BIEN Profiles: Karl Widerquist, former co-chair

by | Dec 3, 2016 | Bios & background Info

Karl Widerquist in 2014

Karl Widerquist was vice-chair of BIEN from May 2017 to August 2018, after serving as co-chair from October 2010 to May of 2017, and as a member of the executive committee from 2004 to 2010. He is a political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University-Qatar. He is the co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network, which he chaired from 1999 to 2008.

Widerquist is best known as an advocate of Basic Income. But he is also an interdisciplinary academic writer who has published in journals in fields as diverse as economics, politics, philosophy, and anthropology. He is a consistent critic of propertarianism (also known as right-libertarianism or libertarianism), Social Contract Theory, and the Lockean proviso. 8, and he cofounded in 2011. He has been a commentator on several television, radio, and print networks.

Contents

  1. Biography
  2. Advocacy of Basic Income
  3. Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory
  4. Other political and economic theories
  5. Bibliography
  6. Media appearances

Biography

karl-joshuahair-bigfile

Karl Widerquist as a grad student-musician in 1993

Karl Widerquist was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1965. His family moved to Cassopolis, Michigan in 1969, and he grew up there. He completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics at the University of Michigan in 1987. For several years Widerquist pursued both music and economics. He was the original bass player for Michael McDermott, and play in several indie bands in New York in the 1990s.[i]

Widerquist completed a Ph.D. in economics at the City University of New York in 1996, later working at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and the Educational Priorities Panel. He was a Hoover Fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain where he worked with Philippe Van Parijs.[ii]

Widerquist received a second doctorate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford in 2006, and then worked as a Fellow at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Since 2009, he has been an Associate Professor at Georgetown University-Qatar.[iii]

Advocacy of Basic Income

Widerquist claims to have been a supporter of some form of Basic Income Guarantee since he heard the topic discussed on an episode of Milton Friedman’s television show, Free to Choose, in 1980, when he was only 15 years old.[iv] But he did not start writing, working, or publishing on the topic until the late 1990s.[v]

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Michael A. Lewis, of Hunter College and USBIG

Widerquist has worked on Basic Income as an economist, a political theorist, a public policy analyst, and organizer. In 1999, Widerquist cofounded the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network along with Michael A. Lewis, Fred Block, Charles M. A. Clark, and Pamela Donovan. Widerquist chaired the organization until 2008 and edited its email NewsFlash until 2014.

Widerquist has been the co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2008. In 2011, Widerquist and Yannick Vanderborght cofounded BIEN’s news website, Basic Income News, and severed as its principle writer and editor until 2014, and he still writes for it occasionally. He and BIEN’s other co-chair, Louise Haagh chartered BIEN as a non-profit organization in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of BIEN’s activities.[vi]

Widerquist’s writing on Basic Income includes several articles reexamined the results of the Negative Income Tax experiments conducted in the United States and Canada in the 1970s.[vii] He and Michael Howard co-edited two books on Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, addressing it as a small model of a Basic Income.[viii][ix]

Michael Howard (holding umbrella) and Karl Widerquist in the rain New York in 2017

Michael Howard holding umbrella and Karl Widerquist in the rain, New York in 2017

He has been critical of the “reciprocity” or “exploitation” objection to Basic Income. Under these objections people who receive Basic Income without work are said to fail in the duty of reciprocity by accepting social benefits without contributing to their production and thereby they are said to exploit workers who do produce those benefits. Widerquist’s responses hinge on the distribution of ownership of resources, which according to him, violates the principle of reciprocity because the law gives ownership of the Earth’s resources to a limited group of people without compensation for the loss of the commons for others. Therefore, Widerquist argues, to be consistent with reciprocity those who hold resources must make an unconditional payment to those who do not.[x]

If this argument works, instead of violating reciprocity, Basic Income is required by that principle. Widerquist further argues that Basic Income, so conceived, does not not exploit workers because it does not matter how one gets control of resources (through work, inheritance, or any other means). What matters is that anyone’s ownership of resources must not be part of a system that imposes propertyless on others.[xi] The absence of propertylessness is important not only to ensure that the privatization of resources is consistent with reciprocity but also to protect all workers from vulnerability to exploitation by their employers.[xii]

This view of property rights as something that both protects owners from interference and imposes interference on nonowners is a running theme throughout much of Widerquist’s writing and his arguments for Basic Income. This idea is closely related to left-libertarian or Georgist views of property, which are based on the principles of self-ownership and some principle of equal access to natural resources.[xiii] Left-libertarians argue that this view of resource rights is more consistent with negative freedom than any other view because the establishment and enforcement of property rights inherently interferes with non-owners in very substantive ways and in a very negative sense of the term.[xiv]

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The first of two books laying out Widerquist’s theory, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.”

