by Kate McFarland | Apr 28, 2017 | News
Alyssa Battistoni, PhD candidate in Yale University’s Department of Political Science, has written an article “The False Promise of Universal Basic Income” for the quarterly left-wing periodical Dissent.
Battistoni questions the idea that basic income transcends left and right, and warns American supporters on the left to “proceed with caution”. Despite this, she maintains that a left-wing UBI “might point us in the right direction” to remedy the defects of capitalism.
Battistoni critiques and compares the tone and rhetoric in two recent popular books on basic income: Raising the Floor by former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) head Andy Stern, and Utopia for Realists by Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman. While she considers Bregman’s optimistic vision of UBI “far more appealing”, she finds it lacking as a cohesive and practicable political program.
She goes on to argue that the left does need to “push for a different view of what work should be, how much of it we should do, and what role it should play in our lives” — which might (although not necessarily) involve the adoption of UBI as part of its agenda. This, Battistoni holds, would require a broad political coalition — “not the one that Stern describes between the ultra-rich and the masses of gig workers, or even of post-ideological rationalists described by Bregman” but one comprising such elements as “workers who need more leverage and the unemployed, those fighting for a sustainable environment and racial justice, [and] care workers both waged and unwaged”.
Read the article here
Alyssa Battistoni, “The False Promise of Universal Basic Income,” Dissent, Spring 2017.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 Lutz Teutloff
by Kate McFarland | Feb 27, 2017 | News
Intelligence Squared U.S. (IQ2US), a debate program moderated by ABC News correspondent John Donvan and broadcast on more than 200 public stations, will air an episode on basic income on Wednesday, March 22.
Four guests will debate the question “Is the universal basic income the safety net of the future?”
“For the Motion”
- Charles Murray (W. H. Brady Scholar at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute). Murray supports a basic income of $10,000 per year to all Americans over age 21, which would replace all current welfare programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (as laid out in his recently reissued book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State). Murray’s right-wing approach to basic income has made him a controversial figure within the movement, with many progressive UBI supporters disavowing his proposals.
“Against the Motion”
- Jared Bernstein (Senior Fellow of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; formerly Chief Economist to Vice President Joe Biden). In a previous debate with Murray, Bernstein maintained that replacing the social safety net with a universal basic income would undercut advances in fighting poverty and ultimately leave many of the poor worse off.
- Jason Furman (Senior Fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute; formerly Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Barack Obama). Furman voiced his opposition to basic income in a speech at a White House workshop in July 2016, viewing the policy as giving up on the possibility of job creation and full employment.
The event will be staged live at the Kaufman Center in New York, NY, including an hour long reception before the debate (see details on the live event here). The debate will also be streamed live on the web.
For more information and to listen to the live stream on March 22, 6:45 pm Eastern Time, visit “The Universal Basic Income Is The Safety Net Of The Future.”
Reviewed by Danny Pearlberg
Photo of Kaufman Center (event venue), CC BY-SA 3.0 Kaufman Center
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 18, 2016 | News
Raising the Floor, the new work on basic income by former SEIU President Andy Stern, has made the Wall Street Journal’s list of top books from 2016.
Andy Stern resigned as President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), then boasting 2.2 million members, in 2010. In part, his resignation was driven by the belief that he had, as he says, “lost his ability to predict labor’s future”. Having left the SEIU, Stern embarked on a “four-year journey to discover the future of jobs, work, and the American Dream”.
By the end of this journey, he concluded that only a universal basic income could protect Americans against job disruption caused by new technology and the changing nature of work. Stern lays out this solution, along with a description of his journey, in his book Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, which was published in June of this year — almost immediately garnering much publicity in the media.
Now, Raising the Floor has been selected as part of the annual Wall Street Journal feature “Who Read What”, with reporter and author John Donvan choosing it as his book of 2016:
For a policy book by a union guy, Andy Stern’s cautionary prediction of a world without work is surprisingly haunting. “Raising the Floor” follows the former labor organizer through a self-education tour to meet and learn from the inventors, tech entrepreneurs and venture-capital guys pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. No Luddite, Mr. Stern is dazzled by the robots and the data-mining and the just-around-the-corner driverless cars. But he grows increasingly dismayed that almost no one leading this disruption gives much thought to the tens of millions of jobs that such innovations will destroy. And it’s not just cabbies and truck drivers at risk. Mr. Stern warns that doctors, lawyers, accountants, financial planners, teachers and many others will be vulnerable. He doesn’t want to stop progress, but he does want us to be ready for it when it arrives. His radical solution? It’s in his subtitle.
According to the most recent Cision data (2014), The Wall Street Journal is the third most widely circulated newspaper in the US.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Andy Stern photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Third Way Think Tank
by Kate McFarland | Jun 27, 2016 | News
Former SEIU president Andy Stern, along with Natalie Foster of Institute for the Future, will be leading a discussion of universal basic income at the SPUR Urban Center in San Francisco, CA, USA, on Tuesday, June 28 at 6 pm Pacific Time.
From the event description:
National labor leader Andy Stern is one of the country’s leading thinkers about the future of work and jobs. In his new book, Raising the Floor, Stern concludes that the United States needs to consider what may be the biggest idea of the 21st century, a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Join us for a discussion with the author about how a universal basic income could work, and be paid for, in order to help all Americans.
Stern’s book, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, was published earlier this month to great publicity. For more background, see recent interviews with Stern in The Atlantic, The Guardian (and here), Yahoo Finance (video), Bloomberg (video), and CNBC (video), and a commentary written by Stern for CNBC.
For more information about the upcoming event, or to register, visit the event page at SPUR’s website.
SPUR Urban Center photo (2010) CC Anita Hart
