by Karl Widerquist | Nov 26, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This post is one of several previewing the book I’m writing on Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments, and it is the second of two reviewing the five Negative Income Tax (NIT) experiments conducted by the U.S. and Canadian Government in the 1970s. This post draws heavily on my earlier work, “A Failure to Communicate: What (if anything) Can We Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments.”
Last week I argued that the results from the NIT experiments for various quality-of-life indicators were substantial and encouraging and that the labor-market effects implied that the policy was affordable. As promising as the results were to the researchers involved the NIT experiments, they were seriously misunderstood in the public discussion at the time. But the discussion in Congress and in the popular media displayed little understanding of the complexity. The results were spun or misunderstood and used in simplistic arguments to reject NIT or any form of guaranteed income offhand.
The experiments were of most interest to Congress and the media during the period from 1970 to 1972, when President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which had some elements of an NIT, was under debate in Congress. None of the experiments were ready to release final reports at the time. Congress insisted researchers produce some kind of preliminary report, and then members of Congress criticized the report for being “premature,” which was just what the researchers had initially warned.[i]
Results of the fourth and largest experiment, SIME/DIME, were released while Congress was debating a policy proposed by President Carter, which had already moved quite a way from the NIT model. Dozens of technical reports with large amounts of data were simplified down to two statements: It decreased work effort and it supposedly increased divorce. The smallness of the work disincentive effect hardly drew any attention. Although researchers going into the experiments agreed that there would be some work disincentive effect and were pleased to find it was small enough to make the program affordable, many members of Congress and popular media commentators acted as if the mere existence of a work disincentive effect was enough to disqualify the program. The public discussion displayed little, if any, understanding that the 5%-to-7.9% difference between the control and experimental groups is not a prediction of the national response. Nonacademic articles reviewed by one of the authors[ii] showed little or no understanding that the response was expected to be much smaller as a percentage of the entire population, that it could potentially be counteracted by the availability of good jobs, or that it could be the first step necessary for workers to command higher wages and better working conditions.
The United Press International simply got the facts wrong, saying that the SIME/DIME study showed that “adults might abandon efforts to find work.” The UPI apparently did not understand the difference between increasing search time and completely abandoning the labor market. The Rocky Mountain News claimed that the NIT “saps the recipients’ desire to work.” The Seattle Times presented a relatively well-rounded understanding of the results, but despite this, simply concluded that the existence of a decline in work effort was enough to “cast doubt” on the plan. Others went even farther, saying that the existence of a work disincentive effect was enough to declare the experiments a failure. Headlines such as “Income Plan Linked to Less Work” and “Guaranteed Income Against Work Ethic” appeared in newspapers following the hearings. Only a few exceptions such as Carl Rowan for the Washington Star (1978) considered that it might be acceptable for people working in bad jobs to work less, but he could not figure out why the government would spend so much money to find out whether people work less when you pay them to stay home.[iii]
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was one of the few social scientists in the Senate, wrote, “But were we wrong about a guaranteed income! Seemingly it is calamitous. It increases family dissolution by some 70 percent, decreases work, etc. Such is now the state of the science, and it seems to me we are honor bound to abide by it for the moment.” Senator Bill Armstrong of Colorado, mentioning only the existence of a work-disincentive effect, declared the NIT, “An acknowledged failure,” writing, “Let’s admit it, learn from it, and move on.”[iv]
Robert Spiegelman, one of the directors of SIME/DIME, defended the experiments, writing that they provided much-needed cost estimates that demonstrated the feasibility of the NIT. He said that the decline in work effort was not dramatic, and could not understand why so many commentators drew such different conclusions than the experimenters. Gary Burtless (1986) remarked, “Policymakers and policy analysts … seem far more impressed by our certainty that the effective price of redistribution is positive than they are by the equally persuasive evidence that the price is small.”[v]
This public discussion certainly displayed “a failure to communicate.” The experiments produced a great deal of useful evidence, but for by-far the greatest part, it failed to raise the level of debate either in Congress or in public forums. The literature review reveals neither supporter nor opponents who appeared to have a better understanding of the likely effects of the NIT and UBI in the discussions following the release of the results of the experiments in the 1970s.[vi]
Whatever the causes for it, an environment with a low understanding of complexity is highly vulnerable to spin with simplistic if nearly vacuous interpretation. All sides spin, but in the late 1970s NIT debate, only one side showed up. The guaranteed income movement that had been so active in the United States at the beginning of the decade had declined to the point that it was able to provide little or no counter-spin to the enormously negative discussion of the experimental results in the popular media.
Whether the low information content of the discussion in the media resulted more from spin, sensationalism, or honest misunderstanding is hard to determine. But whatever the reasons, the low-information discussion of the experimental results put the NIT (and, in hindsight, UBI by proxy) in an extremely unfavorable light, when the scientific results were mixed-to-favorable.
