by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Richard K. Caputo (Professor of Social Work)
My colleague Professor Vicki Lens recommended that I check out the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network which was planning its first annual Congress for March 8-9, 2002 in New York City. Professor Lens was familiar with much of my scholarship on low-income families and economic well-being and thought my interests overlapped with the likes of Stony Brook School of Social Welfare Professor Michael Lewis (who coauthored Economics for Social Workers with Professor Karl Widerquist, the Congress organizer and one of the USBIG Network’s founders), among others.
I submitted an abstract based on the research I had done about the Nixon administration’s Family Assistance Plan while writing Welfare and Freedom American Style II. My abstract, “FAP Flops: Lessons Learned from the Failure to Pass the Family Assistance Plan in 1970 and 1972,” was accepted. I presented the full paper on Friday, March 8th, though somewhat intimidated by such knowledgeable notables as Sociologist Professor Fred Block and independent scholar Allan Sheahen (author of Guaranteed Income: The Right to Economic Security), among others. Thus began what turned out to be my ongoing associations with the USBIG Network and BIEN.
Though intrigued by my participation in First Congress of USBIG, I was not taken in by the idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) guarantee whole cloth. It did not square well with my sense of social justice, nor with my concerns about poverty reduction, though it did address what I saw as the diminished value of wage-based labor in an increasingly global economy and seemed compatible with the social work value of self-determination. As I learned more about the idea and its implications, I was quite taken by what seemed to be the sharp contrast about capitalism and about freedom. At the time, in late 2003 and early 2004, I had been working on an essay, “The ethics of poverty,” for Salem Press, while also thinking about a paper for presentation at the USBIG conference that was to take place February 22-22 in Washington, DC.
I had asked the USBIG primary coordinator at the time, Karl Widerquist, if he knew of any related secular literature dealing with the ethics of poverty. He directed me to the works of Philip Van Parijs (Real Freedom For All: What If Anything Can Justify Capitalism?), one of the two contemporary UBI intellectual heavyweights, the other being Guy Standing (Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality). In my reading of their works, Professors Van Parijs and Standing went head to head about the relationship between capitalism and UBI. For Professor Van Parijs the productive, wealth-generating capacity of capitalism made the UBI possible, enhancing the prospect of each person’s freedom, whereas for Professor Standing capitalism made UBI necessary because of its capacity to eviscerate labor, portending human misery and social unrest. Capitalism as a force for individual and social good vs. capitalism as a force for adverse individual and social consequences made for an interesting mix of scholars and activists who participated in BIEN and USBIG Congresses.
Professors Van Parijs and Widerquist also seemed to be at odds about the idea of freedom. Professor Widerquist, who asked me to comment on an early version of what became his 2006 dissertation from Oxford University (“Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income”) and the basis of his book Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income, dichotomized freedom as a status attribute of personhood, one either had it or did not, implying that a UBI would have to be at a level sufficiently high to enable anyone to reject a job offer s/he deemed unsuitable for any reason while living reasonably well financially. Professor Van Parjis’ idea of freedom was more like a gradient, one had varying degrees of it, enabling him to view any UBI level as an acceptable alternative to not having a UBI at all. I took issue with both, thinking status freedom too narrow if based only on one’s economic circumstances, and a gradient insufficient if the level of UBI had little or no significant impact on the lives of poor individuals and families.
Finally, while drafting the ethics of poverty essay and thinking about a paper for the 2004 USBIG Congress, I also noticed an announcement for the former Yeshiva University Political Scientist Professor Ross Zucker’s Democratic Distributive Justice (2000), which also had a proposal for a guaranteed income. Professor Zucker’s justification for UBI differed from Professor Van Parijs, focusing less on freedom and more on the consumption aspects of making more money available to everyone as consumers.
What I initially learned from my reading of UBI related materials resulted in three articles: (1) “Redistributive Schemes That Skirt Poverty: Reconsidering Social Justice in Light of Van Parijs and Zucker,” published in the Journal of Poverty (2005); (2) “The Unconditional Basic Income Guarantee: Attempts to Eclipse the Welfare State,” published in International Social Work (2008); and (3) “Standing Polanyi on His Head: The Basic Income Guarantee as a Response to the Commodification of Labor,” published in Race, Gender & Class (2008). These articles formed the basis of presentations as several BIEN and related conferences.
