Shop top categories that ship internationally
Buy New
EUR12.85
EUR 4.24 delivery May 6 - 18
Ships from: RAREWAVES-IMPORTS
Sold by: RAREWAVES-IMPORTS
EUR 12.85
EUR 4.24 delivery May 6 - 18. Details
In stock
Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
EUR EUR 12.85 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
EUR EUR 12.85
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Shipper / Seller
RAREWAVES-IMPORTS
RAREWAVES-IMPORTS
Shipper / Seller
RAREWAVES-IMPORTS
Returns
30-day refund/replacement
30-day refund/replacement
Quick refund
Usually issued within 24 hours. See exceptions
Shipping fee
May apply, not eligible for free return. See details
Convenient dropoff
At any of our 50,000 US locations.
See return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
EUR 6.54
Ships from the UK. US orders include tracking. Buy from the UK's book specialist. Enjoy same or next day dispatch. A top-rated and trusted seller on Amazon. Ships from the UK. US orders include tracking. Buy from the UK's book specialist. Enjoy same or next day dispatch. A top-rated and trusted seller on Amazon. See less
EUR 5.37 delivery April 30 - May 8. Details
Only 3 left in stock - order soon.
EUR EUR 12.85 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
EUR EUR 12.85
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Ships from and sold by WeBuyBooks-UK.
Added to

Sorry, there was a problem.

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again.

Sorry, there was a problem.

List unavailable.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

  • A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income

Follow the author

Get new release updates & improved recommendations
Guy Standing
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income Mass Market Paperback – International Edition, July 25, 2017

by Guy Standing (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars (138)
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"EUR 12.85","priceAmount":12.85,"currencySymbol":"EUR","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"85","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":true,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"zplDOniat8XyIoZfnMQlYETa4QUlRU9Aaht1DXqVZn5EsB6yWe%2FvuxjQqO%2F8VI4shnxZ57qdl3UYM%2FG2s5ibTWeGEdnVYYInYzpfD5uc84VpnzYy6pTOVx%2F9tXcqoCHQ9B%2Fd7hXNGO74KgaX53PA%2BXnao4FYWq77sVaQiQx35%2BuZtKLucIT5kw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"EUR 6.54","priceAmount":6.54,"currencySymbol":"EUR","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"54","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":true,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"zplDOniat8XyIoZfnMQlYETa4QUlRU9Aq4RZqhsVLA6c8a1MpnuhwDrFlvjVjfUbRvHDfW92ZFnktDLySsbzBeYHYOe0CLog2xfxr1HlaZknW%2FMcVor8mSoLLeN%2B%2Fmi%2Flfa%2FpUcVWhezxprX%2BtTLr0EzMBxjQNtTwUFmCS5U5vy1GAVE4s1Ux2EBhoIezSll","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

'Basic Income is an idea whose time has come, and Guy Standing has pioneered our understanding of it... Standing's analysis is vital' Paul Mason 'Guy Standing has been at the forefront of the movement for nearly 4 decades, and in this superb and thorough survey he explains how it works and why it has the potential to revitalise life and democracy in our societies. This is an essential book.' Brian Eno Shouldn't everyone receive a stake in society's wealth? Could we create a fairer world by granting a guaranteed income to all? What would this mean for our health, wealth and happiness? Basic Income is a regular cash transfer from the state, received by all individual citizens. It is an acknowledgement that everyone plays a part in generating the wealth currently enjoyed only by a few. Political parties across the world are now adopting it as official policy and the idea generates headlines every day. Guy Standing has been at the forefront of thought about Basic Income for the past thirty years, and in this book he covers in authoritative detail its effects on the economy, poverty, work and labour; dissects and disproves the standard arguments against Basic Income; explains what we can learn from pilots across the world and illustrates exactly why a Basic Income has now become such an urgent necessity.
Read more
Previous slide of product details
  1. Part of series
    Pelican Books
  2. Print length
    320 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Pelican
  5. Publication date
    July 25, 2017
  6. Dimensions
    4.37 x 0.91 x 7.13 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    9780141985480
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0141985480
Next slide of product details
The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Guy Standing co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network and now serves as its honorary co-President. He has held professorships at the University of Bath and at SOAS, was programme director at the International Labour Organisation and has advised the UN, World Bank and governments around the world on labour and social policy. He is the author of the bestselling The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0141985488
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pelican
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 25, 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780141985480
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141985480
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.37 x 0.91 x 7.13 inches
  • Part of series ‏ : ‎ Pelican Books
  • Best Sellers Rank: #2,373,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars (138)

