Why is basic income being debated?

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Welcome to the inquiry from the BBC World Service.

On Charming Cozier, each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer.

October 2025, the Irish government holds a live media conference

after announcing the 2026 budget.

Speakers include Patrick O'Donovan, the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport.

He confirms that a pioneering pilot scheme for one section of the population will be made permanent.

An allocation of 18.27 million will be provided for the basic income for the act scheme

and its successor.

That 18 million euros, or 22 million US dollars, will fund regular cash payments to 2000 artists

with no conditions attached to ease income instability and support creativity.

Ireland has gone further than most.

Many countries are studying and testing variations of basic income.

It's also attracted the interest of industries,

keen to promote them as a crucial element of the future of work.

So this week we're asking, why is basic income being debated?

Part 1, as safety nerds.

It's an interesting question as to why the basic income was introduced in Ireland.

Jenny Dagh is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manuf University in Ireland.

Basic income has different forms and alternatives.

They include universal basic income or UBI,

where individuals get paid regardless of their work or wealth status.

If we look back, we have a history of discussion of UBI in Ireland since the 90s,

and there was actually a commitment within our programme for government in 2020

to try a universal basic income.

And of course, that was before the COVID pandemic hit.

So when pandemic restrictions kicked in and arts venues shut down,

it really laid bare the kind of stark realities of the difficult and challenging working conditions

that were very evident within the arts sector.

During that time, the coalition government included the Green Party.

One of its politicians, Catherine Martin, was the Irish Minister for Culture and Arts.

So she set up a task force to explore what could be done for the arts sector,

and the primary recommendation from the kind of arts and culture recovery task force

was to try a basic income for the arts.

It covers everything from circus performers to creative opera singers,

to your usual dance, theatre, performance, visual artists.

And then there were eligibility criteria based in around that,

in terms of defining how active you are.

So whether you had earned money through your creative practice,

what kind of organisations you've been a part of,

whether you'd published in the last while.

So these were kind of the eligibility criteria built in to kind of understand

the nature of a person's practice.

The basic income for the arts pilot scheme launched in 2022

of more than 9,000 applicants, 8,200 people were eligible.

2,000 of those were randomly chosen to receive 325 euros a week,

so around $1,520 USD a month for the duration of the programme,

with no restrictions on how to spend it.

The Irish Government Commission Jenny to author a report on the impact of the pilot scheme

on work and wellbeing.

We know that it increased so sense of life satisfaction,

and we know that the kind of consistency,

security and longevity of the payment,

the fact that they were getting it on a weekly basis for three years meant

that they could have some breathing space.

So as I say in the report that I did,

it really encouraged the majority of recipients to reflect,

what can I do now with my time now that I have this type of support?

And so it acted as a buffer and a safety net,

even if they took risks and went for an audition

that they may not have gone for before,

and if they had a gap in their contract,

that they were supported in that to keep going

and not have to move out of the sector.

So that idea of trying to retain the skills and knowledge within the sector

worked really well in that sense.

A separate Government Commission report estimated that for every one euro funding,

1.39 euros were generated for the economy.

I think absolutely it is seen as an investment in the sector,

and it's an investment in trying to transform work practices

and provide support for individual artists

beyond the kind of typical welfare model.

So it's not that it's a handout,

it's kind of giving them this kind of guaranteed minimum income in a way

to ensure that they can continue their creative practice and expand.

The pilot ended in February this year.

Applications for the new basic income for the art scheme opened in May.

That new permanent scheme will run for three years.

Both pilot recipients are allowed to reapply.

We're expecting that there will be a lot more applicants this time round

and perhaps then even the pilot scheme.

Now that there has been a lot of publicity and evidence based around it

and 2000 recipients will be chosen to receive

325 euros a week, the same amount for three years.

And then those recipients will not be allowed

apply for the next three years of funding

and then will be allowed the following three years.

So it'll roll across different populations within the art sector.

I know that there are other groups within society like carers and small farmers

that also would benefit from something like a basic income.

