In the picturesque, almost toy-like Swiss village of Rheinau, citizens wanted to test the format of unconditional basic income
As Swissinfo.ch writes, the author of this project, Swiss director Rebecca Panian, was unable to raise even half of the necessary funds. By betting on trendy crowdfunding, she risks putting a final nail in the coffin of this tempting idea in Switzerland. Abroad, attempts in this direction have led to much more advanced results.
The indicator on the website of the crowdfunding project "The Village Tests the Future" (Dorf testet Zukunft) has frozen as if nailed down, and is not about to change color or shape. So far, 151,836 francs have been raised. And that's it! In recent days, the project has not managed to collect a single centime in additional funds. And how much is needed in total?
Even more than one might imagine: 6.2 million francs. That is the amount required to actually launch the project to test unconditional basic income in the village of Rheinau in the canton of Zurich. Yesterday was the deadline! Today it can be said for sure that the project died before it was born!
The project was planned to launch in January 2019. During the test phase, 770 residents of Rheinau would receive a monthly sum with no strings attached – just like that, for free, that is, as a gift! Depending on age, participants would receive amounts ranging from 625 to 2,500 francs. That's how Rebecca Panian envisioned the bright future.
It all started in June 2016. The Swiss people convincingly rejected a popular legislative initiative to introduce unconditional basic income in the country in a referendum. However, Rebecca Panian refused to give up and began looking for a locality that would be willing to experiment with this tempting idea of "money for nothing" in a "single format." Why? She was convinced that before finally consigning the idea to the dustbin of history, it should be tested in reality, giving it a second chance, so to speak.
And now it can be said that this idea is indeed destined to go where all utopias and dreams of a "city of the sun" go, where one can do nothing and get paid for it. Yesterday, the "deadline" for the fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding platform arrived. The amount raised was literally a pittance.
Why? Probably because "the idea itself underlying the project seemed too simple and attractive, like everyone thought we would finance a year-long vacation for every villager. But in reality, we planned nothing of the sort," says Rebecca Panian.
The fact is that unconditional basic income was not intended to be paid on top of what a person already receives. On the contrary, this amount would be just one share of the income already received – unconditional, guaranteed, but only a share. That is, most project participants would not get rich from it! They would not receive more money!
Only those whose income does not exceed 2,500 francs per month (about 67,000 hryvnias – an amount on which it is impossible to live in Switzerland) would actually benefit financially. That is, categories such as stay-at-home fathers caring for a child, pensioners, or individuals intending to start their own business but not yet in a phase of sustainable profitability. "A very small proportion of participants would gain purely monetary profit from the project, but they still remain in the project simply because they feel part of the community, an element of a common cause," says R. Panian.
Essentially, the basis of the project in Rheinau was the idea of strengthening the sense of social community, the feeling of belonging to a big and important cause for everyone. A prerequisite: at least half of the community's residents had to give their consent to participate in the project. The plan was to attract 650 people; in the end, 770 participants signed up.
As Rebecca Panian says, in the village "a kind of social movement has already emerged, which has become the first approximate model of what the implementation of the idea of unconditional basic income on a national scale could lead to. One of the village residents, for example, recently told me that as a result of discussions on this topic alone, she was able to muster the courage to start her own business."
Another village resident admitted that she began contacting neighbors and other residents of Rheinau for the first time, people with whom she previously had nothing in common and never imagined she could find any common topics of conversation. Another resident himself came up with, formatted, and printed an information flyer to urge villagers to think more deeply about the project idea and perhaps even contribute financially to its success. The flyer was then distributed by eight local women – all pensioners who had never before interacted closely with each other. They were brought together by the idea of unconditional basic income.
But for now, it seems that the idea of introducing unconditional basic income in a single Swiss village is too radical for the country and perhaps simply premature. Outside its borders, however, this idea appears to fall on much more prepared ground. In similar pilot projects in many countries around the world, active collection of first practical experience is already underway.
"The goals and motives of such projects can be very diverse, differing as much as the initial formats and methods of implementing such projects," says Enno Schmidt, a Swiss artist and one of the authors of the popular legislative initiative rejected by the people in a referendum in 2016. To get acquainted with them, he has visited various countries in recent months and years, including Japan, a country that particularly attracted him in terms of implementing the idea of unconditional income.
A similar experiment is currently being implemented, for example, in more than a hundred villages and towns in Kenya. There, the international humanitarian organization GiveDirectly pays residents an average of $22 per month, without conditions, for 12 years straight. The total amount of this project reaches $30 million, and so far, mainly through voluntary donations, $26 million has been raised. The goal: to turn unconditional basic income into an effective tool for combating global poverty.
The initiators of a similar project in Finland pursued a completely different idea. There, the government, formed by a center-right parliamentary majority, set out to introduce unconditional basic income for the long-term unemployed. The goal: to save on social support.
However, in practice, this idea did not evoke positive responses everywhere in Finland. Critics said that the project was designed for too short a period and covered too few settlements and regions, making it impossible to collect the information needed for a correct and adequate assessment of the results achieved. The project is currently terminated, and the final analysis will be presented next year, 2019.
Social problems and the fight against poverty are one thing. But the issue of unconditional basic income also has another dimension! We live in the era of the fourth industrial revolution; robots, automated and autonomous systems, as well as artificial intelligence, promise to radically change the global economic structure in the near future. "In labor, the psyche and physiology of a person, his intellect and will are united," pointed out the great German philosopher Georg Simmel.
Until recently, this maxim seemed an eternal law. But now "robots work, man is happy," and the question arises: what should an individual freed from the "curse of labor" do? A possible answer is precisely unconditional basic income. In February of next year, 2019, in the relatively poor city of Stockton, south of San Francisco, the Economic Security Project will begin implementation, which specifically bets on the idea of such income.
Among the initiators of the project is Chris Hughes, an American entrepreneur and one of the founders of the social network Facebook. It is planned to pay about one hundred city residents $500 each month without any conditions. And overall, in the Silicon Valley region, the idea of unconditional basic income is by no means rejected outright. The founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, and the founding father of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, openly support it. Serious attempts to test such income are being made in Scotland. There, the government has even already promised to allocate a corresponding loan.
But let's return to Switzerland, to the wine-growing province of the canton of Zurich. What will happen to the project in Rheinau if the money for its implementation cannot be raised? "I don't want to talk about any 'Plan B' yet, because in accordance with our democratic traditions, the residents of the village themselves must express their opinion about the future of the project, whether they want to participate in it," says Rebecca Panian. For now, she has no choice but to dream of a sudden miracle: "It's a shame to stop halfway; it would be good to still raise funds to continue the project."