by Andre Coelho | Oct 15, 2016 | News
(Photo credit to: Lonely planet – Taroko Gorge, Taiwan)
A political party in Taiwan, called the Basic Welfare Party (formerly known as the Taiwan Republican Party) includes the basic income as a core policy. The groundwork for the party is still being established as of January 2017. The BWP was initiated by members of Taiwan Global Basic Income Social Welfare Promotion Association and Yu Hua Zhai charity vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan. The party’s goal is to promote constitutional, legislative and judicial reform. With these goals, the BWP hopes to contribute to the realization of a country that acknowledges the importance of social welfare and the law, ensuring the right to a minimum livelihood through the establishment of an unconditional basic income for all people. As of January 2017, the BWP does not yet have a chairperson and is seeking individuals to fill the role.
One important figure in Taiwan is Dr. Tien-Sheng Hsu, Taiwan’s Family Medicine and Psychiatrist medical doctor as well as the Seth mental and physical clinic president. On June 5, Dr. Hsu spoke about Switzerland’s movement for the referendum on a basic income in a public speech. When discussing the basic income policy, Hsu said that hypothetically if he were the president of the Republic of China, he would give every citizen 30,000 New Taiwan Dollars (NTD) per month. In the same speech, he claimed that independence and reliance must forever be actively interwoven. In some ways, reliance allows our creativity to flourish. Because of this, Hsu said that if everyone’s basic security was taken care of with 30,000 NTD, then people would be more willing to take risks to achieve their ideal careers or life.
Dr. Tien Sheng Hsu
On June 8, Dr. Hsu and a doctor of international relations, Dr. Xinyi Ma, hosted the talk show “Voice of A-Sheng” which discussed international and domestic Taiwanese news from the perspective of mental and physical health. This program also brought up the Switzerland referendum on basic income. Dr. Hsu and Dr. Ma discussed the possibility of the people of Taiwan launching its own basic income referendum.
Dr. Hsu and Ma wondered whether such a referendum would pass in Taiwan, but Hsu said he approved of the essence behind Switzerland’s proposal, which was to guarantee a basic standard of living for every person. Dr. Hsu also said an important consideration is how such a basic income would be funded in Taiwan.
On several occasions, Hsu seemed to joke that he should become the President of the Republic of China so he could give 30,000 NTD to every citizen. It us unclear if Hsu is serious about his presidential aspirations or if the comments were meant to illustrate the effects of a hypothetical basic income.
During the program, Dr. Hsu and Dr. Ma also analyzed the topic of unconditional basic income from a psychological perspective. They maintain that “You create your own reality.” They defend that, when people go back to their inner state of grace, with their basic survival guaranteed, they feel protected by love, wisdom, mercy, creativity and the magical power of the universe. Dr. Hsu and Dr. Ma begin with the premise that every person’s existence is loved, every person in the universe is cherished. From here the whole society is then built, letting our humanity gain greater degree of freedom within. They say that if most people move in this direction, perhaps the social system we desire could really be built. Take the people from Switzerland, Finland and Holland: these are regions from which the Taiwanese people can learn from.
According to Dr. Hsu and Dr. Ma, if the idea of the basic income does not bring in our inner-selves, but rather employs the violent power of government, then it has again been distorted. Thus we must create the basic income from within, rather than from extrinsic pressure that makes everyone adhere to a certain system. So, Dr. Hsu and Dr. Ma urge, let’s use our intrinsic nature to embark on this endeavor. We can then achieve the feeling of inner richness and, in a state of grace, the proper external reforms will follow.
Editors note: The above article was revised on January 23, 2017 to add context about the nature of Dr. Hsu’s comments and included links to the original speeches. The article was also updated to reflect the current status of the Basic Welfare Party and to reflect the name change of the group from the Taiwan Republican Party.
