UBI – LPE Project

Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights

Luke Herrine — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.

Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually

Luke Herrine — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market.

Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse

Luke Herrine — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work.

Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice

Luke Herrine — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on universal basic income. Basic income could play a key role in reorienting how our social systems answer this century’s most basic political question: who and what will be secured when crisis strikes? It is encouraging, then, that the Movement for Black Lives policy platform made it one of its initial proposals, while building reparations into the program and...

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Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework

Luke Herrine — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and undervalued by the market. It is only by broadening our perspective, for the moment, away from the details of basic income as a social policy, and to basic income as a revolutionary perspective on capitalism, that the emancipatory effect becomes clear.

UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic

Luke Herrine — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on universal basic income. Does universal basic income have a role to play in a more just political economy? It is by now fairly well appreciated that, on the level of individual countries, much depends on the framing and design of the program: a UBI that replaces social insurance is not the same as one that supplements it. But comparatively little thought has...

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Considering and Critiquing Universal Basic Income: Introduction

Luke Herrine — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of our symposium on universal basic income. This week we’re opening up a symposium on universal basic income (UBI). UBI is both an important topic in its own right and a useful lens for examining recurrent virtues and vices in projects of partial decommodification and universal provision. UBI typically is defined as an ongoing periodic cash payment (income) to pretty much...

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