by Guest Contributor | Oct 16, 2017 | Opinion
In September 2016, Mexico City’s Chief of Government, Miguel Mancera, called for the development of a city constitution to grant formal recognition of the rights of all residents. An initial draft of the constitution included an article stating that each Mexico City resident is “entitled to a standard of living that is adequate for him or herself and their family, as well as to the continuous improvement of their living conditions,” a provision inspired by the basic income movement in Mexico (see the previous report in Basic Income News).
However, the proposal for an income guarantee was eventually dropped in the face of opposition from right and center parties. Instead, an article specifying the right to a “vital minimum” is the closest approach to a basic income to appear in the constitution ultimately ratified in February of this year.
In this Basic Income News special feature, Pablo Yanes of BIEN-Mexico describes the process by which a minimum income guarantee came to be replaced in the constitution by the idea of a “vital minimum”, and discusses how this might nonetheless be perceived as a victory for basic income supporters.
THE STRAIGHT LINE AND THE CURVED LINE:
BASIC INCOME, VITAL MINIMUM AND THE CONSTITUTION OF MEXICO CITY [1]
Pablo Yanes, BIEN-Mexico [2]
In Mexico, the discourse around basic income achieved never before seen dimensions and intensity this year due to the debates held by the Constitutional Assembly that deliberated and approved Mexico City’s Constitution.
As we will see later on, in the original proposal, the Chief of Government proposed the recognition of basic income as a right for all persons, from birth.
Finally however, after many negotiations, the universal right to a vital minimum was agreed upon as a compromise with regards to recognizing basic income. This was not the original proposal, but the phrasing contains the original intent and is close to its philosophical content. There is no doubt that this is a great step ahead in the never-straight path of politics.
Because of this, it is important to highlight that the basic income debate in Mexico now has a new status: it’s a political discussion with legislative implications. It’s a part of the discourse around different alternatives for the country’s development, which will only grow with the coming election cycle that will culminate in July of next year. In Mexico, within a very short timespan, basic income went from an idea confined to small academic and political circles, to one of the most important debates held in the Constitutional Assembly of one of the most relevant cities on the American continent.
A non-minimalist vital minimum
Thoughts on basic income, citizen income or a right to a vital minimum have been present at the heart of the Supreme Court of the Nation, which, in 2007, published a judicial thesis whose reading could help illuminate much of the ongoing debate. Due to its relevance I quote it extensively:
“The Constitutional right to a vital minimum is fully in force from the systemic interpretation of the fundamental rights enshrined in the General Constitution […]. A principle of underpinning for a Democratic State of Law is one that requires individuals to have, as a starting point, conditions such that they are allowed to lead a fully autonomous life plan, such that those who are governed can fully participate in democratic life. In this way, the enjoyment of a vital minimum is a principle of underpinning without which the central coordinates of our Constitutional order lack meaning, insofar as the intersection between the Powers of State and the trappings of rights and fundamental freedoms consist of the determination for dignified and autonomous subsistence, protected by the Constitution. This parameter constitutes the content of the right to a vital minimum, which coincides with the competencies, basic conditions and social benefits needed so that a person can lead a life free from the fears and burdens of misery, such that the aim of the right to a vital minimum encompasses all of the positive or negative measures that are indispensable in order to stop a person from being unconstitutionally reduced in his or her intrinsic value as a human being, because of a lack of material conditions needed for dignified existence. Thus this right seeks to guarantee that the person – the center of judicial ordering – does not become an instrument for other ends, objectives, purposes, goods or interests, no matter how important or valuable these are”. [3]
Even if a vital minimum and basic income are not the same thing, it can be deduced that a guaranteed basic income is a fundamental tool for enjoying a vital minimum alongside universal access to other rights and decommodified services such as health care, education and diverse social protection mechanisms. Basic income fits perfectly into a definition of a vital minimum that calls for a guaranteed basic income and access to different public services and goods to achieve maximum possible well-being.
