by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 23, 2015 | News
Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase is optimistic about the future of the sharing economy, but also believes that automation will force many into unemployment. While speaking at the Global Drucker Forum, Chase advocated for a “basic income” in order to combat what she sees as inevitable job displacement by technology.
While some believe that new jobs will replace those that are automated, Chase said she believes many unskilled workers will be left behind. In order to push forward the idea in the United States, Chase called for basic-income pilot projects in cities across the country.
Rick Wartzman, “Startup CEO Loves Tech but Fears Millions Will Be Jobless”, Fortune, November 14, 2015.
by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 22, 2015 | News
In order to combat poverty and increasing automation of labor, experts in technology and policy came together at the Basic Income Createathon. Participants divided into groups to develop proposals for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG).
One group proposed a Group Income scheme, or a “voluntary automated decentralized income transfer.” This would allow a group of individuals to automatically share their income to ensure everyone received at least a basic amount of money.
One group created a website, bettertaxes.org, to illustrate how much money is spent by the U.S. government and how much would be required to implement a basic income of $1,000 USD per month.
Jon Evans, ‘Money For Nothing For Everyone’, Tech Crunch, November 22, 2015.
by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 21, 2015 | News
The most common criticisms of a universal basic income (UBI) are that it is unfeasible and too expensive. However, in a recent series on UBI in the Washington Post, some of the strongest attacks dealt with the possibility that it may undermine civil society in the United States.
Jonathan Coppage, associate editor of The American Conservative magazine, argues that a UBI provides the freedom to “no longer be needed” by the marketplace, where many societal bonds are formed. A UBI would remove these ties, Coppage said.
In India, a UBI trial demonstrated instead that a UBI has the potential to increase entrepreneurial and economic activity. Also, unlike the current entitlement system, UBI benefits do not diminish as income rises, so replacing current social services with a UBI can actually encourage individuals to enter the marketplace.
A cautionary tale does emerge from rentier states in the Middle East. Rentier states, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, use oil revenue to provide their citizens with lavish social services in order to buy loyalty to the government. Some argue that this environment has contributed to the underdevelopment of rentier states’ civil societies, while others dispute this theory.
Nonetheless, the lessons from rentier states cannot properly be applied to implementing a UBI in the United States. There are far too many cultural and institutional differences (such as the repressive politics of many rentier states) to make these countries a useful case study.
In Alaska, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) provides a more accurate illustration of how a UBI would affect civil society in America. The PFD provides an annual payment from the state’s oil revenues to each citizen of Alaska. It is arguably the closest program to a full UBI in the world.
One of the best measures of the strength of civil society is the level of volunteerism, as it indicates how invested individuals are in the betterment of their communities. Alaska is ranked as having the tenth highest volunteer participation as a percentage of the population in the United States. Additionally, from 1989 to 2006, Alaska’s volunteer rate increased by 10 percent.
Many have made the case that a UBI would increase support for civil society as it would allow individuals to shift some of their time to civic engagement. Although more in-depth statistical analysis would be needed to demonstrate that Alaska’s high volunteerism rate is a partial result of the PFD, it is easy to see why it may be the case; the financial freedom resulting from a UBI allows people to dedicate more time to activities that truly benefit them and their community.
At the very least, the experience in Alaska shows us that a universal basic income in the United States would not be the death of civil society. In fact, it could be the very stimulus civil society needs to thrive.
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 19, 2015 | News
Tristan Roberts, organizer
On Thursday, October 29, 2015, Tristan Roberts will host a discussion on strategies towards a post-Scarcity society. The group will explore the current and possible future implementations of Universal Basic Income, at the local, national, and international levels. According to the organizers, “We’ll also be discussing radical solutions that may supplant the current economic system. Technology, in the form of cryptocurrencies, is actively being designed to create transparent microstates. Besides offering transparent governance, some of these modular, voluntary communities will feature digital currencies that have progressive wealth redistribution at their core. In other words, a bitcoin-like, blockchain-based universal basic income.”
The discussion will take place at 7PM, in the NextSpace coworking office on the 2nd floor of 1 Hallidie Plaza, San Francisco, CA.
Topics include:
*The status of the Swiss referendum for a Universal Basic Income
*The Finnish and Dutch efforts towards experimenting with Basic Income on city-wide levels,
*Alaska’s Citizen Dividend and Oregon’s possible Carbon Dividend
*Bitnation’s attempt to create modular, transparent governance
*Next-generation, Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies that feature wealth redistribution
Details:
Political and Technological Strategies towards a post-Scarcity Society
Thursday, October 29, 2015
7:00 PM, NextSpace coworking office
1 Hallidie Plaza, 2nd floor, San Francisco, CA
More information: https://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-Basic-Income-Meetup/events/226127519/
by Vito Laterza | Oct 18, 2015 | News
Celebrated Chinese-American community activist, writer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs died in her house in Detroit, Michigan, on Monday, October 5. She turned 100 in June this year. Her vision of a community-driven socialist alternative to capitalism resonates well with some of the concerns of the basic income movement. While basic income was not a central theme in her work, she endorsed the idea of a city-level universal basic income (UBI).
She was born in New York and grew up in a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant business. A brilliant scholar, she completed her PhD in philosophy in 1940. After that, she became increasingly drawn into full-time political activism. In 1942, she started her close collaboration with Marxist revolutionary theorist C.L.R. James and the Johnsonites, which lasted for two decades. The Johnsonites were revolutionary socialists who focused more than other Marxist groups on marginalized groups like women, people of color and youth, and rejected the notion of a workers’ vanguard party.
