by Dave Clegg | Mar 12, 2017 | News
The 2017 publication Europe’s New Social Reality: the Case Against Universal Basic Income by Sage and Diamond – which can be downloaded from Policy Network online – cites an earlier 2015 Policy Network report which was most concerned about a “growing social, economic and political divergence” developing between the EU nations. In particular, the 2015 report suggested that slow economic growth and the increasing inequality of wealth were causing significant strain on EU governments and even the fabric of democracy itself. Sadly, their latest 2017 report indicates that little has changed.
The 2017 book focuses on the left, right and especially center posturing of the EU’s various political parties regarding economic inequality, but offers nothing tangible to reduce the tensions and differences between these competing interests. Instead the book seems to want to emphasis political divisions by singling out the ‘center left’ of the EU’s political spectrum as the principle promoter of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
However, the reality is that a UBI is not the property of any one political group. In fact, the idea of subsidizing the needs of the citizenry appears to have developed during the Renaissance era as a more effective means of dealing with poverty than executing the poor who were often simply attempting to gain enough sustenance to survive. Over the succeeding 600 years the idea has come and gone in various nations and under a variety of political ideologies.
Most recently a BI has been considered by Republicans on ‘the right’ in the U.S., Canada’s Liberals ‘on the left’ and various centralist parties in the EU. The BIEN link History of Basic Income is a valuable read in this regard.
Sage and Diamond’s book provides the reader with all kinds of graphs, explanations and theories to support the long held belief that politicians and bureaucrats know what’s best for the economy and, by inference, what is best for the citizenry as well. If they just ‘tinker a bit with this and adjust that’ everything will be fine. So they scrap ‘old policies’ and implement ‘new policies’ and we all wait to see some change. Of course this is exactly the same sort of tired old pedantic rhetoric that surfaces every time a UBI discussion has appeared on the horizon over the last 600 years.
Yet despite the centuries of debate, the endless fiddling and tinkering with social programs and the never-ending promises that ‘new programs and policies’ are all that is needed, the fundamental problem of economic inequality has not only not been resolved, but it is worse now than it ever was. This, in a time when the world is awash in wealth counted in the trillions. Yet with a mere 7 billion people depending on that wealth, half the world’s human population is now destitute and desperate when just a single century ago there seemed to be abundance everywhere.
Sadly the Sage and Diamond book seems to be just another example of the hubris that ‘those in authority’ know what is best for the rest of us. Many UBI critics are stuck on the idea that a UBI is about ‘welfare and poverty’ or about ‘unemployment’ in a rapidly evolving workplace. But those are only the most obvious victims of economic inequality. The real concern is about the economic survival of whole populations and is immediate. It cannot wait for more paternalistic tinkering and adjusting.
Sage and Diamond’s book offers nothing new – with the possible exception of their graphs and charts – while the problems remain largely the same and a major contributor to those problems is still economic inequality. This book is simply representative of the anachronistic anchor that is holding progress back while ignoring the potential offered by a population freed from the specter of destitution and homelessness by the implementation of a UBI. Instead, Sage and Diamond offer yet another paternalistic response. A response that is akin to wearing a different suit of solutions while hanging onto the same faded, tattered and smelly underwear of paternalistic policies.
by Kate McFarland | Mar 1, 2017 | News
BIEN cofounder Annie Miller has written a new handbook about basic income, fittingly titled A Basic Income Handbook, which will be published by Luath Press Limited in March 2017.
Publisher’s summary:
“In this informative book, Annie Miller not only explores the idea of basic income: she exhaustively explains what it is and what it would mean to implement, using extensive economic data. Miller starts off from a broad, existential position, outlining why the current system is no longer suitable for the times and needs to change. Her proposed solution is a society with BI, which she first outlines abstractly before diving into its internal workings, explaining who would be eligible for BI, what would happen to the rest of the welfare system, and other crucial details. Miller backs up her statements with substantive economic research and analysis. She ends with a section on how to achieve a society with BI, giving examples of pilot schemes elsewhere and discussing the politics behind implementation. Thus she brings the reader full circle from aspiring to a BI society, to seeing what it would take to reach it.”
Annie Miller, a former instructor of economics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has a long and distinguished history in the basic income movement: she was a cofounder of the Basic Income Research Group (which later became the Citizen’s Income Trust, BIEN’s UK affiliate) in 1984, a cofounder of BIEN itself in 1986, and a cofounder of Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (BIEN’s Scottish affiliate) in 2016.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo credit: Enno Schmidt
by Cordelia Holst | Feb 15, 2017 | News
“Open Mind” Photo CC BY 2.0 Anders Sandberg
“Being open-minded about universal basic income”
The Safety Nets Global Solutions Group at the World Bank has recently blogged about basic income, explaining the income level of a country can indicate where its government is on developing a social security / welfare protection system for its citizens. High income countries with a history of welfare policy focused on the poor, are seeing increased job insecurity for all workers due to advances in AI, robotics and automation. Middle income countries are adjusting and measuring relatively new welfare systems. Meanwhile, low income countries are just at the beginning of these efforts, and struggling with low government revenues to finance these programs. With basic income research pilot projects having been launched around the world, from Finland to Namibia, the Safety Nets Global Solutions Group encourages policymakers to keep an open mind around basic income as we together look at the rationale, context, incentives, and outcomes that will shape the possibilities for these policies going forward.
