Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The universal basic income has become a subject of increasing fascination across the entire ideological spectrum in recent years. Capable of much more than just a simple “employment fix”, basic income could help to create no less than a shared political vision for a future society.
The Netherlands will kick off the year 2017 by launching an experiment with an unconditional basic income starting in January – the culmination, for now, of a charismatic social scientists’ decades of activism.
If a Basic Income is indeed a Good Thing, then new currencies will increasingly seek to build it into their design from the outset.
It’s time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons.
“The 20th century system of economic distribution lasted for 60 years and it’s gone. The 21st century is the century of economic rights.”
The concept of the precariat, from Wiktionary: “People suffering from precarity, especially as a social class; people living a precarious existence, without security or predictability, especially job security.”
What can organizers elsewhere learn from Italy’s movements?
Basic income is a necessary part of any coherent state strategy for fostering private-sector business and entrepreneurship in the future. By providing basic securities for those wishing to start a business, it would create a supporting scaffold on which enterprise, creativity and inventiveness can flourish.
This paper examines the role of basic income in constructing a dynamic, diverse and democratic social economy. ‘Basic income’ or BI is shorthand for a regular, sufficient and unconditional income, administered by the state and issued to every member of society. BI replaces social welfare payments, child benefit and the state pension as we currently know them. It also extends to all those who currently receive no income from the state. Ideally, a BI would be sufficient for each person to have a frugal but decent lifestyle without supplementary income from paid work.
