Category: Basic Income

The Economist’s Open Future initiative aims to remake the case for the classical liberal values of individual freedom and free markets in the 21st century. Highlights from this week’s activities include:

• An “Open Essay” by Philippe Legrain on the benefits of immigration
The biggest determinant of someone’s life chances is not their talent or hard work but where they were born. Over the course of a week, Philippe Legrain will lay out the moral, economic and cultural arguments in favour of immigration. But not everyone agrees that openness is a good thing, so we want to […]

Full Post at www.economist.com

Will populists put Italy on collision course with Europe? Rome, Italy – Italy’s post-election rollercoaster found a resolution on Thursday evening, 88 days after voters went to the polls, with the announcement of a new government led by the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-migrant League.

New Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte spoke to the nation accepting the mandate given to him by President Sergio Mattarella, marking the start of a government led by the two populist political forces that together swept up halt of the Italian electorate on March 4.

It was the second time in just over a week […]

Full Post at www.aljazeera.com

Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini is determined to test the euro’s limits. “Italy is often the first to do wrong things,” Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist and radical activist, observed when I recently interviewed him.

His country now has its most right-wing government since the fascist era – the first populist coalition to take office in a major eurozone member state. The Five Star Movement and the Northern League secured the approval of President Sergio Mattarella after proposing little-known economics professor Giovanni Tria, rather than the stridently anti-euro Paolo Savona, as finance minister.

Italy, the eurozone’s third-largest economy and […]

Full Post at www.newstatesman.com

ROME – Law professor Giuseppe Conte got a mandate as premier from President Sergio Mattarella Thursday and said his 18 new ministers, five of them women, would be sworn in Friday afternoon for a "government of change".
Accepting the mandate, he said the new government would work to lift Italian living standards. "We will work intensely to achieve the political objectives anticipated in the (government) contract, we will work with determination to improve the quality of the lives of all the Italians".
The government comes 88 days after the inconclusive March 4 general election and Mattarella said "a complex […]

Full Post at www.ansamed.info

Photo credit: Bigstock The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the headline, if that, and sound off.

A few weeks ago, for instance, an item appeared on the Bloomberg news site headlined “Finland’s Basic Income Test Wasn’t Ambitious Enough.” Bloomberg’s Twitter account tweeted a link to the article with the teaser, “A lack of ambition is ending Finland’s experiment […]

Full Post at www.weeklystandard.com

The concept of a universal basic income (UBI) has just begun to enter the public discourse in countries like Finland and the United States. The Finnish government recently conducted its own universal basic income trial. And in the US a film project called Bootstraps is asking the question, “what if the cost of living was a human right?” To test their belief, they’re providing a guaranteed, weekly check to 20 Americans from all walks of life. The project plans to capture the experiences of these 20 people and release a documentary film by early 2020 aimed at answering the […]

Full Post at mindshift.money

For years, the citizens of Stockton, California, have faced rampant unemployment, poverty, and hardship. For some, a new experiment could change that.

In the coming months, mayor Michael Tubbs plans to launch a universal basic income trial that will — without any conditions or work requirements — give monthly payments to about 100 families over the next two years, according to the New York Times .

With regular, no-strings-attached payments from the government, people might be able to go back to school or climb out of their student loan debt. The extra cash could turn into more time spent with family […]

Full Post at www.reader.us