Unconditional Basic Income

Cognitive capital is an important resource for employers. A survey instrument is proposed to evaluate employee’s desire to use their cognitive capital in the workplace. Additionally, the survey incorporates elements to allow for cross analysis of results by whether or not the employee is receiving income from external sources outside their primary employer. This is an important aspect for study due to the increasing need to analyze how universal basic income may potentially impact employee mindset and use of cognitive capital within or external to their work environment.

Published in 1964, James Meade’s *Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property* packs an incredible concentration of insightful analysis and provocative policy ideas in under 100 pages. The book is a brilliant exploration of what a more egalitarian society might look like, and of what measures might help us to get there.

As a work that went on to exert a deep influence on both the economists Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson, and the philosopher John Rawls, it does not merit the relative neglect in which it now rests. Time is ripe for its rediscovery.

Online at Policy Network here: http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4909&title=James-Meade-and-predistribution-50-years-before-his-time

В статье обсуждается сериал Girls (HBO, 2012 — н. вр.) в контексте отношения двадцатилетних молодых людей к рабо- те и полученному образованию. Затра- гивается также вопрос о социальной функции денег. Последние годы в ака- демической среде стало хорошим то- ном ссылаться на последние продукты массовой культуры, однако обсуждение и анализ сериалов, в отличие от кино, все еще остается предметом для ауди- торных практик, мало отрефлексиро- ванным в научной литературе. Автор предпринимает попытку проанализи- ровать сериал с обращением к совре- менным теоретическим текстам, подни- мающим проблемы нематериального труда, борьбы за права работников, им занятых, и к вопросу о целесообраз- ности и необходимости гуманитарно- го образования в XXI веке. Помимо об- ращения к теоретической литературе, в статье проводятся параллели с сериа- лами «как преуспеть в Америке» (HBO, 2010–2011) и «Бесстыдники» (Showtime, 2011 — н. вр.), затрагивающими близ- кие проблемные поля. В настоящей работе подробно анализируются высказывания геро- ев сериала в контексте обсуждения трудовых отношений, полученной специализации в колледже или уни- верситете, инвестируемых родственни- ками средств в человеческий капитал студентов и выпускников образова- тельных учреждений и т. д. Подобные вопросы кажутся автору достойными рассмотрения в силу их актуализации и воплощения поколением двадца- тилетних в сериальной форме на ка- бельном телевидении. Шоу снято при непосредственном участии Лены Да- нэм, молодой сценаристки, режиссера и исполнительницы роли главной ге- роини. Предлагаемый в статье подход выводит дискуссию о сериалах за рам- ки обсуждения сюжетных линий и ак- терской игры.

Koncepcja bezwarunkowego dochodu podstawowego uzyskuje w ostatnich latach coraz większe poparcie. Co zaskakujące, wspierający ją różnią się zupełnie poglądami politycznymi, wyznawaną filozofią i krajem pochodzenia. Zwolenników bezwarunkowego dochodu podstawowego można znaleźć zarówno wśród tych, którzy nigdy nie optowaliby za zupełną transformacją społeczeństwa, w którym żyją, jak i wśród ruchów społecznych będących w pełni przeciwko utrzymaniu status quo. Także w kręgach akademickich, zarówno wśród myślicieli liberalnych, republikańskich, ekologicznych jak i feministycznych, znajdziemy zainteresowanych oraz popierających propozycję wprowadzenia bezwarunkowego dochodu podstawowego. Dyskusję nad tą instytucją rozpoczęto niezależnie od siebie w państwach takich jak Stany Zjednoczone Ameryki Północnej i Chile, Australia i Szwecja, Turcja i Republika Południowej Afryki. Różnorodność jej apologetów skłania do przyjrzenia się tej instytucji i odpowiedzeniu sobie na pytanie, co stanowi źródło tej popularności.

