by BIEN | Feb 12, 2017 | News
Anthony Painter (credit to: RSA)
Anthony Painter, Director of the Action and Research Center at the RSA, in an editorial article described an experiment in the middle of the 1970s in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada. As Painter describes, there were “statistically significant benefits” to the physical and mental health of the participants in the experiment, which was in the British Medical Journal.
The experiment involved the provision of “a basic income—a regular, unconditional payment made to each and every citizen” of Dauphin. A complete statistical analysis was not provided for several decades because of a loss of political interest.
Painter claims inequality and poor health outcomes is a well-established finding with the mechanism is less known.
Read the full article here:
Anthony Painter, “A universal basic income: the answer to poverty, insecurity, and health inequality?“, The British Medical Journal, December 12th, 2016
by Kate McFarland | Jul 13, 2016 | News
Lord Robert Skidelsky, professor emeritus of political economy at the University of Warwick, has written a new column on universal basic income (UBI).
Skidelsky describes support of UBI as derived from “a somewhat uneasy mix of two objectives: poverty relief and the rejection of work as the defining purpose of life.” Those who promote basic income on the basis of first objective do not necessarily question or critique the value of paid employment; they simply deny that there are enough stable and well-paying jobs to expect people to rely on them to obtain an adequate income. Proponents who take the latter tack go further to argue that we should not want more work:
As technological innovation causes per capita income to rise, people will need to work less to satisfy their needs. Both John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a horizon of growing leisure: the reorientation of life away from the merely useful toward the beautiful and the true. UBI provides a practical path to navigate this transition.
According to Skidelsky, “Most of the hostility to UBI has come when it stated in this second form.”
Skidelsky goes on to recommends UBI as a way to “check the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial” and “ensure that the benefits of automation go to the many, not just to the few.”
Robert Skidelsky, “A basic income could be the best way to tackle inequality“, The Guardian, 23 June 2016.
Image: Robert Skidelsky (Oct 2014) CC Jwh
by Andre Coelho | Dec 18, 2015 | Research
Robots for good. Credit to: 3D Printing Industry
Machines are getting better and better at performing work that was or still is performed by humans. This article starts with Stephen Hawking’s thoughts on the issue, which are that without proper wealth distribution, society will become a distopia in which an elite will have everything and all the rest almost nothing. Conor Lynch argues that, although current social developments show higher and higher inequality, nothing is for certain, which means that current capitalism could give way to a new social paradigm where basic income plays a central role.
Conor Lynch, “Stephen Hawking sobre el futuro del capitalismo, la desigualdad…y la Renta Básica” [“Stephen Hawking on the future of capitalism, inequality…and the basic income”], Sin Permiso magazine, October 26th 2015
by Citizens' Income Trust | Dec 4, 2015 | Opinion
Benjamin K. Sovacool, Roman V. Sidortsov, & Benjamin R. Jones, Energy Security, Equality, and Justice, Routledge, 2014, xix + 213 pp.
This book is a recent product of the Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment’s research on how to ‘equitably provide available, affordable, reliable, efficient, environmentally benign, proactively governed, and socially acceptable energy services to households and consumers’ (p.xvii). The aim of this book is to describe current inequalities and injustices associated with energy use and make suggestions as to how greater justice might be both understood and achieved.
As the first chapter points out, we are drifting ‘into a future threatened with climate change, rising sea levels, severe pollution, energy scarcity and insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and a host of other dangers’ (p.1), and our desire for low-cost and reliable energy conflicts with the pursuit of the sustainable and cleaner environment that we also wish and need to experience. The chapter provides enough evidence for these statements.
Chapter 2 is more philosophical, and concludes that ‘energy justice’ should be based on two principles:
- a prohibitive principle: ‘energy systems must be designed and constructed in such a way that they do not unduly interfere with the ability of any person to acquire those basic goods to he or she is justly entitled’ (p.42);
- and an affirmative principle: ‘if any of the basic goods to which every person is justly entitled can only be secured by means of energy services, then in that case there is also a derivative right to the energy service’ (p.46).
Because a sustainable and clean environment and a stable climate are basic goods to which we are all entitled, the prohibitive principle requires that the damaging externalities associated with energy production must be minimized.
Anyone who doubts the environmental and climate damage being done by the ways in which we currently produce energy should read chapter 3. The damage done to health by fuel poverty in the UK and elsewhere, and the volatile and increasing cost of carbon, are described in chapter 4 – John Hills’ Getting the Measure of Fuel Poverty ought to have been referenced. In chapter 5 the socio-political dimension is described in terms of corruption, authoritarianism and conflict, which are as problematic in the so-called developed world as in the developing world. Chapter 6 charts the disproportionate way in which the poorest communities fail to benefit from energy production and at the same time suffer the most from production methods. Chapter 7 describes widespread environmental damage and finds that the extension of conventional technologies can only increase inequality.
The impression left by this book is of ubiquitous environmental damage and fuel inequality, that is, damage and inequality in the world’s wealthiest as well as in the world’s poorest countries. The answer is not new technologies: the answer is to ask who is affected by investment and pricing decisions, and to factor in the externalities when relative costs are calculated. If this is done, then solar and wind power turn out to be both more just and cheaper than nuclear power or fossil fuels.
The problem is therefore a political one – a fact that could have been made more explicit in the book’s concluding chapter.
This book should be read alongside Fitzpatrick and Cahill‘s Environment and Welfare: Towards a Green Social Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), in which Tony Fitzpatrick suggests that a citizen’s income could encourage economic growth and therefore greater environmental damage, and James Robertson proposes a carbon tax to fund a citizen’s income, which would encourage renewable energy production at the same time as promoting income justice and therefore fuel justice. It should also be read alongside the recent Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report Energy use policies and carbon pricing in the UK which recognizes that an increased carbon tax is needed on domestic gas use and that this would require poorer households to be compensated. The acknowledged problem here is that such a compensation package would require an increase in means-testing, which would impose additional disincentives, administrative complexity and income volatility on those households least able to cope with them.
Energy Security, Equality and Justice lacks a bibliography, which is a pity, and its index is sketchy, which will make the book difficult to use as a reference volume. But it is a well argued and carefully evidenced discussion of issues vital to our future and it deserves a wide audience.
by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 25, 2015 | News
A report (pdf) by Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicts that unemployment due to technological innovation could eliminate nearly half of all jobs in the United States. This will further exacerbate income inequality, as the potential $7 trillion in new wealth from technology will likely be exclusively controlled by powerful individuals.
The report worries that this will lead to monopolization and impede innovation. While in the past, predictions of technology destroying human employment have been wrong, the article points out that in the 1930s technology made horses obsolete and the same could happen with humans.
The article suggests a Universal Basic Income as a potential solution to avoid this pitfall.
Jack Smith, “Even Big Banks Think Robot Automation Will Lead to Further Income Inequality”, Mic, November 11, 2015.
