by Citizens' Income Trust | Dec 4, 2015 | Opinion
Benjamin K. Sovacool, Roman V. Sidortsov, & Benjamin R. Jones, Energy Security, Equality, and Justice, Routledge, 2014, xix + 213 pp.
This book is a recent product of the Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment’s research on how to ‘equitably provide available, affordable, reliable, efficient, environmentally benign, proactively governed, and socially acceptable energy services to households and consumers’ (p.xvii). The aim of this book is to describe current inequalities and injustices associated with energy use and make suggestions as to how greater justice might be both understood and achieved.
As the first chapter points out, we are drifting ‘into a future threatened with climate change, rising sea levels, severe pollution, energy scarcity and insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and a host of other dangers’ (p.1), and our desire for low-cost and reliable energy conflicts with the pursuit of the sustainable and cleaner environment that we also wish and need to experience. The chapter provides enough evidence for these statements.
Chapter 2 is more philosophical, and concludes that ‘energy justice’ should be based on two principles:
- a prohibitive principle: ‘energy systems must be designed and constructed in such a way that they do not unduly interfere with the ability of any person to acquire those basic goods to he or she is justly entitled’ (p.42);
- and an affirmative principle: ‘if any of the basic goods to which every person is justly entitled can only be secured by means of energy services, then in that case there is also a derivative right to the energy service’ (p.46).
Because a sustainable and clean environment and a stable climate are basic goods to which we are all entitled, the prohibitive principle requires that the damaging externalities associated with energy production must be minimized.
Anyone who doubts the environmental and climate damage being done by the ways in which we currently produce energy should read chapter 3. The damage done to health by fuel poverty in the UK and elsewhere, and the volatile and increasing cost of carbon, are described in chapter 4 – John Hills’ Getting the Measure of Fuel Poverty ought to have been referenced. In chapter 5 the socio-political dimension is described in terms of corruption, authoritarianism and conflict, which are as problematic in the so-called developed world as in the developing world. Chapter 6 charts the disproportionate way in which the poorest communities fail to benefit from energy production and at the same time suffer the most from production methods. Chapter 7 describes widespread environmental damage and finds that the extension of conventional technologies can only increase inequality.
The impression left by this book is of ubiquitous environmental damage and fuel inequality, that is, damage and inequality in the world’s wealthiest as well as in the world’s poorest countries. The answer is not new technologies: the answer is to ask who is affected by investment and pricing decisions, and to factor in the externalities when relative costs are calculated. If this is done, then solar and wind power turn out to be both more just and cheaper than nuclear power or fossil fuels.
The problem is therefore a political one – a fact that could have been made more explicit in the book’s concluding chapter.
This book should be read alongside Fitzpatrick and Cahill‘s Environment and Welfare: Towards a Green Social Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), in which Tony Fitzpatrick suggests that a citizen’s income could encourage economic growth and therefore greater environmental damage, and James Robertson proposes a carbon tax to fund a citizen’s income, which would encourage renewable energy production at the same time as promoting income justice and therefore fuel justice. It should also be read alongside the recent Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report Energy use policies and carbon pricing in the UK which recognizes that an increased carbon tax is needed on domestic gas use and that this would require poorer households to be compensated. The acknowledged problem here is that such a compensation package would require an increase in means-testing, which would impose additional disincentives, administrative complexity and income volatility on those households least able to cope with them.
Energy Security, Equality and Justice lacks a bibliography, which is a pity, and its index is sketchy, which will make the book difficult to use as a reference volume. But it is a well argued and carefully evidenced discussion of issues vital to our future and it deserves a wide audience.
by Josh Martin | Mar 21, 2015 | Research
Irani writes a review of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age, in which they argue for a basic income as a solution to increasing automation and technology.
Lilly Irani, “Justice for ‘Data Janitors’”, Public Books, January 15, 2015.
by Josh Martin | Dec 17, 2014 | Research
[Josh Martin]
Hayward, Oldham, and Rosenbury write from St. Louis right after the ruling in the Michael Brown case that happened just a few miles away in Ferguson, Missouri. They argue that tackling racial tensions requires an understanding of the structural problems in the St. Louis metropolitan area and that one percent of the gross metropolitan product should be put toward three goals: excellent education, new conceptions of community via land use planning, and a “solidarity economy” that seeks to help those on the bottom. In this third goal, they mention the need for a guaranteed income for all that meets their basic needs. This could take the form of a basic income for all in the St. Louis metropolitan area.
Clarissa Hayward, Lynn Oldham, and Laura Rosenbury, “What now? Three ways to tackle structural injustice”, STL Today, 26 November 2014.
by BIEN | Oct 26, 2014 | Opinion
Book review of Birnbaum, Simon. 2012. Basic Income Reconsidered: Social Justice, Liberalism, and the Demands of Equality. Basic income guarantee series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 246 pp.
ISBN 978–0–230–11406–7
Published in Ethical Perspectives, vol.3, 2014, p.464-5.
Roberto Merrill (University of Minho)
In his book Basic Income Reconsidered: Social Justice, Liberalism, and the Demands of Equality, Simon Birnbaum builds a defence of an unconditional basic income which is based on three pillars: the first consists in a radical-liberal interpretation of John Rawls’ theory of justice, the second offers a reconstruction and defence of Van Parijs “jobs as gifts” argument for basic income, and the third proposes a definition of a work ethics which is not perfectionist and is compatible with state neutrality.
The book is divided in three parts.
