school and college. Then I bounced around between crappy, low-paid jobs for three years, before starting graduate school.
The two things I could do for UBI in that period were think and talk about it. The more I thought about it, and the more I learned about politics and economics, the stronger my support became. I began to see UBI as the centerpiece of a just society.
1980 was a depressing time to become a UBI supporter—especially in the United States. There were small waves of support for it in various places around the world during this period and an intellectual movement for UBI began growing in parts of Europe by the mid-80s, but none of that news reached me in the USA. There was no internet. I had the mainstream media, the library, and word of mouth, which was nearly useless.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
I found myself arguing for an increasingly unpopular idea. As the memory of its popularity in the 60s and 70s faded, fewer and fewer people even knew what it was. Politicians like Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK were slowly but successfully dismantling the welfare systems in their countries and vilifying just about everyone who qualified for benefits. People to the left-of-center were so much on the defensive that they were afraid to admit that the current welfare model needed improvement, because they were afraid any admission like that would make it more vulnerable to attack. Left-of-center people often argued that unconditionality was good in the abstract but political support for “the work ethic” was so strong that the only way to make sure benefits were adequate and safe from attack was to direct them exclusively to “the truly needy.”
The obvious weakness of this indirect argument amazes me. Almost all benefits in the USA, the UK, and many other countries, have been based on the model of separating the “truly needy” from the “undeserving poor” since their inception, but they have seldom if ever been adequate, and never free from attack.
Even some nominally left-of-center parties joined in, such as in 1996 when Bill Clinton led a bipartisan effort to “end welfare as we know it,” which basically meant reducing or eliminating benefits for the poorest children in the country because supposedly their mothers were bad people for taking care of children instead of “working.” Never mind that minimum wages weren’t enough to get single mothers or their children out of poverty, much less pay for child care. Never mind that this popular belief coincided with an equally popular belief that mothers whose husbands had money were bad people because they “worked” instead of taking care of children.
Watching things get worse for the least advantaged galvanized my opposition to conditions. Money is power. Propertylessness is powerlessness. Our society uses a judgmental, punitive system to force the least advantage to work for poverty wages. So, my support for UBI as a 31-year-old recent PhD in 1996 was as strong or stronger than it had been as a 15-year-old high school freshmen in 1980, and by now I had some of the skills I needed to work on it in the way I most wanted to—as an academic researcher. There are an infinite number of ways to contribute to a movement. So, I did what I thought I could do well.
Michael A. Lewis
My entry into the UBI movement began in the summer of 1996 while having breakfast the 7A Diner with Michael A. Lewis and Pam Donovan—two other recent PhDs and from the City University of New York. We’d been talking about politics a lot throughout our grad-school years. We had very different perspectives, but that day we all agreed that UBI or something like it was the most important social policy our country could introduce it right now.
Pam said, “then we have to write a paper on it.”
Pam was too busy to collaborate a paper together, but Michael and I had the time. We wrote the paper, and we have been collaborators on-and-off ever since. The feeling that I wasn’t the only one left in the world willing to work for this policy was great. It got my started writing on this issue, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
When Michael and I had a draft of a paper (that would take ten years to publish), we looked through academic journals in our fields (economics and sociology) to find people who’d written recently on the issue, and asked them for feedback. We had to search under at least a half dozen different names (guaranteed income, social dividend, etc.) because UBI had not yet emerged as the standard term. But we found about 20 people’s names and email address. We began getting to know people working on this topic.
In 1997, while I was working at the Levy Institute of Bard College in upstate New York, Malcolm Sawyer asked if I new about the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), as it was then called. I soon learned BIEN had been holding conferences on this idea since 1986. I got online and made plans to attended the next BIEN Congress, which was in Amsterdam in 1998. I can’t describe the feeling of being in a room with of several hundred UBI supporters after 18 years feeling like I was the only one. I’ve attended every BIEN Congress since.
At the conference, I was a new PhD, just getting started, with zero publications. So, I was a little nervous when I introduced myself to the organizer, Robert van der Veen, one of the key UBI researchers whose work had helped bring this issue back into the academic dialogue a dozen years earlier.
But when I thanked him for the work he’d done organizing the conference, he looked at my name tag and said, “And thank you. It was when I got your proposal, that I knew there would be at least one good paper at this conference.”
