Universal basic income / dividend
Emerging Alternative Game position: Modify
Prototype: Stockton SEED, GiveDirectly
Layers a guaranteed periodic baseline payment atop whatever currency a community uses; normal accumulation still continues above that floor.
Structural profile
Topology view
- Capped-return / purpose capital: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
- Commitment pooling: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
- Open value accounting: Emerging Alternative · Game: Modify
Architecture
- Game position
- Modifies the game at the distribution layer; pluralistic
- Value-signal richness
- Inherits the issuing currency's value-signal properties
- Accumulation regime
- Enables accumulation but ensures floor through periodic distribution
Medium-of-Exchange Properties
- Divisibility
- Inherits the issuing currency's divisibility entirely — UBI is a distribution rule, not a new unit.
- Uniformity (Fungibility)
- Inherits the issuing currency's fungibility entirely, same reasoning.
- Durability
- Inherits the issuing currency's durability entirely — UBI is a distribution rule, not a new medium.
- Portability
- Inherits the issuing currency's portability entirely, same reasoning.
- Acceptability
- Inherits the issuing currency's acceptability entirely — UBI changes who receives an existing medium, it doesn't create a new one.
Operation
- Coordination / discovery
- Inherits issuing currency's coordination mechanism
- Governance & issuance
- Issuing authority (state, DAO, or community) sets distribution
- Scale & federation
- Polity-scale typically; can be national or community
Anthropological assumptions
- Default ethical orientation
- Rousseauian; assumes universal entitlement to an economic floor — provisioning through collective contribution to group need, not individual merit or self-interest.
- Accumulative drive
- Drive accepted above floor; floor ensures non-destitution
- Status / recognition
- Partially separated; everyone receives baseline regardless of status
- Time preference
- Variable — a policy layer atop other currencies whose orientation depends entirely on parameters like duration and inflation-adjustment, not a fixed design choice.
In Practice
- Track record
-
Real pilots have run in multiple places — Stockton's SEED program (2019-2021) and numerous GiveDirectly cash-transfer programs have produced published results — though no country has adopted UBI as permanent, universal policy yet. - Governance requirements
- Requires a funding body (government, foundation, or NGO) to administer distribution; recipients need no special structure — this is a distribution-layer rule on an existing currency.
- Resource requirements
- A funded pool of the issuing currency and a distribution mechanism (bank transfers, mobile money, etc.); recipients need only an account able to receive it.