by Eduardo Abreu | Dec 1, 2017 | News
Charles Clark. Credit to: Michael Swan
Writing for The Catholic Register, Michael Swan reports on a talk by Charles Clark, Vatican’s top economic advisor, at an interfaith conference on universal basic income (UBI), held in St. Michael’s College in Toronto on October 20th, 2017.
This talk takes place during a period when a UBI pilot program is running in Lindsay, Thunder Bay and Hamilton, in Ontario, targeting those who qualify as low income.
Primarily, catholic social teaching focuses on human good and UBI aims to promote human well being so, although not directly a part of its teachings, UBI successfully puts in place a framework for catholic practice, said Marquette University’s Jesuit Theologian Fr. Joseph Ogbonnaya.
In Clark’s view there isn’t a Catholic economic policy, but he notes that in light of the Catholic social teaching, which advocates for equality it is sensible for any Catholic, to put forth policies that lead to less poverty and greater social mobility and inclusion, such as UBI. Still, UBI is not a panacea, meaning that we need public goods and the state for public education, public health, for welfare, he said.
Since we live in a society where we obtain what we need through markets, Clark states that we must ensure everyone has sufficient income, at a minimum level, to participate in it and have a decent living.
According to Clark, there is an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, a result of wages that stall in the face of productivity growth. This is important since for a democracy to work there must be mobility, which in turn depends on equality being ensured, something that society needs to work on, said Clark.
Comments on UBI coming from the Catholic Church have been rare, so in this regard, public appearances as such from a Vatican related figure are refreshing.
More information at:
Michael Swan, “Basic income can’t be ignored, says Vatican expert”, The Catholic Register, 27th October 2017
by Sara Bizarro | Nov 29, 2017 | News
Anna Dent, fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), recently wrote an article titled “How has Basic Income progressed from a radical idea to a legitimate policy?” In this article, Anna Dent looks for an explanation of why Basic Income developed from a fringe idea to a popular policy proposal.
Dent researched four different current Basic Income pilots in order to learn what motivated them. The pilots analysed were in Finland, the Netherlands, Ontario and Scotland. Dent found that even with the disparity of location, all the pilots shared “a striking number of common factors” from which more can be learned about the rising popularity of the idea of Basic Income.
Common factors between all pilots were: 1) The feeling that poverty, precarious work and unemployment have grown and that traditional policy solutions are not working; 2) Basic Income is considered as an innovative solution that can help with a wide range of problems; 3) Experimenting with Basic Income enables places to “project positive qualities such as innovation, progressiveness and leadership” and something that serves local cultural identities, the prime example being Scotland; 4) The pilots involve a lot of different people and organizations, from activists, to experts and academics, “providing a critical mass of engagement and interest in basic income, which helped to legitimise it as a solution.”; 5) All pilots were interested in evidence-based social policy.
Dent’s analysis indicates that the countries currently performing of preparing pilots are doing so because of current issues, poverty, precariousness, unemployment and dissatisfaction with traditional yet failing social security solutions. The policy is considered innovative, wide reaching and having a positive impact for the country’s status or social identity. Finally, Dent notes that overall the diversity of people involved, including experts and academics, has given Basic Income additional credibility; therefore, the policy is thought of as a more legitimate solution.
More information:
Anna Dent, “How Basic Income progressed from a radical idea to a legitimate policy?”, October 11th, 2017
RSA on Basic Income.
by Guest Contributor | Nov 22, 2017 | Opinion
Portuguese basic income activist Miguel Horta is pushing for a basic income “for all.” Horta wants to ensure that the people control their basic income, not the government.
Horta is an employee of Portugal’s Finance Ministry, where he deals with tax avoidance issues. He originally heard about the “gratuity of life” from Agostinho da Silva. Eventually he came across basic income, and believed there was a close connection between the two ideas.
From there, Horta developed a financing scheme for Portugal.
In October, Horta was interviewed by Basic Income Korea Network’s Hysong Ahn. The interview was originally published in Korea’s The Times. The full interview can be found below.
Miguel Horta, on left. Hyosang Ahn , on right.
First, can you tell us about your previous employment, and your current role in the UBI movement?
I worked as a tax inspector for the Portuguese government since 1995.
My position in the movement Basic Income of All for All is that of a member equal to all the others. Our movement does not assign specific functions to its members, nor does it have any kind of hierarchy.
What are your personal and group activities since you adopted the basic income idea in the early 1990s?
Despite being ready for it since the 1990s, as I said before, personally I had no activity related to basic income before 2013. That’s when I heard about an organized activist group on the internet for the first time, and I joined it.
In the first two or three years of activism, my activity was essentially to participate in public discussions about basic income, especially on the internet, and to study the question of its financing.
Later, we founded our local movement in Lisbon and began to organize public events to discuss the idea; to get in touch with other organizations and activist groups from other causes, to show them the basic income proposals; and, whenever we have the opportunity, organize debates on basic income with students in secondary schools.
We are also active on the internet, with a blog, a YouTube channel and a Facebook page.
Explain the differences between the movement “Basic Income of All for All’ and the other groups or persons in the basic income movement in Portugal.
