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Through the Goa mining PIL (public interest litigation) in the Supreme Court of India (WP 435/2012), we have developed a tight proposition for minerals, extensible to natural resources and the commons.

We take the perspective of owners of sub-soil assets. Quite simply, we are asking for the following principles to be implemented (in Goa, India and globally):
1. We, the people of [Goa], own the minerals in common. The government is merely a trustee of natural resources for the people and especially future generations (Public Trust Doctrine).

2. As we have inherited the minerals, we are simply custodians and must pass them on to future generations (Inter-generational Equity Principle).

Consider the example of inherited family gold. If the family decide to keep the gold as it is, they ensure the gold remains to be passed onto future generations. However they must safeguard it against theft, which is both a headache and a cost, while the gold produces no income. Alternatively, if they decide to sell the gold and invest the proceeds in say land for example, they and their future generations can benefit from the income of the land as long as it is well maintained. The crucial point is that if the gold were to be lost or the investments mismanaged, the loss of capital would be permanent for all future generations.

3. Therefore, if we mine and we sell our mineral resources, we must ensure zero loss, ie. capture of the full economic rent (sale price minus cost of extraction, cost including reasonable profit for miner). Any loss is a loss to all of us and our future generations.

4. All the money received from our minerals must be saved in a Permanent Fund, as already implemented all over the globe (Botswana, Norway, etc). Like the minerals, the Permanent Fund will also be part of the commons. The Supreme Court of India has ordered the creation of a Permanent Fund for Goan iron ore and already $13 million is deposited. This is a global judicial precedent.

5. Any real income (after inflation) from the Permanent Fund must only be distributed equally to all as a right of ownership, a commons dividend or a Citizen’s Dividend.

These principles are sufficient in themselves to receive support from most people. Read on!

Grounds for the principles

These principles are first and foremost constitutional in India (& likely most countries). They flow from the Public Trust Doctrine & the Inter-generational Equity Principle. These are also the inheritance customs for a large part of the population. It has strong parallels with Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical. It is aligned with environmental and mineral resource economics. From an economic theory perspective, all we are asking for is respect for property rights. This is unarguable in all flavours of mainstream economics (although indigenous people & others will argue that nature cannot be owned). It is palpably fair, ethical, right, just and moral.

We advocate that this be the default framework for minerals (and the commons generally). Any variations from these principles (“social or welfare purposes”) would require strong justification.

The first problem: Massive losses

Title to sub-soil minerals are usually with governments. In India, minerals are largely owned by the sub-national governments. Mining is effectively the sale of the family gold. The goal must be to receive the full value, the economic rent. There are relatively few studies that attempt to calculate whether mineral owners have suffered losses.In our first paper, Implementing Intergenerational Equity in Goa, we used World Bank data series for iron ore mining to estimate the economic rent per ton. We then multiplied this by the tons exported (from the local industry body) to estimate the total economic rent of the iron ore exported. Then compared this with the actual amounts received by the state government through royalty. Over a 5 year period (2004–2009), the state of Goa lost more than 99% of the value of its minerals.

In our second paper, Catastrophic Failure of Public Trust in Mining: Case Study of Goa, we repeat the analysis. However, we estimate the economic rent from the annual reports of Sesa Goa, our largest miner, accounting for 1/3rd of the mining. While the after tax cost of capital should have been 10–12%, we set it at 20%. Of the balance value, the state of Goa lost over 95% of the economic rent. This was over a 8 year period (2004–2012). This paper also shows similar results in iron ore, coal, oil and gas across India.

Worldwide, IMF data (para 64) shows significant losses of the economic rent are common — minimum of 15% for oil and 35% for minerals. Energy is 1/7th the world economy. Some $7 tn of oil & minerals are extracted each year. World Bank mineral depletion estimates are $27 tn between 1970 and 2013.

Creates extensive problems

Effectively, we are selling our mineral inheritance, our family gold, very cheap. This creates corruption, crony capitalism & poor governance. The obviously unfair terms of the mining lease creates incentives for the miner to extract rapidly and exit. This in turn creates the human rights violations and environmental damage. Eventually this leads to conflict and civil war.

As we are selling the minerals cheap, it also eventually drives over consumption, leading to global warming & unsustainability.

Most minerals are owned by the state as a trustee on behalf of the people and especially future generations. This loss is therefore borne equally by everyone, effectively a per-head tax. And a few miners and their cronies are getting ultra rich. This is looting economics, not trickle down. It is driving inequality. It is a clear violation of Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and probably others we are not aware of. It violates justice, equality, common good, and is simply unethical and unfair.

In most countries, zero loss is not an explicit objective of the mining ministry. This must change.

The second problem: Government accounting and statistics

Mining is clearly the sale of the family gold. A related issue is that government accounting and statistics treat money from mining as revenue, not the sale of inherited assets. Other than being obviously wrong, it is contrary to private sector accounting. Green accounting essentially acknowledges this issue.

Terming mineral receipts “windfall revenue” disguises its nature as a sale of an inherited asset. More revenues are good, & we don’t examine windfalls closely. Inherited wealth is frittered away in consumption.

Due to the commodity cycle, “windfall revenue” treatment creates huge volatility in government budgets. “Revenue” booms. Expenditure rises to keep pace. Prices crash. “Revenues” crash. Sell more inherited wealth at the price bottom? Prices drop further. Cut the public sector? Impose a new tax? Hard choices to make.

Alaska, which only deposits 25% of its oil money, has suffered from the price volatility impact, as you can see from their ongoing budget discussions. So too Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Russia. Some countries like Norway & Botswana have a fiscal policy that effectively considers minerals to be capital — they target the non-mineral revenue deficit, and deposit 100% of mineral receipts into their Permanent Fund, effectively treating mineral receipts as capital receipts.

This incorrect accounting also creates pressure to extract — more revenues are good. Money from minerals is easy money, which in turn drives poor governance and eventually autocracies.

The distortion is significant. In Goa, we found over the same 8 year period (2004–2012), the official deficit was 2.46% of GDP. If we treat mineral receipts as capital receipts, then the “non-mineral” deficit rises to 3.73%. However, if we treat the losses as expenses, then the deficit increases to an incredible 41.47%. This is clearly unsustainable.

Note that mineral receipts accounted for only 8% of Goa government revenues. This is much higher in many resource rich nations, approaching 90% in some cases. These nations are simply consuming their inheritance.

We are asking for is for government accounting, statistics and fiscal policy to treat money from mining as capital receipts from inherited assets, not “windfall” revenue as is the current practice. This simple change will be quite profound. “We manage what we measure.” The immediate impact of this change would be to strip government revenues of all mining money. And minerals become an asset with a different set of questions: Should we extract? When should we extract? How much should we extract? What minimum price do we want for our asset? What is its value? Are we incurring a loss? How are we investing the money we receive for our children?

We have written a detailed paper to the IMF, UN, IPSASB, WB, INTOSAI, etc to correct this anomaly. Following some questions and comments, we have sent a response to FAQs. As the relevant government accounting standard is under review, we have started an online petition, A simple accounting change that will save countless lives.

Scale of the injustice

The loss of economic rent and the consumption spending by the government are effectively an enormous loss to the commons, borne by our children & future generations. The absolute losses in Goa were enormous. US$ 9 billion in eight years. Twice state government revenues from all sources. 28% of cumulative GDP. Each family lost more than the average private assets of households in Goa. It is simply immoral.

