Universal Basic Income: gaining traction

[Searcher08]

https://thebossmagazine.com/finland-india-universal-basic-income/

Finland is the first country to implement universal basic income scheme at a national level to reduce unemployment and poverty.

Ubi, basic universal income, universale wage, basic income, what is basic income, universal basic, universal basic incomeUniversal basic income (UBI)—an unconditional weekly or monthly cash payment provided to every human being, without the requirement to work—is an emerging concept thanks to countries trialling the concept, like Finland and India .

Finland Is the First Country to Start Paying Basic Income
On January 1, 2017, Finland became the first country in the world to pay a free basic income to randomly-picked citizens across the nation. The aim of the program is to improve citizens’ quality of life, motivate people, encourage entrepreneurship, reduce unemployment and poverty, and revive the economy as a whole.

Finland’s new universal basic income plan will be managed by the country’s social insurance institution, Kela.

Specifications of Finland’s Basic Income Scheme
The Finnish government will give away 560 euros—approximately $583—for free, every month to a group of citizens over the next two years.

As part of the experiment, about 2,000 unemployed Finns between the ages of 25 and 58 will receive this monthly, unconditional, and tax-free basic income. These individuals are not required to report how they spend this money and continue to receive the free income even if they find a job.

Kela claims the trial will help the Finnish government determine if the scheme can become “a blueprint for the Finnish social security system.” Currently, only people on unemployment benefits will be eligible to participate in the scheme, and they will keep receiving the UBI even if they secure a job.

Benefits of Finland’s UBI Scheme
Supporters believe that this income scheme will reduce poverty and crime, encourage innovation, allow citizens to pursue educational goals, and the freedom to raise children while contributing to society.

Basic income also provides workers with greater security against automation and offshoring. The scheme will allow unemployed Finns to look for full-time or part-time work, become entrepreneurs, and take up casual jobs without losing unemployment benefits.

“Many workers in Finland who used to have good jobs with Nokia, for example, are now unemployed. Lots of these people have skills and could try to start businesses or maybe work for another small business at lower pay. But the traditional unemployment program doesn’t allow this. If they earn any money, they lose all their benefits,” Martin Ford, author of The New York Times-bestselling novel

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, told CNBC.

“So a basic income is a way to structure the safety net so that unemployed workers have an incentive to work to the extent they can, without the fear of losing their benefits.”

The government is also hoping that they can simplify the complex social security measures, which require the citizens to report the ‘in and out’ timings of work.

If it works, it is believed the program will help reduce Finland’s unemployment rate, which was at 8.8 percent in November, according to the EU’s statistics.

The Way Ahead for Finland
Finland will implement the scheme through 2017 and 2018 and examine the results after the two-year trial.

Researchers are suggesting that the plan could be extended to the younger generation and low-income earners such as part-time workers, temporary freelancers, and small-scale entrepreneurs, by next year.

India’s Basic Income Plan
Like Finland, India is looking to introduce a UBI program.

The world’s largest democracy is expected to release a report this month stating that UBI is “feasible and basically the way forward,” according to Guy Standing, an economist, co-founder at Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), and a professor of development at the School of African and Oriental Studies. Standing has been working on India’s basic income project since 2010.

The free basic income report will be a part of the Economic Survey—an annual document being released on January 31—created by India’s Ministry of Finance. Arvind Subramanian, the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, mentioned in October that an analysis of UBI would be carried out in the future survey.

Three UBI schemes have been piloted in the country so far—two in Madhya Pradesh in 2010, and a smaller one in West Delhi—in association with Standing’s BIEN organization.

Ubi, basic universal income, universale wage, basic income, what is basic income, universal basic, universal basic incomeWhat’s in it for India?
Proponents of the scheme in India feel that universal basic income would not only take care of basic survival necessities like food, clothing, and shelter but also encourage citizens to pursue their passion, education, and create more jobs.

According to Standing, the welfare scheme has shown unexpected positive results, “particularly in nutrition among the children, healthcare, sanitation, and school attendance and performance.”

