by Kate McFarland | Dec 24, 2016 | News
Catherine Clifford, senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC, wrote the CNBC article announcing Elon Musk’s prediction that automation would make universal basic income (UBI) necessary. In a subsequent article, titled “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” Clifford
In the article, Clifford portrays the automation of jobs as the main motivation for UBI, continuing to highlight Elon Musk’s remark that he’s “not sure what else one would do” but implement such a policy. (This focus on automation as the sole or main motivator is arguably misleading; many historically important arguments for UBI do not turn at all on worries about automation. Unquestionably, however, the threat of technological unemployment has recently been the driving force behind much of the media attention to UBI in the United States.)
Clifford goes on to note some highlights of the global UBI movement: the impending pilot in Finland, Basisinkomen 2018’s campaign for a basic income referendum in the Netherlands, and Switzerland’s vote on a basic income referendum earlier in 2016.
One passage in the article is especially noteworthy for BIEN: Clifford discusses the resolutions on the definition of ‘basic income’ made at BIEN’s 2016 Congress. In doing do so, she emphasizes that the definition of ‘basic income’ does not entail that basic income must be replacement for other programs and social services, and she point out that BIEN recommends that it not be viewed in this way–quoting BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist as saying that UBI “is not ‘generally considered’ as a replacement for the rest of the social safety net”:
“Some see it primarily as a replacement. Others see it as a supplement, filling in the cracks. Some people who want it to be a replacement try to create the impression that it is generally considered to be so. But that’s not accurate.”
Reference
Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” CNBC, November 18, 2016.
Article reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation.
by BIEN | Dec 24, 2016 | Bios & background Info
Kate McFarland has been a writer and editor for Basic Income News since March 2016 (after having began her volunteership as a content reviewer in November 2015). She was appointed as a member of the Executive Committee at BIEN’s Congress in July 2016. Additionally, she was appointed as Secretary of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network in November 2016.
At the time of this writing, Kate is nearing the end of her final(?) temporary paid appointment at The Ohio State University, where she has been employed in some fashion since 2002.
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Kate grew up in the town of Lancaster, Ohio, until she moving to Columbus to attend school at (The) Ohio State University.
In college, Kate flirted with various social science and humanities disciplines, before eventually majoring in mathematics (with a minor in sociology) and then enrolling in graduate school in statistics.
Kate as statistician (you can tell from the earrings)
During her first year as a statistics PhD student, however, Kate realized that she would never truly challenge herself intellectually if she failed to get a PhD in philosophy. Thus, on a whim, she started enrolling in graduate-level philosophy classes while completing her masters degree in statistics. She went on to complete a PhD in philosophy of language, remaining at Ohio State for the length of “professional student” career (primarily due to convenience).
Kate’s philosophical research focused mainly on the semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of disagreement. She did not work in political theory, and dissertation was unrelated to basic income. However, it would be true, if misleading, to say that her dissertation dealt with the “power to say ‘No'”: she wrote about the conditions under which it is conversationally appropriate for speakers to use the word ‘No’ when replied to something someone else said.
Never pursuing a career as a professional philosopher, Kate accepted a one-year teaching position at Ohio State, focusing on the teaching of ethics to engineering students, as a stopgap after her 2015 graduation.
In the summer of 2016, she was offered what could have become a full-time, permanent position at Ohio State’s Department of Philosophy. By the time, however, she was finally discovered that a world existed outside of Ohio State–thanks mainly to her growing involvement in the Basic Income movement. Not wanting to close other doors, she turned it down.
In 2017, she plans to continue leading her life as a open-ended journey, just the way she likes it.
INTEREST IN BASIC INCOME
Kate has actively followed the basic income movement only since late 2015. However, the seedlings of her support for the cause had developed at least by her teens.
Kate in high school, living in a bubble
As early as middle school, Kate adamantly rejected the notion that the main function of education should be to prepare students for jobs and careers; she insisted, on the contrary, that the attainment of knowledge and the development of one’s cognitive faculties were ends in themselves–and that education ought to be devoted to this end. Also in her early teens, she developed a fondness for underground music (e.g., especially, obscure 1970s prog rock) and an deep skepticism of the mainstream. Whether talking about education policy, music, or any other subject matter, she used “sell out” as a term of derision.
