by Dave Clegg | Aug 2, 2017 | News
Scott Santens. Credit to: Singularity Bros.
Scott Santens, writer and long time UBI advocate, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum 2017, views the Alaska Permanent Fund as a foundational aspect for the funding for a Universal Basic Income – a UBI. Santens, and a growing number of people all over this planet are coming to the conclusion that something like a UBI is required in order to provide an effective counterbalance to the inequality of wealth distribution that currently plagues the world’s populations and the human ramifications of automation, robotization of the workplace.
Santens points out that, in a democracy, all citizens are deemed equal under the law and the Alaskan fund offers an excellent example of how the wealth being extracted from a communities resources must first and foremost benefit the people that comprise that community. The Alaskan fund extracts a percentage of the wealth being extracted from its resources and that money is then used to fund Alaska’s social programs as well as annually depositing as much as a thousand dollars or more into the pockets of every Alaskan citizen. A sort of pay to dig policy. That Alaskan Fund is now worth some fifty billion dollars. Conversely, in a similar but more aggressive manner, some years ago Finland was adamant that its offshore oil resources must benefit all of the Finnish people. Finland took money off the top of the oil profits and put it into what is now a trillion dollar fund that is currently benefiting everyone in Finland.
But for Santens, resource funding is only one of a nation’s assets from which a UBI can produce a revenue flow that can both enrich and empower the populations it will serve.
Santens points out that a related resource, land itself, needs to be re-evaluated. Land is not just where we build our homes, grow our crops and where our businesses and factories operate from. Land is where wealth is invested and from which wealth is extracted. People can hide their money and their wealth, but they can’t hide their land. Therefore a Land-Value Tax would provide “… an extremely progressive tax on both corporations and individuals because land is so unequally distributed towards the top.” Instead of the value of the land being decided by the owner, the land would be valued for the wealth it represents. A vacant downtown lot would then be as valued as the next door highrise and further motivate the owner to develop the land.
Secondly, for Santens a strong, social motivator for a UBI is the ever shrinking workplace where employees are increasingly being undervalued and then victimized by the threat of automation and robotization these days. Santens provides graphic representations of how the decline of collective bargaining, worker’s rights and our wages – which not too long ago had almost balanced out income distribution – have been declining proportionate to the increase in income inequality for years now. Santens understands that a UBI is not just an income supplement whereby workers canweather technological changes in the workplace, but a means whereby we finally achieve the freedom to refuse to take work that is unsafe or underpaid and, instead, achieve an equality of empowerment when bargaining with prospective employers. An equality of needs as it were.
Thirdly, Santens offers that a “annually rising intellectual property fee could be added to any intellectual property wishing to be monopolistically excluded from the public domain, with the revenue returned to citizens universally for their co-ownership of the government granting such protection.” Santens uses the example of data miners like Google and Facebook that extract information from their hundreds of millions of users for free, and then they sell that information to third party profiteers, as the reason why that information must come with a price to the data miners. When you profit from us you pay us for the privilege.
Then there is the creation of money itself. Not that long ago only the state could create new money but corporate and financial lobbyists were able to convince many governments that the commercial banks could be trusted with this responsibility. Santens wants governments to take back this responsibility and thereby put themselves back in charge of first determining the value of the money and secondly setting the value of the money significantly above the cost of producing it so as to ensure adequate funding for that nation’s UBI.
For Santens these three pillars, resource and land value funding, worker empowered bargaining and intellectual property/data mining are all keys to diminishing and, hopefully, continuing to bring greater balance to the economic inequality we see today. But Santens cautions that none of these changes will ever occur, or if they do they will not survive the reactive response of the wealthy set. For without real, effective democratic reform none of these progressive ideas will survive for long. Santens points out that “barriers to voting must be torn down, and the franchise must be expanded” if we wish to implement such radical but much needed changes to the inequality that is plaguing this planet’s populations.
by Jasper van den Bor | May 31, 2017 | News
Ben Mangan is the executive director of the Center for Social Leadership (CSSL) at UC Berkeley-Haas business school, as well as a lecturer there. He is also a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute.
In a January 2017 article for TED, Mangan notes that universal basic income (UBI) has been seen by many as a solution to a wide range of issues such as financial insecurity of workers, a widening wealth gap in developed nations and the impact of technology on work. Even though he observes there would be huge upsides to a UBI (e.g. elimination of poverty), Mangan thinks the barriers to implementation are considerable. He therefore proposes three alternatives that could provide a more sustainable solution to the underlying issues.
- Match savings of lower-income workers when they invest in assets.
- Increase bargaining power of workers.
- Build a new post-secondary education and training system.
