List of advocates of universal basic income

The following is a list of notable individuals who have publicly expressed support or are working for the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI).

Europe

• Dieter Althaus, German politician
• Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor
• Julen Bollain, Spanish economist, politician and basic income researcher
• Robert Habeck, German politician
• Winfried Kretschmann, German politician
• Frank Thelen, German entrepreneur and author
• Richard David Precht, German philosopher and author
• Harald Welzer, German social psychologist
• Maja Göpel, German political economist and sustainability scientist
• Gerald Hüther, German neurobiologist and author
• Ranga Yogeshwar, Luxembourgish author and science journalist
• Alan Watts, British writer
• Louise Haagh, political theorist, form chair of the Basic Income Earth Network
• Rutger Bregman, Dutch author
• Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics
• André Gorz, Austrian-French social philosopher and journalist
• Beppe Grillo, Italian comedian, actor, blogger, and politician
• Benoit Hamon, candidate for President of France in 2017
• Timotheus Höttges, German manager
• Katja Kipping, The Left, Germany
• Caroline Lucas, British politician
• John McDonnell, British politician
• Antonio Negri, Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher
• Philippe Van Parijs, Belgian philosopher
• Carole Pateman, feminist and political theorist
• Thomas Piketty, economist
• Christopher A. Pissarides, 2010 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics
• Jonathan Reynolds, British politician
• Jeremy Corbyn, British politician
• Molly Scott Cato, British politician, academic, environmental and community activist, and green economist
• Osmo Soininvaara, Finnish politician
• Guy Standing, British economist
• Aubrey de Grey, English author and biogerontologist
• Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece
• Björn Wahlroos, Finnish billionaire
• Susanne Wiest, German activist
• Pope Francis, pope of the Catholic Church
• Harald Lesch, German astrophysicist and author
• Thomas Straubhaar, Swiss economist
• Martin Wehrle, German journalist and author
• Michael Bohmeyer, German entrepreneur, author and activist
• Wolfgang Strengmann-Kuhn, German politician
• Joe Kaeser, German manager
• Giuseppe Conte, Italian jurist, politician and leader of the Five Star Movement
• Claus Offe, German sociologist
• David Casassas, Spanish sociologist
• Marcel Fratzscher, German economist
• Clive Lewis, British politician
• Oswald Sigg, Swiss journalist
• Georges-Louis Bouchez, Belgian politician and lawyer
• Richard Branson, British business magnate
• Geoffrey Hinton, British computer scientist

United States and Canada

• Peter Barnes, entrepreneur and environmentalist
• Keith Ellison, Attorney General of Minnesota, former U.S. Congressman and former DNC Deputy Chair
• James Baker, former U.S. Treasury Secretary
• Peter Diamond, 2010 Economics Nobel Prize winner
• Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter
• Martin Feldstein, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers
• Henry Paulson, former U.S. Treasury Secretary
• Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor
• Greg Mankiw, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers
• George P. Shultz, former U.S. Treasury Secretary
• Curtis Sliwa, activist, radio talk show host and Republican nominee for the 2021 New York City mayoral election
• Ted Halstead, policy entrepreneur
• Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
• Erik Olin Wright, Marxist sociologist
• Andrew Ng, computer scientist, statistician, and artificial intelligence researcher
• Tim Draper, venture capitalist
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
• Chris Hughes, co-founder of Meta Platforms
• Dan Savage, LGBT activist
• Charles Murray, libertarian political scientist
• Bill Gross, financial manager
• Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar
• Andy Stern, former Service Employees International Union president
• Michael Hudson, economist at University of Missouri–Kansas City
• Elon Musk, business magnate
• Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite CEO
• Joe Rogan, American podcast host
• Paul Vallée, Pythian Group CEO
• Naheed Nenshi, Mayor of Calgary
• Don Iveson, Mayor of Edmonton
• S. Robson Walton, former Walmart Chairman
• Andrew Yang, American businessman, attorney, lobbyist, and politician. Founder of Venture for America, and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate
• Tulsi Gabbard, former U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district, and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta Platforms
• Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
• Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft
• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google
• Ray Kurzweil, American inventor and futurist
• Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist
• Penn Jillette, American magician, actor, television presenter, and author
• Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist
• Erik Brynjolfsson, American author and inventor
• Andrew McAfee, American research scientist
• Timothy Leary, candidate for governor of California in 1969
• Eugene McCarthy, candidate for president of the United States in 1968
• Peter Diamandis, Greek-American entrepreneur
• Albert Wenger, German-American businessman
• Guy Caron, Canadian politician
• Peter Vallentyne, American academic
• Hillel Steiner, Canadian political philosopher
• Ben Goertzel, American AI researcher
• Michael Tubbs, 79th Mayor of Stockton, California, later special adviser for economic mobility and opportunity for Governor Gavin Newsom
• Aja Brown, 18th Mayor of Compton, California, initiator of the Compton Pledge
• Edward Snowden, American whistleblower
• Peter Thiel, German-American entrepreneur

