Public Positions | Rights to Life: Debating a Universal Income Income Grant

 James Ferguson is Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is the author of many books, including Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (2005).  A leading thinker on the future of progressive politics, he has written extensively on the rise of social welfare programs targeting the poor in Southern Africa. He is currently working on the diminishing centrality, in much of the world, of livelihoods based on stable waged labor and on the changing nature of social obligations, including the obligation to share.

 Lumkile Mondi is a Lecturer in Economics at Wits.  He recently completed his doctoral thesis (based partly at WISER) on the influence of economic policy and rent-seeking on the Eskom parastatal.  He was the Chief Economist at the Industrial Development Corporation until 2013, and before that worked as Group Economist at Transnet and as a Treasury Economist at SCMB.

Liz Fouksman is a Leverhulme Fellow at the African Studies Centre, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow of St John’s College, University of Oxford. She is also a research associate of the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Liz’s research focuses on the economic world-views of the long-term unemployed in South Africa and Namibia. It examines the social, cultural and political impediments to radical visions of post-work and distribution, such as shorter hours and universal basic income.