by Kate McFarland | Feb 16, 2017 | News
A research team consisting of economists, developmental psychologists, and a neuroscientist is developing an experiment to examine the effects of a basic income on the neural development of young children.
A new study of the effects of basic income on young children is being developed by a group of five researchers: Greg Duncan (economist at the University of California, Irvine), Kimberly Noble (neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University), Katherine Magnuson (developmental psychologist at University of Wisconsin, Madison), Hirokazu Yoshikawa (developmental psychologist at New York University), and Lisa Gennetian (economist at New York University).
In a blog post about the proposed study, Duncan writes that “despite hundreds of studies of early childhood preschool and parenting programs, we know surprisingly little about the extent to which income itself is an active ingredient in children’s development very early in life.”
In the proposed experiment, 1000 low-income mothers of newborn children would be randomly assigned to one of two groups: an experimental group in which each mother is given a $333 monthly cash payment for the first 40 months of her child’s life, or a control group in which each mother is given only $20 per month. The mothers and children would be selected from several ethnically diverse communities in different regions of the US, including New York City, St. Paul, Omaha, and New Orleans.
When they reach three years of age, the children would be tested for cognitive and behavioral development, specifically “self-regulation, cognitive, language and memory development, as well as direct measures of brain activity.” Thus, Duncan states, “This study will thus provide the first definitive understanding of the extent to which a basic income plays a causal role in shaping the early socio-emotional, cognitive and brain development of children in low-income families.”
Additionally, the researchers plan to collect information on parental stress, family expenditures, parenting practices, and child care arrangements at several points during the experiment.
The researchers have already completed a pilot study to test the feasibility of their procedures for selecting participants, transferring money to them, and gathering data. In the pilot, which was launched in June 2014 at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, 30 low-income mothers were randomly assigned to either (a) an experimental group receiving $100 per month or (b) a control group receiving $20 per month. The pilot project was carried out for 12 months, after which the mothers completed an interview about their parenting practices and household expenditures.
“While the results should be viewed with caution because of the small sample size,” Duncan says, “we found some evidence that the higher monthly income reduced household chaos and increased mother-child learning activities and child care expenditures.”
The researchers are currently raising funds to launch the full experiment, which they aim to do later in 2017.
Read More:
Greg Duncan, “When a Basic Income Matters Most”, Medium: Economic Security Project, December 19, 2016.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo: “Toddler” CC BY-ND 2.0 攝影家9號
by Austin Douillard | Feb 15, 2017 | News
On January 23rd, Sean Kline, Director of the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment, spoke at a Questions & Answers event where he discussed his ideas for universal basic income (UBI) pilots in San Francisco, as well as other cities across the United States.
https://www.facebook.com/universalincome/videos/1841786812757686/
Kline was hosted by Jim Pugh, the co-director of the Universal Income Project, and they spoke at the Covo center in San Francisco.
“We’re at a galvanizing moment for cities to think more creatively about how they can generate revenue for really progressive policies,” Kline said. His speech focused on implementing basic income projects in cities in part because, “there’s a real appetite to do more at the city level.”
His focus at the city level is in part a response to the criticism of basic income projects: that they represent what Kline called a “Trojan horse that would or could eliminate other crucial social safety nets either in one fell swoop or through a paper cuts.”
Kline responded to this critique that we should not view UBI as a wholesale transformative policy that would immediately replace other social welfare programs. Instead, he spoke about a variety of “incremental paths” for UBI that could start small and grow. In this way, UBI could build on already existing programs that are already functioning and accepted.
To illustrate this point, Kline cited the Alaskan Citizen’s Dividend and the related Pension Fund in Norway, which both give a portion of oil profits back to the people. He said that even social security is a form of an income grant for a portion of the population. Kline claimed that a transition to basic income could build on these already-established programs and grow. “There are a lot of things that don’t have to sound quite so radical that we can build on,” he said.
Kline is currently searching for funding sources to implement city-level basic income experiments. The specifics of his proposals and their funding possibilities are still being considered and negotiated with potential funders. Currently, the Universal Income Project is funded by the Roosevelt Institute and the Citizens Engagement Laboratory.
