This essay is reprinted from OpenDemocracy, 18 October 2017
Support for unconditional basic income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that some might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, activists have been floating the plan — and other forms of a basic income guarantee (BIG) — for over a century. It experienced a small wave of support between 1910 and 1940, followed by a down period in the 40s and 50s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 60s and 70s, followed by another down period in most countries until the early 2000s. Today’s discussion began to take off around 2010 and has increased every year since. It is UBI’s third, and by far its largest, wave of support yet.
Pessimists might think that this wave will inevitably subside, just as prior movements did. History, however, doesn’t always stick to patterns. In a 2016 interview with Wired, Barack Obama predicted that “we’ll be having [the UBI debate] over the next 10 or 20 years”. He may be right.
The history of the UBI movement shows that today’s political context points to an increase in support. More and more activists – from more and more diverse political formations – are calling for UBI. They can now cite evidence from a number of empirical studies, conducted over years in a variety of locations, to demonstrate the programme’s benefits.
Rising inequality and an economic system that seems designed against ordinary people has radicalised voters in recent years. Nationalist-populist movements are trying to redirect this frustration against immigrants and people of colour, but the left can take advantage of this moment to build support for UBI and create a truly universal welfare state.
The first wave
UBI dates back more than two hundred years, but enough people were discussing it in the early twentieth century to constitute a wave – or at least a ripple – of support. The idea was still new enough that most advocates had little knowledge of each other and all tended to give their versions of the programme a different name.
Some supporters of Henry George’s land tax suggested that proceeds be distributed in cash. Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf both praised the idea in their writings without naming it. In 1918, Dennis and E. Mabel Milner started the short-lived ‘State Bonus League’, and, in 1920, Dennis Milner published what was likely the first full-length book on UBI, Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. James Meade and G. D. H. Cole – who coined the phrase “basic income” – wrote favourably about it in the 1930s.
Major C. H. Douglas called it a national dividend and included it in his ‘social credit’ programme. In 1934, the Louisiana senator Huey Long debuted his ‘share the wealth’ programme: he seems to have come up with the idea on his own, as there’s no evidence he was influenced by the ideas spreading around the United Kingdom in those years. The plan might have served as the basis for his presidential run had Long not been assassinated in 1935.
These early UBI advocates managed little direct influence on legislation. In 1935, the Social Credit Party of Canada took power in Alberta, but did not move to implement Douglas’ proposed dividend. After World War II, most welfare states adopted a conditional model, which provides assistance only to those who fit into some category of need, such as old age, disability, unemployment, single-parenthood, absence of market income, and so on. Truly universal programmes are few, far-between, and small. Discussion of a full UBI programme largely fell out of mainstream political discussion for more than two decades.
The second wave
The second wave took off in the early-to-mid 1960s. At that time, at least three groups in the United States and Canada began promoting the idea. Welfare rights activists mobilised people frustrated by inadequate and often demeaning conditional programmes. Futurists saw UBI as a way to protect workers from disruptions to the labour market caused by the computer revolution. Finally, many prominent economists – some leftists and some from the burgeoning libertarian movement – agreed that a basic income guarantee represented a more effective approach to poverty than the conditional and means-tested programmes of the New Deal era. BIG would simplify and streamline the welfare system while also making it more comprehensive.
The mainstream media first noticed UBI around the time Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty”. Politicians and policy wonks began taking up the idea, and the Canadian government released several favourable reports on the “guaranteed annual income” in the 1970s.
For a short time, many saw some kind of guaranteed income as an inevitable next step in social policy: a compromise everyone could live with. Leftists viewed it as the culmination of the welfare system that would fill in the remaining cracks. Centrists and conservatives saw it as a way to make the social safety net more cost-effective.
In 1971, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill introducing a watered-down version of the ‘negative income tax’ (NIT), yet another variant of the idea. It missed becoming law by only ten votes in the Senate. The next year, presidential nominees from both major parties endorsed some form of BIG: Richard Nixon supported NIT, and George McGovern UBI. Interestingly, the fact that both nominees’ held essentially the same position made BIG less of an issue in the campaign than it might otherwise have been.
Nixon’s NIT never got another vote. It died partly because it had no groundswell of support outside of the welfare rights movement. None of its proponents made a serious push to sell the proposal to the public at large. Even BIG supporters viewed Nixon’s version with scepticism, seeing it as a top-down, centralised initiative. Letting it die cost the politicians who backed it very little, so they allowed the idea to fade from public discourse.
