Basic Income: A simple and powerful idea for the twenty-first century*

Give all citizens a modest, yet unconditional income, and let them top it up at will with income from other sources. This exceedingly simple idea has a surprisingly diverse pedigree. In the course of the last two centuries, it has been independently thought up under a variety of names – “territorial dividend ” and “state bonus, ” for example, “demogrant ” and “citizen’s wage, ” “universal benefit ” and “basic income ” – in most cases without much success. In the late sixties and early seventies, it enjoyed a sudden popularity in the United States and was even put forward by a presidential candi-date, but it was soon shelved and just about forgotten. In the last two decades, however, it has gradually become the subject of an unprece-dented and fast expanding public discussion throughout the European Union. Some see it as a crucial remedy for many social ills, including unemployment and poverty. Others denounce it as a crazy, economi-cally flawed, ethically objectionable proposal, to be forgotten as soon as possible, to be dumped once and for all into the dustbin of the history of ideas. To shed light on this debate, I start off saying more about what basic income is and what it is not, and about what distinguishes it from existing guaranteed income schemes. On this background, it 1 * The first version of this paper was prepared for the international seminar “Policies and instruments to fight poverty in the European Union: A guaranteed minimum income ” organized under the aegis of the Portuguese presidency of the European Unio