by Karl Widerquist | Oct 13, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
My latest discussion paper is a draft of Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, the Prehistory of Private Property (coauthored by Grant McCall, Tulane University and the Center for Human-Environmental Research) The paper addresses the natural-rights-based (“right-libertarian” or more descriptively “propertarian”) justification of private property to show that it is not a purely normative argument. The paper argues that propertarian principles cannot rule out government or collective ownership of territory on a purely normative, a priori basis, and therefore, cannot rule out the government’s right to tax, regulate, or redistribute property titles without relying on empirical historical claims. Therefore, the natural-rights-based justification of extensive ethical limits on those powers has to stand on the empirical claim that such an event, though possible, is historically implausible—a claim or a collection of claims we call “the classically liberal hypothesis.”
This hypothesis could be specified in at least three different ways. First, before governments or any other collective institutions appear, all or most resources are appropriated by individuals acting as individuals to established private property rights. Second, only individuals acting as individuals perform appropriative acts (i.e. neither individuals acting as monarchs nor groups intending to establish collective, public, or government-held property rights perform appropriative acts). Third, even if collectives perform appropriative acts, subsequent transfers of titles (in the absence of rights violations) are likely only to produce privatized property rights.
This chapter sets up the next two. Chapter 3 examines the evidence propertarians have put forward to support the classically liberal hypothesis, showing that this evidence is extremely weak. Chapter 4 investigates the truth-value of the hypothesis. It not only gives a strong argument for the falsity of the hypothesis; it presents strong evidence indicating that quite the opposite is true. Individualistic private property rights—largely or entirely free of collective control—tend only to be established through aggressive rights violations.
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, “Is the Natural Rights Justification of Private Property a Purely Normative Argument, or Does it Require Empirical Claims? And if it Does, What Are Those Claims?” The Prehistory of Private Property, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2019.
NOTE to Basic Income supporters: although this paper and this book are not directly about Basic Income, they address an argument commonly used to oppose Basic Income.
by Jurgen De Wispelaere | Jul 28, 2018 | News
The 2018 BIEN Congress, held in Tampere on 24-26 August, has released its revised conference program. In addition to a wide variety of panels and papers covering recent academic and policy discussions on basic income, the program features a series of exciting plenary speakers, including a plenary roundtable on basic income experiments and an opening address by Tarja Halonen, the former President of Finland.
For the first time in the history of BIEN congresses, on the 24th and 25th of August, the Tampere congress also hosts Basic Income in Motion, a film festival featuring more than a dozen films and documentaries on basic income running alongside the congress. Participants are also invited to participate in the Nordic Day on the 23rd of August and discuss recent advances in basic income with members of the different Nordic basic income networks, plus a public lecture by Rutger Bregman to promote the Finnish translation of his bestseller Utopia for Realists.
All events will take place on the main campus of the University of Tampere and are held in English.
The 5th of August deadline for registration is approaching fast! Don’t miss out and register as soon as possible and join us in Finland at the end of the August!
For questions, contact us at biencongress2018@gmail.com
Jurgen De Wispelaere, Pertti Koistinen and Roosa Eriksson
(on behalf of the BIEN2018 LOC)
by Claire Bott | Jun 18, 2018 | News
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) has been the subject of a consideration amount of attention from American and international media lately, with news outlets such as Reuters, the Washington Post and the New York Times publishing articles on the topic.
SEED, which will take place in the city of Stockton, California, will involve giving a regular monthly income of US$500 to a number of residents with no conditions on how they spend the money.
The Reuters report, which is on video, shows a resident, Shay Holliman, weeping as she describes how hard it is to lose your home because you can’t pay the rent, and also includes an interview with Stockton’s mayor, Michael Tubbs, who says that he felt a “moral responsibility” to help those who work hard and yet “fall further and further behind”.
The Washington Post article includes a brief description of the history behind SEED, describing Stockton as “the largest [city] in the country to declare bankruptcy in the years after the recession”, and giving a brief overview of the genesis of the project in a meeting between Tubbs and Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, which is funding SEED.
In the New York Times, as well as giving a description of SEED, the article provides a profile of Shay Holliman, the woman who was seen weeping in the Reuters report. Other news outlets, such as the LA Times and The Hill, have also reported on SEED.
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 6, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in June 2014.