While neither the United States nor Canada introduced full UBI programmes, the second wave of UBI support had some major successes. Both countries conducted five implementation trials, and the United States created or expanded several more limited programmes, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Alaska Dividend. These policies not only helped a lot of people, but their relative success provided convincing evidence to push social programmes toward universality.
Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dramatically changed the conversation around the welfare state in the early 1980s. They successfully vilified recipients as frauds. As a result, many people stopped talking about how to expand or improve the welfare system and started talking about how to cut it. The left largely went on the defensive in response, and stopped criticising the conditional model.
In 1980 the United States and Canada cancelled the last of their implementation trials, Canada stopped analysing the data it had spent years and millions of dollars collecting, and for the next 30 years mainstream American politics engaged in virtually no discussion of any form of BIG. Fortunately, as I discuss below, the results of those trials eventually re-emerged as important proof of the idea’s potential.
Between the waves
While discussion waned in North America, it slowly grew in other parts of the world. In 1977, a small Dutch party started a trend when it endorsed UBI in parliament. The next year, Niels I. Meyer’s book Rebellion from the Center launched a substantial wave of support in Denmark. The proposal gained traction in other countries as well, including post-apartheid South Africa. For the most part, however, discussion of UBI programmes took place outside the political mainstream, where its slight upward trend attracted little notice.
Academic attention began to grow in this period, especially among European scholars. The Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reinvented UBI in 1982 with no prior knowledge of the previous waves. He eventually connected with other supporters – including Guy Standing, Claus Offe, Annie Miller, Hermione Parker, and Robert van der Veen – and together they established the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) and convened the first BIEN Congress on 4-6 September 1986. From this point on, UBI, rather than NIT, dominated the political discussion of BIG.
The academic debate grew substantially between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, especially in the fields of politics, philosophy, and sociology. In 1984, supporters launched the first national UBI network in the United Kingdom; by the time BIEN changed its name to the Basic Income Earth Network 20 years later, activists had organized at least two dozen national groups.
Yet UBI stayed mostly outside the political mainstream, making the movement feel more like a discussion group than a political action network. Even the activist contingent concentrated more on discussion than action, believing that they had to increase public awareness before they could implement their proposals. This feeling actually distracted supporters from how much their movement had grown.
The third wave takes off
The third wave of basic income activism hit the mainstream in 2015 or 2016, but volunteers at Basic Income News had been noticing substantial increases in media attention since at least 2011. And in some places, the crossover began even earlier than that.
In 2006, at the BIEN Congress in South Africa, Zephania Kameeta, then the Lutheran Archbishop of Namibia, slammed his fist on the podium and announced, “Words, words, words!” UBI conferences had seen many passionate calls for action, but they were almost always accompanied by appeals for someoneelse to take action. This time, the speaker already had an action plan under way: the Namibian BIG Coalition was raising funds to finance a two-year implementation trial.
This project coincided with a smaller one in Brazil, and a much larger one followed in India in 2010. These tests attracted substantial media attention and helped inspire the privately and publicly funded experiments now under discussion or underway in Finland, Scotland, Canada, the United States, and Kenya.
At about the same time that Kameeta spoke in Cape Town, a national UBI wave was beginning to swell in Germany. Prominent people from across the political spectrum –Katja Kipping, Götz W. Werner, Susanne Wiest, and Dieter Althaus – all began to push different basic income proposals in a very public way.
Unlike most previous waves of support, this one inspired broad activism, which has only grown. In 2008, UBI networks in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria jointly organised the first International Basic Income Week, which has subsequently grown to become a worldwide event with actions taking place as far away as Australia and South America.
The financial meltdown and subsequent Great Recession sparked a new climate of activism. Public attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and inequality, and UBI supporters suddenly had a much better environment for activism.
Two citizens’ initiatives got under way in Switzerland and in the European Union in the early 2010s. In the former, Daniel Häni and Enno Scmidt successfully collected enough signatures to trigger a national vote. The EU movement eventually recruited organisers in all member states. Although neither ultimately won, they built an infrastructure to support activism across Europe and brought a tremendous amount of attention to the issue, which in turn sparked additional activism and attracted more support.