More information at:
Universal Basic Income Facebook page
by Kate McFarland | Feb 11, 2017 | News
Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investment firm” created by eBay founded Pierre Omidyar, announced on February 7 that it will donate up to $493,000 to the New York based charity organization GiveDirectly. The funds will be used to support GiveDirectly’s major basic income experiment in Kenya.
In the largest and longest-running basic income trial to date, GiveDirectly will provide unconditional cash transfers to the residents of 200 villages in rural Kenya (about 26,000 people in total). The residents of 40 of these villages (about 6,000 people) will receive monthly payments for 12 years. At about $0.75 per day, the amount of the basic income is roughly half of the average income in rural Kenya.
With the grant from the Omidyar Network, GiveDirectly is now just over $6 million shy of fully funding the full $30 million experiment, Communications Associate Max Chapnick tells Basic Income News. Chapnick says, “Since we announced our basic income experiment back in April we’ve seen an outpouring of support from thousands of donors across the world. We’re grateful for the latest grant from the Omidyar Network, whose substantial support will help poor families meet daily needs, while providing valuable data on basic income.”
Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams of the Omidyar Network explain the firm’s decision to donate in a blog post titled “Why We Invested: GiveDirectly.”
Citing a recent literature review of 15 years of research on direct cash transfers (“Cash transfers: what does the evidence say?”), Kubzansky and Williams extol the benefits of cash transfer programs in “alleviating poverty and empowering people”:
“[C]ash transfer programs can potentially help to address bigger issues facing our society, such as rising income volatility, lack of secure benefits, social instability, and the changing nature of work. Concerns around these themes have recently sparked growing attention to a particular form of cash transfer: the idea of universal basic income (UBI)—a transfer that would be regular, long-term, a meaningful amount, and available to everyone.”
Kubzansky and Williams also discuss the threat of automation and the rise of the “gig economy” as forces driving interest in UBI. They go on to note, however, that “no study to date has been conducted with sufficient size, rigor, timescale, or universality to truly test the impact of a full-fledged UBI program.”
It’s to help counter this latter deficit, the authors explain, that Omidyar Network has chosen to invest in GiveDirectly’s experiment — which they applaud for its scope, ambition, and rigor.
“Partnering with top economists (reviewed by their institutional review boards) at Princeton and MIT, GiveDirectly is ensuring the experiment is carried out with scientific rigor and responsibly, generating evidence to help answer critical questions on the impact of UBI.”
Kubzansky and Williams refrain from an all-out endorsement of UBI. Instead, they adopt a more cautious“wait and see” approach, stating, “While we don’t know what the right answer will be, or whether UBI will prove useful or feasible, this is an important first step on generating data, so that policymakers can make informed decisions.”
At the same time, though, the philanthropists are clearly willing to invest in empirical studies of its feasibility — even beyond the $493,000 donation to GiveDirectly. In concluding their blog post, Kubzansky and Williams state:
“GiveDirectly’s pilot in Kenya is geographically-specific and focuses more on the issues around poverty alleviation than questions about jobs displaced by technological change. As such, Omidyar Network will look to support additional studies on UBI to diversify the growing body of research across markets, conditions, and formats.”
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod and Dawn Howard
Photo: “Mothers with their children in Loiturerei village, Kenya” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DFID)
by Michael Howard | Feb 11, 2017 | Opinion
The Climate Leadership Council just put forth a proposal for a carbon fee and dividend, as a key policy to combat climate change. The authors are conservatives, including Republican former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Schultz, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and two Chairs from the Council of Economic Advisors in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. While there are some aspects of the proposal to question, progressives should get behind the main idea: a steadily rising carbon fee and dividend.
First, the proposal is a very welcome development for the effort to fight climate change, and for the introduction of a partial basic income. At a time when the President and many Republicans in Congress make light of or outright deny the problem of anthropogenic climate change, it is encouraging to see such concerted effort by people with impeccable conservative credentials proposing a policy that is also favored by many progressive Democrats and environmentalists like Bill McKibben. The dividend would be a significant benefit especially to poor and working class families, and, if revenue-neutral, would more than compensate for the regressive income distribution effects of a carbon tax.
