A regular, unconditional cash payment to every individual, financed and denominated in national fiat currency, with no means test and no work requirement.
Extended definition
The modern formulation is set out in Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2017), and in Guy Standing, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (Penguin, 2017). Both defend UBI as a universal, individual, unconditional transfer in fiat currency.
The BioConomy’s retention-logic analysis treats UBI as an income intervention that operates inside the existing +M substrate rather than changing it. UBI supplements purchasing power; it does not alter the coordination architecture. This is the structural reason why every major UBI experiment (Finland, Mincome, Madhya Pradesh, Stockton, Kenya, OpenResearch, Ontario, the Dutch municipalities) reliably improved wellbeing and reliably failed to move hours into non-market coordination at any scale. Where coordination effects appeared (Madhya Pradesh collectives, Ontario volunteering, Mincome caregiving), they appeared at the margins and inside the existing monetary substrate.
The pattern is consistent: released hours default to leisure, private investment, or improved market position, not to Emergent (+N) coordination, because UBI pays individuals with no coordination surface to flow into and no denomination that would prevent re-accumulation as +M capital.
Contrast with RPI
UBI and Regenerative Participation Income (RPI) both address the Coercion Continuum’s wage-compulsion phase, but they differ in three structural respects:
- Substrate vs. supplement. UBI supplements income inside the +M substrate. RPI, denominated in a bioregional demurrage currency, changes the substrate itself.
- Individual vs. role. UBI pays individuals unconditionally. RPI funds a coordination role against a defined coordination surface, so that released hours have somewhere to go.
- Legibility. UBI produces no coordination audit trail. RPI makes coordination outputs legible through published surfaces (wikis, tools, forums, llms.txt endpoints), breaking the illegibility loop that keeps +N coordination invisible to funding.
Anthony Atkinson’s participation income (“The Case for a Participation Income,” The Political Quarterly 67, 1996) is the closest prior formulation to RPI, conditioning income on social contribution rather than paying it unconditionally.
Related terms
- Regenerative Participation Income (RPI)
- The Coercion Continuum
- Fictitious Commodities
- Substrate Hypothesis
Related pages
- How the Market Form’s Retention Logic Suppresses Emergent Coordination
- The Emancipation Architecture
Sources
- Van Parijs, P. and Vanderborght, Y. (2017). Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press.
- Standing, G. (2017). Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Penguin.
- Atkinson, A.B. (1996). “The Case for a Participation Income.” The Political Quarterly 67(1).