by Hilde Latour | Jul 31, 2017 | News
Covering the philosophy of freedom, an explanation of universal basic income and the economics behind it, Karl Widerquist, vice-chair (at the time of the interview he still was co-chair) of Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), was interviewed by Sam Barton from Talk of Today in Australia.
During the interview, Widerquist talks about what it means to be a fully free person and argues people should regain their freedom from forced labour. “If you are a free person, you can choose to be given and follow orders for 40 hours a week, but you can also choose not to,” Widerquist states. Many people can only survive by paying for resources that are owned by others, and according to Widerquist, people should be “compensated financially for that so they don’t have to work for others if they don’t want to.” As most people can choose their employer, the labour force cannot be compared with slavery, but “to say you are fully free, you have to be free from oppression”, and many people are not, Widerquist argues.
Widerquist explains a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a means to create a market economy where income doesn’t start at zero and where you can get a higher income from a job on top of that. Some wages will rise as a result of UBI according to Wilderquist. But at the moment, “there are so many people that need their jobs to survive that employers put the wages down.”
UBI can replace a lot of programs that don’t work so well. It will have to be high enough to meet people’s basic needs, but people with special needs, such as paraplegics, will have to get some additional support, as they will need more to meet their basic needs. Other things, such as campaign contributions, can be cancelled in order to finance UBI according to Wilderquist.
Whether or not UBI will cause inflation depends on the balance between taxing and spending, which is a task of the government, with or without UBI.
Info and links
Full interview podcast
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Dawn Howard for reviewing this article
by Hilde Latour | Jul 7, 2017 | News
In May this year, Bryan Caplan debated with Karl Widerquist about Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Welfare at PublicSquare.net.
Widerquist is associate professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service at Qatar and vice-chair of Basic Income Earth Network (co-chair at the time of the debate). He sees UBI as a means to completely eliminate poverty and as a compensation for the government’s actions to turn resources into property, which creates groups of people that don’t have access to resources they need to survive. Widerquist predicts UBI will also have an increasing effect on lower level wages, as the payment for work will need to be high enough for a non-starving person to accept the job. In the current system, employers don’t have the incentive to provide good wages, according to Widerquist.
Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University. He thinks the idea that everyone should be supported by the government is ridiculous. Whatever charity is given should only be for to the people who need it, and UBI is therefore not a good idea, according to Caplan. Furthermore, it will discourage people from working and is not fair to people that are paying their taxes, he states.
Info and links
Photos: Karl Widerquist by BICN/RCRG Basic Income Canada Network, 2014 and Bryan Caplan speaking empathically by Eric Hanneken, 2015, CC-BY-SA 2.0
Special thanks to Dawn Howard for reviewing this article
by Hilde Latour | Jun 20, 2017 | News
Karl Widerquist, vice-chair (at the time of the interview he still was co-chair) of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) was interviewed extensively by Keith Brown from the “We Are Here Podcast” on April 28th. During the interview, Widerquist explains Universal Basic Income (UBI) creates a market economy where income doesn’t start at zero and where people have a positive, rather than a negative, incentive to work.
“Employers currently have an incentive to pay very low wages because income starts at zero. You can work fulltime a whole year and still live in poverty.” In almost every country, there are conditional systems for people who do not work. Widerquist argues that these systems supervise recipients and create high overhead costs. “If you can show you can’t work or can’t find a job, then you are eligible for something. If not, you will get nothing. This means people have a negative incentive to work and will accept jobs with very low wages to prevent them from falling into [extreme] poverty.”
UBI is going to help people that are afraid of becoming poor when they lose their job for whatever reason. According to Widerquist, “UBI can free people from that anxiety.” Widerquist explains UBI is not just for the poor, but also for the middle class. It gives people a choice to leave their dead-end jobs and do something else they really want to do. If you are struggling to meet your basic needs, you will be miserable. If you have UBI that meets your basic needs, you will not be in misery. We will get a situation where money no longer buys happiness. Freedom is the power to say no.
UBI can also be seen as compensation to people for the duties that have been imposed on them, according to Widerquist. For instance, a plumbing system is created because the water is polluted, and people have to pay for it, even if they are not the ones that polluted the water. They don’t have a choice. He gives an example of how this can be compensated: The state took the land from the natives (Inuit) in Alaska to let companies drill the oil from it. These companies pay the government and a small part of it is given ‘back’ to the citizens (Alaska’s “Permanent Fund Dividend”).
