lede
Karl Widerquist, Jose Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere (editors). Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Another PDF
The hardcover edition sells for $176.36.
This anthology contains 74 chapters, nearly all previously published. I am not going to try to summarize all of these riches, but we can hit some high spots on earlier proposals, and take a look forward.
The idea that has come to be known as Basic Income is, in an important sense, very simple. Bertrand Russell wrote in 1918, “A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not” (Russell, 1918). According to Philippe Van Parijs, “A Basic Income is an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement” (Van Parijs, 2004).
In one form or another, under one name or another, this idea has been discussed for more than two centuries, but it is only in the last 50 years or so that it has become a major topic of academic research.
It really goes back to Bread and Circuses in the Roman Empire.
This anthology is organized around the themes of
- Freedom, which we saw in Milton Friedman’s proposed Negative Income Tax
- Justice
- Reciprocity and Exploitation
- Feminism
- Economics
- Post-productivism
- Implementation
- Institutions
- Politics
Ending with “Pathways from Here”.
From the Introduction:
Contrary to existing minimum income schemes, Basic Income is both universal and unconditional.
- It is universal in the sense that it is paid to every citizen or every resident.
- It is not a categorical benefit, which is only paid to certain individuals who fit specific criteria of eligibility.
- It is unconditional in the sense that recipients are not required to perform any duties in return for their benefit other than to maintain their membership in the political community.
- It is paid regardless of whether the recipient is working, willing to work, or has a work record.
- As a universal, unconditional benefit, it is paid regardless of whether the recipient has other sources of income and irrespective of disposable income.
- It is paid regardless of whether the recipient is young or old, able or disabled.
- it should be paid on an individual basis. That is, to each woman, man, and child.
Universal, unconditional, and individual: once properly understood these three key features make Basic Income a radical departure from traditional welfare-state policies.
The Devil, as always, is in the details, which accordingly make up the bulk of the topics discussed in this volume.
- Some want to combine a UBI with a Flat Tax, which is not going to happen.
- Should children receive the same level of funding as adults? (Can two adults and two children live more cheaply than four single adults?—Not if you include child care costs.)
- A UBI can help women fighting unequal pay, but feminists worry that it will make it too easy for women to fall back to being homemakers.
- A UBI can counter some effects of systemic racism, but the naysayers claim that recipients will spend it on drugs.
- Should we add free education through university?
- How about Medicare for all?
Again, as always, special pleading and argument by supposition rather than data dominate the discussion. But now we are getting data from around the world.
Watch this planet.
I will not get into all of that today.
UBI Out in the World
Universal basic income around the world
Experiments in portions of 29 countries.
List of advocates of universal basic income
Including such notables, of exceedingly various political persuasions, as Thomas Paine, Huey Long, Steven Hawking, MLK, 1200 US economists, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bucky Fuller, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Kurzweil, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk...
Further Reading
Wikipedia: Universal basic income
Quotations about Basic Income
By date of publication:
- Ailsa McKay, The Future of Social Security Policy: Women, Work and a Citizens Basic Income, Routledge, 2005, ISBN 9781134287185
- Karl Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No Archived 16 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, March 2013. Early drafts of each chapter are available online for free at this link Archived 13 June 2017 at the Wayback Machine.
- Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists, De Correspondent, 2014, ISBN 9789082520347
- Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Verso Books, 2015, ISBN 9781784780968
- Colombino, U. (2015). "Five Crossroads on the Way to Basic Income: An Italian Tour" (PDF). Italian Economic Journal. 1 (3): 353–389. doi:10.1007/s40797-015-0018-3. S2CID 26507450. Archived (PDF) from the original on 29 December 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2019.
- Karl Widerquist, ed., Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee Archived 23 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine, (book series), Palgrave Macmillan.
- Paul O'Brien, Universal Basic Income: Pennies from Heaven, The History Press, 2017, ISBN 978 1 84588 367 6.
- Benjamin M. Friedman, "Born to Be Free" (review of Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Harvard University Press, 2017), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 15 (12 October 2017), pp. 39–41.
- Marinescu, Ioana (February 2018). "No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Cash Transfer Programs". NBER Working Paper No. 24337. doi:10.3386/w24337.
- Ewan McGaughey, 'Will Robots Automate Your Job Away? Full Employment, Basic Income, and Economic Democracy Archived 24 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine' (2018) SSRN Archived 24 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine, part 4(2).
- Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People, Hachette Books, April 3, 2018
- Lowrey, Annie (2018). Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. Crown. ISBN 978-1524758769.
- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, Simon & Schuster, May 2018, ISBN 9781501143311
- Bryce Covert, "What Money Can Buy: The promise of a universal basic income – and its limitations", The Nation, vol. 307, no. 6 (10 / 17 September 2018), pp. 33–35.
- John Lanchester, "Good New Idea: John Lanchester makes the case for Universal Basic Income" (discusses 8 books, published between 2014 and 2019, comprehensively advocating Universal Basic Income), London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 14 (18 July 2019), pp. 5–8.
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