by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Photo taken by Stefan Pangritz at a solidarity meeting for the Swiss
referendum in January 2014 in Basel.
Toru Yamamori (Basic Income News editor)
1. Encounter to the idea
My encounter to the idea of a basic income was around 1991-2. I was involved in solidarity activism with a casual worker’s trade union, in which many of the members were homeless construction workers. Some left leaning intellectuals also came to show their solidarity from time to time, and one of them told me that what we need is the idea of ‘unconditional social income’ that was articulated in the Italian autonomist movement.
I wasn’t impressed by the idea at that time, mainly because the movement with which we were in solidarity demanded an end to unfairly unpaid or underpaid wages. For me asking ‘income’ in that context sounded like that we are getting amnesty when we want to be proved not guilty.
It took several years for me to digest why we need an unconditional basic income. Then it become a secret joy to read Bertrand Russell’s Roads to Freedom, or Philippe van Parijs’s Real Freedom for All, borrowed from a university library. Because the majority of my friends either from activism or academia didn’t like the idea, it remained a personal relief by dreaming a totally different world.
2. Joining BIEN
In 2002 I travelled to the U.K. to visit to Malcolm Torry, Philip Vince (both from Citizen’s Income Trust), and Bill Jordan (a founding member of BIEN). Malcolm and Philip showed me that the idea was being spread widely from a small alternative sphere. Bill introduced me to the working class people who demanded a basic income in 1970s, which made me remind my old friends with who I wanted to be in solidarity. (So I started to organize public events on UBI outside academia.)
In 2004 I attended the BIEN congress in Barcelona where the network changed from ‘European’ to ‘Earth’. I was fascinated by the unique atmosphere, where established, well-known academics talked with anyone in equal and friendly terms, and where many young activists brought enthusiasm. I immediately became a life member.
Then I attended almost every congress except 2006. The one in 2014 Montreal was special occasion for me, because I presented my 13 years of oral historical research on the working class feminists who demanded UBI in the 1970s Britain, which was started when Bill introduced me some of those people in 2002. Local and international feminists in the congress encouraged me with positive comments, and I felt relieved that finally I succeeded to convey their forgotten struggle to similar minded contemporary feminists.
3. And now…
I was the only participant from Asia in the 2004 congress. The number has grown and this year the congress was held in Korea, and we have five national or regional affiliates in Asia.
People in BIEN keep encouraging me to engage both activism and research on UBI, which means a lot for me. In 2012 I was elected to the Executive Committee. At that time it was out of blue, but since then I have tried to expand this unique broad-church organization, especially by writing news for the Basic Income News, and by exploring communications between Asian members.
Toru Yamamori is a professor of economics of a Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.
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.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 27, 2016 | News
The 2017 Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum is to include a panel on basic income, in which BIEN’s Guy Standing will be participating.
Guy Standing (credit: Enno Schmidt)
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London) has been invited to speak at the next meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, which will take place from January 17 to 20, 2017.
The editor of The Economist will interview Standing on the precariat on January 17. Additionally, Standing will take part in a session on basic income on January 18.
By invitation only, the WEF’s annual Davos conference brings together over 2000 CEOs, political leaders, distinguished academics, and other “notables”, and has come to be regarded as one of the most elite economic and political conferences in the world.
World Economic Forum blog contributions
In connection with his invitation to Davos, Standing has authored an article on basic income for the WEF’s blog (“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“). In it, Standing presents a series of justifications for basic income.
First, and most importantly, Standing argues that a basic income is owed to all as a matter of social justice: “Land, natural resources, and ideas that become ‘intellectual property’ are all part of society’s collective wealth, created and nurtured by generations of our ancestors. So, it is reasonable to argue that everybody should have a modest share, a social dividend, in the form of an equal, modest, individual, unconditional basic income.”
Standing contends that “all assets, including intellectual property, are resources to which all of society has legitimate claim”–recommending, for example, a “special levy on income generated by patents, copyright and other forms of intellectual property” to pay into a sovereign wealth fund.