There are many variations on what people think UBI should look like around the world. Most people agree that it has to be at least enough to meet your basic needs (food, shelter, clothing and enough to live on is the minimum). The maximum is the highest sustainable income possible. Widerquist’s personal view is that “you should be compensated at the highest sustainable level, as it is a compensation for non-equal duties that the government is opposing on us.”
Starting at $12,000 in the US a year would be okay, in hopes of building up to $20,000 or more if it proves to be workable. But starting off at a higher level than $20,000 without building up to it gradually would be risky.
According to Widerquist. “The government is already spending over 2 trillion dollars a year to maintain people’s income and we still have 13.5% of the population living in poverty. So the current system is not working and extremely expensive”.
Widerquist does not believe that UBI requires cuts in other programs, but he gives some examples of government spending that can be replaced by it, including foodstamps and most unemployment benefits.
“It is feasible; the only thing we need is the will to do it. It has not been attempted before on a large scale, but there is a first time for everything”.
On the topic of the “Alaska permanent fund dividend”, which started in 1982, Widerquist argues, “In Alaska they have a very small basic income of one thousand US dollars a year for every resident (man, woman, and child) and even that very small amount has made Alaska one of the most equal states with very low poverty rates. It has been going strong for 35 years now. It makes a huge difference when you realise that a single mother with four kids will get 5000 US dollars a year. In a good year even 10000 US dollars a year.”
UBI can be popular across the political spectrum once it is in place, because the benefits are diverse. “We are tired of inequality growing and poverty staying where it is. The middle class needs a pay raise. Nothing else has worked for the middle class. Let’s try UBI”.
Widerquist continues, “Realize it is also a good deal for people who like capitalism, because it gets out a lot of the bureaucracy and paternalistic attitudes. It is simple and without supervision. The market economy will still exist, but without poverty.”
We spend so much time making our living that we never have time to live our lives.
With UBI, a lot of us would still want to work to get our luxuries, but we can take our time to reflect and do things we really want to do.
Info and links
Full interview podcast: we are here # 006 universal basic income
Special thanks to Josh Martin and Dave Clegg for reviewing this article
by Kate McFarland | May 14, 2017 | News
Karl Widerquist (Georgetown University-SFS Qatar), who has served as co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2010, has recently been asked by MIT Press, the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to write a book on Basic Income for MIT’s Essential Knowledge series. Widerquist will write the introductory text Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge. The MIT Essential Knowledge series is intended to provide short and accessible introductions to a variety of topics written by leading experts.
In order to devote more time to this high-profile book project, along with other projects (such as the book, The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Contemporary Property Theory for Edinburgh University Press, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord for Palgrave-Macmillan, and a project on the upcoming basic income trials), Widerquist will step down from the position of Co-Chair to the newly created position of Vice Chair until the 2018 General Assembly, a formal meeting, open to all Life Members, held at each of BIEN’s Congresses. Louise Haagh (University of York), meanwhile, will become the Chair of BIEN.
Reviewed by Sarah Harris
by Kate McFarland | Feb 21, 2017 | News
VIDEO: “Basic income – real social security”
Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (CBINS), BIEN’s Scottish affiliate, was launched in Glasgow in November 2016. It held its second public event in Kelty, Fife, on January 28, 2017.
Videos of all presentations and Q&A sessions are available online.
Background
Public officials in Fife are currently working to establish a pilot study of basic income in the region, which is likely to be designed as a saturation study in a town (in which all residents of the chosen site are eligible to receive the basic income for the duration of the pilot). In November 2015, the Fairer Fife Commission (an independent commission created by the Fife Council) released a report that called for a basic income pilot as one of 40 recommendations to achieve a “fairer Fife”. Specifically, the commission encouraged the community planning board, the Fife Partnership, to select a town in Fife in which to run a pilot informed by “leading practice around the world” (with the planned study in Utrecht cited as an example of global leading practice at the time). In November 2016, the Fife Council voted to convene a group to carry out an initial feasibility study in early 2017.
