by Harry Curzon | Jun 30, 2018 | News
Olli Kangas. Picture credit: What.Happens.Now?
Olli Kangas, one of the masterminds behind Finland’s Universal basic income (UBI) research experiment, has spoken in detail about the process of implementing the UBI experiment and the challenges that have come with it. Finland’s UBI trial, presents the first of its kind in Europe, however different to other examples of UBI, in that it only gives handout to the unemployed. The research study organized and supervised by Kangas involves around 2,000 unemployed participants, with a budget of approximately 20 million euros, where each participant of the study getting around 560 euros a month for two years.
“Although the contribution a person gets is low, it is permanent and secure,” said Olli Kangas, speaking at the 2018 Nordic work life conference. Kangas overarching goal within the project is to uncover what happens when the people being studied no longer must waste time submitting for economic assistance from the state. Would this newfound time be spent looking for jobs or on other activities?
Politically, Kangas has faced multiple problems in trying to get the experiment up and running, which began in 2016. For instance, some politicians in Finland from the Finns party have argued that the UBI will only succeed in turning Finland into a hotspot for welfare scammers and refugees. This has only added further bureaucratic and political resistance to the project.
Opposition to the UBI project has seemingly transcended ideological lines, in terms of Left and Right typical political wings. The most adamant critics of the project argue that UBI simply acts as a tool to give out free state handouts, which acts to kill citizens desires to get jobs and contribute to working society. Kangas replies that the purpose of the study is to shed some light over these questions posed by sceptical politicians and to reveal how people act when they receive unconditional guaranteed payments.
Olli Kangas. Picture credit to: Iltalehti.
The initial planned study was expected to be large in scope and funding, which as stated by Kangas “made us feel like ‘masters of the universe’, planning an experiment with 100,000 participants. But we soon came back down to Earth, since the bureaucrats turned out to be stronger than the politicians”.
A major problem that the political resistance has brought with it is the difficulties in securing funding for the experiment. As remarked by Kangas over the Nordic Work Life Conference 2018, “it has been extremely difficult to secure funding for this. Politicians were willing to provide 20 million euro for the experiment, but just 700,000 euro to evaluate it”. However, the experiment has also received support from each political side too, with some politicians from the Right viewing UBI as a potential method to strip back the welfare system and arguments from the Left which see UBI more as an expansion of the welfare state.
An additional obstacle with the setting up of Kangas research study was the Finish Constitution. It states that there must be no unequal mistreatment of citizens, which impacted the plans to conduct an obligatory study where participants received payments regardless of whether they needed or wanted them. Hence Kangas had to scrap any experiment that implied payments to anyone, regardless of employment status.
Even given the challenges for setting up this experiment, it has been running for almost two years, and is scheduled to finish at the end of 2018, with its findings expected to be published in late 2020. Finish politicians and social researchers alike will have to wait as to whether their differing claims about the UBI experiment come to fruition. Kangas suspects that with the scepticism rising around the expected results of the project, this will be finished a year earlier than first set out and that if any UBI policy is to be implemented in Finland “it would be through the back door – by merging and simplifying some types of benefit”. Due to the great deal of resistance Kangas has faced when trying to implement this experiment on basic income, he is not entirely optimistic about the prospects of implementing UBI in Finland and feels it’s unlikely to happen in the future. However, Kangas admits that “One experiment here or there couldn’t say if basic income is good or not”, which leaves, in a way, the door open to new initiatives regarding basic income from Kela, the Finish Social Security.