One of the contemporary movement’s most important features is that support now comes from many different places and from people who do not necessarily work together, follow similar strategies, or adhere to the same ideology. Indeed, today’s activists are motivated by a number of different issues and sources.
Mirroring the 1960s futurism discourse, many advocates point to automation and precariousness as reasons to enact the programme. High unemployment, the gig economy, and the pace of automation threaten large segments of the labour force. Whether or not the need for human labour is decreasing, the labour market has become extremely unstable. Labour leaders, activists, academics, and tech entrepreneurs have all proposed UBI in response, making this issue one of the prime drivers of recent interest in UBI.
For the first time, environmentalism has played a major role in this activism. Two of the most popular proposals for combating climate change are the tax-and-dividend and cap-and-dividend strategies, both of which involve setting a price on carbon emissions and distributing the revenue to all citizens. Other environmental groups, such as “Degrowth” and Canada’s “Leap Manifesto,” see UBI as a way to counteract excessive consumption and the depletion of resources.
Two additional proposals, called ‘quantitative easing for the people’ and ‘helicopter money’, are pushing central banks to stop giving money away to private banks and start giving it directly to every citizen. They believe their proposal would constitute a more equitable and effective economic stimulus programme. Although they do not use the term, distributing money directly to the people is essentially a temporary UBI.
Some private groups are trying to bypass central banks entirely by creating non-government digital currencies, and some of these groups have announced their intentions to provide their users with a UBI in the new currency.
At the same time, new evidence has convinced people of UBI’s radical potential. Evelyn Forget, of the University of Manitoba, received grant funding to analyse the data from Canada’s NIT experiment. She released her findings in 2011, just as new implementation trials and citizens’ initiatives were getting off the ground. They received a great deal of press attention and helped spark new interest in the programme in Canada and beyond. This increased media attention has built the movement even further. Seemingly every major news outlet has published something about UBI. And, in a sure sign of the movement’s newfound strength, opponents have started attacking it.
A couple of years ago, it remained unclear whether the third wave would match the size and reach of the second. Now the answer is obvious: grassroots support and international media attention are larger than ever, and the third wave represents the first truly global basic income movement. According to Philippe Van Parijs, “the big difference between the first two waves and the third one is that the third one quickly became international”. The first two did not extend beyond the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but the third wave already involves major campaigns on all six inhabited continents.
How far can the third wave go?
The left should recognise that past UBI movements entered mainstream conversation when people worried about inequality and unemployment, and then subsided when public attention turned to other issues or when other ways of addressing poverty became dominant. The second American wave ended in the United States not in the prosperous economy of the mid-1980s but in the troubling times of the late 1970s, when right-wing politicians convinced large numbers of people that redistributive programmes had become overly generous.
The biggest danger to the third wave appears to be growing nationalism. If politicians can convince voters to blame immigrants for growing inequality, they can effectively distract people from mobilising around better social policies.
Despite these dangers, basic-income activists should feel encouraged: each wave has been larger than the last. With every resurgence, UBI has had a more developed proposal than the time before, and activists have been better prepared to address people’s concerns about poverty, inequality, and unemployment. The fact that academics had continued to study and activists had continued to promote UBI during its unfashionable years gave it recognition as a viable alternative when inequality once again became a dominant policy discussion.
Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the conditional welfare model has been growing for over a century. This system is based on the idea that everyone who can work should and only those who really cannot work should receive help. All others are undeserving.
Conditionality has not made the welfare state more generous or less vulnerable to attack. Many who work still live in poverty, as do many who receive benefits. Opponents have successfully chipped away at welfare for more than 40 years, largely by vilifying any group that meets the conditions for need.
The conditional system also hurts workers. By making welfare requirements so stringent, we have made all employees more dependent on their employers. Dependent workers have less power, making it harder to demand good wages and decent working conditions. It is no coincidence that middle-class income has stagnated over the same period that the welfare system has declined. Despite enormous productivity gains, most workers now work more hours for less pay.
Conditional welfare systems are built on paternalistic assumptions that force people to prove their right to survival. UBI might not always gain steam as fast as it has in the last few years, but those shortcomings won’t disappear, and they provide a good reason for people to look seriously at UBI.
-Karl Widerquist, writing in Doha, New Orleans, and Morehead City in 2016 and 2017
After the 17th BIEN Conference in Lisbon, Portugal had a boost of interest from the media on Basic Income. There were many articles in the mainstream media, TV, Radio and Newspapers and the debate is continuing.
