FRIBIS at the BIEN Congress 2022: Basic Income in Times of Crisis and Transformation

Sep 20, 2022 | News, Topical

From September 26 to 28, 2022, the 21st Congress of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) will take place in Brisbane (Australia). Numerous members of FRIBIS will participate as speakers at the congress, which will be dedicated to the theme “What can basic income offer in a time of crisis and transformation?”.

The FRIBIS Gender and Universal Basic Income and Gender (UBIG) team will give a dedicated panel session on “Re-envisioning a feminist basic income framework” (27/09/22). Team coordinator Jessica Schulz and team members Toru Yamamori (Doshisha University), Almaz Zelleke (New York University, Shanghai), and Chloe Halpenny (University of Cambridge) will be participating, as well as Clem Davies, who works at the Götz Werner Chair for Economic Policy and Constitutional Economic Theory (GWP).

FRIBIS Director Bernhard Neumärker and Jette Weinel (FRIBIS team Basisgeld) will speak on “The Implications of UBI on Utility Functions and Tax Revenue” (9/27/22). Bernhard Neumärker will also give a talk on “The Net Basic Income: Towards A Resilient Governance and Welfare State Reform during a Crisis” (9/27/22) and participate in the Götz Werner Tribute Panel (9/28/22). The latter panel will also feature talks by FRIBIS Executive Director and GWP staff member Enno Schmidt and GWP Visiting Professor André Presse.

Gudrun Kaufmann, a member of the care team at FRIBIS, will discuss “Narrative Economics as an Approach to Universal Basic Income?” (9/26/22). Simon März, coordinator of the Expedition Basic Income team, will provide “A critical analysis of a proposed extensive UBI pilot study in Germany: is it advisable and how can municipalities finance it” (09/27/22).

The conference is not open to the public, but only to registered conference participants.

Philippe Van Parijs about BIEN: The precarious beginnings of a worldwide network

Aug 24, 2022 | News

Image: BIEN founding conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, September 1986. Facing the lecture room, from left to right: Bill Jordan, Claus Offe, Philippe Van Parijs, Nic Douben, Annie Miller, Greetje Lubbi, Riccardo Petrella

Basic Income Earth Network has made a crucial contribution to the worldwide awareness of the idea of an unconditional basic income. For this to happen, perseverance was key. But also technology.

Philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reflects on current events and debates in Brussels, Belgium and Europe

A striking — and moving — initiative was taken last month by the executive committee of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). They wanted to meet BIEN’s founders, or at least those of them who were still alive and who they could trace. The first question that came up was how the founders managed to find one another. Good question. In pre-internet times, this was not a straightforward matter. Nor was the running of an international network.

The idea of a universal, unconditional income had occurred to me in December 1982, as a clever way of addressing the problem of structural unemployment without relying on endless growth. I called it “allocation universelle”. The idea was so clever, I thought, that it must have occurred to others before me. How can I find them? Long before Google search, tips from colleagues were the best bet.

It did not take long for a friend at the OECD to send me a working paper published in 1979 at the University of Aston (UK) under the title “Can a social wage solve unemployment?”. The name was different, but the idea was the same and the argument similar. I immediately wrote to the author, a certain Stephen L. Cook. Alas, the letter came back. The addressee had just died, and his paper did not contain a single reference. Later tips proved more fruitful. They led to a Dutch trade union leader, a Capri-based Swedish aristocrat, the editor of a French magazine defending a “social income” since the 1930s and a handful of others.

I sent them all a personal letter inviting them to “the first international conference on basic income”, which was held in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986. Most of the participants did not know of one another beforehand, but their convergence and enthusiasm far exceeded what was needed for the wish to create an association to emerge. The Basic Income European Network was born, with an irresistible acronym: BIEN.

But then the real work had to start. A network cannot exist without a newsletter. In English only, we decided, but with the firm resolve to minimize the under-representation of what was written or happening in other languages: not an easy job. Three times per year, the newsletter had to be printed, stapled, slipped into an envelope on which a stamp had to be stuck before the pile of newsletters was taken to a post box. To cover the cost, an annual membership fee had to be collected, often in cash and by post so as to avoid prohibitive (pre-euro) bank charges.