As a counterfactual, had our principles been applied for that same 8 year period in Goa, today every citizen in Goa would receive a commons dividend of Rs. 1,000 a month. This would have made a significant dent on poverty (the national poverty line is at Rs. 932 per month).

If significant losses are likely, perhaps it would be better to develop fairer institutions before extracting.

Fair mining

Our principles are clearly fair and universal. The citizen’s dividend is a critical aspect of our design, as it is intended to link the citizen to their minerals. This will create monitoring so that these losses do not recur.

It will also have tremendous other impacts. After the vote, it will be the first true manifestation of equality. As a right of ownership, the citizen’s dividend also is different from a government subsidy. As it grows over time, and keeps pace with inflation as well, the citizen’s dividend is also a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and comes with all its benefits.

Zero loss mining makes the mining lease fair. This reduces the incentives for the haste, and the damage that comes after.

Since the state doesn’t benefit from the mining “revenue”, either at the point of extraction or the distribution of real income, there is little incentive to extract mindlessly.

The whole system is fair, likely reducing many mineral conflicts (though Scotland is more likely to separate from the UK, etc).

Safeguarding great wealth

If we extract minerals, then there is a large amount of wealth “created”. This will attract thieves of all kinds. This in turn drives corruption, poor governance and over-consumption. And environmental damage, human rights violations ending up with conflict. And the huge money coming out makes it difficult to stop as crony capitalists buy the political system with patronage.

What we are essentially doing is allowing mining while sequestering the great wealth away from everyone — miner, government/politician & the people, and only allowing the real income to trickle out.

And everyone is a stakeholder. Transparency, state of the art controls, and whistle-blower rewards and protections are necessary to make it difficult to steal from the pot.

What about Ecological Economics?

We found the Intergenerational Equity principle (“what will future generations do”) to be the core principle — first safeguard the inheritance — if that is done, consume the crop. From this we derive sustainability (sustain what for whom? planetary capability for future generations). From this we derive, through weak sustainability, the precautionary principle for critical assets, and the polluter pays principle for damage to non-critical assets.

Mining is essentially the conversion of natural resources into other non-wasting assets. The first step is listing the assets in the inheritance. These are at least three (a) the damage to the environment/society/agriculture, (b) the work / income associated with the minerals (which depletes along with the minerals), and (c) the mineral value or economic rent. In Goa, we found (a) extensive damage to environment/society, (b) the minerals could be exhausted in nine years (Shah Commission), and © we were receiving less than 5% of the mineral value, and even that was being consumed, a total loss to most of Goa, and our children. For each asset, we need to create a mechanism to ensure that the total value of our commons remains “non-wasting”.

For Goa mining, we propose a tiered structure. The precautionary principle (“don’t risk a catastrophe”) we propose to implement through a cap mechanism, set at the lowest volume where any irreversible damage was observed (12 mt saw the benthic life of our rivers almost extinct) or any legal limit is breached anywhere. The limit would drop sharply on a breach like a stock market trigger. If everything was OK over a long period [5 years], then the limit would increase in increments of [5 mtpa]. Separately, the polluter pays principle would apply to all identifiable damage. And the District Mineral Foundation would be expected to compensate the rest of the damage that cannot be identified to anyone. For the mineral exhaustion, we propose an independent cap set at 1/200th of the reserves, ensuring extraction over 7 generations.

The government needs money!

One common concern is money should go to the government budget. There are two sorts of reasons: (a) The good things government can do (education, health, infrastructure, renewables, etc.) (b) The future will be richer, so we need not save as much.

Our design is intended to make Citizen’s stakeholders, creating an endowment effect. Only then would they monitor mining. Diversion to the budget provides easy money to the politicians, which would worsen governance. If we divert even 1% to the budget, soon enough there will be a budget crisis and this will eventually become 99% or 100%. The link with the citizen gets broken. Raiding the Permanent Fund and then the remaining minerals will be next. The only standard that can be defended is an absolute standard.

From a governance standpoint, if the investments are so productive, then surely capital markets would finance it or taxes could be raised. If this is not possible, it is more likely an issue of the credibility of the governance to deliver the anticipated benefits.

The other idea that the future will be richer depends on continuing growth. Numerous clouds surround us. It would be a bold prediction that the future will always be richer than us, for even the next 1,000 years.

These two blog posts explain further: Why 100% to Permanent Fund and Why income distribution only as Citizen’s Dividend.

What do we do in practice?

We have submitted a detailed note on how our approach needs to be incorporated within India’s National Mineral Policy. Our Goenchi Mati Manifesto suggests a practical framework for implementation in Goa. The 3rd EPW paper discusses how we are approaching this issue at the Supreme Court. More work is needed and inputs would be appreciated.

Can it be implemented?

1. Economics: Keep in mind that our principles would be supported by most flavors of economics. All we are asking for is respect the property rights of commoners.

2. Politics: Politically, minerals have always been a difficult issue as very few people benefit or are harmed directly. The vast majority want “development” and are realistic enough to see that our cars and phones need minerals. However, with this argument and the large losses, we can address the development seekers without stopping mining. Finally, the urban population can get concerned about mining as an corruption/governance issue and a human rights / fairness issue.

As a separate matter, a challenger party can disrupt patronage politics with a stunning vision of a new social compact, one that explicitly treats everyone as equal, while striking a blow at crony capitalism. The first mover advantage is large, and is still available. Sort of “everyone gets a dividend while the corrupt cronies weep & our children cheer”.

Keep in mind that over 50 Permanent Funds from natural resources exist globally, so there is a feasible political path.

3. Moral/Religion: Our principles achieve both intra-generational equality (the Citizen’s Dividend) and inter-generational equity (the Permanent Fund). This is effectively the golden rule (treat everyone as you would want to be treated) which is the moral bedrock of all large religions. The Archbishop of Goa showed his strong support for our ideas, linked to the environmental encyclical of Pope Francis. Is an inter-faith resolution feasible similar to the one before the Paris Convention?

The Future We Need

At a deeper level, the world has an ecological problem and an economic problem. Neither can be solved in the current political system. Change here is difficult due to the money flowing in (Citizen’s United), and eventually, the biggest source is crony capitalism. And the biggest sector for crony capitalism, and actually the biggest sector of the economy is energy & minerals. Looking even deeper, over the last 500 years, we’ve had individualism dominating community, and a shift to consuming the planet instead of acting as custodians for our children.

Our 5 principles essentially reverses this dynamic. We reframe towards community thinking through the commons. We reframe our relationship as stewards of the planet, not consumers. Zero loss mining + the Citizens Dividend controls crony capitalism. We control inequality and extreme poverty on the economic side. And the environment benefits first from the re-framing as custodians, and then from getting the appropriate price with proper environmental safeguards. Higher prices would over time compress consumption as well.

Starting with minerals is probably the easiest point. People can agree on mineral values (unlike a forest). It is usually obvious that the mineral is being depleted, purely capital (sand and water are exceptions). We can successfully make the argument in minerals even to global warming deniers or those wanting more development. If they agree, they implicitly accept the community and custodianship reframing. The reframing opens up a path to eventual acceptability of the need for true sustainability.

