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:
Mark Zuckerberg CEO at Facebook
An entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. There is something wrong with our system when I can make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.
Tim Berners-Lee Inventor of the World Wide Web
It is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality
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.
Noam Chomsky Linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist
It comes from the right wing originally. Milton Friedman proposed it for example. From his point of view it was part of an effort to undermine welfare state measures. But it doesn’t have to have a reactionary component. It can be interpreted as something progressive. That people have rights. In fact if you read the universal declaration of human rights, 1948, take a look at article 45. It says peo... See More
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
Tim O'Reilly Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media. Investor. Studied at Harvard University.
I completely agree that Universal Basic Income is a good idea. But I think that’s just the beginning of the discussion.
Disagree:
Andrew Ng Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain
I do not believe in unconditional basic income because this just encourages people to be trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work. So rather than to pay people to “do nothing” I would rather see a new “New deal” where we pay you to study because I think that today we know how to educate people at scale and the society is pretty good at finding meaningf... See More
Bill Gates Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
Even the US isn't rich enough to allow people not to work. Some day we will be but until then things like the Earned Income Tax Credit will help increase the demand for labor.
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
Branko Milanovic Economist. Development and inequality expert.
Economically, states already guarantee a basic salary under certain conditions, for example in cases of unemployment or extreme poverty. With universal basic income, this assistance would no longer be temporary or linked to a certain condition, and I don’t think it would be sustainable. Moreover, I don’t like the idea of a world where work is no longer a form of self-realisation for citizens. I im... See More
Yuval Noah Harari Israeli historian and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Paying people not to work will only increase inequality and rancor. [...] If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail.
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
David de Ugarte Economist and co-founder of the co-op Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas
The basic income is attractive: it’s individually empowering, it crosses ideological borders, it’s a technocrat’s dream… but it would have terrible social and moral consequences: xenophobia, inequality, and a rise in the power of Big Businesses.
Leigh Phillips Journalist & science writer (Nature, Sci Am, New Scientist, Guardian, Telegraph). Austerity Ec
The UBI short-cut to more leisure time, less poverty, and strengthened unions delivered up on a platter by a corporate-captured state that has demonstrated for 40 years it is committed to the opposite of all this is a fantasy. If we want more leisure time, we have to get productivity growing again. And to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive. And the only way for lab... See More
