Philippe Van Parijs: "Will UBI still make sense in the post-corona world?"
Channel: Basic Income Europe
Date: 2020-06-07

Basic Income Tea special edition: Philippe Van Parijs on how the Corona-crisis has influenced the public discussion about Basic Income in Europe and the political opportunities for its introduction. In the second half of this video he answers questions from the audience.

In his keynote speech at the UBIE General Assembly on 23 May, 2020, Philippe discussed two types of temporary basic income proposals: 1. Introduction of some type of "emergency UBI" for the duration of the lockdown, to ensure that every person has enough to live on during this time. 2. "Quantitative easing for the people" (a.k.a. "helicopter money"), i.e. direct payments distributed from the ECB to boost demand – but to individuals rather than banks or companies as in previous QE programmes. Then he shared his thoughts how these proposals can lead to further support to a permanent introduction of UBI, but also what political obstacles might arise in post-lockdown political debates and what might be the best discursive strategy to counter those. In his closing remarks, he explained his assessment of the recently released final report of the Finnish basic income experiment and highlighted what role the upcoming European Citizens' Initiative "Start Unconditional Basic Incomes throughout Europe" could contribute to bring the basic income debate to the political agenda in Brussels and European capitals. 

Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian political philosopher and political economist. He is professor at the Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences of the University of Louvain, where he directs the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics since its creation in 1991. Philippe is also Co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and of Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE).

The Q&A part is moderated by Dániel Fehér, Vice-Chair of Unconditional Basic Income Europe.