by Karl Widerquist | Oct 27, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay is reprinted from OpenDemocracy, 18 October 2017
Support for unconditional basic income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that some might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, activists have been floating the plan — and other forms of a basic income guarantee (BIG) — for over a century. It experienced a small wave of support between 1910 and 1940, followed by a down period in the 40s and 50s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 60s and 70s, followed by another down period in most countries until the early 2000s. Today’s discussion began to take off around 2010 and has increased every year since. It is UBI’s third, and by far its largest, wave of support yet.
Pessimists might think that this wave will inevitably subside, just as prior movements did. History, however, doesn’t always stick to patterns. In a 2016 interview with Wired, Barack Obama predicted that “we’ll be having [the UBI debate] over the next 10 or 20 years”. He may be right.
The history of the UBI movement shows that today’s political context points to an increase in support. More and more activists – from more and more diverse political formations – are calling for UBI. They can now cite evidence from a number of empirical studies, conducted over years in a variety of locations, to demonstrate the programme’s benefits.
Rising inequality and an economic system that seems designed against ordinary people has radicalised voters in recent years. Nationalist-populist movements are trying to redirect this frustration against immigrants and people of colour, but the left can take advantage of this moment to build support for UBI and create a truly universal welfare state.
The first wave
UBI dates back more than two hundred years, but enough people were discussing it in the early twentieth century to constitute a wave – or at least a ripple – of support. The idea was still new enough that most advocates had little knowledge of each other and all tended to give their versions of the programme a different name.
Some supporters of Henry George’s land tax suggested that proceeds be distributed in cash. Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf both praised the idea in their writings without naming it. In 1918, Dennis and E. Mabel Milner started the short-lived ‘State Bonus League’, and, in 1920, Dennis Milner published what was likely the first full-length book on UBI, Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. James Meade and G. D. H. Cole – who coined the phrase “basic income” – wrote favourably about it in the 1930s.
Major C. H. Douglas called it a national dividend and included it in his ‘social credit’ programme. In 1934, the Louisiana senator Huey Long debuted his ‘share the wealth’ programme: he seems to have come up with the idea on his own, as there’s no evidence he was influenced by the ideas spreading around the United Kingdom in those years. The plan might have served as the basis for his presidential run had Long not been assassinated in 1935.
These early UBI advocates managed little direct influence on legislation. In 1935, the Social Credit Party of Canada took power in Alberta, but did not move to implement Douglas’ proposed dividend. After World War II, most welfare states adopted a conditional model, which provides assistance only to those who fit into some category of need, such as old age, disability, unemployment, single-parenthood, absence of market income, and so on. Truly universal programmes are few, far-between, and small. Discussion of a full UBI programme largely fell out of mainstream political discussion for more than two decades.
The second wave
The second wave took off in the early-to-mid 1960s. At that time, at least three groups in the United States and Canada began promoting the idea. Welfare rights activists mobilised people frustrated by inadequate and often demeaning conditional programmes. Futurists saw UBI as a way to protect workers from disruptions to the labour market caused by the computer revolution. Finally, many prominent economists – some leftists and some from the burgeoning libertarian movement – agreed that a basic income guarantee represented a more effective approach to poverty than the conditional and means-tested programmes of the New Deal era. BIG would simplify and streamline the welfare system while also making it more comprehensive.
The mainstream media first noticed UBI around the time Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty”. Politicians and policy wonks began taking up the idea, and the Canadian government released several favourable reports on the “guaranteed annual income” in the 1970s.
For a short time, many saw some kind of guaranteed income as an inevitable next step in social policy: a compromise everyone could live with. Leftists viewed it as the culmination of the welfare system that would fill in the remaining cracks. Centrists and conservatives saw it as a way to make the social safety net more cost-effective.
In 1971, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill introducing a watered-down version of the ‘negative income tax’ (NIT), yet another variant of the idea. It missed becoming law by only ten votes in the Senate. The next year, presidential nominees from both major parties endorsed some form of BIG: Richard Nixon supported NIT, and George McGovern UBI. Interestingly, the fact that both nominees’ held essentially the same position made BIG less of an issue in the campaign than it might otherwise have been.
Nixon’s NIT never got another vote. It died partly because it had no groundswell of support outside of the welfare rights movement. None of its proponents made a serious push to sell the proposal to the public at large. Even BIG supporters viewed Nixon’s version with scepticism, seeing it as a top-down, centralised initiative. Letting it die cost the politicians who backed it very little, so they allowed the idea to fade from public discourse.
While neither the United States nor Canada introduced full UBI programmes, the second wave of UBI support had some major successes. Both countries conducted five implementation trials, and the United States created or expanded several more limited programmes, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Alaska Dividend. These policies not only helped a lot of people, but their relative success provided convincing evidence to push social programmes toward universality.
Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dramatically changed the conversation around the welfare state in the early 1980s. They successfully vilified recipients as frauds. As a result, many people stopped talking about how to expand or improve the welfare system and started talking about how to cut it. The left largely went on the defensive in response, and stopped criticising the conditional model.
