by Andrew Sanchez | Sep 14, 2018 | News
In her recent work Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (W.H. Allen), Atlantic writer Annie Lowrey offers a new account of the universal basic income (UBI) rooted in her experience as a global observer of geopolitics, economics, and social policy.
Lowrey approaches UBI as a potential tool to redress a variety of issues, including inequality, poverty, and technological unemployment, which have become increasingly divisive in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent boom in AI research. By viewing human action rather than impartial circumstance as the primary driver of socio-political change, Lowrey concludes that UBI represents an “ethos” of universality, unconditionality, and inclusion as much as any concrete policy proposal.
In the opening chapter, Lowrey explores the relationship between basic income, work, and technological unemployment. After sketching the twinned histories of human advancement and the fear of technological unemployment, she examines why current innovations in AI might be qualitatively different from earlier achievements and why these differences may in fact lead to widespread joblessness. Lowrey notes that certain Silicon Valley luminaries, whose own endeavours threaten the livelihood of many low-skilled workers, have promoted the UBI as a necessary social policy for a jobless future.
Despite calls by technologists for a UBI as a “social vaccine for the 21st Century,” Lowrey ultimately considers discussion of basic income in relation to future joblessness as premature. Although she grants that basic income could operate as an important vehicle of state provision in the future, Lowrey prefers to consider the UBI’s potential to address current social and economic problems.
These problems range from a labour market with stagnant wage growth in Houston to chronic poverty on the shores of Lake Victoria to the challenges of welfare reform in rural India. In each case, Lowrey unpacks how political choices, bureaucratic structures, and personal circumstance converge to prevent certain people from meeting their basic needs.
Through carefully examining different political, geographic, and economic contexts, Lowrey can assess the benefits and drawbacks of basic income proposals in a variety of contemporary settings. This approach accepts that any form of UBI would affect different communities and individuals in unique and perhaps unpredictable ways.
Give People Money distinguishes itself from other works on the topic through its commitment to personal narrative and Lowrey’s own experience with the people who stand to benefit from basic income proposals. Although she examines the ethical and economic justifications of UBI, her primary focus lies in the human story and the way she came to view UBI as an ethos of transformative social change. Give People Money ultimately advocates for UBI not by advancing specific policy initiatives, but by presenting basic income as an impetus to radically reconsider what humans owe one another and how the earth’s bounty ought to be shared.
by Andre Coelho | Sep 5, 2018 | News
After reporting on the two first days of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress in Tampere, Finland, 24th and 25th of August, a second and final part is here lay forth, covering for the event on the last day (26th). (Note 1)
Jamie Cooke, Sarath Davala, Evelyn Forget, Loek Groot and Olli Kangas all sat together at the University of Tampere main auditorium to speak and discuss basic income experiments. These stood for, respectively, the Scottish feasibility study (not yet a functional pilot), the Indian Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot (concluded – ran through years 2011 and 2012), Canadian experiments (past “Mincome” experiment and the interrupted Ontario pilot), the Netherlands transfer schemes (several Municipalities) and the Finish ongoing two-year experiment. The session was chaired by Phillipe van Parijs.
Jamie Cooke
The speakers were asked to freely describe each case. Olli Kangas assured the audience that the Finish experiment is going on as planned, and that results will start to be collected and organized after the ending date, in December 2018. He also confirmed that the studied variables were essentially related to paid work and related job market interactions, adding that survey data would be published at the beginning of 2019 at the latest. As for Evelyn Forget, she reminded that basic income experiments in Canada have been more focused on health outcomes, although work-related results have also been captured. She believes the Ontario pilot – six months into its planned duration – was cancelled for ideologic reasons (the new conservative government arguing that people should get jobs, instead of depending on unconditional transfers). In his turn, Loek Groot informed the audience that experiments in the Netherlands are not testing basic income, but several ways of managing people on benefits. He also added that the social benefits system in the Netherlands is decentralizing, hence the Municipalities initiatives to start these experiments which, generally, measure work-related variables, plus health and life satisfaction data. Finally, Jamie Cooke explained that the basic income idea in Scotland has very much gained from BIEN’s affiliate in the region (Basic Income Scotland) and its actions to spread the word about it. That and the work of RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), both in the United Kingdom and the local Scottish RSA, has helped in gaining traction for the (basic income) experiment. Jamie noted that the language used when presenting and discussing basic income must be clear, because people need to understand what is being done or planned.
