by Kate McFarland | Mar 2, 2017 | News
Nicole Teke, Public Relations Coordinator of the French Movement for a Basic Income, spoke at the Crowdsourcing Week – Europe (held November 21-25, 2016, in Brussels, Belgium).
Teke’s approximately 15 minute presentation served as an introduction to basic income — explaining the key features of the idea, outlining past and future sites of pilot studies, and addressing common concerns like “Would people just stop working?” (On the last point, Teke surveyed the audience and notes that, in general, people don’t think that they themselves would stop working.)
Crowdsourcing Weeks occur globally and throughout the year, with the next set in the Swedish Laplands, to explore “the best practices in crowdsourcing and the collaborative economy that are fundamentally changing society, mindsets and possibilities across industries.”
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo Credit: Michael Husen
by Kate McFarland | Mar 1, 2017 | News
BIEN cofounder Annie Miller has written a new handbook about basic income, fittingly titled A Basic Income Handbook, which will be published by Luath Press Limited in March 2017.
Publisher’s summary:
“In this informative book, Annie Miller not only explores the idea of basic income: she exhaustively explains what it is and what it would mean to implement, using extensive economic data. Miller starts off from a broad, existential position, outlining why the current system is no longer suitable for the times and needs to change. Her proposed solution is a society with BI, which she first outlines abstractly before diving into its internal workings, explaining who would be eligible for BI, what would happen to the rest of the welfare system, and other crucial details. Miller backs up her statements with substantive economic research and analysis. She ends with a section on how to achieve a society with BI, giving examples of pilot schemes elsewhere and discussing the politics behind implementation. Thus she brings the reader full circle from aspiring to a BI society, to seeing what it would take to reach it.”
Annie Miller, a former instructor of economics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has a long and distinguished history in the basic income movement: she was a cofounder of the Basic Income Research Group (which later became the Citizen’s Income Trust, BIEN’s UK affiliate) in 1984, a cofounder of BIEN itself in 1986, and a cofounder of Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (BIEN’s Scottish affiliate) in 2016.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo credit: Enno Schmidt
by Kate McFarland | Feb 26, 2017 | News
The city of Barcelona is preparing to test an income maintenance program in one of its poorest districts. While it has been called a ‘basic income’, the tested programs diverge in several ways from BIEN’s definition of the term.
Urban Innovative Actions (UIA), an initiative of the European Commission that supports projects investigating “innovative and creative solutions” in urban areas, has allocated €4.85 million (about $5.15 million) to fund a three-year pilot study of guaranteed minimum income (GMI) in Barcelona, Spain. The project is dubbed “B-Mincome” in reference to Mincome, a well-known study of GMI conducted in the late 1970s in Manitoba, Canada.
In the B-Mincome experiment, 1,000 randomly selected households in the Besos district — one of Barcelona’s most economically disadvantaged areas — will receive cash subsidies of an amount sufficient to ensure that their earnings exceed the poverty line. At the time of this writing, the City Council of Barcelona is still finalizing the design of the study. However, the city plans to test several types of GMI schemes, and it plans to investigate them in conjunction with improvements in public services.
According to Project Manager Fernando Barreiro, the objective of B-Mincome is to “test and analyse how effective forms of universal economic support, combined with access to services such as housing, education, work and community participation can reduce poverty.” Results from the pilot will be used in a comparative analysis of the cost and effectiveness of different anti-poverty policies, “with the ultimate goal of developing more efficient welfare services.”
While the B-Mincome pilot bears some similarity to a universal basic income (UBI), and has been called by this name, it should be noted that the program to be tested is neither universal nor individual. Moreover, some of the GMI schemes to be tested may not be unconditional.
First, the B-Mincome program will provide a cash supplement to boost low incomes rather than a uniform and universal cash grant (as was also the case in the Manitoba’s Mincome experiment). These supplements will guarantee that no participant in the study has a household income below poverty level. However, as typical of GMI schemes, the amount of the supplement will be reduced if a household’s income increases during the course of the experiment.
Moreover, the design of the study will promote the targeting of the most disadvantaged recipients. Researchers will employ a randomized block design to ensure the representation of various types of households that tend to suffer the most poverty (e.g. immigrants, single-parent families, the long-term unemployed, and unemployed youth).
Second, as already implied, the payments will be to households rather than individuals.
Finally, some of the variations to be examined are likely to impose conditions of the receipt of the benefit. Barreiro has related, for example, that the city is considering testing a GMI program that makes benefits conditional searching for a job, participating in a training program, or doing work for the community. Such a program would be analyzed for its efficiency and effectiveness against a GMI lacking these conditions.
