by Kate McFarland | Dec 9, 2016 | News
Launched on Thursday, December 8, the US-based Economic Security Project (ESP) — co-chaired by future of work expert Natalie Foster, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren — has committed to donate $10 million over the next two years to projects related to exploring “how a ‘basic income’ could rebalance the economy and ensure economic opportunity for all”.
The goal of ESP, in the words of its press release, is to help Americans interested in basic income achieve the transition from “conceptual discussion to meaningful action”.
Stressing both the potential of basic income and the need for further investigation, Warren states, “We believe we can end the downward spiral for working families in America by providing a guaranteed basic income for every man, woman, and child – but the precise approach for implementing a cash benefit system needs additional research.”
Mission and Belief Statement
ESP released its Belief Statement at its launch, accompanied by more than 100 signatures from entrepreneurs, academics, activists, artists, politicians, and others who share the vision of the initiative (including Basic Income News editor Kate McFarland, as well as many people more famous than she).
We believe people need financial security, and cash might be the most effective and efficient way to provide it.
The time has come to consider new, bold ways to make our economy work again for all Americans. In a time of immense wealth, no one should live in poverty, nor should the middle class be consigned to a future of permanent stagnation or anxiety. Automation, globalization, and financialization are changing the nature of work, and these shifts require us to rethink how to guarantee economic opportunity for all.
A basic income is a bold idea with a long history and the potential to free people to pursue the work and life they choose. Now is the time to think seriously about how recurring, unconditional cash stipends could work, how to pay for them, and what the political path might be to make them a reality, even while many of us are engaged in protecting the existing safety net.
The undersigned commit to work over the coming months and years to research, experiment, and inspire others to think through how best to design cash programs that empower Americans to live and work in the new economy.
The ESP Belief Statement continues to gather numerous signatures online.
Grant Recipients
ESP has selected six initial grant recipients, to which it has already dedicated over $500,000 in total:
- The Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy group that is beginning to explore how to strengthen America’s safety net in ways that could lead to a universal basic income.
- The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank that has recently released a report on basic income, and which is now undertaking more extensive research on UBI and cash transfers, including macroeconomic modeling, behavioral research, and public opinion surveys and focus groups.
- The Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank that has published frequently on basic income and other cash transfer policies, such as a universal child benefit. The center plans to carry out policy research on various means of implementing cash transfer programs in the US.
- The Alaska Group American Center, which is fighting recent cuts to Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, the unconditional cash payment to state residents that has been influential in much discussion of basic income.
ESP indicates on its website that it is open to funding a variety of projects — from scientific research to advocacy campaigns to artistic and cultural projects — and accepts proposals online.
Coming Next
ESP is preparing to launch a series of articles, written by project advisors and diverse other contributors, on themes related to the path to a basic income in the US.
Photo CC BY-SA 2.0 401(K) 2012
by Kate McFarland | Dec 3, 2016 | News
The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) was named the UK Social Policy Think Tank of the Year at the 16th annual Think Tank Awards, held in London on November 28, 2016.
Anthony Painter CC BY 2.0 G20 Voice
The award was decided in part on the basis of the RSA’s work on basic income, exemplified in December 2015 report “Creative citizen, creative state: the principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income“ by Anthony Painter (Director of the Action and Research Centre) and researcher Chris Thoung.
According to a summary in Prospect, the British magazine that hosts the annual award, the judges described the RSA “a great and well respected institution which nonetheless continues to innovate” and specifically commended its “outstanding” work on basic income, which demonstrates “a rare ability to marry a big and disruptive idea with determined number-crunching”.
Painter, who accepted the award for the RSA, told Basic Income News:
This award was not just for the RSA’s work on Basic Income – honoured as we are to receive it. Our analysis was grounded in decades of work by thinkers, researchers, and activists. It reflects their work too.
But there’s something else. The award marks another moment in the case for Universal Basic Income moving relentlessly from margins to mainstream. And this case will get stronger until it becomes irresistible. We look forward to continuing to work with many others to keep the momentum going.
Established in 2001, Prospect’s Think Tank Awards recognize the contributions of think tanks in several regions (the US, EU, and UK) and areas of specialization (Economic and Financial Affairs, Energy and the Environment, Social Policy, and International Affairs).
The RSA was founded in 1754, and now has a network of 28,000 supporters worldwide. Past members include such notable individuals as Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, and Karl Marx.
Watch a short video introduction to the RSA’s work on basic income (featuring Anthony Painter):
Read More:
Prospect Team (November 29, 2016) “Think Tank Awards 2016: The Winners,” Prospect.
Thanks to Anthony Painter and Jamie Cooke for information and contributions to the article.