Daring, voting and negotiating
Because of this, the inclusion of basic income as a right in the Mexico City Constitution Project is hugely important, as it attunes the proposal to the fundamental contents of the Human Rights reform in Mexico in 2011 and with the emerging international debates in anticipation of the challenges of the 21st century.
In it’s original proposal, the draft of the Constitution of Mexico City read as follows:
“Every person has a right to a standard of living that is adequate for them and their family, as well as a continued improvement of existence conditions. The right to a basic income is guaranteed, with priority for people in situations of poverty and those that cannot fulfill their material needs by their own means, as well as priority attention groups. In order to access basic income, this will defer to the common dispositions in this article.”
This wording generated intense debate, one of the most intense ones in the Constitutional Assembly, due to the opposition of certain political forces to the recognition of the right to basic income derived from the condition of being a person or from citizenship. The arguments for financial unsustainability and for the undesirability of the program due to possible political manipulation (thinking of it as a program and not a right) as well as the possible counter-incentives to work and personal effort were repeated. Nothing new.
It’s noteworthy that, in the original wording, this article not only recognized basic income as a right for all people, as well as including the principle of an adequate standard of living and the constant improvement of living conditions, but also included an operational element that watered down the strength of the recognition of the right by mentioning priorities (non-exclusivity) in its implementation regarding impoverished people and those lacking their own means.
These limitations notwithstanding, the recognition of basic income as a right was submitted to a vote by the Assembly and obtained 57% of the vote, a clear majority, but not the 66% majority required by the Assembly rules. This led to a round of negotiations just as or even more intense than the original debates.
Several alternatives were proposed by the different committees in the search for new wording. Fox example: “Art. 14: Every person has a right to a basic income.” and “Art. 22: Basic income will serve as a mechanism that will, progressively, guarantee access to a minimum basis of well-being, beginning with people in situations of poverty and vulnerability.”
This was not accepted because it mentioned income. Another proposal was made.
“3. Every person shall have the right to a minimum subsistence income that will cover the various dimensions of socio-economic well-being and contribute to a free and dignified existence. The authorities will progressively ensure its fulfillment.”
However, this was not accepted because it mentioned a minimum income for every person (universal).
A variant of this last proposal was created after some more negotiations:
“Every person, from birth, will enjoy the right to a subsistence minimum that covers the various dimensions of well-being and covers their basic human need. The authorities will progressively guarantee its fulfillment.”
This also was not accepted because of the mention of the various dimensions of well-being, in particular as a right for every person since birth.
Finally, after several long days and before the risk of not reaching a two thirds majority, the following wording was agreed upon:
“Article 9. Dignified Life
- Every person is entitled to a vital minimum to ensure a dignified life by the terms of this Constitution.
(Article 17) The mechanisms to make the right to a vital minimum, giving priority to people in a situation of poverty, which will be established according to the criteria of progressiveness, with the indicators determined by the appropriate federal Constitutional organism and the measurable goals established by the corresponding local organism.”
The debate on basic income in Mexico City’s Constitution coincides with both the Senate of the Republic and Congress having proposals for a Constitutional reform recognizing basic income as a right on a national level, introduced by Senator Luis Sánchez and Congresswomen Araceli Damián and Xóchitl Hernández.
That another state in the Republic, Jalisco, also introduced the concept of vital minimum as a guiding axis of its planning is also relevant, even if its relationship to basic income as a right is less clear than in the case of Mexico City. In any case, it is relevant and even older than the Mexico City case.
The Constitution for the State of Jalisco reads:
“Article 4. The human rights recognized for the people within the territory of the State of Jalisco are those in the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States as well as those enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emitted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, in the American Convention on Human Rights, […] and in the treaties, conventions and international accord that the Federal Government has signed or that is otherwise a part of, attendant to the principle of a vital minimum as an axis for democratic planning via which the State must create the conditions so that every person can fulfill his or her life plan.”