More information at:
“Finland’s basic income organisers correct inaccurate media reports of trial’s premature death”. Yle Uutiset, April 25th 2018
Björn Lindahl, “The research project against all odds: Olli Kangas on Finland’s universal basic income”. Nordic Labour Journal, June 22nd 2018
Olli Kangas on YouTube, 2018
Heikki Hiilamo and Olli Kangas, “Universal Basic Income: Does the Carrot Work Better than the Stick?”. Meeting of the Minds, January 27th 2017
Olli Kangas, Sharon Bessell and Martyn Pearce, “Back to basics – Finland’s Universal Basic Income – Policy Forum” (Podcast). Asia & the Pacific Policy Society – Policy Forum, June 1st 2018
by Kate McFarland | Jun 9, 2018 | News
“An Intellectual History of Basic Income”
University of Cambridge – January 14, 2019
A team of three University of Cambridge scholars have released a Call for Papers (CFP) for a conference on the history of the idea of basic income, to be held at the university on January 14, 2019.
Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) co-founder Philippe van Parijs is scheduled speak at the closing event. Other invited speakers are to be confirmed.
The conference, titled “An Intellectual History of Basic Income,” is being organized by Daniel Zamora (Department of Sociology), Peter Sloman (Department of Politics and International Studies), and Pedro Ramos Pinto (Faculty of History). Zamora is currently co-authoring a book (with Cambridge PhD candidate Anton Jäger) on the intellectual history of basic income with a focus on the US and continental Europe. Sloman is meanwhile writing a book on the history of the concept in the UK, and recently published an article in the Journal of Social Policy on the idea in the last century of British politics.
As described in the CFP, the interdisciplinary conference will investigate the “story of how the basic income proposal has achieved global prominence,” with a specific focus on “the contemporary history of basic income from the 1960s to the present,” including “how UBI proposals have been developed and received in different ideological and political contexts, and the ways in which the concept has been shaped by changing attitudes to welfare provision, income inequality, and the future of work.” It will also explore “how an idea that emerged as a response to a specific situation in industrialized countries in the 1960s and 70s has become an important tool for rethinking development policy in the global South,” alongside broader themes related to changing conceptions of global poverty.
The organizers invite abstracts for papers on the above themes (to be submitted by September 1, 2018). Selected authors will be invited to develop their conference papers into full chapters for an edited volume to be published with an academic press.
For more details, including submission guidelines, see: https://inequalityandhistory.blogspot.com/2018/05/call-for-papers-intellectual-history-of.html.
Reviewed by Patrick Hoare.
Photo: Founding meeting of BIEN.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Zamora, Sloman, and Jäger are coauthoring a single book; this has been corrected.
by Sara Bizarro | Jun 6, 2018 | News
The 2018 NABIG (North American Basic Income Guarantee) Congress happened in Hamilton, Ontario, from May 24th to May 27th at McMaster University. There were around 120 people presenting and attendance between 270-280 people. The conference was notably diverse, with attendees from across the income spectrum, from people who have prospered in business, to people living in poverty. There were representatives from legislatures, civil services, business, academia and faith organizations, unions, agriculture, community service groups, advocacy groups, and First Nations communities. There were participants with long and deep knowledge about Basic Income, as well as people who were new to the concept. There was also a large number of young people, attending and presenting. There were participants from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, the USA, and the UK, among others.
Guy Caron, Evelyn Forget, Art Eggleton, Sheila Regehr, Ian Schlakman and Laura Babcock.
The conference opened with welcome remarks from Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger, followed by a panel that included Guy Caron, a federal Member of Parliament (MP) from Québec with the New Democratic Party; Art Eggleton, a Canadian Senator and former MP, and former long-serving mayor of the City of Toronto; Evelyn Forget, Manitoba health economist that uncovered the effects of Mincome on health and wellbeing; Sheila Regehr, chairperson of the Basic Income Canada Network and Ian Schlakman, Basic Income Action activist from the National Welfare Rights and Poor People’s Campaign. The moderator for that section was Laura Babcock, President of POWERGROUP Communications and a national current affairs commentator. Guy Caron spoke about his Basic Income proposal, a way to combine existing benefits such as the Canadian child benefit and tax credits into one policy that guarantees that no one would fall under the poverty line. Senator Eggleton also said he would be for an incrementalist solution to rolling out Basic Income in Canada. At the end of the panel, each speaker was asked to say one inspirational phrase that summed up their views and MP Guy Caron said: “Putting a man on the moon was a huge achievement. If we could end poverty in Canada, we would be the first country in the world to do so!”
