universal basic income thesis statement

The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income

Support for universal basic income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a century.

Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG) has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the 1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every year since then.

Before the First Wave

We could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional income.

First, nomadic, hunting and gathering societies of less than 60 people have often been observed to treat all land as commons , meaning that everyone can forage on the land but no one can own it. A similar right to use land has existed in many small-scale agrarian communities right up to the enclosure movement, which was not complete in Europe until the 20th century and is not complete around the world today. The connection between common land and UBI is that both institutions allow every individual to have access to the resources they need to survive without conditions imposed by others.

Second, most observed small-scale, nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies had strong obligations to share what they had with others. If someone camping with the group found more food than they and their immediate family could eat in one meal, they had to share it with everyone in the camp, including people who rarely or never brought back food for the community. The food shared around camp could be seen as a “basic” income.

Some trace the beginning of UBI history to ancient Athens, which used revenue from a city-owned mine to support a small cash income for Athenian citizens.

The modern definition of UBI stipulates the grant must be in cash, and because small-scale hunter-gatherer or agrarian communities do not have cash economies, they do not have UBIs. But these practices show how the values that motivate much of the modern UBI movement are not new to politics but have been recognized and practiced for a very long time.

Some writers trace the beginning of UBI history to ancient Athens, which used revenue from a city-owned mine to support a small cash income for Athenian citizens. This institution sounds like a UBI, except that the meaning of citizen was very different in ancient Athens. Citizens were a small, elite portion of the population. Noncitizens, such as slaves, women, and free noncitizen males, were the bulk of the population and virtually all of its labor force. A UBI for the elite is no UBI at all.

Proposals that begin to fit the modern definition of UBI begin in the 1790s with two writers, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. Paine’s famous pamphlet “Agrarian Justice” argued that because private ownership of the land had deprived people of the right to hunt, gather, fish, or farm on their own accord, they were owed compensation out of taxes on land rents. He suggested this compensation should be paid in the form of a large cash grant at maturity plus a regular cash pension at retirement age. That amounts to a stakeholder grant plus a citizens pension: nearly, but not quite, a UBI.

From a similar starting point, Spence carried the argument through to a full UBI, calling for higher taxes on land and a regular, unconditional cash income for everyone. If anyone can be said to be the “inventor” of UBI, it is Thomas Spence, but his proposal remained obscure, and the idea had to be reinvented many times before it became widely known.

Joseph Charlier, a Belgian utopian socialist author, reinvented the idea of UBI in 1848, suggesting the socialization of rent, with the proceeds to be redistributed in the form of a UBI.

Henry George, a late 19th-century economist, set out to solve the problem of persistent poverty despite economic progress. He proposed taxing land value at the highest sustainable rate and using the proceeds for public purposes. At one point, he suggested that part of the proceeds could be distributed in cash to all citizens, but UBI was never a central part of his proposal.

BIG proposals remained sparse until the early 1900s.

The First Wave

By the early 20th century, enough people were discussing BIG to constitute its first wave — or at least its first ripple — of support. The idea was still new enough that most advocates had little knowledge of each other, and they all tended to give their versions of the program a different name.

In the United Kingdom, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf both praised the idea in their writings without naming it. In 1918, Dennis and E. Mabel Milner started the short-lived State Bonus League, which briefly attempted to get a conversation started with pamphlets and other publications, including what was probably the first full-length book on UBI: Dennis Milner’s 1920 publication “Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output.”

Several economists and social policy analysts, especially in Britain, discussed UBI, often under the name social dividend , in the 1930s and early 1940s. These included James Meade (economist and later Nobel laureate), Juliet Rhys-Williams (writer and politician), Abba Lerner (economist), Oskar Lange (economist), and G. D. H. Cole (political theorist, economist, and historian). It was apparently Cole who coined the term basic Income in 1935, although that term did not become standard for more than 50 years.

Major C. H. Douglas (a British engineer) included UBI under the name national dividend in a wider package of proposed reforms he called social credit . His ideas were most prominent in Canada, where the Social Credit Party held power in two western provinces on and off between 1935 and 1991, but the party abandoned support for Douglas’s proposed dividend not long after it first took power.

In 1934, Louisiana senator Huey Long debuted a Basic Income plan he called Share Our Wealth. He seems to have come up with the idea on his own; there is no evidence that he was influenced by the ideas spreading around the United Kingdom in those years. Long’s plan might have served as the basis for a presidential run in 1936 had he not been assassinated in 1935.

Although some of these early advocates were highly respected people, they were unable to get any form of BIG onto the legislative agenda in this era. As World War II drew to a close, most Western democracies built up their welfare systems on a conditional model, typified by the British government’s famous Beveridge Report, which recommended fighting poverty, unemployment, and income inequality with a greatly expanded welfare system based on the conditional model. Discussion of BIG largely fell out of mainstream political discussion for nearly two decades.

The Second Wave

Discussion of BIG was kept alive between the first and second waves largely by economists who increasingly portrayed it as an interesting theoretical alternative to existing social policies.

During the second wave, the phrases income guarantee and guaranteed income were often used without indicating whether the guarantee was a negative income tax (NIT) or a UBI. When specified, it was most often an NIT. However, the second wave was extremely important in directing international attention toward the idea of creating a world in which everyone would have an income above poverty level.

The second wave took off in the early to mid-1960s, when at least three groups in the United States and Canada separately started promoting the idea at about the same time. First, feminists and welfare rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., mobilized people frustrated by inadequate and often demeaning conditional programs. The feminist and welfare rights movements for BIG were closely tied together because there was widespread belief that existing welfare programs were inadequate, punitive, and too closely tied to the belief that “typical” families were “headed” by a “male breadwinner” with a “housewife.” Feminists led a large grassroots effort to replace U.S. welfare programs with BIG, and it became an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement by the 1970s.

Some futurists saw a guaranteed income as a way to protect workers from disruptions to the labor market caused by the computer revolution.

Second, futurists such as Robert Theobald and Buckminster Fuller saw a guaranteed income as a way to protect workers from disruptions to the labor market caused by the computer revolution. This effort foreshadowed the automation argument for UBI in the 2010s, but it dropped off considerably in the 1980s and 1990s.

Third, several Nobel Prize–winning economists — including James Tobin, James Meade, Herbert Simon, James Buchannan, and Milton Friedman — and many other prominent economists began arguing that a guaranteed income would represent a more effective approach to poverty than existing policies. To them, BIG would have been an attempt to simplify and streamline the welfare system while also making it more comprehensive. The interest from economists made BIG a hot topic among policy wonks in Washington and Ottawa.

The mainstream media started paying attention to NIT around the time Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty . Politicians and policy advisors began to take up the idea. The Canadian government released several favorable reports on guaranteed annual income in the 1970s. For a short time, many people saw some kind of BIG as inevitable and as the next step in social policy: a compromise that everyone could live with. People on the left viewed it as the final piece of the welfare system — a policy that would fill in the remaining cracks. Centrists, conservatives, and people from the burgeoning libertarian movement saw it as a way to make the social safety net more cost-effective and less intrusive.

In 1971, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill introducing a watered-down version of NIT. It missed becoming law by only 10 votes in the Senate. The next year, presidential nominees from both major parties endorsed a variety of similar proposals: Richard Nixon supported the watered-down NIT, and George McGovern briefly proposed a genuine UBI. The similarity of the two nominees’ positions probably made BIG less of an issue in the campaign than it would have been if one of them had opposed it.