That comment gave me confidence that I had something to contribute. I hope that helps me remember to compliment others.
I also spoke to another key researcher, the secretary of BIEN, Philippe Van Parijs. I asked him how I could get involved with the network. Because BIEN was a European organization at the time, he said they really needed Americans to organize something like BIEN in the United States. Michael and I had a mailing list of about 20 interested people. That’s a start.
Because I was the only one who had time, they let me be coordinator and write the newsletter, eventually named the NewsFlash. That job gave me the opportunity to scour the internet for any UBI-related news I could find every two months. Sometimes it was hard to find, but I was surprised that there was always something to put in the NewsFlash. And that always put me in a good mood.
Jurgen De Wispelaere
I was the editor and main writer (sometimes the only writer) of the USBIG NewsFlash for it’s first 15 years, and it became a lot of work, but it also was a great education. It was a hard and sometimes thankless job, but I learned so much about the movement, it led to writing a lot of things that weren’t thankless, like writing this article, and collaborating on various projects with Michael Howard and Jurgen De Wispelaere.
From the early 2000s, I was all in with the UBI movement. I’ve attended every USBIG and BIEN and BIEN Congress since then. I’ve written as much as I could in UBI, and I volunteered for whatever I was able to do.When BIEN expanded from a “European” to an “Earth Network” in 2004, USBIG became an affiliate and several USBIG members, like Eri Noguchi, Almaz Zelleke, and me) joned the executive committe at various times. Eventually I was elected cochair along with Ingrid Van Niekerk, and later Louise Haagh.
Gradually, I became a recognizable part of the group of people working on UBI.
BIEN chair, Louise Haagh
But the group didn’t even feel like a movement. It felt like a discussion forum. Most of the membership were academics, and even the activists didn’t have critical mass to organize many actions. Instead, they tended either to focus on policies that were steps in the direction of UBI or to write about UBI like the academics but in more accessible way.
The movement was not only small; it was greying. In the mid-2000s, Guy Standing, referred to me as one of “the young people.”
I said, “Guy, I’m like, 40 years old.”
But that was young enough to be one of the younger people at the BIEN Congress.
Guy Standing–probably the most prolific author of UBI research–occupying Washing in 2011
Now that people in their teens and twenties working harder for UBI than anyone else, it’s hard to believe that as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, we were worried about getting young people involved. The movement was still made up mostly of die-hards from the second wave of UBI support, which had subsided more than 20 years earlier. I couldn’t even count myself as an exception because I learned about at the tail end of that wave of mainstream support. Maybe the UBI movement was the a ghost of Guaranteed Income movement of the 1960s.
Michael Howard unconditionally supporting the umbrella
In retrospect, the perception that the movement would slowly die off is obviously wrong. Even though UBI was continuing to recede from the mainstream political dialogue in most countries, subtle signs that the movement was regaining strength were visible. The first national Basic Income network began in the UK in 1985. The first international conference was held in 1986 and it led to the foundation of the first international network, BIEN. Since then local, national, and international groups had been gradually appearing around Europe and around the world. Minor parties in Parliaments in various European countries and elsewhere had been gradually endorsing UBI.
Localized waves of mainstream interest in UBI came and went throughout this period in places like Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, and South Africa. Even after these waves subsided, they left behind diehards who contributed to the growing international discussion and activism for UBI.
As USBIG’s Newsletter editor in the 2000s, I watched the subtle growth of the movement continue without really noticing that significance of its gradual acceleration. Not many other people did either. I never heard anyone saying this discussion and these actions are growing in a way that’s going to lead to a worldwide wave of UBI support that would make it a visible part of the mainstream political discussion across dozens of countries by in the 2010s.
Allan Sheahen
In 2006, US two activists, Al Sheahen and Steven Shafarman got a member of U.S. Congress to submit a bill to introduce small UBI. This bill was supposed to part of a strategy to rally support and press attention to UBI. Despite a lot of lobbying efforts by Al, Steve, and a few others, only two Members of Congress signed on to support the bill; there was basically zero press attention to it and zero activism for it. No one bothered to reintroduce the bill in the 2007 Congress. And the two Members of Congress (Bob Filner and Jesse Jackson Jr.) both ended up convicted of unrelated crimes a few years later.