But I suppose once we show the evidence for a basic income and the benefits from that

I think we can apply that to different sectors

and use that evidence to justify why other types of

precarious workers would benefit from such a payment.

Working out how, where and why to bring in basic income

is an ongoing complex conversation.

Our next expert witness can explain.

Part two, basic principles.

So there's basic income, universal basic income and unconditional basic income.

I favor unconditional basic income because I think it's at the core of the topic.

Dr. Katarina Nerves is a philosopher and post-doctoral fellow

at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Her work for its Vision for the Future project

involves investigating alternative systems

to address social and financial inequalities.

It works as a top-up for those who have pensions or income,

additional income from work for instance,

and hence why it's unconditional.

Contrary to many other cash grants that we have,

a UBI is not taken away if we are too rich.

It's not taken away if we have too much property, it's not taken away.

If we are working or have a pension.

Experiments involving scheme similar to basic income

date back to the late 1960s and 1970s in the US and Canada.

They included negative income tax,

where payments only went to people below a certain income level.

There's also guaranteed basic income.

That's more focused on directing regular cash payments

to the people who need it the most.

I've lost track, but it's been over a hundred

of the guaranteed income experiments in the US.

There's experiments in Barcelona,

there were some experiments in some cities in the Netherlands.

So it's really both exciting and daunting

if we start looking at the number of experiments

that has taken place and the data that we have on them.

Europe's first national government-funded

basic income experiment launched in Finland in 2017.

It ran for two years and focused on the specific section of the population.

So the finished basic income experiment was very much

into trying to understand whether long-term and employed people

would fare better in the sense of finding a job quicker

if they were granted an unconditional cash benefit

instead of the regular unemployment allowance.

And this means that what they did was that they had a group

receiving the unemployment allowance that is taken away

once you find a job.

And another group who was and knew that they were receiving

an unconditional allowance,

there would remain at least a substantial part of it

if they found a job.

2000 unemployed 25 to 58 year olds were picked at random

and paid 560 euros a month.

Today that would be around 660 US dollars.

It found that the mental and financial stress

of recipients reduced.

But it didn't show that people were finding a job quicker

nor that they were delaying their entrance in the labor market.

There were no significant results on that end.

And so a lot of people said,

well, a basic income does not work

as if a basic income is supposed to make people

find a job quicker.

Can that's not exactly the purpose?

I would like us to be very careful

with how we extrapolate and generalize the results

from these experiments.

One, because they are experiments,

meaning they are short-term

and many of the impacts that a basic income will have

will depend upon the fact that it is a stable policy.

But also, experiments have been happening all over the globe

in very different contexts.

Some are closer to basic income.

Others are closer to a guaranteed income.

So the variety is such that to generalize

is difficult than we ought to be careful.

There were a few reasons why basic income

discussions have become more prominent in recent years.

I think it's also driven by the concern

that inequality is increasing quite a lot.

And a lot of people in the middle class

are not becoming rich.

They are rather seeing their living costs

increase and hence they are closer to the,

so to speak, lower class.

Basic income schemes are not always paid for by taxpayers.

Sometimes they have government funding.

Other times, for instance, in the US,

they started by mobilizing private funds from foundations

or some tech entrepreneurs who wanted to fund

basic income experiments.

In 2016, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI,

the company behind ChatGPT,

proposed a basic income research study.

The comprehensive experiment started in 2019

and ran for five years.

3,000 low-income individuals in the US

states of Illinois and Texas

were paid over $50 a month or 1,000.

The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey,

donated millions to a US pilot scheme five years ago.

Metas Mark Zuckerberg was supporting

universal basic income back in 2017.

Three years ago, Elon Musk put forward the idea

of a universal high, not basic income,

in what he called an AI-positive future.

Well, two responses.

The first is because basic income has

this appeal to freedom and individual freedom

that libertarians also buy into,

it's not necessarily surprising

because a lot of these self-made tech bros

appeal a lot to the idea of individual freedom

and a non- paternalistic state.