The first part of the book, untitled “A Society of Equals: Radical Liberalism, Self-Respect, and Basic Income” is divided in two chapters, the first one being devoted to a defence of a rawlsian case for basic income, and the second chapter is an examination and refutation of the claim that only contributors are entitled to social rights. The general aim of the chapter is to defend an understanding of Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, in particular Rawls’ theory of primary goods, including self-respect, which can be compatible with the promotion of a basic income as the best way to protect the status of the least advantaged as free and equals throughout their lives.
A first convincing strategy proposed by Birnbaum in arguing for a rawlsian case for basic income is to recall that John Rawls, following the work of James Meade on property-owning democracy, argued that justice must also achieve resource equalization ex ante rather than only corrective adjustments ex post. Ex post justice is what the welfare state in capitalist societies already does and it’s not working. A basic income should thus be considered as an adequate illustration of a public policy which contributes to realize the ideal of a property-owning democracy. Furthermore, according to Birnbaum paid work should not be considered as a necessary condition of rawlsian self-respect, otherwise it would imply a perfectionist conception of self-respect incompatible with liberal neutrality (Birnbaum, 2012:61).
Another convincing argument proposed by Birnbaum allowing to block a potential objection to a defence of basic income from the rawlsian conception of society as a system of cooperation is to distinguish two conceptions of cooperation: a thick and a thin one. A thick conception of cooperation implies both economic and political cooperation and a thin conception implies only one of them (Birbaum, 2012: 68). Furthermore, both economical and political cooperation can be thick or thin. According to Birnbaum, a thick conception of cooperation, which implies labour market participation is in tension with some of Rawls basic intuitions about justice and therefore should be rejected. If true, this clears the way for a compatibility between Rawls’ conception of social cooperation and a basic income, and thus for radical liberalism.
The second part of the book, untitled “The Exploitation Objection against Basic Income: Equality of Opportunity, Luck, and Responsibility”, is also divided in two chapters.
The first chapter consists of a review and a refutation of the main variants of the “exploitation objection” against the defence of a basic income such as formulated by Philippe Van Parijs in his book Real Freedom for All, which, according to Birnbaum, offers the best defence against the exploitation objection. The main variant of the exploitation objection examined is the “restriction objection”, according to which the distribution of the pool of resources is only for those that are willing to work and are involuntary unemployed (Birnbaum, 2012: 34-35). In this chapter, Birnbaum examines Van Parijs’ controversial claim according to which employment rents, incorporated in wages of privileged jobs, must me considered as resources to which all are entitled. Birnbaum distinguishes a weak and a strong version of this objection and argues that Van Parijs “jobs as gifts” argument, according to which the employment rents should be considered as common resources to which all have an equal claim, survives the strong version of the restriction objection. However, this is only possible if some qualifications related to the “long term stability of justice” are incorporated to the argument. These qualifications are developed in the second chapter, in a clear and convincing reconstruction and defence of Van Parijs “jobs as gifts” argument for basic income. According to Birnbaum, if Van Parijs’ argument is to be successful in rejecting the exploitation objection, apart from accommodating the “stability of justice” clause, it also needs to accommodate some considerations regarding the social and economical conditions of basic autonomy (which are fleshed out in part one of Birnbaum’s book).
The third and last part of the book, untitled “The Feasibility of Basic Income: Social Ethos, Work, and the Politics of Universalism”, is divided in two chapters. The first chapter proposes a conception of a “work ethics” which is compatible with liberal neutrality. Contra Van Parijs, Birnbaum argues for a non obligatory work ethos which avoids any perfectionist implications, by proposing a wide definition of an ethos of contribution which includes activities that are not “productivist”. However, Birnbaum acknowledges that his anti-perfectionist definition of a work ethics, although having the advantage of being compatible with neutrality, also exposes itself to the structural exploitation objection, since it does not protect self-sacrificing individuals to be exploited by selfish ones (Birnbaum, 2012: 160). But this is not the freedom that liberal neutrality should protect, nor the freedom that radical liberal egalitarians seek to promote through the implementation of a basic income. For this reason Birnbaum tries to avoid this consequence of his redefinition of the work ethos by introducing the notion of a “minimal autonomy” to which all individuals must have access if they are to avoid ethical servility and make well informed choices about their life-plans (Birnbaum, 2012: 162). As a neutralist, one might worry here that Birnbaum’s minimal autonomy constraint implies a work ethos and a duty to contribute which after all may not be compatible with liberal neutrality, although it clearly is less perfectionist than the alternative of a strictly productivist ethos while at the same time resisting well to the exploitation objection.
The last chapter proposes an exploration of the political implications of radical liberalism, in practical policy issues, such as political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, and gender equity. The author explores these issues in a clear and well informed way. The book ends with a realistic proposal by arguing for a gradualist implementation of a basic income scheme. Overall, the book is a major contribution to the liberal egalitarian literature on basic income.
by Josh Martin | Jun 15, 2014 | Research
This paper looks at the issue of reparations for group injustice, mainly in the USA, and suggests a basic income guarantee as a possible means of addressing that issue. The need for and legitimacy of such reparations are first established. The author details some personal experience with the issue, which includes encountering frequent resistance to the idea. A basic income guarantee as a means of getting past much of that resistance is then discussed. That is followed by a brief discussion of benefits and limitations. The paper concludes that implementation of a basic income guarantee is the single best way to right the injustices suffered by people due to their inclusion in certain cultural/ethnic groups.
Richa, “A Basic Income Guarantee as Reparations for Group Injustice“, USBIG, December 2009.
