THIS> unconditional basic income

[TalkingDog]

http://mondediplo.com/2013/05/04income

A new pilot study at Panthbadodiya could significantly change living conditions for the poor, and India’s approach to fighting poverty. The village is taking part in the Madhya Pradesh Unconditional Cash Transfer Initiative, a project run by the Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa; a trade union that has defended the rights of women with low incomes in India for 40 years), with subsidies from Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund) India. The research director, Sarath Dewala, explained: “The experiment involves giving individuals a small sum of money, at regular intervals, as a supplement to all other forms of income, and observing what happens to their families if this sum is given unconditionally.”

Dewala’s team studied the effects of a minimum monthly income on 4,000 people in eight villages over 18 months. There were no conditions regarding wages, employment, caste, gender or age, and the recipients could use the money as they saw fit. Besides social security benefits, adults received 200 rupees ($3.65) a month, and mothers were given 100 rupees for each child. Four of the villages had had help from Sewa for some years, with the organisation of support groups, savings cooperatives (2), bank loans, training in financial management and support during visits to local officials. Twelve non-participant villages served as controls for comparative study. The initiative, modelled on an urban Sewa project in a district of Delhi, was India’s first applied research on unconditional income. The hypothesis was that direct financial payments would change behaviour and improve family living conditions, especially children’s nutrition and health.

Studies at the beginning, mid-point and end of the project confirmed that, in villages receiving payments, people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.

snip

The study’s economist, Guy Standing, professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and a founder member of the Basic Income Earth Network, has been defending the idea of an unconditional income for 25 years. The project team met to discuss their final evaluation at the offices of the Council for Social Development in Delhi. Standing said: “The debate has become respectable. In the face of the emerging informal sector and growing inequalities, increasing economic insecurity, a universal basic income is a necessary base for recreating social security — not as a panacea, but as a base.” He said the guaranteed income was seen by libertarians as a tool to promote individual freedom, while progressives regard it as the base level of social security. “The left have to rethink their vision of a good society. We need to think from the perspective of the precariat, not from the old proletariat. We need a combination of a redistributive agenda, a move to basic income, and a policy that strengthens the voice of the precariat.”

[RobertEarl]

1. It is about time

Consider that one middle income person in America could probably keep 100's of Indians a day in good food.

The way it is, 100 middle income Americans can hardly keep one USAF jet fighter in the air for more than a few days.

Somehow it all just don't add up, does it?

[winter is coming]

2. This is the first time I've seen the word "precariat", so here's the definition,

for the benefit of any other DUers who are unfamiliar with it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat

In sociology and economics, precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a Proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

We have met the precariat and he is us.

[TalkingDog]

3. Amen.

n/t

[winter is coming]

4. Nice find, on your part. n/t

[freshwest]

5. It's a variation from Paine's plan for those who have lost the means of production to others.

Last edited Sun May 5, 2013, 01:22 AM - Edit history (1)

His Agrarian Justice was printed in its entirety on the SSA website in 2009:

http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

It is the first in the list here:

http://www.ssa.gov/history/histdocs.html

A search of the site shows more about the philosophy and history of SSA:

http://www.ssa.gov/history/index.html

I'd read it years before in high school history class. My latest search results found it here:

Thomas Paine’s Radicalism

http://riversong.wordpress.com/thomas-paines-radicalism/

A read of several authors we were taught in school are there at that link. I'm unsure why they use the term 'radical.' It is a natural effect of people being displaced by capital or by conquest. Those accumulations can still benefit the whole. But humans are no less human to one who believe as Paine and many of us do in the Rights of Man and should not bound by wealth, a social construct.

The accumulation of land or other valuables is often unjust. Yet we are human beings and part of a whole. Conservatives once admitted the justice of this and supported taxes for it. But we've been dragged into a cesspool by 'cranky billionaires' who demonize those they robbed while following Ayn Rand.

Full justice between classes is unlikely to ever be met, due to different starting points in life. The 'radical' link does not care much for the faulty 'progressive' solution, but the living cannot wait for the perfect solution or utopia. Socialism in the Americas was an outgrowth of utopianism, but a consensus on how to get there has not been made, and possibly never will be.

I love this OP. The removal of power from an intermediary that can be corrupted and steal value. An unconditional and firm level of support is the justice which frees the river of human creativity. An unspoken baseline is what we need to achieve while fending off the sociopathic billionaires and their poisonous teachings.

David Korten speaks of an inverse pyramid of power, in which each person's ability and ideas will expand up from each person outward to solve world problems. Without a baseline set without judgement, we will never get the peace and justice that Thomas Paine calls for.

Not presupposing anyone at DU hasn't been taught or read these ideas years ago, but here are some links. These were basic studies in the sixties and seventies in public school but I don't know what is taught now. It was the foundation of our beliefs about civil rights and how government should be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason

Thanks for bringing these ideas. I hope this heralds a turnabout in the conditions of women in India, not forced to live lives dictated as they have been, or sacrifice their lives in unsafe factories as we saw recently.