So, UBI functions as a very clear mechanism

to substitute these existing services

that are seen as more invasive

of our autonomy and individual freedom.

So, that's not surprising.

But the more cynical answer is also to say,

well, basic income in the sense of

the libertarians and the tech bros

is a very nice response to the concern

that might come with the replacement

of jobs from automation

and just pass on those costs to governments

and ensure that people have an income

to then buy whatever products

a lot of these tech bros are producing

and without a basic income,

that would be very hard to do.

But this is a very cynical answer.

I don't have evidence that this is exactly

their view on the matter.

The speed and scope of automation

and artificial intelligence

is a big reason why basic income

is a hot topic right now.

Let's explore that more with our next expert witness.

Hi, this is Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast.

We have the latest on the peace talks

between US and Iranian negotiators

due to start in Pakistan this weekend.

But with the straight of hormones

still closed to most ships

than Israel waging war on Lebanon,

can they strike a deal?

That's the Global News Podcast,

wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Part three, throwing in the towel.

I would say that universal basic income

would be throwing the towel

and accepting a future in which AI

will necessarily make humans redundant.

Dalin Asamoglu is an institute professor

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

In 2024 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

But my argument is that we do not need to throw in that towel

because the future of work is not written in stone.

It depends on the decisions we make today

and there are many decisions that could steer AI

towards a human complementary direction

so that rather than replacing humans

it actually helps them become more productive.

Big tech is promoting universal basic income as a remedy

to offset the negative effects of AI and automation on jobs.

It would be a major step towards creating

a two-tier society.

So it would be a worse cure than the disease.

Imagine that as some technologists are forecasting,

60, 70, 80% of jobs are displaced completely by AI

at some point within the next 10, 15 years.

Then we're going to have a situation in which

a significant fraction, perhaps a majority,

a more than a majority of the population,

don't have any means of earning a living.

They are unemployable and they get handouts from society

while the remainder of the population as engineers,

creators, or in some other capacity are in this very

high-paying high-pristeesh jobs.

That would be a very dystopian society

in which there is a clearly labeled underclass

and a group of high-status producers

who then feed that underclass.

I think that's a very scary prospect

and is completely inconsistent with a democratic society.

So if not universal basic income,

what measures could be adopted?

This is where our forecasts and our control

over the future of work becomes critical.

In my assessment, a feasible and very desirable future

is one where we use artificial intelligence,

not as a job killer, not as a stepping stone

to artificial general intelligence

that's going to replace everything humans do,

but as a complement to human workers

so that workers can be more productive,

they can burn higher wages and new jobs

and new tasks will become available to workers.

So using AI to enhance work forces, not displace them.

But UBI or other programs are not essential

for the survival of a large fraction of the people.

It's a question of what are the best government programs

to support a future of different types of jobs

that still provide dignity and living conditions

that are decent for the majority of the people.

If on the other hand, we accept the future of joblessness,

must unemployment.

Then we do need some social programs

and UBI is one of the possibilities.

I think none of the options, unemployment insurance,

social security, none of them would be up

to the task of supporting, say, 50% of the working age population

not working, but that's a future that hopefully we can avoid.

I think we would be foolish to put zero probability

and rule out as impossible a future

in which large job losses would happen.

But the same advances in AI that make this

a dystopian possibility also enable much better ways

of complementing human workers,

making existing work more productive,

creating new work for people that would match their skills

and aspirations.

So AI advances are a two-edged sword.

It depends which edge we're going to use.

Time to call our final expert witness.

Part four.

Back to basics.

So the biscuit gum debate literally, it is a global debate

and it goes on and off.

It's literally like switching lights on and off in various points.

Uganda Vispelara is an academic who has been involved

in basic income research for 25 years.

He's acting chair of the basic income earth network,

which promotes informed global debates on the topic.

At the moment, there's a lot of countries in Asia, East Asia,

Southeast Asia that are talking about this.

So in India, there's a huge discussion.

There's a lot of debates beginning of debate going on

in different countries, whether that is Indonesia

or Taiwan, for example, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems to be spreading everywhere.

