The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series from MIT Press presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?
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This is a really useful book by prolific Basic Income author Karl Widerquist. Throughout, it argues that Basic Income is a feasible economic and ethical proposition. There are particularly good sections on employment incentives and the social norm of reciprocity.
A couple of minor quibbles: it isn’t always made clear that the proxy means-tests applied to numerous current US experiments compromise our ability to call them Basic Income pilot projects; and the infeasibility of rolling out these local semi-unconditional incomes nationwide compromises that ability even more. Secondly: Widerquist regards the default Basic Income as one large enough to provide every individual with their basic needs – a subsistence level Basic Income – while at the same time recognizing that subsistence is a problematic concept and that the requirement is correctly absent from BIEN’s definition of Basic Income. Might it not be more consistent to regard an unconditional income of any significant amount as the default Basic Income? And a question: Given that an annual and varying dividend is bound to behave differently from a weekly or monthly unvarying income, what should we call the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend? An ‘ambiguous Basic Income’?
But these really are minor issues. This is a brilliant book, full of persuasive and rational arguments, many of which are unique in their expression. And it’s reasonably priced. Well worth buying.