by Andre Coelho | Nov 7, 2017 | News
Dr. Sean Healy and Michelle Murphy of Social Justice Ireland.
Promoted and organized by the Social Justice Ireland Team, the Annual Social Policy Conference will take place on Tuesday, the 21st of November 2017. The venue will be located at Croke Park, in Dublin, and will last from 9:30 am up to 5:00 pm on that day. Registration can be done online.
Journalist and broadcaster Michael Clifford will chair de Conference. A short description of the Conference is presented by Social Justice Ireland:
“In recent years we have seen increasing divisions within society and between people and the State. Trust between people and the institutions established to serve them has been eroded. Populism and the concept of “fake news” and a post-factual society are gaining traction. This important conference will bring together national and international speakers to address these issues from a range of perspectives.”
More information at:
Social Justice Ireland website (Annual Social Policy Conference)
by Cordelia Holst | Nov 6, 2017 | News
On Thursday, October 19th, activists, social justice advocates, economists, futurists, venture capitalists, writers, community organizers and politicians gathered at the Old Mint in San Francisco – a symbolically poetic building – to talk about Cash. Organized by the Economic Security Project, the goal of the conference was to “reimagine what an economy built on the well-being of everyone could look like.”
Cara Rose DeFabio and Sandhya Anantharaman were the MC’s for the day, introducing each segment, panel or presentation, showcasing a range of thoughts around how cash transfers can shape society. See the full schedule here.
The conference embraced a range of reasons why giving cash through a Universal Basic Income is an appealing concept. Most segments were in a panel format with experts in their field, moderated by one of their own. This allowed participants to see the differences in thinking across the movement as well as its broad appeal, regardless of what brought these thinkers into to the movement. The first panel was a discussion on automation’s effect on the work force, and how UBI could provide economic security during retraining, between jobs, or to supplement part time work. Another panel, with representatives from three different venture funds, discussed how a UBI might encourage entrepreneurship, while a third panel talked through historical and current systemic racist and sexist policies and practices, and how a combination of a UBI plus a wealth tax to help fund it could course correct extreme inequality.
A general acceptance for the benefit of cash transfers seemed to be the most basic common denominator. The audience was educated on the results of past cash transfer and basic income experiments, as well as updates on current experiments. You can view a high level video of some of the outcomes of these experiments here.
Mayor Tubbs of Stockton talked about his plans for a UBI in his city. Elizabeth Rhodes also gave an update on the Oakland Y-Combinator project. Then Joe Huston, CFO of Give Directly spoke to the effectiveness of cash transfers and positive outcomes in their work in Kenya and Uganda. He announced that Give Directly is now involved in its first US based project, where they are giving debit cards with $1500 directly to victims of Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area. He noted the work that still must be done changing perceptions around what people will do when they are given cash unconditionally, joking that employers don’t say, “I would like to give this employee their bonus, but I’m worried they might drink it away,” yet this is somehow common thinking that needs to be changed based on research results.
Aisha Nyandoro, CEO of Springboard to Opportunity spoke about where the current Welfare system in the US fails. She illustrated the challenges that families living in poverty in Mississippi have piecing together welfare benefits from the government – housing voucher, electricity voucher, and food stamps. The system creates poverty traps and the benefits don’t cover many of the real needs these families have, but cash would. Cash would also limit interaction with the system and remove the feeling of being judged, as well as the stigmas around welfare.
Damareo Cooper, Director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative shared his personal story also highlighting how the current welfare system and prison system fails children and young people, making a convincing case for switching to cash. Almaz Zelleke, professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai, went further, explaining why a UBI must be paid as cash and not a negative income tax.
Throughout the day, however, there seemed to be a lack of consensus on aspects surrounding universality and unconditionality of a cash transfer policy. The range of standpoints could be seen clearly in a panel with Hawaii State Representative Chris Lee and Alaska State Senator Bill Wielechowski, as well as Joseph Sanberg, the founder of Golden State Opportunity Foundation. Bill educated the audience on the Alaska permanent fund. On the aspect of Universality and Unconditionality he said, “Universality is critical. If the policy was needs-based it would diminish it. The fund is framed as each resident’s ownership of shared resources. This is something that Alaskans share together.”
On the other side of the issue, Joseph Sanberg said, “The social contract is work and you will be able to have economic security.” He tied work requirements to the right to economic security and his efforts have been focused on California Earned Income Tax Credits.
Chris Lee from Hawaii seemed to be working out his state’s position on the issue, noting that for their Earned Income Tax Credits they have expanded the definition of work, looking at where people are spending their hours – for example, caregiving. He did note that his task force is looking at a universal benefit across all economic classes.
