Business Insider features JFI research

Business Insider’s piece on the newest experiment in cash transfers, funded by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, quotes JFI CEO Michael Stynes on our work in Maricá. Maricá represents one of the largest implementations of basic income in the world, with researchers from JFI and Fluminense Federal University (UFF) tracking the impact as it rolls out at a population level for 52,000 residents of a 150,000-resident city.

The article describes Maezawa’s curiosity about universal basic income and his intention to disburse a sum of 100 million yen ($917,000) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers at random. While the experiment cannot be considered a “basic income” given its disbursement in one lump sum, the funds are totally unconditional.

Stynes described the broader landscape of UBI and basic income research, and said, “The funny thing about basic income is that it has to be one of the most tested welfare policies in history that hasn’t in fact been implemented.”

See more about our current work on a basic policy’s roll-out in Brazil here. And thank you to Aria Bendix for featuring our work, and for continuing to cover new developments in guaranteed income research and implementation.

Read the full article here.