by Jason Burke Murphy | Aug 16, 2017 | Opinion
I hardly ever respond to anything in writing if I am not remembering it at least a year or so later. The piece I am remembering is an episode of the podcast Freakonomics called “Is The World Ready for A Guaranteed Basic Income?” I recommend it as an introduction.
I am going to give you a quote and then I want you to keep reading.
Sam Altman runs Y Combinator, a technology venture capitalist firm that has had some great successes and is now interested in funding social science research that will include basic income. Here is the quote, which came up during his interview in this podcast episode:
Maybe 90 percent of people will go smoke pot and play video games. But if 10 percent of the people go create new products and services and new wealth, that’s still a huge net win.
We are back to the couch potato. This character appears in a lot of objections to basic income. Altman concedes that there will be couch potatoes. He just thinks that is a good price to pay to get more entrepreneurs, even only a few of them. I appealed earlier for the reader to keep going because most people in my orbit would not like this quote. (If it sounds good to you, then I guess I should still urge you to keep reading.) I will explain why some will push back and why I ultimately do not.
We are starting to see increased support for as well as new sorts of negative reactions to the idea. Not very long ago, basic income advocates were often introducing the idea to specific audiences. This meant one could get away with starting where you thought the listener would react best. If you were talking to someone on the left, you might call it a “strike fund for all”. If someone is more liberal, you would emphasize that a basic income reaches people that welfare is supposed to help. With libertarian types, you start with the efficiency and non-bureaucratic character of a basic income. I have been very impressed by recent writing that emphasizes basic income’s ability to remedy asset inequality for people of color and women.
Now, I am very pleased to see more people who have already heard about basic income from someone. Sometimes they caught the wrong person for them. As we explain basic income, we will need to separate the policy (giving everyone an unconditional cash grant) from the project (which can range from left to right).
A quote like Altman’s can swing a listener in different directions. I know this from my social media work. I imagine people running different movies in their head. Some hear “new products and services and new wealth” and visualize start-ups and think it all sounds great. Others try to imagine a world working well with 90 percent of people not doing anything anyone else wants them to do and they just can’t see that working out well. Others hear this and worry that basic income is part of a larger scheme to organize our lives around Silicon Valley capitalists. To them, Altman seems to overly glorify the tech entrepreneur. Other writers are more desperate in labeling basic income a “neo-liberal plot”, which would make you laugh if you went to one of our Congresses. We would not want to merely swap one set of capitalists for another.
I have not met Sam Altman. His other statements show that he also finds basic income interesting because it directly answers a moral mandate to make sure people are clothed, fed, and sheltered. I highly recommend the rest of the podcast. My objective here is to explain why I think we ought to look at this quote charitably. I will show in what way I think his quote is true. I also want to propose an alteration that makes it much more palatable for those I see reacting negatively.
No One is Saying Ninety Percent of Society Will Hit the Couch
Altman is not talking about a whole society in which only 10 percent work. He is saying that even if we lose some work-time to lame leisure (pot and video games), we will make it back even if only 10 percent start up new enterprises. Nor is he saying that he knows that we will get one successful start-up for every nine lives lost to the coach. He is only saying that losing nine to the couch would be an acceptable price to pay if we gain a start-up, which would offer something someone wants and would also be offering jobs. This is very plausible.
Most people with a basic income will live a lot like they do now. They will have a more stable income. They will worry less about many of their friends and family. They will have a plan if they need to train for a job or pay bills between jobs. This cuts into the number of people who would choose the couch. Work can be a place where we get recognized for our talents and for our cooperativeness. And jobs pay money. In fact, you can still count on a basic income if you take on a job. And you can count on it if you change your mind.
The problem now is that employees have very few options when workplaces go sour. Basic income creates one option (work for no one) and enables people to survive while they search for and train for other options. This will increase pressure on workplaces to improve.
I used to be suspicious of most rhetoric surrounding markets. I think that was because so much of it ended up with a conclusion like “Therefore, government should do less/nothing.” I have come to value markets more and more. Now, I want them for everyone. A basic income secures the capability to participate in markets for everyone. There are many sections of the United States that get very little government or market attention. That would be less likely with a basic income in effect. You will also see more start-ups under a UBI because failing doesn’t risk losing everything. Most entrepreneurs now come from the upper one percent of our society. Whole communities aren’t going to see much startup soon if we wait for the elite to try to make money there.
