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 | Nov 8, 2016 | News
This year’s edition of Ireland’s Kilkenomics Festival, the economics festival dubbed “Davos with laughs”, will include a panel discussion on the pros and cons of universal basic income, featuring Rutger Bregman and other noted authors.
Billing itself as “the world’s first economics and comedy festival”, the internationally-regarded Kilkenomics Festival is held annually in Kilkenny, Ireland.
The seventh edition of the festival will take place from November 10-13, 2016, and will bring in many notable participants, including its four headline contributors: behavioral economist and popular author Dan Ariely, former Milton Friedman associate Deirdre McCloskey, probability research and popular author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and comedian Dara Ó Briain.
On Saturday, November 12, the festival will present a panel on basic income, entitled “Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income”:
Debate has become to heat up on the concept of governments providing their citizens with a fixed amount of money, regardless of their income. Recently, Barack Obama suggested that as technology and artificial intelligence begin to replace human paid work, it will become increasingly urgent. Our panel examines the pros and cons of free money for everyone.
The panel will star Dutch journalist and historian Rutger Bregman, the author the best-selling Utopia for Realists, in addition to other distinguished scholars and authors: Deirdre McCloskey, Brown University political economist and Austerity author Mark Blyth, Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu, Economics for Dummies co-author Peter Antonioni, and author and playwright Gerard Stembridge.
For a complete schedule of “shows” and other details about the seventh Kilkenomics Festival, see www.kilkenomics.com.
More information about the basic income panel in particular, including a link to purchase tickets, is available here.
Kilkenny castle photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 vjpaul