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Guy Standing

Guy Standing

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Related books

Page 1 of 1Start Over
Sponsored
Previous page
  1. Shop the Store on Amazon ›
    Build Passive Income with AI – No Code? No Budget? No Problem!: Join the Digital Gold Rush Before It Passes You By
    Build Passive Income with AI – No Code? No Budget? No Problem!: Join the Digital Gold Rush Before It Passes You By
    4.44.4 out of 5 stars461
    EUR14.55 List:EUR16.20
  2. Shop the Store on Amazon ›
    The Tao of Trading: How to Build Abundant Wealth in Any Market Condition
    The Tao of Trading: How to Build Abundant Wealth in Any Market Condition
    4.74.7 out of 5 stars699
    EUR16.99
  3. Shop the Store on Amazon ›
    Social Media Marketing Essentials You Always Wanted To Know: A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Strategies, Content Creation, and Platform-Specific Marketing
    Social Media Marketing Essentials You Always Wanted To Know: A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Strategies, Content Creation, and Platform-Specific Marketing
    4.64.6 out of 5 stars42
    EUR27.20
  4. Shop the Store on Amazon ›
    Think Like a Boss: Kids Edition: 47 Money Making Ideas for Young Entrepreneurs, Earn Key Skills for Future Job Success in the Workplace or in Business. Helping Kids Learn Money Management Early
    Think Like a Boss: Kids Edition: 47 Money Making Ideas for Young Entrepreneurs, Earn Key Skills for Future Job Success in the Workplace or in Business. Helping Kids Learn Money Management Early
    4.54.5 out of 5 stars274
    EUR10.96
  5. Shop the Store on Amazon ›
    Investment Banking Interview Questions and Answers Prep Guide (200 Q&As): Ace your technical questions and tell your unique story that will intrigue ... your background. (Entrepreneur Pursuits)
    Investment Banking Interview Questions and Answers Prep Guide (200 Q&As): Ace your technical questions and tell your unique story that will intrigue ... your background. (Entrepreneur Pursuits)
    4.14.1 out of 5 stars38
    EUR16.99
Next page

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
138 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

  • Floyd Marinescu
    5.0 out of 5 stars This is the best book to get a real both an engaging read ...
    Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2017
    Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This is the best book to get a real both an engaging read and a very comprehensive read into basic income and its opportunity for bringing us to a sustainable economy that works for everyone. Guy Standing is an economist and labour expert who has been at the forefront of the basic income movement for over 30 years, this book includes the authors own views that are among the best articulated of any of the basic income advocates out there. In addition the book goes beyond the usual moral arguments with deeply researched points, summarizing all the points for and counters to objections against, references to experiments done so far and findings in those experiments. I very much enjoyed reading this book cover to cover!
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Paul B. Brown
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2017
    Format: Mass Market Paperback
    An important topic explained clearly
    Helpful
     Report
  • Lawrence Gunnell
    5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly written, very accessible.
    Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2021
    Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase
    A must read. Excellent book, well outlined, extremely fair in representing various perspectives and motivations. Highly accessible and definitely worth a read. Great gift for others too.
    Helpful
     Report
  • DAVID BRYSON
    5.0 out of 5 stars THIS NEEDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY
    Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2017
    Format: Mass Market Paperback
    The notion of a basic income is still struggling to attract much attention and is often dismissed as prima facie nonsense. Here however we have a painstaking treatise on the subject that is both readable and as comprehensive as can be achieved within 300 pages. Professor Guy Standing, honorary co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network, is clearly trying to right this imbalance. He is a committed advocate for the concept without being polemical in style and he has impressed me at least thoroughly. I can’t claim to be a convert at this stage, but he has squared up to the formidable opposition and dealt patiently with what may be the most comprehensive collection of platitudes and superficial pronouncements that can have disgraced academic argumentation since the dawn of Economics.