At this moment, van Parijs introduced a provocative question: What, if any, would be the results of a basic income experiment that would lead you to give up on the basic income idea? Olli Kangas recognized that there could be such a result, taking on a cautious approach. However, he added, experimental results could always be “spun” politically in several directions, according to ideologic agendas. Evelyn Forget didn’t oppose to that view, although, contrary to Kangas, she thinks the outcomes of such experiments are already more or less predictable (drawing from past experiments analysis). Sarath Davala wouldn’t quite imagine himself not being a supporter of basic income, and so returned a more passioned answer: “I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it!”. He added, however, that basic income experiments also test if trusting people is good or not (he believes that it is good). Near the end of the session, Evelyn concluded that people love stories, caring much less about numbers and statistics. That is why she worries about eventual social destructive behaviours which may occur during (basic income like) experiments.
Parallel sessions during this last day of the Congress were widely varied, although only lasted through the morning period. Papers on freedom and (social) reparation, trade unions, work, rights, alternative currencies and the relation of all these with basic income were presented.
Evelyn Forget
The last Plenary Session was featured by Evelyn Forget, who explained in further detailed what happened with the Ontario experiment. She informed that first the new government argued that the experiment had “failed”, which could not be true since there was no data to justify that statement. In a subsequent argument (for having cancelled the experiment), the same government alleged that 25% of the recipients had dropped out, which was also false, for the same reason (no data). The true reason for slashing the basic income pilot finally came, when an official from the newly elected government stated that they did not believe in “free money”, but in people getting jobs. Forget was further concerned about this situation, aggravated by the fact that recipients were getting more or less twice then they would have from regular benefits (and now had to return to their original earnings, with no previous warning). The need to ease these recipients out of the experiment has motivated an insurgence of activity by Canadian social activists (mainly basic income advocates and anti-poverty organizations), to try and restart the experiment or at least to help people transition from their income support during the experiment to their former earnings.
Forget concluded the Plenary with more general considerations on income, welfare and basic income. According to her, income security is not only linked to precarious employment, but also with welfare bureaucracy, which has gotten so complex that people have difficulty in knowing what their earnings will be from month to month. Hence basic income would introduce a kind of income regularity that most people nowadays cannot really expect from the market nor from the State. She ended on the note that the goodness of basic income very much depends on its financing mechanism, which could turn an output of social solidarity into one of societal disintegration.
Closing the Congress, Annie Miller shared a few last words, emphasizing that BIEN Congresses have greatly expanded since their inauguration in 1986. All the same subjects are covered nowadays, as were before (ex.: poverty, social justice), but now including issues such as (basic income) experiments, environmental issues and cryptocurrencies. For her, the importance of research, dissemination of knowledge and activism for basic income cannot be overstated. Finally, Miller is confident that, although present-day world is (mainly) governed by sociopaths, the time has arrived to replace them with empathy, kindness and honesty.
Note 1 – Mistakenly, Lena Lavina’s Plenary Session was held on the 26th (first in the morning), but reported on part 1 as having been on the 25th. So now, the last Plenary held on the 25th, on basic income experiments, is reported on in the present article (part 2).
More information at:
BIEN Congress 2018 website
André Coelho, “BIEN Congress 2018 (part 1)”, Basic Income News, September 3rd 2018
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 29, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in March 2014.
Basic Income is suddenly the subject of much more discussion around the world. Political movements are growing. The media, social networks, and blogs have suddenly devoted more attention to basic income. Basic Income News (BI News) suddenly has much more news to report. The website is running two-to-five stories a day, and its accompanying NewsFlashes have more news than they can fit. This is a good time to talk about the goals of BI News and the accompanying NewsFlashes.
BIEN
BI News has three main goals. Most importantly, it keeps readers informed about all the news directly relevant to the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) around the word. Secondly, it keeps readers informed about events organized about BIG and publications written about BIG. Thirdly, it includes features providing a mouthpiece for members of BIEN and its affiliates to write blogs, opinion pieces, and book reviews about BIG.
The first goal of BI News is important because activists, researchers, and anyone interested in BIG need a place where they can find out what is happening around the world that is relevant to BIG. No one other website is doing it, and no others are likely to start. You can’t just search Google News for “basic income” and expect to find all the news about BIG. There are more than a dozen, perhaps dozens, of terms for BIG in English alone. There are policies and programs that are forms of BIG or that share some of the characteristics of BIG but that are not discussed in terms of BIG: the Alaska Dividend, some cash transfers, the Earned Income Tax Credit, dividends from casino revenue on U.S. Indian Reservations, the Bolsa Familia in Brazil, GiveDirectly in Uganda, and many, many more. There are also policies that are described in the words “basic income” or words very similar to terms for BIG but aren’t BIG or aren’t very closely related to it. The news section of BI News shows readers what proposals, policies, and social activism around the world related to BIG and explains that connection.
USBIG
This effort requires consistent monitoring of mainstream news, social media, blogs, and other sources of information. It involves original reporting to make the necessary connections to BIG as well as meta-reporting—reporting about reporting. Articles in this section of BI News are written from a neutral perspective, because the goal of this section is not to persuade but to inform. There are many arguments going around about BIG, but only one news source dedicated to informing people about BIG. This service is valuable to activists, researchers, and anyone interested in BIG.