Two steps forward, but one step back?
The discussion around basic income in the Mexico City Constitution was resolved, likely provisionally, by recognizing the right to a vital minimum.
This contains several positives which cannot be underestimated:
- The vital minimum was recognized as a right and basic income was left as an underlying part of this.
- This recognition was based on the Supreme Court’s definition, which is not a minimalist one. On the contrary, it’s a bet on satisfying the material conditions that make a person’s independence and autonomy possible.
- It was established as a universal right (all people). Even if priorities are mentioned, it was never proposed as a mechanism only for poor people, or that it would be means-tested.
- It was framed within the guarantee of a dignified life and not a program for combating poverty, even if it is a powerful tool for the eradication of income poverty.
These are all highly meaningful advancements beyond a doubt. On the other hand, some limitations or risks remain, such as:
- The original proposal mentioned basic income as a right; this was not included in the final wording.
- Basic Income can be argued for within the vital minimum, but it can also become diluted within it.
- Normative definitions were mixed with operational criteria, which leads to lingering ambiguity regarding the vital minimum as a universal emancipation tool or as a measure for groups in a situation of poverty or social disadvantage.
- Potential legal competency or conceptualization conflicts are introduced by mentioning the utilization of criteria from the appropriate federal organism (CONEVAL) and the local organism (The Planning Institute and Autonomous Evaluation Council for the City) for determining measurable goals and indicators.
I would like to stress that it is feasible for this to be a preliminary wording, as the City’s Congress will begin working next year and will not be bound by the compositional rules or the interplay of forces present in the Constitutional Assembly. Consequently, new debates and modifications that are closer to the original project cannot be ruled out.
A balance of the content of the articles addressing the vital minimum in the Mexico City Constitution published on February 5th 2017 allows us to state that there is significant progress that will have to be landed later in the definition of the secondary legislation and the formulation of policies, without ruling out new debates and reforms for the Constitutional text itself.
Additionally, it must be remembered that Mexico City has been an entity that is advanced in the recognition of new rights (with strong repercussions at a national level) and that these rights have also gone through intermediate stages.
Here are some examples:
Today, the legal termination of a pregnancy is a reality in Mexico City. However, in order to reach this state, an intermediate step had to be taken in 2000 with a partial reform of the penal code, which was limited to increasing valid reasons for terminating a pregnancy.
Today, the right to equal same sex marriage is fully recognized in Mexico City, including the capacity to adopt, but the intermediate step of civil partnerships (Sociedades de Convivencia) first had to be established in a legal reform in 2006.
And today, the Mexico City Constitution recognizes a vital minimum as a right for all people. It’s convenient to ask ourselves if the recognition of this right is an intermediate step towards the fully recognition of basic income as a universal right in Mexico City.
Even beyond this, the inclusion of basic income as a right proposal in the Constitutional project for Mexico City and the recognition of the right to a vital minimum constitute a relevant step ahead in the discussions regarding social policy, human rights and the social state in the 21st century.
It is a debate that has reached the legislative sphere and is here to stay, both in Mexico and many other parts of the world. What could have seemed a wild idea a few years ago is now treated respectfully and considered a rational, reasoned proposal that has to be debated and talked about.
This is a welcome debate and one that we must congratulate ourselves on. It’s a debate that is just beginning and that will intensify in the foreseeable future with the same speed with which changes and challenges replace each other in this vertiginous time of doubt and hope.
[1] This article is based on a presentation written for the 17 BIEN Congress.
[2] Research Coordinator for the subregional ECLAC headquarters in Mexico. The opinions expressed within may not be those of the United Nations System.
[3] SCJN. Tipo de Tesis: Aislada. Fuente: Semanario Judicial de la Federación y su Gaceta. Tomo XXV, Mayo de 2007. Tesis: 1a. XCVII/2007.Página: 793
Kate McFarland also contributed to this report.
