Showing posts with label basic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label basic. Show all posts
Wednesday 13 March 2024
Saturday 16 September 2023
Wednesday 24 February 2021
Sunday 21 January 2018
Whatever happened to cricketing common sense?
Ian Chappell in Cricinfo
I watched aghast as Hardik Pandya was needlessly run out/ in the first innings of the second Test against South Africa. I wondered: whatever happened to adhering to the basic principles of the game?
I'm not talking about coaches developing new techniques to enhance the power-hitting required in the modern game; or the tactics devised to curb the flood of runs caused by the increased boundary flow; I'm talking about simple, basic principles of the game. These principles apply in any form of the game and if ignored, they can lose you games, as Pandya's brain fade might well have done. "Always ground your bat when running between wickets": it should have been one of the first things Pandya was told by a coach.
There weren't many coaches when I was growing up, but fortunately I had a good one who didn't ignore the basics of the game. With so many coaches available these days, I'm wondering whether it's that they don't hammer home the basic principles or whether the players choose to ignore them.
Pandya's laziness, sloppiness, arrogance, call it whatever you want, it was unforgivable. Basic principles like grounding your bat, not turning blind, always balancing yourself with a slight foot turn before taking a catch in the slips - these should be adhered to. If they're ignored, it's a fair bet they'll bite you on the backside at the most inopportune time.
And no sooner was Pandya back in the pavilion ruing his needless error than in another part of the world, South African Under-19 opener Jiveshan Pillay was out, obstructing the field. This used to be out "handled the ball" but the law has been changed.
No matter what appears in the scorebook, it can easily be avoided. When I was nine years old, my father, Martin, was captaining a club side filled with young talent. An opposition youngster used his hand to stop the ball hitting his stumps and Martin appealed; the batsman was given out.
On the ride home, Martin asked me what I thought about the decision and I replied; "It's the law - you don't stop the ball with your hand when batting."
"Good," replied Martin, "I don't ever expect to see you given out that way."
In all my years of playing cricket, at every level, I never - never ever - touched the ball when I was batting. Never mind the laws of the game or the pretentious spirit-of-cricket doctrine, I didn't want the wrath of Martin coming down on my head.
"My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education"
It's like being Mankaded. If you back up properly, it won't happen. If you don't touch the ball when batting, you won't be out obstructing the field.
Recently I read an interview with former Indian, South Africa, and now Hobart Hurricanes coach Gary Kirsten. He talked about the role of the coach in cricket. "If you look at the coach or manager in other sports they play a fairly significant role," he added, "I think cricket's moving in that direction, in T20 cricket."
My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education. The best advice I received from my coach came at seven years of age: "It doesn't matter how good I am as coach," Mr Fuller told me. "I can't help you when you're out in the middle. The quicker you learn this game for yourself, the better off you'll be."
Which leads to another point. With the proliferation of coaches, is there too much emphasis placed on physical preparation rather than spending time on the mental side of the game?
Shane Warne once bemoaned being subjected to endless fielding drills prior to a day's play. "All I need," groaned Warne, "is to bowl a few balls in the nets, go back to the dressing room, have a shower, then enjoy a cup of tea and think about the batsmen I'll be facing today."
Pure common sense from Warne. Common sense, like basic principles, is to be ignored at your peril in the game of cricket.
I watched aghast as Hardik Pandya was needlessly run out/ in the first innings of the second Test against South Africa. I wondered: whatever happened to adhering to the basic principles of the game?
I'm not talking about coaches developing new techniques to enhance the power-hitting required in the modern game; or the tactics devised to curb the flood of runs caused by the increased boundary flow; I'm talking about simple, basic principles of the game. These principles apply in any form of the game and if ignored, they can lose you games, as Pandya's brain fade might well have done. "Always ground your bat when running between wickets": it should have been one of the first things Pandya was told by a coach.
There weren't many coaches when I was growing up, but fortunately I had a good one who didn't ignore the basics of the game. With so many coaches available these days, I'm wondering whether it's that they don't hammer home the basic principles or whether the players choose to ignore them.
Pandya's laziness, sloppiness, arrogance, call it whatever you want, it was unforgivable. Basic principles like grounding your bat, not turning blind, always balancing yourself with a slight foot turn before taking a catch in the slips - these should be adhered to. If they're ignored, it's a fair bet they'll bite you on the backside at the most inopportune time.
And no sooner was Pandya back in the pavilion ruing his needless error than in another part of the world, South African Under-19 opener Jiveshan Pillay was out, obstructing the field. This used to be out "handled the ball" but the law has been changed.
No matter what appears in the scorebook, it can easily be avoided. When I was nine years old, my father, Martin, was captaining a club side filled with young talent. An opposition youngster used his hand to stop the ball hitting his stumps and Martin appealed; the batsman was given out.
On the ride home, Martin asked me what I thought about the decision and I replied; "It's the law - you don't stop the ball with your hand when batting."
"Good," replied Martin, "I don't ever expect to see you given out that way."
In all my years of playing cricket, at every level, I never - never ever - touched the ball when I was batting. Never mind the laws of the game or the pretentious spirit-of-cricket doctrine, I didn't want the wrath of Martin coming down on my head.
"My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education"
It's like being Mankaded. If you back up properly, it won't happen. If you don't touch the ball when batting, you won't be out obstructing the field.
Recently I read an interview with former Indian, South Africa, and now Hobart Hurricanes coach Gary Kirsten. He talked about the role of the coach in cricket. "If you look at the coach or manager in other sports they play a fairly significant role," he added, "I think cricket's moving in that direction, in T20 cricket."
My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education. The best advice I received from my coach came at seven years of age: "It doesn't matter how good I am as coach," Mr Fuller told me. "I can't help you when you're out in the middle. The quicker you learn this game for yourself, the better off you'll be."
Which leads to another point. With the proliferation of coaches, is there too much emphasis placed on physical preparation rather than spending time on the mental side of the game?
Shane Warne once bemoaned being subjected to endless fielding drills prior to a day's play. "All I need," groaned Warne, "is to bowl a few balls in the nets, go back to the dressing room, have a shower, then enjoy a cup of tea and think about the batsmen I'll be facing today."
Pure common sense from Warne. Common sense, like basic principles, is to be ignored at your peril in the game of cricket.
Monday 6 March 2017
Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty
Rutger Bregman in The Guardian
Why do poor people make so many bad decisions? It’s a harsh question, but look at the data: poor people borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthily. Why?
Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect”. Though not many would go quite so far, the view that there’s something wrong with poor people is not exceptional. To be honest, it was how I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.
It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later I discussed the theory with Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioural science and public policy at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study. The reason, put simply: it’s the context, stupid. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s time, money or food, it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. This narrows your focus to your immediate deficiency. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
‘Indian sugar cane farmers scored much worse on IQ tests before the harvest than after.’ Photograph: Ajay Verma/REUTERS
Suddenly the reason so many of our anti-poverty programmes don’t work becomes clear. Investments in education, for example, are often completely useless. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it makes almost no difference at all. Poor people might come out wiser, but it’s not enough. As Shafir said: “It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.”
So what can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions. We could make the paperwork easier, or send people a text message to remind them of their bills. These “nudges” are hugely popular with modern politicians, because they cost next to nothing. They are a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the causes.
I asked Shafir: “Why keep tinkering around the edges rather than just handing out more resources?” “You mean just hand out more money? Sure, that would be great,” he said. “But given the evident limitations … the brand of leftwing politics you have in Amsterdam doesn’t even exist in the States.”
But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history’s leading thinkers. Thomas More hinted at it in Utopia, more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Friedman.
It’s an incredibly simple idea: universal basic income – a monthly allowance of enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. And it’s completely unconditional: not a favour, but a right.
But could it really be that simple? In the three years that followed, I read all I could find about basic income. I researched dozens of experiments that have been conducted across the globe. And it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon the story of a town that had done it, had eradicated poverty – after which nearly everyone forgot about it.
‘Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line.’ Photograph: Barrett & MacKay/Getty Images/All Canada Photos
This story starts in Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine a warehouse attic where nearly 2,000 boxes lie gathering dust. They are filled with data – graphs, tables, interviews – about one of the most fascinating social experiments ever conducted. Evelyn Forget, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2009. Stepping into the attic, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was a treasure trove of information on basic income.
The experiment had started in Dauphin, a town north-west of Winnipeg, in 1974. Everybody was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. And for four years, all went well. But then a conservative government was voted into power. The new Canadian cabinet saw little point in the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left for an analysis of the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away. In 2,000 boxes.
When Forget found them, 30 years later, no one knew what, if anything, the experiment had demonstrated. For three years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis. And no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment – the longest and best of its kind – had been a resounding success.
Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of children improved substantially. The hospitalisation rate decreased by as much as 8.5%. Domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn’t quit their jobs – the only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students, who stayed in school longer.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need, instead of things experts think they need
So here’s what I’ve learned. When it comes to poverty, we should stop pretending to know better than poor people. The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need. Imagine how many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, scientists and writers are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can’t afford not to do it – poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the US are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education and more crime. It’s an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country’s current military budget, to do what Dauphin did long ago: eradicate poverty.
That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.
We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, and we’ve got the means. Now, 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, we need to update our worldview. Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
Why do poor people make so many bad decisions? It’s a harsh question, but look at the data: poor people borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthily. Why?
Margaret Thatcher once called poverty a “personality defect”. Though not many would go quite so far, the view that there’s something wrong with poor people is not exceptional. To be honest, it was how I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.
It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists. They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later I discussed the theory with Eldar Shafir, a professor of behavioural science and public policy at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study. The reason, put simply: it’s the context, stupid. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. What that thing is doesn’t much matter; whether it’s time, money or food, it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. This narrows your focus to your immediate deficiency. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.
‘Indian sugar cane farmers scored much worse on IQ tests before the harvest than after.’ Photograph: Ajay Verma/REUTERS
Suddenly the reason so many of our anti-poverty programmes don’t work becomes clear. Investments in education, for example, are often completely useless. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it makes almost no difference at all. Poor people might come out wiser, but it’s not enough. As Shafir said: “It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.”
So what can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions. We could make the paperwork easier, or send people a text message to remind them of their bills. These “nudges” are hugely popular with modern politicians, because they cost next to nothing. They are a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms but ignore the causes.
I asked Shafir: “Why keep tinkering around the edges rather than just handing out more resources?” “You mean just hand out more money? Sure, that would be great,” he said. “But given the evident limitations … the brand of leftwing politics you have in Amsterdam doesn’t even exist in the States.”
But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan, something that has been proposed by some of history’s leading thinkers. Thomas More hinted at it in Utopia, more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King to the economist Milton Friedman.
It’s an incredibly simple idea: universal basic income – a monthly allowance of enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. And it’s completely unconditional: not a favour, but a right.
But could it really be that simple? In the three years that followed, I read all I could find about basic income. I researched dozens of experiments that have been conducted across the globe. And it didn’t take long before I stumbled upon the story of a town that had done it, had eradicated poverty – after which nearly everyone forgot about it.
‘Everybody in Dauphin was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line.’ Photograph: Barrett & MacKay/Getty Images/All Canada Photos
This story starts in Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine a warehouse attic where nearly 2,000 boxes lie gathering dust. They are filled with data – graphs, tables, interviews – about one of the most fascinating social experiments ever conducted. Evelyn Forget, an economics professor at the University of Manitoba, first heard about the records in 2009. Stepping into the attic, she could hardly believe her eyes. It was a treasure trove of information on basic income.
The experiment had started in Dauphin, a town north-west of Winnipeg, in 1974. Everybody was guaranteed a basic income ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. And for four years, all went well. But then a conservative government was voted into power. The new Canadian cabinet saw little point in the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left for an analysis of the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away. In 2,000 boxes.
When Forget found them, 30 years later, no one knew what, if anything, the experiment had demonstrated. For three years she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis. And no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment – the longest and best of its kind – had been a resounding success.
Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of children improved substantially. The hospitalisation rate decreased by as much as 8.5%. Domestic violence was also down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn’t quit their jobs – the only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students, who stayed in school longer.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need, instead of things experts think they need
So here’s what I’ve learned. When it comes to poverty, we should stop pretending to know better than poor people. The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need. Imagine how many brilliant would-be entrepreneurs, scientists and writers are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
While it won’t solve all the world’s ills – and ideas such as a rent cap and more social housing are necessary in places where housing is scarce – a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. We can’t afford not to do it – poverty is hugely expensive. The costs of child poverty in the US are estimated at $500bn (£410bn) each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, less education and more crime. It’s an incredible waste of potential. It would cost just $175bn, a quarter of the country’s current military budget, to do what Dauphin did long ago: eradicate poverty.
That should be our goal. The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.
