by Andre Coelho | Jul 19, 2018 | News
Alexander Solovyev, Dimitriy Sarayev, Sergey Vladimirovich Khramov and Irina Soloveva
This Basic Income Conference moto was “Let’s win poverty in Russia together!”, and it took place in Moscow on the 26th of June 2018. It was organized by the combined efforts of the activist organization Basic Income Russia Tomorrow and the Moscow Communists (members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), which also invited leaders from the Trade Unions of Russia (Khramov Sergey Vladimirovich, General Labor Inspector) and the Russian Land Charity Fund (Baldanova Zinaida, Chairman of the Board of Trustees). The Conference main purpose was to debate around issues related with poverty, and how to solve it within the Russian context, while having present the best international examples on the subject.
The two organizing groups took the opportunity of this Conference to announce they would join forces and dedicate more time and effort, together, to reduce poverty in their country. Participants also seized the moment to criticize the government on its decision to raise the retirement age. This, according to them, will degrade the standard of living of all, increase the total number of poor people and spread social discontent across the whole country. A particular statement by the youth branch of the Basic Income Russia Tomorrow was made, as the organization is now determined to make reducing child poverty a priority for its activities. Finally, participants generally called out to all citizens, weather individually or in public or private organizations, to be alert and participate in a society-wide discussion about poverty and how it can be reduced in the 21st century, helping to build a fairer Russian society for the years to come.
The Conference was divided into four main themes: Poverty, Pensioners, Child Poverty and Labor Relations Reform.
Poverty, a theme delivered by Alexander Solovyev (council chairman of Basic Income Russia Tomorrow), was portrayed as destroyer of citizens and the State, degrading health, security, confidence, initiative and promoting the growth of crime. According to Solovyev, Russia has no right to have poor citizens, being so rich in natural resources. Therefore, he argued for the implementation of a US$ 500 per month individual and universal basic income, financed by the State’s revenue with natural resources, which should be shared with every citizen in the country.
Dimitriy Sarayev spoke about pensioners, who are in Russia, according to him, socially unprotected citizens. This situation is only made worse by the unilateral decision by the Russian government to raise the retirement age, which is thought to be justified by a need of this government to cut spending. Sarayev says this will also raise unemployment, as people unable to retire will stay on the jobs longer. According to him, raising the retirement age, if any, must be accompanied with proper healthcare and higher pensions, which is the exact opposite of what the government is doing.
As for child poverty, Irina Soloveva expressed her extreme concern about the high level of child poverty in Russia. She defends basic income as a necessity for children, first and foremost. Irina also refers the US$ 500 per month per person basic income allocation, as “a reliable foundation for their future life, [to] give children freedom and financial security, reduce the level of crime and corruption in the country, [which] will enable the country to develop”.
This Conference, and its focus on basic income as the single most important strategy to reduce poverty in the country, comes at a time when, for the first time in Russia, “public and political organizations began to unite to address the problem of poverty in Russia as a whole, including child poverty”. That is particularly important when in public discussions around poverty, in Russia, the term “child poverty” is completely omitted by state officials and the press.
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 18, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. It is, I think, the first article I published anywhere. I reproduced it here, because the original piece is not online.
Someone asked me to write about sports, but I’m like I don’t play any sports, I ride a bike, but that’s not a sport, that’s transportation. A sport is a physical activity that you do for fun or for a challenge. I don’t think that my bike riding qualities because I use my bike almost exclusively for transportation, but there’s sport to it.
The city is just the right size to ride a bike. Almost everywhere I go is less than 20 minutes by bike, twice as fast as by car and a lot quicker than public transportation. The city would be the perfect place to ride a bike, except it sucks. But, it only sucks because all those people who don’t realize that it’s the perfect place to ride a bike and insist on driving cars. Cars are too big and dirty for the city. Parking is impossible, they create traffic jams, and make the air really disgusting. Half the city has been plowed under to make extrawide streets and free parking spaces for cars, talk about government handouts. Still there’s not enough room for all the cars, but they keep driving in. At least they make biking sporting. My friends think it’s too scary to ride a bike in the city. But, to me, “scary” is walking home late at night risking violent death; risking accidental death trying to squeeze between two buses, that’s “sporting.”