1. Einführung Götz Werners Modell eines bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens (BGE) hat in der letzten Dekade große Prominenz erlangt. Quer durch das politische Spektrum finden sich Anhänger für dieses Modell gesellschaftlicher Versorgung, das der zunehmenden Produktivität fortgeschrittener Volkswirtschaften und daraus resultierender Abnahme an klassischer Erwerbsarbeit gerecht zu werden versucht. Zwei externe Impulse haben die in soziologischen Kreisen schon seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre diskutierte Idee des BGE 1 in den Fokus gerückt: (1) Die sozialpolitischen Folgen der von Gerhard Schrö-der ins Werk gesetzten Agenda 2010 und (2) die ab September 2008 einsetzende Fi-nanzkrise, die das neoliberale Leitbild einer sich selbst steuernden Ökonomie delegiti-miert hat. Denn sie indizierte mit großer Heftigkeit, in welch hohem Maße der gesell-schaftliche Reichtum durch die Finanzmärkte immer ungleicher verteilt wird 2 ; die Be-ziehung Finanzmarkt-Realwirtschaft erweist sich als zunehmend dysfunktional. Da-zu ist es dem persönlichen Engagement Götz Werners zu verdanken, dass die Diskus-sion um das BGE seitdem auf der gesellschaftspolitischen Agenda verblieben ist. In diesem Artikel werden nach einer Darstellung des Wernerschen Modells in Form von acht Thesen Antworten auf diese Thesen gegeben-in Form eigener Hypothesen zu den Realisierungschancen des Modells im Spannungsfeld von klassischen ökonomi-schen Anreiztheorien wie beispielsweise Joseph Schumpeters Theorie der kreativen Zerstörung einerseits sowie sozialen Gerechtigkeits-und Verteilungstheorien wie der eines John Rawls 3 andererseits. Dazu wird der für die Idee des BGE essenziellen, aber umstrittenen These des zukünftig abnehmenden Arbeitsvolumens einige Aufmerksam-keit gewidmet. Des Weiteren wird untersucht, ob ein schleichender Prozess in Rich-tung auf die Einführung eines BGE praktisch bereits in der Sozialgesetzgebung nach-weisbar ist. Abschließend wird ein Blick auf die potenziellen Risiken im Falle der Ein-führung eines BGE geworfen und mögliche Alternativen skizziert. Einführend ist es jedoch nützlich, der theoretischen Analyse einige Anmerkungen zur Person Götz Werners vorauszuschicken.

This research is an attempt by the authors to study basic income experiments and experiences in nearly every political boundary worldwide, models that have been proposed worldwide and come up with one that could potentially beat the fallacies.
This book could be a  rich resource to all the researchers, development sector enthusiasts who are in the process of pragmatic exploration of Basic Income.
The literature enveloped in this book may help you seek answers to the questions like, what problems can UBI specifically combat? How does it stand in contrast to the existing social security system? What could be the proposed efficient and effective models? And many more.
We hope that it helps the readers in connecting further dots.

Die Forschung zum Bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen kreist bisher  vorwiegend um Fragen seiner Auswirkungen auf Arbeitsangebot und  Finanzierung. Wenig thematisiert wird, welche Folgen es für die Lebensführung im Allgemeinen haben könnte, ob es sich  eher  autonomiefördernd oder -hemmend, gemeinwohlfördernd oder -schädigend  auswirken  würde. Welche Folgen könnte es darüber hinaus  für die Sozialisation, das Bildungswesen, das Berufsethos, die Gesundheit oder die Soziale Arbeit haben? Bislang vorgelegte Studien nutzen vorwiegend Modellsimulationen, um etwaige Auswirkungen zu ermessen. Die dafür getroffenen Annahmen sind allerdings selten Gegenstand einer  empirischen Überprüfung und setzen somit etwas voraus, das es erst zu untersuchen gilt. Forschung in der Tradition hermeneutisch rekonstruktiver Verfahren gibt es in diesem Zusammenhang  bislang kaum. Gerade sie könnten jedoch Erkenntnisse über handlungsleitende Überzeugungen und konkrete Handlungskonstellationen geben, die weitreichende Schlussfolgerungen erlauben. Das Symposium versteht sich als Forum  zur Diskussion und Entwicklung von Forschungsfragen rund um das Bedingungslose Grundeinkommen. Es soll dazu beitragen, die vielfältigen, häufig  übersehenen Zusammenhänge, in denen das Bedingungslose
Grundeinkommen ebenso zu sehen ist, deutlich zu machen. Angesichts unverhältnismäßig großer Erwartungen an wissenschaftliche Expertise soll es auch darum gehen zu erwägen, welchen Beitrag Wissenschaft überhaupt zur Auslotung von Auswirkungen eines Grundeinkommens leisten kann und wo ihre Grenzen sind.