In 1980 the United States and Canada cancelled the last of their implementation trials, Canada stopped analysing the data it had spent years and millions of dollars collecting, and for the next 30 years mainstream American politics engaged in virtually no discussion of any form of BIG. Fortunately, as I discuss below, the results of those trials eventually re-emerged as important proof of the idea’s potential.
Between the waves
While discussion waned in North America, it slowly grew in other parts of the world. In 1977, a small Dutch party started a trend when it endorsed UBI in parliament. The next year, Niels I. Meyer’s book Rebellion from the Center launched a substantial wave of support in Denmark. The proposal gained traction in other countries as well, including post-apartheid South Africa. For the most part, however, discussion of UBI programmes took place outside the political mainstream, where its slight upward trend attracted little notice.
Academic attention began to grow in this period, especially among European scholars. The Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reinvented UBI in 1982 with no prior knowledge of the previous waves. He eventually connected with other supporters – including Guy Standing, Claus Offe, Annie Miller, Hermione Parker, and Robert van der Veen – and together they established the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) and convened the first BIEN Congress on 4-6 September 1986. From this point on, UBI, rather than NIT, dominated the political discussion of BIG.
The academic debate grew substantially between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, especially in the fields of politics, philosophy, and sociology. In 1984, supporters launched the first national UBI network in the United Kingdom; by the time BIEN changed its name to the Basic Income Earth Network 20 years later, activists had organized at least two dozen national groups.
Yet UBI stayed mostly outside the political mainstream, making the movement feel more like a discussion group than a political action network. Even the activist contingent concentrated more on discussion than action, believing that they had to increase public awareness before they could implement their proposals. This feeling actually distracted supporters from how much their movement had grown.
The third wave takes off
The third wave of basic income activism hit the mainstream in 2015 or 2016, but volunteers at Basic Income News had been noticing substantial increases in media attention since at least 2011. And in some places, the crossover began even earlier than that.
In 2006, at the BIEN Congress in South Africa, Zephania Kameeta, then the Lutheran Archbishop of Namibia, slammed his fist on the podium and announced, “Words, words, words!” UBI conferences had seen many passionate calls for action, but they were almost always accompanied by appeals for someone else to take action. This time, the speaker already had an action plan under way: the Namibian BIG Coalition was raising funds to finance a two-year implementation trial.
This project coincided with a smaller one in Brazil, and a much larger one followed in India in 2010. These tests attracted substantial media attention and helped inspire the privately and publicly funded experiments now under discussion or underway in Finland, Scotland, Canada, the United States, and Kenya.
At about the same time that Kameeta spoke in Cape Town, a national UBI wave was beginning to swell in Germany. Prominent people from across the political spectrum –Katja Kipping, Götz W. Werner, Susanne Wiest, and Dieter Althaus – all began to push different basic income proposals in a very public way.
Unlike most previous waves of support, this one inspired broad activism, which has only grown. In 2008, UBI networks in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria jointly organised the first International Basic Income Week, which has subsequently grown to become a worldwide event with actions taking place as far away as Australia and South America.
The financial meltdown and subsequent Great Recession sparked a new climate of activism. Public attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and inequality, and UBI supporters suddenly had a much better environment for activism.
Two citizens’ initiatives got under way in Switzerland and in the European Union in the early 2010s. In the former, Daniel Häni and Enno Scmidt successfully collected enough signatures to trigger a national vote. The EU movement eventually recruited organisers in all member states. Although neither ultimately won, they built an infrastructure to support activism across Europe and brought a tremendous amount of attention to the issue, which in turn sparked additional activism and attracted more support.
One of the contemporary movement’s most important features is that support now comes from many different places and from people who do not necessarily work together, follow similar strategies, or adhere to the same ideology. Indeed, today’s activists are motivated by a number of different issues and sources.
Mirroring the 1960s futurism discourse, many advocates point to automation and precariousness as reasons to enact the programme. High unemployment, the gig economy, and the pace of automation threaten large segments of the labour force. Whether or not the need for human labour is decreasing, the labour market has become extremely unstable. Labour leaders, activists, academics, and tech entrepreneurs have all proposed UBI in response, making this issue one of the prime drivers of recent interest in UBI.
For the first time, environmentalism has played a major role in this activism. Two of the most popular proposals for combating climate change are the tax-and-dividend and cap-and-dividend strategies, both of which involve setting a price on carbon emissions and distributing the revenue to all citizens. Other environmental groups, such as “Degrowth” and Canada’s “Leap Manifesto,” see UBI as a way to counteract excessive consumption and the depletion of resources.
Two additional proposals, called ‘quantitative easing for the people’ and ‘helicopter money’, are pushing central banks to stop giving money away to private banks and start giving it directly to every citizen. They believe their proposal would constitute a more equitable and effective economic stimulus programme. Although they do not use the term, distributing money directly to the people is essentially a temporary UBI.
Some private groups are trying to bypass central banks entirely by creating non-government digital currencies, and some of these groups have announced their intentions to provide their users with a UBI in the new currency.
At the same time, new evidence has convinced people of UBI’s radical potential. Evelyn Forget, of the University of Manitoba, received grant funding to analyse the data from Canada’s NIT experiment. She released her findings in 2011, just as new implementation trials and citizens’ initiatives were getting off the ground. They received a great deal of press attention and helped spark new interest in the programme in Canada and beyond. This increased media attention has built the movement even further. Seemingly every major news outlet has published something about UBI. And, in a sure sign of the movement’s newfound strength, opponents have started attacking it.