Cover photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Laura Billings
by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 29, 2016 | Opinion
Europe has received a lot of attention for its recent moves toward experimenting with a basic income policy. What has been lost in this focus are the developments that are taking place in the rest of the globe, including the world’s second biggest economy: China.
Cheng Furui is one of the organizers of the China Social Dividend/Basic Income Network, and has done extensive research on China’s social safety net. In the interview below, she said a basic income would resolve many of the problems facing China’s current welfare program.
As the international economy faces increasing automization, Cheng said basic income is a potent answer to this issue in China.
“I believe that basic income and China’s status quo are aligned because it is in accordance with the essence of both socialism and the market economy,” she said.
The full length interview is below:
What is different between Universal Basic Income and China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (Dibao)？
Dibao is China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee program. Anyone with an income below the minimum can receive a supplementary income up to the standard. In this way, Dibao is unconditional: no one can take away someone’s right to the Dibao income. The Dibao only provides a grant to those that are below the Dibao income standard. Thus, the government must conduct strict evaluations of recipients’ economic situations, which creates a lot of implementation problems and issues of abuse. By contrast, Universal Basic Income provides the grant to every person, regardless of income. Moreover, China’s Dibao benefit has a large discrepancy across different regions, consistent with the regional economic inequality that China already faces. Here is more information for reference: China’s MCA.
How do the Chinese view basic income? Do the Chinese generally understand about this policy?
Most Chinese don’t know about the basic income concept. Nonetheless, there are some places that are currently carrying out this policy, although they do not call it basic income. The areas that are implementing basic income all have different situations. The differences are not just regional, even neighboring areas have large differences depending on the community members’ organizational depth and shape.
Why should China implement basic income? What type of impact would it have?
The foundation for China’s implementation of basic income comes from China’s public ownership system itself. State owned enterprises, urban land, and mineral resources already exist, much like Alaska in the United States. Every person should have a share of public resources. This relies on the profit from the public resources being utilized as a basic income revenue, not only does everyone receive equal payment. This means the government does not have to collect more taxes from the rich only to give back to every person.
Chinese history applies the profit from publicly owned resources to supplement the country’s public finances, therefore lowering the private sector’s tax rate. In turn, conducting large scale investment in service sector and infrastructure development, including constructing railroads, and the systems that support the economy such as education and healthcare. These systems provide benefits to the vast majority of people. During China’s period of urbanization and gradual improvement of infrastructure and even completion of these projects, the profit of public resources perhaps can be used as a benefit to each person. Certainly, this will lower society’s overall wage rate or working hours. Simultaneously, some places have collective ownership of resources, and most of Chinese social dividends come from these resources.
What is the status of China’s basic income movement?
The basic income concept is currently only being discussed among Chinese academics and there are currently few researchers of the policy. However, the general public is already exploring implementation of basic income, also it is genuinely that every person in those areas can enjoy the local basic income. For example, much of the revenue for basic income programs is contributed by the collective organizations’ dividend bonus.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, rural China has implemented collectivization of land, the household farm quota system allows the individual to use the land for production, but they cannot sell the land to others. During the movement toward urbanization, one part of the land was acquired by the government. Some of these collective resources that were taken were compensated with urban-based resources, in turn producing new benefits. From there, it produced social dividends within these communities. Looking at the entire country, this was not a rare case.
In BIEN News, I recently introduced these types of cases. China is putting into effect the policy of ‘separation of three land rights’ (ownership, contracting right, and operating right), which will promote the land right equity investment Recently, our main work has focused on excavating the essence of these cases, evaluating the likelihood of wide-spread promotion of this policy. Under the recent pessimistic economic environment, we want to offer a feasible path forward.
Does basic income suit China currently? Does it fit with Chinese culture?
I believe that basic income and China’s status quo are aligned because it is in accordance with the essence of both socialism and the market economy. However, Chinese culture encourages labor and looks down upon laziness. With the development of automatization, machines will continue to replace human labor. As a result, Chinese people will start to rethink this issue. If a basic income is put in place, after it is implemented it is feasible that the entire country will uniformly cut down on the weekly work schedule. Previously China had a six-day work week, and now it has been cut down to five days. In the future, it is possible it can be reduced to a four-day work week.
Additionally, China’s various regions have had drastically different levels of development, and the cost of living differences are also quite large. The social security system has not yet achieved nationally uniform administration. Public resources and financial data also need to be gradually made more transparent. This lack of transparency has impeded the ability to evaluate the potential impact of basic income.
