by Kate McFarland | Apr 28, 2016 | Research
On June 5th, the people of Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on a referendum to enact a basic income — marking the first time that a basic income has been submitted to the popular vote. Although the basic income initiative received little support in Parliament, about 40% of Swiss citizens support the referendum, according to a recent survey.
A new book, Voting for Freedom by Daniel Häni and Philip Kovce, lays out the arguments for a basic income in Switzerland, and explains why the referendum is a “milestone in the advancement of democracy.”
As the book’s press release describes the basic income initiative, “The proposal creates new alliances and causes old ones to fall apart. The reason: Unconditional basic income asks the right questions.”
Daniel Häni was one of the instigators of the popular initiative for a basic income; he is also CEO and co-founder of unternehmen mitte, Switzerland’s largest coffee house. Philip Kovce is a freelance writer and a researcher that the Basler Philosophicum and Witten Institute of Economics and Philosophy, as well as a member of Think Tank 30.
Prominent venture capitalist Albert Wenger (partner of Union Square Ventures) writes the forward.
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by Joe Timothy | Apr 24, 2016 | News
There are numerous different arguments for the adoption of a basic income. To eradicate poverty, counteract the inevitability of job automation or to allow people the freedom to choose. However, Mark Walker argues that we hear so much about what he terms “leftist” reasons and not so much about the justifications for a basic income for those who sit on the right of the political spectrum. In this blog post, Walker, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at New Mexico State University, outlines why he believes capitalism itself demands a basic income.
Walker sets out his vision of the future of the United States in which people are charged a surcharge for all goods and services that they use much like companies such as Amazon or Ebay do. This extra payment will go into one pot and shared amongst shareholders. Now this sounds like another way of shifting money to a few lucky shareholders however Walker then goes on to suggest those shareholders are the public themselves; “Perhaps the answer is obvious; the shareholders are “we the people”. This vision of public ownership using capitalist principles would allow the public to receive a dividend in the form of a basic income.
Later in the article Walker argues that the market as it is “benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and the poor. Or put the other way around, the poor and the middle class would be better off if we ran public assets on good capitalistic principles”. It is this adoption of a capitalist outlook in public life that Walker believes will lead to the inevitable outcome of a basic income for all.
Mark Walker is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at New Mexico State University, as well as a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the editorial board of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. His latest book is Free Money For All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century (2015, Palgrave)
Mark Walker, “Capitalism Mandates a Basic Income Guarantee”, April 6th 2016
by Kate McFarland | Apr 19, 2016 | News
Rutger Bregman in June 2015
Source: Victor van Werkhooven (Wikimedia Commons)
Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, the latest book by the award-winning Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman, will be published in English on Tuesday, April 19. The book was originally published in Dutch, and met immense success in the Netherlands — where it not only became a national bestseller but also helped to spearhead the movement for municipality-level basic income experiments.
Early in the book, Bregman transports the reader back to a long-gone time of utopian fantasy — to visions of “Cockaigne,” a land where “rivers ran with wine, roast geese flew overhead, pancakes grew on trees, and hot pies and pastries rained from the skies,” and all people danced, drank, and lounged together as equals. A new vision of utopia, he argues, is sorely needed in modern societies.
A century ago, influential thinkers like John Maynard Keynes predicted that automation and improved efficiency would render work all but gone in the not-so-distant future. Instead, here in the early decades of the 21st century, we citizens of developed nations find ourselves working longer hours than ever — all too often in jobs that we ourselves find meaningless. (On the last point, see Bregman’s lucid discussion of “bullshit jobs” in hist chapter entitled “Why it Doesn’t Pay to be a Banker.”) Technology has brought great improvements in living conditions — at least for a few — but dreams of a paradise of leisure seem lost to the wind.
Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Luilekkerland” (“The Land of Cockaigne”), 1567
How, then, can we reclaim our visions of utopia? How can we turn our modern “Land of Plenty,” as Bregman often calls it, into a land of plenty for all — and plentiful leisure and life-fulfillment as well?
No doubt, many skeptics and naysayers will find Bregman’s solutions — his visions of a universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek — to be fanciful as the mythical land of Cockaigne. Bregman himself concedes that, to many, his proposals will sound like “crazy dreams.” But it can’t be over-stressed that this “crazy dream” is, indeed, a “utopia for realists.” Far from being a woolly-headed dreamer, Bregman proposes and describes specific steps en route to utopia — from disincentivizing overtime to taxing banking transactions to developing alternative measure of progress to the GDP — and thoroughly backs his claims with diverse historical and experimental evidence.
For example, in his first chapter on basic income (“Why Everyone Should Get Free Money”), Bregman presents the findings of multiple studies of the effects of “free money.” He discusses the results of “Mincome” experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, and similar concurrent studies conducted in the United States, in some detail — in addition to summarizing the outcomes observed by charitable organizations like GiveDirectly, which deals in no-strings-attached cash donations, and formal studies of cash transfers to the poor. He effectively combines statistics, anecdotes, and theoretical considerations in making the case that a basic income is the most effective means to combat poverty — a realistic approach to utopia-building if any is.
Of course, as Bregman knows, basic income, on its own, is not sufficient to create a utopian future. I will leave it to the reader to discover the other facets and nuances of his “crazy dream” — but, as an educator, I do want to call special attention to Bregman’s critique of our present discourse about education, which he (accurately) notes “invariably revolved around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market?” According to Bregman, this is “precisely the wrong question.” Instead, educators must ask what knowledge and skills we want students to have — to prepare them “not only for the job market but, more fundamentally, for life.” I couldn’t agree more. (Of course, as a philosophy instructor, I also couldn’t agree more when Bregman specifically recommends training students in “philosophy and morals,” but I digress…)
Utopia for Realists is a highly recommended read — but, in the words of Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. Bregman’s book has received widespread praise from noted scholars and thinkers in the basic income movement and beyond.
