by Andre Coelho | Feb 3, 2017 | News
Photo: Nick Pearce. Credit to: Bristol Festival of Ideas.
In this audio recording of a conversation, in front of a live audience at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on the 17th of November, 2016, Louise Haagh, Anthony Painter, Nick Pearce and Torsten Bell discuss the pros and cons of the basic income idea, chaired by Jonathan Derbyshire.
In this talk, Anthony Painter, the Director of the Action Research Center at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), starts by describing what he calls the “gig economy” (one economy driven by tasks, not by jobs). He also refers to the great changes in the distribution of work which are occurring right now, and in the relationships with intelligent machines. According to him, people are feeling increasingly uncertain and powerless, which generates stress. That is his first argument for basic income: it is an agent for freedom. He says politics for basic income must be based in solidarity, empathy and compassion, and that basic income should not be pursued as an end in itself, but as a test and a measure for the betterment of society.
Nick Pierce, professor of Public Policy at the University of Bath (and former Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research), goes on to say that he considers himself to be a “friendly skeptic” of basic income. He recognizes qualities in the basic income movement, led by many activists, who defend tackling problems with current welfare states and pursue a vision/trend for the betterment of society; not simply reacting to problems. On the other hand, he does not agree that basic income can liberate individuals (from entanglement with the State and with the market), nor that it can liberate individuals from work. According to Pierce, work is a way to gain personal fulfillment and, as such, looks at basic income proponents as “anti-work” in a sense. He also fears basic income might lead people to disengage from one another, hence he considers it a dangerous form of dependency, particularly towards the State (seen as a provider). Pierce also points out that basic income, as a policy, will be a result of the social forces that have forged the different welfare states, hence may differ considerably from region to region. He advises basic income advocates to consider all of these regional differences, in order to propose meaningful basic income strategies.
Louise Haagh
Louise Haagh, as Reader at the Department of Politics in the University of York and co-Chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), replies that basic income is a “natural outgrowth of social democracy”. This comes despite Haagh’s agreement that, in fact, the basic income movement has failed to detail the implementation realities of basic income around the world. However, she feels it has succeeded in getting basic income out of academia and into mainstream discourse. She also points out that other welfare features, such as public education and health, do not contain as many conditions as income support (e.g. behavioral conditions), but agrees that basic income should not be seen as a replacement for organized fulltime employment. Rather, they should be seen as a complementary feature to guarantee full citizenship. She also sees basic income as a small but crucial strategic element that enables societies to think about their development with a more long-term approach.
On the critical side against basic income, Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation, says that basic income interest has appeared due to two anxieties: robot anxiety (human jobs are being “eaten” by machines) and Left Existential anxiety (real wages stagnate or dropped, plus support for the traditional Left is fading). However, he perceives this interest as waning progressively. Bell is convinced basic income is not going to happen in the UK, reasoning that robots are systematically underperforming compared to their human counterparts, and that there have never been more jobs in the UK. Moreover, he says, statistics show that part-time jobs are not rising, or have not been, since records have existed. Bell detaches the United States case from the European reality, stating that what is happening in the former is not likely to happen in the latter, and equates basic income to higher taxes and higher poverty. He further reasons that it makes no sense to give a basic income to rich people, and that generally the public does not like the idea that “you should be paid not to work”. Finally, he disagrees with a political organization system where an elite at the top own the robots and make all the money, which is then redistributed to everyone else (assumed idle).
Replying to criticisms, Anthony Painter underlines that the world of work is getting more precarious, less paid and more insecure; hence something – like basic income – must be done about it. Contrary to Torsten’s assertion, he highlights that basic income advocates usually justify basic income as a way to validate work, giving people the opportunity to contribute to society in a meaningful way. He also points out that any basic income implementation cannot possibly surpass the already tremendously bureaucratic welfare state in the UK, so it is only bound to reduce it. On the other hand, Nick Pierce disagrees that basic income is waning, but agrees that politicians are constantly searching for “big ideas” to hold on to. Finally, Louise Haagh agrees that fortunately the basic income idea is not defended on a pure philosophical ground anymore, but instead has progressed to a more hands-on, practical approach. As Nick, she also disagrees that the notion of a basic income is waning, judging from the daily activity at BIEN.
