by Kate McFarland | May 23, 2017 | News
Note: Please see this article for a more current update (Oct 15)
The (Second) Year of the Pilot
Status of Basic Income (and Related) Experiments in May 2017
Last Updated: May 15, 2017
BIEN cofounder Guy Standing, a basic income pilot veteran and now frequent consultant, dubbed 2016 “the year of the pilot“ in response to the burgeoning interest in experimentation with basic income in various countries throughout the world. In 2017, some of these pilot studies were launched, some have been delayed, and other plans have remained dormant. Some have turned out to resemble a full-fledged basic income to a lesser degree than first anticipated.
This page summarizes the current state of this year’s existing, planned, and previously announced basic income pilot experiments (as of May 2017).
A. UPDATES ON SEVEN STUDIES
Following are summaries of the present status (as of mid-May 2017) of seven pilot studies of basic income–or, better put, seven alleged or reported pilot studies of basic income–that have received international publicity within the past year, including projects in Finland, Kenya, the Netherlands, Ontario, Scotland, Uganda, and the United States.
First, though, an important caveat: although each project listed below has been described as a “basic income pilot” or “basic income experiment” in media reports, few manifest every characteristic of a basic income, defined by BIEN as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
Granted, any social policy experiment is by its nature limited in certain ways, making it something of a vacuous criticism to say that a basic income experiment fails to test a “genuine” basic income. While a basic income is lifelong, experiments are necessarily bounded in duration. While a basic income is universal, experiments typically require that a portion of the population not receive the benefit in order to provide a control or reference group. (Even saturation studies, in which every member of a community is eligible for the program, remain limited in that the basic income does not extend to other communities in the same general geopolitical region.)
That said, some of the most highly-publicized experiments and pilot programs diverge from a basic income in ways that are significant even after accounting for inherent constraints due to the nature of experimentation. For example, the target population might not be universal. (As described below, this is the case in the experiment currently running in Finland, as well as those planned in Ontario and several Dutch municipalities and, likely, the experiment under development by Y Combinator.) Additionally, the benefits disbursed to the treatment groups in some of the experiments–such as, most notably, those planned in Ontario and the Netherlands–diverge from some of the key attributes of a basic income, such as by being household-based or reduced with earned income. (As mentioned below, the treatment conditions in the Dutch experiments will even retain a degree of job-conditionality.)
I touch upon additional caveats at the end of this article.
1. Finland’s “Perustulokokeilu” (Basic Income Experiment)
Status: Launched on January 1, 2017.
The national government of Finland has enacted a two-year experiment to investigate the effects of a basic income on labor market participation, designed and directed by Kela (Finland’s Social Insurance Institution). The experimental group consists of 2,000 persons, who were randomly selected from a pool of individuals between the ages of 25 and 58 who were receiving unemployment benefits from Kela in November 2016 (about 175,000 individuals nationwide). Participation in the basic income program was mandatory for those selected.
The 2,000 participants are receiving unconditional payments of €560 (about 590 USD) per month. Unlike Finland’s current programs of unemployment assistance, the pilot program imposes no requirement that recipients demonstrate that they are seeking employment or accept jobs offered to them, and those who do obtain work will continue to receive the full €560. (Thus, while the sample is clearly not representative of all Finns, the individual cash transfers do match the definition of basic income, although not a fully livable one.)
The experiment was officially launched on January 1, 2017–with the first payouts distributed on January 9–and will continue through December 31, 2018.
The research group at Kela will compare outcomes in the experimental group to a control group, consisting of all persons in the original target population who were not selected to participate. As mentioned above, the analysis will focus on labor market participation, including differences in employment rates between the treatment and control groups. Research director Olli Kangas has stated in recent lectures that Kela will also monitor expenditure on medication, health care usage, and income variation.
To avoid observer effects, Kela is conducting no interviews or questionnaires during the course of the experiment, and will publish no results prior to its conclusion at the end of 2018 (despite recent rumors driven by exaggerated claims stemming from a single anecdote voluntarily produced by one experimental participant).
Kangas has recommended expansion of the experiment in future years (e.g. to test different models and broaden the target population); at the time of this writing, however, the government has not acted upon this recommendation.
Official website: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/basic-income-experiment-2017-2018.
2. GiveDirectly’s Kenyan Basic Income Experiment
Status: Pilot launched in one village in October 2016; full experiment (200 villages) intended to launch in fall 2017.
GiveDirectly, a US-based charitable organization, has initiated a project in which it will eventually provide unconditional cash transfers to the residents of 200 villages in rural Kenya (about 26,000 people in total).
