Basic Income News

Basic Income was a recent topic in the German Web-TV channel “Deutsche Welle.” Herbert Wilkens, economist and an advocate of the basic income, took the opportunity and presented the idea of an unconditional basic income. The show – in English – can be found online at: http://www.dw.de/dw/episode/9798/0,,15879017,00.html The part about Basic Income starts at 00:17:30.

This new paper by Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark is published by the influentiel left-wing political newsletter Counterpunch (USA). According to Raventós and Wark, the Spanish citizens have taken to the streets and squares in great numbers to demand their rights. In this context, the idea of a basic income is now widely discussed. “The [...]

The European Foundation Centre (EFC) is holding its 23rd annual general assembly and conference in Belfast this year, and the topic of the conference is “Peace for Social Justice – A Role for Foundations?” As one of 236 EFC members from 40 countries around the world,the Koerber Foundation is organising a session about social justice [...]

In its latest issue (105/2012), Notizie di Politeia, one of the most important journal of political philosophy and public affairs in Italy, hosts a Forum about the Right to an inconditional basic income. It includes five contributions. Four of them, by Corrado del Bò, Nicola Riva, Maurizio Ferrara (all from University of Milan) and Andrea [...]

For the advocates of basic income as an instrument to guarantee real freedom, the capabilities approach constitutes an important challenge. It seems that a universal in-cash benefit, such as basic income, would not play any role in a theory so aware of the diversity of people and so skeptic of the idea that real freedom [...]

European Citizens’ Initiative for the introduction of the Unconditional Basic Income in all member states of the European Union The preparation process of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) for an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) again made some progress. During a meeting that took place in Brussels on 26-27 April 2012, an agreement was reached on [...]

In this book, Frank Lovett (Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, USA) argues that “societies are just to the extent that their basic structure is organized so as to minimize the expected sum total domination experienced by their (present and future) members, counting the domination of each member equally” (p.190). Chapter 7 of the [...]

The deadline for the call for proposals has been extended to May 6, 2012. The conference will take place in Ottobrunn (Munich), Germany on September 14 to 16, 2012. More than 150 participants have already agreed to come, including Philippe Van Parijs, Götz W. Werner, Claus Offe, Min Geum, Renana Jhabvala, Baptiste Mylondo, Ingrid van [...]

As BINews already reported, on 21st April 2012, Switzerland is starting a petition for a referendum on basic income with a big party in Zurich. BINews also reported, that, last year in June, the National Council of Switzerland rejected a parliamentary initiative on unconditional basic income.

This article by Jurgen De Wispelaere (Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada) and Lindsay Stirton (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom) considers the implementation of a universal basic income, a neglected area in basic income research. The authors identify and examine three important practical bottlenecks that may prevent a basic income scheme from attaining the universal reach [...]