For Decades, The Benefits System Has Been Used To Punish People: It’s Time To Give Everyone A Floor To Stand On
With the third global crisis in six years and the arrival of proper AI, it’s time to try a new way of managing our economies: the case for universal basic income has never been stronger.
By Will Stronge. Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw.
Imagine checking your bank account on the first of every month and simply finding money deposited there. Not a wage, not a benefit tied to job-seeking or proof of hardship, just cash. No forms to fill in, no hoops to jump through and no caseworker to report back to. That's the idea behind Universal Basic Income, or UBI, and what was once a fringe economic theory debated in academic seminars is now being quietly tested in countries from Ireland to South Korea, with some genuinely surprising results.
The scale of experimentation is larger than most people realise. Between 2017 and 2025, there were 122 guaranteed income pilots across the United States alone, spanning 33 states and Washington D.C. Together, these programmes distributed over $481 million to around 41,000 recipients, with an average monthly payment of $616. That's not pocket change: it's roughly what many Americans spend on groceries and utilities combined.
In Wales, the government has just finished a three-year trial giving young people who've grown up in the foster care system £1,600 a month, before tax, for up to two years after their 18th birthday. The scheme is designed to ease one of life's most abrupt transitions: the moment a young person grows out of the period in which they are eligible for state care and is, in effect, left to fend for themselves. Results are expected to be published next year, and the interim reports have shown that it has been hugely transformative.
Ireland has gone a step further. Its "Basic Income for the Arts" programme, which gave working artists a regular unconditional payment to free them from financial precarity, has proven popular enough to be made permanent in 2026 — a notable shift from pilot to policy. South Korea, meanwhile, is running a targeted initiative in Gyeonggi Province, directing payments to farmers and fishermen in 24 cities and counties. And in the United States, at least one large county is continuing to hand out $500 a month to residents with no conditions attached.
The most consistent finding across studies is a significant improvement in well-being. The Minneapolis guaranteed income pilot found that recipients showed measurable gains in food security, housing stability, financial resilience, and psychological health compared to those in a control group. Germany's long-running Basic Income Pilot Project (one of the most rigorous studies of its kind) found that recipients made more self-determined life decisions and reported substantially higher life satisfaction. These pilots follow in the footsteps of many pilots in Finland, Kenya, Canada and elsewhere over recent decades, which have brought rich data to the debate.
Critics of basic income have long warned that paying people for nothing will lead to people giving up on their jobs. Why work, the argument goes, if the money arrives anyway? The evidence from pilots is proving more complicated, and in many ways much more encouraging, than that. Smaller pilots tend to show modest positive effects on work participation. Larger trials (those with 500 people or more) show an average dip of around 3.2% in employment, which sounds alarming until you examine what's actually happening. Researchers consistently find that this reduction often reflects people pausing to find better jobs, pursue retraining, or care for family members - not dropping out of the workforce permanently. A 2025 South Korean study found that basic income had minimal negative effects on full-time and part-time workers and actually appeared to encourage unemployed individuals to enter the labour force.
UBI might have remained a fringe policy debate were it not for one thing: the accelerating disruption of artificial intelligence. In early 2026, the World Economic Forum projected that 92 million roles could be displaced by automation by 2030 - even as 170 million new positions emerge. The transition period, as millions of workers find their skills obsolete and new roles not yet accessible, is where policymakers are growing genuinely anxious.
The International Monetary Fund has described an "AI tsunami" already striking entry-level positions, estimating that around 40 per cent of global employment is exposed to disruption, rising to 60 per cent in advanced economies. Unlike previous waves of automation, which largely affected routine and manual work, AI is encroaching on professional territory once considered safe: drafting legal documents, diagnosing medical conditions, writing financial analysis, and generating code. The old reassurance that "new jobs will emerge" feels less convincing when the new jobs also require skills that take years to acquire.
Against this backdrop, guaranteed income is being reconsidered not just as a social safety net, but as something necessary for transition: a mechanism to give workers breathing room to retrain, pivot, and adapt, rather than scrambling to survive. The UK government's minister for investment, Jason Stockwood, has confirmed that a basic income is actively under consideration as a response to AI-driven job displacement.
The sticking point, as ever, is money. Scaling basic income from small pilots to national programmes requires serious public spending - and higher taxation on the rich. The 122 US pilots distributed nearly half a billion dollars to fewer than 41,000 people. A national programme here in the UK, serving around 66 million people, would cost orders of magnitude more. Proposals range from wealth taxes and progressive income taxes to a so-called "robot dividend" - the idea of channelling a portion of the enormous productivity gains generated by AI back to the workers whose jobs and wages it is displacing. It makes sense in principle, but, of course, this idea will need political will to be put into practice.
No country has yet made the full leap to a nationwide, universal basic income. But the landscape is shifting. The experiments are multiplying, the evidence is accumulating, and the political conversation, which was once dominated by ideological misrepresentation, is growing more serious. The urgency of more significant income support has also been accelerated by the cost-of-living crisis since 2022, and now, of course, the war in Iran, which is making fuel incredibly expensive.
The question is no longer really whether guaranteed income can work. The pilots are starting to answer that. The question now is whether societies, faced with the upheaval of AI and global disruption, will find the political will - and the funding - to try it at scale.
Will Stronge is the Director of The Autonomy Institute and author of Post-Work.
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