We’ve got the research, we’ve got the evidence, and we’ve got the means. Now, 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, we need to update our worldview. Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.
Tuesday 3 January 2017
Basic income is the latest bad political idea that refuses to die
John Rentoul in The Independent
The zombie policy of the universal basic income is the first to rise from the grave of well-intentioned impractical ideas in 2017. Labour-controlled Glasgow city council is the latest to announce that it intends to investigate a pilot scheme.
There is a reason why the basic income is the eternal news story. Someone, somewhere, is always saying what a marvellous idea it is. Some local government, or much less often a national government, is saying that it is going to look at it, or going to bring in a pilot scheme or even, every now and again, actually bring in a pilot scheme, which usually involves something which is nothing like a basic income.
Last year Elon Musk, John McDonnell and the Scottish National Party said what a marvellous idea it is. Fife council in Scotland is also looking at it. Two Canadian provinces are said to be interested, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the second of which is normally useful only for pub quizzes.
But the big one is Finland, an entire country, which is going to do a pilot, selecting 2,000 unemployed people at random and giving them a monthly income of about £500, which is more than unemployment benefit but less than a living income. After two years, they will find out whether the scheme has encouraged people to work, given that the participants will be able to keep every euro cent that they earn (after tax).
The idea behind the basic income is lovely. It is that, if the state gives every citizen enough to live on as a right of citizenship, they will accept irregular, part-time or precarious work because they won’t lose welfare benefits if they do so. It is particularly appealing to people who think that the world of work in the future is going to be irregular, part-time and precarious, with people taking portfolios of jobs and being encouraged to become entrepreneurial risk-takers by the safety net of the basic income.
The practice, however, is very expensive. One rudimentary scheme worked out for the UK by Malcolm Torry – and remember that he is an advocate of the basic income – proposed an income of £8,320 a year, to replace all benefits except housing and council-tax benefit. That is hardly a generous annual stipend, and yet if it is to be funded through the income tax system it would require the rates of income tax to go up from 20, 40 and 45 per cent to 48, 68 and 73 per cent. That means anyone on today’s average full-time earnings of about £27,000 a year would lose out, because although the £8,320 a year would make up for losing the income-tax personal allowance, every pound of earnings would be taxed, and more heavily.
And that proposed scheme doesn’t even abolish housing benefit. One of the reasons it cannot is that housing is so much more expensive in London that to set the basic income high enough for the capital would make the scheme unaffordable at any tax rates.
The alert and sceptical reader will have noted that the Finnish scheme isn’t even remotely a basic income, because it is limited to unemployed people. It is therefore merely an experiment in the incentive effects of paying higher unemployment benefit.
The problems of the basic income have been explained again and again, by people who have actually worked on social security policy making and implementation. But journalists and politicians naturally seize on ideas that seem to offer neat and plausible solutions to difficult problems. Elon Musk says robots mean we will have to have a basic income, because traditional salaried jobs will disappear. That doesn’t follow, and besides, most workers in rich countries still work in traditional salaried jobs and will go on doing so for the foreseeable future. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, says “we can win the argument” on a basic income. And yet he hasn’t even begun to try.
None of which would matter very much, except that it would be good for the democratic health of this country to have an opposition that came up with practical policies rather than pie in the sky. The worst thing about the basic income is that it is a tragic misdirection of a compassionate, egalitarian and libertarian impulse: to do something about the often counter-productive interaction of the benefits system with the world of employment.
If only the advocates of the basic income in Britain would devote their attention to the cuts in tax credits that are still pencilled in for remainder of this parliament (Philip Hammond refused to do anything more than soften them slightly at the edges in his Autumn Statement). If it’s grand, universal reform of the benefits system you want, study the everlasting disaster of the Universal Credit system and devise a practical way to make that work, instead of diverting your energies into campaigning for the schemes of impractical dreamers.
The zombie policy of the universal basic income is the first to rise from the grave of well-intentioned impractical ideas in 2017. Labour-controlled Glasgow city council is the latest to announce that it intends to investigate a pilot scheme.
There is a reason why the basic income is the eternal news story. Someone, somewhere, is always saying what a marvellous idea it is. Some local government, or much less often a national government, is saying that it is going to look at it, or going to bring in a pilot scheme or even, every now and again, actually bring in a pilot scheme, which usually involves something which is nothing like a basic income.
Last year Elon Musk, John McDonnell and the Scottish National Party said what a marvellous idea it is. Fife council in Scotland is also looking at it. Two Canadian provinces are said to be interested, Ontario and Prince Edward Island, the second of which is normally useful only for pub quizzes.
But the big one is Finland, an entire country, which is going to do a pilot, selecting 2,000 unemployed people at random and giving them a monthly income of about £500, which is more than unemployment benefit but less than a living income. After two years, they will find out whether the scheme has encouraged people to work, given that the participants will be able to keep every euro cent that they earn (after tax).
The idea behind the basic income is lovely. It is that, if the state gives every citizen enough to live on as a right of citizenship, they will accept irregular, part-time or precarious work because they won’t lose welfare benefits if they do so. It is particularly appealing to people who think that the world of work in the future is going to be irregular, part-time and precarious, with people taking portfolios of jobs and being encouraged to become entrepreneurial risk-takers by the safety net of the basic income.
The practice, however, is very expensive. One rudimentary scheme worked out for the UK by Malcolm Torry – and remember that he is an advocate of the basic income – proposed an income of £8,320 a year, to replace all benefits except housing and council-tax benefit. That is hardly a generous annual stipend, and yet if it is to be funded through the income tax system it would require the rates of income tax to go up from 20, 40 and 45 per cent to 48, 68 and 73 per cent. That means anyone on today’s average full-time earnings of about £27,000 a year would lose out, because although the £8,320 a year would make up for losing the income-tax personal allowance, every pound of earnings would be taxed, and more heavily.
And that proposed scheme doesn’t even abolish housing benefit. One of the reasons it cannot is that housing is so much more expensive in London that to set the basic income high enough for the capital would make the scheme unaffordable at any tax rates.
The alert and sceptical reader will have noted that the Finnish scheme isn’t even remotely a basic income, because it is limited to unemployed people. It is therefore merely an experiment in the incentive effects of paying higher unemployment benefit.
The problems of the basic income have been explained again and again, by people who have actually worked on social security policy making and implementation. But journalists and politicians naturally seize on ideas that seem to offer neat and plausible solutions to difficult problems. Elon Musk says robots mean we will have to have a basic income, because traditional salaried jobs will disappear. That doesn’t follow, and besides, most workers in rich countries still work in traditional salaried jobs and will go on doing so for the foreseeable future. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, says “we can win the argument” on a basic income. And yet he hasn’t even begun to try.
