by Guest Contributor | Jan 11, 2017 | Opinion
On January 9th, Zygmund Bauman passed away at the age of 91. He is considered one of the great philosophers and sociologist of our time, who introduced the concept of “liquid modernity” to describe the postmodern age.
He is the main character in the recently released documentary “In the Same Boat” where he urges to tackle global problems on a global scale, and suggests exploring new roads such as a universal basic income.
Read more in this review: “Man vs machine, or man ahead with machine?”
MACHINE VS MAN, OR MAN AHEAD WITH MACHINE?
Written by: Bart Grugeon Plana
In the modern era, digital technology is substituting human brain power in a similar way as the steam engine did in the eighteenth century, making muscle power inefficient. Would it be possible, however, to harness this digital revolution for the benefit of humans and the planet, to share prosperity? The documentary “In the Same Boat,” which is being released in several countries throughout Europe, has opened up this interesting debate.
We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution and with the advance of Artificial Intelligence, this process is affecting an increasing number of sectors in the economy. Not only is traditional blue-collar work being carried out by machines, but also work that requires specifically human capabilities. In the coming years, for instance, the self-driving car will turn the transportation sector on its head.
This revolution in productivity can be seen as good news, since machines will do our traditional work and we can dedicate our time to education, care, hobbies and services. Also, new technologies and the availability of huge amounts of data allow us to optimise the planet’s scarce resources. However, there is no guarantee that the increase of wealth will be spread over the inhabitants of the planet with any criterion of equity. There is a real risk that the ownership of machines will be reduced to a small number of people and that the great majority of the world’s population will be left without the means to generate an income.
Most countries in the world have seen income inequality rise during the last decade, in part because of the technological revolution. Economic data (Link 1) show that since the year 2000, the western economy has invested more in technology and less in human capital. This strategy has endowed innovative entrepreneurs with more benefits, without creating more jobs or raising average incomes. The generated wealth went to a tiny minority. Wealth accumulation can come if you already have financial capital and know how to invest it, but if you depend on selling your skills in the labour market, it becomes more difficult to make a living.
When looking at the data of the concentration of wealth, there isn’t much margin for many interpretations. There are 62 people in the world that are as wealthy as the poorest half of the global population. In the US, the middle class is endangered; in the period of economic recovery between 2009 and 2013, the top one per cent of the population was assigned 25 times more of the national revenue than the rest (Link 2).
Many people feel that they are being excluded from the labour market, and they are aware that they have little chance to win the race against the machines. The solution is to learn to work ahead with technology and to think about a strategy to create wealth together, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an expert in information economy (Link 3).
“We are in full transformation towards the society of the 21th century, and the outcome is still open: either with shared prosperity, or, at the contrary, with more inequality. This decision depends on our individual choices and on our strategy as a society. The power is in our hands. Technology is merely an instrument,” Brynjolfsson said.
RECONCILIATION OF POWER AND POLITICS
Image still from ‘In the Same Boat’
The dominant political debate today doesn’t pay much attention to the digital revolution we are experiencing, and mainly focuses on creating favourable conditions to stimulate companies to create as many jobs as possible.
This way of thinking conforms to the paradigm of the second half of the 20th century, when we got used to the idea of ‘full employment’, explains sociologist Zygmund Bauman (Link 4). In our social consciousness, the normal situation is to be in employment and a person that is ‘un-employed’ does not fit this normality. However, in the new technological world, the techniques of the past don’t seem to work, and a solution for the structural problem of unemployment hasn’t yet been found. In Europe, 8.5 per cent of the active population has no job, with significant regional and age variation (Link 5). The situation in Greece and Spain is the most alarming.
According to Bauman (Link 6), we don’t know how to regain control over our economic system because it operates on a global scale: “With just one click on a computer, a company can decide to move 100.000 jobs from here to another part of the planet where labour conditions are more interesting,” he asserts, “Capital and finance move without restraints, but labour does not.”
Looking for solutions, citizens turn to the political class who ultimately can’t influence the economic decision-making process. “They have a local sphere of action, mainly at the level of the nation-state, but power is organised on a global scale and escapes from political control. This divorce between power and politics is the essence of the problem of our society in transformation”, says Bauman, who considers it is a task of all citizens to reconcile both (Link 7).
