Tag: Basic Income

Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: Universal Basic Income as a Way to Grow the Economy

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Between Labor Day and chatting with some very bright people about the future of finance at Escape Velocity this weekend, it felt like a good time to post something about the future and universal basic income (UBI). One of the things I like about Dylan Matthew’s article in Vox about the Roosevelt Institute’s recent study on the potential effects of implementing UBI is that he explores the premises behind both the study and the critics of said…

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Various and Sundry

Swiss Miss: No UBI for Switzerland Just Yet

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

So, I’ve been really busy working on this convention coming up next week, which means I haven’t been able to blog as much. One of the things I wanted to do was follow up on my occasional posts about basic income. Switzerland voted on whether to give all its citizens universal basic income earlier this month. The vote failed, but as Dylan Matthews mentions in Vox, it might set the stage for progress on basic…

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Various and Sundry

Continuing to Explore Universal Basic Income (UBI)

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been following various articles about basic income (or Universal Basic Income – UBI) as I find it an intriguing potential solution as we trundle towards ever-greater automation in every aspect of the economy. Matthew Yglesias over at Vox writes about how UBI could tackle poverty — and indeed for some conservative and libertarian proponents of UBI, its potential to tackle poverty and related ills more efficiently than other social programs is one of its appeals. Ezra Klein…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: Coming Changes to Transportation

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

One of the reasons I’ve become more interested in learning about basic income and future potential economic models has been what appears to be the growing automation of everything. In other words, we’ve moved beyond automating factory and manufacturing processes (though we still automate that and refine that automation), and into automating service and analytical processes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the race to implement the self-driving car, because when the self-driving car…

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Various and Sundry

FiveThirtyEight Follow-up on Basic Income

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

A couple weeks ago, FiveThirtyEight did an in-depth look on universal basic income and I talked about it briefly here. This is a great group to look at it because they are so wonkily numbers-driven. They’re back with a quick video recap, but the whole thing makes me feel I should be writing more about it here on the blog. As we humans face more and more automation, it seems like we need to find an…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: A FiveThirtyEight Look at Basic Income

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been reading a lot about basic income over the past year or so, from activist like Scott Santens as well as actual studies that have been and are being done. So I was very pleased to see that the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight decided to do a feature length article about it. If you want to get an idea about what basic income is all about — and what we really know about what…

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