In Germany, an experiment began today in which a group of selected citizens will receive an unconditional basic income of 1.200 euros per month for the next three years.
As Deutsche Welle (DW) writes, it is part of a pilot project whose goal is to investigate the effects of unconditional basic income. More than two million people applied, and in the end 122 of them were selected.
Participants did not have to prove that they have any need for money, and during the project they are allowed to do what and how much they want. They have no obligations to the project's financiers, except that they "must complete seven online questionnaires within three years of the study," the project's website says.
An additional 1.380 randomly selected people also fill out questionnaires every six months, but they receive no basic income, only compensation for the time spent filling out those forms.
About 150.000 private donors provided the money for the project, and those who receive it in the next three years will not have to file a tax return. That is the donated money in the amount of 43.200 euros per participant, a total of about 5,2 million euros.
The project was initiated by the non-profit association "My Basic Income" from Berlin. The initiators are convinced that the unconditional payment of money to all citizens would solve many problems of today's society and that people would become freer, more creative and happier if they were freed from the pressure of having to earn enough money to survive.
As part of the project, scientists will try to investigate whether reality can withstand this utopia.
"We will test what people do when they are financially secure for three years. Will they spend that money or create financial reserves? Will they stop working or will they work less? Will they become more socially engaged, will they donate more ", says the head of the study Jürgen Schup, from the German Institute for Economic Research.
Šup believes that all of this can be determined in this large-scale experiment, and even, he adds, changes in stress levels can be examined using samples of the subjects' hair because they are expected to be under less pressure thanks to the gifted (lowest) salary.
The debate on unconditional basic income has been extremely ideological for years, and, as DW points out, the essential question is: what do people do when they don't have to work.
Many opponents of that idea believe that it is a utopia of leftists who fantasize and want to laze around at the expense of the community. On the other hand, proponents of the idea see it as a solution to current and future problems: social aspects - from education, to neighborhood help and care - would be improved or upgraded, and thus models for the future could be developed at an early stage classic jobs are becoming rare due to increasing digitization and automation.
Researcher Šup hopes that from the experiment it will be possible to learn about topics that are particularly important for the opponents of the basic salary, namely: innovation and entrepreneurship. Perhaps, he states, wage earners will be braver in their decisions, for example about starting their own business or changing jobs.
It is noticeable that many famous entrepreneurs - from Bill Gates, through Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, all the way to the German Samver brothers - had no existential fears when they dared to found their companies.
The motto of the pilot project is - "We want to know". Mihael Bomejer from the association "My basic salary" admits that the expectations of the results of the project make him nervous.
"Of course, in this project it may turn out that the basic salary does not have the effect we expect," Bomejer says in a video on the project's website.
The question is whether the debate on basic income will be less ideological in three years, when the project ends. There are already critics who question the very essence of such an approach. One of their arguments is that the three-year limit does not allow for conclusions to be drawn about how people behave if they are continuously paid the base salary.
In addition, there are questions that the project cannot answer, for example: how would prices develop if everyone received the salary base? Would really sick people or those in need of money eventually have less money available than they do now? And how high would taxes have to be to finance it all?
"Our study will not solve all the issues related to basic income," Jürgen Šup admits. But he is still looking forward to the answers to the key question - What money does to people, as an exciting scientific question for which there are no reliable studies anywhere in the world.
And so far there have been attempts to learn more about the effects of basic income. The results of a similar study in Finland were not the clearest in the end. In Canada, politicians prematurely ended such a study for financial reasons. Even in Germany, there is a lack of political support. So far, no major party has advocated for such a thing.
After the completion of the first three-year phase of the project, two more studies will be launched in which the financing possibilities will be scientifically examined.
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