Van Parijs, Philippe: Does Basic Income Make Sense As a Worldwide Project?, 18.11.05

Does basic income make sense as a worldwide project? To my own amazement, I have come to believe that it does, incomparably more than I did when we founded the Basic Income European Network in 1986.

To explain this, I first need to distinguish two senses in which one might think of turning basic income from a national, or at most a European, into a worldwide project. There is the swelling and there is the spreading.

Swelling the project?

Swelling the basic income project into a worldwide one consists in imagining that it can be organised in a truly universal way, administered and funded at a global level.