This book was recommended to me a a technology-based argument for the basic income guarantee (BIG), and it is, but its support is tentative and only for BIG in the form of the Negative Income Tax (NIT), not in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
The authors define the computer revolution that is currently underway as “the second machine age.” The industrial revolution was “the first machine age.” It brought machines that could apply power to do simple but profoundly important tasks, eventually replacing most human- and animal-powered industries with steam, electrical power, and so on. Machines of the first machine age could often do those tasks much better than humans or beasts of burden ever could. For example, the replacements for horses—automobiles, trains, and airplanes—can carry more people and more cargo father and faster than horses ever could.
Machines of the second machine age have gone beyond the application of power; they are also replacing some human brainwork. Calculators have been around so long that few people are aware they replaced a form of human labor, called “computers.” In the early 20th century, “computers” were people who did computations. It was skilled brainwork, far beyond the capabilities of the up-and-coming technologies of the day, such as the internal combustion engine. Computers (as we define the term today) have almost entirely replaced that form of human labor, and their ability to substitute for human labor only continues to increase—especially when combined with robotics.
The computational powers of computers are so strong can already beat the best chess masters and “Jeopardy” champions. Self-driving cars, which have turned driving into a complex computational task, will not only relieve us all of the task of driving to work, they have the potential to put every professional driver out of business. Perhaps computers, then, will someday learn not just to calculate, but also to think and evaluate. If so, might they eventually replace the need for all human labor?
Erik Brynjolfsson
Perhaps, but Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of the Second Machine Age, do not base their arguments on any such scenario. The possibility of a truly thinking computer is out there, but no one knows how to make a computer think, and no one knows when or how that might happen.
So, the authors focus on the improvements in computers that we can see and envision right now: machines that can augment and aid human thought with computational ability increasing at the current exponential rate. As long as computers are calculating but not truly thinking, humans will have an important role in production. For example, although computers can beat an unaided chess master, they cannot beat a reasonably skilled human chess player aided by computer. This is the focus of the book: computers and robotics taking over routinized tasks (both physical and mental), while humans still the deep thinking with access to aid from more and more computer power.
This change will be enough to radically transform the labor market and eliminate many (if not most) of the jobs that currently exist. At the enormous rate of increase in computing power, one does not have to envision a self-aware, sentient machine to see that the effects on the economy will be profound. According to the authors, “in the next 24 months, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history; over the next 24 years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold.”
The book’s analysis of those changes is very much based on mainstream economic theory. In the books analysis, increases in unemployment and decreases in wages are attributed almost entirely to a decline in demand for labor thanks to the introduction of labor-replacing technology. Political economy considerations, in which powerful people and corporations manipulate the rules of the economy to keep wages low and employment precarious, are not addressed. When the authors consider shifting taxes from payroll to pollution, they don’t consider that powerful corporations have been using their power over the political process very effectively to block any such changes.
Andrew McAfee
Yet, the book demonstrates that even with purely mainstream economic tools, the need to do something is obvious. We have to address the effects of the computer revolution on the labor market. The second machine age creates an enormous opportunity for everyone to become free from drudgery, to focus their time on the goals that they care most about. But it also creates a great danger in which all the benefits of second machine age will go to the people and corporations who own the machines, while the vast majority of people around the world who depend on the labor market to make their living will find themselves fighting for fewer jobs with lower and lower wages.
The technology-replacement argument for BIG has been a major strand in BIG literature at least since the Robert Theobald began writing about the “triple revolution” in the early 1960s.[*] So, approaching this book as I did, I was on the lookout through a large chuck of the book, waiting for BIG to come up. I was very surprised to see the entire “Policy Recommendations” chapter go by without a mention of BIG.
The authors finally addressed BIG in the penultimate chapter entitled, “long-term recommendations.” In the audio version of the book, the authors spend about 20 minutes (out of the 9-hour audiobook) talking about BIG. They recount some of the history of the guaranteed income movement in the United States with sympathy, and write, “Will we need to revive the idea of a basic income in the decades to come? Maybe, but it’s not our first choice.” They opt instead for an NIT, writing “We support turning the Earned Income Tax Credit into a full-fledged Negative Income Tax by making it larger and making it universal.”
