Basic Income
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All citizens receive a regular, liveable and unconditional sum of money. The recipient is not required to work or look for work, and the payment is given independently of any other income.
Agree:
Yanis Varoufakis Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens
Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.
Robert Reich Former Secretary of Labor
A minimal guarantee with regard to income, it seems to me as almost inevitable in terms the direction that the structural changes of our economy are taking us in.
Christopher Pissarides Nobel Prize winner in Economics
I am very much in favour, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market
Jean-Yves Duclos Minister of Families, Children and Social Development in Canada
I think it’s the principles behind the idea [of a guaranteed income] that matter. These principles are greater simplicity for the government, greater transparency on the part of families and greater equity for everyone
Willem Buiter Citi's Chief Economist
Use the tax-transfer mechanism (e.g. through a guaranteed minimum income for all, or an ambitious negative income tax, public funding of health care and long-term care etc.) to support those left behind by technological advances.
Guy Standing University of London Professor, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)
It is very much the belief of us who favour a basic income that 99 per cent of people want to improve their lives. If you do not have basic security you cannot be rational
Jeremy Rifkin American Economic and Social Theorist, Author, Political Advisor
Basic income is not a utopia. It's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey
Lord Robert Skidelsky Economist
An unconditional basic income would make part-time work a possibility for many who now have to work full-time at minimum wages; it would also start to give all workers the same choice as to how much to work, and under what conditions, as is now possessed by owners of substantial capital.
Pranab Bardhan Berkeley Economics Professor
India should consider replacing inefficient subsidies with a basic monthly income for all citizens
Martin Ravallion Economist
A basic-income guarantee would dominate net workfare earnings in terms of the impact on poverty for a given budgetary outlay.Disagree:
Joseph Stiglitz Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University
You want your government to think more carefully about targeting programmes that help those in need, rather than universal. That’s a trade-off given the budget constraints on the public sector
Bill Mitchell Professor of Economics and Musician
A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.
Tony Atkinson Research Fellow at Oxford and Professor at the London School of Economics
I don’t in fact favour a basic income as such, what I favour is what I call a participation income
Randall Wray Professor of Economics at U. Missouri–Kansas City, Senior Scholar at Levy Economics Institute
I do not support sending a BIG check to everyone. It is a devaluation of the currency, as prices rise so that the BIG payment essentially becomes the entry price to the marketplace. So we will need to target the BIG to those who do not (or cannot) work. Yes there’s some stigma. But, first we implement Employer of Last Resort so that anyone who is ready and willing to work has a job in the Job Gua... See More
Richard D. Wolff Marxian economist. Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
UBI creates a new difference between those people who work and earn a living and those people who, for wathever reason, don't work but still earn a living. This is going to create two classes of people (...) and for me the big issue is why do that?. I like the idea of community building by not having people that are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, but I don't like this way of doing it, becau... See More
Pavlina R. Tcherneva Economist. Chair of the Department of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute, Bard College,
There is almost a ‘neoclassical market equilibrating assumption’ behind most BIG analysis that says: “as long as people have cash, the market will magically provide the goods for them, allow them to acquire assets, provide them with the freedom to do what they please, etc. etc.” If the market hasn’t solved these problems now, why would it do so just because people get cash? All structures that ma... See More
MIchael Hudson Economist. Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion. You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and servic... See More
Ha-Joon Chang Economist. University of Cambridge
The right-wing version of UBI (...) is that the government should provide its citizens with a basic income at the subsistence level, while providing no (or little) further goods and services. As far as I can see, this is the version of UBI supported by the Silicon Valley companies. I am totally against this. There are left-wing libertarians who support UBI, who would set its level quite high, whi... See More
Jared Bernstein Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Are the good, effective anti-poverty programs currently in place fully funded? I’m quite certain they’re not, and thus the question for progressives is what gets us the bigger inequality-and-poverty-reducing-bang-for-the-buck: a dollar to UBI, or a dollar to things like quality pre-school, the EITC and CTC (wage subsidies for low-income, working families), expanding Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), a... See More