An initial pilot study commenced in one village in October 2016, in which all 95 residents now receive monthly unconditional cash payments of about 23 USD (€21) per month, amounting to roughly half of the average income in rural Kenya. Payments will continue in this village for 12 years. At the time of this writing, only this initial “test village” is receiving a basic income. GiveDirectly’s current objective is to launch its full experiment in September 2017.
In the full study, 300 villages will be randomly assigned to one of four groups: three treatment groups, in which all residents receive some form of unconditional cash transfer, and a control group of villages in which no cash transfers are given to any residents.
In the first treatment group, which will include 40 villages, residents will receive cash payments of about 23 USD every month for 12 years (as in the initial test village). In the second, containing 80 villages, residents will receive monthly cash payments of the same amount, but only for two years. In the third, also containing 80 villages, residents will receive a lump-sum payment equal in amount to the two-year basic income. (Note that, ignoring their time-boundedness, the schemes implemented in the first two treatment groups do meet BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’.)
As GiveDirectly explains on its website, “Comparing the first and second groups of villages will shed light on how important the guarantee of future transfers is for outcomes today (e.g. taking a risk like starting a business). The comparison between the second and third groups will let us understand how breaking up a given amount of money affects its impact.”
The organization also indicates that it will investigate outcomes including “economic status (income, assets, standard of living), time use (work, education, leisure, community involvement), risk-taking (migrating, starting businesses), gender relations (especially female empowerment), [and] aspirations and outlook on life.”
GiveDirectly is making much of its data public as it collects it (e.g. responses to the first survey of participants in its initial pilot); this practice, however, pertains only to the pilot village, which is not itself to be included in the full experiment. The organization expects to publish its first experimental results after one or two years.
Official website: www.givedirectly.org/basic-income.
3. Ontario’s Guaranteed Minimum Income (“Basic Income”) Pilot
Status: Pilot studies scheduled to commence in two regions in spring 2017, and in a third region in autumn 2017.
The government of the Canadian province of Ontario is preparing a three-year pilot study of a guaranteed minimum income (commonly called in a ‘basic income’ in Canada), which will take place in three locations: the Hamilton, Brantford, and Brant County region (launching in late spring 2017); Thunder Bay and surrounding area (launching in late spring 2017); and the city of Lindsay (launching in autumn 2017).
A total of 4,000 potential participants will be randomly selected from a pool of low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 64 years who have lived in one of the three test locations for at least one year. Participation is voluntary, and those who do agree to participate in the experiment may exit at any time during the study.
Study participants will receive a minimum annual income of 16,989 CAD (€11,340) for single individuals and 24,027 CAD (€16,038) per year for couples. That is, individuals and couples with no external income would receive this amount of money. For participants who to earn additional income, the amount of the benefit will be reduced by the amount of 50% of earned income (entailing that, for example, single individuals will stop receiving any payment if their income rises above 48,054 CAD per year). Individuals with disabilities will receive an additional amount of up to 500 CAD (€334) per month.
The benefit is not contingent on work or looking for work. However, because the amount of the benefit depends on income and household composition, and because eligibility for the study is limited to low-income individuals, the program to be tested in Ontario is not a basic income in BIEN’s sense. (As mentioned above, the term ‘basic income’ is often used in Canada to refer to guaranteed minimum income programs, in contrast to the definition adopted by BIEN and common in Europe. The Ontario government is not being sloppy or dishonest in titling the program ‘Basic Income Pilot’; mere dialectical differences explain the ambiguity.)
According to the Government of Ontario website, the experiment will measure outcomes in a variety of areas, including food security, stress and anxiety, mental health, health and healthcare usage, housing stability, education and training, and employment and labor market participation. A third-party research group will evaluate data collected during the pilot.
Results of the pilot will be reported to the public in 2020.
Official site for more information: www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-basic-income-pilot.
4. Municipal Social Assistance Experiments in the Netherlands
Status (July 2017): Six municipalities approved to proceed with two-year experiments, which will begin in Sep-Oct 2017; applications from Utrecht and Amsterdam currently under review.
In 2016, research teams in several municipalities in the Netherlands developed plans to experiment with unconditional cash transfers to replace the nation’s workfare-oriented program of social assistance. However, their plans encountered resistance from the national government, which imposes constraints upon–and, in effect, prohibits–experimentation with unconditional benefits. (For example, the Dutch Participation Act would require that experimental participants be surveyed after six and twelve months to verify that they have made sufficient efforts to find work, and dropped from the study if they have not–effectively removing the “unconditionality” of the benefit.)
A pilot proposed in Utrecht, which had gained the lion’s share of attention in the English-language news media, has been delayed after the government failed to authorize the experiment as designed by the Utrecht University research team.