An Euro-Dividend for European Social Union?
Una breve panoramica sul dibattito europeo e globale riguardo la previsione di un reddito di base universale e incondizionato (Universal and Unconditional Basic Income), anche nella prospettiva di un possibile, concreto, EuroDividendo.
https://www.bin-italia.org/quaderni-reddito-n9-big-data-webfare-reddito-tutti/

"Mit Durchführung der Schröderschen Arbeitsmarktreformen ist der schon einmal in den 1980er Jahren diskutierte Vorschlag eines bedingungslosen Grundeinkommens und die mit ihm verbundene Diagnose einer »Krise der Arbeitsgesellschaft« in die reformpolitische Debatte zurückkehrt. Sie bilden eine sich zunehmend artikulierende »Antithese« zu dem in Deutschland von der rot-grünen Bundesregierung eingeführten Modell der »aktivierenden Arbeitsmarktpolitik«, das unter anderem eine Kultur des Misstrauens gegenüber Arbeitslosen institutionalisiert hat. Vor diesem Hintergrund versammelt das vorliegende Buch sozialwissenschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge. Im Anschluss an eine Rekapitulation und Neuformulierung dieser Diagnose, die in Deutschland erstmals von Hannah Arendt prononciert formuliert wurde und nun wie eine »Wiederkehr des Verdrängten« eine Renaissance erfährt, folgen darauf bezogene zeitdiagnostische Fallrekonstruktionen sowie Beiträge zu Fragen der Realisierung des Grundeinkommensvorschlags.
Enthält Beiträge von Olaf Behrend, Eva Daniels, Thomas Franke, Manuel Franzmann, Achim Greser, Heribert Lenz, Matthias Jung, Ingmar Kumpmann, Jörn Lamla, Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer, Matthias Müller, Ulrich Oevermann, Michael Opielka, Andé Presse, Gerhard Schildt, Ariadne Sondermann, Johannes Suciu, Yannick Vanderborght, Philippe Van Parijs, Georg Vobruba, Götz W. Werner.
"

Minority empowerment is a relatively new approach on research and policy-making in the field of minority studies. At its core lies the ideal to remove the marginalisation of minorities by providing room for them to take agency on their own behalf. One policy that has been identified as having the potential to rapidly affect marginalised communities is the implementation of a Universal Basic Income; a monthly amount paid equally to all residents of an area without any means-testing or conditions. This working paper explores how these two fields of research can connect and identifies the key areas of everyday life that could be affected. This includes focus on employment, education, relationships and family life, community work, and government intrusion and social stigma; core elements for any individual and society, including minority communities. The analysis section finds that UBI has the potential to alter all of these aspects, but only if it is used to increase the existing standard of welfare and government services and not as an opportunity to reduce government spending by cutting the vital existing programmes.