It's really taken off in the global south.

That economic term for grouping developing nations

includes countries in Latin America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.

There's sometimes a sort of a bit of a myth

that it's a lot easier to implement a basic income

in some place like Europe or North America.

And it's a lot harder to do this in the global south.

But actually, it should be the other way around,

different countries in Europe.

They have very advanced systems, very complex systems.

And every time you introduce something new,

you have to make it fit.

That means a lot of things that have to change

across the system.

And that's really hard to work.

The general point, basically, is in a way

it's a lot easier to try and implement this

in, let's say, an African country.

And countries on that continent

have already turned their basic income talks into action.

The countries where there's a lot of pilots going on

is Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa, historically, and Namibia.

One of the most famous pilots, largest pilots

that are happening are in Kenya

where a private organization gives directly,

is basically funding whole villages

that are effectively given an unconditional cash transfer.

Give directly is a nonprofit that sends cash donations

directly to low income households in the US

and several African countries.

They're also very interesting because they

are taking a much longer term view.

And in the Kenya example, they've actually committed

to funding experiments that run 10 years or even more than that.

So we can then start thinking in terms of, well,

how do people say, adjust their lives

when they have a long term support-like basic income,

as opposed to basically just something that's, you know,

one year or two years?

Over in Latin America, Brazil is leading the way.

So the really fascinating case of Brazil at the moment is

that you have about a dozen municipalities of different sizes,

you know, some relatively small, some really big

that have started implementing something like a basic income.

And it's spreading from one municipality to another

and we're quite excited to see where this will go.

So at that local level, it's a policy not a pilot.

It's exactly, it's a policy.

So they don't bother with a pilot phase.

It's not like two years and then everything reverts back to normal.

This is an actual policy that's been implementing

and has been growing.

It has been expanding within municipalities

and across municipalities.

How's it being funded?

It's basically funded through oil money in Rio de Janeiro,

the state.

There's a lot of oil exploitation

and the oil company effectively pays dividends

to the municipalities and that's a big chunk of their budget.

So some of these municipalities have done the side

that in addition to, of course, doing infrastructure projects

and various other projects,

they've decided to turn this into something

like a basic income that covers a big chunk of their population.

I know this is sort of always a big concern.

You have a basic income and suddenly that means populations

are going to start coming in, et cetera, et cetera.

They are actually quite happy with that

because it's an economy boost, right?

Ultimately, they're quite happy with this

because it also means people are staying

around young families are staying around.

They're not moving out.

That doesn't mean Brazil's results can be reproduced.

The thing to keep in mind is Brazil is a bit of a unique case

in the sense that municipalities really have a lot of local power.

Like, for example, they have power over their budget.

So you need to be careful about thinking that

Brazil is really, really,

it's amazing what's happening there.

Let's just copy paste this into Ireland or UK or any other place.

Every time you look at an idea like that,

you do need to adapt it to local circumstances.

And so the conversations continue.

Every time we have a new pilot,

it's like the discussion gets beefed up again.

You know, you have another spike.

And this is, I think, a really, really important part

of the story of why Biskinkum is now suddenly being taken seriously.

Also, because these pilots are sort of our scientific projects,

suddenly that means the policymakers

start to take it much more seriously.

And that includes policymakers within countries,

but it also includes big organizations

like the World Bank.

IMF suddenly, these people start taking it seriously

because there is evidence,

there's actual practical reality to look at.

So back to our main question,

why is Biskinkum being debated?

It's already been talked about and tested for decades.

The various issues it aims to address

like inequality, poverty,

streamlining welfare systems

and financial security

were also there from the start.

What's changed now is the accelerating impact

of AI on employment.

Big text backing of Biskinkum

has drawn unconditional cash transfers deeper into scenarios

about its role in the future of work

and the society that might create.

This edition of the inquiry was written and presented

by Nees Sharman-Cozia.

The producer was Daniel Rosney,

researcher Evie Epsley,

editor Tom Bigwood,

and technical producer Craig Bordman.

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