"Universal basic income is hot right now.
The idea is that you give people money with no strings attached. A check arrives in the mail or the money appears in your bank account at some regular interval.
Right now, the details — exactly how much you'd get, what's the tax treatment, what's the inflation-adjustment over time — don't really matter.
The question at this stage in the discussion is simply: should we do it?
And the answer right now is definitely maybe.
Writing over at 538 on Monday, Andrew Flowers gave a great overview of the issue, including that very little data really exists on what universal basic income programs do and do not accomplish.
The issue's intellectual history, however, is much more robust. For centuries, the idea of giving people money instead of asking them to work has been what it effectively is right now: a thought experiment, not a serious policy discussion.
Three Reasons
The recent debate around universal basic income has come down to three popular issues: there's a broken welfare system in the US, income inequality is rising, and robots will soon take our jobs.
These ideas, however, are not created equal.
Some studies peg US government spending on welfare and associated programs north of $1 trillion per year. This seems bad.
The US' Gini ratio — where 0 represents a perfectly equal income distribution and 1 represents a completely unequal wealth distribution — now sits at around 0.47, up from 0.39 in the 1960s, and is one of the highest readings in the developed world. Also bad.
Meanwhile, robots are supposed to mean the end of regular work in the developed world as everything from ordering food, to driving, to writing about corporate earnings will, we're told, soon be automated, putting us all out of jobs. Is this bad? It's unclear.
Future Panera 5Hollis Johnson
The future of Panera, where you order at a kiosk and only see a person to be handed your food.
For one thing, the idea that we'll eventually be put out of work by robots is fundamentally misguided because it forgets about where the robots that take these jobs will come from: they'll be made by humans.
Additionally, robot doom assumes a zero-sum workforce in which we can only have so many workers doing so much work. If the robots are better and cheaper and more reliable, well, you know who wins and who loses, right?
Except, this is not how labor markets that respond to societal demands work. There are all kinds of jobs that exist today that didn't exist 50 years ago and vice versa. (I'm doing one right now.)
Opponents of this line of thinking could point to a decline in labor force participation as a sign that, well, maybe there is a limit to how much work can be done and by how many people.
But consider that people now take more time to go to school and live longer after retiring, and some research suggests the decline in labor force participation is almost entirely due to demographic shifts.
Which is to say: things change. They have in the past and they will in the future. Robots will not stop the march of human progress.
People and Politics
Discussions about US government excess and income inequality are heavily drenched in standard, divisive political rhetoric that sees those on the left and right demonize the other side's intentions, data, and overall intelligence.
Robots, on the other hand, are merely the result of mind-blowing computing capabilities packed into a machine that imitates human action while taking out, well, all that political baggage we just mentioned. In a way, robots are supposed to be distilled versions of existing human workers.
Google Robot DogYouTube
A real dog faces off with a robot dog.
But again, robots have to be created by humans, which makes the idea that robots are in some way maximized humans an argument not that robots are good or humans are bad, but that robot-creating humans are the best. Alternatively, this argument assumes there exists a type of human we should aspire to be.
Writing over at Fusion, Rutger Bregman — who has published a book on the topic of universal basic income titled, "Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Border, and a 15-Hour Workweek" — said arguing robots will take our jobs is the "worst possible" reason for implementing universal basic income adding that it's, "an argument that hinges on a future which is altogether uncertain."
But I'd take this a step further: justifying a program of universal basic income based on the argument that robots will take our jobs doesn't hinge on an uncertain future so much as it assumes you will fill in the gaps in that uncertainty.
Declaring robots and the end of labor as reasons for instituting radical wealth transfer programs doesn't place those who might need the money — like, say, already poor Americans — at the center of the discussion. Instead it makes the conversation about those who won't likely need it. Namely: robot-makers, think-tankers, consultants, politicians, futurists, and so on.
And much of this robo-future is an echo of the idea that we've reached the "end of history." An idea from philosophy most closely associated with Hegel that gained newfound acceptance as a driving force of neoliberal social and economic policies in the 1990s.
Francis Fukuyama's seminal book "The End of History and the Last Man" is this field of thought's holy grail and economic ideas like the "great moderation" follow in the same vein.
But nothing could be more naïve than thinking that this current moment in political, economic, or intellectual history is the end of something bigger than your understanding of political, economic, or intellectual history. The metaphysical truth that I will never have an experience of which I am not the absolute center is, of course, true here, as always.
Universal basic income, however, is not an idea that will gain serious traction by using some techno-utopian justification that "traditional work" doesn't matter anymore.
Seriously grappling with issues of poverty and inequality in the US will require, among other things, an acknowledgement that economic and social issues are not separate or, to use the cliche, two sides of the same coin, but actually the same.
This will be hard and serious and deeply un-fun work.
And placing modern Western Civilization and the allegedly inevitable victims of its successes — like the obsoletion of its working class — at the end of some infinity-spanning timeline is just about the least serious way to start this discussion. "
Source
http://www.businessinsider.com/universal-basic-income-justifications-2016-4
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
All of the problems Universal Basic Income can solve that have nothing to do with unemployment
"Universal Basic Income isn’t just mankind’s answer to the threat of robots in the workplace. Those who support the transformative economic policy offer widely varying versions of exactly how it would operate, but all involve distributing a standard sum of money to citizens regardless of need. Many argue that this set-up could save the millions who are on track to lose their jobs to machines. But that’s not all.
The idealistic-sounding scheme would also solve many other 21st century problems, according to its supporters, largely because those with basic income would be less dependent on paid work. This, in turn, would give employees higher negotiating power to change the structure of employment.
Dutch reporter Rutger Bregman, whose Netherlands bestseller “Utopia for Realists,” was published in English earlier this week, argues for a form of UBI high enough to eradicate poverty. He believes this would remove our existing need to toil away for the vast majority of our waking hours, hoping to earn enough bonuses or promotions to enjoy a decent standard of living. Instead, we could fulfill the economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour working week by the year 2030.
Others are less convinced that there would be such a sharp drop in working hours, but nevertheless believe that UBI would reduce the working week. Currently, most people can’t afford to leave a job without worrying about being destitute, points out Jason Murphy, assistant professor of philosophy at Elms College in Massachusetts, who serves on the US Basic Income Guarantee Network Committee. “Having UBI means more negotiating power all around,” he says in an interview.
As well as increasing leisure time, working less could be a massive step towards reducing the pace of climate change. Bregman points to studies suggesting that working less would half the amount of CO2 (pdf) emitted this century. After all, countries with shorter working weeks have smaller environmental footprints (pdf).
“It’s pretty obvious why,” says Bregman in an interview. “We’re using most of our wealth and increased productivity in the form of more consumption.” We work more to spend more—on travel, cars, trips to the mall, exotic food, and many other products that harm the environment.
Murphy adds that more employees will have the negotiating power to insist on a job closer to their home. “A lot of carbon generation comes from commuting to work,” he says.
There has also been a growing focus on how basic income could be implemented to address gender inequality. Murphy believes that introducing a dependable source of income via UBI “gets to the very heart of women’s economic vulnerability.” He points to a rape shelter in Vancouver that has voiced support for UBI, in part because it would give women the economic freedom to escape abusive relationships.
A monthly stipend and reduced working hours would also give both parents the freedom to commit to domestic chores, while still being able to invest in professional careers. Meanwhile, women carry the burden of emotional labor—the childcare, support, and household work, which largely goes uncompensated. “Of course this unpaid work is valuable and I think UBI is recognition of that,” says Bregman.
There’s also some hope that UBI would allow both our employment and leisure time to become more fulfilling. Currently, millions of people are employed in what anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”—work that serves no real purpose, and is simply a way to fill time and provide salaries. One YouGov survey found that 37% of Brits think their jobs are meaningless. But under UBI, Bregman believes we would have the financial freedom to pursue useful and worthwhile work.
And how might we use all the increased leisure that we would enjoy with our greater financial freedom and reduced working hours? Bregman claims that we would no longer be returning from work to sit in front on the TV, exhausted, as we would have the energy to engage in more cultural pursuits. “People in countries with the longest working weeks go to the least theater, read the least books, and watch the most TV,” he adds. For example, those in United States and Japan, with notoriously long working days, spend several hours every day watching TV.
Others are not so certain that we wouldn’t be a little bored. Murphy suggests that we would likely have more cultural and political activities available, simply because there would be more people around the organize them. But he believes some people might well find themselves whiling away their time by watching daytime TV.
“I would gladly trade some bad reality TV for everyone if it means people aren’t worried about being one paycheck away from losing a house,” Murphy adds. “We can solve boredom next.”
Source
http://qz.com/667208/all-of-the-problems-universal-basic-income-can-solve-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-unemployment/
The idealistic-sounding scheme would also solve many other 21st century problems, according to its supporters, largely because those with basic income would be less dependent on paid work. This, in turn, would give employees higher negotiating power to change the structure of employment.
Dutch reporter Rutger Bregman, whose Netherlands bestseller “Utopia for Realists,” was published in English earlier this week, argues for a form of UBI high enough to eradicate poverty. He believes this would remove our existing need to toil away for the vast majority of our waking hours, hoping to earn enough bonuses or promotions to enjoy a decent standard of living. Instead, we could fulfill the economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour working week by the year 2030.
