by Julen Bollain | Mar 10, 2018 | News
Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark have just published a new book titled “Against Charity”.
Both authors argue for an unconditional universal basic income above the poverty line and paid for by progressive taxation to both eradicate poverty and empower recipients—the result being the human right of material existence. The burning issue is not charity, but justice.
Raventós and Wark affirm that charity is not a gift. In their own words, “gift-giving implies reciprocity, an ongoing relationship. When requital is impossible, the act of giving remains outside mutual ties and charity becomes yet another manifestation of class structure, a sterile one-way act upholding the status quo”.
Vacuuming up all the profits thanks to a weak labor movement, lower taxes, and tax havens, the global elite then turns around and remakes the world in its own image, distributing charitable donations that can hardly be mistaken with generosity. In the book, postmodern versions of nineteenth-century charity are described as trying to keep wealth and power in a few hands, countering people’s desire for greater income equality.
Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark present a thorough analysis of charity from the perspectives of philosophy, history, religion, and anthropology. They conclude that charity is an unequal relationship, presupposing the persistence of poverty and serving as a prop for capitalism.
Book reference:
Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark, “Against Charity”, CounterPunch, 2018
by Karl Widerquist | Feb 7, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in June 2008.
What does the Stone Age have to do with modern justice? According to property rights advocates: everything; their arguments rely on two factual claims that can be enlightened by a look at prehistoric anthropology. (1) Property begins as individual property and then governments come along and impose taxes that interfere with the rights of owners. (2) A market economy with no restrictions on inequality makes everyone better off than they were befor the private property was created (i.e. when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers).
I have heard private property advocates make these claims many times, but I’ve never seen them support those claims by referring to anthropological studies of prehistory. How do we know that property began as private property? Are we sure that every single modern worker is better off than our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Recently I’ve taken a look at some anthropological studies including Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins, Bronze Age Economics and How Chiefs Come to Power by Timothy Earle, and The Evolution of Political Society by Morton Fried. I found out that the claims of property rights advocates don’t hold up very well.
To examine the first claim, we need to go back to the creation of fixed property rights in the Bronze Age. Property rights advocates like to imagine land being first appropriated by individualistic pioneers who tamed the wilderness by their own efforts. But that’s not what actually happened. The transformation from hunting and gathering to a settled agricultural life took the joint act of entire bands not simply one person. The rights of land tenure in primitive settled communities were extremely varied, but it seldom if ever looked anything like the neoliberal systems that property rights advocates suppose. In the earliest agricultural societies, every individual had a right of direct access to the land, which was usually owned (if at all) by villages or large extended families. In slightly more economically advanced societies where property rights have become exclusive, the original owners are not private businessmen, but chiefs. Ownership of resources was synonymous with ownership of the government.
The reason chiefs doubled as owners is obvious: the earliest societies were too economically simple to have separate spheres of power—such as government, religion, and business. All of these powers were vested in one person. The Hawaiian Islands were first settled by human beings around the year 600 and so they provide a very recent example of the first creation of property rights. For the most part by the 1400s, each island was run by a chief who owned the land and the irrigation systems that made everyone’s efforts to farm the land viable. Local lords were employees of the chief. They doled out land to peasants only if the peasants promised the interests of the chief. In short, the chief ran his island as a wholly-owned, for-profit business.
Property rights advocates sometimes claim that only recent history matters, but taxation and regulation of property are not new. Modern governments inherited their regulatory powers from medieval kings, who owned the right to regulate their domain in any way they saw fit. Modern landlords hold titles that derive from the medieval vassals of the king. Government taxation is simply the exercise of property rights that are as old as or older than private holdings of property. Some countries went through a brief laissez faire period in the Nineteenth Century, when governments chose to tax and regulate less than before. But I know of no government that signed an enforceable contract to alienate its rights over its domain. So-called property rights advocates simply want to interfere with the property rights of kings to promote opportunities for his vassals, which has about as much to do with “freedom of property rights against interference” as redistribution from condo associations to condo owners, from landlords to tenants, or from stock holders to middle management. If the property rights system the king set up is unjust, his rights should go to the people, not his lords. If the property rights system the king set up is just, we must respect his rights and not force him to cede power to his lords.
