Cairn’s Monthly Dossiers is a free online publication designed to highlight the work of francophone scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Each month, the publication focuses on a topic of current social or political relevance.
Universal Basic Income (UBI) was the topic selected for the debut issue, released on June 15, 2017. As the introduction to the dossier notes, the issue came to prominence in France earlier in the year due the campaign of presidential candidate Benoît Hamon, who won the Socialist Party primary after making a UBI proposal a cornerstone of his campaign.
The dossier features the work of Stéphan Lipiansky, Jean-Éric Hyafil, Denis Clerc and François Meunier.
Lipiansky, an associate professor of economics and management, examines the rise of interest in UBI in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, linking it to the decay of a “social consensus” around the goal of full employment. He emphasizes UBI’s potential role in a cultural shift in which occupational identity is no longer the key defining attribute of an individual’s social role.
Hyafil, a leader of the French BIEN affiliate Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de Base, presents UBI as a means to emancipate individuals from the need to work (in view of the fact that, in present society, the pressure to work leads to the creation of and participation in “bullshit jobs” of little or no social utility). In his article, he delineates a UBI proposal for France, and describes a path to introducing the policy through a series of reforms to the revenu de solidarité active (RSA), the country’s existing minimum income scheme for the poor and unemployed (currently €460 per month).
Clerc, the founder of Alternatives Économiques, considers UBI proposals of three different monthly amounts–€100, €460 (equivalent to the RSA), and €800 (equivalent to the minimum pension)–and argues that any potential benefits are too uncertain to merit the risks and certain costs of implementing the policy. As an alternative social policy, he proposes lifelong training to increase individuals’ employability.
Meunier, an economist and consultant, takes on two arguments commonly given for UBI: that it is more respectful to recipients due to its lack of surveillance and paternalism, and that it is easier to administer due to its simplicity. Meunier contends that conditional welfare is not objectionable in its level of oversight–which might be construed as the expression of care for beneficiaries–and that the simplicity is illusory.
The dossier also includes links to supplemental material (in French) by Anton Monti (on the Finnish experiment), Philippe Warin (on the phenomenon of non-usage of the RSA and its implications for UBI), and Yannick Vanderborght and Philippe Van Parijs (on the history of the idea of UBI and its differences from programs like the RSA).
The second issue of Cairn’s Monthly Dossiers was on the topic of Populism.
Joe Biden, Obama’s ex-vice president, is confident that the reinforcement of the job-centered culture is the answer to the challenges already affecting work marketplaces in the US, as written in his blog at the Biden Institute. He supports this vision instead of the idea increasingly put forward by Silicon Valley moguls: unconditional basic income.
Biden, recalling his father’s words, wrote that he considers jobs to not only be a source of income, but also and foremost about “human dignity and self-respect”. Given that starting position, he is campaigning for an American economy that grows and “put(s) work first”. This, of course, is linked with the educational system and professional retraining, both areas in which Biden calls for profound changes, while maintaining “key workplace benefits and protections (…) in an economy where the nature of work has changed”.
Basic income is given little attention in the cited blog post, summarized only briefly as something that is just boiling up in Silicon Valley due to transformations, present and future, introduced by automation. However, automation concerns have only been one issue among several that can justify introducing an unconditional basic income, such as the elimination of poverty, reducing inequality, solving bureaucratic unemployment and poverty traps and creating more gender equality. Also, as extensive data shows, basic income interest is growing all around the world (e.g.: Canada, UK, Finland, Netherlands, Germany), not only among the Silicon Valley milieu.
Zhang Chao and Gan Lin, high school seniors from the Chinese province of Zhejiang and founders of UBIForALL (Association for the Promotion of Universal Basic Income) recommend establishing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) city in an “undeveloped” area in China. Their prime motivation is to promote, research and develop literature on basic income, intended to be implemented within the Chinese (mainland) reality.
They wrote in August, shortly after having released UBIForALL on the 18th of July 2017: “I’m fully convinced that UBI will take its seat finally (…) so we either accept the UBI completely or suspend the process of UBI.”
The plan for these UBI cities involves buying inexpensive land, funded by governments, wealthy individuals, or unions, and possibly taxes on robots. It also suggests building infrastructure with volunteers and populating the city with UBICERS, who would be receiving the UBI and a special education in order to eliminate poverty and give a new sense of direction and purpose. Using high tech services such as driverless cars and other innovations for sustainable work, the city would avoid the inevitable crisis, when human beings, due to unemployment, are turned into members of an “useless class”.
“UBIC is a big social experiment both in psychology, economy, technology and the promotion of UBI”, Zhao and Gan conclude.
