by Kate McFarland | Dec 23, 2016 | News
The ReCivitas Institute is introducing a “Lifetime Basic Income” in the Brazilian village of Quatinga Velho–a project it hopes will serve as a model to other organizations running their own basic income pilots.
From 2008 to 2014, the ReCivitas Institute, a non-governmental organization based in Brazil, administered a basic income in Quatinga Velho, a small village in São Paulo, Brazil. Under the project, which was funded entirely by private donors, 100 Quatinga Velho residents eventually received a basic income of 30 Brazilian Reais (about 9 USD) per month, paid in cash. All participants were volunteers.
In January 2016, ReCivitas launched a new project, Basic Income Startup, which intends to make these payments permanent. As of January 16, 14 residents of Quatinga Velho have basic incomes, now set at an amount of 40 Reais, that they will retain for at least 20 years.
Basic Income Startup has pledged that for every €1,000 received in donations, a new individual will start to receive the lifetime basic income at no additional cost to donors. It has also stated that this additional recipient will be selected from those living in areas where 40 Reais per month makes a significant impact on quality of life.
According to ReCivitas President Marcus Brancaglione, the idea for Basic Income Startup originated during a trip to Europe in 2015, when he observed the inequality between refugees and European citizens. Unsurprisingly, then, ReCivitas does not see its work and mission as limited to Brazil, but as having global ramifications.
The ReCivitas Institute is now encouraging other local organizations and communities to replicate its project in Quatinga Velho, and invites other NGOs conducting their own basic income studies to unite and form a Basic Income Projects Network:
Our idea of Basic Income is the universal one. Really universal. With no discrimination of any sort, such as of nationality, citizenship or territorial. We work with an open association model that was not designed to expand while being restricted by geopolitical limits, but instead to multiply without regard for borders, in an international network of communities maintained by the peoples themselves, from person to person, through mutual support between non-governmental organizations.
Describing the results of ReCivitas’s project in Quatinga Velho, Brancaglione says that the basic income ” ‘changed the dreams’ of people in the community…giving some of the poorest a basic security, and [allowing] them ‘the capability to project into the future’ rather than living and budgeting without ever being certain that their income was secure. The money and the terms of payment gave citizens the power to change their relationship with the outside authorities. Rather than having to prove the extent of their poverty in order to receive social security, they were freed to assert their citizen’s right to a basic income” [1].
Although the basic income has brought clear benefits to Quatinga Velho, project leaders have emphasized that their goal is not to study basic income or to prove that it “works”. They are already convinced that basic income is effective, and their goal is to implement it [2].
The Brazilian government has maintained the Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program for the poor, for over a decade; however, the government has not yet shown a willingness to institute a full universal and unconditional basic income. Thus, ReCivitas has chosen to move forward with administering its own privately-funded unconditional basic income on a smaller scale, and hopes to inspire similar initiatives worldwide.
For more information about Basic Income Startup, see its website and view the video trailer below:
[1] George Bangham, “Report of Lecture at Oxford University,” Instituto ReCivitas, February 28, 2016.
[2] Cf. Karl Widerquist, “Basic Income in Quatinga Velho celebrates 3-years of operation,” Basic Income News, June 7, 2012.
Information and photographs provided by Marcus Brancaglione, President of ReCivitas.
by BIEN | Dec 22, 2016 | News
Earlier in the year, Basic Income News reporter Scott Jacobsen spoke to Basic Income News reporter Kate McFarland about her background and influences. This is a continuation of Part One.
You mentioned valuing clarity of writing, for readers to have correct inferences. Any advice for BI writers? That is, those that want clear writing and to avoid the statistical probability of readers making wrong inferences.
That’s a good question. I feel like this is something I do based on instincts from my training in analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of language. It’s hard to codify that—those instincts—right off the bat.
I do want to stress that one thing that’s special about Basic Income News—sorta in our mission statement, as it were—is that we are clear to make the distinction between straightforward factual reporting and opinion pieces. If you just want the facts, you read one of our news reports, and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of the writer’s own analysis and commentary to get to them. You’ll see a lot of writing that conflates opinion and persuasive writing with reporting the facts, in a way not always conducive to the reader being able to figure out exactly what’s going on. Too often the factual reporting seems like an afterthought.
As much as I can, and as much as BI News can, we try to give people the bare facts. We don’t want to gloss them over with a bunch of fluff about what we think about basic income. It is not our job in news reporting. Our job is to disseminate the latest information about the basic income movement. It is not to make every one piece a persuasive one. It is not to write exciting stories, fluff, and propaganda.
I would also urge other writers to stick with primary sources whenever possible. When you use quotes, be sensitive to the context. When you talk about data from experiments or surveys, be sensitive to the design of the study and what you can actually infer from it.
