by BIEN | Jan 22, 2015
Overview
Founded in 1986, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) aims to serve as a link between all individuals and groups interested in basic income (i.e. a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement) and to foster informed discussion on this topic throughout the world.
Members of BIEN include academics, students and social policy practitioners as well as people actively engaged in political, social and religious organisations. They vary in terms of disciplinary backgrounds and political affiliations no less than in terms of age and citizenship.
The mission of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) is to offer education to the wider public about alternative arguments about, proposals for, and problems concerning, basic income as idea, institution, and public policy practice. To this end, BIEN organises public conferences around the world on an annual basis in which empirical research and new ideas are disseminated and discussed. BIEN promotes and serves as a repository of published research, including congress papers, an academic blog featuring balanced debate for and against the basic income proposal in different contexts and forms, and by means of an independent academic journal linked with BIEN – Basic Income Studies. BIEN does not subscribe to any particular version of basic income, and fosters evidenced-based research, plural debate, and critical engagement about basic income and related ideas and public policy developments. Individuals connected with BIEN – including affiliated organisations – may express particular opinions about basic income, but they are not opinions of BIEN. BIEN’s explicit mission is to remain neutral among competing arguments for and against basic income and the relation of basic income with other ideas and policies.
By the early 2000s, “Basic Income European Network” had become somewhat of a misnomer, as scholars and activists from other continents have actively joined the network. BIEN expanded its scope to become the “Basic Income Earth Network” in 2004. It is an international network that serves as a link between individuals and groups interested in basic income, and fosters informed discussion of the topic throughout the world.
Executive Committee
A new Executive Committee was elected at the General Assembly held on the 26th August 2018
BIEN’s Executive Committee (EC) is elected by the General Assembly. It usually meets once a month via the internet. Within the limits set by the decisions of the General Assembly and BIEN’s constitution as a charitable organization, it takes any action it judges useful to the pursuit of BIEN’s purposes.
Members of the Executive Committee
| Louise |
Haagh |
Chair |
| Sarath |
Davala |
Vice Chair |
| Julio |
Aguirre |
Secretary |
| Mark |
Wadsworth |
Treasurer |
| Jamie |
Cooke |
Assistant Treasurer |
| André |
Coelho |
BI News Editor |
| Tyler |
Prochazka |
BI Features Editor |
| Leah |
Hamilton |
BI News and Volunteer Recruitment Officer |
| Kate |
McFarland |
Research Manager |
| Toru |
Yamamori |
Research Manager |
| Jasper |
van den Bor |
Affiliate Outreach |
| Julio |
Linares |
Public Outreach |
| Demétrio |
Ruivo |
Website manager |
| Aoife |
Hegarty |
Fundraiser |
| Anne |
Miller |
Bank Account Trustee |
| Jay |
Ginn |
Bank Account Trustee |
| Jake |
Eliot |
Bank Account Trustee |
Volunteers
General Manager
Malcolm Torry, Director of Citizen’s Income Trust, UK was appointed General Manager by the EC in May 2007.
Features Editor, Basic Income News:
Tyler Prochazka (tyler.prochazka@yahoo.com), United States,
BIEN is entirely run by volunteers. It has no paid employees. It has created or is in the process of creating at least six volunteer task forces. We are interested in people who want to volunteer for any of them and in people who have additional ideas they would like to volunteer for. Click here to find out how to volunteer and what volunteers are doing.
The currently existing or forming task forces are:
Non EC members with official roles in BIEN
Honorary Co-Presidents
The Honorary Co-Presidents are past Co-Chairs of BIEN who continue to be actively involved in BIEN and who have been confirmed in this status by the General Assembly.
Claus Offe, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany.
Guy Standing, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, United Kingdom.
Eduardo Suplicy, Federal Senator, São Paulo, Brazil.
Members of the International Advisory Board
The International Board consists of the current members of the Executive Committee, representatives of the recognized national affiliates, and all former members of BIEN’s Executive Committee (listed below).
