According to a recent report (May 2019) by UCL Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), guaranteeing universal basic services (UBS), such as health care, education, child care, transportation and digital information, would be more beneficial to low income groups than universal basic income (UBI).
It is argued, in the referred report authored by Anna Coote, Pritika Kasliwal and Andrew Percy, that “extending public services is likely to be more effective in addressing poverty, inequality and wellbeing than unconditional cash payments to individuals”. That assertion is linked to a yet to be published article by Coote and Yazici called “Universal Basic Income, A literature review”, while the present report does not “consider the case for UBI in any depth”. The discussion defending UBS, in the report, seems then to be unilateral. However, cost considerations between the two systems, for the United Kingdom reality, have been done in a previous report (from 2017). From these calculations, the authors have reached the conclusion (stated after the 2019 report’s release) that UBS would cost around 10% less than UBI to implement in the country.
Andrew Percy, co-author of the report (supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) and Citizen Sponsor at IGP, has said that “universal access to basic public services must be the foundation of 21st century welfare that delivers real social security, allows people to make meaningful choices about their work, and can be delivered in an affordable and practical way”, which doesn’t seem to pitch UBS against UBI. Others, like Will Stronge (Autonomy think tank) and Mathew Lawrence (Common Wealth think tank), explicitly consider UBI and UBS to be complementary in an evolving model for society.
Anna Coote. Picture credit to: Green European Journal
Anna Coote and co-author Edanur Yazici have also recently (April 2019) published another report (signing for the New Economic Foundation), entiled “Universal Basic Income: A Union Perspective”, which clearly rejects UBI in favour of a UBS. That study has been published by the global trade union federation Public Services International (PSI), financially supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung foundation. This particular report was analysed by UBI activist Scott Santens, who has written that it is “a prime example of a disinformation campaign designed to manipulate public opinion against the idea of universal basic income”, and a “shameless propaganda” move.
The publication of the 2019 report on universal basic services, by the IPG, has also spurred a reaction in Guy Standing, a lifelong researcher, economist, author and activist for UBI. According to him, in an article published in Open Democracy, “there is no contradiction between having some public quasi-universal basic services and a basic income”. He adds, concluding, that these systems “address different needs and stem from different rationales. But having cash enhances freedom of choice, is potentially more empowering and can be more transformative. I plead with those advocating ‘Universal Basic Services’ to stop juxtaposing the idea of more and better public services with giving people basic income security.”
My latest book project (coauthored by the anthropologist, Grant S. McCall) is called The Prehistory of Private Property. It book tells two parallel histories. It tells the story of how modern property theory became dependent on three misconceptions about the origin of the property rights system and the difference between societies with common and privatized resources, and how those misconceptions continue to have a negative effect on contemporary political thought and beliefs about our shared responsibility. The second story traces the origin and development of the private property system through history and prehistory to debunk those misconceptions.
The three claims at the center of this book are: 1. The normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world we live in can only support a capitalist system with strong private property rights. 2. Capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system. 3. Inequality is natural and inevitable, or egalitarianism is unsustainable without a significant loss in freedom.
The book devotes a great deal of space to show how these misconceptions are embedded in many influential theories in political philosophy, because political philosophers are often unclear about the extent to which their theories rely on empirical claims. The clarity problem is nearly as important as the dubious nature of the claims. Obscurity and ambiguity help shield these claims from scrutiny.
Underlying this specific theoretical agenda is the more general goal of raising the level of discussion of empirical issues in political philosophy. Ambiguous allusions to empirical claims should be unacceptable in any academic literature. Philosophers have the responsibility to be clear about what empirical claims they rely on and about the level of support they can offer for those claims. Their critics should not let them get away with the sloppy use of ambiguous allusions to empirical claims.
Once the need for each claim is clearly established, the book subjects each claim to rigorous empirical investigation using the best evidence available from anthropology, and then discusses the implications of those findings for contemporary theory. Some of the book’s central findings follow.
The normative principles of appropriation and transfer much more easily support common or collective claims to property. Private property rights systems tend not to develop without state aggression against small-scale societies with better claims of a connection to “original appropriation” than people establishing individualist private property rights.
The hunter-gatherer band economy is more consistent with negative freedom than any other form of socio-political organization known to anthropology. If freedom is an overriding value, everyone must become a nomadic hunter-gatherer. This finding implies both that the justification of any other system must rely at least partially on some other value such as opportunity and that aid to the disadvantaged is not necessarily freedom-reducing: it often counteracts freedom-reducing aspects of private property.
Inequality is not natural nor inevitable nor in conflict with freedom. Contemporary egalitarian theory can benefit from the experience of small-scale societies that successfully maintain very high levels of political, social, and economic equality.
The book is not directly about Basic Income, but it will connect to the idea in the final chapter. We will argue that the mass of humanity lead lives of manufactured desperation. People are not naturally in a struggle to “find work” to ensure they have food, shelter, and clothing. They are artificially put in this situation by a stratified property rights system that is not necessary for human social organization and that most societies (from the earliest hunter-gatherers to more recent peasant farming systems) did not find it necessary to manufacture such desperation. Basic Income is one way to compensate people for the imposition of a stratified property system and to relieve them of desperation that has come with it.
