“Official Visit”

I am lucky enough to be part of a Swiss group that was invited by the US Department of State to visit a number of individuals sitting in the administration, in think tanks as well as in the academic context. Summarizing the trip, I will focus on what my impressions towards the future of social policy and Universal Basic Income (UBI) in particular are.

The primary reason for the invitation by the State Dept. was our work with innovative policy in a number of fields including foreign policy, women-related policy, as well as UBI and social policy back home in Switzerland. We were asked specifically to share our strategic and executive models on producing and sharing policies. Most of us use a crowdsourcing model not only to advocate our causes but also to produce output and specific policy proposals. The Swiss crowdsourced think tank “Foraus” is a perfect example for that: a base of more than 1,000 mostly young volunteers are shaping the Swiss foreign policy scene for a while now. The referendum on UBI last year and the movement that was started along with it is another example of a new way to design and influence policy. The travel program in that sense was designed to learn from each other.

We started our trip — where else? — in Washington DC. The new administration is beginning to settle in now. At the State Department and basically at every other institution we visited, I sensed a lot of uncertainty: What will the main focuses be in the foreign policy and social policy sector? Who will manage to influence the agenda and with what strategies? You could sense these questions in particular in large liberal leaning think tanks like the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Brookings. “We basically don’t know how we’ll manage to influence the policy making process at this point”, a senior fellow from CAP told me. What has been visible so far were “attempts trying to stop the worst” — but it seems still unclear how to strategically organize an opposition. Not to mention a dominant new vision or paradigm for the future.

Trump and Universal Basic Income?