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:
Scott Santens Writer & Basic Income advocate
The question is not if technology is advanced enough to adopt it. The question is if UBI can advance tech. Basic income is the missing foundation upon which everything else should be built upon.
Ralph Callebert History Professor, Virginia Tech
We usually focus on employment and production. Yet, much of the world’s population has no realistic prospects of employment, and we already produce more than what is sustainable. Basic income, however, separates survival from employment or production.
Martin Wolf Chief economics commentator at the Financial Times
We will need to redistribute income and wealth. Such redistribution could take the form of a basic income for every adult, together with funding of education and training at any stage in a person’s life
Jeremy Howard Founder: fast.ai; Faculty: Singularity University; Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum
The pool of displaced workers will just keep growing exponentially, and the solution is to level the playing field.
Chris Boos IT automation evangelist; CEO of arago , algorithm researcher,
The unconditional basic income is a way of shaping the necessary social change from preservation to new construction so as to become socially compatible.
The Kawaii Suite 🌐 Look at me, being super famous with my 35 followers :3
Because I don't have to worry about waking up early in the morning and I value my free time so much.
Jim Gilliam Founder and CEO of Nationbuilder
If we can enable a world of creators, the ROI on a basic income... it's just incomprehensible. It's so big.
Joe Williams Running for Congress in Santa Cruz, CA
What basic income does is set a floor, a monetary floor by which no one will fall below. So you want to guarantee that basic income for everybody.
Anthony Painter Director of Policy and Strategy at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts)
If you want to incentivise work at every level of income then Basic Income is simply the best system
Disagree:
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
Scott Ferguson Asst. Prof of Film & Media Studies; UC Berkeley PhD; Research Scholar @ Binzagr Institute; Bay
Without an associated public Job Guarantee, the Universal Basic Income is merely welfare by another name: a laissez-faire solution to contemporary social and ecological crises.
Louis-Philippe Rochon Economist; Editor of Review of Keynesian Economics. Laurentian University.
A guaranteed annual income is not an end in itself. It should not be viewed as a replacement for a full employment policy. If the purpose is to reduce inequality and poverty, there are other solutions: bringing real changes to the tax system, getting tougher on fiscal havens, introducing inheritance taxes and of course, jobs, jobs, jobs.
Daniel Zamora Sociologist. Université Libre de Bruxelles Institut de sociologie
The popularity of universal basic income is in reality a triumph of the neoliberal ideology, an ideology that refuses, in any social policy, to put inequalities at the center of our democracies. Basically, it is an illusory fight against poverty without really fighting against inequalities
Paul Palsterman Juriste au service d'études de la Confédération des Syndicats Chrétiens de Belgique (CSC).
By applying to a fundamentally unequal situation a perfectly equal treatment does not create more equality: it reinforces instead existing inequalities. Far from being fair, it is on the opposite the negation of justice. Regarding social efficiency, we can easily demonstrate that the project has none
Dany Lang Economist. Associate Professor at University of Paris 13. Researcher at CNRS.
I don't believe in the relevance of the universal basic income proposal. [...] Personally, it is a proposal that embodies the idea of the end of work, i.e. it will not be possible any more to ensure full employment for all. However, in a society where there are many social needs not yet fulfilled, because the market mechanisms do not manage to satisfy them and because the Government, both central ... See More
Stéphanie Treillet Economist. Université Paris - Est Créteil. Conseil Scientific d'Attac France-
La possibilité (pour les femmes uniquement) de retrait du marché du travail grâce au Revenu d'Existenve semble constituer, dans les versions considérées comme « progressistes », la réponse en miroir aux incitations à accepter n’importe quel travail, dans les versions les plus libérales (proches des politiques actuelles de workfare) présentant une allocation universelle comme un outil de flexibilis... See More
Seth Ackerman Doctoral candidate in History at Cornell. Editorial board of Jacobin magazine.
Reducing work-time(...) is enormously preferable, because everyone benefits equally and together. The alternative – reducing the number of workers per capita (with an UBI) – amounts to the creation of essentially arbitrary classes of idle and segmented citizens, whose existence would be virtually guaranteed to divide and embitter the working class to the benefit of reactionary pro-work politics.
