The following article is authored by E. Fouksman.

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• Global research across decades shows UBI simplifies the welfare system, ends poverty, empowers women, improves health, and creates virtuous cycles of economic inclusion.
• The policy potential for universal basic income has been bogged down by confusion around cost, universality and targeting, as well as familiar cognitive biases and tropes, though long discredited.
• By reframing universal basic income as unconditional national dividend, the conversation can move from poverty alleviation towards distributive justice and the right to collective wealth.

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Universal basic income (UBI) – the proposal that every individual should receive an ongoing and regular cash payment, big enough for the basic necessities of life, with no selection criteria or conditions attached – keeps experiencing surges of attention. Tech billionaires laud it as a solution to technological unemployment. Development economists see it as an efficient way to alleviate poverty. Most recently, the economic suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the idea of giving cash even further into the limelight, with governments around the world mailing checks to citizens, or expanding eligibility for unemployment support or welfare payments.
 
This story is not new: throughout the 20^th century, something like a UBI had repeated moments of political traction. Yet guaranteed unconditional income never received enough political support to become policy. What is it that keeps stopping a policy that we know simplifies the welfare system, ends poverty, empowers women, improves health, and creates virtuous cycles of economic inclusion?
 
It’s not a lack of data: we have decades of experiments across the globe showing that unconditionally ensuring a minimum livelihood by giving cash works. This plethora of evidence demonstrates that opposition to UBI is not really about empirical questions. Rather, it’s time to think hard about the way the policy is conceptualized and thus (mis)understood: the cognitive dimension of policy making. Two ways of reframing the debate would lead to greater conceptual clarity around the fundamental policy questions behind UBI.
 
First, debates around UBI tend to get bogged down in confusions around cost, universality and targeting. Many critics claim a means-tested policy is cheaper than a universal one and gets money to those that really need it. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. A universal policy, when paired with taxation, is the same as a means-tested one: the means-testing simply happens when taxes are collected, not when the income is disbursed. After both taxes and transfers are fully accounted for, a universal policy only increases the net disposable income of a segment of the population, while the rest return their UBI via tax payments [1]. This is true of any universal social policy – for instance, while state schools are ‘free’, high-income individuals pay for them through taxes, and also cover their cost for others.
 
If paired with the right taxes, a universal basic income and an income-targeted policy like negative income tax (NIT) are identical in their economic and distributional outcomes, as well as their net cost. While a UBI gives the same amount of money to all and then is collected back via taxes, NIT achieves the same effect without the recoupment, simply by topping up income. Both unconditionally guarantee a minimum income to all. Instead of mistaking implementation details for fundamental differences, we need political agreement on a guaranteed unconditional minimum income, however it may be delivered.
 
Second, many debates around universal basic income are centered on the question of whether this is the most effective way to reform welfare, reduce poverty or mitigate for technological unemployment. There is indeed compelling evidence that UBI is a highly effective way of preventing material deprivation. Yet there is a more fundamental reason to demand it: distributive justice.
 
Even if robots don’t put us out of work, and poverty is no longer a problem, we should still demand a universal, unconditional, guaranteed level of material wellbeing – on the grounds that this is our shared inheritance of collective wealth. This both is the collective wealth of the commons (be it land or natural resources), and the wealth created by past generations, currently captured by just the lucky few who inherit it or get to capitalise on it. We can call this share of collective wealth a national, social, or commons dividend[2].
 
Reframing a UBI away from the language of poverty and welfare and into ‘a rightful share’ of collective wealth shifts the conversation towards questions of fundamental justice and rights[3]. It disrupts familiar cognitive biases and tropes that are long discredited but still intertwined with welfare policy – such as fears of dependency, laziness, or misspending caused by ‘free money’.
 
These fears have little basis in fact – decades of experiments and pilots have shown us that cash transfers largely increase economic participation, as people are able to invest in businesses, get training, or relocate to find work. Such experiments also show that people spend this cash on basic necessities, not ‘sin spending’ such as alcohol. Yet these tropes live on, largely due to classist and racist stereotypes – after all, we don’t worry that the rich will misspend the passive income they receive from investments or that such passive income will make them lazy or dependent. Bigotry is rarely overcome by evidence. By focusing the conversation away from aiding the poor to demanding a share of wealth that is rightfully already ours, we can sidestep these tropes.

To move beyond the well-worn cognitive tracks of the scepticism around UBI and other forms of unconditional guaranteed income, we much clarify that a universal policy paired with a tax clawback is identical to a means-tested policy, and shift the conversation from utilitarian debates to justice-based demands. A large body of evidence already exists around UBI – yet the same hesitations and counter arguments continue to be repeated again and again. What we need is not more evidence – but rather a shift in how we think about the right to economic security.