Tag: basic income

Friday Roundup: Universal basic income, UW honored, school siting, school administrator comp, proposed Seattle income tax

Friday Roundup: Universal basic income, UW honored, school siting, school administrator comp, proposed Seattle income tax

There are always a few items we’ve read during the week that deserve more attention but don’t make it into our regular posts. So we bundle them for the Friday roundup.

Here’s this week’s bundle:

New Geography: Universal Basic Income: A “Social Vaccine” for Technological Displacement? Technology leaders understand that their work contributes to displacement and inequality. In “ The Disruptors: Silicon Valley Elites’ Vision of the Future, ” Greg Ferenstein reports on a survey of tech leaders. He found that most agreed with Paul Graham, the highly influential web leader, that it is the “job of tech to create inequality…You […]

15-hour weeks, basic income and doughnuts. Are these the big ideas that could end inequality?

15-hour weeks, basic income and doughnuts. Are these the big ideas that could end inequality?

Economic growth alone may not be enough to quell public anger about the widening gap between rich and poor. At an unusually divisive time for politics in the West, there’s one thing most people can agree on: the economy is not working well enough, for enough people.

Right now, just 1% of the world’s population holds over 35% of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95% combined. According to Oxfam , the eight wealthiest individuals in the world – all men – have the same wealth as 3.6 billion of the world’s poorest. The world could see its first […]

What Basic Income Means for Disabled People

What Basic Income Means for Disabled People

Disabled people in Ontario are much more likely to experience poverty than non-disabled people. Many have to live on sub-poverty payments under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or the even more wretched income provided by Ontario Works (OW). Those that are in this situation are confronted by an ongoing process of surveillance, invasion of their privacy and moral policing. Those disabled people who are working, because of systemic discrimination, are less likely to be receiving living wages and are far more likely to be precariously employed. As anti poverty organizers, we fully understand the anger and desperation that […]

An Argument for a Universal Basic Income

An Argument for a Universal Basic Income

A former labor leader is urging unconventional political alliances in support of public policy to buffer workers from the coming automation age.

Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees union, has kept himself busy being a senior fellow at Columbia University and wading into sticky political debates. His just-released book, Raising the Floor , goes deeper into one of these debates, the clash over the idea of a “Universal Basic Income.”

Stern considers a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, the answer to rising inequality and the joblessness he sees coming from accelerating automation. He gets a lot right […]

German Universal Basic Income Startup Gives $1,063 A Month To Children Too

German Universal Basic Income Startup Gives $1,063 A Month To Children Too

Euro.Images Money/Flickr Universal Basic Income (UBI) is gaining a lot of steam in many areas around the world due to its simple premise of guaranteeing a basic minimum income that is equal throughout the social spectrum. One startup in Germany called Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income) has actually been testing this premise for a while and has several beneficiaries lined up to be given free money for a whole year, including children.

What Mein Grundeinkommen is seeking to prove by providing people with a monthly allotment of €1,000 ($1,063) for a whole year is that UBI is not the society […]

CHINA: Enno Schmidt speaks on basic income in Beijing

CHINA: Enno Schmidt speaks on basic income in Beijing

Enno Schmidt. Credit to Professor Cui Zhiyuan.

On April 27th, 2017, Enno Schmidt gave a speech on basic income in Beijing. Schmidt was one of the two initiators of the national referendum on basic income in Switzerland last June. He was invited by Professor Cui Zhiyuan from the School of Public Policy and Management in Tsinghua University. The attendance was modest, composed mainly of researchers and students, including some from Poland and the Philippines.

To start, Schmidt presented some of the awareness-raising events they undertook to introduce the concept of basic income to the Swiss people, such as the ‘Everyone is […]

What Is Universal Basic Income, and Can It Help Black America?

What Is Universal Basic Income, and Can It Help Black America?

A German startup is doing something quite revolutionary: It’s giving 85 people enough money to live decently off of for one year—with no strings attached. The startup is called My Basic Income. Its founder is a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI); the idea that the government should provide all people a sufficient level of income to meet their basic needs, whether they already have a means of income or a job.

Phys.org interviewed the founder of My Basic Income, Michael Bohmeyer. He called his startup a “social experiment.”

Bohmeyer turned to crowdfunding to come up with the money needed […]

Thread: Basic income pilot coming to ontario

I think the best thing the govt could do is make mandatory "Life 101" classes in Highschool.

When I was in highschool, we had those courses. They were elective of course. All the academic courses were mandatory (Math, English, Being a whiney bitch etc) and if you wanted to keep up with the Jones’ and go so College/University you had to get as many academics as you could.

We had courses like Home Ec (basically cooking) some fashion course, and a math course based on personal finance. But those were all optional. Trades courses were just starting […]

Thoughts on a universal basic income?

Somebody needs to make the food, and make the light.

Machines will do that, and they don’t care about art. You either give their owners money, convince their owners to give you food and eletricity for art, or accept their charity.

The owners will only consume so much art. If we play our cards right, it is. It could also be an extinction-level event for all involved. You need to think with a new paradigm, as economy as we understand it parts with the principle that man produces value, and society parts with the principle that […]

Even Children Receive Money in This Startup’s UBI Program

Even Children Receive Money in This Startup’s UBI Program

A German startup is putting universal basic income to the test, and recipients in Berlin argue that the program has not turned them into layabouts, contrary to what some UBI critics believe. Worth Considering

The concept of universal basic income (UBI) has been thrown around a lot lately. The idea itself isn’t new, but recent developments — particularly the advancement of automation that threatens jobs in a number of industries — have made UBI a worthwhile consideration. Click to View Full Infographic UBI is a fairly simple concept. It entails giving a fixed amount of money to people without […]