UBI – real solution in perfect storm of debt

UBI – real solution in perfect storm of debt

A new report from the investment service Wealthify reveals that many Scottish people are unable to save for the future because of “zero hour contracts, insecure work and low pay.” Moreover, according to the report, Scottish women save less than half of the money of men, and 10 times less than some areas of England. Using certain tools to help to save can its benefits. There is a structure to follow, making it easier to stick to. If debts need to be paid, enlisting the help of a debt expert or debt management company, like Hello Resolve, can assist in paying back any debts as well as teaching basic money management.

Campaigners have proposed a universal basic income (UBI) in response to this–such as Kirstein Rummery, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Stirling, whom Nathanael Williams interviewed in a Commonspace article about the Wealthify report.

Rummery said, “The only real policy solution would be Universal Basic Income – which would not only mitigate against income insecurity but tackle poverty effectively and lead to a huge economic stimulus.”

She continued, “It is clear that several factors are coming together to make the financial situation particularly precarious for groups of Scots.”

Rummery believes that a UBI might also serve to offset the gender imbalance. Zero hour contracts and pay freezes affect low-paid workers the most, who are mostly women in the public sector. The same for the withdrawal of benefits for the disabled and social care services because of funding constraints. The rise in housing costs exacerbates the situation.

If you want to read more, please see here:

Nathanael Williams. Universal Basic Income can be “real solution” as women and low paid face “perfect storm” of debt. (CommonSpace).

Image Credit: Ken Teegardin

An Interview with Dr. Kate McFarland (Part Two)

An Interview with Dr. Kate McFarland (Part Two)

Earlier in the year, Basic Income News reporter Scott Jacobsen spoke to Basic Income News reporter Kate McFarland about her background and influences. This is a continuation of Part One.

 

You mentioned valuing clarity of writing, for readers to have correct inferences. Any advice for BI writers? That is, those that want clear writing and to avoid the statistical probability of readers making wrong inferences.

That’s a good question. I feel like this is something I do based on instincts from my training in analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of language. It’s hard to codify that—those instincts—right off the bat.

I do want to stress that one thing that’s special about Basic Income News—sorta in our mission statement, as it were—is that we are clear to make the distinction between straightforward factual reporting and opinion pieces. If you just want the facts, you read one of our news reports, and you don’t have to wade through a bunch of the writer’s own analysis and commentary to get to them. You’ll see a lot of writing that conflates opinion and persuasive writing with reporting the facts, in a way not always conducive to the reader being able to figure out exactly what’s going on. Too often the factual reporting seems like an afterthought.

As much as I can, and as much as BI News can, we try to give people the bare facts. We don’t want to gloss them over with a bunch of fluff about what we think about basic income. It is not our job in news reporting. Our job is to disseminate the latest information about the basic income movement. It is not to make every one piece a persuasive one. It is not to write exciting stories, fluff, and propaganda.

I would also urge other writers to stick with primary sources whenever possible. When you use quotes, be sensitive to the context. When you talk about data from experiments or surveys, be sensitive to the design of the study and what you can actually infer from it.

Never, ever selectively misquote or misrepresent information by presenting it out of context! Some people do that, which is why I say always stick with primary sources—the original research reports, the full transcripts, and so forth.

Otherwise, my advice is to learn a lot, do you research from the primary sources, but also read some of the fluffy, superficial, often misleading stories on BI in mainstream media. Pay attention to the awful clickbait headlines. Read the comments sometimes even; notice how people are confused. Let it irritate you. You’ll develop instincts, I think, to write in a way that strives to avoid that. I think it helped me, anyhow.

 

Some things you said suggest mainstream news sources on BI want to persuade one way or another. Does this seem to be the case? It would be in contradiction to journalistic virtues of objectivity and neutrality insofar as they can be achieved.

Well, I see a lot—I see a lot that’s not necessarily to persuade, but where there might be, I think there are, values that conflict with just straightforward objective reporting. It might not be to persuade people on whether to support BI. It might be just to excite people, hook people, or write a catchier piece… As I say, I’m a philosopher, not a journalist; the ideals I have for prose come from there. Maybe journalists want to engage the reader at the expense of laying out the facts in a clear and complete manner. We’re just trying to concisely summarize the facts and make everything as clear as possible.