When she learned of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income, sometime around her freshman year of college, it immediately resonated with her as way as to preserve freedom and individualism without forcing individuals to conform to the demands of the marketplace. She saw it, in short, as a possible basis for a society in which no one needs to sell out. However, she did not further pursue the idea for many years.
Kate in mid-2015
Kate finally became re-attracted to basic income in mid-2015, when looking for a more radical, post-work alternative to the “Fight for 15” memes that her friends were sharing on Facebook. For her, promotion of the idea of basic income was a means to challenge societal assumptions about the function and value of work and jobs.
That said, most of Kate’s present work is not activism at all, but reporting. She maintains that, qua Basic Income News editor, she is not an advocate for basic income per se but instead an advocate for intellectual responsibility and integrity in discourse about basic income.
Her primary mission is not to convince people to that basic income is desirable but, rather, simply to disseminate accurate information about the contemporary movements for it. She approaches all of her research, writing, and reporting for BIEN with the same standards of intellectual honesty and rigor as she would have applied to any scholarly work.
For all her utopian visions of a post-capitalist society, Kate is still a pedantic academic at heart–a trait she hopes to wield for the betterment of the basic income community.
Top photo by Josh Diaz Photography
by BIEN | Dec 22, 2016 | News
Earlier in the year, Basic Income News reporter Scott Jacobsen spoke to Basic Income News reporter Kate McFarland about her background and influences. This is a continuation of Part One.
You mentioned valuing clarity of writing, for readers to have correct inferences. Any advice for BI writers? That is, those that want clear writing and to avoid the statistical probability of readers making wrong inferences.
That’s a good question. I feel like this is something I do based on instincts from my training in analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of language. It’s hard to codify that—those instincts—right off the bat.
I do want to stress that one thing that’s special about Basic Income News—sorta in our mission statement, as it were—is that we are clear to make the distinction between straightforward factual reporting and opinion pieces. If you just want the facts, you read one of our news reports, and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of the writer’s own analysis and commentary to get to them. You’ll see a lot of writing that conflates opinion and persuasive writing with reporting the facts, in a way not always conducive to the reader being able to figure out exactly what’s going on. Too often the factual reporting seems like an afterthought.
As much as I can, and as much as BI News can, we try to give people the bare facts. We don’t want to gloss them over with a bunch of fluff about what we think about basic income. It is not our job in news reporting. Our job is to disseminate the latest information about the basic income movement. It is not to make every one piece a persuasive one. It is not to write exciting stories, fluff, and propaganda.
I would also urge other writers to stick with primary sources whenever possible. When you use quotes, be sensitive to the context. When you talk about data from experiments or surveys, be sensitive to the design of the study and what you can actually infer from it.
Never, ever selectively misquote or misrepresent information by presenting it out of context! Some people do that, which is why I say always stick with primary sources—the original research reports, the full transcripts, and so forth.
Otherwise, my advice is to learn a lot, do you research from the primary sources, but also read some of the fluffy, superficial, often misleading stories on BI in mainstream media. Pay attention to the awful clickbait headlines. Read the comments sometimes even; notice how people are confused. Let it irritate you. You’ll develop instincts, I think, to write in a way that strives to avoid that. I think it helped me, anyhow.
Some things you said suggest mainstream news sources on BI want to persuade one way or another. Does this seem to be the case? It would be in contradiction to journalistic virtues of objectivity and neutrality insofar as they can be achieved.
Well, I see a lot—I see a lot that’s not necessarily to persuade, but where there might be, I think there are, values that conflict with just straightforward objective reporting. It might not be to persuade people on whether to support BI. It might be just to excite people, hook people, or write a catchier piece… As I say, I’m a philosopher, not a journalist; the ideals I have for prose come from there. Maybe journalists want to engage the reader at the expense of laying out the facts in a clear and complete manner. We’re just trying to concisely summarize the facts and make everything as clear as possible.