A couple of years ago, it remained unclear whether the third wave would match the size and reach of the second. Now the answer is obvious: grassroots support and international media attention are larger than ever, and the third wave represents the first truly global basic income movement. According to Philippe Van Parijs, “the big difference between the first two waves and the third one is that the third one quickly became international”. The first two did not extend beyond the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but the third wave already involves major campaigns on all six inhabited continents.
How far can the third wave go?
The left should recognise that past UBI movements entered mainstream conversation when people worried about inequality and unemployment, and then subsided when public attention turned to other issues or when other ways of addressing poverty became dominant. The second American wave ended in the United States not in the prosperous economy of the mid-1980s but in the troubling times of the late 1970s, when right-wing politicians convinced large numbers of people that redistributive programmes had become overly generous.
The biggest danger to the third wave appears to be growing nationalism. If politicians can convince voters to blame immigrants for growing inequality, they can effectively distract people from mobilising around better social policies.
Despite these dangers, basic-income activists should feel encouraged: each wave has been larger than the last. With every resurgence, UBI has had a more developed proposal than the time before, and activists have been better prepared to address people’s concerns about poverty, inequality, and unemployment. The fact that academics had continued to study and activists had continued to promote UBI during its unfashionable years gave it recognition as a viable alternative when inequality once again became a dominant policy discussion.
Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the conditional welfare model has been growing for over a century. This system is based on the idea that everyone who can work should and only those who really cannot work should receive help. All others are undeserving.
Conditionality has not made the welfare state more generous or less vulnerable to attack. Many who work still live in poverty, as do many who receive benefits. Opponents have successfully chipped away at welfare for more than 40 years, largely by vilifying any group that meets the conditions for need.
The conditional system also hurts workers. By making welfare requirements so stringent, we have made all employees more dependent on their employers. Dependent workers have less power, making it harder to demand good wages and decent working conditions. It is no coincidence that middle-class income has stagnated over the same period that the welfare system has declined. Despite enormous productivity gains, most workers now work more hours for less pay.
Conditional welfare systems are built on paternalistic assumptions that force people to prove their right to survival. UBI might not always gain steam as fast as it has in the last few years, but those shortcomings won’t disappear, and they provide a good reason for people to look seriously at UBI.
-Karl Widerquist, writing in Doha, New Orleans, and Morehead City in 2016 and 2017
Occupy Oakland “We are the 99%” protests in 2011.
by Andre Coelho | Oct 25, 2017 | News
Jenna van Draanen. Credit to Enno Schmidt / Luís Gaspar.
Just as in the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress in Seoul, in 2016, BIEN’s General Assembly (GA) took place in Lisbon’s BIEN Congress this year (2017). With an important addition: this time a BIEN Affiliates meeting occurred, allowing for substantial interchange of experiences between basic income activist groups all around the world, connected through the “umbrella” network of BIEN.
As an outcome of the Seoul Congress, the GA decided to establish a specific Task Force for dealing with BIEN’s affiliates, in the sense of promoting their interaction, general exchange of information and experiences. That Task Force was named Outreach, and is currently coordinated by Jenna van Draanen.
At Lisbon, many BIEN Affiliates were represented, including the Universal Basic Income Europe (UBIE) network, itself a joint group of European BIEN affiliates. Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom (Citizens Income Trust and Citizens Basic Income Network Scotland), Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, India (update), Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain and the United States of America were the Affiliates represented, which comprises a 68% presence rate in this Congress. Among the non-represented groups at the Congress counted the Southern Africa, the Argentina and the China Affiliates.
To organize the meeting and to guarantee a more uniform input from affiliates, standard questions were sent out, focusing on activity in the past 12 months, the challenges faced and the opportunities going forward. On a general sense, BIEN Affiliates have been active in networking their own territories in an attempt to get everyone interested in doing activism on basic income to work together or at least knowing of each other’s activities. In those regions already running or contemplating, at the political level, the experimentation with basic income, such as Scotland, Canada (Ontario), the Netherlands or Finland, Affiliates have also been busy counseling and supplying input for the conduction of these experiments. In all other regions, efforts have been made to lobby for basic income within political parties, unions, anti-poverty groups and others, while also trying to reach out to the wider public.
Dániel Fehér. Credit to: Enno Schmidt / Luís Gaspar
On challenges to basic income implementation, BIEN Affiliates were fairly consistent in saying that these challenges are mainly due to ignorance (about the basic income concept), preconceptions, resistance (e.g.: work ethics, moral hazards) and a general sense that the human being is not to be trusted.
The GA meeting, just as already done in Seoul, was conducted in two parts.
In the first part (on the 25th of September, first day of the Congress), Louise Haagh, BIEN’s chair, described the proposed move of BIEN’s registration from Belgium to the United Kingdom, took questions, and invited members to arrange a time to meet her if they required further discussion. Also, proposals for changes to membership fees and changes to the voting procedure for Executive Committee members were discussed. Aiming at choosing where the BIEN Congress for 2019 will take place, representatives of the four countries (Australia, India, United Kingdom and United States) bidding to host the 2019 BIEN Congress spoke about their proposals. This first session ended with a discussion on fundraising.