Nick Srnicek, the co-author of another influential utopian-leaning book (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work), calls Utopia for Realists “a bold call for utopian thinking and a world without work – something needed more than ever in an era of defeatism and lack of ambition,” while noted social theorist Zygmunt Bauman describes it as “brilliant, comprehensive, truly enlightening, and eminently readable” and “obligatory reading for everyone worried about the wrongs of present-day society and wishing to contribute to their cure.”
BIEN co-founder Philippe van Parijs also commends the book, saying, “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions. It can turn allegedly utopian proposals into plain common sense. It can enable us to face the future with unprecedented enthusiasm. To see how, read this superbly written, upbeat, insightful book.”
To learn more about Rutger Bregman and Utopia for Realists, visit the website of its publisher The Correspondent, a crowdfunded online journal for which Bregman has written extensively.
Bregman was recently interviewed by Gawker about basic income, in conjunction with the English version release of his book. The interview covers much ground, including the feasibility of a basic income in the United States (Bregman sees a “natural fit” for a basic income in the US, calling it the “ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics”), and responses to a battery of potential objections, such as the free-rider problem, the threat of inflation, and the worry that an economy in which people work fewer hours could not generate sufficient revenue to finance a basic income.
For a short and accessible video introduction to Bregman’s ideas about a basic income, watch his TEDx talk on YouTube.
by Josh Martin | Mar 16, 2016 | Research
Abstract:
A basic income is typically defined as an individual’s entitlement to receive a regular payment as a right, independent of other sources of income, employment or willingness to work, or living situation. In this article, we examine what it means for the state to institute a right to basic income. The normative literature on basic income has developed numerous arguments in support of basic income as an inextricable component of a just social order, but there exists little analysis about basic income within a jurisprudential or philosophical rights perspective. In our view, strong reasons of either a principled or a pragmatic nature in support of instituting a basic income scheme nevertheless often fall short of ascribing to basic income a distinctive Hohfeldian rights status. This article aims to partially redress this gap by examining two sets of questions. First, what are the implications – ethical and practical – of adopting basic income as a legal right as opposed to a mere policy? Second, we also enquire whether there should be such a right: what, if anything, is the ethical foundation that warrants granting basic income a distinctive legal rights status? This article suggests that any such foundation must be grounded in comparative evaluation and discusses several comparative strategies available to basic income advocates. The aim of this article is not to offer a definite argument in favor of a legal right to basic income, but to chart several lines of argument that a rights perspective might add to the contemporary discussion.
Jurgen De Wispelaere and Leticia Morales, “Is there (or should there be) a right to basic income?”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 13 January 2016.
by Stanislas Jourdan | Jan 26, 2016 | News
Basic income continues to make headway in France after the Minister of Economy and the Minister for Digital Affairs sent positive messages about it.
Interviewed in the popular radio and TV show Bourdin Direct, Emmanuel Macron, the French Minister for Economy, said he believed in the principles behind basic income and thought the topic deserved to be investigated further:
“Basic income is an interesting idea. The debate shouldn’t only be about being pro or against, but I think it’s an idea we should investigate further. Why? Because it means giving the possibility to everyone to have a starting point in life. This is the idea of basic income. There is also the idea of having a basic capital [a one-off payment given to everyone] for all persons of a certain age.”
He went on:
“Ultimately, it refers to what philosophy we have of our society. Personally I believe in freedom, I believe in openness (…) I think the role of the state is to recreate conditions of equality at every moment in one’s life: at school, when starting one’s professional life, and when life accidents occur, through social standards and social benefits and education policy for unemployed persons (…). But I don’t believe in egalitarianism, rather I believe in equal opportunities; and the idea of basic income or basic capital for all goes in this direction and I’m interested in this.”
The interview was broadcasted live on January 20, you can listen to the extract about basic income below:
“Basic income is following the natural course of history”
The night before however, the French National Assembly had rejected several amendments calling on the government to carry out a comprehensive study on basic income to assess its feasibility and explore different ways to implement it.
The amendments were championed by Socialist MP Delphine Batho and her Republican colleague Frédéric Lefebvre in the context of a current bill on so-called ‘Digital Republic’, and were meant as a follow-up of the release of an important report on the transformations of work in the digital era.
The night just before the French National Assembly rejected the amendments by only one vote. However Luc Belot, rapporteur of the bill, and Axelle Lemaire, Minister for Digital Affairs, said they were open to the idea.
“The idea is very seductive and could find consensus across all political parties – as long as we don’t go into the details” said the Minister. “In reality this sort of unique safety floor could lead to removing many benefits such as student grants, family and housing benefits and others. On the other hand, one may also consider the possibility that basic income could complement other social benefit schemes. The debate is infinite. You are right to raise this question, and to do that today. In fact, this subject is definitely following the natural course of history.”
However, both the Minister and rapporteur called on the MPs to reject the amendments on the ground that the topic fell outside of the focus of the bill being discussed. They invited MPs to include basic income into the work of another parliamentary working commission led by Christophe Sirugue, which has been tasked to produce a comprehensive review of the welfare system.
The French Movement for Basic income (MFRB) has been asked to contribute to the commission’s work. “We are currently working on providing concrete proposals to pave the way towards basic income” said researcher and MFRB member Jean-Éric Hyafil.
Credit picture CC École Polytechnique