Living Proof, Hamilton Basic Income Speakers: Jodi Dean, David Cherkewski, Lance Dingman, Jayne Cardno, Rhonda Castello.
The conference also had the participation of the group Living Proof, a select group of speakers that are participants in the Hamilton Basic Income Pilot. The Basic Income recipients stood up, one by one, and told their stories. Each of the participants spoke of how they went from having a comfortable middle-class life to living in poverty and about the challenges they faced on a daily basis. Jodi, one of the Basic Income recipients, said that she had a normal middle-class life before a divorce left her and her children in a dire situation, especially since one of her children has Brittle Bone disease. She talked about a night when she had a child with a broken leg and had to worry about taking her to the hospital because she had no money to pay for parking. Others spoke about mental health and disability challenges and referred to several difficulties with the current social security system whose job is more felt as policing rather than helping them find exit strategies for their situation. Interestingly, all recipients said they started volunteering in their communities since they have been receiving the Basic Income and this has inspired them to try to change their situation of poverty and of those around them.
Living Proof, Hamilton Basic Income Speakers: Margie Gould, Jayne Cardno, Lance Dingman, Tim Button, Dave Cherkewski, Jodi Dean, Rhonda Castello and John Mills (Living Proof group coordinator).
The event was entitled, Basic Income: Bold Ideas, Practical Solutions, and the main plenary talks were on two themes, Convergence and Reality. The Convergence topic intended to presenting Basic Income from different perspectives, from social justice to health, human rights, faith, technology etc. The Reality theme, which goes beyond the reason why we need a Basic Income, included implementation issues on how a Basic Income should operate, e.g. how to fund it and how to gain public support.
The complete program can be downloaded here and the paper and presentations will be available at the Basic Income Canada Network website after June 17th.
More information at:
Nicole Smith, “Canada Could be the First Country to Eliminate Poverty”, Raise the Hammer, May 29th 2018
by Guest Contributor | May 28, 2018 | Opinion
A step to a future of solidarity and sharing
For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women lived in tribal groups, practicing mutual cooperation and solidarity. In the present we live in capitalism, competing among ourselves, driven by individual ambitions to ‘have’. This is not doing us any good. However, we can see it as a painful but necessary civilizational phase, a means of developing the capacity to produce all that’s necessary for the material life of all. The age of capitalism has only lasted 200 years. A better future could be drawn with the re-establishment of an economy of solidarity between people. We propose a process of systematic, automatic and unconditional transfers of money between people, from those who have more to those who have less. We call it Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
The Past – from Ancestral Economy to Capitalism
Human societies in which all men and women have lived on Earth since people here exist, and until the formation of the first sophisticated civilizations, were tribal groups. They functioned through cooperation and solidarity between their members in tasks such as obtaining and distributing food, building shelters and family dwellings or taking care of community assets; tasks that today we would call ‘economic’. In fact, over hundreds of thousands of years of human presence on Earth the whole economy was cooperative and supportive. And it was sustainable then.
After the emergence of the first sophisticated civilizations and empires – about 6,000 years ago – things began to change, and the forms of economic organization put into practice came to vary from then. Today, however, all the economic diversity that has existed over those 6,000 years is virtually nullified, and a unique model has once again consolidated. It is called capitalism, and it has been going on for about 200 years.
While the ancestral economic mode was based on solidarity and cooperation between people, on a harmony between them and nature and on an orientation towards the mere satisfaction of their needs, capitalism is characterized by competition among peers, by the predation of the Earth and by an orientation of its agents towards unlimited material accumulation. Both models are hegemonic, each in its own time. But that’s all they have in common; as for everything else, it is difficult to find more opposing realities.
