Philippe Van Parijs

TheoristModernb. 1951· Belgian

Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian philosopher who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 and chairs its international board. His book Real Freedom for All (1995) argues that a basic income paid to everyone is the fairest way to share a society's wealth. With Yannick Vanderborght he wrote Basic Income (2017), the standard account of the idea, its history and how to pay for it. He directed the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics at UCLouvain from 1991 to 2016 and still writes on basic income for BIEN.