#DappCon22: Day 3 - An Open Discussion Round with BIEN

Transcript

um I have a question regarding how do you deal when the money goes off like for example you have a project of 18 months so you have three months period to adjust to communicate to people that they're not going to get the basic income in the situation of Kenya the money just stopped how are you dealing with disappointment Jewish people because at the end they are counting on that for their daily lives right like um yeah in the in the case of uh of Royal Kenia we stay with them yeah we made we made a promise that we stay with them uh we um confront the donor that made the promise and didn't keep the promise with the effects of uh the their uh of the the money uh

stopping so we will send this interview uh to impact market so they really feel what the effects are and we raise money so uh to to fill the Gap and uh we dedicate uh our energy to uh to solve this problem yeah I think it's also uh this also is a good lesson for us to to design the future projects saying that if we have made a moral contract with the participants I think we have to have assured funding first in place the people we are talking to for the

additional money we required so we are asking them that this has to be front loaded you know up front you should have the entire money because it's a promise we have made for to give them 18 months and that promise we have to fulfill so the lesson that we learn in Kenya is that we lead to front load funding we can't just go by the volatility of the market sorry that leads me to the next question is me again um how do you do you see if or do you think it exists the project for UEI without having a funding like I see self-funded 30 seconds if there is a Ubi project with how that is self-funded like it

doesn't come from an external donor because there's always this dependency on where is the coming the money coming from even to pay the people that works in those projects right like yourselves like so that's like big dependency not just for the people who is receiving the Ubi but also for those who work on those projects that also needs money and that is this paradigma yeah I mean obviously in in a village where you know Community a weather is no cash at all there is no no money uh floating around it's very difficult to have a community-funded basic income but um I can see in the future uh that uh these people may also contribute to the Sovereign fund uh and do some you know

share a bit of the profits that they make with their small businesses to support their own communities and maybe the humanity as a whole but at this point um if there I mean there are people there who have never had an income they live from hand to mouth as they say you know what you earn today you spend immediately so you cannot ask from these people to uh to uh contribute financially to the fund but I can see that you know if if uh you know maybe like 20 years from now when a village like that is more prosperous economically is that they have experience means what what basic income can do and they might be prepared to contribute to that financially as well

so I could add a point to that all we have seen so far is pilot projects and experiments and they've all been very valuable they've all been externally funded and this was true of the bigger really really important really important projects in Namibia and India the major Pradesh project that sarath was talking about the very valuable projects the problem with them is you could never roll them out Nationwide because you couldn't afford it and you couldn't make them permanent because you couldn't afford it what we desperately need is a pilot project preferably in a developed economy that is self-funded that is from within the particular Community there

are ways of doing it and some of my research has been on that it's possible to do it in the UK because of the kind of tax and benefit system we have you could adapt the tax and benefit system sufficiently for individual communities in the UK to mirror what you would do across the entire country if you were going to fund a genuine basic income out of our existing tax and benefit systems it just needs a government willing to do it and maybe just to complement a bit um this an example of that today would be uh in South Korea there is a local currency that acts as a basic income and the way that it is funded um is through a land value added tax so essentially there is a tax on the land property and that gets redistributed in

a local currency so 120 000 people age 24 get it also about 240 000 farmers get this money which they can use to spend in local businesses and then the businesses can exchange that money for the state money for the national currency so that is an example of how you could roll out a basic income in a self-funded way for 24 year olds which is just an interestingly interesting project yeah exactly yeah so Universal um I I just did a talk on uh dowels and public goods for me Ubi is in a way a public good and um the way charitable organizations have been run

they're centrally organized and also they're detached from the beneficiaries um do you see an intersection between such projects and governance uh for both sides those providing funds because normally um people are just asked to donate but they don't have a say of how that money is spent they're given a plan of how it's going to be spent but maybe they would like to be actively involved and also do you believe also the beneficiaries like those receiving the funds would like to have a say in how the funds are managed because sometimes say you you are helping a village

and maybe if you ask the village in instead of just giving money to individual people because with or without that money I'm assuming I may be wrong um there's still somehow coping even without the money so maybe if you ask them what they want to be done with the bulk of the money instead of uh it's being split and given to individual people maybe they would like build us a new well or something like that so so do you see governance in how funds are managed um I think uh it's one of the it's one of the principles that uh

individuals should have cash in their hands now in the pilots what we have seen is different kinds of initiatives people come together okay in the madhya Pradesh pilot we have seen they said that okay the last so 18th month basic income the entire Village decided that the last month's a basic income we're going to pull and repair the temple yeah and then in another Village we found about 20 youth coming together and said that we have this Pond and why don't we learn how to fish or how to grow fish and then they created a fish fishing Cooperative

no so when it comes from the bottom there is a certain um authenticity to it and there's certain something very organic about it I think uh we have I mean repeatedly we have seen in Pilots that this kind of collective action happens like for example we are expecting that the weight based collectors probably will start a Welfare Society for themselves or a trade Union so all kinds of initiatives are possible when we generate that atmosphere but when we don't do it individually and it talked automatically the clan Chiefs or the local Chiefs or the politicians they start having a say on the collective

action rather than every individual feeling entitled getting it and then so I would I would say that yeah it's important yeah one question I would have is what do you think about the thesis that specifically like anything related to kind of blockchain enabled uh ubis should first be tried in places like here because kind of um the the the theory might be if it if we can't even make it work here um why do we think we can make it work somewhere else

