by Kate McFarland | Apr 30, 2018 | Opinion
The following is part two of a two part series (part one can be found here) featuring Kate McFarland interviewing D. JoAnne Swanson of The Anticareerist on Basic Income. The original article can be found here.
KM: Are there any particular writers or thinkers on basic income who have influenced your views? Is there any additional literature that you would recommend for those who are interested, specifically, in the idea that basic income could facilitate and encourage unpaid work?
DJS: This could be a long list! Not all of these people are basic income writers per se, but they’ve all greatly influenced my views on basic income and unpaid work. Here are some of the writers I refer to most frequently, along with a favorite quote from each:
David Frayne – his interview in Contrivers’ Review is among the most lucid treatments of these topics I’ve ever read. I love his writing. I highly recommend his book The Refusal of Work.
“…there has to be more political organisation to create change. The book is deliberately very explicit about this because I felt a strong need to distinguish it from popular books promoting lifestyle changes like “slowness” or “life simplification” as solutions to the problems with work. We are seeing a lot of these books where the author is positioned as a sort of lifestyle guru, who is going to tell us the secret key to living well, and it is usually by working less, being less materialistic, and so on. I don’t think that people really benefit from being told this, and these books actually anger me to a degree, because they suggest that change is a matter of changing individual habits.”
Charles Eisenstein – author of Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible
“Why do we want to create more jobs? It is so people have money to live. For that purpose, they might as well dig holes in the ground and fill them up again, as Keynes famously quipped…Wouldn’t it be better to pay people to do nothing at all, and free up their creative energy to meet the urgent needs of the world?”
“Unfortunately, the term leisure carries connotations of frivolity and dissipation that are inconsistent with the urgent needs of the planet and its people as the age turns. There is a vast amount of important work to be done, work that is consistent with degrowth because it won’t necessarily produce salable product. There are forests to replant, sick people to care for, an entire planet to be healed. I think we are going to be very busy. We are going to work hard doing deeply meaningful things that no longer must fight upstream against the flow of money, the imperative of growth. Yet I also believe we will have more true leisure — the experience of the abundance of time — than we do today. The scarcity of time is one reason we overconsume, attempting to compensate for the loss of this most primal of all wealth. Time is life. To be truly rich is to have sovereignty over our own time.”
Charlene ‘Eleri’ Hamilton of Women4UBI on The Work Trap:
“Some detractors of Basic Income say that it will create dependency and slavery to the government. That is what is happening with our so-called safety nets now. You have to prove yourself to the government to get benefits. You have to continue to prove yourself to keep benefits. You are told when and how and why you can use those benefits. You will lose those benefits the moment you step out of the framework. Basic Income eliminates all that.
Basic Income is about trust and respect. We respect you as a member of our society, and we trust you to make your own choices. We don’t need to means test you, or scour through your finances, or judge what you buy when. When everyone gets the same level of benefit, then no one needs to be judged, shamed or excluded.”
Peter Frase – search his blog for the “work” tag. In particular, see Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs and Work To Need. From Workin’ It:
“I want to separate the different meanings of work. But doing so is essentially impossible in a world where everyone is forced to work for wages, because they have no other means of survival. In that world, all work is work in the first sense, “necessary” because it has been made necessary by the elimination of any alternative.”
Kathi Weeks – The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries and A Feminist Case for Basic Income:
“Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we have more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives.”
Silvia Federici – Wages Against Housework
See also the Caring Labor Archive.
“…under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit.”
J. Larochelle & C.A. L’Hirondelle of Livable4All – “What is Jobism?”
“…anyone doing informal but necessary work such as unpaid care-giving is put under financial duress because their time used for unpaid work cannot be used for paid work. Families, neighborhoods and communities are robbed of the time and resources they need thrive and be healthy. This robbing resources from the informal sector causes great harm to children, elders, people with extra needs from illness or disability and it breaks apart families and communities. This creates a negative feedback loop because the subsequent problems fuel the need for more ‘fixing’ jobs (e.g. social workers, addiction counsellors, police, lawyers, jailers, etc.).”
Ethan Miller – Occupy, Connect, Create! Imagining Life Beyond ‘The Economy’
“The sorcery of capitalist economics is precisely to make its own violence invisible, so that it can appear to be nothing but the miraculous liberator of human potential and the progressive deliverer of ever-abundant goods. And there is a disturbingly good reason for us to give in to this illusion: most of us are dependent on the very economy that has systematically exploited us and undermined the health of our communities and our environments. We have come to rely on the very “job creators” (that new euphemism for exploiters) whose project of profiting at our expense we condemn. We have come to need the very economic growth machine that is eating our world and destabilizing our planetary climate in the name of “progress.”
Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear, Yeoshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith, founders of the gender justice movement Give Your Money To Women: The End Game of Capitalism.
“This goes back to classism again and again and again. If you look across the spectrum, things women do for society are valued little or not at all in terms of money. They’re essentially forced to access capital through their relationships with men: personal, familial, professional.”
Molly Scott Cato – See Arbeit Macht Frei (the first edition of this book was released in 1996 under the title Seven Myths About Work.)
“Work is a confidence trick that lies at the heart of the economic system of capitalism. If a man walked up to another man and hit him over the head with a stick and stole half the money in his wallet this would be considered a crime and the man would be considered a threat to society. But if a man offers another a job and pays him half the value his labour generates we laud him as a wealth-creator, as a worthy entrepreneur, the sort of person our children should be taught to emulate in school.”
Sarah Jaffe – See Opting for Free Time:
“…we need to be willing to argue for leisure as a right, and as a feminist issue. […] A gendered demand for leisure would argue that women’s time is as important as men’s, whether we are spending it parenting or reading a book or lying on a beach. It would take into account the racialized and classed expectations of different groups of women, and argue that low-income women deserve time off too (and it would argue that they deserve to make enough money to enjoy that time.) It would point out that what is earned vacation for white women is not “laziness” in women of color.
It would argue not from any biological imperative (that rarely gets us anywhere good), but from a time-honored (though lately forgotten) labor and left tradition that says that time, as much as anything, is a right—and it would take from the Wages for Housework movement the idea that unpaid work in the home is still work that we deserve a respite from.”
Karl Widerquist – Among my favorite quotes from his work is this powerful statement:
“One answer of mine to one of the common questions [about universal basic income, a.k.a. UBI] is unusual, and it’s been a major theme in my writing since I started. When people say it’s something for nothing, I argue most emphatically that it is not. We force so many terrible things onto the poor. We don’t get their permission. And without UBI, we don’t pay them back for what we force on them. We make them live in a world where everything else is owned. We make rules about all kinds of things they could otherwise do. Our ancestors lived without such rules for 200,000 years. They could hunt, gather, fish or farm as they wished. We’ve taken all that away and given them nothing in return. UBI is long overdue. UBI is paying for the privileges you have taken. If we don’t have UBI we put the propertyless in the position where they have no other choice but to work for the very people whose privileged control of resources makes the propertyless unable to use resources for themselves. UBI is no less than the end of effective slavery.”
James Chamberlain, whose work I just discovered a few weeks ago. (My first reaction: “where were the people who were writing things like this when I was applying to graduate school?”) I’m very excited to read his new book Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, especially after reading an early draft of the first chapter.
“Not only does the requirement to work keep many of us too busy to engage in deep reflections on fundamental questions of collective existence, but the ideology of work erodes freedom by constructing paid work as an unassailable good and by placing it outside the realm of “reasonable” or “realistic” debate. By encouraging us to see the requirement to work for pay as an inevitable or even natural feature of collective existence, the ideology of work therefore chips away at our freedom to even imagine alternative futures in which paid work might play a different role (or none at all), and thus reduces our capacities to act according to our own ends.”
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You can find out more about The Anticareerist and its author HERE.
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In May, Kate McFarland will be speaking about anticareerism at the North American Basic Income Guarantee congress in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
by Andre Coelho | Apr 20, 2018 | News
Picture credit: Leena Kela (“Walk this way”)
The Finnish basic income (BI) experiment proceeds as planned. According to Kela, the Finnish social security agency, results will only start being analysed at the beginning of 2019, and their publication at the end of that year, or early 2020.
As already known, the purpose of the experiment is to evaluate participants behaviour in terms of employment, particularly employment rates. An intention exists, in spite of that, to evaluate “the wellbeing of the participants and their experiences when communicating and conducting business with the authorities”. To this end, questionnaires and interviews are being contemplated, but only when the experiment is over. Here, Kela officials are more cautious, stating that “timing the data collection requires detailed planning and an evaluation of the factors to be measured as well as an assessment of the potential impact of the various stages of the experiment, such as its conclusion, on the measurements”.
Finland has no plans to further the experiment after 2018, although is already experimenting with participatory social security, beginning this year. In fact, according to Miska Simanainen, a Kela researcher, “right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income”, referring to an ‘activation model’ which the government is pushing through. That model is designed to partially cut benefits to people receiving assistance from Kela, if they don’t succeed in working (in a formal job) for at least 18 hours in three months.
