by Patrick Hoare | Nov 20, 2017 | News
Reverend Dr William Barber. Credit to: Flickr
Reverend Dr William Barber of Birmingham, Alabama, has spoken of the need for a “breakthrough” in the civil rights movement in the US, citing an acceptable development being a point where “every poor person has a guaranteed income”. During his tour across 14 states, Rev Barber talked of the need for a “moral revival across the US”, and hoped that the content of his talks would lay the foundation for a new ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ – a 1968 campaign which attempted to push Congress into passing an economic bill of rights including a package of equitable funding, funds for poor communities and a guaranteed income.
Though one’s interpretation of a “guaranteed income” can differ significantly from a Universal Basic Income (UBI), given the context of Rev Barber’s comments in referring to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and therefore to Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior’s repeated reference to “guaranteed income” in speeches and writings at the time, the form of “guaranteed income” being referred to would seem to share many qualities with the standard conceptions of a UBI. In his book published in 1967, ‘Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community’, Dr King dedicated a whole section in Chapter 5 (titled ‘Where Do We Go’) to his idea of why a “guaranteed income” was necessary, and what it would look like.
The premise of his discussion was based on the need, as he saw it, to abolish poverty on the grounds that “if democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking”. Though he accepted that the causes of this poverty are the indirect consequence of multiple social evils – limited educational opportunities; poor housing; fragile family relationships – Dr King said that the solution could not also be indirect, since in order to be effective the programs required to improve those situations sufficiently would have to be coordinated and comprehensive, which, to date, has never been the case. In addition, he stated “that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty”. His conclusion, therefore, was that the simplest approach to the issue was also the most effective, which was to provide people with a direct guaranteed income.
Other than a guaranteed income being a way of addressing the moral quandary we face as a society, Dr King pointed out that “we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of proceeding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished”. He also talked about the psychological benefits to the measure, including a flourishing of individual dignity, the ability for people to seek self-improvement, and a reduction in the friction experienced in personal relations “when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated”.
Dr King did expand on the specifics of what such a program should look like, stating two key conditions he deemed indispensable in ensuring that the guaranteed income remained a progressive measure. The first of these was that a guaranteed income should be pegged to the medium income of the society in order to avoid perpetuating welfare standards. The second was that the level of the income should be dynamic, such that if the income of society grows so does the payment. This latter measure would be necessary to avoid the system becoming regressive.
More information at:
Oliver Laughland, ‘Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr, a new civil rights leader takes center stage’, The Guardian, 25th October 2017
Matt Orfalea, ‘Martin Luther King Jr. on the record for a Guaranteed Income’, Medium, 9th January 2017
Mat Orfalea, ‘MLK on Guaranteed Income: In his own words…’, Medium, 11th November 2015
by Andre Coelho | Nov 16, 2017 | News
Íñigo Errejón, at the 7th Basic Income Simposium.
On the 2nd of November 2017, the city of Zaragoza (Spain) welcomed the 17th Basic Income Simposium, organized by Red Renta Básica (the Basic Income Network affiliate in Spain), which lasted for three days.
In the first day, during the afternoon, the documentary “In the same boat” (trailer here) was screened, followed by interventions by David Casassas (Social Theory professor at the University of Barcelona and member of Red Renta Básica), who explained the normative and technical aspects of basic income, Txema Sánchez (member of Red Renta Básica and the Nulla Política Sina Éthica collective) and Rudy Gnutti (“In the same boat” film director), who claims there is no Left nor Right basic income.
On the second day, the meeting started with a roundtable on how to finance a basic income. This was moderated by Fernando Rivares (from the Zaragosa municipality) and debated by Jordi Arcarons (PhD in Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona), Lluís Torrens (Director of Social Rights Planning and Innovation of the Barcelona municipality), alongside Raúl Burrillo and Jorge Bielsa Callau (Economy professor at the University of Zaragosa). Although it has been shown that a basic income can be financed for the Spanish reality, the financing problem has been a widely debated issue. In the afternoon, Pablo Yanes (CEPAL research coordinator in Mexico) presented his take on what has been developing as the basic income inclusion in the Mexico City Constitution.
