2 minute read…

The idea of a basic income guar­an­tee is not new, but it has recent­ly begun gain­ing trac­tion. It’s ele­gant­ly sim­ple: Give every cit­i­zen a guar­an­teed basic income — not enough to get rich, but enough to get by — and there­by elim­i­nate a lot of expen­sive gov­ern­ment pro­grams rang­ing from wel­fare, food stamps, social secu­ri­ty, health­care sub­si­dies, tax cred­its, hous­ing assis­tance, etc. On its face it appeals to both social and eco­nom­ic jus­tice advo­cates as well as pro­po­nents of small­er gov­ern­ment and less bureau­cra­cy.

Ben Schiller writ­ing for Fast Company suc­cinct­ly iden­ti­fied three trends dri­ving inter­est in a basic income guar­an­tee:

Wages have stag­nat­ed or declined since the 1970s The robots are com­ing Traditional wel­fare pro­grams are inef­fi­cient

In January of this year, the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands began an exper­i­ment in pro­vid­ing a basic income guar­an­tee to some 300 of its cit­i­zens. An indi­vid­ual receives about US$1000 per month while a cou­ple or small fam­i­ly receives about US$1450 per month. A sub­set of the test group — some 50 peo­ple — receives the basic income guar­an­tee with­out any restric­tions or reg­u­la­tions at all; they are free, for exam­ple, to seek jobs, start busi­ness­es, or find addi­tion­al sources of income. Maria Sanchez Diez writ­ing for Quartz report­ed that three oth­er sub­sets of the test group are sub­ject to vary­ing lev­els of rules and a con­trol group receives ben­e­fits under cur­rent Dutch wel­fare law (includ­ing job-seek­ing and qual­i­fy­ing income require­ments).

Diez cites Dauphin, Manitoba’s 1974 – 79 Mincome pro­gram that pro­vid­ed a basic income guar­an­tee to the town’s 1000 fam­i­lies that fell below the pover­ty line. Instead of dam­ag­ing the moti­va­tion to work, Mincome elim­i­nat­ed pover­ty (.pdf; 331.7KB) and pro­vid­ed finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty and pre­dictabil­i­ty for those fam­i­lies. Half-way through the pro­gram, Canada elect­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment and the Mincome pro­gram died qui­et­ly after its five year run.

A long-time friend and busi­ness asso­ciate is work­ing to use the con­cept of a basic income guar­an­tee to help boot­strap a mar­ket in the Apple iOS and OS X sec­tors. His idea springs from the notion that great pro­duc­tiv­i­ty soft­ware elim­i­nates jobs rather than cre­ates them, there­by lim­it­ing the num­ber of peo­ple who can real­ly par­tic­i­pate in the evolv­ing soci­ety and its econ­o­my. He calls this an “exclu­sion bub­ble.” And he intends to pop that bub­ble in a very excit­ing, sus­tain­able, state-chang­ing way.

I’ll be writ­ing more on this as it devel­ops.