A network cannot thrive without personal meetings. Every two years, BIEN organized a conference. Announcement, programme and registrations were sent by (quite often unreliable) post. In most cases, if you wanted copies of your paper to be available to other participants, you had to print them yourself and bring them along in your suitcase. And before the rise of low-cost flights, traveling to the conference could take a long time.

Despite all these logistic hurdles, BIEN reached the 21st century with more and more newsletter subscribers and conference participants coming from outside Europe. They soon started a campaign for turning BIEN into a global network. Forget it, was my first reaction. Operating on a European scale was already overstretching our modest human resources. Moreover, it seemed to me that an unconditional basic income could only make sense in countries with a developed welfare state. On both counts, I was proved wrong.

Firstly, the rapid spread of internet made it possible to reach a fast-growing number of BIEN members very cheaply by e-mail, to send them the newsletter electronically and to set up a website. The idea of a viable global network was no longer ludicrous. Secondly, in January 2004, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, chief campaigner for the globalization of BIEN, managed to convince president Lula to sign a law that committed Brazil to the gradual introduction of a universal basic income. I attended the ceremony — and capitulated.

In September 2004, at its 10th congress held in Barcelona, BIEN became the Basic Income Earth Network. Since then, it has done far more than just survive. It now has affiliate networks in 30 countries, runs a website with tens of thousands of visitors and has switched to organizing a congress every year rather than every two years. The next one, for the first time in hybrid format, will be held in Brisbane, Australia.

All this is due in the first place to a wonderful succession of executive committees made up of committed and competent volunteers, not least to the committee currently in charge, which the founders had the pleasure to meet last month. But technology also play an important part in the story. Just one final example.

Where did I attend last month’s meeting? In a car driven by my wife on a French motorway, with one of my grandsons taking part in his own way from the back seat. I could not only hear, but also see on a screen I held in my hands both my fellow founders and our successors, the latter in places as far apart as India, California and Japan. Totally unimaginable when we founders first met 36 years ago. Mind-boggling.

(This text was originally published in The Brussels Times, Wednesday, 17th August 2022. We share it here with kind permission by the author Philippe Van Parijs.)

NetFi team coordinator Teodoro Criscione co-authored two papers on community currencies

Aug 9, 2022 | News, Topical

Both papers are available online:

E. S. Mattsson, T. Criscione and W.O. Ruddick, Sarafu Community Inclusion Currency, 2020-2021. Scientific Data 9:426, Nature Publishing Group, 2022. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01539-4

We describe a dataset of account information and detailed transaction records for a digital complementary currency in Kenya. This “Sarafu system” initially encompassed several local, physical community currencies, which began transitioning to a feature-phone mobile interface in 2017. One unit of “Sarafu” is roughly equivalent in value to a Kenyan shilling. The published data includes anonymized account information for around 55,000 users and records of all Sarafu transactions conducted from January 25, 2020 to June 15, 2021. Transactions totaling around 300 million Sarafu capture various economic and financial activities such as purchases, transfers, and participation in savings and lending groups. So-called “chamas” are key to the operation of the Sarafu system and many such groups are labeled in the data. Describing this data contributes to research on the operation of community currencies, monetary systems, and economic networks in marginalized, food insecure areas. The observation period includes the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and several documented pilot projects and interventions.

E. S. Mattsson, T. Criscione and F.W. Takes, Circulation of a Digital Community Currency, arXiv preprint2207.08941, 2022. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08941 (in review!!!)

Circulation is the characteristic feature of successful currency systems, from community currencies to cryptocurrencies to national currencies. In this paper, we propose a network analysis methodology for studying circulation given a system’s digital transaction records. This is applied to Sarafu, a digital community currency active in Kenya over a period that saw considerable economic disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Representing Sarafu as a network of monetary flow among the 40,000 users reveals meaningful patterns at multiple scales. Circulation was highly modular, geographically localized, and occurring among users with diverse livelihoods. Network centrality highlights women’s participation, early adopters, and the especially prominent role of community-based financial institutions. These findings have concrete implications for humanitarian and development policy, helping articulate when community currencies might best support interventions in marginalized areas. Overall, networks of monetary flow allow for studying circulation within digital currency systems at a striking level of detail.