On the second part (on the 27th of September, last day of the Congress), after some preliminary settings, the GA voted unanimously for the change of BIEN’s status from an International Non-profit-making Association registered in Belgium to a Charitable Incorporated Organization registered in the United Kingdom. Also unanimous was the favorable vote for Haagh’s proposition that additional trustees for BIEN’s Charitable Incorporated Organization were added, as well as a new treasurer (instead of the former Andrea Fumagalli). These additional trustees being Annie Miller, Jay Ginn, Jake Eliot and Mark Wadsworth, the latter cumulating as the new treasurer. The voting procedure itself was also under discussion, and voting. Between three possibilities, multiple electronic ballots, only voting at the GA by secret ballot and postal ballots alongside a secret ballot at the GA, the latter was chosen. A note was made that no candidate can stand for more than one post, and nominations will have to be received by one month before the GA. After the initial presentations from representative applications for BIEN’s 2019 Congress (in part one of the meeting), GA members clearly voted for India.
At this second part of the GA meeting, reports from the Chair and from the Basic Income News and Outreach taskforces were also presented by Louise Haagh, André Coelho and Jenna van Draanen respectively. Shortly after, three new BIEN affiliate requests were accepted unanimously, namely Iceland, Malawi and World Basic Income. Finally, a vote was held on a proposal to change BIEN’s policy towards donations and membership fees. BIEN members voted unanimously to raise the annual contribution for BIENfactors from 200€ up to 400€. Also unanimous was the voting for the creation of a new status: regular donor (to BIEN). Clearly favorable was the vote to introduce a sliding scale for annual contributions for BIEN’s membership and finally the proposal for increasing the life membership fee from 100€ up to 200€ was rejected.
Assembly room at ISEG. Credit to: Enno Schmidt
At the closing words session of the Congress, Jurgen de Wispeleare refreshed the audience memory on the already known details for the 2018 BIEN Congress, to be held in Tampere, Finland, between the 23rd and 25th of September, 2018. Louise Haagh thanked the Portuguese LOC (local organizing committee), all the speakers and the general audience for a successful Congress. She underlined the importance to involve all patches of society in the global debate around basic income, and as such BIEN’s Congresses should increase their promotion of those kinds of meetings involving academics, activists and leaders from political parties and civil society institutions. Haagh also highlighted that the basic income debate is changing, in terms of its reasoning and discourse, as the distance to actual implementation shrinks.
by Sandro Gobetti | Oct 24, 2017 | News
Meeting of the Basic Income Network, in Italy
On Friday, 10 November 2017, the Italian Basic Income Network – Italy (BIN Italia) organizes a day-to-day discussion forum about basic income, which will feature, among others, the participation of the philosopher and economist Philippe Van Parijs.
Basic income is a universal and unconditional monetary transfer to all people. It is a tool for the redistribution of socially produced wealth and can be seen as an upgrade in social protection and welfare systems. It supports freedom of choice and people’s self-determination and has grown to be one of the most discussed issues in the world. In addition, the world has seen, in the last few years, a proliferation of experiments on basic income in several regions of the planet. These experiments have been conducted in India, Kenya, Finland and Canada, and also the city of Barcelona and several municipalities in the Netherlands, just to mention a few.
The issue is now on the political agenda in many countries and is called into the debate on the 4th Industrial Revolution and the advent of robotics in their ambivalence. The fear exists that a new mass unemployment caused by the development of machines will materialize. On the other hand, some also look on the opportunity that machines will replace people at work, by opening up new scenarios for the use of time, where basic income can allow for a more free and creative use of it.
In fact, in recent times, there are two major phenomena that have gone hand in hand: basic income experimentation and technological innovation. In some cases, the producers of new technologies themselves are supporting the introduction of this proposal (for example Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Silicon Valley Y Combinator enterprise incubator).
Basic income is an issue that has already been in the Italian social and political agenda. There have been various legislative proposals (e.g.: a popular proposal of law by BIN Italia, the proposal of the 5 Star Movement and 170 other associations), although the Italian government has reacted by implementing a conditional assistance program the Inclusion Income (ReI). This program, however, is still very far from the European debate and international experience on social assistance.
The issue has become so stringent that the European Union has long been questioning the need to introduce a measure as an adequate minimum income for all citizens of the old continent as indicated in the 20 European Social Pillars.
The meeting will be located in the Roman district of Ostiense-Garbatella and will take off in the morning with a round table entitled Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Future of work and Guaranteed Income, that will address the issues of the 4th Industrial Revolution, Digital Platforms, algorithm, Big Data, Robotics, and Advanced Automation. BIN Italia Association has recently published a publication titled “Guaranteed income and technological innovation. Among Algorithms and Robotics“, in which 15 authors discuss the new technological revolution (more on the book here).
