by Kate McFarland | Apr 19, 2016 | News
Rutger Bregman in June 2015
Source: Victor van Werkhooven (Wikimedia Commons)
Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, the latest book by the award-winning Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman, will be published in English on Tuesday, April 19. The book was originally published in Dutch, and met immense success in the Netherlands — where it not only became a national bestseller but also helped to spearhead the movement for municipality-level basic income experiments.
Early in the book, Bregman transports the reader back to a long-gone time of utopian fantasy — to visions of “Cockaigne,” a land where “rivers ran with wine, roast geese flew overhead, pancakes grew on trees, and hot pies and pastries rained from the skies,” and all people danced, drank, and lounged together as equals. A new vision of utopia, he argues, is sorely needed in modern societies.
A century ago, influential thinkers like John Maynard Keynes predicted that automation and improved efficiency would render work all but gone in the not-so-distant future. Instead, here in the early decades of the 21st century, we citizens of developed nations find ourselves working longer hours than ever — all too often in jobs that we ourselves find meaningless. (On the last point, see Bregman’s lucid discussion of “bullshit jobs” in hist chapter entitled “Why it Doesn’t Pay to be a Banker.”) Technology has brought great improvements in living conditions — at least for a few — but dreams of a paradise of leisure seem lost to the wind.
Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Luilekkerland” (“The Land of Cockaigne”), 1567
How, then, can we reclaim our visions of utopia? How can we turn our modern “Land of Plenty,” as Bregman often calls it, into a land of plenty for all — and plentiful leisure and life-fulfillment as well?
No doubt, many skeptics and naysayers will find Bregman’s solutions — his visions of a universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek — to be fanciful as the mythical land of Cockaigne. Bregman himself concedes that, to many, his proposals will sound like “crazy dreams.” But it can’t be over-stressed that this “crazy dream” is, indeed, a “utopia for realists.” Far from being a woolly-headed dreamer, Bregman proposes and describes specific steps en route to utopia — from disincentivizing overtime to taxing banking transactions to developing alternative measure of progress to the GDP — and thoroughly backs his claims with diverse historical and experimental evidence.
For example, in his first chapter on basic income (“Why Everyone Should Get Free Money”), Bregman presents the findings of multiple studies of the effects of “free money.” He discusses the results of “Mincome” experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, and similar concurrent studies conducted in the United States, in some detail — in addition to summarizing the outcomes observed by charitable organizations like GiveDirectly, which deals in no-strings-attached cash donations, and formal studies of cash transfers to the poor. He effectively combines statistics, anecdotes, and theoretical considerations in making the case that a basic income is the most effective means to combat poverty — a realistic approach to utopia-building if any is.
Of course, as Bregman knows, basic income, on its own, is not sufficient to create a utopian future. I will leave it to the reader to discover the other facets and nuances of his “crazy dream” — but, as an educator, I do want to call special attention to Bregman’s critique of our present discourse about education, which he (accurately) notes “invariably revolved around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market?” According to Bregman, this is “precisely the wrong question.” Instead, educators must ask what knowledge and skills we want students to have — to prepare them “not only for the job market but, more fundamentally, for life.” I couldn’t agree more. (Of course, as a philosophy instructor, I also couldn’t agree more when Bregman specifically recommends training students in “philosophy and morals,” but I digress…)
Utopia for Realists is a highly recommended read — but, in the words of Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. Bregman’s book has received widespread praise from noted scholars and thinkers in the basic income movement and beyond.
Nick Srnicek, the co-author of another influential utopian-leaning book (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work), calls Utopia for Realists “a bold call for utopian thinking and a world without work – something needed more than ever in an era of defeatism and lack of ambition,” while noted social theorist Zygmunt Bauman describes it as “brilliant, comprehensive, truly enlightening, and eminently readable” and “obligatory reading for everyone worried about the wrongs of present-day society and wishing to contribute to their cure.”
BIEN co-founder Philippe van Parijs also commends the book, saying, “Learning from history and from up-to-date social science can shatter crippling illusions. It can turn allegedly utopian proposals into plain common sense. It can enable us to face the future with unprecedented enthusiasm. To see how, read this superbly written, upbeat, insightful book.”
To learn more about Rutger Bregman and Utopia for Realists, visit the website of its publisher The Correspondent, a crowdfunded online journal for which Bregman has written extensively.
Bregman was recently interviewed by Gawker about basic income, in conjunction with the English version release of his book. The interview covers much ground, including the feasibility of a basic income in the United States (Bregman sees a “natural fit” for a basic income in the US, calling it the “ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive politics”), and responses to a battery of potential objections, such as the free-rider problem, the threat of inflation, and the worry that an economy in which people work fewer hours could not generate sufficient revenue to finance a basic income.