Asia, Africa, Latin America, Oceania

• Richard Di Natale, Australia. An Australian senator from 2011 to 2020 and the leader of the Australian Greens from 2015 to 2020.
• Eduardo Suplicy, Brazil
• Kim Kataguiri, Brazilian Activist and Politician
• Varun Gandhi, Indian Member of Parliament
• Arvind Subramanian, present economic adviser in India
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, South Africa
• Gareth Morgan, economist, New Zealand
• Andrew Little, minister of Justice, New Zealand
• Johann Rupert, South-African billionaire businessman
• Lee Jae-myung, South Korean politician and leader of the Democratic Party of Korea
• Yong Hye-in, South Korean politician of the Basic Income Party

Historical advocates

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

• Thomas Spence, an eighteenth century English radical, was apparently the first to lay out in full what is now called a universal basic income.

• Thomas Paine, a philosopher and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, advocated a capital grant and an unconditional citizens pension in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice.

• American economist Henry George advocated a citizen's dividend paid for by a land value tax in an April 1885 speech at a Knights of Labor local in Burlington, Iowa titled "The Crime of Poverty" and later in an interview with former U.S. House Representative David Dudley Field II from New York's 7th congressional district published in the July 1885 edition of the North American Review.
• William Morris, British socialist activist

Twentieth century

• Buckminster Fuller, architect
• Bertrand Russell, philosopher
• Huey Long, governor and US Senator from Louisiana, in his Share Our Wealth plan

• Jan Pieter Kuiper, Dutch professor of social medicine
• American economists James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith signed a document with 1,200 other economists in 1968 calling for the 90th U.S. Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.

• American economist Milton Friedman advocated a basic income in the form of a negative income tax in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, and again in his 1980 book Free to Choose.

• Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek advocated a guaranteed minimum income in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, and reiterated his support in his 1973 book Law, Legislation and Liberty.

• Tony Atkinson - British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.

• British economist James Meade

• C. H. Douglas - British engineer and pioneer of the social credit economic reform movement.

• Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. endorsed it under the name of "the guaranteed income" in his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? shortly before his assassination.

• French politician Lionel Stoléru argued for UBI in 1974, remarking that it would provide “a means of suppressing and simplifying the entire current series of social programmes”.

• U.S. Senator George McGovern from South Dakota sponsored a bill proposed by the National Welfare Rights Organization to enact a $6,500 guaranteed minimum income, and in his 1972 presidential campaign, proposed replacing the personal income tax exemption with a $1,000 tax credit as a minimum-income floor for every citizen.
• Virginia Woolf, English writer

Twenty-first century

• Stephen Hawking, English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author
• Ailsa McKay, Scottish economist
• Götz Werner, founder, co-owner, and member of the advisory board of dm-drogerie markt

Notes

References