So, for example, if you read a journalistic report on a sample survey—this has just happened recently—you almost never get the details you want to know in order to really know what conclusions to draw. The sample size, sampling frame, selection method, response rate—you don’t often get all that. I would want to know that. And I don’t really care what a survey says about people’s attitudes on basic income if you don’t give me the details of the questionnaire design. What exactly is being asked? How it is phrased? I want to know all that before I make conclusions; I think you should make that info available to the reader if you’re gonna bother to report on an opinion survey at all. ‘Course, I should say I was a statistician before I became a philosopher.
Another thing is quoting out of context. There was an example that comes to mind—I won’t name names—of a famous basic income advocate being asked his opinion on when BI would actually happen. The gist of what he said was that we can’t predict, but in saying it, he said something like “It could as soon as 5 or 10 years, but it could be much longer.” It was clearly just this fragment of a larger point about how we just can’t know. But then the journalist just quotes him as saying that BI could happen as soon as 5 or 10 years! Just that! Entirely misleading. Entirely misrepresented his point.
A related phenomenon—a sub-phenomenon, maybe—is jumping on any use of the phrase “basic income” and then quoting the speaker as making a point about what you and I and BIEN call “basic income”. But that’s really too hasty. There was a recent case of a famous businessman who allegedly came out in support of UBI—he said he supported “basic income” (or “Grundeinkommen”, being German)—and people in the media just assumed he meant the unconditional thing. Later, he tweets that he didn’t mean the unconditional thing, but by then, the damage is done, as it were.
Sometimes this is [a] tough one, I have to be honest. Maybe, that’s another thing for the advice: If you’re not 100 percent positive someone means basic income when they say “basic income”, then leave what they say in quotes. Say “They said these words…” But don’t necessarily disquote if you’re not sure what they mean. I mean, equivocation on the phrase “basic income” is a whole other issue—it’s becoming a real big thing, I think, with the Canada movement versus US commentators—but maybe we’ll get back to that.
Another example with the reporting, I guess, is just being misleading through superficiality or vague weasel words. Like, to make basic income seem exciting, maybe a journalist will give a long list of countries that are “pursuing” BI or “considering” BI or something—but what does that even mean? Or maybe they’ll talk about a long list of people who “endorse” or “support” it just because they said something vaguely favourable at one time.
Then you see things—I’ve been seeing this a lot lately—like “Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are beginning pilots.” The problem there a little subtler, but you see it? That suggests, I think, that the governments of Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are all planning pilots. Kenya? They must be thinking of GiveDirectly, a private charity based in New York that happens to be operating in Kenya. I think it’s important to keep those private efforts distinct from the government-sponsored ones. That’s an important distinction. It’s one sort of thing you often see just casually elided.
I could go on—those are just some examples off the top of my head—but I hope you get the idea. I think that, with most journalism on BI, it’s about saying the bare minimum to be interesting and provocative—don’t bore readers with too many facts and details and distinctions, maybe—at the expensive of saying enough, and saying things clearly enough, to really give a good and accurate sense, knowledge, of what’s going on in the world.
Your background in philosophy at the graduate and doctoral level seems relevant to me. It obviously helps with your clarity, rigour, and simplicity to the point it needs to be to present ideas. For BI, it can come along with different terms and phrases, for different ideas associated with, but not the same as, BI.
Yeah, that’s definitely—that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I try to point to it when it’s relevant. And I try to be consistent in my own terms, and of course to keep my uses consistent with the official definition agreed upon by BIEN—a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
The US BIG site actually has a pretty good primer on some of the different terms, and I tend to follow its usage for BI and UBI versus BIG and so on. But sometimes it’s tricky, especially with the BIG versus BI distinction, which you see conflated a lot these days.