Basic Income and Sustainability: Perspectives from Constitutional Economics and Cultural Studies (Tandem Lecture)

Aug 9, 2022 | News, Topical

On July 6, 2022, Bernhard Neumärker, Director of the Götz Werner Chair for Economic Policy and Constitutional Theory and head of FRIBIS, and Sebastian Kaufmann, Research Center “Nietzsche Commentary” of the Heidelberg Academy Of Sciences and Humanities and member of the FRIBIS team “Participation and UBI“, gave an interdisciplinary tandem lecture on the connection between UBI and sustainability.

In the first part of the lecture, Bernhard Neumärker discussed the connection between Basic Income and social sustainability from an economic perspective. In the second part, Sebastian Kaufmann explored from a cultural studies perspective the interconnections between the narratives surrounding UBI and ecological sustainability. The lecture was given as part of the event series “Alles im Blick? Interdisziplinäre Vortragsreihe Nachhaltigkeit“, in which sustainability is discussed as a shared topic between different disciplines (in German).

You can find the lecture on our YouTube channel.

02 August 2022: “Permissionless Innovation, Freedom, and Basic Income” by Dr. Otto Lehto

Aug 1, 2022 | Events, News, Topical

On Tuesday, 02 August 2022, the Basic Income Workshop Series continues with a contribution of Philosopher & former FRIBIS visiting scholar Dr. Otto Lehto: „Permissionless Innovation, Freedom, and Basic Income“. He is going to present his input and subsequently have a discussion with the audience, Prof. Dr. Karl Widerquist & Prof. Dr. Bernhard Neumärker.

Time: 4pm – 5pm (CEST)

YouTube-Livestream: https://youtu.be/89QqLIbQ2kg

Do you wish to participate in the Zoom-Meeting directly? Send an E-Mail with your request to eventmanagement@fribis.uni-freiburg.de.

Basic income has been tied to „real freedom for all“ (Van Parijs), „capitalism and freedom“ (Friedman), „freedom as the power to say no“ (Widerquist), and many other conceptions of freedom. All of these theories of freedom, despite their differences, involve an institutional structure of rights that gives people the right (both formal and substantive) to experiment with new things, to deviate from the expectations and demands of other people, and otherwise to innovate in a myriad ways. In my talk, I interrogate the relationship between the notion of freedom inherent in such popular
conceptions of basic income and the theories of innovation proposed in evolutionary political economy. (Schumpeter, Hayek, Hogdson, Beinhocker) I will argue that basic income could be seen as a tool of permissionless innovation, which grants people, especially poor people, the right to innovate without having to ask anybody for permission. I will normatively justify this right, not in terms of justice or equity, but in terms of a utilitarian theory of evolutionary welfare enhancement. I will argue that radical innovation is a compelling justification for a liberal implementation of basic income, and innovation should be encouraged in order to more effectively solve the problems of the poor. Crucially, socioeconomic innovation, in this technical sense, extends beyond the economic realm of goods, services, and technologies, to the cultural realm of habits, ideas, and social norms. However, the innovation perspective only justifies certain models of basic income that a) are tied to an extensive regime of market and civil freedoms and b) pass a comparative cost benefit analysis of institutional alternatives. This consequentialist conception challenges several prominent justifications, models, conceptualizations, and implementations of basic income, especially those that see UBI more as a means of stabilizing, equilibrating, or decelerating modernity.

Establishment of “Basic Income for Nature & Climate”: Interview with the team’s coordinator

Jul 28, 2022 | News, Topical

The newly founded FRIBIS team Basic Income for Nature and Climate explores the connection between basic income, climate change, and biodiversity conservation. The team’s coordinator, the Indonesian researcher Ni Made Rahayu Maitri, has agreed to be interviewed about her research group.
1. What is your team about and what are you doing?
Our Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) research group is interested to explore and investigate the possibility that a basic income scheme can contribute to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, and thus can be linked to conservation objectives. If such a scheme is possible, we see that this can be a new and doable approach that can be used to address current social and ecological challenges that are associated with climate change and biodiversity loss. We are focusing our research in Tanah Papua where we propose a basic income scheme for nature and climate whereby the scheme distributes a regular dividend payment to all residing citizens in Tanah Papua via a so called “Forest Carbon Dividend” (FCD). The FCD will be funded from mobilizing financial resources or earnings that are generated from putting a value (price) on the forest carbon stocks that are stored in Tanah Papua’s forest.