On July 3, 2017, the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs authorized experiments in the first five municipalities: Groningen, Wageningen, Tilburg, Deventer, and Ten Boer (read more). Groningen and Ten Boer will be working in collaboration.
A similarly structured experiment in Nijmegen, which is to involve 400 participants, was also approved later in the month.
In contrast the previously rejected design of an experiment for in Utrecht, the designs of the latter experiments were deemed to be in compliance with the requirements of the Participant Act. For example, each includes a treatment group in which participants are subject to workforce-reintegration requirements that are more intensive than current welfare programs.
In each of the experiments, which will run for two years, participants will be randomly selected from a pool of current social assistance beneficiaries (with participation voluntary for those selected), and assigned either to a control group or to one of several treatment groups.
Each experiment has at least three treatment groups, testing the following types of interventions: (1) removing reintegration requirements (e.g. job applications and training programs) on welfare benefits; (2) providing a more intensive form of reintegration service; (3) permitting participants to earn additional income on top of their welfare benefits. Subjects assigned to the third treatment groups will be permitted to retain 50% of additional earned income, up to a maximum of €199 per month, for the duration of the two-year experiment. In contrast, under current policy, welfare recipients are permitted to keep only 25% of additional income, and only for up to six months.
The Groningen / Ten Boer experiment includes a fourth treatment group, in which participants are permitted to choose to join any one of the three preceding groups.
It is not fully accurate to refer to the Dutch municipal experiments as tests of basic income. None includes an experimental condition in which the amount of the benefit is fully independent of either income or household composition (the existing benefits are household-based, which is not to be altered in any of the proposed experiments). Further, none of the proposed experiments includes a treatment that combines a reduction in the withdrawal rate of benefits with a removal of work-related conditions. And, as mentioned above, even those subjects who receive the “unconditional” payments will be subject to removal from the study after six or twelve months if they fail to seek work.
Researchers plan to examine outcomes such as employment (including part-time and temporary employment), education, and health and well being.
5. Eight’s Unconditional Cash Transfer Project in Uganda
Status: Launched on January 1, 2017.
In January 2017, Eight, a charitable organization based in Belgium, began disbursing unconditional cash payments in the Ugandan village of Busibi. All residents of the village, including 56 adults and 88 children, receive monthly cash payments, distributed via mobile phones. Each adult receives 18.25 USD (about €16.70) per month, approximately 30% of the average income of lower-income families in Uganda, and each child receives half of this amount, or 9.13 USD per month. The payments will continue through the end of 2018.
Used by permission of Steven Janssens
Eight is working with anthropologists at Belgium’s University of Ghent to examine outcomes along four main dimensions: girls’ educational achievement, access to health care, entrepreneurship and economic development, and participation in democratic institutions. Researchers will compare data collected during and after the pilot to data that were gathered before its launch. However, no additional village is being studied as a control, limiting the project’s usefulness as an experiment.
That said, Eight’s project has objectives beyond research. It is also the basis of a documentary, the first segments of which have already been release, and cofounder Steven Janssens has emphasized its larger purpose to inform future basic income projects: “From our experiences with this pilot we will learn and adjust where necessary, because in the long term we want to scale-up to more villages as our organization grows.”
Official site for more information: eight.world.
6. Y Combinator’s US-Based Unconditional Cash Transfer Study
Status: Design phase; no known launch date.
Sam Altman, CC BY 2.0 TechCrunch
In early 2016, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Sam Altman decided to pursue a privately-funded basic income experiment, motivated in part by the goal of moving away from a focus on employment effects and examining potential benefits of a basic income more holistically. To this end, he founded a research group at his company Y Combinator to design and implement the project.
In a February 2017 talk at Stanford, research director Elizabeth Rhodes explained that Y Combinator’s pilot is still in the design phase. As currently planned, it will use a stratified sample of 2,000 to 3,000 individuals from two states, between the ages of 21 and 35, with household incomes below the median in their area. At least 1,000 of these study participants will be randomly assigned to the treatment group, in which they will receive 1000 USD (about €915) per month for three years (with a subset receiving the payments for an additional two years). The payments will be given unconditionally and irrespective of income. The remainder of the sample will provide a control group.
The research group is also still in the process of developing metrics to evaluate the experimental results. However, Rhodes has indicated that experimenters are interested in a holistic evaluation of individual-level outcomes such as labor market participation, training and education, time spent with children, physical and psychological health and well-being, risk-taking, financial health, and help given to friends and family. Outcomes related to the children of participants (e.g. grades and test scores) might also be examined.
Y Combinator’s “pre-pilot” in Oakland, announced in May 2016 to media acclaim, is not itself an experiment; its purpose is merely to help the research team fine-tune its methods and procedures (selection of subjects, disbursement of payments, collection and recording of data, etc.).