To examine the second claim, we need to go back all the way to the Stone Age. Studies of hunter-gatherer communities that survived into the Twentieth Century show that people worked an average of three to four hours per day (including time spent preparing food and commuting). They worked at their own pace and slept more than people do today. Researchers reported that they appeared to feel extremely secure about their ability to find food and other necessities, and they never had to answer to a boss. When a hunter-gatherer is in the mood to forage for food, she sees if anyone else feels like joining her. If not, she waits or goes out alone.
Modern capitalism is a very productive system with great potential to produce goods that could benefit everyone, but as we practice it, it has extreme inequalities. People live on the street and eat out of garbage cans. Others work long hours in sweatshops at the edge of their physical ability and still face the possibility of hunger and malnutrition. Most modern workers have more access to luxuries and better medical care than hunter-gatherers, and on the whole they live longer. But many work longer and harder; they have to follow the orders of a boss; they have less economic security; and do not forget the some individuals die young (and younger than many hunter-gatherers) because of malnutrition and other complications of poverty. In short, the transition from hunter-gatherer society to modern capitalism has not been an unequivocal gain for the working class. It has been a tradeoff. But a tradeoff is not good enough to meet the standards that property rights advocates set for themselves.
I am not the one who put forward the standard that the poor must be at least as well off as their Stone Age ancestors. Property rights advocates chose that standard because they thought it was easy to meet. It is. A society, as productive as ours, can easily make everyone far better off than they would be as hunter-gatherers, but we have failed to do so. The minimum we can do to justify our property rights is to make sure that every single human being has more freedom and economic security our Stone Age ancestors. To make sure the standard it met, we only need to make sure that everyone can have some minimal level basic necessities without having to submit to a boss.
We don’t, I believe, largely because we, the better off, have convinced ourselves that we have the right to boss around the poor. We have property and they don’t; and therefore, supposedly, we have the right to make them do what we say 40 hours per week. Yet, studies of societies without property rights show that our property rights are the only thing coming between the poor and their ability to meet their own needs with less effort and without following anyone’s orders. It is we who owe them, not they who owe us. Perhaps we can make the poor work for us if they want to share in the luxuries of capitalism, but we have no right—even by the standards set by property rights advocates—to force them to work for us just to meet their basic needs.
-Karl Widerquist, New Orleans, LA, May 2008
by Toru Yamamori | Jan 24, 2018 | News
During the World Economic Forum during 23rd-26th January in Davos, Switzerland, universal basic income (UBI) will be discussed at several sessions:
11:00 GMT 23 January: How Is Rentier Capitalism Aggravating Inequality?
For the summary, speakers and live streaming, please see here.
11:30 GMT 26 January: Guaranteed Income for Growth?
For the summary, speakers and live streaming, please see here.
Guy Standing, a Research Professor in Development Studies, University of London, and an honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, who will be on the panels of the above two sessions, will also speak for UBI in the following two sessions:
13:30 GMT 23 January: Social Safety Nets for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
16:30 GMT 23 January: Bringing Dignity with Basic Income
The details of these two sessions is not yet disclosed online. UBI was also discussed the World Economic Forum held in 2017.
More information at:
Toru Yamamori, “INTERNATIONAL: Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel Laureate, argues for UBI at the World Economic Forum at Davos”, Basic Income News, 6th February 2017
by Micah Kaats | Dec 24, 2017 | News, Research
In the three years since its initial publication, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists has helped spur a global conversation on universal basic income (UBI). The book has become an international bestseller, garnering praise from intellectual heavyweights and propelling its author to the TED stage this past April. However, Stephen Davies, education director at the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), remains skeptical of many of the young Dutch journalist’s ideas. He makes his case in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Affairs.
“Rutger Bregman’s book is both interesting and irritating,” declares Davies in the opening line of his review. To clarify, he quickly notes that it is interesting “not so much because of its particular content…but because it gives us an insight into what may turn out to be a development of both intellectual and political importance” (p. 442). Such an off hand rejection of a book advocating basic income from the education director of a think tank advocating free market capitalism may be unsurprising to some, but Davies’ response is actually not as inevitable as it may seem. Historically, UBI has found supporters on both sides of the political divide.
Davies distinguishes between two types of arguments Bregman makes for basic income. The first considers UBI to be a pragmatic solution to the shortcomings of the current social welfare system. The second considers it to be a necessary means of radically transforming the existing social order. While Davies may be more sympathetic to the second line of reasoning, he spends most of his time critiquing the first.