“The most striking thing which we hadn’t actually anticipated is that the emancipatory effect was greater than the monetary effect. It enabled people to have a sense of control,” Standing added.

“They pooled some of the money to pay down their debts; they increased decisions on escaping from debt bondage. The women developed their own capacity to make their own decision about their own lives. The general tenor of all those communities has been remarkably positive.”

The Way Ahead for India
Standing expects the country to carry out the partial basic income scheme, “because it’s such a dramatic conversion. But [BIEN] now has a huge network in India, and we’ve got a big conference scheduled in March in Delhi funded by the Canadian government, and partly funded by the Azim Premji Foundation, which is the biggest philanthropic foundation in India.”

Concerns and the Future of Basic Income
Opponents of the UBI fear the scheme will be highly expensive and citizens will stop seeking work. Further, without any spending restrictions, recipients can even use the money to purchase alcohol and drugs.

Besides Finland and India, several other countries are working on universal basic income trials.

Alaska in the U.S., Ontario in Canada, Livorno in Italy, the Netherlands, Italy, Scotland, Brazil, Iceland, and Uganda have all either successfully implemented the universal basic income scheme in parts of the country, or are looking to launch it. (Last year, Switzerland’s basic income plan was rejected by the public in a referendum.)

Despite any opposition, the overall aim of the free basic income benefit is to provide security and inspire people to improve their lives and ultimately the wider societies in which they live.

The Author

Tyler Moselle
Writer & digital marketing ace. Flâneuse. Funk connoisseur. Rockhound. Lakers & Dodgers megafan.

[Iamwhomiam]

At ten grand, you'll be lucky to afford heat. Average 1BR in Albany goes for around $1k, some less, though any newer housing will cost you half again $1k.

[smoking since 1879]

Perhaps we'll satart exporting our behavioral problems to Australia.

and they can send us theirs?

there's always the workhouse...

[Luther Blissett]

At ten grand, you'll be lucky to afford heat. Average 1BR in Albany goes for around $1k, some less, though any newer housing will cost you half again $1k.

This is meant to supplement any other potential forms of income and to replace or complement other safety nets.

[Elihu]

the figures ranging from US$10,000 per year to US$24,000 per year

wow that's not even red koolaid its green

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... revolution

In the city where Adam Smith developed the free-market theories that inspired Thatcherism nearly 300 years later, a young Labour politician is pursuing an economic vision that takes a drastically different approach to “the wealth of nations”. Councillor Matt Kerr, an anti-poverty specialist on Glasgow city council, has been exploring how people become enslaved by poverty – and how they can escape it.

A meeting in Glasgow last month with Guy Standing, the radical economist who founded the Basic Income Earth Network, inspired Kerr to seek cross-party support to pilot a “universal basic income” in parts of Fife and Glasgow. He acknowledges that these are very early days and that there are many obstacles ahead, but the move makes him the most senior incumbent politician in Britain to contemplate a radical scheme that only a few years ago was considered beyond the political pale.

So why is Kerr sticking his neck out?

“Look, it might be that at the end of this whole exercise we find that it’s just not workable, but I’d rather give it a go in good faith. At the moment, defending a system that is only slightly better than the one the government is trying to implement is simply not good enough. It’s not giving anyone any hope.”

...

“This is a big challenge to the left. In these circumstances you can’t just write people off and nor can you have the current system that is hugely difficult to navigate and completely enslaves people to the state.”

Already, the Finnish government, as well as provinces in Canada and some Dutch cities, are looking at pilot schemes. Glasgow, however, would seem to offer an ideal petri dish for experimentation. The infamous “Glasgow effect” sees adult males in the city’s most deprived areas die significantly younger than those from other working-class UK cities with similar patterns of deprivation and health inequalities. Here a person can lose 20 years of life expectancy in a six-mile corridor from the east end of the city to its arboreal west end.

Short on operational details, but honest about the need for vast research, I quite like this chap.

