Might UBI change everything?

Universal basic income (UBI) is often dismissed as unaffordable, unrealistic, or politically impossible. But the conversation I had recently with Howard Reed and Elliott Johnson of the Common Sense Policy Group at Northumbria University left me less sure of that.

The Group's research challenges the Treasury orthodoxy in two important ways:

• Public investment multipliers are far bigger than assumed, and

• Even current spending has a strong multiplier effect, meaning it can pay for itself

And if the economic case for investment is stronger than we’ve been told, then the political question changes too: why aren’t we investing in that case?

We also discussed the Group’s three-tier UBI transition proposal, how it interacts with Universal Credit, and why the security it could supply might be the missing foundation of a functioning economy.