While participating in these conferences and meeting international scholars with varying viewpoints and insights about the merits of UBI schemes, I also got the idea for a book documenting how related proposals were faring politically across the globe. With support from Philippe Van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Michael Lewis, and Eri Noguchi, I applied for and was awarded an $8,000 Summer Research Fellowship from the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs at Yeshiva University in May 2006, based on the proposal, “Achieving a Basic Income Guarantee: Efforts-to-Date Around the World.” Essentially, I classified the countries I examined into two groups, those, which for all practical purposes rejected UBI schemes (South Africa, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Columbia) and those which sought to build upon or expand other social welfare provisions with the eventual aim of achieving UBI (e.g., a child allowance in Argentina, the Bolsa Família Program in Brazil, a child tax benefit in Canada, guaranteed minimum pension income for low-income persons in Chile, expanding the non-means-tested child benefit in Ireland, and baby bond proposals in the US).
I was taken to task somewhat when I presented the preliminary findings at the 2007 Congress of the USBIG Network in New York, though I had retitled the paper, “The Death Knoll of BIG or BIG by Stealth” for dramatological purposes. Few Congress participants were willing to accept that basic income guarantees were dead-on-arrival policy options anywhere. One session participant, Conference of Religious Ireland (later Social Justice Ireland) Co-Director Father Seán Healy, contended that there was more going on in Ireland than what was visibly available online and in the BIEN Newsflashes and USBIG Newsletters, implying also that my research would benefit from more extensive collaboration with those on the ground who could provide greater nuances about UBI-related politics involved in each country.
I took Father Healy’s and likeminded comments from others to heart, realizing that a single-authored book on the topic was unfeasible, perhaps even foolhardy on my part, given the country-by-country variability of the politics and efficacy of advocacy efforts involved in getting the idea of a basic income guarantee on the public agenda.
Over time, I gathered a group of scholars to contribute to my edited volume, Basic Income Guarantee and Politics: International Experiences and Perspectives on the Viability of Income Guarantee, published in 2012 in the Palgrave Macmillan series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee.
One of the things that impressed me about the BIEN and USBIG Congresses overall was the tone set by Professor Van Parijs. I found Professor Van Parjis quite personable and open to criticism, some of which came from me, though the most challenging perhaps from Rutgers University Law Professor Phil Harvey who clearly preferred job guarantees over income guarantees. I always felt welcome, as I suspect Professor Harvey did, given the number of papers we presented over the years at BIEN and USBIG Congresses. On several occasions, I heard Professor Van Parijs iterate that the primary role of BIEN was to promote discussion about the merits of the idea, about ethical and practical considerations that one might argue for and against UBI so that our collective thinking about it would be enhanced.
The prospect of UBI remains a scholarly interest of mine, though UBI seems a difficult sell politically in the US. Even the self-identified libertarian Charles Murray, one of UBI’s major proponents, acknowledged that UBI was a political nonstarter. Some traction can be found in the tech sector, as Professor Michael Lewis and I noted in our introduction to the special symposium on UBI in the Autumn 2016 issue of the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare. I also included UBI as a policy option in the closing chapter of U.S. Social Welfare Reform. On occasion, I also continue to assign related readings for my social welfare policy classes.
Richard K. Caputo is professor of social policy and research at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work in New York City. This retrospective is adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming academic memoir, Connecting the Dots: An Intellectual Autobiography of a Social Work Academician.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 29, 2016 | News
Timotheus Höttges, CEO of the multibillion dollar telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG, has previously expressed support of unconditional basic income. In December 2016, he again addressed the subject in an interview in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
In a recent interview with Handelsblatt, Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges talks about the changing nature of work, especially potential job loss due to digitization — to which, he admits, his own company is not immune — and the demand for more specialized skills. In response to a question about why he supports an unconditional basic income (“bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen”), he notes that jobs are becoming more project-based, with permanent full-time employment becoming less of a norm.
Timotheus Höttges
Between digitization and project-based work structures, we should expect that workers will need more time to retrain as well as more periods of unemployment or part-time employment — and, according to Höttges, Germany’s current welfare system is ill-equipped to support such workers. Thus, he believes that the government should replace its complex system of subsidies with an unconditional basic income [1].
Höttges adds that an unconditional basic income would promote more dignity (“Würde”) than Germany’s current welfare system — which puts the would-be recipient in the position of a supplicant, having to ask for aid — and that it could promote entrepreneurship.
