Who Promotes Universal Basic Income — and Why Does It Matter?
An old idea with new sponsors — and a question that will not go away
There is a question I rarely ask aloud, but which returns to me with stubborn persistence every time I read about artificial intelligence and the labour market: if tomorrow half of what people do at their desks can be taken over by an algorithm, what remains of the social contract we all understood — that work gives purpose, that purpose gives dignity, that dignity gives citizenship? I do not know the answer. What I do know is that there exists a proposal which has circulated for several centuries and which, in recent years, has acquired some surprising sponsors: the Universal Basic Income — or, in its now-ubiquitous acronym, UBI.
This is the story of that idea: who promotes it today, which experiments have tested it, which questions it fails to resolve — and a conceptual rival that frames the problem entirely differently. Not money for everyone, but things for everyone.
An Idea with Deep Roots
Before we discuss Sam Altman or Elon Musk, we need to go further back. The notion of an unconditional income for every member of a community is not an invention of Silicon Valley. It is a political proposal with a biography spanning several centuries.
Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual architects of American independence, proposed in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one, financed through a tax on landed property. Not as charity, but as compensation: the land, Paine argued, had once belonged to everyone, and private property was, in essence, a collective dispossession. Compensation was the debt society owed to those dispossessed.
Several generations later, Milton Friedman — hardly a socialist — proposed the negative income tax: a mechanism by which the state would no longer distribute conditional benefits but would automatically top up the incomes of those falling below a minimum threshold. The logic was administrative efficiency: eliminate bureaucracy and the behavioural traps embedded in the existing welfare architecture. Friedrich Hayek himself noted, in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, that "the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society." Hayek, the intellectual patron of economic liberalism.
In 1986, a group of European academics — with Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs at the centre — founded at Louvain the BIEN network (Basic Income European Network, later renamed the Basic Income Earth Network). Van Parijs would become the éminence grise of the academic UBI movement, articulating the argument in terms of real freedom: freedom does not mean merely the absence of constraint. It means the presence of resources without which choice remains a fiction. A poor person is, in a philosophical sense, less free — not because anyone prevents them, but because they lack the means to choose.
Author's note: There is a paradox that haunts me, as a citizen from northern Moldova, one of the poorer regions of Romania: the liberals who most despise the state are invariably the first to demand UBI when they fear social unrest. And the socialists who most love the state are the first to oppose UBI when they realise it might replace their systems of conditional control. An idea in which everyone recognises something of themselves — and no one recognises themselves fully.
Today's Promoters: A Strange Alliance
If Van Parijs gave UBI its academic credibility on the left, the past decade has brought onto the stage a wave of promoters who fit poorly into the image of a social justice activist: start-up founders, tech billionaires, and Silicon Valley futurists.
The most prominent is Sam Altman, Chief Executive of OpenAI. In 2016, Altman announced on the Y Combinator blog his intention to fund a large-scale study of UBI. His question was straightforward: if people receive money without being required to work, do they play video games — or do they create new things? The study, conducted by the non-profit OpenResearch under the direction of researcher Elizabeth Rhodes, distributed one thousand dollars per month for three years to one thousand low-income individuals in Texas and Illinois, against a control group receiving fifty dollars monthly. The results, published in July 2024, generated a wave of contradictory interpretations.
What actually happened? Recipients spent more on basic needs and helped others financially; they worked slightly less — approximately 1.3 fewer hours per week; they gained greater autonomy, started more small businesses, and chose employment that better suited their lives. Effects on mental health and stress were significant in the first year but faded by the second and third. The study's core conclusion: cash alone cannot resolve structural problems — housing costs, lack of childcare, chronic illness. But the flexibility it provides is real.
Altman himself declared that UBI seemed to him indispensable for genuine equality of opportunity, and that future generations would find it "ridiculous that we used the fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people."
Alongside Altman stands, somewhat incongruously, Elon Musk, who has repeatedly endorsed UBI on the grounds that automation will make it impossible for many to find work. Musk is a particular case: he advocates UBI as a safety net for a post-work world while simultaneously having dismissed tens of thousands of employees at Twitter/X and promoting a fiercely competitive vision of merit and effort. Consistency is not this promoter's strongest quality.
A study published in 2025 in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, authored by Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon of Simon Fraser University, identifies something more uncomfortable: the tech elite's advocacy for UBI presents the proposal as an altruistic response to the disruptions caused by artificial intelligence, whilst in fact constructing a social licence for the omnipresence of AI in society. By championing UBI, tech leaders position themselves as benevolent visionaries concerned for humanity's wellbeing — diverting attention from the fact that they stand to profit most from AI's proliferation. The sociologist Bourdieu would have called this symbolic violence: the imposition of a self-serving narrative framework as though it were natural neutrality.
From Left to Right: A Concept Without an Ideological Owner
What makes UBI simultaneously fascinating and suspect is that it belongs to no single political camp. It is an idea claimed by everyone and wanted differently by each.
The progressive left sees in UBI an extension of the welfare state: a broader, more dignified safety net that liberates people from the humiliation of conditional benefits bureaucracy. Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor under the Clinton administration, has backed UBI as a response to inequality. Andrew Yang, candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, placed UBI — which he called the "Freedom Dividend," one thousand dollars per month for every American adult — at the centre of his campaign, attracting a substantial following.
The libertarian right sees something different: the opportunity to dismantle an expensive, paternalistic welfare system riddled with behavioural traps. The proposal is to replace dozens of conditional programmes with a single unconditional transfer — simpler, more efficient, more respectful of individual dignity.
The problem with this alliance is that both visions want entirely different UBIs. The right wants a UBI that replaces the existing social state; the left wants one that supplements it. If you fund a thousand-dollar-per-month UBI by eliminating Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance — as many American conservatives propose — you end up, mathematically, redistributing money upward, from the poor toward the middle and upper classes. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington warns that precisely this would be the outcome: a UBI financed through cuts to existing programmes would increase poverty, not reduce it.
Philippe Van Parijs proposes the coherent version: a UBI set at one-quarter of GDP per capita — roughly $1,163 per month in the United States — granted in addition to quality public services in health, education, and transport. Not instead of them. It is a consistent vision, but one that requires a level of taxation no Western democracy currently appears willing to contemplate.
