BIA - Book Club - Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income

Where: Zoom

When: 2026-08-12T09:00:00.000Z

Duration: 2 hours

Description: For our third 2026 book club, we’ll be reading Welfare for Markets by Anton Jager and Daniel Zamora Vargas, a sharp and sometimes challenging history of basic income as an idea. Rather than treating UBI as a purely progressive project, this book traces how basic income has been taken up across very different political traditions, including neoliberal and market-focused ones. It asks hard questions about who supports UBI, why, and what kinds of economic systems it might ultimately serve. This is a great book for stretching our thinking, testing assumptions, and having a more critical conversation about strategy, power, and political context. Come along ready to debate, disagree, and dig into the uncomfortable bits together.