by Scott Santens | May 23, 2026 | Opinion
Every time I drop a bag of garbage down the chute in my building, I think about debt.
Not the kind you pay back in monthly installments. Not the kind that shows up on a credit report. I mean the kind you can never repay no matter how long you live or how hard you work. The debt of being alive at all.
Someone built that chute. Someone engineered the pipes that carry water to my faucet and the sewers that carry it away. Someone built the truck that takes the garbage somewhere I will never see, and someone built the road the truck drives on, and someone refined the diesel, and someone before them figured out that crude oil was useful for anything at all. The chain goes back to people whose names I will never know. Every time I drop that bag, I am the beneficiary of thousands of years of accumulated effort. I did almost none of that work. I will never be able to do enough work to repay it.
This is the idea David Graeber surfaces in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, drawing on the French anthropologist Philippe Rospabe. Long before money was a medium of exchange or a unit of account, it was something stranger. It was an acknowledgment that you owed something you could never give back.
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by Tuğba Özay, Ekkehard Ernst | May 21, 2026 | Opinion
Tech developers in Silicon Valley seem to be convinced thatAI will lead to mass unemployment and that only Universal Basic Income (UBI), funded by the government, would be the appropriate policy response. Several leading CEOs have made two related economic claims: that AI will devastate labour markets catastrophically, and that the productivity gains it generates will make such transfers noninflationary. Both claims are empirically weak, and the second does not follow from the first even if the first were true.
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by Scott Santens | May 17, 2026 | News, Opinion
Imagine a room with a thousand people. You know that 999 of them need something to survive, and one of them doesn’t. You have two options. Option one: give the same thing to all 1,000 people, and when they leave through a door where everyone’s income is already being checked, take a bit more from the one person who didn’t need it. Option two: before giving anything to anyone, set up an additional checkpoint inside the room, hire people to run it, create paperwork, establish eligibility rules, and test all 1,000 people — knowing that the test will incorrectly fail dozens if not hundreds of people who actually need help — all to avoid giving something to one person for whom the amount is a rounding error.
That is the choice between universal basic income and means-tested anything. When you frame it honestly, the answer is obvious. But we don’t frame it honestly. We frame it as responsible budgeting versus reckless spending. We frame it as helping the deserving versus subsidizing the rich. We frame it in ways that serve the interests of the people who benefit most from the means-tested version. And those people, as I’ll explain, are not the poor.
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by Scott Santens | Feb 12, 2025 | News, Opinion
As the editor of Basic Income Today and a moderator for the Basic Income subreddit, I read a lot of stuff every year about UBI, somewhere around 100 articles a month. Below, I’ve compiled a list of the top ten articles I consider my favorites out of everything published in 2024.
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by Neil Howard | Jan 17, 2025 | Opinion
Photo by Hamid Roshaan on Unsplash
Social assistance is everywhere conditional, and in Pakistan it is no different. Either it comes with behavioural strings attached — ‘do this and we’ll help you, don’t and we won’t’ — or it is targeted, with receipt conditional on being a specific type of person or facing a particular type of problem (think Benazir Income Support Programme [BISP] and the extreme poor).
Those who defend this approach typically offer the same justifications. First, they argue, resources are limited, which means that we should give them to those most in need and make sure they use them well. Intuitively sensible, this position quickly gives way to the troubling claim that as the poor aren’t used to having any money, we should ‘guide’ them so that they don’t waste what they get. Inside this sits the pernicious, yet sadly widespread, prejudice that the poor are feckless and do not deserve our support.
Critics of these positions abound, as they do of conditionality more broadly.
To read the full article in Dawn, click here.
by Equal Right | Jan 8, 2025 | Opinion
How Cap and Share can end fossil fuel extraction, raise trillions for climate finance, and create a global universal basic income.
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