A Stanford University class –available on a podcast replays the 1970s Manitoba, Canada, experiment called “mincome,” on the way to rejoicing in Universal Basic Income.
In the U.S., Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who according to some is preparing to run for U.S. President, are promoting universal basic income.
What does basic income mean, students ask? The contentious subject raises many questions, such as: would society fall apart because everyone would just hang out on the couch?
The Stanford class seeks to separate the argument that robots will replace 47% of jobs, a prediction that fuels much of Silicon Valley’s support of basic income, from the “paradigm of work” dialogue, according to Juliana Bidadanure, Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at Stanford University, who is teaching the class.
The podcast studies the observations of many “experts” on culture, race and gender in an effort to separate jobs (wage-work) from understanding the true nature of work. Several contributions are under analysis, such as the following:
– Doug Henwood — Journalist, economic analyst, and writer whose work has been featured in Harper’s, Jacobin Magazine, and The Nation, says if robots were really taking over, there would be a strong productivity growth in the U.S., which is not true, so far;
– Rutger Bregman — Journalist and author of “Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-hour Workweek” thinks that if basic income were accomplished by the government printing money, that situation would definitely lead to inflation. But no inflation fears would be attached to a taxation process;
– Kathi Weeks — Marxist, feminist scholar, associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University in North Carolina, and author of “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries” believes that wage-work is not the only meaningful activity. She points to pre-industrial society as a good example of when wage-work took a backseat to the value of non-paid work;
– Evelyn Forget — Economist and professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Manitoba Research Data Centre, who first reported the “mincome” data. Forget argues that “mincome” made it possible for single mothers to get off welfare and proudly have a profession.
A second podcast will be available that discusses whether universal basic income is the end of capitalism or not.
Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath was interviewed on August 7th by Truthout, a nonprofit web-based news and commentary site whose aim is to provide “a platform for transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis.” In this interview, he makes several important points regarding some of the issues in the current debate and research on Basic Income.
De Wispelaere’s key position is that Basic Income’s aim should be first and foremost about relieving poverty and social exclusion. Poverty is fundamentally a lack of money and Basic Income offers a solution to that problem. Compared to other forms of welfare, Basic Income avoids the well-known poverty trap, where earning wages leads to a loss of benefits, while also reducing the need for some of the bureaucracy associated with contemporary welfare states. De Wispelaere also says that welfare states already dispense some amounts of cash or quasi-cash, with Basic Income the main difference is really about how the money is distributed. As he says, “it is not just about whether or not you have more cash with a Basic Income, but also about how you get your cash.” Basic Income is characterized mainly by its unconditionality. De Wispelaere also mentions the Mike Leigh movie, “I, Daniel Blake” as an illustration of how current welfare policies can cause significant problems and how an unconditional Basic Income could make a big difference.
De Wispelaere also speaks about the value of Basic Income experiments, stressing that conclusions reached from one experiment may not be valid elsewhere due to limitations of time and location. Nevertheless, he argues that the experiments are worth pursuing and he identifies three key reasons for performing Basic Income experiments: implementation, politics, and philosophy.
There are a number of aspects of implementation that can be identified and fixed through running a limited experiment, things that are difficult to predict from a theoretical standpoint alone. Basic Income, although it is often presented as such, is not a simple policy; it will interact with other policies such as housing benefits, disability assistance, the tax system and pension rights. When doing an experiment, these interactions can also be tested, along with other parameters. Another great motivation for Basic Income experiments is politics. Risk-averse politicians may like the idea of a Basic Income but be reticent to propose implementing it in full. A limited trial can help gather more political support for a wider implementation. Finally, philosophical considerations reflect the different viewpoints as to whether we can trust people to play by the rules, or whether they are fundamentally lazy. Or, as De Wispelaere puts it, “do we think that the whole range of people to which Basic Income applies all are going to turn into Homer Simpsons?” According to De Wispelaere, “in many cases, evidence alone can’t solve these issues. It’s a philosophical and moral argument that has to be fought and won.”
De Wispelaere also says in the interview he is not convinced by the “Robots Are Coming” narrative. First, because we need Basic Income now to alleviate poverty, job fluctuation, and insecurity. Second, because when the robots do come there will be other significant issues that arise and Basic Income is not enough to solve those. Regarding the Silicon Valley positions, De Wispelaere says: “It is a bit of a caricature, but what they are effectively proposing is a very polarized, divided society. They talk about Basic Income as a necessary part of the solution but don’t mention other important social and economic struggles between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. For me, Basic Income may be necessary, but it’s certainly not enough.”
