by Karl Widerquist | Jul 12, 2013 | Research
“Are More Jobs the Answer? The ‘BIG’ Bait and Switch” and “How BIG is BIG Enough: Would The Basic Income Guarantee Satisfy The Unemployed?”
L. Randall Wray's "Great Leap Forward"
In two articles, L. Randall Wray compares the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) to the Job Guarantee / Employer of
Last Resort (JG/ELR). A Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, NY, Wray has been writing about the benefits of the JG/ELR approach since the 1990s. He is one of the leading scholars of what is now called “modern monetary theory,” which stresses the need to prevent inflation by using a JG/ELR as an anchor for the currency.
Wray opposes the BIG mostly because he believes it will cause inflation. He simply believes that some of the goals of BIG are unsustainable: attempts to provide everyone with a descent income without requiring them to work will, according to Wray, necessarily cause an inflation spiral. He also argues that many of the goals of BIG are good and sustainable, but that they can be achieved better through a JG/ELR than through BIG.
Wray’s starting point is a response to a recent editorial by Al Sheahen (author of the recent book, Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security), but he cites a wide range of BIG authors including Philippe Van Parijs, Guy Standing, Charles M.A. Clark and others.
L. Randall Wray, “Are More Jobs the Answer? The ‘BIG’ Bait and Switch,” Economonitor, June 25th, 2013
L. Randall Wray, “How BIG is BIG Enough: Would The Basic Income Guarantee Satisfy The Unemployed?,” Economonitor, July 9th, 2013
L. Randall Wray's "Great Leap Forward"
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 8, 2013 | News
In this short article, Philippe Van Parijs proposes a Euro-dividend, which he describes as “one, simple and radical, yet … reasonable and urgent” proposal. The Euro-dividend is a modest basic income for every legal resident of the European Union. According to Van Parijs, “This income provides each resident with a universal and unconditional floor that can be supplemented at will by labour income, capital income and social benefits. Its level can vary from country to country to track the cost of living, and it can be lower for the young and higher for the elderly.”
Van Parijs is a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium and the author Real Freedom for All: what (if anything) can justify capitalism.
Van Parijs, Philippe, “The Euro-Dividend,” Social Europe Journal, July 3, 2013
by Citizens' Income Trust | Feb 28, 2013 | Opinion
‘Radical liberalism … holds a substantial universal and unconditional tier of social rights to be one of the ideal requirements of liberal-egalitarian justice.’ (p.8) Equality and freedom can and should be pursued at the same time, a universalist welfare state is the means to this combination, and an important element of such a welfare state is a Citizen’s Income. This is the agenda that Birnbaum has pursued through the research project of which this book is the outcome: an agenda with which he constantly contrasts more conditional forms of welfare state based on ideas of ‘reciprocity’.
In his introductory chapter, Birnbaum locates his treatment between the quite general theorizing of John Rawls and an empirical approach more concerned with feasibility: ‘between’ in the sense that his ‘feasibility’ takes the long view and does not allow short term political realities to determine feasibility in the longer term, and in the sense that his method is one of ‘reflective equilibrium’: a moving backwards and forwards between different propositions in an attempt to resolve contradictions.
In Rawlsian fashion, the first part of the book argues for a Citizen’s Income on the basis that it maximises the economic prospects of the least advantaged member of society more effectively than would more conditional benefits systems. The second part answers the objection that a Citizen’s Income requires taxation and therefore exploits workers. Birbaum follows Philippe Van Parijs in showing that much of the income earned through employment is the result of resources that belong to all of us, and that taxing earned income is therefore a redistribution of gifts. The argument is then extended to jobs: if they are gifts, then everyone has a claim on their value.
The third part of the book tackles feasibility. Birnbaum argues that a Citizen’s Income ‘would be particularly well-suited to foster economic initiatives, meaningful work and a rich associational life’ (p.169), making formal reciprocity requirements unnecessary; and he finds that ‘basic income proposals that seek to build on and develop the social insurance and in-kind benefits of existing welfare state institutions are far better suited to serve objectives [of political legitimacy, sustainability, and gender equity] than radical replacement strategies’ (p.204).
The book is full of enlightening argument, and particularly compelling is a method which sets out from a situation in which a Basic Income has been implemented and then studies a situation in which it has been abolished. This method is well employed on p.59 to demolish the ethical argument for ‘welfare to work’ policies.
The book is also full of quite dense argument which assumes some acquaintance with the terminologies and literatures of moral philosophy and political economy: but readers without such an acquaintance will still find the book invigorating because the argument is both thorough and coherent, and because it contains a persuasive riposte to arguments for a welfare state based on enforced reciprocity. (It is no surprise that Stuart White has the longest author entry in the index after John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs.) In social policy terms, the book is a persuasive argument for a Citizen’s Income and against both today’s ‘welfare to work’ benefits structure and a Participation Income.