Listen to the full conversation:
Bristol Festival of Ideas, “Basic Income – An idea whose time has come?”, in association with the Institute for Policy Research and the University of Bath, November 17th 2016
by BIEN | Jan 31, 2017 | News
Credit to Business Insider
According to Chris Weller from Business Insider, Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator (the largest startup accelerator in Silicon Valley), recently voiced some of his doubts regarding people replacing their current work with other meaningful work or activities if given a basic income.
Weller reports Altman puts faith in the provision of free money to make people both healthier and happier, but isn’t betting everything on it.
According to Weller, Altman, and other Y Combinator researchers, will implement an experiment in 2017, located in Oakland, California. It will give 100 families $2,000 per month. It is to test whether free, regular money helps “people escape poverty and live healthier lives,” Weller explains.
According to Weller, experiments, in Kenya and Honduras, show this; both are underdeveloped countries. Some see work for work’s sake as an intrinsic value. Well suggests separation of work from income might not sit well with those people, but might if presented as freedom from hated work.
“Citizens could finally do the work that matters most to them rather than the work that pays the best.” Weller argued.
Read the full article here:
Chris Weller, “One of the biggest VCs in Silicon Valley explains how basic income could fail in America“, Business Insider, December 18th, 2016.
by Kate McFarland | Jan 16, 2017 | News
A group of basic income supporters in Germany is about to launch a nationwide “tour”, featuring a series of events and speakers on the topic.
BGE Tournee 2017 will commence in Bonn on January 21, with a series of lectures and discussion periods. (BGE is an abbreviation for “bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen”, the German term for unconditional basic income.)
Invited speakers comprise members of three different German political parties — the Greens (Grüne), Pirates (Piraten), and “the Left” (die LINKE) — as well as representatives from several advocacy groups promoting an unconditional basic income:
– Dagmar Partenoga of the advocacy group Attac.
– Sascha Liebermann, professor of sociology and founder of the “freedom instead of full employment” initiative.
– Ulrich Buchholz of the Bonner Initiative for a Basic Income.
– Winfried Gather, secretary of the Catholic Worker Movement in the Diocese of Cologne.
– Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn, MP, economist and member of the German Bundestag; member of the Grünes Grundeinkommen (Green Basic Income) network.
– Charly Hörster of the democratic-socialist party DIE LINKE.
– Jürgen Jack_R of the basic income workgroup of the German Pirate Party.
Following the inaugural event in Bonn, BGE Tournee 2017 will continue with events in Kiel (March 25), Eisenach (April 8), Frankfurt (April 22), and Berlin (April 29). Later events are currently being planned in Bremen, Hannover, Rostock, Stuttgart, and Würzburg.
The idea for BGE Tournee 2017 grew out of a meeting of basic income supporters in 2016 in the small city of Andernach, initiated by Claudia Laux of the German Green Party. Founding member Kostas Thomopoulos says that, at the meeting in Andernach, “we created a movement, and we hope to win the struggle for freedom and justice. Because, we think, the basic income is the right solution for everyone in the future.”
Currently, leaders of BGE Tournee 2017 are continuing to meet with other German organizations sympathetic to basic income, and hope recruit an even broader range of speakers for future events.
Post reviewed by Danny Pearlberg.
Photo (Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 jaime.silva
by Kate McFarland | Jan 6, 2017 | Opinion
One needn’t spend too much time examining the current state basic income movement to deduce that pilot projects are en vogue this year.