Widerquist does not endorse the whole of either of those theories of justice. Instead he presents his theory of justice as a separate ideology, which he calls “justice as the pursuit of accord” or “indepentarianism.” The central difference between this theory and more mainstream left-libertarianism is that it rejects the left-libertarian view that equal access to resources entitles people to an equal share of the market value of natural resources.[xv] Widerquist instead argues that disadvantage might be entitle to greater redistribution larger than what would be required to equalize the income generated by natural resources.[xvi]

He makes several arguments for this position, the most important of which is that respect for equal freedom requires that any legitimate authority protects individuals from the most substantively important interference. This principle, Widerquist argues, requires respect for individuals’ status free individuals, which in turn requires economic independence. They need access to enough resources to ensure that they are not forced by propertylessness to serve the interests of people empowered to give them access to resources. Widerquist calls this concept, “freedom as independence,” or “freedom as the power to say no.” He argues that respect for independence in the present socio-economic context requires redistribution to come at least in part in the form of an unconditional Basic Income and that it must be at least enough to meet an individuals’ basic needs. He also argues that Basic Income protecting vulnerable individuals from exploitation and other forms of economic distress better than traditional conditional welfare state policies.[xvii]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP4sBGbeF8w

Philippe Van Parijs at TEDx Ghent

Widerquist is not the first to recognizing the poverty effectively forces individuals to work in service to more advantaged individuals, nor is he the first to argue that Basic Income can relieve that effective force. The unique feature of his theory is the central role that it gives to “the power to say no” in an individual’s status as a free person.[xviii] This line of argument seems to have recently become more important to the movement for Basic Income with even Philippe Van Parijs, one of the movement’s long-term leaders, arguing along these lines in his recent TEDx Talk, “The Instrument of Freedom.”

Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory

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Prehistoric Myths, this book mentions Basic Income only once–on the last page

Widerquist’s criticism of right-libertarianism began in 2009 when he published both an encyclopedia entry on libertarianism and an article criticizing libertarianism. The article argues that the central principles that are meant to determine the just distribution of property in a right-libertarian economy can justify government ownership of the powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute property just as well as they can justify private ownership of property. It argues that there are no historical or principled reasons to believe that private owners holdings of their powers are any any better justified than government holdings of their powers.[xix]

Karl Widerquist began collaborating with anthropologist Grant S. McCall with the publication of two articles in 2015 and a book entitled Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy released in January of 2017.[xx][xxi][xxii] The book uses anthropological evidence to debunk claims in contemporary political theory. It shows how, since the 1600s, most forms of social contract theory and natural property rights theory—especially those in the propertarian or right-libertarian tradition—have relied on the false empirical claim that Widerquist and McCall identify as “the Hobbesian hypothesis. That is, everyone is better off in a state society with a private property rights regime than everyone is, was, or would be in a society with neither of those institutions. The book shows how this claim became a central feature in the social contract justification of the state with Thomas Hobbes’s publication of Leviathan in 1651. Very much the same claim entered property rights theory a few decades later when John Locke made the fulfillment of his famous “proviso” central to his justification of the private property rights system. The book shows how the Hobbesian hypothesis has reappeared throughout the history of political thought since then and that it continues to be passed on in twenty-first century political theory.[xxiii]

Grant S. McCall of the Center for Human Environmental Research

The book argues, few of the philosophers who pass on the Hobbesian hypothesis offer any evidence to support it. Early philosophers relied on the colonial-era prejudice that any civilized man must be far better off than any savage natives. Later philosophers have simply relied on how commonly this claim is repeated to give it the air of obviousness. Yet, it is not the type of claim that can be obvious. It involves a comparison between the least advantaged people in modern, capitalist states with people who live in small-scale, stateless societies very remote to most modern writes in time and/or in place.[xxiv]

