by Joe Timothy | Apr 15, 2016 | News
Due to the recent skyrocketing of basic income chatter on the internet (interest has quadrupled in the last 3 months) the prolific writer and basic income advocate Scott Santens has helpfully brought together all that is going on around basic income in one short article.
He begins by demonstrating that the increasing interest in different nations on the rise with the “the addition of Canada…This was followed soon after by Scotland’s SNP party’s decision to consider basic income in an independent Scotland, and New Zealand’s Labor Party after that. Nigeria also had some rumblings, as did Namibia. Finally, Finland completed its preliminary report for its basic income experiment plans, with the final report due in November.”
In addition to the increased interest from these countries there were also some key figures that came out in support of the idea including Yanis Varoufakis, Owen Jones, Westpac chief economist Dominick Stephens, and Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper. There were also some key news organisations talking about a basic income including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian magazine, The Guardian and Gawker.
Santens also mentions other related events such as the success of Google’s AlphaGo AI beating the 18-time world champion Go player Lee Sedol. An advancement that is demonstrating the real speed at which AI is developing which will inevitably lead to a reduction in jobs and an increase in the necessity for the basic income.
All these events, articles and shows of support are just part of an increasing trend in the idea of the basic income. It has been a big year so far in terms of the growth of interest in the idea, it will be interesting to see where it goes.
For more information, see the following source:
Scott Santens, “Basic Income on the March (a month in review)”, April 7th , 2016
by Kate McFarland | Mar 30, 2016 | News
Gerd Leonhard, the acclaimed futurist speaker and author, believes that a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) might be a necessary consequence of increased automation.
Last February, Hank Pellissier of the Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technologies interviewed Leonhard on his “opinions and forecasts” regarding BIG.
In the brief interview, Leonhard discusses the conditions that he sees as prerequisites for the adoption of a BIG, concluding that “a basic income guarantee is only possible once we unbundle work money, and once the traditional mantra of profit and growth at all costs has collapsed.” He is optimistic that, eventually, societies will assume this post-capitalist outlook.
After addressing questions on BIG-related topics, including Switzerland’s basic income referendum and technological unemployment, Leonhard broaches the idea of “automation tax,” which “companies would pay for each job replaced by a machine.” In Leonhard’s view, an automation tax may be an effective means of providing governments with money to reinvest in “creating a flourishing society and allowing for human happiness.”
Read the interview here:
Hank Pellissier, “Basic Income Guarantee will allow us to move the Maslow Pyramid – interview with Gerd Leonhard”. Institute of Ethics & Emerging Technologies, February 7th 2016.
For more about Gerd Leonhard, including videos and descriptions of speaking topics, see his website.
Image credit: ictQATAR
by Guest Contributor | Mar 29, 2016 | Opinion
By Clive Lord
Almost everyone I know of who supports the Basic Income (BI) does so on the grounds of social justice. I agree of course, but for me less inequality is only the second most important of three reasons to support the Basic, or as we call it in Britain, the Citizen’s Income.
When I joined the embryonic PEOPLE, now the UK Green Party, in 1973, I listened as an enquirer to a spiel based on the threats to the global environment caused by indiscriminate economic growth, which had been exposed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report Limits to Growth in 1972. I agreed with every word, but I had a question:
“What is your social policy? You are proposing a deep recession. I agree it will be necessary, but every recession to date has caused widespread hardship. What will you do when desperate people start looting?”
The answer was: “If we have to, we shall shoot them in the street. Social breakdown is hardly the best way to alleviate poverty.”
It is all very well readers being as appalled as I was, because the basic premise was right. The speaker then challenged me:
“Do you have a better social policy in mind?”
I didn’t. I spent the journey home wrestling with my own question. Guess what I came up with. I discovered later that the Basic Income had already been invented several times, for different reasons, starting with Thomas Paine in 1798. But even now, 43 years later, limiting economic activity to the ability of the ecosphere to cope was not part of the “successful” Paris climate agreement in December 2015. It will fail without that. A Basic Income will allow a steady state economy to be acceptable to whole populations, and so become a policy option, but it will have to be world-wide.
It will be dismissed as “unaffordable” – this would only be true if the economy has collapsed beyond the ability to provide basic necessities for all, but if linked to ecological realities it will entail drastic redistribution. This brings us to the more common justification for a BI of reducing inequality, but if all the Basic Income does is allow the poor to spend money confiscated from the rich, the Paris agreement is doomed.
However, I am continually perplexed by the widespread failure to grasp the malevolence of means testing – taking benefits away as soon as the claimant has any other income.
