by Kate McFarland | Dec 3, 2016 | News
Baijayant “Jay” Panda, a member of the lower house of the Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha), believes that India should consider a universal basic income (UBI) to replace its current social welfare programs.
Panda describes India’s current socials programs as “grossly inefficient, corruption-ridden, misdirected towards the better-off, and thus unable to achieve stated objectives”. These wasteful programs already need replaced. With this in mind, Panda argues that a UBI could be more affordable in India than in a high-income nation like the United States or Switzerland–citing economists such as Pranab Bardhan (University of California, Berkeley), Vijay Joshi (Oxford), and Maitreesh Ghatak (London School of Economics) for additional support. (One might additionally mention Abhijit V. Banerjee, an MIT economist and adviser for GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot.)
Jay Panda belongs to Biju Janata Dal (BJD), a centrist party in the state of Odisha. BJD holds 20 out of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha, having won 20 out of 21 seats for Odisha in the 2014 general election, and eight out of 245 in the upper house (Rajya Sabha). BJD is the dominant party in the Odisha legislature, where it holds 117 out of 147 seats. Panda is a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce and the Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
Earlier in 2016, Varun Gandhi, MP from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, endorsed basic income in an article for The Hindu.
More recently, India’s Chief Economic Adviser, Arvind Subramanian, has stated that the government will investigate UBI as part of the next annual Economic Survey of India.
Read More:
Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda (Oct 27, 2016) “Cash To All Citizens: Universal Basic Income could actually work better in India than in rich countries” Times of India.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda speaks at Brookings panel, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Brookings Institution.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 3, 2016 | News
Videos of the workshop “Experimenting with Basic Income: Finland and the Netherlands” are available online. Additionally, Jurgen De Wispelaere has a new blog post describing the promises and challenges of a comparative approach to basic income experiments.
As described in recent articles in Basic Income News, both Finland and the Netherlands will be launching basic income experiments early in 2017. In each case, the experiment is planned to continue for two years, the target population under investigation will be restricted to individuals currently receiving social assistance benefits, and research questions will center on the basic income’s effect on work incentives. Despite such broad similarities, however, the experiments also have notable differences — in both design and political context.
Workshop at Kela
To address these issues, Kela, the Social Insurance Institute of Finland, hosted a day-long workshop on “Experimenting with Basic Income: Finland and the Netherlands” on November 8. Speakers included Sjir Hoeijmakers, Loek Groot, Timo Verlaat, Ernst-Jan de Bruijn, and Ruud Muffels on the Dutch experiments, and Johanna Perkiö, Olli Kangas, and Kathrin Komp on the Finnish experiments.
Videos of all sessions are now available (click on the above embedded links).
Lessons and Challenges
Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at Finland’s University of Tampere, presented opening and closing comments at Kela’s workshop, respectively titled “Putting Basic Income Experiments in Context” and “Comparing Basic Income Experiments: Lessons and Challenges” (see video below).
In a recent post on Kela’s blog, De Wispelaere outlines three main reasons to engage in a comparative study of basic income experiments: the comparative approach allows researchers to pool information about issues faced in running a basic income experiment, pool knowledge about the effects of basic income, and study the political forces behind the rapid rise in popularity of basic income.
Jurgen De Wispelaere (November 14, 2016) “Comparing Basic Income Experiments: Lessons and Challenges” Kela.
Other Experiments
While the Kela workshop and De Wispelaere’s brief article focus specifically on the experiments in Finland and the Netherlands, we might note that other basic income pilots and experiments are about to begin around the world. In Canada, the provincial government of Ontario plans to roll out a basic income pilot study by April 2017. The government of France is also investigating the possibility of experimenting with a basic income, although no launch date has been specified. Several privately-funded basic income pilots and experiments are also scheduled to begin in 2017, including those of the Silicon Valley firm Y Combinator (in Oakland, California) and the charities GiveDirectly (in multiple Kenyan villages) and Eight (in a Ugandan village).
