by Faun Rice | Aug 15, 2018 | News
This summary of Basic Income programs in Sri Lanka was written by Sarath Davala (coordinator of India Network for Basic Income) and Selvi Sachidanandam (coordinator of Basic Income Sri Lanka). All images are courtesy of Basic Income Sri Lanka.
The beginnings of a formal Basic Income movement in Sri Lanka
Basic Income Sri Lanka (BISL) was founded two years ago by Selvi Sachidanandam and colleagues based in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Initially, the group’s activities were to meet from time to time and discuss what Basic Income meant and how it was relevant to the Sri Lankan context. The Basic Income developments taking place in neighbouring India in 2017 also acted as stimulants. In India, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) conducted a pilot project on Basic Income between 2011 and 2013 and brought out a report and a book in 2015. The India Network for Basic Income was also formed in 2015. In February 2017, the Chief Economic Advisor to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, authored a full chapter on Universal Basic Income for discussion in the Indian parliament.
In 2017 and 2018, BISL made overtures to the Sri Lankan government to organize a workshop to raise awareness about Basic Income and its desirability as a policy direction in Sri Lanka. Despite attempts made to reach out to political leaders and bureaucrats, BISL has thus far only been able to work within civil society, building awareness among NGOs and within the art community.
As of August 2018, there have been two important articles in the Sri Lankan press. The first, by Talal Rafi in the Sri Lankan Daily Financial Times, is a piece intended to provide general information about the global UBI movement; it invokes automation and rise of artificial intelligence. The second and more significant article by Sri Lankan sociologist Laksiri Fernando (based in Australia) appeared in both the Colombo Telegraph and Daily Mirror. This article delves deeper into the question of UBI’s relevance to Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan context
UBI discussions often begin with burning local issues and contextual priorities, and Sri Lanka is no exception in this regard. Thirty years of war in Sri Lanka left deep scars on the entire society. Many parts of Sri Lankan society bore immense suffering, and they continue to do so. Today, war widows experience insecurity and isolation across the country: in the Northern and Eastern Provinces there are numerous Tamil widows, and in the south there are also the widows of soldiers who died in the war. Nearly ten years after the end of the war, there still is no coherent state policy to address this social calamity. According to a report by the International Crisis Group submitted (2017), there are more than 90,000 war widows in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. This estimate does not include the families of ‘missing persons,’ and the wounds of war are much deeper than what these statistics show. According to one estimate, in the northern region, there are about 58,000 households headed by women (one quarter of total number of households).
Women in Sri Lanka (picture credit to: UNDP, Palmyrah Processing Centre, Naruvilikulam, Mannar, Sri Lanka)
BISL grants and work with the Government of Sri Lanka
It was in this context of providing aid to war widows that BISL brought forth the idea of basic income. BISL believes that giving an unconditional basic income to these widows for a period of 10 or more years could be an effective policy approach. Instead of waiting for the government to adopt this idea, BISL decided to award basic income to some war widows from the north and east through donations from private individuals, as a symbolic gesture. Simultaneously, a study has been initiated to examine the efficacy of Basic Income in this context.
In addition to the war widows from the North, BISL selected two other categories for the basic income awards: an artists’ community in Colombo, and women from a Muslim fisherpersons’ union in the East. These three groups were chosen to maintain a geographical balance; BISL took a cross section of Sri Lankan society to demonstrate the universality of vulnerability across the socio-cultural spectrum, as well as the potential universal applicability of Basic Income. On July 18th 2018, BISL organized a ceremony for five awardees chosen randomly from the first two communities. Three Tamil war widows from Kilinochchi and two artists from Colombo were given the Basic Income grants. Awards to the third category will be distributed once sufficient funds are collected; BISL can raise money for only five awardees at the present time.
Currently, each award is 10,000 Sri Lankan Rupees per month for a period of two years (roughly US$63 per month). This calculation is based on the World Bank’s definition of the poverty threshold as US$1.90 consumer expenditure per person per day. The ceremony was attended by about 40 people including civil society actors, government officials, artists, and students. BISL also invited Sarath Davala, the coordinator of India Network for Basic Income to share the results of the Indian pilot study and the policies pertaining to basic income in India.
On the left: Eran Wickramaratne. On the right: Sarath Davala and Selvi Sachidanandam.
The event received wide publicity in Colombo. The next day in Parliament, a women’s caucus met to discuss policy related to war widows and disabled persons. Selvi Sachidanandam was invited to make a presentation on BISL’s proposal concerning a policy for rehabilitating war widows. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Selvi and Sarath both attended the meeting and made presentations to the honourable Members of the Parliament. Also present was Sri Lanka’s State Minister of Finance (Hon) Eran Wickramaratne. After the presentations, the Minister assured BISL that the government would study the idea of unconditional basic income in depth. Assurances were given on behalf of BISL and INBI to the honourable Minister that assistance would be provided in every possible way to the government process.