Enno, Schmidt
But things were changing. Also 2006, Enno Schmidt and about a half dozen other people put paper crowns on the heads of passerbys in a public space in Switzerland and explaining the meaning of a too-often-forgotten UBI slogan “everyone a king.” Despite my doubts that it would lead anywhere, I was delightfully shocked that someone, somewhere was doing activism for UBI.
About that time, networks in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria created the first International Basic Income Week, which has grown every year since, and now takes place on all six inhabited contents. But it took me several years even to hear about it because it had no web-presence in English.
Zephania Kameeta, Namibian Minister of Poverty Eradication and former Bishop of the Lutheran Church of Namibia
At 2006 BIEN Congress, Zephania Kameeta, slammed his fist on the podiumand said, “Words, words, words. It’s time for action.” I was thinking, “Here we go again. Someone else is going to curse the people lighting candles in the darkness and tell them that they need to stop what they’re doing and start working on his idea.” But he instantly surprised. He announced he raised enough money to start a UBI pilot project in Namibia–the first such experience since 1980, and the forerunner of dozens that are happening now.
These days I look back at 2006 as the year that the UBI reached an inflection point and started to take off, but even following the news as closely as I was, I didn’t notice until 2012.
Before then, the news and research about UBI was small enough that I had time enough to read or listen to a lot of it, seemingly most of it, or at least most of the English-language stuff that seemed important to me. It was getting easier to fill the newsletter, but I felt like I had a good handle on it.
It went smoothly for about a year, but in 2012 Yannick, Joerg, and I all noticed something was happening. Suddenly, there was so much UBI-related news, that the three of us together couldn’t keep up with it.
The three of us knew that UBI was taking off. It’s been rising ever since.
I’d finally noticed that the third wave of UBI movement was happening. And the period in which I had to wonder whether the third wave was going to be as big as the second wave was extremely brief. In about 2010, I was asked to write a chapter called “Is Basic Income Still Worth Talking About?” (not my idea for a title and my answer was yes). But by the time book came out the question already sounded dated. More UBI activity was going around the world than at any time before.
The third wave dwarfs the second wave, and it’s the first genuinely worldwide wave of UBI support. I stepped down as editor of Basic Income News, five years ago (Andre Coelho took over), but I still follow the news as much as I can.
I discussed a dozen or so sources of this rise in another article. I won’t reiterate them here.
Barb Jacobson, one of the many people who work on the European Citizens Initiative for UBI and helped turn it into UBI-Europe
Today, the wave continues to grow from multiple sources even as its most visible driver keeps shifting every couple of years. First, it was two activist-led experiments in Namibia and India. Next, it was two petition drives to get UBI on the ballot in Switzerland and the European Union. Then two campaigns together raised over a half million signatures, and the EU campaign organized in every single EU member state. Somebody took the time to ask people in Malta to gather signatures for UBI. Somebody in Malta said yes. And some people in Malta—along with 350,000 people across 18 other countries—signed.
Look how small and out of the way that place is
After that, the media generated by those two initiatives inspired different kinds of activism around the world. Local, regional, national, and international groups seemed to appear everywhere.
At about the same time, the automation discussion exploded with tech industry people including some deep-pocketed and/or famous entrepreneurs, some of them used their position and resources to promote the idea. Then governments and large institutions around the world started running Basic Income experiments, sometimes in partnership with wealthy individuals or firms. So many experiments are now underway, it is hard to keep track.
Today, the most visible driver of the movement is Andrew Yang‘s campaign for U.S. Present. He’s the first major candidate to make UBI his central campaign issue. In
Andrew Yang upholds UBI as the Freedom Dividend
the 1972 US election, both major-party nominees endorsed forms of UBI, but neither of them made much of an issue of it.
Writing for the USBIG Newsflash during the 2000-2008 elections, I was unable to find any U.S. major parties’ Presidential, Gubernatorial, or Congressional candidates (aside from the two jailbirds mentioned above) even being asked about the issue. The issue was endorsed by Green Party candidates (thanks in part to Steve), and it was in alive in top-level politics in some other countries. But mainstream U.S. politicians almost always either ignored it completely or distanced themselves from that radical idea.
