by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Richard K. Caputo (Professor of Social Work)
My colleague Professor Vicki Lens recommended that I check out the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network which was planning its first annual Congress for March 8-9, 2002 in New York City. Professor Lens was familiar with much of my scholarship on low-income families and economic well-being and thought my interests overlapped with the likes of Stony Brook School of Social Welfare Professor Michael Lewis (who coauthored Economics for Social Workers with Professor Karl Widerquist, the Congress organizer and one of the USBIG Network’s founders), among others.
I submitted an abstract based on the research I had done about the Nixon administration’s Family Assistance Plan while writing Welfare and Freedom American Style II. My abstract, “FAP Flops: Lessons Learned from the Failure to Pass the Family Assistance Plan in 1970 and 1972,” was accepted. I presented the full paper on Friday, March 8th, though somewhat intimidated by such knowledgeable notables as Sociologist Professor Fred Block and independent scholar Allan Sheahen (author of Guaranteed Income: The Right to Economic Security), among others. Thus began what turned out to be my ongoing associations with the USBIG Network and BIEN.
Though intrigued by my participation in First Congress of USBIG, I was not taken in by the idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) guarantee whole cloth. It did not square well with my sense of social justice, nor with my concerns about poverty reduction, though it did address what I saw as the diminished value of wage-based labor in an increasingly global economy and seemed compatible with the social work value of self-determination. As I learned more about the idea and its implications, I was quite taken by what seemed to be the sharp contrast about capitalism and about freedom. At the time, in late 2003 and early 2004, I had been working on an essay, “The ethics of poverty,” for Salem Press, while also thinking about a paper for presentation at the USBIG conference that was to take place February 22-22 in Washington, DC.
I had asked the USBIG primary coordinator at the time, Karl Widerquist, if he knew of any related secular literature dealing with the ethics of poverty. He directed me to the works of Philip Van Parijs (Real Freedom For All: What If Anything Can Justify Capitalism?), one of the two contemporary UBI intellectual heavyweights, the other being Guy Standing (Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality). In my reading of their works, Professors Van Parijs and Standing went head to head about the relationship between capitalism and UBI. For Professor Van Parijs the productive, wealth-generating capacity of capitalism made the UBI possible, enhancing the prospect of each person’s freedom, whereas for Professor Standing capitalism made UBI necessary because of its capacity to eviscerate labor, portending human misery and social unrest. Capitalism as a force for individual and social good vs. capitalism as a force for adverse individual and social consequences made for an interesting mix of scholars and activists who participated in BIEN and USBIG Congresses.
Professors Van Parijs and Widerquist also seemed to be at odds about the idea of freedom. Professor Widerquist, who asked me to comment on an early version of what became his 2006 dissertation from Oxford University (“Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income”) and the basis of his book Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income, dichotomized freedom as a status attribute of personhood, one either had it or did not, implying that a UBI would have to be at a level sufficiently high to enable anyone to reject a job offer s/he deemed unsuitable for any reason while living reasonably well financially. Professor Van Parjis’ idea of freedom was more like a gradient, one had varying degrees of it, enabling him to view any UBI level as an acceptable alternative to not having a UBI at all. I took issue with both, thinking status freedom too narrow if based only on one’s economic circumstances, and a gradient insufficient if the level of UBI had little or no significant impact on the lives of poor individuals and families.
Finally, while drafting the ethics of poverty essay and thinking about a paper for the 2004 USBIG Congress, I also noticed an announcement for the former Yeshiva University Political Scientist Professor Ross Zucker’s Democratic Distributive Justice (2000), which also had a proposal for a guaranteed income. Professor Zucker’s justification for UBI differed from Professor Van Parijs, focusing less on freedom and more on the consumption aspects of making more money available to everyone as consumers.
What I initially learned from my reading of UBI related materials resulted in three articles: (1) “Redistributive Schemes That Skirt Poverty: Reconsidering Social Justice in Light of Van Parijs and Zucker,” published in the Journal of Poverty (2005); (2) “The Unconditional Basic Income Guarantee: Attempts to Eclipse the Welfare State,” published in International Social Work (2008); and (3) “Standing Polanyi on His Head: The Basic Income Guarantee as a Response to the Commodification of Labor,” published in Race, Gender & Class (2008). These articles formed the basis of presentations as several BIEN and related conferences.
While participating in these conferences and meeting international scholars with varying viewpoints and insights about the merits of UBI schemes, I also got the idea for a book documenting how related proposals were faring politically across the globe. With support from Philippe Van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Michael Lewis, and Eri Noguchi, I applied for and was awarded an $8,000 Summer Research Fellowship from the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs at Yeshiva University in May 2006, based on the proposal, “Achieving a Basic Income Guarantee: Efforts-to-Date Around the World.” Essentially, I classified the countries I examined into two groups, those, which for all practical purposes rejected UBI schemes (South Africa, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Columbia) and those which sought to build upon or expand other social welfare provisions with the eventual aim of achieving UBI (e.g., a child allowance in Argentina, the Bolsa Família Program in Brazil, a child tax benefit in Canada, guaranteed minimum pension income for low-income persons in Chile, expanding the non-means-tested child benefit in Ireland, and baby bond proposals in the US).