Although Nixon won the 1972 election, BIG never got another vote. It died partly because it had no groundswell of support outside the politically marginalized welfare rights movement. Its proponents in Congress made little effort to sell the proposal to the public at large. Many prominent guaranteed income supporters viewed Nixon’s version with skepticism, seeing it as too small with too many conditions to fit the model. In the absence of a wider movement for BIG, politicians paid little or no political cost for letting Nixon’s plan die and letting the idea fade from public discussion.

Although the second wave was most visible in the United States and Canada, the discussion spilled over into Europe, even as the second wave waned in North America. A high-level government report in France focused on NIT in 1973. At about the same time, James Meade and others managed to draw attention to the idea in the United Kingdom. In 1977, Politieke Pariji Radicalen, a small party in the Netherlands, became the first party with representation in parliament to endorse UBI. The next year, Niels I. Meyer’s book “Revolt from the Centre” launched a substantial wave of support in Denmark.

People often look back on the second wave of the BIG movement as a lost opportunity because no country introduced a full UBI or NIT, but the second wave had some major successes. The United States and Canada conducted the world’s first BIG implementation trials. The United States created or expanded several programs that can be seen as small steps in the direction of BIG, including food stamps, the EITC, and the Child Tax Credit. All these programs provide income supplements to low-income people. Although they have restrictions and conditions that UBI and NIT don’t, they represent steps toward BIG because they have fewer conditions than most traditional social policies and because they were proposed or expanded as compromise responses to the guaranteed income movement.

In 1982, the State of Alaska introduced the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). The PFD provides yearly dividends, varying usually between $1,000 and $2,000 per year to Alaska residents. Despite being very small, Alaska’s PFD is the closest program yet to meeting the Basic Income Earth Network ’s definition of UBI — falling short only by requiring people to fill out a form to verify that they meet the residency requirement.

Not only did these policies help a lot of people, but their success also provides evidence that can help to push social programs slowly in the direction of universality. But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dramatically changed the conversation. They successfully vilified virtually all welfare recipients as frauds , no matter how well they might have satisfied programs’ need-based criteria. As a result, many people stopped talking about how to expand or improve the welfare system and started talking about whether and how much to cut it. In response, the left largely went on the defensive. Any suggestion that the existing system might be replaced by something better could at that time be seen as lending support to people who wanted to cut existing programs and replace them with nothing.

In 1980, the United States and Canada canceled the last of their implementation trials. Canada stopped analyzing the data that it had spent years and millions of dollars collecting. For the next 30 years, with a few notable exceptions, mainstream politics in most countries included virtually no discussion of BIG.

Between the Waves

The 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were downtime for BIG in world politics, but there were significant exceptions, when proposals briefly gathered attention in one place or another. These exceptions and the growth of academic interest in UBI were extremely important to building what became the third wave of the BIG movement. In 1982, a British parliamentary committee considered a UBI proposal. National waves of support happened in the Netherlands, Denmark, and postapartheid South Africa at various times. But for the most part, discussion of UBI took place outside the political mainstream.

Proposals continued to come out in various circles, but they were more easily ignored in this period. For example, Leonard Greene, an aviation expert and successful entrepreneur, wrote two books and sponsored a demonstration project in which he gave a small UBI to several families, but he received little, if any, media response. When I had the pleasure of meeting him, he described his 10-year-old son’s reaction to UBI, “So what you’re saying is that income doesn’t have to start at zero.” I’ve used that phrase ever since.

As one 10-year-old put it, “So what you’re saying is that income doesn’t have to start at zero.”

One place the UBI discussion grew steadily in this period was in academic journals. In 1984, a group of Britons, led mostly by academics, formed the world’s first national UBI network, the Basic Income Research Group (now the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust ). In 1986, a group of academic researchers established a group that was initially called the Basic Income European Network (BIEN). Philippe Van Parijs (a Belgian philosopher) and Guy Standing (a British economist) were the most active leaders of BIEN for the first 20 or 25 years of its existence.

From the founding of BIEN to the present, UBI, rather than NIT, has dominated the BIG movement. However, in the last few years, the NIT model has come back. In some countries, the BIG discussion is dominated by NIT, usually under other names, such as guaranteed income.

The academic debate grew substantially between the mid-1980s and the 2000s, especially in the fields of politics, philosophy, and sociology. By the mid-2000s, national groups existed in at least two dozen countries, including the United States, where the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network had been established in December 1999. Because so many UBI networks around the world wanted BIEN affiliation, the network changed its name to Basic Income Earth Network in 2004. Yet UBI stayed mostly outside the political mainstream.

I became interested in UBI as a high school student in 1980, just as the second wave of discussion was dying down. I started writing about it professionally after finishing graduate school in 1996, when the idea seemed hopelessly out of the mainstream. For those of us taking part in UBI events in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it felt less like a movement and more like a discussion group.

Even the activist contingent within BIEN and other networks concentrated more on discussion than action, believing (probably correctly) that they had to increase public awareness before they could gather the critical mass of support needed to make political action viable. Isolation from mainstream politics distracted supporters from how much their movement was growing. But as supporters would learn in retrospect, they were helping to lay the groundwork for a takeoff.

The Third Wave

Interest in UBI has grown enormously since 2010. The discussion crossed over into the mainstream international media by the mid-2010s. In some places, the crossover began earlier. Those of us who were volunteering at BIEN’s Basic Income News service noticed a substantial increase in media attention in late 2011 and early 2012, and media attention has grown steadily since. It is impossible to attribute the third wave of the UBI movement to any single source. It is the confluence of many widely dispersed actions and events, which I will try to sketch here as well as I can.

The financial meltdown of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession, and the Arab Spring sparked a new climate of activism. Public attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and inequality. UBI supporters suddenly had a much more welcoming environment for activism.

By 2008, a national wave of UBI support had begun to swell in Germany. Prominent people from across the political spectrum all began to push different UBI proposals in very public ways. That year, UBI activists in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria attracted the critical mass necessary for effective UBI activism and jointly organized the first International Basic Income Week . This event has taken place every year since and has spread around the world, now including actions as far away as Australia and South America.

In 2008, the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition , funded mostly by private donations from the Lutheran Church, began a two-year pilot, giving a small Basic Income to every resident of a rural Namibian village. This project coincided with a smaller one in Brazil and was followed by a much larger one in India in 2010 (both also largely or entirely funded by private donations). These trials attracted substantial media attention both locally and internationally. They helped inspire the privately and publicly funded experiments later conducted around the world.

Just as the Indian experiment faded from the headlines, European activists introduced UBI to the European mainstream media by pushing two citizens’ initiatives, one in Switzerland and one in the European Union, both of which attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures. The EU initiative recruited across Europe and collected signatures from every EU member state. The Swiss initiative collected enough signatures to trigger a national vote, which was held in 2015. Although neither initiative ultimately passed, they both built an infrastructure for UBI activism across Europe and attracted enormous international media attention, which in turn sparked additional activity and attracted more support.

At about this time, journalists around the world started paying attention to UBI, greatly increasing its visibility. By 2015, a third wave was visible to people who were paying attention, and all subsequent activism for UBI owes something to the cumulative results of the actions up to that point.

However, the chain of activism building on activism was only one of many sources of growth in the UBI movement. One of the movement’s most important strengths is its diversity: Support comes from many different places and from people who do not usually work together, follow similar strategies, or adhere to similar ideologies.

By the time the UBI experiment was underway in Namibia, economists and sociologists had already begun reassessing the results of the 1970s NIT experiments in the United States and Canada, bringing renewed press attention to BIG and helping to spark new interest in the idea.