Written by Juku Shenguang: Founder, Vice-president and Secretary-General of Taiwan Global Basic Income Social Welfare Promotion Association
Translated by Tyler Prochazka
Reviewed by André Coelho and Kate McFarland
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 14, 2016 | Opinion
There was an uncanny similarity between two referenda held in June: the UK’s referendum on whether to remain in the European Union, and the Swiss referendum on a Citizen’s Income. In each case, the ballot paper asked a simple question: whether to remain or leave, and whether to establish a Citizen’s or Basic Income – an unconditional income for every Swiss citizen. In the latter case, the wording was explicit that the Swiss federal government was to decide on the level of the Basic Income and on the means of funding it.
And then in both cases the campaigns leading up to the referenda were less about the referenda questions than about very different issues.
In the Swiss case this was largely the fault of the proposers of the referendum question. The wording having carefully left the decision as to the level of the Citizen’s Income to the Swiss government, the campaigners then suggested a level of 2,500 Swiss francs per month – about £400 per week. It was largely this that led to so many members of the Swiss parliament asking people to vote against the proposal; it was the proposed figure that dominated the campaign; and it was the fear of the massive tax increase that would have been needed to fund such a large Citizen’s Income that led to so many people voting against the proposal. All of this could have been avoided quite easily. If the campaigners had wanted to inform the debate about potential levels of Citizen’s Income and possible funding methods then they could have undertaken the kind of careful costing work that we and others have undertaken in the UK. If that had happened, then the government could have made clear the level of Citizen’s Income that they would be likely to agree on if the referendum were to pass, and the debate and the decision might have been rather more rational.
Having said that, the referendum was in many ways a success. The referendum was held; it contributed significantly to media and public interest in Citizen’s Income, both in Switzerland and around the world; and 23% of the Swiss population approved of the idea. The referendum will be seen as an important stage in the Swiss and global Citizen’s Income debates.
In the British case there was always going to be a problem. Public understanding of the European Union is almost non-existent, so the only information that most people had available to them were the halftruths that campaigners on both sides and the press chose to feed to them. Members of the public were told that we could avoid EU workers having the right to live and work in the UK and trade within the single market, even though the European Commission had made it clear that remaining within the single market was conditional upon allowing EU workers to live and work in the UK. Throughout the campaign, leaving the EU was touted as a way of preventing immigration, whereas most immigration is from outside the EU and was therefore nothing to do with the question on the ballot paper.
There are two lessons to draw from these two referenda. One is that referenda are a bad idea in the context of an ill-informed public and a biassed media. The question on the ballot paper might be a simple one, but if it is about a complex reality then even generally well-informed members of the public might have little understanding of the possible consequences of a referendum result – whatever that result might be. In relation to complex issues about which members of the public understand little, representative democracy is the least bad system of government, and it is safer than referenda. It enables proposals informed by a civil service to be debated in a parliament and in committee, to be amended, to be tested in another parliament, and then amended again. Such a method has to be preferable to a one-shot referendum ill-informed by emotive campaigns. This is not to suggest that referenda are never appropriate. If the public is well informed about the issue on the ballot paper, if campaigns are based on evidence, if experts are heard, and if the print and other media see it as their role to educate rather than to persuade, then a referendum has some chance of assessing an informed population’s view on the question on the ballot paper. The 2014 referendum on Scottish independence came closer to this ideal referendum than either the Swiss Basic Income referendum or the recent British referendum on EU membership; and the Swiss Basic Income referendum came closer to it than the British referendum on EU membership. It would take a massive educational effort to enable the UK’s population to gain a sufficient understanding of the desirability and feasibility of a Citizen’s Income to enable it to compare a benefits system based on a Citizen’s Income with the current system. Whether such an educational effort is possible, or such an outcome feasible, must be in doubt: in which case the safer method will be for the institutions of representative democracy – Parliament and the Government – to evaluate the arguments for a Citizen’s Income and to decide in accordance with their findings.
The second lesson to draw is that careful research is essential if any future debate about Citizen’s Income is to be sufficiently well informed. It has been a pleasure to see recent well researched reports from the Royal Society of Arts, the Adam Smith Institute, and Compass, and up to date costings and other statistics relating to a particular illustrative Citizen’s Income scheme have recently been published by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. We hope soon to be able to publish costings and other information relating to a couple more illustrative schemes, and we also hope to have available soon some information on how a range of typical households’ net incomes would be affected by some illustrative schemes. We would like to see even more research organisations involved in the rigorous testing of the financial feasibilities and consequences of illustrative schemes.