Heidi Karow, copy-editor.
by Claire Bott | Oct 15, 2017 | News
The Employment Committee of the European Union (EU) has called for all member states to provide a minimum income, or to upgrade existing minimum income schemes.
A minimum income, unlike universal basic income (UBI), is not distributed to all citizens. In most European countries, a minimum income is already provided conditionally, taking the form of various unemployment benefits, child benefit schemes, disability support, pensions, etc.
Now the Employment Committee has recommended that these schemes be overhauled, or, in any cases where they are not already provided, that they be introduced. This is in response to the fact that 25% of people in the EU – nearly 120 million – are currently deemed to be at risk of poverty and social exclusion.
The Committee’s recommendations include setting the amount provided by consulting official figures such as the Eurostat at-risk-of-poverty rate. They also recommend raising awareness among those eligible for minimum income payments, in order to increase take-up of these schemes.
However, the Committee’s recommendation is not currently binding upon member states. It will now be considered by the full European Parliament, which will decide whether to vote this proposal into law.
Although minimum income differs significantly from basic income, this initiative could potentially pave the way for the development of some form of UBI in the future.
by Kate McFarland | Oct 14, 2017 | News
Notice of correction to and retraction of the article “World Economic Forum recognizes Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot studies”
On September 9, Basic Income News published an article with the headline “World Economic Forum recognizes Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot studies”, which announced that the World Economic Forum (WEF) had bestowed a “best practice in governance award” to Sarath Davala and the India Network for Basic Income (INBI) for their submission of a case study of basic income in Madhya Pradesh, India.
The submission and award are part of WEF’s New Vision for Development competition, an international competition seeking new global approaches to inclusive growth.
This announcement was made in error. In actuality, the Madhya Pradesh case study was deemed eligible for an award in the “best practice in governance” category. However, the case study is one of multiple applications eligible for the award, and WEF has not yet selected the recipient of the award.
The original article has been retracted.
Additional updates, information and background:
The WEF invited Dr. Sarath Davala, an independent sociologist and coordinator of INBI, to join other applicants to the New Vision for Development competition at a Sustainable Development Impact Summit held in New York, New York, from September 18 to 19.
The case study on the Madhya Pradesh basic income pilot, of which Davala was the lead author, was also selected for inclusion on WEF’s Inclusive Growth and Development Platform, at interactive online platform to be launched publicly in early 2018.
Regarding the significance of the New Vision for Development competition, Davala states,
The point is not whether one case-study gets an award or one person gets it. The main point is that the idea of Unconditional and Universal Basic Income is being recognised and endorsed by the mainstream global institutions as an idea that can potentially answer some of the most troubling questions of our times, such as chronic poverty, future of employment, meaning of work, and so on. This is truly a big victory for the idea itself.
His submission detailed the pilot study of basic income conducted in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh from June 2011 to November 2012, co-sponsored by UNICEF and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). During this 18 month experiment, 6,000 individuals in nine villages received monthly unconditional cash transfers equivalent to about one quarter of the median income in the state. The transfers were delivered to all adults in each village in the pilot, with smaller amounts for every child. Similar villages were used as controls. It was found that, relative to the residents of control villages, individuals receiving the cash transfers were seen to be significantly more likely to obtain adequate nutrition, receive regular medical treatment, invest in improved energy and sanitation, start new businesses, and send their children to school, among other improvements. (The study and its results are described at length in Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India, authored by Davala, SEWA’s Renana Jhabvala SEWA, Soumya Kapoor of the World Bank, and BIEN cofounder Guy Standing.)
Davala and other researchers have recently completed a legacy study investigating the long-term impacts of the Madhya Pradesh pilot, and Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India consulted the experiment in preparing a chapter on universal basic income for the 2017 Economic Survey of India. In this document, Subramanian cites evidence from Madhya Pradesh to support a rebuttal of claim that unconditional cash transfers would lead to a reduction in the labor supply, stating that, on the contrary, “the study shows that people become more productive when they get a basic income”.
