by Kate McFarland | Feb 16, 2017 | News
A research team consisting of economists, developmental psychologists, and a neuroscientist is developing an experiment to examine the effects of a basic income on the neural development of young children.
A new study of the effects of basic income on young children is being developed by a group of five researchers: Greg Duncan (economist at the University of California, Irvine), Kimberly Noble (neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University), Katherine Magnuson (developmental psychologist at University of Wisconsin, Madison), Hirokazu Yoshikawa (developmental psychologist at New York University), and Lisa Gennetian (economist at New York University).
In a blog post about the proposed study, Duncan writes that “despite hundreds of studies of early childhood preschool and parenting programs, we know surprisingly little about the extent to which income itself is an active ingredient in children’s development very early in life.”
In the proposed experiment, 1000 low-income mothers of newborn children would be randomly assigned to one of two groups: an experimental group in which each mother is given a $333 monthly cash payment for the first 40 months of her child’s life, or a control group in which each mother is given only $20 per month. The mothers and children would be selected from several ethnically diverse communities in different regions of the US, including New York City, St. Paul, Omaha, and New Orleans.
When they reach three years of age, the children would be tested for cognitive and behavioral development, specifically “self-regulation, cognitive, language and memory development, as well as direct measures of brain activity.” Thus, Duncan states, “This study will thus provide the first definitive understanding of the extent to which a basic income plays a causal role in shaping the early socio-emotional, cognitive and brain development of children in low-income families.”
Additionally, the researchers plan to collect information on parental stress, family expenditures, parenting practices, and child care arrangements at several points during the experiment.
The researchers have already completed a pilot study to test the feasibility of their procedures for selecting participants, transferring money to them, and gathering data. In the pilot, which was launched in June 2014 at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, 30 low-income mothers were randomly assigned to either (a) an experimental group receiving $100 per month or (b) a control group receiving $20 per month. The pilot project was carried out for 12 months, after which the mothers completed an interview about their parenting practices and household expenditures.
“While the results should be viewed with caution because of the small sample size,” Duncan says, “we found some evidence that the higher monthly income reduced household chaos and increased mother-child learning activities and child care expenditures.”
The researchers are currently raising funds to launch the full experiment, which they aim to do later in 2017.
Read More:
Greg Duncan, “When a Basic Income Matters Most”, Medium: Economic Security Project, December 19, 2016.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo: “Toddler” CC BY-ND 2.0 攝影家9號
by Kate McFarland | Feb 11, 2017 | News
Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investment firm” created by eBay founded Pierre Omidyar, announced on February 7 that it will donate up to $493,000 to the New York based charity organization GiveDirectly. The funds will be used to support GiveDirectly’s major basic income experiment in Kenya.
In the largest and longest-running basic income trial to date, GiveDirectly will provide unconditional cash transfers to the residents of 200 villages in rural Kenya (about 26,000 people in total). The residents of 40 of these villages (about 6,000 people) will receive monthly payments for 12 years. At about $0.75 per day, the amount of the basic income is roughly half of the average income in rural Kenya.
With the grant from the Omidyar Network, GiveDirectly is now just over $6 million shy of fully funding the full $30 million experiment, Communications Associate Max Chapnick tells Basic Income News. Chapnick says, “Since we announced our basic income experiment back in April we’ve seen an outpouring of support from thousands of donors across the world. We’re grateful for the latest grant from the Omidyar Network, whose substantial support will help poor families meet daily needs, while providing valuable data on basic income.”
Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams of the Omidyar Network explain the firm’s decision to donate in a blog post titled “Why We Invested: GiveDirectly.”
Citing a recent literature review of 15 years of research on direct cash transfers (“Cash transfers: what does the evidence say?”), Kubzansky and Williams extol the benefits of cash transfer programs in “alleviating poverty and empowering people”:
“[C]ash transfer programs can potentially help to address bigger issues facing our society, such as rising income volatility, lack of secure benefits, social instability, and the changing nature of work. Concerns around these themes have recently sparked growing attention to a particular form of cash transfer: the idea of universal basic income (UBI)—a transfer that would be regular, long-term, a meaningful amount, and available to everyone.”
Kubzansky and Williams also discuss the threat of automation and the rise of the “gig economy” as forces driving interest in UBI. They go on to note, however, that “no study to date has been conducted with sufficient size, rigor, timescale, or universality to truly test the impact of a full-fledged UBI program.”
It’s to help counter this latter deficit, the authors explain, that Omidyar Network has chosen to invest in GiveDirectly’s experiment — which they applaud for its scope, ambition, and rigor.
“Partnering with top economists (reviewed by their institutional review boards) at Princeton and MIT, GiveDirectly is ensuring the experiment is carried out with scientific rigor and responsibly, generating evidence to help answer critical questions on the impact of UBI.”
