by Kate McFarland | May 8, 2016 | News
Last Wednesday, May 4, billionaire bond manager Bill Gross (of Janus Capital) made waves when he endorsed universal basic income in his Monthly Investment Outlook – or, perhaps more accurately, declared a UBI to be inevitable.
Mr. Gross, like many other commentators on current economic trends, foresees massive job loss due to automation:
Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models. Transportation is a visible example as computer driven vehicles soon will displace many truckers and bus/taxi drivers. Millions of jobs will be lost over the next 10-15 years. But medicine, manufacturing and even service intensive jobs are at risk. Investment managers too! Not only blue collar but now white collar professionals are being threatened by technological change.
He is critical of the idea, currently en vogue, that the appropriate response is to make higher education more accessible and affordable — submitting that a college degree might “better prepare students to be contestants on Jeopardy” but not necessarily lead to better jobs or more economic growth.
What, then, should be the alternative? Well, here’s what Mr. Gross says:
Instead we should spend money where it’s needed most – our collapsing infrastructure for instance, health care for an aging generation and perhaps on a revolutionary new idea called UBI – Universal Basic Income. If more and more workers are going to be displaced by robots, then they will need money to live on, will they not? And if that strikes you as a form of socialism, I would suggest we get used to it.
Indeed, he later goes so far as to assert, “The question is how high this UBI should be and how to pay for it, not whether it’s coming in the next decade. It is.”
On the question of how to financial a UBI, Mr. Gross recommends that central banks print more money – the idea popularly referred to as “helicopter money” and promoted in Europe as “QE for the People.”
Within hours, Mr. Gross’ proclamations led to a proliferation of news stories on basic income – including reports in Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and CNN Money, to mention only a few.
Matt Levine (in his Bloomberg View column “Money Stuff“) drew upon some personal anecdotes from Bill Gross to common on the common objection-cum-question “Would people stop working if they had a basic income?”:
Imagine a young Bill Gross, offered a basic income, free of the constraints of needing to earn a living. Would he still have become an obsessive bond manager? Yes of course he would have, come on. Gross has been open about the fact that he’s not in bond investing for the money; he’s in it for the fame. And there is no universal basic income of fame, though I guess Twitter is getting us pretty close.
Meanwhile, other authors and commentators took a skeptical stance. Fortune columnist Chris Matthews, for example, questioned the political feasibility of UBI in present day America, and Myles Udland, writing for Business Insider, claimed that a UBI would not be welcomed because “in the US we have attached a stigma to receiving certain types of government assistance, and the sociopolitical hurdles to a basic income program are very high.”
To be fair, Udland probably penned this criticism before he had chance to the read David Calnitsky’s article in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, “‘More Normal than Welfare”: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience,” reported upon in Basic Income News last week. Calnitsky’s article provides empirical support to what many have already expected: since it is given to everyone — “obscuring the distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor,” as Calnitsky writes — a basic income should substantially diminish the stigma associated with the receipt of government monies.
Is basic income nonetheless too radical to be accepted in the States? At the very least, given the quickly burgeoning interest in the idea — and more and more prominent endorsements like that of Bill Gross — it seems premature to rule out its eventual widespread acceptance, which perhaps might happen sooner than we think.
Image Credit: Sequence Media Group
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by Karl Widerquist | May 3, 2016 | News
Discussion of Basic Income the U.S. media continues to increase. Just in the past two weeks several publications have addressed the issue, many of the major media outlets, and most of them have addressed it in a positive way. Bloomberg View includes the headline, “A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing.” Gawker calls Universal Basic Income “the Utopia We Deserve.” Ben Thomas of Crossing Genres writes, “If You Think Free Money Kills Work Ethic, Your Definition of ‘Work’ Is Horrible.” Triple pundit summarizes, “The Case for Universal Basic Income.” The only negative recent article, in Forbes, gets the definition of basic income wrong. The author is under the misconception the basic income requires that the government “let people starve” and deny them “medical care.” So, even this article does not oppose basic income as it actually is defined by supporters.
From crossingenres.com
by Kate McFarland | May 3, 2016 | News
Philippe Van Parijs
In a recent article for Social Europe, Philippe van Parijs — philosopher, social scientist, and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network — urges social democrats to (re-)introduce the basic income as part of their agenda.
Along the way, he addresses several popular misunderstandings that have tended to make those on the left wary of the idea of providing all adults with cash benefits, irrespective of income and employment status:
“Is it not absurd to pay a basic income to the rich?” Van Parijs explains why it is not.
“It is acceptable to replace the right to a job by a right to an income?” Van Parijs explains that, in fact, a basic income functions like a “flexible, intelligent form of job sharing,” not undermining the job culture but improving it.
“Does a basic income threaten the existence of the welfare state?” Again, van Parijs argues that a basic income does nothing of the sort.
In his conclusion, van Parijs enjoins social democrats to recognize that the “bulk of our real income is not the fruit of the efforts of today’s workers…but a gift from nature increasingly combined with capital accumulation, technological innovation and institutional improvements inherited from the past. … In a truly ‘socialist’ perspective, those entitled to this gift are all members of society equally, male and female, irrespective of the extent of their participation in well-protected full-time employment.”
Indeed, despite the recent explosion of interest in basic income, many on the left continue to ignore or dismiss the idea — devoting much more attention to raising wages or creating more jobs. In these regions of politics, van Parijs’s short but compelling article demands careful attention.
Philippe van Parijs, 11 April 2016, “Basic Income And Social Democracy,” Social Europe.
by Toru Yamamori | Apr 30, 2016 | News
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greece finance minister, encourages the Swiss people to vote ‘yes’ for universal basic income (UBI) at the national referendum scheduled on 5th June.
In the video interview with the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, the Greek economist argues that the future picture of technological progress could be either the Star Trek version, in which the progress can make us equal and free, or the Matrix version in which the progress enslaves us.
In another interview, with the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger (the translation of which is available here), he says:
Because Switzerland is doing so well, it is ideal for experiments with the basic income. But don’t forget, in spite of the wealth, the quality of life is decreasing. What good is a well-paid job if you are scared to lose it? This constant fear paralyzes people and makes them ill. Switzerland should see the basic income as an investment in the future.
Varoufakis, first spke out in favour of basic income in an interview published for The Economist.
Varoufakis will be one of speakers at the UBI event on 4th May in Zurich, Switzerland.
by Kate McFarland | Apr 17, 2016 | News
On Thursday, April 21, the Universal Income Project will host a panel discussion entitled “Care and Cash: Universal Basic Income and Social Services in the Bay Area,” to be held at Impact Hub in San Francisco.
According to the event description, the panel “will feature experts from a variety of different social service sectors to discuss how Basic Income could affect the communities they work with, what factors are most important to consider about the program, and how it would compare to alternative models of assistance.”
The six panelists represent organizations including HandUp, Tipping Point Community, The Reset Foundation, Code for America, and Google.
The discussion will be recorded as well as streamed live. See the event page for updates and details.
Photo: San Francisco, 2015
Image Credit: Ken Walton via flickr
