by Citizens' Income Trust | Mar 14, 2014 | Opinion
Nathalie Morel, Bruno Palier and Joakim Palme (eds), Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, policies and challenges, Policy Press, 2012, xiv + 386 pp, pbk, 1 847 42925 4, £19.99, hbk, 1 847 42924 7, £70
Is the welfare state a cost or an investment? To take two examples: unemployment benefit is a cost; training for employment is an investment.
The 2009 conference and subsequent research project which gave birth to this most interesting book worked with a simple presupposition: that the welfare state of the twentieth century was a social cost welfare state, but that the welfare state of this century will be a production factor, investing in order to reap economic and social benefits for a world very different from that of the last century: hence active labour market policies and a greater emphasis on early years care.
The first chapter charts the early history of the investment welfare state in Sweden during the 1930s, the submergence of that idea by the Keynesian and neo-liberal welfare states, and the more recent resurgence in the form of widespread social investment policy trajectories. The second chapter discusses in depth the evolution of the welfare state from expansion, through retrenchment, and into the new ‘investment’ paradigm, and shows how countries which have taken this route have found the investment welfare state to be both positive for economic growth and coherent with the emerging knowledge economy. Chapter 3 studies the mix of state, market, family and community in Keynesian, neo-liberal and investment welfare states, and finds the investment welfare state to be both flexible and usefully ambiguous politically.
Chapter 4 asks to what extent OECD countries are developing investment welfare states (Scandinavian countries are, and English-speaking countries are developing cheaper versions), and chapter 5 shows how budgetary constraints have led to cost-cutting and to a market-based welfare state rather than to a social investment one.
The authors then tackle particular policy areas. Chapter 6 discusses such family-friendly policies as parental leave. Chapter 7 examines such different active labour market policies as the availability of training and benefits reduction for non-compliance, and identifies the problem that what the economy needs is upskilling, whereas what it gets is low-skill and no-skill employment and employees. Chapter 8 finds that social investment policies such as education improve both employment rates and the proportion of skilled employment. Chapter 9 shows how important both academic and experience-based learning are going to be, and how important it is that they should connect with each other.
The final chapters look to the future. An ageing population requires investment in intergenerational redistribution; the upheaval of the financial crisis might facilitate an unfreezing of welfare states and a resultant more consistent European social investment welfare state. Climate change requires social policy which promotes sustainability; social cohesion needs to be seen as ‘the necessary foundation for the learning economy’ (p.347), rather than as a burden; and we need a new economic model to match the emerging social investment welfare state.
The book provides a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion at the European level of an important new paradigm, with an occasional focus on particular countries – usually Scandinavian ones. What we need now is discussion focused on each European country in turn. The UK will provide an interesting case study. Here, social insurance characterised the Keynesian welfare state, and means-tested benefits the neo-liberal one: but what will characterise the social investment welfare state? One possibility of course is universal provision. Take Child Benefit as an example: It is a family-friendly policy; it promotes a flexible labour market (as it doesn’t change as employment status or earnings change), and it provides a secure base for family finances in a turbulent economic and social situation. An extension of universal benefits to working-age adults would facilitate learning (because lower marginal deduction rates would make it more worthwhile to seek further training in order to increase one’s family’s financial position), and it would be family-friendly because it would offer to couples more choice over employment patterns. If you would like to make an investment you may want to consider to choose the best robo-advisor.
The book’s direction is the right one. It’s a European social investment welfare state that we need: or rather, a global one. So why not a European Citizen’s Income? Or even a global one? It’s not beyond our capability, and it would be remarkably helpful to an investment welfare state.
by Karl Widerquist | Feb 27, 2014 | News
UBI: Emancipating European Welfare
After one year of campaigning for the European Citizens’ Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income, we are still actively continuing on the path towards finding an intelligent approach to European citizens’ real needs, particularly those generated by poverty. The Initiative won the support of over 300,000 people in less than a year. Since then, a network involving people and organisations from 25 countries has come together to carry on the Initiative’s aims.