Subsequent to this meeting, Selvi, Sarath and the BISL Co-Coordinator Visakha Tillekeratne met the Deputy Director General of the Department of Planning of the Sri Lankan Government. A detailed presentation was made to the deputy director and his colleagues. Following this work with government officials, BISL will undertake a brief study of current welfare policy delivery in two districts and examine the schemes that are implemented by the government of Sri Lanka. This study will analyze the comparative efficacy and relevance of unconditional basic income to specific groups in different parts of Sri Lanka.
The developments described in this report are a major leap in the basic income movement in Sri Lanka. BISL is keen to build on this momentum.
More information at:
Talal Rafi, “Universal Basic Income: A solution to automation?“, Daily FT, April 27th 2018
Laksiri Fernando, “Universal Basic Income (UBI): Conceptual Background & Possible Implementation In Sri Lanka?“, Colombo Telegraph, May 25th 2018
“ASIA/SRI LANKA – War widows are the most affected by the conflict which lasted over 30 years“, Agenzia Fides, August 1st 2018
Tracy Holsinger, “Basic Income for thriving cultural sector“, Daily Mirror, July 23rd 2018
by Kate McFarland | Aug 12, 2018 | News
The Chicago Tribune, the most-read newspaper in the Chicago area, has come out in opposition to Alderman Ameya Pawar’s proposal to use the city as a test site for basic income.
Earlier this year, Pawar proposed legislation to create a task force to investigate a pilot study in which 1000 Chicago families would receive an unconditional basic income of $500 per month. Pawar’s resolution is still pending approval from the Chicago City Council and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Alderman has not proposed a specific means to finance such a pilot project, and has indicated in interviews that he envisions the project being supported at least in part through private philanthropy.
In an editorial published on August 6, the Tribune foregrounds the issue of cost in rejecting Pawar’s idea for a municipal basic income pilot study — or, all the more, a full-fledged municipal basic income:
“Pawar’s plan suffers from a number of flaws, the most obvious being: How would Chicago pay for it? Chicago has huge unfunded pension obligations, a lousy bond rating and rising property taxes. This pilot program would cost at least $6 million a year. When asked on WTTW’s ‘Chicago Tonight’ where the money would come from, Pawar had no answer.”
“Even if the Chicago City Council could find the money and the project proved a great success, what then? Expanding to include everyone — the term is ‘universal basic income,’ remember — or even a significant share of Chicagoans would be prohibitively expensive.”
In the editorial, the Tribune does not reject the idea of basic income itself, but deems it financially infeasible on the city-level and politically infeasible on the national-level:
“Realistically, given the sums required, a UBI would require a new federal initiative, which is not going to come from this president or this Congress. [Chicago] City Hall would be wiser to look for ways to help raise incomes among working-class and poor residents without taking on commitments it can’t afford.”
With regard to alternative strategies to raise incomes of the poor and working class, the Tribune suggests investment in and deregulation of the private sector (“There is no substitute for a thriving private sector to generate employment and boost incomes”), job-training or apprenticeship programs, and an expansion of affordable housing.
The Editorial Board concludes on a somewhat ambivalent note concerning basic income experimentation, as a poor allocation of money and priorities at present, but as something potentially worth pursuing if and when it becomes affordable:
“If Chicago becomes economically healthy and fiscally sound, it will achieve far more benefits for hard-pressed Chicagoans than Pawar’s pilot possibly could. And who knows? Prosperity-driven increases in city revenue might make ideas like his affordable.”
The Chicago Tribune has no official political alignment. Wikipedia classifies it as “conservative” (right-wing), while websites purported reporting on media bias have placed it as “left-center” (Media Bias/Fact Check), “center” (AllSides), and “leans conservative” (Boston University Libraries). The newspaper endorsed a third-party candidate, Libertarian Gary Johnson, in the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Reference
Editorial Board, “Instead of a Universal Basic Income for Chicagoans…,” Chicago Tribune, 6 August 2018.
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Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo: “Chicago” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Peter Miller
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 8, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in June 2014.
Marshall Brain is a science writer (both fiction and non-), futurist, founder of the website How Stuff Works, and a long-time advocate of basic income. His book, Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future, makes a case for basic income—and for a post-work society altogether—through the vehicle of science fiction.
The novel is essentially a thought experiment, working through two possible ways in which society might react when technology becomes so sophisticated that machines replace virtually all human labor. In the dystopian part of the story, America essentially warehouses its excess human labor in humane, but highly restricted and regimented residential community. In the later part of the story, the main character makes his way to Australia where the resources that make the machines run are jointly owned, and people do not have to work if they do not want to.