This section reports only on issues directly relating to BIG. It doesn’t report on other social policies or on the economic and social conditions that create a need for BIG unless there is some direct connection to BIG in the news on these issues. The reason is that news indirectly relating to BIG outnumbers the news about BIG by orders of magnitude. If BI News reported on all these other things, its focus on BIG would be lost.
Stories from the news section of BI News can be found at this link: https://binews.org/category/latest-news/.
CIT (UK)
The second goal of BI News is to keep people informed about events being held and literature being written about BIG around the world. The goal of publicizing events is obvious. It helps our members, our affiliates, other networks, and hosting institutions to publicize events related to BIG. The goal of keeping up with the literature is important because of the dispersion and the diversity of the BIG literature today. So many different terms for BIG are used that there simply is no easy way to find it on a search. As far as we know, no other group is keeping a comprehensive bibliography of the literature on BIG as BI News attempts to do.
BI News posts summaries of the more important publications and attempts to post at least the publication information and a link to all publications, even the less important ones. We do this because, even if one individual publication is not terribly importantly by itself, the dialogue as a whole is important. If you want to know what is being said about BIG at a given time or what has been said over a given period, BI News has collected and organized that information. We’re doing a fairly good job of that for English-language publications right now, and hopefully, as we expand we will do it for more and more languages.
Articles in these sections are also written from a neutral perspective, because as with the goal of reporting the news, the goal of reporting on events and publications is also to inform, not to persuade. The literature and events in this section also must directly relate to BIG, again because reporting on wider literature would sacrifice our focus on BIG.
The BI literature posts on BI News are here: https://binews.org/category/bi-literature/.
Events posts are here: https://binews.org/category/events/. Links are here: https://binews.org/category/links/.
BIN Italia
Persuasion is the third goal of BI News. The features section, which includes blogs, opinion pieces, book reviews, and occasional podcasts and interviews, performs this function. This section provides an outlet for BIEN members to write their opinions about BIG, sometimes directed at other supporters, sometimes directed at a wider audience. Arguing for the cause of BIG has obvious value, but there are several reasons why this goal ranks third. The readership of BI News is overwhelmingly made up of people who already support BIG. They’re already convinced; their primary need is for information. Another reason this is a lesser important goal is that there are many places around the world where people can publish features having to do with BIG, but only BI News is pursuing the first two goals. However, making the case for BIG is valuable. BI News provides a place for BIEN members and supporters to become a part of that dialogue. Right now we’re running an average of about one feature per week, but we are hoping to increase that substantially, perhaps eventually to one feature per day.
A list of and links to the latest features can be found on the homepage of BI News: https://binews.org/. Blogs can be found by going to the Features dropdown list and selecting blogs.
To keep up with these goals, BI News maintains a website, updated at least once a day, and a regular newsletter, collecting the recent stories from the website. As we expand our volunteer base, we will expand what we do.
-Karl Widerquist, Doha, Qatar, March 2014
Volunteers needed for BI News
If you’d like to help, we need volunteers. Primarily we need people with one of two skills. We need writers to help us report the news and we need people with website-design skills to help us improve how we present it. Among our writers, we need people with language skills. The languages we need most are English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian, but if news is happening in any language, we need writers to report on it. If you would like to help spread the word about BIG, please contact the editor of BI News, Karl Widerquist <Karl@widerquist.com>.
by Faun Rice | Aug 15, 2018 | News
This summary of Basic Income programs in Sri Lanka was written by Sarath Davala (coordinator of India Network for Basic Income) and Selvi Sachidanandam (coordinator of Basic Income Sri Lanka). All images are courtesy of Basic Income Sri Lanka.
The beginnings of a formal Basic Income movement in Sri Lanka
Basic Income Sri Lanka (BISL) was founded two years ago by Selvi Sachidanandam and colleagues based in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Initially, the group’s activities were to meet from time to time and discuss what Basic Income meant and how it was relevant to the Sri Lankan context. The Basic Income developments taking place in neighbouring India in 2017 also acted as stimulants. In India, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) conducted a pilot project on Basic Income between 2011 and 2013 and brought out a report and a book in 2015. The India Network for Basic Income was also formed in 2015. In February 2017, the Chief Economic Advisor to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, authored a full chapter on Universal Basic Income for discussion in the Indian parliament.
In 2017 and 2018, BISL made overtures to the Sri Lankan government to organize a workshop to raise awareness about Basic Income and its desirability as a policy direction in Sri Lanka. Despite attempts made to reach out to political leaders and bureaucrats, BISL has thus far only been able to work within civil society, building awareness among NGOs and within the art community.