7. Scottish Municipal Experiments
Status: Feasibility studies in progress.
In Glasgow, Scotland, the City Council has partnered with the think tank Royal Society of Arts (RSA) to investigate designs for a basic income pilot. The planning process, while moving forward, is at an early stage in development, with the Council and RSA currently working on a study of the financial, administrative, and constitutional feasibility of the pilot. Workshops on these topics will be held in June and July 2017, and a report is planned for September.
The Councils of Fife and North Ayrshire have also committed to investigate the possibility of conducting basic income experiments.
B. OMISSIONS AND FURTHER CAVEATS
Avid followers of basic income news (including Basic Income News) might have noticed that some previously announced pilots and experiments have been omitted from the above list.
Oversight, of course, is a possible cause: if a current or planned basic income experiment is missing from this page, please submit it to our Submit a News Lead form.
In some cases, though, apparently omissions may be intentional. Sometimes “basic income experiments” are announced in the media (1) prematurely, (2) when the experiment is not actually testing a basic income, or (3) when the project is not an experiment:
1. Not all previously announced pilot studies have come to fruition. For example, contrary to claims promulgated in news media and social media in recent months, neither the Office of Financial Empowerment of San Francisco, California nor the provincial government of Prince Edward Island, Canada is pursuing a pilot study of basic income at this time (primarily due, in both cases, to failures in attempts to secure funding for the experiments).
India has also occasionally been cited as a location about to launch a new basic income pilot study–or even about to implement a full-blown basic income policy (see the response in Basic Income News to rumors that circulated at the start of the 2017). To be sure, the national government of India has shown considerable interest in universal basic income, devoting an entire chapter to the topic in the 2017 Economic Survey, an annual document prepared by the Ministry of Finance. India is also notable in the basic income community for the success of previous basic income pilot studies. At the time of this writing, however, no firm plans for additional pilot studies (let alone a full-blown policy) have been announced, and any popular media reports of new pilot studies in India remain speculative and premature.
In general, one should be wary when the popular media announce the impending launch of a basic income experiment. Such announcements often frame the prospective studies as far more certain–and farther along in the planning process–than they actual are. Researchers and governmental officials might indicate interest in running an experiment prior to attempting to obtain funds or examining the legality or feasibility of the project, and sometimes such expressions of interest capture the ears of the media. Of course, such tentative interest does not entail that an experiment will ever actually manifest.
2. I have raised the second issue–the fact that many so-called “basic income pilots” or “basic income experiments” diverge substantially from tests of a genuine basic income–at the start of this article, and we have already seen examples above (including the Dutch social assistance experiments and the Ontario pilot).
Due to their relative lack of attention in popular media, I have not included reference to other social assistance experiments that have, on occasion, been inaccurately called “basic income experiments” — including those in Barcelona and the Italian town of Livorno. About the latter, a six-month social assistance experiment, BIEN-Italia’s Sandro Gobetti has clarified in Basic Income News, “Among the requirements [for participation in the experiment] was residency in the municipality for at least five years, unemployment status, registration at the employment center and a family income not exceeding €6530 gross per year. In exchange for €500 monthly, the municipality invited successful applicants to perform socially useful work.”
3. Finally, note that several non-profit organizations have launched projects that involve the distribution of unconditional cash transfers to individuals, but that are not experiments (although, in some cases, they might still be called “pilots”).
For example, Brazil’s ReCivitas raises money to distribute unconditional cash payments of 40 Brazilian Reais (about €12 or 10 USD) per month to residents of the village of Quatinga Velho, Brazil. In January 2016, the organization announced that the monthly payments would be lifelong, and began distributing the payments to an initial group of 14 individuals. However, the ReCivitas Institute is not gathering data to study the effects of basic income. Project leaders have stated that they are already convinced that basic income is effective, and that their goal is to provide a model and inspiration to other similar initiatives. The initiative might be considered a pilot, insofar as it is intended to provide information about how NGOs have effectively implement a basic income scheme; however, it is not an experiment.
Lottery programs that award selected individuals their own “basic income” for some length of time, such as Germany’s Mein Grundeinkommen, are also not experiments and should not be classified as such.
Most recently, a newly launched film project in the United States, Bootstraps, has begun raising money for what it calls a “basic income pilot program”. This effort also appears not to be an experiment but, instead, a similar lottery-style program, intended to generate anecdotes, publicity, and awareness of the idea of basic income rather than robustly test its effects.
