by Rebecca Rosewarne | Apr 3, 2019 | News
Which analytical models exist to defend UBI, and how convincing are they? What would the introduction of an UBI mean for different parts of society? What would be the associated opportunities and risks?
To answer these, and many more questions, the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel has programmed a series of interdisciplinary lectures, in order to share both further directions of research and also to make some academic contributions. These academic events will happen between April 23rd and July 2nd 2019, at designated rooms and auditoriums at the University, as indicated below.
This lecture series come from various academic disciplines and touch on a broad spectrum of questions and aspects. They will also be accessible to interested members of the public. At the end of each 45-60 minutes paper presentation, there will be space for discussion between the authors and the audience. The papers will be recorded and made accessible after the event.
General and increasingly extensive discussions of the reforming idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) seem to have come to stay, especially among the younger generations. One basic income experiment after another is springing up around the world. For the first time in Germany, the current state of Schleswig-Holstein has taken up the theme, and has introduced a ‘social security for work yet to be undertaken’ in the state parliament, alongside its coalition agreement. So, the idea of an UBI in particular, together with the Liberal Party’s [FDP = Freie Demoktratische Partei] concept of a citizen’s wage and further initiatives, are being discussed in Germany, and trials are being conceived.
Such a UBI would definitely represent a deep intrusion into the pre-existing architecture of the welfare state, the job market, the economy, the family life of both female and male citizens, and the whole community in Germany and abroad. The moral model of a ‘working society’, which developed alongside industrialisation and the rise of capitalism and whose scope has extended ever further in the last few decades, would be abandoned or at least significantly marginalised. That’s because UBI would change the normative way of life for every adult until retirement age, which still is paid employment. The broad distribution of material prosperity, mostly organised in accordance with the criterion of performance at work, would also change considerably.
Summary of lectures:
23rd April 2019 (Tuesday): Dr. Alexander Lorch – Philosophical reflections on an unconditional basic income.
26th April 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Roswitha Ploch – Unconditional basic income – opportunities and hurdles in the political implementation of a good idea
30th April 2019 (Tuesday): Dr. Thieß Peterson – Macroeconomic effects of an unconditional basic income
10th May 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Hilmar Schneider – Do we need an unconditional basic income or better Maths lessons?
17th May 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Ute Fischer – Liberation or backwards roll? Opportunities and limits of a UBI from the perspective of gender.
24th May 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Gesine Stephan – Field experiments in labour market research: potential, challenges and practical examples
31st May 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Ueli Mäder – Social security democratised (rather than economised)
7th June 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Michael Opielka – Basic income in the labour of the future. On the relationship between payment in cash, kind and service in the welfare state of the future.
11th June 2019 (Tuesday): Prof. Dr. Thomas Straubhaar – Unconditional basic income. From Utopia to reality.
21st June 2019 (Friday): Prof. Dr. Nicole Mayer-Ahuja – Unconditional basic income – an emancipatory response to changes in the world of work?
2nd July 2019 (Tuesday): Dr. Manuel Franzmann – Democritisation of leisure? Unconditional basic income from the point of view of educational theory.
Article reviewed by André Coelho
by Daniele Fabbri | Mar 26, 2019 | News
Picture credit to: Ståle Grut / NRKbeta
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), during a talk at SXSW, was addressed by a tech entrepreneur with a question about automation (how should we act as a society and how will we be able to find a purpose in life as jobs are appropriate by machines).
AOC’s answer placed automation in the broader context of socio-economic inequality: automation is not the problem, and we shouldn’t be haunted by its specter, but rather be excited about it. The problem, AOC states, is that “(…) we live in a society where if you don’t have a job you are left to die (…)”.
The risk is in the reinforcement of the trends that are already occurring with the “automation of injustice”. Automation accelerates economic inequality, she says, and we should be concerned about fixing the current socio-economic system: we are at the most prosperous time in our history, but many are left behind, thus it is imperative for us to figure out new ways to administrate wealth.
While AOC did not address Universal Basic Income (UBI) directly, her view on the matter seems compatible with those seeing it as the necessary answer to the fourth industrial revolution.
Whether the solution is “taxing robots” as proposed by Bill Gates (which AOC considers a clever, acceptable way to suggest taxing corporations), higher tax rates on top income brackets, or some form of wealth redistribution, we need to entertain ideas that would leave us with the possibility to siphon off the benefits brought by automation. It could give us the potential to focus more on studying, inventing and creating art: “Not all creativity should be bound by wage,” she says.
By entering a time in which scarcity is no longer the only reality known to man, and with capitalism being based on scarcity, “our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources”, AOC states.
If the system was not broken, people could already be working less, and focus on activities which are currently not considered work, but that would nonetheless benefit individuals and society. But money is appropriated by corporate greed:
“We’re paid on how little we’re desperate enough to accept. And then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire.”
More information at:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | SXSW 2019, YouTube
Adi Robertson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says ‘we should be excited about automation’, The Verge, March 10th 2019.
by Andre Coelho | Mar 15, 2019 | News
Andrew Yang. Picture credit to: The Daily Beast
Few political analysts bear to take Andrew Yang presidential candidacy seriously, but that doesn’t seem to slow him down. Yang’s team (informally also called “Yang’s gang”) has already surpassed a 14000 donors mark, and has active members in more than 35 states.