Unconditional basic income (UBI) is a policy that has provoked interest across a number of academic disciplines-political theory, ethics, economics and futurology to name a few-and across all points on the political spectrum. These different approaches have all found different reasons to endorse a policy that could augur a potentially radical move away from current welfare practices. This paper provides a survey of the proposed values and functions that will be accomplished by insisting on the unconditionality of a minimum income. These functions include the meeting of basic human rights, realising the right to exit, as well as drawing on libertarian and republican approaches, both of which bring different understandings of freedom to bear on the question of a basic income. In addition, the essay examines contingent and contemporary reasons rooted, first, in a desire to confront bureaucratic intrusion in people's lives, and second, to reckon with labour markets developments, in particular regarding rapid technological reductions to available work. The conclusion sounds out some warnings and gaps in the current literature regarding possible consequence for the economy, the effects for border control, and other policies that might be needed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS/POSTSCRIPT:
This paper was presented at the 4th International Conference on the Capability Approach, 4-7, September 2004, Pavia, Italy. A slightly different version was delivered under the title ‘Basic Income and Capability Approach: On Recognition and Deconstruction for Difference’ at the 10th Basic Income European Network Congress, 19-20 September 2004, Barcelona, Spain. I was grateful for the warm reception and comments on both these occasions, which encouraged
me to revise and rework. Immediately following these conferences, however, I started my post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, which led to my moving on to new projects. The paper had been based initially on a chapter of my PhD thesis submitted to Kyoto University in 2000. Other than the translation from Japanese to English, the only other substantive change had been the accommodation of new literature. I was grateful to Masato Shikata and Kaori Katada for their encouragement during this period.
It has now been twenty years since I first tackled the topic of the paper and it is to my great surprise and pleasure to have recently discovered new readers. I would like to thank especially Dr. Mariusz Baranowski, the editor of Society Register, on whose kind invitation my work is being published here. I would also like to thank Dr. Beatrice Sasha Kobow for including the paper in the reading list for her graduate philosophy seminar at the University of Salzburg in 2020, and for inviting me there. I am grateful for her students’ thoughtful questions and comments.
While I have tried in the intervening years to continually engage with the central problematics of the paper – developing a theory of an evolutionary political economy that can accommodate the issue of cultural justice, my individual works since then have not taken on the topic as a whole, but have rather developed specific points addressed in the paper. The relationship between Amartya Sen’s ethical universalism and non-essential ontology on identity was explored in Yamamori 2006. The concept of need in Sen was discussed in Yamamori (2018, 2019), while the same concept in economics at large was explored in Yamamori (2017, 2020). Yamamori 2017 also tried to examine how colonialist discourse
influenced the formation of the concept of need in economics, which indirectly relates to cultural justice. On Basic Income, I contrasted Nancy Fraser’s work with findings from an oral history of the British working-class women’s movement which had demanded Basic Income in the long 1970s (Yamamori 2014). The definitional issue of Basic Income pointed to in footnote 5 in this paper is revisited in Yamamori 2021.
When Dr. Baranowski offered me this opportunity, I thought immediately of the chance to review and incorporate all the literature to date, but soon realised what a daunting task this would be in the given time constraints. Thus the paper here is almost identical with the original in 2004, albeit in an edited new guise, for which thanks are due to Dr. Rositza Alexandrova.

With growing income inequality and struggles to end poverty in the developed world, governments will need to consider new strategies to support their people. The idea of the universal basic income involves providing a minimum income to all citizens of the state, regardless of employment. This solution has had advocates stretching back hundreds of years and may be the solution to growing inequality, the rise of underemployment, and unemployment due to technological advance. This essay develops the history of the basic income, current economic problems, an explanation of a basic income explanation, and experimental evidence dispelling myths about such a system.

This research note examines a relationship between public attitudes toward Universal Basic Income (UBI) and country-level social and economic conditions in 21 European Countries. Despite abundant theoretical and empirical research on, a comparative analysis on the public appetite for UBI has been available due to data limitation. This research note takes advantage of the 2016 European Social Survey to explore the connection between public support for UBI and the level of social protection and economic (in)security. 1

This paper examines whether the concept of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) can be realised within the framework of capitalism. After describing the essence of UBI, I present its historical antecedents, rival concepts and the pros and cons. The paper then contrasts the effect of UBI on wage labour with aspects of capital accumulation and makes an assessment of the obstacles to the introduction of UBI. It deduces why and how UBI might become unsustainable in cases where it is implemented within the framework of a profit-oriented and property-based society and concludes that as UBI would put a floor under the working-class income, restrict the possibilities of suppressing the wage share and increase the rate of exploitation, it is unlikely to be introduced and certainly cannot be maintained as long as the socioeconomic system is based on the profit motive.

