by BIEN | Jul 15, 2017 | News
Credit to: AT Kearney.
Courtney McCaffrey and others from AT Kearney published an article on the debate around Universal Basic Income (UBI) in markets throughout the world. Politicians, in both Europe and North America, are winning on campaign trails with talk about returning control to the common people from the economic system in the globe.
But one of the big worker displacers is automation and new technologies. Oxford University reported 47% of US jobs will be taken over by automation in the next two decades. A UBI is being offered as an economic buffer for such workplace and technology transitions.
Such a UBI would be universal and unconditional in the application. Past UBI experiments such as Mincome in Canada, projects in Seattle and Denver (USA), and Namibia produced real, positive results empowering those politicians. McCaffrey and her collegues also mention recent major endorsements for UBI, for instance from such luminaries as Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, and Marc Andreessen.
Two books are recommended: 1) Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman, and 2) Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght. Other notable cases reported on were Finland, India, and Ontario.
The article discusses pros and cons of UBI, in a general sense. It was noted that citizens with a UBI will spend more time on family and school. The sources of funding for the UBI could be revenues from natural resources and/or more taxes. Some views of critics are following their own political lines, but the major concern revolves around people’s availability to work when they get a UBI covering their basic needs.
Finally, the article summarizes views agains UBI on the political Right and Left. On the Right, the main argument is cost. On the political Left, detractors view UBI as “regressive” because it could dismantle current welfare systems, and that it may not capture different living costs in different areas.
More information at:
McCaffrey, C.R., Toland, T. & Peterson, E.R., “The Best Things in Life Are Free?“, AT Kearney, March 2017
by Kate McFarland | Jul 12, 2017 | News
BIEN Chair Louise Haagh spoke on basic income at Journey to 100, a longevity-themed conference held last month in Guernsey.
Guernsey, an island with a population of about 63,000, aspires to join the world’s blue zones — regions boasting an exceptionally high proportion of centenarians — and become the first country with a life expectancy over 100. To begin pursuing this goal, Guernsey’s Dandelion Foundation and Evolution of Medicine founder James Maskell organized Journey to 100, a “world-exclusive conference” held on June 30 in St. Peter Port.
In additional to diverse experts in areas such as medicine, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture, the event’s 20 speakers included BIEN Chair Louise Haagh (University of York), who spoke about basic income as a means to rethink and change the way our institutions are governed. Haagh stressed that basic income is neither a radical restructuring of the current welfare state, nor mere business as usual, but a chance to pause and rethink our systems of social insurance. In contrast to welfare programs that impose strict terms and conditions on recipients, basic income, would allow all people to enjoy independence in the form of “selvstaendiggørelse” — to stand in themselves.
Watch the full conference, including Haagh’s talk (beginning around 6 hr 30 min), below:
by Kate McFarland | Jul 11, 2017 | News
The municipalities of Groningen, Wageningen, Tilburg, Deventer, and Ten Boer have received permission from the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment to proceed with proposed social assistance experiments.
Jetta Klijnsma, CC BY 2.0 Partij van de Arbeid
Jetta Klijnsma, State Secretary of Social Affairs and Employment, signed the authorization of the five municipal experiments on July 3, 2017.
Groningen and Ten Boer will be carrying out their experiments in cooperation with one another.
In each of the experiments, which will run for two years, participants will be randomly selected from a pool of current social assistance beneficiaries (with participation voluntary for those selected), and assigned either to a control group or to one of several treatment groups.
Each experiment has at least three treatment groups, testing the following types of interventions: (1) removing reintegration requirements (e.g. job applications and training programs) on welfare benefits; (2) providing a more intensive form of reintegration service; (3) permitting participants to earn additional income on top of their welfare benefits. Subjects assigned to the third treatment groups will be permitted to retain 50% of additional earned income, up to a maximum of €199 per month, for the duration of the two-year experiment. In contrast, under current policy, welfare recipients are permitted to keep only 25% of additional income, and only for up to six months.
The Groningen / Ten Boer experiment includes a fourth treatment group, in which participants are permitted to choose to join any one of the three preceding groups.
Although international media have referred to these experiments as “basic income experiments”, the description is a bit of a misnomer. In all treatment groups, benefits remain means-tested and household-based, and participation is limited to current welfare recipients. Moreover, legal constraints create an effective demand on participants to seek work (on pain of removal from the experiment); this effective conditionality, unique to the Dutch experiments, is discussed below.
Sjir Hoeijmakers, an econometrician who consulted municipalities in their design of the experiments, prefers to speak of “experiments in the context of the Participation Act” (cf. this Basic Income News article), while others refer to “social assistance experiments”.
The experiments are expected to begin around October 1 of this year.
The Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment is currently reviewing applications from three additional municipalities who also wish to conduct experiments on social benefits: Amsterdam, Nijmegen, and Utrecht. Decisions on these proposals are expected later in the summer.
Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, Nijmegen was granted permission to carry out its experiment, which will commence on December 1. A full report on Nijmegen’s experiment will follow.
Background
The municipalities of Groningen, Tilburg, Wageningen, and Utrecht have been planning social assistance experiments since 2015, following the enactment of the Dutch Participation Act. Originally, these experiments were conceived as trials of unconditional basic income (or at least policy moving in this direction), although political pressures encouraged their proponents not to use the term “basic income” (which is popularly associated in the Netherlands with utopian thinking and celebration of laziness). Under the Participation Act, municipal officials are required to implement obligations and sanctions to encourage recipients of social assistance benefits to seek employment. For example, beneficiaries are generally expected to complete a set number of job applications per week, participate in training programs, and attend group meetings as conditions on receiving their benefits. Skepticism regarding the effectiveness of these conditions was a main motivation of the experiments.
In September 2016, Klijnsma authorized municipalities to perform experiments, up to two years in duration, testing the effects of altering the conditions of the nation’s social assistance benefits. This authorization was granted, however, only under strict terms of compliance with the nation’s Participation Act, which effectively prevent the municipalities from testing an unconditional basic income (despite interest in the idea from researchers and promoters of the experiments). For example, in the case in which an experiment treatment involves the removal of work reintegration requirements, the Ministry mandates that officials assess test subjects after six and twelve months to verify that they have made adequate effort to find employment; those who have not done so are subject to dismissal from the experiment.
The Ministry also capped the amount of earned income that participants are permitted to retain on top of their benefits, and required that any experiment including a treatment group with relaxed conditions on social assistance also include a treatment group with stricter conditions.
In the face of these constraints, researchers were forced to design experiments farther from “basic income experiments” than originally desired.
After announcement of a start date of May 1, 2017, Utrecht saw its proposed experiment put on-hold due to a failure to comply with the terms of the Participation Act. The city has since submitted a revised proposal to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, which is pending evaluation.
Another municipality, Terneuzen, proposed a small-scale study of basic income–providing unconditional cash payments of €933 to 20 test subjects–which was axed by Klijnsma earlier in the year. Terneuzen has not submitted a new proposal to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.
In a recent presentation to the Dutch branch of BIEN, Sjir Hoeijmakers stated that 45 municipalities are considering social assistance experiments.
More Information
“Eerste vijf gemeenten krijgen toestemming voor bijstandsexperimenten” (July 3, 2017). Official press release of the Dutch government.
Charlotte Huisman, “Vier steden mogen experimenteren met soepelere bijstand,” Trouw, July 3, 2017.
“Should the Netherlands test the basic income,” EuroTopics, July 4, 2017.
Previous Basic Income News Coverage
Florie Barnhoorn, “The Netherlands: All that’s left is the action. Where do we stand with the experiments?” (June 2, 2017).
Kate McFarland, “THE NETHERLANDS: Social Assistance Experiments Under Review” (May 9, 2017).
Florie Barnhoorn, “NETHERLANDS: Design of BI Experiments Proposed” (October 26, 2016).
Information provided by Florie Barnhoorn, Hilde Latour, and Ruud Muffels.
Photo (Tilburg) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Stephan Ohlsen
by Kate McFarland | Jul 2, 2017 | News
Louise Haagh (formerly co-chair of BIEN) has become Chair of BIEN following Karl Widerquist’s resignation as co-chair.
This marks the first time in BIEN’s 31 year history that the organization has been under the leadership of a single chair rather than two co-chairs. As previously announced, Widerquist will temporarily assume the newly created position of Vice Chair until BIEN’s 2018 Congress.
Haagh is a Reader in Politics at the University of York and co-editor of the journal Basic Income Studies. Prior to her appointment as Chair, she had served as co-chair of BIEN since 2014. Haagh has recently been nominated as a fellow of the UK’s Royal Society of Arts (RSA) for her contribution to the public debate about basic income. Her recent publications on the topic include an article in the journal Nature (“Basic income as a pivoting reform”), and she is currently working on a book titled Basic Income, Welfare Systems and Human Development Freedom for Palgrave MacMillan. Among other activities, Haagh spoke on basic income at the annual convention of the Danish political party Alternativet held at the end of May. Earlier in the year, she served as a witness at an oral evidence session on basic income convened by the Work and Pensions Committee of the UK’s House of Commons.
Malcolm Torry
Coincident with Haagh’s appointment as Chair, Malcolm Torry (formerly co-secretary of BIEN) has assumed the new position of General Manager.
