Guy Standing

Overview

Guy Standing is a British economist, a Professorial Research Associate and former Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London, with a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge. He was previously Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath (2006–2013), Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University (2006–2009), and Director of the International Labour Organization's Socio-Economic Security Programme (1999–2006).[1] In 1986 he co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), of which he is honorary co-president, and he has worked on basic-income pilot schemes including in India.[2][3]

Contributions

• The precariat. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2011) named the growing class of workers in chronically insecure labour and became his most influential book.[4]
• Rentier capitalism. The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (Biteback, 2016; 3rd ed. 2021) argues that returns to rentier assets — property, finance, and intellectual property — have crowded out returns to labour.[4]
• Basic income. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (Pelican, 2017) and Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now (2020) make the case for unconditional basic income as a right.[4]
• The commons. Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican, 2019) traces the erosion of Britain's commons from the Charter of the Forest (1217) through modern enclosure, privatization, and austerity, and proposes a new Charter of the Commons.[4][5][6] In the book itself, this is Article 43 of the proposed Charter of the Commons: "A Commons Fund should be set up, primarily sourced by levies on the commercial use or exploitation of the commons. The Fund should invest to generate and preserve ecologically sustainable common wealth, and Common Dividends should be paid out equally to all commoners." Standing adds that "as a matter of social justice, all forms of rentier income – representing a tangible loss to commoners – should be subject to a levy paid into a Commons Fund," structured across three levy classes — exhaustible resources (oil, gas, minerals, "treated as capital assets"), replenishable commons such as forests, and non-exhaustible commons such as air, water and ideas.[8] The Common Wealth Canada paper that cites the book paraphrases this as "all forms of rentier income arising from private ownership of physical, financial and intellectual property should be subject to a discrete levy, held in a commons fund, from where it should be shared."[7] He extended the commons analysis to the oceans in The Blue Commons: Rescuing the Economy of the Sea (Penguin, 2022).[4]

Relevance to Georgism

Standing is not a Georgist, but his program — identify commonly-created or natural wealth captured by private rentiers, levy it, pool the proceeds in a fund, and pay out common dividends — is the closest contemporary basic-income-movement counterpart to the Georgist chain from economic rent through a common-wealth fund to a citizen's dividend. Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada invokes exactly this: its knowledge-commons section cites Plunder of the Commons (fn 150) for the commons-fund levy on rentier income.[7]

See Also

• Standing (2019): Plunder of the Commons — dedicated research-citation page for the book, used as the source pointer for pages (e.g. Akhil Patel's Secret Wealth Advantage, Ch. 4) that cite Standing without needing his full biography
• Rentier · Land as Commons · Enclosure
• Common Wealth Fund · Citizen's Dividend
• Karl Widerquist — fellow BIEN basic-income scholar
• Peter Barnes — the parallel American commons-dividend proposal

Sources

1. Guy Standing, "Résumé" (personal site). guystanding.com/resume — used for the SOAS, Bath, Monash, and ILO positions and dates (A-claims; self-description, consistent with his SOAS profile at soas.ac.uk/about/guy-standing).
2. Penguin Books Australia, author page for Guy Standing. penguin.com.au/authors/guy-standing — used for the Cambridge PhD, the 1986 co-founding of BIEN, and the honorary co-presidency.
3. The Conversation, contributor profile: Guy Standing. theconversation.com/profiles/guy-standing-1188899 — used to corroborate the BIEN role and the Indian basic-income pilot work.
4. Guy Standing, "Books" (personal site). guystanding.com/books — used for titles, publishers, and years of the books listed.
5. Penguin (UK), Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (2019). penguin.co.uk — publisher's synopsis, used for the book's argument and the Charter of the Forest / charter-for-commoning framing (fetched directly this session).
6. Guy Standing, "Current Projects" (personal site). guystanding.com/current-projects — used for the Charter of the Commons proposal inspired by the Charter of the Forest's 800th anniversary (2017).
7. Common Wealth Canada, Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada (Jan 2023 v.3, fn 150; July 2023 Final, fn 154). PDF — used for the paper's citation of Plunder of the Commons and its paraphrase of the commons-fund levy, verified verbatim against the PDF.
8. Guy Standing, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican/Penguin, 2019), Ch. 8 "A Commons Fund for Common Dividends" and Appendix, "The Charter of the Commons," Article 43 — the Article 43 wording, the "as a matter of social justice… all forms of rentier income" passage, and the three levy classes (exhaustible / replenishable / non-exhaustible commons) are quoted verbatim from the book text, checked this session. Corroborated by Standing's own summary at guystanding.com/current-projects ("a Commons Fund built up from levies on commercial exploitation of the commons that would be used to finance common dividends… for all") and his Big Issue essay "Why we need a Charter of the Commons." Resolves the prior VERIFY note: the book leads with levies on the commercial use of the commons as the Fund's primary revenue, with the rentier-income levy added as a matter of social justice — the Common Wealth Canada paraphrase in the body is faithful to the intent but is not the book's own wording.