None of which would matter very much, except that it would be good for the democratic health of this country to have an opposition that came up with practical policies rather than pie in the sky. The worst thing about the basic income is that it is a tragic misdirection of a compassionate, egalitarian and libertarian impulse: to do something about the often counter-productive interaction of the benefits system with the world of employment.
If only the advocates of the basic income in Britain would devote their attention to the cuts in tax credits that are still pencilled in for remainder of this parliament (Philip Hammond refused to do anything more than soften them slightly at the edges in his Autumn Statement). If it’s grand, universal reform of the benefits system you want, study the everlasting disaster of the Universal Credit system and devise a practical way to make that work, instead of diverting your energies into campaigning for the schemes of impractical dreamers.
Sunday 1 January 2017
Universal basic income trials being considered in Scotland
Libby Brooks in The Guardian
Scotland looks set to be the first part of the UK to pilot a basic income for every citizen, as councils in Fife and Glasgow investigate trial schemes in 2017.
The councillor Matt Kerr has been championing the idea through the ornate halls of Glasgow City Chambers, and is frank about the challenges it poses.
“Like a lot of people, I was interested in the idea but never completely convinced,” he said. But working as Labour’s anti-poverty lead on the council, Kerr says that he “kept coming back to the basic income”.
Kerr sees the basic income as a way of simplifying the UK’s byzantine welfare system. “But it is also about solidarity: it says that everyone is valued and the government will support you. It changes the relationship between the individual and the state.”
The concept of a universal basic income revolves around the idea of offering every individual, regardless of existing welfare benefits or earned income, a non-conditional flat-rate payment, with any income earned above that taxed progressively. The intention is to provide a basic economic platform on which people can build their lives, whether they choose to earn, learn, care or set up a business.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has suggested that it is likely to appear in his party’s next manifesto, while there has been a groundswell of interest among anti-poverty groups who see it as a means of changing not only the relationship between people and the state, but between workers and increasingly insecure employment in the gig economy.
Kerr accepts that, while he is hopeful of cross-party support in Glasgow, there are “months of work ahead”, including first arranging a feasibility study in order to present a strong enough evidence base for a pilot. “But if there is ever a case to be made then you need to test it in a place like Glasgow, with the sheer numbers and levels of health inequality. If you can make it work here then it can work anywhere.”
The idea has its roots in 16th-century humanist philosophy, when it was developed by the likes of Thomas More, but in its modern incarnation it has lately enjoyed successful pilots in India and Africa.
Despite its utopian roots, champions believe that this is an idea whose time has come, particularly in Scotland where the governing SNP voted in support of a basic income at their spring conference (although the proposal has yet to make it into their manifesto).
At the heart of any experiment with basic income is money: how much should people get and where will it come from? Kerr says his instinct is to base the amount on similar calculations to those made for the living wage.
“It’s about having more than just enough to pay the bills. But part of the idea of doing a pilot is to make mistakes and also find out what is acceptable to the public. There will be a lot of resistance to this. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Part of the problem is we’re working against a whole discourse of deserving and undeserving poor.”
As for where the money comes from, “the funding question is always the big one, and really will depend upon the approach a pilot takes,” says Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, which has been spearheading research on the subject across the UK.
Drawing on the experience of similar projects ongoing in Finland, Utrecht in the Netherland and Ontario in Canada, Cooke suggests: “It could be funding from particular trusts, it could be individual philanthropic funding, as we have seen in the States, or it could be a redirection of the existing welfare spend.” Obviously the latter is much harder to do in a pilot, although that will be happening in Finland next year where the experiment is being taken forward by the national government.
As the Scottish government consults on what it has described as “the biggest transfer of powers since devolution began” – the devolution of around £2.7bn, or 15% of the total Scottish benefits bill, affecting 1.4 million people – both Kerr and Cooke believe that this is an ideal moment to consider the basic income seriously. “It’s a time to be testing out new – or rather old – ideas for a welfare system that genuinely supports independence,” says Kerr.
Cooke likewise believes that cross-party support is key, pointing to the fact that the leader of the Conservative group on Fife council has joined forces with the Fairer Fife Commission, the council’s independent poverty advisory group which initially recommended the trial, with the aim of designing a pilot within the next six months.
Scotland was recently added to the list of “places to watch” for basic income activity by the Basic Income Earth Network, founded by the radical economist Guy Standing, whose hugely influential book The Precariat identified an emerging social class suffering the worst of job insecurity and most likely to be attracted to rightwing populism.
“The thing about Scotland is that they really understand the precariat,” says Standing, who recently visited the country to meet civil servants, local authorities and campaigners to discuss a basic income. “The sense of insecurity, the stagnating living standards, all of those things are clear in Scotland and the fact that so many within the SNP are supportive means there’s a real opportunity to do a pilot in Scotland.”
The momentum is there, he says, and once it is framed around a desire for greater social justice “then you get away from the stale debate about whether if you give people the basic income then they will be lazy”.
“People relate to the idea that everyone should have a social dividend. Everywhere I go, it’s the communities that feel left behind by globalisation that are most interested [in the idea of a basic income]. We have seen a sea-change in attitudes.
“This sense of alarm about populist rightwing politics has brought more people to thinking we need to do something to provide better security for people. We are risking our economic and political stability if we don’t do something about it.”
Scotland looks set to be the first part of the UK to pilot a basic income for every citizen, as councils in Fife and Glasgow investigate trial schemes in 2017.
The councillor Matt Kerr has been championing the idea through the ornate halls of Glasgow City Chambers, and is frank about the challenges it poses.
“Like a lot of people, I was interested in the idea but never completely convinced,” he said. But working as Labour’s anti-poverty lead on the council, Kerr says that he “kept coming back to the basic income”.
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Kerr sees the basic income as a way of simplifying the UK’s byzantine welfare system. “But it is also about solidarity: it says that everyone is valued and the government will support you. It changes the relationship between the individual and the state.”
The concept of a universal basic income revolves around the idea of offering every individual, regardless of existing welfare benefits or earned income, a non-conditional flat-rate payment, with any income earned above that taxed progressively. The intention is to provide a basic economic platform on which people can build their lives, whether they choose to earn, learn, care or set up a business.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has suggested that it is likely to appear in his party’s next manifesto, while there has been a groundswell of interest among anti-poverty groups who see it as a means of changing not only the relationship between people and the state, but between workers and increasingly insecure employment in the gig economy.
