During the Citizen’s Basic Income Day at the London School of Economics on Tuesday 20th February 2018, participants took part in a number of exercises. Here we describe the exercises and offer the main results.
Definitions: Participants were invited to list characteristics of a Citizen’s Basic Income, to order them by importance, and to decide which of the characteristics also applied to three alternatives to Citizen’s Basic Income: Negative Income Tax, Tax Credits (genuine ones), and a Minimum Income Guarantee.
On aggregating the results, the two characteristics of Citizen’s Basic Income mentioned more than twenty times and found to have most importance on average were unconditionality and universality. Both nonwithdrawability and payment to individuals were also mentioned more than twenty times, but were believed to be somewhat less important. Allocation of characteristics to the alternatives to Citizen’s Basic Income was found to be somewhat random, evidencing some confusion as to their definitions. Conversely, mistakes in relation to the definition of Citizen’s Basic Income were rare, with only one participant thinking that a Citizen’s Basic Income would be needs-based.
Political feasibility: As they listened to presentations on socialist and neoliberal arguments for Citizen’s Basic Income, participants were invited to list as many arguments as they wished and then to allocate them to socialism, neoliberalism, or both. They were also invited to list alternative political ideologies and to allocate the arguments for Citizen’s Basic Income to those if appropriate.
As each attendee could word the arguments as they wished, the arguments were grouped into themes before calculations were made. In order of numbers of mentions, the most commonly mentioned arguments were found to be:
- ‘freedom/increased scope for creative employments/entrepreneurship/freedom to work/fulfilment’,
- poverty reduction,
- inequality reduction,
- ‘disconnects subsistence from paid work/work as activity/decommodification of work/rewards unpaid work’, and
- ‘solidarity/social cohesion/sense of citizenship/equal status’.
Five of the arguments were commonly mentioned as socialist. In order of the number of mentions:
- inequality reduction,
- ‘disconnects subsistence from paid work/work as activity/decommodification of work/rewards unpaid work’,
- ‘freedom/increased scope for creative employments/entrepreneurship/freedom to work/fulfilment’,
- ‘solidarity/social cohesion/sense of citizenship/equal status’, and
- ‘reduces/abolishes poverty’.
Similarly, five arguments were commonly mentioned as neoliberal. Again, in order of the number of mentions:
- ‘freedom/increased scope for creative employments/entrepreneurship/freedom to work/fulfilment’,
- ‘freedom from state interference/non-paternalistic/identity recognition’,
- ‘provides income in an age of automation/future-proofs economy’,
- reduces poverty/option to abolish poverty, and
- avoids/reduces perverse incentives.
Only occasional participants mention alternative ideologies, the most common being conservatism, with four mentions.
Funding methods: Participants were invited to list as many funding methods as they wished, and then to order them in relation to three characteristics: how likely they were to be financially feasible, how likely they were not to impose losses on low income households, and how likely they were to be politically feasible – and participants were then asked to add together the figures for each funding method in order to create overall feasibility scores.
Of the funding methods mentioned by more than five participants, carbon tax was found to be the most feasible, followed by consumption taxes, land value tax, corporation tax, a financial transaction tax, Income Tax, and finally a capital or wealth tax.
Costings methods: Following presentations on different costings methods, participants were asked to list the kinds of information that they would wish a costings method to provide, and then to order the methods in terms of the likelihood that they would provide each kind of information. The figures were then aggregated, with the number of individuals mentioning a type of information automatically applied as a weight to each type.
Overall, microsimulation was found to provide the most information, followed by the ‘typical households’ method, and then a method that employed the national accounts.
The two most commonly mentioned types of information were as follows:
- Affordability/revenue implications: microsimulation was believed to be most likely to provide this information, followed by the national accounts, and then the typical households method;
- Redistribution/distributive effects/inequality: microsimulation was again thought to be most likely to provide this information, followed by the ‘typical households’ method, and then the national accounts method.
Pilot projects: During the afternoon session, participants listened to presentations on a variety of pilot projects and experiments. They listed the characteristics that they would wish a pilot project to exhibit, and then indicated those pilot projects and experiments that had conformed to those characteristics, or would do so.
The frequency with which each characteristic was listed functioned as a weighting system, and no further weights were applied when the indications were aggregated. The pilot project evaluated as exhibiting the largest number of desired characteristics was the Indian one, with the Namibian project in second place. Unconditionality and universality were the characteristics desired most often.