by Furui Cheng | Oct 14, 2017 | News, Research
Jay Hammond
Jay Sterner Hammond (July 21, 1922 – August 2, 2005) was an American politician of the Republican Party who served as the fourth Governor of Alaska from 1974 to 1982. Hammond was born in Troy, New York and served as a Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II with the Black Sheep Squadron. In 1946, he moved to Alaska where he worked as a bush pilot. Hammond served as a state representative from 1959 to 1965 and as a state senator from 1967 to 1973. From 1972 until 1974 he was the mayor of the Bristol Bay Borough. In 1974 he was elected governor of Alaska. He oversaw the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund in 1976, which, since the early 1980s, has paid annual dividends to Alaska residents. From 1985 to 1992 he hosted a television series called Jay Hammond’s Alaska. He wrote three autobiographies. This article is a short introduction of his last book.
Petroleum is the devil’s excrement, warns Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, a Venezuelan founder of OPEC. Waste, corruption, consumption, and failing public services are repeated curses in oil rich countries. But Alaska managed to avoid much of the befouling of “devil’s excrement” by actions that served to at least halfway pin on a “diaper.”
Article 8, Section 8, of Alaska’s constitution states: “The legislature shall provide for the utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources belonging to the state, including land and waters, for the maximum benefit of its people.” This clause prompted Hammond to attempt to assure that all Alaskans received a discernible share of those benefits and to avoid the common past practice of selectively benefiting the favored few at the expense of the many. This battle to avoid selective benefit still continues today.
Before the permanent fund dividend, Hammond had tried several ways to comply with the mandate of the aforementioned constitution, but all fell flat. His first attempt was to abolish fish traps in the Bristol Bay Borough in 1965. A whopping 97 percent of the fishing payday made within the boundary went to others and local residents got but a paltry 3 percent! He proposed a use tax to be paid by all fishermen on their catch. To offset the impact on local fishermen already paying high property taxes, he proposed to putting tax money into a conservatively managed investment account, then each year issuing residents one new share of dividend-earning stock. He called the concept “Bristol Bay, Inc.” The word “tax” made most Alaskans oppose it.
With passage of the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971, Alaska’s aboriginal peoples were accorded 44 million acres of land and $900 million by the U.S. Congress. Hammond proposed again to follow the Bristol Bay, Inc. model to manage ANSCA grants: create a conservatively managed investment account and spin off equal dividends to every Alaska Native. This account was proposed to be managed by professionals under counsel supplied from an elected advisory board of Natives representing every Native group in Alaska. People would have the opportunity to lift themselves up by being stockholders, providing themselves with the means (along with the responsibility) to use it for their collective best interests. Hammond’s proposal failed in the face of obstructions by lawyers, financially and politically powerful Natives, and other local forces.
His third attempt was to assure that the more affluent rural areas with a sufficient tax base help fund government services the same way as urban centers are required to do. Under his proposed statewide property tax, affluent municipalities, such as the North Slope Borough with high oil property values, would have to assume more of their local government service costs than would those that were virtually destitute. That proposal also fell flat on its face. Unfortunately, inequitable taxation continues to contribute to Alaska’s urban/rural divide.
In another effort to reduce crippling costs of services to hundreds of economically unviable communities – many of which were not connected by roads and lacked adequate housing, schooling, and basic services – he proposed to provide population centers with the greatest economic potential with topnotch schools and other services as a means to encourage migration from other communities. Once again the proposal fell flat.
After becoming governor in 1974, he proposed that 50 percent of all mineral leases, bonuses, royalties, and severance taxes be deposited into a conservatively managed investment account. Each year one-half of the account’s earnings would be dispersed among Alaskan residents, each of whom would receive, annually, one share of dividend-earning stock. The other half of the earnings could be used for essential government services.
Hammond had many reasons for creating such an investment account to which all Alaskans would be shareholders:
- To encourage contributions into the investment account and to protect against its invasion by politicians.
- To transform oil wells pumping oil for a finite period into money wells pumping money for infinity.
- To pit collective greed against selective greed.
- To eliminate the magnetic attraction for others from elsewhere who might otherwise be inclined to flock to Alaska in order to get big money in a short term.
- To instill a sense of ownership in all Alaskans that would incline them to support healthy resource development and resist unhealthy versions that would damage the environment or otherwise.
