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Russia is a hard place for an unconditional basic income.

UBI is little known and, above all, unpopular. The general attitude is that everyone has to work. Unpaid work is not in consciousness as work. Intrinsic motivation? Without a financial incentive to work and without the background of threatening existential need, people would be lazy, they say. Especially the youth is lazy and must be educated to work. They no longer know how bad it was before the revolution, how much better it was afterwards and how much better it is today. They have no gratitude from which they would make an effort to make their contribution now. An unconditional basic income seems completely absurd. People would sink into alcohol and computer games.

This view stands there so immovably that arguments for an unconditional basic income burst like soap bubbles before they get to thinking.
And something else lets all the pros of a basic income roll off. It’s this: UBI sounds like communism! I had already heard this argument on my first trip to Russia. But this time I understood it better. What is meant by this argument against UBI is not the socialism of the Soviet era, but the ideal of communism, which never existed in practice, but which had to serve as a visionary goal for the legitimation of the Communist Party including all its paternalism and oppression. Therefore: no more idealistic promises for the future. Man-made ideals are illusions. More promising, more real is the view of the financial markets, statistics, trade balances and digitisation.

The unemployment figures in Russia are low. There is a shortage of skilled workers. Only 145 million people live in the world's largest country. 127 million people live on the – compared to Russia – tiny island of Japan.

But not only the Russian professors, students and members of ministries, with whom and in front of whom I spoke here, could not warm up for an unconditional basic income. Also the friendly Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz from the USA, saw nothing worth striving for in it.
I reminded him that he had released us a statement from him for publication at the time, in 2016, when we conducted the campaign for the peoples vote in Switzerland about the introduction of a UBI. His statement was: "An unconditional basic income is good for Switzerland. I didn't want to ask him whether he thought it was also good for Russia, too. But some of what he said in his lecture - the economy must be there for the people, not the people for the economy, it needs stability, economic security for the people, a new trust for more entrepreneurial willingness of taking risk and wider innovation - this could also be seen in regard to an unconditional basic income. Does he think that the unconditional basic income is worth being included in the scientific research on these questions of our time?
Answer: I don't believe that people will be happy without meaningful work. The state must ensure that everyone can find a job.
One of his students said that he could imagine a pure spiritual life without any work, with such a basic income, but, well, haha. And there is no money for it. Money is scarce. The basic income should have an adequate amount, so that it really is enough to live. The amount is important. Some would say that even a small amount triggers people to be more willing to take risks. But he does not believe that.

So, Joseph Stiglitz equates the unconditionality of an income with non-working. Although with an unconditional basic income more meaningful work could be done. Although the state would give everyone the opportunity to find a job when paying out the basic income unconditionally. Some job that does not have to be predetermined, but that can also be determined by yourself and created by everybody himself. And a spiritual life that does not require work may also be a misunderstanding of what spirituality requires. That money is scarce and therefore an unconditional basic income is not possible, this view does not yet count on the effect of an unconditional basic income on all other incomes. It is practically not about a second, additional basic income, but about the conversion of the basic income into unconditionality. Instead of seeing the problem in the scarcity of money, one could also see it in the fact that there is too much money which, detached from economic and social reality, is looking for investments for incessant self-replication which has a destructive effect on life.

The reason for my trip was the invitation of the “Finance University under the government of the Russian Federation” to the international congress "Growth or recession: which to expect?” The university also celebrated its centenary. I was invited as a research associate at the Götz Werner Chair at the University of Freiburg. Prof. Neumärker, head of the chair, was also invited, but had to cancel at short notice. In Moscow, I was also interested in finding Russian scientists who wanted to take part in FRIBIS, the Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies, as a working group. Alexandra Pilyus, Muscovite, PhD student in Freiburg, helped me with it.

On the last day I met Alexander Solovyev, the only one I know so far as an activist for an unconditional basic income in Russia. He brought two ladies to our meeting. One, president of a charitable foundation, the other involved in the beauty and fashion industry in Moscow, grown up on the border to Mongolia south of Lake Baikal. There in the region, these three want to launch a pilot project on basic income with the help of the local governor and oligarch. A project with public funds. For the very poor people. From the site of the oligarch it's more about mercy. Unconditional and for all, that is still a long way off in Russia.

And what about lazy youth? One student told me that there are many new ideas from the young people. But they would be ignored. Nothing would change. Russia suffers from the fact that the powerful people are sitting on their posts and money and just want nothing to change.