In this article, we present an anti-capitalist argument for basic income based on its predicted effects on the wage share dynamics and its relation with the working class' bargaining power. Our considerations are located in the Marxist tradition and based mainly on contributions to the Marxist analytical framework made by Rosa Luxemburg and Michał Kalecki. We argue that basic income should lead to a rise of the share of wages in the GDP, by significantly improving workers' bargaining position in various ways: through increasing the effective demand and investments by redistributing income to the advantage of the poorer groups of the society; through guaranteeing the realisation of basic needs outside the labour market; through positive influence on the collective bargaining power, especially during a strike; and through enhancing engagement in alternative relations of production as well as in political struggle for a better situation of working people. We also distinguish some necessary conditions in a realistic historical scenario where the positive, anti-capitalist dynamic launched by basic income could be set into motion.

Abstract
What is effort and why do we value it? This thesis examines various ways in which effort has been used to answer questions of distributive justice. I begin with effort’s role as the unique legitimate basis for justifying differences in the deserts people receive. This role focuses on either the burdens associated with effort, so that it is only when we try hard and suffer disutility that we deserve anything; or else it is because our effort is the only part of our person for which we can be held responsible. I then discuss the legitimacy of the demand for specifically productive reciprocal effort in light of a society’s institutional structure meeting certain thresholds of justice. I find problems with all three of these approaches because they miss important ways in which we use and understand effort in the course of our lives.
I examine the uses to which we put effort, developing a more inductive approach which draws on a particular reading of the concept of burden developed in the first half of the thesis. What are the costs associated with trying hard to do something and why are they important to how our lives go? I then frame this by a particular account of a character I call the ‘craftsman’. This is someone who enjoys a particularly ‘costly’ way of living. The craftsman desires to achieve a depth in her life that is negatively affected by contemporary social and economic demands. Finally, I propose an unconditional basic income as a means to protect the craftsman and the agitator, an additional character identified in response to the discussion on reciprocity, who helps us collectively approach the thresholds identified in the third chapter.

Abstracts français/english :
Trois entretiens inédits en français d'André Gorz (1990, 2003 et 2005).
Ces entretiens révèlent la persistante actualité de la réflexion existentielle de Gorz sur le sens de la vie contrarié par l’emprise tentaculaire de l’économie qui réduit l’être humain à la fonction de travailler et consommer. Associant une critique de l’aliénation du travail et une vision écologiste de la « bonne vie », son utopie est celle d’une civilisation du temps libéré : elle suppose un divorce historique entre le travail, qui doit être réduit, et le revenu, qui doit être garanti, afin de permettre une multiplicité d’activités autodéterminées – créatives, solidaires, militantes – tout au long de la vie de chacun.
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The three interviews, from 1990, 2003 and 2005, show the relevance of André Gorz’s ideas ont the meaning of life. The tentacle-like hold of the economy, which reduces human action to production and consumption, inhibits life. By combining criticism of alienating work with an ecological vision of “the good life”, he presents a utopia in which time has been freed. Such a civilisation separates work, which must be reduced, from income, which must be guaranteed, so that, throughout their lives, people can engage in many different self-determined activities involving creation, activism and solidarity.

This paper decomposes global inequality in redistribution, using data from the World Development Indicators data set of the World Bank. It finds that per capita income has a modest, yet persistent effect on redistribution. More provocatively, the paper also demonstrates that, over and beyond the impact of per capita GDP, global inequalities in redistribution over the last generation or so strongly reflect the double legacies of colonialism (improving the likelihood of redistribution in former-colonizer societies and sharply reducing it in erstwhile-colonized, recently independent societies). In addition, it also finds that the history of recent exposure to state socialism increases the presence of redistributive institutions, partly counterbalancing the effects of lower national incomes. The data have been obtained from the World Bank's online open-access data site World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org.

This article critiques postoperaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the 'crisis of measurability' created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity postoperaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explores this theoretical conflict, asserting that post-operaismo refutes Marx's value theory only insofar as it holds a productivist understanding of value to begin with. The second reflects upon the political implications through a consideration of the postoperaist advocacy of a universal basic income (UBI). Appeals to reward, recompense and redistribution rest upon the veracity of the claims made in the post-operaist treatment of labour, value and their immateriality and immeasurability. A value-form analysis exposes flaws in the assumptions about value and labour that support their case for a UBI.