There is a connection between the Swiss and British referenda: EUROMOD, the microsimulation programme that we use to evaluate illustrative Citizen’s Income schemes. The programme’s development is funded by the European Union. We are very much hoping that the UK will continue to be involved in the European collaboration that makes such a useful piece of research infrastructure possible.
Another connection is the one between Citizen’s Income and important factors in the British European Union referendum. Widening inequality and deep social divisions appear to have been important motivations for voting to leave the EU, even though leaving the EU is unlikely to remedy the situation and might even make it worse. A Citizen’s Income would help to reduce inequality and to heal social division. It is therefore essential that widespread informed debate on Citizen’s Income should take place, and that the institutions of representative democracy should decide to implement a Citizen’s Income: perhaps informed by an advisory referendum.
by Kate McFarland | Oct 13, 2016 | News
United States President Barack Obama addressed universal basic income in a question in an October 12 interview with Wired Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.
The interview covers a plethora of issues surrounding the political, economic, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. After discussing regulation, funding, and cyber security, among other topics, it is Obama who turns attention to the economic implications of AI and, in particular, the specter of technological unemployment:
One thing that we haven’t talked about too much, and I just want to go back to, is we really have to think through the economic implications. Because most people aren’t spending a lot of time right now worrying about singularity—they are worrying about “Well, is my job going to be replaced by a machine?”
He then expresses optimism regarding the possibility for continued job creation in the face of technological progress (“historically we’ve absorbed new technologies, and people find that new jobs are created, they migrate, and our standards of living generally go up”); however, he proceeds to warn that the government must do what it can to ensure that the gain do not simply go to a “small group at the top”:
Low-wage, low-skill individuals become more and more redundant, and their jobs may not be replaced, but wages are suppressed. And if we are going to successfully manage this transition, we are going to have to have a societal conversation about how we manage this. How are we training and ensuring the economy is inclusive if, in fact, we are producing more than ever, but more and more of it is going to a small group at the top? How do we make sure that folks have a living income? And what does this mean in terms of us supporting things like the arts or culture or making sure our veterans are getting cared for? The social compact has to accommodate these new technologies, and our economic models have to accommodate them.
Following up on Obama’s remarks, Ito broaches the topic of UBI:
… I don’t know what you think about universal basic income, but as we start to see people getting displaced there’s also this idea that we can look at other models—like academia or the arts, where people have a purpose that isn’t tied directly to money. I think one of the problems is that there’s this general notion of, how can you be smart if you don’t have any money? In academia, I see a lot of smart people without money.
In reply, Obama acknowledges that the debate over UBI would continue over the coming decades and, moreover, highlights another influential argument often given in its favor–recognition of the value of unpaid (and underpaid) labor:
[W]hether a universal income is the right model—is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people?—that’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years. You’re also right that the jobs that are going be displaced by AI are not just low-skill service jobs; they might be high-skill jobs but ones that are repeatable and that computers can do. What is indisputable, though, is that as AI gets further incorporated, and the society potentially gets wealthier, the link between production and distribution, how much you work and how much you make, gets further and further attenuated—the computers are doing a lot of the work. As a consequence, we have to make some tougher decisions. We underpay teachers, despite the fact that it’s a really hard job and a really hard thing for a computer to do well. So for us to reexamine what we value, what we are collectively willing to pay for—whether it’s teachers, nurses, caregivers, moms or dads who stay at home, artists, all the things that are incredibly valuable to us right now but don’t rank high on the pay totem pole—that’s a conversation we need to begin to have.
Last June, President Obama was asked about universal basic income in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview. Specifically, the interviewers asked about Obama’s view on UBI as a possible solution to economic disruption caused by globalization, and Obama replied by explaining that automation would likely produce even greater disruption (perhaps deliberately courting UBI supporters), while not taking a firm stance on–or even explicitly mentioning–UBI.
