The Case for a Revision of BIEN’s Definition of Basic Income
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Anne Glenda Miller
Abstract
BIEN’s definitive statement of a Basic Income (BI) and the commentaries on its five characteristics are examined in turn, to identify potential clarifications, revisions and omissions. The following amendments are proposed as a basis for further discussion: to shift the position of ‘unconditionally’ in the definitive statement so that it refers to the cash payment rather than to its delivery; some clarifications to characteristics 3 ‘individual’ and 4 ‘universal’; to introduce ‘uniform’, without which BIs could be used to endorse flagrant discrimination against, or even zero amounts for, less favoured groups; to restore the comprehensive nature of ‘unconditionality’ (which is now characteristic 6), by substituting ‘behavioural requirement’ in place of ‘work requirement’; to give the characteristic ‘without means test’ its own commentary (no. 7). The introduction of ‘uniform’ and ‘behavioural’ into the definitive statement should help to prevent BIEN’s definition from being regarded as male orientated.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Mike Danson, Reinhard Huss, Walter Van Trier and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Toru Yamamori, Ali Mutlu Köylüoglu and Télémaque Masson Recipon for our many discussions in BIEN’s Clarification of the Basic Income Definition working group, without which this paper could not have been written.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The Debate Over the Definition of Basic Income
- The Case for a Revision of BIEN’s Definition of Basic Income
- A Survey of Universal Basic Income Experiments
- Macroeconomic Observations on Paying for and Funding Universal Basic Income
- Exploring Young People’s Attitudes Towards Basic Income
- Is G.A. Cohen’s Egalitarian Ethos Consistent with Unconditional Basic Income?
- Unconditional Endowment and Acceptance of Taxes: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on UBI with Unemployed
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The Debate Over the Definition of Basic Income
- The Case for a Revision of BIEN’s Definition of Basic Income
- A Survey of Universal Basic Income Experiments
- Macroeconomic Observations on Paying for and Funding Universal Basic Income
- Exploring Young People’s Attitudes Towards Basic Income
- Is G.A. Cohen’s Egalitarian Ethos Consistent with Unconditional Basic Income?
- Unconditional Endowment and Acceptance of Taxes: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on UBI with Unemployed