Kerr accepts that, while he is hopeful of cross-party support in Glasgow, there are “months of work ahead”, including first arranging a feasibility study in order to present a strong enough evidence base for a pilot. “But if there is ever a case to be made then you need to test it in a place like Glasgow, with the sheer numbers and levels of health inequality. If you can make it work here then it can work anywhere.”
The idea has its roots in 16th-century humanist philosophy, when it was developed by the likes of Thomas More, but in its modern incarnation it has lately enjoyed successful pilots in India and Africa.
Despite its utopian roots, champions believe that this is an idea whose time has come, particularly in Scotland where the governing SNP voted in support of a basic income at their spring conference (although the proposal has yet to make it into their manifesto).
At the heart of any experiment with basic income is money: how much should people get and where will it come from? Kerr says his instinct is to base the amount on similar calculations to those made for the living wage.
“It’s about having more than just enough to pay the bills. But part of the idea of doing a pilot is to make mistakes and also find out what is acceptable to the public. There will be a lot of resistance to this. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Part of the problem is we’re working against a whole discourse of deserving and undeserving poor.”
As for where the money comes from, “the funding question is always the big one, and really will depend upon the approach a pilot takes,” says Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, which has been spearheading research on the subject across the UK.
Drawing on the experience of similar projects ongoing in Finland, Utrecht in the Netherland and Ontario in Canada, Cooke suggests: “It could be funding from particular trusts, it could be individual philanthropic funding, as we have seen in the States, or it could be a redirection of the existing welfare spend.” Obviously the latter is much harder to do in a pilot, although that will be happening in Finland next year where the experiment is being taken forward by the national government.
As the Scottish government consults on what it has described as “the biggest transfer of powers since devolution began” – the devolution of around £2.7bn, or 15% of the total Scottish benefits bill, affecting 1.4 million people – both Kerr and Cooke believe that this is an ideal moment to consider the basic income seriously. “It’s a time to be testing out new – or rather old – ideas for a welfare system that genuinely supports independence,” says Kerr.
Cooke likewise believes that cross-party support is key, pointing to the fact that the leader of the Conservative group on Fife council has joined forces with the Fairer Fife Commission, the council’s independent poverty advisory group which initially recommended the trial, with the aim of designing a pilot within the next six months.
Scotland was recently added to the list of “places to watch” for basic income activity by the Basic Income Earth Network, founded by the radical economist Guy Standing, whose hugely influential book The Precariat identified an emerging social class suffering the worst of job insecurity and most likely to be attracted to rightwing populism.
“The thing about Scotland is that they really understand the precariat,” says Standing, who recently visited the country to meet civil servants, local authorities and campaigners to discuss a basic income. “The sense of insecurity, the stagnating living standards, all of those things are clear in Scotland and the fact that so many within the SNP are supportive means there’s a real opportunity to do a pilot in Scotland.”
The momentum is there, he says, and once it is framed around a desire for greater social justice “then you get away from the stale debate about whether if you give people the basic income then they will be lazy”.
“People relate to the idea that everyone should have a social dividend. Everywhere I go, it’s the communities that feel left behind by globalisation that are most interested [in the idea of a basic income]. We have seen a sea-change in attitudes.
“This sense of alarm about populist rightwing politics has brought more people to thinking we need to do something to provide better security for people. We are risking our economic and political stability if we don’t do something about it.”
15 rules for creative success in the Internet age
Molly Crabapple in Boing Boing
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Here's what I've learned.
1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.
2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.
3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.
4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.
5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more
6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.
7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?
8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.
9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.
10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.
11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.
12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.
13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.
14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.
15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.
Finally...
The Internet will not save creators.
Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.
Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.
Now make some beautiful things.
Friday 23 December 2016
Friday 24 June 2016
A basic income could be the best way to tackle inequality
Robert Skidelsky in The Guardian
Britain isn’t the only European country to hold a referendum this month. On 5 June, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected, by 77% to 23%, the proposition that every citizen should be guaranteed an unconditional basic income (UBI). But that lopsided outcome doesn’t mean the issue is going away anytime soon.
The idea of a UBI has made recurrent appearances in history – starting with Thomas Paine in the 18th century. This time, though, it is likely to have greater staying power, as the prospect of sufficient income from jobs grows bleaker for the poor and less educated. Experiments with unconditional cash transfers have been taking place in poor as well as wealthy countries.
Swiss voters reject proposal to give basic income to every adult and child
UBI is a somewhat uneasy mix of two objectives: poverty relief and the rejection of work as the defining purpose of life. The first is political and practical; the second is philosophical or ethical.
The main argument for UBI as poverty relief is, as it has always been, the inability of available paid work to guarantee a secure and decent existence for all. In the industrial age, factory work became the only source of income for most people – a source that was interrupted by bouts of unemployment as the industrial machine periodically seized up. The labour movement responded by demanding “work or maintenance”. Acceptance of maintenance in lieu of work was reflected in the creation of a system of social security, “welfare capitalism”.
The aim of welfare capitalism was explicitly to provide people an income – typically through pooled compulsory insurance – during enforced interruptions of work. In no sense was income maintenance seen as an alternative to work. As the idea of interruption from work was extended to include the disabled and women bringing up children, so entitlements to income maintenance increased beyond the capacity of social insurance, with benefits paid to eligible individuals from general taxation.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher unwittingly extended the scope of welfare further, as they dismantled institutions and legislation designed to protect wages and jobs in their respective countries. With both left to the market, “in work” benefits, or tax credits, were introduced to enable employed workers to earn a “living wage”. At the same time, conservative governments, alarmed at the growing cost of social security, started to cut back on welfare entitlements.
In this newly precarious environment of work and welfare, UBI is seen as guaranteeing the basic income previously promised by work and welfare, but no longer reliably secured by either. (A leading advocate, Guy Standing at Soas, University of London, has written a book called The Precariat.) An additional argument, always resonant in this tradition, but particularly so today in poorer countries, is UBI’s emancipatory potential for women.
The ethical case for UBI is different. Its source is the idea, found both in the Bible and in classical economics, that work is a curse (or, as economists put it, a “cost”), undertaken only for the sake of making a living. As technological innovation causes per capita income to rise, people will need to work less to satisfy their needs.
Both John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a horizon of growing leisure: the reorientation of life away from the merely useful toward the beautiful and the true. UBI provides a practical path to navigate this transition.