As of August 2018, there have been two important articles in the Sri Lankan press. The first, by Talal Rafi in the Sri Lankan Daily Financial Times, is a piece intended to provide general information about the global UBI movement; it invokes automation and rise of artificial intelligence. The second and more significant article by Sri Lankan sociologist Laksiri Fernando (based in Australia) appeared in both the Colombo Telegraph and Daily Mirror. This article delves deeper into the question of UBI’s relevance to Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan context
UBI discussions often begin with burning local issues and contextual priorities, and Sri Lanka is no exception in this regard. Thirty years of war in Sri Lanka left deep scars on the entire society. Many parts of Sri Lankan society bore immense suffering, and they continue to do so. Today, war widows experience insecurity and isolation across the country: in the Northern and Eastern Provinces there are numerous Tamil widows, and in the south there are also the widows of soldiers who died in the war. Nearly ten years after the end of the war, there still is no coherent state policy to address this social calamity. According to a report by the International Crisis Group submitted (2017), there are more than 90,000 war widows in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. This estimate does not include the families of ‘missing persons,’ and the wounds of war are much deeper than what these statistics show. According to one estimate, in the northern region, there are about 58,000 households headed by women (one quarter of total number of households).
Women in Sri Lanka (picture credit to: UNDP, Palmyrah Processing Centre, Naruvilikulam, Mannar, Sri Lanka)
BISL grants and work with the Government of Sri Lanka
It was in this context of providing aid to war widows that BISL brought forth the idea of basic income. BISL believes that giving an unconditional basic income to these widows for a period of 10 or more years could be an effective policy approach. Instead of waiting for the government to adopt this idea, BISL decided to award basic income to some war widows from the north and east through donations from private individuals, as a symbolic gesture. Simultaneously, a study has been initiated to examine the efficacy of Basic Income in this context.
In addition to the war widows from the North, BISL selected two other categories for the basic income awards: an artists’ community in Colombo, and women from a Muslim fisherpersons’ union in the East. These three groups were chosen to maintain a geographical balance; BISL took a cross section of Sri Lankan society to demonstrate the universality of vulnerability across the socio-cultural spectrum, as well as the potential universal applicability of Basic Income. On July 18th 2018, BISL organized a ceremony for five awardees chosen randomly from the first two communities. Three Tamil war widows from Kilinochchi and two artists from Colombo were given the Basic Income grants. Awards to the third category will be distributed once sufficient funds are collected; BISL can raise money for only five awardees at the present time.
Currently, each award is 10,000 Sri Lankan Rupees per month for a period of two years (roughly US$63 per month). This calculation is based on the World Bank’s definition of the poverty threshold as US$1.90 consumer expenditure per person per day. The ceremony was attended by about 40 people including civil society actors, government officials, artists, and students. BISL also invited Sarath Davala, the coordinator of India Network for Basic Income to share the results of the Indian pilot study and the policies pertaining to basic income in India.
On the left: Eran Wickramaratne. On the right: Sarath Davala and Selvi Sachidanandam.
The event received wide publicity in Colombo. The next day in Parliament, a women’s caucus met to discuss policy related to war widows and disabled persons. Selvi Sachidanandam was invited to make a presentation on BISL’s proposal concerning a policy for rehabilitating war widows. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Selvi and Sarath both attended the meeting and made presentations to the honourable Members of the Parliament. Also present was Sri Lanka’s State Minister of Finance (Hon) Eran Wickramaratne. After the presentations, the Minister assured BISL that the government would study the idea of unconditional basic income in depth. Assurances were given on behalf of BISL and INBI to the honourable Minister that assistance would be provided in every possible way to the government process.
Subsequent to this meeting, Selvi, Sarath and the BISL Co-Coordinator Visakha Tillekeratne met the Deputy Director General of the Department of Planning of the Sri Lankan Government. A detailed presentation was made to the deputy director and his colleagues. Following this work with government officials, BISL will undertake a brief study of current welfare policy delivery in two districts and examine the schemes that are implemented by the government of Sri Lanka. This study will analyze the comparative efficacy and relevance of unconditional basic income to specific groups in different parts of Sri Lanka.
The developments described in this report are a major leap in the basic income movement in Sri Lanka. BISL is keen to build on this momentum.
More information at:
Talal Rafi, “Universal Basic Income: A solution to automation?“, Daily FT, April 27th 2018
Laksiri Fernando, “Universal Basic Income (UBI): Conceptual Background & Possible Implementation In Sri Lanka?“, Colombo Telegraph, May 25th 2018
“ASIA/SRI LANKA – War widows are the most affected by the conflict which lasted over 30 years“, Agenzia Fides, August 1st 2018
Tracy Holsinger, “Basic Income for thriving cultural sector“, Daily Mirror, July 23rd 2018
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