A basic income is
a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.

(basicincome.org)

The first industrial revolution brought the foresight of exponential technological development. Initially, universal basic income was considered a utopy, but from the 1960s certain experiments in the form of negative income tax have started. The first proper UBI experiment took place in Canada in 1974.

Some programmes, mostly those proposed by the government, are dedicated to financially vulnerable population. In general, the purpose of the universal basic income is to provide a form of revenue for anyone.
The idea of a minimum income appeared for the first time in humanistic utopias of the Renaissance period in Europe, such as Thomas More’s Utopia and Juan Luisc Vives’ De Subventione Pauperum.

The first practical idea of basic income took shape in the historical period of the first industrial revolution, with the proposal of “capital grants provided at the age of majority” dating back to Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice of 1795.

The term “Social dividend” had commonly been used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, with the term “Basic income” gaining widespread currency afterwards.

Imagine that you had 500€ guaranteed each month,
what would you do?

It doesn’t matter if you work or if you’re unemployed, if you are healthy or if you have any disabilities, you’re going to get it anyway.
How would you spend it?

“If only I had 12 hours more…”
but what will you really do?

You could relax at home, go climbing, learn how to cook or simply work more than before. You could use it just for one task or split it into different activities, it’s your choice.

We create also an installation with this issue for the exhibition located at Politecnico di Milano, Durando campus, lasting one month.

Exhibition,
February
2018

There every person can learn about the history and nowaday situation of Basic Income and share how they would invest the new amount of money and time provided by an hypothetical Basic Income adoption.

Offline Data collection

Here you can see the “offline” results from the installation in real time.

MONEY

Read more about Basic Income and Automation of work in our previous projects.

Further
readings

During last semester we made an extensive research of this issue, from work replacement and automation to Basic Income. You can see the results here.

For the first link we used existing databases of famous sources. For the second link, we searched the information by ourselves, mostly referring to Google, Reddit and Wikipedia sources.