Widerquist and McCall present several chapters of evidence making that comparison and showing that the Hobbesian hypothesis is false: contemporary society has failed to fulfill the Lockean proviso. The least advantaged people in contemporary state society are actually worse off than the remaining native peoples who live outside the reach of the authority of the state or the property rights system. Therefore, if either of the two theories is to successfully justify the state and/or the property rights system, societies have to treat their disadvantaged individuals much better than they do now—whether that be by providing a Basic Income or by some other means.[xxv]

Other political and economic theories

Widerquist coauthored a textbook entitle, Economics for Social Workers.[xxvi] He has argued that Piketty’s observation that the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the growth rate in the economy should be seen as an outcome of the institutional setting rather than as a natural law of capitalism.[xxvii] Widerquist has also examined the effect that relaxing public choice theory’s assumption of self-interested behavior. He shows that many public choice problems exist as long as political actors are rational and disagree about what government should do, even if their disagreement stems from adherence to competing ethical theories rather than from competing self-interested wants.[xxviii]

Although Widerquist’s work uses some sufficientarian assumption, he criticized other aspects of sufficientarianism.[xxix] He has done historical work examining the many different (and often contradictory) ways that Lockean appropriation theory has been interpreted and revised.[xxx] He has written critically about wage subsidies as a redistributive strategy.[xxxi]

Media appearances

Karl Widerquist has frequently appeared in print, radio, and television news networks, including:

Click here for an updated (hopefully updated) list of Widerquist’s media appearances.

Publications

Books

Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press

Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis, and Steven Pressman (eds.), 2005. The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate

Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Karl Widerquist, Jose Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere (eds.), July 2013. Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017

Journal Articles

Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401

Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part I” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (3): 749–757

Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part II” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (4): 1019-1030

Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278

Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81

Michael Lewis, Steven Pressman & Karl Widerquist, 2005. “The basic income guarantee and social economics,” The Review of Social Economy 63 (4): 587-593.

Karl Widerquist and Jurgen De Wispelaere, 2006. “Launching a Basic Income Journal” Basic Income Studies 1 (1): 1-6

Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis, 2006. “The Basic Income Guarantee and the goals of equality, efficiency, and environmentalism,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2 (1): 21-43.

Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464

Karl Widerquist, 2006. “The Bottom Line in a Basic Income Experiment” Basic Income Studies 1 (2): 1-5

Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339

Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72

Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103

Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26

Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480

Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44

Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90

Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.

[i] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html

[ii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu

[iii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu

[iv] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html

[v] “Selected Works of Karl Widerquist”, at works.bepress.com/widerquist/

[vi] “About BIEN”, at basicincome.org.

[vii] Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81

[viii] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

[ix] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

[x] Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401

[xi] Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464

[xii] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103

[xiii] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000), The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An anthology of historical writings. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

[xiv] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000b), Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave

[xv] Vallentyne, P. (2000). “Left-Libertarianism – A Primer,” in P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner, Eds.). Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave, 1-22

[xvi] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

[xvii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

[xviii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

[xix] Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72

[xx] Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44

[xxi] Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.” Analyse & Kritik 37 (2), August

[xxii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017

[xxiii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017

[xxiv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017

[xxv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017

[xxvi] Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press

[xxvii] Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90

[xxviii] Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278

[xxix] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480

[xxx] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26

[xxxi] Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339

Karl Widerquist in speaking in front of (a painting of) the Danish Parliament

Karl Widerquist in speaking in front of (a painting of) the Danish Parliament

Basic Income Interviews: Juon Kim

Basic Income Interviews: Juon Kim

by | Aug 14, 2016 | News, Testimonies

Juon Kim has been an organizer of Basic Income Youth Network in Korea since 2013. In March of this year, Juon ran for a proportionate candidate of Green Party Korea in the general election, representing the party’s UBI agenda. She’s currently a graduate student of cultural anthropology, and plans to write her MA thesis about basic income.

In this Basic Income Interview, Juon talks about how she came to learn about and support basic income, and why she is now an activist.

About 5 years ago, only a few people in Korea knew about basic income, including my friends. Since they were studying basic income, I became aware of it but was not attracted to it at first. But after reading two women’s books, I decided to live as a UBI advocate and joined the Basic Income Youth Network based in South Korea.

One book is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “It is necessary for women to have five hundred pounds a year and a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” It reminded me of basic income immediately. The other is Carole Pateman, a feminist political theorist saying that basic income could guarantee universal economic citizenship of women.

Juon Kim at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul

Juon at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul

When I was young, I dreamt of becoming a human rights lawyer. Many discrepancies in the society seemed to have been caused by law which is a tool only for the powerful. I entered university envisioning that I would stand in the forefront of social changes with the law as the tool for justice. I was even thinking of branding law firm ideas to increase my chances of being someone’s first choice to defend them.