Steven Davies. Credit to: The London School of Economics and Political Science
In Utopia, Bregman draws on a wealth of research to highlight deficiencies in the means-tested benefit programs that constitute the welfare states of most developed societies. He notes that many of these programs create negative incentives, keeping beneficiaries locked in a poverty trap. Even worse, financial instability can result in a scarcity mindset, making it even harder for poor people to make responsible financial decisions. According to Bregman, unconditional cash transfer programs (UCTs) have proven to be the most successful remedy to this vicious cycle of poverty and dependence. In support of this view, Bregman offers additional in-depth analyses of related programs, including Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, negative income taxes, and the Speenhamland system.
Davies acknowledges the implications of this body of research. He writes, “Much of the evidence presented by Bregman is indeed very striking and should encourage us simply to trust people more and have greater confidence in their judgment and their knowledge” (p. 447). However, he is far more hesitant to interpret these results as evidence for universal basic income.
Davies notes that many of the policies Bregman touches on are in fact means-tested in one way or another, and may therefore be more analogous to standard welfare programs than basic income. Additionally, Davies argues that many of the UCT programs discussed in Utopia for Realists have not been around long enough to show lasting impacts, and he calls for more research to determine the specific amounts at which UCTs can begin to induce behavioral change. Yet, even more worrisome for Davies is the “bold assumption that there is no meaningful distinction between single lump-sum payments and continuing income stream” (p. 448). He notes that while individual cash transfers may bring sudden and liberating benefits, similar effects of ongoing basic income payments may become muted over time.
According to Davies, all of this “reveals confusion over what a UBI is thought of as being – is it a way of establishing a floor or minimum that is guaranteed to all or is it a redistributive mechanism designed to narrow income differentials?” (p. 449). This confusion motivates Davies’ second critique of Bregman’s argument for universal basic income as a response to the widening global wealth gap. While basic income programs may go a long way in ensuring no one lives in a state of absolute poverty, Davies writes that “it is not clear how a UBI by itself will do anything to reduce relative poverty or inequality” (p. 449). In fact, he notes it may even make the problem of inequality worse if UBI programs seek to replace other means-tested benefits.
However, while Davies takes issue with many of Bregman’s pragmatic arguments, he seems much more sympathetic to the idealistic aspects of his account. As automation increases and “bullshit jobs” proliferate, Davies grants Bregman his assumption that UBI could become a useful tool to decouple meaningful activity from paid work. He writes, “This is clearly the vision that truly inspires Bregman, the utopia of his book’s title, and he would have done better to stick to this rather than muddy the waters by conflating it with more limited and pragmatic discussions of a guaranteed income in a society where wage labor is still widespread and predominant” (p. 456).
While he may be unmoved by Utopia for Realists, Davies clearly recognizes the significance of the political and intellectual movements it represents. The book’s international success seems to reflect a growing anxiety about stagnation of big ideas in the face of an increasingly unsatisfying status quo. Davies concludes, “What we are starting to see is an attempt to work out what a non-capitalist or, more accurately, a post-capitalist political economy would look like” (p. 457).
Davies review appears in the most recent edition of the Journal for Economic Affairs.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Dec 18, 2017 | Opinion
This article is based on a research project conducted by a French student, Lucas Delattre, during the summer of 2016, and updated in October 2017
Introduction
A Citizen’s Basic Income is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income paid to every individual as a right of citizenship.
In 2016, at a discussion on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work (Verso, 2015) at the New Economics Foundation, Ed Miliband was asked what needed to happen to move us towards the implementation of a Citizen’s Basic Income scheme. ‘A pilot project’ was the answer. Others have made the same suggestion.
Existing pilot projects
Many of the projects that have been claimed as Citizen’s Basic Income pilots do not satisfy the criteria of being universal, unconditional and based on the individual. Those that do pay unconditional incomes to individuals cannot be absolutely universal, since they necessarily exclude those outside the sample. This is also an ethical issue that cannot be avoided. And the short duration of most projects enables some short-term effects to be detected, but not long-run or life-time effects. (A project in Kenya is giving 23 US$ per month to 40 villages for 12 years, which is much longer than the two years for which most experiments run.)
Some projects call for volunteers, and so are unlikely to be representative. Mandatory involvement of a representative sample is to be preferred; and even better is a saturation sample, covering a defined geographical area, which can enable effects to be picked up at a local level. Projects that compare the experience of pilot groups that receive an unconditional income to the experience of control groups that do not are preferable to experiments that do not employ control groups.
