by Andre Coelho | Nov 15, 2017 | News
Phillipe van Parijs (at the Lisbon BIEN 2017 Conference). Credit to: Enno Schmidt.
Phillipe van Parijs has delivered the 2017 annual Il Mulino lecture, which happened on Saturday, the 28th of October, at the Bologna University’s Aula Magna. This major event, attended by around 900 people, had the presence of former Prime Minister and European Commission president Romano Prodi, ex-minister Vincenzo Visco, the president of the Italian Central Bank and the Archbishop of Bologna, among other Italian political public figures.
The lecture was titled “Il reddito di base: tramonto della società del lavoro?” [“Basic income: sunset of the work society?”], and coincided with the publication of van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght latest book “Basic Income: a radical proposal”, published in Italian under the title “Il reddito di base: una proposta radicale” (an edition by Il Mulino).
The event got massive coverage by the Italian media, including Corriere di Bologna, La Republica Bologna, La Nazione, the LEFT magazine, plus several radio stations and the national Italian TV (RAI). However, according to Sandro Gobetti, from BIN Italia (Basic Income Network Italy), Italian media tended not to grasp the main news message in this event. Gobetti argued in his article that it was not so much that political figures Visco and Prodi met and hugged, but that they had, in fact, attended a lesson on basic income by a prominent thinker in the field, Phillipe van Parijs. The relevance then, is not so much in knowing if these politicians agree or not with the basic income concept (they expressed many reservations), but recognizing this as a real issue, growing everyday as an international debate.
More information at:
Kate McFarland, “Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght”, Basic Income News, March 25th 2017
[In Italian]
Leonardi Filippi, “Come rivalutare il lavoro? Dando un reddito a tutti [How to revalue work? By giving a basic income to everyone]”, LEFT, November 10th 2017
“Visco, lungo abbracio com Prodi a Bologna [Visco, long hug with Prodi at Bologna]”, Corriere di Bologna, October 28th 2017
Ilaria Venturi, “Van Parijs oggi al Mulino Reddito garantito a tutti l’idea che divide il mondo [Today, Van Parijs presented at Mulino basic income, the idea which divides the world]”, La Repubblica, October 28th 2017
Sandro Gobetti, “Prodi e Visco a lezione di reddito di base da van Parijs [Prodi and Visco go to basic income lesson from van Parijs]”, BIN Italia, October 30th 2017
by Aleksander Masternak | Nov 13, 2017 | Opinion
Philippe Van Parijs, co-founder of BIEN and professor emeritus at Université catholique de Louvain, presented a talk about Basic Income and citizen work duties at the Q Berlin conference, held on the 19th and 20th of October 2017. This was the first installment of Q Berlin but it is set to become an annual event where specialists and influencers from various fields present talks and answer audience questions on five broad topics. [1] Van Parijs’ talk concerned the topic, ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
When I heard this question, the first thought that sprang to mind was ‘what should a government faced with an unmanageable level of unemployment do when conventional policy has failed to resolve the issue?’ Perhaps then a seemingly radical solution, such as universal basic income (UBI), becomes plausible.
Van Parijs took a different take on this question: what would human beings do when they need not work to survive? Critics of UBI persistently raise concerns that individuals who are not incentivised to work will become idle because they will apparently have nothing left to do. Van Parijs argued that any reasonable proponents of the policy understand that people will have things to do.
UBI frees individuals from having to work, allowing them to broadly pursue their own conception of the good life. Those who prefer to become employed would hold more negotiation leverage with their employer. In fact, Van Parijs stated that UBI gives individuals the freedom to say ‘yes’ to jobs. Individuals will not have to do that which they do not wish to do. Fewer people will engage in menial and unsatisfying work.
UBI creates a floor (minimum level) on the income distribution curve, alleviates poverty, and gives bargaining power to the ones who have it least. In this way UBI acts as a systematic subsidy for all underpaid or unpaid jobs that are undervalued by the market but which people wish to do. With UBI, the demand for menial, gruelling work is expected to decrease. Van Parijs theorised employers may be forced to increase the wages for such jobs.
Van Parijs presented UBI as venture capital that allowed individuals to do anything they wish to do. Those who prefer to change fields can invest in education and training. The option to retrain is a particularly pertinent concern for those whose job is at risk of automation.
Forgetting about work for a moment (if you can), think about what you should do when your physiological needs are no longer a concern. If you’ve had a passion at the back of your mind then you might finally pursue it. If, on the other hand, you’ve passed life going from one kind of busy to another, then you might have missed opportunities to reflect and figure out what you would like to be doing. The cost of failure may have been too high if it meant putting you or your family’s livelihood at risk.