Can, like its ancestral homologous form, also this present ‘state of the art’ in economic organization – capitalism – last for hundreds of thousands of years? It doesn’t seem possible, given the condition in which it left us humans, and the planet, after only 200 years. And yet, despite its deeply dark sides, an important merit can be attributed to capitalism: with the demand for accumulation and profit it gave us machinery, techniques and knowledge that can now allow us to have the resources for the material comfort of all. This is only a possibility and not inevitable because although these machines, techniques and knowledge give us the capacity, they alone do not guarantee that we will use it. However, capitalism cannot possibly make any sense in history unless the immense price it charged and still charges us eventually results in the actual extinction of the material scarcity from the face of the Earth. Only then will it be seen as a process of rising human civilization to a higher level, albeit with great suffering.
Thus, the great question of the present is how to accomplish the potential that capitalism offers us, to free ourselves from the ‘fatality’ of material scarcity. The simple progress of the economy, as we have it, does not seem to be the way. Reality shows us very clearly that the mere growth, without any change or innovation in the logic and processes of the present economy, will never raise the condition of all, although it may greatly improve it for some people. Neither the strengthening of the so-called welfare state, in its traditional, bureaucratic, expensive and life-controlling form, can do more than mitigate poverty. Traditional welfare will never eliminate poverty and it charges from its beneficiaries a price in dignity and in humanity that the more unnecessary it becomes, the more intolerable it gets.
No, capitalism does not inherently have a mechanism to guarantee essentials for all. Let us resurrect from our ancestral economic way its essential element: solidarity among people.
A Future – the UBI-AA
Solidarity among people is the essential idea of the alternative distribution model of the resources generated in society we will talk about here: the Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
To show what it is and how it works we will turn here to an explanation given elsewhere:
The UBI-AA is a revenue redistribution process designed to operate monthly, providing automatic and unconditional transfers among citizens, from those who have higher incomes to those with low or no income at all. Built, supported and leveraged by them, the process will invite the participants to take responsibility and engage in their communities, which will reinforce them.
It works in two stages:
1) As it is acquired, each member of the community discounts to a common fund – a ‘UBI Fund’ – a proportion of their income, at a single and universal rate;
2) At the end of each month, the Fund’s accumulated total is equally and unconditionally distributed by all members of the same community.
This simple process of treating everyone equally puts those who in each moment have above-average incomes to deliver to the UBI Fund more than they receive from it, and those who have below-average incomes would receive more. Thus, the process operates a joint distribution between the participants of part of their individual incomes. In addition, to reduce inequalities between them, this solidarity between peers creates an unconditional guarantee of income for all, that is, an Unconditional Basic Income.
It follows from the action of the UBI-AA process the loss of available income by some and its gain by others. For those who lose money, it is important to limit the loss, while maximizing the gain for the rest to ensure broad acceptance of the policy.
The demand for this double result should not, however, mean a devaluation of the possibilities of mutability of all individual positions. With the passage of time and with the exercise of the options that the process itself will open to the participants, the situations of income “winners” or “losers”, in which each of them will at each moment be, should always be seen as circumstantial.
To make possible its intended effects, the implementation of the UBI-AA should be accompanied by the release of its participants from the burden of personal income tax. Such tax relief will compensate them for the contributory effort required by the UBI-AA process, although, for those above a certain level of income, such compensation may turn out to be merely partial.
Abolished the personal income tax, the moderation of loss for citizens with higher incomes and, at the same time, the material significance of the gains to those in the opposite condition, will be possible if the rate of contributions to the UBI Fund is set at an optimal level, balancing the two outcomes. [1]
A more complete description of the UBI-AA process, as well as a simulation of the financial effects it would have produced, both in individual citizen spheres and in the State budget, hypothesizing it in force in Portugal in 2012, can be seen here.
UBI-AA differs from most of the traditional redistributive processes in operation because it is unconditional; and from most of the unconditional alternative processes for being a construction of common citizens instead of the policy of a government, a central bank or any other ‘power’.
What is proposed with the UBI-AA is not directly the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all. The proposal is the institution of an alternative form of organization of the economy in its distributive side. This will be accomplished with the income distribution process described above; a process that will favor the rehabilitation of values such as solidarity and voluntary cooperation between people, and of which the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all will be a corollary.
