by Andre Coelho | Feb 3, 2017 | News
Photo: Nick Pearce. Credit to: Bristol Festival of Ideas.
In this audio recording of a conversation, in front of a live audience at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on the 17th of November, 2016, Louise Haagh, Anthony Painter, Nick Pearce and Torsten Bell discuss the pros and cons of the basic income idea, chaired by Jonathan Derbyshire.
In this talk, Anthony Painter, the Director of the Action Research Center at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), starts by describing what he calls the “gig economy” (one economy driven by tasks, not by jobs). He also refers to the great changes in the distribution of work which are occurring right now, and in the relationships with intelligent machines. According to him, people are feeling increasingly uncertain and powerless, which generates stress. That is his first argument for basic income: it is an agent for freedom. He says politics for basic income must be based in solidarity, empathy and compassion, and that basic income should not be pursued as an end in itself, but as a test and a measure for the betterment of society.
Nick Pierce, professor of Public Policy at the University of Bath (and former Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research), goes on to say that he considers himself to be a “friendly skeptic” of basic income. He recognizes qualities in the basic income movement, led by many activists, who defend tackling problems with current welfare states and pursue a vision/trend for the betterment of society; not simply reacting to problems. On the other hand, he does not agree that basic income can liberate individuals (from entanglement with the State and with the market), nor that it can liberate individuals from work. According to Pierce, work is a way to gain personal fulfillment and, as such, looks at basic income proponents as “anti-work” in a sense. He also fears basic income might lead people to disengage from one another, hence he considers it a dangerous form of dependency, particularly towards the State (seen as a provider). Pierce also points out that basic income, as a policy, will be a result of the social forces that have forged the different welfare states, hence may differ considerably from region to region. He advises basic income advocates to consider all of these regional differences, in order to propose meaningful basic income strategies.
Louise Haagh
Louise Haagh, as Reader at the Department of Politics in the University of York and co-Chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), replies that basic income is a “natural outgrowth of social democracy”. This comes despite Haagh’s agreement that, in fact, the basic income movement has failed to detail the implementation realities of basic income around the world. However, she feels it has succeeded in getting basic income out of academia and into mainstream discourse. She also points out that other welfare features, such as public education and health, do not contain as many conditions as income support (e.g. behavioral conditions), but agrees that basic income should not be seen as a replacement for organized fulltime employment. Rather, they should be seen as a complementary feature to guarantee full citizenship. She also sees basic income as a small but crucial strategic element that enables societies to think about their development with a more long-term approach.
On the critical side against basic income, Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation, says that basic income interest has appeared due to two anxieties: robot anxiety (human jobs are being “eaten” by machines) and Left Existential anxiety (real wages stagnate or dropped, plus support for the traditional Left is fading). However, he perceives this interest as waning progressively. Bell is convinced basic income is not going to happen in the UK, reasoning that robots are systematically underperforming compared to their human counterparts, and that there have never been more jobs in the UK. Moreover, he says, statistics show that part-time jobs are not rising, or have not been, since records have existed. Bell detaches the United States case from the European reality, stating that what is happening in the former is not likely to happen in the latter, and equates basic income to higher taxes and higher poverty. He further reasons that it makes no sense to give a basic income to rich people, and that generally the public does not like the idea that “you should be paid not to work”. Finally, he disagrees with a political organization system where an elite at the top own the robots and make all the money, which is then redistributed to everyone else (assumed idle).
Replying to criticisms, Anthony Painter underlines that the world of work is getting more precarious, less paid and more insecure; hence something – like basic income – must be done about it. Contrary to Torsten’s assertion, he highlights that basic income advocates usually justify basic income as a way to validate work, giving people the opportunity to contribute to society in a meaningful way. He also points out that any basic income implementation cannot possibly surpass the already tremendously bureaucratic welfare state in the UK, so it is only bound to reduce it. On the other hand, Nick Pierce disagrees that basic income is waning, but agrees that politicians are constantly searching for “big ideas” to hold on to. Finally, Louise Haagh agrees that fortunately the basic income idea is not defended on a pure philosophical ground anymore, but instead has progressed to a more hands-on, practical approach. As Nick, she also disagrees that the notion of a basic income is waning, judging from the daily activity at BIEN.