Finland’s two-year experiment–in which 2,000 randomly-selected unemployed people will receive an unconditional payment of €560 per month instead of the country’s standard unemployment benefits–was launched on January 1. Several Dutch municipalities are also planning experiments, expected to begin early in 2017, in which existing welfare benefits will be replaced by unconditional benefits for current claimants. Meanwhile in Canada, the government of Ontario is finalizing its plan for a pilot study of a minimum income guarantee (most likely in the form a negative income tax), also set to commence early in 2017, and Prince Edward Island is seeking federal support to run a pilot of its own. And, in Scotland, the councils of Fife and Glasgow are actively taking steps to develop basic income pilots.
In the private sector, some organizations are not waiting for government-run pilots, and have taken it upon themselves to instigate studies. Non-profit organizations like GiveDirectly, ReCivitas, Eight, and Cashrelief have launched, or will soon launch, pilot studies of unconditional cash transfers in poor villages in Kenya, Brazil, Uganda, and India (respectively). In the states, the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator has initiated a short-term pilot study in Oakland, intended to pave the way for a larger scale basic income experiment.
And this is not to attempt to enumerate all of the various individuals, political parties, unions, and advocacy groups who have issued calls for basic income pilots in their own countries, states, or municipalities. Indeed, it has become commonplace, it seems, for basic income supporters to demand pilot studies of basic income rather than, say, just to demand a basic income straight-out.
This wave of pilot projects–with more, most likely, on the horizon–should rightfully excite basic income supporters, as well as those who are merely “BI-curious”. No doubt these studies will provide many useful and interesting data on the effects of cash transfers. At the same time, however, I caution strongly against the fetishization of pilot studies. A pilot study in itself is never a final goal–such is the nature of a pilot–and such a study is neither sufficient nor (presumably) necessary to secure the implementation of basic income as a policy. Furthermore, significant dangers can arise from a narrow and myopic focus on the goal of running pilot studies.
The first problem is this: excessive attention to experimentation threatens to trigger the presupposition that the question of whether basic income should be adopted is a question subject to experimental evaluation. To be sure, even if one is antecedently convinced that a basic income should be adopted, there are many reasons for which one might run a pilot study. It could, for example, help to identify and resolve potential hitches in implementation. But, more commonly, pilot studies are framed as mechanisms for determining whether a basic income is desirable in the first place. Skeptics and supporters alike speak in terms of finding out whether basic income “works”. The experimental approach tend to invoke an instrumentalist view of basic income as policy: the policy should be adopted if, and only if, it is more effective than other candidate policies in achieving certain socially desirable outcomes.
I would contend that this instrumentalist view should be rejected. We can remain neutral on this point, however, and assert only that the debate surrounding the justification of a basic income is severely and artificially constrained by the implicit assumption that this justification rests on empirical grounds. (And, specifically, empirical grounds amenable to testing in a pilot study!) Consider, for example, the view that all individuals deserve a share of society’s collectively generated wealth, unconditionally, merely in virtue of being a member of that society. On this view, it would be entirely beside the point to run an experiment to determine whether a basic income is justified.
If individuals are owed an unconditional basic income simply as their right–whether as a share of a common inheritance, as a condition on individual freedom, or as a realization of a right to the means to survival–then asking whether basic income “works” has the flavor of a category mistake. It is a nonsensical question to ask. (Conversely, if we assume that the question does make sense, we implicitly rule out the position that a basic income is simply a basic right.)
At this point, perhaps, the activist might say, “I don’t need experimental evidence to pursue me that a basic income should be adopted. Policymakers, however, do–and basic income experiments are the best way to convince policymakers that basic income ‘works’ according to the their criteria.” But this maneuver, I believe, goes to far to countenance whatever criteria policymakers use to judge the “effectiveness” of basic income.
In many cases, the goals deemed valuable in status quo politics–increases in jobs, increases in consumption, increases in economic growth–can themselves be called into question (and, I would argue, ought to be). Yet these conventional goals are likely to guide researchers and policymakers in their selection of “success conditions” of basic income experiments. Finland’s experiment, for example, has been designed specifically to assess whether employment increases with the replacement of means-tested unemployment benefits by unconditional transfers.
