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The inaugural Campfire Convention took place in August 12-14, 2016, in the English countryside. It featured a keynote address from Brian Eno, in addition to an array of panel discussions, music performances, and other events.

One panel discussion was on the topic of universal basic income: Universal Basic Income: A Utopian Vision or a Viable Reality? Basic income for all – a universal weekly payment for all eligible citizens – can lead to the kind of creativity needed in the sort of world we would all like to live in. Would we all qualify and how would we fund it? […]

Full Post at basicincome.org

Finally someone comes out and says it. Work provides a sense of purpose to people that a welfare check by any other name cannot. It occupies one’s time in a way that keeps people from resorting to other desperate means of "validation." The monkeys chimping out in Chicago every time some crackhead gets disposed of by a law officer moonlighting as sanitation engineer are all on welfare. The moribund, aposematic campus feminists having PMS sperg fits about microaggressions are on de facto welfare (college assistance), and will be subsisting on the public dole once they graduate with their worthless, […]

Full Post at voat.co

Protesters dressed as robots demand a basic income for everyone during a demonstration at the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, Switzerland, in April 2016. An idea gaining traction in various part of the world is that everyone in society should receive an amount of money from the state to cover their basic cost of living. People would no longer be stigmatised on benefits, argue supporters.

Dependent women would become financially independent. People would be freed to care for the elderly, crime would fall and the general health of the population would improve. Particularly in an era of fears about future mass unemployment […]

Full Post at www.csmonitor.com

I have been UBI-curious in the past. But after watching this year’s global political upheavals, I am now firmly against the idea of giving every American adult a government check, no questions asked.

The universal basic income — a universal payment to every adult, designed to support a basic living standard regardless of whether the recipient works — has never been a broadly popular idea.

But it has become subject of fascination for policy wonks across the ideological spectrum because of the goals it intends to serve: decoupling subsistence from wage labor (a goal of the left), replacing complex safety-net programs […]

Full Post at www.businessinsider.com

As automation makes more jobs redundant, policymakers cannot put off discussing universal basic income as an option. (Shutterstock image) Martin Ford writes in the Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future that around 47% of total employment in the US, around 64 million jobs, have the potential to be automated perhaps within a decade or two. Europe is already facing a crisis of jobs. Youth unemployment in Italy stands around 36% while it is nearly 44% in Spain. Thanks to offshoring and automation, we are seeing a polarisation in the labour market that is […]

Full Post at www.hindustantimes.com

The resurrection of universal basic income (UBI) proposals in the developed world this year gained support from some prominent Australians . But while good in theory, it’s no panacea for the challenges of our modern economy.

UBI proposals centre on the idea that the government would pay a flat fee to every adult citizen, regardless of his or her engagement in skill-building activities or the paid labour market, as a partial or complete substitute for existing social security and welfare programs.

Of the schemes run in developing places like Kenya, Uganda, and India, some have been evaluated statistically , delivering some […]

Full Post at www.moraltime.com.np