The administrative efficiency of basic income

Basic income advocates typically praise the administrative efficiency of universal income maintenance. This article exposes several misconceptions, unwarranted generalisations or careless assumptions that permeate discussion of the administrative properties of basic income. Each of these obscures a significant constraint on the possibility of administrative savings, or else inflates the likely size of such efficiencies where they do exist. Our analysis also reveals a number of important political choices faced by policy makers and advocates intent on implementing an administratively efficient basic income policy. The absence of systematic administrative analysis in the basic income literature has obscured these hard choices.