Steven Shafarman
In the 2012 and 2016 election cycles, mainstream politicians including Bernie Sanders, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton started being asked about it. Instead of feeling like they had to distance themselves from the idea, they tended to say favorable things about it while trying to convince UBI supporters that the most effective way to move in that direction right now was to join them in supporting some very non-UBI policies. That kind of response indicates that they recognized that UBI movement as worth courting, and that doing so was a net benefit over any negative they might get from association with an idea that had been too radical to touch since 1972—when even George McGovern quietly deemphasized it after receiving a difficult attack from Hubert Humphry in a primary debate.
Scott Santens with Conrad Shaw (“the UBI guy”/filmmaker) in a good mood after the Basic Income March, October 26, 2019
Yang’s version of UBI is ambitious, but not as much as most UBI supporters want to see. However, he’s been inspired by and considers himself a part of the UBI movement. His plan is a start. He’s received dedicated support from one of the most prominent UBI activist-writers in the United States, Scott Santens. Should UBI supporters endorse a candidate? I, for one, suggest we endorse the candidate who has endorsed us.
Yang’s campaign has raised UBI to greater prominence that it’s ever before received in the United States. It has forced all the Democratic candidates to state a position on the issue. He’s made it more difficult for other politicians to dismissively say nice things about the movement while trying to sell supporters on a non-UBI policy. If they’re not ready to endorse UBI right now, they have to explain why not, and often those arguments against UBI-now don’t look that great for people who see themselves as left-of-center. They sound reactionary and judgmental. If you’re serious about inequality, poverty, making sure everyone (no just the 1%) benefit from our prosperity: stop judging, start helping.
A small part of the Yang Gang in Los Angeles
Yang has built a network of “Yang Gangs” around America, and these groups are rallying around UBI more than any of Yang’s other policy proposals. Many dedicated members of the Yang Gang did not know what UBI was a year ago. Whether these gangs will grow into a long-term movement for UBI remains to be seen, but they’re giving a big boost to the UBI movement right now, and it’s spreading around the world.
Yang’s campaign has certainly reached more people than Milton Friedman’s TV show. Whatever happens it will leave behind many dedicated UBI supporters who will bring their ideas and enthusiasm to UBI research activism for a very long time. Maybe some of them will write articles in 2060, looking back on 40 years of activism–hopefully with a lot of successes to look back on.
Although Yang’s campaign is the most visible driver of the movement, right now, much more is going on–too much to chronicle. Experimental results will begin trickling out soon, and that will keep UBI in the news for years. Several documentaries about UBI are in production. UBI has become a major issue in India–especially in the state of Sikkim.
James Felton Keith & Diane Pagen
James Felton Keith, a candidate for Congress in Harlem, recently teamed up with long-term UBI activists, such as Diane Pagen, to organized a Basic Income march in October 26, 2019 in New York. The idea quickly spread around the world: 30 cities heald UBI marches that weekend.
Two other candidates for Congress, Chivona Newsome in the Bronx, and Agatha Bacelar in San Fransisco participated in the march and have given UBI a prominent place in their platform. I’ve gotten to know J. F. Keith. He’s not just someone who’s willing to say something nice about UBI. He’s a part of the movement. His voice in Congress could greatly raise the prominence of the idea.
From 1980 to 1996, I was an isolated UBI supporter. Then I was part of what felt like an all-but-hopelessly marginalized group of UBI supporters for another 15 years or so. For nearly a decade, I’ve been a part of growing movement that seems to reach new milestones every few months. In the process, I’ve gone from being one of the kids of the movement to a member of the old guard. I’ve had the chance to speak about UBI on all five continents. I even got to speak at the 2019 UBI March in New York.
Congressional candidate, Chivona Newsome, who is making UBI in issue
Being a respected part of this movement is the most satisfying part of my professional career. There is no group whose repect I value more. I hope everyone knows the respect is mutual. The chance to meet and correspond with so many people working for UBI in so many different ways has a been an adventure. The diversity of this group–so many people working in their own way on their own version of UBI or something like it–is what keeps this idea growing.
I’ve watched this movement grow with my mouth hanging open. Each success surprises me. People have given me and other visible members of the old guard way more credit for this wave of support than we deserve. Nobody saw this coming. Nobody said, this is what’s going to happen, and this is how we’ll do it. I can say that because I’ve attended most of the major UBI conferences since 1998.