Add Caregivers and Organizers To The Mix
Someone organizing a non-profit, a political organization, or even an informal social scheme fits under Sam Altman’s phrase of “new products and services and new wealth.” He is not confining his hopes to technological startups.
Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, written in 2000, lays out the loss of social networks and the harm that has caused most Americans. These can be voluntary associations, political clubs, fraternal organizations, or sports leagues. Participation has declined as work-hours per household has increased. This means that many will look for alternative ways to interact with like minded Americans, especially when it comes to sporting events.
There is a strong link between organizational affiliation and many different metrics for happiness or meaningfulness. We also see more affiliation in communities that have more political power and that generate more market activity. (There is likely a causal loop there. Lack of power and lack of market options may often precede losses in organizational depth. And a lack of organizational depth may well often precede losses in money and power.) Social-capital comes hand in hand with capital-capital.
Michael Lewis and Eri Noguchi apply Putnam’s work, and combine it with survey data, to give us strong reasons to think that we would see improvements in civic networks as well. Declines in civic participations can be shown to coincide with an increase in work hours. People who value civic participation will have an option to do so.
If you want to know how a basic income will benefit society, let’s make it clear that we are including “organizers” within our understanding of “entrepreneur”. Our culture is one that has to be reminded of this. Once we expand our understanding, we can look around and see how many people are trying to participate in institutions that organize in pursuit of truth, justice, and beauty.
Examples will help here: church committees, symphony boards, rotary clubs, sports leagues, poetry circles, craft guilds, environmental organizations, identity-based youth groups, identity-based cultural organizations, music bands, theater companies, unions, political organizations, lobbying organizations, etc. This list could go on a very long time.
At this point, I want to share a little bit of what I learned as a community organizer in Arkansas for ACORN. Organizing is difficult. There are many ways in which it is not like entrepreneurship at all. You aren’t selling anything. All organizations have trouble finding this skill set. It is also difficult to get the resources together for full-time organizing. We would often hire someone who loved the mission of the organization but had to leave for pretty small increases in money. It might also prevent the loss of organizers to the for-profit sector.
Please note: I have noticed that a large section of the US internet is trying to malign the very term “community organizer” but my argument includes organization of groups I disagree with.
The ratio of organizers to members goes beyond the one to nine ratio that Altman imagines. About six of us at Arkansas ACORN served around 5,000 households if you are only counting dues payers. The community that responded to our work was larger than that. There were meetings every month. People debated goals and tactics. Political leaders were interviewed or protested. Organizations that despised us did the same things, though often with more funding from fewer people.
Every time I hear the term “couch potato” brought up as some sort of nightmare case for basic income, I remember that I sat on thousands of couches, urging people to get active, to get involved with their community’s decisions. I know that with a basic income, we would have had more organizers and more active members. Rival organizations would have had the same benefit. We will live in a more democratic place.
I am still involved in political work, even though I am not employed to do it. I also have been published as a poet and as a photographer, though not paid. You will find a lot of people working on magazines, readings, and websites in which the true, the good, and the beautiful are debated. A lot of people can see how to raise some money doing cultural, social, or political work but they can’t get to a decent level. A basic income would generate audiences for artists, philosophers, preachers-good and bad. A thriving art world is full of disputed art. A thriving philosophical culture will have disputed philosophical projects. We will live in a more interesting place.
Norman Rockwell “Freedom of Speech”
Finally, we should look at the decision to care for a family like we would a “start-up”. The “caregiver” has started a “career” that works for many people like a vocation. For each caregiver, there is at least one other person, usually more, benefiting in a meaningful way. Economists often do not count care for children and elders unless someone is formally paid to do it. A basic income would enable people to say no to employment if someone they love needs them. We will live in a more caring place.
In fact, Robert Putnam shows us in his research, as do Michael Lewis and Eri Noguchi in theirs, that the “stay-at-home” mom was often a civic association organizer as well.
More markets, more culture, more democracy, more care. This looks to be well worth investing 3% of our GDP and letting a few people stay home.
When I read the comments and notes that come with all basic income articles, I can see that some people would worry about people not working because of basic income. Basic Income enables people not to work. Kate McFarland points out that a basic income enables people to say no to all social useful activity. But we are far away from that. Some people will live incorrectly. Many people live incorrectly now. Basic income is a good bet for increasing socially useful work.
- More entrepreneurs means more people are offered employment.
- More organizers mean more people are being invited to venues where what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful are debated and plans are made.