Obama’s recent remarks, then, may represent his most direct–and most sympathetic–comments on UBI to date.
On November 8, Americans will vote on the next President, to be inaugurated on January 20. Frontrunner Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken about basic income rarely, and has not expressed support. In an interview with LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth (“From bots to Brexit: Hillary Clinton explains how she’ll manage this uneasy economy”), published on June 28, she directly rejected the policy –saying that she’s “not ready to go there” and instead focusing on job creation and expansion of the earned income tax credit.
References
Davey Alba (October 12, 2016) “We must remake society in the coming age of AI: Obama,” Wired.
Scott Dadich (October 12, 2016) “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, the Future of the World,” Wired.
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
Photo: “President Barack Obama observes the Cybernetic Human Robot” CC BY-ND 2.0 U.S. Embassy, Jakarta
by Kate McFarland | Oct 12, 2016 | News
Joel Dodge is an attorney and writer based in New York City. Recently, he has been writing articles on the topic of universal basic income, several of which have been published in the online news publication Quartz.
Dodge’s interest in UBI stems in part from his attraction to the idea of a child allowance–a policy he encountered in the Netherlands while studying Dutch social programs. He cites the journalist Russell Shorto, an American expat living in Amsterdam, as an influence. In Dodge’s words, Shorto wrote about “the refreshing surprise of the Dutch government depositing money in parents’ bank accounts to help out with the cost of school books, diapers, and raising kids generally.” Commenting on the origins of his interest in UBI, Dodge explains, “The charm and user-friendliness of the policy stuck with me–how government wanted to be there to help out for the big moments in life, and it did so through simple automatic cash infusions.”
Read more: “The best way to fix child poverty in the US is to give poor kids free money”
With UBI’s recent increase in publicity and popularity, Dodge began researching earlier discussions of basic income guarantee programs in US politics — especially circa 1970, when the US federal government nearly passed a basic income guarantee in the form of President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, and Nixon’s challenger, George McGovern, developed his own basic income proposal (the “demogrant”).
Dodge says, “Part of learning about UBI has been excavating our past political debates, which is exciting. So it’s both an old idea and an extremely cutting edge, even revolutionary one.”
Read more: “When Basic Income Was Almost an American Reality“
In his most recent writings on UBI, Dodge has explored some of the main objections from both Right and Left. He dismisses the contention that it will “make people lazy” — pointing that, insofar as people do stop working, they might make other valuable social contributions (as did such “gentlemen of leisure” as Charles Darwin and Rene Descartes).
Read more: “Universal basic income wouldn’t make people lazy–it would change the nature of work”
The major worry from the left — that a basic income would disrupt the welfare state in a way that leaves many worse-off — is one that Dodge finds more pressing. In communication with Basic Income News, he describes motivation for writing “The progressive case against a universal basic income“:
I was motivated to write [it] for two principal reasons. First, I think some of the hype surrounding the cross-ideological embrace of UBI is overstated. The right and left have very different ideas about how UBI would interact with the current welfare state, and I wanted to draw attention to that disagreement.
I also saw certain influential liberal policy figures like Larry Summers, Jason Furman, and Jared Bernstein rapidly coalescing around the same critique of UBI in recent months: namely, that funding a UBI would inevitably come at the expense of other social welfare programs. And I think it’s an important critique. Those who advocate for UBI on the left need to come up with a clear and plausible way to fund a UBI while merging it with our existing social welfare regime.
Scott Santens and some other UBI advocates support retaining government healthcare programs and adding on certain UBI supplements, such as disability benefits. They point to the holes in our social safety net, but that’s really an argument for just plugging in these holes to keep people from falling through the cracks–a much more practical near-term project in our political tradition than a UBI, frankly.
And the reason progressives support certain in-kind benefits like food stamps, housing support, and public healthcare is because we think these are essentially fundamental rights that everyone should be entitled to. Would we really go back on those basic instincts if we replaced the welfare state with a UBI? That is, if someone exhausted their UBI, would we support the hard-line Charles Murray-style position that they are out of luck and must depend on charity? I doubt it, and certainly hope not. So I think UBI needs to be structured in a way that adapts to the moral imperative of guaranteeing that certain targeted, basic needs will be met, understanding that there’s social value to providing more than just cash benefits in some circumstances.
