How the Findings Help Advance the Basic Income Debate and Advocacy

This chapter builds on the main insights gathered from the interviews and discusses some of the main normative questions that came out from both part one and part two of the book. We will start off on Sect. 7.1 by arguing that we still have important knowledge gaps on the impacts of unconditional cash transfers, and some results we already have might deserve more attention. Hence, we will argue that we do have enough information, but it tends to be scattered. The insights from this book aim to contribute to help us shed light on results from basic income experiments, pilots, and policies, which can hopefully also help us understand which results we know less about. In Sect. 7.2, we tackle the role of different stakeholders engaged in basic income experiments, pilots, and policies, namely researchers, politicians, communities, or the media. We discuss how particular goals often compete which can contribute to misperceptions on the success or failure of the experiment. We will argue that despite the difficulties in juggling the agendas and roles of different stakeholders, namely researchers and politicians, we should acknowledge these limitations and incorporate them in how we design, implement, and communicate the findings of any experiment or policy. Finally, in Sect. 7.3, we discuss what our interviewees told us about how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped the debate on basic income and particularly on the need to have UBI experiments. Hence, the final section of the chapter will discuss the possibility for the pandemic to inspire a short-term basic income policy