[Rune]

Switzerland Mulls Giving Every Citizen $2,800 a Month

Earlier this month, an initiative aimed at giving every Swiss adult a "basic income" that would "ensure a dignified existence and participation in the public life of the whole population" gained enough support to qualify for a referendum. The amount suggested is 2,500 francs ($2,800) a month.

While most observers think that the vote is a longshot, it has certainly sparked debate — and not just in Switzerland. Writing for USA Today, Duncan Black said that a "minimum income" should be considered for the U.S.

"It's pretty clear that the most efficient way to improve the lives of people is to guarantee a minimum income," Black concludes.

However, Black understates just how radical the proposal is. We spoke to Daniel Straub, one of the people behind the initiative, to get a better understanding of what the proposal really means, why it is so radical, and what the world could learn from it.

How did this idea come to be?

Daniel Straub: A lot of people have proposed this idea. For example Thomas Paine in the United States or also the famous psychologist Erich Fromm has written about it in the sixties.

Why choose a minimum income rather than, say, a higher minimum wage? 

We are not proposing a minimum income — we are proposing an unconditional income. A minimum wage reduces freedom — because it is an additional rule. It tries to fix a system that has been outdated for a while. It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income. We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor — that is great — we should be celebrating.

How was the figure of 2,500 Swiss francs settled on? What standard of living does this buy in Switzerland? 

That depends where in Switzerland you live. On average it is enough for a modest lifestyle. 

What effect would you expect the minimum income to have on Swiss government expenditure? 

The unconditional income in Switzerland means that a third of the GDP would be distributed unconditionally. But I don't count that as government expenditure because it is immediately distributed to the people who live in this society. It means less government power because each individual can decide how to spend the money.

I've seen people compare it to Milton Friedman's negative income tax, do you think that comparison works? 

We go a step further than Friedman with the unconditionality. This would lead to a paradigm change. Not the needy get an income from the community but everybody.

When I first started posting about machine intelligence, robots, AI and all that, I got a whole lot of shit about it. But, increasingly, I am reading economists who look at the trend of displacemant of human manual labor, and the growing displacement of human cognitive "labor".

It's the same thing as what happend in agriculture. At one time, 90% of us were employed in farming. Now it is only 2%.

The same thing is happening in manufacturing with the advent of advanced robotics. And the same trend will happen more and more in areas of cognitive human skills. What will all of us ordinary slobs do for a living if our skillsets cannot compete with either machines or human/macine collaboration?

What does this mean for economics and the consumer society we live in?

[Ibon]

I happen to be In Switzerland at the moment. It is my first time back here in years, when I was younger I lived here for over 10 years. This is a folks initiative the swiss are considering. It's interesting to see how these referendums turns out. It is a kind of direct democracy because the citizens actually vote on specific issues as the one you raise here.

Years ago when I was living there there was a folks referendum vote on increasing the tax on gasoline to help finance public transportation. The tax was .27 rappen a liter which at that time was roughly almost a dollar a gallon increase. The referendum passed and today I am blown away once again by the public transportation here. The same year that folks initiative passed the Florida legislature also had an initiative to pass a penny a gallon tax increase for the Everglades restoration. This initiative failed as voters voted it down.

Interesting how much can be done with an enlightened electorate.

This new initiative will probably pass. In will follow up later on this.

[Strummer]

The idea of basic income as such is pretty sound, but it always seemed to me that it's not really compatible with a world of diminishing resources. The dream of machines doing all the work and 11 billion people spending their time on consumerist leisure is a complete fantasy in today's world and would probably require a massive population reduction to become viable.

[Rune]

YouTube

About Basic Income

A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:

• it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
• it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
• it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.

Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.

But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.

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.

FAQs

The following FAQ's are based on Philippe Van Parijs's Background Paper to BIEN's 9th Congress in Berlin, Basic Income. A simple and powerful idea for the 21st century.

Click here to download Van Parijs's paper.