For the first time in human history, all inhabitants of the planet are interconnected and are interdependent. If we want to resist the populist and protectionist wave that is extending over the globe after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, we must think about different ways to organise work and to distribute wealth. Several experts insist that we should radically rethink the foundations of our society and they propose an open dialogue to come to sensible solutions.
WE ARE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT
The documentary “In the Same Boat” made a momentous effort to open this debate and to project the voices that invoke a new paradigm. Zygmund Bauman, Serge Latouche, Tony Atkinson, Mariana Muzzucato, José Mujica and many others explain why the current labour model has hit a dead end. With a cinematographic style, spectacular photography and a varied musical palette, the film is fresh and inspiring, even whilst dealing with such a weighty subject as the future of humanity.
Zygmund Bauman considers the message of ‘In the Same Boat’ the complete antithesis of Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan ‘TINA’; claiming that “There Is No Alternative” to the liberalisation of all parts of society as it is the only way to guarantee welfare. On the contrary, the polish sociologist proposes to “change the course of the boat that all inhabitants of the planet are in”. He believes that the new paradigm of the 21st century should cut the ties between income and work. “We should abandon the idea of working to make our living. We cannot condition the right to live to the interests of the company we work for,” he argues (Link 8).
The documentary proposes a universal basic income as one of the solutions to fair wealth redistribution. It is not considered a charity for the misfortunate, but rather a technological dividend of the past — a common right. Mariana Mazzucato (Link 7), an economist specialized in technological innovation, explains that “innovation largely depends on public financing and on a collective effort. Moreover, innovation today is a heritage of discoveries of the past.” In other words, what makes your smartphone smart (battery, GPS, Internet, mathematical algorithms, touch screen, etc.) are no individual or private inventions, but are the result of the effort of society as a whole with publicly-funded research programs. Why is it then that the benefits of this technological heritage go to just a privileged minority? How can it be justified that the cost and the risk of research is burdened by the public, but the rewards are privatised? If technology allows us to delegate work to machines due to the effort of many generations, wouldn’t the legitimate heir be society as a whole?
The film has arrived at the precise moment to put the current economical and institutional crisis into a wider perspective. Hopefully it can help to spark a global debate about the necessary societal changes.
“In the Same Boat” was released in Spain in November 2016 and will be screened in other countries during 2017. Members of the Basic Income Network that want to organise local screenings can contact the team on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/inthesameb.
Included is the trailer of the documentary and the presentation with Zygmund Bauman, talking about the future of work. Barcelona, February 2016.
About the author:
Bart Grugeon Plana works as an investigative journalist for the Barcelona based newspaper La Directa, and collaborates with other news platforms such as Apache.be and Ouishare Magazine. He has a special interest in common-based peer production, collaborative economy, platform cooperativism and energy transition.
Trailer In the Same Boat
Interview with Zygmund Bauman
Link 1 the great decoupling
https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling
Link 2 US inequality
https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/107100.pdf
Link 3 Brynjolfsson
https://raceagainstthemachine.com/
Link 4 Bauman
https://www.socialeurope.eu/2013/05/europe-is-trapped-between-power-and-politics/#
Link 5 EU unemployment
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics#Unemployment_trends
Link 6 Bauman
https://wpfdc.org/images/docs/Zygmunt_Bauman_Living_in_Times_of_Interregnum_Transcript_web_I.pdf
Link 7 Bauman
https://directa.cat/actualitat/zygmund-bauman-ordinadors-poden-fer-nostra-feina-essers-humans-serem-redundants
Link 8 Mazzucato
https://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/
by BIEN | Jan 10, 2017 | News, Testimonies
Interview by Scott Jacobsen
*Conducted via email with minor edits.*
You write on the future of work. What is the future of work? Where will humans find meaningful and fulfilling lives with or without work?
The future of work will see continued technological pressure on the paying jobs that humans do. This will change the nature of work, it will eliminate many jobs, and create some new ones. Humans will continue to do the things that only humans can do well — being creative, imaginative, empathetic, playful and social — and do less of the things that machines can do better than us. That will include everything from building things, digging things, and driving things, to researching and data crunching.
People are already involved in much meaningful work, and that meaningful work is not always their job. Sometimes it is, however, and the loss of such jobs — and therefore meaning — from people’s lives will be difficult to deal with. What we have to ensure is that people are financially supported even if they don’t have a job so that they can continue not just to exist but to engage in work that is meaningful to them. We have to destroy this notion that you are only a good citizen if you have a job: before it destroys us. I have enormous faith in our ability to find meaning even in a world where technology does a lot of the jobs we do now.