So, for example, if you read a journalistic report on a sample survey—this has just happened recently—you almost never get the details you want to know in order to really know what conclusions to draw. The sample size, sampling frame, selection method, response rate—you don’t often get all that. I would want to know that. And I don’t really care what a survey says about people’s attitudes on basic income if you don’t give me the details of the questionnaire design. What exactly is being asked? How it is phrased? I want to know all that before I make conclusions; I think you should make that info available to the reader if you’re gonna bother to report on an opinion survey at all. ‘Course, I should say I was a statistician before I became a philosopher.

Another thing is quoting out of context. There was an example that comes to mind—I won’t name names—of a famous basic income advocate being asked his opinion on when BI would actually happen. The gist of what he said was that we can’t predict, but in saying it, he said something like “It could as soon as 5 or 10 years, but it could be much longer.” It was clearly just this fragment of a larger point about how we just can’t know. But then the journalist just quotes him as saying that BI could happen as soon as 5 or 10 years! Just that! Entirely misleading. Entirely misrepresented his point.

A related phenomenon—a sub-phenomenon, maybe—is jumping on any use of the phrase “basic income” and then quoting the speaker as making a point about what you and I and BIEN call “basic income”. But that’s really too hasty. There was a recent case of a famous businessman who allegedly came out in support of UBI—he said he supported “basic income” (or “Grundeinkommen”, being German)—and people in the media just assumed he meant the unconditional thing. Later, he tweets that he didn’t mean the unconditional thing, but by then, the damage is done, as it were.

Sometimes this is [a] tough one, I have to be honest. Maybe, that’s another thing for the advice: If you’re not 100 percent positive someone means basic income when they say “basic income”, then leave what they say in quotes. Say “They said these words…” But don’t necessarily disquote if you’re not sure what they mean. I mean, equivocation on the phrase “basic income” is a whole other issue—it’s becoming a real big thing, I think, with the Canada movement versus US commentators—but maybe we’ll get back to that.

Another example with the reporting, I guess, is just being misleading through superficiality or vague weasel words. Like, to make basic income seem exciting, maybe a journalist will give a long list of countries that are “pursuing” BI or “considering” BI or something—but what does that even mean? Or maybe they’ll talk about a long list of people who “endorse” or “support” it just because they said something vaguely favourable at one time.

Then you see things—I’ve been seeing this a lot lately—like “Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are beginning pilots.” The problem there a little subtler, but you see it? That suggests, I think, that the governments of Finland, Ontario, and Kenya are all planning pilots. Kenya? They must be thinking of GiveDirectly, a private charity based in New York that happens to be operating in Kenya. I think it’s important to keep those private efforts distinct from the government-sponsored ones. That’s an important distinction. It’s one sort of thing you often see just casually elided.

I could go on—those are just some examples off the top of my head—but I hope you get the idea. I think that, with most journalism on BI, it’s about saying the bare minimum to be interesting and provocative—don’t bore readers with too many facts and details and distinctions, maybe—at the expensive of saying enough, and saying things clearly enough, to really give a good and accurate sense, knowledge, of what’s going on in the world.

 

Your background in philosophy at the graduate and doctoral level seems relevant to me. It obviously helps with your clarity, rigour, and simplicity to the point it needs to be to present ideas. For BI, it can come along with different terms and phrases, for different ideas associated with, but not the same as, BI.

Yeah, that’s definitely—that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I try to point to it when it’s relevant. And I try to be consistent in my own terms, and of course to keep my uses consistent with the official definition agreed upon by BIEN—a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.

The US BIG site actually has a pretty good primer on some of the different terms, and I tend to follow its usage for BI and UBI versus BIG and so on. But sometimes it’s tricky, especially with the BIG versus BI distinction, which you see conflated a lot these days.

“BI” and “UBI” are both often used to refer only to policies where everybody gets a check of the same amounts—no clawbacks with additional earnings—but sometimes people use them more generally to include policies that include what you might otherwise hear called “guaranteed minimum income” or a “guaranteed annual income” or a “negative income tax”; these are policies where everyone’s assured a minimal income floor, unconditionally, but the amount you receive is clawed back as you earn more and more on top of this floor. That’s what Ontario’s almost certainly gonna pilot next. It won’t be everyone in the pilot getting money. It’ll be that everyone’s guaranteed money if their income drops low enough—but, assuming Hugh Segal’s advice is followed, it won’t be the rich people in the sample also getting the check.