Never, ever selectively misquote or misrepresent information by presenting it out of context! Some people do that, which is why I say always stick with primary sources—the original research reports, the full transcripts, and so forth.
Otherwise, my advice is to learn a lot, do you research from the primary sources, but also read some of the fluffy, superficial, often misleading stories on BI in mainstream media. Pay attention to the awful clickbait headlines. Read the comments sometimes even; notice how people are confused. Let it irritate you. You’ll develop instincts, I think, to write in a way that strives to avoid that. I think it helped me, anyhow.
Some things you said suggest mainstream news sources on BI want to persuade one way or another. Does this seem to be the case? It would be in contradiction to journalistic virtues of objectivity and neutrality insofar as they can be achieved.
Well, I see a lot—I see a lot that’s not necessarily to persuade, but where there might be, I think there are, values that conflict with just straightforward objective reporting. It might not be to persuade people on whether to support BI. It might be just to excite people, hook people, or write a catchier piece… As I say, I’m a philosopher, not a journalist; the ideals I have for prose come from there. Maybe journalists want to engage the reader at the expense of laying out the facts in a clear and complete manner. We’re just trying to concisely summarize the facts and make everything as clear as possible.
So, for example, if you read a journalistic report on a sample survey—this has just happened recently—you almost never get the details you want to know in order to really know what conclusions to draw. The sample size, sampling frame, selection method, response rate—you don’t often get all that. I would want to know that. And I don’t really care what a survey says about people’s attitudes on basic income if you don’t give me the details of the questionnaire design. What exactly is being asked? How it is phrased? I want to know all that before I make conclusions; I think you should make that info available to the reader if you’re gonna bother to report on an opinion survey at all. ‘Course, I should say I was a statistician before I became a philosopher.
Another thing is quoting out of context. There was an example that comes to mind—I won’t name names—of a famous basic income advocate being asked his opinion on when BI would actually happen. The gist of what he said was that we can’t predict, but in saying it, he said something like “It could as soon as 5 or 10 years, but it could be much longer.” It was clearly just this fragment of a larger point about how we just can’t know. But then the journalist just quotes him as saying that BI could happen as soon as 5 or 10 years! Just that! Entirely misleading. Entirely misrepresented his point.
A related phenomenon—a sub-phenomenon, maybe—is jumping on any use of the phrase “basic income” and then quoting the speaker as making a point about what you and I and BIEN call “basic income”. But that’s really too hasty. There was a recent case of a famous businessman who allegedly came out in support of UBI—he said he supported “basic income” (or “Grundeinkommen”, being German)—and people in the media just assumed he meant the unconditional thing. Later, he tweets that he didn’t mean the unconditional thing, but by then, the damage is done, as it were.
Sometimes this is [a] tough one, I have to be honest. Maybe, that’s another thing for the advice: If you’re not 100 percent positive someone means basic income when they say “basic income”, then leave what they say in quotes. Say “They said these words…” But don’t necessarily disquote if you’re not sure what they mean. I mean, equivocation on the phrase “basic income” is a whole other issue—it’s becoming a real big thing, I think, with the Canada movement versus US commentators—but maybe we’ll get back to that.
Another example with the reporting, I guess, is just being misleading through superficiality or vague weasel words. Like, to make basic income seem exciting, maybe a journalist will give a long list of countries that are “pursuing” BI or “considering” BI or something—but what does that even mean? Or maybe they’ll talk about a long list of people who “endorse” or “support” it just because they said something vaguely favourable at one time.
Then you see things—I’ve been seeing this a lot lately—like “Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are beginning pilots.” The problem there a little subtler, but you see it? That suggests, I think, that the governments of Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are all planning pilots. Kenya? They must be thinking of GiveDirectly, a private charity based in New York that happens to be operating in Kenya. I think it’s important to keep those private efforts distinct from the government-sponsored ones. That’s an important distinction. It’s one sort of thing you often see just casually elided.
I could go on—those are just some examples off the top of my head—but I hope you get the idea. I think that, with most journalism on BI, it’s about saying the bare minimum to be interesting and provocative—don’t bore readers with too many facts and details and distinctions, maybe—at the expensive of saying enough, and saying things clearly enough, to really give a good and accurate sense, knowledge, of what’s going on in the world.
Your background in philosophy at the graduate and doctoral level seems relevant to me. It obviously helps with your clarity, rigour, and simplicity to the point it needs to be to present ideas. For BI, it can come along with different terms and phrases, for different ideas associated with, but not the same as, BI.