Marshall Brain via cyberpunkreview
The story moves quickly beyond basic income to a society that has no more need of paid labor. In Manna’s vision, there is such little need for human effort that people are free to pursue whatever projects they wish, some of which is things we would call “work” but not “paid labor.”
No doubt not all readers will find all aspects of Brain’s utopian vision to be truly utopian. His characters willingly concede a great deal of power over their lives and their own bodies to a centralized, impersonal computer system. They do it for security, but the fear that it will be misused will hit some readers even if it is ignored in the book.
The most important part of the book for BIG supporters is the warning in the dystopian portion of the book. America deals with less need for labor by squeezing wages and then eventually warehousing workers. Brain’s nonfiction work has argued that the rate of increase in computer and robotics technology makes the level of technology discussed in this book a realistic possibility—perhaps sooner than most of us think.
In any case, robotics technology is already here. It’s replacing human effort on a daily basis. It’s affecting our labor market, and those effects will increase every year from now on. Whether or not it will eventually replace all labor, we have to think about how to react to the labor it is now replacing on a daily basis. If we no longer need everyone to work, then BIG has to be part of the solution.
-Karl Widerquist, Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina
Marshall Brain, Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future. BYG Publishing, Inc. 2012.
Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-ebook/dp/B007HQH67U.
Author’s website for the book: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
by Kate McFarland | Aug 7, 2018 | News
Photo: Stormy weather in Ontario, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Jeff S. PhotoArt
Ontario’s guaranteed income pilot has been ended nearly two years early, prompting researchers and advisors who contributed the project to speak out.
On Tuesday, July 31, Ontario’s recently elected Progressive Conservative (PC) government announced the cancellation of the province’s guaranteed income experiment, reneging on a statement made during the campaign that the PC would see the three-year experiment through to its end if elected to form the new government.
The abrupt and unexpected announcement stirred the ire of politicians, anti-poverty advocates, and, not least, program participants themselves. Nonetheless, Lisa MacLeod, who presented the news at a press conference in her capacity as Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, has held her ground, dismissing claims that the PC broke a campaign promise as “fake news” since the party never included a commitment to the experiment in its campaign platform. Her words, however, have left many unappeased and continuing to fight to save the project.
Those who have spoken out again this decision of the PC government’s include several individuals involved with the implementation of the experiment, such as project advisors Hugh Segal and Kwame McKenzie, and at least one researcher who spoke to the press anonymously out of concern for confidentiality.
Former Canadian Senator Hon. Hugh Segal
The Honourable Hugh Segal, former Canadian Senator of the Conservative Party, was appointed as Special Advisor on Basic Income by Ontario’s Liberal government during the project’s initial planning stages. In this role, Segal authored the comprehensive discussion paper (“Finding a Better Way: A Basic Income Pilot Project for Ontario“) that laid the groundwork for the design and implementation of the experiment.
When MacLeod announced the pilot’s early termination, Segal responded with a scathing opinion column in The Globe and Mail, in which he foregrounds the issue of fairness to participants: “These people believed the promise that they would not end up worse off for signing up for the pilot project. They have now been let down badly.”
“[W]hen a party gives its word – as then-Official Opposition leader Patrick Brown gave me in 2016 and PC Party Leader Doug Ford echoed through his spokesperson during the 2018 election campaign – that it would let the pilot project go forward before judging the results […] , this assurance influenced those signing up.”
Segal also addresses the assertion of MacLeod and PC government that the experiment was too expensive to continue: “Looking at the cost of the pilot project is fair enough – but frankly, simplistic. We know that poverty is a perfect predictor of poor health and early hospitalization, bad educational outcomes, substance abuse and problems with the police – all of which cost Ontario billions.”
Drawing a connection to Premier Ford’s key policy goal of ending so-called “hallway health care” (hospital facilities so inadequate that patients must be treated and housed in corridors), Segal additionally speculates that a guaranteed income could lower hospitalization rates as low-income individuals begin “eating better, living more balanced lives and making progress in work, education and family.” He laments that “we will now never know” whether the policy would have had such predicted positive effects on health outcomes.
Dr. Kwame McKenzie
Dr. Kwame McKenzie, psychiatrist and CEO of the Wellesley Institute, had been named Special Advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot by the previous provincial government. Like Segal, McKenzie is now concerned about the effect of the experiment’s cancellation on those currently enrolled in it. The psychiatrist tweeted on August 1, the day after the experiment was cancelled, that he “woke this morning more worried about the health impacts on participants. This is a high risk situation.”
