There’s a version that sees UBI as the spark for a generation of entrepreneurs, and another that simply attempts to stave off a revolt of the precarious masses.īasic income is therefore often posited as a post-ideological solution suited to a new era of politics: the odd confluence of interest from the left and right tends to be read as a sign that political positions should be eschewed in favor of rational compromise. Another version aspires to egalitarian universalism and challenges the legitimacy of privately accumulated wealth. One version functions as a kind of noblesse oblige-a handout to the unfortunates being made obsolete by robots smarter and more efficient than they are.
There are, in short, many different reasons for supporting UBI-and just as many versions of what it could be. supported basic income-and the new generation of advocates is similarly eclectic, running the gamut from Trump-supporting venture capitalists like Thiel to “fully automated luxury communists” like Peter Frase. It’s often noted that Milton Friedman as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. Most notably, the seed accelerator Y Combinator is starting a basic income pilot program in Oakland this year, proposing to pay a hundred families between $1,000 and $2,000 each month, “no strings attached.” But the most prominent supporters of UBI in the United States today are technocapitalists like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and with the exception of Alaska, basic income experiments are being implemented not by the state but the private sector. Since 1982, the fund has paid every Alaskan resident anywhere from a few hundred to $2,000 annually out of its oil revenues. The United States is home to the closest thing to a basic income program existing in the world today: the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Neither amount is enough to live on, really, but they aren’t negligible either. Starting this year, about 250 people in Utrecht will receive €960 each month (about $1,030) from the government, while a Finnish experiment will pay between five and ten thousand people €550 (about $600) monthly. Growing public discussion has been accompanied by a small but significant number of experimental programs, mostly in Europe. In France, Benoît Hamon recently won the Socialist Party presidential nomination on a platform that included a basic income. Jeremy Corbyn said last September that the Labour Party would investigate the prospects for basic income in the UK, and experiments are on the agenda in Scotland, backed by the left-wing SNP. UBI was recently endorsed by the Movement for Black Lives as part of a reparations program, while Canada’s Leap Manifesto calls for consideration of UBI on the grounds of environmental sustainability. But it has seen renewed interest since the 2008 financial crash: as millions of people lost their jobs and wondered whether they’d find new ones, some also began to wonder whether they needed to work at all. UBI, where everyone gets a regular check from the government regardless of what else they’re doing or how they spend it, is an old idea. But these days, universal basic income-a policy often glossed as “paying people for being alive”-is gaining popularity both in the United States and abroad. Is his faith misguided? (Center for American Progress)įive years ago, dropping the abbreviation UBI in conversation would be more likely to earn you a puzzled glance than a knowing nod. Alyssa Battistoni ▪ Spring 2017įormer president of SEIU Andy Stern presents universal basic income as part of a twenty-first-century vision for the labor movement. But UBI’s supporters on the left should proceed with caution. Long dismissed as utopian, proposals for a universal basic income are now gaining traction on both the right and the left.
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