At this point in the talk, Van Parijs paused and asked the audience a question. Assuming UBI ensures a basic livelihood for everyone in a community, do these citizens have a duty to give back by working? Do individuals have a duty to accept paid, available employment? Some supported the idea, more disagreed. He then reframed the question and drew a distinction between formal employment and work broadly. Do individuals have a duty to do something? Van Parijs asked the audience to think of examples of socially-beneficial work. Most respondents agreed individuals have a duty to do something, apparently if it is socially beneficial.
Van Parijs preferred not to tell others what they should do. When asked off-stage, he said he has his own conception of the good life and was reluctant to share the details. Rather he said there was something about people helping each other for its own sake that makes for a good society. A society is not well functioning if it’s members are not interested in actively improving each other’s well-being. Working for your community takes several forms. Van Parijs drew the example of caring for the those who cannot care for themselves (such as the elderly, children and disabled). One could volunteer for various causes they care about, whether they be social, environmental, tech-related or so on.
Even if you disagree that working for your community (or giving back) is a duty, if you’re not doing anything else, why not try it? In the best case, your efforts will be appreciated. Your recognition that you have alleviated the suffering of others might make you feel like you have done something meaningful. In the worst case, you might think your efforts yielded insufficiently satisfying results, be it for yourself or your target beneficiaries, and you have wasted your time. UBI provides the opportunity for you to try contributing to your community in different ways. This freedom lets you find a way to contribute that is most satisfying for yourself.
Notes:
[1] This year, the topics included: ‘Imagine yourself as the other self. How do we embrace tolerance and difference?’ ‘What will be the next social contract?’ ‘Urban Angst and Stamina. What are the promising concepts to handle the rise and fall of the city?’ ‘How should we govern at the pace of economic, social and technological change?’and ‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
by Kate McFarland | Sep 9, 2017 | Research
Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, authors of the new book Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press), have contributed a chapter to the book The Good Life Beyond Growth: New Perspectives, a collection of essays published as part of Routledge’s series Studies in Ecological Economics.
Their contribution, titled “Basic income and the freedom to lead a good life,” is based on the first chapter of Basic Income, in which the authors detail the distinguishing characteristics of a basic income (e.g. universality, lack of means test, lack of work obligation, payment to individuals rather than households), providing motivation for each of these features.
Van Parijs and Vanderborght introduce basic income as a way to address poverty and unemployment without reliance on sustained economic growth. Summarizing their position near the end of the chapter, they state:
Involuntary unemployment is a major challenge. But activation and growth, routinely offered as self-evident remedies, are both unrealistic and undesirable. An unconditional basic income offers a way of addressing this challenge without relying on an insane rush for keeping pace with labor saving technical change through the sustained growth of production and consumption.
They contend that a basic income would “mak[e] it easier for people to choose to perform less paid work at any given point in their lives” and “subsidiz[e] paid work with low immediate productivity”. Further, they claim, such lifestyle choices would result in lower material consumption in developed nations. In this way, the “freedom to lead a good life” supported by basic income would promote sustainability goals.
The collection The Good Life Beyond Growth originated with a conference by the same name, which was held in May 2015 at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, and convened by the university’s Research Group on Post-Growth Societies. At this conference, which presented interdisciplinary perspectives on questions of “what a good human life is about, what its subjective and objective conditions are, and how it may be reframed for a post-growth society,” Van Parijs presented “Good Life and the Welfare State” with another founding member of BIEN, Claus Offe.
Van Parijs and Vanderborght’s contribution is the only chapter in The Good Life Beyond Growth to deal specifically or at length with the idea of basic income. Another contributor, the social theorist and political economist Andrew Sayer, mentions the idea, but expresses doubt that it is the best means to achieve societal well-being without growth.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo CC BY 2.0 Giuseppe Milo
by Kate McFarland | Jun 4, 2017 | News
A Special Rapporteur of the United Nations will hold a panel discussion on universal basic income and the future of human rights on Thursday, June 8, 2017.
Organized by Professor Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the event will explore the potential for basic income to mitigate global economic insecurity. The panelists include two cofounders of the Basic Income Earth Network — Professor Philippe van Parijs (University of Louvain, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and Guy Standing (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) — in addition to Isabelle Doresse (People’s Universities in Northern Pas de Calais, ATD Fourth World) and Alex Praça (Human and Trade Union Rights Officer of the International Trade Union Confederation).
