by Jason Burke Murphy | Jul 16, 2018 | Opinion
Interview with Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang
By: Jason Burke Murphy
[Note from Jason Burke Murphy. This interview took place on June 11th, 2018. Yang took time out of one of his presidential campaign rallies and fundraisers to speak with me. I describe the rally in US Basic Income Guarantee Network’s blog. After I stopped recording, he expressed his hope that supporters of basic income would get behind his campaign early. Andrew Yang was then, and still is as of this writing, the only announced candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.]
Murphy: How did you first hear about basic income?
Yang: I think I heard about it first for sure from Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots. I heard about it before then in articles but Martin Ford’s book made an impression. Andy Stern’s book Raising the Floor cemented the idea while coming from a different angle. Martin is a technologist and Andy is a labor leader. Stern’s book clinched it for me. I found myself coming to the same conclusion. Now basic income could no longer just be about technologists over-hyping the near-term progress of automation. Stern is someone who has a firm grasp on the labor market in the US.
Promotional for Andrew Yang’s book presenting his argument for Basic Income, Medicare for All, and “human capitalism”.
Murphy: How did friends and family react to your decision to run for President?
Yang: Oh, my parents were initially anxious and worried about it. Friends had a range of reactions. One cried tears of joy and has been immensely helpful. Others were skeptical. I will say now that support is very strong with friends and family. When you tell someone about a decision, they might react one way but when the decision is made in public, then they have a different attitude and stance.
Murphy: Joseph Biden, a possible candidate, has explicitly rejected basic income. It seems like other presumptive candidates have stayed quite distant. Why do you think that is the case?
Yang: I think in Joe’s case—and I read his comments—he is stuck in this framing of a subsistence model in which value is tied to showing up at an hourly waged job. His explicit argument for why basic income is a bad thing is that people need work. What he doesn’t realize is that universal basic income is pro-work. It is pro doing work that people actually want to do. Joe is stuck in an era when we thought that, if someone had a certain amount of money in their pocket, they would want to do nothing at all. That is an old welfare-era framework that I think was never true. [Laughs.] In Joe’s mind, that relationship is still there. Other Democrats are going to resist making commitments in this direction because they are afraid of being painted as “socialists” or economically unsophisticated. In truth, it requires a degree of economic sophistication to understand basic income and to see how it would be great for our economy and our people.
“Other Democrats in my opinion are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy… They do not realize that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Do you think as people hear about basic income, they are going to think more about economics?
Yang: What happens right now is that people are stuck in this scarcity mindset in which they ask how we can afford it. Won’t it cause rapid inflation? Won’t it make purchasing power go away? None of that is true! [Laughs.] So, other Democrats, in my opinion, are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy. They are stuck thinking that the money would be “gone” and we would need to “go get more of it.” They are not realizing that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens. The vast majority of the money would be spent in our regional economy every day. The Roosevelt Institute’s estimates that it would create four and a half million new jobs and grow the economy by two and a half trillion.
Murphy: I really liked that paper. For one thing, it is methodologically very cautious. For another, I liked basic income before I knew it would be that good.
Yang: Yeah, their projection was based on it coming from deficit spending and they posited a lower impact if it was paid for by taxes. Whereas, I am very confident that, simply by shifting money to the hands of the people most likely to spend, you would induce economic growth. One thousand dollars a month in the hands of a really wealthy person does absolutely nothing. It just becomes a line item somewhere.
Murphy: Money in the hands of the wealthy, if spent at all, goes into the streets that are already looking pretty good.
Yang: It just stays in someone’s account. When money goes to anyone in the bottom half of the US population then it will be spent on things that will manifest themselves in local businesses in the community.
Murphy: One of the reasons I support a basic income is that I grew up in Arkansas. A region like the Delta is invisible politically. I just know that very few other approaches are going to get anything down there.
Yang: That’s right. Virtually nothing else.