Listen to the full conversation:
Bristol Festival of Ideas, “Basic Income – An idea whose time has come?”, in association with the Institute for Policy Research and the University of Bath, November 17th 2016
by Genevieve Shanahan | Feb 1, 2017 | News
The World Economic Forum has published an article on unconditional basic income (UBI) by prominent advocate Scott Santens as part of its 2017 Annual Meeting, commonly referred to by its location, Davos.
Santens’ article explains the concept of UBI for newcomers and tackles common reservations and misconceptions. Responding, for instance, to those who argue that it is wasteful to provide a UBI to those who don’t need it, only to recoup this amount in taxes (as prominent economist Thomas Piketty does in a recent blog post), Santens draws an analogy with seat belts. He claims that, while it could be said to be similarly wasteful to install seat belts in the cars of drivers who never crash, “we recognize the absurd costs of determining who would and wouldn’t need seat belts, and the immeasurable costs of being wrong. We also recognize that accidents don’t only happen to ‘bad’ drivers. They can happen to anyone, at any time, purely due to random chance. As a result, seat belts for everyone.”
Beyond defending UBI against such practical critiques, Santens encourages imaginative thinking about its far-reaching implications, outlining some aspects of its transformative potential: “UBI has the potential to better match workers to jobs, dramatically increase engagement, and even transform jobs themselves through the power UBI provides to refuse them.“
The World Economic Forum is a nonprofit foundation, “committed to improving the state of the world” through public-private cooperation. Its flagship annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, recently included a panel on basic income, featuring Guy Standing, cofounder of BIEN.
Read the full article here:
Scott Santens, “Why we should all have a basic income“, World Economic Forum, January 15, 2017.
Reviewed by Dave Clegg
Photo: Davos, Switzerland, CC BY 2.0 TravelingOtter
by Guest Contributor | Jan 30, 2017 | Opinion
“The UBI Bait and Switch” by Bruenig, Jauhiainen, and Mäkinen: A Critical Response
By Otto Lehto, political economist, King’s College London; former chairman of BIEN Finland (2015-2016).
A recent article in Jacobin Magazine on the Finnish UBI experiment is mostly an accurate and well-researched piece of journalism. I was especially impressed by its fastidious attention to detail in its account of the timeline of events leading up to the experiment. However, as someone well-acquainted with Finnish UBI experiment, allow me to bring another perspective on the matter. Jacobin Magazine has all the right to be as firebrand leftist as it wants to be. No question, the rhetoric of the commentary is in line with its socialist ethos. But I would just like to point out a few things that are inaccurate or misleading.
I, too, have written about the government’s proposal in harsh and unforgiving tones in the past, so I really can’t fault them for that. The experiment, let us not mince words, is badly mangled, expert advice is ignored or distorted, and the government coalition’s commitment to any form of basic income is half-hearted, with the gracious exception of a few MP’s. The narrow focus on reducing unemployment and increasing workforce incentives is unfortunate. It becomes tragic when one realises that this ideological agenda drowns out the human rights perspective.
But this is where it gets tricky to fully agree with the Jacobin article’s apocalyptic spin. It describes the current experiment as a “UBI-as-workhouse nightmare”. Now hold on a minute. A workhouse is a place where you must work in exchange for basic amenities. This is a preposterous description of the UBI proposals and experiments underway today. Even under the most critical lens, the (partial) UBI model under experimentation in Finland, while obviously targeted too narrowly and with too many exclusions, significantly reduces the “workhouse nightmare” nature of the benefit system.
