Universal Basic Income: A History of an Idea

Having identified the structural problems with the digital economy and thought about how the concept of work might be reconfigured in response to them, chapter four explains why the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) has come to assume such prominence in the search for alternative modes of re-organising work and welfare. There have been many UBI models which responded to the specific conditions of twentieth-century life. This chapter highlights two of these, each representing a different model of UBI: one libertarian in tenor; the other of a more social democratic/socialist bent. These are respectively the attempt by US President Nixon’s administration to introduce a negative income tax scheme in the form of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), and the still running Alaska Permanent Fund, a programme of annual payments funded by what is essentially a sovereign wealth fund financed by the selling of oil drilling licences. While neither of these conform to normative conceptions of the universal basic income, they were important markers of the potential of UBI not only to improve existing conditions but to utterly transform future society. While a cynic might say that accounts of past models collectively represent a history of failure, they can be considered more positively as keeping the idea alive, inspiring some actual, albeit limited, schemes, and highlighting its utopian potential. In this chapter, all these ideas and experiments are used to develop a normative model of UBI, against which the case studies in the next chapter are judged.