Everybody's talking about universal basic income or UBI.
"Guaranteed minimum income."
"We should explore ideas like universal basic income."
"Basic income has come to the fore in recent years."
"Universal basic income is going to the first thing I do as President.
"We will have to have some kind of universal basic income."
This is when a government gives every citizen money on a regular basis and that is unconditional,
meaning everyone gets it whether they work or not and no matter how much money they have.
The idea of a basic income is that everybody would receive a modest amount paid each week, each month
without conditions and paid equally to every man, every woman with a smaller amount paid for every child.
Thinkers from a range of political backgrounds want to see it happen.
There have been UBI pilots but only in small areas or with a small number of people, never in a whole country.
And they're weren't any plans to trial it anytime soon,
that's until coronavirus.
"I must give the British people a very simple instruction, you must stay at home."
"Many companies have now shut down, whether it's bars or restaurants."
"I know that people are worried about losing their jobs."
"We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately."
"For the first time in our history the government is going to step in and help to pay people's wages."
The coronavirus pandemic is making it even more imperative that we introduce a basic income
as quickly as possible in every part of the world.
"Calling on the federal government to immediately begin a universal basic payment."
"Will the Prime Minister stand up today
and give a commitment to provide people with the security of a universal basic income?"
100 years ago exactly there was the Spanish flu, which was a global pandemic
by which over 40 million people across the world lost their lives.
But what was extraordinary about that was that there wasn't an economic crisis immediately afterwards.
By contrast, the coronavirus is going to be associated with an incredible economic crisis
that spreads across the world and it's this combination of a pandemic and an economic crisis
that is going to cause many, many more people to die or have lives of misery.
Since globalization began the economic system of the world has become increasingly fragile,
fragmented and dangerously unbalanced. In addition we have the biggest crisis of all
and that is the ecological crisis, the fear of extinction, the realization
that we have to change our growth model, that we have to have more sustainable
respect for the environment and the way we live. It will become a legitimate part
of our social fabric very quickly and as it does so I think you will find people
having a greater sense of freedom, a greater sense of community and will want
to shift their lifestyles to spending more time doing work that is not labour,
doing care work, doing community work, doing voluntary work, doing ecological work,
doing the sort of activities that don't eat up the resources and eat up
the planet and cause extinction but rather actually help to reproduce our
communities, our sense of localism and our sense of slowing down.
And that I think is a very healthy prospect because then people will feel they're gaining
control of their lives and in that process I believe new forms of social
solidarity, new forms of collective action will spring up and I think the
potential there for that is a wonderful liberation, a wonderful return to the
values of the Enlightenment, the values of community, the values of creativity
and leisure, real leisure in the sense of the ancient Greeks looking after our culture,
looking after the values and reproducing the ethics of empathy and compassion.