Over the past several years, interest in basic income guarantee has been rejuvenated and its popular appeal broadened as a potentially viable policy response to the prospects of the rise of precarious or meaningless jobs, technological unemployment and under-employment amid improvements in robotics, software, and artificial intelligence, as well as job displacement from trade shocks. This interest is evidenced by more than two dozen UBI (universal basic income) programs and cash transfer experiments in Namibia, Kenya, Uganda, India, Mexico, Finland, the Netherlands, New York City, Alaska (Permanent Fund Dividend) and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolinaās Great Smoky Mountains, among others; by plans for additional study or legislative deliberations in Scotland, California, and Ontario Canada ,1 among other locations; and by related appeals from high-profile office seekers and political parties such as Democratic Party Presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Mayor Michael Stubbs of Stockton, CA in the United States, Benoit Hamon, the socialist presidential candidate in France in 2017, and the Five Star Movement in Italy, among others. Recent initiatives for basic income guarantee have occurred in Argentina, Austria, Chile, Columbia, and Korea, adding to those that have been active for the past several decades in Germany, Canada , South Africa, and elsewhere. Basic income guarantee initiatives have taken a variety of forms (grassroots [e.g., Germany] as well as top-down [e.g., Brazil]) and have met with varying degrees of success. The many pilots and public discussions of UBI underline that (1) it is important that local activistsā network within and across countries makes a political case for UBI, and (2) there is a growing realization among broader segments of the public and political leaders that the growth of unstable employment relationships and the threat of technological unemployment make UBI a political, social, and economic necessity.
Historically, salient thinkers like Thomas Paine (2004), Milton Friedman (2002), and Martin Luther King (2010) have endorsed a UBI. UBI experiments in Canada and the United States in the 1970s had first put UBI on the political agenda after having been discussed in limited academic circles. Academics and activists in favor of UBI formed the Basic Income European Network in 1986, which expanded globally to the Basic Income Earth Network in 2004 highlighting research and educational activities on UBI. After being dormant for many years, basic income trials in Namibia in 2008 returned UBI to the forefront of public consciousness. Most recently, in the English-speaking world, there has been growing interest in debating and presenting a case for it (Wright 2004; Widerquist 2013; Mason 2016; Srnicek and Williams 2016; Stern 2016; Bregman 2017; Standing 2017; Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017; Hughes 2018; Lowrey 2018; Yang 2018; Hamilton and Mulvale 2019; see Santens 2016 for further book recommendations).
The book brings together international and national scholars who identify and discuss the efficacy of the most significant past, present, and near future activists, public intellectuals, and grassroots organizations seeking to influence public discourse about and policymakersā deliberations regarding basic income guarantee as a viable policy option when seeking changes in social policy legislation in their respective countries and/or across regions of the globe. The idea for the book emerged in part from the New Directions in Basic Income Workshop, co-sponsored by Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan and the Economic Security Project and Stanford Basic Income Lab, held May 18ā20, 2018, in Ann Arbor, MI. By design,2 the Workshop brought together seasoned and emerging scholars and activists to share their basic income-related work, to build new and expand existing networks, and establish mentor-apprenticeship relations between senior and nascent scholars. Caputo, one of the co-editors of this book and editor of a related volume (Caputo 2012), had been invited as one of two panelists for a discussion on the politics of basic income. Liu attended the Workshop as one of the nascent scholars.
After several discussions at the Workshop and subsequent email exchanges, we acknowledged how little is known about unconditional basic income (UBI)-related advocacy, at least compared to the knowledge base regarding arguments and pilot projects assessing the merits of the idea. Who are the main proponents of UBI, what do they do to advance their cause, how do they influence public opinion, what strategies and tactics do they find most or least helpful when promoting the causeāwith legislators, with the public at large, with other activists? To begin to address these questions, we drafted a proposal for Palgrave Macmillan to consider and drew upon the list of all Workshop participants and from our extant networks of scholars and activists from whom we solicited contributions to what became this volume. We asked contributing authors to address a specific set or subset of issues related to their country or region that included:
- 1.the most significant persons/groups/political parties involved in support or against UBI legislative initiatives;
- 2.the main theoretical/practical justifications used to influence public opinion and policymakers to support/oppose BIG-related initiatives;
- 3.the main strategies and tactics used to influence public opinion and policymakers;
- 4.what practical and theoretical lessons about human behavior and the social environment might be learned from past and contemporary political and social actions to affect social policy change regarding basic income guarantee and related measures such as conditional cash transfers to guide the efforts of activists and public intellectuals in the near-term future.
We are happy to present the results of our solicitation, a mix of seasoned and emerging UBI-related scholars and activists, much in the spirit of the New Directions in Basic Income Workshop. In addition to co-editors Caputo and Liu, other Workshop participants with chapter contributions are Olga Lenczewska and Avshalom Schwartz (Chapter 2), and Joseph Kane (Chapter 4). Chapters 2ā4 are theoretical, while Chapters 5ā14 are case studies of political activism, primarily in Europe, North America, and Australia, as well as in India.
In Chapter 2, Lenczewska and Schwartz show how universal basic income can serve as a key policy around which social movements and political activists could form an āoverlapping consensusā in todayās politically divisive climate. They draw on the political philosophy of John Rawls and make the case for UBI as an object of a broadly construed overlapping consensus among activists of feminist, racial justice, liberal egalitarian, Marxist-socialist, and libertarian persuasions whose varying normative rationales are supportive of UBI. Provocatively, Lenczewska and Schwartz claim that even if each of these groups of activists was to see UBI as only the second or third best alternative solution to the social problems they seek to address, UBI affords them a policy that they can agree upon and rally around. They recommend that activists of any persuasion focus their advocacy efforts on UBI as a policy itself rather than on the at times varying divisive or disagreeable normative reasons for supporting it.
In Chapter 3, Burkhard Wehner provides an analytic framework that orients activistsā advocacy effort toward the long term, say a transition period over the course of a human lifetime. He advises basic income advocates to consider popularity of the idea vs. its plausibility, neglected issues like the capacity of any given state to afford UBI, the nature and extent of citizen solidarity and fairness over the transition period, and, among other things, how UBI would be integrated into an existing welfare state apparatus. Wehner lays out two UBI scenarios: (1) a hybrid form that synthesizes an unconditional basic income and more conventional welfare state provisions, including work for those who want it, and (2) a constitutional article that includes such provisions as establishing a basic income system at a given point of time after which all citizens of all future birth years would be lifelong recipients of UBI and benefits claims of those citizens born prior to the launching of the basic income system would remain unaffected. The constitutional article would be supplemented by considerations of the amount necessary to constitute an adequate total income composed of UBI and conditional income transfers, income from work, social insurance benefits, and costs of an appropriate and fair livelihood. Wehner also offers several political strategies to increase the likelihood of realizing adoption of a UBI-related constitutional article, including the use of public opinion surveys and for smaller states nationwide basic income projects that could serve as a basis for upscaling for larger, more affluen...