Another source of momentum for UBI came from developing countries that had been streamlining and easing the conditions of eligibility for redistributive programs by creating what are now known as conditional cash transfers (CCTs). Although these programs were conditional, the results from easing conditions were so positive that they significantly bolstered support for further steps toward UBI, not only in lesser-developed countries of the Global South but all around the world. At least one CCT program, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, inspired by the senator and UBI advocate Eduardo Suplicy, was introduced explicitly as a step toward UBI.

Support comes from many different places and from people who do not usually work together, follow similar strategies, or adhere to similar ideologies.

The third wave of the UBI movement is more identifiably left of center than the second wave, which involved many people who portrayed BIG as a compromise between left and right. But some right-of-center support has boosted the movement as well. For example, a group of philosophers and economists calling themselves Bleeding Heart Libertarians wrote a significant amount of pro-UBI literature in the 2010s.

Mirroring the futurism discourse of the 1960s, new attention to the automation of labor and the related precariousness of employment brought many new adherents to UBI. As unemployment reached new highs during the Great Recession and job openings lagged behind the overall economic recovery, many people, especially in high-tech industries in the United States, began to worry that the pace of automation was threatening large segments of the labor force with high unemployment, low wages, and gig-economy precariousness. Labor leaders, activists, academics, and tech entrepreneurs have all proposed UBI in response, making automation-related labor market changes one of the prime drivers of recent interest in UBI, especially in the United States. Some entrepreneurs, such as Chris Hughes of Facebook and the late Götz Werner of the German drugstore chain DM, have put their money where their mouth is, supporting UBI research, activism, and experimentation, giving an unquestionable boost to the movement.

Another way technology has affected the UBI debate is through cryptocurrencies (privately issued, all-electronic mediums of exchange). Some people see cryptocurrency as a way to bypass central banks entirely and provide users with a UBI in the newly created currency.

Environmentalism has also played a major role in the growth of interest in UBI. Two of the most popular proposals for combating climate change are the tax-and-dividend and cap-and-dividend strategies, both of which involve setting a price on carbon emissions and distributing the revenue to all citizens — thereby creating at least a small UBI. Some environmentalists see UBI as a way to counteract the depletion of resources by giving people a way out of the cycle of work and consumption. These kinds of proposals have received support from both Republicans and Democrats.

Growing interest in UBI, and to some extent tech industry money, have inspired a new round of UBI and UBI-related pilot projects in Finland, Kenya, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and many other places. UBI experiments are both a product and a driver of the current wave of support for UBI. This new round is characterized mostly by many small experiments rather than the few large experiments of the 1970s. Part of the reason is that many of the contemporary experiments are privately financed and therefore have to work on more limited budgets.

One exception is GiveDirectly’s enormous project in Kenya . This nonprofit has raised enough funds to finance a UBI of 75 cents per day for 20,000 people for 12 years, in an area where many people live on a dollar per day or less. When complete, this study will be the largest and longest UBI experiment ever conducted.

Between 2017 and 2020, UBI support got a large boost from Andrew Yang’s campaign for president of the United States. He was the first major-party candidate to endorse UBI since 1972, and the first ever to make UBI the centerpiece of their platform. For a political outsider, Yang did extremely well, qualifying for debates and recruiting a large network of supporters. Partly inspired by Yang, many candidates for lower offices also endorsed UBI in 2020 and 2022.

U.S. activism for UBI took off in October 2019, when activists in New York organized a UBI march from Harlem to the South Bronx. Hundreds of people, including myself , participated in the New York march, while 30 cities around the world joined in with their own marches. The march was so successful that organizers decided to make it an annual event. The 2022 march took place on September 24 at the climax of Basic Income Week.

Just as Yang suspended his campaign in 2020, UBI got yet another boost from an unexpected source. The COVID-19 outbreak and the related economic meltdown gave impetus for a temporary, emergency UBI. Suddenly mainstream politicians across the world were discussing UBI.

UBI was particularly well suited to the COVID situation. It functions as a cushion for people who are unable to work either because of social distancing or because of the economic downturn, and at the very same time it functions as a bonus for the essential workers asked to remain on the job during a pandemic. In both ways, it helps reduce the severity of the recession by stimulating the economy from the bottom up. To some extent, these policies represented politicians catching up with activists who had been calling for quantitative easing for the people (rather than for bankers) since the start of the Great Recession in 2009.

As late as perhaps 2015, it remained unclear whether the third wave would match the size and reach of the second. By 2019, the answer was obvious: Grassroots support and international media attention are more extensive than ever. The third wave represents the first truly global wave of UBI support. The first two did not extend much beyond the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but the third wave involves major campaigns on all inhabited continents.

The Pattern

This look at the ups and downs of the UBI movement shows that UBI has tended to enter the mainstream conversation at times when people were concerned with and open to new approaches to address inequality, poverty, and unemployment. UBI has tended to recede from the mainstream conversation when public attention turned to other issues, or when other ways of addressing inequality became dominant. The first wave subsided when policymakers settled on the attempt to build a comprehensive welfare system on the conditional model. The second wave subsided (at least in the United States and Canada) not in the prosperous economy of the mid-1980s but in the troubling times of the late 1970s, when right-wing politicians convinced large numbers of people that redistributive programs should be cut instead of improved.

The biggest danger to the third wave appears to be growing nationalism. If nationalist politicians can convince enough voters to blame immigrants and foreign competition for growing inequality, they can effectively distract people from mobilizing around better social policies.

Karl Widerquist , a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University-Qatar who specializes in distributive justice, is the author of “ Universal Basic Income ,” from which this article is excerpted.

This article draws heavily on Widerquist’s essay “ Three Waves of Basic Income Support ,” published in “The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income,” edited by Malcolm Torry.

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Given the flux of American politics right now, an idea like “universal basic income” could gain political traction, a Stanford historian says.

Stanford scholar Jennifer Burns , a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of history in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, says such a program could help protect workers who hit rock bottom in an age of technological disruption.

A basic income – also called basic income guarantee, universal basic income or basic living stipend – is a program in which citizens of a country receive a regular sum of money from the government. Tech leaders Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have floated the idea, and the city of Chicago is considering such a proposal as a way to reduce the disruptions of automation in the workforce.

Jennifer Burns, associate professor of history, says a universal basic income program could help protect workers who have hit rock bottom. (Image credit: Courtesy Jennifer Burns)

Burns researches and writes about 20th-century American intellectual, political, and cultural history and is currently writing a book about the economist Milton Friedman , who supported the idea of a universal income.

What would be the benefits of a universal basic income if it were to become a reality?

The most attractive aspect of universal basic income, or UBI, is that it can serve to underwrite market participation, in contrast to other welfare programs that essentially require people to not be employed to receive the benefit. Some programs even require participants to have essentially zero assets in order to qualify. In effect, the programs kick in when people have hit rock bottom, rather than trying to prevent them from getting there in the first place.

What are the best arguments against a universal basic income?

The best argument against UBI is feasibility. You may be surprised I do not mention cost. If one multiplies the popular figure for an annual UBI – typically $12,000 a year – by the population of the United States, you get an eye-popping figure of over $3 trillion. The figure varies depending on whether children are included and at what benefit level. However, if you set this against current taxes and transfers, and conceptualize the UBI as a benefit that can be taxed for higher earners, the costs come down significantly.

