List of advocates of basic income

This is a list of notable persons or organizations that are advocates of basic income.

Europe

• Dieter Althaus, German politician[1]
• Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor[2]
• Julen Bollain, Spanish economist, politician and basic income researcher
• Annalena Baerbock, German politician[3]
• Robert Habeck , German politician[3]
• Frank Thelen, German entrepreneur and author[4]
• Richard David Precht, German philosopher and author[5]
• Gerald Hüther, German neurobiologist and author[6]
• Louise Haagh, political theorist, form chair of the Basic Income Earth Network[7]
• Rutger Bregman, Dutch author[8]
• Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics[9]
• André Gorz[10]
• Benoit Hamon, candidate for President of France in 2017[11]
• Stephen Hawking, English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author[12]
• Timotheus Höttges, German manager[13]
• Katja Kipping, The Left, Germany[14]
• Caroline Lucas, British politician[15]
• John McDonnell, British politician[16][17]
• Ailsa McKay[18]
• Antonio Negri[19]
• Ulrich Oevermann, German sociologist[20]
• Carole Pateman, feminist and political theorist[21]
• Thomas Piketty, economist[22]
• Christopher A. Pissarides, 2010 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics[23]
• Jonathan Reynolds[24]
• Molly Scott Cato, British politician, academic, environmental and community activist, and green economist.[25]
• Osmo Soininvaara[26]
• Guy Standing[27][28]
• Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece[29]
• Björn Wahlroos, Finnish billionaire[30]
• Götz Werner, founder, co-owner, and member of the advisory board of dm-drogerie markt[31]
• Susanne Wiest, German activist[32]
• Pope Francis[33]
• Arfst Wagner, German politician[34]
• Harald Lesch, German astrophysicist and author[35]
• Thomas Straubhaar, Swiss economist[35]
• Martin Wehrle, German journalist and author[36]

United States and Canada

• Karl Widerquist, political theorist and economist[37]
• Peter Barnes, entrepreneur and environmentalist[38][39]
• Keith Ellison, Attorney General of Minnesota, former U.S. Congressman and former DNC Deputy Chair[40]
• Milton Friedman, prominent economist and nobel laureate[41]
• James Baker, former U.S. Treasury Secretary[42]
• Peter Diamond, 2010 Economics Nobel Prize winner[43]
• Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter[44]
• Martin Feldstein, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers[42]
• Henry Paulson, former U.S. Treasury Secretary[42]
• Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor[45]
• Greg Mankiw, former Chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers[42]
• George P. Shultz, former U.S. Treasury Secretary[42]
• Ted Halstead, policy entrepreneur[42]
• Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder[46]
• Erik Olin Wright,[47] Marxist sociologist
• Andrew Ng, computer scientist, statistician, and artificial intelligence researcher
• Tim Draper, venture capitalist[48]
• Sam Altman, Y Combinator president[49]
• Chris Hughes, Facebook cofounder[50]
• Dan Savage, LGBT activist[51]
• Charles Murray, libertarian political scientist[52][53]
• Bill Gross, financial manager[54]
• Robin Chase, Zipcar cofounder[55]
• Scott A. Smith, founder of The Financial Freedom Act.
• Andy Stern, former Service Employees International Union president[56]
• Elon Musk, business magnate[57]
• Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite CEO[58]
• Paul Vallée, Pythian Group CEO[59]
• Guy Caron, NDP leadership candidate, economist, and MP[60]
• Naheed Nenshi, Mayor of Calgary[61]
• Don Iveson, Mayor of Edmonton[61]
• S. Robson Walton, former Walmart Chairman[42]
• Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America, and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate
• Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district, and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate[62]
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook[63][64]
• Gisele Huff, president of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity[65]
• Ray Kurzweil, American entrepreneur[66]

Asia, Africa, Latin America, Oceania

• Eduardo Suplicy, Brazil[67]
• Varun Gandhi, Indian Member of Parliament[68]
• Arvind Subramanian, present economic adviser in India[69]
• Vikas Singh, economist in India[70]
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, South Africa[71]
• Gareth Morgan, economist, New Zealand[72]
• Andrew Little, minister of Justice, New Zealand[73]
• Douglas Maclaine-Cross, General Executive, Australian Progressives

Historical advocates

• 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.[74]
• Buckminster Fuller, architect
• Bertrand Russell, philosopher
• Huey Long, governor and US Senator from Louisiana, in his Share Our Wealth plan
• Thomas Spence was apparently the first to lay out in full what is now called a universal basic income.[75]
• American economist Henry George advocated for 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.[76][77]
• 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.[78]
• 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.[79][80]
• 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.[81][82]
• British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, Tony Atkinson.[83]
• British economist James Meade[84][85]
• British engineer and pioneer of the social credit economic reform movement, C. H. Douglas[86][87]
• 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.[88][89]
• 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,[90] 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.[91]

References

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