Tue, Apr 18, 2017 page10

• FEATURE: Berlin start-up uses crowdfunding to offer a year with no money worries

  • AFP, BERLIN
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  Miko from Berlin might only be five, but he already has 1,000 euros (US$1,063) per month to live on — not from hard graft, but as part of an experiment into universal basic income (UBI).

  He is one of 85 people, including about 10 children, chosen by start-up Mein Grundeinkommen (“My Basic Income”) to receive the payments for a year since 2014.

  Founder Michael Bohmeyer has set out to prove to a skeptical public in Germany and further afield that the universal basic income idea is workable.

  “Thanks to my first start-up, I got a regular income, my life became more creative and healthy. So I wanted to launch a social experiment,” 31-year-old Bohmeyer said.

  He was not alone in wanting to test the idea, as about 55,000 donors have stumped up the cash for the payments in a crowdfunding model — with the final recipients picked out in a “wheel of fortune” event livestreamed online.

  Mother Birgit Kaulfuss said little Miko “can’t really understand, but for the whole family it was exhilarating” when he was chosen — offering a chance to live “in a more relaxed way” and take a first-ever family holiday.

  “Everyone sleeps more soundly and no one became a layabout,” Bohmeyer said of his beneficiaries.

  Recipients’ experiences range from a welcome spell without financial worries to major turning points in their lives.

  “Without day-to-day pressures, you can be more creative and try things out,” Valerie Rupp told public broadcaster ARD in an interview.

  She was able both to take care of her baby and start a career as a decorator — even as her husband, newly arrived from Mali, was taking German lessons.

  Winners have left jobs that were doing little more for them than put bread on the table to become teachers, taken time out to address chronic illness, broken alcohol addiction, taken care of loved ones, or paid for children’s studies.

  “It’s at once a gift and a prompt” to make a change, said Astrid Lobeyer, who used the money to give eulogies at funerals and studied the therapeutic Alexander technique, a method for relieving stress in the muscles.

  Bohmeyer’s experiment has fascinated social media and boosted discussion about a universal income in Germany.

  At the same time, Finland is testing the idea with 2,000 homeless recipients and the idea is a flagship policy for French Socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon.

  In 2009, the German parliament flatly rejected a petition from about 50,000 Germans demanding a universal income.

  Nevertheless, about 40 percent of the public still think it is a good idea, according to a survey conducted in June last year by pollster Emnid.

  Supporters have formed a campaign group called Buendnis Grundeinkommen (“basic income federation”) with their sights on September’s legislative elections, but so far no major party has taken up the cause.

  There are pockets of support among left-wingers, the right, Catholic organizations and even industry leaders, whose reasoning ranges from fighting poverty to simplifying bureaucracy or smoothing the transition into the digital era.

  Resistance to the idea is more focused, centering on how UBI would change people’s relationship to work.

  Right-wingers dismiss it as a “reward for laziness,” while the Social Democratic Party worried in 2006 about unemployed recipients being “labeled useless” rather than getting help to find jobs.
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