The Safety Nets Global Solutions Group (GSG) is a network of practitioners within the World Bank who share an interest in the analytics and practice of social assistance. It currently includes 150+ professionals actively engaged in different regions across the world.
Read the article here:
Ugo Gentilini and Ruslan Yemtsov, “Being open-minded about universal basic income,” Let’s Talk Development (blog), January 6, 2017.
by BIEN | Feb 5, 2017 | News
(Credit to: The American Prospect)
Delphine d’Amora from Mother Jones has offered a brief history of the idea of basic income, tracking its development from the 18th century to its current resurgence with prominent modern advocates, such as Belgian philosophy professor Philippe van Parijs, and various basic income experiments ongoing in a number of countries.
“After decades of obscurity, the idea is suddenly in fashion,” d’Amora notes, “Politicians around the world are interested and a handful of governments, such as Finland and the Canadian province of Ontario, are planning or considering basic-income pilot projects.”
The article is an in-depth, chronological history of basic income, starting with the 18th century, and including various manifestations of the idea, including negative income tax as described by American economist Milton Friedman in an embedded video.
Read the full article here:
Delphine d’Amora, “A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life“, Mother Jones, December 26th 2016
by Pierre Madden | Feb 5, 2017 | News
Photo: Jean-Yves Duclos, CC BY-NC 2.0 UNU-WIDER
Thirty McGill students meet with Jean-Yves Duclos, the Federal minister of Families, Children and Social Development for Canada.
If you follow this site, you may remember a piece on my meeting with François Blais, Quebec minister of Employment and Social Solidarity, who, over 15 years ago—when he was an academic—wrote a well-regarded book on Basic Income. Minister Blais has been tasked by his boss Philippe Couillard, the Premier of Quebec, to explore options for its implementation.
On January 16, his federal counterpart, Jean-Yves Duclos, the minister of Families, Children and Social Development for Canada, sat down for an hour with some 30 McGill students to answer questions.
Unlike Blais, Duclos does not have a mandate from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to develop a plan for Basic Income. He is currently focusing on a National Housing strategy, a poverty reduction strategy and the issue of homelessness.
Although the discussion covered many topics, the common thread in Duclos’ responses was the eternal Canadian question of which is a federal and which is a provincial responsibility. I was not alone in asking some pointed questions about Basic Income. The underlying theme of his answers was also constitutional in nature [1].
When I asked the Minister what his thoughts were on Basic Income, he had only positive assessments:
He felt it would avoid poverty traps and that there is less stigma attached to it than social assistance. He also feels it is administratively simpler for both governments and the public, since Canada already has two Basic Incomes – one for children (the Canada Child Benefit), and one for seniors (the Canada Pension Plan). Expanding on the first, the minister explained that the entire pre-existing system was under federal control. Fifteen years ago, the support for children on welfare was taken over by the federal government and separated from the support for adults on welfare, which remained a provincial responsibility. The federal government, therefore, had all the necessary tools to implement the Canada Child Credit in July 2016. Provincial programs vary widely across the country. If an individual province wants to implement Basic Income in its area of jurisdiction, nothing can stop it. For the federal government to implement a national program would be far more difficult. “It would be a challenge, a problem of a different order of magnitude,” he said.
However, the federal government has a powerful tool to achieve national standards while respecting provincial competence: money. Today, Canadians enjoy the same level of health care no matter where they live because the provinces agreed to common standards of comprehensiveness, universality, portability, public administration, and accessibility, in exchange for cash transfers.
With regard to housing, the Minister had this to say:
In a federation, a natural and, in most cases, a productive tension exists between the different levels of government. In Canada, in some areas, the tension is avoided by claiming that one area is under some jurisdiction, completely. For housing, this not the case. Housing is shared. Provinces in these situations say: “Why don’t you transfer us the money and we, being closer to our citizens, should know better what to do with those resources.” However, then you lose accountability for these federal tax dollars and it is difficult to have a national, shared vision across all Canadians wherever they live. So the trade-off is between full control to provinces and territories versus a national sense of identity and a common set of values. So the tension is always there and when it’s properly managed, the outcome is always good.
The takeaway is quite clear. Clues to the process of implementing Basic Income are to be gleaned from the history of health care introduction. In that case, successful provincial programs in Western Canada evolved into the national system.
[1] Articles 91 and 92 of the Constitution Act, 1867 lay out distinct responsibilities of the Federal and Provincial governments. Other articles spell out shared responsibilities. Although the division of powers for poverty is not clearly delineated, in part because of the complexity of the issue, the federal government has successfully imposed national standards in shared domains such as Health Care.
Questions like these are less prominent in the United States because of the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