Others are less convinced that there would be such a sharp drop in working hours, but nevertheless believe that UBI would reduce the working week. Currently, most people can’t afford to leave a job without worrying about being destitute, points out Jason Murphy, assistant professor of philosophy at Elms College in Massachusetts, who serves on the US Basic Income Guarantee Network Committee. “Having UBI means more negotiating power all around,” he says in an interview.
As well as increasing leisure time, working less could be a massive step towards reducing the pace of climate change. Bregman points to studies suggesting that working less would half the amount of CO2 (pdf) emitted this century. After all, countries with shorter working weeks have smaller environmental footprints (pdf).
“It’s pretty obvious why,” says Bregman in an interview. “We’re using most of our wealth and increased productivity in the form of more consumption.” We work more to spend more—on travel, cars, trips to the mall, exotic food, and many other products that harm the environment.
Murphy adds that more employees will have the negotiating power to insist on a job closer to their home. “A lot of carbon generation comes from commuting to work,” he says.
There has also been a growing focus on how basic income could be implemented to address gender inequality. Murphy believes that introducing a dependable source of income via UBI “gets to the very heart of women’s economic vulnerability.” He points to a rape shelter in Vancouver that has voiced support for UBI, in part because it would give women the economic freedom to escape abusive relationships.
A monthly stipend and reduced working hours would also give both parents the freedom to commit to domestic chores, while still being able to invest in professional careers. Meanwhile, women carry the burden of emotional labor—the childcare, support, and household work, which largely goes uncompensated. “Of course this unpaid work is valuable and I think UBI is recognition of that,” says Bregman.
There’s also some hope that UBI would allow both our employment and leisure time to become more fulfilling. Currently, millions of people are employed in what anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”—work that serves no real purpose, and is simply a way to fill time and provide salaries. One YouGov survey found that 37% of Brits think their jobs are meaningless. But under UBI, Bregman believes we would have the financial freedom to pursue useful and worthwhile work.
And how might we use all the increased leisure that we would enjoy with our greater financial freedom and reduced working hours? Bregman claims that we would no longer be returning from work to sit in front on the TV, exhausted, as we would have the energy to engage in more cultural pursuits. “People in countries with the longest working weeks go to the least theater, read the least books, and watch the most TV,” he adds. For example, those in United States and Japan, with notoriously long working days, spend several hours every day watching TV.
Others are not so certain that we wouldn’t be a little bored. Murphy suggests that we would likely have more cultural and political activities available, simply because there would be more people around the organize them. But he believes some people might well find themselves whiling away their time by watching daytime TV.
“I would gladly trade some bad reality TV for everyone if it means people aren’t worried about being one paycheck away from losing a house,” Murphy adds. “We can solve boredom next.”
Source
http://qz.com/667208/all-of-the-problems-universal-basic-income-can-solve-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-unemployment/
What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?
"Straub remembers the night he got hooked on basic income. He had invited Götz Werner, a billionaire owner of a German drugstore chain, to give an independent talk in Zurich, where Straub was working as a project manager for a think tank. He had read an article about the radical proposal to unconditionally guarantee citizens an income and spent a few years casually researching the idea. Straub had heard Werner was a good speaker on the topic, and that night in 2009 he was indeed excellent at connecting with the audience, a sold-out house of 200. “It was a very intense evening; people were paying attention,” Straub recalled.
Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do? Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen. No conditions. No questions. Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live.
Straub had studied business, international policy and psychology at school and spent years working for IBM, the International Red Cross and a Montessori school. Basic income “struck a nerve,” he said. “People are burned out more than ever. You come to Switzerland and talk to people, they aren’t happy. They fear for their jobs. There is a gap between the economic possibility in this country and the quality of life.”
After Werner’s talk, Straub quit his job at the think tank and began to campaign for a basic income full time. He and a few hundred volunteers gathered 126,000 signatures over two years to force a referendum, now slated for June 5, to amend the Swiss Constitution to guarantee a basic income to all citizens. (The suggested amount is 2,500 Swiss francs per month, or about $1,700 after adjusting for the cost of living.)
Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, and compared to the United States, it offers far more generous health care and education to its citizens. But supporters of the referendum think the government can provide even more security. “We limit ourselves too much,” Straub said. “I’m interested in consciousness, expanding consciousness. And basic income is a wonderful tool for that — it challenges a lot of assumptions we have.”
The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”
He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.
“In the last five years we’ve taken on a new respectability. But in the last two years it has become an avalanche,” said Guy Standing, a British economist who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 to promote debate and research on the topic. Initially a small cabal of young economists, philosophers and activists, BIEN has grown into the largest hub for basic income supporters — a global network with national organizations in 23 countries.
Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger.
538_progressive_finalflat
The economic uncertainty surrounding basic income is huge, and the politics of bringing such a program about on a large scale are daunting. But something makes this radical proposal so exciting that people and governments are increasingly willing to try it. Basic income challenges our notions of the social safety net, the relationship between work and income, and how to adapt to technological change. That makes it one of the most audacious social policy experiments in modern history. It could fail disastrously, or it could change everything for the better.
Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state. Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs. Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”
Critics of the idea say it’s too expensive, would encourage people to stop working and possibly tank a country’s economy. It’s thought to be a political non-starter, too, especially in countries less wealthy and with less generous welfare states than Switzerland. And because basic income proposes a radical reform to the existing welfare system — one that many progressives, at least in the United States, have been defending tooth and nail over the last 30 years — it makes anti-poverty advocates nervous. Max Sawicky, a former economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in the U.S., outlined a progressive case against basic income in 2013, calling it a “distraction” from raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing full employment, rolling back Clinton-era welfare reforms and supporting unions — all policies, he argues, “more in keeping with our current system and our political culture.”
Both lovers and haters of basic income often miss an important point: We don’t have great data on how it would work or what would happen if it did. Similar policies were tested in both Canada and the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s, but studies of their effects were either flawed or abandoned. “To be honest, a full long-term universal basic income has never been tried, let alone rigorously evaluated,” said Michael Faye, the co-founder and executive chairman of Give Directly, a nonprofit that has pioneered direct cash transfers to the extreme poor, primarily in Kenya and Uganda.1 Earlier this month, Faye announced Give Directly’s plan to launch a large basic income pilot in Kenya, giving at least 6,000 people a guaranteed income for 10 to 15 years. They hope to find out what happens when everyone in a randomly selected place receives a guaranteed basic income for a long period — something that has never been done before.
Experiments like this are important for our understanding of how basic income would work. But the idea has always been about politics as much as economics. Until we have more evidence, the best thing basic income has going for it is its broad appeal — after all, who doesn’t like free money?
Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation — to address social ills by just giving people money — has a long history.
Thomas Paine, the intellectual founding father and pamphleteer, outlined a plan in his 1797 essay “Agrarian Justice” to create a national fund making payments of 15 pounds sterling to each adult over 21 years old. In the early 20th century, socialists and labor activists took up the cause, arguing basic income could empower workers and transform economies: British philosopher Bertrand Russell backed it, along with those in the social credit movement in Britain; left-wing Louisiana Gov. Huey Long supported it while pushing to “Share the Wealth.” But basic income never really caught on. In the U.S., the New Deal — which focused on boosting employment through public works projects, expanded workers’ rights and new forms of social assistance like Social Security — was the approach that won out instead.
In the 1960s, basic income became intertwined with the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fan. In his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King wrote: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Around the same time, its appeal expanded rightward. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman began to advocate for a negative income tax, whereby those earning below a certain threshold would get money from the government instead of paying taxes. At the end of the ’60s, President Richard Nixon’s plan for a partial basic income passed the House of Representatives before stalling in the Senate. No longer a proposal of bleeding-heart lefties, basic income was endorsed by a slew of notable economists (including several who went on to nab Nobel Prizes).
But by the early 1980s, enthusiasm had petered out again. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took power in the U.S. and Britain, riding a wave of conservative backlash to expansive government programs. The tenor of debate shifted from improving the welfare state to cutting it. Those receiving government assistance were called lazy, if not corrupt. “Welfare queen” entered the lexicon and President Bill Clinton promised to end welfare as we know it. Progressives and anti-poverty advocates went on the defensive. Basic income was tabled, if not forgotten.
In the U.S., we’re left with a patchwork benefits system, an indecipherable alphabet soup of programs: SNAP, TANF, CHIP, Section 8, EITC, WIC, SSDI. The U.S. government spends nearly $1 trillion across dozens of separate programs at the state and federal level,2 as this byzantine diagram from the House Ways and Means Committee shows. This all requires enormous administrative oversight on the part of the government, and it requires the ability to navigate multiple agencies on the part of recipients.
The problems with this system go beyond its complicated structure. Because eligibility for most social assistance is based on income (or is “means-tested”), recipients lose their benefits as they earn more income — this is often labeled the “welfare trap” or “poverty trap.” For example: A family of four can’t qualify for food stamps if it earns more than $31,536. These benefit phase-outs, or “cliffs,” essentially create steep marginal tax rates on the poor.
flowers-ubi-1
Even welfare advocates are critical of the incentives embedded in this system. “If you’re a dollar over, you can’t get assistance,” said Wessita McKinley, founder and director of Sistas United, a nonprofit working with individuals in poverty around the Washington, D.C., area. “Sometimes it feels like a governmental control; you’re on a leash, and you can only go so far.”
Basic income promises an escape from the welfare trap — all the benefits would be the same, regardless of circumstance. And by cutting a single check for the same amount of money, it could dramatically reduce administrative costs.
