Frequently Asked Questions about our ECI on UBI

What about the implementation of UBI?

Our proposal is deliberately open. We believe it does not make much sense to specify the details of a specific model at this stage. There are numerous opinions on how it can be implemented, so we have focused on outlining the fundamental cornerstones of our vision.

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its expected impact on society and the labor market, our world is bound to undergo significant transformation anyway. For this reason alone, over-specifying operational details right now is counterproductive.

Amidst these sweeping changes, a Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) serves as a critical pillar for navigating future uncertainties. It provides a reliable safety net that guarantees everyone's livelihood.

EU countries are not in good economic shape, so where is the money going to come from?

If UBI is implemented across all EU member states, it ensures that no single country faces an unfair economic disadvantage relative to others within the Union. Unfortunately, the EU currently lacks the legal competency to mandate the introduction of a UBI, meaning our European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) technically proposes a "recommendation." While this dependency makes the framework more fragile, it is an issue rooted in how the EU is structurally constructed rather than a flaw of UBI itself.

Most of us anticipate that even if our ECI is successful, the EU-which is currently governed primarily by right-wing and conservative forces-will be reluctant to adopt the proposal immediately.

However, the text of our ECI directly addresses how the system can be financed. We advocate for eliminating economically redundant "bullshit jobs" and introducing robust eco-taxes (for example, on carbon-intensive industries and commercial data centers). If we maintain the same level of genuinely useful goods and services, funding a UBI becomes fundamentally a matter of wealth redistribution from the top to the bottom.

How do you see the digital euro currency connecting with UBI?

Neutral: A UBI does not depend on fundamental changes to how our monetary systems operate. In theory, a digital currency could enable innovative, direct methods for distributing payments-potentially even bypassing national bureaucratic bottlenecks-but UBI is fully viable without it.

I am concerned that UBI could be used to control people by removing the "unconditional" part.

This is a valid concern that is frequently raised, and it is precisely why we insist on keeping "unconditionality" as an absolute, non-negotiable cornerstone of UBI. Ultimately, the only true safeguard ensuring UBI remains unconditional is a vibrant democracy. We must collectively demand and protect it.

What people often overlook or rationalize in this context is the extent to which our current economic system already forces conformity:

• People are frequently afraid to speak up or challenge authority at work out of fear of losing their job and livelihood.
• The dominant contemporary models of income distribution place highly unpleasant, coercive conditions on earning a living, yet this is rarely questioned because society treats it as "normal."
• Within households where one partner stays at home while the other earns the primary income, the stay-at-home partner (statistically most often a woman) is frequently placed in a position of systemic financial subordination.

It is ironic that people fear a future UBI might be used to enforce social conformity, while entirely ignoring how much their current paycheck already forces them to conform.

What would be the impact on the environment?

There are four key mechanisms through which a UBI could significantly benefit the environment and climate action:

1. Elimination of Redundant Sectors: Research suggests that a significant portion of modern employment consists of "bullshit jobs" that do not create meaningful social value and often cause ecological harm (e.g., hyper-aggressive advertising, predatory marketing, corporate patent litigation, and bloated middle-management bureaucracy). With a UBI, fewer people would be forced into these roles. Combined with the right tax incentives, we could phase out these resource-draining positions and drastically reduce their associated ecological footprints.
2. Wealth Redistribution and Carbon Reduction: Currently, the highest volume of carbon emissions is driven by the ultra-wealthy. Statistically, an individual in the top 0.1% generates more CO2 in a single day than someone in the bottom 50% does in an entire year. Because UBI acts as a mechanism for economic redistribution, it naturally helps curb this high-emissions luxury consumption.
3. Time Sufficiency for Sustainable Lifestyles: A UBI grants people the financial security to opt for more sustainable lifestyles. For instance, instead of taking a high-speed, carbon-heavy flight for a brief vacation, individuals have the time and flexibility to choose slow travel, such as a cycling trip. When you are not starved for time, the journey itself becomes a meaningful part of the vacation.
4. Reducing Resistance to Green Transitions: Under the current system, people depend entirely on their specific jobs for survival. Consequently, workers are understandably anxious about changing or shutting down unsustainable industries if it threatens their livelihood. An airline worker, for example, might oppose a carbon tax out of fear of unemployment. A UBI removes this existential dread, thereby lowering public and political resistance to necessary ecological transformations.