From previous articles, and from several interviews, it is clear that at the core of Yang’s motivation for running for President is the understanding of two things: automation is upon us (sure to wipe out millions of jobs in the next few years) and present-day economy is just not working for the average human anymore. He has already said that, according to him, Trump won the 2016 elections due to automation taking away four million jobs in swing states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa.
Some might say the replacement of human labour by machines is a terrifying perspective, but these dire predictions can only materialize if the social structure still demands income from jobs to assure survival. And then others criticize the basic income proposal as “socialist” – which has a very negative connotation in the USA – as if somehow the implementation of that particular policy would turn contemporary USA into mid-XXth century USSR. On that issue, Yang simply replies that “this is capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero”.
Naturally that Yang is frequently asked the million-dollar question of how is he thinking to pay for a basic income in the USA (he proposes a 1000 $/month for every adult citizen, no questions asked). To him, the answer seems straightforward: make tech giants pay value-added taxes (since these are the main movers behind the great automation wave), and savings on conditional benefits (which can be replaced by the unconditional stipend). Yang envisions basic income to be implemented as a Negative Income Tax (NIT) policy, in which the state would, in each yearly tax exercise, consider the full amount of owed taxes versus basic income, and determine how much each adult citizen would pay or receive under a NIT system.
That and a lot more Yang spoke about at this year’s SXSW Conference, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also been present (on another of the Conference’s sessions).
More information at:
David Smith, “Andrew Yang: the 2020 candidate warning of the rise of robots”, The Guardian, 24th February 2019
Daniele Fabri, “USA: Presidential Hopeful Andrew Yang speaks at the Register’s Political Soapbox”, October 6th 2018
Jacob Banas, “How universal basic income could be affordable, Andrew Yang explains”, Futurism, March 10th 2019
by Andre Coelho | Mar 13, 2019 | News
By: Rebecca Warne
This article by Alex Gray summarizes a presentation given by historian Rutger Bregman at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, January 2019.
Bregman would like to see ‘work’ redefined as ‘activity which adds value to society.’ He sees the starting point for this as more general recognition that some jobs are socially useless (at best). Bregman quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee of Facebook who apparently said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Bregman’s interest in an UBI is twofold. Firstly, it would enhance individual quality of life by removing the necessity to work for money. Secondly, workers whose jobs are poorly paid but socially useful would be freer to draw attention to this fact by withholding their labour.
He rejects the further argument that an UBI will be necessary to offset the inevitable replacement of human beings by technology: “Automation throughout history has never meant mass unemployment. We should never underestimate the power of capitalism to come up with more socially useless jobs. Theoretically, it’s possible we will all just be pretending to work.”
Bregman doesn’t engage with economic arguments around the feasibility or impracticability of an UBI, so much as the ‘hearts and minds’ aspects: “The obstacle is not about economics or technology, it’s ideology. We have to redefine so many of our basic concepts.” According to Bregman, “We’re all basically nice, meaning-seeking creatures, and if you assume the best, that’s what you get out. It’s the power of expectation…. The first time I wrote about basic income was five years ago, and back then no one was talking about it. Now the idea is everywhere and there are experiments around the globe. The first talks I gave were for small groups of anarchists and now I’ve been invited to the World Economic Forum. It just shows how ideas change the world. Life-changing ideas never start in Washington, Westminster or Davos, they start at the fringes. In a basic income society, wages would better reflect societal value, and kids would live out their dreams.”
More information at:
Alex Gray, “This is our chance to completely redefine the meaning of work”, World Economic Forum, January 9th 2019
by Andre Coelho | Mar 6, 2019 | News
Charles Eisenstein. Picture credit to: Resilience.
Charles Eisenstein, author, thinker and true believer that a better world is possible, has spoken his mind about Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). For that purpose, he has recorded this short video.
In his view, UBI stands as a threat for the current work marketplace, since people (getting a UBI) would not easily do “degrading, dangerous work”, or that “no one would do it for very long, or very much…unless you paid them to do it”. He goes as far as to say that UBI would “change the whole structure of the economy”, since people would no longer submit to terrifying work conditions, or under-poverty line salaries, just in order to survive. With UBI, Eisenstein reasons, “people wouldn’t be trapped in those things”. In fact, he continues, today’s economy is locked in with millions of people undergoing degrading work.
People want to do things, people have dreams, Eisenstein says. But in this present-day economy, people’s wants, needs and dreams are trampled on constantly by the relentless speed and coldness of “survival”. So, he questions affluent people: “Do you want your affluence to be built of the humiliation of other people?”. At the bottom of his argument, Eisenstein points to “force”: work is only degrading when people are forced to do it. And so UBI would simply revolutionize capitalism, since people would no longer be forced – by means of a “survival threat” – into labour, but gain enough freedom to pursue their dreams and passions.
https://www.facebook.com/basicincomequotes/videos/2113748875604082/