Congressional candidate, Agatha Bacelar, who is making UBI an issue
Asking who should get the credit from the UBI movement is like asking which brick holds up the wall. The wall is the bricks. The movement is the people involved. The third wave of the UBI movement is being driven by extremely diverse support coming from all over the world for different reasons. The third wave is happening because a bunch of different people tried a bunch of different things–and some of it worked.
If you’ve said anything nice about UBI any time in the last 40 years, you helped build a movement. There’s no way to sort out who to credit and no point in trying.
We don’t know what happens next. This wave might be the one that makes UBI happen, but support might go into a period of decline for an unpredictable amount of time before picking up steam again. All I can say is whether the movement stalls or grows, don’t give up. Support has gone up and down several times, but it’s trended up for over 100 years. The diehards who kept working on UBI when it fell out of favor in their country made it into a bigger movement than it ever was before. It was that tiny group of people putting paper crowns on the heads of perplexed passerbys that started the snowball of activism that made it easy for the UBI march to spread all over the world. Or maybe 100 other little actions started the snowball.
If you want to get involved, there are an infinite number of valuable things you could do. Find something other people aren’t doing or that we need more people doing. If you need ideas about what needs doing, I have lots of them.
I don’t know how long it will take, but I think UBI will win eventually. The conditional welfare state, extreme capitalism, and extreme socialism have consistently failed to solve the underlying problems of inequality, poverty, and privilege. The have failed because even if they know that property is power, they have failed to realize that propertylessness is powerlessness and that making powerlessness the default position of everyone but the 1% is the ultimate class privilege.
UBI March, New York, 2019. Photo by Franklin Chávez
As long as inequality, poverty, and privilege exist, so does the opportunity to build the movement for UBI. The struggle doesn’t end until justice wins. Justice doesn’t win until the privileged stop telling the poor what to do so we can end the powerlessness that makes so many people in world weak, vulnerable, and marginalized.
-Karl Widerquist, Hey Cafe, New Orleans Louisiana, February 7, 2020 (with parts writted earlier and in other places). Updated February 9, 2020
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article makes no attempt to comprehensively cover the UBI movement. It’s the view from my perspective. It’s about the small slice of the enormous UBI movement that I’ve interacted with most closely. My apologies to the hundreds of dedicated people whose names just didn’t happen to come up.
That’s me giving my talk at the UBI March in the New York.
“Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services: the case for radical change” is the title of the podcast hosted by Robin Archer, Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme, a prestigious lecture series on the spirit of free social inquiry at the London School of Economics.
What are the arguments for Universal Basic Income and for Universal Basic Services? How do they relate to each other and what might the difficulties be?
An early version of the book, Exporting the Alaska Model, is available for download for the first time. This is possible because most academic publishers allow authors and editors to post early versions of their works on their person websites. A preview, written in 2012, is below. If you’d like to cite or quote it, please refer to the published version:
In recognition of every Alaskan’s share of the ownership of the state’s oil reserves, every year, every Alaskan gets a dividend from the returns of the Alaska Permanent Fund (a sovereign wealth fund comprised of a pool of assets collectively owned by the residents of the state). It was created from royalties the state receives from the oil industry. Each year it pays a dividend to every Alaska resident. In 2008, the dividend reached a high of more than $3200 (including a supplement added from that year’s state budget surplus). That dividend amounted to more than $16,000 for a family of five.
Many other resource-exporting regions around the world have sovereign wealth funds, but only the APF pays a regular dividend to citizens. The APF and the accompanying Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) are actually a combination of resource-management policy and a progressive social policy. As a sovereign wealth fund, it helps to ensure that the state will continue to benefit from its oil long after its reserves are depleted. As a dividend, it helps every single Alaskan make ends meet each year without a bureaucracy to judge them.
The PFD is one of the most popular government programs in the United States. It has helped Alaska attain the highest economic equality of any state in the United States. It has coexisted with, and possibly contributed to, the state’s growing and prosperous economy. Most importantly it has given unconditional cash assistance to needy Alaskans at a time when most states have scaled back aid and increased conditionality.
Cliff Groh
This book argues that the model provided by the combination of the APF and the PFD is worthy of imitation by other states, nations, or regions. Of course, not every country has as much oil as Alaska, but every country has resources. The total value of natural resources (including not only mining, fishing, and forestry but also land value, the broadcast spectrum, the atmosphere, etc.) is surprisingly high even in areas not thought of as being resource rich. The case for taxing natural resources is at least as good, and probably far better than taxing other sources of wealth.