Yeah, that’s definitely—that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I try to point to it when it’s relevant. And I try to be consistent in my own terms, and of course to keep my uses consistent with the official definition agreed upon by BIEN—a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
The US BIG site actually has a pretty good primer on some of the different terms, and I tend to follow its usage for BI and UBI versus BIG and so on. But sometimes it’s tricky, especially with the BIG versus BI distinction, which you see conflated a lot these days.
“BI” and “UBI” are both often used to refer only to policies where everybody gets a check of the same amounts—no clawbacks with additional earnings—but sometimes people use them more generally to include policies that include what you might otherwise hear called “guaranteed minimum income” or a “guaranteed annual income” or a “negative income tax”; these are policies where everyone’s assured a minimal income floor, unconditionally, but the amount you receive is clawed back as you earn more and more on top of this floor. That’s what Ontario’s almost certainly gonna pilot next. It won’t be everyone in the pilot getting money. It’ll be that everyone’s guaranteed money if their income drops low enough—but, assuming Hugh Segal’s advice is followed, it won’t be the rich people in the sample also getting the check.
But sometimes you’ll see things like “Ontario plans to give all its residents an income boost”—because people hear “basic income”, and elsewhere they hear “basic income” to mean “checks to everybody, even then rich”, and they put two and two together, incorrectly. Sometimes all these policies together are referred to as a “basic income guarantee”, a “BIG”, with the GAI/GMI/NIT and the UBI (or “demogrant” as it’s sometimes called) being different types.
I can see this becoming a real problem—confusing these types of “BIGs”, equivocating on the term “basic income”—for people’s understanding and interpreting past and present pilots, and understanding how they revolve around the current debate, and I do hope to write a full-length article about it in the new year, if it keeps being problematic.
I’m realizing that what I’m talking about is not so much too many phrases for BI—but the term “basic income” being used to mean too many things. That might actually be the bigger problem, in fact, especially in the States. In addition to this equivocation with “does it entail giving money to the rich”, there’s this issue with some people, it seems, thinking that anything called “basic income” by definition replaces the whole rest of the welfare state. But that’s not true. But writers sometimes talk that way, and it leads to confusion and misconceptions.
And there’s also an issue about whether a “basic income” is, by definition, enough to live on. I think writers occasionally go in both ways. They probably sometimes equivocate, which would be bad… There’s been some controversy in BIEN caused by precisely this last concern, in fact. I think you can read about it some in Toru’s report on the controversy about the definition at the last BIEN Congress.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 21, 2016 | News
On November 29 and 30, the White House, the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-hosted the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity.
Held at Stanford, the event brought together “275 high-level players in technology, philanthropy, community service, government, and academia” to listen to and participate in a series of panel discussions on social and economic policy and the role of technology and big data.
The conference included a 40-minute panel on “The Future of Jobs and the Question of a Basic Income”:
PANELISTS (from viewer’s left to right)
– Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, and the initiator of its plan for a basic income experiment. Y Combinator is currently running a pilot study of a basic income in Oakland, with plans for a larger scale experiment in the future.
– Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and (as of this month) a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, which will be distributing $10 million in grants to support basic income projects in the US.
– Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Philosophy who specializes in political theory and public policy. Bidadanure will be teaching a graduate seminar on the philosophy of basic income in winter 2017.
Future of work expert Natalie Foster moderated the discussion.
All four participants are supporters of universal basic income.
PANEL OVERVIEW.
Bidadanure, Hughes, and Altman, respectively, begin the panel by describing how they came to interested in basic income and outlining their reasons for supporting such a policy. Following these introductory remarks, discussion turns to past and present basic income experiments: Altman talks about Y Combinator’s newly launched pilot study, Hughes describes the work of the charity GiveDirectly, and Bidadanure lays out the results of past experiments in Manitoba, Namibia, and India. Altman additionally stresses the ability of a basic income to alleviate financial anxiety for people who currently live paycheck to paycheck. Finally, panelists present their thoughts on the question of how to finance a basic income. Due to concerns about feasibility, Hughes proposes beginning with a small basic income of $100 or $200 per month; Bidadanure and Altman, however, raise concerns with the implementation of a basic income that is it not sufficiently large to allow for freedom and security.
Additional press on the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity:
Nitasha Tiku, “Stanford, The White House, And Tech Bigwigs Will Host A Summit On Poverty”, BuzzFeed News, November 28, 2016.
Reviewed by Jenna van Draanen
Photo (Stanford University) CC BY 2.0 Robbie Shade
by Dave Clegg | Dec 18, 2016 | News
![Sosiaali- ja terveysministeriö](https://i0.wp.com/stm.fi/yja-stm-theme/images/stm/logo_en.png?w=1080&ssl=1)
Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health has issued its latest and apparently final press release outlining its long awaited Basic Income pilot project slated to begin Jan 1st, 2017. Near the end of the first year the project will be assessed for the feasibility of a second year as well.