Although he admits that some might take advantage of the basic income without contributing to society, Höttges denies that a basic income would create a “society of loafers” (“Gesellschaft von Faulenzern”), since it is through work that people find meaning and identity.
Höttges also points out that a basic income would encourage respect for those who choose to do work that is traditionally unpaid, giving the example of care for ailing parents. (It’s worth noting in this connection that, earlier in the interview, Höttges argues that revenue is no longer an adequate measure of productivity, given the extent to which information can now be created and distributed freely, as in Wikipedia.)
When asked about funding for an unconditional basic income, Höttges stresses that the policy needs to be seen as part of a broader package of a reforms, including tax reform. He maintains that corporate profits must be taxed and redistributed as a matter of justice, fairness, and solidarity (“Gerechtigkeit, Fairness, Solidarität”).
The interview also mentions top-ranked German CEOs who are sympathetic to basic income, including Götz Werner of dm-drogerie markt — with whom Höttges has discussed the idea — and Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, who called for “a kind of basic income” during the Süddeutsche Zeitung Economic Summit in November (although he subsequently indicated in a Tweet that he did not believe the basic income needed to be unconditional).
If you read German, you can read the entire interview here:
Ina Karabasz, “Telekom Timotheus Höttges CEO: ‘Wir sind zu satt’,” Handelsblatt, December 20, 2016.
[1] In the original German: “Also wird es Phasen geben, in denen der Mensch keine Arbeit hat, umschult oder nur in Teilzeit für ein Unternehmen arbeitet. Diese Phasen wird der Sozialstaat überbrücken müssen. Warum soll man dessen komplexe Förderungssystematik nicht mit einem bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen ersetzen?”
Timotheus Höttges photos: CC BY-SA 4.0 Sebaso
by Kate McFarland | Dec 27, 2016 | News
The 2017 Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum is to include a panel on basic income, in which BIEN’s Guy Standing will be participating.
Guy Standing (credit: Enno Schmidt)
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London) has been invited to speak at the next meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, which will take place from January 17 to 20, 2017.
The editor of The Economist will interview Standing on the precariat on January 17. Additionally, Standing will take part in a session on basic income on January 18.
By invitation only, the WEF’s annual Davos conference brings together over 2000 CEOs, political leaders, distinguished academics, and other “notables”, and has come to be regarded as one of the most elite economic and political conferences in the world.
World Economic Forum blog contributions
In connection with his invitation to Davos, Standing has authored an article on basic income for the WEF’s blog (“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“). In it, Standing presents a series of justifications for basic income.
First, and most importantly, Standing argues that a basic income is owed to all as a matter of social justice: “Land, natural resources, and ideas that become ‘intellectual property’ are all part of society’s collective wealth, created and nurtured by generations of our ancestors. So, it is reasonable to argue that everybody should have a modest share, a social dividend, in the form of an equal, modest, individual, unconditional basic income.”
Standing contends that “all assets, including intellectual property, are resources to which all of society has legitimate claim”–recommending, for example, a “special levy on income generated by patents, copyright and other forms of intellectual property” to pay into a sovereign wealth fund.
Additionally, Standing argues that a basic income promotes individual freedom and security–noting that economic security is a requirement for rational decision-making–and removes the poverty and “precarity” traps in current welfare systems. (A precarity trap exists when a would-be worker decides not to accept short-term employment due to delays in benefits processing or other complications that encourage avoidance of temporary changes in benefits status. In this way, existing welfare systems often discourage temporary work.)
Standing also points out that a basic income would be seen as remunerating unpaid labor–and that this, in turn, could encourage more environmentally sustainable lifestyles.
“Care work, voluntary work, community work and the ‘work’ many do in retraining are all statistically unrecognised today, but they are socially valuable, and are not resource depleting, unlike many forms of labour. A basic income would tilt the economic system towards socially and ecologically sustainable growth.”
Finally, although he seems to regard it as a comparatively weaker argument, Standing concludes by claiming that the automation argument–that is, that a basic income is necessary as insurance against a robot job takeover–“should not be dismissed”.
“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“ (December 20) is the final article in a three-part series:
The first, “Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism” (November 9), describes the characteristics and structure of the precariat.
The second, “The 5 biggest lies of global capitalism“ (December 12), discusses “rentier capitalism” — a system in which increasing shares of wealth accrue to those who hold property from which they can extract rents — and explains how (in Standing’s view) it sits at the heart of contemporary economic inequities.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan.