Lee Boggs’ personal encounter with Marxism and socialism was shaped by a focus on race and poverty, in particular the systematic discrimination faced by black American working class communities. In 1953, she married Detroit-based black activist and autoworker Jimmy Boggs, author of the influential 1963 book The American revolution: pages from a Negro worker’s notebook. In the same year she moved to Detroit to live with him. The city remained her home until her death. Grace and Jimmy partnered in community activism, political struggles and revolutionary writing.
Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Grace and Jimmy were prominent in organizing the civil rights and Black Power movements in Detroit. They collaborated with towering figures like Martin Luther King and Malcom X, and organizations like the Black Panthers. After the decline of mass political activism that started in the 1980s, they continued to focus on community work and alternative urban livelihoods. Jimmy passed away in 1993, and Grace continued with these activities until her death.
In a 2011 piece, Grace Lee Boggs mentions a workshop presentation in the early 1990s in which she had imagined a future where Detroiters would come together to implement a city-wide UBI by the year 2015:
Because Detroiters have developed a deep sense of moral responsibility, citizens decided in 2015 A.D. to adopt a Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) as an alternative to welfare. The UBIG is based on the idea that every citizen has a right to the basic material necessities of life, including health care and education, and every citizen also has a duty to share in the responsibilities of the community, city, nation and planet, and to contribute in some form to the overall well-being.
Lee Boggs’ engagement with UBI was more complex than her words above let transpire. Her take was heavily influenced by evolving ideas about work, community and the rejection of the capitalist system. Her socialist approach was informed by Marx’s critique of alienation and wage labor under capitalism. Lee Boggs’ association with black working class communities became a pragmatic entry point into the concept and practice of revolution – which she always saw as something changing, shifting and emerging from uncertainty, rather than a linear path driven by monolithic ideas. Revolution, for Lee Boggs, was what people did on the ground when they took practical action informed by a long-term vision of the society they wanted to build.
Her work speaks to UBI activists because she lived through the decline of formal jobs in the Detroit automotive industry, and the social and economic devastation black communities experienced as a result. In the 1960s, all the signs of the crisis were clear, with black workers losing their jobs in large numbers due to automation and other irreversible structural changes in global capitalist production. In the following years, Lee Boggs was particularly concerned with the dramatic contradictions emerging from the decline of formal labor coupled by rampant consumerism. She identified the capitalist system as the main cause of the breakdown of communities plagued by mass unemployment, crime and drugs.
The Boggses led decades of urban renewal experiments emerging from the ashes of capitalism and focusing on youth entrepreneurship, urban agriculture and community education. Where others saw a post-industrial wasteland, they saw opportunities to build a new society that would break away from consumerism and dependence on large-scale structures like the state and big companies. The James & Grace Lee Boggs School and the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership are among the many projects that carry their legacy today.
The basic income grant that Lee Boggs envisioned was to be delivered by self-governing Detroiters coming together, not as a large-scale redistributive mechanism at state or federal level. It was closely tied to the duty to participate and share with others locally and globally, and to behave responsibly towards other humans and the natural environment. The strong connections between UBI and the community would have neutralized the potential negative effects of linking cash grants to mass production and global capitalism.
In a 2012 talk at the New School in New York, Lee Boggs provided the following comment on Martin Luther King’s proposal of a guaranteed annual income (something quite close to a federal UBI):
I’m not sure I’m ready to propose a guaranteed annual wage. I think that’s too simplistic. … I think we need to do a lot more with ourselves, with our economy, and envisioning a new kind of economy. You can think so much in terms of re-distribution. Or you can begin thinking about justice in terms of restoring another way of life.
Whether one agrees with Lee Boggs’ communitarian conception of UBI or not, her work is a major contribution to basic income debates. Lee Boggs’ writings emphasized the dignity of work, and how its redemptive qualities had little to do, if at all, with wage labor. On the topic of change, she was an advocate of “visionary organizing.” She believed that community activism in the “here and now” could bring about global systemic change only if driven by a strong vision of the future to come. Her mature views about revolution and social change are presented in her powerful book The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, first published in 2011.
Her radiant presence and profound insight will be sorely missed. She influenced basic income advocates like Scott Santens, who celebrated her life work with these words: “Some people see where the arc of history should bend, do all they can to make it bend, and live long enough to see it bend.” She will continue to inspire thousands of UBI activists engaged in small-scale experiments that are already sowing the seeds of a future world where UBI becomes the norm.
Grace Lee Boggs in post-industrial Detroit. Credit: Quyen Tran. © PBS POV
Essential readings
Grace Lee Boggs, “Visionary organizing and the MLK Memorial,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs, “Jobs aren’t the answer,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs at the New School, New York [TRANSCRIPT], April 22, 2012.
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for change: an autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige), The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011.
Documentary film “American Revolutionary: the evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” directed by Grace Lee, June 2013.
Ryan Felton, “Grace Lee Boggs, longtime Detroit activist, dies aged 100,” The Guardian, October 6, 2015.
Michelle Chen, “Grace Lee Boggs’ century of social renewal,” Al Jazeera America, October 7, 2015.
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Postscript: Grace Lee Boggs,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2015.
Barbara Ransby, “The (r)evolutionary vision and contagious optimism of Grace Lee Boggs,” In These Times, October 6, 2015.
Jordan Weissmann, “Martin Luther King’s economic dream: a guaranteed income for all Americans,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2013.
Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase is optimistic about the future of the sharing economy, but also believes that automation will force many into unemployment. While speaking at the Global Drucker Forum, Chase advocated for a “basic income” in order to combat what she sees as inevitable job displacement by technology.