Kubzansky and Williams refrain from an all-out endorsement of UBI. Instead, they adopt a more cautious“wait and see” approach, stating, “While we don’t know what the right answer will be, or whether UBI will prove useful or feasible, this is an important first step on generating data, so that policymakers can make informed decisions.”
At the same time, though, the philanthropists are clearly willing to invest in empirical studies of its feasibility — even beyond the $493,000 donation to GiveDirectly. In concluding their blog post, Kubzansky and Williams state:
“GiveDirectly’s pilot in Kenya is geographically-specific and focuses more on the issues around poverty alleviation than questions about jobs displaced by technological change. As such, Omidyar Network will look to support additional studies on UBI to diversify the growing body of research across markets, conditions, and formats.”
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod and Dawn Howard
Photo: “Mothers with their children in Loiturerei village, Kenya” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DFID)
by Hilde Latour | Feb 9, 2017 | Research
David Piachaud, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and an associate of The Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), published a discussion paper on Citizens’ Income (CI) in December of last year.
Abstract:
A Citizen’s Income, or a Basic Income, is not a new idea but it has been receiving
increasing attention. There is confusion about the idea and an attempt is made to
distinguish different concepts. Then a full Citizen’s Income is examined in relation to four key criteria: the justice of an unconditional benefit; the possibility and fairness of a simple individual benefit; economic efficiency; and political feasibility. On all four criteria, Citizen’s Income fails. It is concluded that Citizen’s Income is a wasteful distraction from more practical methods of tackling poverty and inequality and ensuring all have a right to an adequate income.
Summary
Piachaud first acknowledges that a CI, or a basic income, is attractive in its simplicity, and he cites article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: “Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.”
Piachaud states, “A Citizen’s Income could ensure that right was achieved.”
He then describes four different concepts of a Citizen’s Income (CI):
- Bonus CI (a basic income based on a dividend)
- Partial CI (a basic income for particular groups only)
- Supplemental CI (additional income alongside a social security system)
- Full CI (an unconditional basic income adequate to live on to all citizens)
In the rest of his paper, Piachaud examines a full CI (which in his definition is not based on dividend but fully financed out of taxation) in relation to four key criteria. Through his analysis, he concludes that Citizens’ Income fails all four of these tests:
- The justice of an unconditional benefit
Piachaud discusses Philippe Van Parijs’s paper “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income” and argues that it is unfair (and therefore unjust) for healthy people to live off the labor of others.
- The possibility and fairness of a simple individual benefit
A full CI is intended to ensure (in a simple manner) that needs are met, but not everyone has the same needs. Piachaud gives examples related to disability, diversity in housing costs, and diversity in living arrangements (people living alone or with others). Basing a CI on individuals and assuming their needs are identical, is therefore unjust, Piachaud argues. “The social security and in some ways the tax system attempt to take these factors into account, however inadequately.”
- Economic efficiency
Piachaud defines a full CI as an unconditional income fully financed out of taxation. With respect to the economic efficiency, he argues:
“A full CI goes to everyone unconditionally, whereas social security is targeted at certain groups who in the absence of social security would be most likely to be poor. In consequence, a full CI that replaces social security is far more costly than social security, and this has to be paid for from higher taxes on all incomes with far-reaching economic consequences. The inevitable conclusion is, therefore, that a targeted social security system was, is, and will be more efficient and equitable than a full CI.”
- Political feasibility
Piachaud finds it very unlikely any political party will adopt an unconditional CI as a policy proposal either in the full or supplemental forms
After this analysis, David Piachaud concludes, “Citizen’s Income is a wasteful distraction from more practical methods of tackling poverty and inequality and ensuring all have a right to an adequate income.”
Info and links
The full paper can be found here.
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Danny Pearlberg for reviewing this article
Photo: diversity by Nabeelah Is, january 2012, CC-BY-SA 2.0
by Kate McFarland | Jan 28, 2017 | Research
Jurgen De Wispelaere (Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Tampere) and Lindsay Stirton (Professor of Public Law at the University of Sussex) have coauthored a new article in which they argue that basic income advocates must not ignore questions about how the policy is to be administered (“When Basic Income Meets Professor Pangloss: Ignoring Public Administration and Its Perils”).
De Wispelaere and Stirton consider several reasons for which basic income supporters believe that issues of administration are immaterial, such as the assumption that technology will render administration unproblematic and the comparative claim that administering a basic income could not be more difficult than administering conditional benefits. The authors find such justifications insufficient, maintaining that the challenges of administering a basic income are non-trivial, and that their resolution can impact the political feasibility and even ethicality of a basic income proposal.
The article has been published in the British political journal The Political Quarterly.
Jurgen De Wispelaere and Lindsay Stirton, “When Basic Income Meets Professor Pangloss: Ignoring Public Administration and Its Perils,” The Political Quarterly, December 14, 2016.
