by Citizens' Income Trust | Jul 10, 2015 | Opinion
Sarath Davala, Renana Jhabvala, Soumya Kapoor Mehta and Guy Standing, Basic Income: A transformative policy for India, Bloomsbury, 2015, xii + 234 pp, 1 4725 8310 9, hbk, xvi + 331 pp, £65, 1 4725 8311 6, pbk, xvi + 331 pp, £19.99
How can poverty be ended in the world’s developing nations? A simple question: and it might have a simple answer. A recent pilot project in India shows that a Citizen’s Income – an unconditional income for every individual – can make a substantial dent in poverty and create the conditions for its elimination.
This book is the report of eighteen-month experiments in which thousands of men, women and children in urban, rural and tribal communities in India were given a monthly unconditional income in place of India’s flawed subsidised food and guaranteed employment schemes. Pilot communities in which cash transfers would replace the subsidy system, and control communities in which they would not, were randomly selected, and the different outcomes in relation to a number of factors were carefully evaluated during the project and at the end.
The first chapter describes how the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) worked with Guy Standing and his colleagues to decide that the pilot project would be of a genuine Citizen’s Income – a universal, unconditional and nonwithdrawable cash transfer – for every individual in the pilot communities. Arguments against such cash transfers are answered. The second chapter describes the project, and the vast amount of work that went into establishing the necessary infrastructure, and particularly into ensuring that everyone in the pilot communities had bank accounts into which their Citizen’s Incomes could be paid.
The rest of the book describes the effects of the Citizen’s Income in terms of improved housing, electricity and water supplies, sanitation, nutrition, health, healthcare, school attendance and performance (especially for girls of secondary school age), and economic activity: by the end of the project, ‘many more households in the basic income villages had increased their earned incomes than was the case in the control villages, and many fewer had experienced a fall in earned income than in the control villages’ (p.139). In the pilot villages, child and teenage labour shifted from wage labour to own account work on family farms and to increased school attendance, bonded labour decreased as debts were paid off, and the purchase of such assets as sewing machines facilitated increased own account economic activity. Women’s status was enhanced by their new financial independence and by SEWA’s involvement, and the elderly and the disabled experienced improved status and living conditions. The final chapter shows that India could afford to pay a small universal Citizen’s Income by reallocating the money currently spent on food subsidy schemes.
SEWA, UNICEF and the researchers are to be congratulated on the establishment, and the significant success, of this pilot project. They have proved that it is possible to implement a Citizen’s Income in a developing country and that the benefits of doing so are substantial. The results are encouragingly similar to those generated by a Namibian pilot project in which Guy Standing was also involved. A significant cumulative case has now been built. Now all that is required is the political will to establish a Citizen’s Income scheme. If that happens then it might be a developing country, rather than a developed one, that implements the first universal Citizen’s Income and reaps the social and economic benefits.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jul 3, 2015 | Opinion
Christopher Balfour, Learning from Difference: 150 years of family endeavour. From Afghanistan and the Americas to the Meon Valley and loss of an airport, Tricorn Books, 2014, 1 1909660 27 4, hbk, 267 pp (along with some diversely numbered pages of photographs), £20. Available from pgwells@btconnect.com and Amazon
You need to be strong to read this book, because it weighs in at 1.5 kg; and you need to have time to spare, because it is long – perhaps rather too long in places. But it is worth the effort, because by the end of it you will have a deeper knowledge of Britain’s industrial history and of its politics, and you will feel that you know both Christopher Balfour and his fascinating collection of ancestors.
Family history is a boom industry, but there are few people who have constructed such a detailed family tree back to the seventeenth century. (Distant relatives are Basil Jellicoe, of Camden Housing Association fame, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher.) And there are few people who have gathered so much detail about the lives of parents and grandparents – sometimes too much detail. But having said that, the reader will finish the book knowing a family of independent-minded entrepreneurs – mainly in the aircraft and shipping industries – and feeling deeply the financial and other risks that they took, and their successes and the failures.
The first part of the book is about Christopher’s forebears, but readers of this Newsletter, and particularly those who know Christopher, will value most the second part. Here we hear about Christopher’s time at Eton, his National Service in Libya (he thinks that he should have delayed it to join Rootes the car manufacturer), his rather desultory Cambridge career (he arrived not having decided what to study), a journey by road to Afghanistan (clearly much enjoyed, but it’s where his health problems began), a few years of doing this and that, failing to win Gloucester for the Conservatives at the 1966 General Election, and then being ejected as Gloucester’s Conservative candidate because of his rather independent views. He worked for the Youth Employment, later Careers, Service, in Warwickshire and a London borough; became an independent local councillor in the Forest of Dean ( – independence clearly suited him); employed family capital to become a Name at Lloyd’s (which involved unlimited liability); and at various periods bought, refurbished and sold valuable ancient cars. To those of us who know the quiet-spoken Eton-voiced Christopher, the risk-taking and the general air of chaos of the life recorded come as an interesting surprise.
As a Councillor, Christopher was involved in establishing training projects for people without employment, and battled to raise the earnings disregard relating to Supplementary Benefit (an out-of-work means-tested benefit). As a member of the Conservative Party he was firmly in the ‘One Nation’ camp with people like David Howell and Brandon Rhys Williams, and in the book he argues not only for the Citizen’s Income that they wanted to see implemented, but also for the raising of additional money to pay for it, perhaps by establishing a financial transaction tax.