One reason Alaska introduced the APF was that lawmakers realized that oil drilling would give the state a large and temporary revenue windfall. They wanted to extend the period in which that windfall would benefit Alaskans by putting some if it away into a permanent fund. To some extent the PFD was a way to sell ordinary Alaskans on the idea of the APF.
But to some extent the motivation for the APF was to support the PFD. Some of the lawmakers who created the APF, most especially Governor Jay Hammond, were influenced by the movement for what is now known as a “basic income”—a small unconditional income for every citizen to help them meet their basic needs. At the time, the policy was best known as the “guaranteed income” or the “negative income tax.” It was widely discussed by policymakers in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. Hammond had created a similar policy on a local level when he was a mayor of Bristol Bay, and he very much saw the APF as an opportunity to create a guaranteed income. The argument was simple: the oil, by right, belonged to all Alaskans. The PFD was an efficient way to ensure that every Alaskan would benefit from it.
A similar argument can be made for almost any natural resource.
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to assessing whether the APF is a model to be copied with chapters in the disciplines of economics, philosophy, sociology, history, and social policy studies. It also has chapters written by political activists and practitioners.
Several chapters discuss the history of the APF and similar policies around the world (both resource taxation policies and income support policies). Others chapters discuss the ethics of unconditional cash grants and resource taxes, and how the Alaska mode fits in with recent theoretical models. As mentioned, the PDF is essentially a small basic income—a political proposal that has been widely discussed in political theory literature. Stakeholder grants would replace the yearly basic income with a large, one-time payment when individuals come of age. Resource egalitarianism is the belief that all people should benefit equally from the natural resources of the Earth. Policies like the APF, which link resource taxes to direct redistribution, advance resource egalitarian goals. We discuss what should count as a “resource” for purposes of the standard of “equality of resources,” and how this might be focused on resources that can become the basis of a sovereign wealth fund. A clean atmosphere, for example, is a shared resource that is being depleted by billions of individual polluters.
Several chapters debate whether it is a good idea to link a progressive social policy, such as a cash grant, to an environmental policy, such as a resource tax. One reason to make this link is that resource taxes redistributed as dividends reflect shared ownership claims to the environment. Other reason to do so is that the redistribution of resource tax revenue can compensate people for the cost of moving to less resource-intensive activities. One danger is if the redistribution of resource taxes is seen as a good thing, people might be more willing to accept increased exploitation of natural resources.
The book also discusses possible ways that the model might be altered and improved, including a proposal for Citizens Capital Accounts, which personalize the fund, giving each individual owner, among other things, the power to decide whether to take out regular dividends or let her earnings accrue as a protected investment. Instead of passively receiving a check each year, each citizen have some control over a small portion of the principle and the choice of when and whether to withdraw her available returns.
The book also has country- and region-specific proposals with estimates of what size dividend might be achievable in various places. As criteria for success we consider effects on poverty, effects on inequality, effectiveness in discouraging greenhouse gasses and other forms of pollution (for carbon-based taxes), efficiency, satisfaction of voters, and other factors.
Summary
This book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses employing the Alaska model in circumstances similar to those of Alaska: in wealthy, resource-exporting nations and regions. Part II discusses applications of the model further afield. And Part III discusses a hybrid proposal for an individualized version of Alaska’s fund and dividend.
Michael W. Howard (right) and Karl Widerquist (left) in the rain at the 2017 NABIG Congress in New York
Hamid Tabatabai (chapter 2) begins Part I with a discussion of the second place in the world to introduce a resource dividend: of all places, Iran. Like Alaska, Iran stumbled upon the dividend following a peculiar set of circumstances. For most of its period as a resource-exporting nation, Iran has used its resource wealth to support an inefficient system of commodity subsidies (mostly on gas and oil consumption). Iranian politicians knew that these subsidies had to go, but the policies benefited so many people in such a significant way that the politicians knew they could not eliminate them without a similarly broad-based policy (discussed as the fifth lesson in section 2 above). After lengthy discussions, the policy that emerged was a basic income in the form of a regular resource dividend. The policy is not funded by a permanent resource endowment, but it does employ the other two elements of the Alaska model.
