by Kate McFarland | Feb 25, 2017 | News
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing is slated to speak at a student-led economics conference at the University of Glasgow on March 12.
The Glasgow Economic Forum (GEF) is an annual conference organized by students at the University of Glasgow, intended to encourage undergraduate economics students to learn more “outside of the textbooks.” The third GEF will be held March 11-12, 2017, with a focus on economic growth. According to its Eventbrite page, the 2017 GEF “sets out to explore a plurality of perspectives on whether growth constitutes a means or is an end in itself.”
The conference’s headline speakers include BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), who will speak on themes from his latest book, The Corruption of Capitalism (2016, BiteBack), wherein he argues that “rentier capitalism” has broken down and needs to be replaced with an economic system centered on a basic income.
Other headline speakers include Professor Leszek Balcerowicz (former Finance Minister for Poland and the former President of the National Bank of Poland) and John Weeks (Professor Emeritus of SOAS).
According to the GEF’s website, the two previous conferences drew nearly 200 attendees from across Europe, including student groups from universities throughout the UK. Previous meetings focused on the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and its impact.
Guy Standing (credit: Enno Schmidt)
For Standing, the GEF meeting comes amid a busy week.
On March 9, he will meet ambassadors and officials of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to discuss basic income and the precariat. On March 10, he is scheduled to speak about The Corruption of Capitalism at the Headstrong Club in Lewes, UK, a debate and discussion venue that describes itself as promoting “high-quality discussion and debate on a wide range of topics” at special ticketed events. On March 11, he will meet with the National Union of Journalists in London to talk about the precariat. Then on March 13, the day after the GEF talk, Standing will present themes from this new book at a Marx Research Seminar at the University of Lincoln.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
University of Glasgow photo CC BY-SA 2.0 Alvin Leong
by Kate McFarland | Feb 20, 2017 | News
Ashley Dawson, professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City, maintains that the loss of biodiversity (with hundreds of species facing extinction each day) is rooted, in part, in global capitalism — a theme at the center of his 2016 book Extinction: A Radical History.
Dawson explains in The Guardian:
“Capitalism is an economic system founded on ceaseless expansion,” Dawson, who specializes in Postcolonial studies, said. “It must grow at a compound rate or it will experience convulsive economic and social crises. The contradictions of this system are patently self-evident: an economic system based on infinite expansion must inevitably crash into the natural limits of finite ecosystems.”
According to Dawson, the only way to forestall mass extinction is to shift to an economic system that is not founded on the goal of unlimited growth. As the summary in The Guardian describes, Dawson looks to indigenous groups and small-scale farmers as examples of ways in which communities may develop “using sustainable practices and living close to nature.”
One starting point considered by Dawson is the provision of a guaranteed income to people living in biodiversity hotspots, biologically rich areas including “tropical woodlands of Brazil’s Atlantic coast, southern Mexico with Central America, the tropical Andes, the Greater Antilles, West Africa, Madagascar, the Western Ghats of India, Indo-Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Caledonia.” By alleviating poverty, a guaranteed income would remove the pressure to engage in poaching and other environmentally destructive practices:
“Focusing such guaranteed income on the relatively limited number of biodiversity hotspots would remove the prime economic motive people living in such areas have for destroying their local environment: poverty.”
Dawson suggests funding the guaranteed income by measures such as a tax on financial transactions, stating, “Such a Robin Hood tax, of even only a very small percentage of the speculative global capital flows that enrich the 1%, would generate billions of dollars to help people conserve hotspots of global biodiversity.”
He emphasizes that the guaranteed income should not be seen as a replacement for existing conservation efforts but rather as a supplement to them.
Read more:
Jeremy Hance, “What if we gave universal income to people in biodiversity hotpots? [sic],” The Guardian, January 24, 2017.
Ashley Dawson, “Why the Extinction Crisis Isn’t Just About the Environment, but Social Justice,” Alternet, November 29, 2016.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo: Hall of Biodiversity at American Museum of Natural History, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Dom Dada
by Hilde Latour | Feb 17, 2017 | News
Business Insider published an article based on an interview with co-founder of BIEN, Guy Standing, focusing on his analysis of the working class in the Western world.
