The Götz Werner Chair (GWP) will be hosting the internationally renowned philosopher and economist Karl Widerquist as a visiting professor in the first half of 2022. Prof. Widerquist has made a name for himself as a researcher and advocate of basic income, not only within the academic world but also among the general public. We are therefore delighted to be have the opportunity to welcome him to Freiburg.

We asked Karl Widerquist what he hopes to gain from his time in Freiburg on both a private and academic level:

“Academically, I’m looking forward to visiting Freiburg, where I can meet and interact with colleagues in the UBI movement and in the broader academic community. I’m looking forward to presenting two classes based on my research to graduate students who are interested in politics, philosophy and UBI. I’m also looking forward to having a lot of time to work on my latest research and writing. And, Covid permitting, I’m looking forward to going to conferences and visiting other colleagues and UBI projects around Germany and Central Europe.

On a personal level, I’m always interested in meeting new people and going to new places.  My apartment will be near the Black Forest and not far from the center of town. So, I’m looking forward to exploring both. If Omicron dies down, I’m hoping to take the train to nearby parts of Switzerland and France and explore the region.”

We also wanted to know if there are any writing projects he wants to focus on during his stay:

“Right now I’m working mostly on three projects: (1) Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge is a short introduction to UBI for MIT University Press’s “Essential Knowledge” Series. I’ve never written an introductory book before and I’m learning how hard it is. After reading about UBI for 40 years and writing about it for 25, it’s not easy to ask myself which parts of my knowledge are essential?

(2) Property and the Power to Say No: Five Arguments for Universal Basic Income will update my doctoral dissertation and publish it for the first time as a complete work. I’ve published chapters as articles, and I expanded one part of the thesis into a book of its own, but this will be the first time I’ll publish my dissertation as a unified, complete work. It will include chapters that have never been published before and that make most sense in this context.

(3) Georg Arndt and I are revising our paper “The Cost of Basic Income in the United Kingdom” for publication. We’ve been working on it for a while, so it’ll be great to finally get it out.”

If you want to learn more about Karl Widerquist and his stance on basic income on the FRIBIS YouTube channel, watch an interview with him that Enno Schmidt conducted at the end of 2021. In this interview, Karl Widerquist talks about the advantages and disadvantages of UBI test projects, the possible influence of a UBI on real wages, UBI financing via (resource) taxes, the Alaska Permanent Fund, the development of the UBI debate over the last four decades and the question of the extent to which some kind of UBI is already in place in some of the rich oil states of the Persian Gulf.

On 2 December 2021 Expedition Grundeinkommen was awarded this year’s German Commitment Award (“Deutscher Engagementpreis”). With the backing of FRIBIS, the Expedition is campaigning for the UBI by means of referendums to launch state-funded pilot projects in various cities and municipalities throughout the country.

In this video, Valentin Schagerl and Joy Ponader, activists of the Expedition, explain what their project is all about.

What is the German Commitment Award?

The jury of the “Deutscher Engagementpreis” awards the prestigious prize each year for exceptional civic commitment. What is special about the prize is that it is awarded by the public and not a jury. This year, more than 12,000 people voted for Expedition Grundeinkommen to be the winner.

What the prize means for the Basic Income movement and for FRIBIS

Awarding the prize to Expedition Basic Income is a clear demonstration of the growing popularity of UBI. FRIBIS, in particular, has good reason to be happy about the Expedition’s award: Since the founding of Expedition Basic Income in 2019, we have supported the activists with technical and theoretical advice as well as financial back up. In the FRIBIS Expedition Basic Income team (XUBI), scholarship and activism go hand in hand. Together we are committed to turning Basic Income into reality – in the form of nationwide pilot projects throughout Germany. 

Ms. Palermo Kuss, who received her PhD in economics from the Götz Werner Chair (GWP), is the only economist among the finalists for the German Thesis Award of the Körber Foundation. Her contribution is entitled: “Unconditional Basic Income: A concept for the welfare state of the 21st century? Economic investigation of possible effects and popularity”. Ms. Palermo Kuss is now working at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW).

We asked her what the nomination means to her personally and how it might affect the debate around Basic Income: “I am very happy about the nomination of my doctoral thesis for the German Thesis Award. The nomination shows that the topic of Basic Income is of great importance to society. The compatibility of a basic income with existing social security systems is a topic that needs further research. So, I am delighted that FRIBIS dedicates itself to this task. Whether basic income is a concept for the welfare state of the 21st century depends directly on whether the concrete policy reform contributes positively to people’s freedom and self-determination as well as to societal prosperity.”

The entire FRIBIS-Team congratulates Ms. Palermo Kuss on this outstanding achievement and wishes her all the best for her personal and professional future.