Murphy: If someone has a big plan for education and job training, I am not against those, but I doubt it will actually get to the neighborhoods I worked in there in Arkansas.
Yang: You are right.
Murphy: How are you looking to fund a basic income?
Yang: The main way we need to fund it is through a value-added tax. A VAT is an efficient way to raise revenue, it taxes consumption, which is what we ought to be taxing instead of something like work and labor. We are the only industrialized economy that does not use the VAT. We would be harvesting the gains of automation and new technologies much more effectively than income-based taxes.
Murphy: There are a few other proposals like a carbon tax or a tax on income above the one percent. What do you think of these other proposals that pop up?
Yang: I think some proposals try to finesse something that cannot be finessed. We try to find a way to fund a basic income without causing any pain or friction. I support taxing carbon and we will tax rich people. But we are talking about re-organizing the way that value is distributed in our society. So we can’t think that we can do that in some elegant way that leaves most people untouched.
[Note from Murphy: Yang’s platform also includes a financial transactions tax, which we did not discuss. There is also a call for an end to the current favorable tax treatment for capital gains and carried interest. That is not listed as funding for a BI.]
Murphy: Thinking of that, sometimes supporters present basic income as a reformist measure and sometimes others present it as a very radical transformation.
Yang: You can put me in the “radical transformation” category.
“Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: You are the first candidate [for the Democratic Presidential nomination] to announce. This is giving you access to curious people. I saw an article in which you were meeting with New Hampshire Democrats. That is a new crowd for basic income. How are these meetings working for you?
Yang: They are interested in what I have to say. Most of what I have to say revolves around the fact that we are going through the greatest technological and economic shift in human history. That is objective. That is data-driven. People find it very resonant. They sense that this is true. Most of our conversations are around what is happening with technology and labor and the economy and job polarization—all things that we are experiencing right now. One of the dangers of basic income right now is that it can seem like we are debating different versions of utopia. When we turn someone’s attention to the depth and breadth of our current social problems, we can talk about what can actually make a difference. The situation you saw in Arkansas is becoming more and more true for more and more Americans. May I give some of the stats that I feature in my book and in speeches?
Murphy: Absolutely.
Yang: Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.
Murphy: We often use words like “self-employed” and “side hustle” for people who are…
Yang: Who are being exploited by a billion-dollar tech company that says “be your own boss” but pays you nickels on the dollar.
“We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards thing that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Not long ago, we would hear people say that we need to choose between universal health care and basic income. Your platform simply has both. It seems like we are having a similar moment with a jobs guarantee. We keep hearing that we need to pick one or the other. It seems like many good people think that basic income crowds out something they are very concerned about.
Yang: That is an unproductive approach. We should not get lost in dueling utopias. If you are for universal health care, you should think about how much one thousand dollars a month will open up access to health care. If you care about gender equality and you want to see women avoid abusive workplaces and domestic situations—a thousand dollars a month could be vital. Let’s start with the cash because that will be the easiest thing to get done.
Opening page of Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign website.
Murphy: Your platform has multiple issues alongside basic income.
Yang: Definitely. I am all for single-payer health care and we can certainly do better with health than we are at present. That said, even after I win the Presidency, giving everyone cash will be easier to execute than universal health care. Andrew Stern points out that the government is terrible at many things but it is excellent at sending cash to many people promptly and reliably.
Murphy: Any ideas on how a basic income would affect foreign policy?
Yang: In the end, I think basic income will rationalize our spending, make us more optimistic, and smarter about our resources. Our citizens may end up less likely to want to lose a trillion dollars on military interventions worldwide.
Murphy: You call your worldview “Human Capitalism”. For some people “capitalism” refers to markets. For others, it refers to the domination of wealthy people.