Our framework naturally leads to many other ideas as well. Carbon tax + dividend. Pollution tax + dividend. Land tax + dividend. All these are premised on the idea of commons, and the tax is a recovery of the value destroyed (by carbon / pollution) or created (land, value created by society). The dividend is key — since a large majority will be net beneficiaries under any such scheme, they will support tax increases, eventually squeezing consumption. The land tax also has the impact of lowering land values and making it expensive to keep land permanently fallow. India’s land taxes are a fraction of the western norm of 1–2% of the capital value of property and a hidden source of inequality, like mining.

Clearly, our principles must be part of the core of any sustainable economy. It quite simply is The Future We Need.

What are we doing?

1. The Goenchi Mati Movement (GMM) in Goa is advocating for the full implementation of our 5 principles. Our manifesto (goenchimati.org/manifesto) lays out how these principles can be implemented in Goa. In general, we found that people of all strata understand our principles very easily and naturally. Those who read the manifesto also found it clear and logical. Amongst our supporters in Goa, we have a miner, a tribal mining affected leader and a mining dependent trade union leader. You can view a list of prominent GMM supporters. In our recent state elections, 4 political parties endorsed our manifesto, including Aam Aadmi Party (a good governance / anti corruption party that swept the Delhi elections). Consider supporting us. However, we found it difficult to get the idea to spread virally and were unable to significantly impact the elections. More work is needed here.

We did have some success. The Government of India has discussed our idea in the recent Economic Survey (pg 297), and CGD reported on it. The Shadow Chancellor of the UK is also interested in our ideas.

2. Goa Foundation (goafoundation.org), an environmental non-profit that is involved, among other things, in litigation against mining in Goa, and supports the Goenchi Mati Movement. The Supreme Court order on the Permanent Fund is a result of Goa Foundation’s work. This research work is under Goa Foundation. GF has also been advocating how these principles should be implemented with the Goa and the Central governments.

3. In partnership with an alliance (mm&P) and a non-profit (Common Cause), we have launched a campaign to change India’s National Mineral Policy. Goa Foundation sent in a detailed representation that sets out how these principles should be implemented, and provides the rationale for a strong control system and radical transparency. The first draft does contain some language on Intergenerational Equity. However, the road is long and much can change.

4. We are conscious that these principles are universal, and we would like to implement them globally. Our global initiative is The Future We Need (TFWN). We are looking for global partners.

5. The second initiative of The Future We Need (after GMM) is to advocate a change in government accounting, statistics & disclosure from revenue to capital. The relevant international accounting standard, IPSAS — 13 Leases, is under review, but unfortunately doesn’t include mineral leases. We have started an online petition, A simple accounting change that will save countless lives. Consider supporting us.

Learn more

1. A youtube video at a conference on basic income. This doesn’t cover the environmental aspects.

1. The three published papers in EPW related to this work are Implementing Intergenerational Equity in Goa, Catastrophic Failure of Public Trust in Mining: Case Study of Goa and Intergenerational Equity Case Study

2. We recommend reading these two blog posts that answer the most frequent questions, Why 100% to Permanent Fund and Why income distribution only as Citizen’s Dividend.

4. Here’s our detailed note on mineral accounting by governments, and the response to FAQs.

4. How a loss from the commons is equivalent to a negative basic income or a per-head tax.

6. A recent article on the deeper causes of the Alaska budget crisis and how implementing our principles would avoid it.

Goa specific in more detail

1. A 9 part series of articles on what happened in Goa with a lot of detail, so that the information is in the public domain. Ore Chor! 144 is on how bad the lease renewals were. Links to the earlier ones are in the article.

2. A Youtube playlist going into some detail (80 minutes)

3. Somewhat of a history of what happened: http://goenchimati.org/intergenerational-equity-documents/. It has a particular lens, but covers quite a wide swathe of the work with links to go into much more detail.

4. Most of our collateral can be accessed on our website — academic papers, explainer videos, articles, etc.

Rahul Basu is the Research Director of Goa Foundation, an environmental NGO in India. The Future We Need is a global movement asking for natural resources to be viewed as a shared inheritance we hold as custodians for future generations. This work is based on the practical work of the Goa Foundation.

Whose Mine Is It Anyway is a campaign to make government finances and national income statistics treat mining as the sale of minerals. Read Mitigating the Resource Curse by improving Government Accounting and Government Accounting and the Resource Curse — Response to FAQs.

The Goenchi Mati Movement is advocating these principles for all mining in Goa, India. A joint campaign is asking for these principles to be part of India’s National Mineral Policy.

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Rok Kranjc | Feb 6, 2018 | The Commons Post: Many of today’s proposals for and experiments with Universal Basic Income (UBI) in so-called developed countries seem to be congruent with, and indeed in some instances explicitly catered towards maintaining the dominant political economic architecture and status quo imaginary. Some of the more salient narratives regarding UBI present it as a silver bullet for all kinds of (neoliberally framed) social and economic woes and as a remedy for the pressing issue of automation which is assuredly having disruptive effects on the business-as-usual as practiced to-date. On the other hand, more radical proposals relevant to the UBI debate find themselves confined to academic and political ghettos, while those that do make it to experimental stage are watered down to versions of ‘basic income light’[i] through processes and barriers integral to incumbent political economic structures and forms of political deliberation.

While such experiments and proposals may be crucial stepping stones in fostering social salience and political legitimacy around alternatives to dominant welfare and wage labour models, it is important to recognize their limitations, particular application contexts, scales and time-horizons, with reference to wider integrative visions and potential mechanisms of socio-economic and political transformation. However the reality is that at this time such wider and integrative visions are lacking, while radical and systemic alternatives to welfare remain severely undertheorized in crucial areas. In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.

1. Considering UBI as an interim model for citizen empowerment

Imagining potential futures of welfare from a ‘long now’[ii] perspective necessitates the recognition that some solutions should be designed to have intentionally short life-spans while others should be designed to change over long periods of time.[iii] The reality is that the forms of UBI thus far explored are likely not the be-all and end-all of alternatives. It is thus important to consider the view that UBI models based on fiat money pooled and distributed by means of more or less conventional market and state mechanisms (e.g. taxes, redistribution of state funds) may be an an overall important, yet perhaps best seen as consciously interim step in institutional re-design and citizen emancipation and empowerment. It is relevant to note however that UBI models, defined as unconditional payments of certain sums of money to individuals of a society, already today find rivals, for example in the concepts of Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[iv] and Universal Basic Services (UBS)[v], which importantly shift the debate from income to access to and participation in the commons. Using the ‘city as a commons’ framework and the critical concepts of UBA and UBS as starting points, it is possible to conceive of commons-based welfare models that operate on the principles of universal rights and effective access to basic and potentially expanding asset and service options (e.g. housing, food, energy, healthcare, mobility, internet, education, sport, recreation) and the care, co-creation of and democratic deliberation about them using novel collaborative, open-source, circular, sharing and regenerative economy approaches, among others.