538_libertarian_finalflat_edit
“The money we spend on welfare will be better spent — more productive for the kind of ends we want — if we spend it through a basic income,” said Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and one of the most prominent libertarian advocates for basic income. Despite squeamishness at the idea of government “handouts,” some libertarians see basic income as a more efficient replacement for current social programs, one that would streamline the welfare bureaucracy and reduce costs overall.
He also argues that basic income is superior on moral grounds. People could spend their money however they want. No longer would food stamp recipients, for example, be constrained to using their benefits to buy food, or even certain types of food. “There is something objectionable about paternalism: treating adults as children who need to have their decisions made for them,” Zwolinski said.
A basic income could be any amount, but estimates typically begin with how much is currently spent on social assistance programs (that’s more or less how the Swiss basic income advocates arrived at 2,500 Swiss francs). This method is practical for both quantitative and political reasons: It’s fairly simple to evaluate existing social spending and to advocate basic income as a replacement. It’s harder, amid government austerity, to argue for more generous benefits, though many supporters of basic income would like to see spending increase.
Welfare spending varies widely from country to country. In 2011, per capita public social spending in the U.S. totaled about $700 per month, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group composed mostly of rich countries. This includes some programs commonly thought of as welfare, like food stamps and housing vouchers and bigger expenses like pensions (Social Security) and health care (Medicaid and Medicare). Among 35 OECD countries, the U.S. ranks 11th in this kind of social spending.
flowers-ubi-2
These figures are just a floor for a basic income; other economists researching the idea envision something “high enough to ensure a material existence and participation in society,” said Valerija Korosec in an email. Korosec is a sociologist at the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development in Slovenia, and the author of the first proposal for a basic income in her country. She suggests a target between the current poverty level and as high as 60 percent of the median income. Yes, that would require a huge increase in government revenues and thus, most likely, a big hike in tax rates to fund the redistribution as basic income.
Replacing existing benefits with a single, universal check also raises eyebrows among advocates for the poor who might otherwise be friendly to the basic income idea. “There are some benefits that could be made universal … but there are some benefits that are targeted to people in need,” said Deborah Weinstein, the executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-poverty alliance. People with disabilities, for example, “have requirements that not everyone has.”
Even if you could agree on an amount, there are other economic costs. The biggest concern among critics is that with a guaranteed basic income, too many people would stop working, or would be deterred from working more than they already do.
It’s not clear exactly what work effects would materialize under a basic income scheme. However, over the last 50 years there have been numerous attempts to study this question. Between 1968 and 1980, the U.S. ran four major negative income tax experiments in which families were assigned into treatment and control groups, given cash and tracked over several years. The experiments were located all over: in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; Iowa and North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and, the largest, in Seattle and Denver.
“We learned an enormous amount from those experiments,” said Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University-Qatar professor who has studied the NIT experiments extensively. But the results “were a political failure.” The core question unanswered by either side: What is an acceptable decline in work? Unsurprisingly, work effort did decline. Some NIT recipients cut back their hours, but the declines were modest: no more than 5 to 7 percent among primary earners, and a bit more for secondary earners.
538_experimentalist_finalflat
But participants quitting altogether didn’t happen, and people who did cut back their hours used their newly available time to pursue other goals, including going to school. “Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal,” wrote Widerquist in his 2005 paper summarizing the studies.
While the purpose of the NIT pilots was to observe changes in work effort, an unrelated phenomenon caught the eye of critics: divorce. Controversy erupted when data from the Seattle and Denver studies seemed to show an increase in the divorce rate among participants (those findings were later discovered to be the result of a statistical error). The press spun wild stories, and the political credibility of NIT — and of basic income, for that matter — began to unravel. Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey threatened to prosecute families in the experiments with welfare fraud. The experiments were allowed to run their course but the divorce controversy and concerns about work disincentives effectively killed the momentum behind the program.
As time has passed, the interpretation of these experiments has become more positive. While work declined, it fell by a modest amount. That gives hope to advocates, who cite these studies as evidence that basic income can be implemented with few economic side effects. “I don’t worry as much about work disincentives as some other people,” said Zwolinski, the libertarian advocate.
The original seed planted by Friedman’s negative income tax idea eventually blossomed into the Earned Income Tax Credit, thought by both conservative and liberal economists to be one of the more effective anti-poverty programs in the U.S. because it manages to encourage work while avoiding the benefits cliff. The argument for a basic income as an anti-poverty program over something like the EITC is that it would be easier to administer.
What do we know about giving a guaranteed income to everyone? Not much. Negative income tax policies such as the EITC target specific groups, usually the poor. They have been tested. But basic income is often pitched as universal — everyone would get the same amount, regardless of their circumstances. And that has never been examined in a rigorous way.
The closest research we have to how a universal basic income could work comes from a small town in Canada. From 1974 to 1979, the Canadian government partnered with the province of Manitoba to run an experiment on the idea of providing a minimum income to residents. The result was MINCOME, a guaranteed annual income offered to every eligible family in Dauphin, a prairie town of about 10,000, and smaller numbers of residents in Winnipeg and some rural communities throughout the province.3 MINCOME remains one of the most influential studies of basic income in a rich-world country.
Evelyn Forget, now an economist at the University of Manitoba, was a student in Toronto at the time. “I knew this was happening in Manitoba. I just stopped hearing about it,” she said. When Canada’s governing party changed midway through the MINCOME experiment, funding dried up and the researchers were told to archive their data for later analysis. No database was created, and the results of MINCOME were not examined.
Decades later, Forget started digging for the data. She unearthed 1,800 dusty cardboard boxes — with information on each family receiving MINCOME — at Canada’s National Archives. Forget digitized the materials and matched MINCOME records with those in the database of Canada’s universal health insurance program, which was introduced around the same time. That allowed her to compare the health of those receiving MINCOME to the health of similar people who didn’t. It resulted in a blockbuster research paper, decades in the making: “The Town With No Poverty,” published in 2011.
Families receiving MINCOME had fewer hospitalizations, accidents and injuries, Forget found. Mental health hospitalizations fell dramatically. And the high school completion rate ticked up during the years of the experiment, with 16-to-18-year-old boys, in particular, more likely to finish school. Younger adolescent girls were less likely to give birth before age 25, and when they did, they had fewer kids.
The program brought most recipients above Canada’s poverty line. And the employment effects in Dauphin were modest. “For primary earners — those with full-time jobs — there was virtually no decline” in work, Forget said. “Nobody was quitting their jobs.” Cash from the government eased families’ economic anxiety, allowing them to invest in their health and plan over a longer horizon.
MINCOME is now serving as inspiration for basic income’s comeback in Canada. The Liberal Party, which recently swept to power behind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is seriously flirting with the idea. There are several popular petitions to add it to the party’s platform, and a Liberal-dominated committee in Parliament is recommending the federal government study the idea. In its 2016 budget, the provincial government of Ontario announced plans to conduct a basic income pilot this year.
The U.S. negative income tax experiments and the Canadian MINCOME pilot, while useful, can only tell us so much about what happens when you give people free money. One reason is that they don’t meet rigorous modern standards for randomized control trials, the gold-standard of experiments. A number of basic income experiments popping up around the world are designed to get better data.
Give Directly, which is launching the basic income pilot in Kenya, has previously run RCTs to examine the effects of giving cash unconditionally; those experiments have shown that cash works wonders, and the peer-reviewed results have won over economists. The children of recipients are healthier and get more education; adults earn more income by using the cash to plan investments over a longer horizon; spending on alcohol and other vices — a worry some critics of cash grants raise — stays flat or even declines.
Give Directly’s work has gained broad acclaim as a more efficient and effective form of charity. “We have learned a lot about the positive impacts of cash transfer programs,” Faye, the group’s executive chairman, said. But taking the next step requires addressing many more questions that haven’t even begun to be answered: “Should the transfer be one-time or recurrent? How long should the transfer last? What is the right amount?”
Give Directly’s analysis of previous basic income experiments finds them coming up short. A bullet-proof experiment on basic income should be universal, randomized, long term and basic (that is, the income should be sufficient to live on). No experiment has met all four: Some are basic, but not randomized; some are randomized, but not universal; and so on. The MINCOME pilot, for instance, was randomized and basic but lasted less than five years. The U.S. negative income tax experiments were similarly limited. Some highly touted experiments, including in Namibia and India, either weren’t randomized or didn’t provide enough income to be called basic. (Give Directly has a detailed breakdown of why every basic income experiment attempted so far has failed to be rigorous.)
With basic income’s credibility on the line, Faye worries a flimsy study could be worse than none at all. He points to the excitement over microfinance as an instance where evidence later disappointed expectations. Basic income should avoid letting anecdote get ahead of the data.
“There is no empirical evidence on whether basic income works or not,” said Markus Kanerva, the founder of Tänk, a think tank working with the Finnish government’s social security agency to design and prepare the implementation of a basic income pilot. The study has been promised 20 million euros over two years and could provide a partial basic income up to 750 euros per month to more than 1,000 Finnish citizens.
Researchers in the Netherlands have a similar aspiration to run a rigorous randomized controlled trial of basic income in municipalities around the country. Just don’t call it basic income. “For political strategy reasons, they’re staying away from the term ‘basic income,’ ” said Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at the University of Tampere in Finland, who is in contact with those running the Dutch experiments. Instead, the pilots are billed as “trust experiments” and the basic income is often called a “citizen’s wage.” The cities of Utrecht, with a population over 300,000, and Tilburg, at over 200,000, are the largest Dutch municipalities planning to conduct an experiment. Two other major municipalities are on board but are waiting to get a green light from the minister of social affairs; and 15 smaller municipalities are hoping to get clearance, too.