The scientists who presented the data are not entirely to blame for this misunderstanding. Neither can all of it be blamed on spin, sound bites, sensationalism, conscious desire to make an oversimplified judgment, or the failure of reports to do their homework. Nor can all of it be blamed on the people involved in political debates not paying sufficient attention. It is inherently easier to understand an oversimplification than it is to understand the genuine complexity that scientific research usually involves no matter how painstakingly it is presented. It may be impossible to communicate the complexities to most nonspecialists readers in the time a reasonable person to devote to the issue.
Nevertheless, everyone needs to try to do better next time. And we can do better. Results from experiments in conducted in Namibia and India in the early 2010s and late ’00s were much better understood, as resulted from Canada’s Mincome experiment that sadly did not come out until more than two decades after that experiment was concluded.
The book I’m working on is an effort to help reduce misunderstandings with future experiments. It is aimed at a wide audience because it focuses the problem of communication from specialists to non-specialists. I hope to help researchers involved in current and future experiments design and report their findings in ways that are more likely to raise the level of debate; to help researchers not involved in the experiments raise the level of discussion when they write about the findings of the experiment, to help journalists understand and report experimental findings more accurately; and to help interested citizens of all political predispositions see beyond any possible spin and media misinterpretations to the complexities of the results of this next round of experiments—whatever they turn out to be.
[i] Widerquist, 2005.
[ii] Widerquist, 2005.
[iii] Widerquist, 2005.
[iv] Widerquist, 2005.
[v] Burtless, 1986.
[vi] Widerquist, 2005.
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 27, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
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 someone else 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
Occupy Oakland “We are the 99%” protests in 2011.
by Andre Coelho | Oct 25, 2017 | News
Jenna van Draanen. Credit to Enno Schmidt / Luís Gaspar.
Just as in the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress in Seoul, in 2016, BIEN’s General Assembly (GA) took place in Lisbon’s BIEN Congress this year (2017). With an important addition: this time a BIEN Affiliates meeting occurred, allowing for substantial interchange of experiences between basic income activist groups all around the world, connected through the “umbrella” network of BIEN.
As an outcome of the Seoul Congress, the GA decided to establish a specific Task Force for dealing with BIEN’s affiliates, in the sense of promoting their interaction, general exchange of information and experiences. That Task Force was named Outreach, and is currently coordinated by Jenna van Draanen.
At Lisbon, many BIEN Affiliates were represented, including the Universal Basic Income Europe (UBIE) network, itself a joint group of European BIEN affiliates. Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom (Citizens Income Trust and Citizens Basic Income Network Scotland), Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, India (update), Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain and the United States of America were the Affiliates represented, which comprises a 68% presence rate in this Congress. Among the non-represented groups at the Congress counted the Southern Africa, the Argentina and the China Affiliates.
To organize the meeting and to guarantee a more uniform input from affiliates, standard questions were sent out, focusing on activity in the past 12 months, the challenges faced and the opportunities going forward. On a general sense, BIEN Affiliates have been active in networking their own territories in an attempt to get everyone interested in doing activism on basic income to work together or at least knowing of each other’s activities. In those regions already running or contemplating, at the political level, the experimentation with basic income, such as Scotland, Canada (Ontario), the Netherlands or Finland, Affiliates have also been busy counseling and supplying input for the conduction of these experiments. In all other regions, efforts have been made to lobby for basic income within political parties, unions, anti-poverty groups and others, while also trying to reach out to the wider public.
Dániel Fehér. Credit to: Enno Schmidt / Luís Gaspar
On challenges to basic income implementation, BIEN Affiliates were fairly consistent in saying that these challenges are mainly due to ignorance (about the basic income concept), preconceptions, resistance (e.g.: work ethics, moral hazards) and a general sense that the human being is not to be trusted.
The GA meeting, just as already done in Seoul, was conducted in two parts.
In the first part (on the 25th of September, first day of the Congress), Louise Haagh, BIEN’s chair, described the proposed move of BIEN’s registration from Belgium to the United Kingdom, took questions, and invited members to arrange a time to meet her if they required further discussion. Also, proposals for changes to membership fees and changes to the voting procedure for Executive Committee members were discussed. Aiming at choosing where the BIEN Congress for 2019 will take place, representatives of the four countries (Australia, India, United Kingdom and United States) bidding to host the 2019 BIEN Congress spoke about their proposals. This first session ended with a discussion on fundraising.
On the second part (on the 27th of September, last day of the Congress), after some preliminary settings, the GA voted unanimously for the change of BIEN’s status from an International Non-profit-making Association registered in Belgium to a Charitable Incorporated Organization registered in the United Kingdom. Also unanimous was the favorable vote for Haagh’s proposition that additional trustees for BIEN’s Charitable Incorporated Organization were added, as well as a new treasurer (instead of the former Andrea Fumagalli). These additional trustees being Annie Miller, Jay Ginn, Jake Eliot and Mark Wadsworth, the latter cumulating as the new treasurer. The voting procedure itself was also under discussion, and voting. Between three possibilities, multiple electronic ballots, only voting at the GA by secret ballot and postal ballots alongside a secret ballot at the GA, the latter was chosen. A note was made that no candidate can stand for more than one post, and nominations will have to be received by one month before the GA. After the initial presentations from representative applications for BIEN’s 2019 Congress (in part one of the meeting), GA members clearly voted for India.