What are we to make of the conundrum? It would be useful to separate the general political ambitions of the Sipilä government and the UBI experiment itself. The Sipilä government has an admittedly “schizophrenic” attitude towards basic income. While, on the one hand, it is committed to seeing through the UBI experiment, it is simultaneously, via other channels, pushing for stringent workfare conditionality. These draconian practices – nonsense baked in the tears of unemployed people – are truly deplorable, even from the point of view of austerity itself, i.e. even if one believes the anti-Keynesian line that one must balance the budget when national output is down. The proposed and enacted cuts are disproportionately hurting poor people, relative to the cuts affecting the mid income and high income sectors. The richest people have even been given delicious tax cuts, while students, pensioners, sick people, disabled people and others have suffered.
All that is worth criticising. Some other enactments of the government, like drastically deregulating the opening hours of stores, or shaking the stiff and moribund government monopoly on alcohol sales, I personally find most welcome developments. But all things considered, the general direction of the austerity program, and the government’s attitude towards poor people, leaves a lot to be desired. But I would argue that one shouldn’t judge the UBI experiment on this basis.
I will concede that the general ethos of the Sipilä government certainly permeates the parameters of the experiment. The limits of the experiment were decided after the 2015 elections. The result is a predictable beast built upon the sorrowful soil of a Protestant work ethic that fetishises work incentives and bemoans the metaphysical sinfulness of laziness. It involves the misguided and conscious exclusion of people who are either too old or too young, or who are not currently recipients of the mainline unemployment benefit. This distorts the experiment from the start.
But here’s something to consider. The only people for whom the current UBI experiment is a significant welfare-reduction are people who fulfill all of the following criteria: 1) they happen to be long-term unemployed, 2) they happen to be taking part in the UBI lottery and 3) they happen to have received a slightly higher level of benefit from the state in the past. The diversity of benefits in Finland translates to a diversity of levels of income security, with some people relatively well-off while others receiving pennies (if anything at all). The universal UBI level of approximately €560 can be a reduction to people who have received approximately €650 in the past. The UBI is topped off with housing benefits and other types of discretionary benefits. But a few will obviously be net losers in any equalizing scheme. This is understandable. But this hardly qualifies as a “workhouse nightmare.” In fact, the reduction in quantity comes with many obvious upsides that may or may not compensate for the marginal reduction in the absolute level of welfare income for some people.
Even with net-losers mixed in with net-gainers (in a yet-to-be-determined proportion), the proposed UBI model is an improvement over the current system in almost every respect: 1) it is given automatically and without hassle (for the duration of the experiment), 2) it provides a long-term safety net (a steady shower rather than a drizzle of sporadic benefits) and 3) it is not withheld from people who take up part-time or full-time work (thus improving work incentives). I will surely not need to enumerate for my audience the other well-known benefits of a non-utopian UBI system.
In fact, since the tax system hasn’t (yet) been reformed to account for the UBI system, those lucky participants in the experiment who find employment, full-time or part-time, will also gain significantly in terms of post-tax income. To this extent the experiment is arguably too generous. The tax system obviously needs to be reformed as well, since money doesn’t just grow on trees.
But there’s another thing. Some of the aims of the utopian left, as evinced by this piece, are just contradictory or confused. One cannot simultaneously call for more legal power to the unions, in the style of the old corporatist model of the Nordic welfare state, and to call for a truly universal basic income guarantee. This, however, is the paradoxical cry of the Jacobin piece, whose logic I simply cannot comprehend. The power of the unions has been traditionally very strong in Finland. This has meant, e.g., the legally protected collective bargaining of wages and benefits. For all the good this has brought to industry-insiders, this has meant very little for people outside the framework. It has created a natural opposition between “inside” and “outside” groups: the “insiders” being the members of the protection racket of the unions and the employer’s associations, who receive good and generous benefits, while the “outsiders” being all the other people that fall outside the “standard” model of employment. The insiders have received semi-automatic and hassle-free benefits for a long time, while outsiders have suffered from the “workhouse nightmare” of the discretionary welfare bureaucracy. The guarantee of a non-union-based unemployment and sick leave benefit scheme in the form of a UBI naturally chips away at the monopolistic power of unions to determine who deserves what, when and under what conditions. This is a good thing.