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka. Some additional proofreading by Karl Widerquist, May 25, 2017
Cover Image: CC BY-ND 2.0 iT@c
by Karl Widerquist | May 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
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My books and research articles
Indepentarianism is the political ideology associated with the political theory called “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA). I (Karl Widerquist) defined JPA and outlined its theory of freedom in my 2013 book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. It argues that the promotion of freedom in a society with private property requires, among other things, an unconditional basic income in part, on grounds that it is wrong to put conditions on anyone else’s access to the resources they need to survive. A worker needs the power to say no—not just to any one job, but to all jobs—to enter the market place as a free person and not as a forced laborer. Although this theory is drawn from principles stressing freedom in the most negative sense of the term, it is not associated with theories that use freedom to justify economic inequality. It is committed to the idea that economic and politically disadvantaged people in every society are the least free and that the promotion of freedom in the most meaningful sense requires far greater equality of income, wealth, and political power; greater respect for political dissenters, better stewardship of the environment, and other policies. I am planning to layout the JPA theory of property rights more fully in a future book entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.
The name, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord,” comes from the belief that most prevailing theories of justice in political philosophy today are utopian in the sense that they ignore the problem of reasonable disagreement about the basic principles of justice. Social contract theory imagines all the reasonable, rational people in the world agreeing to a hypothetical social contract outlining what justice is. Anyone who doesn’t agree in practice can be dismissed as irrational or unreasonable. Natural rights theorists do not believe that justice comes from any hypothetical agreement. It is just whether anyone agrees or not, but they believe that any rational, reasonable person can discover the true principles of justice by observation and contemplation and anyone who doesn’t agree can be dismissed is irrational or unreasonable. Even the best philosophers are not good at recognizing the difference between reasonable and unreasonable dissent.
These utopian aspects of the leading theories have produced dystopian consequences. Philosophers have misled people into the belief that everyone shares in the benefits of modern society. No matter how disadvantage a person maybe, we are told to believe that they are better off because the government and the property rights system exist. The truth, as Grant S. McCall and I argue in our 2017 book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, is that our institutions harm people. Many disadvantaged people are probably worse off than their ancestors were 20,000 years ago.
JPA makes no statement whether there might be a theory of justice to which all rational, reasonable people should or would agree, but it is based on the belief that we are far from the point of discovering such a theory. A true accord exists only if all people are fully autonomous and all literally agree to the social contract or some other basic structure such as a set of natural rights. The essential political problem in the world today is severe disagreement between reasonable people about the most basic principles of justice. We must always pursue that accord, but we should be aware we are unlikely to reach it. Therefore, whoever makes the rules always forces them onto reasonable dissenters. The ruling coalition’s right to make the rules stems both from the agreement of the majority and from their effort to create the minimum negative interference with dissenters. This constraint, of course, requires the governments of the world to treat the disadvantaged and disaffected people of the world much better than they do now—including a payment by those who are most advantage under the existing structure to compensate those who are most disadvantaged under it.
The name, “indepentarianism,” stresses the central role that freedom as independence plays in JPA. The book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, argues that an individual’s status as a free person is best understood as “Effective Control Self-Ownership” (ECSO freedom, pronounced “exo-freedom” as in external-freedom). In essence: status freedom is the power to say no. An independent person is free from all direct and indirect force to actively serve the interests of others. You can tell a person: go do what you want over there, but if you make it impossible for them to do live as they want without serving some other group of people, you have taken away their status as a free person.
In this sense, most working people in the world are not fully free. If they had direct access to resources, they could hunt, gather, fish, farm, invest, or start a business or start some manufacturing venture by themselves or with whoever wanted to work with them. Instead, the rules of property create “propertylessness,” which in turn indirectly forces the vast majority of people to ask for a job from someone who controls enough resources to give them one. That is, it forces one group of people into become a subordinate of at least one member of another group of people—because we have robbed them of the power to say no to whatever jobs are on offer.
There’s nothing wrong with employment—as long as you choose it freely. Just like there’s nothing wrong with sex—as long as it’s not rape. A choice of bosses without the freedom to say no to all of them is not freedom from forced labor just as a choice of sexual partners without the power to say no to all of them is not freedom from rape.
One of the main reasons I defined indepentarianism as a new ideology is the lack of attention that most of the prevailing political ideologies pay to the injustice of indirectly forced subordination.
The book argues that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the best way to support ECSO freedom in the modern economy. But UBI support is not synonymous with indepentarianism. Someone could conceivably support indepentarian principles without believing they are best upheld by UBI or a similar policy. Although I hope all UBI supporters will have some interest in indepentarianism, I expect that most of them are not indepentarians. For example, one of the architects of the UBI movement, Philippe Van Parijs, argues for UBI on the theory of justice and/or the ideology he calls “Real Libertarianism,” which is based on very different principles than JPA.
