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 BIEN | Dec 21, 2016 | News
While sitting in his favorite hotel lobby in Bucharest, Romania, Opdyke was looking at his phone for the news for the day, while waiting around for none other than his girlfriend. He found a (supposedly) “non-partisan” article, written by an economist funded by the Economic Policy Institute. In the article, the economist claimed “higher wages are the solutions to America’s expanding reliance on payday lending.” Later, he found another article entitled “This robot-powered restaurant could put fast-food workers out of a job.”
By Opdyke’s estimation, these “two theses are mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist…I can promise, it’s not the position held by the economist.” Opdyke said, “I can also promise that you and I will ultimately feel the repercussions in our paychecks and in our wallets…”
With machines able to create “perfect burgers,” the argument for a $15/hr minimum makes little sense to Opdyke. Human labour value for fast food will become obsolete in the near future. He considers the possible solution of paying a basic income to all adults (which he defines as a “minimum monthly income on which people can pay for their lives”), but he dismisses the idea as too expensive, at least without a drastic increase in taxes (which he does not seem to favor).
If you want to read more, please see here:
Jeff D. Opdyke (August 24, 2016) “Basic Income Will Kill the Economy“
by Tyler Prochazka | Dec 21, 2016 | Opinion
With the emergence of cryptocurrencies (digital money) as an alternative to traditional cash, there has been
discussion about how new currencies can be used to implement a Universal Basic Income.
Some crytopcurrency startups, such as
uCoin (now Duniter), automatically distribute a basic income dividend to all of its verified members, thereby slightly growing the monetary base but in an egalitarian way.
Author Duke Johnson said because they rely on internet and electricity, these digital currencies are not easy enough for mainstream adoption and as of now are not “appropriate for UBI.”
Johnson has a slightly different system in mind for a currency: Creator Currency Octaves. He has
written about how a Universal Basic Income of a “complementary currency” can “protect a currency from pitfalls of hyper-inflation” and has said it would also “put a real price on everything.”
He explains the complementary currency would be enough to cover basic necessities, but would also expire.
“Those who join a Creator Collective could accept active or expired Basic Bucks as rewards (and of course dollars/euros/gold/whatever) but depending on the level of their work and their individual Creator Octave, they would be able to exchange Basic Bucks for dollars at an elevated level, say 1.5x or even 4 dollars for 1 Basic Buck,” Johnson said.
“This would put both a supply and demand onto Basic Bucks into any system, without negatively altering the primary currency, and still providing incentive for people to work for collective projects and do great innovative or artistic work.”
For Johnson, the push for this new system is about making a fairer society.
“I want to participate in a fair system, where children don’t starve, and I’d like to see poverty eliminated in my lifetime,” Johnson said.
The full interview with Duke Johnson can be found below:
1. You said in “CurrentSea X-Change” that “A function of UBI would put a real price on what everything”. What did you mean by this, and how would basic income accomplish that?
For UBI, I feel financial freedom is true independence, and of course, with freedom, that which UBI could provide, people will be free to follow their passion instead of a paycheck.
When I mention that this system could put a real price on what everything is truly worth, including time, I’m speaking to the affect that manufactured scarcity places upon economics, where the current central banking system has far too much influence on what things cost, as opposed to what they should cost. One example, in the USA, the average price of a house in the 1970s cost ~8k hours of minimum wage work. Today, the average price is ~45k hours of min wage work. Therefore, a generation ago, life was affordable, but today low income people can typically only get by with debt and/or government assistance.
2. How would a basic income challenge our current economic system and expose its “flaws”?
If people didn’t have to work for housing/food/utilities, would they still be willing work a 40-50 hour/week job to afford, say, a new car every 2 years? If not, the car companies would likely lower their prices. Similarly, people would be in a better position to refuse jobs they dislike, therefore the cost of all labor would balance upon what people deem fair compensation, as opposed to what they’re forced to accept due to desperation in the current system.
Some other flaws UBI could expose in the current systems are the problems with disproportionate “making vs taking.” Today, Wall St. investors typically don’t actually make anything, except everything more expensive. If Creative Currency Octaves came into play, the people being rewarded would be the artistic creators and developers within a collective, as opposed to people making millions and billions from interest/dividends/ownership.
3. What is the appeal of implementing universal basic income?
Poverty elimination is the best reason to introduce UBI, and when people don’t have to work to support a family, that reduces stress from a population, which in turn could free people from the chains of debt servitude. I also argue that placing property ownership back into the people’s hands and away from institutions, would have a major balancing affect on communities in a positive way.
4. What is your view of cryptocurrencies as a way to distribute basic income?
As far as crypto-currencies go, I’m in favor of new ways to transfer money online that are secure and takes power away from central banks, however BlockChains rely on electricity and a functioning internet connection, which is a potential downfall. When people can buy lunch on the go as easily with BlockChain as with cash, then there will be a monetary revolution. Ultimately, mainstream money transfer is all about ease, which is why cash is king and credit/debit cards are more prevalent today. Of course it takes millions/billions of investment and decades to implement what visa/mastercard/debit cards have achieved in safe payment solutions, but again cash is the simplest for everyday purchases. BlockChain may become easier for large transactions than card/bank services, and of course cash can’t be transferred online, so I think BlockChain will prove it’s worth to the masses in the near future, though I don’t think it’s appropriate for UBI, unless as an option to be offered instead of, say, a monthly reloaded debit card.