In this capacity, Torry will undertake tasks delegated to him by the Chair, Treasurer, and Secretary. Torry has simultaneously withdrawn from his role in BIEN’s Executive Committee, making Julio Aguirre the organization’s only current Secretary.
Torry is the Director of the Citizen’s Income Trust, a UK-based affiliate of BIEN, which he cofounded in 1984. His recent publications on basic income include Citizen’s Basic Income: A Christian Social Policy and The Feasibility of Citizen’s Income.
The appointments of Haagh as Chair and Torry as General Manager were approved at a meeting of BIEN’s Executive Committee on May 23, 2017.
Post reviewed by Dave Clegg.
Top photo: Louise Haagh at the 2016 UBI-Nordic Conference.
by Kate McFarland | Jul 2, 2017 | News
Photo: Political Laboratory on Basic Income at The Alternative’s convention (credit: Louise Haagh).
“The Alternative Facts”
Denmark’s green political party The Alternative (Danish: Alternativet) has adopted basic income as an aspirational goal and established a working group to investigate a precise model and implementational strategy for the policy.
These decisions were formalized at the party’s 2017 convention, which took place May 27-28 in Odense, where basic income was a prevailing theme. Since its founding in November 2013, The Alternative has developed its policy positions through what it describes as a “political open-source process,” centered on political laboratories [link: Danish] at which party members and other interested individuals discuss and debate proposed policies. Its initial party program, for example, was influenced by the contributions of over 700 people who participated in political laboratories and workshops in early 2014. The recent convention in Odense featured such a political laboratory on the topic of basic income, which was attended by over 300 delegates.
Haagh at the Alternative’s political laboratory on basic income
The political laboratory began with presentations of opposing views on basic income.
First, BIEN Chair Louise Haagh laid out reasons to support the policy, including, fundamentally, the idea that basic income is a democratic right. Haagh emphasized that basic income can be seen as a natural extension of the Nordic welfare model, an enhancement of the existing welfare state rather than its replacement. She also argued that, among other advantages, a basic income could provide an improvement for unemployed job seekers, as Denmark’s existing job centers are inefficient, producing a low employment rate and forcing customers to spend a large amount of time in administrative processes.
Following Haagh’s presentation, Kristian Wiese, Director of the think tank Cevea, offered reasons to be skeptical of basic income. Wiese worried that basic income is merely a palliative that fails to address the underlying problems of unemployment and precarious employment, and expressed concern regarding the policy’s support from neoliberals and Silicon Valley technocrats.
After the presentations, participants broke into small groups to discuss the relative merits and drawbacks of basic income. The discussion was framed around several questions–whether a basic income is a good idea if it can be introduced without extra cost, whether a basic income is likely to lead to more socially productive activity or less, and what new policies and procedures could be introduced alongside basic income to promote community and entrepreneurship–and responses from each group were collected. While no formal vote was taken, the general consensus of delegates was favorable to basic income, and the party decided to proceed with the development of a precise model to adopt as party policy.
To the latter end, the assembly established a working group tasked with the project of drafting a policy proposal on basic income for the party within one year. In addition to the proposal of the working group, The Alternative will await precise calculations from the Ministry of Taxation before endorsing any model of basic income as party policy. (Basic Income News will publish a follow-up report on the activities of the working group later in the year when more details are known.)
The Alternative’s current political program endorses the provision of benefits without work requirements or other conditions to uninsured social security recipients as well as to those covered by insurance through union membership. Basic income will be the third and final step in the party’s social policy reform. Even prior to the recent convention and political laboratory, party leaders such as MP Torsten Gejl have described The Alternative’s advocacy of the former policies as steps toward its eventual promotion of a universal basic income for Denmark (cf., e.g., Gejl’s talk at the book launch of Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic Income).
Torsten Gejl at UBI Nordic Conference (credit: Michael Husen)
The party has shown increasing interest in basic income in recent years, and has established close ties with BIEN-Danmark, BIEN’s Danish affiliate. The party was the official host for the two-day Nordic Conference on Basic Income Pilots, held at Christiansborg Palace, the seat of the Danish Parliament, in September 2016. Leading members of the party have continued to participate in basic income events in 2017. For instance, party leader and cofounder Uffe Elbæk spoke at the world premier of the basic income documentary Free Lunch Society, Josephine Fock participated in a debate at a seminar on basic income and the future of work, and Gejl spoke at BIEN-Danmark’s annual meeting, in addition to the aforementioned book launch.
The Alternative currently holds 10 out of 179 seats in the Danish Parliament, making it the sixth largest party in terms of representation.
Thanks to Louise Haagh and Karsten Lieberkind for information and suggestions for this article.
Post reviewed by Dave Clegg.