For a short and accessible video introduction to Bregman’s ideas about a basic income, watch his TEDx talk on YouTube.
by Kate McFarland | Apr 13, 2016 | News
The Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator made international news earlier this year, when it announced plans to fund a five-year study on the effects of a guaranteed basic income. (Basic Income News covered the announcement here.)
While this has widely been hailed as a breakthrough for the basic income movement, author Evgeny Morozov takes a critical approach to the ambitions of Y Combinator — and the Silicon Valley basic income movement more generally — in an article written for The Guardian.
Drawing upon the work of Italian economists Carlo Vercellone, Andrea Fumagalli, and Stefano Lucarelli, Morozov presents an argument in favor of basic income as a means to facilitate “cognitive capitalism” (in which cognitive labor assumes a much greater importance than material production). Interestingly, however, Morozov contends that the same argument also entails that Silicon Valley is not the “greatest champion” of the basic income agenda but indeed its “main enemy.”
So, then, how could Silicon Valley encourage the transition to a basic income, if not through its current activities? Here, Morozov suggests a radically different (and, he believes, certainly unpopular) approach: “why not make us, the users, the owners of our data?”
The Bay Area’s tech elite have been instrumental in promoting and popularizing the idea of a basic income, and it would surely be premature to dismiss their efforts out of hand. Nonetheless, Morozov raises deep concerns that are worthy of consideration by those involved with or interested in the movement.
Evgeny Morozov, 27 February 2016, “Silicon Valley talks a good game on ‘basic income’, but its words are empty,” The Guardian.
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
by Guest Contributor | Mar 29, 2016 | Opinion
By Clive Lord
Almost everyone I know of who supports the Basic Income (BI) does so on the grounds of social justice. I agree of course, but for me less inequality is only the second most important of three reasons to support the Basic, or as we call it in Britain, the Citizen’s Income.
When I joined the embryonic PEOPLE, now the UK Green Party, in 1973, I listened as an enquirer to a spiel based on the threats to the global environment caused by indiscriminate economic growth, which had been exposed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report Limits to Growth in 1972. I agreed with every word, but I had a question:
“What is your social policy? You are proposing a deep recession. I agree it will be necessary, but every recession to date has caused widespread hardship. What will you do when desperate people start looting?”
The answer was: “If we have to, we shall shoot them in the street. Social breakdown is hardly the best way to alleviate poverty.”
It is all very well readers being as appalled as I was, because the basic premise was right. The speaker then challenged me:
“Do you have a better social policy in mind?”
I didn’t. I spent the journey home wrestling with my own question. Guess what I came up with. I discovered later that the Basic Income had already been invented several times, for different reasons, starting with Thomas Paine in 1798. But even now, 43 years later, limiting economic activity to the ability of the ecosphere to cope was not part of the “successful” Paris climate agreement in December 2015. It will fail without that. A Basic Income will allow a steady state economy to be acceptable to whole populations, and so become a policy option, but it will have to be world-wide.
It will be dismissed as “unaffordable” – this would only be true if the economy has collapsed beyond the ability to provide basic necessities for all, but if linked to ecological realities it will entail drastic redistribution. This brings us to the more common justification for a BI of reducing inequality, but if all the Basic Income does is allow the poor to spend money confiscated from the rich, the Paris agreement is doomed.
However, I am continually perplexed by the widespread failure to grasp the malevolence of means testing – taking benefits away as soon as the claimant has any other income.
The next few paragraphs refer to the UK but will apply anywhere means tested benefits are used. For the person losing a means tested benefit, the effect is identical to a massive marginal tax. The clearest demonstration of this can be found in an unexpected source: the 2009 report Dynamic Benefits: towards welfare that works, released by the Centre for Social Justice. The Centre was set up by Iain Duncan Smith, who has been Work and Pensions secretary in the UK Coalition, now Conservative government since 2010 – and has recently resigned in protest against announced cuts to disability benefits. Dynamic Benefits was the foundation for the government’s welfare ‘reform’ policies. Its key recommendation was the Universal Credit (UC), whereby on finding employment a claimant would retain 45% of their former benefits. The former Work and Pensions secretary reduced this to 35% on taking office. This means that the former claimant is faced with a tax rate equivalent of 65%. Bankers on the highest tax rate lose 45% of their income.
In Dynamic Benefits, there are several graphs showing benefit withdrawal rates as though they were taxes. In fact, the first part of the report, outlining the problem, is an excellent statement of the case for a Basic income. The UC is an emaciated BI which attempts to remove the work disincentive of means testing, but still penalises beneficiaries disproportionately vis-à-vis high-income earners.