It’s not just governments and charities attracted to the idea of basic income. The private sector is curious, too. Silicon Valley in particular. These enthusiasts are motivated less by an interest in improving the welfare state and more by a desire to guard against much bigger economic changes coming down the pike. In a much-written-about 2013 paper, two Oxford economists estimated that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs were at risk of computerization. Increasingly, technologists envision basic income as a “hack,” or fix, to the system — it offers a way of coping with an economic future dominated by automation, a fallback plan for when most human labor isn’t valued or needed.
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“We think there could be a possibility where 95 percent — or a vast majority — of people won’t be able to contribute to the workforce,” said Matt Krisiloff, the manager of Y Combinator’s basic income project. “We need to start preparing for that transformation.”
Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s president, committed $10 million personally toward YC Research, out of which this experiment will be run. Plans are still in early development but the study will “most likely be a randomized control trial,” said Krisiloff. That means giving cash to randomly selected Americans, hopefully over a long period. “To really do this well, you’d have to do it on a large swath of the nation,” Krisiloff acknowledged. The ultimate goal, he hinted, will be to inspire some local or state government to launch a basic income pilot of its own.
“Basic income is about wanting to embrace automation,” said Albert Wenger, a partner at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. In his forthcoming book “World After Capital,” Wenger argues scarcity has driven epoch shifts: The invention of agriculture changed the scarcity from food to land; the Enlightenment and subsequent industrial developments shifted scarcity from land to capital; but as computers and the internet have transformed us into an information society, capital is no longer scarce. “We have enough physical capital in the world. but it’s unequally distributed,” Wenger said. The last big scarcity is attention. “What are we actually spending our time on, both collectively and individually?”
Wenger wants less time spent on tasks that could be automated and more time spent on issues he thinks are insufficiently addressed: fighting climate change, exploring space, preventing the next global pandemic. Like the backers of basic income in Switzerland, he thinks providing for basic needs will allow innovation to flourish. With a basic income, he said, “you’re put in charge of your time. You’ll have 100 percent of your time available to you.”
Cameron Ottens wasn’t going to wait on some government or company to run an experiment. “There is some steam behind basic income,” he said, so he wanted to “start the ball rolling.” For some hard-core advocates, basic income is less about pure science than living a lifestyle. Ottens is a co-founder of My Basic Income, a San Francisco-based, one-year basic income raffle. Yes, that’s right — anyone can enter, for free, to win a basic income of $1,250 per month for a year. My Basic Income successfully raised $15,000 and plans to raffle it off at the end of April or in early May. The group plans to track the winner as a case study in what a basic income can free us up to do. The idea has already attracted interest from sweepstakes and raffle enthusiasts who may not know much about basic income but like a free shot at $15,000.
Others have crowdfunded their own basic income. About two years ago, Scott Santens, a New Orleans-based writer, discovered Patreon, a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding site with a focus on creative types. It enables musicians, artists and niche bloggers to raise money directly from their fans. He took as his starting goal to raise enough to live on $1,000 per month; it took about a year to reach that goal, but at the end of last November he hit $12,000 and hasn’t looked back. Since then, he’s been living entirely off his personally crowdfunded basic income.
Popular interest in basic income has exploded, affording him the opportunity to fund a basic income for himself, mostly from fans of his writing — about basic income. Santens sees the rapid change happening in the world as driving this curiosity. “We have all this technology, and it scares some people. You’re thinking, when is my job going to be eliminated?”
In this context, Santens believes basic income will be “extremely impactful.” “We’re going away from a traditional, 40-hour per week economy … there is going to be a lot more flexibility and variety in what we’re doing,” he said.
From Switzerland to the Netherlands to Kenya to Silicon Valley, a mixture of insecurity and curiosity are driving interest in basic income, but its dominant ideology — and appeal — is utopian. The core existential struggle lurking in the debates over basic income centers on what meaning work holds in our lives. Straub, the Swiss referendum organizer, remembers his great-grandfather working 10 hours per day, six days per week. That kind of toil is no longer necessary, nor desirable. The dream of a world where we produce more than we need has come true.
Back when he was gathering signatures in 2012, he would joke about the supposedly impending Mayan apocalypse as a way to engage listeners on the core questions of basic income, questions he thinks still resonate: “Well, if the world really was going to end, how would you live this year? Why don’t you live your life like that?
“The market economy is great, but we want to substitute it with another system — take it to the next level,” he said. The big picture is about changing how we live. “This is a paradigm shift, and we want a referendum on that paradigm shift.”
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Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do? Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen. No conditions. No questions. Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live.
Straub had studied business, international policy and psychology at school and spent years working for IBM, the International Red Cross and a Montessori school. Basic income “struck a nerve,” he said. “People are burned out more than ever. You come to Switzerland and talk to people, they aren’t happy. They fear for their jobs. There is a gap between the economic possibility in this country and the quality of life.”
After Werner’s talk, Straub quit his job at the think tank and began to campaign for a basic income full time. He and a few hundred volunteers gathered 126,000 signatures over two years to force a referendum, now slated for June 5, to amend the Swiss Constitution to guarantee a basic income to all citizens. (The suggested amount is 2,500 Swiss francs per month, or about $1,700 after adjusting for the cost of living.)
Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, and compared to the United States, it offers far more generous health care and education to its citizens. But supporters of the referendum think the government can provide even more security. “We limit ourselves too much,” Straub said. “I’m interested in consciousness, expanding consciousness. And basic income is a wonderful tool for that — it challenges a lot of assumptions we have.”
The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”
He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.
“In the last five years we’ve taken on a new respectability. But in the last two years it has become an avalanche,” said Guy Standing, a British economist who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 to promote debate and research on the topic. Initially a small cabal of young economists, philosophers and activists, BIEN has grown into the largest hub for basic income supporters — a global network with national organizations in 23 countries.
Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger.
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The economic uncertainty surrounding basic income is huge, and the politics of bringing such a program about on a large scale are daunting. But something makes this radical proposal so exciting that people and governments are increasingly willing to try it. Basic income challenges our notions of the social safety net, the relationship between work and income, and how to adapt to technological change. That makes it one of the most audacious social policy experiments in modern history. It could fail disastrously, or it could change everything for the better.
Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state. Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs. Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”
Critics of the idea say it’s too expensive, would encourage people to stop working and possibly tank a country’s economy. It’s thought to be a political non-starter, too, especially in countries less wealthy and with less generous welfare states than Switzerland. And because basic income proposes a radical reform to the existing welfare system — one that many progressives, at least in the United States, have been defending tooth and nail over the last 30 years — it makes anti-poverty advocates nervous. Max Sawicky, a former economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in the U.S., outlined a progressive case against basic income in 2013, calling it a “distraction” from raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing full employment, rolling back Clinton-era welfare reforms and supporting unions — all policies, he argues, “more in keeping with our current system and our political culture.”
Both lovers and haters of basic income often miss an important point: We don’t have great data on how it would work or what would happen if it did. Similar policies were tested in both Canada and the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s, but studies of their effects were either flawed or abandoned. “To be honest, a full long-term universal basic income has never been tried, let alone rigorously evaluated,” said Michael Faye, the co-founder and executive chairman of Give Directly, a nonprofit that has pioneered direct cash transfers to the extreme poor, primarily in Kenya and Uganda.1 Earlier this month, Faye announced Give Directly’s plan to launch a large basic income pilot in Kenya, giving at least 6,000 people a guaranteed income for 10 to 15 years. They hope to find out what happens when everyone in a randomly selected place receives a guaranteed basic income for a long period — something that has never been done before.
Experiments like this are important for our understanding of how basic income would work. But the idea has always been about politics as much as economics. Until we have more evidence, the best thing basic income has going for it is its broad appeal — after all, who doesn’t like free money?
Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation — to address social ills by just giving people money — has a long history.
Thomas Paine, the intellectual founding father and pamphleteer, outlined a plan in his 1797 essay “Agrarian Justice” to create a national fund making payments of 15 pounds sterling to each adult over 21 years old. In the early 20th century, socialists and labor activists took up the cause, arguing basic income could empower workers and transform economies: British philosopher Bertrand Russell backed it, along with those in the social credit movement in Britain; left-wing Louisiana Gov. Huey Long supported it while pushing to “Share the Wealth.” But basic income never really caught on. In the U.S., the New Deal — which focused on boosting employment through public works projects, expanded workers’ rights and new forms of social assistance like Social Security — was the approach that won out instead.
In the 1960s, basic income became intertwined with the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fan. In his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” King wrote: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Around the same time, its appeal expanded rightward. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman began to advocate for a negative income tax, whereby those earning below a certain threshold would get money from the government instead of paying taxes. At the end of the ’60s, President Richard Nixon’s plan for a partial basic income passed the House of Representatives before stalling in the Senate. No longer a proposal of bleeding-heart lefties, basic income was endorsed by a slew of notable economists (including several who went on to nab Nobel Prizes).
But by the early 1980s, enthusiasm had petered out again. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took power in the U.S. and Britain, riding a wave of conservative backlash to expansive government programs. The tenor of debate shifted from improving the welfare state to cutting it. Those receiving government assistance were called lazy, if not corrupt. “Welfare queen” entered the lexicon and President Bill Clinton promised to end welfare as we know it. Progressives and anti-poverty advocates went on the defensive. Basic income was tabled, if not forgotten.