Additionally, Standing argues that a basic income promotes individual freedom and security–noting that economic security is a requirement for rational decision-making–and removes the poverty and “precarity” traps in current welfare systems. (A precarity trap exists when a would-be worker decides not to accept short-term employment due to delays in benefits processing or other complications that encourage avoidance of temporary changes in benefits status. In this way, existing welfare systems often discourage temporary work.)
Standing also points out that a basic income would be seen as remunerating unpaid labor–and that this, in turn, could encourage more environmentally sustainable lifestyles.
“Care work, voluntary work, community work and the ‘work’ many do in retraining are all statistically unrecognised today, but they are socially valuable, and are not resource depleting, unlike many forms of labour. A basic income would tilt the economic system towards socially and ecologically sustainable growth.”
Finally, although he seems to regard it as a comparatively weaker argument, Standing concludes by claiming that the automation argument–that is, that a basic income is necessary as insurance against a robot job takeover–“should not be dismissed”.
“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“ (December 20) is the final article in a three-part series:
The first, “Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism” (November 9), describes the characteristics and structure of the precariat.
The second, “The 5 biggest lies of global capitalism“ (December 12), discusses “rentier capitalism” — a system in which increasing shares of wealth accrue to those who hold property from which they can extract rents — and explains how (in Standing’s view) it sits at the heart of contemporary economic inequities.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan.
Davos photo CC BY 2.0 WebRatio Communications.
by BIEN | Dec 24, 2016 | Bios & background Info
Kate McFarland has been a writer and editor for Basic Income News since March 2016 (after having began her volunteership as a content reviewer in November 2015). She was appointed as a member of the Executive Committee at BIEN’s Congress in July 2016. Additionally, she was appointed as Secretary of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network in November 2016.
At the time of this writing, Kate is nearing the end of her final(?) temporary paid appointment at The Ohio State University, where she has been employed in some fashion since 2002.
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Kate grew up in the town of Lancaster, Ohio, until she moving to Columbus to attend school at (The) Ohio State University.
In college, Kate flirted with various social science and humanities disciplines, before eventually majoring in mathematics (with a minor in sociology) and then enrolling in graduate school in statistics.
Kate as statistician (you can tell from the earrings)
During her first year as a statistics PhD student, however, Kate realized that she would never truly challenge herself intellectually if she failed to get a PhD in philosophy. Thus, on a whim, she started enrolling in graduate-level philosophy classes while completing her masters degree in statistics. She went on to complete a PhD in philosophy of language, remaining at Ohio State for the length of “professional student” career (primarily due to convenience).
Kate’s philosophical research focused mainly on the semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of disagreement. She did not work in political theory, and dissertation was unrelated to basic income. However, it would be true, if misleading, to say that her dissertation dealt with the “power to say ‘No'”: she wrote about the conditions under which it is conversationally appropriate for speakers to use the word ‘No’ when replied to something someone else said.
Never pursuing a career as a professional philosopher, Kate accepted a one-year teaching position at Ohio State, focusing on the teaching of ethics to engineering students, as a stopgap after her 2015 graduation.
In the summer of 2016, she was offered what could have become a full-time, permanent position at Ohio State’s Department of Philosophy. By the time, however, she was finally discovered that a world existed outside of Ohio State–thanks mainly to her growing involvement in the Basic Income movement. Not wanting to close other doors, she turned it down.
In 2017, she plans to continue leading her life as a open-ended journey, just the way she likes it.
INTEREST IN BASIC INCOME
Kate has actively followed the basic income movement only since late 2015. However, the seedlings of her support for the cause had developed at least by her teens.
Kate in high school, living in a bubble
As early as middle school, Kate adamantly rejected the notion that the main function of education should be to prepare students for jobs and careers; she insisted, on the contrary, that the attainment of knowledge and the development of one’s cognitive faculties were ends in themselves–and that education ought to be devoted to this end. Also in her early teens, she developed a fondness for underground music (e.g., especially, obscure 1970s prog rock) and an deep skepticism of the mainstream. Whether talking about education policy, music, or any other subject matter, she used “sell out” as a term of derision.
When she learned of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income, sometime around her freshman year of college, it immediately resonated with her as way as to preserve freedom and individualism without forcing individuals to conform to the demands of the marketplace. She saw it, in short, as a possible basis for a society in which no one needs to sell out. However, she did not further pursue the idea for many years.