The meeting will have two sessions:
11:00 h (Aula Verra, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Roma Tre University, Via Ostiense 234):
Round Table on Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Future of Work and Guaranteed Income with Sociologist Chiara Saraceno (College Carlo Alberto, University of Turin), among the leading scholars of poverty and social inclusion, the philosopher Giacomo Marramao (University of Rome Tre) and the economist Andrea Fumagalli (University of Pavia), a known analyst and scholar interested in basic income. Introduction and moderation by Luca Santini, President of BIN Italia
17:30 h (Moby Dick – Cultural Hub Library, via Edgardo Ferrati, 3 – Garbatella, Rome)
Lectio Magistralis entitled Basic Income, a proposal for the 21st century by Philippe Van Parijs (Basic Income Earth Network – Université Catholique de Louvain), author of the book (coming out in October in Italy) entitled: The basic income. A radical proposal (Il Mulino). Introduction and moderation by Rachele Serino, vice-President of BIN Italia
More information at:
BIN Italia Facebook page
BIN Italia website
This article was reviewed by André Coelho.
by Kate McFarland | Oct 23, 2017 | Opinion
Relaxing Conditions on ‘Basic Income’: A Case Against Definition
From a linguistic standpoint, there is no one “correct” definition of the term ‘basic income’ [1]. Different groups and organizations have adopted different definitions, suitable to their purposes, and these definitions sometimes conflict with one another.
BIEN, at present, coordinates affiliates who use the term differently from one another, organizes conferences to bring together individuals who use the term differently from one another, and issues news reports on varied stories in which the term is used in different ways.
I have come to believe that, in its role as such an umbrella organization, BIEN’s attempt to define ‘basic income’ does not lend clarity. Instead, to avoid equivocation and confusion, it would do better to admit upfront this diversity in definition and shades of meaning.
BIEN’s Definition of ‘Basic Income’: One Among Many
At its 2016 Congress in Seoul, BIEN adopted the following definition: “A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
When I write for BIEN’s website, I accept this as a stipulative definition of the term, and call attention to potentially confusing differences in usage. For example, when I report on the recently launched “basic income pilot” in Ontario, I note that the program being tested–in which payments to participants are household-based and income-dependent–does not actually satisfy BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ (although, as I emphasize below, it does congeal with an established and widespread use of the term within Canada).
My comments in might sometimes seem to treat BIEN’s definition as privileged or authoritative. This, however, is only an artifact of the particular context in which I am writing–BIEN’s website–and my desire to maintain consistency within this context. I do not believe that BIEN’s definition is privileged in any absolute or objective sense, or that it is more “correct” than other uses that have become established within other groups, organizations, and geographical regions.
As I take it, my prevailing duty as a news writer is to prevent readers from believing false things. In this context, clarity and consistency in meaning are of utmost importance, and BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ is a burden I must bear, knowing that there will be many situations in which it will be inconsistent with the definitions employed by the parties on whom I report.
Two particularly important cases, in my experience, are the following two types of definitions:
- Definitions that additionally stipulate that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
- Definitions that lack the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
A. Definitions stipulating that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
Many high-profile groups and organizations have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ with this additional necessary condition (philosophers may enjoy the opportunity to say that, on these definitions, “the ‘sufficient’ condition is a necessary condition”); for example (emphases added):
- GiveDirectly, the charity organization known in the basic income community for its impending major experiment in Kenya, defines ‘basic income’ as a type of cash transfer that is “unconditional (recipients don’t have to work or do anything else to be eligible), universal, with all members of society receiving, enough to cover basic needs, and guaranteed for the recipients’ lifetimes”.
- International Basic Income Week, an annual initiative that is pursuing partnership with BIEN in 2018, stresses four conditions that must be met to use ‘basic income’ to refer to a cash transfer policy: payments must be (1) universal, (2) individual, (3) unconditional, and (4) high enough.
- Founding members of the Economic Security Project, a major US-based initiative launched in late 2016, have decided to reserve the use of ‘basic income’ for programs in which payments are high enough to meet basic living expenses, and have endorsed the neologism ‘base income’ to refer to programs that provide universal and unconditional payments of lesser amount.
- Multiple affiliates of BIEN–including groups in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Switzerland, and perhaps others–have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ (or its translational equivalent) that include some type of condition specifying that the amount of payment must be “sufficient” or “high enough” to meet some type of minimal needs (see “Affiliate Definitions of ‘Basic Income’”).
The question of whether BIEN itself should include the sufficiency condition as a necessary condition (so to speak) has been the cause of previous terminological controversies within the organization, including the one that eventuated in the vote at the 2016 Congress in Seoul, in which BIEN rejected the proposal to restrict the definition of ‘basic income’ in such a manner. In a paper delivered at the 2017 BIEN Congress (“What’s a Definition? And how should we define ‘Basic Income’?”), Malcolm Torry, General Manager of BIEN and Director of the UK’s Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, defends this decision. According to Torry, the adopted definition does not “conflict with any affiliate’s definition”, “represent[s] the consensus among affiliates”, and “reflect[s] common usage of the term”.
All of these claims seem dubious, however, especially when one considers that BIEN has aspired to provide a definition–that is, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to use the term ‘basic income’–rather than a non-exclusive list of necessary or paradigmatic features.