2. Anchoring alternative welfare systems in alternative currencies

One issue that is very rarely addressed even within more radical UBI debates is that of the currencies and accounting frameworks on which such systems are (to be) based.[vi] Arguably, pursuing the interrelated goals of ecological sustainability and social justice calls for a reconsideration of ‘money-as-usual’. Many currency systems have been proposed that too range from local, complimentary and other currency types more or less congruent with or supplementary to the economic status quo, to radical alternatives.[vii] The envisioned ‘commonified’ basic assets and services model(s), indeed commons and commoning activity generally, may be anchored in a rich ecosystem of alternative currencies, indices and accounting frameworks operating at different scales and in different socioeconomic and socioecological contexts. Some of the more prominent proposed money anchors specifically include energy, time, CO2 emissions, single resources such as water or grain, or ‘baskets of resources’.[viii] Additional aspects to consider include:

• the ethics, scales and forms of cosmopolitan and translocal solidarity
• gift cultures and economies
• open data
• forms of transaction (e.g. ‘commoner smart cards’ for food, public transportation and skill-sharing)
• the potentials of blockchain technology

3. A deep rethinking of ‘work’

The currently ongoing and planned UBI experiments in the Netherlands, once presented as a beacon of hope in mainstream media, have recently been subject to a number of relevant critiques. It is important to outline that these experiments are not of universal income as they specifically target the unemployed and those already receiving some form of social benefit; nor are they unconditional, but configured with mind to supporting existing ‘labour market integration’ policies and mechanisms. Today, it is crucial to expand our definition of work and to rethink our engagement with it, a discussion that should go well beyond the reductionism of the automation narrative as presented in the mainstream. What is thus needed are systems complimentary to UBI/UBA/UBS that open up and encourage access to skills, (co-production of) knowledge, and discovering and trying oneself out at various (sometimes not at once apparent) forms of social and ecological ‘service’ and ‘life callings’ in transitional times; as well as civic media infrastructures that can support proactive public discourse around and experimentation with alternative institutional options, balancing the challenges of sustainability and social equity with resilient subsistence and social welfare contribution and provisioning. An interesting idea in this regard is the ‘balanced job complex’,[ix] proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their model for participatory economics; a deliberative democratic model that may be found useful in conceptualizing dynamic ways of societal self-configuration of equitable and contributory work loads depending on needs, capacities, preferences and challenges.

Conclusion

By imbuing the UBI debate with a more systems-oriented and commons perspective, I have argued that an important shift is made from income and work as such to deeper interrelated questions of 1.) rights, capabilities and effective access; 2.) forms of deliberation, governance, entrepreneurship, collective care and accounting; 3.) forms and scales of pooling resources and work, and; 4.) forms and scales of equitable distribution and sustainable and resilient provisioning of universal basic commons entitlements. The perspective illuminates the contingent relationship between the contextual and subjective ‘political viability‘ of the UBI, and the scopes and salience of articulated (critical, open-source, open-ended) alternative institutional possibilities; and the prospects of a polity that exploits a dialectical relationship between interim or hybrid institutional models on the one hand, and radical experimentation with other socio-economic configurations, emergent city-making/place-making cultures and political possibilities in the here-and-now on the other.

[i] Schouten, Socrates. 2018. Baby Steps on the Road to Basic Income. Green European Journal. Available at: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/baby-steps-on-the-road-to-a-basic-income/

[ii] Brand, Stewart. 1999. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

[iii] Irwin et al. 2016. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.

[iv] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.

[v] https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2017/10/universal-basic-services-or-universal-basic-income

[vi] Bauwens, Michel. 2006. Complementary Currencies and the Basic Income. Available at: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/complementary-currencies-and-the-basic-income/2006/02/14; Bauwens, M. & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value  Accounting. Chiang Mai: Heinrich Böll Stiftung & P2P Foundation.

[vii] Dittmer, Kristofer. 2011. Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual. Available at: http://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dittmer_JCP_pre-pub-manuscript.pdf

[viii] New Economics Foundation. 2013. Energising Money: An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. Available at: http://neweconomics.org/2013/02/energising-money/

[ix] Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso

Photo by Mister Higgs

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Andrea Fumagalli on the Five Criteria To Distinguish a Progressive Interpretation of the Basic Income

Basic Income presents different and contradictory definitions. That is why the terms can mislead. On my opinion, we can speak of Basic income only when the following five criteria are verified:

1. Individuality criterion: the basic income must be paid at the individual level and not familiar. It can then discuss if children under 18 years will have the right or not.

2. Criterion of residence: the basic income must be paid to all / the people who, residing in a given territory, live, rejoice, suffer and participate in the production and social cooperation regardless of their marital status, gender, ethnicity, religious belief, etc.

3. Criterion of unconditionality: basic income must be provided by minimizing any form of compensation and / obligation as a free individual choice as possible.

4. Access criteria: the basic income is paid in its initial phase of experimentation to all / the people who have an income below a certain threshold. This threshold may, however, be greater than the relative poverty line and converge toward the median level of the personal distribution of existing income. Moreover, this level of income must be expressed in relative terms, not absolute, so that increasing the minimum threshold (as a result of the initial introduction of the measure) the range of beneficiaries will increase continuously until to rise to graded levels of universality.

5. Criteria for funding and transparency: the modalities of financing of basic income must always be set out on the basis of economic viability studies, detailing where resources are obtained based on an estimate of its cost necessary. These resources have to fall on general taxation and not on other assets of origin (such as, for example, social security contributions, sale of public assets, privatization proceeds, etc.). Basic income is complementary to welfare systems and never substitutive. On my opinion, basic income should be a conflict tool not a compatibility tool with respect to the existing contemporary neo-liberalist capitalism. That is why, the criteria of total unconditionality and an enough level (> relative poverty line as minimum) just to say “NO” to halting conditions of work and exploitation without blackmail, are more important than an immediate universality (may be, providing a insignificant amount of money).

Link to original discussion on Facebook

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

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Jacobson discusses the history of the “wages for housework” movement, connecting it to the contemporary movement for unconditional basic income.

Republished from basicincome.org

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Basic Income and the New Universalism

Universal basic income is firstly universal, secondly about income and only thirdly basic. In short, the most radical thing about basic income is that it touches everyone. This marks a significant change in how we view society at large.

Image Source: MiSs LolliPop/ Flickr

The universal basic income has become a subject of increasing fascination across the entire ideological spectrum in recent years. Capable of much more than just a simple “employment fix”, basic income could help to create no less than a shared political vision for a future society.

There are a number of experiments in basic income about to be implemented this year around the world. The experiments offer basic income as a solution to automation, lack of disposable income, benefit traps or a bloated bureaucracy. In other words, the goal is to “fix” various parts of the existing relationships between the state, the individual and capital. Currently, the technology-driven vision for our society can be summarised thus: let robots do the dirty work, let a small group of creative entrepreneurs come up with new solutions to emerging problems and the rest of us can live on a universal basic income and the odd jobs the platforms provide.

In the present political climate, however, such visions could amount to suicide for any policy or movement. What people want are jobs for everyone, not basic income. In many countries, such as the UK and US, the public that cast its vote in recent elections expects this to happen though a return to a resurgent manufacturing industry: a modern-day version of the great industrial society of the past and a result of the fact that, for decades, politics has been about special groups and policies directed not at society as a whole but at those parts of it considered in need of fixing.

