With no conditions. Free money.

Because the world is changing rapidly.

More and more jobs will be taken over by robots and intelligent software.

So how will we earn our money? How will we be able to buy things?

Won't our economic system collapse?

It's high time we started thinking about a new social model.

Could a guaranteed income for all be the solution...

...to a new economic system?

Coming up next:

Welcome to the possibility of a guaranteed income.

We're embarking on a new era, The Second Machine Age...

...in which not everyone can count on a permanent job.

Robots will take over many of our tasks.

American Economist Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT...

...has written a book predicting the 'Second Machine Age'.

He claims a huge shift is about to take place...

...regarding the relationship between labour and capital...

...and the way we will regard the term 'work' in the future.

If this is what the future holds...

...what will happen to those millions of people working in an office now?

Will we become obsolete? Will we sit at home?

Or will we find another way to lead our lives?

Economist Marcel Canoy...

former advisor for the European Committee...

...is working on topics at the interface between economics and philosophy.

We asked him for his thoughts on the matter.

Are we properly prepared for the future that lies ahead?

This is his analysis.

It's the year 2014 now.

What will our lives be like in ten years' time?

What will change in those ten years? Well, a lot.

Simple work will be carried out by robots and the Chinese, right?

What will that mean?

We'll have to depend on our creativity and innovation skills to survive.

What will it mean for our work life?

Most of us work for a boss, and often the same one for a long time.

This will change.

More of us will become self-employed, or partially, or we'll work for each other.

Our current social networks already allow us to connect.

This will have consequences.

Another result of robotization will be that we'll have more free time.

So our work-life balance will change.

We'll start to spend our free time differently.

We'll start to fill that time with social tasks.

Helping sick family members, or doing something creative.

And we're all growing older.

So as a result there will be less of us to collect tax income from...

...and it will lead to healthcare issues.

If work isn't everything anymore...

...and not everyone will be able to partake in the job market....

...how will we distribute our wealth in the future?

There's a movement emerging in the Netherlands...

...of people fighting for the introduction of a guaranteed income for all.

Dutch citizens receive a fixed monthly amount, unconditionally.

A new way of redistributing wealth.

We're a small society. But it is growing. - Yes, it is.

Yara Rahimi is one of them.

She worked as a reintegration consultant for many years.

Her job was to help unemployed people re-enter the job market.

I saw how billions of euros were being invested...

...in reintegration and work experience projects.

These started out with great enthusiasm...

...but came back after six months completely demotivated...

...because they weren't suited to the job market.

She found she had to meet increasingly strict requirements.

A result of the commoditisation of our social system.

Suddenly we started working with targets.

I had to get three to five people onto the job market per month...

...which leads to certain results.

However, the problem is that there is less and less work.

Did that ever lead to moral dilemmas?

Yes, one time I faced a serious moral dilemma.

There was a man at my desk who told me...

This wasn't really related to the targets, more with the compulsory trajectories.

He wanted to look after his mother who was suffering from dementia.

He told me she was very poorly.

He had worked in healthcare and knew how bad it was.

He didn't want his mother to be exposed to that.

This was a moral dilemma for me.

I thought: Do I have to force this man to follow a certain trajectory?

Or do I let him take care of his mother?

How much would it cost the state if he didn't look after her?

It seems like he should be able to look after his mother.

If the government introduced a guaranteed income...

...people like him would have the option to look after their mother...

...and take on the care responsibilities that the state would otherwise pay for.

If our current social welfare system isn't functioning...

...or has become inefficient, to put it mildly...

...isn't it time to think about creating a new social model?

What is our current social welfare model?

It's a hugely complicated machine.

With all sorts of allowances. Help, there's another one.

80% of all people receive some sort of allowance.

It doesn't make sense.

On top of that, it's vulnerable to fraud.

And it requires a huge inspection system of toothbrush counters.

And we have a huge unemployment industry...

...trying to get people to re-enter but it's expensive and ineffective.

Then there's people who end up on social benefit for whatever reason.

What do we do with them? We have them sweep the square.

Let's just humiliate them.

That leads to a lot of stress and healthcare expenses.

This system is not geared to the future at all.

A guaranteed income could help solve the problems we'll face in the future.

But is it feasible?

They tried it as an experiment 40 years ago in Dauphin, Canada.

1,000 families received a guaranteed income for four years.

The results were remarkable.

How can we learn from past experiences for the future?

We're interested in how this experiment, the Mincome Project, panned out.

We begin our search at the local library.

The Mincome Experiment lasted four years.

For some strange reason, nothing was published about it afterwards.

The results were missing for years...

...until Canadian economist Evelyn Forget recovered them...