I have to admit, I did not know anything about these initiatives until today, though after reading books like Lights In The Tunnel, the thought had occurred to me.

The author of The Lights in the Tunnel looked at the rapid growth of automation and AI; he looked at how machines are able to remove people from participating in the economy (because their job has been automated) - thus shrinking the human economy - and he concluded that we will probably have to pay people to "behave themselves" - that is, stay healthy and happy and occupied learning or doing something that prevents them from just sinking into anarchical ennui.

[Rune]

The idea of basic income as such is pretty sound, but it always seemed to me that it's not really compatible with a world of diminishing resources. The dream of machines doing all the work and 11 billion people spending their time on consumerist leisure is a complete fantasy in today's world and would probably require a massive population reduction to become viable.

Having looked at what is possible in nuclear energy, I just simply don't believe that.

The Chinese are saying they could power their economy for the next 20,000 years on Thorium. They have a well-funded research program in place and want to develop small modular, factory-produced commercial reactors in twenty years.

No one who has looked at it seems to think the technological barriers are insurmountable at all.

Having looked at the advent of machine intelligence, I don't see how the average joe is going to be worth a whole lot by around 2030, the same time as these reactors are expected.

[vision-master]

In the USA, we get the street....... the brother got $208 Month cash assistance while waiting on a disability claim.

[Ibon]

When I lived here I worked for a Swiss and German company Leica, some of you may remember the Leica Camera. The cleaning lady in the building I worked in earned $ 29000 a year. The CEO of the company earned $ 750,000.00 Typical of the income spread of European companies. Compare that in the US with a cleaning lady making maybe $ 12000 with no benefits and the CEO making $ 300 million. Income disparity in Europe is much less and there are also initiatives here to cap the disparity.

Question to the American posters here. What do you think of putting a cap on income disparity in the US?

[vision-master]

When I lived here I worked for a Swiss and German company Leica, some of you may remember the Leica Camera. The cleaning lady in the building I worked in earned $ 29000 a year. The CEO of the company earned $ 750,000.00 Typical of the income spread of European companies. Compare that in the US with a cleaning lady making maybe $ 12000 with no benefits and the CEO making $ 300 million. Income disparity in Europe is much less and there are also initiatives here to cap the disparity.

Question to the American posters here. What do you think of putting a cap on income disparity in the US?

Yes, If a family can't live well on $ 750,000.00 year, they should be shot!

[Plantagenet]

What a great idea. If the Swiss budget can support giving every citizen $2800, then by all means they should do it.

If they move to this minimum income idea, they will cut back on their equivalent of welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers, student financial aid etc. Switzlerland will use the money saved by cutting the existing targetted forms of government transfer payments that go only to a minority of people to help fund the minimum income for all people.

[Lore]

Question to the American posters here. What do you think of putting a cap on income disparity in the US?

We're under the illusion here that the wealthy will naturally at some point shower their good fortune upon the lower wage earners by providing better income opportunities. The seemingly never ending mission is that we just have to make them richer to do so. Of course, just the opposite is happening, but our ill informed electorate is too dense to get it.

It would be viewed as the height of socialism. Which for most is a word interpreted and associated with progressive thinking.

[rollin]

Considering the consequences of industrial and business mechanization eliminating and shifting jobs, along with the financial weathervaning of the last dozen years or so, I vote for the citizen wage. The US could really use this system.

[Shaved Monkey]

When I first started posting about machine intelligence, robots, AI and all that, I got a whole lot of shit about it. But, increasingly, I am reading economists who look at the trend of displacemant of human manual labor, and the growing displacement of human cognitive "labor".

It's the same thing as what happend in agriculture. At one time, 90% of us were employed in farming. Now it is only 2%.
What does this mean for economics and the consumer society we live in?