First, notice that the different definitions of BIEN and some of its affiliates lead to different assignments of truth and falsity to certain sentences. For example, the sentences ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Iran once implemented a basic income’ seem to be true on BIEN’s definition [2], but they are false on definitions of ‘basic income’ that include a provision that the amount must be high enough to meet basic living expenses. The definitions disagree on whether certain core cases discussed in the basic income literature are actually cases of basic income–and this, I wager, counts as “conflict” between the definitions if anything does.
Secondly, it would be more accurate to say that BIEN’s definition reflects a–but not the–common usage of ‘basic income’, and that it does not represent consensus, even amongst BIEN’s own affiliates. As reflected by the above list of examples (and further examples could be given), it is unquestionably typical for many speakers and organizations to restrict application of the term to policies that provide livable cash payments.
If one still wonders why a less restrictive definition should prove contentious, it is significant to notice that the act of defining carries evaluative and expressive element: to establish a definition of a term is not merely to clarify and elucidate current usage, nor is it necessarily an attempt to honor as much of present usage as possible while introducing greater clarity and precision; to establish (and insist upon) a specific definition is often also to express what one values. Specifically, speakers sometimes choose to adopt definitions that are narrow or exclusive and reject ones that are more encompassing.
Many conservative Christians, for example, continue to resist the redefinition of ‘marriage’ to allow the term’s application to same-sex partnerships. And many pro-choice Americans were recently outraged that the US Department of Health and Human Services decided to define ‘life’ broadly to the point of conception. Or, in a somewhat lighter vein, consider cocktail purists who scoff at the practice of using ‘martini’ to refer to any mixed drink served in a v-shaped glass. In the eyes of the conservative Christian and the cocktail purist, the more inclusive definitions are simply unacceptable, for they disrespect the sanctity of marriage and martinis (as God and the International Bartenders Association intended them to be). And when the definition in question has legal or political ramifications, the choice bears substantial weight.
Likewise, in my experience in the basic income movement (especially in the US context), I have observed that many left-leaning proponents of basic income insist upon the strict definition–with the “sufficiency” condition–as a way to distance their own proposals from right-wing and libertarian schemes, such as Charles Murray’s proposal to replace all existing programs with a universal flat-rate cash payment of 10,000 USD per year. Often, champions of a narrow definition of ‘basic income’ don’t want Murray-like proposals to be assimilated into the basic income movement, and their preferred definition reflects this.
Such activists might decry definitions like BIEN’s as unacceptable precisely because it aspires to retain neutrality on the level of the payment. If BIEN were simply to reply that the definition should be kept broad in order to accommodate all proposals for regular unconditional cash transfers, including views like Murray’s, then it would quite directly miss their point. It is their prerogative as speakers to fine-tune the meaning of terms in light of their values and interests, and they might have good strategic and political reasons to insist upon these particular definitions.
I believe that BIEN should acknowledge this difference as what it is: disagreement about word meaning–and not at all uncontentious. This disagreement threatens to present readers and newcomers with potentially confusing discrepancies, such as disagreement about the truth of such commonly heard claims like ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Finland is experimenting with a basic income for its unemployed population’. For the reader of BIEN materials, forewarned is forearmed.
B. Definitions lacking the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
As mentioned above, this type of definition seems particularly common in Canada, where the idea has enjoyed a long history, where an experiment in Manitoba in the late 1970s became one of the most famous trials of a negative income tax–or what many Canadians politicians, academics, and journalists would call a ‘basic income’.
For example, on a page titled “About Basic Income”, BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, Basic Income Canada Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ (which seems to be used synonymously with ‘basic income’) as a program that “ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status” [3] [4]. Similarly, the Government of Ontario, which has recently launched a new experiment of what it calls a ‘basic income’, defines the term as “a payment to eligible families or individuals that ensures a minimum income level, regardless of employment status” [5].
Exemplifying this usage, Canadian politician Guy Caron has introduced a proposal for what he calls ‘basic income’, which is a “top-up aimed at helping low-income Canadians to reach the ‘low-income cut-off’”, clearly not a universal and non-withdrawable payment. I submit that this proposal, like Ontario’s pilot, is not inaccurately named: it merely reflects what might be described as dialectical ambiguity with respect to the term ‘basic income’.
Also in his 2017 paper, Torry states, speaking of the Ontario experiment, that the payments “do not constitute a Basic Income, and perhaps BIEN should say that”. I would contend the appropriateness of Torry’s advice depends, in part, on one’s audience. If addressing an audience of basic income activists in UK, for example, then it might indeed be important to clarify that Ontario’s pilot is “not a basic income” (assuming they endorse, and are most familiar with, the definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by BIEN, the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, and Basic Income UK). But it would be quite presumptuous to make the same assertion to the Government of Ontario itself.
By analogy, suppose a British child were to overhear an American speak of “eating biscuits with dinner before the football game”. It might be important to clarify that the food in question is “not really biscuits” and the game in question is “not really football” in order to prevent the child from forming misconceptions about the American’s selections of baked goods and sports. But it would not be appropriate, presumably, to tell the American himself that he is “not really eating biscuits or watching football” and should stop using his words like that. But Ontarians are not en masse misusing the term ‘basic income’ any more that Americans are en masse misusing the words ‘biscuit’ and ‘football’. The term has merely taken on a different meaning, one with antecedents dating at least to the time of the Mincome experiment in the 1970s.