Anyone coming to this book will need to work hard at it, but the work will be worth it.
Simon Birnbaum, Basic income Reconsidered: Social justice, liberalism, and the demands of equality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xii + 246 pp, hbk, 0 230 11406 7, £62.50
https://us.macmillan.com/basicincomereconsidered/SimonBirnbaum
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jan 21, 2013 | Opinion
After an unsuccessful first attempt, the European Citizens’ Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income finally got accepted by the European Commission, thus opening the possibility for the organizers from 14 European countries to start collecting their signatures of support. Hereby starts a 12-month European-wide campaign for basic income in Europe, with the goal of collecting one million signatures.
The citizens committee members got it right not to give up after the EU commission rejected the first attempt, back in september. Indeed, the second attempt was finally accepted, the citizens committee members were noticed on the 14th of January in a communication by Klaus Sambor, the head organizer of the initiative.
Under the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) new procedure, the EU commission must certify that the goal of the initiative submitted by citizens falls under its competences and attribution before citizens start collecting signatures, so that they don’t do it for nothing.
Following the first rejection by the EU commission, which stated at the time that the proposal “manifestly fall outside the framework of the Commission’s powers to submit a proposal for a legal act of the Union for the purpose of implementing the Treaties”, the citizens committee decided in Munich to keep on working on a second attempt, with the main objective of having it accepted by the EU commission.
Citizens met again in Firenze (Italy) and, after discussion and consensus, submitted a new proposal – the one that just got accepted by the commission. In order to meet the commission’s requirements, the new text (available here on the website’s commission), does not demand a “legal act”, but instead requests the commission to explore the feasibility of a European basic income. What fiscal harmonization would be necessary for implementing a basic income in the EU? What would a basic income imply for other social policies and labor rights? These questions must find clear answers. Hence the new title of the initiative: “Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) – Exploring a pathway towards emancipatory welfare conditions in the EU”.
This can be done by organizing conferences, calling for studies, giving subsidies and any other means the commission has. Long story short, we’re asking the commission to make a serious case for the implementation of basic income in Europe, and to feed the debate on how to do it in a harmonized way inside the European Union. As we expected, this request could hardly be rejected by the commission.
Now the next step is to have the online signature collection system be authenticated as ‘secure’ by the EU authorities, so that people can directly sign the initiative online. The ECI citizens committee decided to use the system and servers provided by the EU Commission in Luxembourg, which implies a delay.
In other words, citizens cannot sign online yet, but of course we will let them know as soon as they can through our facebook page.
If we collect more than one million signatures, then the commission will offer a hearing to the organizers at the European Parliament in Brussels. The EU commission will then have to accept or refuse the demand expressed by citizens, and give justifications for it.
We admit, our demand is very modest – and the results highly hypothetical. But one has to start somewhere. In France, the ECI has inspired and empowered groups of citizens who are now working hard to create a broader social movement. Being at the front line of this, I can assure you: nothing would have happened without such a challenge like the ECI.
And this is why I completely agree with Philippe Van Parijs, who said in a message of support to the organizers: “Whatever the exact wording and whatever the number of signatures that will ultimately gathered, it is good to seize this new opportunity for spreading the idea of basic income far beyond the circles in which it has been thought about so far. The challenge presented by the mobilization of a civil society spread over 27 countries and speaking 23 different official languages is huge. But is is definitely worth taking on.”
The road may be long, but the way is clearly free. Let’s make it a historical campaign!
by Yannick Vanderborght | Nov 22, 2012 | Research
The proposal of a basic income is intensely debated internationally as well as in Germany. While – up to now – the debate mostly concentrated on normative issues the discussion on pathways to a basic income is still at the beginning. The edited volume with contributions in German and English will contribute to the emerging debate on most likely and realistic pathways to a basic income.
In the first section of the book the debate on pathways to basic income is located in a broader framework of social reform strategies and developments. In the second section different proposals on first steps towards a basic income are discussed. The last section deals with model projects and social experiments. The volume includes contributions of Stephan Lessenich, Philippe van Parijs/Yannick Vanderborght, Dirk Jacobi, Sebastian Duwe/Milena Büch/Nicholas Bardsley, Ulrike Herrmann, Katja Kipping, Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn, Franz Segbers, Götz Werner/André Presse, Susanne Wiest, Johannes Terwitte and Guy Standing.
Full references: Dirk Jacobi/Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn/Bildungswerk Berlin der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (eds.), 2012, Wege zum Grundeinkommen, Berlin: Bildungswerk Berlin der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
The book is available for free download.
https://www.bildungswerk-boell.de/downloads/Wege_zum_Grundeinkommen.pdf
