Denver Basic Income Project 18 Month Report
The report covers updates & impact of the project in 2025-26.
To view the report, click here.
South Korea Moves to Create a Basic Income for Artists
Photo by William Warby on Unsplash
- South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism named an basic income for artists among six key tasks in its second-half business report, delivered at a briefing hosted by President Lee Jae-myung, and plans to have a model established by the end of this year.
- Inspired by Ireland’s successful trial and implementation, the stated purpose is to support a stable creative environment for artists as the foundation of a culturally powerful nation.
- The move lands as AI takes over graphic design, advertising, and other arts-adjacent work that has historically paid artists’ bills — the same pressure the Creatives Rebuild New York evaluation flagged earlier this year.
The World’s Largest Unconditional Cash Transfer Is Building an Economy in Rural Malawi
- GiveDirectly’s $198 million program is paying as many as 230,000 adults across two districts of Malawi roughly $700 each, with no conditions on how it is spent. In the world’s poorest country not affected by conflict, that sum is roughly a full year of per-capita economic output.
- Since the money reached the village of Kamala in February, residents have bought the area’s first refrigerator and started selling chilled water, bought electric sewing machines, goats, and corrugated iron roofing, and opened a food stall, a rest house for travelers, and a makeshift cinema charging 12 cents a ticket.
- Oxford economist Dennis Egger, who has studied GiveDirectly’s programs, finds that every dollar distributed generates about $2.50 in local economic activity over the following 30 months with only marginal price increases, alongside falling child mortality. On the old worry that cash creates dependency or gets spent on alcohol, he notes there are now hundreds of papers showing otherwise.
Texas Senate Nominee James Talarico Puts an “AI Dividend” at the Center of His Economic Platform
Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash
- Talarico laid out a plan he calls “the New American Dream” to a crowd of about 1,300 in Arlington, built around an AI dividend that would give ordinary people a share of the profits of the companies developing the technology.
- “If they are going to use our human ingenuity, if they’re going to use our collective intellectual property, then we want our royalty checks,” he said, arguing that under his plan every American citizen owns a piece of the AI companies.
- The rest of the platform includes raising the federal minimum wage, universal child care and paid family leave, a permanent expanded Child Tax Credit, medical debt forgiveness, and down payment help for first-time homebuyers. Recent polls show Talarico narrowly ahead of Ken Paxton going into the November 3 election.
Taiwan Will Pay Every Resident an AI Dividend of NT$10,000 in Its 2027 Budget
Taiwan’s president announced that the proposed 2027 budget will set aside NT$235.7 billion (about $7.4 billion) for a universal NT$10,000 (about $314 USD) payment to every person, funded out of higher projected revenue, mostly due to TSMC.The money is being communicated as an AI dividend to be “shared by all,” crediting global demand for AI for lifting orders and exports across Taiwan’s semiconductor and manufacturing supply chains. The 2026 growth forecast was just raised to 11.05%, which would be Taiwan’s strongest year in 39 years.
He also said the gains have not been felt equally, since many people work outside the booming technology sector in services, traditional industries, and small and medium-sized businesses — the argument for universality rather than targeting.
This would be Taiwan’s third universal cash payment in five years, after NT$6,000 in 2023 and NT$10,000 in 2025, the latter covering citizens, foreign permanent residents, and foreign spouses holding residence permits.
Dolly Parton Knew What People Need
How the queen of country music gave unconditional cash to wildfire survivors — and proved basic income works.
| You’ve probably already seen the tributes pouring in, the greatest hits, the rhinestones, the Jolene memes, the Whitney Houston story, and all of that is real, and all of it matters. But I want to honor her by writing about something Dolly did that most people still don’t fully appreciate, something that should reshape how we think about helping people in their greatest time of need.She gave people money. Unconditionally. No bureaucrats deciding what they were allowed to spend it on. No means-testing. No paternalism. Just cash, because she trusted that they knew their own lives better than anyone else.“I always count my blessings more than I count my money,” she once said. “I don’t work for money, never did.” But she understood what money means to people who don’t have enough of it. She understood that when everything you own has burned to the ground, the last thing you need is someone deciding for you what help looks like. What you need is the freedom to decide for yourself. You need money. |
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BIEN Congresses
The next annual BIEN Congress will occur in Wrocław, Poland on 15-17th July 2027 https://biencongress2027.org/
The theme will be Basic Income and the Spirit of Solidarity: Pathways to Justice and Equality. Call for papers will be up soon.
The last annual BIEN Congress occurred August 19th-22th at the Toronto Metropolitan University.
See pictures from the 24th BIEN CONGRESS in Maricá & Niterói here.