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Kela office, CC-BY-SA-4.0 Kotivalo
by Kate McFarland | Nov 28, 2016 | News
A tech conference held in October in Berlin, Germany, included a panel on universal basic income, which featured basic income popularizer Michael Bohmeyer (Mein Grundeinkommen) alongside three AI experts.
The Data Natives conference, which took place in Berlin from October 26 through 28, featured a variety of sessions on data science, AI, machine learning, and related technical topics, as well as sessions on business in a data-driven age [1].
Amidst its panels and presentations on data science, software development, and business, there was one politically-oriented panel: “The Future of AI and Universal Basic Income”.
The panel discussion was moderated by Hans Uszkoreit, scientific director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (who speaks about his own work in a separate session), and included three panelists: Abdourahmane Faye, a machine learning specialist who works on what advanced data analytics can do for business; NiMA Asghari, UAV applications expert at Drone Industry Insights; and Michael Bohmeyer, founder of Mein Grundeinkommen, a German non-profit organization that has given away dozens of year-long basic incomes to randomly-selected entrants.
Panelists discussed such issues as whether artificial intelligence really will destroy jobs, whether individuals with a basic income would lose motivation to work and help others, and whether it is accurate to extrapolate the findings of basic income pilot studies (including individual trials like those of Mein Grundeinkommen) to a society with a full-scale universal basic income.
While Bohmeyer, of course, is a champion of UBI, others on the panel hold less favorable views. Faye opposed the policy: expressing confidence in humanity’s ability to continue to create new jobs in a digitized, automated economy, he does not see a need for UBI, and he worries that a UBI would undermine work incentives. Asghari seemed to assume a more neutral territory, raising points both for and against UBI throughout the discussion.
Watch the four men speak from really short chairs in this complete video of the session:
[1] The author, being both fond of puns and a big fan the band Einstürzende Neubauten, would like to make special note of a session entitled “Einstürzenden Neudaten“.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: nHow (conference venue) lobby CC-BY-SA-3.0 Forster82
by Kate McFarland | Nov 27, 2016 | News
Warren (Smokey) Thomas, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), has issued a cautionary statement against the province’s interest in pursuing a basic income guarantee.
The OPSEU leader’s statement comes in response to the comprehensive report published by Hugh Segal, the lead adviser to the Ontario government’s impending pilot study of a basic income guarantee, which was published on November 3.
Thomas worries that the adoption of a basic income guarantee, which enjoys much of its support from politicians on the right, would be followed with cuts in essential public services:
“Basic Income has had the support of right-wingers for decades now because of the expectation that it would reduce the government’s role in providing services, and shift that work on to families and communities. Given the direction the current Ontario government is taking on social services, I think Ontarians have every reason to be skeptical.”
“We support the goals of raising incomes for people living in poverty. We support extra counselling. We support reducing the stigma associated with social assistance. But we aren’t convinced Basic Income will do these things. If anything, it may make people a little less poor, for a little while, until public services end up on the chopping block. I’m worried that this Basic Income is just part of the Liberals’ larger plan to further privatize the province.”
Instead of a basic income guarantee, Thomas supports raising the minimum wage, expanding and increasing existing social assistance programs like Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), and maintaining funding for public services.
Segal argues in his report that a basic income should be tested as a replacement for OW and ODSP, which place limits on recipients’ earned income and work participation and thus require extensive monitoring of recipients. OW, for example, requires that recipients demonstrate “financial need” and prove that they are making “reasonable efforts” to obtain employment (in the absence of extenuating circumstances). ODSP requires that recipients document proof of a disability. According to Segal, the main purpose of the pilot is to test the effectiveness of an unconditional income guarantee against what he describes as “broad policing, control, and monitoring” inherent in these programs.
If Segal’s recommendations are adopted, Ontario’s pilot will examine–among other impacts–the cost of administering a basic income guarantee in comparison to OW and ODSP, as well as its relative effectiveness in improving health, education, and workforce participation. Segal also urges that the pilot be designed such that no participant would be financially worse off under the basic income guarantee than under these existing programs.