The Experiments: What They Tell Us, What They Conceal
One of the few certainties in the UBI debate is that we now have more solid empirical data than a decade ago. Pilot programmes have proliferated — in Finland, Kenya, Canada, Germany, and the United States — and whilst there is no universal answer, certain conclusions recur.
Finland, 2017–2018. The Finnish government offered €560 per month, for two years, to two thousand unemployed individuals selected at random. Results: increased subjective wellbeing, reduced stress, improved relations with public administration — with no significant reduction in the desire to work. The principal criticism: the experiment targeted only unemployed people, not the general population, and was too brief for robust conclusions.
Kenya, GiveDirectly, from 2016. The world's largest and longest UBI study: approximately twenty thousand people across one hundred and ninety-five rural villages receive regular cash transfers for periods of two or twelve years. Preliminary results show that recipients do not become inactive — on the contrary, entrepreneurial activity increases, children's health indicators improve. The obesity rate fell by 4.5 per cent; girls' secondary school attendance rose by 30 per cent. The caveat: the Kenyan context does not automatically transfer to Europe or North America.
Altman's OpenResearch Study, 2020–2023. The most important methodological finding: individual experiments do not capture the systemic effects of a truly universal UBI. If a single person in a neighbourhood receives an additional thousand dollars, their behaviour differs from what it would be if every resident received the same. Multiplier effects — more money circulating in the local economy, more employers competing for labour — do not appear in isolated pilots. Alaska remains the only place in the world with something approaching genuine universal UBI: the Permanent Fund Dividend, distributed annually to all residents from state oil revenues. The sum is modest (a few hundred dollars per year), but it has been universal and unconditional for four decades.
Context: Why Now, Why AI?
UBI is not a new idea. But why is it fashionable now? Several forces are converging.
Automation and AI. The fear that artificial intelligence will eliminate entire categories of employment — not merely repetitive physical work, but cognitive routine work: accountants, radiologists, translators, junior programmers — revives the spectre of mass labour displacement. The economist Guy Standing has written for decades about the emergence of a new precarious proletariat — which he terms the precariat — composed of people on temporary contracts, without social security, without professional horizons. UBI, in his view, is the only systemic response. Whether the catastrophic scenario of automation will materialise remains unknown. It is a hypothesis, not a fact.
The Pandemic. COVID-19 functioned as a forced experiment in partial UBI: the stimulus payments distributed by Western governments demonstrated that direct cash transfers work faster and more efficiently than complex bureaucratic programmes. The poverty rate in the United States fell dramatically in 2020–2021 as a result of these payments, only to return to prior levels almost immediately upon their cessation. The lesson: it can be done. But not without political will.
The Crisis of Work's Meaning. The anthropologist David Graeber, in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, argued that a significant proportion of employment in the modern economy — administrative roles, public relations, compliance, middle management — is perceived by those who hold it as pointless. UBI might allow people to refuse such work and choose something else: volunteering, art, care, small-scale entrepreneurship. It is a promise, not a guarantee.
Author's note: My father was a car mechanic in Botoșani, a mid-sized town in north-eastern Romania. He did not earn much. But he never imagined his work was useless — because it was not. Cars broke down, he repaired them, people drove on. The connection between effort and utility was direct, tangible. I do not know whether UBI would have helped our family in the nineteen-nineties. What I know is that what helped was an economy in which his work mattered. That is not something UBI can provide.
The Criticisms: Why It Is Not Simple
There are serious objections to UBI that arise not from ideology but from arithmetic and logic.
Cost. A UBI of one thousand euros per month for every adult in a country with ten million adults amounts to one hundred and twenty billion euros annually. Romania's GDP is approximately four hundred billion euros. One-third of GDP for a single social programme — on top of all other state expenditure. The figures do not close without dramatic tax increases, structural deficits, or the elimination of existing programmes.
Inflation. If everyone receives more money without a corresponding increase in the supply of goods and services, prices rise — particularly housing, which is the least elastic market of all. Winners would cease to win in the medium term. The counter-argument: everything depends on how UBI is financed. A UBI funded through taxation redistributes; it does not create new money.
The Effect on Work. The OpenResearch study showed a small reduction in hours worked. Opponents argue that at the scale of an entire economy, a decline in labour force participation would reduce output. Proponents argue that people would work better, not less — choosing roles that better match their capabilities, becoming more productive and more stable employees.
The Substitution Risk. The most serious left-wing objection: if politicians use UBI as a pretext for dismantling public healthcare, free education, and the other pillars of the welfare state, the most vulnerable lose far more than they gain. A token monthly payment cannot replace access to healthcare, education, or social housing. A pocket-sized UBI substituting real public services would be regression, not progress.
Eastern Europe and the Limits of the Debate
Romania has no serious national debate about UBI in the universal sense. What it does have is a welfare system in transition. Since 1 January 2024, the so-called Venit de Incluziune (Inclusion Income) has been in force — a reform that unified the old Guaranteed Minimum Income with the Family Support Allowance into a single administrative instrument. The amounts are modest: the equivalent of roughly €74 per month for the inclusion benefit (after indexation to 2024 inflation), and around €190 for a family with children. This is not UBI. It is conditional social assistance, accessed through application and periodic social investigation.
At the European level, the 2022 Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages obliged Romania to enshrine in law a framework for calculating the minimum wage based on clear economic indicators. The gross minimum wage reached 4,050 lei (approximately €815) per month from January 2025. It is an improvement, but Romania remains in the lower half of the European ranking for wages and purchasing power.
The Central and Eastern European context renders the UBI debate fiscally premature but socially urgent. These are societies experiencing massive labour emigration, demographic collapse, overburdened pension systems, and dual economies — a productive formal sector alongside an enormous informal one. UBI resolves none of these problems directly. But perhaps it poses the right question: how do we define membership of a community in the absence of stable work?
Who Benefits from the Debate?
I return to Bélisle-Pipon's 2025 observation: UBI has become a narrative instrument in the hands of the tech elite. Altman and Musk do not champion UBI because they are altruists. They champion an idea that allows them to accelerate automation without confronting the political resistance of organised labour. If people know they will receive something regardless of what happens to their job, they may be less inclined to object when the robot takes their place on the factory floor.
