Basic income is uniquely defined by being monetary rather than in-kind

Evidence

What would a history of basic income look like without this telos? First, it would imply letting go of what J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn call a tendency to “mythologise” given works by reading our own presuppositions into them “as a whole,” making all history an “enterprise in the present.” Second, it would require specifying an object. For the basic income, this implies singling out its unique aspects: unconditional, individual, and universal. Most important, however, the basic income is monetary and not provided in kind. Rather than providing specific public goods, it leaves it to recipients to decide how they want to spend the grant. — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: The monetary-not-in-kind criterion is the sharpest discriminator separating genuine UBI ancestors from paid-in-kind predecessors like More and Fourier.
• XREF: connects to: More’s guaranteed provision was paid in kind, not in money — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 70; Paine’s grant was a one-off to enable land purchase, not recurring income — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 65; Affluent automation anxiety, not scarcity, created the market for basic income. — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 138 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Money is an impersonal standard that negates the content of goods #expands (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 65
• Money carries multiple frames of value beyond its economic function #complicates (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 386
• Money as arbitrary fiction can only represent real social labour #complicates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 612