From RBB Inforadio
A business man in Berlin, Michael Bohmeyer, starts on Wednesday paying a monthly unconditional payment of 1000 € to each of four people, raffled from a group of registrations. The money has been collected from a crowdfunding process and will be paid individually, during one year.
Annette Miersch, “Ein Jahr lang Grundeinkommen [An year of Basic Income]“, Inforadio RBB, October 1 2014
[Claus Offe]
Thanks to the initiatives of 29 year old Berlin-based freelancer Michael Bohmeyer, there has been a recent wave, probably unprecedented in its size, of media attention to basic income issues in German local and national media. What gathered wide attention is a project Bohmeyer started which can be seen as a remote relative to, or micro version of, a proper Basic Income (BI). What Bohmeyer shares with most proponents of the latter is one moral intuition: A person’s access to income must be unhinged from his or her prior market-tested productive contribution. His experiment is designed to demonstrate that people who receive income (of Euro 1000 per month for the modest duration of just one year) will still, even in the absence of any work incentive or “equivalence conditionality” attached, make an effort to perform useful activities – be it for sale in markets, be it as “free” services to communities.
Michael Bohmeyer, Mein Grundeinkommen
Contrary to BI schemes, there is no legal entitlement of citizens to the transfer, but a random selection of recipients from a pool of applicants. Also, the income granted is not tax financed, but “crowd funded”, i. e. derived from voluntary donations of supporters and, hopefully, charitable foundations. Furthermore, there still seems to be some soft test attached which is to provide evidence (to donors and potential future donors, that is) that recipients are in fact doing something “useful” and respectable while enjoying their “unconditional” benefits. Finally and unsurprisingly, the number of “basic incomes” thus generated is miniscule, with currently just five recipients being served in Berlin. All the greater is the favorable media resonance highlighting the two astounding (if not outright “scandalous”) facts that there are in fact people out there who donate money without thereby purchasing an equivalent, and that there are also people who receive that money without stopping to engage in some kind of useful activity. It is this demonstration effect that may work as a mild antidote to deep-seated market liberal popular assumptions.
For more information (in German), see Mein Grundeinkommen [My Basic Income] at: Mein-grundeinkommen.de.
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) has released the tentative schedule for its series of Internet events on the Seventh Annual International Basic Income Week, September 15-21, 2014. Each event will be an “Ask Me Anything” (also know as AMA or sometimes as “As Us Anything”). In these events, an expert in a given topic promises to be available for a given amount of time to type answers to questions submitted from anyone around the world. The AMAs will appear on Reddit. The following presenters have been confirmed for the following times. A few more are still to be confirmed. Additions will be announced on binews.org and reddit.com/r/basicincome.
Date | Time (EDT) | Subreddit | Name | Bio
15th | 12 pm | /r/IAmA | Karl Widerquist | Co-chair of BIEN, Associate Professor at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University, editor of Basic Income News, and author of A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No
15th | 1 pm | /r/Futurology | Marshall Brain | Founder of HowStuffWorks.com, entrepreneur, and author of Manna and Robot Nation & Robotic Freedom
16th | 5 am | /r/BasicIncome | Toru Fujimori | Executive committee member of BIEN in Japan and co-founder of Japanese Association for Feminist Economics
16th | 11 am | /r/IAmA | Michael Bohmeyer | German entrepreneur and founder of Mein Grundeinkommen “My Basic Income”, a successfully crowdfunded basic income
16th | 12 pm | /r/BasicIncome | Adriaan Planken | President of the Vereniging Basisinkomen (NL). Helped organize the “European Citizens Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income”
16th | 2 pm | /r/IAmA | Peter Barnes | Author of Who Owns the Sky?, Capitalism 3.0, and With Liberty and Dividends for all