Most of the hostility to UBI has come when it stated in this second form. A poster during the Swiss referendum campaign asked: “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” The objection of most UBI opponents is that a majority of people would respond: “Nothing at all.”
But to argue that an income independent of the job market is bound to be demoralising is as morally obtuse as it is historically inaccurate. If it were true, we would want to abolish all inherited income. The 19th-century European bourgeoisie were largely a rentier class, and few questioned their work effort. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman who wanted to write fiction “must have money and a room of her own”.
The explosion of robotics has given the demand for UBI renewed currency. Credible estimates suggest that it will be technically possible to automate between a quarter and a third of all current jobs in the western world within 20 years. At the very least, this will accelerate the trend toward the precariousness of jobs and income. At worst, it will make a sizeable share of the population redundant. A standard objection to UBI as a way to replace earnings from vanishing jobs is that it is unaffordable. This partly depends on what parameters are set: the UBI’s level; which benefits (if any) it replaces; whether only citizens or all residents are eligible; and so on.
But this is not the main point. The overwhelming evidence is that the lion’s share of productivity gains in the last 30 years has gone to the very wealthy. And that’s not all: 40% of the gains of quantitative easing in the UK have gone to the wealthiest 5% of households, not because they were more productive, but because the Bank of England directed its cash toward them. Even a partial reversal of this long regressive trend for wealth and income would fund a modest initial basic income.
Beyond this, a UBI scheme can be designed to grow in line with the wealth of the economy. Automation is bound to increase profits, because machines that make human labour redundant require no wages and only minimal investment in maintenance.
Unless we change our system of income generation, there will be no way to check the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial. A UBI that grows in line with capital productivity would ensure that the benefits of automation go to the many, not just to the few.
Britain isn’t the only European country to hold a referendum this month. On 5 June, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected, by 77% to 23%, the proposition that every citizen should be guaranteed an unconditional basic income (UBI). But that lopsided outcome doesn’t mean the issue is going away anytime soon.
The idea of a UBI has made recurrent appearances in history – starting with Thomas Paine in the 18th century. This time, though, it is likely to have greater staying power, as the prospect of sufficient income from jobs grows bleaker for the poor and less educated. Experiments with unconditional cash transfers have been taking place in poor as well as wealthy countries.
Swiss voters reject proposal to give basic income to every adult and child
UBI is a somewhat uneasy mix of two objectives: poverty relief and the rejection of work as the defining purpose of life. The first is political and practical; the second is philosophical or ethical.
The main argument for UBI as poverty relief is, as it has always been, the inability of available paid work to guarantee a secure and decent existence for all. In the industrial age, factory work became the only source of income for most people – a source that was interrupted by bouts of unemployment as the industrial machine periodically seized up. The labour movement responded by demanding “work or maintenance”. Acceptance of maintenance in lieu of work was reflected in the creation of a system of social security, “welfare capitalism”.
The aim of welfare capitalism was explicitly to provide people an income – typically through pooled compulsory insurance – during enforced interruptions of work. In no sense was income maintenance seen as an alternative to work. As the idea of interruption from work was extended to include the disabled and women bringing up children, so entitlements to income maintenance increased beyond the capacity of social insurance, with benefits paid to eligible individuals from general taxation.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher unwittingly extended the scope of welfare further, as they dismantled institutions and legislation designed to protect wages and jobs in their respective countries. With both left to the market, “in work” benefits, or tax credits, were introduced to enable employed workers to earn a “living wage”. At the same time, conservative governments, alarmed at the growing cost of social security, started to cut back on welfare entitlements.
In this newly precarious environment of work and welfare, UBI is seen as guaranteeing the basic income previously promised by work and welfare, but no longer reliably secured by either. (A leading advocate, Guy Standing at Soas, University of London, has written a book called The Precariat.) An additional argument, always resonant in this tradition, but particularly so today in poorer countries, is UBI’s emancipatory potential for women.
The ethical case for UBI is different. Its source is the idea, found both in the Bible and in classical economics, that work is a curse (or, as economists put it, a “cost”), undertaken only for the sake of making a living. As technological innovation causes per capita income to rise, people will need to work less to satisfy their needs.
Both John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a horizon of growing leisure: the reorientation of life away from the merely useful toward the beautiful and the true. UBI provides a practical path to navigate this transition.
Most of the hostility to UBI has come when it stated in this second form. A poster during the Swiss referendum campaign asked: “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” The objection of most UBI opponents is that a majority of people would respond: “Nothing at all.”
But to argue that an income independent of the job market is bound to be demoralising is as morally obtuse as it is historically inaccurate. If it were true, we would want to abolish all inherited income. The 19th-century European bourgeoisie were largely a rentier class, and few questioned their work effort. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman who wanted to write fiction “must have money and a room of her own”.
The explosion of robotics has given the demand for UBI renewed currency. Credible estimates suggest that it will be technically possible to automate between a quarter and a third of all current jobs in the western world within 20 years. At the very least, this will accelerate the trend toward the precariousness of jobs and income. At worst, it will make a sizeable share of the population redundant. A standard objection to UBI as a way to replace earnings from vanishing jobs is that it is unaffordable. This partly depends on what parameters are set: the UBI’s level; which benefits (if any) it replaces; whether only citizens or all residents are eligible; and so on.
But this is not the main point. The overwhelming evidence is that the lion’s share of productivity gains in the last 30 years has gone to the very wealthy. And that’s not all: 40% of the gains of quantitative easing in the UK have gone to the wealthiest 5% of households, not because they were more productive, but because the Bank of England directed its cash toward them. Even a partial reversal of this long regressive trend for wealth and income would fund a modest initial basic income.
Beyond this, a UBI scheme can be designed to grow in line with the wealth of the economy. Automation is bound to increase profits, because machines that make human labour redundant require no wages and only minimal investment in maintenance.
Unless we change our system of income generation, there will be no way to check the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial. A UBI that grows in line with capital productivity would ensure that the benefits of automation go to the many, not just to the few.
Thursday 14 April 2016
Unconditional Basic Income for all?