Given this divergence in meaning, there is again a pronounced threat of equivocation and confusion. Widely used sentences like ‘Ontario is testing basic income’, ‘Manitoba’s Mincome was an experiment of basic income’, and ‘Milton Friedman supported basic income’ might be either true or false depending on the speaker. Indeed, the truth or falsity of such sentences can be determined only after knowing the specific definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by the speaker (or, as a clue, the speaker’s nationality).
Once again, I believe the lesson here is that a wide-scope organization like BIEN must acknowledge this diversity in word use if it wishes to ward against such confusion.
C. “Similarities Overlapping and Criss-Crossing”
In working as a reporter for Basic Income News, I commonly observe speakers–many of them with considerable experience and expertise in the movement–use the term ‘basic income’ in accordance with the two types of definitions described above.
In itself, such ambiguity is benign; it is a common feature of natural language that the meanings of words are shaped and honed in somewhat different fashions within different communities or groups of speakers. When a speaker realizes that a term carries multiple definitions, she knows that she must attend to context in order to resolve the ambiguity, and she knows to be cautious of drawing certain inferences if that ambiguity cannot be resolved.
Complications arise, however, when casual readers falsely assume that ‘basic income’ is well-defined and unambiguous. And, unfortunately, this is all too easy: most articles and websites that purport to introduce “the” concept of basic income do not mention that the term is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, between different speakers. On the contrary, many authors blithely write as if the term does have a single conventional meaning, offering a gloss on a definition with no mention of the fact that others define the term somewhat differently. Thus, many casual readers might be unaware of the ambiguities that surround the use of the term–raising the specter of unintentional equivocation, confusion, and false belief (e.g. one might unwittingly come to accept falsehoods like “Alaska provides its residents with livable annual income” or “A town in Manitoba was the site of an experiment in which every resident, regardless of income, received a fixed monthly cash payment”).
If an organization like BIEN wishes to be a broad church, facilitating discussion between diverse parties that research or support something they call ‘basic income’, then, I submit, it should cease to posture as if the term has a single definition.
BIEN could state outright that there is no set of conditions that constitutes a unique standard meaning for ‘basic income’. Then, as an alternative to definition, it could provide a list of stereotypical or paradigmatic features of proposals that bear the name. Some of these features–such as being paid in cash and at regular intervals–are more central than others, and might even be said to be necessary features of anything called ‘basic income’. Other features, however, are matters of dispute or discrepancy (such as consisting of a livable amount and being paid in equal amount to all regardless of income).
New problems would likely arise when attempting to decide what to say about frequently cited conditions or features of a basic income. Even the condition of unconditionality, for instance, might not be sacrosanct. Some have spoken about questions such as whether a “participation requirement should be added to the basic income”: is this loose talk, semantic nonsense (akin to asking, perhaps, whether a “marriage requirement should be imposed on bachelorhood”), or evidence that unconditionality is not really a necessary or immutable part of the conceptual core of what speakers call ‘basic income’? If informed and competent speakers’ judgements fail to detect paradox in phrases like ‘a participation requirement on a basic income’, then it is likely the latter.
Yet more new problems would arise when considering the fact that the paradigmatic form of the policy contains further attributes that are often not mentioned explicitly in definitions of the term: the amount is typically assumed to be relatively stable; the program is typically assumed to be created and administered by a government (although, with some activists proposing privately-funded programs, some definitions deliberately reject it); the condition of “universality” is often (although not always) implicitly assumed not necessarily to extend to children. (See Torry’s paper for further discussion of examples of implicitly accepted paradigmatic features.)
Still more points of controversy could be mentioned. Should ‘basic income’ be defined to require payment in conventional currency (to exclude cryptocurrency-based proposals), or should it be sure not to impose this constraint? Should ‘basic income’ be defined as a universal payment to citizens, permanent residents, or some other specification of the relevant population base?
At the beginning of his 2017 Congress paper, Torry mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the idea of “family resemblance” in his Philosophical Investigations. He does not, however, carry this Wittgenstein reference to its natural conclusion: a case against definition. I suggest that we do.
According to Wittgenstein, terms of natural language typically do not lend themselves to definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Different uses of a term need not exemplify a common core meaning–and, often, they don’t. Instead, Wittgenstein tells us, different uses of a word are often related by a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”.
To illustrate, he delivers the example of the word ‘game’:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. … Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how (§66).
The natural progression of Torry’s Wittgenstein reference would have been to argue that ‘basic income’ is like ‘game’: as we examine the diverse and multifarious uses of ‘basic income’, similarities crop up and disappear, with no single common meaning able to be identified. Although Torry does not take this tack, I believe that it would have been precisely on-point.
