by Hilde Latour | Jan 8, 2017 | News
At the party’s congress on December 17th, members of Dutch political party Green Left (“Groen Links”) were given the opportunity to vote on amendments to its election program. This document will be released soon, in advance of the country’s parliamentary elections, which will be held on March 15th, 2017.
In the draft version of the election program, a basic income was only mentioned as a possible means to reform the social welfare system.
Two amendments concerning a universal basic income (UBI) were voted on at the party’s congress:
- Implementation of a UBI
“Green Left supports the (eventual) implementation of an unconditional basic income for everyone, high enough to live decently from. Unconditional economic security will lead to possibilities for a fairer distribution of paid jobs, caregiving, volunteer work and income. In addition to that, it will facilitate entrepreneurship. Starting point is that the lowest incomes will not decrease and the basic income will be co-financed through progressive income taxes. Existing additional financial support for citizens in specific circumstances can continue to exist.”
- Experimenting with a UBI
“Implementation of a national representative experiment of a universal basic income, to be conducted on a large-scale and over several years, aimed at a better understanding of the effects on people’s behaviour.”
Before the voting took place, the board of the party advised members to reject both of the amendments, arguing:
“an unconditional basic income is a bridge too far, as an unconditional basic income uses tax money to support people who don’t need it”.
But the members decided differently: approximately 80% of those present, voted in favour of the second amendment: to start a nationwide experiment of a universal basic income.
The first amendment, concerning the implementation of a UBI failed in a much closer vote: 53% rejected this proposal.
“We now are working hard to make changes in the text of the election program and the definite version will be available soon”, Christel Kohlmann (Head Strategy and Information of the party) explains. It could not be confirmed whether the experiments would really be aimed at a UBI for everyone, however.
For comparison, the currently planned experiments in The Netherlands, although they will test elements of basic income, are not examining a representative sample of the entire population. The social security experiments expected to start this year, for example, will examine only a group selected from people currently receiving welfare benefits.
Green Left is now the second Dutch elected political party that is already in Parliament and now in favour of experimenting with a real UBI. (That is, its members are in favour, and with a convincing majority). The Party for the Animals (“Partij voor de Dieren”) is also in favour of a serious experiment with a UBI and has formulated that in their program. In addition to these two parties, sitting Member of Parliament Norbert Klein will participate in the upcoming elections with the Cultural Liberal Party (“Vrijzinnige Partij”). Klein is now in Parliament as an individual member, having left the 50plus party after the last elections. The Cultural Liberal Party is also in favour of research with a universal basic income, and has even produced a rough calculation on how a UBI should be financed.
Compared to the former elections, support for a UBI has clearly spread and grown in The Netherlands. More than 65.000 people already signed a petition and this number is still growing. In the upcoming month, more political parties will have their members voting for amendments to their party programs in advance of the upcoming elections in March.
Info and links
The amendments on a universal basic income can be found on page 75 of the Green Left congress paper (in Dutch).
The election program of Green Left can be found here (when ready and in Dutch).
Information about the upcoming experiments with social welfare can be found here and here (in Dutch).
THE NETHERLANDS: Party for the Animals wants Universal Basic Income to be investigated
[Hilde Latour]
NETHERLANDS: Debate about unconditional Basic Income in Parliament
[Hilde Latour]
Photo: Euro by Alf Melin 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Kate Mc Farland for reviewing this article
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
by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
José A. Noguera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, International Advisory Board of BIEN)
I still remember quite clearly the first time I read something about the idea of a Basic Income (BI): it was back in 1991, when I was finishing my degree in Sociology in Barcelona, and spent most of my time reading abstruse texts of social theory. It was one of my favourite authors at that time, Jürgen Habermas, who gave me the clue in a chapter of his Political Essays, in which, somewhat cryptically (as is usual in him), he spoke of something like “decoupling income from work through a guaranteed income”. Obviously he was referring to the idea of an unconditional income guarantee that authors such as André Gorz or Claus Offe had been popularizing in certain circles since the early 1980s (at that time I did not even know who Philippe Van Parijs was).
My reaction, I remember well, was of the type: “Of course! How is it that the Left did not think of that earlier?” (Obviously, the Left – and the Right – had thought about it, but I did not know.) And then I went on to “I definitely have to read more about this!”
Indeed, in the following years I did so: I then read the famous article by Van Parijs and Van der Veen and some of the debates it generated. I began to talk to colleagues and friends about the subject, and I even spoke about BI at some meetings of the Eco-Socialist political party I had joined, Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds (ICV), with ambivalent results: while some (the more veteran) described it as a “Martian proposal”, others (the younger) showed a lot of interest and asked me for readings and further clarifications. A decade later, ICV was the only party in Spain incorporating BI in its program as a long-term goal, so I am pleased to think that my efforts were not in vain!
To be honest, at that time I approached the subject rather as an amateur and a political activist convinced that the Left had to make big cultural and ideological changes to conquer the future. But when I finished my doctoral thesis in 1998, with more time and an academic career ahead, I decided to dedicate part of it to studying BI more seriously. I published an article (that today I see infamous) on BI in Spain and I got a post-doc grant to study the topic at the London School of Economics and Political Science. London’s weather favoured reading, so between one pint of beer and another, I really started to grasp all the implications (and complications!) of implementing a BI in an advanced welfare system.
That year 2000 I attended my first BIEN Congress in Berlin, where I first met some of the BIEN founders, and, to my surprise, I discovered more Spaniards and Catalans interested in the idea. When I returned to Barcelona, and together with some of them, we created the Spanish Basic Income Network, which soon became an active national member of BIEN. Before we could notice, we were organising the 2004 Barcelona BIEN Congress in which the network became a worldwide organisation.