At this conference we would like to consolidate this network by reflecting both on what has happened in the past year and on our future aspirations. Our main aim is for unconditional basic income to be implemented throughout the EU. There are also moves underway to get UBI recognised as a human right under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 1: Human Dignity).
We hope that you will be able to attend our conference on 10 April 2014, and actively participate in the discussion of ideas which will be presented there. We would be grateful if we could receive your confirmation by 25 March. Please RSVP by e-mail: conference@ubie.org.
=== AGENDA ===
9:30 – 9:40 am: Welcome from European Economic and Social Committee (EESC)
9.40 – 9.50: Welcome from Barb Jacobson, Chair, Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE)
9:50 – 10:05: Jones Sian, European Anti Poverty Network: Situation with income poverty and hidden poverty in Europe
10:05 – 10:15: Questions & Answers
10.15 – 10.30: Ronald Blaschke, Co-Founder and Member of the Board of Netzwerk Grundeinkommen Germany: Unconditional Basic Income – Consistently against (hidden) poverty and for real freedom for everyone
10:30 – 10:40: Q&A
10:40 – 11:00: Coffee Break
11:00 – 11:15: Elena Dalibot: European Alternatives, Project Coordinator: Citizens Manifesto for European Democracy, Solidarity and Equality – Different Needs and Solutions
11:15 – 11:25: Q&A
11:25 – 11:40: Gerald Häfner, MEP, Greens: Development of ECI and EU-Referendum – tools for more democracy in the EU
11:40 – 11:50 Q&A
11:50 – 12:05 David Casassas, Member of BIEN, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Democracy and Unconditional Basic Income
12:05 – 12:15 Q&A
12:15 – 12:30: Werner Rätz, Attac Germany, Working Group Enough for all and Working Group Beyond the Growth: Degrowth, Health and Unconditional Basic Income
12:30 – 1:00 pm Q&A (ten minutes) and General Discussion
1.00 – 2:00 pm: Lunch Break
2:00 – 2:15 – Philippe Van Parijs, Chair of Advisory Board of BIEN: Euro- Dividend – An example for an partial basic income in Europe
2:15 – 2:25: Q&A
2:25 – 2:40: Guy Standing, Honorary Co-President of BIEN: What can we learn from Namibian and Indian experiments with unconditional cash transfers?
2:40- 2:50: Q&A
2:50 – 3:20: BREAK
3:20 – 5:20: Building the European Movement for an UBI – Panel
• Stanislas Jourdan, French Movement for UBI: How the ECI woke up the European movement
• Valerija Korosec, UBI Slovenia: Running in the EU elections for UBI
• Vahur Luhtsalu, UBI Estonia: Learning-by-doing: How we jumped on the ECI-UBI train (and what are the lessons learned)
• Plamen Dimitrov (Bulgarian Trade Union president – CITUB) (tbc)
• Spanish speaker on the National Popular Initiative (tbc)
• Speaker from Scandinavia (tbc): UBI in the context of advanced welfare countries
• Klaus Sambor, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen Austria: The movement for UBI as part of wider social movements in Europe
5:20 – 5.30: – Closing address
For more information go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/1445383579030636/
by Karl Widerquist | Feb 6, 2014 | News
TITLE: “Citizen’s Income: A minor policy change that would transform our society”
SPEAKERS: Guy Standing and Malcolm Torry
TIME & DATE: “Tuesday 4th March. 6.30pm – 8.30pm
LOCATION: Committee Room 5, House of Commons
TICKETS are available at this link.
Guy Standing
A Citizen’s Income is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income for every individual as a right of citizenship. The withdrawal of means-tested benefits as earned incomes rise means that far too many households receive almost no benefit from additional earnings. A Citizen’s Income would change that and would therefore enable families to climb out of poverty. There is very little now that binds every individual into society. Everyone would receive a Citizen’s Income, creating a new social belonging. The labour market gives few choices to most individuals. A Citizen’s Income would increase people’s power in the labour market, and would enable both employers and workers to negotiate the employment patterns that they want.