Is UBI a left-wing idea or a neoliberal idea?

UBI transcends traditional political categories, drawing support from a broad spectrum of ideologies:

• The Left: Many progressives champion UBI because it drives wealth redistribution and fosters socioeconomic fairness. Beyond that, it offers a path toward transforming society away from rigid capitalism; individuals gain the leverage to do meaningful work rather than being forced to sell their labor power to commercial enterprises. We already see this impulse in action: millions of people freely contribute to the public good by editing Wikipedia, developing free and open-source software, volunteering in communities, or participating in grassroots arts and music without financial coercion.
• Humanists and Ethicists: Many support UBI out of religious, philosophical, or humanist convictions, believing that every human being deserves a dignified life by virtue of existence alone. This represents a radical departure from our current paradigm, where human "worth" is viewed primarily through the lens of utility to a corporation or capital accumulation.
• Liberals and Libertarians: Many classic liberals embrace UBI because it maximizes individual liberty. The philosopher Bertrand Russell envisioned a basic income as a harmonious blend of socialism and anarchism: while society guarantees the security of your basic physical needs, you retain absolute freedom to choose how to direct your own life.

Because UBI addresses the core concerns of these diverse political philosophies, it represents a powerful, unifying policy framework for the future.

What are »Bullshit Jobs«?

The term was coined by the anthropologist David Graeber (1961–2020). He wrote an essay and a book with the same title. In his definition of the term, these are jobs that are useless to society (or even doing more harm than good), and even the person who does the job understands how useless it is. If we think about it: there are really many jobs today that are useless and harmful to society, but not in all cases are people aware of that fact. Some decide to buy into the propaganda that justifies their existence.

Bullshit jobs are often well paid. A good example of a bullshit job is, e.g., a patent attorney. His job is to rob society of something that could otherwise be freely shared for the benefit of society.

In contrast to this, there are the »Shitty Jobs«. Those are jobs that are usually not paid well and have bad working conditions, but are otherwise useful to society. In the pandemic, we have seen what jobs are really necessary for society. A lot of important work in our society is not paid at all-e.g., think of care work (often done by women).

David Graeber's focus is on the useless jobs in the bureaucracies of large corporations.

In the text of our ECI, we use the term »Bullshit Jobs« to refer to useless work, regardless of whether the workers themselves realize it is useless.

Artificial Scarcity.

Where do these bullshit jobs come from? Capitalism has the need to operate in scarcity. If there is too much of something, then it cannot be sold for a high price. The profits of corporations also need to be reinvested, and thus capitalism has a need to constantly expand. Historically, this led to imperialism and colonialism. Today, the expansion is more inward: creating new demands by creating artificial scarcity. Typical cases of such jobs are:

• Advertising and Marketing - it only has one product, and that is our discontent with what we have. Advertising is there to manipulate us to buy things we did not know we even needed. The useless crap we buy also has a huge ecological footprint.
• So-called »Intellectual Property«: using legal restrictions to artificially restrict access to ideas or goods that could otherwise benefit everyone.
• Planned obsolescence: goods designed to be short-lived simply to drive repeat sales, creating a massive ecological footprint.
• Financial »Products«: making things more complicated just so that consumers cannot compare prices.
• Military and War. Arundhati Roy wrote: »Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons«. While each war has more complex origins, the general tendency that war is a »good« business is there.

These are just a few examples, but there are many more. E.g., some company is paid to send out spam while another is paid to protect against it. While studies are rare, we think that it is a good guess to assume that half of the paid jobs today are harmful or useless.