What is an effective way to reduce poverty? Get involved in ‘international development’ projects which destroy a country’s bioregional culture and expose it to predatory neoliberalism? Create a punitive benefits system which forces people into useless jobs which have no function except to create more economic growth and hence more environmental and social destruction? Perhaps the best way is in fact the most obvious, which everyone seems to overlook as it doesn’t fit into their ideological viewpoint on reality: simply to give people money. We have been conditioned by neo-liberalism to believe that human beings are essentially ‘bad’ and if given money they will somehow waste it. In fact the opposite is the case. When in an experiment in 2008 every person in the village of Otjivero-Omitara In Namibia was given a basic income of $100 Namibian dollars ($13US), after one year child malnutrition declined from 42% to 10%, school dropout rates declined from 40% to 0%, crime went down by 42%, household poverty dropped from 76% to 37%.and entrepreneurial activity and self employment went up by 300%. We need to start perceiving an unconditional basic income as a fundamental human right.