In the U.S., we’re left with a patchwork benefits system, an indecipherable alphabet soup of programs: SNAP, TANF, CHIP, Section 8, EITC, WIC, SSDI. The U.S. government spends nearly $1 trillion across dozens of separate programs at the state and federal level,2 as this byzantine diagram from the House Ways and Means Committee shows. This all requires enormous administrative oversight on the part of the government, and it requires the ability to navigate multiple agencies on the part of recipients.
The problems with this system go beyond its complicated structure. Because eligibility for most social assistance is based on income (or is “means-tested”), recipients lose their benefits as they earn more income — this is often labeled the “welfare trap” or “poverty trap.” For example: A family of four can’t qualify for food stamps if it earns more than $31,536. These benefit phase-outs, or “cliffs,” essentially create steep marginal tax rates on the poor.
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Even welfare advocates are critical of the incentives embedded in this system. “If you’re a dollar over, you can’t get assistance,” said Wessita McKinley, founder and director of Sistas United, a nonprofit working with individuals in poverty around the Washington, D.C., area. “Sometimes it feels like a governmental control; you’re on a leash, and you can only go so far.”
Basic income promises an escape from the welfare trap — all the benefits would be the same, regardless of circumstance. And by cutting a single check for the same amount of money, it could dramatically reduce administrative costs.
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“The money we spend on welfare will be better spent — more productive for the kind of ends we want — if we spend it through a basic income,” said Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego and one of the most prominent libertarian advocates for basic income. Despite squeamishness at the idea of government “handouts,” some libertarians see basic income as a more efficient replacement for current social programs, one that would streamline the welfare bureaucracy and reduce costs overall.
He also argues that basic income is superior on moral grounds. People could spend their money however they want. No longer would food stamp recipients, for example, be constrained to using their benefits to buy food, or even certain types of food. “There is something objectionable about paternalism: treating adults as children who need to have their decisions made for them,” Zwolinski said.
A basic income could be any amount, but estimates typically begin with how much is currently spent on social assistance programs (that’s more or less how the Swiss basic income advocates arrived at 2,500 Swiss francs). This method is practical for both quantitative and political reasons: It’s fairly simple to evaluate existing social spending and to advocate basic income as a replacement. It’s harder, amid government austerity, to argue for more generous benefits, though many supporters of basic income would like to see spending increase.
Welfare spending varies widely from country to country. In 2011, per capita public social spending in the U.S. totaled about $700 per month, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group composed mostly of rich countries. This includes some programs commonly thought of as welfare, like food stamps and housing vouchers and bigger expenses like pensions (Social Security) and health care (Medicaid and Medicare). Among 35 OECD countries, the U.S. ranks 11th in this kind of social spending.
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These figures are just a floor for a basic income; other economists researching the idea envision something “high enough to ensure a material existence and participation in society,” said Valerija Korosec in an email. Korosec is a sociologist at the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development in Slovenia, and the author of the first proposal for a basic income in her country. She suggests a target between the current poverty level and as high as 60 percent of the median income. Yes, that would require a huge increase in government revenues and thus, most likely, a big hike in tax rates to fund the redistribution as basic income.
Replacing existing benefits with a single, universal check also raises eyebrows among advocates for the poor who might otherwise be friendly to the basic income idea. “There are some benefits that could be made universal … but there are some benefits that are targeted to people in need,” said Deborah Weinstein, the executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-poverty alliance. People with disabilities, for example, “have requirements that not everyone has.”
Even if you could agree on an amount, there are other economic costs. The biggest concern among critics is that with a guaranteed basic income, too many people would stop working, or would be deterred from working more than they already do.
It’s not clear exactly what work effects would materialize under a basic income scheme. However, over the last 50 years there have been numerous attempts to study this question. Between 1968 and 1980, the U.S. ran four major negative income tax experiments in which families were assigned into treatment and control groups, given cash and tracked over several years. The experiments were located all over: in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; Iowa and North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and, the largest, in Seattle and Denver.
“We learned an enormous amount from those experiments,” said Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University-Qatar professor who has studied the NIT experiments extensively. But the results “were a political failure.” The core question unanswered by either side: What is an acceptable decline in work? Unsurprisingly, work effort did decline. Some NIT recipients cut back their hours, but the declines were modest: no more than 5 to 7 percent among primary earners, and a bit more for secondary earners.
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But participants quitting altogether didn’t happen, and people who did cut back their hours used their newly available time to pursue other goals, including going to school. “Some of the experimenters said that they were unable to find even a single instance of labor-market withdrawal,” wrote Widerquist in his 2005 paper summarizing the studies.
While the purpose of the NIT pilots was to observe changes in work effort, an unrelated phenomenon caught the eye of critics: divorce. Controversy erupted when data from the Seattle and Denver studies seemed to show an increase in the divorce rate among participants (those findings were later discovered to be the result of a statistical error). The press spun wild stories, and the political credibility of NIT — and of basic income, for that matter — began to unravel. Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey threatened to prosecute families in the experiments with welfare fraud. The experiments were allowed to run their course but the divorce controversy and concerns about work disincentives effectively killed the momentum behind the program.
As time has passed, the interpretation of these experiments has become more positive. While work declined, it fell by a modest amount. That gives hope to advocates, who cite these studies as evidence that basic income can be implemented with few economic side effects. “I don’t worry as much about work disincentives as some other people,” said Zwolinski, the libertarian advocate.
The original seed planted by Friedman’s negative income tax idea eventually blossomed into the Earned Income Tax Credit, thought by both conservative and liberal economists to be one of the more effective anti-poverty programs in the U.S. because it manages to encourage work while avoiding the benefits cliff. The argument for a basic income as an anti-poverty program over something like the EITC is that it would be easier to administer.
What do we know about giving a guaranteed income to everyone? Not much. Negative income tax policies such as the EITC target specific groups, usually the poor. They have been tested. But basic income is often pitched as universal — everyone would get the same amount, regardless of their circumstances. And that has never been examined in a rigorous way.
The closest research we have to how a universal basic income could work comes from a small town in Canada. From 1974 to 1979, the Canadian government partnered with the province of Manitoba to run an experiment on the idea of providing a minimum income to residents. The result was MINCOME, a guaranteed annual income offered to every eligible family in Dauphin, a prairie town of about 10,000, and smaller numbers of residents in Winnipeg and some rural communities throughout the province.3 MINCOME remains one of the most influential studies of basic income in a rich-world country.
Evelyn Forget, now an economist at the University of Manitoba, was a student in Toronto at the time. “I knew this was happening in Manitoba. I just stopped hearing about it,” she said. When Canada’s governing party changed midway through the MINCOME experiment, funding dried up and the researchers were told to archive their data for later analysis. No database was created, and the results of MINCOME were not examined.
Decades later, Forget started digging for the data. She unearthed 1,800 dusty cardboard boxes — with information on each family receiving MINCOME — at Canada’s National Archives. Forget digitized the materials and matched MINCOME records with those in the database of Canada’s universal health insurance program, which was introduced around the same time. That allowed her to compare the health of those receiving MINCOME to the health of similar people who didn’t. It resulted in a blockbuster research paper, decades in the making: “The Town With No Poverty,” published in 2011.
Families receiving MINCOME had fewer hospitalizations, accidents and injuries, Forget found. Mental health hospitalizations fell dramatically. And the high school completion rate ticked up during the years of the experiment, with 16-to-18-year-old boys, in particular, more likely to finish school. Younger adolescent girls were less likely to give birth before age 25, and when they did, they had fewer kids.
The program brought most recipients above Canada’s poverty line. And the employment effects in Dauphin were modest. “For primary earners — those with full-time jobs — there was virtually no decline” in work, Forget said. “Nobody was quitting their jobs.” Cash from the government eased families’ economic anxiety, allowing them to invest in their health and plan over a longer horizon.
MINCOME is now serving as inspiration for basic income’s comeback in Canada. The Liberal Party, which recently swept to power behind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is seriously flirting with the idea. There are several popular petitions to add it to the party’s platform, and a Liberal-dominated committee in Parliament is recommending the federal government study the idea. In its 2016 budget, the provincial government of Ontario announced plans to conduct a basic income pilot this year.
The U.S. negative income tax experiments and the Canadian MINCOME pilot, while useful, can only tell us so much about what happens when you give people free money. One reason is that they don’t meet rigorous modern standards for randomized control trials, the gold-standard of experiments. A number of basic income experiments popping up around the world are designed to get better data.
Give Directly, which is launching the basic income pilot in Kenya, has previously run RCTs to examine the effects of giving cash unconditionally; those experiments have shown that cash works wonders, and the peer-reviewed results have won over economists. The children of recipients are healthier and get more education; adults earn more income by using the cash to plan investments over a longer horizon; spending on alcohol and other vices — a worry some critics of cash grants raise — stays flat or even declines.
Give Directly’s work has gained broad acclaim as a more efficient and effective form of charity. “We have learned a lot about the positive impacts of cash transfer programs,” Faye, the group’s executive chairman, said. But taking the next step requires addressing many more questions that haven’t even begun to be answered: “Should the transfer be one-time or recurrent? How long should the transfer last? What is the right amount?”
