The idea of a universal basic income has become a staple of contemporary political discourse. It calls out in circumstances of uncertainty—even as the history of basic incomes has been somewhat obscured in the process, and the patterning and different kinds of uncertainty (precarious work, poverty, ‘cultural anxiety,’ risk, climate change) have often been conflated and attached to widely divergent politics. Yet few, if any, proposals put forward under the heading of a UBI are in fact either universal or as unconditional as might be supposed (or suggested by the label)—as with Andrew Yang’s proposal for a “freedom dividend” […]
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