- More caregivers mean more people are taken care of.
Therefore, most likely, for every couch potato, we will have better reasons than ever to get off the couch.
About the author:
Jason Burke Murphy teaches philosophy and ethics at Elms College in Western Massachusetts. He serves on the board of US Basic Income Guarantee Network and recently presented at their North American Congress. He helps with social media for US Basic Income Guarantee Network. He has written before for Basic Income News. His most read piece so far is “Basic Income as Proposal, as Project, and as Idea.”
by Kate McFarland | Aug 6, 2017 | News
Prof. Dr. Helmut Pelzer, Professor Emeritus of Pharmacology at the University of Ulm, has passed away on July 14, aged 90. Pelzer is remembered as the inventor of the Ulmer Model, a mathematical model for calculating the design of a basic income.
In the 1990s, Pelzer’s work inspired research on basic income among faculties at the University of Ulm. The Ulmer model, which he developed in 1996, continues to influence the German basic income movement, especially the Initiative Grundeinkommen Ulm of which Pelzer was a founding member. To date, 15 scientific papers have been published citing the model.
Dr. Pelzer was also a member of the scientific advisory board of BIEN’s German affiliate, Netzwerk Grundeinkommen, and B(I)ENEFACTOR of BIEN.
His passing was announced on the Facebook page of Initiative Grundeinkommen Ulm, which posted the following note:
Shortly after his 90th Birthday (12 March 2017), the founding father of Initiative Grundeinkommen Ulm, Prof. Dr. Helmut Pelzer, slept peacefully this morning.
We will carry on his legacy by ensuring that his work gains more and more support in the 21th year of his “scientific justification for financing and realizing an unconditional basic income according to the mathematical-based Ulmer Model.”
Ute Fischer, Sascha Liebermann, and Thomas Loer have published an extended obituary on the blog of the initiative founded by Liebermann, Freiheit statt Vollbeschäftigung (“Freedom instead of Full Employment”), which can be read in full here.
Lauding Pelzer’s contributions to the basic income discussion, the three social science researchers note the uniquely versatile design of the Ulm Model: “In contrast to other calculations, Helmut Pelzer’s marginal transfer model was based on variable parameters. This makes the model particularly adaptable to design requirements, not only in Germany, but in the whole EU.”
Netzwerk Grundeinkommen also posted a short obituary on its website, concluding, “The Basic Income Movement as well as our Network mourn a scientist who fought passionately for the idea and proposal of a Basic Income.”
Thanks to Albert Jörimann and Ronald Heinrich for information and translation assistance.
Photo: University of Ulm, CC BY-SA 3.0 Jürgen Lehle
by Florie Barnhoorn | Aug 5, 2017 | News
Summer 2017,
On Thursday, July 21, the city council of Amsterdam decided that it will in no way adopt stricter local rules for its social assistance recipients, not even on paper. A large majority of the members supported a motion submitted by the chairman of the GreenLeft (GroenLinks), Rutger Groot Wassink.
The motion called for Amsterdam’s alderman for Work, Income and Participation, Arjan Vliegenthart (Socialist Party), not to lay down regulations for forced compensation in a local statute (as described below) and to launch its own social assistance experiment in September. Only the VVD and the CDA voted against it. A conflict was born.
The Participation Act, which was introduced in 2015, requires municipalities to force each social benefit recipient to make a useful contribution to society, in exchange for his or her social benefit payments. This is the very controversial so-called ‘compensation’ (Dutch: Tegenprestatie). The ‘compensation’ can be voluntary work, taking up a language training or giving informal care.
The Participation Act also requires every municipality to lay down the regulations regarding the ‘compensation’ in a local statute. This document may contain for instance punitive measures that can be imposed on a reluctant recipient. Since the introduction of the law in 2015, Amsterdam has refused to fulfill these requirements. The city does not demand a compensation from every social benefit claimant and has not recorded the necessary regulations in its local statutes. However, Jetta Klijnsma (PvdA / Labour Party), the State Secretary for Social Affairs and Employment, will only give her permission for social assistance experiments in municipalities that have fully implemented the Participation Act.[1] (See also NETHERLANDS: Design of BI Experiments Proposed.)
Consequently, Amsterdam is heading to a confrontation with Klijnsma, who insists that the municipal authorities record their local rules on paper first in accordance with the law. Only then would Amsterdam be allowed to start with its social assistance experiment.