On a second roundtable, moderated by Violeta Barba (Aragón Congress president), Daniel Raventós (PhD in Economic Sciences and president of Red Renta Básica), Íñigo Errejón (PhD in Political Science and Congressman for Unidos Podemos political party), Amparo Bella (historian, feminist and Congresswoman at Aragón by the Podemos political party) and Pedro Santisteve (from the Zaragosa municipality) debated around the bold theme “unconditional basic income”. At this moment, Santisteve approaches basic income from a constitutional right perspective. According to him, these rights shall be “locked” inside the constitution, so they cannot be tramped with by any one government. Amparo Bella then introduced basic income under a feminist perspective. This way, basic income shall value all kinds of labour, stressing that work is much more than a job. In his turn, Íñigo defended the upgrade of the welfare state, where basic income shall be the backbone of the needed constitutional reform. Finally, Raventós has pointed out that knowing about the basic income proposal is a crucial step towards supporting it, and that no one can really be free unless he or she has their material needs met.
On the last day, in the morning, the last roundtable took place. This was named “30 years of minimum income: the alternative, basic income”. The discussion then circulated around the failure to eradicate poverty through these (conditional) minimum income schemes, and around the possible alternatives. The debate was moderated by Luisa Broto (from the Zaragosa municipality Social Services) and had the presentations of Mari Carmen Mesa (Spokeswoman to Aragón Social Workers union), Sonia García (CCOO Social Action Secretary) and Julen Bollain (Euskadi Congressman and Red Renta Básica member). Mar Carmen started by showing reservations about the implementation of the basic income scheme in the short term. In the same vein, Sonia García rejected basic income in favour of a (conditional) minimum income scheme (of 430 €/month) which has been presented to the Spanish Congress by CCOO and UGT. However, Bollain argued that in fact conditional minimum income schemes have failed all around the world in the last few decades. He claimed that none of such schemes ever eradicated poverty, but still introduced unnecessary stigma, bureaucracy and administrative costs. He thinks that society must overcome these targeted, conditional policies and fight for the universal, unconditional rights that basic income represents.
More information at:
Jullen Bollain, “El XVII simposio de la Red Renta Básica: ¿punto de inflexión? [The 17th Red Renta Básica Simposium: an inflection point?]”, Red Renta Básica, November 12th 2017
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 15, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in December 2001.
As I was putting this newsletter together, the National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced that the U.S. economy has been in recession since last March. The delay in the diagnosis is nothing unusual because a downturn is not considered a recession unless it lasts for a significant period of time. But the point at which a recession is recognized is a good moment for reflection on the performance of the economy. Even though the United States is in a recession right now, the long-term performance of the economy as a whole over the last 20 years has been quite good. The expansion that ended in March lasted for exactly 10-years—the longest in U.S. history—and it came after a short and mild recession in the early 1990s, which followed a long, stable expansion during the 1980s. The last 20 years have had the most stable growth in U.S. economic history. The growth was not particularly rapid, but there is a lot to be said for stability. The economy may decline by a few percentage points over the course of the recession, but an economy that grows by 2 or 3 per year during economic expansions can weather the occasional downturn. Thus, although there are worrying signs on the horizon (such as a persistent trade deficit and a high and growing level of indebtedness), the verdict on the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole over the last 20 years has to be largely positive.
Good performance of the economy as a whole does not necessarily mean that it has performed well for all individuals. If one judges the success of an economy by the well being of its less advantaged individuals the performance of the U.S. economy has been terrible over the last 20 years. Real wages at the low-end of the wage spectrum have stagnated or even declined slightly. Usually, poverty declines slowly during expansions and increases quickly in recessions, but there has been no lasting progress in reducing poverty since the early 1970s. The official poverty rate has been stuck in a range between 11% and 15% since the early 1970s. There was an extremely rapid decline in poverty in the 1940s and again in the 1960s, but it has not been repeated since. The ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were marred by frequent recessions, but individuals across the economic spectrum were able to count on gains during the expansions that would more than make up for losses during recessions. The ’70s were a period of instability in which the less advantaged lost ground, and since then there has been no return to the progress experienced earlier.
Why were the experiences of the less advantaged so different during the good economic times of the ’80s and ’90s than they were in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s? The difference is largely one of government policy. The earlier period saw the GI Bill, the fruition of Social Security, the expansion of AFDC and Medicare, increases in the minimum wage and the creation of Food Stamps and Medicaid. Since the early 1970s, many of these programs have been canceled or allowed to lapse or have been effectively cut by not being adjusted for inflation. These programs were not the best possible programs for fighting poverty, but they were all we had, and rather than being reformed, they’ve largely been cut with little or nothing to replace them aside from TANF, which seems to make welfare so unpleasant that jobs without living wages are preferable. TANF has been declared a success simply because it has reduced the number of families on welfare. The success of TANF should be measured instead by whether it reduces poverty and whether it makes children healthier and happier and whether it helps them grow into better-adjusted adults. Should it be any surprise cutting nearly every program designed to aid the poor should slow or stop the progress we had been making toward the reduction of poverty? Something else is needed if poverty reduction is our goal.