In its Inclusive Growth and Development Report (2017), the WEF states that basic income alone cannot adequately substitute for what it considers the “five crucial institutional underpinnings of a well-functioning labor market” (labor-market policies, equal access to quality education, gender parity, non-standard work benefits and protections, and effective school-to-work transition); however, its authors remark that the policy may “form part of an appropriate policy response” or “serve as a useful complement” to other strategies.
The World Economic Forum does not endorse basic income but encourages the sharing and discussion of a wide range of approaches to inclusive and sustainable growth.
Post reviewed for content by the World Economic Forum and copyedited by Heidi Karow
Photo: Valleys of Madhya Pradesh, India CC BY 2.0 Rajarshi MITRA
by Peter Vandevanter | Oct 13, 2017 | News, Research
Congressional Quarterly (CQ) has published a research paper on basic income (BI) that explains its universal popularity due to automation growth estimates worldwide. The CQ Researcher covers everything from Scott Santens’ crowdfunded self-financing mechanism to U.S. ex-President Obama’s belief that the debate may last 10 to 20 years.
The 21-page research paper, written by London freelancer Sara Glazer, includes an explanation of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) – a basic income like payment to all residents – and revels in the prediction of automation worldwide. Predicted percentage of job losses are shown in charts for 8 countries, as well as for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (made up of 21 countries).
BI appeal to the political Left is explained as the continuation of a welfare state. Its appeal to the political Right is explained as a libertarian limit on government intrusion and cost. However, the research warns that many people believe the poor may be worse off: “Some anti-poverty advocates say a UBI would increase both poverty and inequality by using welfare funds now spent on the poorest two-fifths of the population to provide cash to people of all income levels“.
The report also mentions the current endorsement of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Chris Hughes. Moreover, references are made to the 1960s precedent of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s instituted War on Poverty as well as U.S. President Richard Nixon un-instituted 1970s negative income tax credit. This latter issue has been today resurrected by Congressman Ro Khanna, by his proposed bill for extending the earned income tax credit for the poor.
The Canadian 1970s experiment, called Mincome, is described as a positive pilot project, acting as a precedent for current basic income pilot projects in Finland, the U.S. (California ), Canada (Ontario ), Spain (Barcelona), Africa (Give Directly) and the Netherlands. In this report Karl Widerquist says that, with a BI, people will be allowed without fear to work the way they feel best. In an opposite viewpoint, Pavlina Tcherneva argues that a Job Guarantee program would be a better, less costly, way to make sure everyone had work they cared for.
More information at:
David Wheeler, “What if everybody didn’t have to work to get paid?”, The Atlantic, May 18th 2015
Chris Weller, “President Obama: We’ll be debating unconditional free money over the next 10 or 20 years” Business Insider, October 12th 2016
Kate McFarland, “SPAIN: Barcelona prepares study of Guaranteed Minimum Income”, Basic Income News, February 26th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Kate McFarland , “THE NETHERLANDS: Government authorizes social assistance experiments in first five municipalities”, Basic Income News, July 11th 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
Peter Vandevanter, “United States: Ro Khanna introduces EITC bill, garners comparison to BI”, Basic Income News, October 2nd 2017
Ashley Blackwell, “KENYA: GiveDirectly’s Guaranteed Monthly Income Expands to 200 Villages Fall 2017”, Basic Income News, September 10th 2017
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: First Basic Income payments sent to experiment participants”, Basic Income News, January 12th 2017
by Guest Contributor | Oct 12, 2017 | Opinion
Why it’s useful to see Basic Income through the lens of Population Health Intervention Research
Thanks in part to the health sciences, there is widespread public acceptance that being poor is bad for your health. It doesn’t take much for us to make the connections. We might expect that less to eat and poor housing conditions interfere with our ability to maintain healthy bodies and immune systems. Less money could mean no access to things like computers so that people can visit sites like Thenutritioninsider.com
to get advice on how to eat healthy and look after their bodies. It may also mean less access to the health services that could treat or prevent illness and disease.
