1. NABIG 2018 Brian Milani GreenEconomics.net
Basic Income in the New Security: Regenerative Development and the Economics of Abundance
NABIG 2018
Brian Milani
GreenEconomics.net

2. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000

3. The Green Economy A Historical Transition: …from Quantity to Quality
A Question of Potentials
…not simply limits
Key to Sustainability:
Redefining Wealth

4. Basic Income as (part of) Structural Reform
Seeing Basic Income as simply a poverty reduction measure effectively blocks its contribution to both eliminating poverty altogether and unleashing regenerative development

5. A New Security
Basic Income (in its most appropriate form) must be considered just one part of a new level of guaranteed economic security.

6. Guaranteed Economic Security (GES) is not the end in itself, but a means or platform for a redeployment of human energy toward social and ecological regeneration

7. Guaranteed Economic Security: An Essential Step in Human Development
We now live in the richest human society ever known—able to support every human being to a level of healthy subsistence. Some (most?) of the worst social & environmental destruction depends on unnecessary insecurity. The Right to Live is a top moral imperative of our time.
N.B.: This is NOT simply a moral or poverty reduction measure, but an essential prerequisite or platform for creating positive regenerative activity throughout the economy.

8. Free Money
Basic Income is one element of free money in regenerative economies that seek to also provide more free food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc. Part of design to make money simply a means of regenerative exchange & development --money as information Optimizes personal choice & freedom.
Role of community & digital currencies, etc.

9. People-Production
The new platform is made necessary by the rise of culture-based production that puts all-round human development at the core of economic development.
Issues of Human Nature become central elements of political-economic design.
Identity: key dimension of postindustrial development at every level

10. Seizing the “Means of Production” in the era of People-Production: Who/What do we want to Become?

11. A New Stage & Paradigm of Economic Development
New Productive Forces =
Abundance =
Culture-based economy =
People-Production =
Qualitative Development =
Postindustrial =
Green economy

12. Abundance = Sufficiency
Economic Floor: Healthy Subsistence

13. Why call the New Productive Forces “Abundance”?
To highlight the role of scarcity in perpetuating capitalism & ecocide
To emphasize the paradigm shift required for qualitative development
To call attention to the new role of the human being in economic development.
To highlight the reactionary character of austerity as an economic strategy.

14. What are the NPFs?
The centrality of culture-based production / a “knowledge-based” economy
Powers resulting from the movement of industrialization into the realm of culture.
A new phase of humanity’s technological extension: from “muscles to mind”
An unleashing of human caring and sharing capacities long-suppressed by civilization, and now enriched with new scientific, technological and social powers of human development.
Tools for reintegrating with Nature. New capacities of knowledge and design can (1) create economies that work with (rather than against) nature, and (2) free up vast resources from production to ‘dematerialize’ the economy.
Post-material productive powers that make possible—and necessary—a fundamental economic shift to Qualitative Development, requiring a comprehensive redefinition of wealth.

15. Redefining Wealth: the starting point of real change
Quantitative:
Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative:
Well-being
Regeneration
Indicators

16. Essential Premises
Regenerative alternatives must emerge organically from the interstices of the existing system, but… This new platform is different from capitalism in form (decentralized but integrated), content (people & ecosystems, not things) & driving forces (social & environmental values, not money). Our main spiritual, social, economic, political & environmental problems are the result of the wholesale suppression of these growing potentials by late capitalism. .

17. Capitalism & Scarcity Capitalism:
…is intrinsically a form of quantitative development & competitive individualism—both of which are (today) uneconomic and toxic to postindustrial development.
…is a class society based in scarcity, and since the Great Depression it has survived primarily through the artificial creation of scarcity through waste.
The main driver of “economic growth” in North America over the last 70 years has been waste

18. Watershed of Industrialism: The Great Depression
Structural “Overproduction”: productivity outruns worker capacity to buy.
Beginnings of long-term crisis of “effective demand”
Waste: main development strategy to create demand without redistributing wealth.

19. The Post WW II Waste Economy
Permanent War Economy
The Suburb Economy:
Oil / Autos / Subdivisions

20. “The greatest misallocation of resources in human history
“The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.” …James Howard Kunstler

21. Fordism & the Reinforcement of Industrial Wealth
Matter Waste Fordism Suburbanization/ Consumer Economy War Industry
Money
Debt
Keynesianism
Paper Economy
Planned Inflation
New forms of credit-money

22. Post-1980 Casino Capitalism: Hijacking the Information Revolution
Main strategy for reproducing scarcity shifts from material waste to debt
New info technologies supply new ways of creating money: Fantasy Finance
Decline in real wages; increasing polarization of the rich and the rest. Benefits of productivity gains monopolized by the 1%.
Great Risk Shift from organizations to individuals.
Rise of McJobs, outsourcing.
Shift in power from manufacturing to financial capital