Give Directly’s analysis of previous basic income experiments finds them coming up short. A bullet-proof experiment on basic income should be universal, randomized, long term and basic (that is, the income should be sufficient to live on). No experiment has met all four: Some are basic, but not randomized; some are randomized, but not universal; and so on. The MINCOME pilot, for instance, was randomized and basic but lasted less than five years. The U.S. negative income tax experiments were similarly limited. Some highly touted experiments, including in Namibia and India, either weren’t randomized or didn’t provide enough income to be called basic. (Give Directly has a detailed breakdown of why every basic income experiment attempted so far has failed to be rigorous.)
With basic income’s credibility on the line, Faye worries a flimsy study could be worse than none at all. He points to the excitement over microfinance as an instance where evidence later disappointed expectations. Basic income should avoid letting anecdote get ahead of the data.
“There is no empirical evidence on whether basic income works or not,” said Markus Kanerva, the founder of Tänk, a think tank working with the Finnish government’s social security agency to design and prepare the implementation of a basic income pilot. The study has been promised 20 million euros over two years and could provide a partial basic income up to 750 euros per month to more than 1,000 Finnish citizens.
Researchers in the Netherlands have a similar aspiration to run a rigorous randomized controlled trial of basic income in municipalities around the country. Just don’t call it basic income. “For political strategy reasons, they’re staying away from the term ‘basic income,’ ” said Jurgen De Wispelaere, a research fellow at the University of Tampere in Finland, who is in contact with those running the Dutch experiments. Instead, the pilots are billed as “trust experiments” and the basic income is often called a “citizen’s wage.” The cities of Utrecht, with a population over 300,000, and Tilburg, at over 200,000, are the largest Dutch municipalities planning to conduct an experiment. Two other major municipalities are on board but are waiting to get a green light from the minister of social affairs; and 15 smaller municipalities are hoping to get clearance, too.
It’s not just governments and charities attracted to the idea of basic income. The private sector is curious, too. Silicon Valley in particular. These enthusiasts are motivated less by an interest in improving the welfare state and more by a desire to guard against much bigger economic changes coming down the pike. In a much-written-about 2013 paper, two Oxford economists estimated that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs were at risk of computerization. Increasingly, technologists envision basic income as a “hack,” or fix, to the system — it offers a way of coping with an economic future dominated by automation, a fallback plan for when most human labor isn’t valued or needed.
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“We think there could be a possibility where 95 percent — or a vast majority — of people won’t be able to contribute to the workforce,” said Matt Krisiloff, the manager of Y Combinator’s basic income project. “We need to start preparing for that transformation.”
Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s president, committed $10 million personally toward YC Research, out of which this experiment will be run. Plans are still in early development but the study will “most likely be a randomized control trial,” said Krisiloff. That means giving cash to randomly selected Americans, hopefully over a long period. “To really do this well, you’d have to do it on a large swath of the nation,” Krisiloff acknowledged. The ultimate goal, he hinted, will be to inspire some local or state government to launch a basic income pilot of its own.
“Basic income is about wanting to embrace automation,” said Albert Wenger, a partner at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. In his forthcoming book “World After Capital,” Wenger argues scarcity has driven epoch shifts: The invention of agriculture changed the scarcity from food to land; the Enlightenment and subsequent industrial developments shifted scarcity from land to capital; but as computers and the internet have transformed us into an information society, capital is no longer scarce. “We have enough physical capital in the world. but it’s unequally distributed,” Wenger said. The last big scarcity is attention. “What are we actually spending our time on, both collectively and individually?”
Wenger wants less time spent on tasks that could be automated and more time spent on issues he thinks are insufficiently addressed: fighting climate change, exploring space, preventing the next global pandemic. Like the backers of basic income in Switzerland, he thinks providing for basic needs will allow innovation to flourish. With a basic income, he said, “you’re put in charge of your time. You’ll have 100 percent of your time available to you.”
Cameron Ottens wasn’t going to wait on some government or company to run an experiment. “There is some steam behind basic income,” he said, so he wanted to “start the ball rolling.” For some hard-core advocates, basic income is less about pure science than living a lifestyle. Ottens is a co-founder of My Basic Income, a San Francisco-based, one-year basic income raffle. Yes, that’s right — anyone can enter, for free, to win a basic income of $1,250 per month for a year. My Basic Income successfully raised $15,000 and plans to raffle it off at the end of April or in early May. The group plans to track the winner as a case study in what a basic income can free us up to do. The idea has already attracted interest from sweepstakes and raffle enthusiasts who may not know much about basic income but like a free shot at $15,000.
Others have crowdfunded their own basic income. About two years ago, Scott Santens, a New Orleans-based writer, discovered Patreon, a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding site with a focus on creative types. It enables musicians, artists and niche bloggers to raise money directly from their fans. He took as his starting goal to raise enough to live on $1,000 per month; it took about a year to reach that goal, but at the end of last November he hit $12,000 and hasn’t looked back. Since then, he’s been living entirely off his personally crowdfunded basic income.
Popular interest in basic income has exploded, affording him the opportunity to fund a basic income for himself, mostly from fans of his writing — about basic income. Santens sees the rapid change happening in the world as driving this curiosity. “We have all this technology, and it scares some people. You’re thinking, when is my job going to be eliminated?”
In this context, Santens believes basic income will be “extremely impactful.” “We’re going away from a traditional, 40-hour per week economy … there is going to be a lot more flexibility and variety in what we’re doing,” he said.
From Switzerland to the Netherlands to Kenya to Silicon Valley, a mixture of insecurity and curiosity are driving interest in basic income, but its dominant ideology — and appeal — is utopian. The core existential struggle lurking in the debates over basic income centers on what meaning work holds in our lives. Straub, the Swiss referendum organizer, remembers his great-grandfather working 10 hours per day, six days per week. That kind of toil is no longer necessary, nor desirable. The dream of a world where we produce more than we need has come true.
Back when he was gathering signatures in 2012, he would joke about the supposedly impending Mayan apocalypse as a way to engage listeners on the core questions of basic income, questions he thinks still resonate: “Well, if the world really was going to end, how would you live this year? Why don’t you live your life like that?
“The market economy is great, but we want to substitute it with another system — take it to the next level,” he said. The big picture is about changing how we live. “This is a paradigm shift, and we want a referendum on that paradigm shift.”
Source
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/
#BasicIncome
Why free money beats bullshit jobs
"The universal basic income is an idea whose time has come. And, slowly but surely, it is converting members of the tech elite.
It’s a radical idea: Everyone should get an unconditional, monthly allowance, whether you’re rich or poor, old or young, overworked or out of work. An allowance that should be enough to live on, and how you spend it, is up to you. The only condition, as such, is that you have a pulse.
The influential startup fund Y Combinator is already rolling out a study on basic income. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen calls it “a very interesting idea.” And Business for Basic Income offers a brand-new web platform where business owners worldwide can express their support for the idea.
So what’s going on? It’s simple, really: The robots are coming, and people in Silicon Valley have realized that it’s only a matter of time before they swallow up most jobs. That it is high time, in other words, to start distributing cash. For free.
As a staunch basic income advocate for several years now, I couldn’t be happier to see that a multitude of millionaires are suddenly rallying around this idea. And yet, I’m also suspicious: Libertarian ultra-capitalists throwing their chips in with Marxist academicians? Sounds fishy.
Basic income: it’s not about robots
For starters, take the financing of basic income. Would Apple and Google finally be willing to cough up their fair share of tax dollars? Don’t bet on it. Hedge fund manager Chris Hawkins proposes we just ditch the old welfare state, Medicare, Medicaid and all. That’s a far cry from the scenario put forward by left-libertarian philosopher Philippe van Parijs, who for three decades now has been arguing for a basic income to supplement social welfare programs.
More to the point, however, is that the “rise of the robots” is actually the worst possible justification for basic income. It’s an argument that hinges on a future which is altogether uncertain. Sure, there are plenty of trend watchers who earn fat paychecks forecasting the imminent demise of 90% of all jobs. But if history has anything to teach us, it’s that trend watchers can’t be trusted.
In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report stated that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just 14 hours, with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed. Obviously, things turned out differently. We wanted mass unemployment; instead we got extreme inequality. Apparently, there will always be some billionaire who’s unwilling to give up his personal fan-waver.
But there is good news, too. We don’t have to wait around for automated butlers and self-driving trucks. Forget about robots. The reasons why we need basic income are infinitely better.
It’s about freedom and meaning
To begin with, basic income would give us all genuine freedom. Nowadays, numerous people are forced to spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless. Jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. “Bullshit jobs,” the anthropologist David Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.
And we’re not talking about just a handful of people here. In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission. Another recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37% think they have a bullshit job.
What is more, the very reason we don’t have personal robo-butlers and flying cars yet may be precisely because we don’t have a basic income. How many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, inventors, and musicians are at this very moment flipping hamburgers or driving for Uber? And imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” mocks Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s resident intellectual. But he doesn’t say why. A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s finest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Nowhere are there as many bullshit jobs, however, as in Silicon Valley. A survey of 5,000 software developers and engineers last year found that, in the words of The Economist, “many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated.” Only 19% of tech employees say they are satisfied with their jobs. A mere 17% feel valued. Or, as a former math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.” In plain English: Higher taxes would get more people to do work that’s useful. A basic income would give them the real freedom to make something of their lives.