While Iain Duncan Smith’s stated reason for resigning was cuts to disability benefits, I believe the real reason is the imminent scrapping of the UC. In four years since being announced, the UC has only reached 5% of the 4.5 million who should be eligible. The Department of Work and Pensions is claiming that the UC will be fully rolled out by May 2021. The track record of slippage to date makes that improbable. That the initiator of benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax, and Work Capability Assessments presents himself as the defender of the weak and vulnerable is sickening, but Dynamic Benefits remains a useful document for basic income debates.
But my third reason is much more fundamental. A Basic income can begin a shift to a totally new culture. Instead of haves vs have nots, or bosses vs workers , the new fault line will be those who want to preserve natural systems versus those who believe there will always be a technological answer. This will enable a low growth economy to protect the ecosphere.
Milton Friedman, an archetypal neo-liberal, was in favour of the Basic income. Market forces are a basic pillar of neo-liberalism, but instead of the current system whereby the strong can exploit the weak, persuasion will replace work compulsion. The would-be employee will have equal bargaining power with the boss. Needless to say, Employee Benefits such as healthcare cover will also need to be negotiable. Experiences in India and Namibia show that far from encouraging idleness, a BI facilitates entrepreneurship. But it will also allow people generally to heed eco-constraints, notably climate change, where competitive capitalism does not.
Anyone curious to know more, my Book, Citizens’ Income and Green Economics (2011) is available from the Green Economic Institute. My blog www.clivelord.wordpress.com which is more up to date, but 
inevitably less coherent, discusses the Tragedy of the Commons, population, the Greek crisis, migration and fracking.
We may yet save “Paris” (and the planet), and feed everyone. There is even something in it for the capitalists.
Clive Lord is a founding member of the British Green Party, a major contributor to the party’s first “Manifesto for a Sustainable Society” and a basic income advocate.
by Guest Contributor | Mar 8, 2016 | Opinion
By Liane Gale and Ann Withorn
for the Basic Income Woman Action Group (BIWAG)
Since 1909, International Women’s Day has been a day for recognizing women’s economic, political and social achievements. Yet over the past century, March 8 Women’s Day celebrations have revealed tensions between feminists, socialists and anarchists about the meaning of women’s roles in society. Feminists saw full equality through equal participation in the polity as the major way women would gain power. Socialists argued that full inclusion of women as workers within a self-aware proletariat was the way for women to achieve solidarity, and therefore power. Anarchists envisioned women’s liberation as based on learning new ways of living and loving, so that a new way organizing society would become possible.
Today, we view the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as a means to transcend such historic differences. BIG offers a way for women to achieve basic economic security outside of the labor market. It firmly denies that only certain activities done outside the home and community should be rewarded, much less be the chief source of one’s respect and social value in society. With a meaningful basic income as a secure base for living, women everywhere should be more able to live a life without fear, and of their own design.
If basic income could fundamentally change the lives and fates of women and girls, and with it the fate of humanity, then why is this not widely discussed in the community? One case in point is the appeal by Martha Beéry to the national media agency in Switzerland to invoke bias towards male views in a panel on basic income on national television in 2012 that only included men. The decision was in her favor, but the inclusion of women’s points of view in regards to basic income has been slow both in mainstream and social media. Despite this, recently we have seen a welcome surge of contributions about the economic and social realities of women, that often offer basic income as a solution to some of the disadvantages women face.
These analyses include calls to elevate the value of care work and other contributions to society (such as community work), which are underpaid or not paid at all, and as a result do not elicit much respect by a society which largely equates money-making abilities with importance and status. Organizations, such as the Care Revolution Netzwerk, that is active in German-speaking countries, Mothers at Home Matter from the UK, and initiators and supporters of the “Leap Manifesto: A Call For a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another” are all grassroots efforts to change the current narrative. With the Basic Income Woman Action Group (BIWAG), we strive to contribute to this international effort. To that end, we are facilitating national and international conference calls with interested members and maintain a BIWAG Facebook Group.
The program of the 15th Annual North American Basic Income Congress in Winnipeg, Canada (May 12-15) is especially attentive to women’s concerns and to enhancing women’s roles in the movement. More than half of the planning committee members are women. Dr. Felicia Kornbluh, professor of Gender Studies, writer, welfare rights advocate and member of the Vermont Commission on Women, will give a keynote on “Two, Three, Many Precariats: Basic Income and the Fight for Gender, Class and Disability Justice”. Two other keynotes will also be given by women. At least sixteen panel presentations and speakers will be directly addressing links between basic income and women. In addition, three BIWAG sponsored roundtables will allow serious time for discussion of “Women’s Roles within the Basic Income Movement”, “Basic Income and the Care-Centered Economy”, and “Basic Income’s Role in Ending Violence Against Women.” A panel on the Color of Poverty and speakers from the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg will also bring much immediacy to the event.