5. What appeals to you about basic income and how did you get interested in the movement?
In conclusion, my efforts are focused on UBI through generating awareness of the system I’ve put forth- Creator Currency Octaves and a UBI of a complementary currency- that both protects the primary currencies and provides an incentive for workers/creators to innovate and still participate in the economy.
In my view, this system:
1) negates all arguments against Basic Income
2) can’t be claimed as unfair, because it works for all citizens
3) is the best way to introduce UBI into an existing monetary system
4) balances economic power away from profit-above-all institutions and towards a creative, innovating, and artistically eager populous
5) can eliminate poverty
It’s my goal to help create a future where college grads follow their passion as opposed to a paycheck, artists actualize their dream projects without a producer limiting their creativity, and people power trumps the power of financial desperation leveled upon communities like an economic weapon. I want to live in a city where parents don’t have to explain to their kids why people are homeless starving on the street in an era of exceeding abundance. I don’t want to enable those who inherit wealth to exploit those who have unmet basic needs. Ultimately, I want to participate in a fair system, where children don’t starve, and I’d like to see poverty eliminated in my lifetime.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Raising the Floor, the new work on basic income by former SEIU President Andy Stern, has made the Wall Street Journal’s list of top books from 2016.
Andy Stern resigned as President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), then boasting 2.2 million members, in 2010. In part, his resignation was driven by the belief that he had, as he says, “lost his ability to predict labor’s future”. Having left the SEIU, Stern embarked on a “four-year journey to discover the future of jobs, work, and the American Dream”.
By the end of this journey, he concluded that only a universal basic income could protect Americans against job disruption caused by new technology and the changing nature of work. Stern lays out this solution, along with a description of his journey, in his book Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, which was published in June of this year — almost immediately garnering much publicity in the media.
Now, Raising the Floor has been selected as part of the annual Wall Street Journal feature “Who Read What”, with reporter and author John Donvan choosing it as his book of 2016:
For a policy book by a union guy, Andy Stern’s cautionary prediction of a world without work is surprisingly haunting. “Raising the Floor” follows the former labor organizer through a self-education tour to meet and learn from the inventors, tech entrepreneurs and venture-capital guys pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. No Luddite, Mr. Stern is dazzled by the robots and the data-mining and the just-around-the-corner driverless cars. But he grows increasingly dismayed that almost no one leading this disruption gives much thought to the tens of millions of jobs that such innovations will destroy. And it’s not just cabbies and truck drivers at risk. Mr. Stern warns that doctors, lawyers, accountants, financial planners, teachers and many others will be vulnerable. He doesn’t want to stop progress, but he does want us to be ready for it when it arrives. His radical solution? It’s in his subtitle.
According to the most recent Cision data (2014), The Wall Street Journal is the third most widely circulated newspaper in the US.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Andy Stern photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Third Way Think Tank
by Kate McFarland | Dec 16, 2016 | News
Universal basic income (UBI) has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in India–including from the national government, with the Chief Economic Adviser having announced that UBI will be examined as part of the country’s next Economic Survey.
Within the government, UBI tends to be viewed chiefly as a way to overcome the inefficiencies and corruption that plague existing programs of social welfare. Some academic economists, including Abhijit V. Banerjee (MIT) and Pranab Bardhan (UC-Berkeley), have also emphasized the efficiency of UBI in comparison to India’s current welfare state.
One critic of this approach to UBI is Nimai Mehta, Academic Director of Global Economics and Business at Washington DC’s School of Extended and Professional Studies. Mehta maintains that UBI should not be seen only–or even primarily–as a way to make India’s welfare system more efficient, but should instead be conceptualized as a route to other reforms.
In an article published in October, Mehta argues that a UBI alone would not suffice to solve the most fundamental problems faced by the poor in India. Indeed, the adoption of a UBI could threaten to leave many worse off if the government were to take it as a license to make substantial cuts in its spending on health, sanitation, education, and other public goods:
Where entrepreneurship and job creation continue to face formidable challenges, and public sector failures in education, health and sanitation severely degrade the poor’s expenditure on human capital, a UBI will prove insufficient or even wasteful. This is not because, as many fear, the poor would spend it unwisely, but because, without wider reforms, the poor remain handicapped in their ability to “buy” themselves out of poverty, whether through entrepreneurship or investments in their human capital. Worse, a UBI handout could reduce the political incentive for these reforms.
Mehta proposes what he calls “UBI-for-reform” programs as a way to address further handicaps faced by the poor. Crucial to his proposal, these programs would be organized within individual Indian states rather than nationwide. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has preferred that states take the lead in initiating reforms, and has promised support for states undertaking difficult but important reforms. Thus, Mehta suggests that the national government provide money to a state to help fund a UBI for its residents, while making its renewal contingent on the state’s carrying out additional reforms aimed at, for example, improving educational quality and access, removing barriers to entrepreneurship, or helping laborers to find more secure and stable work.
Reference
Nimai Mehta (Oct 28, 2016) “A universal basic income to step up economic reform” Ideas for India; originally published as “A UBI to step up economic reform” (Oct 18, 2016) Mint.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Cover Photo CC BY 2.0 Trocaire