The real challenge is political. First, there is significant bias against unconditional transfer programs. Most welfare programs in the United States are tied in some way to employment; for example, think of Social Security. Building popular support for a program that breaks this connection between welfare and work will require political leadership of the highest order. And then there is the enormous hurdle of integrating a UBI with the extant institutional and bureaucratic structure of the federal state. For these reasons, we may see a UBI on the state level first.

What did Milton Friedman think of the idea of a universal basic income?

Although he didn’t call it a UBI, the idea of a minimum income was the earliest policy proposal Friedman came up with. In his papers, I was astounded to find his first proposal for what he called “a minimum standard of living” written in 1939. This is when he was completely unknown as an economist, although he was clearly already thinking big.  Eventually, he revised it into a proposal for a negative income tax, which was enacted through the earned income tax credit, or EITC, a policy still in place today. The EITC is considered a highly successful program, with well-documented benefits for children in particular. Scholars have also found it serves to increase workforce participation among recipients.

Although he has a reputation as a radical libertarian, Friedman believed there was a clear role for the state in society. In particular, he believed there would always be persons who could not compete effectively in a market economy. He also recognized the role of luck in life, even calling the memoir he wrote with his wife, Rose, Two Lucky People . Whether it was temporary assistance or long-term support, Friedman saw a place for welfare. But Friedman was a great believer in the power of choice. Rather than give poor people specific benefits – food stamps, for example – he favored giving people cash that they could then bring into the marketplace and use to exercise individual choice.

Wouldn’t people stop working if they got “free money”?

That’s another common response to the idea of UBI. In most scenarios, the grant would not be enough to forsake paid employment altogether. The idea is that when combined with paid income, a UBI would lift the living standard of even low-skilled, low-income workers. This is why the EITC has been so effective. However, families could pool grants, perhaps enabling several members to leave the workforce altogether. This possibility has proven a point of interest both to conservatives, who point out that current welfare programs often incentivize fathers to live apart from their children, and progressives who want to provide cash benefits to mothers and others providing family care.

Milton Friedman had an interesting take on this issue. William F. Buckley asked him if he wasn’t worried about people taking the money and neglecting their children, etc. Friedman responded: “If we give them the money, we will strengthen their responsibility.” He seemed to be making a point that more recent social science research has fleshed out. Poverty, scholars have found, actually makes it harder to be responsible, to plan, to think about the future. When you are focused on getting enough to eat, or making rent, you don’t have many psychological resources left over to focus on anything else. And, when you can’t pay a traffic fine or afford safe housing, all the other foundations of a good life like steady employment and getting your children an education can also be out of reach.

What does the future hold for universal basic income in the U.S.?

If the future of UBI can be gauged from media interest, its future is bright. Also, the idea has attracted an enormous number of high-level supporters. Particularly in Silicon Valley, it’s a genuine fad, attracting adherents from entrepreneurs and tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

There are two challenges ahead. The first is to spread the basic idea so that it continues to move from fringe to mainstream. The second is to build it into a workable policy with a political base. Given the fluidity of American politics right now, it could be the perfect moment for a policy that is at once utopian, bipartisan and deeply rooted in American thought.

Media Contacts

Jennifer Burns: [email protected]

Clifton B. Parker, Hoover Institution: (650) 498-5204, [email protected]

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Home > USC Columbia > HONORS_COLLEGE > SENIOR_THESES > 587

Senior Theses

Free money: the feasibility of implementing a universal basic income in the united states.

Chase H. Dorn , University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow

Date of Award

Spring 2023

Degree Type

Moore School of Business

Director of Thesis

Dr. Christian Jensen

First Reader

Dr. Jason DeBacker

Second Reader

The objective of this thesis is to explore whether a universal basic income paid to all United States citizens is both economically possible and advantageous. A recent surge in popularity of the idea has led to a plethora of universal basic income experiments that have been or are being performed across the world, however there has yet to be a UBI implemented on a national level. Using data from these experiments and existing academic research into the policy, the first part of the thesis details the necessary components of a UBI, documents the history of the idea, notes the justifications for implementing the policy, and addresses related criticisms.

The second part of the thesis calculates a ballpark cost estimate of an aggressive universal basic income that would eliminate poverty almost completely. It utilizes a simplified method employed in earlier academic research as a basis for the cost equation before exploring five different hypothetical methods of funding such a program: repurposing of redundant welfare budgets, a value-added tax, wealth tax, corporate tax, and carbon tax. Using aggressive cost estimates and conservative funding estimates, the rudimentary calculation methods determine a UBI to be feasible for the United States. This thesis is intended to deconstruct the utopian and far-fetched label that UBI often receives, showing that considering this policy to be realistic is not quite as naïve as some might think.

Recommended Citation

Dorn, Chase H., "Free Money: The Feasibility of Implementing a Universal Basic Income in the United States" (2023). Senior Theses . 587. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/senior_theses/587

© 2023, Chase H Dorn

Since April 19, 2023

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IMF Working Papers

Universal basic income: debate and impact assessment.

Author/Editor:

Maura Francese ; Delphine Prady

Publication Date:

December 10, 2018

Electronic Access:

Free Download . Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file

Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.

This paper discusses the definition and modelling of a universal basic income (UBI). After clarifying the debate about what a UBI is and presenting the arguments in favor and against, an analytical approach for its assessment is proposed. The adoption of a UBI as a policy tool is discussed with regard to the policy objectives (shaped by social preferences) it is designed to achieve. Key design dimensions to be considered include: coverage, generosity of the program, overall progressivity of the policy, and its financing.

Working Paper No. 2018/273

Income distribution Income inequality Labor Personal income Progressive taxation

9781484388815/1018-5941

WPIEA2018273

Please address any questions about this title to [email protected]

Universal Basic Income and Consumption Essay

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The issues related to inequality and economic disparities always have topical for human civilization. The uneven distribution of wealth has become the central theme of endless conflicts around the globe. In fact, economic inequality can be considered to be the primary factor of the class stratification of society. In order to address the problem, prominent economists, politicians, experts, and activists have proposed an array of solutions. In recent years, the notion of universal basic income (UBI) has acquired particular importance. The idea of providing each household with a certain amount of money has been actively discussed as a means of eradicating poverty and inequality. The idea’s proponents claim that the UBI is an effective instrument, which would enable a better quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. Nevertheless, such propositions tend to disregard the economic impact of the universal basic income. Instead, it has the potential to increase the degree of uncertainty in the already complicated environment. This essay argues that the implementation of the UBI will not alleviate the issue of income disparities, reviewing it from a purely economic perspective.

In its general understanding, the idea of universal basic income is presented in a similar manner across various contexts. According to the concept, each person should be entitled to a specific amount of income on unconditional terms. The exact amount of funds is to be determined individually for each particular nation. Ideally, it should exceed the basic sustenance level, thus allowing people to have a broader range of needs covered. Proponents assume that the UBI is bound to alleviate the stress experienced by those who are forced to take unpleasant jobs for the sake of survival. Simon Lewis dedicated a considerable portion of his opinion-based article to universal basic income. The author lists the UBI among the key aspects of a well-functioning society of the future. Lewis states that the implementation of this idea is expected to increase people’s quality of life and reduce global consumption levels by a significant margin. This forecast is based on the idea that the current elevated level of consumption is conditioned by the pursuit of reward after hard work.