The idea of a universal basic income is about to leap from the margins to the mainstream, bringing promises of a happier and healthier population
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
With a basic income, the harsh, punitive model of ‘welfare’ is a distant memory – passing in and out of the gig economy is something everyone can afford. Photograph: David Pearson/Alamy
John Harris in The Guardian
John Harris in The Guardian
Imagine a Britain where the government pays every adult the basic cost of living. Whether rich or poor – or, crucially, whether you’re in paid employment or not – everyone gets the same weekly amount, with no strings attached. The harsh, punitive model of modern “welfare” is a distant memory; passing in and out of employment in the so-called gig economy is now something everyone can afford. The positive consequences extend into the distance: women are newly financially independent and able to exit abusive relationships, public health is noticeably improved, and people are able to devote the time to caring that an ever-ageing society increasingly demands. All the political parties are signed up: just as the welfare state underpinned the 20th century, so this new idea defines the 21st.
Welcome to the world of a unconditional basic income, or UBI, otherwise known as citizens’ income or social wage. It might look like the stuff of insane utopianism, but the idea is now spreading at speed, from the fringes of the left into mainstream politics – and being tried out around the world. The UK Green party has supported the notion for decades: staunch backing for a version of UBI was one of its key themes at the last election. At its spring conference last month, the Scottish National party passed a motion supporting the idea that “a basic or universal income can potentially provide a foundation to eradicate poverty, make work pay and ensure all our citizens can live in dignity”. A handful of Labour MPs have started to come round to the idea – and serious work is being done among thinktanks and pressure groups, looking at how it might work in the here and now.
Meanwhile, there have been UBI-type policies and experiments in India and Brazil. These have suggested that, contrary to modern stereotypes about “welfare” sapping people’s initiative, a basic income might actually increase people’s appetite for work, by adding to their sense of stability, and making things such as childcare and transport more accessible. A pilot of a UBI-ish policy whereby people on benefits are paid unconditionally is happening in Utrecht, in the Netherlands; other Dutch towns and cities look set to follow its example, and there are plans to pilot a more ambitious kind of basic income in Finland. On 5 June, the Swiss will vote in a referendum on a plan that would see all adults receive about £1,700 a month, with an extra £400 for each child.
And then there is the rising noise from Silicon Valley. The California-based startup incubator Y Combinator has announced that it wants to fund research into UBI’s viability. Its president, Sam Altman, says: “It is impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.” In New York, the influential venture capitalist Albert Wenger has been sounding off about a basic income for at least three years, claiming it offers an answer to a very modern question. If, as he says, “we are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done”, how do you avoid “a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don’t”?
This Saturday, thousands of people are expected in central London for the latest demonstration organised by the anti-austerity alliance the People’s Assembly. The top-line is pretty much as you would expect. “End austerity now” is the big slogan, accompanied by four key words: “health, “homes”, “education” and, of course, “jobs”. But there too will be noise about UBI. A group called Radical Assembly, founded last May, is organising what it terms the No Jobs bloc: a subsection of the march for people sick of the daily grind, looking ahead to a world without it and convinced that technology is the answer. As they see it, the point shouldn’t be to argue for more, or better work, but to demand a world with very little paid work at all – and the key way to make that vision work is a basic income.
The idea cuts straight to the heart of the crisis being experienced by mainstream leftwing parties across Europe and beyond. For the UK Labour party, the concept of a basic income raises a painful question: how can you carry on styling yourself as the party of workers when traditional work is disappearing fast?
If the machines take all the jobs, we’ll need to disentangle the link between work and wages. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
As well as books such as Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class(2011) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015), one recent text is talked about more than most among people interested in UBI. Inventing the Future was published last year and has already created significant buzz in leftwing circles; its two authors, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury, and their work is the key inspiration behind what Radical Assembly have planned for this Saturday. The No Jobs bloc, in fact, echoes the slogans printed in bold type on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation, demand universal basic income, demand the future.”
Srnicek, 33, is from Canada: he came to the UK in 2009, and works as a freelance academic in London. He says he’s both thrilled and surprised by the idea of people marching in favour of what he and Williams advocate. “I’ve heard about the No Jobs bloc, and it sounds great,” he says.
As he explains, the concept of a basic income has been doing the rounds for centuries, and has been voiced by such people as the 18th-century radical Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, and the free-market guru Milton Friedman. In the US, the Nixon administration of the 1970s had plans for a rightwing version that nearly made it into law. Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1978, the US government did a series of experiments with a basic income in such places as New Jersey, Seattle and Denver, Colorado. It was also tried in the small Canadian town of Dauphin, Manitoba. Although it took years for the research findings to be published, they suggested that among the results had been a drop in hospital admissions, and a rise in the number of teenagers staying on in school.
This tangled history contains a few warnings about different political conceptions of the UBI idea. “The right tends to see it as a replacement for the welfare state,” says Snircek. “Basically, in their conception, UBI is a way to do away with benefits and marketise everything. And, obviously, that has to be warded off completely.”
He says he also has concerns about interpretations of the idea from some parts of the political left. “UBI has to be universal: it has to apply to everybody,” he says. “It’s problematic for some people that it includes the rich as well, but universal benefits have a political power that means-tested benefits don’t. It has to be unconditional. It can’t be means-tested. Everybody gets it, no matter what.
“The other aspect is, it should be as a high as possible. It can’t just be some middling level, like the Green party was proposing at the last election.” Their idea, he explains, was to pay everyone around £72 a week, roughly the same level as Jobseekers’ Allowance. “That would help people, but they would still have to go out and find a 40-hour job to survive, so it doesn’t do any of the political things that are so important.”
As Inventing the Future explains, these include boosting people’s bargaining power with employers, and UBI’s distinct feminist aspect: “One of my favourite stories from the experiments with UBI in Canada and the US is that they found that divorces went up. Women had suddenly got financial independence to leave bad and abusive relationships.”
The big theme that sits under Srnicek and Williams’s ideas is that of automation, and its effects on the place of work in our lives. A third of jobs in UK retail are forecast to go by 2025. The Financial Times recently reported on research predicting that 114,000 jobs in British legal sector would be automated over the next 20 years. As and when automation reaches transport, all this could turn nuclear. Recent estimates have put the number of jobs in the US related to traditional trucking at 8.7m – which, when people are talking about automated haulage (in last month’s budget, for example, George Osborne promised trials for driverless lorries), gives a sobering sense of how huge the future changes to paid work could be.
“The technology we’re talking about today is really touching on areas that we thought were always going to be the preserve of humans: non-routine tasks, things like driving a car – but then also the automation of basic social interaction, like call-centre work, customer service work and all that kind of stuff,” says Srnicek. “A lot of jobs are going to be taken, possibly at a very rapid pace. That means that, even if it doesn’t lead to mass unemployment, automation leads to a massive shift in the labour market, and people having to find new jobs and new skills.”