Indeed, I believe that a main reason to agitate for a universal and unconditional basic income is to challenge conventional social and political values, such as (especially) the Protestant work ethic. To allow to those same conventional values to provide the metric of whether basic income “works” is to subvert this critical role of the movement.
In a worst case scenario, a pilot study could lead policymakers to categorically reject basic income on the grounds that the policy has been shown to be associated with politically undesirable outcomes, when there is reasonable dispute over whether these outcomes are genuinely undesirable. There is some historical precedent here: in the 1970s, experiments of the negative income tax were held in several US cities; however, they were widely dismissed as failures in light of reports that they showed the policy to be associated with a decrease in work hours and increase in divorce rates [1].
There is, to be sure, much to anticipate in basic income research in 2017. But our excitement and fascination at empirical studies mustn’t overshadow the basic normative question of what society should be like. It is only by keeping sight of this latter question that we can properly contextualize the demand for basic income (if any) and, in turn, the role that can be served by pilot studies (if any).
[1] See, e.g., Karl Widerquist, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” The Journal of Socio-Economics (2005).
Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 sandeepachetan.com travel photography
This article was originally written for an editorial in USBIG Network NewsFlash, but posted here instead due to word length.
by BIEN | Jan 1, 2017 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Louise Haagh (BIEN Co-Chair)
I first came across basic income in summer of 2001 when instructed about it by Workers’ Party Senator Eduardo Suplicy, at his home in São Paulo. I was doing research on workers’ rights, at the same time undertaking a survey of economic security among residents in poor and middle-income districts (published in World Development, 2011a). Eduardo famously played a key role in the drive to legalise a basic income as a policy goal in Brazil, and in presenting the extension of targeted cash grants as a step towards it (Suplicy, 2002). Eduardo was insistent that I do not go home that evening till I mastered all there was to know about reasons for basic income and how the path towards it was being paved in Brazil. Night fell. I remember enjoying more than a few helpings of food and tea, before Eduardo was satisfied I understood, after which – the gentleman that he is – he accompanied me to somewhere I could hail a cab, making sure to have a long friendly chat with the driver before we were sent off into the night.
The basic income appealed to me then primarily as a necessary foundation for consolidating workers’ rights – and in many ways that is still how I see it, but in a broader context of rights to human development. I had been working on workers’ rights and issues of economic citizenship since the early 1990s, during my PhD on Chile and later work on South Korea, both places I spent a lot of time and in which I did surveys of workers’ condition of precarity and their institutional sources of power. Against this background I was struck by the sanity – the immediately obvious justification for basic income. It seemed to me evident that the most important justification was a basic humanist and democratic one – and I still think that today.
Coming to the BI proposal from the perspective of workers’ movements, and in general the problem of the democratisation of everyday institutions, gives a different perspective on the political character of a BI reform. Above all, it makes it evident that BI intersects with other institutional and political challenges. This is something I am very conscious of when thinking about the question of how a BI might extend the social bases of freedom.
The sense in which I first found BI intuitively important was in relation to occupational freedom. I had been studying the economic liberalisation and institutional restructuring of the Chilean economy during the years of Pinochet and found that the precariousness among workers it generated, both economically and institutionally, had become embedded in a way that the new democratic regime of 1990 could not overturn (Haagh 2002a, 1999). The result, I argued (Haagh, 2002b), was that Chile deepened political rights without this leading to the expected deepening of social rights, given the absence of economic rights. This marked an evident contrast to the formation of welfare states in Europe in the 20th century, as discussed in T.H. Marshall (1949). Before I knew about basic income – during the mid-1990s – I had been working on a concept of ‘occupational citizenship’ – first in my PhD and then during a later British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford University. Essentially, what sparked my enquiry was the contradiction within liberal economic theory – so manifest in the labour market outcomes I studied in Chile – between the expectation of worker mobility– and the lack of underlying forms of economic security – in the forms both of money and services – that would make this sustainable.