Angela Cummine (chapter 3) looks at the very opposite issue. There are many SWFs in the world today. Some of them are many times larger than the APF. Yet, only the APF pays a dividend. Given the enormous popularity of the PFD, why have no other resource-exporting nations imitated it? Employing information gained from interviews and other sources, Cummine assesses the reasons SWF managers around the world are skeptical about dividends.
Alanna Hartzok (chapter 4) looks back at the Alaska model itself in advance of export. She argues that the APF and PFD embody the idea of socializing the rent of assets that rightfully belong to the people as a whole, but to do this, managers at the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC) should take on a strong responsibility toward social investing, and they are not yet living up to that responsibility. Any nation or region wishing to socialize rent on a large or small scale should, therefore, take a look at what the APFC has done right and what it has done wrong.
Rather than looking at employing the Alaska model in other places, Cliff Groh (chapter 5) looks at the future of the Alaska model in Alaska. Although the PFD has a sound permanent endowment in the APF, it is the only part of the Alaska government that has such safe financial footing. Most of Alaska’s state budget is based on current oil export revenues. The volume of Alaskan oil exports has been declining for more than 20 years. So far, increases in the price of oil have more than made up for the decline in the volume of oil exports, but they will not always do so. When oil revenue begins to dry up, there will be enormous pressure on the state government budget, which will also put pressure on the APF and PFD. Groh discusses when this might happen, what it will mean, and what can be done about it.
Gary Flomenhoft begins Part II with a chapter (chapter 6) estimating the potential for a common-asset-based dividend in the “resource-poor” state of Vermont. He shows that even Vermont has many resources that are being given away for free by government to corporations who sell those resources back to the people at higher prices. Flomenhoft estimates how much revenue the state could generate by treating those assets the way Alaska treats its oil. In his low estimate, he finds that Vermont could support a dividend at least as large as Alaska’s; and in his high estimate, he finds that Vermont could support a dividend many times larger—perhaps more than $10,000 a year for every Vermonter. If a resource-poor state such as Vermont can do it, any state or nation can too.
Paul Segal (chapter 7) discusses employing the Alaska model in the poorer nations of the world and discusses the impact on poverty of doing so. He finds that a resource dividend could cut world poverty by more than half, as measured by the World Bank’s poverty rate of US$1.25 per day at purchasing-power-parity.
Jason Hickel (chapter 8) examines the potential impact of the Alaska model on a less developed nation—the newly independent state of South Sudan. Although South Sudan has large oil reserves to draw on, the potential impact of the Alaska model on it is hard to estimate because the state is so new and few good data are available. However, he finds that oil exports have the potential to finance both a substantial dividend and significant infrastructure improvements.
Governor Jay Hammond, “Father of Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend”
Jay Hammond’s contribution (chapter 9) applies the Alaska model to Iraq. Hammond was the fourth governor of the state of Alaska and is justly described as the father of the PFD. He campaigned for the idea long after he left office. His posthumous contribution to this book is a piece he wrote near the end of his life suggesting that a permanent fund and dividend would help ensure that Iraq’s oil revenues were shared by members of all of its diverse communities. This chapter includes a brief introduction by Larry Smith.
Michael W. Howard’s chapter (chapter 10) discusses the cap-and-dividend approach to global warming as a politically viable way of applying the Alaska model at the federal level in the United States. The idea of cap-and-dividend is simple. The government limits the amount of carbon emissions allowed (the cap). It sells the rights to make those emissions to the highest bidder and redistributes the proceeds as a dividend for all citizens.
Widerquist closes Part II with two chapters (chapters 11 and 12). The first examines the possibility for, and potential size of, a permanent common-asset-based endowment for the United States. The second examines the prospects of exporting the Alaska model back home to Alaska to widen and deepen the use of the strategy we call the Alaska model in Alaska itself. Widerquist argues that a fuller use of the Alaska model will strengthen Alaska against the likely eventual decline in resource revenues.
Part III of the book is entirely devoted to the discussion of a proposal by Karl Widerquist to create an individualized version of the permanent fund and dividend approach. Widerquist’s proposal, called Citizens’ Capital Accounts (CCAs) (chapter 13), assigns a portion of the principal of the fund to each individual at birth. They can decide when and whether to draw dividends, but the principal must remain in the fund for future generations. Widerquist argues that CCAs provide more economic security for the money than basic income or other similar proposals, because they allow individuals to keep the returns in their safe investment account until they are needed. Subsequent chapters by Michael W. Howard, Jason Berntsen, Ayelet Banai, and Christopher L. Griffin, Jr. (chapters 14–17) evaluate, criticize, and consider variations of the CCA proposal. In the final chapter of part III (chapter 18), Widerquist responds to criticism.