That cynical reading is possible. But it is not the only one. Altman may be sincere in his concern. The data from his experiment — the increased autonomy, reduced stress, stimulated entrepreneurship — may be real and deserving of political attention. Both things may be simultaneously true: UBI may be both a narrative instrument serving tech-elite interests and a social policy with genuine merit.
What is not possible is for UBI to be neutral. Every concrete version of it redistributes from someone to someone else, preserves or abolishes other rights, consolidates or weakens the welfare state. The question is not "UBI: yes or no?" — it is "which UBI, who pays for it, what does it replace or complement, and whom does it actually serve?"
UBI Versus Universal Basic Services: Money or Things?
There is an alternative to UBI that public debate ignores almost systematically, even though it is older and more concrete than it appears: rather than giving everyone money with which to purchase what they need, why not provide directly what they need — housing, food, hospitals, nurseries, schools, transport?
This approach has a name: Universal Basic Services (UBS). The concept was systematically formulated by the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) at University College London in 2017, and has been refined since by researchers such as Anna Coote and Ian Gough. The logic is straightforward: the fundamental needs of human beings are not money — they are concrete things. And certain of those things — health, education, shelter, basic nutrition — can be provided more efficiently, more equitably, and more durably through public infrastructure than through individual cash transfers.
What the UBS Model Proposes
A standard Universal Basic Services package would include:
- Housing — guaranteed access to decent shelter: not necessarily private ownership, but enough — a room, a functional flat, a quality residential facility for those without family support
- Food — public canteens or subsidised access to basic meals; not gourmet dining, but adequate nutrition for all
- Healthcare — universal access to hospital care, a general practitioner, essential medicines, maternity services; this model already exists in several countries (the NHS in the United Kingdom, the Nordic systems)
- Education — nursery, school, and potentially university: free and high-quality public services
- Childcare — accessible crèches and nurseries, not as a privilege but as infrastructure
- Transport — guaranteed basic mobility: bus, metro, access to the public network
- Connectivity — internet, basic telephony, access to information
- Community activities — cultural centres, libraries, civic spaces, community programmes
Proponents of UBS argue that these services possess economies of scale that cash cannot replicate. A hospital efficiently serves tens of thousands of people; if each individual spent their UBI on private health insurance, the aggregate cost would be far higher and the quality far more unequal. The same argument applies to education, transport, and social housing.
The Fundamental Tensions with UBI
Between UBI and UBS there are several real tensions, not merely differences of political taste.
Autonomy versus security. UBI gives you money and lets you decide. UBS gives you things and decides on your behalf what you need. Liberal philosophers — Van Parijs included — maintain that the first model respects individual dignity: I know better than the state what I want with my thousand euros. UBS advocates respond that freedom without resources is fiction, and that cash without adequate public infrastructure generates irrational consumption and unequal access to essential services. If you receive the equivalent of five hundred lei and must purchase health insurance, pay rent, buy food, and fund transport — in today's Romania you cannot go very far.
Real versus declared universality. UBI is, in theory, universal: everyone receives the same sum, without conditions. UBS has an implementation problem: to distribute food or allocate social housing, someone must decide who needs it and how much. This inevitably recreates an eligibility mechanism — precisely the bureaucracy UBI seeks to eliminate. Anna Coote, one of the principal UBS advocates, acknowledges that "universality" in the UBS context actually means "guaranteed access on the basis of need" — which is something different. Guy Standing, a UBI advocate, criticises precisely this slippage: UBS claims to eliminate conditionality but reintroduces it under a different name.
Paternalism versus agency. The classic objection to UBS: the state decides you need a canteen, not a restaurant of your choosing; social housing, not your preferred rented flat; a public nursery, not the childminder you would have selected. UBS advocates respond that the accusation of paternalism is a luxury available only to those who already have the resources to choose. A single mother with two children in Botoșani — or in Stoke-on-Trent, or in Łódź — does not have the luxury of choosing between the public canteen and the organic café. She needs the public canteen to exist and to be good. Paternalism becomes practical relevance when the alternative is absence.
Cost and efficiency. UBS may be cheaper than UBI at the aggregate level, precisely because collective services carry lower unit costs. Researchers estimate that a comprehensive UBS package in OECD countries would cost between four and five per cent of GDP — compared to the ten to fifteen per cent that a generous UBI would absorb. But it is neither free nor simple to administer: public infrastructure carries its own costs in terms of quality, corruption, and bureaucracy.
Fungibility. Money from UBI is fungible — you can use it for anything. A service is not fungible — a place at the public canteen cannot be converted into rent. This is both an advantage (the service reaches where it is needed) and a disadvantage (it does not respond to the idiosyncratic needs of every individual). A person with a special diet cannot use the standard canteen. A person living in a rural village does not benefit from free urban transport. The universality of services has geographical and personal limits that the universality of money crosses more easily.
Infrastructure of Stability and the Horizon of Continuity
There is a difference between UBI and UBS that economic literature treats too little, but which strikes me as decisive in practice: UBS builds infrastructures of stability, whilst UBI offers resources for navigating instability. These are not the same thing.
When a hospital has functioned well in the same location for a decade; when the nursery has been there as long as anyone can remember; when the school canteen feeds children regardless of fluctuations in family income — something is constituted that cannot be purchased with money: a horizon of continuity. People know the service will be there tomorrow, and in five years' time. They can plan. The child knows they will attend the same school. The elderly person knows the hospital has not moved. The mother knows the crèche exists. This predictability is a collective good — invisible in any calculation of individual utility, yet structuring the social psychology of an entire community.
UBI does not build this horizon. A cash transfer, however generous, is an individual and presentist instrument: it gives you purchasing power now, in the conditions of the present market, with the present supply of services. If the local hospital closes, if the nursery is privatised, if the public canteen never existed — your UBI payments compete in a market that lacks local supply. You pay monopoly prices or you move. Neither constitutes stability.
This problem has a territorial dimension that UBI debates structurally ignore. Discussion of local and regional community infrastructure appears, at best, in the footnotes of strategic planning documents — as an appendix, a "pre-condition," a problem to be resolved elsewhere. UBI is proposed as a geography-free universal solution: a thousand dollars a month works identically in Manhattan and in a rural county of south-western Romania. But it does not work identically — because in that rural county the market of services on which to spend the money does not exist. The nominal sum is identical; its real power to organise a life differs completely, depending on what infrastructure surrounds you.