But the university that I encountered back in 2010 was no more than a ruin. The gravity of making ends meet pulled heavily against my attempted search for friends with whom I would find solutions to the social ills. No time could be wasted if it wasn’t for career preparation, no space was available without fees, and ultimately no freedom to plan my life as I wanted was granted.

Fortunately, there were great classes and friends in and out of the campus. There were those who were being forcefully evacuated from the very place of their livelihoods in their cities, those who are taking their lives in their hands just to reclaim their lost jobs, and those religious figures, LGBT activists, disability-rights activists, grass-root activists and youth activists who fought against state violence and its forced militarization of Gangjeong village in Jeju island and forced nuclearization of Miryang in Korea.

I saw how they tried and worked to rebuild hope in their own respective communities. We met in support, delight and equality. I experienced happiness rising from others even amidst poor material conditions.

In our encounters I realized something. All of us who were dreaming of a better life, one that’s better than now, were in fact fighting against ‘dual poverty’. They fought against poverty of their own and simultaneously poverty of the world.

What I endured was not different from what they endured. It was in this moment I was introduced to the idea of ‘basic income’. I strongly related to its philosophy that the rights to eat and live should be guaranteed just for the reason that I am a constituent of this society.

What if the activists I met who suffered from dual poverty had basic income? What if my colleagues, women, youth and young adults, farmers, artists and seniors had basic income? What happens when there appears this gift called basic income in the Korean society, whose severe income bipolarization and winner-takes-all structures in all corners render all untrustworthy toward each other?

I imagined an alternative made possible by the hope called basic income to those who give up their lives or terrorize others’ lives because there cannot be a better tomorrow. Then I joined basic income movement because I wanted to imagine all these possibilities as one.

The ‘human rights’ that used to be so nondescript when I wanted to be its lawyer took shape as an economic citizenship, basic income. Basic income as the fundamental right for all humans. I hope it becomes a common sense to all everywhere in the world in the nearest future.

Photos used by permission of Juon Kim. (Cover photo: Juon promotes basic income at International Women’s Day, dressed as a suffragette.)

Juon wishes to thank her friend Heehe for translation assistance.

Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.

Have your own thoughts to contribute? Want to see yourself in a future Basic Income Interview?

Visit our interview form.

CANADA: Robert-Falcon Ouellette’s petition to study basic income marked by his own childhood

by | Apr 23, 2016 | Opinion

From the Basic Income Canada Network by , on March 29, 2016
Robert-Falcon Ouellette

Robert-Falcon Ouellette

As a youth growing up in Calgary, Robert-Falcon Ouellette remembers being inspired by the 1988 Olympics. Ouellette’s parents struggled financially, and his father was in and out of the picture. But his mother managed enough money so he could enjoy swimming at the City pool where he took to the water “like a fish.”

“I was there as much as possible – I just loved every minute of it,” says Ouellette, who is now Member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre.

“Until one day a coach spotted me and invited me to join the University of Calgary swim team.”

The coach talked to both Ouellette and his mother, but the cost was a couple thousand dollars per year. He remembers the coach telling his mom that her son had great natural talent which should be developed. But the financial barrier was too severe for the family. In fact, even the visits to the City pool for leisure swimming soon stopped, also for financial reasons.

“That was a real dream of mine,” says Ouellette. “I’m still marked by it.”

Ouellette, who has gone hungry before as a youth and even spent one summer homeless, says he is sure there are many stories like this that have played out similarly across Canada, many much worse than his. Persistent poverty and lost opportunities are the kinds of things he suspects would dramatically be reduced if Canada had a basic income.

A basic income guarantee can take different forms but it is generally understood to ensure everyone an income that is sufficient to meet their basic needs, regardless of work status. The rookie MP is determined to have empirical evidence of how such a social policy change might benefit Canadian families, by establishing basic income pilot projects in the country.

His determination to have data undoubtedly comes from his depth of education. Ouellette is something of a Renaissance man, with degrees in music, education, and a PhD in anthropology. He also has 19 years under his belt with the Canadian Armed Forces, retiring from the Royal Canadian Navy with the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class. Even now, he remains a part of the naval reserve.