Taxis are the worst, the natural enemy of the bike. They’ll honk at you for the crime of being in front of them. Then they’ll pass you and stop right in front of you with no apparent sense of irony. You can try is to get way over to the side of the road — typical rookie mistake. This saves you from getting honked at by people in a hurry to speed up to the red light in front of you, but it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of mishaps you can’t get in the center of the road. You can get driven off the street by cars making right turns, or buses and taxis stopping to pick up people, and, sooner or later, you’re going to get doored. One night a guy opened a taxi door right in front of me and clipped my handle bars. “Are you all right?” Next thing I knew I was lying face up on the pavement. The driver and the passenger both got out and stood over me, the passenger said, “Are you OK?” I was dazed and bruised and not quite cognizant.
“HOW ARE YOU?”
“I’m fine thanks.”
“He’s OK,” and they sped away.
Karl widerquist in the mid-90s
Pedestrians can make for sport. As the light turns they leave from both sides of the street. Do you try to get through the center before the two groups come together or do you go behind a group on one side after the last one leaves the corner. Pedestrians and bikers get along OK. You stay out of their way; they stay out of your way: no problem. Except, for the deer people. Most people know that if their crossing the street and they see a bike heading strait for where they’re standing right now, that if they keep going they’ll be well away before the bike gets there. Not the deer people. They walk right out into the street, and stop right in your path. You wouldn’t think a primate could be that stupid. But, dodging them is a sport.
This is not to say that there are not a lot o’bad bicyclists out there, there are. There are enough that I wouldn’t blame pedestrians for being scared. There was this guy who used to ride his bike in full football padding, helmet, face mask, shoulder pads, the whole bit, outside his close. I’d be stopped at a red-light, waiting for a break in in traffic to go. He’d zoom past me into a break I didn’t see. I don’t see him around lately. I wonder if he’s still alive.
Red lights, there’s a sport. To bicyclists every traffic law is a suggestion. I mean I try to stay out of everybody’s way, but if nobody’s comin’, I’m goin’, full speed. What’re they gon’a do, take your license away? This is safe, as long as you look, there is no risk to it at all, but it’ll kill me eventually. Like that scene in “Slaughterhouse Five” where the guy says, “I’ve seen my death, I’ve been there many times…” In Manhattan almost every street is one way. Parents teach their children to, “Look one way before crossing the street.” Sooner or later I’ll be looking left when the cross traffic is coming from the right and I’ll be on the grill of a garbage truck.
Simply standing at red lights is its own sport, you try to balance yourself while you wait for a break. A bike can’t come to a complete stop and still stay balanced, the trick is to inch forward, pull yourself back, inch forward… You could stop and put your foot on the ground. There is no practical reason for balancing, it’s just a sport.
The most challenging sport in city biking is keeping it. Bike theft is incredible in the city, I’ve lost count of how many bike’s I’ve lost. Legend has it that thieves use liquid nitrogen to make locks brittle and easy to break. But, theft can be beaten. You got’a have the worst bike and the best lock. First I tried one of those U-locks that “guarantees” against theft. Quite the bluff, actually, they’re one of the easiest locks to break, you can’t make a claim unless the bike was registered, you have a police report, a receipt for the lock, a receipt for the bike, a recent assessment of the bike’s value, you have to recover the broken lock, and the guarantee is void in Manhattan away. I wonder if they’ve ever paid on one of those guarantees? Now I’ve got a five foot, double reinforced metal square link chain that weighs more and costs more than my twenty year old girls ten speed, purple frame, with florescent orange spray painted stripes. That heavy chain makes it a lot more difficult to get up those hills, but it’s worth it. Theft is not a sport, it’s just aggravation.
One big drawback of using your bike for transportation and sport is that you arrive everywhere right after your workout. You change close a lot. One summer I took a job as a bike messenger. The biking was great, the actual delivering the packages wasn’t so great. That summer there was this huge heat wave. One day it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity, and I had to take a package to the Chanel Perfume company on the 30th Floor of a Fifth Avenue high-rise. It looked like one of those banks that Dickens described in a Tale of Two cities, it had all this old looking wood everywhere, everything was extra-fancy. There was this giant bottle of Chanel No. 5 encased in glass. Of course, I’m dripping with sweat. I go up to the receptionist at a big oak desk she said, “I’m not signing for it, take it to receiving, on 31, one flight up.” I walk toward the Oak wood circular Staircase, “No, you can’t use the stairs, go back into the lobby and take the elevator.”
