The Long, Weird History of Universal Basic Income—and Why It’s Back
It's not a new idea, but many think it's time to adopt it
https://www.investopedia.com/news/history-of-universal-basic-income/
Thomas Paine, Napoleon, and Martin Luther King, Jr., don't have much in common at first glance. Nor do socialists and libertarians—or Finnish bureaucrats and Silicon Valley tycoons. Some policies have a habit of creating strange bedfellows, but none more so than the idea that governments should guarantee their citizens a minimum level of income. Not by creating jobs or providing traditional welfare, but by cutting checks, for the same amount, to everyone.
Universal basic income (UBI) is an old idea, but in recent years it has gained considerable momentum. The threat of automation is focusing minds: Algorithms are learning to perform a growing number of blue- and white-collar jobs, and soon there may not be enough paid employment to go around.
Some basic income proponents, however, reject or ignore this doomsday scenario. "I appreciate that argument," Basic Income Earth Network (BEIN) co-chair Karl Widerquist told Investopedia, "but I'm worried about overstressing it." He prefers to frame the policy in terms of fundamental justice: "I support basic income because I believe it's wrong for anyone to come between someone else and the resources they need to survive."1
The coronavirus pandemic has brought even more urgency to the topic, as unemployment and financial hardship spread across the globe. The Spanish government, for one, announced in April that it was planning to pay a basic monthly income to roughly a million of the country's neediest households to help them through the pandemic.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A universal basic income is an unconditional, periodic cash payment that a government makes to everyone with no strings attached.
Writers, politicians, and others—from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Richard Nixon—have endorsed the idea of a minimum guaranteed income.
UBI proponents include reformers, who aim to address problems with the status quo—such as mending a broken welfare system or cutting bureaucratic waste—and futurists, who are more concerned about the threat of technological unemployment or see a basic income as a cornerstone of an eventual utopia.
Evidence from Brazil's Bolsa Família program has shown that a basic income can substantially reduce poverty.
Questions remain concerning the affordability of a basic income and whether citizens who receive it would continue to (or seek) work.