Aisha Nyandoro cited the work she does as evidence that work requirements are difficult and policy makers are out of touch on the issue. She invited any policy makers that wanted to get in touch to call her. Anne Price, President of Insight Center for Community Economic Development, explained how racism and sexism shaped current welfare policy around judging who is deserving and who is undeserving. She noted that it is degrading to be on the receiving end of morality, and shared her vision for dignity for all: universal benefits – working or not.
How to pay for it was touched on by some, with ideas ranging from a wealth tax to combat inequality, to a shared patrimony dividends, like Alaska, or some combination of these revenues.
Other highlights of the day included a session by Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the future, and A Frank Conversation about Money with Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and Co-Chair of the hosting Economic Security Project. Jane coached the audience on how to create empathy for our future selves and envision a future with Universal Basic Income. Anna Sale from “Death, Sex, and Money” interviewed Chris Hughes about his thoughts and feelings around his own fortune and why he supports Universal Basic Income.
The organizing team is clearly very competent and professional, as the entire conference ran very smoothly from check in, AV, lunch, and seating. All details were thought out and executed well. Participants had many opportunities to make connections and discuss the themes.
All in all, this was a very important gathering for the movement.
by Dave Clegg | Oct 19, 2017 | News
Related to Ontario’s Basic Income pilot project there will be a lively 2 day panel discussion Oct 19, 2017, 7-9 pm followed by a Q&A at University of St. Michael’s College, in the COOP section of Brennan Hall, 81 St. Mary’s street, Toronto Ontario. Then Oct 20, 2017 also in the COOP section from 9 am to 5 pm,, there will be a Multi-Faith perspective on Basic Income entitled the Case for Solidarity examining employment, faith and social justice as related to a Basic Income. Both are free and registrations can be found at https://stmikes.utoronto.ca/event/the-case-for-solidarity-multi-faith-perspectives-on-basic-income/ Or
https://www.tst.edu/about/events/st-michaels-college-case-solidarity-multi-faith-perspectives-basic-income
by Guest Contributor | Oct 12, 2017 | Opinion
Why it’s useful to see Basic Income through the lens of Population Health Intervention Research
Thanks in part to the health sciences, there is widespread public acceptance that being poor is bad for your health. It doesn’t take much for us to make the connections. We might expect that less to eat and poor housing conditions interfere with our ability to maintain healthy bodies and immune systems. Less money could mean no access to things like computers so that people can visit sites like Thenutritioninsider.com
to get advice on how to eat healthy and look after their bodies. It may also mean less access to the health services that could treat or prevent illness and disease.
We need to make treatments more accessible which is why using coupons from somewhere like Save On Cannabis for CBD products might enable the vast health inequality to become smaller in the future. Moreover, fewer resources might mean fewer opportunities and fewer job options. Poverty also compounds political and social injustice, with marginalized people such as women, Indigenous people and racialized groups profoundly affected by poverty. These groups often constitute much of the poor. Lastly, evidence suggest we suffer the psychological consequences of living in material deprivation, both in absolute terms and relative to others. Therefore it is a necessity for marketing cbd brands to change the narrative around cbd products so that there’s a change in the structure and more people get accessible medical care.
The immense research on poverty, income inequality, and the social determinants of health culminated in public sympathy for the plight of the poor. Yet for all the studies that have been done on poverty, perhaps it is time to develop research and public support for a solution – such as Basic Income. There are practical challenges to getting basic income into common public health parlance. The health of everyone is highly important, no matter the level of wealth, every person should have access to healthcare, for example, men may need sexual health medications (), which means that they must be able to have that access when required by their doctor.
The answer may lie in the understanding of Basic Income as an ideological proposal that can affect our health. The discourse around basic income as a deeply ethical idea is necessary, but perhaps insufficient. I believe we should consider reframing the concept concretely as a population health intervention.
Why call basic income a “population health intervention”?
A concept advanced by Canadian researchers Potvin and Hawe (2012) as being policies or programs that shift the distribution of health risk by addressing the underlying social, economic and environmental conditions, population health intervention research is a unique approach to figuring out how we are affected by policies that have a wholesale effect on people. Eminent basic income economist Dr. Evelyn Forget took this approach in her paper “New questions, new data, old interventions: The health effects of a guaranteed annual income” (Forget 2013). She used old administrative data from the well-known “Mincome” experiment in Manitoba, and looked at health records from the same time-period. She saw a reduction in hospital burden relative to a similar town’s health care use that did not get the income grant.
Calling basic income an intervention means that we can treat it as a ‘natural experiment‘.
We can study the impact of a policy on our health and well-being without necessarily running a Randomized Controlled Trial (where you randomly assign some people to a treatment, policy, or program, and not others).
