I’ve highlighted UBI once before in this series via a Freakanomics episode dedicated to the topic. Since then, UBI has exploded into the podcastiverse.
The primary source is now The Basic Income Podcast. Created in the bay area by Jim Pugh and Owen Poindexter, two of the most active leaders in the UBI space, this podcast has followed every recent UBI development through conversations with academics/activists working around this concept and occasionally in episodes sharing their own thoughts. Pugh was one of the original organizers of the UBI Meetups at which I was drafted into the movement and is a co-founder/director of the Universal Income Project and a founding signatory of the Economic Security Project. Poindexter was also a regular attendee of the UBI Meetups and has followed his passion for this idea into local politics, he is currently running for CA Assembly in District 15 (South Berkeley) on a UBI platform.
Their podcast is the easiest way to stay up-to-date on the state of the UBI movement. Episodes are 15-20 minutes and include talks with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, labor leader Andy Stern, Dorian Warren on UBI and racial justice, TED Talker Rutger Bregman, UBI self-tester Scott Santens, and representatives from all the major UBI experiments world-wide. They recently informed me that UBI has been added to the official platform of the California Democratic Party! Please subscribe.
Aside from Jim and Owen’s weekly updates, UBI seems to pop up in my playlist on a regular basis now. It is encouraging to know that the concept seems to have cemented itself as a main point in every discussion of our economic future. We even have a 2020 presidential candidate running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang.
Best of the Left weaves UBI into its episodes on economics and culture on a regular basis. Some of those episodes:
99% Invisible explored UBI In “The Finnish Experiment”. Planet Money has been mentioning UBI a lot recently. Sam Harris has mentioned UBI at least a dozen times in the last few years and while he hasn’t come out definitively for it, his insistence on putting it to his guests makes me think he’s a supporter.
UBI remains one of the only policies with supporters on both the left and right. Check out “The Conservative Case for the Universal Basic Income” from The Atlantic. The first modern proponents of the idea were free-market fundamentalists Friedrich Hayek and his protegé Milton Friedman (mostly through a negative income tax). Martin Luther King Jr. supported UBI in the last years of his life as he shifted his focus towards economic justice. And now UBI is an official part of the platform of The Movement for Black Lives. While it initially states “a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people” if you read further on it clarifies their point to mean “a pro-rated additional amount included in a UBI for Black Americans”.
- #1119 The inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men
- #823 It makes moral and economic sense (Minimum Wage)
- #879 Capitalism will not set you free (Economics)
- #941 Taking food out of the mouths of babes (Poverty)
- #978 The future of work (Culture)
99% Invisible explored UBI In “The Finnish Experiment”. Planet Money has been mentioning UBI a lot recently. Sam Harris has mentioned UBI at least a dozen times in the last few years and while he hasn’t come out definitively for it, his insistence on putting it to his guests makes me think he’s a supporter.
UBI remains one of the only policies with supporters on both the left and right. Check out “The Conservative Case for the Universal Basic Income” from The Atlantic. The first modern proponents of the idea were free-market fundamentalists Friedrich Hayek and his protegé Milton Friedman (mostly through a negative income tax). Martin Luther King Jr. supported UBI in the last years of his life as he shifted his focus towards economic justice. And now UBI is an official part of the platform of The Movement for Black Lives. While it initially states “a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people” if you read further on it clarifies their point to mean “a pro-rated additional amount included in a UBI for Black Americans”.
I don’t think UBI is the end-goal of the progress we need to make in our generation. It’s not going to heal the environment or the manifold “-ism’s” that plague our culture. I do think it is the best means proposed thus far to use our current capitalist toolkit to move beyond late capitalism. A world with UBI will produce a mind-space from which we may collectively make the quantum cultural leaps necessary to survive another century. We are simply too weighed-down by our current system to imagine a better story in which to live, too traumatized by our conditions to see beyond the veil of our personal needs. UBI will be an analgesic that, while not a treatment in itself, will allow us to see beyond our pain and invent a new, healing, sustainable toolkit for future generations.
If you know any other good clips, discussions, or other sources on the topic please share.
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