Other groups and individuals generally conceive of basic income as the demand for a “right” made by the people from the State or, if not from the State, from central banks, the financial sector, or large corporations. This is a conception of basic income as a “top-down” program, a program of power, be it political, monetary, or economic power.
In contrast, our movement conceives of basic income as a construction of ordinary people, who will emancipate themselves and make a different society happen, by their own efforts and for their own good.
So, our basic income model is different because it is a people’s program. This has important implications. One is this: we are convinced that a basic income made by any of those “powers” I mentioned will probably end up being put to the service of that same power. In a matter of time, a basic income offered by a government will eventually be used by that same government, or, if not the same, by other future governments, for their own electoral purposes or, in a worse scenario, to keep population under its control. Similarly, a basic income offered by an economic power will likely be put at the service of the economy; one offered by a monetary power will most probably be used as a mere tool to manage inflation rates, and so on. The basic income we propose, on the contrary, being directly financed and controlled by ordinary people, is much more likely to remain at the exclusive service of the people.
Moreover, the basic income models other groups and individuals advocate are often shaped to fit in and to be friendly to their previous ideologies or causes. For instance, that’s the case of a basic income financed with taxes over capital, as a way of favoring the working class; or with taxes over speculative financial operations, as a way of favoring a moralization of financial practices; or with taxes over alcohol, as a way of favoring people’s health, and so on.
Our movement is different here too. For us, basic income should not be the way to serve any other cause apart from everybody’s freedom and dignity. For that purpose, we focus only on people, not on particular population groups (such as the rich and the poor, workers and capitalists, “good consumers” and “bad consumers”, etc.), and the goal is everyone to be treated absolutely the exact same way, as equal peers, through the process of solidarity we conceived, which requires the same effort from all and gives the same benefit to all.
So, the idea that animates our movement differs from others also in this: we do not want basic income to favor one social or economic group over another. We want to benefit all individuals, and we like to see our proposal as a way to reconcile interests and promote the best for absolutely everyone in society.
Is the Portuguese government likely to accept the plan your group proposed?
The Portuguese government doesn’t seem ready to accept it at the moment. I hope that will happen in the future, but it will depend on the support we can find within the Portuguese society, and perhaps abroad.
Of course, we are aware that it will probably be easier for a government to please their citizens by offering them some sort of “helicopter money”, without requiring any active role or effort from them, than to allow a scheme that assigns such role and demands such efforts, as ours does.
Either way, we will be doing our best to present our idea and to encourage people to consciously decide the solution they will support.
What began your interest in Basic Income?
I was ready to adopt the idea since the early 1990s, when I heard an old man declaring on TV: “Men were not born to work, but to create”. The man’s name was Agostinho da Silva, a Portuguese mystic and poet, who used to talk and write a lot about a future in which machines would do all the work, while people would create, contemplate, improve themselves or do whatever they wanted. His message made total sense to me, and so, many years later, when I first heard the name “basic income”, I understood it immediately as the path to the future that Agostinho da Silva used to talk about, and I joined the cause that same minute.
What aspects of Basic Income do you focus on?
When I first started working on the idea, my first focus was on the financial question: how to finance a basic income, from what source, and what financial effects it would have, both for people and for the State sphere.
But I’ve shifted my focus since then. Now my main interest is to understand the profound implications of different models of basic income on people’s freedom, sense of purpose and attitude towards material goods.
Explain the current situation of basic income movement in Portugal. And what is your evaluation?
The movement seems to be growing slowly but steadily. The number of activists and the public actively involved in the discussion, both on the internet and in face-to-face events, have grown in recent years.
And the movement is growing not only in numbers but also in maturity, as people involved become aware of the wide variety of different things “basic income” can potentially become (being possible to classify as “basic income” not only different but even opposite schemes, in their essential features).
This is what enabled us in Lisbon to create an organized group to defend a single one of all these possibilities, something impossible two or three years ago. I’m talking, of course, about the movement “Basic Income of All for All”.
What is the political and philosophical background of your basic income scheme?
It is the conviction that solidarity among people is the right foundation for a society.
A community where people are bound by mutual solidarity will promote the best possible life for all. Although you might say that this is a mere personal inclination – in the sense that I just prefer to believe in this rather than the opposite – the idea is nevertheless reinforced by the recognition that all ancient human societies were based on solidarity. In the tribe, the hunted animal did not belong to its hunter, but to all in the group. In the tribe everybody shared the same luck and resources, and looked after each other. This is how humankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years – the most of our time on Earth – until the rise of the first sophisticated civilizations and empires, and, mostly, before the emergence of the “empire” of capitalism; which now rules everywhere, shaping human societies with the values of competition rather than cooperation, and accumulation instead of sharing. Clearly, this is not fostering our freedom or happiness as the “old” solidarity would.
Do you have any strategy to introduce the basic income scheme in Portugal?
In fact, I developed a plan for that purpose a few months ago, and together with my fellow members of the movement Basic Income of All for All, we took the plan to the Portuguese Minister of Labor, Solidarity, and Social Security.
In very simplified terms, the plan is to create a governmental pilot program, allowing small local communities to apply and, in those accepted, exempt voluntary members from national personal income tax, provided they begin to share a part (half) of their income between them.