During recessions, people often voice opposition to direct anti-poverty policies, arguing that the best way to help people is to get the economy moving again. During expansions, the argument is usually to keep it moving or to get it moving faster. They say, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and everyone benefits from economic growth. But the lesson to learn from the last twenty years of economic expansion is that these arguments are simply false. The incomes of low-wage workers stagnated during the good economic times of the ’80s and ’90s because policy turned against the redistribution of income, but they increased during the good economic times of ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s because policy favored increased redistribution of income. There is no inherent mechanism in a capitalist economy to ensure that everyone will share in the fruits of economic growth. I believe that a basic income guarantee is essential to ensure that everyone shares in our economic success. This and other strategies for better distributional equity will be discussed at the First Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. I invite you to join us.
Karl Widerquist, New York, NY, December 2001.
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 27, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay is reprinted from OpenDemocracy, 18 October 2017
Support for unconditional basic income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that some might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, activists have been floating the plan — and other forms of a basic income guarantee (BIG) — for over a century. It experienced a small wave of support between 1910 and 1940, followed by a down period in the 40s and 50s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 60s and 70s, followed by another down period in most countries until the early 2000s. Today’s discussion began to take off around 2010 and has increased every year since. It is UBI’s third, and by far its largest, wave of support yet.
Pessimists might think that this wave will inevitably subside, just as prior movements did. History, however, doesn’t always stick to patterns. In a 2016 interview with Wired, Barack Obama predicted that “we’ll be having [the UBI debate] over the next 10 or 20 years”. He may be right.
The history of the UBI movement shows that today’s political context points to an increase in support. More and more activists – from more and more diverse political formations – are calling for UBI. They can now cite evidence from a number of empirical studies, conducted over years in a variety of locations, to demonstrate the programme’s benefits.
Rising inequality and an economic system that seems designed against ordinary people has radicalised voters in recent years. Nationalist-populist movements are trying to redirect this frustration against immigrants and people of colour, but the left can take advantage of this moment to build support for UBI and create a truly universal welfare state.
The first wave
UBI dates back more than two hundred years, but enough people were discussing it in the early twentieth century to constitute a wave – or at least a ripple – of support. The idea was still new enough that most advocates had little knowledge of each other and all tended to give their versions of the programme a different name.
Some supporters of Henry George’s land tax suggested that proceeds be distributed in cash. Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf both praised the idea in their writings without naming it. In 1918, Dennis and E. Mabel Milner started the short-lived ‘State Bonus League’, and, in 1920, Dennis Milner published what was likely the first full-length book on UBI, Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. James Meade and G. D. H. Cole – who coined the phrase “basic income” – wrote favourably about it in the 1930s.
Major C. H. Douglas called it a national dividend and included it in his ‘social credit’ programme. In 1934, the Louisiana senator Huey Long debuted his ‘share the wealth’ programme: he seems to have come up with the idea on his own, as there’s no evidence he was influenced by the ideas spreading around the United Kingdom in those years. The plan might have served as the basis for his presidential run had Long not been assassinated in 1935.
These early UBI advocates managed little direct influence on legislation. In 1935, the Social Credit Party of Canada took power in Alberta, but did not move to implement Douglas’ proposed dividend. After World War II, most welfare states adopted a conditional model, which provides assistance only to those who fit into some category of need, such as old age, disability, unemployment, single-parenthood, absence of market income, and so on. Truly universal programmes are few, far-between, and small. Discussion of a full UBI programme largely fell out of mainstream political discussion for more than two decades.
The second wave
The second wave took off in the early-to-mid 1960s. At that time, at least three groups in the United States and Canada began promoting the idea. Welfare rights activists mobilised people frustrated by inadequate and often demeaning conditional programmes. Futurists saw UBI as a way to protect workers from disruptions to the labour market caused by the computer revolution. Finally, many prominent economists – some leftists and some from the burgeoning libertarian movement – agreed that a basic income guarantee represented a more effective approach to poverty than the conditional and means-tested programmes of the New Deal era. BIG would simplify and streamline the welfare system while also making it more comprehensive.
The mainstream media first noticed UBI around the time Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty”. Politicians and policy wonks began taking up the idea, and the Canadian government released several favourable reports on the “guaranteed annual income” in the 1970s.
For a short time, many saw some kind of guaranteed income as an inevitable next step in social policy: a compromise everyone could live with. Leftists viewed it as the culmination of the welfare system that would fill in the remaining cracks. Centrists and conservatives saw it as a way to make the social safety net more cost-effective.
