We hear a lot about universal basic income (UBI) — but nowhere has the idea been fully realized. Guaranteed income experiments are a perennial favorite of the international press, but these test-runs have so far only been deployed on a relatively small scale. Since the outbreak of covid-19, interest in these kinds of cashbased assistance programs has grown in parallel with calls for stronger social safety nets around the world. Since then, more Western cities have tinkered with their own versions of UBI but none have yet gone full-scale.

A quick refresher on UBI, if this is the first time you’re hearing of it: Essentially, everyone gets paid a set minimum by the state, regardless of their employment status and with no strings attached. The idea is to alleviate the burden of living costs and reduce inequality. A form of UBI was first posited by Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia. The idea continues to resurface in the newscycle, triggered by major economic downturns and celebrity cosigns.

UBI is supposed to help tackle some of the ills of an unfair global economy: The thinking behind UBI is that it could help lift people out of poverty, improve health and educational outcomes, and at the very least alleviate some of the stress brought on by skyrocketing living prices — which in turn could make everyone a whole lot more productive in the process.

In its purest form, these payments would be doled out to everyone: Universal is in the name for a reason. Everyone would be entitled to these payments — which are typically just enough to cover basic living expenses — without having to go through an arduous screening process or qualify for assistance.

Universality eliminates welfare injustice, bureaucracy, and fraud: Proponents of UBI often argue that universality is the best way of ensuring that the most vulnerable are not wrongfully excluded from payments. They also say it’s a whole lot easier (and possibly cheaper) to indiscriminately dish out payments than it is to task bureaucrats with figuring out who deserves help.

The #1 objection to UBI — why should I work if I get paid anyway? Concerns about large scale assistance programs often stem from the belief that they eat away at incentives to engage in economically productive activities. “It’s that a permanent and society-wide system to provide for everyone would destroy fundamental elements of the social contract and create the wrong incentives for people as they make choices about their life’s course,” Oren Cass, executive director of conservative think tank American Compass told the NYT.

But in reality this argument doesn’t really hold much ground: UBI schemes or guaranteed income proposals aim to provide a floor that covers no more than the basic cost of survival. In most places around the world, that figure would be just enough for people to keep their heads above water — let alone to live comfortably on and forgo work entirely. For residents in places where some form of an income guarantee has long been in play, there’s been no evidence of people exiting the workforce en masse, according to a 2018 University of Chicago paper (pdf) that studied recipients of Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend. The study found that, although part-time work does tend to increase, any negative effects “seem to be offset by increases in spending that in turn increase the demand for more workers,” the study’s author told UChicago News.

More and more cities are testing out their own form of UBI. Finland was the first to really spearhead this experiment back in 2017, when it handed a group of 2k randomly selected unemployed people a monthly check of EUR 560 in the hopes that participants would find work. Though participants weren’t more likely to get a job, they did report less stress than the control group and greater trust in other people and in public institutions.

Dozens of US cities have now rolled out similar assistance programs: Some 48 cities across the US including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Denver and Atlanta have in the past few years launched pilot programs where some homeless and low-income residents are given monthly payments. Some of the financing behind these programs is coming from private organizations — in one example, founder and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey contributed USD 15 mn to UBI programs in 2020.

We’re seeing this take off elsewhere in Europe: In Germany, a privately funded basic income scheme kicked off in 2019, offering 250 randomly selected people up to USD 466 per month. A separate initiative also picked 120 Germans to receive USD 1.4k every month for three years to see how they’ll fare. More recently, the Irish government has budgeted some EUR 25 mn this year to provide basic income to support 2k artists.

And as living costs spiral, we could be seeing more of this: With global inflation reaching record highs, experts in the UK are already proposing that lawmakers give UBI a go to help people — particularly those in the 16-24 age bracket — cope with rising financial burdens.