Nevertheless, it appears possible to view the discussed matter from a different perspective, which would dictate an entirely different outcome. First of all, the envisaged reduction of consumption levels appears to contradict current trends. The rise of consumerism has been observed across nations, and the tendency remains strong in the 2020s. Today’s industries develop at an unprecedentedly rapid pace, presenting new benefits of modern civilization more quickly than ever. Consequently, consumers are eager to purchase and test the new advancements, which often happens at the expense of more relevant elements of sustenance (Campbell 2018). Evidently, the demands and desires of society constantly evolve, and the introduction of the UBI will resolve the issue. If universal income is provided, the demand-conditioned aspects of the market are only going to increase, thus prompting industries to respond by an elevated supply. For example, if a person receives an additional $1000 per month, the current trends suggest that they will be more likely to spend it on various means of entertainment rather than more basic needs. Changing the patterns of consumption is a major objective, but it would require a profound shift of global mentality.

Furthermore, the idea of a universal basic income deserves additional research in terms of its macroeconomic impact. As established above, the idea of the UBI is unlikely to instigate short-to-mid-term positive results on a scale of individual consumer behavior. However, it is equally projected to have major repercussions for the global economy. In the 21 st century, the vast majority of developed nations rely on capitalist principles. Within this framework, purchasing power plays a crucial role in determining the state of the market in terms of supply, demand, production, and prices. In other words, the value and the cost of a specific product or service are determined by its necessity and the number of consumers who can afford it. In this regard, the UBI ventures beyond the principles of the modern economy (Hoynes and Rothstein 933). If each household receives a specific, fixed sum on an unconditional basis, the default level of wealth will simply move from zero to the UBI amount. Consequently, the market will react to the innovation, adjusting its key parameters in kind. In the end, the expenses will increase proportionally to the current state through inflation.

The idea of the universal basic income, as it is, demonstrates a broad array of variables, which are often ignored by its proponents. In his article, Simon Lewis argues that the implementation of the UBI will be a major step toward an equal society. According to these ideas, less financially secure people will be able to provide themselves with basic needs while having a portion of their budgets left for other purposes. However, this presentation of the idea does not necessarily eliminate the idea of economic disparity. Fouksman and Klein write that the questions of power and class relations remain the most serious impediments to the UBI. The situation will not dramatically change, as wealthy people will receive the basic amount, as well. If there are to be specific criteria, excluding certain groups from the UBI framework, it will contradict the very basis of the notion. The UBI is supposed to be universal, and imposing limitations will revert the concept toward the territory of welfare. In this case, the initiative will face similar issues as welfare distribution in the context of systemic discrimination and power abuse.

The universal basic income represents an area of intense interest for researchers and the public, in general, due to its perceived potential in terms of resolving profound economic issues. The idea of the UBI has attracted many proponents who continue to promote it as the key to a prosperous future. The concept implies that each citizen is to receive a guaranteed payment on a universal basis, meaning that less fortunate social groups can enjoy financial security and better quality of life. In reality, the UBI is far from being an inherently positive phenomenon for a variety of reasons. First of all, additional funds are unlikely to cause a major change in terms of consumer behavior patterns. This process is projected to be long and difficult, only being attainable through profound education in the area of financial literacy and environmental awareness. In addition, the UBI has the potential to disrupt the fundamental economic concepts upon which capitalist societies are based. Overall, it is possible to conclude that the idea of universal basic income in its current state is far from optimal, as its practical disadvantages outweigh the perceived benefits.

Works Cited

Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Fouksman, E. and E. Klein. “Radical Transformation or Technological Intervention? Two Paths for Universal Basic Income.” World Development , vol. 122, 2019, pp. 492-500.

Hoynes, Hillary and Jesse Rothstein. “Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries.” Annual Review of Economics , vol. 11, 2019, pp. 929-958.

Lewis, Simon. “Four steps this Earth Day to avert environmental catastrophe.” The Guardian, 2021. Web.

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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 22, 2019, review article, the political theory of universal basic income.

• Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 22:481-501 (Volume publication date May 2019) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317-070954
• First published as a Review in Advance on March 05, 2019
• Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Universal basic income (UBI) is a radical policy proposal of a monthly cash grant given to all members of a community without means test, regardless of personal desert, with no strings attached, and, under most proposals, at a sufficiently high level to enable a life free from economic insecurity. Once a utopian proposal, the policy is now widely discussed and piloted throughout the world. Among the various objections to the proposal, one concerns its moral adequacy: Isn't it fundamentally unjust to give cash to all indiscriminately rather than to those who need it and deserve it? This article reviews the variety of strategies deployed by political theorists to posit that the proposal is in fact justified, or even required, by social justice. The review focuses mainly on the contemporary normative debate on UBI—roughly dating back to Philippe Van Parijs's influential work in the 1990s—and is centered on the ideals of freedom and equality.

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Towards a Kantian Argument for a Universal Basic Income

• Published: 09 November 2022
• Volume 26 , pages 225–236, ( 2023 )

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• Alessandro Pinzani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8721-2134 1  

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The paper defends that it is possible to offer a Kantian argument for justifying the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI). It first briefly presents Philippe van Parijs’ argument for UBI based on the concept of real freedom for all. In doing so, it will focus on its general structure and central insight, without entering too much into other issues like the economic feasibility of UBI. It second briefly presents Kant’s concept of external freedom and especially focuses on some of its components to assess whether there is some closeness to van Parijs’ concept of real freedom. It further considers whether UBI is not only compatible with a Kantian position, but can be justified from such a position because it represents a tool for concretely realizing external freedom as presented in the Doctrine of Right and for attaining the ethical ideal of virtuosity presented in the Doctrine of Virtue .

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The introduction of UBI can be defended on the basis of different arguments such as the communitarian argument (Freeden 1992 ), the compensation argument (first used by Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice : see Paine 1995 ), or the basic needs argument. None of them, however, can be defended from a Kantian perspective. I cannot prove this in this context, though.

On this controversial thesis see Mészáros 1995 , Rifkin 1995 and Gorz 1999 . On the future of mechanization see Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014 .

Children, particularly from poor families, may face many external obstacles to their education, even when there is a public system of education: schools may be too far away in the absence of public transport; parents may take children out of school because they need their help at home or to provide another source of income, etc.

On Kant’s concept of external freedom see among others Ripstein 2009 , Bird and Hruschka 2010 , Horn 2014 , as well as Pinzani 2017 , 2021b .

Quotations from Kant are marked by referring to the English translation I used (Kant 1996 ) and by indicating the volume and the page of the Akademie-Ausgabe of his works.

It shares this formality with Kant’s metaphysical concept of right, which he defines as “the sum of the conditions under which the choice [ Willkür ] of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom” (Kant 1996 , 387; 06: 230).

According to Kant, the criminal loses his “dignity of a citizen” through his crime, and, “though he is kept alive, he is made a mere tool of another’s choice (either of the state or of another citizen).” Now, Kant goes on, “whoever is another’s tool (which he can become only by a verdict and right) is a bondsman (servus in sensu stricto) and is the property (dominium) of another, who is accordingly not merely his master (herus) but also his owner (dominus) and can therefore alienate him as a thing, use him as he pleases (only not for shameful purposes) and dispose of his powers though not of his life and members” (471 f.; 06: 229 f.).

See Hobbes 1996 , 91 ( Leviathan , chapter XIV) and Hayek 2011 , 58 and passim.

On this see Horn 2014 , who convincingly argues for a non-individualistic justification for the existence of the state in Kant.

On Kant on taxation see Penner 2010 .

It is noteworthy that the political community has a duty of self-preservation and therefore a duty to assist its poorest members while these have no corresponding subjective right to such assistance. On the contrary, it is evidently expected that they help themselves through work, since laziness is not admitted and since only individuals who, for different reasons, are not able to work are eligible for public assistance.

