Business Insider

Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California, was just 28 years old when he launched a pilot program that gives free money to his city's residents.

In February, the city began distributing $500 monthly stipends to 125 residents who live at or below the median income line (about $46,000 annually). The stipends are a test of basic income, a policy approach that would essentially pay people simply for being alive.

Open Knowledge

Universal basic income (UBI) is emerging as one of the most hotly debated issues in development and social protection policy.

But what are the features of UBI? What is it meant to achieve? How do we know, and what don’t we know, about its performance?

What does it take to implement it in practice? 

Fast Company

Thaïs Bendixen had a problem. Like many other millennials, the 25-year-old master’s student from Portugal “didn’t have any [financial] help from her parents” and had to balance the need to feed her brain with the need to put food on the table. “I knew I didn’t want to be in front of a computer—I wanted to be outside doing something to help the environment,” Bendixen says, explaining how difficult she found it to work and study at the same time.

Jamie Swift

What happens when we’re young shapes us for life.

That seems obvious, but it’s worth keeping in mind, particularly when we ponder the stubborn persistence of poverty in one of the world’s richest countries.

Hugh Segal — former senator, longtime professor, lifetime politico — was born in Montreal in 1950, an “edge-of-poverty working class kid,” as he refers to his upbringing in the book.

One frigid winter day in the 1950s, his oft-unemployed cab-driver dad gave young Hugh’s treasured wooden toy box to a neighbour living in the same triplex. The man didn’t have the money to fuel his furnace. Young Hugh resented this act of charity. He would later come to understand that there were people poorer than the Segals.

His family scraped by, navigating setbacks familiar to people living with less. The events seared themselves into his consciousness.

“A bailiff arriving to seize your dad’s car and empty the house of furniture is not something that fades into distant memory. It stays with you, like a dark spot at the edge of a slice of bread,” he reflects.   

The idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) floor where everyone starts with the same minimum amount of money as everyone else each month as an economic right of citizenship is not a new idea. UBI is an idea with a long history and thus a long history of support.

Among that support exists a number of Nobel prize winners.

The following is a compilation of some of those names and what they've said about UBI in recent years.

Vox

For about a decade now, the charity GiveDirectly has been distributing cash straight to poor residents in sub-Saharan Africa, starting in Kenya and expanding later to Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Morocco.

The organization was founded by economists, and has been studying the impact of its programs from the get-go. But the research has focused narrowly on recipients: Were they better off, the same, or worse off than people not getting cash?

Lindsay Advocate

Canadians are marching for Universal Basic Income on Oct. 26 as Toronto and cities around the world join forces – and it won’t be just Toronto, as people from former pilot centres Lindsay, Hamilton, Thunder Bay and other areas will also be taking part.

The event will be held in front of the Ontario Legislative Building at Queen’s Park, from where participants will march and hear from champions of a universal basic income in Canada.

Thunder Bay Newswatch

Ruth Westcott says Ontario’s now-cancelled basic income pilot project changed her life.

It’s why she’s helping to lead a grassroots effort to ensure the program is available not only in Ontario again, but across the country.

Lifting people out of poverty must become a national priority, she said, speaking at city hall on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Brian Russell had $40 left in his pocket when he was one of 4,000 people selected for Ontario's basic income pilot project. "Your life is better," he says. "I had better food and money to travel around the city. My life was more stable and secure."

For Joan Frame, basic income payments from the province meant she no longer had to borrow from friends to make it through the last few days of the month. Frame says she was always juggling bills and that basic income gave her back power over her life.

"I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you need to ask for money, but it is impossibly difficult," she says. "It was the worst part about being on any kind of assistance for me."

Open Democracy

Jessie Golem is a photographer and was, for a short time, a basic income recipient in Ontario. Beyond Trafficking and Slavery caught up with her at the 19th Global Basic Income Congress in Hyderabad, India, to chat about what the programme did for her, and what it meant to have it cut short.

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery: You were, for a short time, a recipient of a basic income in Canada. What was the program you were part of?

Jessie Golem: In 2017, the Ontario provincial government under the Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne introduced a three-year basic income pilot. They chose 4,500 people in four cities in Ontario, all of whom were making under C$30,000 a year, to receive an unconditional guaranteed basic income. The size of the income was put on a sliding scale. You could receive up to C$1,400 a month, but if you were working then it was reduced by 50 cents to the dollar. Because I was working, I received about C$700 a month.