The potential Fife pilot is still being designed. When asked about its details at the Kelty event, Paul Vaughn, Head of Community and Corporate Development at the Fife Council, relayed that the Council wishes to select a town of 2,000 to 5,000 people for the study, and that the pilot would run for at least two years. Otherwise, the details of the study’s design (including the amount of the basic income) are still “up for grabs”.
Meeting in Kelty
At CBINS’s Kelty meeting (titled “Basic income – real social security”), participants addressed broad issues concerning the motivation to pursue a basic income in Fife, the promises and potential pitfalls of pilot studies, and political support for a basic income in Fife and Scotland.
After introductory remarks by CBINS’s Willie Sullivan and Maddy Halliday, guest speaker Karl Widerquist (BIEN co-chair and associate professor of philosophy at University of Georgetown-Qatar) presented a justification of basic income as compensation for individuals’ deprivation of access to natural resources due the institution of private property. Widerquist argued no person should be forced to work for others out of necessity, and that a basic income would provide an incentive for employers to provide better wages.
After Widerquist spoke on the general question of “why basic income”, Vaughn turned to the question of “why Fife”. Vaughn provided an overview of the challenges currently faced by the council area, especially with respect to poverty and deprivation, noting that Fife tends to be representative of Scotland as a whole on measures such as health, employment, community safety, and other indicators used by government and community planners. Further, Vaughn presented the work of the Fairer Fife Commission that instigated the investigation into the pilot. Although the commission report made dozens of recommendations, the suggestion of a basic income pilot has generated the most interest among local authorities, according to Vaughn. However, as Vaughn described, a great deal remains to be completed, from awareness raising to gaining political and financial support to working out the implementation details and other preparatory work.
During the afternoon CBINS’s Annie Miller chaired a session in which Mike Danson (CBINS trustee and Professor of Enterprise Policy at Heriot-Watt University) and Widerquist offered two different perspectives on basic income experiments. Danson encouraged the audience to begin thinking through the myriad challenges related to implementing a basic income and even a pilot study thereof — raising many examples himself. Should students receive the benefit? Who counts as a “citizen” for the purpose of the basic income? Will the databases used to track recipients miss some of the most vulnerable (e.g. the homeless)? Given that a pilot would ideally be conducted at the national level (since the central government exerts control over taxation and other welfare benefits), how can local and regional pilots be useful?
Widerquist then spoke about limitations and potential dangers of pilot studies. For example, any pilot study, even a saturation study, cannot discern all impacts of a basic income on the labor market, given that the labor market is national (even global). Moreover, he cautioned that those who conduct pilot studies have a tendency to focus on whatever outcomes are easiest to record and measure (the “streetlight effect”), such as effects on work hours, rather than thinking broadly about the possible effects of a basic income. And he warned that policymakers are others are likely to try to spin results of any study to their advantage; for example, policymakers are likely to portray any decrease in work hours as a bad outcome.
Finally, public officials representing positions across the political spectrum briefly presented their views on the idea of a basic income for Scotland. Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP) Alex Rowley (Labour) enjoined Scotland to be ambitious and bold in tackling poverty. Fife Councillor Dave Dempsey (Conservative), a former student of mathematics, described basic income as an “elegant” solution, and revealed that the Fife Conservatives support the idea (although he could not speak for Scottish Conservatives in general). Maggie Chapman, co-convener of the Scottish Green Party, emphasized the ability of basic income to transform the nature of society and the economy. Chapman noted that, as well as ameliorating many problems with the welfare system, a basic income would support work that is currently unpaid or underpaid, such as care work. Another Fife Councillor, Lesley Lewis (Labour), addressed some of the issues and challenges in winning public support. Finally, Member of Parliament (MP) Ronnie Cowan (Scottish National Party), a long-standing supporter of basic income, also spoke about the uphill battle faced by proponents of the idea — especially given that money is highly valued in society as a mark of success. Cowan encouraged everyone to write a personal letter to their MPs and MSPs in support of basic income, stressing that letters do influence policymakers.
More information on the event
Gerry Mulvenna, “Basic income – real social security,” The Independence Live Blog, January 30, 2017.
“Flashback to Kelty: Maddy’s opening address at our Pilot event,” Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland blog, February 6, 2017.
Liam Turbett, “The Scottish Town Planning to Give Everyone Free Money,” Vice, February 1, 2017.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Fife’s Roome Bay, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Tom Parnell
