Guaranteed Livable Income - Blog

BIEN Canada member Richard Pereira has won the Progressive Economics Forum top prize for a graduate student essay.  Richard's essay, Economic Security in the Twenty-First Century – Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) An ecological, democratic, justice and food security imperative, considers economic security in the 21st century, arguing that a Guaranteed Annual Income is necessary to provide security in the modern economic context.

This is not the first essay on GAI to win a PEF prize - in 2007 Evan Rosevear won the undergraduate prize for Ensuring Equality:
Guaranteed Annual Income and Democratic Legitimacy.

Those who oppose Guaranteed Livable Income often argue that people won't work if you give them unconditional income security. In fact, one of the main assumptions behind the belief in a "work disincentive" is the assumption that people are solely or primarily motivated to work by money. Take away the financial incentive to work, and people will stop working.

In reality, however, money is one of many possible motivations that guide human behaviour. Empirical evidence also demonstrates that money is not necessarily always a motivator. In this video (by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), author Dan Pink describes the surprising conclusions of two studies that discovered financial rewards and punishments do not correlate with successful outcomes: Read more »

As promised, here are the slides from my presentation at the BIEN conference on Montreal. Read more »

Yesterday I mentioned the Mincome experiment which took place in Dauphin, Manitoba from 1974 to 1978. Dr. Evelyn Forget of the University of Manitoba has been doing wonderful research on the long-term health and social benefits of Mincome. But Dr. Forget has been forced to rely on using anonymous health data for her research, rather than being able to interview participants in the experiment.

However, several months ago the Winnipeg Free Press tracked down some participants and asked them what they remember about the experiment. The answers are very interesting. Read more »

Last week I was in Montreal for an international conference on “Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval: A Path to Justice and Stability?” This conference, sponsored by the Centre de Recherches en Ethiques de l’Université de Montréal, BIEN Canada and USBIG, welcomed nearly 90 participants from around the world. It was an excellent and thought-provoking several days of discussion about Guaranteed Livable Income (GLI) and its prospects in our time of economic uncertainty. Read more »

A roundup of GLI news from Alaska, Brazil, Haiti and Namibia, as well as upcoming events in Montreal and Ottawa. Read more »

The Globe and Mail reported today that Canada is facing a jobless recovery, as businesses are not expecting to hire in 2010 and public sector positions are being eliminated.

The article quotes Sébastien Lavoie, assistant chief economist at Laurentian Bank Securities, who predicts that we will see employment restored to its pre-recession level in 2011. Read more »

I’m back in the office after some time off for health reasons and a family vacation, so I’m catching up on several months worth of reading. Today, I came across the September issue of Policy Options, which focused on Employment Insurance. While the articles clearly present the flaws of EI – in addition to a few flaws that only economists worry about – I found the proposed solutions to be quite limited.

However, I was also surprised to discover that Tom Courchene and John Allan advocate for a revised EI in the context of a guaranteed annual income. (I can’t link to the article, but you can click through to it from the main page).They argue that EI should be restructured as an insurance program, limiting benefits to a weeks-worked basis that applies evenly across the country. But to achieve social policy goals of income security and redistribution, they propose a guaranteed annual income in a Negative Income Tax version. Read more »

Earlier this afternoon, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Cities released, In From the Margins: A Call to Action on Poverty, Housing and Homelessness. In a press conference on the report, Senator Art Eggleton, Committee Chair stated that Canada’s system of lifting people out of poverty is substantially broken and needs to be fixed. Read more »

Late last week, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a paper on Guaranteed Livable Income: "Possibilities and Prospects: The Debate Over a Guaranteed Income," by Margot Young and James Mulvale. (Jim Mulvale is the chair of BIEN Canada). The paper provides a good overview of the guaranteed income debate in Canada. It traces the history, looks at arguments both for and against, examines possible models, and considers other social welfare reforms often ignored by guaranteed income debates.

The paper is a good resource, and I highly recommend it.