There was an interesting article I read on this recently in an Australian paper (I cant find it )
Basic principle was its going to become harder and harder to have a relatively egalitarian system,as unskilled labour becomes less required.
They used to be soaked up in agriculture and then manufacturing and now there is a massive shift as cheap off shore labour has taken all the unskilled jobs.(not just machines).
So you have an underclass of unskilled that remain unemployed longer or fills low paying service jobs,mowing lawns,house cleaning,call centres,short term retail/labour contracts, etc.
This destroys the fabric of our quasi egalitarian society.
In Australia we do have relatively high minimum wages and unemployment safety nets,but the gap between rich and poor is widening and will continue to do so.

[KaiserJeep]

It is instructive to note that if the US Congress had not been stealing money from the Social Security Fund, the system would be self-supporting now with no need for payroll deductions.

The same could easily be true of the US budget itself, paying income taxes would not be necessary given three impossible conditions:

1) Federal Government spending is reduced to just those seven things that the US Constitution permits that government to do.

2) The existing debt is retired by paying off all the T-bills. Surplus money is invested rather than spent.

3) New US immigrants are required to "buy into" the system by paying 25% income taxes for 10 years. No deductions, no exemptions, and if you cheat the taxman, your 10 years starts over.

This would enable you to enjoy all of the services you get today without taxes.

[Sixstrings]

Question to the American posters here. What do you think of putting a cap on income disparity in the US?

I think it's a great idea.

It's exactly what we used to do. We used to have an income distribution more like Europe. Top income tax rate in the US was in the 90% range in the '50s and '60s, then down a bit in the '70s, then down a lot under Reagan (still high by today's standards), Clinton cut it more (to a low but sustainable level), then Bush cut the top rates so much it blew up the budget. Bush cuts were supposed to be temporary but have been perpetuated by Obama.

Republicans refuse any tax increase on the super rich.

Regarding Switzerland.. they can afford to do this, and it makes sense given the high cost of living there.

When I first started posting about machine intelligence, robots, AI and all that, I got a whole lot of shit about it. But, increasingly, I am reading economists who look at the trend of displacemant of human manual labor, and the growing displacement of human cognitive "labor".

Yup. You're 100% correct.

This is the real crux of the peak jobs problem. Innovation has already crossed that point at which it destroys more jobs than is created. We'll have to figure out something for people to do, and how to ensure it pays enough to support them. Not everyone can be an engineer for Apple -- apple only employs a few thousand at most.

Apple employs a lot of Chinese people (what it is, a million? I forget), but even they will be replaced by robots eventually.

Then when the AI gets here, that's the big one, when software can do anything a person can do, from fluently speaking English and handling customers, to then doing even creative work. Even right now, if I call my cable company I don't get a live person on the phone, not even an Indian call center -- I get a software program asking me questions and it's pretty good, seems to understand me. I still hate it though and keep mashing 000000000000

[Shaved Monkey]

Cost of living is a rubber beast that swells to take as much as it can, simply raising the minimum wont satisfy its hunger,it will just gobble it up and return to equilibrium.

......................................................................................

Just saw the add for the next Foreign Correspondent serious political/doco show on government owned station in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/forei ... espondent/

USA - Down In Jungleland
Series 22 | Episode 25

Would you work for $2.13 an hour? That's the tough new reality for two former professionals you'll meet in this disturbing assessment of America's economic reality.

It should be up to view on the net after it airs on Tuesday.

[Rune]

The Swiss idea is that government welfare is completely inefficient. So instead of relying on government to re-distribute wealth to the qualified poor or disabled or elderly or what ever, they want to distribute a minimum income to every citizen and let the population do what the government formerly did.

I haven't thought this through and don't know if I could. But it sounds like someone over there has and they seem pretty sure of themselves.

[Rune]

Why Basic Income should become a Human Right

The U.S. Basic Income Network define Basic Income as, "...an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs." http://basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

This program could eliminate poverty resulting in a more predictable and stable society as crime and violence would decay.

It could also move innovation beyond traditional employment as everyone would have access to the necessities of life by a basic income thus economic flexibility.

It could, in addition to deliberate automation, diminish the work hours for full-time employers, giving people more time to friends and family and activities that enrich their lives thus increasing quality of life.