When I’m on my way back down, the elevator stops again on the 30th floor, a model gets in. She’s obviously just been shooting an ad. She’s wearing a long flowing black shoulder showing dress. I’m wearing shorts and a short sleeved shirt so soaked in sweat that you can’t tell that I haven’t just been swimming in the ocean with all my close on. I’ve accessorized with a clipboard and a messengers bag that’s held together with duct tape. She leans against the back wall and puts all her weight on her left leg as her right leg comes out of this enormous heretofore unseen slit in her dress. There are mirrors on all the walls and the door and the ceiling, so that wherever you look you see the beauty and swamp thing. She has long flowing light brown hair. I have sweat is flowing out of my crooked bicycle helmet. She shifts her weight. Her right leg disappears and her left leg emerges from another unseen slit. So I straightened my helmet.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 18, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
Barack Obama, for the second time, has favorably discussed basic income. In his Mandela Lecture, which included some hard-hitting remarks about the rise of strongman politics, Obama discussed the rise of automation and the difficulties it causes for workers. He finished that section of his speech with the following statement:
“It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. (Applause.) And so we’re going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we’re going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track.”
This speech comes two years after an interview in which Obama said, “[W]hether a universal income is the right model—is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people?—that’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years.”
Neither of these statements is an outright endorsement of UBI, and his most recent statement, talking about how jobs provide “dignity,” “structure,” uses language that opponents tend to use when they want to say that UBI isn’t good enough because it’s “just money.”
But yet, he brought up UBI on his own accord without any direct criticism of it. While the earlier statement says we “will” be talking about it for some time; the later statement says we “should consider” it. So, one can see some movement toward the idea. If nothing else, this statement is a strong reflection of the extent to which UBI has penetrated mainstream political thinking.
https://www.facebook.com/basicincomequotes/videos/1739996622785908/
by Jason Burke Murphy | Jul 16, 2018 | Opinion
Interview with Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang
By: Jason Burke Murphy
[Note from Jason Burke Murphy. This interview took place on June 11th, 2018. Yang took time out of one of his presidential campaign rallies and fundraisers to speak with me. I describe the rally in US Basic Income Guarantee Network’s blog. After I stopped recording, he expressed his hope that supporters of basic income would get behind his campaign early. Andrew Yang was then, and still is as of this writing, the only announced candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.]
Murphy: How did you first hear about basic income?
Yang: I think I heard about it first for sure from Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots. I heard about it before then in articles but Martin Ford’s book made an impression. Andy Stern’s book Raising the Floor cemented the idea while coming from a different angle. Martin is a technologist and Andy is a labor leader. Stern’s book clinched it for me. I found myself coming to the same conclusion. Now basic income could no longer just be about technologists over-hyping the near-term progress of automation. Stern is someone who has a firm grasp on the labor market in the US.
Promotional for Andrew Yang’s book presenting his argument for Basic Income, Medicare for All, and “human capitalism”.
Murphy: How did friends and family react to your decision to run for President?
Yang: Oh, my parents were initially anxious and worried about it. Friends had a range of reactions. One cried tears of joy and has been immensely helpful. Others were skeptical. I will say now that support is very strong with friends and family. When you tell someone about a decision, they might react one way but when the decision is made in public, then they have a different attitude and stance.
Murphy: Joseph Biden, a possible candidate, has explicitly rejected basic income. It seems like other presumptive candidates have stayed quite distant. Why do you think that is the case?
Yang: I think in Joe’s case—and I read his comments—he is stuck in this framing of a subsistence model in which value is tied to showing up at an hourly waged job. His explicit argument for why basic income is a bad thing is that people need work. What he doesn’t realize is that universal basic income is pro-work. It is pro doing work that people actually want to do. Joe is stuck in an era when we thought that, if someone had a certain amount of money in their pocket, they would want to do nothing at all. That is an old welfare-era framework that I think was never true. [Laughs.] In Joe’s mind, that relationship is still there. Other Democrats are going to resist making commitments in this direction because they are afraid of being painted as “socialists” or economically unsophisticated. In truth, it requires a degree of economic sophistication to understand basic income and to see how it would be great for our economy and our people.
“Other Democrats in my opinion are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy… They do not realize that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Do you think as people hear about basic income, they are going to think more about economics?
Yang: What happens right now is that people are stuck in this scarcity mindset in which they ask how we can afford it. Won’t it cause rapid inflation? Won’t it make purchasing power go away? None of that is true! [Laughs.] So, other Democrats, in my opinion, are not sophisticated enough to understand the impact a basic income would have in the economy. They are stuck thinking that the money would be “gone” and we would need to “go get more of it.” They are not realizing that we would be channeling money back into our economy through the hands and the decisions of our citizens. The vast majority of the money would be spent in our regional economy every day. The Roosevelt Institute’s estimates that it would create four and a half million new jobs and grow the economy by two and a half trillion.