Amid all the talk about the new age of work and increasing automation, we have perhaps not seen the obvious. It is not just work that is changing, but entire societies. Somehow, we need to be able to convene both the automation of demeaning tasks (demand full automation^[1]) and take into consideration the desire to work that right now energises politics like no other idea. In order to bridge this gap, we need to look at the big picture. We need to understand what work means to people and what its precise role is in society.

Basic income has been compared to “the moonshot” (by us and others), where the process is much more important than the immediate goal. The process of basic income is in opening a new chapter in the discussion of automation and work. These work and automation phenomena do not occur in isolation from the rest of society. The current technological progress is once again evoking the question related to universals: what are the new infrastructures, new rights and new responsibilities that can weather the change?

In what follows, we suggest viewing basic income not as income, but as the capacity to produce and thus to participate actively in society. This perspective shifts our attention from automation and the increasingly rapid disappearance of (white-collar) jobs to the wider implications of what work has meant to us as a society. Viewed this way, the basic income combats the universally shared experience of the “spectre of uselessness” that haunts all parts of society, independent of social status or background. In doing this, it pushes us towards the “politics of what is shared”: the very process of getting basic income implemented is able to galvanise politics on a new level.

Framed in the right way, basic income can become much more than a quick fix for automation, or the societal flavour of the month of techno-fantasists. It can ignite a new social movement and help to create a unifying vision for a post-industrial society.

Framed in the right way, basic income can become much more than a quick fix for automation, or the societal flavour of the month of techno-fantasists. As a universal policy, it can ignite a new social movement and help to create a unifying vision for a post-industrial society.

Basic Income and Four Reasons to Fear the Future

Recent popular discourse on the subject of basic income has coalesced around four lines of argument. First, a wave of statesmen and business leaders from President Obamato billionaire business magnate Elon Musk have voiced their concerns over a future society where robots have replaced over half the workforce. As automation eliminates low-end jobs, an increasing number of people will be unable to make ends meet with earnings from low-paid, episodic or zero-contract-style employment.

That said, a couple of decades from now, advances in artificial intelligence, for example, might lead to us creating more wealth than we could ever have imagined before. This wealth would accumulate in the hands of the entrepreneurs and investors, however, and as incomes drop the economy as a whole collapses. There would be nobody able to buy the products and services that are automatically produced. These fears have contributed to the technologists’ enthusiasm for basic income. As such, it comes as no surprise that Y Combinator, the world’s leading start-up accelerator, is running its own basic income pilot with one hundred families in Oakland, California.

A third concern, a fixation on employment and incentives, currently dominates the thinking of the Finnish basic income experiment.^[2] There, the central argument is that basic income will break with the incentive structure of the current social benefits system: a system, it is argued, that discourages people from working. In Finland – as in many modern welfare societies – an individual has to navigate a web of income-tested “basic” benefits that are paid on top of one another. The joint effect of the layered benefits is that if a person who is receiving these benefits finds a job, work does not necessarily pay. Moreover, becoming an entrepreneur (or even “working” actively in the voluntary sector) can lead to losing one’s benefits entirely.

A fourth concern relates to the reduction of bureaucracy and administration. The transaction costs of means-testing the receivers of benefits are significant. The idea of an unconditional payment can therefore be seen as one way of providing a more efficient welfare system. This is the reason why basic income is of interest to the “liberal” end of the political spectrum, where streamlining the state is a major concern. The state can be reduced to these kind of “algorithms” that are simple and transparent.

Outdated Concepts of State v. Individual v. Capital

These four arguments for basic income are all relevant. That said, they are, however, all based on a somewhat outdated concept of the relationship between the state, the individual and capital. In the post-war societal consensus, work united employers, workers and the state in a shared mission (something that in the Nordic countries was dubbed the welfare state). The different formulations provided the basis for all the industrial societies of the West. In this vision, economic growth bound together the interests of the state, the people and private capital.

The state ensured a steady supply of labour for the employment markets by educating, re-educating and creating mechanisms for those that had fallen ill and could not return to the job market. Employers, for their part, supplied the state with taxable income, but also people with a sense of worth and income. Central to this vision was the idea that work is something permanent and not working permanently is a temporary situation that requires interventions: benefit systems, insurances, healthcare, re-education and more.

So now, the changes in work are not just changing work itself, but breaking this “machine”. If you take work out of an industrial society, the interests of capital, the people and the state are no longer aligned. And that is a major problem.

Indeed, work is not just simply about income to individual citizens. It is more, from both a societal point of view and an individual point of view. Work relates to our sense of worth, identity and social cohesion, and it plays a part in the contract that has bound together employers, the workforce and the state. Steady jobs and professions have been so central to our societies that currently our main way of contributing to society happens via work: that is how we identify ourselves, that is where we spend most of our waking time.

Currently, we are in a situation where technological progress and globalisation seem to break the connection between growth, productivity and human well-being.

The current lines of argumentation see basic income as something that “fixes” what is happening to work. We propose looking at the big picture: work had a very special function in the industrial society. While work remains important to individuals, work (and therefore the social order) is changing. Currently, we are in a situation where technological progress and globalisation seem to break the connection between growth, productivity and human well-being.

Metaphorically speaking, basic income is not an app to save the industrial society, but it could be the start of a new operating system for the post-industrial society.

Viewed from the perspective of the four arguments postulated above, basic income merely functions as artificial respiration extending the lifespan of industrial society. Instead, now that work is changing, we have to form a new type of “contract” between the state, capital and the people. Metaphorically speaking, basic income is not an app to save the industrial society, but it could be the start of a new operating system for the post-industrial society. Its creation is by no means an easy task.

To get the job done, we propose two things in particular: one, to rethink what basic income is and two, to rethink what politics is. Basic income needs to be about more than income for the precarious job markets. Politics needs be about “the people”. In order to speak to everyone, we need to rethink the foundations of basic income as something that relates to not just work but participates actively in the community we are part of.

In the next two sections, we aim to do just that. To discuss the return of politics based on shared experiences and unifying challenges, as well as basic income having the capacity to produce.

Basic Income to Generate Social Renewal

With the focus on fixing the industrial mode of production, we fail to see the scale and scope of basic income in terms of generating social renewal. For it is unique in its scale: typically, the biggest single share of most countries’ budgets goes towards the funding of social and welfare costs. By way of an example, it represents approximately a quarter of the entire budgets of many advanced economies, such as the Finland and US. However, the scope of basic income is even more dramatic. The most important characteristic of basic income is the fact that it is universal, that it is for everyone.

Currently, basic income is regarded mainly as a redistributive social policy instrument. As such, its foundation is often traced back to social rights, such as the right to social security and adequate social and medical services. As a flat-rate transfer given to everyone, the universal basic income has been hailed by many welfare state scholars as the ideal typical universal benefit, reviving the concept of social rights-based social security.^[3]

The idea of a universal basic income, however, can be traced back further in history to the establishment of civil rights, a far older embodiment of universalism and a more foundational set of rights. The basic income discussion commenced probably for the first time in its current form around the time of the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century. It was a practical application of the establishment of the concept of universal human rights. The problem that philosophers puzzled over was how to reconcile the right to private property with the right to life and thus to a minimum standard of living.

As a solution, “founding father” and political theorist Thomas Paine proposed an early version of the basic income as a solution in Agrarian Justice.^[4] Paine’s argument centred on access to land. He departed from the premise that since land existed before man and was not created by man, it should belong to everyone equally. Therefore, every individual has an equal right to land by virtue of being human.