The pilot project which is being carried out in Barcelona – B-MINCOME – combining guaranteed minimum income and active social policies in Barcelona’s deprived urban areas– published a report, on July 2019, with the results of its first operational year (2017-2018). The experiment, which began in October 2017 and is due by the end of 2019, aims to reduce poverty and social exclusion in highly vulnerable groups. During these 24 months, and based on a Randomised Control Trial model, 1000 households (randomly) selected from three of the city’s poorest districts (Nou Barris, Sant Andreu and Sant Martí) have been receiving a maximum cash transfer of €1675 a month. Of these 1000 households, 550 have also taken part in four active-inclusion policies which the project has set up: one for training and employment; one of fostering entrepreneurship in the social, solidarity and cooperative economy; one with grants for refurbishing flats in order to rent out rooms; and one involving community participation.
What makes this project so innovative is that it combines four modes of participation: Conditional (people randomly assigned to an active policy are obliged to take part in it), Unconditional (participation in these policies is not a condition for receiving the income), Limited (any additional income that might be obtained proportionally reduces the amount of the cash transfer) and Non-limited (where this additional income does not reduce the amount of the transfer).
Apart from reducing poverty and fostering personal autonomy, the B-MINCOME’s overall objective is to test which modality of income transfer is the most effective (concerning results) and the most efficient (concerning implementation costs). This experiment or pilot project is, therefore, an initial step towards implementing a municipal income-transfer system which should be consolidated in the near future.
In line with the results obtained in similar experiments, such as the one in Manitoba during the 1970s, the Finish one, the one suddenly cancelled in Ontario and those that are now coming to a close in various Dutch cities, such as Utrecht, the report now published by the Barcelona City Council shows very positive quantitative results. For example, an 11% average increase in general well-being and a 1,4% increase in economic well-being. It also shows an 8% reduction in the severe material privation index, and a reduction of up to 18% in ‘worrying about not having enough food’. It is also worth noting the 3% average reduction in the need to get money through means other than employment (e.g. by renting out rooms, a problem that especially affects the city of Barcelona) or the decreasing trend in developing mental illnesses and an improved quality of sleep, by 10% and 1% respectively – two results associated with a reduction in the financial stress suffered by these families. Furthermore, the qualitative and ethnographic evaluation of the project also reveals positive impacts, such as an increase of nearly 28% in happiness and general satisfaction with life, as well as a significant increase in engagement with and participation in neighbourhood and community life.
However, the report does not detect statistically significant changes in housing insecurity or in the households’ ability to cope with unexpected expenses (although this cash-transfer is not designed to make savings possible but only to meet basic expenses). Furthermore, no significant results have been observed regarding work placement or in other dimensions related to employment. However, it should be noted that this result was expected and is in line with other similar experiments, which also confirms the initial hypothesis: people in the Conditioned modality experienced a “lock-in effect”, as their (compulsory) participation in the active policies may have meant they had less time to look for work. However, it should be noted that most participants were suffering from a high degree of exclusion or job precariousness prior to the start of the project. It was, therefore, unrealistic to expect ambitious results in this sense.
The referred report only contains results obtained during the first year of the project, and hence the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the project can only be definitively evaluated in early 2020.
Given the recipients’ highly vulnerable profile, and the fact that these results come from a single year of (the pilot’s) implementation, there are motives for optimism. Final results are expected to be more significant and consistent from a statistical perspective, plus even more encouraging from a substantive point of view, i.e. in improving beneficiaries’ quality of life, increasing their freedom and autonomy and reducing their dependence on other public subsidies.
Written by Bru Laín (bru.lain@ub.edu). Affiliate professor of Sociology (University of Barcelona), researcher at the B-MINCOME project and Secretary of the Spanish Basic Income Network
In 1997, while I was working at the Levy Institute of Bard College in upstate New York, Malcolm Sawyer asked if I new about the 
In December 1999, several people from that mailing list happened to be in New York at the same time. Six of us (