Standing sees a growing class of “precariat” workers, caused by a political agenda promoting market-led competition since the 1970s. A significant group of this “precariat” is prone to listen to ugly voices playing on their fears and supporting neo-fascist populism as a result. This helps explain the election of Donald Trump in the US, but also Brexit and the popularity of Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders in Europe.
He refers to his book “The Corruption of Capitalism”, where he describes a growing group of wealthy citizens (the “rentier class”) who live on income from investments and property (including copyright and patents that often last for 20 years). This increases the gap between the rich and the poor.
According to Standing, at least part of the solution could be the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI), and he has seen growing support for this idea from both left and right wing politicians, economists and many others in the last few years.
“I see no reason why we will not have it within the next ten years — and maybe sooner.”
Standing states that a UBI can be seen as a matter of social justice, as a compensation for a system of property that results in a loss of natural inheritance, a point argued extensively by Thomas Paine, who introduced the idea of a citizen’s dividend back in 1795. It would also enhance individual liberty and give people a sense of security.
The affordability of a UBI is not a problem, Standing argues. It would replace other forms of public spending, and could be funded by the establishment of capital funds, like those derived from oil in Alaska and Norway, and the rental flows from patents.
The belief that UBI would remove the incentive to work is ridiculous, he further claims. Enough evidence is available to show it is the opposite:
“If you had a basic income, it would mean that everybody would have a base, on top of which their earned income would be taxed at the standard rate of tax. That would increase the incentive to take low-wage jobs.”
The current Western systems of ‘social welfare’ discourage people from taking low-wage jobs. These systems are poverty traps, argues Standing.
“We must have a new income distribution system [as] real wages will continue to decline in OECD countries, insecurity will continue to grow, and rental incomes will continue to go to the top. That is a recipe for economic instability, political extremism, and a lot of other nasty things.”
Info and links
This article is the second in a two-part series based on Thomas Colson’s interview with Standing. The first article contained ambiguities that lead to inaccurate reports about the Indian situation. It was corrected in a Basic Income News article “Jumping the Gun in India“.
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Genevieve Shanahan for reviewing this article.
Photo: yinxu – oracle bones by Xuan Che, CC-BY-SA 2.0
by BIEN | Jan 21, 2017 | News
(Image Credit: The Hankyoreh Media Company)
According to business writer Kwack Jung-soo, South Korea will need to make fundamental changes to its operations due to the nation’s prolonged low growth and lack of new growth engines.
In a new book entitled 2017 Grand Forecast for the South Korean Economy, 43 economics experts provide analyses and possible solutions to the economic crisis in South Korea.
One contributor, Professor Lee Keun of Seoul National University, believes that the present situation is a “crisis of South Korean capitalism” rooted in income inequality. He maintains that part of the solution is a “basic income system” in which “sufficient livelihood benefits would be paid to all citizens to keep them out of poverty, regardless of assets, income, or working status” (in the words of reporter Jung-soo).
Read the full article here:
Kwack Jung-soo, “Economists saynin 2017 will enter “long-term low growth conditions“, The Hankyoreh, November 23, 2016.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland
by Kate McFarland | Jan 3, 2017 | News
Sir Anthony (“Tony”) Atkinson, a distinguished economist best known for his work on inequality, passed away on January 1, 2017, aged 72.
In the words of BIEN co-founder Philippe van Parijs (Professor Emeritus at Université de Louvain), Atkinson was a “great scholar and a wonderful man, to whom the basic income movement is greatly indebted.”
Tony Atkinson (May 2015), CC BY-SA 4.0 Niccolò Caranti
At the time of his death, Atkinson was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford (previously Warden of Nuffield College). He was a Fellow of the British Academy, and a former President of the Royal Economic Society, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the International Economic Association.
Atkinson began writing on economics in the 1960s, when he published a first book on poverty in Britain and a second on unequal distribution of wealth. Throughout his career, Atkinson’s research focused on issues of social justice and public policy, especially related to income inequality. His recent projects included the World Top Incomes Database and a report on monitoring global poverty for the Commission on Global Poverty of the World Bank.