Many have proposed that we need to conduct this sort of formal scientific experiment first. Some have questioned how useful such limited studies would be. A Randomized Controlled Trial might tell us whether basic income works in a certain social, economic, and political setting, but tells us little about whether the policy would work in other settings, or why the policy had a particular effect.
We ought to be careful not to set ourselves up to fail with studies too narrowly drawn in scope. Mixed or unexpected results from such studies also risks misinterpretation, and can be used to prevent basic income from entering policy.
Although the Ontario Pilot Program represents a step in the right direction, nothing stops us from advocating for the full national implementation of basic income. A host of different research and study designs would be embedded into the impact evaluation of this federal policy, on par with health care or public education. Framing a given policy as a population health intervention acknowledges the fact that many there are health-promoting aspects to programs outside of health care sector (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
Basic income is such a policy. Programs to alleviate poverty lie outside the doctor’s office, but nevertheless have a profound impact on health.
Population Health Intervention Research compels us to think bigger than ourselves.
Traditional medicine treats the individual person. If we are looking at the effect of social programs and policies, this unit of analysis is often too small to see measurable differences in any single person. Moreover, if we restrict a given treatment or social program to the poorest people – such as welfare, we may see limited overall benefits to the population as a whole.
Epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose recognized this problem (Rose 1985). Imagine that people lie on a continuum of ‘risk’ for certain diseases and health outcomes. For example, this could be said of high blood pressure as a risk factor for heart attack. Higher blood pressure puts you at higher risk of heart attack.
For our purposes, let’s say this distribution represents the relationship between poverty and getting sick. Higher poverty puts you at higher risk of ‘sickness’. We might expect that most people lie somewhere in the middle of the distribution, while those at very high or very low poverty sit somewhere at the tails.
Rose noted that traditional medicine’s approach was to target high risk people at the far right. However, these people are a smaller proportion, and paying attention only to them might not give us the biggest bang for our buck. Instead, he posited that interventions that reach entire groups of people would ‘shift’ the distribution itself. At the end of the day, he estimated that these far-reaching treatments would have a bigger impact overall (Rose 1985).
Basic income fits that profile – a social policy that brings everyone up, effectively ‘shifting’ the distribution. In order to examine policies that lend a helping hand to everyone, we need a scientific lens that is broad enough to capture the whole picture. Reframing basic income as a population shifter might fill that void.
Lastly, population health interventions allow us to redirect our thinking from the problem to the solution.
We keep studying poverty, not the fixes for poverty. A population health intervention approach calls for the health sciences to consider the potential gains to be made by studying the impact of income interventions on population health. We should be turning our attention from studying how poverty effects our health, to studying how fixing poverty effects our health.
You might be quick to point out that we have not eradicated poverty yet. So, how do we study this state of affairs, when it doesn’t yet exist?
In some ways, we can. We have the pilot run in Dauphin, Manitoba that in many ways, was ahead of its time. Dr. Forget was the first to recognize the strength of “intervention-alizing” the Canadian basic income experiment. We can also examine policies that get close to basic income, such as the Bolsa Família program of Brazil – a conditional cash transfer available to families with children. In Canada, the non-conditional income grant for senior citizens called the Old Age Supplement has been analyzed as an analog to basic income (McIntyre, Kwok et al. 2016) and indeed, those researchers found that participants eligible for OAS reported better self-reported physical, mental, and function health. Importantly, they also found those on OAS (which is non-conditional) where better off than those on conditional income programs. These are innovative approaches to the question of basic income’s potential impact, using information we already have. And, it might move us from studies of poverty, toward studies of basic income.
As it stands, promoting basic income as a population health intervention for the sake of our health is underutilized, yet it seems like a sensible way to communicate the idea. Poverty is intricately tied to the material conditions of our lives and societal position in the world, predicated on sex, race, and class. How a policy like basic income works among these conditions deserves no less than comprehensive and holistic look at how our health is profoundly impacted. Research that is based on an understanding of population health intervention attempts to do just this – and capture the value and differential effect of these interventions, the processes by which they bring about change and the contexts within which they work best (Hawe and Potvin 2009).
The Dauphin Experiment and the impending Ontario Pilot have and will continue to shape our thinking moving forward. They are also a testament to the desire of Canadians for a better, kinder, healthier society for all. However, we have not yet fully transformed the public’s conception of poverty alleviation as a necessary policy, worthy of widespread implementation as are universal health care, public education, or social assistance.
Implementing a basic income as an essential social program and for our health is possible, and fully within our experience of policy-making at both the provincial and national levels. The time has come to make this a reality.
Sarah M Mah is a PhD student in the department of Geography at McGill University. She is also a member of the Asian Women for Equality Society, an organization dedicated to the campaign for a Guaranteed Livable Income.
The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of BIEN or BI News.