As Paul infamously put it: “If anyone will not work, then let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians, 3:10). On Luther see Geremek 1994 , 180.

An example of this can be observed in the case of the abolishment of the Brazilian social program Bolsa Familia (one of the largest of the world) by the government of President Bolsonaro.

Karen Stohr called my attention to this point.

One could also claim that it represents a violation of human dignity (see Mieth and Williams 2022 ), but Kant’s view of this concept is not as unequivocal as it is often assumed (for an exhaustive analysis see Sensen 2011 ), and I would rather leave this issue aside since I think that the argument according to which poverty is a hindrance to the fulfillment of our duties already offers a good reason for eradicating it.

Once again, I thank Karen Stohr for calling my attention to this point.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to this paper was funded by CNPq with grant nr. 302590/2018-8. I thank for their suggestions and critiques the two anonymous reviewers of a first version of the paper, as well as Claudia Blöser, Violetta Igneski, Corinna Mieth, Reza Mosayebi, Oliver Sensen, Martin Sticker, Karen Stohr, Garrath Williams, and Ariel Zylberman. I would also like to thank Kim Butson for reviewing the text.

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Pinzani, A. Towards a Kantian Argument for a Universal Basic Income. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 26 , 225–236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-022-10339-z

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Why We Shouldn’t Go Through With Universal Basic Income

The idea of giving everyone their basic necessities seems like everything we could want. Although It may have many upsides and the concept seems good, it is just too difficult to march towards the goal of a UBI right now because we have to deal with other issues already on our plate.

During the 2020 Election, presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, proposed the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) for every American, but this was not a new idea. Although it has been proposed in numerous countries such as Kenya, Italy and Finland , they are still in the testing phases of implementing a UBI and have found that it has been successful.

For some American citizens, some type of UBI could have been useful, such as the mother of Los Angeles Times journalist Sukhi Samra . At 53 , she “had enrolled in GED courses twice before, but dropped out because there just weren’t enough hours in the day to juggle school, work, three daughters and a disabled husband.”

People should not have to put their opportunities for growth on hold just so they can make enough for their everyday living. That is why the benefits of the UBI seem so attractive – it gives the illusion that you will be financially safe so that you would not have to worry about your next meals or being able to provide for your family.

In a perfect world this could work, but with all the issues that we are currently facing and how they keep piling up, it would be difficult to put any of them in priority over the other. One example of this would be the current COVID-19 pandemic. Other than a couple stimulus checks, the government is struggling to formulate a plan to return us to normality, and for the time being that should be our main focus.

Rachel Minogue from Third Way made some very good points on why the implementation of a UBI would be difficult.

One of the first issues that would be difficult to handle is the ridiculous cost that would be needed to begin the program: a whopping $2.4 trillion annually. With this being about one-eighth of the nation’s GDP, it is just too much money to contribute to one sole cause.

Another problem with this is how the citizens would react to this safety net. Instead of giving people some sense of relief to pursue higher education or not need to overwork themselves, this could push certain individuals to not work at all and live off of the system.

This would lead to the unemployment rate getting higher and people just settling for doing nothing. The jobs that are in high demand would not have enough resources to get stuff done, and little by little the world around us would falter because the economy relies on people’s incentive to work.

The final problem of a system with UBI is that inflation could be triggered. If everyone is spending their newfound income, the demand will grow so the price of the supply will grow as well.

In a different situation where we have all of our other issues sorted out, this system could work. Until then it is just not possible because there are other priorities.

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) – Top 3 Pros and Cons

Universal basic income (UBI) is an unconditional cash payment given at regular intervals by the government to all residents, regardless of their earnings or employment status. [ 45 ]

UBI remains largely theoretical and, thus, does not have much of a history.

Pilot UBI or more limited basic income programs that give a basic income to a smaller group of people instead of an entire population have taken place or are ongoing in Brazil , Canada , China , Finland , Germany , India , Iran , Japan , Kenya , Namibia , Spain , and The Netherlands . [ 46 ]

In the United States, the Alaska Permanent Fund (AFP), created in 1976, is funded by oil revenues . AFP provides dividends to permanent residents of the state. The amount varies each year based on the stock market and other factors, and has ranged from $331.29 (1984) to $2,072 (2015). The payout for 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic was $992.00, the smallest check received since 2013. The most recent payment was $1,312 for 2023. [ 46 ] [ 47 ] [ 48 ] [ 49 ] [ 58 ]

UBI popped up in American news thanks to the 2020 presidential campaign of Andrew Yang whose continued promotion of a UBI resulted in the formation of a nonprofit, Humanity Forward. [ 53 ]

Some consider the stimulus payments from the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic to be a sort of “emergency UBI.” Those payments, however, were not unconditional, but instead were calculated based on individual or family income. [ 59 ]

Should the United States Implement a Universal Basic Income?

Pro 1 Universal Basic Income (UBI) reduces poverty and income inequality, and improves physical and mental health. A UBI set at $1,000 per adult per month and $300 per child per month would eradicate US poverty entirely, according to Scott Santens, Founding Member of the Economic Security Project. [ 12 ] Case in point: the poverty rate in Brazil fell to the lowest level in 40 years in just six months in 2020 after $110 (600 reais) a month was distributed to about 25% of the population as pandemic relief program called Bolsa Família. [ 51 ] Namibia’s UBI program trial, the Basic Income Grant, reduced household poverty rates from 76% of residents before the trial started to 37% after one year. Child malnutrition rates also fell from 42% to 17% in six months. [ 7 ] Participants in India’s UBI trial said that UBI helped improve their health by enabling them to afford medicine, improve sanitation, gain access to clean water, eat more regularly, and reduce their anxiety levels. [ 14 ] Mincome, a trial UBI in Manitoba, Canada, found that hospitalizations for accidents, injuries, and mental health diagnoses declined during the trial. [ 1 ] Kenya’s ongoing UBI trial has reportedly led to increased happiness and life satisfaction, and to reduced stress and depression, proving UBI could improve a range of mental health concerns and stressful situations proven to deteriorate mental health. [ 2 ] “Recent research has linked the stress of poverty with inflammation in the brain… UBI could be set at a level to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. This would reduce much of the stress faced by the working poor or families on benefits… UBI would also help people, usually women and children, to leave abusive relationships. Domestic abuse occurs more often in poorer households, where victims lack the financial means to escape. Similarly, UBI might prevent the negative childhood experiences believed to lead to mental illness and other problems later in life. These include experiencing violence or abuse, or having parents with mental health, substance abuse and legal problems. Behind these problems are often poverty, inequality and social isolation,” says Matthew Smith, professor in health history at the University of Strathclyde. [ 50 ] Read More

Pro 2 UBI leads to positive job growth and a better educated citizenry. The guarantee of UBI protects people from sluggish wage growth, low wages, and the lack of job security caused by the effects of the growing gig economy, as well as increased automation in the workplace. [ 42 ] [ 5 ] [ 10 ] Researchers from the Roosevelt Institute created three models for American implementation of UBI and found that under all scenarios, UBI would grow the economy by increasing output, employment, prices, and wages. [ 44 ] Since implementation of the Alaska Permanent Fund, for example, the increased purchasing power of UBI recipients has resulted in 10,000 additional jobs for the state. [ 6 ] UBI would also give employees the financial security to leave a bad job, or wait until the good job comes along to (re)join the job market. People won’t have to take an awful job just to pay the bills. [ 54 ] Further, UBI enables people to stay in school longer, reducing drop-out rates, and to participate in training to improve skills or learn a trade, improving their chances of getting a good job. Uganda’s UBI trial, the Youth Opportunities Program, enabled participants to invest in skills training as well as tools and materials, resulting in an increase of business assets by 57%, work hours by 17%, and earnings by 38%. [ 8 ] The Canadian Mincome trial found that participants of the trial were more likely to complete high school than counterparts not involved in the trial. [ 1 ] The Basic Income Grant trial in Namibia (2007-2012) enabled parents to afford school fees, buy school uniforms, and encourage attendance. As a result, school dropout rates fell from almost 40% in Nov. 2007 to 5% in June 2008 to almost 0% in Nov. 2008. [ 7 ] Read More