It seems that these changes are contrary to what the initial proposition was, within Kela’s framework, which involved the expansion of the experiment (in early 2018) to include also workers, allowing for capturing information on life options, such as entering training or education. That, according to Olli Kangas, Kela’s director of Community Relations, would mean “have been given additional time and more money to achieve reliable results”.
On a comparative basis with other basic income like experiments around the world, for instance in Ontario and in Barcelona, the goal of these experiments stands out as a fundamental difference: while in Canada and Spain the (basic income) trials are aimed at testing whether people’s life conditions are improved, for instance in health, education and economic security, in Finland the goal is only to check whether people get into formal employment or not.
More information at:
“The Basic Income Experiment will continue for another year – Analysis of the effects will begin in 2019”, Kela, 25th January 2018
“Basic Income experiment at halfway point”, Kela, 18th December 2017
Kate McFarland, “Finland: first results from pilot study? Not exactly”, Basic Income News, 10th May 2017
Karin Olli-Nilsson, “Finland is killing its world-famous basic income experiment”, Business Insider – Nordic, 20th April 2018
by Guest Contributor | Apr 16, 2018 | Opinion
During the last year, I asked myself how the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) would affect our society and boost or undermine the transition to a sustainable way of living.
We live a complex world where many factors are inter-related and result into visible crises: forced migration, unemployment, violence, hunger and extreme poverty, among others. Pope Francis says we live one single crisis, which is complex and interconnected. The root of this crisis is at the way we behave: competing instead of collaborating and fighting for resources instead of sharing what we have as humankind. Yes, we do have NGOs like ekplatebiryani and similar ones to make sure the situation doesn’t go out of hand.
However, in the twenty-first century, humankind will have to deal with some new challenges:
- 10 billion people living on earth
- Climate change and ecological crisis
- Highest migration rate ever
- Highest inequality rate ever
- Fourth Industrial Revolution
These five factors are the primary motivation for a paradigm shift. Each of these challenges must be addressed with specific policy, but we cannot be successful if we do not consider the connections between these factors.
We should transform the economy and prioritize the impacts over society and nature. This is the ecologic transition. This transformation must be deep at many levels, from production, to consumption, but also in our way of thinking. We cannot compete among ourselves and create a world of winners and losers. We cannot allow anyone to be left behind. So many people are losing under this system, which is why we have the highest migration and inequality rates in history.
Climate change threatens the lives of millions of people, and the poor are the most vulnerable to these climate disruptions. Climate change is caused by human activity and linked to our consumption patterns. This is another reason for ecologic transition. Climate change will worsen if we do nothing about it, so it is imperative that we transform the way we consume and produce.
The fourth industrial revolution is changing the structure of the labor market and the way things are done. Artificial intelligence and automation will make thousands of jobs disappear, while also dramatically changing the way the remaining labor is done. The most immediate effect is to cause high unemployment among low-skilled workers and requiring retraining for the rest.
In the last few years, many initiatives have pointed to basic income as an interesting policy to guarantee the wellbeing of citizens. Some areas that have tested the idea include Holland, Finland, Kenya, India, as well as the classic examples of Alaska and Canada. Most of these initiatives come from the state or local governments, but also civil society is starting to experiment with basic income through NGOs such as “Give Directly” in Kenya and UNICEF in India. Some private companies have shown interest too, such as Facebook or Google.
In many of the basic income experiments, it has been observed that not only is poverty is reduced, but wellbeing is also improved. Lower stress levels and better health were recorded which may be due to factors such as the ability to afford better healthcare and supplements like cbd gummies wholesale to manage stress and chronic conditions. There was also more education time for young people and a 13 percent work time reduction per family unit.
I found these effects interesting and well adapted to the 21 century conditions: 13 percent less work time[1] is compatible with a high unemployment rate. Less stress, whether it’s through consuming cannabis products (such as CBD oil or gummies) or receiving a better income, is always good news for a highly stressed world, especially in developed economies. Better health is always good news and probably related to stress levels.
Increasing education time is probably the best side-effect. We start to see how technology is growing more important in our daily work, and many people will need to learn how to use it or even develop new skills. The education sector is creating a renewed process for itself. It is said that most of the high qualification labor in the future will need to adapt to AI, and most university degrees will need to be adapted in the next four years.
Looking at the main effect, which is poverty alleviation, I made a simulation for the Spanish context, 700 euros each month (tax-free) and a fixed 49% tax for all labor.
