10
Shares
What if we gave young people £10,000 on their 18th birthday? In an age of growing inter-generational inequality and resentment,
Julian Le Grand (LSE) explains the thinking behind an idea whose time may have come.
A lot of people are going to find themselves in a precarious situation at the end of this pandemic. The state can support them in a number of different ways: the classic one, very fashionable at the moment, is to support people by giving them doses of income. One of the better-known ideas is Universal Basic Income (UBI). I want to talk about a slightly different version of UBI. We call it Universal Basic Capital (UBC). The idea is not so much to act as a safety net, but as a springboard for people to leap out of the pit in which they may find themselves, and to propel themselves to the heights of better living conditions and a more equal society.