Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 16:54:28 -0400 From: Karl Widerquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: Jerome Levy Economics Institute This just in from Philippe Van Parijs. It's his account of the SASE conference for the next BEIN newsletter which will go out to every BEIN member in a month or two: Madison (Wisconsin), 8-10 July 1999 "Globalization and the Good Society. Tenth Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics" Founded by the "communitarian" sociologist Amitai Etzioni, currently chaired by Wolfgang Streeck, director of Cologne's Max Planck Institute, SASE holds one big international conference every year. The theme of this one hardly guaranteed that basic income would play a prominent role in it. Yet, it did. Among the countless parallel workshops, one was explicitly devoted to basic income, with a critical review of a number of recent books by Karl Widerquist (Levy Institute), a paper on the limits of the work ethic by Michael Lewis (State University of New York) and a paper on political resistance to basic income in North America by Sally Lerner (University of Waterloo), who announced at the end of the workshop her intention of starting an interactive forum on basic income ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). But the surprise came from the semi-plenary addresses and plenary panels. While Robert Haveman (University of Wisconsin) restated his plea (see OECD Econ. Papers 1996) for a comprehensive package including a refundable tax credit at two thirds of the poverty line and employment subsidies targeted at the low skilled, Ronald Dore (Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics) made a vibrant plea for a citizen's income at 40% of GNP per capita and predicted that the Blair Government's Working Families Tax Credit (analogous to the US Earned Income Tax Credit) would gradually expand and move in this direction. Joel Rogers (Department of Law, University of Wisconsin and leader of the New Party) contrasted his new egalitarianism (enabling, empowering, responsibility-compatible, decentralized) with both neo-liberalism and traditional egalitarianism (passivity-inducing, ex-post correcting, centralized). In reply to comments by Fritz Scharpf (Max-Planck Institut Köln) and Philippe Van Parijs (Université catholique de Louvain), he indicated that his views had been moving away from conditional, "activating" benefit schemes to a non-means-tested unconditional basic income (which would give more bargaining power to its recipients while eroding the hurdles that prevent activity). Finally, Erik Olin Wright (Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin) concluded the last plenary panel by stating that everything he heard (especially by the Harvard law professor XXX and Julie Kerksick, director of the State of Wisconsin's project "New Hope. Buiding Bridges to Work") pointed to the relevance of introducing a universal basic income. As the the next SASE Conference (London School of Economics, XXX July 2000) will be on "Citizenship and Exclusion", there is no doubt more than a fair chance that "socio-economics" will be pondering again on the virtues and drawbacks of a basic income. ==========================================================