Of course, an association of “gamers” is free to stipulate a specific definition of the particular type of game in which it is interested. Likewise, an organization like BIEN could stipulate a specific definition of ‘basic income’ to describe the particular type of policy with which it is concerned. One concern, however, is that BIEN’s other actions don’t seem to accord with this desire for specificity. BIEN, at present, seems unified more by word-shape than word-meaning: it coordinates affiliates who support what they call ‘basic income’ (allowing affiliates to adopt their own definitions thereof), organizes conferences to bring together individuals who are interested in something they call ‘basic income’, and publishes news stories about people who talk about something they call ‘basic income’. If BIEN wishes to unify its activities in this way, then it cannot prescribe a definition of ‘basic income’ but must instead defer to the groups and individuals who use the term and who constitute its membership–and, as seen, their definitions of the term are varied and disparate, with only a thin and insubstantial core of features possessed by all.
But we may leave aside questions of BIEN’s mission and goals, for there is another concern facing the organization’s decision to adopt a particular stipulative definition: as a mere matter of fact, the term is used in varied manners that are not always consistent, media coverage of basic income is not always clear to dissociate these (and is usually not), and BIEN does not hold purchase over media reporting on basic income. Adding yet another organization-specific definition to the mix does not lend clarity to confusion. What is needed is straightforward acknowledgement of the diversity and disparity in uses of the term ‘basic income’.
Notes
[1] In this essay, I use single quotes to notate that I am speaking about a linguistic item (the term ‘basic income’) rather than the thing it refers to (a basic income).
[2] Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and Iran’s oil subsidy reform program possess other non-stereotypical features. Most notably, perhaps, the level of the payments is not only non-livable but also unstable and uncertain. No fixed amount is guaranteed from year to year. (Indeed, as it happens, the future of the PFD is presently uncertain due to ongoing fiscal crisis in Alaska–in an unprecedented decision of the state’s Governor, its amount was halved between 2015 and 2016–and Iran has begun withdrawing higher earners from the subsidy program.)
[3] Note that other groups, such as BIEN’s Australian affiliate, also use ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ interchangeably, but with a definition that includes the qualifications that the payments must be individual and non-withdrawable; thus, the use of the word ‘guarantee’ does not imply that the “Canadian-type” definition of ‘basic income’ is at play.
[4] BIEN’s US affiliate, the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ in a manner similar to BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, as “a government ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason” (with no condition that the support must be non-withdrawable or paid on an individual basis). However, USBIG does not treat ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ as synonyms, but defines ‘basic income’ in a manner similar to BIEN, as type of basic income guarantee in which “every citizen [is given] a check for the full basic income every month” (leading to peculiarities like the truth of the sentence ‘Ontario is testing a basic income guarantee, but it is not testing a basic income’).
[5] Although common, this is not the only definition in use in Canada. For example, François Blais, a political scientist researching income guarantee programs for Quebec, has defined ‘basic income’ as “an unconditional income that the government awards to every citizen” (see his book Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians)–which, as written, could be interpreted as implying an individual and non-withdrawable payment (although not explicitly specified).
Earlier draft reviewed by Tyler Prochazka and Heidi Karow
Cover Photo (Games): CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 B
by Peter Vandevanter | Oct 13, 2017 | News, Research
Congressional Quarterly (CQ) has published a research paper on basic income (BI) that explains its universal popularity due to automation growth estimates worldwide. The CQ Researcher covers everything from Scott Santens’ crowdfunded self-financing mechanism to U.S. ex-President Obama’s belief that the debate may last 10 to 20 years.
The 21-page research paper, written by London freelancer Sara Glazer, includes an explanation of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) – a basic income like payment to all residents – and revels in the prediction of automation worldwide. Predicted percentage of job losses are shown in charts for 8 countries, as well as for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (made up of 21 countries).
BI appeal to the political Left is explained as the continuation of a welfare state. Its appeal to the political Right is explained as a libertarian limit on government intrusion and cost. However, the research warns that many people believe the poor may be worse off: “Some anti-poverty advocates say a UBI would increase both poverty and inequality by using welfare funds now spent on the poorest two-fifths of the population to provide cash to people of all income levels“.
The report also mentions the current endorsement of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Chris Hughes. Moreover, references are made to the 1960s precedent of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s instituted War on Poverty as well as U.S. President Richard Nixon un-instituted 1970s negative income tax credit. This latter issue has been today resurrected by Congressman Ro Khanna, by his proposed bill for extending the earned income tax credit for the poor.
The Canadian 1970s experiment, called Mincome, is described as a positive pilot project, acting as a precedent for current basic income pilot projects in Finland, the U.S. (California ), Canada (Ontario ), Spain (Barcelona), Africa (Give Directly) and the Netherlands. In this report Karl Widerquist says that, with a BI, people will be allowed without fear to work the way they feel best. In an opposite viewpoint, Pavlina Tcherneva argues that a Job Guarantee program would be a better, less costly, way to make sure everyone had work they cared for.
More information at:
David Wheeler, “What if everybody didn’t have to work to get paid?”, The Atlantic, May 18th 2015
Chris Weller, “President Obama: We’ll be debating unconditional free money over the next 10 or 20 years” Business Insider, October 12th 2016
Kate McFarland, “SPAIN: Barcelona prepares study of Guaranteed Minimum Income”, Basic Income News, February 26th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Kate McFarland , “THE NETHERLANDS: Government authorizes social assistance experiments in first five municipalities”, Basic Income News, July 11th 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
