[go: up one dir, main page]

IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hdl/wpaper/2401.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Basic Income advocates, sober up

Author

Listed:
  • Ive Marx;
Abstract
Basic income advocates see a universal income grant, no questions asked, as bringing many potential benefits, not in the least as an ironclad protection against poverty, if set high enough. It is hard to know with any certainty what a world with a sizeable basic income would look like but we can make theoretically and empirically informed guesses about its likely first-round impacts. Neither the insights we get from (quasi-)experimental research nor those from (micro-)simulation modelling are very encouraging. The estimated first-round effects on poverty are for the most part disappointing, especially in countries with comparatively well-functioning social protection systems. Aggregate employment is likely to fall, especially affecting women. It requires an enormous leap of faith to assume that the effects further down the road would be miraculously better. Moreover, there seems to be a vast gap between what people think a basic income would bring them and how it would actually impact them. Under any plausible scenario there would be many net losers. In short, there are few sound reasons at this time to argue for replacing the better performing social protection systems currently in place with a basic income, especially if a more adequate social floor is the main concern.

Suggested Citation

  • Ive Marx;, 2024. "Basic Income advocates, sober up," Working Papers 2401, Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp.
  • Handle: RePEc:hdl:wpaper:2401
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/files/6663/8897ecce-c6be-4f9b-991f-fdb8bfd9e95c.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Aerts, Elise & Marx, Ive & Verbist, Gerlinde, 2023. "Not That Basic: How Level, Design and Context Matter for the Redistributive Outcomes of Universal Basic Income," IZA Discussion Papers 15952, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marx, Ive, 2024. "Basic Income Advocates, Sober Up," IZA Discussion Papers 16757, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hdl:wpaper:2401. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Santiago Burone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csbuabe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.