The main Portuguese public TV station, RTP 1, had a very interesting piece in the news, including interviews with Philippe Van Parijs and Scottish MP Ronnie Cowan:
Why it’s useful to see Basic Income through the lens of Population Health Intervention Research
Thanks in part to the health sciences, there is widespread public acceptance that being poor is bad for your health. It doesn’t take much for us to make the connections. We might expect that less to eat and poor housing conditions interfere with our ability to maintain healthy bodies and immune systems. Less money could mean no access to things like computers so that people can visit sites like Thenutritioninsider.com
to get advice on how to eat healthy and look after their bodies. It may also mean less access to the health services that could treat or prevent illness and disease.
We need to make treatments more accessible which is why using coupons from somewhere like Save On Cannabis for CBD products might enable the vast health inequality to become smaller in the future. Moreover, fewer resources might mean fewer opportunities and fewer job options. Poverty also compounds political and social injustice, with marginalized people such as women, Indigenous people and racialized groups profoundly affected by poverty. These groups often constitute much of the poor. Lastly, evidence suggest we suffer the psychological consequences of living in material deprivation, both in absolute terms and relative to others. Therefore it is a necessity for marketing cbd brands to change the narrative around cbd products so that there’s a change in the structure and more people get accessible medical care.
The immense research on poverty, income inequality, and the social determinants of health culminated in public sympathy for the plight of the poor. Yet for all the studies that have been done on poverty, perhaps it is time to develop research and public support for a solution – such as Basic Income. There are practical challenges to getting basic income into common public health parlance. The health of everyone is highly important, no matter the level of wealth, every person should have access to healthcare, for example, men may need sexual health medications (), which means that they must be able to have that access when required by their doctor.
The answer may lie in the understanding of Basic Income as an ideological proposal that can affect our health. The discourse around basic income as a deeply ethical idea is necessary, but perhaps insufficient. I believe we should consider reframing the concept concretely as a population health intervention.
Why call basic income a “population health intervention”?
A concept advanced by Canadian researchers Potvin and Hawe (2012) as being policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions, population health intervention research is a unique approach to figuring out how we are affected by policies that have a wholesale effect on people. Eminent basic income economist Dr. Evelyn Forget took this approach in her paper “New questions, new data, old interventions: The health effects of a guaranteed annual income” (Forget 2013). She used old administrative data from the well-known “Mincome” experiment in Manitoba, and looked at health records from the same time-period. She saw a reduction in hospital burden relative to a similar town’s health care use that did not get the income grant.
Calling basic income an intervention means that we can treat it as a ‘natural experiment‘.
We can study the impact of a policy on our health and well-being without necessarily running a Randomized Controlled Trial (where you randomly assign some people to a treatment, policy, or program, and not others).
Many have proposed that we need to conduct this sort of formal scientific experiment first. Some have questioned how useful such limited studies would be. A Randomized Controlled Trial might tell us whether basic income works in a certain social, economic, and political setting, but tells us little about whether the policy would work in other settings, or why the policy had a particular effect.
We ought to be careful not to set ourselves up to fail with studies too narrowly drawn in scope. Mixed or unexpected results from such studies also risks misinterpretation, and can be used to prevent basic income from entering policy.
Although the Ontario Pilot Program represents a step in the right direction, nothing stops us from advocating for the full national implementation of basic income. A host of different research and study designs would be embedded into the impact evaluation of this federal policy, on par with health care or public education. Framing a given policy as a population health intervention acknowledges the fact that many there are health-promoting aspects to programs outside of health care sector (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
Basic income is such a policy. Programs to alleviate poverty lie outside the doctor’s office, but nevertheless have a profound impact on health.
Population Health Intervention Researchcompels us to think bigger than ourselves.
Traditional medicine treats the individual person. If we are looking at the effect of social programs and policies, this unit of analysis is often too small to see measurable differences in any single person. Moreover, if we restrict a given treatment or social program to the poorest people – such as welfare, we may see limited overall benefits to the population as a whole.
Epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose recognized this problem (Rose 1985). Imagine that people lie on a continuum of ‘risk’ for certain diseases and health outcomes. For example, this could be said of high blood pressure as a risk factor for heart attack. Higher blood pressure puts you at higher risk of heart attack.