...in some dusty archives in Winnipeg.

The boxes turned out to hold a huge source of information.

Forget analysed the data...

...and wrote an article about it that reached the international press.

This put the concept of a guaranteed income back on the agenda.

In Toronto, we speak to Ron Hikel.

He led the experiment in Dauphin at the time.

The Mincome Project with its budget of 17 billion dollars...

...was the biggest social experiment in Canadian history.

A team of economists, sociologists and anthropologists...

...examined the effect of receiving free money on human behaviour.

Of all the places in Canada...

...Dauphin was chosen as the place to conduct this experiment.

A small agricultural community with less than 8,000 people...

...in the middle of the country.

Isolated for a large part of the year due to thick layers of snow.

Erik Richardson and Clark Wallis were teenagers at the time of the project.

What was the outcome of the experiment in Dauphin?

The fear that people with a guaranteed income would work less...

...was justified to a certain extent.

Some people worked less hours.

But it turned out that the people who worked less...

...didn't just sit on the couch, they did other meaningful things.

However promising the Mincome experiment was...

...guaranteed income was never implemented in Canada.

Because the political wind changed.

The progressive government that had come up with the plan...

...had to make way for a conservative one.

If you offer people the opportunity to take charge of their lives...

...and the means to live their lives as they want to...

...they will become more enterprising, healthier and happier.

What could we learn from the Mincome experiment, 40 years later?

Can what worked in Canada in the 70s work in the Netherlands in 2014?

What will happen if we introduce the concept of guaranteed income?

First of all, we can wipe out all those allowances and the bureaucracy.

Let's to that. This can go, the toothbrush counter can go.

The result is a very simple system: One type of benefit, that's all.

It will cost a lot of money. Where will we get it from?

It will cost a lot per annum.

Let's take a look.

Costs and benefits.

Benefits: No more social benefits or allowances.

That's 75 billion. Not bad.

Tax deductions? Won't need them. 40 billion. Brilliant.

Execution costs are much simpler. 6 billion.

Student funding can go, they'll also get an income too. 4 billion.

Add it all up: 125 billion euros in benefits.

That's as far as the benefits are concerned.

How much will it cost to implement a guaranteed income?

Let's say the guaranteed income will be the same as a state pension.

760 euros per month.

Multiply that by 12 billion Dutch citizens, that's 117 billion euros.

We'll abolish child benefits, but we do want to give them something.

We'll give them 380 euros: half. So that's 18 billion.

For some people, like the disabled, this amount won't be enough.

We do want to help them out, so we'll give them a special benefit.

We'll reserve 20 billion for that.

If we add that all up together it comes to 155 billion.

Hang on. 155 versus 125.

The accountant has a 30 billion gap.

30 billion. That's roughly our entire budget deficit.

Fortunately, accountancy is not the same as economy.

Economists don't just compare the cost items.

They look at what the effects of this implementation will be.

We need to factor that in too.

First of all, because it creates a sense of peace...

...because everyone gets the same amount...

...people can make their own choices and aren't forced by society...

...or by external pressure, or the labour market, or whoever.

They can do what they need to do.

If people grow up in a society like that they will make their own decisions.

When people can make their own choices they become more creative.

So it leads to more innovation and higher productivity.

After all, people enjoy their work.

And there are soft benefits. Sounds soft, but they're important.

People can look after family members and do other worthwhile things.

And if people have more free time, they become happier.

So a guaranteed income model is much better suited...

...to tomorrow's world.

Getting rid of this whole machine...

...and replacing it with this one simple system of guaranteed income...

...will make way for all kinds of other soft values.

It sounds good. But a few questions remain.

Like: Can we accept that part of society won't have to work anymore...

...yet still receive a fixed monthly income?

Robots will be the new wage slaves...

...so we can spend more time on developing ourselves.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Yuri.

I've only been a member of the society for a little under a year.

We'll be able to let go of the concept of 'working for a living' in the future.

It seems like the younger generation has less of problem with it already.

It doesn't really make sense.

More people are starting to realise we're living in this huge paradox.

This paradox is that on the one hand we see...

...that we're very wealthy. We have the means to offer everyone a good life.

And at the same time we're still dealing with poverty, unemployment...

...increasing economic inequality and insecurity.

Strikingly, the free spirits from the 1970s...

...seem to be joining forces with today's twenty-somethings.

The time seems ready to start discussing it again.

Is that what you mean? What do you really want?

I want a guaranteed income for all.

I want that to be implemented.

You mean via local authorities?

I really believe we need a support network for it.

To reach those who wouldn't hear about it otherwise, but who would be in favour.

That would be a step in the right direction.