Earlier in the week, on July 14, Klijnsma called on Amsterdam to be pragmatic by incorporating the desired ‘technical adjustment’ (i.e. regulations with regard to the compensation as stated in the Participation Act and the local legislation in case of default, mentioned above) into its local statutes: “It would be very sad, if the Amsterdam City Council misses the opportunity, because of this ‘technical point’, to execute an experiment with the social assistance program. If Amsterdam participates, wide public support will be generated and the experiments will gain more significance.”
Additionally, in an attempt to pacify the situation, she stressed that “Municipalities do not need to impose that obligation in practice, because they have much ‘freedom of policy’ in the execution of the Participation Act.”
Municipal councillor and leader of GroenLinks, Groot Wassink, refers to Klijnsma’s demands as ‘ridiculous’. He does not want to ‘give in’ due to the ‘blackmail’ of an outgoing secretary of state: “It seems that the state secretary has launched a kind of punitive expedition to Amsterdam.”
Vliegenthart, who is not happy with the politicized debate with the PvdA state secretary, is nevertheless planning to implement the motion. He wants to present the design of his own experiment in September. According to the councillor, such an experiment exclusively for Amsterdam is legally possible: “I will make it legal as waterproof as possible.” The plan will be very similar to a research proposal that the city submitted earlier to Klijnsma and which was already approved.
“According to scientific research, compulsion and coercion do not help,” says Vliegenthart, “We want to make it easier for our social benefit recipients to find a job, not to impose on them restrictive measures.” He wants to start a social assistance experiment whereby recipients, who have difficulties in getting paid work, are allowed to earn some money on top of their benefits. In this way, on Vliegenthart’s view, work would be not only a compensation for society’s ‘gift’ (i.e. the welfare payments), as Klijnsma views it, but a project that really yields something.
The Council of State has already decided that the municipalities are free to include the compensation in the experiments or not. Vliegenthart also thinks so, after obtaining legal advice. “I suppose the state secretary is wrong,” he has said. However, she can still block Amsterdam’s experiment by legal means.
Groningen (including the neighboring village of Ten Boer), Wageningen, Tilburg, Deventer and Nijmegen are the first municipalities which have been given permission to begin social assistance experiments. Since early July, another municipality, Apeldoorn, has also started a social assistance experiment directed at developing self-management skills and tailor-made solutions. The municipalities of Epe, Oss and Geldrop-Mierlo, relatively rural municipalities situated in the eastern and southern part of the Netherlands, have joined the project that is led by Apeldoorn. This experiment fits within the framework of the Participation Act. The research involves about 90 participants from Epe and 450 from Apeldoorn and receives scientific guidance from Tilburg University. The trial will run until July 2019.
Under the Participation Act, up to 25 municipalities in the Netherlands may execute experiments, with each experiment lasting two years. Nationwide there is room for over 18.000 beneficiaries between the various projects.
See also Kate McFarland in The Netherlands: Government authorizes social assistance experiments in first five municipalities.
Credit Photo: Pixabay (Amsterdam, City Hall), tpsdave.
Thanks to Kate McFarland for reviewing the article and for her enthusiasm.
1. All social assistance experiments must be approved by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. For that reason the ministry has developed a general administrative regulation (Dutch: Algemene Maatregel van Bestuur / AMvB). This document sets out the exact standards for the implementation of the social assistance experiments. See also The Netherlands: All that’s left is the action. Where do we stand with the social assistance experiments?↩
by Peter Vandevanter | Aug 3, 2017 | Research
Louise Haagh
Louise Haagh, an associate professor at the University of York and chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), argues in the June Nature that the reform is making inroads internationally today.
Nature is one of the world’s top academic journals, claiming an online readership of about 3 million unique readers per month.
At the same time, Haagh says basic income is a pivoting argument, because it helps discussions that bring about changes in individual and public policy. She also argues that basic income should not be viewed in moral terms as a compensation for economic insecurity, that such a moralistic interpretation does not do full justice to the claim that “security is important because it enhances people’s sense of control over their lives”.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, Haagh, as a life member, reflected on her own personal journey with the network:
“Basic income appealed to me then primarily as a necessary foundation for consolidating workers’ rights – and in many ways that is still how I see it, but in a broader context of rights to human development… Against this background I was struck by the sanity – the immediately obvious justification for basic income. It seemed to me evident that the most important justification was a basic humanist and democratic one – and I still think that today.”
