BIEN | Opinion
Opinion Posts
Here you will find articles expressing opinions about current issues in the Basic Income debate. Opinions expressed are not necessarily the opinions of BIEN.
Why do you support UBI? Answering at the BIEN Congress in Montreal 2014
One cut with Chinese subtitles: An overlap clip with German subtitles:
A list of controversial claims on both side of the UBI debate
In the process of cowriting a book about the upcoming Unconditional Basic Income Trials, I've been trying to come up with a list of the claims that tend appear in the debate. Below are two lists: first a list of supporters’ claims and then one of opponents’ claims. I...
‘Mincome Experiment’ documentary will investigate 1970s experiment
The Mincome Experiment is a documentary that is as much a story about basic income as it is about human socioeconomic evolution throughout the years.
How much does UBI cost?
I just completed some simple, “back-of-the-envelope” estimates the net cost of a UBI set at about the official poverty line: $12,000 per adult and $6,000 per child with a 50% “marginal tax rate.” They are in a paper entitled, "the Cost of Basic Income:...
The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How Natural is this Natural Tendency and What Can Basic Income Do about it?
The publisher of a paper I wrote in 2015 has now given me the right to share the published version of my own article without charge. (That is, without them charging me for sharing my own work with you.) The title is, "The Piketty Observation against the Institutional...
Podcast: The largest basic income trial in history
Joe Huston, the CFO of GiveDirectly, speaks with the UBI Podcast about the largest basic income trial in history.
The BIG misunderstanding about the cost of Universal Basic Income
The cost of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often greatly exaggerated, because people are tempted to think the cost of UBI is the size of the grant multiplied by the size of the population. You can call that the “gross cost” of UBI, but it’s a gross overestimate of...
About Indepentarianism
All posts from my blog, the Indepentarian My books and research articles Indepentarianism is the political ideology associated with the political theory called “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA). I (Karl Widerquist) defined JPA and outlined its theory of freedom...
The American Dividend: In the Name of Prosperity
I hope that soon enough we will have the good fortune of debating at great length strategies for basic income on the national scale, because it will mean that the very premise has been accepted into our hearts and consciences as both essential and moral moving forward.
Interview: California gubernatorial candidate proposes state-wide basic income
Zoltan Istvan is running for governor of California in 2018 and has made headlines for his proposal to develop California lands and use the revenue to form a Universal Basic Income for all California households.
A response to “Citizen’s Income: Rights and Wrongs”
David Piachaud of the London School of Economics last November published an article claiming to successfully refute Philippe van Parijs’ famous argument for basic income from his 1991 paper “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income.” He claims that the fatal flaw of van Parijs’ argument is that he does not take into account the crucial distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed. Unfortunately, Piachaud overlooks or underestimates van Parijs’ lucid explanation of why both are entitled to the basic income. In this article, I try to show why van Parijs’ argument is unaffected by Piachaud’s critique.
Interview: ‘Bootstraps’ documentary launches crowdfunding campaign
The team behind the upcoming Bootstraps documentary, which will follow a group of actual basic income recipients, has launched a crowdfunding campaign.