UBS, by its very nature, is a programme of territorial construction: you cannot provide basic services without building or maintaining local infrastructure — hospitals, schools, transport, food distribution networks. Every guaranteed service is a commitment to a place, to a community, to a time horizon. This territorial commitment is precisely what is absent from the logic of UBI, which is designed to function independently of geography, community, and local infrastructure. And that is why, in regions already emptied of infrastructure — northern Moldova, rural Oltenia, the post-industrial heartlands of Wales, eastern Germany, the depopulating interior of southern Italy — UBI alone is not an answer. It is a plaster applied to a wound that requires reconstruction.
Money Has Limits. The System Is the Key.
The UBI versus UBS debate, if followed to its logical conclusion, produces a finding that few state explicitly: money does not resolve everything. This is not a moralistic observation. It is a structural one.
Money is an instrument of mediation. It transforms a need into demand, and demand into a transaction. It functions exceptionally well when a market exists capable of responding to that demand — when there is supply, competition, distribution, infrastructure. When the market is absent or distorted, money performs nothing of what it promises. You can give a thousand euros to a person in a village without a doctor: no doctor is thereby created. You can give five hundred lei to a family without access to a nursery: no nursery appears. Money does not build systems. It circulates through systems already built.
This is the fundamental limitation of UBI as social policy: it presupposes that the system exists and is accessible. It presupposes that markets in education, healthcare, housing, and food are functioning, and that the individual, equipped with additional resources, can successfully navigate them. Where the system works — in large cities, in regions with solid infrastructure, in countries with regulated markets and already-consolidated basic public services — UBI makes sense as a supplementary instrument. Where the system is absent, underdeveloped, or in collapse, UBI is a solution to a problem that is not the lack of money. It is the lack of structure.
What genuinely matters in any social context is not the sum transferred, but the adaptive system in which people live: a health system that recognises needs change and recalibrates; an education system that does not produce graduates for jobs that no longer exist; a transport network that connects rather than isolates; a housing infrastructure that permits mobility without producing rootlessness; community services that adapt to real demographic change rather than to the demographic projections of twenty years ago. An adaptive system is neither free nor automatic. It is the product of deliberate political decisions, sustained public investment, and local governance structures with genuine authority.
Money — whether in the form of UBI, universal benefits, or higher wages — is an input to the system, not a substitute for the system. Altman's OpenResearch study demonstrated clearly that a thousand dollars a month cannot resolve structural problems: housing costs, the absence of childcare, chronic disease. Not because the sum is too small, but because these problems have no individual monetary solution. They have systemic solutions: housing policy, crèche networks, preventive healthcare systems. Things that money can support, but cannot replace.
There is a particular irony in the fact that Sam Altman — one of the most powerful system-builders in the world, a man who has constructed the global infrastructure of artificial intelligence — proposes as a remedy for the disruptions caused by his own system an instrument that ignores the need for system. UBI, in Altman's logic, is a security patch applied on top of a system he has no intention of changing. It is sufficient to reduce social pressure. It is not sufficient to build something in place of what automation unmakes.
The conclusion is not that money is useless. It is that money alone is half an answer. The other half is the adaptive structure: the system that knows how to receive people, respond to their real needs, recalibrate when those needs change, and remain territorially present even where it is not profitable to do so. This is, at its core, the distinction between a social policy and a development policy. UBI is a social policy. UBS, at its maximum potential, is a development policy. And many of the regions where these debates matter most have an urgent need of the second.
UBI as an Illusion of Freedom and the Erosion of Regional Civilisational Institutions
There is a deeper argument than the economic one — which I ordinarily avoid in analytical writing, precisely because it is difficult to calibrate without sliding into rhetoric — but which I consider, ultimately, the most serious of all: UBI does not offer a perspective of continuity. It offers a perspective of slow degradation beneath the appearance of freedom.
Here is why.
A community — a village, a small town, a region — does not survive through individual incomes. It survives through institutions. Not institutions in the bureaucratic sense, but in the anthropological sense: collective structures that reproduce, over time, the conditions of life in common. These institutions are not optional, and they are not interchangeable. They are interdependent, like the organs of a living organism. When one weakens severely, the others absorb an additional burden for which they were not designed. When two weaken simultaneously, the system enters acute stress. When three or more give way over the long term, the community does not reform. It disappears, or is replaced.
The anthropological and historical traditions of thought — from Bronisław Malinowski to Émile Durkheim, from Ernest Gellner to the more recent literature on Eastern European demographic collapse — identify, with variations in terminology, the same minimal set of institutions without which a local civilisation cannot reproduce itself:
Political and administrative institutions — the community's capacity to take collective decisions, to administer common resources, to negotiate with the outside world. A functioning municipal council, a local authority with real power, a regional administration with budget and competence. When these hollow out — through the emigration of administrative elites, endemic corruption, chronic underfunding — the community loses its capacity for self-governance. It becomes the object of decisions made elsewhere.
Religious and spiritual institutions — not necessarily in a strictly confessional sense, but as infrastructures of collective meaning: the church or chapel, the maintained cemetery, the community festival, the rites of passage. These institutions produce no economic goods, but they produce cohesion, identity, and temporal horizon — the sense that there exists a "we" that existed before and will continue after. When they weaken, social cohesion atomises and collective identity becomes vulnerable to external narratives or to the void.
Economic and subsistence institutions — the local market, the agricultural cooperative, the transmitted craft, the informal exchange network, the local bank or credit union. This is not a matter of capitalism versus socialism: it is a matter of the community's capacity to reproduce its material base without total dependence on external supply chains. When these disappear — when the local market dies, when subsistence agriculture is abandoned, when craftspeople emigrate — the community becomes dependent on supply chains it does not control and cannot substitute in a crisis.
Social institutions and maternity — the extended family as a network of solidarity, the crèche and nursery as infrastructure of biological reproduction, social care services as a safety net for those unable to manage independently, community support for maternity and child-rearing. Maternity is not a private matter. It is a civilisational function. A community that no longer reproduces sufficient children, that no longer sustains women in bearing and raising children, is signing its medium-term demographic death certificate.