But sometimes you’ll see things like “Ontario plans to give all its residents an income boost”—because people hear “basic income”, and elsewhere they hear “basic income” to mean “checks to everybody, even then rich”, and they put two and two together, incorrectly. Sometimes all these policies together are referred to as a “basic income guarantee”, a “BIG”, with the GAI/GMI/NIT and the UBI (or “demogrant” as it’s sometimes called) being different types.

I can see this becoming a real problem—confusing these types of “BIGs”, equivocating on the term “basic income”—for people’s understanding and interpreting past and present pilots, and understanding how they revolve around the current debate, and I do hope to write a full-length article about it in the new year, if it keeps being problematic.

I’m realizing that what I’m talking about is not so much too many phrases for BI—but the term “basic income” being used to mean too many things. That might actually be the bigger problem, in fact, especially in the States. In addition to this equivocation with “does it entail giving money to the rich”, there’s this issue with some people, it seems, thinking that anything called “basic income” by definition replaces the whole rest of the welfare state. But that’s not true. But writers sometimes talk that way, and it leads to confusion and misconceptions.

And there’s also an issue about whether a “basic income” is, by definition, enough to live on. I think writers occasionally go in both ways. They probably sometimes equivocate, which would be bad… There’s been some controversy in BIEN caused by precisely this last concern, in fact. I think you can read about it some in Toru’s report on the controversy about the definition at the last BIEN Congress.

Daniel Häni: Basic income is an initiative against laziness

Daniel Häni: Basic income is an initiative against laziness

In a recent interview, Swiss entrepreneur and activist Daniel Häni contends that “the unconditional basic income is an initiative against laziness.”

 

Häni is well known in the basic income as the co-founder the co-founder of Switzerland’s popular initiative for an unconditional basic income (UBI), which launched the campaign for a referendum to establish a national basic income.

 

In the interview, he talks about new conceptualizations of work in modern society, the value of time, and implied social changes from a UBI. Häni argues that man is not by nature lazy. He notes that, in contrast, much opposition to UBI comes from the opposite–and false–view that man is by nature lazy. Häni also describes the importance of automation (robots) in terms of its relationship to work and humans.

 

“We have invented the machines and now the robots. We no longer need to be diligent and obedient,” Häni said. “This can make the machines and robots much better. They work around the clock and actually do what we program.” In other words, robots can diligently and obediently perform work programmed into them by humans. By implication, the “unpredictable” (or “human”) work can be done by people, not robots, and the predictable can be done by robots.

 

Häni cautions against the funneling of the purpose of work that prevails in modern society.

“The narrowing of work on work is outdated and harmful,” he notes. “Labor and income will be separated, at least as far as existence is concerned, or we will suffocate in abundance and starve in abundance. The signs are already there.”

 

If you want to read the interview (in German), see:

Daniel Häni: „Das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen ist eine Initiative gegen Faulheit.“ (Pressenza).

Jeff Opdyke – Basic Income Will Kill the Economy

Jeff Opdyke – Basic Income Will Kill the Economy

While sitting in his favorite hotel lobby in Bucharest, Romania, Opdyke was looking at his phone for the news for the day, while waiting around for none other than his girlfriend. He found a (supposedly) “non-partisan” article, written by an economist funded by the Economic Policy Institute. In the article, the economist claimed “higher wages are the solutions to America’s expanding reliance on payday lending.” Later, he found another article entitled “This robot-powered restaurant could put fast-food workers out of a job.”

By Opdyke’s estimation, these “two theses are mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist…I can promise, it’s not the position held by the economist.” Opdyke said, “I can also promise that you and I will ultimately feel the repercussions in our paychecks and in our wallets…”

With machines able to create “perfect burgers,” the argument for a $15/hr minimum makes little sense to Opdyke. Human labour value for fast food will become obsolete in the near future. He considers the possible solution of paying a basic income to all adults (which he defines as a “minimum monthly income on which people can pay for their lives”), but he dismisses the idea as too expensive, at least without a drastic increase in taxes (which he does not seem to favor).

If you want to read more, please see here:

Jeff D. Opdyke (August 24, 2016) “Basic Income Will Kill the Economy

An Interview with André Coelho

André Coelho (credit to: Ann-Kathrin Anthon)

André Coelho (credit to: Ann-Kathrin Anthon)

What made you become an activist for basic income, and devote so much time to it?

A revolution is taking place here and now, and each person has a choice: to be an active part in that revolution (to work for it to succeed), to be a passive part in it (to let it happen, if it must), or to fight against it. For me, the latter is just plain nonsensical. To be passive does not quite go along with my character, so I guess I could only go with the first one.