“BI” and “UBI” are both often used to refer only to policies where everybody gets a check of the same amounts—no clawbacks with additional earnings—but sometimes people use them more generally to include policies that include what you might otherwise hear called “guaranteed minimum income” or a “guaranteed annual income” or a “negative income tax”; these are policies where everyone’s assured a minimal income floor, unconditionally, but the amount you receive is clawed back as you earn more and more on top of this floor. That’s what Ontario’s almost certainly gonna pilot next. It won’t be everyone in the pilot getting money. It’ll be that everyone’s guaranteed money if their income drops low enough—but, assuming Hugh Segal’s advice is followed, it won’t be the rich people in the sample also getting the check.
But sometimes you’ll see things like “Ontario plans to give all its residents an income boost”—because people hear “basic income”, and elsewhere they hear “basic income” to mean “checks to everybody, even then rich”, and they put two and two together, incorrectly. Sometimes all these policies together are referred to as a “basic income guarantee”, a “BIG”, with the GAI/GMI/NIT and the UBI (or “demogrant” as it’s sometimes called) being different types.
I can see this becoming a real problem—confusing these types of “BIGs”, equivocating on the term “basic income”—for people’s understanding and interpreting past and present pilots, and understanding how they revolve around the current debate, and I do hope to write a full-length article about it in the new year, if it keeps being problematic.
I’m realizing that what I’m talking about is not so much too many phrases for BI—but the term “basic income” being used to mean too many things. That might actually be the bigger problem, in fact, especially in the States. In addition to this equivocation with “does it entail giving money to the rich”, there’s this issue with some people, it seems, thinking that anything called “basic income” by definition replaces the whole rest of the welfare state. But that’s not true. But writers sometimes talk that way, and it leads to confusion and misconceptions.
And there’s also an issue about whether a “basic income” is, by definition, enough to live on. I think writers occasionally go in both ways. They probably sometimes equivocate, which would be bad… There’s been some controversy in BIEN caused by precisely this last concern, in fact. I think you can read about it some in Toru’s report on the controversy about the definition at the last BIEN Congress.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 13, 2016 | Opinion, Testimonies
This year, BIEN celebrated its 30th anniversary. An event commemorating the occasion was held at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium on October 1, in connection also with the 25th anniversary of UCLouvain’s Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics and the retirement of BIEN cofounder Philippe van Parijs as its director.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Philippe Van Parijs about the past, present, and future of BIEN.
What’s the most striking difference between BIEN’s earlier years and now?
Participants in BIEN’s founding meeting
The internet. It is hard for young people today to imagine what it meant to run an international network when all communication between its members had to happen through the post. The newsletter needed to be typed, then printed, then photocopied, then stapled. Each copy of the newsletter then had to be inserted in a big envelope, with a stamp stuck on it, and the whole lot had to be taken to the nearest post box. All this cost money. So, annual fees had to be collected. But bank charges were high for international transfers and would have absorbed half of these fees. We therefore asked people to send the money to Louvain-la-Neuve in an envelope in pesetas, deutsche Mark, French Francs, lire, etc. and I changed them at the bank before paying equivalent amounts in Belgian Francs into BIEN’s bank account. We more or less managed three issues per year, but given the time this cost to a tiny number of busy people, this was a recurrent miracle. To lighten the thankless burden of fee collection, we wisely switched in the late nineties to a life membership formula. And from 2000, thanks to increasing access to internet among BIEN’s members, we allowed ourselves to gradually switch from the tri-annual printed newsletter to more frequent e-mailed news flashes.
What were BIEN’s most memorable successes in its first 30 years?
The greatest success — and the first virtue of a good network — is simply to have kept going, with a newsletter sharing intelligible and trustworthy information every few months and with a congress unfailingly organized every two years. These congresses enabled a core of highly committed people to get to know each other personally, to inform, encourage and inspire each other, but proved also a powerful instrument for making more people aware of the idea of basic income and ready to take it seriously. The first two conferences (in Louvain-la-Neuve in 1986 and Antwerp 1988) were very modest, low-budget events. The first grand congress was organized by Edwin Morley-Fletcher, with the support of Italy’s Lega Nazionale delle Cooperative e Mutue at the European University Institute (Florence) in September 1990. I thought at the time that organizing such big and expensive events would be unsustainable. But I was proved wrong by a long and so far uninterrupted succession of enthusiastic conference organizers.