Yang; First, I would agree with those who think that our current version of capitalism and corporatism is why our disintegration is happening. I am not a fan of continuing down this road. We have to reverse course as fast as possible. Reversing course, however, does not mean abandoning the things that have made capitalism effective. The problem is that our measuring sticks are all wrong. There are more effective ways to do things. Markets can help find the effective ways. We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards the things that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward. This is bad even for the so-called “winners” in society. Studies have proven that the winners in an unequal society are more anxious and depressed than the winners in a more equal society. This is enlightened self-interest. I can sympathize with anyone who thinks that “capitalism” is a dirty word. The first line in the description of human capitalism on our website is “Humans are more important than money.”
Murphy: Thank you for speaking with me between events. Is there any last word you want to make to readers?
Yang: I am hoping to get support soon from the basic income community. I have been campaigning for about four months. We are drawing from their ideas. We hope we can see them sign up because we need their support.
You may disagree with some item on my platform but I hope you can see that the direction and the spirit are right and that we can push a genuine conversation about basic income. We could really use their passion. We need a movement that recognizes that our community is disintegrating and that basic income is an essential answer. I hope that basic income activists can believe in this campaign.
Photo of Jason Burke Murphy (Left) and Andrew Yang (Right) shortly after this interview.
[Note from Murphy. Some portions of this interview were edited slightly for clarity as we moved from spoken word to written word. No content was altered. Thank you to Andrew Yang for taking time out of his campaign to speak with me. Thanks to Tyler Prochazka for proofreading.]
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 11, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. I reproduce it here because the original source is not available online.
“The written word is alive…” but the book is dead, at least the bookstore anyway, and so is the CD, the record store, the VCR, and the video rental shop.
Recently I heard that record stores will soon manufacture CDs on the spot. It’s already possible for record stores to access a database through the internet that has the digital code for any CD in existence. All retailers need to do to generate a CD on demand is “press” the disc, laser print the cover, and insert both into a jewel box. Instead of walking around a store looking at covers, you’ll sit at a computer terminal browsing cover art on a screen and listen to music samples on headphones.
And this is only the beginning. It would not be much more difficult to put together a do-it-yourself CD using a home computer and a color laser printer. Assuming your computer will have enough memory, you can download the music (the digital information) from a central database onto your hard drive, and, if you feel like, you can print the cover–or maybe not. Just call it up on the monitor whenever you want. Or, you could sign up for an online service that lets you play any song ever recorded without having to download the information onto your hard drive. The digital information would come from that same database directly to your speakers. Many people take their activities in the realm of music downloads over to sites like Avoidcensorship which gives them access to Pirate Bay proxies so they can tap into a near limitless supply of on-demand music and film.
The CD as we know and collect it today is dead. By this same logic, the video is dead; newspapers and magazines are dead; the book is dead. Barnes & Nobles, Blockbuster Video, the corner newsstand-all dead.
As the bass player for one of New York’s most underground bands, my immediate reaction was, “Great, this means it will be as easy as to get world-wide music distribution as it is to post something on the internet.” Right now an artist who wants to get his work to the public has to find someone to risk the cost of inventory and shipping. The internet would eliminate these costs. Every book, movie, and song ever made will be compiled on one big database and available to anyone with the hardware and the cash. 
Since most of these books, movies, and songs will be crap, how will you find what you like? Aside from randomly browsing through the voluminous compost heap of information, I can think of two ways: hype and word of mouth. Hype–corporate advertising–creates superstars; word of mouth creates the underground scene. Hype has and always will be around, but the internet, by reducing barriers between artists and listeners, will help the small-time, underground, niche-market, limited-appeal, sub-alternative artist, or whatever you want to call it, flourish.
But then I thought about it some more. “Sure it’ll be great for subversive artists but what will all of this accessible information do for society at large?” Long ago people were born into a culture; now you choose your culture. What is the impact of each person customizing his or her cultural diet? I call it the specialization or the niche-marketization of culture.
In the stone age, the tribe was isolated from each other and members of a particular tribe knew the same songs and stories and shared common knowledge, experiences, and reference points for communication. More recently, a few centuries ago, every European who could read had read the same books: the Bible, the Greek Classics, and the major local authors.
