by Kate McFarland | Dec 22, 2016 | News
The National League of Cities (NLC) — an advocacy organization representing 19,000 cities and towns in the United States — has published a report called The Future of Work in Cities, which briefly recommends that cities investigate universal basic income.
The Future of Work in Cities examines the changing nature of work, especially due to automation and the growth of the “gig” or “1099” economy, and the lays out several policy recommendations for cities to address these changes. One recommendation is that cities “explore basic income and other more broad-based social support systems.”
The NLC report describes basic income as “similar to US social security and welfare systems, with the major exception that the benefit goes to everyone, regardless of age, ability, class status, or participation in the workforce,” and provides a brief summary of a few arguments for and against such a universal and unconditional benefit:
Some individuals from the tech world tout basic income as a way to counteract the economic blow of automation replacing jobs currently occupied by humans. Other supporters argue that basic income is more streamlined, efficient, and transparent than currently administered social welfare systems. Finally, there are some individuals who endorse the idea of less work overall, arguing that a basic income might free up the time individuals spend working and allow them pursue other, more creative, and enjoyable pursuits. Many critiques of basic income systems center on how it will be sustainably funded or the cultural implications of instituting such a system (p. 48).
The authors mention taxation as a possible funding mechanism, but do not delve into any more detail.
Other strategies broached in the report include offering more portable benefits (e.g. health insurance that is not tied to an employer), increasing the minimum wage, ensuring that families have affordable childcare and paid leave, and easing the entry of individuals with criminal records into the workforce.
The Future of Work in Cities is the second report in NLC’s City of the Future series. The first report, City of the Future: Technology & Mobility, investigates ways in which new technologies will impact transportation systems in urban areas.
Reference
Nicole DuPuis, Brooks Rainwater, and Elias Stahl (2016) The Future of Work in Cities, National League of Cities Center for City Solutions and Applied Research.
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Sparky
by Kate McFarland | Dec 21, 2016 | News
On November 29 and 30, the White House, the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-hosted the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity.
Held at Stanford, the event brought together “275 high-level players in technology, philanthropy, community service, government, and academia” to listen to and participate in a series of panel discussions on social and economic policy and the role of technology and big data.
The conference included a 40-minute panel on “The Future of Jobs and the Question of a Basic Income”:
PANELISTS (from viewer’s left to right)
– Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, and the initiator of its plan for a basic income experiment. Y Combinator is currently running a pilot study of a basic income in Oakland, with plans for a larger scale experiment in the future.
– Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and (as of this month) a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, which will be distributing $10 million in grants to support basic income projects in the US.
– Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Department of Philosophy who specializes in political theory and public policy. Bidadanure will be teaching a graduate seminar on the philosophy of basic income in winter 2017.
Future of work expert Natalie Foster moderated the discussion.
All four participants are supporters of universal basic income.
PANEL OVERVIEW.
Bidadanure, Hughes, and Altman, respectively, begin the panel by describing how they came to interested in basic income and outlining their reasons for supporting such a policy. Following these introductory remarks, discussion turns to past and present basic income experiments: Altman talks about Y Combinator’s newly launched pilot study, Hughes describes the work of the charity GiveDirectly, and Bidadanure lays out the results of past experiments in Manitoba, Namibia, and India. Altman additionally stresses the ability of a basic income to alleviate financial anxiety for people who currently live paycheck to paycheck. Finally, panelists present their thoughts on the question of how to finance a basic income. Due to concerns about feasibility, Hughes proposes beginning with a small basic income of $100 or $200 per month; Bidadanure and Altman, however, raise concerns with the implementation of a basic income that is it not sufficiently large to allow for freedom and security.
Additional press on the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity:
Nitasha Tiku, “Stanford, The White House, And Tech Bigwigs Will Host A Summit On Poverty”, BuzzFeed News, November 28, 2016.
Reviewed by Jenna van Draanen
Photo (Stanford University) CC BY 2.0 Robbie Shade
by Kate McFarland | Dec 18, 2016 | News
Raising the Floor, the new work on basic income by former SEIU President Andy Stern, has made the Wall Street Journal’s list of top books from 2016.
Andy Stern resigned as President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), then boasting 2.2 million members, in 2010. In part, his resignation was driven by the belief that he had, as he says, “lost his ability to predict labor’s future”. Having left the SEIU, Stern embarked on a “four-year journey to discover the future of jobs, work, and the American Dream”.
