Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award!

Surely just giving people money couldn''t work. Or could it?

Imagine if every month the government deposited £1000 in your bank account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return It sounds crazy, but Universal Basic Income (UBI) has become one of the most influential policy ideas of our time, backed by thinkers on both the left and the right. The founder of Facebook, Obama''s chief economist, governments from Canada to Finland are all seriously debating some form of UBI.

In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movementShe travels to Kenya to see how UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, and India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor. She visits South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in the face of advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labour.

She also examines at the challenges the movement faces: contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing.

The UBI movement is not just an economic policy -- it also calls into question our deepest intuitions about what we owe each other and what activities we should reward and value as a society.



Format Häftad Omfång 272 sidor Språk Engelska Förlag Ebury Publishing Utgivningsdatum 2018-07-12 ISBN 9780753545775