This project will be narrowly focused on a small, random sampling of employable adults and the ways in which a BI might improve their employment chances. This project will not be looking at any other populations, vulnerable or otherwise, which might benefit from a BI. However, Finland’s government sees this pilot as the beginning of a “… culture of experimentation” designed to identify and then help address the most pressing needs of their citizens in the years to come.
Photo: “Colors of Finland” CC BY-NC 2.0 Mariano Mantel
by Kate McFarland | Dec 13, 2016 | Opinion
This fall, BIEN celebrated 30th anniversary of its founding. Video recordings of its founders’ reunion are available online.
On October 1, several founding members and other past and present BIEN leaders — comprising three generations of basic income advocates — united at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium for a conference held in commemoration of the occasion in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of UCLouvain’s Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics and the retirement of BIEN cofounder Philippe van Parijs as its director. (See also a Basic Income News interview in which Philippe discusses the past, present, and future of BIEN.)
Reflecting on the event and the history of BIEN, Belgian entrepreneur and long-time basic income advocate Roland Duchâtelet said:
What impresses me most is that during the 30 years of BIEN many different personalities expressed many different views regarding UBI models, implementation, and the way the organisation should behave… and yet, I do not believe there have been any defectors. Moreover, despite the highly diverse background of the members and their desire to succeed, the organisation managed to keep its harmony.
To me this was the prevailing feeling of the 30th anniversary event: we are a (strong) group of friends.
![Roland Duchalet (photo credit: Enno Schmidt)](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Roland-2.jpg?resize=357%2C238&ssl=1)
Roland Duchatelet (credit: Enno Schmidt)
For Jose Luis Rey Pérez (Adjunct Professor of Philosophy of Law at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid), BIEN’s 30th anniversary event rekindled memories of studying with van Parijs and others at UCL years earlier:
I was in Chair Hoover [in UCL] two months in April and May 2003, while I was writing my PhD. I learnt a lot from Philippe van Parijs during that time, and I had the opportunity to read everything that was published about basic income in that time. (In those years where books and articles were not on internet like now.) I had also the opportunity to share coffees, time and discussions with Axel Gosseries, Hervois Portouis, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere and Myron Frankman who were in the Chair at that time.
It was nice, 13 years later, to listen and learn again from some authors that I have studied deeply. I wish Philippe a very rich retirement. I know that he will continue through his conferences, books and articles to enrich the philosophical thought. We have a lot of things to learn from him yet. Because he is one of the best philosophers of this XXI century.
Two other attendees, Bonno Pel and Julia Backhaus of the TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory (TRANSIT) research project, have written an extended feature article on the event (“BIEN Celebrates Thirty Years: Basic income, a utopia for our times?“), looking at the 2016 UCL event as a reflection of (a photo of) the founding meeting in 1986.
Video Footage
Belgian filmmaker Steven Janssens videotaped six conference sessions: (1) BIEN’s improvised birth, (2) Basic income implemented in the short and the long run (note: a parallel session on the history of basic income was not recorded), (3) Lessons from the Swiss referendum, (4) Promises and limits of past and future experiments, (5) Moving forward, (6) Final reflections.
(Janssens is also the driving force behind the documentary about a basic income pilot in a Ugandan village, with a planned launch date of October 2018.)
1. BIEN’s Improvised Birth: Testimonies by Some Co-founders
Featuring Philippe van Parijs, Paul-Marie Boulanger, Annie Miller, Guy Standing, Claus Offe, and Robert van der Veen.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference1
2. Basic Income Implemented in the Short and the Long Run
Featuring Philippe Defeyt (“An income-tax-funded basic income of EUR 600”), David Rosseels (“A micro-tax on electronic payments”), and Karl Widerquist (“Sovereign funds and basic income”).
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference2
3. Lessons from the Swiss Referendum
Featuring Nenad Stojanovic and Enno Schmidt.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference3
4. Promises and Limits of Past and Future Experiments
Featuring Yannick Vanderborght (overview), Guy Standing (on India), Jurgen De Wispelaere (on Finland), Alexander de Roo (on The Netherlands).
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference4
5. Moving Forward
Featuring Louise Haagh, Stanislas Jourdan, Roland Duchatelet, Yasmine Kherbache.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference5
6. Final Reflections
Featuring Claus Offe, Gérard Roland, Joshua Cohen, Erik O. Wright.
https://vimeo.com/eight8/bienconference6
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka.
Cover Photo: BIEN’s 30th anniversary renunion , credit Enno Schmidt.