At this second part of the GA meeting, reports from the Chair and from the Basic Income News and Outreach taskforces were also presented by Louise Haagh, André Coelho and Jenna van Draanen respectively. Shortly after, three new BIEN affiliate requests were accepted unanimously, namely Iceland, Malawi and World Basic Income. Finally, a vote was held on a proposal to change BIEN’s policy towards donations and membership fees. BIEN members voted unanimously to raise the annual contribution for BIENfactors from 200€ up to 400€. Also unanimous was the voting for the creation of a new status: regular donor (to BIEN). Clearly favorable was the vote to introduce a sliding scale for annual contributions for BIEN’s membership and finally the proposal for increasing the life membership fee from 100€ up to 200€ was rejected.
Assembly room at ISEG. Credit to: Enno Schmidt
At the closing words session of the Congress, Jurgen de Wispeleare refreshed the audience memory on the already known details for the 2018 BIEN Congress, to be held in Tampere, Finland, between the 23rd and 25th of September, 2018. Louise Haagh thanked the Portuguese LOC (local organizing committee), all the speakers and the general audience for a successful Congress. She underlined the importance to involve all patches of society in the global debate around basic income, and as such BIEN’s Congresses should increase their promotion of those kinds of meetings involving academics, activists and leaders from political parties and civil society institutions. Haagh also highlighted that the basic income debate is changing, in terms of its reasoning and discourse, as the distance to actual implementation shrinks.
by Sandro Gobetti | Oct 24, 2017 | News
Meeting of the Basic Income Network, in Italy
On Friday, 10 November 2017, the Italian Basic Income Network – Italy (BIN Italia) organizes a day-to-day discussion forum about basic income, which will feature, among others, the participation of the philosopher and economist Philippe Van Parijs.
Basic income is a universal and unconditional monetary transfer to all people. It is a tool for the redistribution of socially produced wealth and can be seen as an upgrade in social protection and welfare systems. It supports freedom of choice and people’s self-determination and has grown to be one of the most discussed issues in the world. In addition, the world has seen, in the last few years, a proliferation of experiments on basic income in several regions of the planet. These experiments have been conducted in India, Kenya, Finland and Canada, and also the city of Barcelona and several municipalities in the Netherlands, just to mention a few.
The issue is now on the political agenda in many countries and is called into the debate on the 4th Industrial Revolution and the advent of robotics in their ambivalence. The fear exists that a new mass unemployment caused by the development of machines will materialize. On the other hand, some also look on the opportunity that machines will replace people at work, by opening up new scenarios for the use of time, where basic income can allow for a more free and creative use of it.
In fact, in recent times, there are two major phenomena that have gone hand in hand: basic income experimentation and technological innovation. In some cases, the producers of new technologies themselves are supporting the introduction of this proposal (for example Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Silicon Valley Y Combinator enterprise incubator).
Basic income is an issue that has already been in the Italian social and political agenda. There have been various legislative proposals (e.g.: a popular proposal of law by BIN Italia, the proposal of the 5 Star Movement and 170 other associations), although the Italian government has reacted by implementing a conditional assistance program the Inclusion Income (ReI). This program, however, is still very far from the European debate and international experience on social assistance.
The issue has become so stringent that the European Union has long been questioning the need to introduce a measure as an adequate minimum income for all citizens of the old continent as indicated in the 20 European Social Pillars.
The meeting will be located in the Roman district of Ostiense-Garbatella and will take off in the morning with a round table entitled Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Future of work and Guaranteed Income, that will address the issues of the 4th Industrial Revolution, Digital Platforms, algorithm, Big Data, Robotics, and Advanced Automation. BIN Italia Association has recently published a publication titled “Guaranteed income and technological innovation. Among Algorithms and Robotics“, in which 15 authors discuss the new technological revolution (more on the book here).
The meeting will have two sessions:
11:00 h (Aula Verra, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Roma Tre University, Via Ostiense 234):
Round Table on Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Future of Work and Guaranteed Income with Sociologist Chiara Saraceno (College Carlo Alberto, University of Turin), among the leading scholars of poverty and social inclusion, the philosopher Giacomo Marramao (University of Rome Tre) and the economist Andrea Fumagalli (University of Pavia), a known analyst and scholar interested in basic income. Introduction and moderation by Luca Santini, President of BIN Italia
17:30 h (Moby Dick – Cultural Hub Library, via Edgardo Ferrati, 3 – Garbatella, Rome)
Lectio Magistralis entitled Basic Income, a proposal for the 21st century by Philippe Van Parijs (Basic Income Earth Network – Université Catholique de Louvain), author of the book (coming out in October in Italy) entitled: The basic income. A radical proposal (Il Mulino). Introduction and moderation by Rachele Serino, vice-President of BIN Italia
More information at:
BIN Italia Facebook page
BIN Italia website
This article was reviewed by André Coelho.
