A Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.
The Royal Society of Arts Explains: [2 minutes]
BIEN Congresses
The 24th BIEN CONGRESS in Maricá & Niterói – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 27-29 August 2025
Linkedin, Instagram, X – biencongress25 (at) gmail [dot] com
BIEN2024 was August 29–31 (Pictures and more coming soon)
Recent News, Opinion, and Research
SPAIN: Documentary about Basic Income opens in Madrid
A new documentary about Basic Income, RBUI, nuestro derecho a vivir, in english UBI, our right to live, had its debut in Madrid, on May 12th in the Auditorium of the Cultural Center “Pozo del Tío Raimundo” during the Foro Humanista Europeo 2018. The documentary was...
Review of “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.” (from 2014)
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in June 2014. This book was recommended to me a a technology-based argument for the basic income guarantee (BIG), and it is, but its support is tentative and only for BIG in the form of the...
CANADA: NABIG Congress 2018 in Hamilton, Ontario
The 2018 NABIG (North American Basic Income Guarantee) Congress happened in Hamilton, Ontario, from May 24th to May 27th at McMaster University. There were around 120 people presenting and attendance between 270-280 people. The conference was notably diverse, with...
Johann Hari describes UBI as anti-depressant
Johann Hari, a successful non-fiction writer, has used his latest book, Lost Connections, to explore the topic of depression, looking at certain possible solutions to the debilitating condition. Although most traditional solutions for depression are individual and...
Bolivia: BONOSOL programme is 21 years old, this year
Image credit: La Razón. BONOSOL is a mandatory, non-contributory, central government social security program in Bolivia. It is unconditional in nature and started in 1997, having endured to this day, having risen more than 220% from 2008 through 2016. It...
Smaller dividends should inspire a change to “percentage of market value” formula for calculating the Permanent Fund payout (from 2012)
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in December 2012. This year Alaskans received a dividend of $878, not bad compared to all the other states, but this dividend is the smallest since 2005, and it is only the second time in more than...
BBC UBI Radio Programme
The BBC has made a half-hour radio programme exploring the current universal basic income (UBI) experiment taking place in Kenya. The programme was originally broadcast on 31th of March 2018, as part of the BBC World Service. The experiment, funded by American charity...
Portugal: Unconditional Basic Income of All for All
Capitalism does not inherently have a mechanism to guarantee essentials for all. Let us resurrect from our ancestral economic way its essential element: solidarity among people.
Scott Santens: “It’s Time for Technology to Serve all Humankind with Unconditional Basic Income”
Scott Santens published on Medium the transcription of a speech he wrote for a keynote session he presented in Sweden in 2017, with the title “It’s time for technology to serve all humankind with Unconditional Basic Income.” The speech revolves around the...
EUROPE: Universal Basic Income Europe at the EYE2018
Next week – 1 through the 3rd of June – Universal Basic Income Europe (UBIE) activists will be at the EYE2018 event, in Strasbourg. This event is an annual gathering of young Europeans at the European Parliament premises. There, they “come up with ideas for the future...
Fox News Praises the Alaska Model (from 2012)
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in August 2012. Last February two conservative commentators, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs, from the Fox News Network, praised the Alaska Dividend as “a perfect Model” of what America should be doing with...
Political Quarterly special issue on Tony Atkinson’s Participation Income
Political Quaterly has just published a series of papers devoted to Tony Atkinson’s Participation Income (these will appear in print later in 2018, but all articles are available online at the moment). These have been presented and discussed at the 2017 BIEN Congress....