However, the development of agriculture, while contributing to civilisation, had dispossessed the majority of the population of their natural inheritance, but without compensation. For Paine, anyone born now should not be worse off than someone born before the onset of “civilisation”, when people, supposedly, had equal access to natural resources. Since the natural resources that had already been appropriated by individuals could not be separated from their cultivation (i.e. the labour of the proprietor), each individual should receive his or her entitlement in monetary form. In short, each man and woman should receive a lump sum of £15 when he or she turns 21. The amount was roughly two thirds of an agricultural labourer’s yearly income in Britain at the time.

To Understand the Present, We Must Understand the Past

Paine’s line of reasoning was echoed by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon at the turn of the 21st century. While Paine focused on land, Simon justified redistribution through the claim that a producer’s output depends largely on human and social capital, such as shared values, scientific knowledge, trust and other social institutions. Following Paine, he argued that social capital belongs jointly to all members of society rather than specific individuals. Therefore, the producer should only be entitled to a relatively small share of the profit. The rest should be taxed and redistributed as a kind of basic income to all members of society. Simon even went as far as claiming that at least 90% of all wealth derives from social capital.^[5]

Indeed, much of the value in today’s society is created, renewed and sustained by us as a collective: the shared culture with its practices and manners, the trust in others, the shared language, the meetings in public spaces, the ideas we overhear, the conversations we enter into, the ideas that are in the public domain and not protected by licences or patents; the list goes on. All of these factors are in addition to – as Paine observed – the limited natural resources that lie in the hands of the few. There is no way an economic system of any kind could identify and capture all the value (through, for instance, taxes or markets) generated by these common elements, and allocate it fairly in the complex system of value creation that the modern economy is. In this way, the fact that we collectively produce things that enable market production but lie outside the monetary system is another reason to treat basic income as a universal civil right, rather than as a quick fix for an ailing industrial society.

But a right to what? What does basic income in fact represent in these arguments? We argue that both land and social capital should be seen as representing a capacity to produce. In the rural society of Paine’s era, land represented access to a means of production, or the ability to independently produce a harvest. People were fleeing the feudal Europe, where ownership rights had not been established and the land belonged to the king. Coming to the US meant that one could claim ownership of land. Paine’s discussion was initiated by the understanding that, at some point, the land would run out. This rudimentary basic income could therefore be seen as guaranteeing natural ownership rights, where ownership can be interpreted as the capacity to produce, in an age when most production was farming. Similarly, we can see that the social capital created in the 20th century through welfare and education, for example, improved the capacity to produce; this time, of course, in the context of industrial society.

Capacity to Produce in the 21st Century

What is equal to land in the 21st century? What does the capacity to produce entail in a post-industrial society? To answer that question, we should look at basic income as capital, and not just money. Capital can be seen as all the physical and intangible assets that combine with labour to produce the goods and services in an economy (data, machines, offices, intellectual property rights, brands, energy and software). In other words, money becomes capital when we have enough of it to invest in what Karl Marx called “means of production”.

Post-industrial means of production are very different to those in Marx’s time of industrial revolution. In their article “New World Order – Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy”, the technology, economics and business scholars Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee and Michael Spence point out that software-based products and services are changing the nature and the role of capital in relationship to labour.^[6] As today’s machines are more and more software-based, this new capital can be replicated with zero marginal cost. They point out, however, that even if this “digital capital” is in theory abundant and free, it accumulates in the hands of a few.

Furthermore, they argue that technological progress speeds up the accumulation of wealth (citing the work of Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century^[7]). Brynjolfsson et al. write:

Machines are substituting for more types of human labour than ever before. As they replicate themselves, they are also creating more capital. This means that the real winners of the future will not be the providers of cheap labour or the owners of ordinary capital, both of whom will be increasingly squeezed by automation.

The real winners, the writers argue, are entrepreneurs who can create new solutions to new problems, while the rest will remain outside the new economy regardless of how much labour or traditional capital they can supply.

Here we have a great paradox on our hands: as a new kind of (digital) capital is becoming abundant and is replacing human labour in the production of goods and services, it is also slipping out of reach of most people. We are facing an era of abundance, in which the means of production are available to fewer people than before.

Therefore, in the era of capital accumulation, digital capital and renewable energy, we should see basic income not just as income for paying rent and buying food, but increasingly as access to capital in the productive sense of the word: in the same way as the right to own and claim land existed when moving from a feudal society to the era of nation states; and just as there was the right to healthcare and education after the move from an agrarian to an industrial society.

Now that we are moving from an industrial society to the next phase of socio-technological development, we have to ask what are the new rights people should have to remain active participants of society, to be able to produce, contribute and create value – not just to survive and have enough money for basic necessities, or, worse, to have state-sponsored jobs that could and should be automated.

In creating a new universal benefit system, we are creating a new relationship between everyone. Therefore, the real question about basic income is a big one: why? What is the purpose of this relationship? Why should anyone get this money? This question of framing should not to be confused with introducing conditionality to basic income (thus destroying its core idea). It is merely a question of how to communicate the purpose of basic income.

In this, we should look to the founding fathers and their idea of basic income as an extension of ownership rights. And ownership not just to have, but ownership as a freedom to produce. Picture this: this time we are not fleeing the feudal society, but an industrial one. Our industries can no longer provide us with the means of production. Work and politics no longer supply us with adequate means of participation. We need to figure out nothing more or less than a new way of collaborating to create value.

From Basic Income to Basic AI – Renewable Energy and Abundance

Current technological progress has the effect of driving down prices and wages. As this progress accelerates (a phenomenon we believe is clearly under way), the deflationary pressure it brings could increase and spread. In other words, the nature of money (and capital) is changing because of technological progress, such as the cheap and new forms of automation and global price transparency in consumer goods. In brief, it means that extreme advances in technological productivity are pushing down the prices of consumer goods, to the point where it is possible that the role of money is reduced. This is often referred to as technological deflation. The output per working hour keeps rising, even if salaries remain steady.

Some writers, technologists and economists have proposed that the information economy, coupled with the automation of cognitive tasks through AI and the eventual zero spot price of energy that renewables will bring, will force a drop in marginal prices to zero, or at least almost zero. In conditions of competition, this would also mean that prices drop, also to close to zero. Some thinkers have even claimed that we would then move into a new era, named provocatively and variously as the “age of abundance”,^[8] “post-capitalism”,^[9] “the world after capital”,^[10] “the post-scarcity society”^[11] or “the zero marginal cost society”.^[12]

Common to all these visions is an understanding that with the degradation of the price mechanism, markets will lose importance as the general-purpose resource allocation system. Markets may not disappear, but they will no longer be needed to allocate resources efficiently. In fact, efficiency becomes less important in resource allocation, as other values emerge. The focus shifts from efficiency to how to guarantee access to abundant resources, when capital is accumulating in the hands of a few.