23. A Dashboard for the Cockpit
The ‘Family’ of indicators:
Urban Metabolism or regional mass balance
Green GDP (e.g. Genuine Progress Indicator—GPI )
Ecological Footprint
Carbon accounting / carbon footprint
Gross National Happiness index
Life-cycle Assessment (products, processes, landscapes)
Industry-based accounts: food, building, forestry, etc.
Local Development Standards
5 ‘capitals’: personal, professional, spiritual, environmental and financial
Firm sustainability accounting / Corporate governance standards (B Corp, etc.)
Sustainable Community Indicators

24. ...released this week

25. [Mark Anielski] Table of Contents
Introduction: A New Economic Paradigm Based on Well-Being
Reclaiming Economics for Happiness
A Roadmap to Well-Being
Bhutan, Edmonton and Alberta: Models of Well-Being Economics
The Well-Being Community
Well-Being for First Nations
The Well-Being Workplace
Accounting for Enterprise Well-Being
Well-Being Impact Investing
The Community Asset Well-Being Fund
Banking on Well-Being
Personal Well-Being

26. The Human in Industrial Capitalism I
in Production, a Cog in the Machine &
a Commodity on the Market

27. The Human in Industrial Capitalism II
in Consumption: A Passive Consumer of Stuff

28. The Human Being in Culture-based Development
Production:
Key Factors: Human creativity & sharing
Consumption:
Key Factor: End-use or Human need
“Hot Showers & Cold Beer”
Key means: Sharing
Rising portion of “public goods” …& growing importance of the Commons

29. Hot Showers & Cold Beer: End-Use & Service
the primacy of end-use & human need
a reversal of capitalism’s means/ends relationship
Backcasting
the starting point for ecological design: e.g. product-service systems & EPR requires integrating the formal & informal economies. subordinate manufacturing to mission

30. The Green Economy: Human & Eco Dimensions
“The Service Economy”
End-use: “Hot Showers and Cold Beer”
Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access, Shelter, Community, etc.
The Economy in Loops —
The “Lake Economy”
Flowing with nature, Every output an input, Closed-loop organization, Let nature do the work

31. Supporting Eco-Prosumption
Advanced eco-production harnesses, nurtures, unleashes or complements the eco-capacities of every micro-climate, rooftop, back alley.
Schor: growing role of “self-provision” & the informal economy in postindustrial economy.
The centrality of Commons-based production: no combination of markets & government can come close to providing this vital prosumption.

32. Wikinomics: Supporting the Information Commons
Demarketization accelerates as mass collaboration outperforms both the market & bureaucracy
The labour market is particularly unsuited to remunerating work in the wiki-sphere.
Not everyone today has equal opportunity & material support to participate in network society. Guaranteeing healthy subsistence is an essential prerequisite for optimal & fair mass collaboration. Guaranteed material security goes hand-in-hand with the decommodification of knowledge to create generate an explosion of regenerative creativity.

33. Mass Collaboration beats competition every time
wikinomics: based in abundance not scarcity
undermines industrial markets

34. Abundance-oriented Strategy: Essential Components of a Green Economy in the Anthropocene
a Circular Economy
Free Culture: Overhaul of Intellectual / cultural Property:
“Information wants to be free” and shared!
Access more important than Ownership
Ownership not a right in itself, but employed as one form of stewardship or participation.
Today’s property & ownership: too often a form of enclosure and an artificial generator of scarcity.
Guaranteed economic security:
Free food, housing, education, healthcare, & money (Basic Income, community currencies, etc.)

35. Basic Income Strategy (1)
Think about how it can be used in combination with other forms of “free money” like communities currencies, and infrastructures of ‘free’ food, housing, goods, education, etc. to meet people’s basic needs.

36. Strategy (2)
Dovetail its design with use of, and support for, community development plans and regenerative alternatives activities in every sector.

37. Strategy (3)
Dovetail its design with use of, and support for, indicator systems, both social and environmental.

38. Strategy (4)
Cultivate the engagement of activists & innovators in all areas—sustainable food systems, green energy, music and art, holistic healthcare, conscious social media, citizen science, etc.—to find out how Basic Income can support their work.

39. Strategy (5)
Respond to the cost issue by supporting full cost/real cost research into all options and policies. Support the incorporation of full costs into market prices via green taxes, etc.

40. Also…
Combine advocacy for BI and GES with education about economic alternatives. Show people regenerative ways to use newly freed-up time.
Support commons-based activity not currently remunerated, or not fairly remunerated.
Support market-based enterprises and networks that build social & environmental values into their primary driving forces. (Korten’s “mindful markets”)
Use Basic Income to build support for (paid) worker unionization & collective bargaining strength, and end precarious labour.

41. Excellent New Book
A Guaranteed Living Income for Everyone: Delusion or Necessity? by Robyn Peterson

43. Extra slides

44. Scarcity & Class Class: arose from societies with a
permanent economic surplus.
Based in
control of scarce resources (the surplus)
monopoly of ‘high’ culture
Undermined by
material abundance (sufficiency)
Widespread cultural production

45. Work & Postindustrialism
There is No shortage of work: there is lots to do
There is a shortage of jobs paid via the market
No crisis of work, but of remuneration
Irrationality of labour market as we know it.
Fact: the existing labour market—almost by definition—cannot possibly provide this work.
An increasing role of public goods & commons-based production
Abundance-based/ non-rival character of info production: “Information wants to be free” : Efficiency requires sharing.