Cultural, symbolic, and educational institutions — the school, the library, the provincial theatre, the local radio station, the community newspaper, the folk ensemble, the village museum. Not luxuries: infrastructures of transmission. They transmit not only knowledge but the language through which a community understands itself, the values by which it judges, the narratives through which it situates itself in time and space. When these disappear — when the school closes, when the library ceases to receive new books, when the local newspaper has died — the community loses the capacity to form generations able to continue it.
Military and defence institutions — in the broad sense: the community's capacity to defend its physical existence, its territory, its resources, and its identity. At the local level, this includes functional policing, volunteer fire brigades, emergency response capacity, but also something more subtle: the sense that a structure exists to protect you, and that you belong to a larger entity that guarantees your security. When this perception disappears — when people feel that the state is not there when needed — what follows is either resignation or emigration.
What does UBI have to do with any of this?
UBI does not interact with any of these institutions. It does not consolidate them, rebuild them, finance them, or replace them. It is an individual monetary transfer that presupposes institutions exist and function — that the individual has somewhere to spend their money, that the community in which they live has the capacity to respond to their needs.
But in regions where these institutions are in advanced erosion — and northern Romania, like most of rural Eastern Europe, belongs in this category — UBI becomes an illusion of freedom: you receive money, there is nowhere local to spend it, you emigrate or send it to children who have already left. The monthly sum does not stop the school emptying, does not repopulate the local market, does not reactivate the torpid municipal council, does not bring the parish priest back to the village, does not reconstruct the network of female solidarity around maternity. It provides individual survival within a collective collapse.
Moreover: the illusion of stability that UBI produces may delay the political response that is actually needed. If people are sufficiently pacified — because they have some money — the pressure for institutional reform diminishes. The community does not mobilise to demand a functioning school, a decent hospital, a competent administration. It accepts slow degradation because it survives individually. This is what Pasolini called, in a different context, cultural genocide through apparent wellbeing — not the violent destruction of identity, but its slow dissolution through sufficient comfort and simultaneous institutional void.
Demographic replacement — the blunt term for what happens when a community no longer reproduces sufficiently and is replaced through migration or simply disappears — is not the consequence of a lack of money. It is the consequence of the simultaneous collapse of several civilisational institutions, combined with the absence of a reconstruction project. UBI, at best, postpones. It does not repair.
The only real answer is institutional reconstruction — local, regional, deliberate, patient, and publicly financed. An answer that presupposes the state decides to exist in the territory, not only in capitals.
UBI + UBS: Not Either/Or, but Both/And
The most coherent argument I have encountered in the recent literature comes from an article published in 2025 in Capitalism Nature Socialism: UBI and UBS are not rivals but complements. Implemented together, they correct one another's deficiencies. UBI compensates for the rigidity and potential paternalism of UBS; UBS compensates for the atomisation, consumerism, and irrationality of certain individual decisions that pure UBI can generate.
Is that a utopian formula? Perhaps. But no more utopian than imagining that a post-work society functions with either instrument in isolation.
Author's note: If I were to choose for the Botoșani in which I grew up, I would choose UBS without hesitation. Not because people there do not know what they want with their money — they know very well. But because the infrastructure is almost entirely absent: the hospital is underfunded, there is no public canteen, the nursery is overcrowded, the buses run irregularly. Cash in the pocket does not resolve the absence of infrastructure. You purchase the freedom to choose from an empty menu.
Conclusion: The Question Behind the Question
These are questions that public debate — in Romania and in most of Eastern Europe, but equally across much of the post-industrial West — has barely begun to formulate. That may, in itself, be a sign of progress: it means we have arrived, at last, at discussing not merely survival, but how we wish to organise a society in which work is no longer the sole source of meaning and dignity.
The debate between UBI and UBS is not, at its core, a debate about social policy. It is a debate about what kind of freedom we want: the freedom to dispose of money, or the freedom from fear — of illness, of hunger, of cold, of illiteracy? Both are real freedoms. Both can coexist. But each requires a different kind of state, a different fiscal model, a different form of social solidarity.
I do not know whether my father would have understood any of this. He repaired cars. Cars needed him. Perhaps that is why he never thought about unconditional income or public canteens. Or perhaps he would simply have been glad of a hospital where you did not wait four hours in accident and emergency, and a nursery where you did not pay a bribe to the nursery teacher.
That is not UBI. That is not UBS in its academic form. It is simply a state that functions. And that is where any serious debate should begin.
Select Bibliography
- Van Parijs, Philippe & Vanderborght, Yannick. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press, 2017.
- Widerquist, Karl. Universal Basic Income. MIT Press, Essential Knowledge Series, 2024.
- Standing, Guy. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Pelican Books, 2017.
- Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Allen Lane, 2018.
- Bélisle-Pipon, Jean-Christophe. "AI, universal basic income, and power: symbolic violence in the tech elite's narrative." Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 8, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/frai.2025.1488457.
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Transparency note: This article was written by Petru Cojocaru with AI assistance (Claude / Anthropic) for bibliographic research and editorial structuring. Voice, arguments, and positions belong to the author. This declaration is part of the editorial transparency policy .
Ten Questions Worth Holding — and Answers Worth Earning
These are not quiz questions. They are the knots this article deliberately leaves tied, because honest intellectual work produces productive tensions, not clean resolutions. Read each question slowly. The answer that arrives immediately is probably not the deepest one.
1. Is UBI a social policy or a narrative tool — and can it be both simultaneously?
The most honest answer is: yes, and that simultaneity is not a contradiction to resolve but a tension to monitor. Sam Altman's experiment produced real data showing real benefits for real people. The same Altman is building the AI systems that render UBI politically necessary in the first place. A policy can be genuinely beneficial and strategically convenient for its promoters at the same time. What matters is not the motive of its advocates, but the content of its design: who finances it, what it replaces, whom it serves. Scrutinise the design, not the biography of the sponsor.
2. What is the difference between poverty and the absence of infrastructure — and why does it matter for UBI?
Poverty is typically measured as insufficient income. The absence of infrastructure is something else: it is the non-existence of the systems through which income becomes liveable life. A person in a village without a functioning clinic is not simply poor — they are infrastructurally abandoned. Giving them money does not create the clinic. This distinction matters enormously for UBI because the entire logic of cash transfers presupposes that markets and services exist to absorb the cash. Where they do not, money circulates briefly before leaving the territory entirely — sent to relatives in cities, spent on goods produced elsewhere, unable to generate local economic multipliers. UBI answers the question of income. It does not answer the question of infrastructure.