The main objective of the article is to investigate the potential influence of basic income on the economy, especially Gross Domestic Product. The author uses Michał Kalecki's reproduction schemas and relations between fundamental macroeconomic factors in national economy (like GDP, the share of profits/wages, the amount of the budget deficit, private investment etc.) to verify objections against basic income made by Michel Husson: problem with financing, accusations of causing potential increase in social inequalities and reducing workers' wages. At the end of the paper some conditions under which implementing basic income can be beneficial are made and some political obstacles are indicated.

This article aims to examine Karl Widerquist’s book "A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens" in the context of various governments’ current interest in conducting basic income experiments. Based on the reflections in the book, the first section of this paper analyses why basic income experiments usually have positive results and why it is logical to expect this to be the case. The second section questions why, regardless of the results, the experiments have not led to the implementation of a measure like basic income. The third section addresses the two main goals of the book: how to understand and communicate the results of basic income experiments and how to conduct such experiments given the methodological difficulties that they entail.

We examine the effect of unconditional cash transfers by a unitary discrete labour supply model. We argue that there is no negative income effect of social transfers in the case of poor adults because leisure could not be assumed to be a normal good under such conditions. Using data from the national employment survey of Ecuador (ENEMDUR) we estimate the effect of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH). Results show that cash transfers, unconditional in labour, do not produce labour disincentives in the case of household heads, but may be paying for housework and childcare provided by partners and single adults. However, labour market and care work gender inequality must be addressed by complementary policies.

This study deals with five sources of data that may help to answer the question of how labor supply would respond to the introduction of unconditional basic income. Research of lottery winners' labor supply and the results of field experiments, in which the behavior of households who have received a regular unconditional income for a limited time period was observed and is then investigated and discussed. Results of the laboratory experiment, the estimates of microsimulation models, and the results of the opinion polls are also examined. The surveyed data sources show mainly a slight decline in labor supply. However, none of these data were collected in situations that would fully correspond with the expected conditions of decision-making that would occur with the basic income. Any results derived from them therefore need to be considered with caution.

Il reddito di cittadinanza approvato in Italia è stato capace di raggiungere molto più di altre precedenti misure il gruppo target, del quale ha certamente migliorato le condizioni economiche, anche se non è stato altrettanto capace di trovare lavoro ai percettori del RdC. Pur mettendo da parte la pesante incidenza della pandemia sul mondo del lavoro, è vero che anche in passato, e anche per misure simili del resto d’Europa, le politiche attive del lavoro per chi accede a forme di reddito di ultima istanza (quali il RdC) hanno avuto un esito positivo in una percentuale molto ridotta di casi.
Perché allora questa forte insistenza a includere all’interno di schemi di sostegno al reddito e contrasto alla povertà le politiche di attivazione? Perché non distinguere in maniera netta le politiche pubbliche atte a raggiungere questi due importanti obiettivi? La risposta è probabilmente da rintracciare in un’intuizione etico-politica fortemente radicata, secondo la quale tutti coloro che ricevono un sostegno pubblico devono ricambiare questa «generosità» attraverso la disponibilità a lavorare, mentre coloro che non lavorano sono per certi versi «colpevoli» del loro stato e devono essere spinti fuori dall’apatia tramite un soft-nudge (non sempre soft).

www.democracychronicles.org/basic-income - “We know basic income promotes freedom and we want to see our people experience that freedom. 50 years from now, it will seem ridiculous that governments used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. We also know that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs, we’re going to see Unconditional Basic Income happening at an international scale.”