The next few paragraphs refer to the UK but will apply anywhere means tested benefits are used. For the person losing a means tested benefit, the effect is identical to a massive marginal tax. The clearest demonstration of this can be found in an unexpected source: the 2009 report Dynamic Benefits: towards welfare that works, released by the Centre for Social Justice. The Centre was set up by Iain Duncan Smith, who has been Work and Pensions secretary in the UK Coalition, now Conservative government since 2010 – and has recently resigned in protest against announced cuts to disability benefits. Dynamic Benefits was the foundation for the government’s welfare ‘reform’ policies. Its key recommendation was the Universal Credit (UC), whereby on finding employment a claimant would retain 45% of their former benefits. The former Work and Pensions secretary reduced this to 35% on taking office. This means that the former claimant is faced with a tax rate equivalent of 65%. Bankers on the highest tax rate lose 45% of their income.
In Dynamic Benefits, there are several graphs showing benefit withdrawal rates as though they were taxes. In fact, the first part of the report, outlining the problem, is an excellent statement of the case for a Basic income. The UC is an emaciated BI which attempts to remove the work disincentive of means testing, but still penalises beneficiaries disproportionately vis-à-vis high-income earners.
While Iain Duncan Smith’s stated reason for resigning was cuts to disability benefits, I believe the real reason is the imminent scrapping of the UC. In four years since being announced, the UC has only reached 5% of the 4.5 million who should be eligible. The Department of Work and Pensions is claiming that the UC will be fully rolled out by May 2021. The track record of slippage to date makes that improbable. That the initiator of benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax, and Work Capability Assessments presents himself as the defender of the weak and vulnerable is sickening, but Dynamic Benefits remains a useful document for basic income debates.
But my third reason is much more fundamental. A Basic income can begin a shift to a totally new culture. Instead of haves vs have nots, or bosses vs workers , the new fault line will be those who want to preserve natural systems versus those who believe there will always be a technological answer. This will enable a low growth economy to protect the ecosphere.
Milton Friedman, an archetypal neo-liberal, was in favour of the Basic income. Market forces are a basic pillar of neo-liberalism, but instead of the current system whereby the strong can exploit the weak, persuasion will replace work compulsion. The would-be employee will have equal bargaining power with the boss. Needless to say, Employee Benefits such as healthcare cover will also need to be negotiable. Experiences in India and Namibia show that far from encouraging idleness, a BI facilitates entrepreneurship. But it will also allow people generally to heed eco-constraints, notably climate change, where competitive capitalism does not.
Anyone curious to know more, my Book, Citizens’ Income and Green Economics (2011) is available from the Green Economic Institute. My blog www.clivelord.wordpress.com which is more up to date, but 
inevitably less coherent, discusses the Tragedy of the Commons, population, the Greek crisis, migration and fracking.
We may yet save “Paris” (and the planet), and feed everyone. There is even something in it for the capitalists.
Clive Lord is a founding member of the British Green Party, a major contributor to the party’s first “Manifesto for a Sustainable Society” and a basic income advocate.
by BIEN | Mar 13, 2016 | Research
In this paper Jude Thomas, a US musician, discusses how within the last two decades « … growth and improvement of both recording technology and Internet access have brought about fundamental changes in how people create and consume arts ». The story of labor in the arts, the Digital Revolution, and Modern Patronage tell of the need for UBI in order to combat the Crisis of Independent Artists and make sure that those going into the arts are protected from extreme poverty. As the author writes, « what UBI changes is who makes decisions about which works of art get to exist, and which artists are worthy of creating art ».
For the full text see :
https://www.usbig.net/papers/Thomas%20-%20Vanishing%20Scarcity%20copy.pdf
For a full video presentation over that theme by Jude Thomas, see:
https://composerjude.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/vanishing-scarcity-at-nabig-2015/
by Stanislas Jourdan | Feb 25, 2016 | News
Paris was the ‘place to be’ for basic income last Thursday, February 4th, at a high-profile conference featuring key basic income personalities from France and beyond.
The event, which was organised by the liberal think tank Génération Libre, was held at the famous Salle Gaveau, and was attended by about 600 people.
This conference united diverse individuals, with myriad different backgrounds and values, around one common interest: basic income. Attendees included prominent foreign basic income supporters, such as Belgian philosopher and political economist Philippe van Parijs and Brazilian politician and economist Eduardo Suplicy, as well as French politicians from left to right — including former ministers Delphine Batho and Alain Madelin and European parliament members Karima Delli and Sylvie Goulard — in addition to members of the civil society, entrepreneurs, and basic income sympathizers who were simply curious to know how the idea is progressing in France.