Today we all read different things–the sports column, romance novels, sci-fi–you name it. There’s so much information available that you can’t possibly learn it all, so we go after whatever catches our attention. Whatever niche you choose has its own shared knowledge, vocabulary, and even a canon of literature. I bet there are more Star Trek books in print today than all books on all subjects in print 500 years ago. But, the more we pursue our niche, the less we share with people in our immediate vicinity.
Some Jesus-Freak-Sci-Fi-Geek translated the Bible into Klingon; his professor might not even know (or care) what Klingon is. A teenage girl in Turkey killed herself when she heard about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Her neighbor who spends his time studying the Koran–like the guy sitting next to me on the subway–probably never heard of Kurt Cobain. A thirty-year-old single woman producing the local TV news in Minneapolis probably has more in common with a newswriter in Seoul, Korea, than with the family in the apartment downstairs.
Just when it looked like global communication would join the world into one monolithic culture, we’ve started to split into smaller cultures again, this time based on what you know instead of where you live.
New age, environmentalism, Gay rights, Socialism, entrepreneurialism, right to life, right to death, turning fifty-ism, natural law, wicken-ism, and thousands of other categories–there are people who make these things their identities, while their next-door neighbors know nothing about them. These categories may not define a person as much as race and nationality do, but they’re getting more important all the time. The buffet is open: Choose your culture.
None of this is good or bad; it’s a fact of life. Regional cultures were the result of isolated communities. Niche-culture is the result of a world with abundant information and sophisticated communication. In some ways, it’s better. We can learn about each other and learn from each other–we don’t have to retreat into our own niche-cultures or lose all sense of shared experience. We don’t have to evolve into a society of strangers. We need a balance between the niche and the community–some common denominators that everyone gets. But what? The first task is to get people from all niches to agree on what these denominators might be. I’ll start by posting this question on the net.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Andre Coelho | Jun 10, 2018 | News
The Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) group, based in New York, is preparing a large-scale cash transfer study in Liberia, particularly focusing on rural farming households. Cash transfers will be delivered by GiveDirectly, and also coordinated with USAID, to be rolled out for at least two years. GiveDirectly has been responsible for other large scale unconditional cash transfer programs, namely in Kenya, and is applying the randomized controlled trial method to the Liberian study as well.
There have been other cash transfer programs in Liberia, such as the Cash for Work on Vulnerable Youth in Liberia, but “no positive psychosocial or economic impacts were observed”. This program, due to its conditionality, “was found to be undesirable and faced implementation challenges”. It was also managed by Innovations for Poverty Action, now innovating by participating in a basic income-style cash transfer study.
IPA and GiveDirectly are, therefore, recruiting senior researchers, program managers and office administrators. To this end, J-PAL – Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab – is also helping with providing ways to draw top human resources to this task. Already onboard are principle investigators Jon Robinson (University of California, Santa Cruz), Jenny Aker (Tufts University), Alan Spearot (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Shilpa Agarwal (India School of Business).
More information at:
Kate McFarland, “US/Kenya: GiveDirectly launches UBI experiment”, Basic Income News, November 17th, 2017
by Guest Contributor | May 28, 2018 | Opinion
A step to a future of solidarity and sharing
For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women lived in tribal groups, practicing mutual cooperation and solidarity. In the present we live in capitalism, competing among ourselves, driven by individual ambitions to ‘have’. This is not doing us any good. However, we can see it as a painful but necessary civilizational phase, a means of developing the capacity to produce all that’s necessary for the material life of all. The age of capitalism has only lasted 200 years. A better future could be drawn with the re-establishment of an economy of solidarity between people. We propose a process of systematic, automatic and unconditional transfers of money between people, from those who have more to those who have less. We call it Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
The Past – from Ancestral Economy to Capitalism
Human societies in which all men and women have lived on Earth since people here exist, and until the formation of the first sophisticated civilizations, were tribal groups. They functioned through cooperation and solidarity between their members in tasks such as obtaining and distributing food, building shelters and family dwellings or taking care of community assets; tasks that today we would call ‘economic’. In fact, over hundreds of thousands of years of human presence on Earth the whole economy was cooperative and supportive. And it was sustainable then.