The 2016 theme of International Women’s Day includes the goals of ending all forms of discrimination and violence against all women and girls everywhere, and we believe that a basic income would be a firm step into the direction of a more humane world for all.
To learn more about BIWAG or to get involved, please join our Facebook group or contact us at withorn.ann@gmail.com or liane.gale@gmail.com.
Recent contributions on women and basic income, and closely related issues and causes:
Nicole M. Aschoff, “Feminism Against Capitalism,” Jacobin, February 29, 2016.
Allissa Battistoni, “Why Women’s Work is Key to a Just and Sustainable Future,” Feministing, August 6, 2015.
Alyssa Battistoni, “Why Establishing a Guaranteed Income for All Can Help Prevent Environmental Catastrophe,”, Alternet (reprinted from Jacobin), February 19, 2014.
Madeleine Bunting, “Who Will Care for Us in the Future? Watch Out for the Rise of the Robots,” The Guardian, March 6, 2016.
Petra Buskins, “‘Flexibility’ Won’t Stop Women Retiring In Poverty,” New Matilda, October 30, 2015.
Liane Gale and Ann Withorn, “Basic Income Women Action Group”, Google Hangout, hosted by Marlen Vargas Del Razo, Living Income Guaranteed, Streamed Live, August 23, 2013.
Claire Cain Miller, “How Society Pays When Women’s Work is Unpaid,” New York Times, February 22, 2016.
Helen Ninnies, “As Rental Prices Rise, Women Stay in Bad Relationships to Survive,” Broadly, February 20, 2016.
Vanessa Olorenshaw, “Mothers at Home Matter and the Politics of Mothering – When Maternal Care is Taboo and Politicians Have No Clue,” Huffington Post U.K., March 17, 2015.
Meera Lee Patel: “Idea: All Work Deserves Pay,” Fast Company, January 20, 2016.
Ina Praetorius: “The Care-Centered Economy: Rediscovering What Has Been Taken for Granted,” e-book published by Heinrich Böll Stiftung, April 7, 2015.
Judith Shulevitz: “It’s Payback Time for Women,” New York Times, January 8, 2016.
by Dawn Howard | Feb 12, 2016 | Opinion
Founded in 2014 by futurist and philosopher Zoltan Istvan, the Transhumanist Party is an American non-profit political organization, which advocates the use of non-discriminatory implementations of science and technology to solve a majority of the world’s problems. Despite being in its early stages, the Transhumanist party has been incredibly inspirational for millions of people who are seeking modern, progressive solutions to the challenges we face as a species.
The current leader of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan, is running for US president in 2016. At the heart of Zoltan’s platform is a focus on the use of science and technology in the pursuit of immortality. He also promotes free education for all, an end to US military actions abroad, and the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Zoltan’s campaign platform can found here.
Zoltan was kind enough to answer a few questions for Basic Income News, specifically regarding his support for a UBI.
Dawn Howard: You have made UBI part of your 2016 presidential election platform. Can you tell us who you are thinking about appointing as your chief economics advisor? Does he or she have experience designing or implementing UBI pilots?
Zoltan Istvan: A UBI Plan is a huge part of my campaign. As someone who contemplates technology all day long, I am sure that robots are going to take many if not nearly all jobs in the next 10 to 35 years. So we need a way to transition society to being able to happily live in an age where there are no jobs. UBI is the perfect vehicle.
While I have advisors helping me sort out the basics of implementing a basic income, I can’t reveal who might fill the role of implementing that program. But we would draw on experts that have already had some experience in their own nations of doing so.
DH: Several countries including Canada, India and most recently Finland have already tested or are in the process of testing basic income for a small portion of their population. How do you feel about this type of research, and do you think it could work in the US?
ZI: One of the best things to happen to the world in the last few years is having smaller populated nations test out a UBI. It gives the larger nations the evidence they need to confidently implement their own plans one day, and it offers a road map to follow.
DH: Many in the UBI community speak of a “transition” in terms of the timeline between passing legislation and full implementation. In as little or as much detail as you wish, can you tell us what you think this transition would look like?
ZI: I think the transition would probably take five to six years to fulfill from the point legislation passed to everyone having a basic income. While I support a quick transition, we also must be careful not to disturb our national economy too much as this historic process takes place. It would be better to do it slowly, but correctly, rather than force it and lead to a recession, or worse. Capitalism is changing due to technology, and may not even survive 30 years into the future. We must be able to change with it and help the needs of every single citizen out there. But we must also not be hasty.
For more information about Zoltan’s presidential campaign, visit his web site here.
Photo: Zoltan Istvan, leader of the Transhumanist Party and US presidential candidate. Credit: Business Insider.