3. Is the accusation of paternalism against UBS a principled argument or a class privilege?
It is, with uncomfortable frequency, both. The philosophical argument — that individuals know their needs better than states — is sound in principle and well-documented in practice: state paternalism has a long history of condescension, misallocation, and stigmatisation. But the invocation of anti-paternalism as a reason to prefer cash over services tends to come from people who already have the infrastructure they need. For someone with a functioning NHS, a well-maintained public transport network, and decent public schools, cash is indeed freedom. For someone in a region where all three have collapsed or never existed, cash is the freedom to travel elsewhere to access what is absent locally. The anti-paternalism argument is strongest where services are adequate. It weakens precisely where the UBS case is strongest.
4. Why do Silicon Valley billionaires advocate UBI rather than UBS — and what does that tell us?
Because UBI requires no structural change to the systems from which they profit. A monthly payment to individuals does not alter the ownership of AI infrastructure, does not redistribute the productivity gains from automation, does not constrain the market power of technology platforms, and does not require billionaires to pay the taxes necessary to fund genuine public services. UBS, by contrast, demands exactly those things: public funding, public provision, democratic accountability for how resources are allocated. UBI is compatible with the continuation of techno-feudalism; UBS is not. The choice of which to advocate is not ideologically neutral.
5. Can a community survive the collapse of a single civilisational institution — or is it always a cascade?
The anthropological evidence suggests it is almost always a cascade, but the sequence matters and the pace varies. Some institutions are more load-bearing than others. The loss of an economic base tends to accelerate all other losses: when young people cannot earn a living locally, they leave — and their departure weakens political institutions (fewer voters, fewer candidates), religious institutions (shrinking congregations), cultural institutions (empty schools, libraries, theatres), and the social infrastructure of maternity and care. The school closing is often the visible symbol, but the economic collapse that preceded it is the cause. Conversely, maintaining a single functional institution in a depleted region can act as a stabilising anchor — the hospital that keeps nurses in town, the school that keeps young families, the local market that keeps farmers producing. The order of collapse and the order of reconstruction both matter enormously.
6. Is UBI the policy that postcommunist Eastern Europe needs — or precisely the one it cannot afford?
Neither, fully. Eastern Europe cannot afford the version of UBI that would actually be transformative — the Van Parijs model of a quarter of GDP per capita, supplementing rather than replacing existing services. It can afford the token versions that already exist in various forms — Romania's Inclusion Income, Poland's 500+ child benefit — but these are not UBI in the philosophical sense: they are targeted conditional transfers with UBI-adjacent rhetoric. What Eastern Europe actually needs, and cannot easily finance either, is the systematic reconstruction of regional institutional infrastructure dismantled by communism, structural adjustment, and the extractive dynamics of EU accession. UBI without that reconstruction is a subsidy for continued emigration.
7. What would a genuinely adaptive system look like — and who gets to design it?
An adaptive system is one that modifies its structure in response to real changes in population, need, and capacity, rather than persisting in forms designed for conditions that no longer obtain. In practice, this means: schools that can shift from teaching large cohorts to providing mixed-age community learning when demographics change; health infrastructure that can redeploy from acute care to long-term care as populations age; transport networks designed around actual movement patterns rather than administrative boundaries; community spaces that can serve as library, meeting room, civic forum, and emergency shelter as circumstances require. The design question — who decides — is not technical but political. Adaptive systems require genuine local authority with real budgets and democratic accountability. They cannot be designed from the centre and implemented peripherally. This is why decentralisation is not merely a governance preference but a structural prerequisite for the kind of adaptive capacity that regions actually need.
8. Is the concept of "demographic replacement" analytically useful or politically dangerous?
Both — and the distinction between the two uses is crucial. As a demographic and sociological description, it refers to the observable process by which depopulated regions lose their original inhabitants (through emigration, low birth rates, and aging) and are either repopulated by in-migrants with different cultural and social profiles, or simply remain underpopulated and institutionally hollow. In this descriptive sense, it is an analytically valuable concept applied by demographers across the political spectrum to places as different as rural Japan, the Welsh valleys, and the post-industrial American Midwest. As a political slogan, however, the same term has been weaponised by the far right to refer to something quite different: a conspiracy theory about the deliberate replacement of ethno-national majorities through immigration. The analytical and the conspiratorial uses share a vocabulary but not a logic. Using the term requires specifying which sense is intended. This article uses it in the purely demographic and sociological sense: communities that cease to reproduce institutionally — not biologically or ethnically — become structurally unable to sustain themselves over time.
9. If UBI and UBS are complementary, what is the minimum viable starting point for a country like Romania?
The most defensible starting point is not UBI and not a comprehensive UBS. It is the honest reconstruction of the single most critical institutional failure in each specific territory. That requires genuine diagnostic work — what is the actual load-bearing institution in this community? What is the one collapse that, if reversed, would create the conditions for other reversals? In some villages it is the school. In some small towns it is the hospital. In some rural areas it is agricultural cooperative infrastructure. The temptation of universal programmes — UBI and UBS alike — is that they offer the same instrument everywhere. Adaptive reconstruction requires the opposite: different instruments in different places, calibrated to actual conditions. This is administratively harder, politically less satisfying, and financially less legible. It is also more likely to work.
10. What is the question that neither UBI nor UBS asks — and what would happen if we asked it?
Neither asks: what is a community for? Both assume the goal is individual wellbeing, measured in access to resources or services. Neither asks whether there is something irreducibly collective about human flourishing that cannot be disaggregated into individual welfare functions — something that only exists when people live together over time, build shared meaning, transmit culture, argue about governance, and bury their dead in the same ground. If we asked this question, the policy debate would shift from "how do we sustain individuals in communities?" to "how do we sustain communities as communities?" — a fundamentally different problem, with fundamentally different solutions, requiring a fundamentally different kind of politics. One that does not yet exist in any organised form, anywhere.
A Note from the Author: How This Article Grew — and What It Got Wrong
This section documents the intellectual evolution of the article across the conversation that produced it, including its tensions, its subjective errors, its aesopic devices, and its rhetorical tools. It is written in the belief that showing the seams of argument is itself an act of intellectual honesty.
