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NEW · ENArts Basic Income in Spain (RBA-E): Freedom, Dignity and Cultural Justice— core document of the project

Why a Basic Income for the Arts and not a Universal Basic Income?

The Basic Income for the Arts does not fragment the universal sense of Basic Income; it anticipates it—acting as a political laboratory and a test field for structural redistribution of wealth.

Updated: 2025-11-01

Why a Basic Income for the Arts and not a Universal Basic Income?

The Basic Income for the Arts (BIA-E) is not conceived as a corporatist exception or a professional privilege, but as a sector-specific application of the universal principles of the Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Its purpose is not to fragment the redistributive horizon of the UBI, but to accelerate its feasibility and demonstrate its social effects in a strategic field: culture.

The UBI aims at structural justice — redistributing, unconditionally, the collective wealth generated by capital, labor, and automation.
The BIA-E operates within that same horizon, translating it into a concrete experimental field where its impacts on freedom, innovation, mental health, and social cohesion can be precisely observed.

Far from weakening the universal principle, it strengthens it:

  • It functions as a political laboratory. As in Ireland, Finland, or New York, the BIA-E allows the measurement of a basic income’s effects within a highly intermittent and socially valuable sector.
  • It demonstrates social return. International evidence shows that every euro invested in a cultural basic income yields more than €1.30 in social and fiscal return.
  • It anticipates governance mechanisms. Its implementation helps design funding, traceability, and evaluation models applicable on broader, even universal, scales.

The sectoral approach is therefore not a betrayal of universality but a strategy of transition.
Public policies often begin as partial experiments: social security, unemployment insurance, and public health systems all started as limited frameworks before becoming universal rights.

In this sense, the cultural sector acts as a privileged testing ground, concentrating the very problems the UBI seeks to solve — structural precarity, discontinuous labor, the invisibility of unpaid work, and the generation of collective, non-monetized value.
If such a policy works here, it can work anywhere.

The BIA-E therefore does not replace or fragment the Universal Basic Income: it anticipates, tests, and legitimizes it.
Culture, as a field of symbolic and social production, offers the most fertile terrain to show that basic income is not a subsidy but a new social contract between the State and its citizens.