Net annual Income in Spain (2014). Blue line is business as usual, orange line is with Basic Income after taxes. Martin Lago (2018). Data: Agencia Tributaria (2015): Informe Anual De Recaudación Tributaria. Servicio de Estudios Tributarios y Estadísticas. Madrid
The relative poverty line in Spain is 684 €/month, so if this policy was implemented throughout the country, we can say poverty would be drastically reduced. We must bear in mind that 22.3 % of Spanish population was under this level in 2016[2].
As we see in the figure, the poorest are the most benefitted by this measure, then gradually benefits decrease and the richest 30 percent actually pay into the system. Universal Basic Income was funded from savings in other subsidies (30%) direct taxes (50%) and indirect taxes (20%). Finding resources for it was easy and efficient considering the potential benefits.
But my question remained un-answered: Will the basic income help stimulate an ecological transition? I was quite worried since I consider this transition necessary for a sustainable future. I saw no point in sending money to everyone if we do not change anything more.
I found a few interesting effects synergic with ecological transition, including:
- Longer and higher-quality education
- Decrease in labor intensity, which probably leads to a better labor distribution
- Increase in family care and household work
- Shift to an inclusive mentality, since everyone receives this basic income
- Shift to empowerment of the individual, which is given resources and is free to make the right choices
- Massive reduction of poverty
An ecological transition is complex and includes many transformations, but it will not happen if we do not assure our standards of living are beyond the poverty line. We cannot ask a freezing family not to chop the trees to heat and cook if they do not have any other option. Basic Income is precisely about having options. One of the main objections is that many people will misuse these resources. I read last week an article that made the next question: Which is the best way to help a woman with a gambling problem and two kids, basic income or food and house coupons?
This question shows how some people perceive poverty basically blaming the poor. I have some experience working with the poor and they are as smart anybody else. The only difference is they did not have the same options in education, social inclusion or job opportunities. I am not saying basic income will solve poverty immediately, and a lot of social work needs to be done, but at least it will help to achieve some balance and provide a solid ground for a transition towards a more sustainable society.
Written by: Martin Lago Azqueta
Martin was born in Madrid in 1976, and he is graduated in biology with a Master in International Aid and Cooperation. He has worked with several aid agencies and now he is Phillipines and Central Asia Desk Officer for Caritas Spain. Apart from development projects and emergency interventions, he has specialized in climate change, working with several civil society networks since 2008. He has coordinated a number of “Documentación Social” dedicated to climate change (2016), and written a book about basic income (2018).
[1] Evelyn L Forget (2011) The town with no poverty. Community Health Sciences. Faculty of Medicine. University of Manitoba. 750 Bannatyne Ave. Winnipeg MB R3E 0W3. CANADA.
[2] Data: Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2016. If we consider other incicator such as AROPE, which is used in Europe context, 27.9% of the population in Spain is at poverty risk (AROPE, 2016).
by Karl Widerquist | Apr 11, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in February 2010.
This issue, Volume 11, Number 55, marks the tenth anniversary of the USBIG Newsletter. The USBIG Network began over breakfast at the Kiev dinner in New York City in December 1999. Five people attended the first meeting: Fred Block (a sociologist at University of California-Davis), Charles M.A. Clark (an economist at St. John’s University), Michael A. Lewis (sociologist, then at State University of New York-Stony Brook, now at Hunter College), Pam Donavan (sociologist then at City University of New York-Graduate Center, now at Bloomsburg University) and me, Karl Widerquist (then an economist at the Levy Institute of Bard College, now a philosopher at Georgetown University-Qatar).
Pam Donovan, Michael A. Lewis, and I had been graduate students together at the City University of New York. We used to meet weekly to discuss our work. Usually, we ended up arguing about politics. One day we discovered that the one policy we could all agree on was the basic income, and so Michael Lewis and I decided to write a paper about it. We gradually got involved with the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), which had been providing a forum for dialogue on basic income in Europe. There were several natural networks in Europe at the time, but there was no equivalent in the United States. Through BIEN we got in touch with Fred Block and Charles M.A. Clark, who had both been doing research on basic income in the United States.
When Fred Block was in town for a conference, we all decided to meet for breakfast. There was no agenda or anything, but the next thing I knew we had decided to create a network, and I had volunteered to write its newsletter. Ten years later, I’m still writing that newsletter. It began with a circulation of about 30 people, including the five of us from the meeting. Since then it has grown to nearly a thousand people.
