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 Stanislas Jourdan | Apr 8, 2016 | News
Ahead of the national referendum taking place next June 5th in Switzerland, basic income activists are aiming at creating the World’s biggest poster with basic income slogan on it. They need 180,000 to make it happen.
An historical campaign is happening in Switzerland right now. While the whole country will vote on basic income on June, an unprecedented level of campaign activities, events and press coverage are happening.
Now the famous Basel-based group Generation Grundeinkommen (Generation Basic Income) is taking the challenge to the next level by attempting to break the Guinness-World-Record for the largest poster on earth.
The activists want to print a massive 7500m2 poster (as large a soccer field), on which it will be written: “WHAT WOULD YOU WORK ON, IF FOR YOU YOUR INCOME WAS TAKEN CARE OF?”
Big questions deserve big poster
The poster aims at raising attention on basic income ahead of the referendum, explains the activist: “Good questions are the best answers. So let’s step forward asking the biggest question on Earth.”
The poster will be displayed in mid May. “We have several places in mind. One possible option is the Plain Palais in Geneva. This is a big space in the middle of the city with flea-markets and carnivals. It’s a space made for the people which suits our initiative.” The definite location will be communicated through their startnext-page.
Big questions also imply big numbers. To make this happen, the organisers are pledging 180,000 euros on a crowdfunding platform. Already 100,000 euros have been collected thanks to 600 donators. They still need to cover 40% of their funding need (105k euros) by April 24th. To make the operation financially less costly and environment-friendly, the poster material will be manufactured into carry-bags and backpack afterwards.
The campaigning group is experienced with large and successful street happenings. In 2013, they famously dumped 8 millions 5 pennies coins on the Parliament’s Square in Bern, which massively contributed to promoting basic income worldwide.
“Our Question deserves to get the biggest on earth. And all of you can carry it together with us. So get your question bag or your world record-backpack and help us to bring the biggest question on earth all over our lovely planet!”
You can make a donation from www.startnext.com/groesstefrage
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 Andre Coelho | Mar 17, 2016 | Opinion
Informal settlement in Soweto. Credit to: The Conversation
The hypothesis: basic income has not been deployed in South Africa in part because the powers that be do not let go of their interest and ability to explore people.
The following article attempts to demonstrate the validity of this hypothesis.
Let’s begin with some background. Basic Income (BI) is not a new idea in South Africa. In fact a thorough economic analysis for BI implementation has existed since 2004. The analysis was drawn from the work of recognized economists, specialists in the field, and the findings were summarized in what became known as the Taylor Committee. The Basic Income Coalition (composed of Black Sash, COSATU and SAAC), used these results to prove that BI is feasible, or at least should be tested, in South Africa.
More than 10 years have passed, and yet nothing resembling BI has been implemented or even tested in South Africa. Why not?
It is not due to lack of need: 54%1 of South Africans – over 29 million people – live under the country’s poverty line, and over 40% of the labor force is unemployed2. Moreover, according to the BIG Financing Reference Group report, it is also not due to a lack of funds:
“The Basic Income Grant is an affordable option for South Africa. Although the four economists [Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI), Prof. Pieter le Roux, Prof. Charles Meth and Dr. Ingrid Woolard] posit slightly different net costs for the BIG, representing transfers to the poor of different amounts, there was consensus that the grant is affordable without necessitating increased deficit spending be government.”
In spite of this, the same report also states that government officials believe that BI cannot combat poverty. They have refused to consider a BI, despite knowing that current social assistance plans fail to reach over 50% of those living under the poverty line, or nearly 15 million people. These officials have continued to say that BI would not be effective despite demonstration by the Taylor Committee that basic income is the best way to diminish or even eradicate poverty in the shortest amount of time. They also ignore fiscal collection and social security savings when speaking of BI, which more than doubles its actual net cost of about 24 million ZAR/year (1.35 billion €/year), according to the calculations of the Taylor Committee. In short, most government officials completely ignore these very consistent and thought-out analyses from the Taylor Committee. Why is that?
Well, the answer may lie in the kind of structure of South African economy. The private sector accounts for around 80% of the country’s economy3. The median income is 3036 ZAR/month (171 €/month)4, which is low compared to European standards. Taking the United Kingdom as reference, the following table can be set up (Table 1).
Table 1 – Income relationships, South Africa / UK
The relationship between the median income and the average living income is considerably higher in the UK than it is in South Africa. Moreover, the ratio of median income to statutory minimum income is also much higher in the UK. Indeed, while the median income in the UK is above the minimum income (as it should be), this is not the case in South Africa: more than half of South Africans have wages below the statutory minimum income. Finally, as we can see on the graph below, the spread of incomes in South Africa is clearly skewed to the lower end on the income axis, while incomes in the UK are much more evenly distributed around the center (Figure 1 and Figure 2).
Figure 1 – Income spread in South Africa4
Figure 2 – Income spread in the UK5
These data show that the South African economy is impoverished compared to a country like the UK, and that most economic activity depends on a low-wage, low-skilled work force6. This situation is best maintained when a large number of poor, dependent people are craving for jobs in the economy. Given their subservient position, these millions of people will naturally accept low wages and substandard working conditions that they might not otherwise accept. They are also kept away from most schooling and higher education, which could provide them with extra skills and allow them to apply to other jobs or start their own businesses. This is convenient for large corporations, and these corporations lobby and finance politicians and governments to protect their interests by providing them with access to cheap labor and lax environmental laws. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deals, for example, are just a formally imposed recognition of the attitudes of domination that large corporations foist upon governments and the people at large.
There is a link between corporate interests and government policy. Furthermore, the implementation of a basic income would basically be contrary to corporate interests: BI would lift millions of people out of poverty, empower them to refuse conditions of exploitation and start their own business, invest in education and bettering their lives – depriving the corporations of their pool of cheap labor. Government policymakers may also respond out of ideology or prejudice, but corporate political sponsoring response must not be ruled out, given the entrenchment and longevity of their denial (relative to progressive policies like basic income).
More information at:
A. BIG Financing Reference Group, 2004. ““Breaking the poverty trap”: Financing a basic income grant in South Africa.” Basic Income Grant (BIG) Financing Reference Group conference, Johannesburg, 24 November 2003. March, 2004.
Notes:
1 – World Development Indicators – Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty lines (% of population), 2010
2 – A more accurate, expanded definition of unemployment, including the so-called ‘discouraged jobseekers’, according to reference A.
3 – World Development Indicators – General government final consumption expenditure (% of GDP) = 20.3. Hence Non-government (private) final consumption expenditure (% of GDP) = 79.7
4 – From the spread of households within the income distribution in South Africa, 2008.
5 – From Measuring National Well-being – Personal Finance, 2012 (UK)
6 – Higher skilled professionals are usually paid on or above the median income, so a low income distribution as shown in Figure 1 must be related with a high proportion of low skilled workers.
by Toru Yamamori | Mar 1, 2016 | Opinion
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greece prime minister, recommends Swiss people to vote ‘yes’ for UBI at the national referendum scheduled on 5th June.
Varoufakis, who’ve recently made his support for UBI clear in the interview published for the Economist, calls ‘yes vote’ for the UBI referendum in the recent two interviews.
In the video interview with the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, the Greek economist argues that the future picture of technological progress would be either the Star Treck version that the progress can make us equal and free or the Matrix version that the progress enslaves us.
In another interview with 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 will be one of speakers for the UBI event on 4th May in Zurich, Switzerland.
