by Guy Standing, Sarath Davala, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Louise Haagh, Annie Miller, Malcolm Torry, Karl Widerquist, Toru Yamamori, Philippe van Parijs, Walter Van Trier, Alexander de Roo | Apr 24, 2026 | News
BIEN founding conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, 6 September 1986
From 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 founding members of BIEN. In September 1986, he played a central role at the conference at which the Basic Income European Network (later to become the Basic Income Earth Network) was founded. His work as a sociologist, a social worker and a political theorist contributed greatly to the vigour of the incipient British and European basic income movement.
Bill was born in Dublin on the 4th of January 1941. He spent most of his childhood in South Africa and settled in England with his mother and siblings in 1955. He studied Philosophy Politics and Economics at Oxford from 1959 to 1962 and next worked for 12 years as a probation officer in British prisons. He later taught sociology and social policy at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth and at East European Universities.
In his prolific career, he published many books, including Automatic Poverty (1981), The State: Authority and Autonomy (1985), The Common Good (1989), Trapped in Poverty? Labour-Market Decisions in Low-Income Households (1992) and What’s Wrong with Social Policy and How to Fix it (2010).
Having settled in the town of Newton Abbott, near Torquay (Devon), in the early 1970s, he helped build the local Claimants’ Union and campaigned for the benefit claimants’ movement to establish a national structure. In his short book, Paupers. The Making of the New Claiming Class (1973), he explained how the claimants’ revolt against the existing means-tested and repressive welfare system led them to advocate a guaranteed income.
In 1984, Bill was a founding member of BIRG, the Basic Income Research Group, based in London, together with Anne Miller, Peter Ashby and Mimi Parker, who also helped found BIEN two years later.
Bill was a trenchant critic of Margaret Thatcher’s mean-spirited social policies of the 1980s and 1990s. His politics were ‘left liberal’. In 1989, he wrote what was effectively the manifesto for the Liberal Party leader, Paddy Ashdown, published as Citizen’s Britain. It led the Liberals to support basic income for several years. His most famous student was Mark Drakeford, whose Ph.D. he supervised. Drakeford went on to become First Minister of Wales and a very popular Labour Party politician.
Bill’s values were those of a classic English social liberal. Indeed, one might say that he was a solid west-country English liberal, wedded to the parts of the country where he resided. (He spent most of his adult life in Whimple, Devon, where several of us visited him.) Those were his physical and ideological roots, traceable to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. However, he was always painfully aware that he was preaching a social liberalism that was struggling against the grain of the time.
We mourn Bill’s passing as a long-time friend and a ‘fellow traveller’, with an impressive athletic record and an unforgettable sense of humour. He believed passionately in basic income — or what he preferred to call social dividend — as an essential component of the Good Society. Without a basic income, freedom was a mirage.
Bill will be sorely missed by his many friends and by all those who keep believing that there is a far better future than the neo-liberal dystopia that defined the social context in which he wrote.
Guy Standing, Sarath Davala, Alexander de Roo, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Louise Haagh, Annie Miller, Malcolm Torry, Walter Van Trier, Karl Widerquist, Toru Yamamori, Philippe Van Parijs
by Karl Widerquist, Jack Rossbach | Feb 3, 2026 | News, Research
Abstract
This article estimates the cost of Universal Basic Income (UBI) sufficient to
eliminate poverty in the United States. It uses the most recent microdata available
from the Census Bureau through its Current Population Survey (CPS) public-use
microdata files and references historical income data from the Annual Social and
Economic Supplements (ASEC) going back to 1967. It finds that UBI (or an equivalent
guaranteed income) sufficient to eliminate official poverty is surprisingly affordable
and that the cost of UBI as a percentage of GDP has been falling steadily for more than
50 years. Estimates based on the most recent data (from 2024) show the net cost of a
UBI set at $16,000 per adult and $8,000 per child (slightly higher than the official
poverty line) with a 50 % marginal tax rate is approximately $783.7 billion per year,
which is about 2.67 % of GDP. In inflation-adjusted terms, the current cost of a
poverty-line UBI as a percentage of GDP has fallen significantly from 9.35 %of GDP in
1967 to 4.95 %in 1995, 3.70 %in 2015, and 2.67 %in 2024. Therefore, as a percentage of
GDP, the current cost of a poverty-line UBI is less than one-third (28.6 %) of what it
would have cost when the guaranteed income was under discussion in the United
States in 1967. This article also updates and significantly improves on calculations
made in the article “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations”
which appeared in Basic Income Studies in 2017.
To read the full article, click here.
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 26, 2024 | Events, News
Buford Farris, a stalwart of the basic income movement, died peacefully at aged 98 in Austin, Texas on October 5, 2024. His work was important in keeping the movement for a basic income guarantee alive during the difficult days in the late twentieth century and in building the movement again in the early years of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network.
To read more click here.
by Karl Widerquist | Sep 18, 2023 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
My main perspective is an argument with four premises:
1. It’s wrong for anyone to come between anyone else and the resources they need to survive in almost all circumstances.
2. Freedom is the power to say no.
3. A private property economy (or a socialist economy) without basic income interferes with people as they try to use resources to survive.
4. By doing 3, economic rules take people’s freedom away.
5. (Conclusion): private property or socialist economies require a basic income large enough to meet people’s basic needs.
I’ve written a lot justifying each of these premises, explaining & exploring what they mean, justifying the connection between these premises and the conclusion, replying to potential objections, making addition arguments for basic income, and exploring other conclusions that follow from my basic moral perspective, but–near as I can tell–this is the heart of my political theory.
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 10, 2023 | News
The last post in my 18-part blog series, “Mandatory Participation on Trial,” is now online. Here is the lead paragraph:
According to Henry David Thoreau, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think it’s more accurate to say the mass of people lead lives of manufactured desperation. We, as a people, are not in a desperate struggle to produce enough food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life for everyone. We can do that with ease. We worked our way out of that struggle long ago, if it was ever real at all. We are instead in a challenging struggle to provide more luxuries and leisure without destroying the environment that sustains us. Yet, the mass of people as individuals still often find themselves in a desperate struggle to maintain access to food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life.
Read the full text here.