McKenzie spoke to CBC Radio about his concerns, emphasizing that participants currently face a “difficult and stressful time” which could lead to many and severe possible physiological consequences. He noted that many of those who enrolled in the pilot have made “life-changing decisions” founded on the belief that they would have a three-year guaranteed income, and argued that they now need both adequate financial support (he recommended at least a year to wind down the project) and personal support in making new decisions.
Also like Segal, McKenzie believes that a guaranteed income could have promoted key objectives of the PC government. He stressed, for example, its potential to result in better jobs for low-income people. Asked by CBC about MacLeod’s work-focused approach to welfare, McKenzie stated that he agrees that “good jobs is a great health intervention” (while cautioning that bad jobs tend to worsen health). He went on, however, to explain that a guaranteed income might have offered a effective means to achieve this goal, bemoaning “Now I guess we’ll never know.”
Speaking anonymously to CBC, another researcher on the experiment’s academic team more directly addressed MacLeod’s allegation that the pilot project is not working: “There’s no conceivable way that they were told the project wasn’t working. We just don’t have any data to know whether it was working or not.”
The researcher acknowledged that individual recipients have gone to the media with stories that are “very positive” but underlined the fact that these reports might not be representative: “[T]he whole point of our project was to just stand back from all the stories people are telling and try to look at the data in a reasonably scientific way.”
If the experiment had continued as planned, the research group was expected to evaluate outcomes in many areas — potentially including, among others, food security, stress and anxiety, healthcare usage, housing stability, education, and employment — comparing data gathered from the 4,000 guaranteed income recipients to that collected from a control group.
Results had been expected to be reported to the public in 2020.
by Jelena Vitic | Aug 2, 2018 | News, Research
Picture credit to: iStock
The start of the longest and largest Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment in Kenya and the approaching end of the trial in Finland spark a new discussion among experts on the effects of ‘no-strings attached’ money transfers.
An article published in Nature in May 2018 discussed the importance of randomized trials in informing researchers and policy makers alike about the feasibility of an UBI scheme. The article states that critics of the currently employed conditional welfare systems believe that the limited results do not justify large administrative costs that come with such policies. Some policy-makers see UBI as a more affordable alternative that has more potential to alleviate poverty, according to the article, but the costs and benefits of UBI schemes still have not been clearly identified. With that in mind, many decision makers prefer to employ a data-driven approach by making randomized trials, the most universally accepted method of gathering information about the effects of UBI. However, even supporters of the evidence-based approach claim that designing and conducting UBI trials comes with its own set of difficulties. They point out that it requires a large amount of planning and researchers need to look for benefits in a wide variety of areas such as health, education, nutrition and job-seeking. Furthermore, lack of standardized goals and agreed upon areas of impact pose another challenge for advocates of UBI trials.
Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago believes that even clearly demonstrated benefits will not necessarily indicate that UBI would work in practice. He arguments that most resources for the trials come from private funds and only include a small portion of the population. Hence, he thinks trials do not say much about the affordability of big government programs and the willingness of people to fund them through tax increases. On the other hand, he adds that despite these inherent limitations research still should be done.
Others propose that trials have an ongoing impact on UBI discussions. Rob Reich, a political scientist at California’s Stanford University thinks trials will help researchers identify flaws in the process, refine goals and impact areas as well as provide policy makers with some answers they are looking for. Furthermore, supporters argue that over time the studies will provide more insight on the costs and benefits of guaranteed income schemes. Proponents of UBI trials recognize that despite being important, updating research is expensive.
On the other hand, Quartz interviewed experts that expressed doubt whether randomized trials are the best option for analyzing the effects of UBI in the first place. According to Karl Widerquist, many effects will play out over the years and will not be revealed during the experiment, regardless of its size and cost. Nonetheless, he notes there is very little downside to trying it out. Others believe that the benefits have already been proven by initiatives such as Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and there is no need for more research. Matthew Zwolinski adds that UBI has to be “robust enough to survive the political process”, meaning that he sees gradual changes having a higher likelihood of being implemented, compared to radical policies.
Although opinions differ, supporters hope that big trials like the one in Kenya will open the door for future research and help the discussion move forward.
More information at:
Carrie Arnold, “Nature: Money for nothing: the truth about universal basic income”, Nature, News Feature, May 30th 2018
Kate McFarland, “Overview of current basic income related experiments (October 2017)”, Basic Income News, October 19th 2017
Kate McFarland, “US/KENYA: GiveDirectly Officially Launches UBI experiment”, Basic Income News, November 17th 2017
Olivia Goldhill, “We’re giving up on universal basic income before the evidence is in”, Quartz, May 29th 2018