JPA also differs from other political theories in its treatment of property rights in external assets: that is, assets external to the human body including natural resources and the things humans make out of them. Egalitarians tend to assume external assets are naturally collective property. Left-libertarians tend to assume that external assets should naturally owned individually in equal shares. So-called “libertarians” tend to assume external assets are natural unowned, but ownable by the first person to “appropriate” them by some procedure that tends to lead to highly unequal ownership. JPA assumes resources are “naturally” unowned and unownable. The only way to create a truly justice property rights system would be through a property rights accord, which is probably impossible. In the absence of that accord, the ruling coalition is always forcing a system of property onto reasonable dissenters. Therefore, they have to minimize the negative interference that their system of rights imposes on dissenters and future generations. This, responsibility, I argue motivates both a strongly egalitarian and environmentalist property rights system.
I plan to layout JPA property theory more fully in a future book, entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord. It will argue that this responsibility for an egalitarian property rights system requires a UBI high enough not only to maintain ECSO freedom but a UBI set at the highest sustainable level. However, I suspect that not everyone who agrees with the basic principles of indepentarianism will agree with this part of the argument.
I’m very interested in what people think—for and against indepentarianism. I’m especially interested to know whether there are other indepentarians out there. You don’t have to agree with all I’ve said here to call yourself an indepentarian. If you’re in agreement with enough of it to use the term, please say so in a comment. If you’d like to know more about it, please contact me at karl@widerquist.com. I am not interested in creating an echo chamber. I’m interested in respectful dialogue with people taking these ideas in their own directions. I’m also greatly interested in people who criticize any aspect of valetudinarianism.
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-Karl Widerquist, Begun in New Orleans, completed at Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, May 21, 2017
by Guest Contributor | May 19, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Conrad Shaw
There is an idea out there. It is of the transformational variety. It exists in various forms and goes by many names: universal basic income, basic income guarantee, negative income tax, citizen dividend. All of these monikers highlight important aspects of this concept. “Universal” because it applies to everyone with no conditional requirements. “Basic” and “guarantee” to emphasize that, rather than subsidizing luxury or ease, it’s about guaranteeing the right to simply live in dignity and security. “Negative income tax” to illustrate that tax structures can be understood and utilized not only as a way to extract money from the people, but also as a means of fair predistribution to those being underserved by our system. “Citizen” to encourage taking ownership of one’s community and obligations. “Dividend” to emphasize that it is not a form of charity, but a return on an investment, the rightful entitlement every one of us has to our proper share of this country’s resources and opportunities.
“A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
-Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)
This idea, if you haven’t heard of it before, is the simple premise that the government (composed of the people) would deliver a regular, guaranteed, and unconditional amount of income to every person in a society. Some argue that only citizens should receive it, some say legal residents, some suggest only adults, and some insist that every breathing human within the borders deserves the payment. There are valid arguments for all of these viewpoints, and I hope that soon enough we will have the good fortune of debating at great length these strategies on the national scale, because it will mean that the very premise has been accepted into our hearts and consciences as both essential and moral moving forward.
For that to happen, the idea must first inspire the support of the people as a whole, and because the United States is a nation of pride and marketing savvy, nothing sells here without a good, cohesive pitch. As a first order of business, we should settle on a name for our American version of this policy, and I have a suggestion:
The American Dividend
“American” because the only requirement is that you, in fact, are a part of this great country, and we will recognize that with your “Dividend,” your carried interest in the investment you and your family have made and continue to make in this country by merit of your participation in it.
On to the details. Perhaps alarm bells are ringing and red flags are waving for you right now. “That sounds like socialism,” you might point out. I freely admit that it is a socialistic policy, and I argue that an appropriate amount of socialism is essential in a successful and just society – even a capitalist one. We seem, in America, to cling to the naive idea that we can or should only have one or the other, socialism or capitalism. That idea has run its course; we must have both. Neither of these simple, broad ideologies is robust enough to run our complex economy alone, because our economy is not only one of markets, but also of human beings. Markets run by the laws of supply and demand, and are greatly motivated and spurred on by capitalism, the great incentivizer. A purely socialized, redistributive society in which all citizens received the same reward regardless of their contributions could squash the immense growth, motivation, and innovation that capitalism fosters. Human beings, though, survive and thrive by the natural laws of inalienable rights, defined and set out by and for ourselves as entitlements to which we are guaranteed by dint of nothing other than our humanity. Socialistic regulations are required to make sure we adhere to these natural laws. Healthcare, for example, must eventually be socialized and untethered from the need for financial means, because no supply and demand curve can fairly measure the value of health. The demand is infinite, because a sick or dying individual will agree to pay any amount for even a chance at survival. This is where capitalism fails. It eventually localizes far too much power in the hands of the few, the owners of property and corporations, and we find ourselves in a situation closer to extortion than free markets.