- To eliminate controversial state expenditures for such things as abortions or family planning. Individuals wishing for these services could pay for it from their dividends or utilize free ultrasound or abortion assessment services.
To promote these concepts, fashioned after his failed Bristol Bay, Inc. proposal, Hammond created “The Alaska Public Forum”. Fortunately, this attitude came in the wake of a $900 million windfall in 1970 from leases issued in Prudhoe Bay which had been “blown” in the eyes of many people. To their credit, however, a sufficient number
of legislators were successful in passing legislation creating what they termed “The Alaska Permanent Fund.” This statute at least created a semblance of Alaska, Inc., but fell far short of what Hammond had hoped for.
For more detailed information about the book, please click here.
Many thanks for Russell Ingram’s reviewing and editing.
by Peter Vandevanter | Oct 13, 2017 | News, Research
Congressional Quarterly (CQ) has published a research paper on basic income (BI) that explains its universal popularity due to automation growth estimates worldwide. The CQ Researcher covers everything from Scott Santens’ crowdfunded self-financing mechanism to U.S. ex-President Obama’s belief that the debate may last 10 to 20 years.
The 21-page research paper, written by London freelancer Sara Glazer, includes an explanation of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) – a basic income like payment to all residents – and revels in the prediction of automation worldwide. Predicted percentage of job losses are shown in charts for 8 countries, as well as for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (made up of 21 countries).
BI appeal to the political Left is explained as the continuation of a welfare state. Its appeal to the political Right is explained as a libertarian limit on government intrusion and cost. However, the research warns that many people believe the poor may be worse off: “Some anti-poverty advocates say a UBI would increase both poverty and inequality by using welfare funds now spent on the poorest two-fifths of the population to provide cash to people of all income levels“.
The report also mentions the current endorsement of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Chris Hughes. Moreover, references are made to the 1960s precedent of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s instituted War on Poverty as well as U.S. President Richard Nixon un-instituted 1970s negative income tax credit. This latter issue has been today resurrected by Congressman Ro Khanna, by his proposed bill for extending the earned income tax credit for the poor.
The Canadian 1970s experiment, called Mincome, is described as a positive pilot project, acting as a precedent for current basic income pilot projects in Finland, the U.S. (California ), Canada (Ontario ), Spain (Barcelona), Africa (Give Directly) and the Netherlands. In this report Karl Widerquist says that, with a BI, people will be allowed without fear to work the way they feel best. In an opposite viewpoint, Pavlina Tcherneva argues that a Job Guarantee program would be a better, less costly, way to make sure everyone had work they cared for.
More information at:
David Wheeler, “What if everybody didn’t have to work to get paid?”, The Atlantic, May 18th 2015
Chris Weller, “President Obama: We’ll be debating unconditional free money over the next 10 or 20 years” Business Insider, October 12th 2016
Kate McFarland, “SPAIN: Barcelona prepares study of Guaranteed Minimum Income”, Basic Income News, February 26th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Kate McFarland , “THE NETHERLANDS: Government authorizes social assistance experiments in first five municipalities”, Basic Income News, July 11th 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
by Kate McFarland | Oct 8, 2017 | News
Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator has concluded its pilot in Oakland and released a draft proposal for a large-scale randomized control trial of basic income in the United States.
In January 2016, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman announced his intention to spearhead a privately funded trial of unconditional basic income in the United States, hiring social work and political science PhD Elizabeth Rhodes as Research Director later in the year, and eventually assembling a team of expert advisors.
Since this time, Y Combinator has conducted a feasibility study in Oakland, California, and is now working to finalize the design of its full scale experiment. (Contrary to some misconceptions, the Oakland project was not itself an experiment. Its purpose was merely to test and fine-tune the mechanisms for conducting the experiment–such as the selection of participants, disbursement of funds, and collection of data–not to analyze the effects of unconditional cash transfers on recipients. The latter will be the goal of the project described in the new research proposal, which has yet to be launched.)
Although some details of the experiment remain to be decided, including the precise outcome variables and methods of data collection, Y Combinator has decided to design the experiment as a randomized controlled trial, conducted on a random sample of poor and low-income young adults from two US states (using a stratified sample to ensure adequate representation across race, gender, and income categories).