I argued the atomised labour market regime not only predictably led to weak investment in skills, and thus a low-wage, low–skill equilibrium economy (Haagh 1999). In addition, it undermined workers’ freedom in a way that denied them effective citizenship within the polity at large (Haagh 2002a,b).
Having theorised a ‘gap’ in terms of absence of occupational citizenship (Haagh 1999, 2002a), it seemed obvious to me that basic income (BI) would be a necessary but not sufficient element in improving persons’ control of their lives.
There are important lessons from Latin America about the political conditions for a BI reform that are important to consider as the debate on BI is gaining force in Europe today. These are of both a practical and analytical kind. Like the case of Chile’s in part stunted democratization, the story of BI in Latin America is not a straightforward one of cash grants turning into rights (Lo Vuolo 2013). Similarly, one cannot be sure prospective transitions into partial forms of basic income through experimentation in Europe will turn into secure bastions of freedom, given the overall context of austerity and preceding roll-back of public sector protections (Haagh 2015).
It is ironic to think that Friedman – who advocated a form of constant basic security in the shape of the Negative Income Tax essentially on freedom grounds as rooted in an idea of independence – also indirectly was architect of Chile’s economic experiment.[1] The irony lies in the fact that that experiment was not complemented with a set of basic rights outside the market. On the contrary, deregulation of unions’ functions – detailed in Haagh (2002a,b) – along with other mechanisms of economic security, was paralleled with the implementation a state organised system of individual insurance, too weakly subsidized to afford real protection (Haagh 2002a, 2006). Given the underlying precarity of workers’ income streams, the individual insurance model was unable to offer effective cover.
The case of Chile shows why basic income has moral appeal, yet the basis of that appeal that lie in destabilisation, precarity, inequality, and loss of workers’ democratic rights may not be a likely political basis for a sustainable BI reform. Moreover, time has shown that in conditions of high inequality and weaker public finances, such as in Latin America, political preferences are likely to continue to be for targeted and conditional benefits (Lo Vuolo 2013, Haagh 2007, 2011a, 2013, Haagh and Helgø 2002).
The practical contradiction – as demonstrated in Chile – between the two seemingly symbiotic elements of Friedman’s advocacy, for economic liberalisation, and for basic security, is then not that surprising from a political and institutional perspective.
This is because the destabilisation of institutions that the first project entails destroys the basis for everyday cooperation within society that gives legitimacy to the second project to extend universal rights. Although Friedman did not see the Negative Income Tax as a welfare right, but as a kind of money mechanism to promote agency and ensure against basic risk, even something ostensibly simple like the NIT, depends on quite complex institutional development and political agreements. The fact that Friedman did not like the welfare state does not mean it did and does not exist in the United States. It is its more hierarchical – interclass-distributive- form that makes it more incoherent and punitive (Haagh 2012, 2015).
In short, the conditions of precarity in Latin America – now more common in the developed world – showed me why basic income is morally necessary for the market economy (as Friedman knew), but not itself sufficient for freedom in a democratic polity.
The Chilean case also showed me that the moral appeal of basic income is not the same as a political foundation for basic income reform. The two may even be contradictory if moral appeal is linked with conditions of crisis and compensation, as distinct from equality as equal standing in a more complex sense, which gives to BI a key but partial role in democratising institutions’ form.
For me it is very important to stress the compatibility of basic income and the interests of workers’ movements. The demands made by workers’ organisations historically can be argued to have played a transitional role in a process of democratisation to consolidate more universal rights. At the same time, the interests they channel in terms of institutions’ stability and democratic form represents something constant and deeper. This is important to remember today when – in a context of growing precarity in the developed world – there is a risk that the defence of basic income comes to be thought about as compensation for loss of – or an exchange for – other rights.