In 2008 and 2009 a privately-financed pilot project was held in the small rural settlement of Otjivero-Omitara in Namibia. 100 Namibian dollars (£7) was paid each month to every member of the population for a period of two years, and significant results were achieved in relation to health, education, crime reduction, economic activity, and poverty reduction. There was no control group with which to compare these results.
Between 2011 and 2013, similar projects in India paid 300 rupees (£3) per month to every member of several pilot villages, and in India the impressive results obtained in the pilot project villages could be compared with those in the control villages.
The Alaskan Permanent Fund (APF) is a sovereign wealth fund based on Alaska’s oil revenues, and invested in the international stock market. It gives an annual dividend payment to every Alaskan citizen, who has been resident for at least a year in Alaska. The APF has usually been able to provide a dividend of between $1,000 and $2,000 each year. Obviously, it is annual and variable, and is not sufficient to take on the role of social security: but it has had beneficial effects on the population of Alaska.
A micro-level pilot project in Germany provides Citizen’s Basic Incomes to selected individuals for one year. In Finland, a random sample of 2,000 people aged 25-58, who were unemployed at the end of 2016, are receiving €560 per month Income for two years in place of existing benefits, and the sample subjects can keep their payments after they have found employment. However, while being based on the individual and unconditional, this does not fulfil the Citizen’s Basic Income criteria of being universal. A similar approach is being considered by some Dutch municipalities. The current experiment in Ontario, Canada, is a Guaranteed Minimum Income project where a means-tested household-based benefit targeted on subjects aged 18-64 is being tested.
The Negative Income Tax experiments in the USA and Canada during the 1970s were based on the household, and so did not fulfil the criteria as a Citizen’s Basic Income pilot projects.
None of this is to suggest that the projects that have been undertaken are not of value. They are. Valuable lessons have been learnt in Namibia, India, Alaska, and the various states in Canada and the USA where Negative Income Tax experiments have taken place; and additional useful lessons will be learnt in Berlin, in the Netherlands, and in Finland. But we still await a genuine Citizen’s Basic Income pilot project. It is arguable that the Indian and Namibian experiments were as near to genuine pilot projects as possible because they were of sufficient duration to enable trends in behavioural change to be evaluated and trajectories predicted.
The UK
Might it be possible to run a Citizen’s Basic Income pilot project in the UK? A genuine Citizen’s Basic Income pilot project? Multiple problems present themselves:
- the project would have to be for a sufficiently long period for a sufficient number of assessments of behavioural change to be made to enable trajectories to be plotted and reliable estimates made of the likely behavioural changes that would accompany a permanent Citizen’s Basic Income scheme;
- any Citizen’s Basic Income viable in the short to medium term in the UK (and in any developed country) would have to be funded wholly or in part by changing income tax and social insurance contribution levels and thresholds. So a genuine pilot project would require government departments to make those adjustments just for the individuals involved in the project, and to recycle the savings into pilot project participants’ Citizen’s Basic Incomes – a somewhat unlikely proposition;
- the project would need to involve a cross-section of the population if it were to stand some chance of modelling a genuine Citizen’s Basic Income; and
- because any revenue neutral or almost revenue neutral scheme would impose losses on some households (- preferably on households in the higher income deciles), some participants in the pilot project would lose disposable income at the point of implementation.
A feasible Citizen’s Basic Income experiment
What would be feasible would be to provide a genuine Citizen’s Basic Income to a small community on top of existing benefits provisions and without altering National Insurance contributions or Income Tax payments. This would avoid government departments having to change current tax and benefits provisions: but it would require additional funding and it would not mirror the tax and benefits changes that would be required to fund a genuine Citizen’s Basic Income. This is why I have called it an ‘experiment’ rather than a ‘pilot project’. Important lessons could be learnt: but nobody would be able to regard the experiment’s results as evidence for how a Citizen’s Basic Income would work in practice.
A further feasible option would be to give a Citizen’s Basic Income to all sixteen to eighteen year olds and not give them an Income Tax Personal Allowance. This approach would create minimal problems for the tax and benefits authorities and for employers, and it would result in almost no losses at the point of implementation. The important question would be whether to promise permanence – in which case it would be a genuine pilot project; or whether to limit the experiment to a stated number of years – in which case it would be an experiment. (Microsimulation research on such a pilot project/experiment can be found in a recent working paper. )