References
Forget, E. L. (2013). “New questions, new data, old interventions: the health effects of a guaranteed annual income.” Prev Med 57(6): 925-928.
Hawe, P. and L. Potvin (2009). “What is population health intervention research?” Can J Public Health 100(1): Suppl I8-14.
McIntyre, L., C. Kwok, J. C. Emery and D. J. Dutton (2016). “Impact of a guaranteed annual income program on Canadian seniors’ physical, mental and functional health.” Can J Public Health 107(2): e176-182.
Rose, G. (1985). “Sick individuals and sick populations.” Int J Epidemiol 14(1): 32-38.
by Michael Lewis | Oct 10, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Michael A. Lewis
I was recently listening to a talk show on public radio. The first segment was about President Trump’s tax proposals. It included a debate between a supporter of Trump’s plan and an opponent of it. The supporter is associated with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Her conclusion was that Trump’s proposed tax cuts would be great because they would lead to more economic growth and, therefore, more jobs. This is, of course, the supply-side/trickle-down economics reasoning, which could be a subject of debate itself.
A later segment on the talk show focused on New York City’s attempt to persuade Amazon to set up its headquarters in the city. For those who may not be aware, New York City’s mayor is widely considered to be politically progressive. If you are more familiar with European politics, you can think of him as something like a Social Democrat. He did not appear on the radio program, but one of his deputies did. The deputy said a primary reason the city wants to attract Amazon is that such a move would generate a lot of jobs.
Thus, there was a representative of a progressive mayor and a conservative, both of whom argued for two very different proposals on the same basis — jobs. This is not that unusual. The U.S. political Right and Left disagree on plenty: tax cuts, the proper role of the federal government, how best to improve U.S. schools, what the U.S. Constitution says about the right to own a gun, and a host of other issues. But both sides can always be counted on to agree that whether someone has a job or not is an issue of utmost importance.
Conservatives may argue that the best way to generate jobs is for the government to get out of the way and let businesses “do their thing.” Progressives may counter that the private sector will never create enough jobs for all those who desire one, and that the only way to assure people can find work is for the government to guarantee a right to work, even if it must do the hiring. But for both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, jobs are what matters.
It makes sense that both the Right and Left would be so focused on jobs. The main source of many, if not most, incomes in the U.S. is a wage or salary. For many people, if they lost their job, it would not be long before things became dire for them. For many of those currently without jobs, things are already quite dire. It is in the nature of capitalism for most of us to toil away as “wage slaves” as the Marxists define it. But it seems that over time, this economic necessity has developed into something many people call the work ethic, but which I have come to think might better be called the job ethic. The job ethic is the culture which develops when what we have to do to survive becomes not just a source of income but also one of social recognition.
In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, the late philosopher Iris Marion Young has an essay on the definition of “oppression.” That essay is called The Five Faces of Oppression, and one of those “faces” is marginalization. Marginalization is what happens to the involuntarily unemployed. Obviously, those faced with this situation have a serious financial problem, given that they are living within a system which requires them to have money to meet their needs. But, according to Young, this is not the main reason involuntary unemployment is oppressive. The main reason is that those who are unemployed lack something which grants them access to being recognized and esteemed by their fellow citizens/residents — a job. It is this lack of a job which makes the unemployed feel cast aside and marginalized. The fact that someone is not willing to hire them results in their feeling socially worthless.
Being a philosopher/political theorist, Young does not support her argument with figures and statistics. But I think she may be onto something. A number of opponents of basic income seem to think so, too. Anyone who has followed the basic income debate has heard the argument that basic income is imprudent public policy because it would result in less work. Less work would mean people would be less inclined to engage in an activity which provides them not just with income, but also with meaning and social recognition. What these individuals are really saying is that basic income is bad social policy because it would result in fewer people having to obtain meaning and social recognition from what they have to do to “put food on the table.”
In the past, I have questioned whether basic income would have this effect. But I’m also inclined to wonder: So what if it does? As important as making a living is, humans do a lot of other things besides sell their labor. They spend time with children, spouses, and friends, they enjoy hobbies of various kinds, they engage in pursuits of higher learning, they become involved in civic pursuits to make the world a better place, and a host of other things. Can’t at least some of these things be sources of social recognition, as well? As long as capitalism and tasks that cannot be completed by machines exist, there will be a need for humans to sell their labor. But if a basic income freed some of us up to spend more time doing other things which provide us with social recognition, would that really be so bad?
About the author:
Michael A. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist by training whose areas of interest are public policy and quantitative methods. He’s also a co-founder of USBIG and has written a number of articles, book chapters, and other pieces on the basic income, including the co-edited work The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee. Lewis is on the faculties of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the Graduate and University Center of the City University of New York.