2. What motivated you to establish the team?
The initiator of the scientific investigation into the basic income for nature and climate scheme in Tanah Papua which, thus, initiate the establishment of this team is our lead scientist, Sonny Mumbunan. He recognizes that Tanah Papua holds global importance in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation, so, designing a basic income scheme that is linked to conservation objectives can hold a promising approach to addressing climate change and biodiversity issues. By linking financing sources to carbon stock that are stored in the forest, it could serve as a powerful incentive for the local population to conserve and maintain their forest land to enable a lasting basic income payment. Interested readers can learn more about our proposed scheme from our published report here.

3. What are your goals?
Through our current collaboration with FRIBIS, our immediate goal is to initiate policy dialogue in the local, national and international level. By also doing scientific investigations on the proposed basic income scheme in forest-rich districts, we intend to initiate a policy dialogue and discussion that are based on scientific evidence. In the long term, our goal is that the central government, provincial government and/or the donor community in Indonesia are considering to pilot a multi-year basic income scheme of this kind and undertake a basic income trial in one jurisdiction (district) of Tanah Papua.

Lectures by Prof. Bernhard Neumärker on Basic Income in the Climate Crisis

Jul 25, 2022 | News, Topical

In May 2022, Bernhard Neumärker gave two lectures addressing the potential of basic income in the climate crisis. His May 19 lecture was at the invitation of Students for Future Freiburg and was entitled “Climate Justice and New Ordoliberalism: The Case for Social Sustainability and Basic Income”. In his lecture, Prof. Neumärker shows how climate bonus systems can be designed as a partial basic climate income. He also demonstrates the extent to which net offset systems between CO₂ tax and basic climate income are ecologically and socially disadvantageous in terms of ecological visibility and incentivization when compared to a gross system with separate tax and transfer design. T, based on a German paper on Carbon Pricing and Social Inequality in Germany, he demonstrated that by having a per capita equal repayment of the CO₂ tax, one not only promotes fair redistribution and inequality reduction, but also achieves a higher socio-environmental target efficiency than with the usual means-tested social transfers. Watch this talk on our YouTube-Kanal.

On May 26, Prof. Neumärker gave a keynote speech at the 40th International Energy Workshop at the Konzerthaus in Freiburg. In his lecture “Decarbonization regulation by a tax-transfer system: The Carbon Tax – Climate Basic Income (CaTaBi) Scheme”, he presented his gross tax-transfer system “CaTaBi”, focusing on his governance approach of the so called “New Ordoliberalism”. Among other things, he showed to what extent only CaTaBi is politically strategy proof, while other uses of tax revenues always lead to the expectation of strategic manipulation of politics by interest groups (rent-seeking). In the ecosocial context of the climate crisis, one has to resort to ex post governance, which offers sufficient protection against unforeseen contingencies of climate development. Bernhard Neumärker, on the other hand, does not believe that tackling the climate crisis with statistical forecasts or scenarios ex ante is expedient. Instead, he argued for viewing the “environment” in terms of conflict economics and game theory as an adversary of “nature,” which would in fact react unfavorably to humans due to man-made climate and environmental damage.

In light of recent developments, Bernhard Neumärker drew a parallel between the climate crisis and the Ukraine war. Both crises would likewise reveal that “climate protection” and “national defense” as (global) public goods would only be taken seriously and sufficient investments would only be made if “protection” or “defense” were no longer only discussed in the abstract, but protection against an adversary/aggressor (be it “nature” or the Putin regime) was actively sought. The fact that Germany was only prepared to spend 100 billion euros on its military defense in a state of immediate threat clearly illustrated the underlying precautionary principle.