By the end of this journey, he concluded that only a universal basic income could protect Americans against job disruption caused by new technology and the changing nature of work. Stern lays out this solution, along with a description of his journey, in his book Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, which was published in June of this year — almost immediately garnering much publicity in the media.
Now, Raising the Floor has been selected as part of the annual Wall Street Journal feature “Who Read What”, with reporter and author John Donvan choosing it as his book of 2016:
For a policy book by a union guy, Andy Stern’s cautionary prediction of a world without work is surprisingly haunting. “Raising the Floor” follows the former labor organizer through a self-education tour to meet and learn from the inventors, tech entrepreneurs and venture-capital guys pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. No Luddite, Mr. Stern is dazzled by the robots and the data-mining and the just-around-the-corner driverless cars. But he grows increasingly dismayed that almost no one leading this disruption gives much thought to the tens of millions of jobs that such innovations will destroy. And it’s not just cabbies and truck drivers at risk. Mr. Stern warns that doctors, lawyers, accountants, financial planners, teachers and many others will be vulnerable. He doesn’t want to stop progress, but he does want us to be ready for it when it arrives. His radical solution? It’s in his subtitle.
According to the most recent Cision data (2014), The Wall Street Journal is the third most widely circulated newspaper in the US.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Andy Stern photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Third Way Think Tank
by Kate McFarland | Dec 11, 2016 | News
Entrepreneur Gary Fowler has written a guest column for the San Francisco tech zine VentureBeat in which he argues that universal basic income is a viable solution for technological unemployment and that, rather than making people lazy, it would permit the flourishing of human creativity.
After considering the capacity of AI technologies to reduce the need for human labor, and reflecting on the results of basic income trials and psychological studies of motivation, Fowler asserts that people will not become lazy and uncreative “if robots take our jobs and the government gives us a universal basic income.” He goes on to hypothesize that UBI could “lead to a decrease in unemployment as people work towards achieving their needs beyond physiological requirements.”
Fowler is the CEO and cofounder of Findo, a search assistant program, and the founder of Fowler International, an international business development consulting company. His VentureBeat draws from his experience with smart search assistants; in predicting the future of work, he envisions a society in which AI assistants look after individuals’ day-to-day needs.
Gary Fowler (November 6, 2016) “Universal basic income: If a robot takes your job, it could actually be good for you” VentureBeat.
Basic Income Fact-Checking.
It is worth clarifying a couple of ambiguous statements that Fowler makes about basic income pilots.
• Fowler writes, “Finland, for example has initiated a two-year trial period where each individual will get $600 a month as basic income.” To be precise, the two-year trial will only select participants from a subset of the population of working-age adults currently receiving social welfare benefits (see, e.g., “Legislation for Basic Income Experiment Underway“).
• The pilot in Namibia to which Fowler refers was not nationwide (as Fowler’s comment might suggest) but confined to the village of Otjivero. Additionally, it was administered by the Basic Income Grant (BIG) Coalition — a coalition of organizations including NGOs, churches, and unions that has committed to work with the Namibian government — rather than the government itself. (See the BIG Coalition for more information.)
Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı
by Kate McFarland | Dec 10, 2016 | News
The charity GiveDirectly, which is now preparing to launch a large-scale basic income experiment in Kenya, has been giving direct cash donations to poor individuals in Kenya and Uganda since 2009. Now donors and other interested parties will be better able to observe the effects of these cash transfers: in November 2016, GiveDirectly launched a new website, GDLive, which reports live and unedited updates from donation recipients.
As GiveDirectly explains in a blog post, “With GDLive, donors can see when (to the hour), how much, and to whom cash transfers were sent, and learn more about recipients’ lives. Respect also means a commitment to honesty: We aren’t cutting a single recipient’s answers and we’ll show everything they have to say about how GiveDirectly has impacted their lives: the good stories and the bad. We encourage recipients to be as honest as possible.”
To protect privacy, GDLive does not publish individuals’ last names or specific villages. The organization also gathers consent from recipients at multiple stages before publishing their testimonies.
In 2016, about 6500 households in Kenya received cash through GiveDirectly. As of October 19, GiveDirectly reports, about two-thirds consented to sharing their stories on GDLive.
Follow GDLive at live.givedirectly.org.
See also:
Michael Cooke (November 22, 2016) “Human stories are not the opposite of data” GD blog.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo of GiveDirectly recipient, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 PROcoolloud
