A UBI is necessary to address extreme poverty as automation increases unemployment.

In addition to issues of sustainability, the recent interest in a basic income is generated by specific concerns about growing economic inequality and the changing nature of work. As evidence of this inequality, Oxfam has noted the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires. In 2018, 26 people owned the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion people who comprise the poorest half of the world’s population – in 2017, this figure was 43 people.45 Few countries seem willing or able to tax the global companies that generate this wealth. While inequality is growing the rate of reduction of extreme poverty had slowed by half since 2013 according to the World Bank.46 The Bank is now projecting that the economic impacts of COVID-19 will result in ‘the first increase in global extreme poverty since 1998, effectively wiping out progress made since 2017’.47 Inequality has severe consequences for political and economic stability, health and the environment.48 This inequality manifests in many parts of the world in under-employment and salary stagnation. Precarious labour conditions are a reality for millions within the increasingly global labour market. There are fears about the loss of jobs in what has been labelled the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ which entails changes in scale and scope that cannot yet be predicted, including via robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, the ‘internet of things’ and quantum computing.49 These technologies are likely to reduce employment in many areas with some uncertainty about whether new forms of income generating work will arise to replace the old jobs or whether many people will become unemployed or underemployed leading to even greater inequality and insecurity. It is these concerns about both a crisis in work and the related challenges of inequality that have led to calls for a basic income from a range of quarters. A basic income is being seen variously as ‘venture capital for the poor’, a response to poverty and austerity, and as a means of freeing people to work as they choose rather than remain in meaningless, unsatisfying ‘bullshit jobs’.50