Murphy: I really liked that paper. For one thing, it is methodologically very cautious. For another, I liked basic income before I knew it would be that good.
Yang: Yeah, their projection was based on it coming from deficit spending and they posited a lower impact if it was paid for by taxes. Whereas, I am very confident that, simply by shifting money to the hands of the people most likely to spend, you would induce economic growth. One thousand dollars a month in the hands of a really wealthy person does absolutely nothing. It just becomes a line item somewhere.
Murphy: Money in the hands of the wealthy, if spent at all, goes into the streets that are already looking pretty good.
Yang: It just stays in someone’s account. When money goes to anyone in the bottom half of the US population then it will be spent on things that will manifest themselves in local businesses in the community.
Murphy: One of the reasons I support a basic income is that I grew up in Arkansas. A region like the Delta is invisible politically. I just know that very few other approaches are going to get anything down there.
Yang: That’s right. Virtually nothing else.
Murphy: If someone has a big plan for education and job training, I am not against those, but I doubt it will actually get to the neighborhoods I worked in there in Arkansas.
Yang: You are right.
Murphy: How are you looking to fund a basic income?
Yang: The main way we need to fund it is through a value-added tax. A VAT is an efficient way to raise revenue, it taxes consumption, which is what we ought to be taxing instead of something like work and labor. We are the only industrialized economy that does not use the VAT. We would be harvesting the gains of automation and new technologies much more effectively than income-based taxes.
Murphy: There are a few other proposals like a carbon tax or a tax on income above the one percent. What do you think of these other proposals that pop up?
Yang: I think some proposals try to finesse something that cannot be finessed. We try to find a way to fund a basic income without causing any pain or friction. I support taxing carbon and we will tax rich people. But we are talking about re-organizing the way that value is distributed in our society. So we can’t think that we can do that in some elegant way that leaves most people untouched.
[Note from Murphy: Yang’s platform also includes a financial transactions tax, which we did not discuss. There is also a call for an end to the current favorable tax treatment for capital gains and carried interest. That is not listed as funding for a BI.]
Murphy: Thinking of that, sometimes supporters present basic income as a reformist measure and sometimes others present it as a very radical transformation.
Yang: You can put me in the “radical transformation” category.
“Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: You are the first candidate [for the Democratic Presidential nomination] to announce. This is giving you access to curious people. I saw an article in which you were meeting with New Hampshire Democrats. That is a new crowd for basic income. How are these meetings working for you?
Yang: They are interested in what I have to say. Most of what I have to say revolves around the fact that we are going through the greatest technological and economic shift in human history. That is objective. That is data-driven. People find it very resonant. They sense that this is true. Most of our conversations are around what is happening with technology and labor and the economy and job polarization—all things that we are experiencing right now. One of the dangers of basic income right now is that it can seem like we are debating different versions of utopia. When we turn someone’s attention to the depth and breadth of our current social problems, we can talk about what can actually make a difference. The situation you saw in Arkansas is becoming more and more true for more and more Americans. May I give some of the stats that I feature in my book and in speeches?
Murphy: Absolutely.
Yang: Fifty-nine percent of Americans can’t afford to pay a surprise $500 charge. Our life expectancy is declining due to a surge in suicide. Seven Americans die of opiates every hour. Americans are starting businesses, getting married, and having kids at record low level or at the lowest in multiple decades. So, society is disintegrating and even very sick.
Murphy: We often use words like “self-employed” and “side hustle” for people who are…
Yang: Who are being exploited by a billion-dollar tech company that says “be your own boss” but pays you nickels on the dollar.
“We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards thing that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward.”
Andrew Yang
Murphy: Not long ago, we would hear people say that we need to choose between universal health care and basic income. Your platform simply has both. It seems like we are having a similar moment with a jobs guarantee. We keep hearing that we need to pick one or the other. It seems like many good people think that basic income crowds out something they are very concerned about.
Yang: That is an unproductive approach. We should not get lost in dueling utopias. If you are for universal health care, you should think about how much one thousand dollars a month will open up access to health care. If you care about gender equality and you want to see women avoid abusive workplaces and domestic situations—a thousand dollars a month could be vital. Let’s start with the cash because that will be the easiest thing to get done.
Opening page of Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign website.
Murphy: Your platform has multiple issues alongside basic income.
Yang: Definitely. I am all for single-payer health care and we can certainly do better with health than we are at present. That said, even after I win the Presidency, giving everyone cash will be easier to execute than universal health care. Andrew Stern points out that the government is terrible at many things but it is excellent at sending cash to many people promptly and reliably.