To develop B-Mincome, the Barcelona City Council has partnered with four research organizations and institutions: the Young Foundation, the Institute of Governance and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and the Catalan Institution for Evaluation of Public Policies (IVALUA). The city is also consulting with contacts within the governments of Finland, the Canadian province of Ontario, and the Dutch municipality of Utrecht, which are currently running or about to run their own similar pilot studies.
Sources
The Young Foundation, “Young Foundation partners with Barcelona City Council to help deliver radical project in the fight against poverty” (press release), October 28, 2016.
“Linking the Urban Development Network and the Urban Innovative Actions in Barcelona,” Urban Innovative Actions, January 9, 2017.
“B-MINCOME – Combining guaranteed minimum income and active social policies in deprived urban areas,” Urban Innovative Actions.
Fernando Barreiro, personal communication.
Photo: “Homeless in Barcelona” CC BY-NC 2.0 Melvin Gaal
Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly listed IESE as one of the City of Barcelona’s partners in the pilot. It has been corrected to IVALUA. (Edited March 2, 2017.)
by Kate McFarland | Feb 24, 2017 | News
On January 26, 2016, the Buchanan Institute, a student-led think tank based in Edinburgh, Scotland, launched a new report on basic income: “A Secure Foundation to Build Our Lives: Making the Case for a Universal Basic Income (UBI)” by Jonny Ross-Tatam. (See the previous Basic Income News announcement of the launch event for a summary.)
The launch was accompanied by a public event at the University of Edinburgh. Following a short introductory speech by Jamie Cooke, Head of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA) in Scotland, Ross-Tatam provided an overview of some of the main arguments for a basic income, as well as the Buchanan Institute’s specific proposal.
The event also featured guest speaker Matt Kerr, a Glasgow City Council member who has been active in encouraging the investigation of a basic income pilot in Glasgow.
A video recording of the full speeches from Cooke, Ross-Tatam, and Kerr is now available:
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
University of Edinburgh photo CC BY-ND 2.0 Boon Low
by Cameron McLeod | Feb 23, 2017 | News
A discussion on “the basic income experiment” was the focus of an episode of Al Jazeera’s The Stream, with Femi Oke and Malika Bilal, in January 2017.
The debate, which centred around the Finnish BI experiment, included perspectives from both sides of the issue: those concerned basic income will eliminate incentives to work and those who see BI as a path to reducing unemployment.
The debate included Marjukka Turunen, head of Kela’s legal unit (Finland’s Social Insurance Institution); Guy Standing, co-founder of Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN); Oren Cass, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute; as well as Scott Santens, writer and advocate for basic income.
The discussion began by asking what life will be like going forward for the 2,000 who were randomly selected by Kela for Finland’s first BI experiment: one man selected described his new sense of freedom on Facebook. Marjukka described how those selected could now do “whatever they want,” and will be studied only “in the background.”
Guy Standing was asked, with regard to his experiments in India, how people reacted when they were told they would receive an unconditional basic income. Guy discussed awareness days hosted before launch where the villages were told how the program worked, and where its unconditionality was emphasized. Guy also talked about the nutrition and health improvements, increased work, and “equity effects.” There were gains for the disabled, and the pilots had an “emancipatory effect.”
Also involved in the discussion was Scott Santens, who designed his own scheme: in 2015 he built up a crowd fund on Patreon and was able to receive 1,000 dollars a month, in what was meant to be his own personal basic income. Santens calls BI, “money that enables people to pursue what they wish to pursue.” He notes that he had not realized just how insecure he was until he found the security his basic income provided.
Oren Cass argued during the debate that that what happened in India was in fact not a basic income, because it did not undermine the principle that it is important to work for a living and similarly that Santens’ BI was not truly a basic income. The problem for Oren with Scott Santens’ scheme was that it does not indicate anything about whether or not we want society “to be a place where everybody receives a check no matter what they do.”
The discussion also touched on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the broken income distribution systems of the 20th century. Guy claimed that the share of the economy going to labor is no longer constant: it is disproportionately going to capital. He noted the rise of political extremes and his theory of the precariat.
Oren stated that the rationale for a basic income had a number of “conflicting explanations” and he suggested a wage subsidy instead of BI. Scott argued this only benefits corporations, and that the BI provides employees with bargaining power. Marjukka noted later on that “we can’t know” whether BI is the solution “unless we experiment.”
In the brief post-show, the issue of automation, and the replacement of labour with capital, alongside Elon Musk’s position, were briefly touched upon.
More information at:
The Stream, “The basic income experiment.” Al Jazeera, January 5 2017. https://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201701052319-0025352
Credit Picture CC Mohamed Nanabhay (more…)