Your new book, Why the Future is Workless, describes a workless future. One powerful collective force (aside from potential nuclear catastrophe and climate change) looms into the immediate future: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Your book is about technology, and the social and political effects of such technology in a world after work. What probable outcomes will emerge from the Fourth Industrial Revolution by 2025 and 2045?
We’ll see not just a change in the nature of work but in social relations. Services will replace products, something that has already happened with movies and music. This will likely happen with cars too, amongst other things. People will look to have experiences rather than to own things. Many everyday things will become cheaper, almost to the point of being free: zero marginal cost, as the economists say. Technology will get smarter and we will move from dealing with the web via direct questions typed into a search engine to talking with the tech on an ongoing basis, as we are seeing with services like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Whether this will all be a boon or a burden for people will depend on how we deal with these changes politically. We have to make choices to create a fair world: it won’t just happen.
What is happening now, especially with things like Amazon Go?
We are seeing the start of a lot of this stuff already, as with Amazon Go. So we are right at the bottom of the change curve, entering a change of era, not merely an era of change. The real change will happen when powerful, cheap processors are embedded in things — fridges, sidewalks — and they are all networked. It will be a different world. Again, though, it’s important to stress: this might be heaven or hell, depending on how we handle the politics.
How can automation and machines release human beings from the drudgery of hard labour, whether physical (open to the elements) or mental (repetitive, simple tasks)?
They will make things cheaper and more ubiquitous. We will move from scarcity to plenty. Technology will turn products into services. It will create enormous wealth. The question becomes: how do we distribute that wealth, especially if a lot of paying jobs disappear.
How do you propose to deal with growing inequality in the world?
Via a reinvention of distribution. We will need taxes on global financial flows and the implementation of systems that require corporations to stop freeloading off the social wealth created by governments and citizens (this is an idea put forward by Yanis Varoufakis). Corporations will be required to provide a percentage of their capital value as a kind of common stock, revenue from which is then distributed to all of us, probably in the form of some sort of basic income. We will also need shorter working hours, without loss of pay or conditions.
Neoliberal economists assume the creation of new jobs as a given, but you disagree. That is, some neoliberal economists assert ‘if jobs go, they will come back’ – while you think this is not necessarily so. Why?
The nature of the economy is changing. We are shifting from scarcity to plenty, from industrial to knowledge, and from long working hours to short. In such an economy, we simply don’t need as many people doing things — jobs — as we did in the past in order to create the stuff we need. Sure, there will be new jobs, they just won’t need many people to do them. We already have huge populations surplus to the requirements of the economy (as the economists say) and they are refugees, prisoners, the unemployed, the under-employed, and the 800 million people subsisting in the slums on the edges of some of our great cities. Paid employment is already becoming a really bad way of distributing wealth and we should stop pretending that the jobs will “come back” and make everything all right again. We have to come up with a better idea than “jobs”.
This is the Korean version of the text.
by Hilde Latour | Jan 8, 2017 | News
At the party’s congress on December 17th, members of Dutch political party Green Left (“Groen Links”) were given the opportunity to vote on amendments to its election program. This document will be released soon, in advance of the country’s parliamentary elections, which will be held on March 15th, 2017.
In the draft version of the election program, a basic income was only mentioned as a possible means to reform the social welfare system.
Two amendments concerning a universal basic income (UBI) were voted on at the party’s congress:
- Implementation of a UBI
“Green Left supports the (eventual) implementation of an unconditional basic income for everyone, high enough to live decently from. Unconditional economic security will lead to possibilities for a fairer distribution of paid jobs, caregiving, volunteer work and income. In addition to that, it will facilitate entrepreneurship. Starting point is that the lowest incomes will not decrease and the basic income will be co-financed through progressive income taxes. Existing additional financial support for citizens in specific circumstances can continue to exist.”
- Experimenting with a UBI
“Implementation of a national representative experiment of a universal basic income, to be conducted on a large-scale and over several years, aimed at a better understanding of the effects on people’s behaviour.”
Before the voting took place, the board of the party advised members to reject both of the amendments, arguing:
“an unconditional basic income is a bridge too far, as an unconditional basic income uses tax money to support people who don’t need it”.