Eduardo Suplicy (CC BY 2.0 Senado Federal)
The second greatest success — and the second virtue of a good network — is to have kept expanding. As time went on, more and more people from outside Europe attended BIEN’s congresses. Among them, Brazilian Senator Eduardo Suplicy, who started suggesting, from 1998 onwards, that the Basic Income European Network should become the Basic Income Earth Network. Guy Standing was sympathetic to the suggestion from the start. I was very skeptical at first, partly because I knew too well how hard it had been to keep our little European network going, and partly because I thought that a broad interest in basic income could only arise in countries that experienced for a sufficiently long time the perverse effects of conditional income schemes. But by 2004, 25 percent of BIEN’s life members were from outside Europe. Moreover, in January 2004, Eduardo managed to get President Lula to sign his “basic income law”. And the internet was conquering the world. My resistance evaporated. At the Barcelona congress, in September 2004, the General Assembly approved our proposal to make BIEN a worldwide network.
Can these greatest successes be called memorable? Not really. A network acts discreetly in the background. It empowers its components, thereby helping them do a number of things, including memorable ones. Would there have been a basic income law in Brazil or a basic income referendum in Switzerland in the absence of the slow maturing and dissemination of the idea made possible by the existence of a lasting and expanding network? And would they stick as firmly in many people’s memories without an efficient and influential network that confers them a memorable rather than anecdotal status?
Can these greatest successes be called memorable? Not really. A network acts discreetly in the background.
What have been the biggest challenges?
Apart from the material concerns already mentioned, I can think of two main challenges. One is linguistic. Opting for English as the sole language of a European network was far less obvious thirty years ago than it has now become. There were voices rightly pointing out the elitism involved in this choice. In most countries, only bilinguals (or more) could be involved. Yet, given the resources available, only the monolingual formula was realistic. Consequently, a constant effort was required, far from fully successful, to correct the imbalance thereby created along many dimensions: from the overrepresentation of news and publications from Anglophone countries to the overrepresentation of Anglophones among active participants in our congresses or assemblies.
The other challenge is sectarianism. When people sharing the same conviction form an association, there is a danger that their meetings and publications will largely reduce to a rehearsal of the common faith and a denunciation of the stupidity or wickedness of those who don’t share it. It has been crucial to the vitality and impact of BIEN that it has resisted such sectarian degeneration. It has kept inviting to its congresses speakers who spoke against basic income. It has kept reporting in a fair way on criticisms and setbacks. And it has kept insisting that its membership is open to people “committed to or interested in” an unconditional basic income in a precise yet broad sense that does not stipulate a specific funding method, rationale, level or set of accompanying measures.
Has BIEN ever run the risk of dying?
Twice, I think. First, it could have been still-born. Driven by the pioneers’ enthusiasm, the initial plan, at the September 1986 founding conference, was to hold a conference every year, and someone offered to hold the next one in Maastricht in September 1987. But the proposal fell through and instead there followed a long silence. It is only in February 1988 that BIEN’s first newsletter was sent out, announcing a second conference, which Walter Van Trier, BIEN’s first secretary, managed to put together in Antwerp, in September 1988.
The second time agony seemed close was in the mid-nineties. With my four children, Louvain’s Hoover Chair to run and my Real Freedom for All nearing completion, I was struggling to combine the jobs of BIEN secretary and newsletter editor. To my great relief, at the London 1994 congress, a founding member who was hardly involved until then agreed to become the newsletter editor. I still dealt with the first issue following the congress, but thereafter, despite many reminders and repeated promises, nothing happened for many months. I took back the editor job and laboriously published a treble Christmas 1995 issue, after a full year gap. It made me realize both how crucial a newsletter is to the very existence of a network and how important it is for the sustainability of a network that people should only commit to what they are really able to do.
Philippe Van Parijs (photo credit: Enno Schmidt)
What do you see as BIEN’s biggest challenges moving forward?