In 1971, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill introducing a watered-down version of the ‘negative income tax’ (NIT), yet another variant of the idea. It missed becoming law by only ten votes in the Senate. The next year, presidential nominees from both major parties endorsed some form of BIG: Richard Nixon supported NIT, and George McGovern UBI. Interestingly, the fact that both nominees’ held essentially the same position made BIG less of an issue in the campaign than it might otherwise have been.
Nixon’s NIT never got another vote. It died partly because it had no groundswell of support outside of the welfare rights movement. None of its proponents made a serious push to sell the proposal to the public at large. Even BIG supporters viewed Nixon’s version with scepticism, seeing it as a top-down, centralised initiative. Letting it die cost the politicians who backed it very little, so they allowed the idea to fade from public discourse.
While neither the United States nor Canada introduced full UBI programmes, the second wave of UBI support had some major successes. Both countries conducted five implementation trials, and the United States created or expanded several more limited programmes, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Alaska Dividend. These policies not only helped a lot of people, but their relative success provided convincing evidence to push social programmes toward universality.
Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dramatically changed the conversation around the welfare state in the early 1980s. They successfully vilified recipients as frauds. As a result, many people stopped talking about how to expand or improve the welfare system and started talking about how to cut it. The left largely went on the defensive in response, and stopped criticising the conditional model.
In 1980 the United States and Canada cancelled the last of their implementation trials, Canada stopped analysing the data it had spent years and millions of dollars collecting, and for the next 30 years mainstream American politics engaged in virtually no discussion of any form of BIG. Fortunately, as I discuss below, the results of those trials eventually re-emerged as important proof of the idea’s potential.
Between the waves
While discussion waned in North America, it slowly grew in other parts of the world. In 1977, a small Dutch party started a trend when it endorsed UBI in parliament. The next year, Niels I. Meyer’s book Rebellion from the Center launched a substantial wave of support in Denmark. The proposal gained traction in other countries as well, including post-apartheid South Africa. For the most part, however, discussion of UBI programmes took place outside the political mainstream, where its slight upward trend attracted little notice.
Academic attention began to grow in this period, especially among European scholars. The Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reinvented UBI in 1982 with no prior knowledge of the previous waves. He eventually connected with other supporters – including Guy Standing, Claus Offe, Annie Miller, Hermione Parker, and Robert van der Veen – and together they established the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) and convened the first BIEN Congress on 4-6 September 1986. From this point on, UBI, rather than NIT, dominated the political discussion of BIG.
The academic debate grew substantially between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, especially in the fields of politics, philosophy, and sociology. In 1984, supporters launched the first national UBI network in the United Kingdom; by the time BIEN changed its name to the Basic Income Earth Network 20 years later, activists had organized at least two dozen national groups.
Yet UBI stayed mostly outside the political mainstream, making the movement feel more like a discussion group than a political action network. Even the activist contingent concentrated more on discussion than action, believing that they had to increase public awareness before they could implement their proposals. This feeling actually distracted supporters from how much their movement had grown.
The third wave takes off
The third wave of basic income activism hit the mainstream in 2015 or 2016, but volunteers at Basic Income News had been noticing substantial increases in media attention since at least 2011. And in some places, the crossover began even earlier than that.
In 2006, at the BIEN Congress in South Africa, Zephania Kameeta, then the Lutheran Archbishop of Namibia, slammed his fist on the podium and announced, “Words, words, words!” UBI conferences had seen many passionate calls for action, but they were almost always accompanied by appeals for someone else to take action. This time, the speaker already had an action plan under way: the Namibian BIG Coalition was raising funds to finance a two-year implementation trial.
This project coincided with a smaller one in Brazil, and a much larger one followed in India in 2010. These tests attracted substantial media attention and helped inspire the privately and publicly funded experiments now under discussion or underway in Finland, Scotland, Canada, the United States, and Kenya.
At about the same time that Kameeta spoke in Cape Town, a national UBI wave was beginning to swell in Germany. Prominent people from across the political spectrum –Katja Kipping, Götz W. Werner, Susanne Wiest, and Dieter Althaus – all began to push different basic income proposals in a very public way.
Unlike most previous waves of support, this one inspired broad activism, which has only grown. In 2008, UBI networks in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria jointly organised the first International Basic Income Week, which has subsequently grown to become a worldwide event with actions taking place as far away as Australia and South America.
The financial meltdown and subsequent Great Recession sparked a new climate of activism. Public attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and inequality, and UBI supporters suddenly had a much better environment for activism.