How long does he think it will be before UBI becomes a credible part of mainstream politics?
“Well, I do think this is a longterm project; it’s not going to happen overnight,” he says. “You need to build it up over time. And you also need to find new revenues for it. So you need to be talking about the Panama Papers and tax havens, and how you’re going to claw back tax revenues to pay for it.” The basic point is that something as ambitious as a basic income that allows people meaningful choices is going to cost, and the only way of bringing in the funds chimes with our rising concerns about tax avoidance and evasion – and, for that matter, global inequality and the fragile job markets that increasingly sit under it.
The key point, he says, is context: putting UBI alongside other plans and proposals, so as to flesh out the idea of a world beyond work, and what it would mean. “One big thing would be reducing the working week,” he says. “My preference is to implement a three-day weekend. We already have that in certain cases, because of bank holidays. We’re already used to it. And everybody always really enjoys it. That could plausibly be done in the next five years.”
Friday or Monday?
“I think we’ve got such a hate for Monday, that might be something we need to hold on to. So, maybe Friday.”
Caroline Lucas: UBI is ‘a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated.’ Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock
The Greens’ sole MP, Caroline Lucas, is a fan of Inventing the Future: “I love the way they talk about a basic income as something really transformative,” she says. She recently tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI. Thirty-two MPs signed up to it: 23 from the SNP, with six from Labour, and two from Northern Ireland’s SDLP. The Tories and Lib Dems were conspicuous by their absence.
“This idea works on so many levels,” she says. “It’s a very practical policy, in terms of ensuring that people don’t fall between the cracks of the welfare system. But it’s also a deeply radical idea in terms of its feminist potential, and what we do in a world in which more and more work is going to be automated. It also gets you into a sense of contributing to your community, cleaning up the beach, visiting an elderly friend who might be lonely. There’s a whole freedom and liberation that it gives you, and I think it takes you into really deep questions about whether we really exist simply to spend a third of our lives working for someone else.”
If all that sounds rather high-flown, she also emphasises the hard work that is being done on UBI’s basic economics. In this context, she mentions Compass (the pressure group that includes Greens, Labour members, and many people with no party attachment) and the RSA, formally the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose basic-income proposal was published in December 2015.
Its author was Anthony Painter, the RSA’s director of policy and strategy. He says a lot of his initial interest in UBI came from his work on the board of an FE college in Hackney, east London, and the way that the local job centre took money from people who were going on its courses, so as to kick them into jobs instead. “This seemed to be the tip of an iceberg of a system that had gone haywire,” he says. So it was that in the spring of 2014, he began looking in depth at the various experiments with a basic income down the years, and how the idea might work in the 21st century. “Our starting point was, how do people get economic security, and why’s the current system going wrong?”
His favourite example of a basic income is the model tried in Manitoba, and what happened as a result. “What was really interesting about it was the wider benefits of a basic income, in terms of health, education, kids staying in education for longer, better mental health and fewer hospital visits,” he says. “Whereas now, our entire conversation about welfare has been narrowed down to a single question: is someone in work, or not in work?”
The RSA proposed an annual UBI of £3,692 for everyone aged between 25 and 65, rising to £7,420 for pensioners. There would also be a temporary basic income for children up to four years old of £4,290 for a family’s first child, falling to £3,387 for other children as they come along, and down to £2,925 for all between the ages of 5 and 25. For people without kids, that would put the weekly UBI at £77 a week. Is that really enough?.
Matthew Taylor is the RSA’s chief executive. Between 2003 and 2006, he headed Tony Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He’s more sceptical about the looming future of automation than some, but still thinks a basic income is the best route to greater security in an insecure economy. When I mention the argument that less than £80 a week is a rather small amount, he sighs.
“Let’s establish the principle and see that the world doesn’t collapse,” he says. “Then, by all means, if it does work and it does lead to a better society, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t grow. You’ve got to be practical about this. But let’s start the argument in a place where we’re most likely to win.”
Talking to this former Downing Street insider about such a cutting-edge idea feels like proof in itself of how far the idea of a basic income has come. He says the fact that UBI is now discussed all over the left of politics and beyond is proof of how much everything is in flux, from the basics of the economy to the fundamentals of politics. This is an age in which ideas can quickly whizz from the radical fringes to the centre of political debate.
“There was a slightly kind of anally retentive obsession that people like me used to have when I was involved in New Labour – that if you float a dangerous idea, it’s kind of terminal for you,” says Taylor. “But I don’t think people feel like now. I think things can move much faster. And a basic income is one those things where if the argument was made in the right way, all the assumptions we have about how people would react could be blown away pretty quickly.”
Friday 26 June 2015
Dutch city of Utrecht to experiment with a universal, unconditional income
Louis Dore in The Independent
The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.
The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of 'basic income' can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.
Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.
The Netherlands as a country is no stranger to less traditional work environments - it has the highest proportion of part time workers in the EU, 46.1 per cent. However, Utrecht's experiment with welfare is expected to be the first of its kind in the country.
Alderman for Work and Income Victor Everhardt told DeStad Utrecht: "One group will have compensation and consideration for an allowance, another group with a basic income without rules and of course a control group which adhere to the current rules."
"Our data shows that less than 1.5 percent abuse the welfare, but, before we get into all kinds of principled debate about whether we should or should not enter, we need to first examine if basic income even really works.
"What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls? Will someone sitting passively at home or do people develop themselves and provide a meaningful contribution to our society?"
The city is also planning to talk to other municipalities about setting up similar experiments, including Nijmegen, Wageningen, Tilburg and Groningen, awaiting permission from The Hague in order to do so.
The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.
The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of 'basic income' can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.
Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.
The Netherlands as a country is no stranger to less traditional work environments - it has the highest proportion of part time workers in the EU, 46.1 per cent. However, Utrecht's experiment with welfare is expected to be the first of its kind in the country.
Alderman for Work and Income Victor Everhardt told DeStad Utrecht: "One group will have compensation and consideration for an allowance, another group with a basic income without rules and of course a control group which adhere to the current rules."
"Our data shows that less than 1.5 percent abuse the welfare, but, before we get into all kinds of principled debate about whether we should or should not enter, we need to first examine if basic income even really works.
"What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls? Will someone sitting passively at home or do people develop themselves and provide a meaningful contribution to our society?"
The city is also planning to talk to other municipalities about setting up similar experiments, including Nijmegen, Wageningen, Tilburg and Groningen, awaiting permission from The Hague in order to do so.
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