um no I think I think we've shown that we can use blockchain technology to reach the last mile um but they will not receive cryptos themselves so um yeah no I mean yeah we can do it here because the lines are short and communication to improve it you know to improve the technology to improve but you know um no because it is possible to bring it there so why not I would maybe add that um I think it's also a question about the distribution of knowledge so how uh if we're talking about blockchain enable basic income what is the relationship between a

specific community and the developers that can actually change the system so in your case it's impact Market my case is circles but like um how do you create the structure so that there is someone who can who knows about the system and can access it and change it and debug it Etc and that it's related to the community uh somehow so I think it's more of a question about the distribution of knowledge uh because it's definitely possible to do it anyway it's just a question about if it breaks can we fix it because if we cannot fix it then we have a big dependency of power yeah just a quick card addition to that Martin

um I think just because something becomes successful here I don't think that it's replicable in India or in Kenya because because um the infrastructure is different people are different but what is common is the the sense of cooperation and Collective action those are common but then how do you how do you bridge the the challenges that are posed in India for example if you go to a remote State like nagaland or somewhere um how do you implement uh because those challenges are different from the challenges here the literacy is very different the infrastructure is different so I think we need experiments

everywhere yes I'm I'm sort of involved in this as well but what strikes me when people ask questions it's like it's a fear what are these people going to do with their money why don't we trust them we don't need to put our perspective on what are they going to do with the money and I think that is really important I think that's what's been so important with with Cavite let them do it and they can organize it and I think with all the other Charities it also comes from above but we don't we don't even see ourselves as a charity we're just construed contribute or con what do you mean distribute would distribute the money to the people that needed more than what we do and we don't

make any judgment we don't need to question them no one question me I do my job I get my pay that's it I can do whatever I want let them do whatever they want and they do wonderful things wonderful things just to Echo that I mean what's been found is that really people are our best place to actually know what they need so let's make give them the possibility to do so and really achieve what they want and and decide what the impact of you know is it the development project or a peace building project let them decide what the real impact is this way you Empower them and you really sort of take a bit of responsibility away from the donor away from the policy maker because at the end of the day it's not really

it's very difficult for them to understand the ins and hours of the local community it's kind of an impossible job you need to live there to really know so one way to sidestep this shortcoming which is a natural one is really just to give them the cash that they need to build up on Martin's question of trying here first and elsewhere it's easy to see a group that is underprivileged and and they have um low income and we feel like giving them money is doing something good but the ethical question is you give them a taste of something and you did then you take it away from them how do you actually solve their position with their

Chiefs and and their Mayors like if they are in a position like this and you're not changing the circumstances that led to that type of economy you giving them funds for a while and then taking it away they'll go back to to the old ways so question is what is the purpose of Ubi and and will probably need to find how it fits in the society and the economy here in order to try and apply it there and um I I would say the best use of that is if people save it try and educate the children so that they could get out of that um yeah poverty and if if I look into a similar situation here's probably

homeless people like that this this springboard what will have uh because a homeless person is not necessarily a bad person they may want to go find a job but they haven't had a shower in two weeks and when they go and apply for a position people just tell them to go away so maybe Ubi would be helpful to homeless people who could find shelter have a shower buy clothes and then help them find the job and once they find a job they no longer need this income yeah I mean um it's our expectation that if they are well off they will take a shower but why should they take a shower I mean so again it's we are imposing our

uh our expectations or our development outcomes that we are expecting our Notions of the poor so we are just so I think that's where the autonomy of the individual is very important uh see at the end of the day finally it's the government that has to implement if we are dreaming of a basic income Society we are expecting that the government gives every single individual a basic amount of money which is kind of a foundation on which you stand and then to the extent job market labor market is available that itself seems to be a very uh difficult question that in future what kind of jobs will be there I mean

what kind of gig economy or super gig economy uh will be there so so to that extent people should have the freedom to participate or not participate in the labor market so it's uh I mean it's uh it's we expect the state to implement that contribute something from the Namibia pilot project which hasn't been mentioned here yet today it was the first major pilot project was held in Namibia about 10 years ago now it had some stunning results in terms of additional economic activity amongst the lowest paid and so on um and women's emancipation additional

um educational buy-in from parents and schools and children and better health and nutrition and so on very good results um I make two points about it when the results were first explained at a meeting at psoas the school of Oriental and African studies at the University of London by Professor guy standing who had researched the pilot project as it was going on the people who look most nervous in the audience were those who were running Charities development Charities and they were actually saying isn't it better if we provide them with schools and if we provide them with with this and that that is what they wanted to provide

whereas actually the results have been produced by an experiment government that simply giving them the money um and and there was a certain feeling of shock around the the audience amongst those um charity employees which I found really quite educational um the other thing to say about that particular project is that although it was relatively small amounts of money given to a fairly large single Community uh in Namibia for a period of two years uh if that had been rolled out Nationwide it would have cost only three to four percent of GDP in that particular country and everything is context specific what that means is it would not be impossible for that

government to implement precisely what had been done in that Community that's what we need we actually need permanent Nationwide basic incomes and it is possible it's possible in a country like the UK we've proved for our research that it's possible Namibia it's possible that the pilot projects have their use they show us what the effects can be and although they're ethical downsides in relation to having to remove the money at the end of the project um we still need more of them to persuade governments that actually this will be good for your populations thank you I think we've all built up quite the appetite uh it's time for

lunch thank you to our esteemed uh panel for being here today [Applause]