Kate in mid-2015
Kate finally became re-attracted to basic income in mid-2015, when looking for a more radical, post-work alternative to the “Fight for 15” memes that her friends were sharing on Facebook. For her, promotion of the idea of basic income was a means to challenge societal assumptions about the function and value of work and jobs.
That said, most of Kate’s present work is not activism at all, but reporting. She maintains that, qua Basic Income News editor, she is not an advocate for basic income per se but instead an advocate for intellectual responsibility and integrity in discourse about basic income.
Her primary mission is not to convince people to that basic income is desirable but, rather, simply to disseminate accurate information about the contemporary movements for it. She approaches all of her research, writing, and reporting for BIEN with the same standards of intellectual honesty and rigor as she would have applied to any scholarly work.
For all her utopian visions of a post-capitalist society, Kate is still a pedantic academic at heart–a trait she hopes to wield for the betterment of the basic income community.
Top photo by Josh Diaz Photography
by Kate McFarland | Dec 21, 2016 | News
On November 29 and 30, the White House, the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-hosted the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity.
Held at Stanford, the event brought together “275 high-level players in technology, philanthropy, community service, government, and academia” to listen to and participate in a series of panel discussions on social and economic policy and the role of technology and big data.
The conference included a 40-minute panel on “The Future of Jobs and the Question of a Basic Income”:
PANELISTS (from viewer’s left to right)
– Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, and the initiator of its plan for a basic income experiment. Y Combinator is currently running a pilot study of a basic income in Oakland, with plans for a larger scale experiment in the future.
– Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and (as of this month) a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, which will be distributing $10 million in grants to support basic income projects in the US.
– Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Philosophy who specializes in political theory and public policy. Bidadanure will be teaching a graduate seminar on the philosophy of basic income in winter 2017.
Future of work expert Natalie Foster moderated the discussion.
All four participants are supporters of universal basic income.
PANEL OVERVIEW.
Bidadanure, Hughes, and Altman, respectively, begin the panel by describing how they came to interested in basic income and outlining their reasons for supporting such a policy. Following these introductory remarks, discussion turns to past and present basic income experiments: Altman talks about Y Combinator’s newly launched pilot study, Hughes describes the work of the charity GiveDirectly, and Bidadanure lays out the results of past experiments in Manitoba, Namibia, and India. Altman additionally stresses the ability of a basic income to alleviate financial anxiety for people who currently live paycheck to paycheck. Finally, panelists present their thoughts on the question of how to finance a basic income. Due to concerns about feasibility, Hughes proposes beginning with a small basic income of $100 or $200 per month; Bidadanure and Altman, however, raise concerns with the implementation of a basic income that is it not sufficiently large to allow for freedom and security.
Additional press on the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity:
Nitasha Tiku, “Stanford, The White House, And Tech Bigwigs Will Host A Summit On Poverty”, BuzzFeed News, November 28, 2016.
Reviewed by Jenna van Draanen
Photo (Stanford University) CC BY 2.0 Robbie Shade
by Tyler Prochazka | Dec 21, 2016 | Opinion
With the emergence of cryptocurrencies (digital money) as an alternative to traditional cash, there has been
discussion about how new currencies can be used to implement a Universal Basic Income.
Some crytopcurrency startups, such as
uCoin (now Duniter), automatically distribute a basic income dividend to all of its verified members, thereby slightly growing the monetary base but in an egalitarian way.
Author Duke Johnson said because they rely on internet and electricity, these digital currencies are not easy enough for mainstream adoption and as of now are not “appropriate for UBI.”
Johnson has a slightly different system in mind for a currency: Creator Currency Octaves. He has
written about how a Universal Basic Income of a “complementary currency” can “protect a currency from pitfalls of hyper-inflation” and has said it would also “put a real price on everything.”
He explains the complementary currency would be enough to cover basic necessities, but would also expire.
“Those who join a Creator Collective could accept active or expired Basic Bucks as rewards (and of course dollars/euros/gold/whatever) but depending on the level of their work and their individual Creator Octave, they would be able to exchange Basic Bucks for dollars at an elevated level, say 1.5x or even 4 dollars for 1 Basic Buck,” Johnson said.