    Very properly Standing begins by defining Basic Income and differentiating it from related ideas that should not be mistaken for it. So – Basic Income is ‘a modest amount of money paid unconditionally to individuals on a regular basis’. As an alternative wording, ‘a universal basic income’ is given a pass, and before we have gone half a page we have three concepts calling for and being given detailed expansion and clarification – basic, individuals and universal. However the core idea is that each citizen should receive a small income as a matter of right, much as the air the citizen breathes is a matter of right, and emphatically not subject to qualification or justification. Still at the philosophical level, Standing clearly implies that humanity took a mis-step when it introduced the idea of ownership into the possession of land (another common gift to all) and even to what is usually known these days as IP – Intellectual Property.

    The argument as it proceeds is more economic than ethical, but the author makes it clear all the same that the fundamental drive behind the Basic Income project is not to ease the burden of low income but to right injustice. There is quite a lot about reducing inequality, but this professor is too canny to hitch his star to any political grouping, notably the dreaded socialism. Increasing (and accelerating) inequality is downright dangerous (as I suspect he implies without saying it outright) and if he had come right out and said that it was what led to one revolution in 1789 and could be leading to another even as we read, write and argue about the matter, I would have had difficulty in disagreeing with him.

    One line of reasoning, again politico-economic, that is likely to seize a tired reader’s flagging attention is Standing’s obvious and admirable disgust with the convoluted processes of means-testing and the related rites of human beings evaluating what their fellow human beings may be thought or said to ‘deserve’. Not only is the mentality toxic, it is ludicrously expensive, error-prone and still dubious even without clear-cut errors. There is an obvious benefit to be gained here in the much-bruited concept of ‘saving waste and bureaucracy’. This is commonly taken to imply either astounding savings to be harvested from cutting down on photocopies and paperclips, or abolition of plain safeguards that are there for the protection of us all, but particularly those whose voice of protest does not carry far. What the savings must be from ridding ourselves of the underpaid staff from overpaid agencies, and releasing such staff from their demeaning activities into an environment where they have a basic income which they can then supplement in better ways is a thing that many must have calculated by now, and I would like to see what the figures amount to.

    One of the most interesting discussions concerns ‘work’ and ‘labour’. These are carefully differentiated and put into the context of a world where ‘full employment’ as we once understood it has vanished, to be replaced by the gig economy, zero-hours contracts and that whole wretched caboodle. Behind such practices, of course, looms the elephant in the room, to wit automation, and the steady reduction in the need for human labour, at any rate in the more advanced economies. This, I suspect, is the situation that more than any academic arguments will bring the notion of Basic Income into the foreground, and perhaps quite suddenly and abruptly at that.

    Any thorough treatment of such a subject would need chapters on Affordability, and of course on the knotty issue of How Do We Get There From Here? Space precludes the kind of lengthy disquisitions that each of these topics demands in even a full-length book let alone a 1000-word review. What I would say to any prospective readers of this fine book is that they should not expect to be bowled over with the dazzling insight of each and every argument. I might choose as a particular instance the odd-seeming argument for Basic Income v doled-out allowances that a Basic Income could be helped in cost terms by compensating reductions in taxes elsewhere. That same benefit could be extended to the dole as well by offsetting its cost elsewhere, surely?

    Most of the book having been theoretical Standing finishes with accounts of trials in various parts of the world. Once again the author has to be fairly summary. Obviously, too, he is looking for outcomes that have offered him encouragement, but experiments with the Basic Income concept in various parts of the globe give him what seem to me legitimate, if unspectacular, grounds for optimism.