But the members decided differently: approximately 80% of those present, voted in favour of the second amendment: to start a nationwide experiment of a universal basic income.
The first amendment, concerning the implementation of a UBI failed in a much closer vote: 53% rejected this proposal.
“We now are working hard to make changes in the text of the election program and the definite version will be available soon”, Christel Kohlmann (Head Strategy and Information of the party) explains. It could not be confirmed whether the experiments would really be aimed at a UBI for everyone, however.
For comparison, the currently planned experiments in The Netherlands, although they will test elements of basic income, are not examining a representative sample of the entire population. The social security experiments expected to start this year, for example, will examine only a group selected from people currently receiving welfare benefits.
Green Left is now the second Dutch elected political party that is already in Parliament and now in favour of experimenting with a real UBI. (That is, its members are in favour, and with a convincing majority). The Party for the Animals (“Partij voor de Dieren”) is also in favour of a serious experiment with a UBI and has formulated that in their program. In addition to these two parties, sitting Member of Parliament Norbert Klein will participate in the upcoming elections with the Cultural Liberal Party (“Vrijzinnige Partij”). Klein is now in Parliament as an individual member, having left the 50plus party after the last elections. The Cultural Liberal Party is also in favour of research with a universal basic income, and has even produced a rough calculation on how a UBI should be financed.
Compared to the former elections, support for a UBI has clearly spread and grown in The Netherlands. More than 65.000 people already signed a petition and this number is still growing. In the upcoming month, more political parties will have their members voting for amendments to their party programs in advance of the upcoming elections in March.
Info and links
The amendments on a universal basic income can be found on page 75 of the Green Left congress paper (in Dutch).
The election program of Green Left can be found here (when ready and in Dutch).
Information about the upcoming experiments with social welfare can be found here and here (in Dutch).
THE NETHERLANDS: Party for the Animals wants Universal Basic Income to be investigated
[Hilde Latour]
NETHERLANDS: Debate about unconditional Basic Income in Parliament
[Hilde Latour]
Photo: Euro by Alf Melin 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Kate Mc Farland for reviewing this article
by Tyler Prochazka | Jan 8, 2017 | Opinion
While many basic income advocates concentrate on shifting government policy, some in the tech world are taking the fight into their own hands.
Cyrptocurrencies have the potential to dramatically disrupt the government system of fiat issued currency. When new money is created, some cryptocurrencies are planning to distribute the dividend as a basic income to its members. This is a very exciting time because cryptocurrencies are completely separate from the government and the more it becomes mainstream, the more people are investing in it. Many investors are looking to comprar bitcoin (BTC) for their long-term investments because they can only see the prices of the cryptocurrency to increase. Many are interested in investing in it, and instead of jumping straight in they are rightly researching some useful tips from xCoins and other online sites on how to invest in it properly, successfully and safely.
However, despite this positive potential outcome people are still nervous about doing it all digitally and with their money, luckily now there are VPNs that can be put in place here that can keep traders’ privacy safe and secure if they so choose to do it. It’s not just Bitcoin that’s making big waves in the crypto industry. Reading up online resources about investing in cryptocurrencies could be a good place to start. Someone looking to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum could also look up a few great review of crypto exchanges on the internet.
Duniter (formerly known as uCoin) is helping to push this monetary revolution. Duniter would evenly distribute all of the money created, potentially even on a daily basis, to add up to 10 percent growth each year.
One of the lead developers of Duniter, Gaël, said he was inspired by the basic income after the financial crisis in 2008, when he realized something was wrong with the global economic system.
“We needed a system that would let people create without having to prove to the institutions, be it the banks, or the state, that what they were doing was useful,” Gaël said.
The full interview can be found below:
1. What is your involvement in Duniter? What is your background?
My name is Gaël and I’m known as “inso” in the Duniter project. I am the Lead Developer of Sakia, a desktop client for Duniter networks.
I am an engineer in Software and Systems. I have been working as part of the Duniter team in my free time for 3 years. At the beginning, I was building the only client existing on Duniter network, so that advanced users could see and test it for real. I gave cgeek (the founder of Duniter) some feedback about his developments and the API (a set of functionality for the developers) of the Duniter network. Our goal at this moment is to help more developers to contribute to the project, by testing and working with us.
