The Social movement “Basic Income Russia Tomorrow”, together with the charity foundation “Coordinates of Good”, were awarded the Wow Successful Awards 2019, in the Social Innovation chapter, on the 13th of March. This award means the movement will be able to make unconditional cash transfers for five recipients, for three months. The value transferred will be small – 6500 rubles/month (around 100 $/month) – and for a very short period of time, but such an amount can be significant for many Russians. The money involved in the experiment is the result of private donations.
This short-term unconditional cash transfer experiment starts now, in April 2019, and will be monitored by Vyacheslav Nikolaevich Bobkov, from the Institute of Social and Economic Studies of Population at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
I an very happy to know about this stop towardsvthe Unconditional Basic Income in Russia.. I an now in the Yalta Internacional Econômic Fórum where I spoke about the Citizens Basic Income in Brazil, in Kenia, in Alaska and in other placês in the world.
It’s a new revolution in Russia but must not be confused with socialism. Socialism has nothing to do with Basic Income scheme. I think private donations cannot be a sustainable source of funding Basic Income. Levying a Land Value Tax (LVT) may be a more better or rather the best option.
I am very dubious about any “experiment” in Universal Basic Income. It is a contradiction in terms, universal is unequivocal in meaning. If UBI were implemented on a large scale somewhere in a large population, there would be no way of investigating its results except in a very long unit of time, decades and beyond. It is arrogant to use people as equivalents of laboratory rats. UBI is right on principle, to reverse the wrong of present distribution of wealth, and to reverse the chronic insecurity of all who do not possess large wealth.
At the same time, I accept that all these experiments together are doing something to promote the idea of UBI, and I accept the integrity of the people involved.