Professor Guy Standing, SOAS, University of London, and author of The Precariat: The new dangerous class, will tell us how the need for a Citizen’s Income is increased by the growth of the precariat in the UK and elsewhere. Those in the precariat typically face economic uncertainty and pervasive poverty traps and precarity traps that remove incentives to labour and work. A Citizen’s Income is the only feasible way to provide basic socio-economic security, and would make a modest but sustainable contribution to the reduction of the high and rising level of income inequality. Professor Standing will also be able to report on the stunning results of Citizen’s Income pilot projects in Namibia and India.
Malcolm Torry, for Policy Press
Dr. Malcolm Torry, Director of the Citizen’s Income Trust, Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, and author of Money for Everyone: Why we need a Citizen’s Income, will explain how a Citizen’s Income would have significant beneficial effects for individuals and for society, and that it is an entirely feasible policy because it could be paid for by reducing tax allowances and means-tested benefits. No additional public expenditure would be required, and on day 1 few households would notice much financial difference. It’s in the weeks, months and years after that that individuals, families, and society as a whole would experience life very differently.
For more information go to: https://thepeoplesparliament.me.uk/themes/citizens-income/.
by Karl Widerquist | Jan 26, 2014 | News, Research
[Michael W. Howard]
In this column, Velasquez-Manoff summarizes ground-breaking research by Duke University epidemiologist Jane Costello and UCLA economist Randall Akee on the effects of regular unconditional cash disbursements to every member of the North Carolina’s Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, as equal shares of some of the profits of their casino. There have been many casinos build within Native American communities, which is sometimes controversial. However, gambling can be a fun and safe past time when casinos are run well. Visitors might want to read this article by the South Florida Reporter to learn how to find a reputable casino. Furthermore, casinos provide much-needed jobs and income for those living nearby. After five years, by which time the yearly profits per person amounted to $6000, the number in poverty declined by half, a surprising result for Costello. “The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,” Costello told Velasquez-Manoff. “This one had quite large effects.” Other effects included a decline in minor crimes by youth, an increase in high school graduation rates, and, especially when the income arrived early in a child’s life, better mental health in early adulthood. The study thus tends to support the view that poverty can cause mental illness, rather than poverty being explained by mental illness. It is thought that the income facilitated better parenting by reducing the stresses of poverty. Even income arriving for 12-year-olds, according to Akee, has benefits that in five to ten years exceed the cost of the extra income.
Harrah's Cherokee Casino -via Daily Kos
Velasquez-Manoff does not mention the relevance of this study for basic income policy, but it is particularly relevant. First, even major studies like the Mincome pilot program in Manitoba were of fixed length. Critics could say that behavior was affected by the expectation that the income would end. Here, the payments are ongoing. Second, the payments, although not sufficient to cover basic needs, are substantial. By 2006, the yearly stipend had risen to $9000 per person. So, unlike Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, these payments have been a more substantial percentage of individual incomes among poor families. Yet, as basic income advocates would expect, there appears not to have been a substantial work disincentive. Rather, the steady supplements to wages have relieved the stresses of seasonal, irregular employment, with numerous benefits to family and community life, and this, as Charles Karelis has argued, in The Persistence of Poverty, enables work. Akee “calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs – the payments to parents while the children were minors.”
The study also raises interesting questions. The source of the funding is a business owned by the tribe; it is a “bottom-up” initiative. Would it make a difference to the outcomes if the source were publicly owned resources or tax revenues? Not all of the casino revenue went to cash payments. Some went to infrastructure and social services.
There are some questions regarding the long-term sustainability of these policies. For example, the growth of online casinos like https://thisisstory.com which may cut into the Cherokee casino profits if they continue to grow. But for the most part, these policies look like they will continue.