Two citizens’ initiatives got under way in Switzerland and in the European Union in the early 2010s. In the former, Daniel Häni and Enno Scmidt successfully collected enough signatures to trigger a national vote. The EU movement eventually recruited organisers in all member states. Although neither ultimately won, they built an infrastructure to support activism across Europe and brought a tremendous amount of attention to the issue, which in turn sparked additional activism and attracted more support.
One of the contemporary movement’s most important features is that support now comes from many different places and from people who do not necessarily work together, follow similar strategies, or adhere to the same ideology. Indeed, today’s activists are motivated by a number of different issues and sources.
Mirroring the 1960s futurism discourse, many advocates point to automation and precariousness as reasons to enact the programme. High unemployment, the gig economy, and the pace of automation threaten large segments of the labour force. Whether or not the need for human labour is decreasing, the labour market has become extremely unstable. Labour leaders, activists, academics, and tech entrepreneurs have all proposed UBI in response, making this issue one of the prime drivers of recent interest in UBI.
For the first time, environmentalism has played a major role in this activism. Two of the most popular proposals for combating climate change are the tax-and-dividend and cap-and-dividend strategies, both of which involve setting a price on carbon emissions and distributing the revenue to all citizens. Other environmental groups, such as “Degrowth” and Canada’s “Leap Manifesto,” see UBI as a way to counteract excessive consumption and the depletion of resources.
Two additional proposals, called ‘quantitative easing for the people’ and ‘helicopter money’, are pushing central banks to stop giving money away to private banks and start giving it directly to every citizen. They believe their proposal would constitute a more equitable and effective economic stimulus programme. Although they do not use the term, distributing money directly to the people is essentially a temporary UBI.
Some private groups are trying to bypass central banks entirely by creating non-government digital currencies, and some of these groups have announced their intentions to provide their users with a UBI in the new currency.
At the same time, new evidence has convinced people of UBI’s radical potential. Evelyn Forget, of the University of Manitoba, received grant funding to analyse the data from Canada’s NIT experiment. She released her findings in 2011, just as new implementation trials and citizens’ initiatives were getting off the ground. They received a great deal of press attention and helped spark new interest in the programme in Canada and beyond. This increased media attention has built the movement even further. Seemingly every major news outlet has published something about UBI. And, in a sure sign of the movement’s newfound strength, opponents have started attacking it.
A couple of years ago, it remained unclear whether the third wave would match the size and reach of the second. Now the answer is obvious: grassroots support and international media attention are larger than ever, and the third wave represents the first truly global basic income movement. According to Philippe Van Parijs, “the big difference between the first two waves and the third one is that the third one quickly became international”. The first two did not extend beyond the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but the third wave already involves major campaigns on all six inhabited continents.
How far can the third wave go?
The left should recognise that past UBI movements entered mainstream conversation when people worried about inequality and unemployment, and then subsided when public attention turned to other issues or when other ways of addressing poverty became dominant. The second American wave ended in the United States not in the prosperous economy of the mid-1980s but in the troubling times of the late 1970s, when right-wing politicians convinced large numbers of people that redistributive programmes had become overly generous.
The biggest danger to the third wave appears to be growing nationalism. If politicians can convince voters to blame immigrants for growing inequality, they can effectively distract people from mobilising around better social policies.
Despite these dangers, basic-income activists should feel encouraged: each wave has been larger than the last. With every resurgence, UBI has had a more developed proposal than the time before, and activists have been better prepared to address people’s concerns about poverty, inequality, and unemployment. The fact that academics had continued to study and activists had continued to promote UBI during its unfashionable years gave it recognition as a viable alternative when inequality once again became a dominant policy discussion.
Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the conditional welfare model has been growing for over a century. This system is based on the idea that everyone who can work should and only those who really cannot work should receive help. All others are undeserving.
Conditionality has not made the welfare state more generous or less vulnerable to attack. Many who work still live in poverty, as do many who receive benefits. Opponents have successfully chipped away at welfare for more than 40 years, largely by vilifying any group that meets the conditions for need.
The conditional system also hurts workers. By making welfare requirements so stringent, we have made all employees more dependent on their employers. Dependent workers have less power, making it harder to demand good wages and decent working conditions. It is no coincidence that middle-class income has stagnated over the same period that the welfare system has declined. Despite enormous productivity gains, most workers now work more hours for less pay.
Conditional welfare systems are built on paternalistic assumptions that force people to prove their right to survival. UBI might not always gain steam as fast as it has in the last few years, but those shortcomings won’t disappear, and they provide a good reason for people to look seriously at UBI.
-Karl Widerquist, writing in Doha, New Orleans, and Morehead City in 2016 and 2017
Occupy Oakland “We are the 99%” protests in 2011.