“This would put both a supply and demand onto Basic Bucks into any system, without negatively altering the primary currency, and still providing incentive for people to work for collective projects and do great innovative or artistic work.”
For Johnson, the push for this new system is about making a fairer society.
“I want to participate in a fair system, where children don’t starve, and I’d like to see poverty eliminated in my lifetime,” Johnson said.
The full interview with Duke Johnson can be found below:
1. You said in “CurrentSea X-Change” that “A function of UBI would put a real price on what everything”. What did you mean by this, and how would basic income accomplish that?
For UBI, I feel financial freedom is true independence, and of course, with freedom, that which UBI could provide, people will be free to follow their passion instead of a paycheck.
When I mention that this system could put a real price on what everything is truly worth, including time, I’m speaking to the affect that manufactured scarcity places upon economics, where the current central banking system has far too much influence on what things cost, as opposed to what they should cost. One example, in the USA, the average price of a house in the 1970s cost ~8k hours of minimum wage work. Today, the average price is ~45k hours of min wage work. Therefore, a generation ago, life was affordable, but today low income people can typically only get by with debt and/or government assistance.
2. How would a basic income challenge our current economic system and expose its “flaws”?
If people didn’t have to work for housing/food/utilities, would they still be willing work a 40-50 hour/week job to afford, say, a new car every 2 years? If not, the car companies would likely lower their prices. Similarly, people would be in a better position to refuse jobs they dislike, therefore the cost of all labor would balance upon what people deem fair compensation, as opposed to what they’re forced to accept due to desperation in the current system.
Some other flaws UBI could expose in the current systems are the problems with disproportionate “making vs taking.” Today, Wall St. investors typically don’t actually make anything, except everything more expensive. If Creative Currency Octaves came into play, the people being rewarded would be the artistic creators and developers within a collective, as opposed to people making millions and billions from interest/dividends/ownership.
3. What is the appeal of implementing universal basic income?
Poverty elimination is the best reason to introduce UBI, and when people don’t have to work to support a family, that reduces stress from a population, which in turn could free people from the chains of debt servitude. I also argue that placing property ownership back into the people’s hands and away from institutions, would have a major balancing affect on communities in a positive way.
4. What is your view of cryptocurrencies as a way to distribute basic income?
As far as crypto-currencies go, I’m in favor of new ways to transfer money online that are secure and takes power away from central banks, however BlockChains rely on electricity and a functioning internet connection, which is a potential downfall. When people can buy lunch on the go as easily with BlockChain as with cash, then there will be a monetary revolution. Ultimately, mainstream money transfer is all about ease, which is why cash is king and credit/debit cards are more prevalent today. Of course it takes millions/billions of investment and decades to implement what visa/mastercard/debit cards have achieved in safe payment solutions, but again cash is the simplest for everyday purchases. BlockChain may become easier for large transactions than card/bank services, and of course cash can’t be transferred online, so I think BlockChain will prove it’s worth to the masses in the near future, though I don’t think it’s appropriate for UBI, unless as an option to be offered instead of, say, a monthly reloaded debit card.
5. What appeals to you about basic income and how did you get interested in the movement?
In conclusion, my efforts are focused on UBI through generating awareness of the system I’ve put forth- Creator Currency Octaves and a UBI of a complementary currency- that both protects the primary currencies and provides an incentive for workers/creators to innovate and still participate in the economy.
In my view, this system:
1) negates all arguments against Basic Income
2) can’t be claimed as unfair, because it works for all citizens
3) is the best way to introduce UBI into an existing monetary system
4) balances economic power away from profit-above-all institutions and towards a creative, innovating, and artistically eager populous
5) can eliminate poverty
It’s my goal to help create a future where college grads follow their passion as opposed to a paycheck, artists actualize their dream projects without a producer limiting their creativity, and people power trumps the power of financial desperation leveled upon communities like an economic weapon. I want to live in a city where parents don’t have to explain to their kids why people are homeless starving on the street in an era of exceeding abundance. I don’t want to enable those who inherit wealth to exploit those who have unmet basic needs. Ultimately, I want to participate in a fair system, where children don’t starve, and I’d like to see poverty eliminated in my lifetime.