So, this would begin to be applied in voluntary communities and, in these, by volunteer persons. In these communities, a common fund would then be created, and the volunteers would start putting half of all their incomes, of any source, in it. At the end of each month, the fund’s accumulated total would be equally and unconditionally distributed by them, creating for the participants a basic income based on local solidarity.
The government would manage the scale of the pilot program at will. It may start with one or two communities and then, if the results turn out to be good and there are other communities willing to do the same, expand the program in succession until, in the limit, it becomes a nationwide program.
In the Portuguese reality, the impact on the State budget of such a scheme should not be negative, mainly because the creation of the universal income guarantee would render a wide range of social programs useless, thus allowing savings of amounts close to the lost revenue of the personal income tax for the State.
As for the Portuguese government’s response, we are still waiting for it…In any case, the plan does not depend exclusively on that answer; it can be applied anywhere in the world.
Interview by:
Hysong Ahn, Basic Income Korea Network
Edited by:
Tyler Prochazka
André Coelho (contributed to introduction)
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The devil’s in the details is a common saying about policy proposals. Perhaps we need a similar saying for policy research, something like the devil’s in the caveats. By this, I mean that the evidence any particular piece of research can provide is only a small part of the evidence people need to fully evaluate policy proposals. Non-specialists involved in the debate over that policy are often unable to translate caveats about the limits of research into a firm grasp of what that research does and does not imply about the policies they want evaluated. Therefore, even the best scientific policy research can leave nonspecialists with an oversimplified, or simply wrong, impression of its implications for policy.
For example, popular media reports about medical research often leave people in the United States today with the impression that the medical professionals make widely swinging recommendations about prevention and treatment of diseases, when medical consensus is actually slow to change and even slower to reverse a change once made. It is possible that the misperception of an erratic medical consensus exists because nonspecialists don’t have the background to understand the difference between a medical consensus and an oversimplified or sensationalized report of one study.
Whatever the problems of this type are with medical research, they are likely to be much greater with social science research in general and Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments in particular. At least some medical research is fairly straightforward. Many medicines affect people only on an individual basis, and all we might want to know about a medicine is whether it is safe and effective. In many cases, medical research can address that question directly in a controlled experiment, and hopefully, it’s not too difficult to communicate the results to nonspecialists.
Although medical experiments might not always be this straightforward, UBI experiments can never be straightforward. I believe this problem is so big that I’m working on a book, provisionally titled Basic Income Experiments—The Devil’s in the Details, to discuss the enormous difficulty of conducting a UBI experiment that successfully raises the level of political debate over UBI.
UBI has complex economic, political, social, and cultural effects that cannot be observed in a controlled experiment. Researchers conducting experiments know that experimental evidence alone cannot fully answer the big questions about UBI: does it work? Is it cost-effective? Should we introduce it on a national level? They have to be content with making a small contribution to a large body of knowledge about UBI. When research is conducted of, by, and for specialists, mutual understanding of the limits of research usually requires no more a simple list of caveats, many of which can go without mention in a group with a great deal of shared, specialized knowledge.
The same is not true when policymakers and citizens make up part of the audience of research—as they do for research on major policy issues such as UBI. Citizens and policymakers want answers to the big questions mentioned above; they understandably try to interpret experimental results in light of those questions. But as I will argue throughout the book, they have great difficulty understanding what UBI experiments do and do not imply about those big questions. The devil is in the caveats.
Most academic specialists are professionals at writing for other academics within the same specialty but amateurs at communicating with nonspecialists. The book argues that these communications barriers affect not only how specialists report their research to nonspecialists but also how they design and conduct it.
It is no coincidence that UBI experiments are getting underway just after an enormous growth in the discussion of UBI in many countries around the world. In that environment, one of the goals of UBI experiments is—or ought to be—to raise the level of debate over UBI. The book will argue that past experiments have a mixed record in raising the level of debate over UBI: although all of them have provided valuable evidence, some have succeeded in raising the level of debate, and some have been so misunderstood that they might well have had an overall negative affect on the level of debate. This effort to raise the level of political debate (like the UBI debate) requires knowledge and skills that researchers have no special training to do and creates risks that research aimed purely at other researchers does not have, including the vulnerability to spin, misuse, sensationalism, or oversimplification.
The goal of the book is help researchers, policymakers, citizens, journalists, and anyone else interested in UBI experiments bridge gaps in understanding between them to help the experiments succeed in the goal of raising the level of debate. I hope that this effort will be valuable to researchers designing, conducting, and writing about UBI experiments, to policymakers commissioning and reacting to experiments, to journalists reporting on experiments, and to citizens involved in the debate or simply interested in the topic of UBI.
To help people bridge these gaps, the book has to explain how many significant barriers there are to conducting experiments that successfully raisr the level of debate. So, I will have a lot of negative things to say, but that should not distract readers from my overall enthusiasm for UBI experiments. They are worth doing, and worth doing well in all relevant ways. And to readers who are unenthusiastic about UBI experiments, I say, they are coming; it’s important to make the best of them.
A meeting during the Indian pilot project, c. 2011-2013
