Radical Idea? The New Funding Around a Basic Income

There's something very wrong with how our society deals with those it leaves behind. For all its benefits, modern welfare tends to be restrictive, humiliating, bureaucratic and just not enough. Meanwhile, the ranks of those left behind by today's economy keep expanding, as more workers are sidelined by large-scale structural forces like globalization and technological change. The latter force is likely to gain steam in coming years as artificial intelligence advances, allowing whole new categories of jobs to be automated. Today's economic inequality may be nothing compared to what lies ahead in a world with far less work.

That’s where a “radical” idea comes in. The concept of universal basic income imagines a society in which every citizen gets a check to survive, and can spend that money freely while working to earn more.