[Luther Blissett]

the figures ranging from US$10,000 per year to US$24,000 per year

wow that's not even red koolaid its green

I'm still going to give you an extra $10,000 per year.

Though the left usually insists on something closer to $35,000 as necessary for mutual liberation from poverty and for ending rat park. Or, better yet, for the abolition of money altogether, but that's step 2.

[Elihu]

I'm still going to give you an extra $10,000 per year

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: https://runesoup.com/2017/01/chaeconomi ... e-edition/

Long-ranging and very Austin Fitts, as per usual, but he addresses UBI in the following...

She makes the point in the following interview that if you even float the suggestion that more government spending or a universal basic income aren't good ideas (at this point in the timeline) then you must somehow hate the poor or something. It is the opposite. Centralisation has made us poorer. How would more of it help? To say it would is to be a general fighting the last war.

Even if you disagree -especially if you disagree- you should watch the interview.



...

The dollar will continue to climb. The US markets will likely wobble through Q1 -too many big trades like long Dow and long dollar are too crowded- but will close 2017 higher, perhaps dramatically so.

It is an inevitability of the further funnelling of the world's wealth into the US -followed by fucking around with the currency on a centralised, digital basis. This is how we will end up in a situation where robots take all the jobs, governments can't pay for essential services, global trade becomes unilateral and yet the share market will take off for the moon. Share market valuations are no longer an indicator of the health of the economies they operate in.

94% of all new jobs created under the Obama administration were part time.

So this is happening. The Chaos Protocols year has arrived. Those of you on the alleged Left calling for universal basic income, higher minimum wage and so on, have to look at these numbers and tell me just how that will work without full totalitarianism. Those of you on the Right who think you can magically onshore manufacturing jobs (which is a Left policy anyway -just not a Democrat one because they're not Left) need to tell me how that works without robots and massive inflation.

What I would dearly like is for everyone to temporarily set aside their declared home on a spectrum of political representation set up in response to the realities of a Victorian industrial economy, take a calming breath, and read some ideas they find dangerous. Make your heads hurt a bit. But above all go decentral rather than central.

[Luther Blissett]

Via: https://runesoup.com/2017/01/chaeconomi ... e-edition/

Long-ranging and very Austin Fitts, as per usual, but he addresses UBI in the following...

… Those of you on the alleged Left calling for universal basic income, higher minimum wage and so on, have to look at these numbers and tell me just how that will work without full totalitarianism.

lol. Funniest thing I've read in 2017 probably.

They go on to say:
[url]Because no one has a model for where we are in 2017.[/url]

They should read more.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Situational Ethics: Would you agree to a lifetime of UBI in exchange for being sterilized?

[DrEvil]

I would, I'm not planning on spawning any mini-mes. Being around myself is stressful enough as it is.

[Luther Blissett]

JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours

At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.

The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation.

While the financial industry has long touted its technological innovations, a new era of automation is now in overdrive as cheap computing power converges with fears of losing customers to startups. Made possible by investments in machine learning and a new private cloud network, COIN is just the start for the biggest U.S. bank. The firm recently set up technology hubs for teams specializing in big data, robotics and cloud infrastructure to find new sources of revenue, while reducing expenses and risks.

The push to automate mundane tasks and create new tools for bankers and clients -- a growing part of the firm’s $9.6 billion technology budget -- is a core theme as the company hosts its annual investor day on Tuesday.

Behind the strategy, overseen by Chief Operating Officer Matt Zames and Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, is an undercurrent of anxiety: Though JPMorgan emerged from the financial crisis as one of few big winners, its dominance is at risk unless it aggressively pursues new technologies, according to interviews with a half-dozen bank executives.

Redundant Software

That was the message Zames had for Deasy when he joined the firm from BP Plc in late 2013. The New York-based bank’s internal systems, an amalgam from decades of mergers, had too many redundant software programs that didn’t work together seamlessly.

“Matt said, ‘Remember one thing above all else: We absolutely need to be the leaders in technology across financial services,’” Deasy said last week in an interview. “Everything we’ve done from that day forward stems from that meeting.”