We have full drafts of 8 of the books ten chapters, and we are positing them online at this link as they reach presentable form. We hope to have a full draft we can send to our publisher (Edinburgh University Press) within a few weeks or months.
Enzo grills Karl at the PPA+ conference, Amsterdam, 2019
Louise Haagh, presently Reader at the University of York, and Chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), just released a new book, through Polity: The case for Universal Basic Income. A summary is featured on the editor’s page:
Advocated (and attacked) by commentators across the political spectrum, paying every citizen a basic income regardless of their circumstances sounds utopian. However, as our economies are transformed and welfare states feel the strain, it has become a hotly debated issue.
In this compelling book, Louise Haagh, one of the world’s leading experts on basic income, argues that Universal Basic Income is essential to freedom, human development and democracy in the twenty-first century. She shows that, far from being a silver bullet that will transform or replace capitalism, or a sticking plaster that will extend it, it is a crucial element in a much broader task of constructing a democratic society that will promote social equality and humanist justice. She uses her unrivalled knowledge of the existing research to unearth key issues in design and implementation in a range of different contexts across the globe, highlighting the potential and pitfalls at a time of crisis in governing and public austerity.
This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to get beyond the hype and properly understand one of the most important issues facing politics, economics and social policy today.
An important report on basic income has been released in the UK, as announced before, and publicly presented at the RSA last Tuesday. In that report, one central idea is to put forward, for the UK social reality: to give every adult citizen a 100 £/week (equivalent to about 460 €/month), unconditionally and without means-testing. According to the Progressive Economic Forum (PEF), this policy can be tested in the UK in five different ways (for an year):
Giving a 100 £/week (116 €/week) to every adult in a randomly selected community, plus 50 £/week (57 €/week) for children and any extra amount to account for disability necessities. The scheme would replace all benefits but the housing benefit.
Giving a 70 £/week (81 €/week) to every adult in a randomly selected community, plus 20 £/week (57 €/week) for children, but keeping child benefits. All other means-tested benefits would remain in place, accounting for the unconditional transfer as income, thus reducing or eliminating the (existing) benefits paid.
A 50 £/week (58 €/week) to every adult in a randomly selected community, plus any existing benefits (not considering the unconditional transfer as income).
A randomly selection of adults (country-wide) on welfare seeing conditionalities removed.
A randomly selection of homeless people given an unconditional cash grant, replacing other (cash or non-cash) benefits.
At the referred presentation, Labour Party’s John McDonnell, the Exchequer Shadow Chancellor, said the Labour Party is not committing to introduce basic income in the UK (if elected), but this report will definitely be instrumental for the party’s next manifesto design.
Not surprisingly, Tories in parliament stand firmly against this policy, branding it as a “handout”, and dismissing it as hugely expensive and unfair to “hardworking taxpayers”. To that, Guy Standing, main author of the referred author, has replied that governments looking forward should “at the very least introduce local pilots to see how effective it could be”. He and RSA Director Anthony Painter have been strong proponents of reducing or eliminating means-testing and conditionality in general, in a welfare system in the UK which has been “expensive to administer and is causing destitution”. Painter summarizes by saying that “basic income-style pilots have been proven to have beneficial effects on health, well-being, and trust, while giving people more freedom to decide for themselves how to manage their lives.”
A series of articles have been produced on this issue, in several news outlets, such as the Guardian, Brave New Europe, the Mirror and BBC News. The presentation video can be watched below, and also heard on an RSA podcast.
As students of life, some of us have lived through poverty, through the worried nights of insecurity, the feeling of being powerless and valueless. Some of us have seen the angst of unemployment, the feeling of being unwanted, the restless days of sitting at home while others go to work, and the lull of the nights that is not entirely peace.
Some of us are scholars committed to understanding poverty and economic insecurity. We try to find the underlying political and economic causes of inequity and ways of solving them. We see a vision for the future, and try to lay down steps to overcome poverty and build a more equitable society.
All of us whose vocabulary has been informed by the lived experience of poverty and unemployment, or those of us who may have an indirect knowledge or experience of it; all are invited. We may be students, artists, researchers, social workers, community organizers, development practitioners, and politicians. We can also be those who have no claim to any such knowledge or experience, and those who fervently dream of a better world.
For the 19th BIEN Congress, India Network for Basic Income plans to publish an anthology of different kinds of writing on themes surrounding Basic Income and what it hopes to address – unfreedom, new forms of slavery, poverty, economic insecurity, being debt-ridden, addiction, deprivation, depression – and the sense of shame that accompanies each of these states of mind. The list can be almost endless. The writings can also be of different kinds:
Poems
Short story / parable
Biography / Autobiography / memoir
Personal reflection
Interview / conversation
Cartoon
Painting
Graffiti
Please ensure that the writing does not exceed 1000 words.
INBI invites contributions to this anthology, as an open call until 15th of June 2019. These shall be sent to Akhilesh Arya at akhilesh.arya@gmail.com.
