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.
Financing a UBI from existing benefits
Under what conditions is targeting preferable, and when is universalization better?
The job guarantee and automation
What would it really mean to guarantee someone a job? If automation will result in a loss of jobs for humans, this question becomes especially salient.
On the ‘automation’ argument for basic income
As we spend so much time debating who’s right about whether robots will take most of our jobs and whether there’ll be a need for a basic income, other arguments for such a policy get “crowded out” of the discussion.
Six Basic Income Tales
The stories may be fiction, but they do resemble what real people experience every day and illustrate how Basic Income can work in practice and what impact it can have on peoples’ lives.
Bill Gates is wrong: Don’t tax robots
We should welcome robots doing more tasks for humans, thus freeing up humans to engage in other fulfilling endeavors.
China must be ready for automation
China’s spectacular growth in the past thirty years has begun to slow down in recent years. Emerging signs suggest that China is woefully unprepared for the fallout from exponentially rising automation of manufacturing jobs.
How basic income ends the poverty trap
In a Universal Basic Income system, incentives are always aligned for the individual to accept a raise or to work an additional hour because it will always put more money in their pocket.
UBI needs peers to control services of general interest (part one)
Basic income needs to be accompanied by changes in general interest services.
Conservative Carbon Dividend Proposal is a Welcome Development for Introduction of Partial Basic Income
The Climate Leadership Council just put forth a proposal for a carbon fee and dividend, as a key policy to combat climate change. The authors are conservatives, including Republican former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Schultz, Treasury Secretary Henry...
A response to ‘The dangers of a basic income’
The non-productive among us could be very busy writing poetry, composing music, playing it, or engaging in other pursuits. What makes one non-productive isn’t a lack of effort or initiative but the lack of a market for their goods or services.
Basic Income as All-inclusive Democratic Subsidy
Freedom should not be understood as a mere absence of intervention or interference. On the contrary, freedom should be understand as independence over against any arbitrary authority.
Basic income is superior to the job guarantee
To guarantee jobs for everyone, in this first sense, does not necessarily generate more happiness for individuals than basic income, simply because the cultural environment around work gets totally transformed.
