Policy Shop: Is a Universal Basic Income Really Utopian?

New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

Moreover, a UBI is not unprecedented. It has been successfully implemented in a number of developing countries, including recently in rural India and Namibia. Additionally, the U.S. actually has a deep-cover UBI program that we call Social Security. It’s only for old people, so it obviously falls short of universal, but it is more or less a UBI for old people. And it has been super-effective: in the 35 years after 1960 — that being the year that Social Security payments began to rise significantly — we cut our elderly poverty rate from 35 percent to 10 percent, a 72 percent reduction.

Read the rest over at Policy Shop.