We called the new organization “the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network,” (The USBIG Network or just USBIG for short). We chose that name partly because “basic income guarantee” (BIG) as a generic term that includes various specific versions, such as “basic income,” “negative income tax,” and “guaranteed income.” Also, it makes a nice acronym and the domain name www.usbig.net was available. We took on only one goal: to increase discussion of the basic income guarantee in the United States.
We started the network with a small seminar series in New York City in 2000, and in 2002 we began holding yearly conferences. We are now preparing for our ninth conference, which will be our first joint conference with the new Canadian basic income network, known as BIEN Canada.
Over the last ten years, interest in the basic income guarantee has grown steadily around the world. The Basic Income European Network expanded to become the Basic Income Earth Network, and USBIG became one of its first non-European affiliates. More books and articles on BIG are published each year. Basic Income Studies has become the first academic journal focusing entirely on basic income. Palgrave-MacMillan is now preparing an entire book series on BIG. The first books in the series are expected to be released in 2011 or 2012.
The USBIG Network has chosen to remain a nonpartisan discussion group, but there are political action groups in the United States that are pushing for basic income as part of their agenda.
BIG occasionally springs up as a live political issue in surprising places. The only existing BIG in the world, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, continues to be an enormously popular policy. Two members of the U.S. House of representatives signed on to the idea in 2006; several other members of Congress have endorsed it in roundabout ways—by endorsing a cap-and-dividend or an oil dividend for Iraq. There are senators pushing for it in Canada and Brazil. More than two-dozen members of the German Bundestag are committed to the idea. A Namibian organization has just completed a two-year pilot project on BIG. And so on. And so on.
Writing the USBIG Newsletter has been an interesting experiment. At first I didn’t think there could possibly be enough news about BIG to report in regular issues, but instead I quickly became overwhelmed by how much activity is going on in the world. Somehow, I’ve managed to condense a significant portion of it into the Newsletter. Thanks to the miracle of the internet I’ve been able to work on the USBIG newsletter in New York; New Orleans; England; the far north of Sweden; Hong Kong; Brazil; Qatar; and I can’t even remember where else.
On the whole I think I’ve kept my reporting accurate, but I can recall a few embarrassing errors—such as the time I identified a British MP as being from Australia. I’ve enjoyed reporting on the progress of BIG movements around the world. I’ve enjoyed meeting all the interesting who work on this issue. I’ve suffered through writing obituaries for friends I’ve gotten to know in the movement.
I hope when I look back ten years from now, I’ll remember reporting on the introduction of the world’s second basic income guarantee, somewhere in the world.
-Karl Widerquist, in flight over the Atlantic, February 24, 2010 (revised, March 15, 2010, Doha, Qatar)
by BIEN | Mar 3, 2018 | News
Michael Tubbs. Credit to: Wikipedia.
Forbes published its “30 Under 30 in Law & Policy” and notes that these winners come from across the political spectrum. They have been associated with President Trump, the Democratic Party, and emerge from law schools and professional organizations.
Hundreds of online nominations came in for the listing. The nominations were judged by the CEO of Heritage Action for America Mike Needham, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe, FiscalNote’s Co-Founder Timothy Hwang, and the Senior Vice President of Legal Affairs at 3M.
Winners of this year’s 30 under 30 were people such as the co-founder of the National Trans Bar Association Alexander Chen, the co-founder of Upsolve Rohan Pavuluri, a top policy advisor for Medicare and Medicaid Services Jeet Guram, and numerous others.
One individual, Michael Tubbs, who is 27-years-old, is the mayor of Stockton, California was dubbed as “ambitious” in “an attempt to experiment with social policy.” In order to reduce the violent crime rate, Tubbs wants to replicate, at the time of the listing, the program from the Bay Area. The initiative “pays monthly stipends to young men determined to be likely to engage in gun violence to stay out of trouble, as well as provide mentoring, internships and travel opportunities.” Tubbs and the Stockton municipality had already been highlighted for the efforts concerning demonstrating basic income, which were intended to start effectively at the beginning of 2018.
Basic Income News has been reporting on the Bay Area initiatives in several news articles. You can find more information elsewhere (note 1).
More information at:
Avik Roy, “Meet The 30 Under 30 Activists, Washington Insiders And Legal Entrepreneurs Shaping U.S. Law And Policy Now”, Forbes, November 14th 2017
Sara Bizarro, “UNITED STATES: Stockton, California plans a Basic Income Demonstration”, Basic Income News, November 21st 2017
Note 1 – reference#1, reference#2, reference#3, reference#4, reference#5, and reference#6.