    The whole idea of this book is to raise the level of the ‘debate’ (if such it can be called) on a topic that may be waiting in the wings, perhaps to make a dramatic entrance of a kind unwelcome to any who would dismiss it out of hand. The book is long, it requires patience to read, but any who have read it can no longer say they had no good guide to the matter.
    6 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Geoff Crocker
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent case but needs heterodox economics
    Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2017
    Format: Mass Market Paperback
    Guy Standing deploys his eclectic intellect, persuasive gifts, and personal commitment to great effect in this excellent case for basic income. There are 3 main arguments for basic income
    • Social justice, freedom and security
    • Administrative welfare system efficiency
    • Economic necessity to fund aggregate demand in high tech economies
    Standing makes clear that his own justification for basic income is social justice (p97), and devotes the first four chapters to this theme, which occasionally read as a stream of consciousness. He mentions the argument for administrative welfare efficiency, but only grudgingly admits the case from technology.

    He becomes more incisive from chapter 5 when discussing the economics of basic income. The core point is that technology is raising productivity so that wages are not keeping pace with output. Basic income fills the demand gap and would have avoided the 2007 economic crash and current austerity policy. He dismisses the objection of lower work participation eloquently in chapter 8.

    But the case for basic income crashes against the objection of affordability. Standing follows Torry, Compass and RSA in testing affordability within financial orthodoxy, ie that government budgets must balance. Tax rates then have to rise to 35%, 55% and 60% to fund even a modest basic income (p136), failing the test of political feasibility, and giving credence to Tim Harford and John Kay’s breezy dismissals (p129).

    An alternative heterodox economic paradigm is needed. In the real economy, output GDP is the test of affordability, not the availability of money. Money is simply an intermediary whose own value is determined by the same output GDP, not by gold standards or by sales of government bonds. In a thought experiment where a machine is plugged into the earth to produce all output GDP without any labour, and this GDP is distributed by vouchers issued and destroyed each year, then 100% of GDP becomes basic income, and 100% of GDP is deficit financed. The nuanced claim is that in high tech economies where output increasingly exceeds wage, then basic income is essential and financial deficit inevitable. Recent economic fact supports both these hypotheses. Acceptance of the inevitability of deficit financing renders basic income genuinely affordable by output GDP.
    2 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • Micha
    5.0 out of 5 stars Grundeinkommen von allen Seiten betrachtet
    Reviewed in Germany on May 29, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Unglaublich informativ und vielschichtig macht Guy Standing klar, dass es viele gute Gründe dafür gibt, das Grundeinkommen einzuführen.
    Report
  • T. Watkins
    5.0 out of 5 stars It makes powerful sense
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2017
    Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase
    I have been very concerned about rising levels of inequality, and I have read a bit about universal basic income. What I read recommended Guy Standing as the author with the greatest authority on the subject. Looking for something of his, I came across this Pelican book, a series for which I have great respect, both for its recent original publications, and for its historic importance. Standing writes simply, straightforwardly, in command of his facts and ideas, and he makes things clear and comprehensible. Excellent, a rewarding read.Having read the book as soon as it arrived, I have already referred back to sections of it; I am fairly sure that I will continue to go back to it - and that is quite rare. The ideas in this book will affect my political thinking.
    Report
  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should have a guaranteed basic income from the federal government!
    Reviewed in Canada on August 17, 2020
    Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase
    this is a great read! And, this should be a priority by both provincial and federal governments. And this would start at the grass roots demanding Politian's to implement. Governments have had the opportunity to do so time and again for the past 50 - 60 years. It is only through a lack of understanding by government officials Canadians do not have a GBI. This type of program would bring many people suffering from poverty, justifiably onto an equal playing field. Spend the 16$ and share the book with a friend.
    Report
  • DR. PRANJAL PROTIM BURAGOHAIN
    5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
    Reviewed in India on December 20, 2020
    Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Outstanding book describing the need of provisioning basic income to the people.
    Report
  • Humberto Besso
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
    Reviewed in Mexico on July 22, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    I bought if to know more about Basic Income being a complete strange to the concept. Book was really complete and taught me deeply on how to make it happen.
    I just think that in order to apply it at complex corrupted societies as the latinoamericans would be extremelly difficult. But humanity will find the solution, maybe not at the right moment, but we will persevere.
    The book was very easy to read and leave you willing to read more and research more. Unfortunatetly there are other Basic Income books that are extremely costly, dunno why if the authors want more people to read their minds and think as, they won't achieve that with prices over $200 dls!
    Guy Standing's book has the correct price with the best value.
    Report
See more reviews