For our purposes, let’s say this distribution represents the relationship between poverty and getting sick. Higher poverty puts you at higher risk of ‘sickness’. We might expect that most people lie somewhere in the middle of the distribution, while those at very high or very low poverty sit somewhere at the tails.
Rose noted that traditional medicine’s approach was to target high risk people at the far right. However, these people are a smaller proportion, and paying attention only to them might not give us the biggest bang for our buck. Instead, he posited that interventions that reach entire groups of people would ‘shift’ the distribution itself. At the end of the day, he estimated that these far-reaching treatments would have a bigger impact overall (Rose 1985).
Basic income fits that profile – a social policy that brings everyone up, effectively ‘shifting’ the distribution. In order to examine policies that lend a helping hand to everyone, we need a scientific lens that is broad enough to capture the whole picture. Reframing basic income as a population shifter might fill that void.
Lastly, population health interventions allow us to redirect our thinking from the problem to the solution.
We keep studying poverty, not the fixes for poverty. A population health intervention approach calls for the health sciences to consider the potential gains to be made by studying the impact of income interventions on population health. We should be turning our attention from studying how poverty effects our health, to studying how fixing poverty effects our health.
You might be quick to point out that we have not eradicated poverty yet. So, how do we study this state of affairs, when it doesn’t yet exist?
In some ways, we can. We have the pilot run in Dauphin, Manitoba that in many ways, was ahead of its time. Dr. Forget was the first to recognize the strength of “intervention-alizing” the Canadian basic income experiment. We can also examine policies that get close to basic income, such as the Bolsa Família program of Brazil – a conditional cash transfer available to families with children. In Canada, the non-conditional income grant for senior citizens called the Old Age Supplement has been analyzed as an analog to basic income (McIntyre, Kwok et al. 2016) and indeed, those researchers found that participants eligible for OAS reported better self-reported physical, mental, and function health. Importantly, they also found those on OAS (which is non-conditional) where better off than those on conditional income programs. These are innovative approaches to the question of basic income’s potential impact, using information we already have. And, it might move us from studies of poverty, toward studies of basic income.
As it stands, promoting basic income as a population health intervention for the sake of our health is underutilized, yet it seems like a sensible way to communicate the idea. Poverty is intricately tied to the material conditions of our lives and societal position in the world, predicated on sex, race, and class. How a policy like basic income works among these conditions deserves no less than comprehensive and holistic look at how our health is profoundly impacted. Research that is based on an understanding of population health intervention attempts todo just this – and capture the value and differential effect of these interventions, the processes by which they bring about change and the contexts within which they work best (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
The Dauphin Experiment and the impending Ontario Pilot have and will continue to shape our thinking moving forward. They are also a testament to the desire of Canadians for a better, kinder, healthier society for all. However, we have not yet fully transformed the public’s conception of poverty alleviation as a necessary policy, worthy of widespread implementation as are universal health care, public education, or social assistance.
Implementing a basic income as an essential social program and for our health is possible, and fully within our experience of policy-making at both the provincial and national levels. The time has come to make this a reality.
Sarah M Mah is a PhD student in the department of Geography at McGill University. She is also a member of the Asian Women for Equality Society, an organization dedicated to the campaign for a Guaranteed Livable Income.
The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of BIEN or BI News.
References
Forget, E. L. (2013). “New questions, new data, old interventions: the health effects of a guaranteed annual income.” Prev Med57(6): 925-928.
Hawe, P. and L. Potvin (2009). “What is population health intervention research?” Can J Public Health100(1): Suppl I8-14.
McIntyre, L., C. Kwok, J. C. Emery and D. J. Dutton (2016). “Impact of a guaranteed annual income program on Canadian seniors’ physical, mental and functional health.” Can J Public Health107(2): e176-182.
Rose, G. (1985). “Sick individuals and sick populations.” Int J Epidemiol14(1): 32-38.
The 18th Congress of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), Basic Income and the New Universalism: Rethinking the Welfare State in the 21st Century, will take place 23-26 August 2018, at the University of Tampere in Finland.
Organizers have released a call for papers, inviting proposals for individual papers as well as themed panels (up to three panelists) and roundtable discussions (up to five discussants). Proposed papers, panels, and roundtables may concern “any aspect of the justification, design, implementation, or politics of universal basic income.”