This is a most honest book in which we meet Christopher, the real person, with his enthusiasms, successes, failures, and humanity. A conclusion that perhaps Christopher might have drawn is that his life mirrors that of our economy during his lifetime: the difficulties of manufacturing industry; the rise and fall of the public sector; and the risks of the financial industry. And there is also a sense in which his life mirrors that of our society: war, the post-industrial world, and the journey from open debate to machine politics. It is easy to see how Christopher’s advocacy for a Citizen’s Income stems from his multi-faceted experience. That life and our economy and society having run so closely parallel, we now await both our economy and our society advocating a Citizen’s Income: and, we hope, implementing it.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 5, 2015 | Opinion
John Hills, Good Times, Bad Times: The welfare myth of them and us, Policy Press, 2014, 1 44732 003 6, pbk, xviii + 323 pp, £12.99
The title says it all: the normal experience for most families and individuals is that there will be good times and bad times; and it is simply not true that society is made up of two relatively stable groups: one group of people that pays for the welfare state, and the other that benefits from it. The political polemic of ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’ is precisely that: political polemic. At different points in our lives we might be net contributors or net recipients in relation to the welfare state, but there is nobody who does not at some stage benefit from its provisions. Another myth that the book challenges is that vast sums are spent on supporting people who are ill, disabled, or out of work, whereas in fact the budgets for the relevant benefits are small compared with the budgets for the pensions and healthcare from which all of us benefit.
The author employs a number of literary devices to get his message across. He writes about the different ‘wavelengths’ along which changes occur: for instance, the long wavelength within which we accumulate and then run down assets as we progress through middle age and into old age; and the short wavelength of coping with the loss of income precipitated by unemployment or illness. And throughout the book he follows the fortunes of two fictitious but recognisable families: the middle class Osbornes, and the working class Ackroyds.
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, then read the diagrams and text about these two families at the beginning of each chapter. The picture that they reveal is that both families benefit from the welfare state, and that taking the tax and benefits systems as a single system, the Osbornes do rather well out of it. But if you do have time to read the whole book then you will find that the mass of survey data discussed in the body of each chapter reveals a highly complex picture, an important characteristic of which is that what is normal for the Ackroyds is rapid and frequent change in their economic position. One week a government minister might describe them as ‘skivers’, and the next they would be praised as ‘strivers’. Another important characteristic that hits the reader time after time is the effect of initial social and economic capital on economic and social capital outcomes. The social mobility ladder seems to have some rungs missing.
Along the way, we discover how unequal predistribution is in the UK compared with most other countries, and how much harder our welfare state therefore has to work to generate a little more equality; we notice how much everyone benefits from the welfare state, particularly in childhood and old age; we discover how difficult it is for Working Tax Credits – and in the future how difficult it will be for Universal Credit – to respond to the rapid changes in income level experienced by an increasing number of households; we understand how current austerity measures reduce the incomes of low income households but largely protect the incomes of higher earners; and we find that wealth inequality is exacerbated by a tax system that rewards the already wealthy and a benefits system that takes household wealth into account when benefits are calculated.
John Hills is the Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, and this book is full of thorough analysis of social exclusion. A few questions are asked at the end about the ways in which future policy might take into account the book’s findings, but Hills leaves it to others to work out what should be done to rectify the situation that he discovers.
Of particular interest to readers of this Newsletter will be the numerous ways in which a benefits system based on a Citizen’s Income would respond to the problems explored in the book. In particular, a Citizen’s Income would cohere far better with rapidly gyrating earnings than means-tested benefits will ever manage to do. But perhaps the most important lesson that the book holds for anyone promoting debate on social policy reform is that however thoroughly robust evidence and logical argument manage to demolish myths perpetrated by the press and by politicians, those myths persist. So perhaps however good the evidence that a Citizen’s Income would be feasible, the myth will persist that it isn’t. If John Hills’ book manages to reduce the potency of the myth of them and us, then some of us might begin to hope that the myth of a Citizen’s Income’s infeasibility might one day lose some of its strength.
by Josh Martin | May 31, 2015 | News
Santens uses John Oliver’s segment on the lack of paid parental leave legislation in the U.S. to highlight how basic income can effectively serve the same purpose as parental leave legislation and how it helps mothers of newborn children. By using the negative income experiments of the 1970s in the U.S. and Canada, Santens argues that the worst-case reduction in hours worked by mothers would be about 10 weeks of time off from work to care for the new child, but these 10 weeks would be voluntarily taken off and would still be less time off than parents in other countries have.
Scott Santens, “Basic Income as Paid Parental Leave”, 11 May 2015.
by Jenna van Draanen | May 13, 2015 | News
In a recent interview with Steven Shafarman, program director of an organization called Basic Income Action, Ralph Nader voiced extensive support for the idea of basic income. He compared it to his work to ban smoking on airplanes: saying that one day he hopes to see basic income go through the same shift in public perception to becoming something that is accepted as status quo. Both Shafarman and Nader describe the key components of basic income and the benefits that it could provide to society at large and cover topics like what will happen to existing social programs, health care, and many others.
For more information on the interview, see:
Ralph Nader, “Steve Shafarman, Basic Income, GM” Ralph Nader Radio Hour. April 26, 2015.
