Earlier this week, I attended The BIG Conference, where OpenResearch presented results by Vivalt et al. from their three-year study of people who received unconditional money. Unsurprisingly, the study participants became less inclined to work jobs. Noah Smith, among others, interpreted this as bad news for Universal Basic Income. But the key...
I wanted to respond to an article recently posted by Scott Santens because he’s highlighted something I see as a major problem in basic income discourse. Elon Musk has been talking about “Universal High Income,” which he distinguishes from regular Universal Basic Income (UBI) in two ways: a) it’s higher, and b) it presumably exists somewhere in...
Ellis Winningham recently wrote a ten-part blog series examining Universal Basic Income (UBI) through the lens of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Here, I will respond to the first post in the series, entitled “Terms Matter.”
There’s no doubt that the economic carnage that has rocked the world in the last week or so was triggered by a contraction in economic activity associated with Covid-19 and the efforts to contain it. But there’s also no doubt that this shock exposed underlying issues, setting off a cascade of chaos and fear through an economic system overloaded...
If you follow technology, you could be forgiven for believing that humanity is standing the precipice of a robot apocalypse. It’s only a matter of time before automation eliminates so many jobs that humans will simply no longer be “needed.” Right? Five years back, YouTuber CGP Grey made this case in his popular Humans Need Not Apply video.
People move to a new country if they expect their lives to improve. Robust infrastructure, favorable climate, and stable governance all contribute to a country’s appeal. Basic income takes this to the extreme. A country with basic income actually pays people to live there. Photo by Nitish Meena
Money is a claim on goods and services in the same way that airline tickets are claims on seats. It is standard practice for airlines to overbook their flights — they sell more tickets than there are seats. They do this because they know that some passengers won’t show up. Photo by Nicole Geri
Basic income is commonly described as an amount of money that’s sufficient to ensure some pre-determined minimum standard of living. I have previously dismissed this characterization as inaccurate. But who am I to insist that the popular definition of basic income is wrong? Why should I not admit that this blog is about something slightly...
Does humanity need to exist? No. If we disappeared, nobody would be around to notice. But since we’re here, why not make the most of it? The first step is to keep ourselves alive and healthy. We feel better when we’re not sick or dying. This might seem self-evident, but there’s a reason why dying feels bad: Without an aversion to death, humanity...
When people ask me about whether basic income addresses inequality, I tend to punt on the question. I explain to them that basic income solves the problem of how to provide spending money to consumers. I remind them that there are important problems that basic income doesn’t solve. Specifically, basic income does not address inequality. It takes...
Basic income gives consumers money to spend. The only way to pay for a basic income is by having an economy that gives consumers something to buy with that money. If our economy can’t produce enough goods to match the level of consumer spending, then we end up with inflation. There. I just gave you the answer. You can now skip the rest of this...
As I’ve previously mentioned, basic income proponents fundamentally understand that our economy has the resources to do better for humanity. Andrew Yang understands this. He also understands that the economy exists to serve the people. Yang is a candidate running for United States president in 2020. His campaign slogan is “Humanity First” and...
I explained last month that tax revenue is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean that taxes are all together useless. Taxation can have important positive (or negative) effects on the economy. It all depends on what we tax and how we tax it. And, as it turns out, money is always the wrong thing to tax. This must sound strange. Taxation is, after...
Many of us are dismayed by the injustice we see in the world. We want our society to treat people fairly. Our sense of justice feels absolute and right and good. Yet different people hold incompatible views about what’s fair. How can this be? Could it be that justice is indeed objective and that some people happen to be getting it wrong? Do some...
After having read my last post, a friend mentioned that basic income’s purpose had never before been clearly articulated to him. This is hardly surprising. People are confused about basic income. They’re confused about what it is and what it’s for. It bears repeating that basic income is a regular income unconditionally paid to every person....
Basic income is simple. It’s a regular income unconditionally paid to every individual. It solves the problem of how to get spending money to consumers. That’s all it is and all it does. Among the many things that basic income is not, it is not defined to be an amount of money that’s sufficient to meet people’s basic needs. It could be less. It...
My first post mentioned that the most remarkable thing about basic income is that it’s actually possible for us to hand out money to people. Interestingly, what makes basic income possible is also what makes it possible for us to pay out other cash benefits. Namely, the economy has sufficient resources to produce what people will buy with the...
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that the government is a black box whose internal workings are completely opaque to us. We know that this black box can add money to the economy through spending or remove money from the economy through taxation. But we have no idea why the government is administering fiscal policy (spending and taxing)...
This post was revised on Apr 9, 2019 Hi! I’m Alex. Welcome to Project Greshm. My goal is to fix the world’s economy using basic income: a regular income unconditionally paid to every individual person. Alex Howlett | Photo by Joe Baz | 2013