Abstract:
Basic income advocates propose a model that they believe will dramatically improve on current welfare programmes by alleviating poverty, reducing involuntary unemployment and social exclusion, redistributing care work, achieving a better work–life balance, and so on. Whether these expected social effects materialise in practice critically depends on how the model is implemented, but on this topic the basic income debate remains largely silent. Few advocates explicitly consider questions of implementation, and those that do are typically dismissive of the administrative challenges of implementing a basic income and critical (even overtly hostile) towards bureaucracy. In this contribution we briefly examine (and rebut) several reasons that have led basic income advocates to ignore administration. The main peril of such neglect, we argue, is that it misleads basic income advocates into a form of Panglossian optimism that risks causing basic income advocacy to become self-defeating.
Post reviewed by Danny Pearlberg
Photo: Scene from theatrical production of Candide (Pangloss on viewer’s left), CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 shakespearetheatreco.
by Kate McFarland | Jan 27, 2017 | News
A cross-party committee of the Scottish Parliament will hold a committee meeting on basic income on March 9, which will be broadcast live on television.
Scotland’s basic income movement has recently enjoyed time in the media spotlight due to the planning of pilot studies in the city of Glasgow and council area of Fife (see, for example, articles in The Guardian by Libby Brooks and Kevin McKenna). While these efforts are being pursued by the respective regional councils, the country’s legislature is also investigating the possibility of a basic income for all of Scotland.
On March 9, 2017, the Social Security Committee of the Scottish Parliament will convene a meeting at which a panel of experts is to present evidence concerning the feasibility of a basic income. The cross-party committee intends to investigate what level of basic income would be sufficient, how the program could be funded, and whether it could be implemented in Scotland given the current devolution of powers in the UK.
Sandra White, MSP from the Scottish National Party (SNP), is the Convener of the Social Security Committee. Explaining the importance of the session on basic income, she says, “We all know the current benefits system is riddled with complexity, and on the face of it the concept of a universal income for everyone is an interesting alternative. However, whilst there is much talk at the moment of the benefits of a citizen’s income, this Committee wants to investigate if the principle can work in practice. Whilst we all want a system that is fairer and looks after those most in need, it’s clear that the implementation of such a concept is far from straightforward.”
The SNP, Scotland’s largest political party, passed a motion endorsing basic income at its conference in March 2016.
The website of the Scottish Parliament notes five experts will address the committee, all of whom have previously written on basic income proposals for Scotland or the UK (see background reading below):
• Donald Hirsch (Professor and Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University)
• Siobhan Mathers (Reform Scotland Advisory Board)
• Annie Miller (Chair of Citizen’s Income Trust, co-founder of BIEN and Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland)
• Anthony Painter (Director of the Action and Research Centre of the Royal Society for Arts)
• Howard Reed (Director of Landman Economics)
The meeting will be broadcast live on www.scottishparliament.tv.
More information: https://www.parliament.scot/newsandmediacentre/103064.aspx
Background Reading
Annie Miller, “Why an independent Scotland would fair better with a Citizen’s Income (CI) or Basic Income (BI) scheme,” Evidence to the Expert Working Group on Welfare, December 13, 2013.
Miller has previously submitted evidence on basic income to the Scottish Government, describing the purported benefits of, philosophical arguments for, and existing empirical research on the idea. (She does not propose any specific basic income scheme here.)
Donald Hirsch, “Could a Citizen’s Income Work?,” Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 2015.
Hirsch considers major shifts in popular opinion that would be required for the acceptance of a universal basic income. He maintains that UBI is not immediately viable but that reforms in the UK’s Universal Credit system could start to make UBI eventually “more thinkable than it is today.”
Anthony Painter and Chris Thoung, “Creative citizen, creative state: The principled and pragmatic case for a Universal Basic Income,” RSA, December 2015.
Painter and Thoung present multiple arguments for UBI, and develop a proposal for a scheme for the UK, modifying an earlier proposal put forward by the Citizen’s Income Trust. The RSA won a 2016 “Think Tank of the Year” award in part due to this report.
James Mackenzie, Siobhan Mathers, Geoff Mawdsley, and Alison Payne, “The Basic Income Guarantee,” Reform Scotland, February 2016.
The authors critique the UK’s existing welfare system and propose the replacement of many benefits with a universal basic income. They develop a funding model for UBI at the level proposed by the Scottish Greens (£100 per week per adult and £50 per week per child).
Howard Reed and Stewart Lansley, “Universal Basic Income: An idea whose time has come?” Compass, May 2016.
Reed and Lansley simulate and analyze basic income schemes for the UK: three variants of a “full scheme” that replaces most existing means-tested benefits, and two variants of a “modified scheme” that exists alongside existing means-tested benefits in place. They recommend the latter, possibly as transition to the former, and discuss possible funding sources.
Reviewed by Asha Pond
Photo: Scottish Parliament Building, CC BY-NC 2.0 Hamish Irvine
