Philippe Van Parijs is Professor of Economic and Social Ethics, University of Louvain. Yannick Vanderborght is Professor of Political Science, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels.
A meticulously comprehensive, frequently persuasive accounting of
[universal basic income’s] superiority by measures economic,
philosophical, and pragmatic.
*New Yorker*
Basic Income provides a rigorous analysis of the many arguments for
and against a universal basic income, offering a road map for
future researchers who wish to examine policy alternatives.
*Wall Street Journal*
Although their goal is utopian, Van Parijs and Vanderborght aim to
infuse it with economic and political realism…What Van Parijs and
Vanderborght bring to this topic is a deep understanding, an
enduring passion and a disarming optimism.
*Washington Post*
Van Parijs and Vanderborght go deep, focusing exclusively on a
universal guaranteed income and examining a range of philosophical,
practical and political arguments for and against it. In
considered, often enlightening, prose, they delve into John Rawls,
Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen. They look at a number of
alternative schemes; they discuss various objections to guaranteed
income programs, including those over cost, free riding, and the
possibility of diminished incentives.
*Financial Times*
Van Parijs and Vanderborght have done the discussion of a universal
basic income a great service. They have set forth, clearly and
comprehensively, what is probably the best case to be made today
for this form of economic and social policy.
*New York Review of Books*
What matters—what will lift the heart of every reader of Basic
Income—is that Van Parijs and Vanderborght have enlisted the rigor
and scruple of first-rate social science in the service of a
generous social vision that is at least as old as Saint Ambrose and
as up-to-date as Pope Francis. Our sensible and humane
descendants—they are bound to be sensible or humane, since humanity
would otherwise have long since succumbed to nuclear or
environmental catastrophe—will doubtless wonder, with the easy
impatience of posterity, what we were waiting for. They may, in
fairness to us, decide that we were waiting for books like
this.
*Commonweal*
Provid[es] argument after argument as to why [basic income’s]
introduction would be ‘economically clever’ and why it is the next
logical step to take in a long history of social policies aimed at
reducing poverty and inequality. Their proposals are not only clear
but also extremely pragmatic…The value of this book is that, more
comprehensively than any other study yet, it explains why an
obligation-free income for all would be so beneficial, and it also
charts how this could be incrementally attained.
*Times Higher Education*
The book is likely to become a primer on core debates, such as the
scheme’s overall feasibility, but its most striking aspect is how
the authors make their argument. They justify a basic income not as
a tool with which to address inequality, but rather as an
‘instrument of freedom.’
*Nature*
Will be essential for the ongoing debate.
*New Scientist*
The West is awash these days in populist movements that cloak
repressive and inegalitarian agendas. In these troubled times, an
unconditional basic income is a beacon: a workable proposal that
furthers freedom and equality for all. In this book, two modern
pioneers of the UBI make the moral and practical case for endowing
everyone with the resources to shape a life of their own
choosing.
*Anne Alstott, Yale University*
This is a major contribution to the effort to design a realistic
program for achieving social justice in the twenty-first
century.
*Bruce Ackerman, Yale University*
The idea of a universal basic income has been around for quite a
while, but has the time for it finally arrived? This superb,
closely argued book makes the case for the affirmative answer.
While the authors do not hide their sympathies, they approach their
subject with a philosopher’s care for ethical justification, a
historian’s focus on the antecedents, an economist’s concern for
incentives, an empiricist’s respect for evidence, and a
practitioner’s attention to feasibility.
*Dani Rodrik, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University*
In this important introduction to the ‘basic income’ initiative—an
economic proposal that may radically transform the nature of the
modern economy and society—two leading social scientists examine
the ethics and economics of the proposed move. This is essential
reading for anyone interested in the problems of deprivation and
unfreedom that survive even in the richest countries in the world.
The remedial reasoning presented by Van Parijs and Vanderborght is
powerful as well as highly engaging—a brilliant book.
*Amartya Sen, Harvard University*
The concrete proposal for reducing economic inequality makes it a
good complement to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First
Century. This work, while certainly controversial to some readers,
is a sober and well-argued study of the basic income concept.
*Library Journal*
Van Parijs and Vanderborght…make a sturdy ethical and philosophical
argument for the provision of universal basic income… This
thorough, thoughtful study will undoubtedly become a much-cited
landmark work on its subject.
*Publishers Weekly*
At once an intellectual paean to the ideal of a universal basic
income, an attempt to win over those who might be skeptical or
undecided, and a plea for pragmatism to its supporters.
*Economic Record*
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