Economist Marc de Basquiat launched the show with a presentation of how basic income could fix the complexity and inefficiency of the French tax-benefit system, and introduced key steps to move forward the implementation of a basic income. He also presented the results of a microsimulation of the redistributive effects of a basic income scheme in France. It showed a modest increase in social contribution from wealthy households, while the poorest, and especially families would benefit most.
Next, Jean-Eric Hyafil, an economist and member of the French Movement for a Basic Income (MFRB), delivered a presentation in which he emphasized the rapid growth of the movement in the past few months: “basic income had never known a surge of interest such as the one we are living know,” he said.
After these opening talks, the floor was given to Philippe van Parijs and Eduardo Suplicy, both prominent figures of the basic income movement, historian Laurence Fontaine, and Lionel Stoléru, known as a historical proponent of the negative income tax in France in the 70s.
These four panelists laid out the philosophical and economic justifications for the basic income. Philippe van Parijs stressed the three core principles of basic income – a basic income must be universal, unconditional and individual – and stressed that basic income is, first and foremost, a matter of freedom. Lionel Storélu called for a better integration of fiscal and social systems, something basic income would eventually make possible.
The liberal thinker and former minister of Economy was the only dissent voice among the speakers. He gave a very critical speech, in which he claimed that basic income would encourage idleness. As he stated, “In wanting to do too much, you risk losing effectiveness in the fight against poverty.”
Other speakers — including Diana Filippova (Ouishare), Benoit Thieulin (National Digital Council), and entrepreneur Yann Hascoet (Chauffeur Privé) — were able to relay their firsthand experience in the new digital economy.
Thieulin, co-author of an important report on the Transformations of Work in the Digital Era ordered by the Ministry of Labor, justified basic income on the ground that we were “facing an unprecedented and much deeper upheaval than the industrial revolution. It is thus not realistic to try adapting the new digital assets to fit in the old socio-economic frameworks”. According to Thieulin, basic income allows a smooth transition toward the new economy.
“We keep saying we tried everything to fight unemployment. Well no, we haven’t tried basic income!” – Benoit Thieulin
Following Thieulin, Diana Filippova delivered a talk in which she argued that “basic income would enable a better redistribution of the wealth originating from the digital labor, and in particular the profits made from personal data collected through social networks.”
Politicians beyond borders on basic income
After the talks from the representatives of the new digital economy, politicians took the stage at the conference. These political discussions showed that, in spite of the ideological differences, it is still possible to have a common goal – which, in this case, is introducing basic income into public debate. As Frédéric Lefebvre, from the right-wing party Les Républicains, claimed, “The government has no right to miss out on this debate.”
The Socialist Party’s Delphine Batho, former Minister of Ecology, also highlighted that “basic income is not just about giving a handout, but it is about entering into a new ecological, digital and social model.”
Sylvie Goulard, member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the Liberal party, expressed her interest in the idea. As president of the parliamentary intergroup on poverty, she argued that poverty implies a significant deprivation of freedom. According to Goulard, a European basic income would make sense: “I have never believed in a complete harmonisation of social systems in Europe … However, the idea of guaranteeing a decent income for all across Europe could be shared.”
Member of the European Parliament Karima Delli insisted that basic income is part of an emancipatory project. It should allow a transformation of the economy by allowing new forms of work. “It will allow people to ask each other: what do you want to do with your life?”
Too soon to decide on an appropriate level
Both Goulard and Lefebvre agreed that, importantly, it is not yet time to decide upon the level of basic income. “There is still a lot of work to do and we need a democratic debate between possible options after we have appraised works on this,” Goulard said.
As this conference showed, basic income is no longer the utopian dream that it was considered not so long ago. In the past few months, all eyes have been turned towards the Finnish initiative to experiment with basic income; more recently, however, attention has focused more and more on how basic income might evolve in the French society, and politicians from both sides of the spectrum have started to officially support the idea.
Indeed, Ministers are discussing the idea even at the level of the national government. After the declaration of Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron, stating that basic income was an interesting idea we should study further, the Minister for Labour Myriam El Khomri agreed that it was “a beautiful idea that we should consider.” Her statement followed the report handed out by the National Digital Council to the Ministry of Labour at the beginning of January, supporting basic income as one out of 20 possibilities that might help to cope with labour evolution due to the digitalization of the economy.
In the space of a couple of months, 3 amendments on basic income have been presented to the National Assembly, from representatives of parties on the left as well as the right.
The next important event will take place at the Finnish embassy in Paris on the 3rd of March, organized by the French Movement for a Basic Income (MFRB). Then, on March 9th, a motion tabled by Green Senator Jean Desessard will be debated at the French Senate.
Nicole Teke and Stan Jourdan
