A Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.
The Royal Society of Arts Explains: [2 minutes]
BIEN Congresses
The next annual BIEN Congress will occur August 19th-22th at the Toronto Metropolitan University. The BIEN Congress will not be occurring in USA this year.
Theme: Basic Income and the Polycrisis: The Key to Unlocking the Puzzle 🔑
See pictures from the 24th BIEN CONGRESS in Maricá & Niterói here.
Recent News, Opinion, and Research
Bill Jordan — A Tribute
BIEN founding conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, 6 September 1986From left to right: Bill Jordan, Claus Offe, Annie Miller, Nick Douben, Greetje Lubbi, Riccardo Petrella. Bill Jordan died in the night from 11 to 12 April 2026 in Worcester (England). He was one of the...
BIEN’s Treasurer runs Rio Marathon to raise funds for Toronto BIEN Congress
On 7 June 2026, BIEN Treasurer Lindsay Stirton is running the Rio Marathon to raise money for the BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund. The Congress Solidarity Fund exists to help low-income participants attend BIEN’s annual Congress by contributing towards essential costs...
Toolbox for modelling sufficiency
Against the backdrop of slow progress in the energy transition and the challenges of meeting high levels of demand, analyzing the potential and policy framework for reducing demand through sufficiency approaches is becoming increasingly important. Over the past five...
Caricature of the early BIEN leadership back in 1989
The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI
Two guys in papier-mâché masks from Saguenay, Quebec, have been playing music together for 20 years since they were 13 years old. For most of that time, they existed in relative obscurity. Then, KEXP posted a video of them playing four songs and the internet lost its...
Dependency Is the System: What Hungary Teaches Us About Basic Income and Democracy
Scene from the documentary "The Price of a Vote" (De! Akcióközösség, 2026) The fall of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary raises a question the celebrations have obscured: why did dismantling such a corrupt and inhuman system take sixteen years? The answer lies less...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Basic Income (BI)
Beginning with Andrew Yang's proposal for a $1,000 a month "Freedom Dividend" during his Democratic Party primary campaign (2019-2020), Basic Income has become salient as a means to mitigate the social and economic turbulence caused by rapid adoption of robotics and...
Intra-Gender Trade-Offs in Basic Income Regimes
Abstract The contemporary debate about basic income and gender primarily adopts an external perspective according to which women as a group are pitched against men as a group. This article examines tensions internal to women as a group. We distinguish three types of...
BIEN Congress 2026 — Toronto: Call for proposals
The Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) in partnership with the Basic Income Earth Network(BIEN) has issued a Call for Session Proposals for the 25th BIEN Congress, taking placeAugust 20–22, 2026 in Toronto, Canada. All presentations will be in person. The Congress...
New article published for the Imagining the Digital Future survey of experts report
AI is going to play a much bigger role in shaping our decisions, work, and daily lives, not because it becomes an allknowing overlord, but because it steadily reduces how much human labor is needed to produce the same outputwhile our institutions still treat wages as...
The Next Moonshot: Universal Basic Income
What Artemis II and the Return to the Moon Should Remind Us About Ending Poverty As I write this, four astronauts are hurtling toward the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew. On April 1, 2026, NASA’s Artemis II launched from Kennedy...
BBC Podcast: Why is basic income being debated?
Note: Interviewees include BIEN's Catarina Neves and Jurgen De Wispelaere "Ireland has a new permanent government scheme providing regular cash transfers to 2,000 artists. The people who can access it range from circus performers to opera singers. It follows a pilot...