We hope that may contribute to the flourishing of a new culture, less marked by the centrality of material goods. Who knows if making everybody’s access to essential material resources as simple as the possibility of breathing, will not end up instilling in us the same attitude towards those resources – money and things it buys – as that we have towards the air we inspire: no matter how valuable it may be to us, we do not quarrel with each other for it; we use the quantities we need. Accumulating it would no longer be necessary.
Such cultural shift would certainly be a great step forward for us, human beings, and very good news for Earth.
[1] This stretch is an English translation from Projeto de um RBI – Local – Solidário – Voluntário, [Project of an UBI – Local – Supportive – Voluntary], by Miguel Horta, 2017, available (in Portuguese) from: https://pt.scribd.com/document/341205904/Projecto-RBI-Local-V-2017.
Written by Miguel Horta
by Andre Coelho | May 20, 2018 | News
Andrew Yang has already made his name known by leading a presidential campaign which defends the implementation of basic income. Now he extends that with an interview for the Merion West journal, a news outlet particularly associated with low biases. In that interview, posted on the 9th of May, Yang affirms his conviction that humanity is going through an unprecedented shift, while the (United States) political class “is completely asleep at the switch”.
Yang, as other influential people in the United States, especially those dealing with technological developments and digital-based companies, is very worried about the job loss wave in the United States, due to automation. According to him, that is already happening, and will deepen in the near future. To counteract the predictable consequences of such job displacement “by software, AI, and machines”, he defends the implementation of a 1000 US$/month per adult basic income, which he calls a “freedom dividend”. That and a “human-centric capitalism”, an economic system which measures things like “childhood success rate, mental health, levels of engagement with work, freedom from substance abuse”, instead of GDP.
Asked about a possible parallel with the Industrial Revolution, where, despite strifes and strikes, displaced people eventually found new work, Yang says that (referring to manufacturing workers in the Midwest) “there was no magical reorganization of work; instead, many workers went home and killed themselves by the numbers”. According to him, anyone thinking this “magical reorganization of work” is possible, is “not paying attention to the real data on the ground rate now”.
As for basic income itself, Yang approaches it with a certain humour, even, when he says “One thing I’m looking forward to asking, when I’m president, which state would like to have universal basic income first?” However, he states it very seriously when putting forth his conviction that “universal basic income would dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions of individuals and families. There might be some tweaks and tailoring, but I’m very bullish on the substance”.
As for financing, Andrew Yang is confident that a basic income of 1000 US$/month per adult is affordable, considering its price tag is around 2 trillion US$ per year, compared with current welfare costs of 6 trillion US$ per year. That doesn’t equate to ending all welfare benefits, but that it is possible to include basic income within the benefits systems, by introducing an unconditional parcel. Even still, he defends, like Phillipe van Parijs has also proposed in the European context, basic income can be mostly financed with a value-added tax around 10%, or about half of what is practiced in Europe, on average. An expectation of further economic growth, due to a rise in aggregated demand by influence of the existence of a basic income, will self-finance the rest, given an equivalent rise in collected taxes.
Yang also believes that the US current system of social security, health and education are essentially broken, categorizing them as “dysfunctional welfare systems”. According to him, these systems generate vast disincentives amongst the population, or benefit traps. Hence, the introduction of basic income could break those economic and social traps, by providing a financial floor cumulative with earnings from a job. As far as economic policy is concerned, he concludes the interview with a deeper, more general call to society: “In America, we won’t trust our people, but the only thing we will trust are systems, and more systems and processes—and it’s immensely counterproductive. We need to start trusting our people again; we have to trust ourselves.”
More information at:
Sara Bizarro, “United States: Andrew Yang is running for President in 2020 on the platform of Universal Basic Income”, Basic Income News, April 8th 2018
Henri Matilla, “Interview with Andrew Yang, 2020 Presidential Candidate”, Merion West, May 9th 2018