 

“Is a Penny a Month a Basic Income?” – Best Paper Award for Toru Yamamori from the FRIBIS Team Universal Basic Income & Gender

Jul 18, 2022 | News, Topical

Foto: Enno Schmidt

In his new paper: “Is a Penny a Month a Basic Income? A Historiography of the Concept of a Threshold in Basic Income“, Prof. Toru Yamamori examines the definition of Universal Basic Income under the question of a threshold. Based on its basic pillars: unconditionality, individuality, and universality, he discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a threshold and gives a historical overview of the history and different currents of the demand and definition of a Universal Basic Income. With this paper, he is the winner of the 2021 BIS essay contest in the Journal “Basic Income Studies”.

Without the (re)definition, do we run the risk of calling even one cent a Universal Basic Income when it is paid unconditionally and universally to every individual? What are the reasons and arguments for successively removing this threshold from the definitions? Toru Yamamori discusses why and whether we should reintroduce a threshold into the definition of a Universal Basic Income in this paper, which was awarded the prize for the best paper of 2021 by the journal Basic Income Studies published by De Gruyter Verlag.
The question of the definition of Universal Basic Income is a central theme of the FRIBIS UBI & Gender team, which explores the pillars of definition: universality, unconditionality and individuality from an intersectional feminist perspective. With his historical analysis of the meaning of a threshold, Toru Yamamori has created a starting point for further reflections on the definition of what we call Universal Basic Income from different situations, perspectives and locations, and what this Basic Income means for each of us.

Find the Paper here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/bis-2021-0037/html

Jessica Schulz is the team coordinator of the Gender & UBI Team and interviewed Toru with respect to his paper.

How did you come to deal with this question of a threshold in particular?

I’ve known that it was common to define UBI with a threshold in 1980s, and has interpreted the non-threshold definition by BIEN as a result of the difficulty of havin g a consensus on what level the threshold would be. However, by witnessing that some leading advocates condemn the definition with a threshold as ‘flawed’ and deny the existence of what I thought a historical fact, I felt to research this issue seriously.

To what extent is the question of a threshold value related to feminist questions about the unconditional basic income?

In the 1970s and 80s in Europe, there were feminist movements that demanded UBI. All of them defined UBI with a threshold. However, those movements have been almost erased both in UBI communities and feminist academia. There might be a logical connection between the easement of those feminist voices and the denial of (and historical revisionism against) the definition of UBI with a threshold. Also, what I learnt through this historical journey, the concept of UBI is a social construct, and what has been included under the label of UBI is not clear cut. Accepting this plurality of the concept, we could ask the following question: What definition of UBI could feminists embrace?

 
 

Prof. Dr. Toru Yamamori is a Professor of Economics at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan and Senior Academic Research Editor of BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network). His research includes the philosophical foundations of feminist economics and the oral history of the working class women’s liberation movement that called for unconditional basic income in Britain in the 1970s.

May/June 2022: Basic Income Workshop Series hosted by Karl Widerquist (online)

Jun 15, 2022 | Events, News, Topical

In the summer term 2022 Karl Widerquist was hosting a workshop series that featured lectures by international guest speakers from the field of basic income research. Detailed Information and the Live-Stream-Link you can find below.

Six lectures had been scheduled for May 2022. On May 10, Simon März kicked off the series, followed by Jurgen de Wispelaere & Simon Birnbaum. Michael Bohmeyer, Amy Castro & Stacia West (5-6 pm), continued on May 17. Paul Nieshaus and Jurgen De Wispelaere & Joe Chrisp  went for their talks on May 31. On June 21, the last session of this seriet took place with Anna Oostendorp & Johann Gutzmer (4 pm – 5 pm) & Jamie Cooke (5 pm – 6 pm). For more information on the topics and speakers, see below.

 

Events

21 June from 4 pm – 6 pm

Anna Oostendorp & Johann Gutzmer (4 pm – 5 pm)

“The Effect of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Voting – Evidence from the Finnish Basic Income Experiment”

Anna Oostendorp is a social psychologist working as a scientific analyst for Stiftung Grundeinkommen, a German think tank with an evidence-based approach to exploring the transformation towards more universal social systems. Johann Gutzmer is a social and motivational psychologist working as a policy analyst/expert for Stiftung Grundeinkommen.