Davos photo CC BY 2.0 WebRatio Communications.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 23, 2016 | News
Some commentators view basic income as a one-stop solution, which is meant to eliminate the welfare state. Temple University Law Professor Brishen Rogers is one basic income proponent who’s speaking out against this trend.
Brishen Rogers, Associate Professor of Law at Temple University, is a long-time supporter of a universal basic income (UBI) to mitigate poverty and economic insecurity. At the same time, he is critical of certain pervasive “tropes” in the mainstream discussion of UBI. The latter are his focus in a recent Boston Review article (“How Not to Argue for Basic Income”), in which he criticizes discourse that portrays UBI as necessitated (only) by automation and technological unemployment, and that presents it as a replacement for all other welfare programs.
Although he praises former SEIU President Andy Stern’s “willingness to challenge labor movement orthodoxy”, Rogers challenges the presentation of UBI in Stern’s popular new book on the topic, Raising the Floor, which Rogers takes exemplify this problematic discourse:
Like many others in the future-of-work debates, he [Stern] presents UBI as an urgent policy solution to a problem—massive technological unemployment—that has not yet materialized. Also like many others, he signals a willingness to cut welfare benefits in order to get conservatives on board. These tropes of mainline debate are unfortunate. They alienate progressives who might otherwise favor a UBI and cast the policy as a one-stop solution for economic inequality, which it is not.
Opposing a UBI that replaces the social welfare state, Rogers proposes that basic income be integrated into a social democratic economy, rather than laid on top of a neoliberal one:
[T]he solution is not to buy off a hoard of displaced workers armed with pitchforks. Rather, it is to fight for a UBI while rebuilding a robustly democratic state that can enact broader progressive reforms to tax and welfare policies, subject large firms to far greater oversight, and protect workers and the unemployed in the here and now. Such reforms aren’t just good policy but also good politics, since they can help rebuild faith in the state. A standalone UBI simply cannot.
In previous academic work (“Justice at Work”), Rogers has argued that a basic income would not eliminate the need for minimum wage laws, which would continue to be necessary to promote fair and respectful treatment of workers.
References and Further Reading
Brishen Rogers, “How Not to Argue for Basic Income,” Boston Review, October 31, 2016.
Brishen Rogers, “Justice at Work: Minimum Wage Laws and Social Equality,” Texas Law Review, April 26, 2014.
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
Image: CC BY 2.0 Robert Couse-Baker
by Kate McFarland | Dec 17, 2016 | News
Photo: Results of “ball poll” at UNISON West Midlands Regional Games in Birmingham (credit: Becca Kirkpatrick).
The trade union UNISON has called on West Midlands mayoral candidates to commit to running a basic income pilot in the region.
UNISON, a major public service employee union, has released a 20-point manifesto, calling on candidates in the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) mayoral election to declare which of the 20 “asks” they would implement if elected.
The election, which is to take place on May 4, 2017, will decide the first mayor of England’s West Midlands region. The WMCA was established to the govern the seven-authority area in June 2016.
One of the points of UNISON’s manifesto, which has been published in full on the West Midlands political blog The Chamberlain Files, is a demand for a “micro-pilot” of universal basic income (no further details of the pilot have been specified):
WMCA to run a micro-pilot on the use of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A UBI could have many benefits including helping the long-term unemployed get back into work via part-time work and providing a basic income that would allow people to undertake entrepreneurial activities.
Unemployment is a pressing concern in the West Midlands. A new report from the Resolution Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, reveals that WMCA has an employment rate of 64.5%, as compared to an overall employment rate of 71.6% within UK city regions other than WMCA.
The UNISON manifesto also calls for a range of improvements in education, transportation, housing and development, and government accountability in the WMCA.
UNISON has approximately 1.3 million members across the UK. It has over 120,000 members in the West Midlands, making it the largest union in the region. Members in the region comprise employees in eight main types of work: local government, health care, education services, water, energy, community, police and justice, and private contractors.
Sources
Kevin Johnson, “Nationalisation, seats for unions and free public transport – Unison unveils mayoral manifesto,” The Chamberlain Files, December 15, 2016.
Neil Elkes, “Call for universal basic income trail [sic] in the West Midlands,” Birmingham Mail, December 15, 2016.
Becca Kirkpatrick, personal communication.