Basic income could help eradicate poverty
The second argument for free cash is that it would wipe out poverty once and for all. As an investment, its potential is nothing short of spectacular. A 2013 study estimated the costs of child poverty in the U.S. at as much as $500 billion a year. Eradicating poverty, by contrast, would cost only $175 billion, according to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations. That’s roughly a quarter of the U.S. military budget. As a matter of fact, all the world’s developed countries had it within their means to eliminate poverty years ago.
Could basic income kill the welfare state?
The third reason we need a basic income is that it would pull the plug on a welfare system that has devolved into a perverse behemoth of control and humiliation. Officials keep tabs on public assistance recipients via Facebook to check whether they’re spending their money wisely – and woe be to anyone who dares to do unapproved volunteer work. An army of social services workers is needed to guide people through the jungle of eligibility, application, approval, and recapture procedures. And then the corps of inspectors has to be mobilized to sift through the paperwork.
The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “The political right is afraid people will stop working, and the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices,” says University of Manitoba economist and basic income expert Evelyn Forget. A basic income system (combined with free education and universal healthcare) would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever.
Why basic income could work
In the early 1970s, four large basic income experiments were conducted in the U.S. All were an unmitigated success. Participants did not suddenly all sit around twiddling their thumbs – far from it. Free cash brought one bullshit job after another crashing down. As the concluding report of one of the experiments, in Seattle, noted, “[The] declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home.” For example, one mother who had dropped out of high school worked less in order to earn a degree in psychology and get a job as a researcher. Another woman took acting classes, and her husband began composing music. “We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists,” she told the researchers. Among youth included in the experiment, almost all the hours not spent on paid work went into more education. Such as in New Jersey, where the high school graduation rate rose 30% among study subjects.
But that feels like a long time ago. These days, the idea of a basic income for all Americans is as unthinkable as women’s suffrage and equal rights for racial minorities was in the past. It’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever be able to shake off the dogma that if you want money, you have to work for it.
And yet, the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is only evidence of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. Basic income remains a tremendous idea. We don’t have to wait for robots or for Silicon Valley. If there’s one economic reform that everyone who has been getting the short end of the economic stick these past 40 years – that is, practically everyone – should be championing, it’s universal basic income."
Source
http://fusion.net/story/288907/why-free-money-beats-bullshit-jobs/
#BasicIncome
It’s a radical idea: Everyone should get an unconditional, monthly allowance, whether you’re rich or poor, old or young, overworked or out of work. An allowance that should be enough to live on, and how you spend it, is up to you. The only condition, as such, is that you have a pulse.
The influential startup fund Y Combinator is already rolling out a study on basic income. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen calls it “a very interesting idea.” And Business for Basic Income offers a brand-new web platform where business owners worldwide can express their support for the idea.
So what’s going on? It’s simple, really: The robots are coming, and people in Silicon Valley have realized that it’s only a matter of time before they swallow up most jobs. That it is high time, in other words, to start distributing cash. For free.
As a staunch basic income advocate for several years now, I couldn’t be happier to see that a multitude of millionaires are suddenly rallying around this idea. And yet, I’m also suspicious: Libertarian ultra-capitalists throwing their chips in with Marxist academicians? Sounds fishy.
Basic income: it’s not about robots
For starters, take the financing of basic income. Would Apple and Google finally be willing to cough up their fair share of tax dollars? Don’t bet on it. Hedge fund manager Chris Hawkins proposes we just ditch the old welfare state, Medicare, Medicaid and all. That’s a far cry from the scenario put forward by left-libertarian philosopher Philippe van Parijs, who for three decades now has been arguing for a basic income to supplement social welfare programs.
More to the point, however, is that the “rise of the robots” is actually the worst possible justification for basic income. It’s an argument that hinges on a future which is altogether uncertain. Sure, there are plenty of trend watchers who earn fat paychecks forecasting the imminent demise of 90% of all jobs. But if history has anything to teach us, it’s that trend watchers can’t be trusted.
In the mid-1960s, a Senate committee report stated that by 2000 the workweek would be down to just 14 hours, with at least seven weeks off a year. The RAND Corporation, an influential think tank, foresaw a future in which just 2% of the population would be able to produce everything society needed. Obviously, things turned out differently. We wanted mass unemployment; instead we got extreme inequality. Apparently, there will always be some billionaire who’s unwilling to give up his personal fan-waver.
But there is good news, too. We don’t have to wait around for automated butlers and self-driving trucks. Forget about robots. The reasons why we need basic income are infinitely better.
It’s about freedom and meaning
To begin with, basic income would give us all genuine freedom. Nowadays, numerous people are forced to spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless. Jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices. “Bullshit jobs,” the anthropologist David Graeber calls them. They’re the jobs that even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.
And we’re not talking about just a handful of people here. In a survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission. Another recent poll among Brits revealed that as many as 37% think they have a bullshit job.
What is more, the very reason we don’t have personal robo-butlers and flying cars yet may be precisely because we don’t have a basic income. How many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, inventors, and musicians are at this very moment flipping hamburgers or driving for Uber? And imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” mocks Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s resident intellectual. But he doesn’t say why. A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country’s finest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance.
Nowhere are there as many bullshit jobs, however, as in Silicon Valley. A survey of 5,000 software developers and engineers last year found that, in the words of The Economist, “many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated.” Only 19% of tech employees say they are satisfied with their jobs. A mere 17% feel valued. Or, as a former math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.” In plain English: Higher taxes would get more people to do work that’s useful. A basic income would give them the real freedom to make something of their lives.
Basic income could help eradicate poverty
The second argument for free cash is that it would wipe out poverty once and for all. As an investment, its potential is nothing short of spectacular. A 2013 study estimated the costs of child poverty in the U.S. at as much as $500 billion a year. Eradicating poverty, by contrast, would cost only $175 billion, according to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations. That’s roughly a quarter of the U.S. military budget. As a matter of fact, all the world’s developed countries had it within their means to eliminate poverty years ago.
Could basic income kill the welfare state?
The third reason we need a basic income is that it would pull the plug on a welfare system that has devolved into a perverse behemoth of control and humiliation. Officials keep tabs on public assistance recipients via Facebook to check whether they’re spending their money wisely – and woe be to anyone who dares to do unapproved volunteer work. An army of social services workers is needed to guide people through the jungle of eligibility, application, approval, and recapture procedures. And then the corps of inspectors has to be mobilized to sift through the paperwork.
The welfare state, which should foster people’s sense of security and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. It is a grotesque pact between right and left. “The political right is afraid people will stop working, and the left doesn’t trust them to make their own choices,” says University of Manitoba economist and basic income expert Evelyn Forget. A basic income system (combined with free education and universal healthcare) would be a better compromise. In terms of redistribution, it would meet the left’s demands for fairness; where the regime of interference and humiliation are concerned, it would give the right a more limited government than ever.
Why basic income could work
In the early 1970s, four large basic income experiments were conducted in the U.S. All were an unmitigated success. Participants did not suddenly all sit around twiddling their thumbs – far from it. Free cash brought one bullshit job after another crashing down. As the concluding report of one of the experiments, in Seattle, noted, “[The] declines in hours of paid work were undoubtedly compensated in part by other useful activities, such as search for better jobs or work in the home.” For example, one mother who had dropped out of high school worked less in order to earn a degree in psychology and get a job as a researcher. Another woman took acting classes, and her husband began composing music. “We’re now self-sufficient, income-earning artists,” she told the researchers. Among youth included in the experiment, almost all the hours not spent on paid work went into more education. Such as in New Jersey, where the high school graduation rate rose 30% among study subjects.
But that feels like a long time ago. These days, the idea of a basic income for all Americans is as unthinkable as women’s suffrage and equal rights for racial minorities was in the past. It’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever be able to shake off the dogma that if you want money, you have to work for it.
And yet, the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is only evidence of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. Basic income remains a tremendous idea. We don’t have to wait for robots or for Silicon Valley. If there’s one economic reform that everyone who has been getting the short end of the economic stick these past 40 years – that is, practically everyone – should be championing, it’s universal basic income."
Source
http://fusion.net/story/288907/why-free-money-beats-bullshit-jobs/
#BasicIncome
Monday, April 4, 2016
EUROPE: Basic income is an essential approach for social democracy, says Varoufakis
"In a recent interview with ‘The Economist’, Yanis Varoufakis says basic income is an ‘absolutely essential’ approach for the future of social democracy.
Source
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/04/basic-income-essential-approach-varoufakis/
#BasiceIncome
This is a major endorsement from a rising star of the European left. Varoufakis is a Greek economist who served as Finance Minister of Greece under the first Syriza government installed in January 2015. He recently launched ‘Democracy in Europe Movement 2025’ (DiEM25), with the aim of transforming the European Union from an elitist technocracy into a transparent and democratic institution that serves people’s interests.
In the interview, Varoufakis links the case for a basic income to the future of social democracy:
Today we are facing a serious danger of large masses of people who have low economic value. This is a powder keg in the foundations of society. Making sure that the great wealth-creation which capital is capable of does not light this dynamite — the basic income approach— is absolutely essential, but it is not part of the social democratic tradition. Think about it. The post-war consensus was all about national insurance, it was not about basic income. Now, either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.
Further on, he adds:
So what do we need to do to capture hope? That is the issue. In the 50s and 60s the dream of shared prosperity was that which gave hope. (…) So I think the basic income approach is capable of doing this as long as (…) you can explain to them where the money will come from, that it will not be simply debt, that we are going to generate a lot more income and a chunk of it is going to fund this. But we, the Left, must not be fearful.