I was taken to task somewhat when I presented the preliminary findings at the 2007 Congress of the USBIG Network in New York, though I had retitled the paper, “The Death Knoll of BIG or BIG by Stealth” for dramatological purposes. Few Congress participants were willing to accept that basic income guarantees were dead-on-arrival policy options anywhere. One session participant, Conference of Religious Ireland (later Social Justice Ireland) Co-Director Father Seán Healy, contended that there was more going on in Ireland than what was visibly available online and in the BIEN Newsflashes and USBIG Newsletters, implying also that my research would benefit from more extensive collaboration with those on the ground who could provide greater nuances about UBI-related politics involved in each country.
I took Father Healy’s and likeminded comments from others to heart, realizing that a single-authored book on the topic was unfeasible, perhaps even foolhardy on my part, given the country-by-country variability of the politics and efficacy of advocacy efforts involved in getting the idea of a basic income guarantee on the public agenda.
Over time, I gathered a group of scholars to contribute to my edited volume, Basic Income Guarantee and Politics: International Experiences and Perspectives on the Viability of Income Guarantee, published in 2012 in the Palgrave Macmillan series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee.
One of the things that impressed me about the BIEN and USBIG Congresses overall was the tone set by Professor Van Parijs. I found Professor Van Parjis quite personable and open to criticism, some of which came from me, though the most challenging perhaps from Rutgers University Law Professor Phil Harvey who clearly preferred job guarantees over income guarantees. I always felt welcome, as I suspect Professor Harvey did, given the number of papers we presented over the years at BIEN and USBIG Congresses. On several occasions, I heard Professor Van Parijs iterate that the primary role of BIEN was to promote discussion about the merits of the idea, about ethical and practical considerations that one might argue for and against UBI so that our collective thinking about it would be enhanced.
The prospect of UBI remains a scholarly interest of mine, though UBI seems a difficult sell politically in the US. Even the self-identified libertarian Charles Murray, one of UBI’s major proponents, acknowledged that UBI was a political nonstarter. Some traction can be found in the tech sector, as Professor Michael Lewis and I noted in our introduction to the special symposium on UBI in the Autumn 2016 issue of the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare. I also included UBI as a policy option in the closing chapter of U.S. Social Welfare Reform. On occasion, I also continue to assign related readings for my social welfare policy classes.
Richard K. Caputo is professor of social policy and research at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work in New York City. This retrospective is adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming academic memoir, Connecting the Dots: An Intellectual Autobiography of a Social Work Academician.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
José A. Noguera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, International Advisory Board of BIEN)
I still remember quite clearly the first time I read something about the idea of a Basic Income (BI): it was back in 1991, when I was finishing my degree in Sociology in Barcelona, and spent most of my time reading abstruse texts of social theory. It was one of my favourite authors at that time, Jürgen Habermas, who gave me the clue in a chapter of his Political Essays, in which, somewhat cryptically (as is usual in him), he spoke of something like “decoupling income from work through a guaranteed income”. Obviously he was referring to the idea of an unconditional income guarantee that authors such as André Gorz or Claus Offe had been popularizing in certain circles since the early 1980s (at that time I did not even know who Philippe Van Parijs was).
My reaction, I remember well, was of the type: “Of course! How is it that the Left did not think of that earlier?” (Obviously, the Left – and the Right – had thought about it, but I did not know.) And then I went on to “I definitely have to read more about this!”
Indeed, in the following years I did so: I then read the famous article by Van Parijs and Van der Veen and some of the debates it generated. I began to talk to colleagues and friends about the subject, and I even spoke about BI at some meetings of the Eco-Socialist political party I had joined, Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds (ICV), with ambivalent results: while some (the more veteran) described it as a “Martian proposal”, others (the younger) showed a lot of interest and asked me for readings and further clarifications. A decade later, ICV was the only party in Spain incorporating BI in its program as a long-term goal, so I am pleased to think that my efforts were not in vain!
To be honest, at that time I approached the subject rather as an amateur and a political activist convinced that the Left had to make big cultural and ideological changes to conquer the future. But when I finished my doctoral thesis in 1998, with more time and an academic career ahead, I decided to dedicate part of it to studying BI more seriously. I published an article (that today I see infamous) on BI in Spain and I got a post-doc grant to study the topic at the London School of Economics and Political Science. London’s weather favoured reading, so between one pint of beer and another, I really started to grasp all the implications (and complications!) of implementing a BI in an advanced welfare system.
