Eva Jacob, 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar

As a PhD student at the University of Strasbourg, Eva Jacob wrote a dissertation on unconditional basic income and social justice, focusing on the philosophy of UBI’s most eloquent contemporary supporter, the Belgian political philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, who developed a theory of social justice based on UBI.

“But in my view, there is an enormous unanswered question in Van Parijs’s work,” Eva, a 2025–26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar, points out. “Just how should a UBI be funded?”

Her attempt to answer the question has led her to the work of the British economist Anthony B. Atkinson, whose papers are in Duke’s Rubenstein Library.

Atkinson did not write about UBI per se, but he did write a lot about poverty and inequality, and he was a student of James Meade, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1977. Meade wrote about his own version of UBI, which he called a citizen’s income or social dividend.

“Atkinson proposed a version of UBI, a ‘participation income,’ which would complement existing social insurance programs,” Eva explains. 

Indeed, Atkinson, who died in 2017, was interested in social security programs more generally, as a way to combat poverty and inequality—two subjects that he always grouped together.

“I want to look at Atkinson historically, to see how his ideas about income programs evolved, especially his proposals for funding them.”

To that end, Eva is working on three projects.

The first examines how Atkinson thought about his participation income in the context of the UK in the 1990s.

The other two projects are being conducted with another 2025–26 Visiting Scholar, Andrés Álvarez, who is also working on Atkinson.

One looks at the influence of Cambridge economists from the 1970s on Atkinson, who, from 1967 to 1971, was a fellow at St. John’s College at Cambridge.

The other analyzes Atkinson’s central contribution to normative economics, highlighting how he links poverty and inequality through a conception of measurement as a normative tool for distributive justice and public policy.

“It was Atkinson who brought the idea of inequality back into the conversation in the 1970s, always in conjunction with poverty. Why was he so consistent in talking about the two together?”

Born in a town named Schiltigheim, in Alsace, a region of northeastern France, Eva began her work on UBI by recognizing that UBI is a complex topic with multiple dimensions.

And that, she says, lends itself well to the way she likes to work. 

“To really understand UBI, you need to approach it in more than one way. I really like to use different tools—quantitative tools, bibliometric analyses, experiments.”

As she points out, several locales have experimented with UBI, including the state of Alaska, which still today gives most residents an unconditional cash payment using funds from oil and mining revenues.

“But nearly all of those experiments have used essentially ‘helicopter money,’ money that was already sitting around somewhere. To implement UBI on a nationwide scale will require some kind of tax plan to fund it. And it’s that step that we don’t really understand very well.”

Of course, UBI raises issues of responsibility and incentives. Will people work if they receive regular cash payments? And if they don’t, is that a problem?

“Most people say we have to work out the effects of UBI on labor force participation before we can even think about offering UBI,” says Eva, who, when she’s not researching issues related to UBI and social justice, likes to read novels and practice yoga. “But Van Parjis flips that around, saying we need to offer UBI first and then worry about any incentive effects.”

When asked whether UBI will ever become a reality, Eva says that for the time being UBI will likely be possible only in limited settings and situations. “I can see it becoming a national program only if there’s a major shock to the economy, such as the elimination of millions of jobs by AI.”

Eva will be at Duke until April.