17th | 10 am | /r/BasicIncome | Popho E.S. Bark-Yi | Feminist scholar whose major research interests are basic income, sexuality, gender, queer theory, emotion, and patriarchal capitalism. Steering committee member of Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN)
17th | 1 pm | /r/IAmA | Ed Dolan | Economist and blogger at Ed Dolan’s Econ Blog; author of the textbook Introduction to Economics from BVT Publishing. Ph.D. in economics from Yale with many years of experience teaching economics in the U.S. and Europe
17th | 4 pm | /r/TwoXChromosomes | Ann Withorn and Shawn Cassiman | Ann-Withorn, Ph.D. is Professor of Social Policy, Emeritus. University of Massachusetts/Boston. Shawn-Cassiman, MSW, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio
18th | 10 am | /r/BasicIncome | Mike Howard | Editor of Basic Income Studies, coordinator of USBIG, and a socialist philosopher at the University of Maine-Orono, with expertise on the Alaska dividend & the cap-and-dividend approach to global warming
18th | 8 pm | /r/BasicIncome | Pablo Yanes Rizo | of Red Mexicana Ingreso Ciudadano Universal (BIEN’s affiliate in Mexico)
18th | 10 pm | /r/BasicIncome | Hyosang Ahn | Director of the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN) and editor of the Left Monthly
19th | 12:30 pm | /r/Philosophy | Jason Murphy and Gaura Rader | Jason Murphy is a philosopher at Elms College and Gaura Rader is a philosopher at Ohio University and of the Socratic Diablogues
19th | 1 pm | /r/Christianity | Charles Clark | Professor of Economics, Tobin College of Business, and Senior Fellow, Vincentian Center for Church and Society, St. John’s University, New York
19th | 2 pm | /r/Europe | Unconditional Basic Income Europe | Barb Jacobson, Stanislas Jourdan, and Enno Schmidt, of Universal Basic Income Europe and leaders of people’s initiatives that raised a total of more than 400,000 signatures for basic income in 2013-2014
19th | 10 pm | /r/IAmA | Generation B.I.G. | Juon Kim, Télémaque Masson, and Stanislas Jourdan of Generation B.I.G., a new youth group recently organized to pursue basic income activism
20th | 10 am | /r/IAmA | Jeffery Smith | Edits The Progress Report, contributor at TruthOut, and is published in the academic press. Coined “Citizen’s Dividend” and “geonomics”. A member of the International Society for Ecological Economics and of Mensa
21st | 1 pm | /r/IAmA | Louise Haagh and Anja Askeland | Louise Haag, co-chair of BIEN and Reader in politics and the University of York (UK) and Anja Askeland, Secretary of BIEN and member of BIEN-Norway
The Basic Income Subreddit
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) has announced the list of speakers for its “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) series of internet interviews, which will take place on the Reddit website. The interviews will be text only and open to everyone. Anyone in the world can type in a question. The AMA series will take place during the Seventh Annual International Basic Income Week, September 15-21, 2014.
Reddit is one of the world’s most popular websites, last year receiving 731 million unique visitors and 56 billion page views. The Basic Income community on Reddit has recently experience enormous growth, rising from 50 users last summer to over 16,000 today
Participants in BIEN’s AMA series include:
The Basic Income Subreddit is online at: https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/
Information about the grown of the BI Subreddit is online at: https://redditmetrics.com/r/BasicIncome
The IAMA subreddit is online at: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA
More information about the AMA series will be announced soon.
Michael Bohmeyer, a 29 year old IT professional and basic income activist raises money for a project named Mein Grundeinkommen (my basic income) via crowdfunding, were people can win a basic income of 1.000 Euro per month payed for one year. Within only 22 days almost 500 people donated 12.000 Euro for the first winner to be drawn soon. Bohmeyer wants to find out how the winners will use the money and how it may make a difference in their life. The project has attracted a lot of attention in German media.
For more information (in German) see: Mein Grundeinkommen
For an interview in English with Michael Bohmeyer see:
Chris Köver, “A German Guy Wants to Give You a Bunch of Money for Nothing.” Vice, Aug 14 2014.
Michael Bohmeyer, photo by Jannismayr.de via Vice