If money loses its central role alongside work, we will have to rethink the idea of wealth and its distribution as well. “A post-capital society” would also mean that taxes will have to be collected in another form than money (an idea explored in this paper). Similarly, benefits such as basic income should be paid in something more directly useful than money, in basic productive capacity that is becoming abundant, such as free and equal access to new and emerging general-purpose technologies: capacity in computing, AI, 3D printing, DNA analysis, robots, (renewable) energy and so forth. These general-purpose technologies, as a result of a radical drop in their price and the difficulty of protecting the intellectual property related to them, become easily concentrated (in ownership) in the hands of a few and the services through which they are dispersed.

This type of post-scarcity and capital world is, of course, still some decades away, but requires that serious thought must be given to it. Therefore, we must already propose framing basic income as a basic tool for production, a seed money for the people, as an embodiment of the right to produce and participate in the common good – as opposed to an unemployment benefit that helps individuals to cling onto the search for work. For the difference between the two is stark: either basic income is a quick fix for a society where work in an industrial setting is the norm, and it provides a cushion for those times you are not employed by the “factory”; or, conversely, basic income is a universal right to produce and contribute to society as an autonomous actor.

The Return of Universalism

The last wave of universalism in politics ended in the 1970s and 80s, when the emphasis on universally shared characteristics gave way to the discourse on individualism and the needs of special groups. One manifestation of the end of universalism is identity politics: political activity that finds its justification in the experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups, to the extent that we have grown accustomed to nodding in agreement with the political truism that “we should become aware of and celebrate our differences”.

While identity politics has achieved a lot of good in highlighting the increasing diversity of our societies, some scholars have attributed to it the emergence of a moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity, populist politics, and even see it as the root cause of so-called post-truth era politics, where individual experience trumps common facts.

For almost a generation, people of a specific religions, races or social backgrounds have formed exclusive political alliances by way of emphasising diversity. However, playing up to certain groups, politics and politicians have excluded others. The increasingly specific and differential relationships with the state have eroded the sense of trust and equity in society. The problem with identity politics is not that individual experience is not important; but quite the contrary.

New populist movements have indeed successfully exploited identity politics by emphasising how the displaced (largely white male) workers feel. Populists across the globe have broken down alliances between people, countries and religions, culminating in the outcomes of two key elections of 2016 – the US presidential election to Brexit. Populist movements are the pinnacle of identity politics. They reveal a fatal mistake in identity-based political thinking: by taking individual experience as a starting point, the winners in the end are the most powerful groups, not society as a whole. Identity politics hurts the people it was supposed to protect.

The Time is Now for a New Societal Vision

We desperately need a forward-looking and unifying vision to save us from the tyranny of what “majority politics” has suddenly turned into.

It is precisely in this situation that the idea of universalism can come to the rescue. For basic income to become reality, we must be able to start a new kind of politics. Political scientist Mark Lilla has argued that national politics in healthy periods is not about “difference”, but about “commonality”. Our generation is indeed in need of a broader societal vision. We desperately need a forward-looking and unifying vision to save us from the tyranny of what “majority politics” has suddenly turned into. Furthermore, at the moment, we do not lack common challenges; in fact most of the biggest challenges of our time are global and universal.

Automation, for example, will eventually affect people across every tier of work, from factory workers to lawyers and bookkeepers. In this sense, automation drives the middle classes into areas inhabited by the working classes for decades (if not always): a fight against a machine that does not sleep, get sick or demand a pay rise. The sociologist Richard Sennett already noted this 10 years ago. “The spectre of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers and an ageing population that is in good shape but driven outside the boundaries of working life.^[13] The spectre of uselessness is a common experience in which we can build a new kind of societal vision, one where (through the capacity to produce) we can be active, productive, creative, useful to others and thus participate in society, even if steady jobs and professions become the privilege of a few.

So the wider promise (the process of getting to the moon) that basic income has to offer is the politics of what is shared. The very process of getting basic income implemented can and must galvanise politics on a new level. Universal policies require universal visions. As history has shown us, universalism has the potential to bring together people from different backgrounds and ideological stances. The welfare state was a vision shared by most mainstream parties in the Western world and the founding fathers of the United States came to agree on civic – constitutional – rights from very different political backgrounds.

In fact, universal basic income already does this, as demonstrated by the variety of arguments by which it is backed. For instance, over half of the Finnish population supports a basic income reality, and most political parties have put together their own basic income blueprint.

Almost all the colours of the political spectrum seem to have their reasons for supporting universal basic income. Libertarians support it for the slim government it promises. The Left sees it as dignity for the poor and impoverished, since they would receive it with no humiliating strings attached. Other parts of the Left see it as a way towards income equality. Greens see it as a way of providing for the urban poor and agricultural parties view it as a way of supporting life outside the urban centres. Economists and technologists see it mostly as an opportunity to sustain the middle classes in the wake of automation. Social innovators see it as a platform for 21st-century governmental and civic innovations. Entrepreneurs and capitalists see it as a way of getting labour in less risky chunks. Finally, realpolitik politicians see it as a way to boost public finances by increasing the supply of labour, by collecting more tax and by decreasing the transaction costs of providing welfare (all in one go!).

Universal basic income, as something that touches everyone, is notably the first universal initiative of our generation. This, precisely, is the moonshot quality of the basic income proposition. Moonshot was never about getting to the moon. There was nothing on the moon. President Kennedy and his administration knew that. The point is that each generation must have their mission, something that encapsulates their vision.

Footnotes and references

^[1] Srnicek N. and Williams A. (2015), Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, Verso Books, London/New York.

^[2] Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (2016), “Ministry of Social Affairs and Health requests opinions on a basic income experiment”, press release, 25 August 2016.

^[3] Kildal N. and Kuhnle S. (2005), Normative Foundations of the Universal Welfare State, Routledge, London.

^[4] Paine T. (1797). Agrarian Justice, Alex Catalogue, Raleigh, NC.

^[5] Simon H. (2000), A Basic Income for All, A Forum Response, Boston Review. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/herbert-simon-ubi-and-flat-tax.

^[6] Brynjolffson E., McAfee A. and Spence M. (2014), “New World Order. Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy”, in Foreign Affairs, (online) July/August 2014 Issue. Available at: www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2014-06-04/new-world-order.

^[7] Piketty T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

^[8] Diamandis P. H., and Kotler S. (2012), Abundance: The future is better than you think, Free Press, New York.

^[9] Mason P. (2016), Postcapitalism: A guide to our future, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

^[10] Wenger A. (2016), World After Capital, Gitbook, accessed at: https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/.

^[11] Keynes J. M. (1937), “The general theory of employment”, The quarterly journal of economics, pp. 209-223.

^[12] Rifkin J. (2014), The zero marginal cost society: The internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism, St Martin’s Press (Macmillan), New York.

^[13] Sennett R. (2007), The culture of the new capitalism, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Liiten M. (2016), ”Kysely: Perustulolla enemmän kannattajia kuin vastustajia”, in Helsingin Sanomat(online), 10 January 2016. Available at: www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000002879059.html.

Lilla M. (2016), “The End of Identity Liberalism”, in The New York Times, (online), 18 November 2016. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html.

Sadowski J. (2016), “Why Silicon Valley is embracing universal basic income”, The Guardian (online), 22 June 2016. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/silicon-valley-universal-basic-income-y-combinator.

Unkuri M. (2017), “Will Finland’s basic income trial help the jobless?”, BBC (online) 16 January 2017. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38593513.