Apart from the technical stuff, I communicate about the project as much as I can on Twitter and diaspora (inso@framasphere.org). I translate our French articles into English on our blog. I try to explain what we are doing and why : what are the problems with modern money systems (debt-money, crypto-currencies, etc.) and what we are trying to fix by developing Duniter.
2. What inspired you to get involved in this project ?
I grew up with the Internet and I have always been passionate about the decentralized aspect of it.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit the planet, I suddenly realized that something was inherently wrong in modern economics. I discovered that if banks disappeared with their debts, the common money we were using would disappear with them. The banking system was too important — “Too Big To Fail”. At the same time, the Universal Basic Income was starting to become a real topic on the social networks. Automation was going to replace a lot of manual jobs really fast, what is called “Disruption” today. We needed a system that would let people create without having to prove to the institutions, be it the banks, or the state, that what they were doing was useful. Because if the society was not agile enough to adapt, social crisis were going to hit soon or later.
This is where I discovered the Relative Theory of Money (Here in French or here for a basic English translation). This theory describes a money which is issued by every individuals, using a symmetric distribution in space and time. It means it is decentralized and growing regularly. There is no one who has the power of money issuance on others. It understands the fact that nobody can definitively say what is valuable, and so it is respectful to what humans want to do with their own life.
A first crypto-currency project began, called Open-UDC. But it was complicated and I did not understood exactly how it would work. This is were cgeek forked Open-UDC by creating what was called by then uCoin, now Duniter. He used technologies I could understand, and it was based on concepts which were proven to work (Web of Trust, Blockchains), so I was willing to work with him.
3. What is the goal of Duniter ?
The Duniter project wants to create a Libre Money, as defined by the Relative Theory of Money. A Libre Money is issued as a Universal Dividend, which is a percentage of the existing monetary mass, shared to all the money members. For a Libre Money to issue a valuable Universal Dividend, it will need a lot of users. We would like the first Libre Money to be issued by 1 million to 10 million users. So Duniter has to be easy enough to use and secure enough to be trusted.
4. How does Duniter work ?
The Duniter network is decentralized. It is using a blockchain to synchronize the money state across its nodes. As opposed to Bitcoin, there is no power race in Duniter. In Bitcoin, because of the CPU race, the power is given to the ones who own the more computing power. In Duniter, it is democratic; because every user is identified as a unique human, they can write in the blockchain in turns. Simply put, each node is associated to a member of the money. When a member writes data in the blockchain, he has to wait before being able to write again. This is what ensures that the blockchain does not end in the hand of a few users, and that it does not burn too much energy.
To identify users, Duniter makes the choice of a self-regulated system by its own members. This is the Web of Trust. Each member can certify new users. When a user receives enough certifications and is not too far away from the existing members in the web of trust, he becomes a member.
For example, if I certified cgeek and that cgeek certifies you, your distance from me is two steps. This distance is checked with all the members of the Web of trust, and if it is below a given limit, let’s say four or five, you join the web of trust and start to issue your own Universal Dividend. Simple as that!
5. How much of a basic income does Duniter include for each member ?
Duniter issues around 10 percent of new money each year. This new money is shared to all the members. The rhythm can be faster: for example, we can issue every day 0.026 percent of new money, and at the end of the year, it will be a growth of 10 percent.
Ten percent is not a number chosen randomly. It respects the symmetry in time. If a new user join the Duniter network in 35 years, he will start to issue the Universal Dividend at the same speed as we did before. Ten percent is calibrated so that in half a human life, 40 years, you create the same share of the monetary mass as every members did before. One should not be privileged and create a bigger share of money during his life just because he joined Duniter earlier or later.
6. What are the reasons Duniter is utilizing a basic income and how did the team first get introduced to the basic income concept?
I think most of the team discovered Basic Income before reading about the Relative Theory of Money. One of the biggest debate within basic income community is “how much should we give to individuals?”
The Relative Theory of Money demonstrate that to consider individuals equals and free, a money has to be issued symmetrically between individuals, in space and time. It means that it has to be issued by a Basic Income called Universal Dividend.
Yoland Bresson (an early advocate and participant in the Basic Income Earth Network), who wrote the preface of the Relative Theory of Money, is the author of the theory of “Time-Value”. Interesting enough, both theories, applied to the euro-zone, result in almost the same Universal Basic Income amount.