Coming back to that evening in 2001, it was not at all a surprise to me then that it was a Senator of a Workers’ Party advocating for basic income who was trying to convince me of the. To me, it was intuitive that workers’ movements should and would embrace the idea – at least in the context of a family of rights-based institutional changes. Having come to BI via work on unions, I was therefore quite surprised when – after going to the BIEN Congress in Geneva in 2002 – I became aware of the polemical nature of the BI debate concerning the relationship of that proposal and the established welfare state – hereunder social democracy and the union movement. Although it is painful to acknowledge, I think an important basis for that real life tension lies in the academic basis of the BI proposal as couched in fairly abstract and idealistic terms (Haagh 2011b).
In short, coming from the comparative institutional tradition of historical enquiry it seems evident to me that basic income is an element in a wider process of democratisation of institutions in society. The success, substance, form, and stability of that proposal is likely to stand or fall with the level of democratisation of society as a whole.
That is why we should not be surprised that BI experiments and debates are happening today in some of the most institutionally developed welfare states in Europe. It is far from given however how they will turn out.
[1] Explaining the purpose of the Negative Income Tax that closely resembles a basic income, Friedman (1979, 120) argued that the ‘basic amount’ (or ’personal allowance’) would “..provide an assured minimum to all persons in need regardless of the reasons for their need, while doing as little harm as possible to their character, their independence, or their incentive to better their own condition” (italics added) 120 He further (ibid. 121) noted, “[t]he negative income tax would allow for fluctuating income… but that is not its main purpose. Its main purpose is rather to provide a straightforward means of assuring every family a minimum amount…”
Friedman, M., 1990[1979/1980], Free to Choose, San Diego: Harvest.
Haagh, L. (2015) Alternative Social States and the Basic Income Debate: Institutions, Inequality and Human Development,’ in Basic Income Studies, Special Issue on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, August, ISSN (Online) 1932-0183, ISSN (Print) 2194-6094, DOI: 10.1515/bis-2015-0002, August 2015, https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bis.ahead-of-print/bis-2015-0002/bis-2015-0002.xml
Haagh, L. (2013) ‘The Citizens’ Income and Democratization in Latin America – A Multi-Institutional Perspective‘ in Rubén Lo Vuolo (Ed.) Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimes in Latin America. From Cash Transfers to Rights, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee Series, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haagh, L. (2012) ‘Democracy, Public Finance, and Property Rights in Economic Stability: How More Horizontal Capitalism Upscales Freedom for All’ in Polity, October, Volume 44, No. 4. pp.542-587.
Haagh, L. (2011a) ‘Working Life, Well-Being and Welfare Reform: Motivation and Institutions Revisited’, World Development, March, Vol. 39, No.3. pp.450-573. Also available Basic Income, Social Democracy and Control over Time at: https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeewdevel/v_3a39_3ay_3a2011_3ai_3a3_3ap_3a450-473.htm
Haagh, L. (2011b) , Policy and Politics, January, Vol. 39, No.1, pp. 41-64.
Haagh, L. (2007) ‘Basic Income, Occupational Freedom and Anti-Poverty Policy’ in Basic Income Studies, Vol. 2, Issue, 1, June.
Haagh, L. (2006) ‘Equality and Income Security in Market Economies: What’s Wrong with Insurance?’’ in Social Policy and Administration, Vol. 40:4, 385-424.
Haagh, L. (2002a) Citizenship, Labour Markets and Democratization – Chile and the Modern Sequence, Basingstoke: Palgrave, St. Antony’s Series.
Haagh, L. and Camilla Helgø (2002) (Eds), Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America, Basingstoke: Palgrave. St. Antony’s Series.
Haagh, L. (2002b) ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: Labor Reform and Social Democratization in Chile’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring, pp. 86-115.
Haagh L (1999) ‘Training Policy and the Property Rights of Labour in Chile (1990-1997): Social Citizenship in the Atomised Market Regime, Journal of Latin American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 31, 429-472.
Lo Vuolo, R. (Ed.)Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimes in Latin America. From Cash Transfers to Rights, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee Series, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marshall, Thomas, H., 1949, Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suplicy, E. (2002), Renda de Cidadania – A Saída é Pela Porta, Cortez Editora
Photo credit: Enno Schmidt
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