Their discussion of why they prefer the NIT to UBI is perhaps the weakest part of the book. They favor work. They want to maintain the wage-labor economy, because, taking inspiration from Voltaire, they argue that work saves people from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need. I am skeptical about this claim. I view it as an employers’ slogan to justify a subservient workforce, but my skepticism about this argument is not why I find the book’s argument for the NIT over UBI to be the weakest part of the book. The reason is that the argument from work-incentives gives no reason to prefer the NIT to UBI. The authors view the NIT as a “work subsidy,” but it is no more a work subsidy than UBI.
The NIT and the UBI are both BIGs, by that, I mean they both guarantee a certain level below which no one’s income will fall—call this the “grant level.” Both allow people to live without working. UBI does this by giving the grant to everyone whether they work or not, but taxing them on their private income. NIT does this by giving the full grant only to those who make no private income and taking a little of it back as they make private income. In standard economic theory, the “take-back rate” of the NIT is equivalent to the “tax-rate” of the UBI, and so either one can be called “marginal tax rate.”
Applying standard mainstream economic theory (which is used throughout the book), the variables that affect people’s labor market behavior are the grant level and marginal tax rate. The higher the grant level and the higher the marginal tax rate, the lower the incentive to work whether the BIG is an NIT or a UBI. You can have an NIT or a UBI with high or low marginal tax rates and grant levels, and you can have a UBI or an NIT that have the same grant level and marginal tax rate. It is for this reason that Milton Friedman, the economist and champion of the NIT, gave for drawing equivalence between the two programs:
INTERVIEWER: “How do you evaluate the proposition of a basic or citizen´s income compared to the alternative of a negative income tax?”
FRIEDMAN: “A basic or citizen’s income is not an alternative to a negative income tax. It is simply another way to introduce a negative income tax”.
-Eduardo Suplicy, USBIG NewsFlash interview, June 2000, https://www.usbig.net/newsletters/june.html
If the book’s arguments for work incentives are sound, I seen an argument for a modest BIG with a low marginal tax rate, but I see no argument one way or another why the BIG should be under the NIT or the UBI model.
Whatever one thinks about the issue of NIT versus UBI, the book presents an extremely sophisticated and powerful argument for moving in the direction of BIG. Therefore, it is a book that anyone interested in any form of BIG should examine closely.
-Karl Widerquist, Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, June 2, 2014, revised June 14, 2014
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. Audio edition: Grand Haven, Michigan: Brilliance Audio, 2014.
by Claire Bott | May 29, 2018 | News
The BBC has made a half-hour radio programme exploring the current universal basic income (UBI) experiment taking place in Kenya. The programme was originally broadcast on 31th of March 2018, as part of the BBC World Service.
The experiment, funded by American charity GiveDirectly, is due to run for 12 years and is now in its second year. It involves 20,000 people in more than 200 villages, and includes a number of groups including a large control group. The villages used in the main experiment have been sequestered from outside visitors, as there are concerns that these could be disruptive to the experimental conditions. However, a “test” village is open to visitors, and the programme-makers conducted interviews with a number of people living there.
These included Edwin, who had spent the extra money ($22 per month) to buy much-needed furniture for his family, and Evelyn, who had invested part of it in her business selling fried fish at the market, and had saved the rest. Irene, a teacher, says that children from the village which is being given money are much more likely to attend school regularly. Joseph, the head teacher, added, “Previously, we had a lot of absenteeism from the village children during market days.”
The programme also included a brief summary of the history of UBI, including brief references to both Thomas More and Thomas Paine. There are quotations in support of UBI from celebrities such as Richard Branson (“It will come about one day, out of necessity”) and Elon Musk (“Ultimately, I think we’re going to have to have some form of basic income”).
Michael Faye, Director and Co-Founder of GiveDirectly, said on the progamme, “When I’ve gone to some of the surrounding villages, things I will hear are ‘Well, of course we wish we had gotten the transfer, but we’re doing meaningfully better than before the transfer started.’ I’ll ask, ‘Why are you doing meaningfully better?’ And they’ll say, ‘A lot of people in the village [which is getting the transfer] decided to rebuild their house, or they go to the market more. Well, somebody needs to build the house for them, someone needs to sell things in the market. So our businesses are booming because of the capital that the village next door has received.’”
The programme-makers intend to return to the village at regular intervals, in order to see how the situation is developing as the experiment continues.
Edited by: Caroline Pearce