How effective this particular carbon tax and dividend proposal will work depends on details not spelled out in the proposal. The proponents propose starting at $40 per ton of CO2, and a lot depends on how quickly the tax rises. They claim that a commission will decide after five years whether to raise the tax, and if it is flat for five years, that would not be adequate. One analysis of the proposal assumes that if the tax rose by $5/year, it would reduce US carbon emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. While not as much as we need, it would be a big step beyond the status quo, and could be strengthened as the political will rises to do so.
The authors propose a tradeoff between the carbon tax and regulation. The authors claim, “To build and sustain a bipartisan consensus for a regulatory rollback of this magnitude, the initial carbon tax rate should be set to exceed the emissions reductions of current regulations.”
If this is indeed the effect, the tradeoff might be worth it with respect to the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. According to Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center, “well over 80 percent of the plan’s targeted reduction in electricity-sector emissions for 2030 had already been achieved by the end of 2016,” so an economy-wide carbon tax is the logical next step. But worrisome is the Climate Leadership Council’s apparently wider scope of reduction of regulatory power of the government, which serves many other purposes unrelated to climate change. And unless the carbon tax is set high enough and is assured of rising regularly, to give away the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions might be a fool’s bargain. The challenge for progressives and environmentalists is making sure that any tradeoff gives us a robust climate fee and dividend.
A deeper question is whether a carbon fee and dividend will stimulate growth. The model suggested here does not give us enough detail, but a similar proposal by Citizens’ Climate Lobby is projected to create millions of new jobs in clean energy, and not inhibit growth. However, as we steadily use up our carbon budget, the level and pace of reduction in greenhouse gases necessary to avert catastrophic climate change may not be compatible with sustained economic growth.
This leads me to question whether the challenge of climate change — more than two decades after the international community became aware of the problem and initiated treaties to address it — can now be addressed through a carbon tax alone. We may also need direct investment in research and development of alternative technologies. We need to make good on our promise in the Paris Agreement to aid poor countries in the transition to a non-carbon future, so that they do not face an intolerable dilemma between economic development and environmental safety. And we may need to manage a scaling down of our consumption in a manner that does not cause widespread misery.
But there should be little doubt that a carbon tax is a key pillar in the battle against climate change, and using the revenue for dividends is an equitable and politically prudent policy. For basic income supporters, it is the closest analogue on the national scale to Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend that we can hope for in the near term.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland
Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 macwagen
by Kate McFarland | Feb 11, 2017 | News
A group of prominent Republicans has released a proposal for a carbon tax and dividend as an alternative to the Obama administration’s regulation-based approach to mitigating climate change.
The proposal would provide Americans with a small basic income, as it calls for revenue from the tax to be “returned to the American people on an equal and quarterly basis.”
A carbon tax (or fee) and dividend has often been noted as a possible means of financing a basic income in the United States, endorsed by groups such as the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Chesapeake Climate Action Network and even recommended by the California State Senate in an August 2016 vote.
While campaigners typically focus on the taxation of carbon as a strategy to mitigate climate change, basic income supporters call attention to the “dividend” component: in most proposals, revenue from the carbon tax would be distributed to all individuals in uniform cash grants paid out on a regular basis (e.g. monthly or quarterly). The amounts of dividends vary across specific proposals, but are small, relative to a full-fledge liveable basic income. For example, the California Senate resolution was estimated to lead to payments averaging $288 per month to family of four. And economist James K. Boyce and With Liberty and Dividends for All author Peter Barnes argue for a $200 monthly dividend to individuals, funded by taxes on pollution and other rents from “universal assets”. However, dividends funded by a carbon tax meet the main criteria for a basic income: they are paid in cash, with no strings or conditions, to all members of a community on a regular basis.
A group of prominent US Republicans has now issued a call for a carbon tax and dividend, which they present as a “free market” solution to climate change.