The MP, who serves on the House of Commons’ finance committee, recently invited Professor Evelyn Forget to Ottawa to make a presentation because he wants his Party to consider testing the idea in a few regions across Canada, including rural, urban, and on a First Nations’ reserve. Forget was the researcher who unearthed promising data from the well-known Mincome experiment, which ran from 1974 through 1978 and which helped establish a minimum income for about a third of the people who lived there.

Forget dug up the records from the period and found there were fewer emergency room visits and less recorded incidents of domestic abuse. As well, less people sought treatment for mental health issues and more high school students continued on to finish Grade 12 to graduate.

When she appeared before the committee, Forget recommended a basic income of $18,000 per year. It would be paid, when necessary, by using the existing federal tax system. People could still earn money over and above this basic income but Forget recommends it be taxed back at a rate of 50 per cent on each dollar earned over $18,000.

When he was running for a seat in the federal election, Ouellette actually met a woman in a working class neighbourhood of Winnipeg who had been a participant in the Mincome experiment. It was a story Ouellette found inspiring. The Mincome money she received allowed her to go back to school to finish her education while she raised her three sons. Today, two of her sons have their Masters degrees, with one working for the City of Winnipeg and the other for Manitoba Hydro. The third son owns his own business.

“Here’s a single mom who was always just trying to get ahead. She now owns her own, small home and she helped her sons do well. That’s the hope for basic income – that’s why it deserves to be tested,” says the MP.

To that end, Ouellette has sponsored an online petition here to bring pressure and attention to this issue for his own government to support further study. He will likely have some high level supporters in Ottawa. Jean-Yves Duclos, federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, stated to several media outlets that a guaranteed minimum income is a policy with merit for discussion. As well, Senator Art Eggleton, has just called on the federal government to launch a basic income pilot.

Quebec has strongly signalled its interest in turning their existing income support tools in the direction of a basic income guarantee and Ontario recently announced it would fund a basic income pilot in an undisclosed location.

“We often hear poor people just make bad choices. Sometimes societies make those choices for us, though. If we have a society that supposedly believes in meritocracy without opportunity, then you don’t have a society of merit you have one of privilege,” he says.

“And as a society we just might be losing out.”

LONDON: Basic Income: How do we get there? (December 3rd)

LONDON: Basic Income: How do we get there? (December 3rd)

by | Nov 22, 2015 | News

Next December 3rd, Basic Income UK will be hosting a conversation with Brian Eno, David Graeber, and Frances Coppola. The  discussion will be facilitated by Becca Kirkpatrick from Unison.

Brian Eno is a musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He recently spoke about basic income during his John Peel Lecture on Radio 6.

David Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: the first 5000 years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Frances Coppola worked in banks for 17 years. She is now a musician and teacher, who writes on economics, finance and banking at Piera, Forbes and her own blog Coppola Comment.

Fond out the details of the event on Meetup.com

Review of “Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution,” by James Ferguson

Review of “Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution,” by James Ferguson

by | Jul 29, 2015 | Opinion, Research

Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution, by James Ferguson (Duke University Press Books, 2015).

James Ferguson’s latest book focuses on the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in the form of grants to low income and vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly, women and their children, and the disabled. Post-apartheid South Africa has led the way. It has an extensive system which administers grants to 30 percent of the population. Other countries like Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique have also implemented nationwide programs, while pilot programs are being tried elsewhere in the region.

Ferguson’s goal is not to provide an extensive ethnographic treatment of these developments, but rather to analyze their implications and the field of political possibilities they might open up. Half comparative ethnography, half political pamphlet, Ferguson’s impressive narrative is a tour de force questioning, deconstructing and reconstructing classic and contemporary notions of poverty, development and the welfare state in the region and beyond. Through a focus on direct cash transfers, the author brings together the anthropology of southern Africa, with the latest debates in development practice and anti-poverty activism.

Written in a highly readable style, the book is structured around a series of self-contained chapters, originally given as the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures in 2009 at the University of Rochester. One can easily read the chapters independently or as part of a larger whole.

Ferguson’s starting point is the contradiction between dominant narratives on the relentless expansion of the neoliberal state, and the substantial extension of state social provisions through grants. The modest size of these social payments sets them apart from more comprehensive welfare measures in Nordic countries, yet the author believes that this phenomenon marks the rise of what can be legitimately called “welfare states” in southern Africa. While their impact might be limited in the present form, the systems in place lay the foundations for more radical possibilities.

