Should We Have a Universal Basic Income?
The Strange Alliance Behind Free Money for Everyone
The most radical idea in modern economic policy has been seriously championed by a libertarian economist, a tech billionaire, and a 1970s US President — and for completely different reasons.
The Idea
Universal Basic Income — a regular, unconditional cash payment to every citizen, regardless of employment or means — is one of those ideas that sounds either utopian or absurd depending on your priors. But what makes it genuinely fascinating is the breadth of its supporters, who arrive at the same destination from wildly different directions. From the political right, the argument is often efficiency. Milton Friedman, the godfather of free-market economics, backed a version of UBI called the Negative Income Tax. His logic: bureaucratic welfare systems are bloated and paternalistic. Better to give people cash and let them spend it as they see fit. Government gets out of the business of telling people what they need. From the left, the argument is dignity and power. A guaranteed income means workers are never desperate. You can quit a bad job, leave a bad relationship, or care for a child or parent without falling into poverty. The floor doesn't just catch you — it changes your negotiating position entirely. From the tech world, the argument is disruption. If automation is going to hollow out the labour market, we need a mechanism to redistribute the productivity gains from machines back to people who no longer have the jobs those machines replaced. Three different diagnoses. Three different prescriptions. One overlapping answer. The disagreements about UBI — how to fund it, what it replaces, how much — are as interesting as the agreement that something unconditional might be needed.
In the World
In 2017, Finland quietly ran one of the most closely watched economic experiments in recent memory. The government selected 2,000 unemployed citizens at random and gave them a guaranteed monthly payment — roughly equivalent to a modest but liveable benefit — with no strings attached. They could find work, start a business, go back to school, or do nothing. The payments kept coming regardless. The results confounded the cynics. Recipients didn't stop working. In fact, they were slightly more likely to find employment than the control group. More strikingly, they reported significantly better mental health, more trust in institutions, and a greater sense of confidence in their ability to plan for the future. The unconditional nature of the payment — the absence of surveillance, form-filling, and conditionality — seemed to matter psychologically, not just materially. Meanwhile, in Stockton, California, Mayor Michael Tubbs launched a privately funded pilot in 2019, giving 125 residents a monthly stipend with no conditions. Within a year, full-time employment among recipients had nearly doubled compared to a control group. Participants reported reduced anxiety and were more present as parents. Neither experiment was large enough to answer the big funding question — how do you scale this nationally? — but both quietly demolished the assumption that free money makes people idle. That assumption, it turns out, said more about how we think about poverty than about how poor people actually behave.
Why It Matters
The UBI debate forces you to examine beliefs you might not have known you held — about what work is for, whether people can be trusted with money, and what a government owes its citizens. If you've ever stayed in a job you hated because the alternative was financial freefall, UBI speaks directly to that experience. The guarantee isn't just economic — it's existential. It changes what risks you can afford to take. If you're sceptical, the interesting question isn't whether people would misuse the money — the evidence suggests they largely wouldn't — but whether society can design a funding mechanism that doesn't simply transfer the problem elsewhere. A UBI funded by gutting existing welfare might help some while leaving the most vulnerable worse off. And if you're somewhere in the middle, the real takeaway might be this: the way we currently structure financial support for citizens is a set of choices, not a law of nature. The debate over UBI is really a debate about what we think human beings need to flourish — and who's responsible for providing it.
A Question to Ponder
If everyone you knew received a guaranteed monthly income, what would they actually do with it — and does your honest answer reveal something about how you see them?
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