How it began and where it went
The article started as a relatively conventional piece on who promotes UBI and why — the standard cast of Silicon Valley billionaires, academic philosophers, and presidential candidates, set against the experiments that have tested the idea. That is a tractable subject with solid empirical material and a clear narrative arc.
It grew, in several steps, into something more ambitious and more contested. Each addition during the drafting conversation pushed the argument further from the comfortable centre of policy analysis toward a more uncomfortable periphery: the distinction between cash and services; the claim that systems matter more than money; the argument that UBI may sustain individual survival within collective collapse; the analysis of civilisational institutions as an interdependent organic system; and the suggestion that "demographic replacement" — carefully circumscribed — names something real happening to communities across the depopulating periphery of Europe.
Each of these additions represents a genuine intellectual risk. Not all of them are equally well-founded.
Honest tensions in the argument
The paternalism charge cuts both ways. The article is fairly critical of UBI and more sympathetic to UBS and institutional reconstruction. But UBS has its own paternalism problem, as the article acknowledges — the state deciding what people need is not always wiser than people deciding for themselves. The article handles this tension by arguing that paternalism objections weaken where infrastructure is absent. That is defensible. But it is also a move that privileges the author's preferred conclusion. A stronger version of the counter-argument — that conditional and in-kind provision has repeatedly failed the poor throughout the twentieth century, that housing programmes produced stigmatised estates, that canteens produced queues and shame — could have been given more space.
The civilisational institutions framework is analytically powerful but normatively loaded. The six-institution typology (political, religious, economic, social/maternity, cultural, military) is drawn from a legitimate anthropological tradition. But listing "religious and spiritual institutions" as one of the minimum six required for a community's survival is not a neutral act in a secular European policy debate. The article is careful to define religious institutions in terms of their social function — cohesion, identity, temporal horizon — rather than their theological content. But a secular reader may reasonably object that the functions performed by religious institutions in some communities are performed by secular civil society institutions in others, and that the typology imports an implicit conservatism about which forms of social organisation are load-bearing.
The Romania-centrism of the examples is both a strength and a limitation. The provincial perspective — Botoșani, northern Moldova, the father who repaired cars — is the article's most distinctive and honest register. It grounds abstract policy debate in lived specificity. But it also risks provincialising an argument that the article claims is universally applicable. The claim that UBI fails where infrastructure is absent is no less true in rural Shropshire or post-industrial South Wales than in Vaslui county — but the Romanian examples carry an implicit claim about Eastern European specificity that may not transfer cleanly to Western European post-industrial decline, which has different institutional histories, different state capacities, and different demographic dynamics.
The Pasolini reference is a citation-by-gesture. The article invokes Pasolini's concept of "cultural genocide through apparent wellbeing" — which is a real concept, powerfully articulated in his 1970s journalism and in his 1975 Scritti corsari — but does not cite it rigorously or engage with its specific content. Pasolini was writing about Italian consumerism and the homogenisation of regional cultures under television capitalism, not about cash transfer policy. The analogy is illuminating but strained. It should be marked as a suggestive parallel, not a clinical application.
The šopârle — Aesopic language explained
The Romanian term šopârlă (literally "lizard") refers to a technique of coded, embedded argument developed during the communist period, when direct criticism of power was dangerous. The writer or speaker would embed their real argument inside an apparently innocuous or displaced context — a folk tale, a historical parallel, a metaphor — trusting that sufficiently literate readers would decode the actual message whilst the censor saw only the surface. It is the Romanian variant of what literary theorists call Aesopic language, after the tradition — attributed to the ancient fabulist — of delivering political or moral truths through animal allegory.
In this article, the šopârle are declared rather than concealed — they are marked with the label "Author's note" in the English version, and with "Șopârlă declarată" (declared lizard) in the Romanian. This self-conscious transparency is itself a post-communist move: the technique is preserved as an editorial device and authorial identity marker, but stripped of its original defensive function. What remains is the structure: a personal register inserted within analytical prose, using narrative displacement (the father, the town, the childhood memory) to carry an argument that would be less persuasive if stated directly.
The father-as-mechanic šopârlă carries a specific embedded argument: that meaningful work — not income, not leisure, not dignity in the abstract — is what most people actually need, and that no policy instrument which ignores the conditions of meaningful work is adequate. This is stated but not quite argued in the main text. The anecdote does the rhetorical work of grounding a philosophical claim in emotional recognition, which is both more persuasive and less rigorous than a direct argument.
The Botoșani šopârlă at the end of Section IX carries a different weight: it personalises the abstract UBS/UBI comparison by anchoring it in a specific geography of institutional absence. The argument it embeds is: when the author says "infrastructure," they mean something concrete and locally verifiable, not a policy abstraction. The šopârlă transforms a policy preference into a testimony — which is more persuasive but also more subjective.
Rhetorical tools used in this article
Chiasmus and reversal. "UBI is a social policy. UBS, at its maximum potential, is a development policy." Paired oppositions used to crystallise distinctions. Effective but risks oversimplification.
The organism metaphor. The six civilisational institutions are described as organs in a body — interdependent, load-bearing, not interchangeable. This is a powerful frame for the cascade-collapse argument, but it imports a functionalist assumption (that societies have parts that serve the whole) which is itself philosophically contested. Functionalism has been a productive and a problematic paradigm in sociology since Durkheim.
Irony by juxtaposition. Altman as "one of the most powerful system-builders in the world" proposing a solution that "ignores the need for system." The irony does rhetorical work without requiring the author to make a direct accusation of bad faith — which would require evidence the article does not have.
The open question as closer. Section X ends not with a conclusion but with a question: "what is a community for?" This is a rhetorical device that transfers agency to the reader whilst suggesting that the author has brought them to the edge of the genuinely important problem. It is honest in so far as the author does not know the answer. It may also be evasive.
Encyclopaedic listing. The six institutions are listed item by item, each with a brief definition and a description of what is lost when it collapses. This creates an impression of systematic coverage and anthropological authority. It is, however, a selection — other frameworks identify different or more institutions (Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community adds neighbourhood and guild; Tocqueville adds voluntary association) — and the selection is not theoretically justified within the article.