The panel will discuss a report prepared by Alston and submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council. Alston’s report addresses the concern that “the human rights movement needs to address and respond to the fundamental changes that are taking place in economic and social structures at the national and global levels,” including precarious employment, automation, increasing inequality, and the obsolescence of traditional forms of labor market regulation.
As Alston describes the idea, a basic income “is explicitly designed to challenge most of the key assumptions underpinning existing social security systems”:
Rather than a system where there are partial payments, basic income guarantees a floor; instead of being episodic, payments are regular; rather than being needs-based, they are paid as a flat rate to all; they come in cash, rather than as messy in-kind support; they accrue to every individual, rather than only to needy households; rather than requiring that various conditions be met, they are unconditional; rather than excluding the well off, they are universal; and instead of being based on lifetime contributions, they are funded primarily from taxation.
The 20-page report describes each of these characteristics of a basic income, overviews the history of the idea, and describes various types of basic income and related policies, such as a negative income tax and cash transfers. Alston also lays out some examples of the possible cost of implementing a basic income scheme.
Alston holds that “the basic income concept should not be rejected out of hand on the grounds that it is utopian” and encourages further discussion of the policy as a means to alleviate economic insecurity and promote human rights and social justice. He additionally urges that the debate on basic income be united with that on social protection floors.
Further Viewing and Reading
The June 8 panel discussion will be broadcast live online here.
The full report on universal basic income of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is available in the UN’s document repository or can be directly downloaded as a PDF here.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Human Rights Council during 15th Session, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 UN Geneva
by Kate McFarland | Apr 13, 2017 | News
Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, a comprehensive book by BIEN’s Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, was published last month on Harvard University Press.
In honor of the launch of the book, Van Parijs has delivered several public lectures, beginning with events in Copenhagen, Denmark (March 28) and Stockholm, Sweden (March 30).
Copenhagen (Video Below)
The former was part of a workshop on basic income organized by the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen in conjunction with two political parties, the Alternative and the Social Liberal Party, and held at the Danish Parliament, Christiansborg.
In his talk, Van Parijs describes the origins of his own support for basic income and his discovery of previous supporters of the idea. He goes on to discuss the current popularity of the idea, examining three events that have popularized basic income within the past year: the Swiss basic income referendum, the decision of the Finnish government to conduct a basic income pilot study, and the election of president candidate Benoît Hamon in France’s Socialist primary.
Van Parijs’s lecture was followed by two additional presentations on the topic — a critical perspective from Otto Brøns-Petersen of the think tank CEPOS, and a sympathetic one from Torsten Gejl of the Alternative, who relates that the party is beginning to investigate a model for a feasible basic income for Denmark.
Stockholm (Video Below)
The second launch event was a seminar at Stockholm University, moderated by Institute for Future Studies Director Gustaf Arrhenius.
In this lecture, Van Parijs considers basic income from the standpoint of philosophical ethics and social justice, addressing the common objection that it is unjust to provide money to individuals without requiring some type of work or contribution. In countering the “freeloader” objection, Van Parijs begins with what he calls “ad hominem” replies — accusing the objectors of applying inconsistent principles. He proceeds to provide a positive account to justify the provision of a basic income without requiring anything in return, viewing it instead as a social inheritance. According to Van Parijs, most of the wealth in society cannot be ascribed to the contributions of any particular individuals, and is best conceived as rightfully belonging to all of us collectively. At the same time, he stresses that we still need an “ethos of contribution”, which is compatible with the provision of an unconditional basic income.
Ingrid A.M. Robeyns (Chair Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University) and Andreas Bergh (Associate Professor in Economics at Lund University) provided comments on Van Parijs’s talk.
Robeyns praises Basic Income, especially for its balanced and sympathetic treatment of critical views. Her comments provide a general critique of the discourse surrounding basic income, arguing that one cannot be “for” or “against” a basic income outright without specifying amount, funding source, and what other programs would be replaced.
Bergh also praises the book, calling it “convincing”, although he too has complaints with the current state of basic income discourse–beginning with the book’s subtitle. According to Bergh, basic income is not a “radical” proposal and, moreover, calling it such is unhelpful with respect to its political popularity. Bergh urges basic income advocates to “get their hands dirty with national politics”.
United States
After the European book launch events, Van Parijs traveled to the United States for additional public lectures. These included a talk at Bowling Green State University in Ohio on April 7, where he was one of three keynote speakers (along with Evelyn Forget and Matt Zwolinski) at the university’s annual Political Theory Workshop–which, for 2017, focused on basic income and the future of work. On April 12, Van Parijs spoke at Stanford University, as the second major event hosted by the university’s newly founded Basic Income Lab.
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
Cover photo credit: Enno Schmidt