Pro 3 UBI reduces gender inequality. UBI makes all forms of work, including childcare and eldercare, “equally deserving” of payment. “Almost definitionally, a properly designed basic income system will reduce gender-based inequality, because on average the payment will represent a higher share of women’s income,” says Guy Standing, professor of development studies at the University of London [ 25 ] [ 56 ] A UBI also allows working parents to reduce their working hours in order to spend more time with their children or help with household chores. [ 26 ] [ 27 ] Reviewing the UBI trial in India, SEWA Bharat (an organization related to women’s employment) and UNICEF (a children’s rights organization) concluded that “women’s empowerment was one of the more important outcomes of this experiment,” noting that women receiving a UBI participated more in household decision making, and benefited from improved access to food, healthcare, and education. [ 14 ] The Basic Income Grant Coalition trial in Namibia found that UBI “reduced the dependency of women on men for their survival” and reduced the pressure to engage in transactional sex. [ 7 ] Mincome, the Canadian UBI trial, found that emergency room visits as a result of domestic violence reduced during the period of the trial, possibly because of the reduction in income-inequality between women and men. [ 28 ] Read More

Con 1 Universal Basic Income (UBI) increases poverty. Universal Basic Income (UBI) takes money from the poor and gives it to everyone, increasing poverty and depriving the poor of much needed targeted support. People experiencing poverty face a variety of hardships that are addressed with existing anti-poverty measures such as food stamps, medical aid, and child assistance programs. UBI programs often use funds from these targeted programs for distribution to everyone without regard for need. [ 15 ] “If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them,” according to Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. [ 15 ] Luke Martinelli, research associate at the University of Bath, created three models of UBI implementation and concluded that all three would lead to a significant number of individuals and households who are worse off. He notes, “these losses are not concentrated among richer groups; on the contrary, they are proportionally larger for the bottom three income quintiles .” [ 37 ] “Rather than reducing the overall headcount of those in poverty, a BI [basic income] would change the composition of the income-poor population” and thus “would not prove to be an effective tool for reducing poverty,” concludes Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Finland, France, Italy, and the U.K. [ 39 ] UBI does not cure addiction, poor health, lack of skills, or other factors that contribute to and exacerbate poverty, making UBI less cost-effective than targeted welfare programs. [ 19 ] [ 24 ] There is “the danger of UBI entrenching low pay and precarious work. It could effectively subsidise employers who pay low wages and – by creating a small cushion for workers on short-term and zero-hours contracts – help to normalise precarity,” explain Anna Coote, of the New Economics Foundation, and Edanur Yazici, PhD student. UBI could become another American tipping system in which employers pay low wages and count on customers to fill in the gap with tips. [ 52 ] Read More

Con 2 UBI is too expensive. A $2,000 a month per head of household UBI would cost an estimated $2.275 trillion annually, says Marc Joffe, Director of Policy Research at the California Policy Center. Some of this cost could be offset by eliminating federal, state, and local assistance programs; however, by Joffe’s calculation, “these offsets total only $810 billion… [leaving] a net budgetary cost of over $1.4 trillion for a universal basic income program.” [ 23 ] A 2018 study found that a $1,000 a month stipend to every adult in the United States would cost about $3.81 trillion per year, or about 21% of the 2018 GDP, or about 78% of 2018 tax revenue. [ 57 ] The UBI trial in Finland provided participants with €560 ($673 USD) a month for two years. Finland’s UBI model is “impossibly expensive, since it would increase the government deficit by about 5 percent,” explains lkka Kaukoranta, Chief Economist of the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK). [ 20 ] [ 21 ] Former U.K. Minister of State for Employment Damian Hinds rejected the idea of UBI during parliamentary debate, saying that the estimated implementation costs ranging from £8.2 billion – £160 billion ($10.8 billion – $211 billion USD) are “clearly unaffordable.” [ 38 ] Economist John Kay, Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, studied proposed UBI levels in Finland, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and concludes that, in all of these countries, UBI at a level which can guarantee an acceptable standard of living is “impossibly expensive… Either the level of basic income is unacceptably low, or the cost of providing it is unacceptably high.” [ 41 ] Read More

Con 3 UBI removes the incentive to work. Earned income motivates people to work, be successful, work cooperatively with colleagues, and gain skills. However, “if we pay people, unconditionally, to do nothing… they will do nothing” and this leads to a less effective economy, says Charles Wyplosz, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. [ 33 ] The Swiss government opposed implementation of UBI, stating that it would entice fewer people to work and thus exacerbate the current labor and skills shortages. [ 34 ] A strong economy relies on people being motivated to work hard, and in order to motivate people there needs to be an element of uncertainty for the future. UBI, providing guaranteed security, removes this uncertainty, according to economist Allison Schrager. [ 36 ] UBI would cause people “to abjure work for a life of idle fun… [and would] depress the willingness to produce and pay taxes of those who resent having to support them,” says Elizabeth Anderson, professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. In fact, guaranteed income trials in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s found that the people who received payments worked fewer hours. [ 9 ] [ 17 ] “The daily routines of existing work-free men should make proponents of the UBI think long and hard. Instead of producing new community activists, composers, and philosophers, more paid worklessness in America might only further deplete our nation’s social capital at a time when good citizenship is already in painfully short supply,” according to Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky, both at American Enterprise Institute (AEI). [ 55 ] Read More

Discussion Questions

1. Should the United States implement a Universal Basic Income? Why or why not?

2. Should cities or states implement Universal Basic Income? Why or why not?

3. What other economic polices to reduce poverty would you enact? Explain your answers.

Take Action

1. Investigate the World Bank’s report, “Exploring Universal Basic Income: A Guide to Navigating Concepts, Evidence, and Practices.”

2. Explore Stanford University’s Basic Income Lab .

3. Examine where a basic income has been implemented and the results at Vox .

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives .

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Universal Basic Income: To UBI or not to UBI

February 12, 2022

by Sonny Africa

The catastrophic collapse of family incomes from lockdowns worldwide when COVID-19 hit has spurred interest in universal basic income (UBI) programs. It seems especially urgent now as socioeconomic statistics come in. Officially reported poverty increased in the first semester of 2021, the recently released December 2021 labor force figures set up the Duterte administration to have the biggest increase in unemployment in the post-Marcos era, and so-called job creation is virtually all in poor quality informal work.

Pope Francis visibly pushed for UBI last year, some lawmakers have tossed the idea around, and the lone Leftist presidential candidate in the May 2022 elections is formally proposing it. Institutionalizing more comprehensive and actually universal social protection is certainly long overdue. Current measures are fragmented and, outside of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) for the poorest four million or so families, underfunded.

However, this starts with the current and next administration making the clear policy choice that one of its key development objectives is ensuring that every Filipino has a minimum decent standard of living. This should be on a daily basis and especially in situations of distress, crisis and vulnerability such as the current pandemic.