Possible wrong perspectives
The article may be wrong that UBS is structurally superior to UBI for depopulating peripheral regions. It is possible that what depopulating regions need is not reconstruction of institutions there, but better conditions for their inhabitants wherever they are — including in the cities to which they have migrated. Insisting on territorial reconstruction may be a form of sentimentality about place that ignores people's real preferences. Many people leave Botoșani not because there is no infrastructure but because they prefer the opportunities available elsewhere. Respecting that preference may mean accepting demographic decline as a legitimate outcome of individual choice, and investing in portable welfare — which is what UBI provides — rather than place-based infrastructure.
The article may also be wrong that the collapse of civilisational institutions is the primary driver of demographic decline in Eastern Europe. An alternative analysis would emphasise: the income differential between East and West as the dominant driver of emigration; the legacy of communist urbanisation policies that de-institutionalised rural communities long before the post-1989 period; and the structural economic disadvantages of peripheral regions in a European single market that concentrates agglomeration benefits in western metropolitan cores. In this alternative analysis, institutional reconstruction without addressing income and structural economic disadvantages would be insufficient.
These are not hypothetical objections. They are live debates in regional economics and development sociology, and this article does not resolve them.
Call to Action: What You Can Do Tomorrow
Five concrete suggestions. Five things to avoid. Not a manifesto — a starting point.
What you can do tomorrow
1. Map the institutional ecology of your own community. Before forming a view on UBI or UBS, ask: which of the six institutions — political, spiritual, economic, social/maternity, cultural, military/protective — still function in the place where you live or grew up? Which are weakening? Which have already collapsed? You do not need data or a study. You need to walk around with honest eyes. The school with twenty pupils. The surgery closing its list. The last shop. The sports club nobody has time to run. The community map is more important than any policy framework.
2. Read one primary source rather than one more opinion piece. The debate about UBI is drowning in commentary and very lightly read at source. Choose one: Van Parijs and Vanderborght's Basic Income (2017) for the philosophical case; Anna Coote and Andrew Percy's The Case for Universal Basic Services (2020) for the counter-argument; the OpenResearch 2024 results for the empirical data; or Ian Gough's LSE paper for the comparison framework. Even fifty pages of a primary source will change your thinking more than another hour of feeds.
3. Ask your local councillor — or equivalent elected representative — one specific question about infrastructure. Not about UBI (they probably have no view) but about something concrete: the condition of the local surgery's GP list; the funding for the public library; the state of the rural bus timetable; the school roll projections. The answer matters less than the act of asking — which signals that someone is paying attention to the adaptive capacity of local institutions, and that this is a matter of democratic concern.
4. Find the organisation in your area doing the most unglamorous institutional maintenance. The volunteer group running the food bank. The local history society keeping the archive. The parent-teacher association fighting the school closure. The community transport scheme replacing the cancelled bus route. Donate to them, or give two hours. These are not charities in the sentimental sense. They are the people doing the actual work of preventing institutional collapse. They need support more urgently than the think tanks writing papers about institutional collapse.
5. Have one conversation in which you distinguish between what you personally need and what your community needs. UBI appeals to individual intuitions: who would not want an unconditional monthly payment? UBS appeals to collective intuitions: who would not want a functioning hospital? These intuitions are not always in conflict, but they are not the same. The conversation — with a friend, a partner, a colleague, a neighbour — about what your community would need to be a place where you could imagine your children staying: that conversation is more politically important than most formal acts of civic participation.
What to avoid
Do not mistake enthusiasm for a policy with evidence for that policy. UBI has an enormous and enthusiastic advocacy community, producing a continuous stream of articles, threads, and manifestos. Much of this material selects and amplifies the most positive experimental findings whilst minimising the caveats. The Finnish experiment did not prove UBI works universally. The OpenResearch study showed limited and fading effects. GiveDirectly's Kenya results are real but geographically specific. Maintain the distinction between "promising" and "proven."
Do not accept the UBI/UBS binary as the only frame. The debate as it is typically conducted presents a choice between giving people cash and giving people services, as though these exhaust the options. They do not. Participatory income (conditional on community contribution), community wealth-building, cooperative ownership of productive assets, deliberate industrial policy for peripheral regions, and quality public employment in deprived areas are all serious alternatives and complements that the UBI/UBS binary tends to crowd out of discussion.
Do not treat money as ideologically neutral. Cash transfers are not innocent. Who receives them, on what terms, financed by whom, replacing what, at what level — each of these choices has distributional consequences. A UBI financed by a wealth tax redistributes downward. A UBI financed by eliminating existing welfare programmes redistributes upward. Treating the money itself as neutral and the only debate as being whether to distribute it obscures the political choices embedded in every version of the proposal.
Do not confuse the failure of existing welfare systems with the success of UBI. The argument that UBI is better than the current welfare architecture is frequently made by pointing to the real failures of means-testing, conditionality, bureaucratic humiliation, and the poverty trap. These are genuine failures. But the failure of the status quo does not establish the success of the proposed alternative. UBI could be better than current welfare systems in some respects and worse in others, or better for some populations and worse for others. The existence of a problem is not evidence for any particular solution.
Do not outsource your thinking to the people with the most to gain. Sam Altman's experiment is the most cited UBI study of 2024. Sam Altman stands to profit more than almost anyone alive from the automation that makes UBI politically necessary. This does not make his experiment's findings false. It does make them worth reading critically, with attention to what they measure, what they don't measure, what they conclude, and — crucially — what the organisation that conducted the study has subsequently recommended on the basis of those findings. Good science can be produced in service of interested parties. It should still be read as science, with methodological scrutiny, not as advocacy.
This article, with all its additions, revisions, embedded arguments, and declared uncertainties, is a document of a thinking process — not a concluded position. The šopârla that runs through it, from beginning to end, is this: the most important questions about how we live together cannot be answered by economics alone, however sophisticated. They require us to ask what we are for — as communities, as polities, as inheritors of civilisations we did not build and may not sustain. UBI and UBS are policy tools. That question is something older.
Transparency note: This article was written by Petru Cojocaru with AI assistance (Claude / Anthropic) for bibliographic research, editorial structuring, and the development of Sections XI–XIII. Voice, embedded arguments, declared šopârle, and authorial positions belong to the author. This declaration is part of the editorial transparency policy .