Chair
Philippe Van Parijs, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Former members of BIEN’s Executive Committee:
Anja Askeland
Borja Barragué
Simon Birnbaum
David Casassas
Alexander de Roo
Jurgen De Wispelaere
Kelly Ernst
Andrea Fumagalli
Louise Haagh
Seán Healy
Lena Lavinas
Edwin Morley-Fletcher
James Mulvale
Eri Noguchi
José Antonio Noguera
Claus Offe
Ilona Ostner
Steven Quilley
Dorothee Schulte-Basta
Guy Standing
Eduardo Suplicy
Robert J. Van Der Veen
Ingrid Van Niekirk
Philippe Van Parijs
Walter Van Trier
Yannick Vanderborght
Karl Widerquist
Lieselotte Wohlgenannt
Pablo Yanes
Almaz Zelleke
Reports from the General Assembly
Minutes of the General Assembly
Treasurer’s Reports
BIEN is registered as a charity in the United Kingdom
Constitution
Charity registration number: 1177066
The 2018 General Assembly will be held at Tampere in Finland on the 26th August 2018
See the General Assembly page for further details
Press Contacts
Louise Haagh, Chair of BIEN
louise.haagh@york.ac.uk,
Sarath Davala, Vice chair of BIEN
sarathdavala@gmail.com
A Short History of BIEN
The origins (1983-1986) – An idea, a collective, a prize. In the Autumn of 1983, three young researchers decided to set up a working group in order to explore the implications of an extremely simple, unusual but attractive idea which one of them had proposed to call, in a paper circulated a few months earlier, “allocation universelle”. Paul-Marie Boulanger, Philippe Defeyt and Philippe Van Parijs were then, or had recently been, attached to the departments of demography, economics and philosophy, respectively, of the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). The group became known as the Collectif Charles Fourier. Its main output was a special issue of the Brussels monthly La Revue nouvelle (April 1985). But along the way, it won a prize, with a provocative summary of the idea and its putative consequences, in an essay competition on the future of work organised by the King Baudouin Foundation.
The first meeting – With the money it thus unexpectedly earned, the Collectif Charles Fourier decided to organise a meeting to which they would invite a number of people to whom the idea of an unconditional basic income had, they gradually discovered, independently occurred . This became the first international conference on basic income, held in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986, with sixty invited participants. This was quite an extraordinary event, with many seemingly lonely fighters suddenly discovering a whole bunch of kin spirits. They included, among others, Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, Jan-Otto Andersson, Yoland Bresson, Paul de Beer, Alexander de Roo, Rosheen Callender, Nic Douben, Marie-Louise Duboin, Ian Gough, Pierre Jonckheere, Bill Jordan, Greetje Lubbi, Annie Miller, Edwin Morley-Fletcher, Claus Offe, Hermione Parker, Riccardo Petrella, David Purdy, Guy Standing, Robert van der Veen and Georg Vobruba.
Seeds of a lasting network – At the final session of the conference, several participants expressed the wish that some more permanent association be created, with the task of publishing a regular newsletter and organising regular conferences. Guy Standing proposed calling this association Basic Income European Network, which gathered an easy consensus, since no one could beat the beauty of the corresponding acronym (BIEN). Its purpose, later enshrined in its Statutes, was formulated as follows: BIEN aims to serve as a link between individuals and groups interested in basic income, and to foster informed discussion on this topic throughout the world. Peter Ashby (National Council for Voluntaty organisations), Claus Offe (University of Bremen) and Guy Standing (International Labour Organisation) became co-chairmen. Walter Van Trier (University of Antwerp) became secretary, and Alexander de Roo (parliamentary assistant at the European Parliament) treasurer.
BIEN’s past and current activities – From 1986 on, in addition to smaller events, BIEN has been organising one major international congress every second year, in an increasingly structured and professional way. In each case, a major academic or international organisation has accepted to host it, and financial support has been forthcoming from many sources, both public and private, both national and international. BIEN’s first two congresses were small enough to lend themselves to the publication of proceedings, but subsequent congresses had far too many contributions for them to fit into a volume of proceedings. Many of the papers presented were independently published and several found their ways into three books largely inspired by BIEN’s congresses:
- Philippe Van Parijs ed., Arguing for Basic Income. Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform. London & New York: Verso, 1992
- Robert J. van der Veen & Loek Groot eds., Basic Income on the Agenda. Policy Options and Political Feasibility. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000
- Standing, G. ed., Promoting Income Security as a Right. Europe and North America, London: Anthem Press.
Since 1988 BIEN published a Newsletter three times per year since 1988 (33 issues, some in collaboration with the London-based Citizen’s Income Study Center). Publication of the Newsletter has been discontinued, but instead since January 2000 BIEN has started publishing a regular NewsFlash. BIEN’s NewsFlash appears every second month and is dispatched electronically to over 1500 subscribers. Since 1996 BIEN maintains a very substantial website. All issues of the newsletter and the newsflash can be downloaded from BIEN’s website. Finally, BIEN keeps an archive in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) which includes, among other items, a great number of books and reports on BI. The titles currently stored in the archive are listed here (updated November 2010).
After its Congress in Barcelona (2004), BIEN extended its scope: now its name is Basic Income Earth Network. All life members of the Basic Income European Network, many of whom were non-Europeans, automatically became life members of the Basic Income Earth Network.
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 4, 2014 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This book was recommended to me as 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?
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.
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.[i] 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.
[i] Mostly in three works, The Challenge of Abundance (1961), The Triple Revolution (1964), and The Guaranteed Income (1966).