After the emergence of the first sophisticated civilizations and empires – about 6,000 years ago – things began to change, and the forms of economic organization put into practice came to vary from then. Today, however, all the economic diversity that has existed over those 6,000 years is virtually nullified, and a unique model has once again consolidated. It is called capitalism, and it has been going on for about 200 years.
While the ancestral economic mode was based on solidarity and cooperation between people, on a harmony between them and nature and on an orientation towards the mere satisfaction of their needs, capitalism is characterized by competition among peers, by the predation of the Earth and by an orientation of its agents towards unlimited material accumulation. Both models are hegemonic, each in its own time. But that’s all they have in common; as for everything else, it is difficult to find more opposing realities.
Can, like its ancestral homologous form, also this present ‘state of the art’ in economic organization – capitalism – last for hundreds of thousands of years? It doesn’t seem possible, given the condition in which it left us humans, and the planet, after only 200 years. And yet, despite its deeply dark sides, an important merit can be attributed to capitalism: with the demand for accumulation and profit it gave us machinery, techniques and knowledge that can now allow us to have the resources for the material comfort of all. This is only a possibility and not inevitable because although these machines, techniques and knowledge give us the capacity, they alone do not guarantee that we will use it. However, capitalism cannot possibly make any sense in history unless the immense price it charged and still charges us eventually results in the actual extinction of the material scarcity from the face of the Earth. Only then will it be seen as a process of rising human civilization to a higher level, albeit with great suffering.
Thus, the great question of the present is how to accomplish the potential that capitalism offers us, to free ourselves from the ‘fatality’ of material scarcity. The simple progress of the economy, as we have it, does not seem to be the way. Reality shows us very clearly that the mere growth, without any change or innovation in the logic and processes of the present economy, will never raise the condition of all, although it may greatly improve it for some people. Neither the strengthening of the so-called welfare state, in its traditional, bureaucratic, expensive and life-controlling form, can do more than mitigate poverty. Traditional welfare will never eliminate poverty and it charges from its beneficiaries a price in dignity and in humanity that the more unnecessary it becomes, the more intolerable it gets.
No, capitalism does not inherently have a mechanism to guarantee essentials for all. Let us resurrect from our ancestral economic way its essential element: solidarity among people.
A Future – the UBI-AA
Solidarity among people is the essential idea of the alternative distribution model of the resources generated in society we will talk about here: the Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
To show what it is and how it works we will turn here to an explanation given elsewhere:
The UBI-AA is a revenue redistribution process designed to operate monthly, providing automatic and unconditional transfers among citizens, from those who have higher incomes to those with low or no income at all. Built, supported and leveraged by them, the process will invite the participants to take responsibility and engage in their communities, which will reinforce them.
It works in two stages:
1) As it is acquired, each member of the community discounts to a common fund – a ‘UBI Fund’ – a proportion of their income, at a single and universal rate;
2) At the end of each month, the Fund’s accumulated total is equally and unconditionally distributed by all members of the same community.
This simple process of treating everyone equally puts those who in each moment have above-average incomes to deliver to the UBI Fund more than they receive from it, and those who have below-average incomes would receive more. Thus, the process operates a joint distribution between the participants of part of their individual incomes. In addition, to reduce inequalities between them, this solidarity between peers creates an unconditional guarantee of income for all, that is, an Unconditional Basic Income.
It follows from the action of the UBI-AA process the loss of available income by some and its gain by others. For those who lose money, it is important to limit the loss, while maximizing the gain for the rest to ensure broad acceptance of the policy.