My argument even leaves aside our very significant problem with automation. As we continually and irretrievably lose massive chunks of our labor market to machines, these pressures toward economic inequality will exponentially intensify. Properly addressed, however, these same technologies could provide abundance to society rather than greater scarcity and insecurity.
The answer to the question of growing complexity in human and economic markets is not to throw away our hard-won structure as a total failure, but rather to keep tweaking the capitalism/socialism balance to calibrate it to the changing needs of the times. In determining what should be socialized, we can tie it all back into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Written deep within our American values, these freedoms are the inheritance of all people regardless of circumstance, be it race, culture, gender, age, or financial means. Life requires, at the very least, food, shelter, and health. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the ability to choose one’s path without fear of harm or retribution from any authority, and without fear of starvation. Our system has never fully guaranteed these things, and so we have not yet managed to fulfill our constitutional mission statement. The American Dividend can be used to ensure those rights. It can guarantee all people the ability to feed and house themselves as well as the power to say NO to any path in life that doesn’t serve their interests, be it a line of employment or an unhealthy relationship.
If we understand that we have always lived in a blended society of both socialism and capitalism, we can let go of our distrust of these words, our reflexive labeling of them as inherently evil or good, and instead see them simply as tools in the constant balancing act of governance.
Let’s address the two main sticking points the American Dividend will encounter: 1) the fear/resentment of subsidizing laziness by paying hard-earned money for others to sit around and do nothing, and 2) the very prudent concern that it might be simply infeasible to fund a program of such broad scope – essentially the fear that we can’t afford to guarantee these rights to all.
Paying for Sloth?
As to subsidizing laziness, this fear is created and nourished by a skewed perspective in the American capitalist culture that money is the driving motivator for work. We place the dollar on a pedestal far above all others, but money does not deserve this worship. The adage that money is the root of all evil is myopic. Insecurity is the root of evil, and money, or more accurately the lack thereof, is merely our means of expressing and comprehending insecurity. Whereas money is nothing but a tool, poverty is a force. It is the lack of freedom. Because we have been inculcated our entire lives with the idea that money represents value and merit, we have fallen into a misunderstanding of our fellow human beings. We have descended into the weary and preoccupied mind’s fallacy of “othering.” This is to say we have allowed ourselves to perceive the other members of our society as opponents, statistics, enemies, leeches, and threats to our own security. When we are in constant competition mode, we forget the other players for the sake of the game.
When we take the time to truly examine and understand our neighbors, compatriots, brothers, and sisters, however, we see that they are merely reflections of ourselves. We all have hopes and dreams; we all want to be special; we all want to contribute. The current system, which clumsily attempts to reward valuable effort but often disincentivizes hard work and ethics, leads people to despair and apparent laziness, sapping their motivation. In its current form, welfare assistance disappears the moment someone gets a job and increases their income, creating welfare traps. Additionally, other societally valuable endeavors like child-rearing, home healthcare, the arts, furthering education, and entrepreneurialism aren’t deemed worthy of any kind of salary in this economy. They can only be done on faith, at a loss, and at risk of harm to oneself. Throughout human history, a great majority of the movers and shakers of the arts, sciences, and business have had the luxury of pursuing their passions without earning an income from an employer because theyither came from means or they gained access to a benefactor. Wouldn’t it be something new and remarkable if those rich in inspiration and motivation but lacking an inheritance or extreme risk tolerance weren’t forced to spend years of their lives struggling to survive, seeking funding, essentially asking permission from corporations and the owner class in order to pursue the realization of their visions? With guaranteed security and the freedom to choose one’s work and define one’s value, people will contribute their best selves, and we can slowly change our national ethic from one of taking and hoarding to one of contribution. Productivity increases, health improves, and crime decreases in a society that chooses not to allow poverty, thereby permitting its members to be more effective versions of themselves. “Survival job” should not be a term, and a gun to the head is not nearly as effective a motivator in the long term as the ability to pursue meaning in life.
But the Cost!