On the tentative design, the researchers will select a total of 3000 participants, randomly assigning 1000 to the treatment group–who will receive a regular cash payment of 1000 USD per month unconditionally for the duration of the experiment–and the remaining 2000 to the control group. (Individuals in the control group will provide the same type of feedback and data to researchers but receive only a much smaller cash payment, tentatively set at 50 USD per month.) The experiment is planned to continue for three to five years.
Y Combinator expresses an interest in a “holistic approach to understanding the individual-level effects of basic income”, in contrast to past and present experiments which have focused on the labor market impacts of unconditional cash payments, such as Finland’s current basic income experiment and the negative income tax experiments conducted in the United States in the 1970s. Among these individual-level effects, the research group is particularly interested in time use, mental and physical health, subjective well-being, financial health, decision making and attitudes toward risk, as well as political and social attitudes. Furthermore, although individual-level effects will be the focus of the experiment, researchers also hope to examine spillover effects on recipients’ families, friends, and communities.
While the research group has not finalized its choice of data sources and collection methods (see its project proposal for a discussion of possibilities currently under discussion), it plans to combine quantitative analysis with regular surveys and interviews (in contrast, for example, to the Finnish experiment, in which researchers have abjured the use of surveys and interviews during the duration of the experiment). Rhodes has explained, however, that participation in surveys and interviews will be voluntary for participants; that is, the payments will continue for the duration of the experiments even if recipients do not respond to requests for data and information.
The research team acknowledges that the experiment does not, strictly speaking, test a universal basic income. For one, as mentioned, the sample will be limited to young adults (aged 21 to 40) with incomes below the area median. The researchers justify this limitation, however, by noting that “the marginal effect of the additional income on many of the outcomes is expected to be relatively small at higher income levels” and that, under most plans, “the benefit received by higher-income individuals would be paid back in taxes in order to fund the program”.
Additionally, due to the use of a randomized controlled trial, the research will not capture multiplier effects that might result from the implementation of a universal basic income (in contrast, for example, to the saturation study in Dauphin, Manitoba, or GiveDirectly’s recently launched village-level RCT of basic income in Kenya). However, researchers note that “ the intervention is very expensive and our sample size is constrained by the budget. We will not have enough statistical power to detect effects with a geographically saturated study and the increase in sample size required to allow for clustering is financially infeasible.”
To conduct the experiment, Y Combinator has partnered with the Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI) at Stanford University. The research has been approved by Stanford’s Institutional Review Board for research involving human subjects.
Y Combinator is currently working with state and local governments to coordinate mechanisms for distributing payments without affecting recipients’ future eligibility for existing government benefits, and to obtain the use of registries to collect individual data.
With many details still to be settled, no specific launch date has been set for the experiment (although Rhodes stated at the recent BIEN Congress that the research group hopes to begin the study in “early 2018”), and the states from which subjects will be sampled have not been publicly announced.
The full research proposal can be read on Y Combinator’s blog (see “Basic Income Research Proposal,” published September 20, 2017).
The organization invites comments and feedback on its project proposal.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo (Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 MagicMediaProduction
by Andre Coelho | Sep 24, 2017 | News
The documentary Free Lunch Society will be screened on Tuesday 26th September, at 7:30 pm, during Basic Income Earth Network Conference in Lisbon. This will take place at ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management – and will be followed by a debate between basic income experts Scott Santens (USA), Jorge Pinto and Sara Bizarro (Portugal) and the director of the film Christian Tod (Austria). The debate will be shared live on Facebook, and the event link can be found here.)
This screening is an initiative of the Moving Docs network, a partnership of several arts-related organizations across Europe, managed by the European Documentary Network, and supported by Creative Europe. To further help and spread the word about basic income, Moving Docs also has a short animation to condenses the essentials about basic income, directed at the population at large. The Free Lunch Society documentary is already scheduled to be screened in several other European locations until de end of the year, such as Scotland, Poland, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Greece.
Christian Tod is a filmmaker and an economist. His debut was in 2007 with Fatsy – The Last Cowboy of Austria. His first feature length documentary was Es muss was geben and was chosen for the official selection at Filmfest München in 2010. On Free Lunch Society, Christian Tod combined his expertise for a project he considers essential for the future of humankind: Unconditional Basic Income.
