by Andrew Kaplan | Dec 28, 2016 | News
Filippo Nogarin, the mayor of the Italian coastal city of Livorno who launched an initiative to provide a guaranteed basic income to the city’s 100 poorest families in June 2016, is poised to extend the program in the beginning of 2017. A member of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), Nogarin was elected in 2014.
Nogarin’s first basic income pilot, which began in June 2016 and lasted six months, provided each of the 100 families with $537 (roughly €517) per month. In January 2017, this pilot will be expanded to another 100 families. While the intervention is designed to provide meaningful support to each family, it will reach only a fraction of Livorno’s population: the coastal city boasts over 150,000 residents.
Nogarin, like many proponents of basic income policies, sees the initiative as a fundamental way to help those in poverty without the patriarchal overtones of traditional welfare programs. “I’ve never met the recipients, and this is a hugely important point,” he said, “I don’t want them to see me as a patriarchal figure handing out charity. This is the real power of this scheme: it’s the community helping the community.”
However, critics in Livorno, such as local trade union activists, are wary of the scheme: some believe the initiative to be misguided, while others see it as misleading. Though basic income provides cash support for the targeted families, it does not offer employment. Furthermore, the initiative’s focus on a small subset of the Livorno population has been criticized as too narrow for an anti-poverty program.
Other Italian municipalities led by M5S may follow Livorno’s lead in testing a cash transfer program. Ragusa and Naples are now considering basic income trials as well, and interest in such programs has spiked.
At the national level, M5S has proposed what it calls a “citizen’s income,” though some have pointed out that this terminology could be construed as deceptive, since the party’s proposal resembles a traditional unemployment benefit more than a basic income guarantee.
More information at:
Jamie Mackay, “Money for Nothing,” VICE News, December 6, 2016.
Sabrina Del Pico, “Italy: 5 Star Movement and the confusing proposal of a citizen’s income,” Basic Income News, March 14, 2013.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 24, 2016 | News
Catherine Clifford, senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC, wrote the CNBC article announcing Elon Musk’s prediction that automation would make universal basic income (UBI) necessary. In a subsequent article, titled “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” Clifford
In the article, Clifford portrays the automation of jobs as the main motivation for UBI, continuing to highlight Elon Musk’s remark that he’s “not sure what else one would do” but implement such a policy. (This focus on automation as the sole or main motivator is arguably misleading; many historically important arguments for UBI do not turn at all on worries about automation. Unquestionably, however, the threat of technological unemployment has recently been the driving force behind much of the media attention to UBI in the United States.)
Clifford goes on to note some highlights of the global UBI movement: the impending pilot in Finland, Basisinkomen 2018’s campaign for a basic income referendum in the Netherlands, and Switzerland’s vote on a basic income referendum earlier in 2016.
One passage in the article is especially noteworthy for BIEN: Clifford discusses the resolutions on the definition of ‘basic income’ made at BIEN’s 2016 Congress. In doing do so, she emphasizes that the definition of ‘basic income’ does not entail that basic income must be replacement for other programs and social services, and she point out that BIEN recommends that it not be viewed in this way–quoting BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist as saying that UBI “is not ‘generally considered’ as a replacement for the rest of the social safety net”:
“Some see it primarily as a replacement. Others see it as a supplement, filling in the cracks. Some people who want it to be a replacement try to create the impression that it is generally considered to be so. But that’s not accurate.”
Reference
Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” CNBC, November 18, 2016.
Article reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 23, 2016 | News
Some commentators view basic income as a one-stop solution, which is meant to eliminate the welfare state. Temple University Law Professor Brishen Rogers is one basic income proponent who’s speaking out against this trend.
Brishen Rogers, Associate Professor of Law at Temple University, is a long-time supporter of a universal basic income (UBI) to mitigate poverty and economic insecurity. At the same time, he is critical of certain pervasive “tropes” in the mainstream discussion of UBI. The latter are his focus in a recent Boston Review article (“How Not to Argue for Basic Income”), in which he criticizes discourse that portrays UBI as necessitated (only) by automation and technological unemployment, and that presents it as a replacement for all other welfare programs.
Although he praises former SEIU President Andy Stern’s “willingness to challenge labor movement orthodoxy”, Rogers challenges the presentation of UBI in Stern’s popular new book on the topic, Raising the Floor, which Rogers takes exemplify this problematic discourse:
Like many others in the future-of-work debates, he [Stern] presents UBI as an urgent policy solution to a problem—massive technological unemployment—that has not yet materialized. Also like many others, he signals a willingness to cut welfare benefits in order to get conservatives on board. These tropes of mainline debate are unfortunate. They alienate progressives who might otherwise favor a UBI and cast the policy as a one-stop solution for economic inequality, which it is not.
Opposing a UBI that replaces the social welfare state, Rogers proposes that basic income be integrated into a social democratic economy, rather than laid on top of a neoliberal one:
[T]he solution is not to buy off a hoard of displaced workers armed with pitchforks. Rather, it is to fight for a UBI while rebuilding a robustly democratic state that can enact broader progressive reforms to tax and welfare policies, subject large firms to far greater oversight, and protect workers and the unemployed in the here and now. Such reforms aren’t just good policy but also good politics, since they can help rebuild faith in the state. A standalone UBI simply cannot.