Were the positive outcomes due to the complementarity of these policies? Could there have been better outcomes if more had been spent on in-kind goods, or if more had been disbursed in cash? Whatever the answers, this study shows the positive potential of substantial universal unconditional cash payments in the fight against poverty.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?” Opinionator, New York Times, January 18, 2014.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In reaction to Velasquez-Manoff’s article, several other authors wrote articles about the project, some making the connection to BIG:
Matt Bruenig, “A Cherokee Tribe’s Basic Income Success Story,” Policy Shop, January 19, 2014.
Jared Bernstein, “The Transfer of Income to Poor Families with Children Can Be An Investment with Long Term Payoffs,” On the Economy, January 19th, 2014.
Dave in Northridge, “What Happens when Poor People get Cash? An Empirical Study,” Daily Kos, Jan 20, 2014.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Dec 20, 2013 | Opinion
Alberto Minujin and Shailen Nandy (eds), Global Child Poverty and Well-Being: Measurement, concepts, policy and action, Policy Press, 2012, xxxii + 591 pp, pbk, 1 847 42481 5, £28.99, hbk, 1 847 42482 2, £70
In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first internationally agreed definition of child poverty:
Children living in poverty are deprived of nutrition, water and sanitation facilities, access to basic health-care services, shelter, education, participation and protection, and … while a severe lack of goods and services hurts every human being, it is most threatening and harmful to children, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, to reach their full potential and to participate as full members of society (quoted on p.3)
In 2007, UNICEF stated that
measuring child poverty can no longer be lumped together with general poverty assessments which often focus solely on income levels, but must take into consideration access to basic social services, especially nutrition, water, sanitation, shelter, education and information (also quoted on p.3)
In 2008, a conference, ‘Rethinking poverty: making policies work for children’, gave birth to a revived academic interest in the measurement and causes of child poverty. In 2009, Peter Townsend died. His early work on child poverty and his constant commitment to poverty’s measurement and abolition have been an inspiration to academics, policy-makers and practitioners, and to the authors of the papers published in this tribute volume.
The first part of the book finds that children’s human rights are frequently violated, and that economic growth is far from being a sufficient condition for the elimination of child poverty. The second part discusses a variety of methods for measuring child poverty, and finds that the multidimensional nature of poverty means that cash-defined poverty lines are inadequate on their own. The third part relates case studies on the development of multidimensional poverty indices; and the fourth part studies the causes of child poverty and a number of methods for eradicating it. Of particular interest to readers of this Newsletter will be chapter 18, ‘Utopia calling: eradicating child poverty in the United Kingdom and beyond’. Ruth Levitas tells the story of the UK’s Family Allowance, which evolved into Child Benefit, and shows how other rather different policies intended to reduce child poverty reduce the level of absolute poverty but do little or nothing to reduce relative poverty. She laments the proposal to means-test Child Benefit, shows how social polarisation is at the root of child poverty, and suggests that to increase the level of Child Benefit and establish a Citizen’s Income would provide a good basis on which to tackle the many aspects of child poverty. The fourth part of the book shows that economic growth is not a sufficient condition for abolishing child poverty, that tackling one deprivation at a time (for instance, sanitation) can make a real difference to levels of child poverty, and that a global study in fifty countries effectively combines quantitative and qualitative methods to provide a deep description of child poverty. The final chapter, by Peter Townsend, calls for an international financial transactions tax to pay for a global Child Benefit. This is classic Townsend: well researched, big ideas, and quietly passionate.
I have only one quibble: that an editor might have removed duplication, such as the similar discussions of the flawed ‘under $1 a day’ poverty definition in adjacent chapters: but such duplication is hardly unusual in a volume which started life as conference papers.
This is a brilliant book, and a most fitting tribute to Peter Townsend’s lifelong campaign to measure and eradicate child poverty. Now that we have some more adequate methods of measuring global child poverty, all we need to do is abolish child poverty, and then measure it again to see if we’ve succeeded.
