Why 2016 is going to be a big year for the Basic Income movement

When I first started writing about the subject of Basic Income in 2013 the topic was very niche. Since then the Basic Income movement has picked up some significant momentum.

In this article I'm going to provide a few useful resources and then detail some of the most important recent Basic Income developments.

Resources

Basic Income is the idea that absolute poverty can be alleviated by providing every member of a society with an unconditional subsistence income. Beside the reduction in absolute poverty one of the main benefits of such a system is that anyone who chooses to work is always better off because their work related income is not subtracted from their welfare payments creating extraordinarily high rates of marginal taxation for the low paid as is currently the current welfare policy in the UK.

My first article on Basic Income was this introduction to the subject. I have also written this one about the labour market consequences of Basic Income provision, and this one comparing Basic Income with the current UK social security system.

If you want to keep up with the latest Basic Income news then it's worth following Basic Income Europe (Facebook/Twitter) and checking out the Basic Income Earth Network website.

Recent global developments

Finland
You may have heard talk that Finland is going to introduce a Basic Income payment of 800€ for all citizens, but this story has been severely over-exaggerated by elements of the UK press. What is actually happening is the establishment of Basic Income trials in Finland as a result of the Finnish government's adoption of evidence based policy (something else I've been advocating for many years). Essentially the Finnish government is planning to conduct a large scale Basic Income cost-benefit analysis. You can read more about the developments in Finland here.

Netherlands

Another major development is the announcement of a kind of Basic Income trial in the Dutch city of Utrecht. What is being done there is not a full-scale Basic Income trial because the payments will only be made to the unemployed, however it will be useful in determining if unemployed people are more likely to go out and find work if they get to keep everything they earn rather than having the majority of their earnings subtracted from their benefits as is the case under . Here's a recent article on the Utrecht experiment.

Spain
The Political party Podemos was only founded in March 2014, yet after the Spanish General Election in December 2015 it is now the third biggest party in the Spanish parliament, provides the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona and has a social media following twice as big as all of the other parties in Spain combined! Podemos support the concept of Basic Income, and if their exponential rise in popularity and influence continues, it seems only a matter of time before they enter government, meaning Basic Income would well and truly be on the agenda in Spanish politics.

Switzerland
The long awaited Swiss referendum on the introduction of a Basic Income payment for all Swiss citizens is due in the autumn of 2016. The Swiss political establishment are clearly terrified by the concept (voting 146 to 14 against the idea). Right-wing politicians queued up to spew furious fearmongering rhetoric against Basic Income, describing it as "the most dangerous and harmful initiative ever", "a bomb at the heart of our society and our economy" and a "hand grenade that threatens to tear the whole system apart". Despite the Swiss political establishment's campaign of fearmongering against the idea of eliminating absolute poverty through the introduction of a Basic Income scheme, opinion polls show that public opinion is still quite evenly divided on the subject.

Canada
The Liberal Party won an astonishing election victory, recovering from their worst performance ever in 2011 to win an absolute majority on an anti-austerity platform in 2015. One of the many progressive pre-election policy resolutions is the implementation of a Basic Income scheme for all Canadians. In December 2015 Kingston, Ontario became the first municipality to endorse Basic Income and call on the federal government to develop the measure at the national level. It's unlikely that such a bold progressive proposal would be implemented at the national level without a huge amount of pressure on the Liberal Party leadership, however the fact that Basic Income is on the agenda at all in Canada is definitely a noteworthy development.

Developments in the UK

Considering developments in other countries, the subject of Basic Income is still somewhat in the shadows in the UK. The Green Party are still the only significant UK party to put Basic Income as one of their headline policy proposals. There are Basic Income advocates within the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, but Basic Income was not mentioned in either of their 2015 manifestos. The Labour Party don't advocate Basic Income either, but the new leader Jeremy Corbyn has appointed the Basic Income advocate Richard Murphy as one of his economic advisers.

While the subject of Basic Income seems to have gained little traction within the UK political establishment, it is gaining more recognition elsewhere. Even though several of the recent articles about Basic Income trials in the UK press have been somewhat inaccurate in their claims, it's still notable that the subject is being written about in most of the mainstream newspapers.

It's also worth noting that the RSA have started advocating for Basic Income, as have the innovation charity Nesta.

Conclusion

Basic Income looks set to become one of the big political topics of 2016. If the trials in Finland and the Netherlands are as successful as previous Basic Income trials in demonstrating reductions in poverty, increased entrepreneurship, increased worker productivity, reduced domestic violence etc ... then advocates of Basic Income will have even more hard evidence to argue their case. The Swiss Basic Income referendum towards the end of 2016 is likely to attract a significant amount of press coverage, especially if the Swiss political establishment continue trying to polarise the debate with their policy of transparently alarmist fearmongering. 

Whether the Swiss referendum on Basic Income is successful or not, public awareness of the concept is set to increase dramatically over the coming year. In my view it's only a matter of time before Basic Income schemes become commonplace. When people look back they'll recognise 2015-16 as the period when the Basic Income movement really began to gain traction.

   

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Comparing Nordic apples with American oranges

The supporter of ideologically driven right-wing economic orthodoxy will often come up with truly pathetic arguments to justify their position. Sometimes it is because they hold their audience in such contempt that they think that they can get away with making rubbish arguments, but often, it seems the proponent has such low intellect that they can't even understand why their own arguments are so fundamentally flawed.

