UBI Lab Arts: Basic Income for the Arts in Ireland - What Can We Learn?
Original image credit - Darren Lawrence
In December 2022 we (UBI Lab Arts) along with UBI Lab Leeds and Culture Declares emergency held our first in a series of conversations with Irish artists involved in the Basic Income for the Arts Pilot Scheme.
Readers of this blog may already be aware that the Government of Ireland has set up a Basic Income trial that began in September 2022. 2000 artists and cultural workers will receive a weekly unconditional income of €325 weekly for a period of three years.
The idea with the initial session was to learn about the background of the trial and hear directly from artists and artworkers involved in the pilot scheme. We also offered some general context about Universal Basic Income, other pilot schemes, and the work of UBI Lab Arts and the wider UBI Lab Network in advocating for, and broadening and deepening the discussion about, Universal Basic Income.
We were joined by artists and artworkers from Ireland, including Shane Finan, Rachel Botha and Alisha Doody, who gave us personal insights into the way in which, in this early stage, the Basic Income trial is affecting them and their creative communities. We talked about the motivations behind applying, what it felt like finding out they had been accepted or rejected, how the pilot scheme is being received within the artistic and wider community, and the potential for the pilot providing evidence for a Universal Basic Income.
Mike Prior from Culture Declared Emergency found that the ‘insights into the pilot from Rachel, Shane and Alison (RS&A) were fascinating to me as an outsider but must be highly valued by artists inside and outside the pilot. I loved the way their individual testimonies highlighted important, and more universal themes and brought it all to life in away that makes basic income more understandable for everyone.’
Some critical issues related to the political advocacy for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the pros and cons of Basic Income (BI) pilots and trials were raised during our discussion. The public may confuse the scientific concept of a randomised control pilot and the political concept of a UBI, because BI is only given to a selected group during the pilot. The potential recipients in a scientific BI pilot will be selected using certain geographical or social criteria such as being an artist. The random selection process means that participants are selected by chance not because of their need. For example, some of the BI recipients may not really need the money because of their good financial situation. The existence of a control group means that the control group should be similar to the intervention group which receives the BI and include people who are and who are not in need of a BI.
Some related issues arise for the pilot participants. The scientific method of randomised control trial was originally developed in healthcare to demonstrate that a new medicine is better than a placebo (without an active chemical ingredient) in treating a specific disease. The terms pilot, trial and experiment are sometimes used to mean the same type of intervention, while they can also have distinct meanings in different academic areas. You can learn more about the use of these terms in BI studies at the blog ‘Types of UBI pilots’.
The method of randomised control trial (and pilot) has then been transferred to social science in order to test social interventions on people. However, critics argue that people as subjects and people as objects in medicine trials are different. People reason and make decisions based on their context when they are part of a social intervention in contrast to people in medicine trials when their behaviour is normally prescribed and controlled. As discussed during our event artists ask themselves, whether they should share the information that they receive a BI, because it may induce jealousy. They also wonder whether they should share the BI with other artists, how they should respond to survey questions and whether they need to demonstrate good performance as artist. Finally there is the important question whether participants should be involved in the design and evaluation of such a pilot. People are subjects who reason in a BI pilot and they are not just passive recipients of a new medicine!
You can view the full discussion and read more at the YouTube video below and join us for our next check-in with artists in the pilot scheme on June 7th 2023 at 18:30pm. You can register for the event here.