Livestream link: https://youtu.be/DlYWCGTJ2D8

Jamie Cooke (5 pm – 6 pm)

“Basic Income in Scotland – Rhetoric and Reality”

Jamie Cooke is the head of RSA Scotland, the Scottish branch of the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce. In his lecture, he will cover the progress of RSA Scotland around the support for basic income and future steps.

Livestream link: https://youtu.be/DlYWCGTJ2D8

31 May from 4 pm – 6 pm

Paul Niehaus (4 pm – 5 pm)

Paul Niehaus is co-founder and chairman of GiveDirectly and Associate Professor of Economics at University of California San Diego. In his talk, he will be speaking about “Universal Basic Income: experimental evidence from Kenya”. A paper by Paul Niehaus closely related to the lecture topic has already been published, “Effects of a Universal Basic Income during the pandemic”.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/kLZbRTeNEuA

Jurgen De Wispelaere & Joe Chrisp (4 pm – 5 pm)

Jurgen De Wispelaere is an Assistant Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Joe Chrisp is a researcher at the University of Bath. In their talk, they will be “(Re)Thinking the Policy Impact of Basic Income Experiments”.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/kLZbRTeNEuA

17 May from 4 pm – 6 pm

Michael Bohmeyer (4 pm – 5 pm)

Michael Bohmeyer, founder of Mein Grundeinkommen e. V., will talk about the “Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen” he initiated, which is the first long-term study on UBI in Germany.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/KoVI6Kn0x7k

Amy Castro & Stacia West (5 pm – 6 pm)

The value of pilot studies and experiments on the BGE is controversial in basic income research. In their talk “The case for Basic Income Experiments“, Amy Castro and Stacia West will argue that experiments should continue to be done in the future.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/KoVI6Kn0x7k

10th of May from 4 pm – 6 pm

Simon März (4 pm – 5 pm)

Simon März (FRIBIS) will talk about an extensive pilot study on Universal Basic Income in Germany and will provide a critical analysis of its proposed implementation.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/FGyXTguJt3s

Jurgen de Wispelaere & Simon Birnbaum (5 pm – 6 pm)

Jurgen De Wispelaere (Stockholm School of Economics in Riga) and Simon Birnbaum (Södertörn University) will talk about whether basic income is an exit strategy or an exit trap in the age of precarious employment. Following the presentations, Karl Widerquist will engage in discussion with the speakers.

Rewatch in full length: https://youtu.be/FGyXTguJt3s

14 June 2022: Talk on the justification and the need for the Catalan Basic Income Pilot by Bru Laín and Àngel Ferrero

May 25, 2022 | Events

Àngel Ferrero, media spokesman for the Office of the Pilot Project for the Implementation of an Universal Basic Income in Catalonia, will be giving a brief introduction about the Office and will be talking about its history, structures and functions. Then, Bru Laín (consultant of the Office) will talk about the Catalan Basic Income Pilot Project and explain why this pilot project is important and necessary. There will be time for audience questions afterwards. The event will take place in Freiburg. It will be recorded and uploaded later on the FRIBIS YouTube channel.

Abstract: “Both the Spanish and the Catalan welfare regimes are not really well equipped to face the challenges posed by the XXI century. A markedly dual labour market on the one hand, and a fairly contributive social protection system on the other, do require for innovative solutions, more universalistic, more unconditional. In order to find out some of these solutions, the Catalan government has launched a two-year Universal Basic Income Pilot Scheme. It will be implemented throughout 2023 and 2024, and will combine a randomized control trial with a saturation methodology, granting up to 5.000 individuals across the entire country. Qualitative and quantitative assessments must provide scholars and policymakers with empirical evidence of how UBI is impacting beneficiaries’ lives and how it also affects the provision and use of the actual social policies and the internal public administration settings and institutional dynamics.”

Place: 14. Juni 2022, 6:15 pm – 7:45 pm

Time: KG I – HS 1016, Platz der Universität 3, 79098 Freiburg