After visiting companies including Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. three years ago to understand how their developers worked, the bank set out to create its own computing cloud called Gaia that went online last year. Machine learning and big-data efforts now reside on the private platform, which effectively has limitless capacity to support their thirst for processing power. The system already is helping the bank automate some coding activities and making its 20,000 developers more productive, saving money, Zames said. When needed, the firm can also tap into outside cloud services from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.

Tech Spending

JPMorgan will make some of its cloud-backed technology available to institutional clients later this year, allowing firms like BlackRock Inc. to access balances, research and trading tools. The move, which lets clients bypass salespeople and support staff for routine information, is similar to one Goldman Sachs Group Inc. announced in 2015.

JPMorgan’s total technology budget for this year amounts to 9 percent of its projected revenue -- double the industry average, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Betsy Graseck. The dollar figure has inched higher as JPMorgan bolsters cyber defenses after a 2014 data breach, which exposed the information of 83 million customers.

“We have invested heavily in technology and marketing -- and we are seeing strong returns,” JPMorgan said in a presentation Tuesday ahead of its investor day, noting that technology spending in its consumer bank totaled about $1 billion over the past two years.

One-third of the company’s budget is for new initiatives, a figure Zames wants to take to 40 percent in a few years. He expects savings from automation and retiring old technology will let him plow even more money into new innovations.

Not all of those bets, which include several projects based on a distributed ledger, like blockchain, will pay off, which JPMorgan says is OK. One example executives are fond of mentioning: The firm built an electronic platform to help trade credit-default swaps that sits unused.

‘Can’t Wait’

“We’re willing to invest to stay ahead of the curve, even if in the final analysis some of that money will go to product or a service that wasn’t needed,” Marianne Lake, the lender’s finance chief, told a conference audience in June. That’s “because we can’t wait to know what the outcome, the endgame, really looks like, because the environment is moving so fast.”

As for COIN, the program has helped JPMorgan cut down on loan-servicing mistakes, most of which stemmed from human error in interpreting 12,000 new wholesale contracts per year, according to its designers.

JPMorgan is scouring for more ways to deploy the technology, which learns by ingesting data to identify patterns and relationships. The bank plans to use it for other types of complex legal filings like credit-default swaps and custody agreements. Someday, the firm may use it to help interpret regulations and analyze corporate communications.

Another program called X-Connect, which went into use in January, examines e-mails to help employees find colleagues who have the closest relationships with potential prospects and can arrange introductions.

Creating Bots

For simpler tasks, the bank has created bots to perform functions like granting access to software systems and responding to IT requests, such as resetting an employee’s password, Zames said. Bots are expected to handle 1.7 million access requests this year, doing the work of 140 people.

While growing numbers of people in the industry worry such advancements might someday take their jobs, many Wall Street personnel are more focused on benefits. A survey of more than 3,200 financial professionals by recruiting firm Options Group last year found a majority expect new technology will improve their careers, for example by improving workplace performance.

“Anything where you have back-office operations and humans kind of moving information from point A to point B that’s not automated is ripe for that,” Deasy said. “People always talk about this stuff as displacement. I talk about it as freeing people to work on higher-value things, which is why it’s such a terrific opportunity for the firm.”

To help spur internal disruption, the company keeps tabs on 2,000 technology ventures, using about 100 in pilot programs that will eventually join the firm’s growing ecosystem of partners. For instance, the bank’s machine-learning software was built with Cloudera Inc., a software firm that JPMorgan first encountered in 2009.

“We’re starting to see the real fruits of our labor,” Zames said. “This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff.”

[Karmamatterz]

Situational Ethics: Would you agree to a lifetime of UBI in exchange for being sterilized?

Cute, socialist unicorn dreams mixed with Eugenics!

[norton ash]

Situational Ethics: Would you agree to a lifetime of UBI in exchange for being sterilized?

Cute, socialist unicorn dreams mixed with Eugenics!

Sure, what the hell. I'm too old to even make decent soylent green.