The Climate Leadership Council (CLC) includes, among others, two former Secretaries of State (James Baker III and George Shultz), a former Secretary of the Treasury (Henry Paulson Jr), and two former Chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw).
The CLC’s proposal, laid out and defended in “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends” (February 2017), describes its dividend proposal as follows:
All the proceeds from this carbon tax would be returned to the American people on an equal and quarterly basis via dividend checks, direct deposits or contributions to their individual retirement accounts. In the example above [a carbon tax beginning at $40 per ton and increasing over time], a family of four would receive approximately $2,000 in carbon dividend payments in the first year. This amount would grow over time as the carbon tax rate increases, creating a positive feedback loop: the more the climate is protected, the greater the individual dividend payments to all Americans. The Social Security Administration should administer this program, with eligibility for dividends based on a valid social security number.
In justifying the dividend, the CLC states, “We the People deserve to be compensated when others impose climate risks and emit heat-trapping gases into our shared atmosphere” — a claim reminiscent of much discourse surrounding basic income.
The CLC also notes that the dividend would be especially beneficial to poor Americans: “The Department of Treasury estimates that the bottom 70% of Americans would come out ahead under such a program. Carbon dividends would increase the disposable income of the majority of Americans while disproportionately helping those struggling to make ends meet.”
The CLC’s proposal has gained the support of other advocates for a carbon tax and dividend.
In remarks to CNN, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby spokesperson Steve Valk called the proposal “an aggressive, properly designed carbon tax that employs the power of the free market to do the work is more effective and efficient than regulations.” Peter Barnes, whose 2014 book With Liberty and Dividends for All helped to popularize the idea of pollution taxes and dividends, also welcomes the conservatives’ proposal. Barnes states:
“This is a real step forward for conservatives. They are proposing to pay dividends to all Americans with money generated by pricing a previously unpriced common asset, the air we all breathe. These eminent Republicans effectively agree that the air belongs to everyone, one person one share. In this sense they are heirs to the late Republican governor of Alaska, Jay Hammond, who created the Alaska Permanent Fund on the same premise, with oil rather than air as the co-owned asset.”
Michael Howard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine and Chair of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, has written a Basic Income News feature in response to “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.” Howard calls the publication a “very welcome development” in both the fight against climate change and the movement for basic income. A carbon tax and dividend, he claims, is “closest analogue on the national scale to Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend that we can hope for in the near term.”
Other responses, however, have been less enthusiastic.
In particular, some environmental advocates denounce the proposal’s demand that existing regulations on pollution be repealed. The National Resources Defense Council, for example, released the following statement in response to the CLC:
What’s important is that we cut carbon pollution fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Putting a price on carbon could be an important part of a comprehensive program. It can’t do the job alone, though, and is not a replacement for carbon limits under our current laws.
Likewise, Howard agrees that “unless the carbon tax is set high enough and is assured of rising regularly, to give away the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions might be a fool’s bargain,” and doubts that carbon tax alone is sufficient to combat climate change. As he notes in his Basic Income News feature, reduced consumption, development of alternative technologies, and assistance to poor countries in their transition to non-carbon energy sources might be necessary components of the solution.
Members of the CLC met with White House officials on Wednesday, February 8 to present the proposal.
However, the White House has yet to comment on any planned action, and most commentators agree that it is unlikely the Trump administration will pursue any climate legislation (even if that legislation is proposed and defended by prominent Republican statesmen) in the foreseeable future.
More information:
Climate Leadership Council, “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” February 2017.
Martin S Feldstein, Ted Halstead, and N Gregory Mankiw, “A Conservative Case for Climate Action,” The New York Times (op-ed), February 7, 2017.
Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, “Senior Republican statesmen propose replacing Obama’s climate policies with a carbon tax,” The Washington Post, February 8, 2017.
John Schwartz, “‘A Conservative Climate Solution’: Republican Group Calls for Carbon Tax,” The New York Times, February 7, 2017.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Pollution photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Christina Carter