Out of the four demons conjured by the authors of the Jacobin article in the concluding paragraph – “forcing unemployed workers into bad jobs while undermining organized labor, earnings equality, and the welfare state” – the first one, about forcing people into bad jobs, is simply false (nobody is forced under the UBI system to accept any bad jobs, either de jure or de facto); the second one, about undermining organized labor, is actually a mixed blessing (since it actually helps “outsiders” gain benefits at a cost to “insiders”); the third one, about earnings equality, is something that the authors give no reason to think is threatened by the experiment (and indeed, it seems like a complete throwaway line); and the fourth point, about undermining the welfare state, is a tad question-begging.
The real question is, which structures should be reformed and which not. The existing welfare state has obviously failed in many ways to provide effective welfare for all people, and it is impossible to reform the system (for the better) without breaking a few eggs.
If the accusation is levelled at the other stuff the Sipilä government is doing, or the broken moral compass of the austerity crowd, the accusation sticks much better. But I have tried to show these should be kept separate. The UBI experiment is, indeed, severely compromised as a result of a confluence of factors. It survives, barely, within narrow ideological bounds. But the important thing is that the experiment tests the waters for a paradigm shift – slowly, ineluctably.
Even a compromised UBI marks a steady improvement over the status quo in almost all conceivable dimensions. And those are just the conceivable dimensions.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland
Photo: Finland’s “frozen waves”, CC BY-ND 2.0 Marjaana Pato
by Genevieve Shanahan | Jan 30, 2017 | News
The French Socialist Party has elected a pro-basic income politician, Benoît Hamon, as its candidate for the presidential election this spring.
Benoît Hamon, the left-wing politician who has gained considerable media attention in recent months for his basic income proposal, has won the Socialist Party presidential nomination. He comfortably beat rival and former prime minister Manuel Valls by 58.9% to 41.1%, after his surprise win in the first round.
“Universal basic income is a tool to liberate work, allowing people to actually choose their work and not suffer from it” Hamon declared yesterday in his speech to supporters after his victory was made official.
A centerpiece of Hamon’s campaign has been his universal basic income proposal, which he claims should be introduced step by step:
- Introducing, in 2018, a basic income without means-testing for those between the ages of 18 and 25.
- Raising existing unemployment and underemployment benefits (RSA) to 600 euro a month.
- Instituting a system of automatic payment of such benefits, to replace the existing system under which eligible persons have to apply (meaning that a third of those eligible do not receive their entitlements).
- Launching a citizens’ conference to determine the details of the basic income’s ultimate extension to all citizens, and increasing the payment to 750 euro a month.
Nicole Teke of BIEN’s French affiliate, the French movement for basic income (MFRB), said the following of the result: “This is a beautiful victory, not only for Hamon but also for the idea of basic income. This vote shows that hundreds of thousands of people want basic income to be at the heart of political debate. This is such progress when compared with the misunderstanding of the idea three years ago! The advocacy work carried out by the MFRB along with other associations has borne fruit today.” She highlights that MFRB have contacted all the presidential candidates, advocating for the swift introduction of basic income across the political spectrum. Basic income is proving to be a popular idea in France, as elsewhere, with the Senate just last October releasing a report calling for pilot projects to investigate the policy.
In explaining his reasons for adopting such a stance, Hamon focuses on arguments regarding the changing nature of work given advances in automation. In an interview with Le Monde, for instance, he states: “According to all serious studies, there are hundreds of thousands of unskilled or low-skilled jobs that are beginning to be destroyed in Western economies. We must manage this transition and make the most of this amazing opportunity that the digital revolution offers us to work less and live better.”
This proposal drew sharp criticism from the pro-business Valls, who (despite earlier statements) instead offered a “decent income” of 800 euro a month, targeted solely at the worst-off. This would involve simplifying the French welfare system, but maintaining means-testing.
Hamon’s success has been compared to that of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, as both represent a return to socialist values within parties that have been moving ever closer to the political center. Hamon’s platform also includes a tax on robots to fund the basic income, reductions in working hours.
