I'm self taught mostly from books and MOOCs and arguing with friends of mine who are actual economists. Perhaps my lack of formal economics training is another reason not to listen to me.
If you're interested in going deep on this stuff, I highly recommend this MOOC:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
He doesn't talk about basic income, but this class really helped me understand the nature of money and economic policy.
If you're curious about more about the economics of a deficit-funded basic income, I'm working on a paper about that. Here's the abstract:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KDLUTAOkduOXdNQWl3REw4eWc...
Feel free to email me if you're interested in reading the full paper. It's over 50 pages long, but it's not very mathy and should (hopefully) be accessible to non-economists.