We need to make treatments more accessible which is why using coupons from somewhere like Save On Cannabis for CBD products might enable the vast health inequality to become smaller in the future. Moreover, fewer resources might mean fewer opportunities and fewer job options. Poverty also compounds political and social injustice, with marginalized people such as women, Indigenous people and racialized groups profoundly affected by poverty. These groups often constitute much of the poor. Lastly, evidence suggest we suffer the psychological consequences of living in material deprivation, both in absolute terms and relative to others. Therefore it is a necessity for marketing cbd brands to change the narrative around cbd products so that there’s a change in the structure and more people get accessible medical care.
The immense research on poverty, income inequality, and the social determinants of health culminated in public sympathy for the plight of the poor. Yet for all the studies that have been done on poverty, perhaps it is time to develop research and public support for a solution – such as Basic Income. There are practical challenges to getting basic income into common public health parlance. The health of everyone is highly important, no matter the level of wealth, every person should have access to healthcare, for example, men may need sexual health medications (), which means that they must be able to have that access when required by their doctor.
The answer may lie in the understanding of Basic Income as an ideological proposal that can affect our health. The discourse around basic income as a deeply ethical idea is necessary, but perhaps insufficient. I believe we should consider reframing the concept concretely as a population health intervention.
Why call basic income a “population health intervention”?
A concept advanced by Canadian researchers Potvin and Hawe (2012) as being policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions, population health intervention research is a unique approach to figuring out how we are affected by policies that have a wholesale effect on people. Eminent basic income economist Dr. Evelyn Forget took this approach in her paper “New questions, new data, old interventions: The health effects of a guaranteed annual income” (Forget 2013). She used old administrative data from the well-known “Mincome” experiment in Manitoba, and looked at health records from the same time-period. She saw a reduction in hospital burden relative to a similar town’s health care use that did not get the income grant.
Calling basic income an intervention means that we can treat it as a ‘natural experiment‘.
We can study the impact of a policy on our health and well-being without necessarily running a Randomized Controlled Trial (where you randomly assign some people to a treatment, policy, or program, and not others).
Many have proposed that we need to conduct this sort of formal scientific experiment first. Some have questioned how useful such limited studies would be. A Randomized Controlled Trial might tell us whether basic income works in a certain social, economic, and political setting, but tells us little about whether the policy would work in other settings, or why the policy had a particular effect.
We ought to be careful not to set ourselves up to fail with studies too narrowly drawn in scope. Mixed or unexpected results from such studies also risks misinterpretation, and can be used to prevent basic income from entering policy.
Although the Ontario Pilot Program represents a step in the right direction, nothing stops us from advocating for the full national implementation of basic income. A host of different research and study designs would be embedded into the impact evaluation of this federal policy, on par with health care or public education. Framing a given policy as a population health intervention acknowledges the fact that many there are health-promoting aspects to programs outside of health care sector (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
Basic income is such a policy. Programs to alleviate poverty lie outside the doctor’s office, but nevertheless have a profound impact on health.
Population Health Intervention Research compels us to think bigger than ourselves.
Traditional medicine treats the individual person. If we are looking at the effect of social programs and policies, this unit of analysis is often too small to see measurable differences in any single person. Moreover, if we restrict a given treatment or social program to the poorest people – such as welfare, we may see limited overall benefits to the population as a whole.
Epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose recognized this problem (Rose 1985). Imagine that people lie on a continuum of ‘risk’ for certain diseases and health outcomes. For example, this could be said of high blood pressure as a risk factor for heart attack. Higher blood pressure puts you at higher risk of heart attack.