In previous academic work (“Justice at Work”), Rogers has argued that a basic income would not eliminate the need for minimum wage laws, which would continue to be necessary to promote fair and respectful treatment of workers.
References and Further Reading
Brishen Rogers, “How Not to Argue for Basic Income,” Boston Review, October 31, 2016.
Brishen Rogers, “Justice at Work: Minimum Wage Laws and Social Equality,” Texas Law Review, April 26, 2014.
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
Image: CC BY 2.0 Robert Couse-Baker
by Kate McFarland | Dec 22, 2016 | News
The most recent report from the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers mentions, but rejects, the suggestion that a universal basic income be implemented to mitigate economic disruption caused by the automation of labor.
On December 20, the Council of Economic Advisers to US President Barack Obama released a report on policy responses to the threat of job loss due to artificial intelligence (AI) and other labor-displacing technologies.
The report recommends three general strategies: (1) greater investment in AI research (noting that, despite the challenges posed by technological unemployment, AI promises myriad benefits), (2) job training and education for the highly skilled jobs of the future, and (3) strengthening the social safety net, including the provision of unemployment insurance to displaced workers. In discussing the third strategy, the authors make clear that their recommendation is to strengthen the existing social safety net, rather than to replace current programs with a universal basic income (UBI).
Jason Furman, CC BY-ND 2.0 Center for American Progress
Although the main body of the report does not directly address UBI, a prominent sidebar quotes a speech made by Council Chairman Jason Furman in a White House workshop last July, in which he dismisses UBI as a reasonable response to concerns about potential technological unemployment (see page 40). In the quoted passage, Furman acknowledges that proponents of UBI have many diverse motivations, including ”real and perceived deficiencies in the current social safety net, the belief in a simpler and more efficient system, and…the premise that we need to change our policies to deal with the changes that will be unleashed by AI and automation more broadly.”
Despite this, Furman goes on to cast UBI as policy “premised on giving up on the possibility of workers’ remaining employed” — a possibility that he himself does not believe the US government should rule out. Instead, according to Furman, “our goal should be first and foremost to foster the skills, training, job search assistance, and other labor market institutions to make sure people can get into jobs, which would much more directly address the employment issues raised by AI than would UBI.” The Council of Economic Advisers’ latest report continues to affirm this approach.
President-elect Donald Trump will take office in January 2017. As reporters like April Glaser (Recode) and Mike Brown (Inverse) point out, it is unlikely that Trump’s Cabinet will be receptive to many of the proposals in the report, which call for increased funding for welfare programs and public education.
References
Complete Report
Executive Office of the President, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy,” December 20, 2016.
Media Coverage
Mike Brown, “White House: Basic Income Won’t Solve Robot Automation,” Inverse, December 21, 2016.
Klint Finley, “The White House’s Fix for Robots Stealing Jobs? Education,” Wired, December 21, 2016.
– Includes commentary from Jim Pugh of the Universal Income Project, a California-based basic income advocacy group, regarding the narrowness of the conception of UBI in Furman’s remarks.
April Glaser, “The White House says the U.S. will need a stronger social safety net to help workers displaced by robots,” Recode, December 20, 2016.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
White House in snow photo, CC BY-ND 2.0 U.S. Embassy, Jakarta
by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, announced on December 14 that the Finnish Parliament has passed the act authorizing an experiment of basic income. The experiment is set to begin on January 1, 2017.
Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health drafted the legislative proposal for the experiment in August, and submitted the proposal to Parliament after hearing public opinions on the draft proposal. The proposal elicited some controversy, in part due to the relatively small size of the basic income (560 EUR) as well as the choice of sample population, which will consist only of recipients of the country’s unemployment benefits. However, the basic design of the experiment remains unchanged: a random sample of 2,000 individuals, drawn from current working-age beneficiaries of unemployment benefits, will receive an unconditional basic income of 560 EUR per month for a two-year period. (Brief responses to the objections are included in the most recent version of Kela’s report on the experiment.)
The primary objective of the experiment is to assess whether an unconditional basic income promotes employment. Experimenters will compare the employment rate among basic income recipients to that within a control group of individuals who continue to receive traditional unemployment benefits. As Kela’s website states, the Finnish government is interested in basic income due to its potential to “reduce the amount of work involved in seeking financial assistance” and “free up time and resources for other activities such as working or seeking employment”. The experiment will also provide data used to estimate the cost of implementing a nationwide basic income.
The 2,000 experimental subjects will be chosen by a random-sampling algorithm and contacted by the end of December. Participation is mandatory for those selected.
The first payments will be distributed to subjects on January 9, 2017. Automatic payments will continue through December 2018.
More information about the experiment is available on Kela’s newly-launched web page, Basic Income Experiment 2017–2018.
Source:
Kela (December 14, 2016) “Preparations for the basic income experiment continue”
Photo (Helsinki) CC BY-NC 2.0 Jaafar Alnasser