I identify with this revolutionary course – the implementation of basic income – because it’s about recognizing the humanity in us all, of our birth right to a decent living, and enough freedom to actually pursue happiness in this life.

What are other terms or phrases for ideas associated with, but not the same as, Basic Income (BI)? What characterizes them?

In most welfare states there are social benefits in place, paid in cash or in the form of tax credits. However, all of them are conditional, usually on income and/or willingness to take up a job. In Portugal, for instance, there is a minimum insertion income (RSI), which is only given to people who clearly show they have no other source of income.

There are also, for example, child benefits, disability benefits, income assistance…a whole set of income redistribution schemes, which always entail some conditionality. The only exceptions I know of, other than basic income pilot projects, are the Alaska and the Macau dividends. The latter two dividends, although unconditional, are not basic (not enough to cover basic expenses).

What makes the BI plan of action unique?

If I can put my finger on one main feature, I would say it is its unconditional nature. That’s what makes people roll their eyes around. What? Now we’re giving all this money to people, even if they don’t work? That’s just plain unfair.

Well, of course this is a short sighted opinion at best, and a plain lie at worst. It’s a limited view on our humanity. Usually people view themselves as active and willing to contribute with their work, but then are suspicious that their neighbours will do the same.

Of course that if everyone thinks this way we’ll arrive at an impossible proposition: that everyone is active and willing, while not being active nor willing, at the same time. But apart from our personal sensibilities, results from basic income pilot projects show that people contribute as much or more to society with their work, while receiving a basic income.

And even when slight decreases are observed, these are coupled with investments in education.

What are the most common success stories of BI or similar programs? Any failures? 

The basic income pilot projects I usually cite are the Namibian, Indian and Canadian experiences. The first two were experiments in very poor, rural contexts, while the Canadian one was both urban and rural, involving the entire local population.

In all these cases, people receiving the basic income did not stop working (clearly the opposite in the Namibian and Indian cases), health conditions improved, as well as education indicators. There were also other benefits, such as reduced crime rates (in Namibia and India).

I think that, in the context of basic income experimentations, there cannot be ‘failures’. If done properly, these experiments aim to widen our knowledge, while temporarily helping the populations in question.

Of course that, as it was the case in the United States experiments, the results can be “spun” in different ways for political purposes. But that is always a risk attached to any experiment, especially those related with social behaviour.

What country seems the most progressive and forward thinking in implementation of BI?

According to news information around these days, Finland seems to be the part of the world most willing to formally take up the idea of trying basic income. Finnish officials and partners are developing an experiment, which is setup to start in 2017.

However, I would not say that translates necessarily into greater progressiveness than other regions of the world. The Finish experiment is already plagued by several shortcomings, even before it has started (although I still think it’s worth it).

The Canadian central and regional governments, and particularly the latter, are also seriously considering experimenting with the basic income. As well as regional Dutch officials, who are already developing their own basic income experiments (similar to Finland’s experiment).

Let’s also not forget the Swiss case, that recently held a national referendum on the subject. And also Spain, particularly in the Basque region. However, the interest in basic income is growing quickly around the world, so who knows who will implement it first?

Activist networks for basic income are also spreading. At this moment, BIEN already has 30 national and regional affiliates, and this is expected to rise in the next few years.

What is your work on BI?

At Basic Income News, I do writing, editing, training and coordinating. I also represent BIEN, on occasions, as an advocate for basic income in international meetings (up until now, related to the CO-ACTE project).

Locally, I also participate in some actions for our activist network in Portugal, by writing articles, speaking at venues and organizing events.

Any advice for would-be policy makers or activists about strategies for the implementation of BI?

I guess that if I could choose one piece of advice it would be not to consider basic income as a ‘miraculous’ cure for all social problems. Basic income is a helpful tool, even a crucial one, but cannot replace a “systems approach” thinking about society, a holistic view.

Also I would recommend to self-analyse and make clear why each of us is defending basic income, and how we think it should be implemented. Because the devil is in the details, and basic income can get “dirty” when analysed in its implementation depth.

I have been, more than once, challenged by the possibility of a “right-wing” basic income, which would come as a replacement of all other social benefits and welfare state public systems, including health and education.

This approach to basic income is common among the “right-wing” side of the political spectrum. It is dangerous and a real possibility which all activists should be aware of if they really care about the wellbeing of present and future society.

Thank you for your time, André.