About the interviewee:
Cheng Furui is doing her Post-doctoral program in Chinese Academy of Social
Science. She got her PhD in Tsinghua University. Her research interest is social
policy. “Social Assistance and Poverty Alleviation Divergence: A Capability
Approach” is her $rst published book based on her doctoral dissertation,
which explores Chinese social safety net in details. She is a voluntary news
editor of BIEN now. She is also one of organizers of China Social
Dividend/Basic Income Network: bienchina.com
by Guest Contributor | Nov 21, 2016 | Opinion
Original post can be found at TRANSIT
Written by Bonno Pel & Julia Backhaus
On Saturday October 1st 2016, the Basic Income Earth Network celebrated its 30th anniversary at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). The picture shows the founding meeting in 1986, but is also quite applicable to BIEN 30 years later. The conference was held at the same location and many of the founders and their fellow militants met in good atmosphere to commemorate the early beginnings of the network. Together with other scholars and generally interested people, they discussed current developments in science and policy and ‘the way forward’ for the basic income movement.
picture source
An unconditional income for all
First, the picture is telling for the ways in which BIEN pursues transformative social innovation, namely through the development, discussion and dissemination of persuasive “new framings” and “new knowings”. The seminar room in the picture gathers several individuals who by now have become eminent scholars in economy, social philosophy or sociology. Over the course of three decades and together with activists, politicians and citizens, BIEN members have developed a whole complex of arguments, evidence and framings around the basic income. The idea itself is simple: An unconditional, individual income entitlement, more or less sufficient for fulfilling basic needs, promises real freedom for all.
It offers individual empowerment in the form of income security and the material conditions for a self-determined existence in society, but it is also in many aspects about changing social relations: between men and women (as the conventional breadwinner model is challenged by individual income entitlements), between employed and unemployed (as stigmatization lessens when entitlement is universal rather than for the ‘unproductive’ only), and between employee and employer (the latter’s possibilities to exploit the former are decreased by the basic income security). In current institutional-ideological constellations, the idea of a basic income is bizarre and outrageous for rewarding jobless ‘free-riders’. Apparently relinquishing hard-earned social security arrangements, BIEN members met (and continue to meet) with tough press, sidelining them as ‘irresponsible freaks’. Yet the power of BIEN members’ socially innovative agency resides in showing that it is actually many common ideas about work and income that are outdated, and harmful even.
Claus Offe (credit: Enno Schmidt)
Impressive examples of outdated conceptions were provided by prof. Claus Offe, who argued that we do not earn our income, as commonly believed. Wage flows from labour that forms part of ever-extending production chains of individuals and machines. The availability of jobs fluctuates cyclically, and independently from individuals’ employability efforts. Moreover, the current productivity in highly industrialized countries is possible because ‘we stand on the shoulders of giants’. It is largely inherited from previous generations. So it is rather the current insistence on employability, on meritocracy and on ‘earning one’s income’ that is out of tune with economic reality. Production has become post-individual, and this requires a matching social security system. Harmful effects of a capitalist system that ignores its obviously collective character through individualist ideology include blaming the losers and accepting precarious conditions for some. Economist Gérard Roland outlined how the basic income provides a better trade-off between labor market flexibility and precariousness than current social security arrangements. Sociologist Erik O. Wright views the basic income as a “subversive, anti-capitalist project”. He expanded how the concept allows moving on from merely taming to escaping the globalized, capitalist system. For him, the basic income can provide the basis for numerous social innovations that also the TRANSIT project considers, such as social and solidarity economy initiatives or co-operatives.
BIEN thriving on internal differences: many streams forming a river
Second, based on the variance of people’s clothing, the picture above also visualizes how BIEN has developed as an association of very different individuals. At the conference various founding members recalled the routes they had traveled towards the transformative concept. They arrived at the idea on the search for liberalist re-interpretations of Marx, through feminist commitments, when rethinking meritocracy, as a response to the structural unemployment of the time, or as a logical conclusion of a transforming and ‘robotizing’ economy. The forthcoming case study report on BIEN by yours truly spells out in more detail how these different little streams came to ‘form a river’, as expressed by a founding member. The internal differences between the generally principled and intellectually sharp BIEN members led to fierce debates, it was recalled. According to a longstanding motor, evangelizer and lobbyist for the basic income, BIEN has only survived as a network for members’ capacity to ‘step back a bit’ from their ideological disputes at times, and to recognize what united them. BIEN even thrived on its internal divisions. It functioned as a discussion platform, and helped to institutionalize basic income as a research field. Since 2006, there is even an academic journal on this example of transformative social innovation: Basic Income Studies.