Mało komu znany jest fakt, że kojarzące nam się z rozwiniętymi państwami zachodu słowo 'robot' ma w rzeczywistości zachodniosłowiańską genezę. Jego twórcą i popularyzatorem jest piszący w XX wieku czeski prekursor fantastyki naukowej Karel Čapek. W swoim najsłynniejszym dramacie R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) opisuje on od początku do końca dzieje przedsięwzięcia polegającego na stworzeniu istot będących źródłem taniej i niezawodnej siły roboczej. Postawiony przed faktem powodowanego przez roboty bezrobocia wśród robotników Harry Domin, dyrektor naczelny firmy Rossum, odpowiada: "W ciągu dziesięciu lat Rossumowskie Uniwersalne Roboty wyprodukują tyle pszenicy, tyle materiałów, tyle wszystkiego, że powiemy: te rzeczy nie mają już wartości. Teraz każdy niech bierze, ile mu potrzeba. Koniec nędzy nie zabraknie już niczego. Tak, robotnicy będą bez pracy, ale wkrótce potem w ogóle już ludzka praca nie będzie potrzebna. Wszystko zrobią za nas żywe maszyny. Człowiek będzie zajmował się tylko tym co kocha. Będzie żył tylko po to żeby się doskonalić."

In this article the issue of basic income is analyzed along five main research vectors: A putative " Italian delay " concerning both the reception of the international debate on basic income and the original elaboration of its constitutive elements; Labor transformations in late capitalism; The role played by nation-states in the European space; The new functions performed the realm of social reproduction in contemporary value-producing activities; The supposed existence of an ecologically harmful productivist nexus at the very core of the (different versions of the) Fordist welfare state.
Numero monografico di Etica e Politica, a cura di Emanuele Leonardi e Giacomo Pisani, contributi di  i contributi di Francesca Coin, Stefano Lucarelli, Christian Marazzi, Cristina Morini, Emanuele Murra, Laura Pennacchi, Onofrio Romano, Roberto Romano, Chiara Tripodina, Giovanna Verteva. Vol. XIX, No. 1, 2017

In this article, we explore the prospects of Basic Income (BI) as a development policy tool. Our approach is to analyse the BI as a tool for promoting micro-investments and as a general development policy instrument, thus deliberately departing from the perception of cash transfers as targeted poverty reduction tools. As experiences in testing BI systems in developing country contexts are limited to local and regional experiments in Namibia and India (Haarmann et al., 2009; Haarmann & Haarmann, 2012; Davala et al., 2015), conclusive assessments about the impacts of the BI cannot be drawn. Therefore, we aim to estimate potential impacts of the BI by synthesising existing knowledge. This estimation will not be quantitative, but rather show likely outcomes of a BI scheme. We will complement existing knowledge by exploring cognate cash transfer policies and other experiences that bear similarity to the BI.

As we think about building societies that can be ready for pandemics and resilient to shocks, basic income needs to be part of the picture. The insecurity and hardship caused by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis have prompted calls for an emergency basic income. The proposal would be a vital line of support for people in many different situations: out of work, reduced hours, or at-risk working in unsafe conditions. While it is unlikely in the immediate future to join the support schemes announced by governments, the argument for a permanent, universal basic income grows stronger.

The global human family is confronted with many and oftentimes quite serious problems of various types: cultural, economic, environmental, legal, political, etc. The general thesis of this paper is that one of the most effective ways to tackle many of these bigger and transnational problems is to introduce an unconditional basic income or UBI for every person around the globe. More specifically, what is discussed in this paper are six prime reasons for a UBI that shed light on its great problem-solving capabilities from various perspectives.

This article reveals the basic ideas of Erich Fromm’s analytical social psychology and shows links among work, character and education. Social changes may be better understood in the background of work evolution. Today the concept of waged work has been extended to unpaid activities. At the same time, the working life has been changed from a stable model to a flexible one. The work, its standards and social distribution, are also different now. Erich Fromm’s concept of ‘social character’ clarifies the changes and explains the consequences of the social changes. The relations to work are also different. During these changes – unemployment included – concepts of the unconditional basic income were studied. These concepts explain why it’s possible for people without waged work to participate in community life and consumption, without being excluded. The author presents the basic social changes that affected many different subpopulation and age groups.

Décroissance, écologie, travail… Le philosophe et journaliste André Gorz, cofondateur du “Nouvel Observateur”, a proposé avant l’heure des alternatives au capitalisme. Un visionnaire, pour l’historien Willy Gianinazzi, qui publie une biographie de ce penseur.