Read more: Ben Mangan, “Will universal basic income end inequality? Maybe.” ideas.ted.com, January 13, 2017.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland
Photo: CC BY 2.0 TaxRebate.org.uk
by Kate McFarland | Apr 8, 2017 | Research
Matthew Dimick, Associate Professor of Law at University at Buffalo, has written a new article for the Indiana Law Review in which he compares the promises of basic income to those of working-time regulation, presenting a case to prefer the latter.
According to Dimick, the potential benefits of working-time regulation outweigh those of basic income, in large part because they would be shared more equitably throughout the population. For example, on Dimick’s assessment, a basic income would not allow the majority of people to increase their leisure time (a benefit he sees as largely confined those who “earn subsistence-level incomes or lower” and thus “would have either the option not to work or the bargaining power to secure a more favorable work-leisure trade-off with employers”); working-time regulation, in contrast, would increase leisure time for middle- and even upper-class workers as well. Additionally, Dimick argues that working-time regulation could allow not only leisure but also jobs to be more widely available and equitably distributed — whereas a basic income would deepen the divide between the working and non-working populations.
And working-time regulation might have other positive effects. For instance, due to the across-the-board increase in leisure time, Dimick contends that the policy would likely result in decreased consumption, while a basic income might spur additional consumption — leading to a preference for the former from an ecological viewpoint.
Further, because working-time regulation is a less radical departure from current policies — and, in particular, does not aim to sever benefits from work — it is much better positioned to gain popular and political support.
Dimick notes that basic income might do more than working-time regulation alone to “transform the workplace” (e.g. by giving more bargaining power to employees themselves) but that, with respect to this goal, working-time regulation should be conceived as part of a larger set of legislative reforms.
Matthew Dimick’s current areas of research include labor and employment law, tax and welfare policies, and income inequality. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied organized labor under Erik Olin Wright and Ivan Ermakoff, and a JD from Cornell Law School.
Matthew Dimick, 2017, “Better Than Basic Income? Liberty, Equality, and the Regulation of Working Time,” Indiana Law Review.
Post reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 Laurence Edmondson
by Genevieve Shanahan | Mar 7, 2017 | News
In this article, Tracey Reynolds, a professor of social sciences at the University of Greenwich, surveys some arguments for and against basic income on gender equality grounds, and highlights the ways in which these arguments overlook the heterogeneous experiences of women. Specifically, she points to how black women have tended to relate to care work and reproductive labour in ways that differ from the dominant understanding of how (white, middle-class) women perform this kind of work.
For instance, one feminist argument against basic income is that it would encourage women to exit paid work, due to the persisting gender wage gap, and return to traditional gender roles. Yet Reynolds’ research, she claims, shows that black women’s mothering identity has come to combine “their dual status of economic worker and domestic carer.” In this way, perhaps, the gendered division of labour experienced as normal by many white, middle-class households would not be a particularly attractive way of structuring family life for black and other ethnic minority families.
Reynolds also highlights that basic income would not be a panacea for gender equality – pointing, for example, to the ways in which migrant women are exploited for cheap care work by the wealthier women of the global north.
Reynolds’ article is part of Compass’ blog series ‘Universal Basic Income: Security for the Future?’.
Tracey Reynolds, “Black women, Gender Equality and Universal Basic Income,” Compass, January 27, 2017.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo: Greenwich University, CC BY 2.0 Paul Hudson
by Roberta Stewart | Feb 17, 2017 | News
Photo: Paul Harris
John Quiggin, an economist, Professor and Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, has written a recent article for The Guardian on how a functional conception of UBI would look despite the current and successional neoliberal course. Quiggin argues that the political cautiousness of centre-left parties has resulted in their failure to provide radical alternatives to neoliberalism since its inception in the 1970s. The article outlines that the UBI offers a potential alternative to the present economic standing. The question is, how to introduce it in such a way as to render it achievable.
Where many proponents of UBI stress the “universal” aspect of the idea, Quiggin suggests that our emphasis should instead be on the “basic” aspect to begin with. That way we could start by providing a sufficient income to those most in need with the intention of expanding it to the entire population. This would meet the objective of ensuring that everyone has at least a basic income from the outset, and it could be achieved by building on structures that are already in place.
Quiggin claims that it would be more effective to introduce sufficient income support in a model more likened to the “guaranteed minimum income” which would then become universal incrementally, rather than starting with a small universal payment and increasing the level over time, until an adequate level of income is reached. This would significantly reduce the risk that the program would be disbanded or derailed before meeting the target of being adequate enough to live on, which would likely take several decades. Quiggin explains “Of course, an attempt to expand access to income support will be politically difficult, more so than advocacy of a small universal payment. But, in an environment where the economic and political order is breaking down around us, political caution is a road to oblivion. Social democratic parties need to break with their current role as the responsible managers of the status quo, and offer a radical vision for the future. An expanded, and ultimately universal, basic income is such a vision.”
To read the full article click here