Proposals must be submitted online (at the linked web form) by Monday, January 15, 2018.
Confirmed invited speakers include Jamie Cooke (Head of RSA Scotland), Evelyn Forget (Professor in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba), Loek Groot (Associate Professor Economics of the Public Sector at the Utrecht University School of Economics), Louise Haagh (Chair of BIEN and Reader in Politics at the University of York), Renana Jhabvala (President of Self-Employed Women’s Association in Bharat, India), Olli Kangas (Director of Governmental relations at Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland), and Lena Lavinas (Professor of Welfare Economics at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).
The BIEN Congress will be preceded by a one-day event focusing on the basic income debate in Nordic countries.
The 17th BIEN Congress took place in Lisbon, Portugal from the 25th to the 27th of September. The focus of the congress was on “Implementing Basic Income.” The 150 presenters represented 33 countries, with more countries represented in the additional 380 audience members. According to Karl Widerquist, Vice-Chair of BIEN, this may have been the largest BIEN Congress since Brazil in 2010. The Congress included keynote presentations by BIEN co-founders Guy Standing and Philippe Van Parijs, in addition to keynote presentations about several Basic Income pilot programs, reflecting the congress’s focus on implementation, and from several political figures who are advocating for Basic Income in their respective countries.
The first day of the congress took place at the Portuguese Parliament (Assembleia da República), and as Standing said: “I am sure I speak for many of the co-founders, and many of them are here, that when we set up BIEN 31 years ago we never anticipated that we would be in a place like this in 2017.” The second and third days were held at ISEG, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, a beautiful venue that used to be a convent (Convento das Inglesinhas, restored by architect Gonçalo Byrne) that has kept many of its original architectural features and now hosts the university’s post-graduate programs.
Starting the keynote session on Basic Income pilot programs, Evelyn Forget’s presentation was about the differences between the narratives attached to several Basic Income experiments. She underlined that different narratives will create different criteria of success. For example, Finland’s narrative is about long-term unemployment and incentivising return to work. In this case, the experiment will be successful if people return to work. Ontario’s narrative is about social justice and a gap in benefits for adults because of the new reality of precarious work and poverty issues. Their goal is to expand the welfare state. Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator’s narrative started out as an utopia put forward by private individuals who wondered what would happen once automation freed people to do what they want. Forget stressed that “context matters” in pilot programs, and she suggested that when we bring together all these shared experiences, we can create newer and richer narratives.
After Forget’s insights, there were several presentations about specific pilot programs being developed. Karen Glass, from the experiment in Ontario, Canada, described the pilot program as a type of Negative Income Tax program, since the payments decrease as the recipients start working. The Ontario project applies to households and encompasses individuals aged 18 through 64, who have been residents of the region for one year. The pilot provides a guaranteed annual income of $17,000 dollars per individual and $24,000 per couple, which is 75% of the low income measure. The success criteria are not focused primarily on work incentives, but on recipients’ improved health, reduction in anxiety and the ability to make ends meet. Elizabeth Rhodes from Y Combinator, a seed investment company, talked about the contours of what this private experiment wants to achieve. Y Combinator has already financed a feasibility study in Oakland. and now plans to select 3000 participants who will receive 1000 dollars per month, some for three years and others for five. There is an income cap in the selection and they will be undersampling higher incomes. Presently the program is considering selecting subjects 21 to 40 years in age. The pilot intends to evaluate well being, mental and physical health, social and civic engagement and social networks effects as well as effects in the children of the participants. The research team has been piloting and testing their methods with a smaller group of participants.
Joe Huston spoke about the experience of GiveDirectly in Kenya. GiveDirectly has raised funds privately and has been distributing them to around 100 people, but once the project is fully launched there will be up to 26,000 people receiving some type of cash transfer. The pilot is divided into three groups, one group will receive a monthly payment for 12 years, another for 2 years and yet another will receive a one time cash grant of the same amount. The 100 people who are receiving a monthly Basic Income already have reported on their experiences, and, as Huston says,many have reported they did not reduce their work efforts; instead, many have several projects that need to be completed (such as paying for school and building a house), so they need to work. Others have pulled their Basic Income payments together in something called “table banking” and give a larger sum to each member at a time so that more can be achieved. Giving to individuals as opposed to households has had the emancipatory effects that are often theorized: because each person receives an equal amount of money, it is easier to solve household disputes. Regarding how the money is spent, Huston says that Basic Income debates seem to oscillate between saying that people will become lazy bums or startup engineers; however, both extremes are inaccurate and do not apply to what is happening in the village so far. Huston explains that when walking from house to house in Kenya one can see a diversity of life choices: “Irene spent some in purchasing a goat for about $12 and kept some of the money as savings. Eric spent most of his money in a fishing net, saved some of the money and bought small fish like anchovies for a snack. Frederick spent most of the money in school fees.” So far, each person used the money as is more adequate in their particular circumstances.