Now comes paying for it all. Let’s do some simple, back-of-the-napkin, ballpark math for the numerically inclined. To immediately raise every American above the poverty line, we could provide a dividend of $12,000 per year to every adult and $4,000 per year to every child. That’s a bit under $3.25 trillion, which is certainly a huge number, but it’s not a direct expense. Think of it this way: the US GDP is approximately $18 trillion. If a simple across-the-board tax increase was levied on every American to raise that full amount for the dividend, a flat tax plopped down on top of our progressive system, that would mean about an extra 18% in taxes we’d each pay. That may sound like a lot, but since every taxpayer would also be receiving an extra $12,000 in income, then everyone making under $66,000 would come out ahead to some degree. At the $66K breakeven point, an individual would be paying $12K in extra taxes to receive the $12K in dividends. You can plug $66K into this US income percentile calculator and see that this represents over 75% of all Americans who would receive more money under this policy than they would give in taxes to pay for it, thereby directly profiting at the same time as we strive to completely abolish extreme forms of poverty and homelessness. That in itself should make the American Dividend a no-brainer.
However, a uniform tax levy like this is far from the only source of funding at our disposal. We could fund a large part of the American Dividend in many other ways. Taxes on the use of resources can chip in quite a bit. Taxes on carbon, pollution, minerals, timber, land value, and other natural resources acknowledge that we all own the land in equal share and would simply require companies profiting from and often damaging our commonly-owned property to repay the costs we bear by permitting them to do so. This would also discourage abuse of resources and incentivize more ecologically sustainable innovation. Very small taxes on financial trades would both reduce harmful speculation currently performed on a massive scale by large institutions with black box algorithms – encouraging long-term investment in its place – and it would acknowledge that we all own the financial system in this country and deserve a return from its continued function. Cutting tax exemptions that benefit the wealthy almost exclusively — scrapping the social security tax cap, raising unearned income tax rates to at least the level that earned income bears, cutting the home mortgage deduction, and a host of other such measures — would fund a significant part of the dividend. These measures are long overdue in any case and would represent a strong step forward against the economic injustice in our current system. Finally, raising the income tax rates on those in the very top brackets would acknowledge the fact that these earners have attained their position not only through intelligence and merit, but also through the good fortune of living within a system that allows for a few to leverage their positions to reap enormous returns — a system of laws, infrastructure, and opportunity that has been built over the course of generations, a system that each of us owns in part and deserves a share of. Factor in these methods, and we could pay for much of the dividend. As an example, if we paid for a third of the dividend this way (an entirely feasible amount according to the economists with whom I’ve spoken), it would bring the necessary tax increase down to around 12% and the break-even point to everyone making under $100K. Plug that into the calculator and see for yourself that more than 88% of the country would directly and immediately profit from the American Dividend under this scenario. Someone out of a job or unable to work would receive the full $12,000. Someone making $50K would come out $6,000 ahead. Someone breaking even at $100K will know that they are part of a stable system that will protect them should their fortunes turn for the worse. So, while it will end extreme poverty as we know it, the American Dividend is clearly not just for the extremely poor. It is for all Americans.
What’s more, we haven’t even factored in the savings yet. When people are secure, healthcare costs fall, crime drops, and entire welfare programs can eventually be phased out. This pushes the break-even point even further upward. This is not yet even accounting for the benefits reaped from fueling innovation and entrepreneurialism. Also, unlike the failed policies of trickle-down economics under which much of the money this country makes lands in wealthy bank accounts and simply sits there, money given to the lower classes is generally spent immediately on necessities and better quality of life, equating to a massive boost in the overall economy as businesses gain new customers across the board. It would be presumptuous to predict the actual magnitude of these windfalls, but I would bet you the American Dividend, in very short order, would begin to pay for much of itself.
Bear in mind this is not a panacea, and we mustn’t perceive or promote it that way. The American Dividend will not immediately usher in a new Utopian Age, and there will still be some that need help, but it has the power to effectively end catastrophic poverty and homelessness. It will grant all Americans a real shot at the American Dream. It will mean a simpler governmental system, a change of social and cultural ethics, and a betterment of individual quality of life across the board. And we have the means to do it. All we need is the political will of the people to stand up and demand it.
Give it to Me Straight
So tell me, if this idea of an American Dividend can: 1) end homelessness and catastrophic poverty, 2) establish and reinforce basic human rights and security across the nation, 3) improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs, 4) reduce crime, 5) encourage entrepreneurialism, 6) act as an economic stimulus, AND 7) result in an immediate net income gain for the vast majority of the population… tell me how can this idea not sell? How can it not sweep the nation? Tell me it’s not an issue of marketing savvy.
And tell me, now that you’ve seen my arguments about the wider economic implications, what would you do with your Dividend? Take a little time and play out the thought experiment. Now imagine what your brother, mother, sister, father, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, boss, coworker, employee, or passing acquaintance would do with it? What would each be able to contribute? What would your community look like? What would America look like?
It’s time for the American Dividend.
Check out our upcoming film, Bootstraps, at www.bootstrapsfilm.com