Murphy: Any ideas on how a basic income would affect foreign policy?
Yang: In the end, I think basic income will rationalize our spending, make us more optimistic, and smarter about our resources. Our citizens may end up less likely to want to lose a trillion dollars on military interventions worldwide.
Murphy: You call your worldview “Human Capitalism”. For some people “capitalism” refers to markets. For others, it refers to the domination of wealthy people.
Yang; First, I would agree with those who think that our current version of capitalism and corporatism is why our disintegration is happening. I am not a fan of continuing down this road. We have to reverse course as fast as possible. Reversing course, however, does not mean abandoning the things that have made capitalism effective. The problem is that our measuring sticks are all wrong. There are more effective ways to do things. Markets can help find the effective ways. We need to quit measuring everything based on GDP and profitability at the expense of human values. We should direct our energy towards the things that improve lives. The concentration of gains in the hands of a few is a toxic way to move forward. This is bad even for the so-called “winners” in society. Studies have proven that the winners in an unequal society are more anxious and depressed than the winners in a more equal society. This is enlightened self-interest. I can sympathize with anyone who thinks that “capitalism” is a dirty word. The first line in the description of human capitalism on our website is “Humans are more important than money.”
Murphy: Thank you for speaking with me between events. Is there any last word you want to make to readers?
Yang: I am hoping to get support soon from the basic income community. I have been campaigning for about four months. We are drawing from their ideas. We hope we can see them sign up because we need their support.
You may disagree with some item on my platform but I hope you can see that the direction and the spirit are right and that we can push a genuine conversation about basic income. We could really use their passion. We need a movement that recognizes that our community is disintegrating and that basic income is an essential answer. I hope that basic income activists can believe in this campaign.
Photo of Jason Burke Murphy (Left) and Andrew Yang (Right) shortly after this interview.
[Note from Murphy. Some portions of this interview were edited slightly for clarity as we moved from spoken word to written word. No content was altered. Thank you to Andrew Yang for taking time out of his campaign to speak with me. Thanks to Tyler Prochazka for proofreading.]
by Andre Coelho | Jul 10, 2018 | News
Picture credit to: The Conversation.
Approval of a universal basic income (UBI) has risen sharply in the United States. Karl Widerquist cites a 10-year-old poll showing that only 12% of Americans approved an UBI at that time. Now that number is 48%, according to a Gallup poll, conducted at the end of 2017 (on around 3000 adult US citizens).
The cited poll also shows that women show more support than men (52 and 43% respectively), age strongly correlates with that support (54% for youngsters from 18 to 35 years-old down to 38% for people with more than 66 years of age), education level also has an influence (51% for people with less than a bachelor’s degree versus 42% for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher), as well as political orientation (28% for republican voters up to 65% for democratic voters). That same report finds that 73% of Americans think artificial intelligence (AI) will suppress more jobs than those it creates, which might in part justify these results, compared to those 10 years ago.
However, Gallup’s poll shows that, for those in support of UBI, more than half (54%) wouldn’t be available to pay higher taxes in order to finance it. This is more evident in women (57%) then men (51%), and there is a strong educational effect: the higher the educational degree, the more willing supporters of UBI are to pay higher taxes to have it implemented (64% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher versus 38% for those with less than a bachelor’s degree). Democrats are also more likely (55%) to pay higher taxes to get UBI than republicans (29%). In spite of this result, 80% of all supporters think companies benefitting from AI should pay more taxes (than they do now) in order to finance the UBI policy.
This results for the United States are, in a way, similar to those from a recent survey in Finland, ran by researcher Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo. In the latter, support for UBI, based on the definition by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), was also very close to the 50% mark (51%), which clearly shows that the public remains divided when it comes to UBI. Not only in Finland, but also in the United States, even though the survey questions were posed somewhat differently in these two surveys (note 1).
Note 1 – in Gallup’s survey the exact question was “Do you support or not support a universal basic income program as a way to help Americans who lose their jobs because of advances in artificial intelligence?”. In the Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo survey there was no reference to jobs or artificial intelligence.
More information at:
RJ Reinhart, “Public split on basic income for workers replaced by robots”, Gallup News, February 26th 2018
Annie Nova, “Universal basic income: US support grows as Finland ends its trial”, CNBC, May 1st 2018
André Coelho, “Finland: Finland shares unconditional money, but the public view remains polarized”, Basic Income News, February 12th 2018
