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Plus, they say, it’s just plain unaffordable for the government to pay every citizen enough to live on regardless of whether they work. And the evidence so far suggests that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime.īut critics worry that it will disincentivize work, cheating economies out of productivity and cheating individuals out of the sense of meaning that work can bring. Proponents of basic income argue it’s the best way to end poverty: Just give everyone money! Some also say it’ll help society cope with a coming era of automation-induced joblessness. These small-scale trials are necessary because governments want to have a good sense of what the effects will be before they start shelling out many billions or trillions of dollars. In other words, they offer a basic income, but not a universal basic income. With a few exceptions - Kenya, where a big experiment in universal basic income (UBI) is underway Iran, which has a nationwide unconditional cash transfer program and Alaska, which gives an annual dividend to everyone in the state - basic income programs are offering money to small groups of a few hundred or a few thousand people, not an entire polity. Yang touted a universal basic income during his presidential campaign. Andrew Yang campaigning in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 8, 2020. With the crisis generating so much financial loss and uncertainty, and with federal stimulus packages failing to meet the needs of millions, advocates are arguing that citizens desperately need some sort of guaranteed income.Īnd around the world, countries are running pilot programs to test it. The Covid-19 pandemic has given the idea fresh momentum. But it’s recently experienced a remarkable resurgence: Advocates ranging from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to libertarian economist Milton Friedman to former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang have endorsed it.
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The general idea - that the government should give every citizen a regular infusion of free money with no strings attached - has been around since the 16th century.
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But the last few years have seen it become less outlandish, to the point where we now have many limited basic income programs up and running around the world - perhaps a dry run for a broader embrace of the policy in the coming years. The idea of a basic income was, for decades, something of a policy fantasy.