Now Hamon will face a hard battle to win the presidential election against his rivals. The Socialist Party has lost a massive number of supporters under the mandate of President Hollande and is expected to be a big loser in the upcoming election.
According to the most recent polls, Hamon would only receive 15% of the votes, in fourth position behind Front National’s Le Pen (25%), Conservative Fillon (22%) and Centrist Macron (21%), but ahead of the radical-leftist Mélenchon (10%). This estimate is, however, much higher than earlier polls suggested, which had predicted Hamon to receive only up to 6% of the votes if he were to become the Socialist candidate.
The first round of the presidential election will take place on 23 April.
Read more:
Stanislas Jourdan, “FRANCE: Pro basic income candidate set to win socialist primary election“, Basic Income News, 22 January, 2017.
Thomas Samson, “Part-Sanders, part-Corbyn: how French socialist Hamon stepped out of the dark“, France 24, 25 January, 2017.
Pascal Guyot, “French left mulls universal basic income ahead of primaries“, France 24, 12 January, 2017.
Cédric Pietralunga and Bastien Bonnefous, “Benoît Hamon : « Le revenu universel est la nouvelle protection sociale »” [Benoît Hamon: universal income is the new social security], Le Monde, 4 January, 2017.
Mathilde Damgé et Adrien Sénécat, “Hamon-Valls : deux revenus de base, un même flou de financement” [Hamon-Valls: two basic incomes, a common haze on financing], Le Monde, 24 January, 2017.
Barbara Carnevale, “La proposition de revenu universel de Benoît Hamon” [Benoît Hamon’s universal income proposal], Le Mouvement Francais pour le Revenu de Base, 23 December, 2016.
Stanislas Jourdan, “FRANCE: Prime Minister Pledges Again to Open the Debate on Basic Income“, Basic Income News, 25 September, 2016.
“FRANCE: Senate Report Marks Another Milestone for Basic income“, Basic Income News, 23 October, 2016.
Additional reporting by Stanislas Jourdan
Photo: Benoît Hamon CC 2.0 Parti socialiste
by Kate McFarland | Jan 29, 2017 | News
Germany’s basic income political party, Bündnis Grundeinkommen, will be on the ballot for the first time in the federal state of Saarland, which holds state elections on March 26, 2017.
Founded in September 2016, the German political party Bündnis Grundeinkommen (“Basic Income League”) is devoted to a single issue: the establishment of an unconditional basic income in Germany.
Unlike Switzerland–which held a national referendum on basic income in June 2016 after campaigners collected more than the necessary 100,000 signatures–Germany does not allow national referenda. Thus, basic income supporters decided to launch a dedicated political party as a means to put the issue on the ballot in the nation’s federal elections, to be held on September 24, 2017.
The party achieved a significant step forward in January, when the election commission of the federal state of Saarland announced that Bündnis Grundeinkommen would appear on the ballot in the state’s election on March 26, 2017.
In a press release announcing the achievement, press officer Ronald Heinrich said:
Bündnis Grundeinkommen will be on the ballot [in] one of three electoral districts, but it is the first real test for the idea of basic income in Germany in an election. To fulfill the legal requirements in Saarland was a real stunt. The federal chapter was just founded six weeks ago, and to get everything sorted and done over the Christmas holidays is a huge achievement for everybody involved.
Ronald Trzoska, chairman of the party, added:
Every casted vote in Saarland for the basic income party in March will help to get the attention of the citizens towards the idea of an basic income. In September are the national elections in Germany. It is the great goal of Bündnis Grundeinkommen to get the word of basic income spreading on over 45 million ballots, and we are eager and confident to get the job done.
To date, Bündnis Grundeinkommen has established chapters in 11 of the 16 federal states of Germany, with the other five in progress. Along with establishing chapters in each state, the party must collect 23,000 signatures to be admitted to the national elections. Signatures are being gathered in each state in which Bündnis Grundeinkommen is established.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan and Dawn Howard
Image: Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany; CC BY-NC 2.0 Wolfgang Staudt