Since then, I have been discussing BI mainly from an academic (maybe even ‘technocratic’) point of view, more than from political advocacy, since I felt that was how I could honestly contribute better. That option, on the other hand, has also made me see all the complications and nuances of the debate about the BI, as well as the complexity of its practical implementation. Through the years I have published articles, participated in conferences and workshops, given talks, and together with Karl, Yannick and Jürgen, compiled the first comprehensive anthology on BI for Wiley-Blackwell (which was born and designed during memorable beer sessions at Turf Tavern in Oxford).
The Great Crisis of 2008 pushed me back from academic to political concerns. Widespread corruption, poverty, inequality and unemployment reached socially unbearable levels in my country. A new political movement, Podemos, emerged from the roots of the 15M demonstrations in order to fight the rampant cynicism of the political and economic elites and their policies. I immediately felt I should help that cause as I better could. They were sympathetic to BI from the start, so I start to work with them and by 2015 we finally designed a feasible proposal to progress in the right direction: a nationwide Guaranteed Income with no work condition attached, plus a wage supplement for low-income workers. The proposal created a sort of bandwagon effect by which many other political parties started to include income guarantee proposals in their programs.
BIEN has been during almost 20 years a source of intellectual excitement and political stimulation for me. I am confident that it will continue to be so. I believe that the future prospects of BI will depend on its supporters being able to combine the necessary doses of pragmatism and impartial analysis (thus resisting sectarian or self-serving attitudes), with the conviction that this is a good and just idea and it is worth defending it.
José A. Noguera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He serves on the Board of the Spanish Basic Income Network (RRB) and on the International Advisory Board of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN).
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 29, 2016 | News
Timotheus Höttges, CEO of the multibillion dollar telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG, has previously expressed support of unconditional basic income. In December 2016, he again addressed the subject in an interview in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
In a recent interview with Handelsblatt, Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges talks about the changing nature of work, especially potential job loss due to digitization — to which, he admits, his own company is not immune — and the demand for more specialized skills. In response to a question about why he supports an unconditional basic income (“bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen”), he notes that jobs are becoming more project-based, with permanent full-time employment becoming less of a norm.
Timotheus Höttges
Between digitization and project-based work structures, we should expect that workers will need more time to retrain as well as more periods of unemployment or part-time employment — and, according to Höttges, Germany’s current welfare system is ill-equipped to support such workers. Thus, he believes that the government should replace its complex system of subsidies with an unconditional basic income [1].
Höttges adds that an unconditional basic income would promote more dignity (“Würde”) than Germany’s current welfare system — which puts the would-be recipient in the position of a supplicant, having to ask for aid — and that it could promote entrepreneurship.
Although he admits that some might take advantage of the basic income without contributing to society, Höttges denies that a basic income would create a “society of loafers” (“Gesellschaft von Faulenzern”), since it is through work that people find meaning and identity.
Höttges also points out that a basic income would encourage respect for those who choose to do work that is traditionally unpaid, giving the example of care for ailing parents. (It’s worth noting in this connection that, earlier in the interview, Höttges argues that revenue is no longer an adequate measure of productivity, given the extent to which information can now be created and distributed freely, as in Wikipedia.)
When asked about funding for an unconditional basic income, Höttges stresses that the policy needs to be seen as part of a broader package of a reforms, including tax reform. He maintains that corporate profits must be taxed and redistributed as a matter of justice, fairness, and solidarity (“Gerechtigkeit, Fairness, Solidarität”).
The interview also mentions top-ranked German CEOs who are sympathetic to basic income, including Götz Werner of dm-drogerie markt — with whom Höttges has discussed the idea — and Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, who called for “a kind of basic income” during the Süddeutsche Zeitung Economic Summit in November (although he subsequently indicated in a Tweet that he did not believe the basic income needed to be unconditional).
If you read German, you can read the entire interview here:
Ina Karabasz, “Telekom Timotheus Höttges CEO: ‘Wir sind zu satt’,” Handelsblatt, December 20, 2016.
[1] In the original German: “Also wird es Phasen geben, in denen der Mensch keine Arbeit hat, umschult oder nur in Teilzeit für ein Unternehmen arbeitet. Diese Phasen wird der Sozialstaat überbrücken müssen. Warum soll man dessen komplexe Förderungssystematik nicht mit einem bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen ersetzen?”
Timotheus Höttges photos: CC BY-SA 4.0 Sebaso
by BIEN | Dec 25, 2016 | News
A new report from the investment service Wealthify reveals that many Scottish people are unable to save for the future because of “zero hour contracts, insecure work and low pay.” Moreover, according to the report, Scottish women save less than half of the money of men, and 10 times less than some areas of England. Using certain tools to help to save can its benefits. There is a structure to follow, making it easier to stick to. If debts need to be paid, enlisting the help of a debt expert or debt management company, like Hello Resolve, can assist in paying back any debts as well as teaching basic money management.
Campaigners have proposed a universal basic income (UBI) in response to this–such as Kirstein Rummery, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Stirling, whom Nathanael Williams interviewed in a Commonspace article about the Wealthify report.
Rummery said, “The only real policy solution would be Universal Basic Income – which would not only mitigate against income insecurity but tackle poverty effectively and lead to a huge economic stimulus.”
She continued, “It is clear that several factors are coming together to make the financial situation particularly precarious for groups of Scots.”
Rummery believes that a UBI might also serve to offset the gender imbalance. Zero hour contracts and pay freezes affect low-paid workers the most, who are mostly women in the public sector. The same for the withdrawal of benefits for the disabled and social care services because of funding constraints. The rise in housing costs exacerbates the situation.
If you want to read more, please see here:
Nathanael Williams. Universal Basic Income can be “real solution” as women and low paid face “perfect storm” of debt. (CommonSpace).
Image Credit: Ken Teegardin