One big challenge is to keep track of the countless fast swelling stream of relevant developments worldwide and to make their nature and significance intelligible to people across the world. Internet is no doubt a fabulous asset for a worldwide network. But working out the right hierarchy, in terms of relevance, significance and reliability, among the mass of information to which we now have easy access is both essential and difficult. BIEN’s current team is doing a terrific job in this respect.
Another challenge is to constantly find the right balance between utopianism and pragmatism, between on the one hand an attractive, stirring vision of a better world that can boost our hopes and stimulate our actions and on the other an acute, clear-headed awareness of difficulties, obstacles, defeats and disappointments.
What do you see as most exciting?
The fact that so many different people in such different countries discover, discuss and appropriate the idea and that this helps them regain the hope they had lost in a better future for themselves and for their children.
Philippe Van Parijs has been chair of BIEN’s international board since 2004. He was the organizer of BIEN’s founding conference (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), BIEN’s newsletter editor from 1988 to 2004, BIEN’s secretary from 1994 to 2004. He is the author (with Yannick Vanderborght) of Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy, Harvard University Press, Spring 2017.
Cover Photo: Van Parijs at BIEN’s 30th Anniversary event (credit: Enno Schmidt).
by Guest Contributor | Dec 6, 2016 | Opinion
Written by: Pierre Madden
On November 12 and 13 I attended a congress of the Liberal Party of Quebec, which is currently in power in the province.
The Minister of Employment and Social Solidarity, François Blais, confirmed that a joint working group, with his colleague in Finance, will issue a preliminary report on Basic Income in the Spring. Our neighbouring province of Ontario (which, together with Quebec accounts for 62 percent of the population of Canada) was just released a working paper on a pilot project to begin in April 2017. Quebec does not seem to be leaning towards a pilot project.
In his talk, Minister Blais placed much emphasis on the principles underlying the development of the government’s project:
- The development of human capital (though education, for example)
- The obligation of protection from certain risks (with unemployment insurance and health insurance, for example)
- Income redistribution
The minister’s speech was highly focused on incentives to work or study (especially for the illiterate or those without a high school diploma).
The principle of unconditionality, a fundamental aspect of Basic Income, will likely not be a feature of the government’s plan.
On the second day of the congress it was the minister’s turn to ask me if he had answered my question. I described my own situation as a case in point. I am 62, three years away from my public pension which here in Canada is sufficient to raise most people out of poverty (works for me!). Why would the government be interested in the development of my human capital? The minister replies: “In a case like yours, we would have to go back in time to see what choices you made.” I have several university diplomas, which doesn’t help his argument. I am still either underemployed or unemployable.
The minister could only answer: “I would have to know more about your individual case.”
And that is what the government does and will continue to do for all those considered “fit for work.” Petty bureaucratic inconveniences for those “unfit for work” will be removed and their inadequate benefits will be improved by dipping into the funds previously used for the “fit” as they return to the workforce. The government sees no difficulty in a law it passed just last week (Bill 70: An Act to allow a better match between training and jobs and to facilitate labour market entry). The government highlights the positive measures it imposes to help participants join the job market. Those who prefer a non-paternalistic approach (“Give me the money and let me make my own decisions”) are penalized.
The irony is that before he entered politics Minister Blais actually wrote a book in support of Basic Income for all. He confirmed to me that he still believes what he wrote 15 years ago.
In Canada, both the federal and the provincial governments partially reimburse sales tax. Here in Quebec, the Solidarity Tax Credit refunds part of the estimated sales tax paid by consumers. The higher your income, the lower the monthly payout, so it works like a negative income tax. The minister was asked about this as a stepping stone towards Basic Income. He simply said it would be “a more radical approach.” Of course, tax credits don’t impact on “human capital.”
You can be sure I will be rereading François Blais’ book when his work-group’s report comes out next year.
About the author: Pierre Madden is a zealous dilettante based in Montreal. He has been a linguist, a chemist, a purchasing coordinator, a production planner and a lawyer. His interest in Basic Income, he says, is personal. He sure could use it now!