Weller C. (2016), “Elon Musk says there’s a ‘pretty good chance’ universal basic income will become reality”, Business Insider Nordic (online), 7 November 2016. Available at: http://nordic.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2016-11?r=US&IR=T.

Weller C. (2016), “Obama just warned Congress about robots taking over jobs that pay less than $20 an hour”, in Tech News (online), 10 March 2016. Available at: www.businessinsider.com/obama-warns-congress-about-robot-job-takeover-2016-3?r=US&IR=T&IR=T.

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This post by Conrad Shaw  was originally published on opendemocracy.net

The benefits of financial security are obvious, so why doesn’t the idea of UBI enjoy more popular support?

If we took all of the income the United States makes in a year and divided it by the total number of Americans, then every woman, man, and child would be making over $50,000. That’s over $200,000 for a family of four.

If we wiped the slate clean and took all of the personal net wealth of the United States and divvied it up among every American with a heartbeat, each person would receive over $250,000 as a nest egg.

Let’s take a second to think about those numbers. Even though nearly 40 per cent of the country doesn’t work in paid employment and 46 per cent couldn’t come up with $400 if their life depended on it, the ‘average’ American apparently pulls in $55,000 a year and has a cool quarter-of-a-million Dollars in assets. The national poverty line is defined as just below $12,000 per year for an individual.

Does it surprise you to learn how much wealth there is in this country, or how rich the top one percent really are?

These facts should make it clear that we already have the resources to eradicate poverty if we want to. It wouldn’t require a revolution. It would only require an adjustment of our priorities in favor of a Universal Basic Income or UBI.

UBI is a serious solution that simply and elegantly delivers an economic floor of security to every person in society. As these figures show, we can easily afford it, so it should be a no-brainer on the basis of both logic and human decency.

Right now the UBI movement is exploding. It’s founded on the idea that everyone in a civilized society has an inalienable right to the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter and healthcare, and that the most effective way to guarantee those rights is through a regular cash stipend to each individual. In the US a good starting point for a full UBI would be around $12,000 a year for every adult, with a smaller amount provided for each child.

Beyond human decency, there are myriad other arguments to be made in favor of UBI: economic stimulus and sustainability, improved health outcomes, reduced crime, more community action, higher creativity, more self-fulfillment, more participation in politics, and more flexibility to spend time with and care for our children and loved ones when they need us.

Even Silicon Valley is pushing hard for it as a way to help people through the coming times of job displacement due to automation, since recent estimates forecast that we will lose up to half of our jobs to machines in the next 20 years. Basic income pilots are popping up all around the world, doing important research to test these claims and measure the efficacy of direct cash giving under a host of different scenarios.

But here’s the thing: the US has just witnessed a presidential election in which large numbers of voters rebelled against the technocrats and political elites on both sides of the aisle who have ruled America for decades. These voters felt ignored and decided to push back. What’s to say that UBI won’t be seen as another technocratic solution handed down by the same political class from Washington DC? If so, it would probably be doomed.

The UBI movement must avoid the establishment’s tendency to overestimate its own influence and take everyone else for granted, of valuing the support of billionaires and corporations above all else. Basic income is a policy of, by, and for the people, and to succeed it’s going to have to have the support of the great mass of those people, both Democrats and Republicans.

I care less about convincing another tech whiz kid CEO, veteran venture capitalist, or Nobel laureate economist to join the movement, and much more about bringing on board farmers in Missouri, displaced coal miners in West Virginia, and schoolteachers in Wisconsin. This is necessarily politics after all, not just economics and philosophy. To win a Universal Basic Income we must eventually pass legislation, and in order to do so people will have to stand up and demand it across the political divide.

So how do we handle the politics of UBI? My partner and I are filmmakers. Politics runs on storytelling, and we see film and visual media as the most powerful storytelling tool available today. So we’ve decided to make a film about UBI, a documentary film, but what kind of documentary?

It can’t just be for and about the experts and the reams of historical evidence; great research doesn’t rivet an audience. Statistics alone don’t capture hearts and minds or make an emotional connection that’s powerful enough to overcome the opposition. I’ll wager that every single one of the films you remember most vividly in your life, those that have had the most impact on you, have revolved around human stories, not talking heads and facts.

What’s more, they were likely not simple snapshots of people in interesting situations. They were rich character studies, following unexpected plot lines, and ultimately culminating in some kind of growth or change. An effective documentary about UBI must do the same.

And it also needs to honestly address the elephant in the room: some people’s fears about subsidizing laziness in others. While I expect a world with a Universal Basic Income would be freer and more productive—populated by more effective and intrinsically-motivated human beings—others might forecast a world of entitled do-nothings living off the work ethic of a noble few. If we want to prove them wrong we had better provide some evidence to back our claims.

This is the point of the trials that have already happened, or are underway or are coming soon around the world. But how much can a study of UBI in a rural Kenyan village or an already generous Scandinavian social support system offer to Americans? Even successful results in the trial that’s currently taking place in Oakland, California might not hold much water in making the case to a Montana rancher or a manufacturing worker from the Rust Belt.

So instead, what we’ve decided to do is to create a new basic income pilot program specifically for our film, crafted for the sole purpose of telling diverse American stories from all walks of life: a farmer, a student, an athlete, a new family, a manufacturing worker, a police officer, an artist, a teacher, a veteran and a retiree.

We want to know and show what all of them do with a floor of security to stand on. Each participant will receive a basic income of $1,000 per month for two years, and we’ll check in with them regularly, recording their achievements, failures, choices, and growth in their daily lives.

BOOTSTRAPS – proof of concept from deia schlosberg on Vimeo.

However, we aren’t billionaires or celebrities, and this film will boast no A-list stars. We’re artists and journalists, and so we need your help. While the big political movers and shakers would consider our $600,000 pilot budget miniscule, it’s an unachievable fortune for everyday Americans. So if you are invested in the idea of a brighter future through UBI please give a few dollars to the campaign to fund our pilot, and share this article widely.

As a former engineer, one of UBI’s greatest appeals for me has to do with human optimization. When people are operating through anxiety, they lose 10-15 IQ points. When they are worried about survival, they aren’t dreaming about what they can offer to the world. We are currently turning people into diminished versions of themselves through the systems that we’ve built, but it needn’t be that way.

We can invest in them and support them to bring their best selves to the challenges they face. If we expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the least we can do is provide the boots and a solid floor to stand on. When everyone around us has that same fair footing, we’ll all stand taller together.

You can make a contribution to the Bootstraps campaign here.

Lead image: Flickr/Russell Shaw Higgs

The post Getting to the heart of Universal Basic Income appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post by Miles Krauter in collaboration with Carter Vance was originally published on Medium.com, here and here.

Photo by familymwr

The post Working to Death: Leftist Critiques of Basic Income Fail to Offer Meaningful Alternatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following excerpt is from a post originally published on thenextsystem.org. To read the complete paper, download the PDF here.

This paper by Michael T. Lewis, published alongside three others, is one of many proposals for a systemic alternative we have published or will be publishing here at the Next System Project. We have commissioned these papers in order to facilitate an informed and comprehensive discussion of “new systems,” and as part of this effort, we have also created a comparative framework which provides a basis for evaluating system proposals according to a common set of criteria.

The post Navigating System Transition in a Volatile Century appeared first on P2P Foundation.