Experiment offers income for a year
BERLIN — Miko may only be 5, but he already has 1,000 euros ($1,063) per month to live on — not from hard work, but as part of an experiment into universal basic income.
He is one of 85 people in Berlin, including around 10 children, chosen by startup 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 startup, I got a regular income, my life became more creative and healthy. So I wanted to launch a social experiment,” 31-yearold Bohmeyer said.
And he wasn’t alone in wanting to test the idea, as some 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 firstever 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 a recent interview.
She was able both to take care of her baby and start a career as a decorator.
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
Eike Wendland, Janne, Miko and Birgit Kaulfuss, who receive 1,000 euros a month under the scheme.
idea is a flagship policy for French Socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon.
In Germany, there are pockets of support but resistance to the idea is more focused, centering on how UBI would change people’s relationship to work.
“Who will take on the exhausting and sometimes less attractive tasks, like emptying bins or taking care of the elderly?” asked Werner Eichhorst of the Bonn Centre for the Future of Work in 2013.
UBI supporters argue such jobs would either be taken over by robots or find a new place of honor in society if the policy were enacted.
“No machine will take over working for us and pay our taxes at the same time,” Eichhorst and opponents reply.
In 2014, Yaghi and his UC Berkeley team synthesized an MOF, a combination of zirconium metal and adipic acid, that binds water vapor, and he suggested to Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at MIT, that they join forces to turn the MOF into a water-collecting system.
“This work offers a new way to harvest water from air that does not require high relative humidity conditions and is much more energy efficient than other existing technologies,” Wang was quoted as saying in a news release from UC Berkeley.
However, there is still plenty of room for improvement, Yaghi said. The current MOF can absorb only 20 percent of its weight in water, but other MOF materials could possibly absorb 40 percent or more. The material can also be tweaked to be more effective at higher or lower humidity levels.
Yaghi and his team are at work improving their MOFs, while Wang continues to improve the harvesting system to produce more water.
“It’s not just that we made a passive device that sits there collecting water; we have now laid both the experimental and theoretical foundations so that we can screen other MOFs, thousands of which could be made, to find even better materials,” Yaghi said.
“There is a lot of potential for scaling up the amount of water that is being harvested. It is just a matter of further engineering now.”