Thomas’s skepticism is not an unusual response from a progressive critic of basic income. In the United States, for example, anti-poverty researcher and advocate Robert Greenstein (President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) has argued that any politically feasible basic income has a high risk of leaving tens of millions of poor Americans worse off–since, to attract right-wing supporters, the policy would most likely accompany massive cuts in other programs and services (see also Greenstein’s interview in Vox). Earlier in the year, writer and attorney Joel Dodge raised similar concerns about right-wing basic income proposals in an interview with Basic Income News (following up on his article for Quartz on the same topic).
Thomas’s remarks were publicized via a OPSEU press release. The OPSEU represents more than 130,000 employees of the provincial government of Ontario (as reported on its website).
The government of Ontario is currently accepting public feedback on Segal’s report, both online and via in-person meetings, until January 31, 2017.
Reference
“OPSEU sounds note of caution on Basic Income plan” (OPSEU Press Release from November 18, 2016).
Article reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Top photo: OPSEU at Toronto Pride Parade, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 David Allan Barker
by Hilde Latour | Nov 26, 2016 | News
In a recent IMPAKTER interview, as part of a series exploring the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Ian Bassin (Chief Operating Officer, Domestic, of GiveDirectly), explains how his organization is moving from unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) towards unconditional basic income (UBI) in Kenya.
GiveDirectly traditionally provides UCTs to the extremely poor, operating in Kenya and Uganda.
“We started our program in Kenya because they had a very robust mobile money payment system there, and that’s the means by which we transfer cash to poor households”, Bassin says.
The primary goal of GiveDirectly is to help demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of cash transfers. The research done so far shows that giving money to poor people works.
“Poverty in its simplest terms is a lack of money and resources. It is not a lack of capacity or ability”, Bassin notes. “If we’re not doing more with our dollar than the poor could do for themselves, we should probably just be giving them the dollar.”
Recipients of UCTs don’t spend the cash transfer on vice consumption, like alcohol or tobacco, nor does the transfer discourage people from working, Bassin explains. He refers to a recent World Bank Study that has shown UCTs are in fact more likely to reduce than to increase the consumption of vice goods.
“Our recipients use the funds incredibly wisely. […] They tend to spend it on positive goods and what we saw in our original RCT was that after the transfer had ended our recipients saw their incomes rise by thirty-four percent and saw their assets increase by fifty-eight percent.”
Bassin highlights that this research can “help drive cash as a benchmark for decision-making in the aid sector.”
From unconditional cash transfers towards unconditional basic income
GiveDirectly is now planning a major implementation and evaluation of a universal basic income, to launch shortly in Kenya. Instead of giving money to the poor only, a program by which everyone receives cash will be implemented and evaluated.
“A ‘guaranteed basic income’ or ‘basic income guarantee’ is the idea of providing a minimum floor for all members of a community. It’s enough to meet basic needs, so it would be enough to live on without work or other forms of income. It’s guaranteed over the long term so that you can make decisions about major life plans with a minimum level of basic security. And it’s universal in that everyone gets it.”
(…)
“We’re going to be providing whole communities with a regular basic income for 12 years. And we have three of the world’s leading researchers on board to rigorously evaluate it: J-PAL co-founder Abhijit Banerjee, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Alan Krueger, and MIT professor Tavneet Suri. We’ve raised $22 million so far for the project and need to raise another $8m to run the full randomized controlled trial”
(…)
“Six thousand individuals in Kenya will receive a full basic income for twelve years and around 20,000 individuals will receive cash for a shorter period of time.”
Info and links
The full interview can be found here.
Related Basic Income News articles
US / KENYA: Charity GiveDirectly announces initial basic income pilot study
[Kate McFarland]
WORLD: The charity GiveDirectly will start a major basic income trial in Kenya
[Karl Widerquist]
Photo: Bus Ride Kenya-Uganda, 2015, CC 4.0 Jake Stimpson
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Genevieve Shanahan for reviewing this article