The demand for this double result should not, however, mean a devaluation of the possibilities of mutability of all individual positions. With the passage of time and with the exercise of the options that the process itself will open to the participants, the situations of income “winners” or “losers”, in which each of them will at each moment be, should always be seen as circumstantial.
To make possible its intended effects, the implementation of the UBI-AA should be accompanied by the release of its participants from the burden of personal income tax. Such tax relief will compensate them for the contributory effort required by the UBI-AA process, although, for those above a certain level of income, such compensation may turn out to be merely partial.
Abolished the personal income tax, the moderation of loss for citizens with higher incomes and, at the same time, the material significance of the gains to those in the opposite condition, will be possible if the rate of contributions to the UBI Fund is set at an optimal level, balancing the two outcomes. [1]
A more complete description of the UBI-AA process, as well as a simulation of the financial effects it would have produced, both in individual citizen spheres and in the State budget, hypothesizing it in force in Portugal in 2012, can be seen here.
UBI-AA differs from most of the traditional redistributive processes in operation because it is unconditional; and from most of the unconditional alternative processes for being a construction of common citizens instead of the policy of a government, a central bank or any other ‘power’.
What is proposed with the UBI-AA is not directly the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all. The proposal is the institution of an alternative form of organization of the economy in its distributive side. This will be accomplished with the income distribution process described above; a process that will favor the rehabilitation of values such as solidarity and voluntary cooperation between people, and of which the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all will be a corollary.
We hope that may contribute to the flourishing of a new culture, less marked by the centrality of material goods. Who knows if making everybody’s access to essential material resources as simple as the possibility of breathing, will not end up instilling in us the same attitude towards those resources – money and things it buys – as that we have towards the air we inspire: no matter how valuable it may be to us, we do not quarrel with each other for it; we use the quantities we need. Accumulating it would no longer be necessary.
Such cultural shift would certainly be a great step forward for us, human beings, and very good news for Earth.
[1] This stretch is an English translation from Projeto de um RBI – Local – Solidário – Voluntário, [Project of an UBI – Local – Supportive – Voluntary], by Miguel Horta, 2017, available (in Portuguese) from: https://pt.scribd.com/document/341205904/Projecto-RBI-Local-V-2017.
Written by Miguel Horta
by Andre Coelho | May 23, 2018 | Research
Political Quaterly has just published a series of papers devoted to Tony Atkinson’s Participation Income (these will appear in print later in 2018, but all articles are available online at the moment). These have been presented and discussed at the 2017 BIEN Congress.
Participation Income has been an idea introduced by Tony Atkinson in the 1990’s, which can be summarized as follows (by Jeremy Williams):
“The participation income is a compromise that overcomes both of these issues [definition of citizenship and “money for nothing” moral hazard]. Rather than a true universal and non means-tested payment, it would be conditional. To receive the basic income, people would need to be participating in society. That could be formal work, it could be unpaid work such as care. It could be volunteering, or education, and of course people who were disabled or unable to work wouldn’t be excluded. Anyone who was contributing to society in some way would be eligible to enjoy its rewards.”
More information at:
Stirton, Lindsay, “Symposium Introduction: Anthony Atkinson’s “the Case for a Participation Income””. The Political Quarterly: 1–2, May 3rd 2018
Jurgen De Wispelaere and Lindsay Stirton. “The Case Against Participation Income — Political, Not Merely Administrative”. The Political Quarterly, May 7th 2018
Heikki Hiilamo and Kathrin Komp. “The Case for a Participation Income: Acknowledging and Valuing the Diversity of Social Participation”. The Political Quarterly: 1–6, April 30th 2018
Cristian Pérez Muñoz, “Participation Income and the Provision of Socially Valuable Activities”. The Political Quarterly: 1–5, May 4th 2018
Almaz Zelleke, “Work, Leisure and Care: a Gender Perspective on the Participation Income“. The Political Quarterly: 1–7, May 13th 2018