Overall, Dodge describes himself as “deeply curious about UBI” but, at the same time, cautious. He believes that it’s important to wait for the outcomes of upcoming studies of basic income before adopting such a policy. Meanwhile, he maintains that progressive reforms should be approached in an incremental manner. As he relates in other remarks to Basic Income News:
I’m deeply curious about UBI. I admire the ambition, simplicity, and utopian instinct of UBI. But it’s also important to pay attention to how basic income works in practice in the experiments that are just gearing up. The best data we have now are from experiments conducted more than 40 years ago, so we need to see how UBI works today.
I also tend to be an incrementalist when it comes to progressive reform. So I try to harness some of the energy surrounding UBI toward smaller scale reforms. Some of our refundable tax credits could be transformed into direct periodic payments from the government to help out families year-round. There are good fiscal and efficiency arguments to back this up, so the political path is clearer. And if we enact UBI-lite policies today, it could pave the way toward bigger and bolder UBI-style reforms tomorrow.
Bibliographical Summary: Joel Dodge on UBI
“The best way to fix child poverty in the US is to give poor kids free money” (August 19, 2016) Quartz.
“Universal basic income wouldn’t make people lazy–it would change the nature of work” (August 25, 2016) Quartz.
“When Basic Income Was Almost an American Reality” (August 30, 2016) Medium.
“The progressive case against a universal basic income” (September 23, 2016) Quartz.
See also J. DODGE blog.
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Zoriah
by Kate McFarland | Oct 3, 2016 | Research
The Government of Ontario plans to move forward with a pilot study of a basic income guarantee, to begin by April 2017.
On September 20, four researchers — Evelyn L. Forget (Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba), Dylan Marando (PhD Student at the University of Toronto), Tonya Surman (founding CEO of the Centre for Social Innovation), and Michael Crawford Urban (Policy Associate at the Mowat Centre) — released a report called “Pilot Lessons: How to design a basic income pilot project for Ontario”. “Pilot Lessons” offers recommendations to the Ontario government on the basis of previous trials of basic income guarantee programs. It also calls for a greater focus on the impact of a guaranteed income on innovation and entrepreneurship.
The report begins by glossing the meaning of the term ‘basic income’ as it is used by the authors (“basic income is best conceptualized as a policy whereby a government guarantees, to all of its citizens, a regular predictable income sufficient to live a basic but dignified life”), distinguishing between the “demogrant” and “negative income tax” models.
The authors go on to overview past experiments on basic income, especially those conducted in the United States and Canada during the 1970s.
Based on this review of past experience, they identify four lessons:
1. Vary the parameters (e.g. eligibility conditions, amount of income guarantee, tax-back rates), but don’t vary them too much.
2. Communicate the results of experiments through scientific, not political, channels. The authors state that “science and politics don’t mix well”. For example, they point to the politically-driven promulgation of the alleged correlation between receipt of a basic income and increased divorce rates following the United States experiments in the 1970s. This contributed to the deterioration of interest in the policy, especially among Republicans.
3. Don’t overlook indirect benefits of basic income that might be observed in experiments. For example, the authors note Evelyn Forget’s investigation of Manitoba’s “Mincome” experiment: Forget demonstrated that the basic income guarantee in Dauphine corresponded to lower hospitalization rates and increased high school graduation rates.
4. Don’t assume that a decline in the time spent in paid employment implies a decline in the time spent in socially valuable work (e.g. consider whether the time is spent instead in childcare, continued education, volunteer work, etc).
In the next chapter, the authors describe major changes in the labor market that pose important differences between the present context and that of the past experiments, such as the increase in precarious labor and rise of automation. They also argue that, by decreasing the risk associated with leaving a job or starting a business, a basic income could facilitate entrepreneurship and innovation.
The report concludes with 14 recommendations for the design of a pilot study.
The full report is available for download.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo: Vancouver Science World CC BY 2.0 Franco Ng