Surfers should be fed
Varoufakis also mentions the famous controversy initiated by Philippe van Parijs and John Rawls about whether ‘surfers should be fed’. Varoufakis stands with van Parijs:
I gave a talk some time ago in the United States and said: yes, surfers in California must be fed by the rest of us. We may not like that, we may feel they are bums, but they deserve a basic income too.
OK, they don’t “deserve”, but they should have a basic income, because this is the way to stabilise society. But you need politicians that are capable of going out there and saying: You see that lazy bum over there that you hate? We should feed him. And we should make sure he has a house. Because if he does not have a house and he gets sick and so on, he is a greater burden for all of us.
It is the first time Varoufakis has explicitly endorsed basic income, but he has made allusions to it in in the past.
Back in 2010, he co-authored with Stuart Holland a report called ‘The Modest Proposal’ in which he elaborated four proposals to fix the structural crisis of the European monetary union. Under his 4th proposal, the Emergency Social Solidarity Programme (ESSP), Varoufakis developed the idea of implementing an EU-wide food stamp-style scheme as an emergency measure to reduce poverty, to unify Europe and to redistribute across all European states the trade surplus accumulated by countries like Germany. Such a scheme could even be financed by the European Central Bank:
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/04/basic-income-essential-approach-varoufakis/
#BasiceIncome
Get Rid of Program Redundancy, Get Rid of so many programs and the pay and cost to run them INSTEAD Basic Income
a Talk on Basic Income Canada
#BasicIncome
#BasicIncome
"
Source
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/cash-for-all_free-money-stunt-highlights-basic-income-initiative/42021050
The organisers of a public initiative that’s captured the imagination of people around the world staged a pricey publicity stunt in Zurich’s main station on Monday. CHF10 ($10) notes were handed out to crowds of eager commuters during morning rush hour.
The initiative's founders would like to see an unconditional basic income of CHF2,500 per month for all legal residents of Switzerland, and CHF625 for each child, although the initiative text does not specify an amount. The aim is to allow people to choose how they want to live their own lives, without making choices based on financial necessities.
Swiss Public Television, SRF filmed the scene at the railway station as people reached out their hands for the free money. The notes had all been stamped with the name of the initiative and the date of the vote, June 5, 2016.
You can see how the crowd reacted at the beginning of this German-language report.
Some passers-by were understandably cautious at first.
“Hello, would you like a flyer for the unconditional basic income?”
“Hello, would you like a flyer for the unconditional basic income?”
But it didn’t take long for a crowd to gather as a total of CHF10,000 was given away.
“A mammoth crush!”
“A mammoth crush!”
The daily freesheet 20 Minuten explained the giveaway had been financed by “large and small one-off donations”. They asked a few of the recipients what they thought about the publicity stunt. A student, Daniel S. commented, “I think it’s a great thing to do. It’s the first time I’ve been given free money.” Plumber Ronny Gerber, told the newspaper “I couldn’t believe it at first, I didn’t think it was real money.”
Although the initiative campaign was launched on Monday, it’s not the first time the people behind the idea have courted publicity. In October 2013, when the signatures were first handed in to parliament to secure a public vote, a mass of CHF0.05 coins were dumped onto the square in front of Switzerland’s parliament building in Bern.
The German-language Blick newspaper spoke to a retired designer who turned down the handout on Monday, “you should work for your money”, 64-year-old Kurt Schmidt told the paper. Admittedly, CHF10 doesn’t go too far in Switzerland, but the people Blick met at the station said they would use it for anything from “buying cigarettes and an energy drink” to “putting it towards lunch”.
The paper also raised the question with passers-by of whether they had any problem with taking money “for nothing”. One young woman answered that she was happy to take money from her parents without any strings attached, but that once she had a job it might prove "difficult to motivate" herself to work if she already had a guaranteed income.
The paper also raised the question with passers-by of whether they had any problem with taking money “for nothing”. One young woman answered that she was happy to take money from her parents without any strings attached, but that once she had a job it might prove "difficult to motivate" herself to work if she already had a guaranteed income.
The Tages-Anzeiger newspaper reported that most of the money was gone within 15 minutes, after the stunt began at 7.30am.
The paper spoke to one of the campaign’s founders, Daniel Häni, asking him what he thought their chances of success were when the issue goes to the public vote. “I have a lot of confidence,” he replied. “There will be a broad debate. But it would be naïve to think that a vote which hinges on such a large question of principle could be won right away.”
Source
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/cash-for-all_free-money-stunt-highlights-basic-income-initiative/42021050
EUROPEAN UNION: Unconditional Basic Income Europe Works with New Democracy Movement
"Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE) attended the launch of the new European movement for democracy “DiEM25” with former Greek finance minister Yiannis Varoufakis.
Two key speakers - Katja Kipping from the German Left Party and Caroline Lucas from the UK Greens - called for Basic Income to be among the key demands of the new movement. For Kipping, to create a social citizenship for Europe “as a first step, a basic income is needed that is orientated on national poverty levels. Not as a handout that is mercifully granted, but as a fundamental right.”
Hundreds of activists from all over Europe joined the launch event at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The UBIE board was represented by Dániel Fehér, who welcomed the launch of DiEM25:
“Ensuring a life in dignity for all Europeans is at the heart of UBIE’s charter and also a core principle for DiEM25, as is the demand that all people, no matter what their social standing, should have access to the necessities of life. This is a solid common ground to fight together for the right of all citizens to influence the European Union’s future and to share equally the benefits of integration.”
“Citizens and initiatives organised in UBIE are convinced that a universal basic income is the best economic basis for real democracy. Thus we work to create equal opportunities for all to participate in their societies’ economic, social, cultural and political lives.”
Source
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/03/european-union-unconditional-basic-income-europe-works-with-new-democracy-movement/
#BasicIncome
Two key speakers - Katja Kipping from the German Left Party and Caroline Lucas from the UK Greens - called for Basic Income to be among the key demands of the new movement. For Kipping, to create a social citizenship for Europe “as a first step, a basic income is needed that is orientated on national poverty levels. Not as a handout that is mercifully granted, but as a fundamental right.”
Hundreds of activists from all over Europe joined the launch event at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The UBIE board was represented by Dániel Fehér, who welcomed the launch of DiEM25:
“Ensuring a life in dignity for all Europeans is at the heart of UBIE’s charter and also a core principle for DiEM25, as is the demand that all people, no matter what their social standing, should have access to the necessities of life. This is a solid common ground to fight together for the right of all citizens to influence the European Union’s future and to share equally the benefits of integration.”
“Citizens and initiatives organised in UBIE are convinced that a universal basic income is the best economic basis for real democracy. Thus we work to create equal opportunities for all to participate in their societies’ economic, social, cultural and political lives.”
Source
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/03/european-union-unconditional-basic-income-europe-works-with-new-democracy-movement/
#BasicIncome
101 Reasons for Citizen's Income
"“Provides a clear and incisive contribution to what may become one of the most critical social policy debates of the current era.”
Professor Hartley Dean, London School of Economics
“All your questions about Citizen’s Income are answered in this book by Malcolm Torry, a world expert on the subject. Each myth and misunderstanding, whether from a right- or left-wing perspective, is clearly and succinctly dealt with.”
Jay Ginn, King’s College London
101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income offers a short, accessible introduction to the debate on a Citizen’s Income, showing how a universal, unconditional income for every citizen would solve problems facing the UK’s benefits system, tackle poverty, and improve social cohesion and economic efficiency. For anyone new to the subject, or who wants to introduce friends, colleagues or relatives to the idea, 101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income is the book to open up debate around the topic. Drawing on arguments detailed in Money for everyone (Policy Press, 2013), it offers a convincing case for a Citizen’s Income and a much needed resource for all interested in the future of welfare in the UK."
Source
http://citizensincome.org/101-reasons/
Professor Hartley Dean, London School of Economics
“All your questions about Citizen’s Income are answered in this book by Malcolm Torry, a world expert on the subject. Each myth and misunderstanding, whether from a right- or left-wing perspective, is clearly and succinctly dealt with.”
Jay Ginn, King’s College London
101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income offers a short, accessible introduction to the debate on a Citizen’s Income, showing how a universal, unconditional income for every citizen would solve problems facing the UK’s benefits system, tackle poverty, and improve social cohesion and economic efficiency. For anyone new to the subject, or who wants to introduce friends, colleagues or relatives to the idea, 101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income is the book to open up debate around the topic. Drawing on arguments detailed in Money for everyone (Policy Press, 2013), it offers a convincing case for a Citizen’s Income and a much needed resource for all interested in the future of welfare in the UK."
Source
http://citizensincome.org/101-reasons/
Basic Income is a Civil Right
"An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant,[1] or citizen’s income) is a form of social security system[2] in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.
#BasicIncome
An unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes referred to as a "partial basic income".
Basic income systems that are financed by the profits ofpublicly owned enterprises (often called social dividend orcitizen's dividend) are major components in many proposed models of market socialism.[3] Basic income schemes have also been promoted within the context ofcapitalist systems, where they would be financed through various forms of taxation.[4]
Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism. The phrase "social dividend" was commonly used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, after which the phrase "basic income" gained widespread currency.[5] Prominent advocates of the concept include Philippe Van Parijs, Ailsa McKay,[6]André Gorz, Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne, and Guy Standing."
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#BasicIncome
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