Another interesting thing is the Theorem of equivalence between a Libre Money and a Universal Basic Income. This demonstration states that a Universal Dividend, based on money issuance, is strictly equivalent to a Universal Basic Income based on a tax with a lower issuance rate of money. Basically, issuing 10 percent of new money each year is strictly the same as issuing three percent of new money and taxing seven percent of every accounts. But the Occam’s razor principle states that the simpler a system is, the better. The Universal Dividend is really simple: no taxation is required, no administration is necessary to check for the redistribution. It is only about issuing new money. And it is strictly equivalent to a Universal Basic Income! You can analyze on the website of cuckooland how it works (in french).
7. How many members does Duniter currently have and what is the utilization rate? What have the trends been so far?
Our current testing money is issued at the rhythm of 10 percent per day. This is huge because we do not want this money to take any value: we are just using it to test Duniter network. This money currently has 200 members. This is pretty good for a test. We have seen a growing interest for Duniter recently. In France we are doing events every six months to work on Duniter and find new contributors. More and more people are coming each time, so this is really encouraging.
We will start a new test money at the beginning of January, called “GTest”, and then the first real money, calibrated at 10 percent growth a year, will be started. We expect a lot of people to register at this time. For the first time in history, we will be able to create our own Universal Basic Income without having to wait for governments and banks to understand its importance!
by Kate McFarland | Jan 7, 2017 | News
Kela (the Finnish Social Insurance Institution), the government body running the nation’s newly launched basic income experiment, is hosting a live-streamed discussion of the basic income trial as well as the country’s long-standing maternity package.
On January 12, Kela will hold an event called “Socially Innovative Finland”, which will provide information about the country’s basic income experiment–launched on January 1, 2017, to much international publicity.
Maternity package, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Visa Kopu
The event will also include discussion of one of Finland’s existing social welfare initiatives: its internationally renowned maternity package, initiated in 1938, which provides all mothers-to-be with a package of child necessities, such as clothing and bedding (the box itself can be used as a crib).
Three members of Kela will speak:
• Olli Kangas (Director of Government and Community Relations): “Basic income – Part of tomorrow’s social security?”
• Marjukka Turunen (Head of Legal Affairs Unit): “How the basic income experiment works in practice”
• Olga Tarsalainen (Communications Specialist): “Finnish Maternity package – The best known brand of Finnish social security”
The event will take place on Thursday, January 12, 9:00-10:30 Finnish time (UTC/GMT +2), at Kela’s head office in Helsinki. It will also be broadcast live at the following page: https://videonet.fi/web/kela/20170112/.
Questions for the speakers can be submitted on Twitter during the event, using the hashtag #basicincome2017 or #maternitypackage2017. Questions may also be emailed in advance to Eeva-Kaisa Kivistö (firstname.lastname@kela.fi).
Complete details about the event are available from Kela: https://www.kela.fi/socially-innovative-finland.
Background: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment
On January 1, 2017, Finland launched an experiment in which 2,000 individuals will receive unconditional cash payments of €560 (about 590 USD) per month for two years. Test subjects were randomly selected from a pool of about 175,000 individuals between ages 25 and 58 and already receiving unemployment benefits from Kela, and those selected were required to participate. The main goal of the experiment, at present, is to determine whether unconditional cash transfers are superior to means-tested unemployment benefits with respect to promoting job-seeking and employment. However, Olli Kangas, leader of the research team behind the experiment, has recommended expanding the experiment to other target populations (including “other persons with small incomes” and individuals under age 25).
News of the experiment’s launch has been widely disseminated through international media, although some reports seem misleadingly to suggest that the Finnish government has actually decided to implement a basic income (or a basic income for the unemployed), despite the fact that the Finnish government is merely testing the policy, with any decision to implement a basic income for its citizens awaiting the conclusion and analysis of the experiment.
The latest information about the study can be found on Kela’s “Basic Income Experiment 2017-2018” webpage: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/basic-income-experiment-2017-2018.
For additional background on Finland’s basic income experiment, see these previous reports in Basic Income News:
Kate McFarland “Basic Income experiment authorized by Parliament” (December 18, 2016)
Kate McFarland “Kela’s report on Basic Income experiments released in English” (October 15, 2016)
Kate McFarland “Legislation for Basic Income Experiment Underway” (August 25, 2016)
Article reviewed by Danny Pearlberg
Cover Photo: Sunset in Helsinki, CC BY-NC 2.0 Giuseppe Milo