Need for universal social protection

A universal social protection floor should include not just basic income security but also essential health care and minimum education and nutrition for children. The best and most sustainable sources of financing for this are the redistributive measures of higher income taxes and a wealth tax on the rich. IBON has been advocating for a billionaire tax for years.

There is already a rudimentary delivery mechanism for cash transfers that can be improved further. For social services, the government will need to let go of its overly market-oriented framework. Health care can’t be privatized and education shouldn’t be commercialized. Robust publicly-provided social services are still the best ways for affordability and accessibility over the long-run.

The crisis will worsen inequality especially with the government not taking any steps to mitigate this. The richest families and largest corporations will remain secure. MSMEs have closed permanently with adverse consequences on their owners and employees.

Many poor have been put out of work, face lower incomes from whatever odd-jobs they have, spend more on health care and education, and depleted any savings they might have had. The high unemployment also certainly means huge downward pressure on wages.

Free, affordable services more vital

The objective of a universal basic income (UBI) to ensure that everyone has a minimum basic income is unassailable. However, it’s probably inappropriate in the Philippine policy context and at its level of development.

For the UBI to be meaningful it will have to be large and such a large permanent cash transfer will likely have adverse policy consequences. The budget for this will easily run into the hundreds of billions of pesos.

Given the government’s overly market-oriented approach to social development, this could lead to a decline in public services where the UBI will be seen as the quick fix to development and universal social protection. Budgets for the public health system, education system, and welfare services will likely suffer and be increasingly turned over to the “efficient” private sector. The end result will be even more emaciated publicly-provided social services.

This kind of dynamic is already seen in the health sector. The government’s approach to universal health care is PhilHealth – e.g., a health insurance scheme essentially giving patients funds to pay for health care. The pandemic has drawn attention to how this privatized approach has resulted in an increasingly underfunded public health system and in insufficient health care capacity.

Public hospitals are underfunded because PhilHealth supporting the health expenses of its beneficiaries is supposed to incentivize private hospitals to provide this.  This has already resulted in more private hospital beds than public hospital beds.

Profit-seeking private hospitals however frown on excess bed and health worker capacity because, by financial calculations, unused capacity is excess inventory which cuts into profits. Private hospitals are also more expensive because of their profit premium – private hospitals are 3-4 times more expensive than public hospitals.

From a long-term development policy perspective, it makes more sense to focus on ensuring universal basic social services (including building public sector capacity to provide this) and modernizing the economy to create jobs and decent incomes (with vibrant agriculture and strong Filipino industry). Without these, UBI will just be a populist quick fix improving official ‘poverty’ figures but not really addressing structural constraints to national development.

Put another way, free or affordable social services, decent jobs and incomes, affordable transport and utilities, and comfortable homes are much better indicators of beating poverty than programmed UBI cash transfers.

At the micro level, a large UBI cash transfer may also inadvertently create a strong disincentive to work. This is less of a problem in a more advanced capitalist country of mostly formal work because minimum wage levels tend to be relatively uniform and high. In this context, a UBI recipient still has an incentive to work for the presumably greater earnings from getting a minimum wage or higher.

The Philippines however has such a high level of informality that earnings from odd-jobs or unregistered enterprises are on a continuum from nothing to around the minimum wage. In this context, it’s possible that a guaranteed UBI will discourage work at the lower and lowest ends of the scale with corresponding implications on overall economic activity.

A UBI can be productive but this cannot be a stand-alone effort and has to be just one element of a larger universal social protection scheme to avoid untoward consequences.

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Survey Reveals High Cost of Course Materials Stops Students from Success

Professors share 5 myths students believe about college, anxiety among students: what do teachers think about it, how to write a character analysis essay, dorm overbooking and transitional housing: problems colleges are trying to solve, a universal basic income essay sample, example.

But what exactly is it? Universal, or unconditional basic income (UBI) is a sum of money given to each member of a society or a political community by a government, without individuals having to work for it. It is not the same as a minimum income, which now exists in European countries: the key word is “unconditional,” which means that regardless of a person’s labor contribution, he or she will receive a fixed income sufficient to live and perform social functions in dignity ( Basicincome-Europe.org ).

UBI possesses several important characteristics. As it has been mentioned, it is unconditional: even an unemployed person can receive it, by right of birth, regardless of social or financial status. It is universal, which means that every member of a society receives it, including children—from their day of birth, or after reaching a certain age; it is preferable, though, that children receive UBI from birth, since there are many countries in which they are deprived of basic needs due to existing poverty (Globalincome.org). UBI is also periodic: it is not a one-time share, but a monthly or annual supply. Finally, UBI should be granted to individuals in cash, not in the form of food or services: every individual receiving UBI should be able to decide for themselves what they want to spend money on ( BIEN ).

The existing conception of a welfare state implies that a person receives “free” finances only in case if he or she cannot sustain themselves. The main difference between a UBI and the existing unemployment or disability pensions is its universality; and, unlike many pensions, it should be enough to live on, not to just survive on. UBI is expected to not only increase the overall quality of life in a state, but also to decrease bureaucracy and the scales of governmental control over people’s eligibility and behavior; for this reason, this idea is rather favored by libertarians and left-wing politicians. They tend to see UBI as a way to fix a large number of problems connected to social safety, and even as a panacea from “wage slavery,” when people have to work without breaks only to sustain their basic needs. The idea of UBI is also attractive in part because they see it as a continuation of an old feminist demand for payment for housework ( Independent ).

There are several countries in which pilot projects of UBI have already been launched, and even though they are obviously not perfect, they have already provided positive results. For example, in Namibia, the implemented UBI project helped decrease poverty and crime rates, and school attendance among children and teenagers went up significantly. In India, those who received basic income shares used them to start their own businesses, thus proving the hypothesis that UBI can be used as a means to help poorer people “help themselves out” ( Independent ). As for the European Union, UBI is currently being tested as well. For example, Finland has become the first country of the EU to start paying unemployed people (who comprise 8.1% of Finnish society) certain sums of money: starting from January 1st, 2017 unemployed Finns between 25 and 58 years receive 560 euros per month for free for two years; this amount of money will be granted to them even in case if they find work. This is expected to raise unemployed people’s motivation to look for jobs, because unlike the existing social support system (which implies that even low earnings at work cause huge cuts in social payments received) UBI is paid in full regardless of a person’s income. Therefore, from now on, finding a job means an increase in monthly wages, not a decrease. The initiative is backed by the Finnish government, and is expected to solve a number of social and financial problems existing in Finland ( The Guardian ).

As it can be seen, a somewhat utopian idea of a universal basic income is, in fact, realistic and possible to realize. Currently, pilot tests of UBI programs have been launched in several countries around the world, including Namibia, India, and Finland, and the results they have already brought forth are encouraging. If UBI projects prove their efficiency, soon enough every person on the planet will receive unconditional, guaranteed, sufficient cash payments, and such problems as unemployment or robots taking away people’s jobs will be solved.

Works Cited

• “What is Unconditional Basic Income?” Unconditional Basic Income Europe . N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. .
• “Global Basic Income: Definition and Arguments.” Globalincome.org . N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. .
• “What is Basic Income?” BIEN . N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. .
• Callebert, Ralph. “What is a Universal Basic Income—and How Could It Lift Millions out of Poverty?” The Independent . Independent Digital News and Media, 08 Mar. 2016. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. .
• Henley, Jon. “Finland Trials Basic Income for Unemployed.” The Guardian . Guardian News and Media, 03 Jan. 2017. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. .

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