Discover 4 opportunities in universal basic income

One of the key features of the global economy is that it tends to grow over time. In fact, that growth has become something of an expectation in the modern capitalist system, where the success of corporations is often judged by their growth, even over relatively short time horizons.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so the old proverb goes. And with coronavirus spreading through countries, deep economic recession clambering at its coattails, the collective need has rarely been higher. In just four months, almost 300,000 lives have been taken worldwide, and lockdown, in its various forms, is threatening untold livelihoods - as of May 9th, 33 million jobs have been lost in the US alone. True to the saying, some invention has been forthcoming as incumbents have scrambled to protect their citizens and economies. The UK’s Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, for instance, has shown great ideological flexibility, committing to stimulus packages so large they’d make the most ardent of socialists blush. And similar developments can be seen across the world.

Automation will transform our world; there is no doubt about it. Quite how, though, is highly contested – whether optimist or pessimist, there are predictions to match every predilection. Newspapers alternately run articles speculating a work-free, post-capitalist future filled with armchair philosophising, with forecasts of a world ravaged by inequality in which robots tend to the mega-rich, and everyone else is cast onto the scrap heap to contemplate what-on-earth went wrong. Little, it appears, exists in the in-between.

As a policy, support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) flouts traditional political and social lines, making unlikely bedfellows of those on both the right and left wing. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman, and firebrand economist Yanis Varoufakis all count among its high profile, and rather disparate, champions. With the help of their advocacy the initiative has entered into mainstream consciousness, and widespread political discussion of its implementation, in contrast to a few years ago, is now readily had. Gone are the days in which UBI was simply dismissed as an unattainable utopian concept.