Breaking away from conventional welfare and poverty interventions, grants are not delivered with the final goal of reproducing a healthy and productive workforce in the cities, or creating a class of productive farmers in the rural areas. The eligibility criteria are simple – mostly age for pensions and child care grants – and do not include conditions like searching for employment or investing in productive activities.
This hints at economic structures that affect the vast majority of southern Africans: the rural areas are witnessing a constant decline in agricultural production, while the formal sector in urban areas, even when experiencing high growth, simply fails to absorb most people who are in need of employment. Far from being a temporary situation that can be rectified through economic policies, this is a chronic feature of contemporary capitalism in southern Africa and increasingly in other parts of the world, including Northern economies like the US and Europe.

The author points out that production remains the dominant paradigm in economic anthropology, development discourse and practice, and radical left thinking. He calls for a radical shift away from “productionist” tenets towards distribution. His wide-ranging critique builds on a re-elaboration of key themes in classic and contemporary southern African ethnography, from kinship-based reciprocity across the rural-urban spectrum to a mix of moral and economic concerns at play in sex, love and intimacy in times of precarious livelihoods.

The “distributive political economy” mapped by Ferguson is characterized by a myriad of acts of wealth distribution, entangled in multiple and complex relations of dependence influenced by configurations of gender, kinship, labor, community, ethnicity, society and the state. Rather than producing more wealth, this “distributive labor” is primarily directed at dividing sources of wealth into “smaller and smaller slivers as they work their way across social relations of kinship, clientage, allegiance, and solidarity” (p.97). It is this kind of activity that sustains and reproduces society, more than engagement in production as defined by macro-economic frameworks centered on the labor of able-bodied men in the formal sector and the reproductive work of women as wives and mothers. One powerful example of this reversal in South Africa is the shift from dependence of women, children and rural relatives on remittances from men working in the mines in the heyday of the apartheid economy, to the central distributive role played today by women and elderly people. The latter are the main beneficiaries of state grants, and disenfranchised men at the margin of the productive economy have increasingly come to rely on them.

Establishing and maintaining dependence on others who have access to wealth becomes a full-time job for those who are excluded from the benefits of middle class life. Dependence, in Ferguson’s treatment, has more to do with sharing than either gift or market exchange. Sharing and dependence cannot be easily subsumed under the conventional opposition between equality and inequality. These relations hint at a “new politics of distribution” beyond these two poles.

Within this framework, Ferguson convincingly reinterprets varied political movements calling for redistribution in the region, from the populist socialism of new radical movements in South Africa to the region-wide basic income grant campaign, and debates around land reform and resource nationalism. Calls for redistribution go beyond narrow views of African patrimonialism. People demand what Ferguson labels their “rightful share” in wealth that is owned collectively. Legitimate participation in this process can be framed along citizenship lines at the state level, but there are other levels of belonging too when local communities and traditional leaders are involved. These claims are not exercised from a position of inferiority or supplication. People own collectively all the resources of their community of belonging, hence they have a claim to a share of the wealth produced from these resources.

By inserting the normative and political dimensions of these movements into a long history of local idioms and practices, Ferguson provides a different angle on activist discussions around radical measures like the basic income grant (BIG). BIG is argued from a variety of perspectives, ranging from radical Marxism to left-leaning libertarianism and technocratic social democracy. The distinctive feature of a basic income is that it should not be tied to any condition and everybody should be entitled to it. The ideal world imagined by BIG activists is one where all human beings receive a basic income that would afford them a decent livelihood, with no compulsion to work for a wage or generate income through other activities. This is a radical break from existing welfare measures that tie unemployment benefits to the reintegration of beneficiaries in the labor market. In line with other activist scholars, Ferguson notes that these emerging state systems of cash distribution provide an essential infrastructure for the possible establishment of BIG. At the same time, his anthropological analysis develops moral and political arguments in favor of BIG that are grounded in local discourses and aspirations, a dimension often missed by global activist groups and regional campaigners.

Ferguson joins a growing number of anthropologists who subvert the conventional boundaries between analysis and engagement. With his creative and flexible analysis, he provokes thinking for action beyond narrow ideological boundaries. One could imagine enthusiastic endorsements of his work by Marxist campaigners, World Bank technocrats and traditional leaders alike. This highly original book is likely to leave a lasting mark not only on contemporary anthropological debates around poverty and development, but also policy and activist thinking in southern Africa and beyond.

This review was originally published in Anthropology Book Forum.