Simplistic direct comparisons between these economies are
bound to provide plenty of misleading conclusions

The argument by false analogy (comparing apples and oranges) is one of the most pathetic forms of fallacy used by thick people, or by people hoping to convince an audience that they assume to be thick. One of the finest displays of right wing argument by false analogy can be found in a Daily Telegraph article by Tim Stanley, in which he  lamely attempts to diminish the Scandinavian social democratic model.

After a lot of fairly predictable hot air about how he believes that high taxation, strong social mobility, high welfare standards, high general incomes and greater equality are all bad things he concludes with a quite remarkable paragraph.

"The sad fact is that sometimes the relentless pursuit of fairness in outcome imperils the creation of an atmosphere of opportunity. Put crudely, yes Scandinavia probably does ferry a child safely from cradle to grave with the result that levels of poverty and crime are conceivably lower. But where is the Swedish Facebook? How many Danes have walked on the moon? Does Norway have a Commonwealth? How’s that Finnish movie industry doing?"

The first thing to note about the four questions he asks in his concluding paragraph is the vast population disparity between the social democratic Nordic countries he is criticising and the neoliberal Anglo countries he is eulogising. To make direct comparisons between the outputs of such vastly differing economies is transparently misleading. Much fairer comparisons could be made between places with similar populations.

• Finland vs Scotland
• Norway vs Colorado
• Denmark vs Wisconsin
• Sweden vs North Carolina

It is clear that the pro-neoliberalism argument would be lost using fair comparisons, both in terms of actual wealth (GDP per capita) and in terms of utterly absurd questions (where is North Carolina's Ikea? Does Colorado have a coastline? How's that Scottish mobile phone manufacturing industry doing?) hence Stanleys's decision to use fallacious and absurdly disproportionate ones instead.

Returning to the remarkable display of fallacious reasoning in the quoted paragraph, let me address Tim Stanley's four questions in order:

"Where is the Swedish Facebook?"

Sweden doesn't have a Facebook but it does have another very famous website called The Pirate Bay, (which has more visitors than any British based website other than the state controlled BBC). Sweden also has a global retail brand with a turnover of €25bn called Ikea, which is surely of more economic significance than a website that produces nothing apart from spamvertizing revenue, costs the "real economy" billions in lost productivity (as millions of workers skive off work to check their updates on their smartphones on a daily basis) and which just provided one of the most farcical IPOs in recent history, hardly a glowing example of neoliberalism at work.

"How many Danes have walked on the moon?"

Ask yourself this; how many Americans have walked on the moon?  The answer is 12, making a ratio of 1 for every 28 million of their citizens. Given this ratio you would have expected less than 1/4 of a Dane to have made it to the moon so far. This question about moon walking is nothing more than a boast about American economic might which utterly disregards the vital bit of information that not a single American has walked on the moon since Apollo was cancelled in the early 1970s, meaning that since the rise of neoliberalism as the economic orthodoxy in the United States since the late 1970s, as many Danes as Americans have walked on the moon (none).

"Does Norway have a Commonwealth?"

This question is even more absurd than the moon walking one. Norway does not have a Commonwealth because it did not have an empire established during the mercantilist era and strenghtened during the era of industrialisation. Using the fact that Norway weren't successful mercantilists and empire builders several Centuries ago as a criticism for their social democratic stance over the last 50 odd years is just bizarre. Noting that Norway has not retained the remnants of an empire built up centuries ago and using that as an implied criticism of modern Norwegian economic policy is either the work of an idiot, or the work of a man that assumes his audience to be idiots. One remarkable bit of information that Stanley completely failed to mention in his article, is that Norway a country with a population of only 5.01 million (or 1.6% of the US population if you like) has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the entire world ($573bn), which contrasts sharply with the vast unfunded welfare deficits in the US and the UK.

"How’s that Finnish movie industry doing?"

Again, another apples and oranges comparison. Finland has actually produced some quite good films in recent years, but expecting a country with a 60th of the population of the USA to compete with Hollywood in terms of output and revenues would be utterly absurd. One way in which the Nordic film industry does out compete the US is in quality of output. For every genuinely well made and thought provoking film out of Hollywood, there are at least a dozen lazy, stereotype riddled, mindless action or romcom films. The discerning viewer of World cinema knows that "Scandinavian film" (lets incorrectly refer to Finland as a Scandinavian country instead of a Nordic one, as Stanley does throughout his article) has a long tradition of producing engaging dramas, which generally demonstrate much better grasps of realism, nuance and ambiguity than their cash addled US counterparts.

The lameness of these points in Stanley's concluding paragraph demonstrate what a weak case against social democracy he had managed to construct. The economic evidence is absolutely clear, the social democratic mixed economy model provides greater economic stability, greater productivity, greater social mobility and an equatable share of the growing national wealth for the vast majority of citizens. Neoliberalism on the other hand allows the inflation of vast speculative bubbles which result in severe economic crises, creates the illusion of growth through the creation of debt throughout all sectors of society, damages social mobility and is has only ever been proven successful at transferring wealth from ordinary working people to the tiny economic elite.

That a defender of neoliberalism would resort to misleadingly comparing Nordic apples and Anglo-American oranges in the conclusion to his attack on social democracy speaks volumes about the intellectual poverty of his position. The absurdity of Stanley's arguments underline the fact that he is either an idiot himself, or someone that believes he is preaching to an audience of idiots. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the intellectual capabilities of his audience of Telegraph readers.

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