The Eleventh North American Basic Income Guarantee (NA-BIG) Congress took place at the University of Toronto on May 3-5, 2012. I had the privilege of attending this conference. It provided an unusual opportunity for me to go to a NA-BIG Congress purely as a participant, because I had almost nothing to do with the organization of it this year.
Alaska’s basic income is cursed with interesting times. The Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is a small, variable basic income given yearly to every Alaskan who meets the state’s residency requirement. The size of the dividend is determined by several different factors, all of which are facing increased uncertainty and possibly moving in different directions.
Palgrave Macmillan, part of the Macmillan Group of publishers, is a global academic publisher of textbooks, journals, monographs, professional, and reference works. For several years now, the publisher been putting together a book series on the basic income guarantee. The […]
Libya has been a classic case of the resource curse: enormous resource wealth (even on a per-person basis), but instead of prosperity, the windfall has coincided with poverty and political oppression. The new government now has the job of finding […]
The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) ended its fiscal year on June 30, 2011 with a total value of over $40 billion. The APF is the Sovereign Wealth fund that finances Alaska’s partial basic income, known as the Permanent Fund Dividend […]
I write a lot about the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)—about its labor-market effects, its use as cushion against instability, and so. In this essay I want to explain in simple terms why I believe it is so worth talking about.
The coalition government of Mongolia is taking steps to make good on promises made in the 2008 election to introduce an Alaska-style resource dividend. Mongolia is a large, sparsely populated land-locked country sandwiched between Russian and China. About half of […]
Karl Widerquist (visiting associate professor of political philosophy, Georgetown University-Qatar, co-chair, BIEN, and editor, this newsletter) will speak on the Basic Income Guarantee in several Germany cities this fall. The tentative schedule is: September 25. Eichstatt: University of Eichstatt September […]
A telephone survey finds 11 percent of U.S. voters favor a Basic Income Grant. The survey was conducted by Rasmussen Reports and published on Thursday, September 1, 2011. Rasmussen found that 82 percent of respondents opposed the idea. Rasmussen surveyed […]
Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend is closer to a Basic Income than almost any other policy in the world today. The lessons of how it was created and how it became so popular and successful are extremely important to the Basic […]