The idea of a basic income guarantee is getting popular. In case you have not heard about it yet, a basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen with a sum of money that allows the receiver to participate in society with human dignity. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional.
In Germany they speak about 500 or even 1000 € monthly unconditional income for everyone.
What are the arguments?
One of the arguments for a basic income was articulated by the French Economist and Philosopher André Gorz:
- The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet-unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact…
- From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work…
- Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: ‘the micro-chip revolution’. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and work-based society is thrown into crisis (André Gorz, Critique of economic Reason, Gallile, 1989).
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) describes one of the benefits of a basic income as having a lower overall cost than that of the current means-tested social welfare benefits. However critics have pointed out the potential work disincentives created by such a program, and have cast doubts over its ability to be implemented. In later years, BIEN has made several fully financed proposals.
Today there are already some examples of partial implementation of the idea:
1) The U.S. State of Alaska has a system which provides each citizen with a share of the state’s oil revenues, although this amount is not necessarily enough to live on. The U.S. also has an Earned income tax credit for low-income taxpayers. In 2006 a bill written by members of the advocacy organization USBIG to transform the credit into a partial basic income was introduced in the US Congress but did not pass.
2)The city of Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada took part in an experimental basic income program (“Mincome“) between 1974 and 1979.
3)In 2008, a pilot project with a basic income grant was started in the Namibian village of Omitara by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition. After six months the project has been found to significantly reduce child malnutrition and increase school attendance. It was also found to increase the community’s income significantly above the actual amount from the grants as it allowed citizens to partake in more productive economic activities.
Can a state really survive with such a system and where the fundings will come from?
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low – and slowly increasing – basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income – among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature – on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects – is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network.
The concept of basic, or guaranteed income in the form of social provision, was foreshadowed by Karl Marx, who came to the conclusion that as the productive forces increased, along with automated production, the need for unskilled labor would diminish, eventually leading to a situation in which work would be divided among all members of society (solving the issue of unemployment in capitalism) as it is gradually reduced, emancipating labor from the need to engage in long and alienating work. Marx referred to this stage as Upper-stage communism, where goods and services (rather than income) would be provided free of charge. Other socialist authors, such as Bertrand Russell, envisioned four-hour workdays in a future socialist society.
I do hope that one day the humanity will come to this system, because the amount of unnecessary work most of us are doing is truly absurd.