46. The Problem of Costs
Obvious need for transitional action & organization that can be successful
But markets today, & monetary valuation generally, do not reflect real costs.
What’s profitable is often destructive
What’s regenerative is often completely invisible.
Movement for BI: mainly based on the intuition that we can’t afford NOT to implement BI.
Research that works to build full costs and benefits into everyday economics
Essential to build Big Picture potentials into our transitional strategies. Make more of the Invisible visible.
It’s crucial to support growing sectors of the Commons. Simply building costs into market prices isn’t enough.

47. Purpose in Postindustrialism
The crisis of income is at roots a crisis of the purpose of work
Our problems of inequality, alienation, powerlessness and environmental destruction are essentially problems with what we are collectively producing…with illth

48. Industrialism: The Divided Economy
Invisible Visible
Use-value Exchange-value
“Consumption” “Production”
People Things
Unpaid Paid
Women Men
Informal Formal
Private Public

49. From Thing-production to People-Production
Increasing non-material composition of inputs and outputs.
Growing portion of work involved with production of meaning and value.
Intelligent design: decisive element of material production.
Cultivation of human creativity & sharing: keys to postindustrial efficiency
Primacy of End-use (human need)
Happens everywhere, all the time
Holistic human individuality: both a means and goal of postindustrial economy

50. The 3 D’s of Knowledge-based Development
Dematerialization: substituting information for resources
Detoxification: (and decarbonisation): great potential to tune in to natural processes & substances.
Decentralization: intrinsic to both the network- and ecosystem-based economy

51. Structural Changes of Postindustrialism
End of linear take/make/waste economy:
--Lake/Circular economy
--Inversion of labour-resource relationship
End of the Divided Economy: Prosumption Abolishing Invisibility: Human creativity and ecological productivity are cultivated everywhere Info economy = Network Economy Localization of resource use / global sharing of information (Daly: “Trade recipes not cookies”)

52. Labour & Resource Relationship
Industrial economy: resource-intensive. labour productivity: Substitutes resources for labour.
Green Economy:
people-intensive / resource-saving. Substitutes human creativity for resources

53. Invisible Economy (1) Total Productive System of an Industrial Society (layer cake with icing)2
GNP-Monetized
½ of Cake
Top two layers
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of Cake
Lower two layers
GNP “Private” Sector
Rests on
GNP “Public” Sector
Social Cooperative
Love Economy
Nature’s Layer
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
All rights reserved Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson

54. the appropriate goal: Gift Circulation
Money as information & energy
Brand: “Information wants to be free.”
Requires social / eco value to be embedded in everyday life : indicators
Question: transitional mechanisms

55. Common Sense Economics
Increase restrictions on the flow of material goods and physical capital (to minimize transport costs, etc.)
Lessen restrictions on the flow of information and culture.
note:
Globalization does exactly the opposite: via free trade and intellectual property law.
Herman Daly
“Trade Recipes,
not Cookies.”

56. The Economy in Loops

57. Summary 1
BI is one part of a New Security essential to postindustrial development.
The NS is a platform for a new stage of economic development: qualitative development.
Implementing qualitative development requires a value revolution and a redefinition of wealth, as well as in-depth implementation of its indicators.
Qualitative development is made possible & necessary by the rise of new productive forces based in human creativity and sharing.
Capitalism is threatened by these emerging human powers. They undermine a system based in cog-labour & passive consumption. Capitalism can meet needs only as a spin-off, trickle-down or by-product of the accumulation of money & material.
Qualitative development must focus directly on human need, with money & matter simply means-to-an-end.
Capitalism is also, like all class societies, based in scarcity, and since the Great Depression the system has had to artificially reproduce scarcity to maintain itself.

58. Summary 2
Waste production has been the basis of capitalist development since WWII, especially in North America.
Designed Scarcity—material, monetary & cultural—is the biggest factor in driving social & environmental destruction today.
Real Abundance is qualitative not quantitative, but has an important material dimension: a floor of healthy subsistence.
Qualitative development is all about purpose, end-use, and meeting deep need.
Because GES is a platform for qualitative development, campaigns for BI can be more powerful if integrated with campaigns for regenerative alternatives in every sector.
BI can contribute to this era’s value revolution by learning from and supporting emerging systems of social & ecological indicators.

59. Summary 3
3 key elements of postindustrial strategy: Circular economy, Guaranteed Economic Security, and “free culture”.
The Problem with “Jobs”
Reinforcing the faltering labour market can be a mistake. Developing new forms of remuneration & wealth-sharing may be more appropriate to unleash the productive powers of the Commons.
Supporting work in the labour market without supporting vital work outside the market reinforces repressive industrial structures.
Both ecological and informational development involve much greater levels of “public goods”, “non-rival” goods, sharing, consciousness & participation. Most existing markets suppress or ignore all these things.