by Peter Vandevanter | Sep 20, 2017 | News
A Stanford University class –available on a podcast replays the 1970s Manitoba, Canada, experiment called “mincome,” on the way to rejoicing in Universal Basic Income.
In the U.S., Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who according to some is preparing to run for U.S. President, are promoting universal basic income.
What does basic income mean, students ask? The contentious subject raises many questions, such as: would society fall apart because everyone would just hang out on the couch?
The Stanford class seeks to separate the argument that robots will replace 47% of jobs, a prediction that fuels much of Silicon Valley’s support of basic income, from the “paradigm of work” dialogue, according to Juliana Bidadanure, Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at Stanford University, who is teaching the class.
The podcast studies the observations of many “experts” on culture, race and gender in an effort to separate jobs (wage-work) from understanding the true nature of work. Several contributions are under analysis, such as the following:
– Doug Henwood — Journalist, economic analyst, and writer whose work has been featured in Harper’s, Jacobin Magazine, and The Nation, says if robots were really taking over, there would be a strong productivity growth in the U.S., which is not true, so far;
– Rutger Bregman — Journalist and author of “Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-hour Workweek” thinks that if basic income were accomplished by the government printing money, that situation would definitely lead to inflation. But no inflation fears would be attached to a taxation process;
– Kathi Weeks — Marxist, feminist scholar, associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University in North Carolina, and author of “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries” believes that wage-work is not the only meaningful activity. She points to pre-industrial society as a good example of when wage-work took a backseat to the value of non-paid work;
– Evelyn Forget — Economist and professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Manitoba Research Data Centre, who first reported the “mincome” data. Forget argues that “mincome” made it possible for single mothers to get off welfare and proudly have a profession.
A second podcast will be available that discusses whether universal basic income is the end of capitalism or not.
More information at:
Podcast: Universal Basic Income – An Idea Whose Time Has Come
by Kate McFarland | Sep 19, 2017 | News
The 17th North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress will be held in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada from May 24-27, 2018.
The annual congress is co-hosted by BIEN’s two North American affiliates, the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) network and the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN), with locations alternating between the US and Canada. The 2017 congress was held in New York, New York, and drew more than 100 attendees and 50 speakers.
The location of the 2018 congress is notable as one of three sites of a guaranteed annual income pilot project launched by the provincial government of Ontario. The government is currently enrolling participants from the Hamilton, Brantford, and Brant County areas, as well as the Thunder Bay area. A third pilot will begin in the city of Lindsay later in 2017.
During the three-year experiment, individual participants will receive up to $16,989 per year unconditionally ($24,027 per year for couples), an amount of the payments was chosen as equivalent to 75% of the Low Income Measure in the province. The amount of the payments will be reduced by 50% of any additional earned income. (The ) Although distinct from a basic income, the program is similar insofar as it provides regular and unconditional cash payments to beneficiaries. (It differs in that the amount of transfers depends on income and household status.) The effect of the unconditional payments will be examined with respect to health (including mental health), food security, housing stability, education, and workforce participation.
BICN will provide more information about NABIG 2018 on its website and social media when available.
Reviewed by Robert Gordon.
Photo: Albion Falls, Hamilton, Ontario CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 JP Newell
by Sara Bizarro | Sep 13, 2017 | News
Hillary Clinton just released a new memoir, What Happened, about her 2016 campaign for US President. In the memoir, she claims to regret not embracing a type of Basic Income proposal, which she dubbed “Alaska for America”, as part of her platform.
Clinton attributes her enthusiasm about Basic Income to a book by Peter Barnes, With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough. The book, Hillary says, “explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year.”
Hillary endorses Peter Barnes’ idea of a national dividend and, like Barnes, she suggests that it should be financed in part from the revenue of shared national resources such as “oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies” and the “same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing.” Clinton goes even further, however, saying that she would additionally view “the nation’s financial system as a shared resource” and implement a “financial transactions tax”. She suggests there could be a capitalized fund financed by these resources which would not only provide a “modest Basic Income” every year – which appealed to Clinton as a way to increase incomes – but also “make every American feel more connected to our country and to one another-part of something bigger than ourselves.”
Hillary says that she and her husband were fascinated by this idea and spent weeks working with her policy team to see if the idea was viable and could be included in the campaign. The proposal would be called “Alaska for America.” The campaign did not pursue this proposal because, according to Clinton, “we couldn’t make the numbers work.” In the book, Clinton also quotes Republican former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson who proposed a nationwide carbon dividend that would “tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American” as an alternative to government regulation. Again, however, Clinton claims she looked at the proposal but couldn’t make the “math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families.”
If we look back, Basic Income was seldom mentioned during Clinton’s Presidential campaign, and, when it was, she was dismissive. Asked about the idea by LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth, during a discussion of education and job training, the Democratic nominee replied, “I’m not ready to go there,” and proceeded to discuss the need to create new jobs. At the time of this interview, she viewed Basic Income as an undesirable alternative to full employment, concluding, “[W]e’ve got to help create better opportunities … without just giving up and saying, ‘Okay, fine, you know, the rest of us who are producing income, we’ve got to, you know, distribute it and you don’t really have to do anything anymore.’ I don’t think that works for a democracy and I don’t think it works for most people.”
In the LinkedIn interview, Hillary suggested that job loss due to automation could (and should) be addressed by skills training and the creation of new jobs. Her memoir, however, seems to treat technological unemployment as a more dire threat, saying that she takes Silicon Valley seriously when they claim “this could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates” – and one which requires us to think “outside the box.” She mentions she was so impressed by this that her staff lived in fear that she’d start “talking about ‘the rise of the robots’ in some Iowa town hall”. She adds: “Maybe I should have.”