For our purposes, let’s say this distribution represents the relationship between poverty and getting sick. Higher poverty puts you at higher risk of ‘sickness’. We might expect that most people lie somewhere in the middle of the distribution, while those at very high or very low poverty sit somewhere at the tails.
Rose noted that traditional medicine’s approach was to target high risk people at the far right. However, these people are a smaller proportion, and paying attention only to them might not give us the biggest bang for our buck. Instead, he posited that interventions that reach entire groups of people would ‘shift’ the distribution itself. At the end of the day, he estimated that these far-reaching treatments would have a bigger impact overall (Rose 1985).
Basic income fits that profile – a social policy that brings everyone up, effectively ‘shifting’ the distribution. In order to examine policies that lend a helping hand to everyone, we need a scientific lens that is broad enough to capture the whole picture. Reframing basic income as a population shifter might fill that void.
Lastly, population health interventions allow us to redirect our thinking from the problem to the solution.
We keep studying poverty, not the fixes for poverty. A population health intervention approach calls for the health sciences to consider the potential gains to be made by studying the impact of income interventions on population health. We should be turning our attention from studying how poverty effects our health, to studying how fixing poverty effects our health.
You might be quick to point out that we have not eradicated poverty yet. So, how do we study this state of affairs, when it doesn’t yet exist?
In some ways, we can. We have the pilot run in Dauphin, Manitoba that in many ways, was ahead of its time. Dr. Forget was the first to recognize the strength of “intervention-alizing” the Canadian basic income experiment. We can also examine policies that get close to basic income, such as the Bolsa Família program of Brazil – a conditional cash transfer available to families with children. In Canada, the non-conditional income grant for senior citizens called the Old Age Supplement has been analyzed as an analog to basic income (McIntyre, Kwok et al. 2016) and indeed, those researchers found that participants eligible for OAS reported better self-reported physical, mental, and function health. Importantly, they also found those on OAS (which is non-conditional) where better off than those on conditional income programs. These are innovative approaches to the question of basic income’s potential impact, using information we already have. And, it might move us from studies of poverty, toward studies of basic income.
As it stands, promoting basic income as a population health intervention for the sake of our health is underutilized, yet it seems like a sensible way to communicate the idea. Poverty is intricately tied to the material conditions of our lives and societal position in the world, predicated on sex, race, and class. How a policy like basic income works among these conditions deserves no less than comprehensive and holistic look at how our health is profoundly impacted. Research that is based on an understanding of population health intervention attempts to do just this – and capture the value and differential effect of these interventions, the processes by which they bring about change and the contexts within which they work best (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
The Dauphin Experiment and the impending Ontario Pilot have and will continue to shape our thinking moving forward. They are also a testament to the desire of Canadians for a better, kinder, healthier society for all. However, we have not yet fully transformed the public’s conception of poverty alleviation as a necessary policy, worthy of widespread implementation as are universal health care, public education, or social assistance.
Implementing a basic income as an essential social program and for our health is possible, and fully within our experience of policy-making at both the provincial and national levels. The time has come to make this a reality.
Sarah M Mah is a PhD student in the department of Geography at McGill University. She is also a member of the Asian Women for Equality Society, an organization dedicated to the campaign for a Guaranteed Livable Income.
The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of BIEN or BI News.
References
Forget, E. L. (2013). “New questions, new data, old interventions: the health effects of a guaranteed annual income.” Prev Med 57(6): 925-928.
Hawe, P. and L. Potvin (2009). “What is population health intervention research?” Can J Public Health 100(1): Suppl I8-14.
McIntyre, L., C. Kwok, J. C. Emery and D. J. Dutton (2016). “Impact of a guaranteed annual income program on Canadian seniors’ physical, mental and functional health.” Can J Public Health 107(2): e176-182.
Rose, G. (1985). “Sick individuals and sick populations.” Int J Epidemiol 14(1): 32-38.