Further information about Ms. Palermo Kuss can be found on the ZEW homepage, more details on the study award of the Körber Foundation can be found here.

Catarina Neves and Roberto Merrill (Portugal) will be in Freiburg as FRIBIS visiting scholars between 18 and 23 November 2021. They will offer a symposium on basic income experiments on 22 November.

22 November 2021, 6:00-8:00 p.m.:
Basic Income Experiments: A Critical Examination of Their Goals, Contexts, and Methods.
Location: HS 1009, Kollegiengebäude I, Platz der Universität 3, 79098, Freiburg.
Important Update: Due to the recent Covid regulations of the state of Baden-Württemberg, only fully vaccinated or recovered persons are allowed (2G) to participate in the symposium of Roberto Merrill and Catarina Neves. Therefore, unvaccinated or non-recovered persons can no longer attend the event, even with a negative PCR test.

The symposium will be recorded and uploaded on the FRIBIS YouTube channel.

“The focus of the symposium will be their newly published book. The book brings together insights and reflections following a set of interviews conducted with the main stakeholders involved in past, current, and future basic income experiments. It provides an analysis of some of the major elements and factors influencing experiments, as well of some of their most important outputs understood as results of their own experimental design, their sociological and political basis, and the epistemological status of their results.

By pursuing a bottom-up strategy, where the interviews conducted take a pivotal role in the collection and analysis phase of the book, this book gathers key questions relating to policy experiments. Some questions reflected upon include the general idea of why one should engage and implement a basic income experiment, and the paradox consisting in the fact that most basic income experiments fall short of being closely considered ‘pure’ basic income schemes. In facing the question and the paradox head-on, the book assesses questions of experimental design, the political and social context surrounding the policy, and the main results and what can they tell us about basic income.”

Roberto Merrill is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Minho, where he coordinates the Master of Political Philosophy. He is also a researcher at the Center for Ethics, Politics and Society (CEPS), where he directs the Research Project on Unconditional Basic Income. He has published and edited several books, the most recent one in 2019 on the UBI (Rendimento Básico Incondicional: uma defesa da liberdade).

Catarina Neves is a PhD student at the University of Minho. She focuses on the philosophical justification of the Unconditional Basic Income, namely on the objection of reciprocity. She aims to find out to what extent theoretical concepts can be found in empirical experiments on the UBI. She is also a teaching assistant at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Lisbon, Portugal) where she gives courses on corporate social responsibility and global business challenges.

Watch the recordings of the contributions of the first annual FRIBIS conference, 2021 on our Youtube channel.

This year’s the FRIBIS conference shed light on an emerging topic in economics of UBI: the monetary issues of a UBI. Monetary aspects are becoming more important due to an increasing economic interest in monetary innovations and major disruptions in central banking and finance.

UBI research is being increasingly influenced by this development. UBI pilots use specifically minted currencies to ensure local spending, and new strands of transformative economics propose monetary financing or community currencies as financing mechanisms for a UBI.

FRIBIS acknowledges this evolution by creating research teams in order to keep up-to-date with research in this field. At this year’s conference, FRIBIS presented this teams’ research, as well as other research activities. In addition, research collaborations were presented.

The event language is English.

Here you can find the event program

The research group arround Dr. Wolfgang Gründinger published the paper “Carbon Pricing and Social Equity in Germany” in the journal “Momentum Quarterly”. Prof. Neumärker participated in this research group among others.

The paper is written in German.

Link to the paper

Bernhard Neumärker, Bianca Blum, Burhan Yalcin and Sema Yalcin have jointly published a new paper in the FRIBIS Discussion Paper Series, which is available in both German and English. Its topic is the counterfinancing of the Net Basic Income in times of debt-financed relief ​during the Corona Crisis.

In addition, Bianca Blum and Bernhard Neumärker have also published another paper in the journal World 2021, 2(2), entitled Lessons from Globalization and the COVID-19 Pandemic for Economic, Environmental and Social Policy. The paper analyzes the current economic and social crises, which have only been exacerbated by the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. The authors discuss not only the extent to which Basic Income offers a non-bureaucratic solution to the social and financial hardships of the current crisis, but also the role it could play in addressing the social and environmental challenges of the post-crisis period.

On October 7, at 6:00 p.m., FRIBIS will host a Zoom event on Net Basic Income. Bianca Blum and Bernhard Neumärker, along with Susanne Wiest, the parliamentary petitioner for the crisis basic income, as well as Enno Schmidt (Freiburg Götz Werner Chair) will take a stand on their publications and report on their experiences with the parliamentary petition.

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