It would in fact save significant costs by liquidating cumbersome and bureaucratic government agencies, to a much simpler program that could be automated.

Furthermore, since there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it which could manifest a positive psychological effect in people to spend less and appreciate leisure, which is ultimately good for the environment.

An example of a 'mini-basic income' is the Permanent Fund Dividend which in an annual individual payout to Alaskans. Though the payout is relatively small and only annually distributed, it still goes to show that this kind of program is being used today: http://pfd.alaska.gov

Research from Namibia revealed that the introduction of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) led to an increase in economic activity which contradicts critics' claims that the BIG will lead to laziness and dependency. Learn more about it here: http://bignam.org

Namibia had amazing results in a number of other things as well, namely poverty reduction, which is a pivotal point in and of itself, and a reduction in crime rate by 40%. Now, imagine what a global basic income guarantee could do.

There's a Salon interview of an economist about it also, dated Oct. 13 2013.

Salon asked him about how the system would be accepted in the US. It sounded like there would be a huge fight about it here compared to europe. The economist also warned that existing safety net programs might be eroded.

All the complexity of the world kind of makes me wish for a global currency, a global healthcare system, a global basic income, a global government.

I guess the Illuminati have prevailed.

[Loki]

$2800/mo for 313.9 million Americans would require redistributing 67% of GDP. Not likely.

For Switzerland it's 43% of GDP (7.997 million population and USD$632.2 billion GDP).

[Rune]

Vortex

They should do an experiment. Randomly select 100 kids in high school and
tell them that they'll get paid a min income for the rest of their life.

Find out where they are in 4 years versus a control group.

This experiment has been done millions of times throughout history, and it
is done thousands of times a year in any first-world country. The high
school kids are called "trust fund babies." They are the children of the
rich. We know what happens to them. Some screw up and live irresponsibly,
like the character "Arthur" in the movie by that title. Others make
ordinary contributions to society. Still others -- such as Thomas Jefferson
-- take advantage of their wealth and position in society to accomplish
great things.

Middle class and poor people also diverge in this way. Some ruin their
lives; some are normal; others do great things. It is difficult to say
whether having money enhances the likelihood of success, or subverts it. I
suppose it depends on the person. I know for a fact that some people who
are free to do anything they like will spend a lifetime doing difficult,
painstaking work, and even boring work because they feel it is worthwhile
and of value to society. Work such editing cold fusion papers and
organizing a web site devoted to them. I expert the contributions of such
people make up for the lost productivity of several wastrels and lazy
drones who waste their lives.

In his masterpiece "Profiles of the Future" Arthur Clarke described the
ultimate machine, the replicator, which can supply any material good at
no effort or expense. In the chapter titled "Aladdin's Lamp" he described
the effect it might have on society:

"It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if it can ever be built at
all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions.
Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse speedily into sybaritic
hedonism, followed immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety.

Some cynics may doubt if any society of human beings could adjust itself to
unlimited abundance and the lifting of the curse of Adam—a curse which may
be a blessing in disguise.

Yet in every age, a few men have known such freedom, and not all of them
have been corrupted by it. Indeed, I would define a civilized man as one
who can be happily occupied for a lifetime even if he has no need to work
for a living. This means that the greatest problem of the future is
civilizing the human race; but we know that already."

- Jed

Let's say this system is in place in the US. And $2,800 buys what $2,800 buys.

What would YOU do with your life?

If I were smart enough to do better than my peers and the machines, I would read a lot, be a science journalist and futurist.

If I were not smart enough, I would read a lot and experiment a lot with altered states.

[Keith_McClary]

If they move to this minimum income idea, they will cut back on their equivalent of welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers, student financial aid etc. Switzlerland will use the money saved by cutting the existing targetted forms of government transfer payments that go only to a minority of people to help fund the minimum income for all people.

I don't know the details of the Swiss proposal, but I thought the minimum income concept was to replace all these programs with one simple program and eliminate a lot of bureaucratic waste.