BIEN co-chair Louise Haagh (Reader at University of York) reflects:
Atkinson was a remarkable figure in the field of economics and in public debate. He is behind the concern with inequality as a threat to capitalism that is now common knowledge. Most important of all, with the likes of Amartya Sen, he made the field of public and welfare economics respectable, showing how the economy cannot function without a strong, well-funded public sector and a combined concern with pre- and redistribution to make equality of outcome attainable.
Malcolm Torry, BIEN co-secretary and Director of the Citizen’s Income Trust, describes Atkinson’s books, reports, and papers as having always been “packed full of detail, and always with a purpose: to tell anyone willing to listen that poverty and inequality matter, and that changes to tax and benefits systems can reduce them.”
In his last major work, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (2015), Atkinson presented 15 proposals to curb income and wealth inequality in developed nations. These include a national participation income and an unconditional basic income for children. Similar to a basic income, a participation income grants all members of society a right to a secure livable income. However, as its name suggests, a participation income is subject to a participation requirement. On Atkinson’s view, this requirement might be satisfied by not only paid employment but also caregiving, volunteer work in one’s community, full-time education, or other socially valuable activities.
Although he advocated for a participation requirement, Atkinson was an important contributor to the basic income discussion, even participating in BIEN’s congresses. Haagh recounts that, for over two decades, Atkinson was “open about his support for universal grants” at the same time as he also voiced “skepticism about how the proposal would sit with current welfare systems and norms” — a skepticism which, in Haagh’s view, lay behind his suggestion of a participation condition.
“I interpret Atkinson’s concern as not wanting to give up on ideas and practices of cooperation and community in the areas of welfare and economic development. That is why he thought participation was important as a form of legitimacy and for itself,” Haagh says. “Being the mark of honest and curious scholarship, Tony changed his mind on both the form and funding of basic income and participation income over time, explaining his reasons. Tony was critical in making basic income analysis less messianic and part of the wider welfare debate.”
Torry offers a slightly different interpretation of Atkinson’s endorsement of participation income, while agreeing that his work has been instrumental in driving forward critical, evidence-based debate about basic income and welfare policy:
Early in his career he recognised the desirability of Basic Income, but worried that it might be publicly and therefore politically unacceptable to give to everyone an income unconditionally: hence his proposal for a Participation Income. When he first made the proposal in 1992 he privately admitted that it might not be possible to administer a Participation Income: but he never gave up on the idea, and included it in his last book Inequality.
Elaborating upon Atkinson’s scientific approach to these topics, Torry contends that the distinguished economist’s most important legacy might be his development of microsimulation tools for the modeling of tax and benefit reforms:
It is thanks to Tony and his one-time colleague Holly Sutherland that the UK has been a leader in using microsimulation programmes and large survey databases to evaluate a wide range of individual and household effects of tax and benefits reforms. The Basic Income debate in the UK has been as intelligent as it has been because we can use the tools that Tony was the first to develop.
Tony combined a deep desire to reduce poverty and inequality with a social scientist’s pursuit of evidence as to how that might best be achieved. He will continue to be an example to us all.
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London), a long-time acquaintance of Atkinson, was among the many saddened to hear of his passing. Standing reflects:
I knew him for many years, and was delighted when he accepted my invitation to give an opening keynote to the BIEN Geneva Congress in 2002, where he gave a characteristically optimistic speech about basic income coming in through the back door. Above all, he should have received the Nobel Prize in Economics. His lifelong work on income inequality will be his primary intellectual legacy. It was the real foundation for Thomas Piketty’s influential book. In his final magisterial book, Tony returned to basic income, and his participation income variant of the idea. He was a gentleman scholar.
Note (January 3, 7:30 ET): Since the original posting of this article, van Parijs has contributed an additional short post commemorating Atkinson.
Additional Reading: Sir Anthony Atkinson on Basic Income
A. B. Atkinson, “The Case for a Participation Income,” The Political Quarterly, 1996.
A. B. Atkinson, “Basic Income: Ethics, Statistics and Economics,” revised version of a paper presented at the Basic Income and Income Redistribution workshop at the University of Luxembourg, April 2011.
Citizen’s Income Trust, “Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson, a review,” Basic Income News, August 26, 2015.
Top photo: Sir Tony Atkinson at Fourth Angus Maddison Lecture on Data, Distribution and Development (Oct 2015), CC BY-NC-ND OECD Development Centre
