by Kate McFarland | Mar 1, 2019 | News
The Basic Income Lab at Stanford University has extended its deadline for applications for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the 2019-20 academic year.
Applications are due March 8, 2019.
The postdoctoral fellow will carry out extensive research on basic income experiments, study ongoing pilot designs, review the findings of cash-based programs throughout the world, culminating in a comprehensive report Universal Basic Income: Learning from the Global Evidence Base, which is to be launched at an international event in 2020.
Applicants should have research interests and experience in universal basic income or related cash transfer programs, poverty eradication, or social and economic inequality, and must hold a PhD in economics, political science, public policy, psychology, sociology, or related fields.
See the full description of the position here: https://basicincome.stanford.edu/fellowships/postdoctoral-research-fellow.
Established in February 2017, the Basic Income Lab (BIL) promotes research on the design, implementation, and impact of basic income and related policies, and stimulates discussion on the topic between scholars, policymakers, nonprofit organizations, think tanks, and others.
BIL has collaborated with the National League of Cities to create the toolkit Basic Income In Cities: A Guide to City Experiments and Pilot Projects. At present, BIL is preparing to launch an online platform that will provide a detailed visual representation of existing research on basic income.
Image Attribution: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
by Kate McFarland | Jun 9, 2018 | News
“An Intellectual History of Basic Income”
University of Cambridge – January 14, 2019
A team of three University of Cambridge scholars have released a Call for Papers (CFP) for a conference on the history of the idea of basic income, to be held at the university on January 14, 2019.
Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) co-founder Philippe van Parijs is scheduled speak at the closing event. Other invited speakers are to be confirmed.
The conference, titled “An Intellectual History of Basic Income,” is being organized by Daniel Zamora (Department of Sociology), Peter Sloman (Department of Politics and International Studies), and Pedro Ramos Pinto (Faculty of History). Zamora is currently co-authoring a book (with Cambridge PhD candidate Anton Jäger) on the intellectual history of basic income with a focus on the US and continental Europe. Sloman is meanwhile writing a book on the history of the concept in the UK, and recently published an article in the Journal of Social Policy on the idea in the last century of British politics.
As described in the CFP, the interdisciplinary conference will investigate the “story of how the basic income proposal has achieved global prominence,” with a specific focus on “the contemporary history of basic income from the 1960s to the present,” including “how UBI proposals have been developed and received in different ideological and political contexts, and the ways in which the concept has been shaped by changing attitudes to welfare provision, income inequality, and the future of work.” It will also explore “how an idea that emerged as a response to a specific situation in industrialized countries in the 1960s and 70s has become an important tool for rethinking development policy in the global South,” alongside broader themes related to changing conceptions of global poverty.
The organizers invite abstracts for papers on the above themes (to be submitted by September 1, 2018). Selected authors will be invited to develop their conference papers into full chapters for an edited volume to be published with an academic press.
For more details, including submission guidelines, see: https://inequalityandhistory.blogspot.com/2018/05/call-for-papers-intellectual-history-of.html.
Reviewed by Patrick Hoare.
Photo: Founding meeting of BIEN.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Zamora, Sloman, and Jäger are coauthoring a single book; this has been corrected.
by Karl Widerquist | May 17, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This summer and fall I’ll give at least ten talks in seven cities in six countries including the United States, Canada, France, Scotland, Finland, and Lithuania. Here’s the information I have on each talk so far:
Friday, May 18, to Sunday, May 20, 2018, keynote speaker at “New Directions in Basic Income Workshop,” the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, presenting “The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments,” Sunday, 1:00 – 2:30pm.
Thursday, May 24, to Sunday, May 27, 2018, participant at “North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress,” McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, presenting “The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments,” Saturday 10:30 – 12:00pm, Room 1305/07.
Wednesday, June 13, Paris, France. Guest speaker at Science Po, presenting “Freedom as the Power to Say No.” Details TBA
Thursday, June 14, to Saturday, June 16, 2018, participant at “The Economic Ethics Network Conference.” Invitation only. University of Paris, presenting “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.”
Sunday, June 17, Talk to Basic Income Activists on “Basic Income’s Third Wave,” Paris, France, details TBA
Monday, June 18, 3 to 5pm, guest speaker presenting “Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
Friday, July 20, 2018, presenting “A Critical Discussion of Basic Income Experiments: The Devil’s in the Caveats,” Glasgow, Scotland
Friday, August 24 to Sunday, August 26, 2018, participant at Basic Income Earth Network Congress, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland, presenting “Microsimulation Analysis of the Cost of Basic Income in the United Kingdom” (joint presentation with Georg Arndt).
Thursday, August 30, to Saturday, September 1, 2018, participant European Network for Social Policy Analysis Conference, Institute of Sociology and Social Work, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania, presenting “Basic Income’s Third Wave.”
Thursday, October 18, to Saturday, October 20, 2018, participant at Association for Political Theory, Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Pennsylvania, presenting, “The Prehistory of Private Property, Part 1: The Myth of Appropriation.”
by Andre Coelho | Apr 28, 2018 | News
“There will always be hope”. Picture credit: Alex Gi.
On the 11th and 12th of October 2018, the University of Freiburg, in Germany, holds an interdisciplinary Conference titled “Basic Income and the Euro-Dividend as Sociopolitical Pillars of the EU and its Member Countries”. It will be organized by the Department of Economic Policy and Constitutional Economic Theory and the aim is to gather relevant leading researchers and thinkers in Europe to discuss an EU wide approach of a basic income.
In Europe, the public debate about a universal basic income (UBI) is usually a national one. In recent years a European version of a UBI has attracted more and more attention – primarily pushed by the suggestion of Philippe Van Parijs titled a “Euro-Dividend”. This conference aims to shed some light at pros and cons of a EU wide UBI regulation and its relation to national approaches from an interdisciplinary perspective. Both UBI approaches shall be analyzed and discussed with respect to justice, economic and migration effects, legal aspects, creation of solidarity in the EU, and political viability. On the first day, the conference will address general issues about UBI, while the schedule of the second day contains EU-related concepts just like the Euro-Dividend.
Papers are invited from areas such as Philosophy, Sociology, Political Science, Law, and Economics and even Technical Sciences addressing one or more of the following topics:
o UBI and arguments of freedom, solidarity, social and gender justice
o Changing time allocation and shifting time sovereignty, voluntarism and creativity
o Legal aspects of UBI
o Experiments and microsimulations on UBI’s level and impact
o UBI in the digital age / Robots, AI, Labor, and the Welfare State
o The European Pillar of Social Rights, UBI, and Euro-Dividend: Creating European
Solidarity
o Financial feasibility of a UBI and financing concepts of a Euro-Dividend
o EU labor market effects and migration (on international level and within the EU)
More information at:
The “Basic Income and the Euro-Dividend as Sociopolitical Pillars of the EU and its Member Countries” Conference website
by Karl Widerquist | Dec 24, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This audio is of talk I gave on why we need a Universal Basic Income. I gave the talk for the “Sydney Ideas” series in August of 2017, and I’m particularly happy with it. It summarizes the reasons I think are most important, and I think I did a relatively good job of delivering it. It discusses how Basic Income removes the judgment and paternalism that pervade the world’s existing social welfare systems, and why doing so is so important not only for people at the bottom but also for the average worker. It also briefly addresses how to craft a realistic Basic Income proposal, how much it costs, options for paying for it, and evidence about what it can do.
Following the lecture the audio file includes a question and answer session where I’m joined by Dr Elizabeth Hill, Chair of Department of Political Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, and Professor Gabrielle Meagher, Department of Sociology, Macquarie University.