That year 2000 I attended my first BIEN Congress in Berlin, where I first met some of the BIEN founders, and, to my surprise, I discovered more Spaniards and Catalans interested in the idea. When I returned to Barcelona, and together with some of them, we created the Spanish Basic Income Network, which soon became an active national member of BIEN. Before we could notice, we were organising the 2004 Barcelona BIEN Congress in which the network became a worldwide organisation.
Since then, I have been discussing BI mainly from an academic (maybe even ‘technocratic’) point of view, more than from political advocacy, since I felt that was how I could honestly contribute better. That option, on the other hand, has also made me see all the complications and nuances of the debate about the BI, as well as the complexity of its practical implementation. Through the years I have published articles, participated in conferences and workshops, given talks, and together with Karl, Yannick and Jürgen, compiled the first comprehensive anthology on BI for Wiley-Blackwell (which was born and designed during memorable beer sessions at Turf Tavern in Oxford).
The Great Crisis of 2008 pushed me back from academic to political concerns. Widespread corruption, poverty, inequality and unemployment reached socially unbearable levels in my country. A new political movement, Podemos, emerged from the roots of the 15M demonstrations in order to fight the rampant cynicism of the political and economic elites and their policies. I immediately felt I should help that cause as I better could. They were sympathetic to BI from the start, so I start to work with them and by 2015 we finally designed a feasible proposal to progress in the right direction: a nationwide Guaranteed Income with no work condition attached, plus a wage supplement for low-income workers. The proposal created a sort of bandwagon effect by which many other political parties started to include income guarantee proposals in their programs.
BIEN has been during almost 20 years a source of intellectual excitement and political stimulation for me. I am confident that it will continue to be so. I believe that the future prospects of BI will depend on its supporters being able to combine the necessary doses of pragmatism and impartial analysis (thus resisting sectarian or self-serving attitudes), with the conviction that this is a good and just idea and it is worth defending it.
José A. Noguera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He serves on the Board of the Spanish Basic Income Network (RRB) and on the International Advisory Board of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN).
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Dave Clegg | Dec 25, 2016 | News
UC sociology professor Fred Block, and CUNY political science professor Francis Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority, are scathing in their indictment of “…archaic economic ideas…” in the online opinion journal article on The Nation. Yet they also insist that a Basic Income – an idea as old as the Capitalistic system that dominates the world today – is an idea whose time has truly come.
B&FP applaud the broad appeal to both left and right political spectrums, support from influential economists, advocates for social reform and, most importantly, the technological community who understands the dramatic changes coming to the workplace as robotics and automation continue to free human beings from the office cubicle and the assembly line.
B&FP decry the right’s vociferous claims that ‘free money’ will demoralize the poor and offer, instead, that a BI does just the opposite by empowering people with a modicum of financial security in their lives during fiscally challenging times.
B&FP rail against the imposition during the last few centuries of the premise that one’s life must be dependent upon the exchange of one’s labour for wages or become destitute. B&FP see the holding of this premise as religious-like in the unflinching devotion of so many of its modern day adherents.
B&FP offer no illusions about how difficult implementing a BI will be. But they are confident that a BI would result in a significant transformation of our existing class relations. What that transformation will look like is dependent upon each and every one of us.
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 Guest Contributor | Dec 23, 2016 | News
Professor Krustyo Petkov, a prominent Basic Income advocate in Bulgaria and the former Chairman of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions, passed away on the night of Friday, 23 December, after a painful illness.
In the past years the professor struggled with cancer but continued to work.
Krustyo Petkov Petkov is a Bulgarian scholar and politician, chairman of the United Labour block, founded in 1997. He was Chairman of Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria from 1990-1997.
He was also an MP from the parliamentary group of Coalition for Bulgaria in the 39th National Parliament.
Professor Petkov was born on 18 November 1943 in the village of Knyaz Aleksandrovo (now Dimovo). He graduated from the School of Irrigation in Pavlikeni and in 1968 graduated with a degree in “Political Economy” at the University of Economics “Karl Marx” – Sofia (now the University of National and World Economy).
In 1986, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the issue of labor relations and was appointed professor of sociology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.
Professor Petkov specialized in sociology, sociology of labor economics and social policy at the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, the International Institute for Labour in Geneva, at the University of Economics and Political Science in England.
He has participated in university programs and seminars in the US, the University of Michigan, Berkeley, Duke and others.
Professor Petkov is renowned for advocating the idea of Basic Income in Bulgaria and beyond. Thanks to his active support, Bulgaria gathered 300% signatures above the quota for the European Citizen’s Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income from 2013 through 2014.
He helped a lot with his huge public and policy experience in creation of a modern political party, which included in its program the introduction of an Unconditional Basic Income in Bulgaria: the Bulgarian Union of Direct Democracy, BUDD.
He was a speaker at the meetings of Unconditional Basic Income Europe 2014 and 2015.
May he rest in peace!
Photos from “Почина проф. Кръстьо Петков – след тежко и мъчително боледуване” (epicenter.bg).