Hillary concludes this portion of her memoir by urging us that “we have to think big and think different”, suggesting policies like “taxing net worth instead of annual income” in order to reduce inequality. She says we need to “rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable”.
More information at:
Russell Berman, “What Hillary Clinton Says She Learned From Her Defeat”, The Atlantic, September 12th, 2017
Anders Hagstrom, “Hillary Clinton Pursued A Universal Basic Income Plan For Her Campaign”, The Daily Caller, September 12th, 2017
Ezra Klein, “The Vox Conversation with Hillary Clinton”, Vox, June 22nd, 2017
Tyler Prochazka, “UNITED STATES: Hillary Clinton asked about Negative Income Tax and does not answer the question”, Basic Income News, August 27th, 2015
by Sara Bizarro | Sep 10, 2017 | News
On August 29, 2017, the Roosevelt Institute released a report where researchers Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, Gennaro Zezza model the macroeconomic effects of implementing Basic Income. (Marshall Steinbaum is a Research Director and a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Michalis Nikiforos and Gennaro Zezza are both associated with the Levy Institute.)
The Roosevelt Institute, following the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, presents itself as re-imagining “America as it should be: a place where hard work is rewarded, everyone participates, and everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity”, and as building a “new economic and political system: one built by the many for the good of all”.
The report presented by the Roosevelt Institute evaluates three different variations of Basic Income, $1000 a month to all adults, $500 a month to all adults, and a $250 a month child allowance. The researchers also analyzed two different types of funding, increasing the federal debt and increasing taxes on households. The model is designed considering an eight year time period and Basic Income is progressively introduced throughout that period.
From their models of the three scenarios, the researchers conclude that, if funded by increasing the federal debt, each Basic Income policy would have a result of economic growth, the $250 child allowance would increase the GDP by 0.79%, while the $1,000 per adult would increase the GDP by 12.56%. When the Basic Income is financed by household taxes, the model forecasts no effect on the economy if the program was simply giving “ with one hand what it takes away with the other”. However, if the model is adapted using what the researchers call a “distributional model”, it forecasts a beneficial effect on economic growth. As the researchers describe it, “the distributional model incorporates the idea that an extra dollar in the hands of lower income households leads to higher spending. In other words, the households that pay more in taxes than they receive in cash assistance have a low propensity to consume, and those that receive more in assistance than they pay in taxes have a high propensity to consume.” The general idea is that lower income brackets tend to spend everything they earn, therefore consuming more, and higher income brackets tend to save part of their earnings, therefore, consuming less in relation to their potential as consumers. Therefore, if you take from the rich to give to the poor, the money will be flowing more than when it is simply accumulated by the few, and in this way, the economy will grow. The researchers (and this is the official position of the Roosevelt Institute as well) assume that our economy is “not currently operating near potential output” and this is so partly because of current gaping inequality, which is “one of the main reasons why the US economy faces the prospect of secular stagnation”.
Besides assuming that the economy could be preforming better, the model used also incorporates two microeconomic assumptions: “(1) unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply; and (2) increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior.” These assumptions have been promptly criticized in the media. However, the researchers themselves are aware that the assumptions are contentious, and have thus sought to establish them with evidence. They base assumption (1) on a survey of experiments done by Ionana Marinescu in a paper entitled “No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Tax Transfer Programs” that estimates the microeconomic behavioral impact, using several experimental designs, results in labor supply remaining unchanged. Regarding assumption (2), the idea that increasing taxes does not change household behavior, the researchers assume that since the tax increase is progressive, the most affected households are the higher income brackets who tend to save and “hoard” money, so to speak, so they would save less but not change their consuming behavior in a drastic way. In order to justify this assumption, they use data from the Congressional Budget Office.
The report concludes that the researchers’ aim is not to have the final word on how to model the macroeconomic impacts of Basic Income but, instead, simply to have applied a valid model, which has done a reasonably good job of explaining macroeconomic effects so far, and used it to predict the effects of three Basic Income variations; on this model, the introduction of a Basic Income with a distributional component would mostly result in economic growth.
More Information:
Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, Gennaro Zezza, “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income”, The Roosevelt Institute, August 29th, 2017
Rakeen Mabud, Felicia Wong, “Starting the Conversation: The Economics of a Universal Basic Income”, The Roosevelt Institute, August 31st, 2017
“The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2013”, Congressional Budget Office, 2016
Ioana Marinescu, “No Strings Attached The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Cash Transfer Programs”, The Roosevelt Institute, May 11th, 2017
by Kate McFarland | Aug 27, 2017 | News
The Economic Security Project (ESP), a two-year initiative established in December 2016 to fund projects related to the study and implementation of basic income in the United States, is preparing to host its first public conference.
The conference, called the Cash Conference, will take place on October 19 at the San Francisco Mint in San Francisco, California. Established in 1874, the San Francisco Mint is said to have held nearly one third of nation’s wealth in its heyday, according to the venue’s website. The mint ceased its operations in 1937, and now functions as an event venue.
ESP describes the Cash Conference as meeting to “reimagine what an economy built on the well-being of all of our [America’s] citizens could look like.”
We want to redefine what ‘work’ means and explore how a basic income could provide economic stability to Americans and fundamentally change society. How do we bridge the gap between the ways the job market is failing Americans today, and what it could look like tomorrow? Can we find a new system that provides access to opportunity for everyone and gives all of us the freedom to chart the course of our lives?
The conference will feature contributions from politicians, academics, entrepreneurs, artists, storytellers, and comedians.
Tickets and further details concerning the place and time are available on Eventbrite. The event is free; however, space is limited.
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
Photo (San Francisco Old Mint in front): CC BY-NC 2.0 Shawn Clover