On the political arena there were several important participants. From Germany, Cosima Kern spoke about the new Basic Income single issue party, and explained that since Germany has no direct democracy (in contrast to Switzerland) this is a way to force Basic Income into the political arena. The Basic Income party had almost 100,000 votes in the election that took place on day before the Congress, which Kern said is a good result for a new party. Enno Schmidt talked about the referendum in Switzerland and also underlined that the 23% vote for Basic Income was a great first result, reminding everyone how it took 17 years of discussion in Switzerland for women to have the right to vote. Lena Stark spoke about the new political party in Sweden in the same vein as the German party; they plan to run for elections in September 2018. Ping Xu presented the situation in Taiwan with the help of Tyler Prochazka. Taiwan has the highest housing costs and the lowest birth rates, and would be an ideal site for a full implementation of Basic Income. From Japan, the ex-Minister of Agriculture, Masahiko Yamada, spoke about the importance of Basic Income in his country, which is facing new economic challenges that urgently need to be addressed.
Finally, the Scottish MP Ronnie Cowan inspired the audience with his privileged viewpoint regarding how politicians tend to operate and the heartfelt way that Scotland is pursuing their Basic Income pilot programs. Mr. Cowan said that politicians rely on experts, but experts and academic often disagree, and politicians need facts and figures, which is why experiments are so important. With pilot schemes, we can monitor outcomes; they can be used to tell if “people are happier, more socially engaged, eating healthier, if kids are doing better at school, we can measure the benefits against the cost.” Mr. Cowan concluded: “Basic Income really comes alive for me when we consider it’s for everyone. It is not means tested. It is not subject to the disability test. It removes stigma. It creates choice and it’s absolutely dripping in humanity.”
The two main keynote speakers, Guy Standing and Philippe Van Parijs, also captured the audience’s interest with their presentations. Standing celebrated the 800 year anniversary of The Charter of the Forest, a piece of legislation that was valid for 754 years, only repealed in 1971. Standing argued that the commons defended in The Charter of The Forest have been plundered upon for hundreds of years, and Basic Income is a way to bring back the commons. He defended the position that Basic Income should be seen as a social dividend based in the commons and land tax, not something that will send income tax through the roof. Van Parijs spoke of the right to work and the duty to work. He argued that even though many see Basic Income as an attack on these, it actually facilitates both. Basic Income can organically encourage part-time work and therefore job sharing, thus promoting the right to work. Basic Income can also allow for the duty to work to be expressed in a meaningful way that includes paid and unpaid jobs. According to Van Parijs, the duty to work cannot mean simply doing something for a salary; it should be viewed more widely as a duty to participate in society in a meaningful way. Basic Income can liberate people to participate in such a way by either allowing them to chose paid work that is more meaningful, or by choosing other unpaid useful work. If we eliminate the idea that people have to work in whatever they can to survive, the morality of what one chooses to do will come to the forefront, allowing the duty to work in a more meaningful way to become center stage as far as human activity is concerned.
The keynote presentations wrapped up with Eduardo Suplicy from Brazil, ex-Senator and long time defender of Basic Income, and Francisco Louçã, member of the left wing party Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal. There were also many other local Portuguese participants, as well as a slew of media attention related to the congress (which will be discussed in a future Basic Income Newspiece). The congress also included 37 parallel sessions, among others, Malcolm Torry’s presentation on Defining Basic Income, sessions on Degrowth, Digital Economy, Communicating about Basic Income, and many other topics, as well as two films, Christian Todd’sFree Lunch Society and Rena Masuyama’s Film Project, the first fiction film about Basic Income produced in Japan. Summaries of all the sessions provided by the chairs should be available in about one month at the Portuguese Basic Income Site, for now there are papers and presentations and videos of the event available of the site.