Evolving communication: spreading the word
Philippe Van Parijs (credit: Enno Schmidt)
Third, the black and white photo immediately suggests how different the world was three decades ago. At the time of founding, network members and conference participants from various countries had to be recruited through letters. Initially, the newsletter was printed out, put in envelopes and stamped, for which members gratefully sent envelopes with pesetas, Deutschmarks and all the other European currencies, subsequently converted at the bank by standard bearer professor Philippe Van Parijs and his colleagues. Today’s e-mail, website and Youtube recordings obviously make a crucial difference when it comes to facilitating discussion and spreading the word fast and wide – especially for this social innovation that primarily travels in the form of ideas. The presentations on the history of basic income underlined the significance of the communication infrastructure. The history of basic income can be conceived of as a long line of individuals working in relative isolation, often not knowing of others developing similar thoughts and blueprints. The evolution of BIEN very instructively shows the importance of evolving communication channels and knowledge production for transformative social innovation – critical, weakly-positioned, under-resourced individuals no longer need to re-invent the wheel in isolation.
BIEN, a research community? Ways forward
A fourth, telling element the picture above is the confinement of the seminar room. There have been discussions about BIEN’s existence as a researchers’ community, with the expert-layman divides it entails (during this meeting of experts, yours truly fell somewhat in the latter category). There are in fact also other networks of basic income proponents that have rather developed as citizen’s initiatives and activist networks. BIEN, as a network that can boast such a high degree of conceptual deepening and specialization, is illustrative for the ways in which it remains confined in its own room. It is significant in this respect that the current co-chair brought forward two lines along which the network should reach out more. First, BIEN should be more receptive towards and engaging with the various attempts to re-invent current welfare state arrangements. While this may imply using a more practical language and taking off the sharp edges it may yield real contributions to social security. Often these change processes (regarding less stringent workfare policies, for example) are not undertaken under spectacular headings and transformative banners, but they involve application of some basic income tenets such as unconditional income entitlements. A second line for outreaching confirms the importance of comparative research into transformative social innovation like TRANSIT: The co-chair highlighted that BIEN will explore and develop its linkages with other initiatives, such as Timebanks and alternative agriculture movements more actively.
Basic income: a ‘powerful idea, whose time has come?’
Fifth and finally, the seminar room setting depicted in the photo raises attention to the knowledge production that BIEN has been and is involved in. The socially innovative agency of its members can be characterized as ‘speaking truth to power’. Basic income activism has taken the shape of critiques, pamphlets and counterfactual storylines (Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ being a 500 year-old example), but also featured modeling exercises, forecasts, and economic evidence to support the case. BIEN members’ key resource is their expertise. Moreover, considering the strong arguments and evidence gathered in favor of the basic income over the past decades, there are reasons to be confident in basic income ending up as the ‘powerful idea, whose time has come’. As described in Pel & Backhaus (2016) and currently considered further, it is remarkable how much BIEN seems to have developed in line with the trend of evidence-based policy. The commitment to hard evidence gives rise to an important internal discussion on the recent developments towards basic income-inspired experimentation (such as in Finland and in the Netherlands). The common stance of BIEN members is that these experiments fall short of providing any reliable evidence for their limited duration and scope, and for the system-confirming evaluative frameworks that tend to accompany them. However, there is also a somewhat growing attentiveness to the broader societal significance of experiments and pilots in terms of legitimization, awareness-raising and media exposure. It is therefore instructive for the development of TSI theory to study the basic income case for the new ways in which ‘socially innovative knowings’ are co-produced and disseminated.
About the authors:
Bono Pel (Université libre de Bruxelles; bonno.pel@ulb.ac.be) and Julia Backhaus (Maastricht University; j.backhaus@maastrichtuniverstiy.nl) are working on TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory), an international research project that aims to develop a theory of transformative social innovation that is useful to both research and practice. They are studying the basic income as a case of social innovation, focusing on national and international basic income networks and initiatives.
by Kate McFarland | Oct 27, 2016 | News
Basic Income Manitoba has launched a new website: basicincomemanitoba.ca
The group can also be followed on Facebook: www.facebook.com/basicincomemanitoba
Basic Income Manitoba, a volunteer-run organization based in Winnipeg, describes its goals and activities as follows: “educates Manitobans about basic income, its benefits and effects; promotes and develops public support for basic income in Manitoba and across Canada; seeks to influence public policy with regard to basic income; and encourages and shares research on basic income.”
Manitoba has a distinguished history in the basic income movement: from 1974 to 1978, the “Mincome” experiment–one of the most discussed trials of a basic income guarantee–was held in Dauphin.
The province was also the site of the most recent North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress, held in May 2016 in Winnipeg.
Basic Income Manitoba is currently led by its two co-chairs: Donald Benham, who has experience in municipal politics and is currently the Hunger and Poverty Awareness Manager at Winnipeg Harvest, and Ursule Critoph, who has decades of work in the Canadian union movement.
The organization receives support from local organizations including Bounce Design, Winnipeg Harvest, and the University of Manitoba.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Manitoba photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Valerie
