The “basic” part of “basic income” entails the amount being sufficient to live in the society
Guy Standing 17, British labor economist, Professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network. “Basic Income – Its Meaning and Historical Origins.” Basic Income: A Guide for the Open-Minded, Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 1–22. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bvnf53.4. AJ
The term ‘basic’ causes a lot of confusion. At the least, it means an amount that would enable someone to survive in extremis, in the society they live in. It could be more. However, the underlying purpose is to provide basic economic security, not total security or affluence. Total security would be neither feasible nor desirable.
Deciding what constitutes basic security is a challenge, but intuitively it should be easy to understand. Basic security in terms of being able to obtain enough to eat and a place to live, an opportunity to learn and access to medical care surely constitutes what any ‘good society’ should provide, equally and as certainly as it can. Most advocates of a basic income believe it should be provided as a ‘right’, meaning that it cannot be withdrawn at will. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 3.
Some argue that the basic income should be sufficient to ensure ‘participation in society’. As a definition, this seems both unnecessary and too vague. However, it reflects a laudable wish for all to have adequate resources to enable them, in words associated with Alexis de Tocqueville, to go forth in society as citizens with equal status. A sensible pragmatic position is that the level of a basic income should be sufficient to advance in that direction.