More information at:
Free Lunch Society screening and live event, on Facebook
by Jason Burke Murphy | Sep 19, 2017 | Opinion
By Jason Burke Murphy
US Basic Income Guarantee Network
Coming up on September 24th, Germany will be holding national parliamentary elections. A new “single-issue-party” will be on the ballot in every state, the “Alliance for Basic Income” (Bundnis Grundeinkommen). If this party gets five percent of the vote or more, they will have five percent or more of votes in the Bundestag.
The party is building on a movement in Germany that has seen steady growth for years. This campaign is inspired by the initiative in Switzerland and the way that movement promoted discussion all over the world.
Germans vote for their district representative and they cast a “second vote”, which determines the percentage a party has in the Bundestag. You will see the word “Zweitstimme” on almost all Basic Income Alliance campaign material.
North American Basic Income activists and scholars got to meet with Felix Coeln, who is a candidate in Germany, at our Congress in New York in 2015. Coeln was then working with the German Pirate Party. He is busy campaigning but took time to answer a few questions.
![](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/german1.jpg?resize=1080%2C311&ssl=1)
Campaign banner. “Basic Income Alliance” “Freedom Meets Justice”
Interview
Jason Burke Murphy: Why did you decide to join this new political party?
Felix Coeln: I did not join the party. I am an independent candidate on the list for the national parliament. Since I have been a member of the Pirate Party for three years (until August 2015), but needed to withdraw my membership after some terrible internal party decisions. I did not feel like joining another party.
I also felt I could not yet join because the Basic Income Alliance (Bündnis Grundeinkommen) has in its manifesto a paragraph that I cannot agree with under any circumstances. The party will dissolve after introducing a Basic Income in Germany. To me this is absolutely wrong as I believe it is very important to have parliamentarians to pay attention and make sure the laws regarding Basic Income are not corrupted after some while. I also think it would be important to introduce the Basic Income to the whole European Union. Therefore I think it would be crucial to keep the party together even if Basic Income is introduced at least for some more years, maybe ten or twenty.
![](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/german2.jpg?resize=345%2C195&ssl=1)
Felix Coeln
But the Basic Income Alliance is willing to accept independent candidates on their election lists. They want to make sure that Basic Income activists can contribute and bring in their experience to the process of introducing the UBI and/or expand the debate around it.
Murphy: What are your chances of getting elected?
Coeln: German election law asks parties to give lists of candidates for each state, then they send people to the Bundestag based on that percentage. I am #6 on the list in North-Rhine Westfalia. This means that if we pass the 5% threshold, I would join the national Parliament, too.
Murphy: What would you consider to be successful in this upcoming election?
Coeln: I already consider the campaign a full success: by now we have more than 40 parties running for parliament. A lot of them propose UBI. But most of those parties do not have a chance to overcome the 5% threshold.
On the other hand, the public debate has already increased. Some of the long-time established parties have also offered to “check out” UBI models as possible political solutions for future trends of digitalization and advanced productivity. To me this is a direct reaction to the founding of the Basic Income Alliance.
Apart from that, if we exceed half of one percent, the party will be refunded for each valid vote. We would get 0.83 € euro each year until the next election.
If we exceed 3% we will gain some significant media attention and the other political parties will make some effort to develop their concepts of UBI. UBI plans are already ready to be presented to the public. I know this, because I have broad contact to members of all parties.
If we exceed 5% we will enter parliament – and I am pretty sure we would gain a lot of (international) attention.
![](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/german3.jpg?resize=828%2C315&ssl=1)
Campaign Banner. “Basic Income is Electable”
Murphy: Felix Coeln, thank you for speaking with us!
If you want more information, we have included some links here:
“GERMANY: Basic Income Party Set to Participate in National Elections” by Kate McFarland for Basic Income News.
GERMANY: Basic Income Party Set to Participate in National Elections
(In German) Founding of the party in September 2016
(“https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/zuendfunk/politik-gesellschaft/buendnis-grundeinkommen-ihr-habt-ne-partei-100.html“)
(In German) Interview with the party chairwoman, Susanne Wiest. (Wiest started a petition in December 2008 that instantly crashed the Bundestags-Server.)
(“https://www.zeit.de/2017/22/susanne-wiest-bedingungsloses-grundeinkommen“)
A 1-minute news article on German national television.
(“https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/drehscheibe/drehscheibe-clip-4-516.html“)
A commercial broadcast by Bundnis Grundeinkommen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=can_Zg-QeeE
Netzwerk Grundeinkommen: A Basic Income Earth Network Affiliate in Germany.