A Citizen's Basic Income is an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income paid to every individual: that is, the same amount of money, every week or every month, for each person (with higher amounts paid to older people, and smaller amounts for children). It is a remarkably simple idea, with the potential to make our economy and our employment market more efficient, make work pay, encourage training and enterprise, make our society more cohesive, reduce poverty and inequality, and set people free from bureaucratic intrusion.

Discussion of the desirability, feasibility and implementation of Citizen's Basic Income will often be context specific because it is in relation to a particular tax and benefits system that many of the arguments will have to be formulated. The context envisaged in this book is the UK's tax and benefits system, and readers in other countries will need to ask how those arguments might need to be adapted for their own situations.

This book is a second edition of Money for Everyone, published in 2013. The reasons for publishing Money for Everyone were that it was then more than 10 years since the previous general treatment in English of arguments for a Citizen's Basic Income; following the urban unrest of August 2011 there was considerable concern about growing inequality, and, although the suggestion was often made that a Citizen's Basic Income might be able to help, little detailed exploration of the idea had been offered; whatever solutions to the problems facing our benefits system were tried, the problems only seemed to get worse; and a Citizen's Basic Income was being actively debated and occasionally piloted in other parts of the world. Money for Everyone filled a gap, and might have been one of the reasons for the increasing level of debate on Citizen's Basic Income in the UK from 2013 onwards.

We had expected Money for Everyone to serve as a general introduction to the topic for a number of years, and we placed details of illustrative Citizen's Basic Income schemes on the Citizen's Income Trust's website because we believed that the figures would go out of date more quickly than the book.