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Whatsapp Money for nothing? The idea is being suggested in several countries around the world.

At first it sounds totally unworkable: the idea of a government handing out a monthly payment to everyone in the country, no questions asked. But the proposal is being seriously considered on the left and the right. Tim Roxburgh tries to make sense of the push for a universal basic income.

Not so long ago, Andy Stern was one of the most powerful union leaders in the United States, if not the world.

Let's create a permanent stabilising force in our economy that allows people to survive and potentially thrive at a time of enormous disruption.

He was president of the Service Employees International Union, the SEIU, which contributed millions to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. They even managed to get Obama to spend a day working alongside one of their members, a home care worker.

'We were probably the only major union growing in the United States,' Stern says.

'We certainly were the fastest growing union in the world.'

When Obama finally clinched the Democratic nomination, Stern was there. He remembers it well: 'The night of clinching the nomination he shouted across the room to me. "Organising matters, hey?" he said. And I said, "Sure did, Mr President."'

What Stern did next surprised a lot of people.

He quit.

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Whatsapp Andy Stern, then president of the SEIU, speaks during a rally in front of Goldman Sachs' offices at the height of the global financial crisis in 2009.

In search of bigger ideas for the future

Stern says that even in a growing union at the peak of its power, he felt like there were bigger forces at play: growing headwinds that he didn't fully understand.

'I really had run out of ideas,' he says.

'I realised I was trying to lead an organisation into the future, and I was really at a loss of what the future was going to look like.

'I realised that from my place in the union, there was only so much I could do, and that I needed ideas that were a lot bigger.

'I started going out and talking to people. Everyone told a different piece of the story, and it all started to come together around technology.'

One technology in particular haunted Stern.

'I watched as Europe did these caravans, where they had a driver in the first truck, but then there were all these other trucks drafting behind it without drivers,' he says.

'Then I realised that the largest job in 29 of our 50 states in America is truck driving.'

A privileged elite ignoring the warnings

For as long as machines have existed, people have been afraid that they will destroy jobs and new ones won't be created. But Stern bristles at the suggestion that he's just another luddite Chicken Little.

'It's the privilege of elite people to be able to sit around and say: "Oh, it's not going to happen this time,"' he says.

'What I say to people is very simple. I don't know what the future is, if you do, please tell me, because we can make a lot of money in the stock market, or at the horse racing.

'What I do know is this. The McKinsey Global Institute says that 45 per cent of all the tasks in the world can be eliminated by technology.

'Pew Research does a study of 1,900 economists and people that are involved in the economy, 900 say something big is going to happen.

'Brookings, the World Economic Forum, the Royal Society, all of these reputable groups, who business and governments rely on every day, are saying a tsunami is coming. A storm is coming. Warning, warning, warning.

'What responsible adult would say "let's not do anything because maybe they're all wrong"?'

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Whatsapp Universal basic income activists dump coins in a public square in the Swiss city of Bern.

Reimagining society in a future without jobs

If there aren't enough jobs to go around, Stern says we have to reimagine how our societies will look.

Maybe the best way to deal with this is to pay every single person a basic wage, regardless of whether they can find work.

'Let's create, in a sense, a permanent stabilising force in our economy that allows people to survive and potentially thrive at a time of enormous disruption,' he says.

So why give it to everyone, instead of just those without a job? The proponents give a few reasons.

First, it's dead simple: it doesn't require a big bureaucracy to decide who gets it and who doesn't.

Second, it doesn't discourage you from working, as unemployment benefits that cut out when you decide to start working do.

Third, universal programs keep everyone on-side. Think of Australia's Medicare—it's become almost untouchable because everyone, whether rich, middle-class or poor, sees it as their entitlement.

What happens when our robot overlords come

It's not just figures on the far left who support a universal basic income. Historically, it's also had support from right-wing economists like Milton Friedman. Today, it's even gaining favour among some business owners in Silicon Valley.

Megan McArdle, a Washington-based columnist for Bloomberg View, says its appeal is that it doesn't involve a lot of interference in the market.

'It doesn't involve the government getting into your business and telling you what to do,' she says. 'All it involves is redistributing some of the cash that a lot of them have a lot of.

'People are thinking heavily about this. They're thinking about what happens when our robot overlords come. The answer that a lot of them have come up with is: let's just go ahead and just pay people not to work.'

There are plenty of critics of the idea of a universal basic income, however, and McArdle is one of them. She says one of the main problems is that it would cost a staggering amount of money.

'When you try to finance this, you quickly run into the problem that it's unaffordable,' she says.

'Let's work through the numbers. There are basically 240 million people in the US. Giving people $1,000 a month would cost almost $4 trillion, which is to say, the entire US budget.'

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Whatsapp A child leads a parade of basic income activists dressed as robots in Zurich, Switzerland.

Supporters divided on welfare state's future

Champions of a basic income say that you'll get most of it back by having a really progressive tax system—basically by taxing the rich. But critics like Henning Meyer, the editor of the online journal Social Europe, aren't so sure.

'I think if you have a close look at how our tax systems work in the western world, and how efficient they have been, especially at reclaiming money from the rich,' he says.

'Most of it will go to people who don't need it in the first place, and then you struggle to reclaim it.'

You might think Meyer would be a fan of the universal basic income. But he says the diverse group that supports the proposal might start to turn on each other when they start talking about how to pay for it.

'Even though on a superficial level it has a broad array of support behind it, when it actually comes to what it should do and how it should be financed, there are significant differences amongst the supporters as well,' he says.

'The libertarian view of a basic income comes with the abolition of the welfare state. That's how they want to pay for it. So if everyone's got some money now, if you want health insurance, go and buy yourself some health insurance. You dismantle collective institutions in the state in order to pay for it.'

But proponents say that if all this new technology does materialise, it will make everything more efficient, so there will be heaps more money washing around, and plenty of ways to tax it.

A free pass to become a couch potato

Let's say the supporters agree on a way to finance a universal basic income. What will everyone do with their free money? Critics also worry that many of us will waste our time.

'Even if 80 per cent of people use their free time positively, there will be people who might sit in front of the television all day and become drug addicts and so on and so forth,' says McArdle.

'Work is really integral to who we are and how we thrive. We don't necessarily think it. We don't necessarily all love our jobs ... Nonetheless, being long-term unemployed, you're basically just as unhappy five years later as the day you lost your job.'

That finding holds up even if you're receiving a generous dole payment.

But Stern argues that we don't worry about this when it comes to another kind of basic income that already exists—the support that middle-class families provide their kids.

'It's not that they don't work anymore, it's just that they have a sense that there's a safety net, a floor, and someone who's got their back,' he says.

'I think that's what we need to give to everyone in our country, because poor people don't have those choices.'

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Whatsapp Universal basic income activists install a poster in a public square in Geneva, Switzerland.

A conversation worth having

The one thing that most critics and proponents of UBI have in common is they're glad this conversation has started.

'You see momentum behind it globally, and I'm in favour of that because it actually points the finger at the problem and it actually opens up the discussion for solutions,' says Meyer, although his favoured solution to the problem is different: some kind of government job guarantee.

As for Andy Stern, he's open to alternatives. But in his mind, a universal basic income sounds like it might be the simplest solution.

Winston Churchill once said that about democracy is 'the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried'. Stern says the same may be true of a universal basic income.

'It sounds like a terrible idea until you try everything else,' Stern says.

'I just want people to try something else. Tell me what we're going to do with my son or grandson or nieces or nephews if the tsunami hits.'