In the Nature article, Haagh says basic income is a pivoting reform, in two ways, that together may be more important than ever:
“First, it is pivoting in relation to freedom extension because it helps to rebuild individuals’ pivot positions, through re-enabling greater differentiation between different core forms of security. Second, basic income is potentially pivoting for other institutions’ development; it creates a monetary basis and rationale for building new risk-sharing mechanisms and institutions between individuals directly and through public policy.”
More information at:
Louise Haagh, “Basic Income as a pivoting reform“, Nature, June 2017 Vol 1 Article 125
by Dave Clegg | Aug 2, 2017 | News
Scott Santens. Credit to: Singularity Bros.
Scott Santens, writer and long time UBI advocate, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum 2017, views the Alaska Permanent Fund as a foundational aspect for the funding for a Universal Basic Income – a UBI. Santens, and a growing number of people all over this planet are coming to the conclusion that something like a UBI is required in order to provide an effective counterbalance to the inequality of wealth distribution that currently plagues the world’s populations and the human ramifications of automation, robotization of the workplace.
Santens points out that, in a democracy, all citizens are deemed equal under the law and the Alaskan fund offers an excellent example of how the wealth being extracted from a communities resources must first and foremost benefit the people that comprise that community. The Alaskan fund extracts a percentage of the wealth being extracted from its resources and that money is then used to fund Alaska’s social programs as well as annually depositing as much as a thousand dollars or more into the pockets of every Alaskan citizen. A sort of pay to dig policy. That Alaskan Fund is now worth some fifty billion dollars. Conversely, in a similar but more aggressive manner, some years ago Finland was adamant that its offshore oil resources must benefit all of the Finnish people. Finland took money off the top of the oil profits and put it into what is now a trillion dollar fund that is currently benefiting everyone in Finland.
But for Santens, resource funding is only one of a nation’s assets from which a UBI can produce a revenue flow that can both enrich and empower the populations it will serve.
Santens points out that a related resource, land itself, needs to be re-evaluated. Land is not just where we build our homes, grow our crops and where our businesses and factories operate from. Land is where wealth is invested and from which wealth is extracted. People can hide their money and their wealth, but they can’t hide their land. Therefore a Land-Value Tax would provide “… an extremely progressive tax on both corporations and individuals because land is so unequally distributed towards the top.” Instead of the value of the land being decided by the owner, the land would be valued for the wealth it represents. A vacant downtown lot would then be as valued as the next door highrise and further motivate the owner to develop the land.
Secondly, for Santens a strong, social motivator for a UBI is the ever shrinking workplace where employees are increasingly being undervalued and then victimized by the threat of automation and robotization these days. Santens provides graphic representations of how the decline of collective bargaining, worker’s rights and our wages – which not too long ago had almost balanced out income distribution – have been declining proportionate to the increase in income inequality for years now. Santens understands that a UBI is not just an income supplement whereby workers canweather technological changes in the workplace, but a means whereby we finally achieve the freedom to refuse to take work that is unsafe or underpaid and, instead, achieve an equality of empowerment when bargaining with prospective employers. An equality of needs as it were.
Thirdly, Santens offers that a “annually rising intellectual property fee could be added to any intellectual property wishing to be monopolistically excluded from the public domain, with the revenue returned to citizens universally for their co-ownership of the government granting such protection.” Santens uses the example of data miners like Google and Facebook that extract information from their hundreds of millions of users for free, and then they sell that information to third party profiteers, as the reason why that information must come with a price to the data miners. When you profit from us you pay us for the privilege.
Then there is the creation of money itself. Not that long ago only the state could create new money but corporate and financial lobbyists were able to convince many governments that the commercial banks could be trusted with this responsibility. Santens wants governments to take back this responsibility and thereby put themselves back in charge of first determining the value of the money and secondly setting the value of the money significantly above the cost of producing it so as to ensure adequate funding for that nation’s UBI.
For Santens these three pillars, resource and land value funding, worker empowered bargaining and intellectual property/data mining are all keys to diminishing and, hopefully, continuing to bring greater balance to the economic inequality we see today. But Santens cautions that none of these changes will ever occur, or if they do they will not survive the reactive response of the wealthy set. For without real, effective democratic reform none of these progressive ideas will survive for long. Santens points out that “barriers to voting must be torn down, and the franchise must be expanded” if we wish to implement such radical but much needed changes to the inequality that is plaguing this planet’s populations.
