Feb 27th At Vendome

Hello Dialogue Artists,

We're building collective wisdom and collaborative imagination in our dialogue events, and each of us contributes. The concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a valuable reference point for that process, so as my contribution for tomorrow, I've chosen Annie Lowrey's recent book Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. I've attached my two-page summary as a document in Word.

Also here is a 24-minute interview with Annie Lowrey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu23HOoyFHw

and here are excepts from my summary, to give you a glimpse of what the book is about:

In her book on Universal Basic Income (UBI), Annie Lowrey addresses a standard set of objections to UBI, provides examples of cases in which it is being tried, and then proceeds to build the case in favor of adopting it. The term UBI is related to others, such as the “negative income tax” proposed by Milton Friedman and presented to Congress as a bill for passage into law by Richard Nixon. (It didn’t pass.) Lowrey discusses costs and variations of the concept in the chapter “$1,000 a month.” The variety in versions of a UBI is huge and significant, in terms of both costs to the provider (usually a government) and outcomes for the recipients (the poor in general, or some other population subset as defined). For simplicity, Lowrey uses the model of a specific amount of money being given monthly to everyone (the same amount going to rich and poor alike).

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has received attention in Canada, including the initiation of a pilot project in Ontario which the Conservative Ontario government aborted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_in_Canada despite an election promise to continue it. At least one op-ed has suggested the Ontario government had killed it exactly because they were afraid it would succeed https://wapo.st/2GNdDkb .

The wikipedia article provides a number of references on UBI. An animated video on the concept is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl39KHS07Xc and a TedX talk is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0 .

Lowrey concludes the book with a postscript “Trekonomics” referring to the economic settings that appear in science fiction works (e.g. Star Trek), as well as the 2030-ish vision that John Maynard Keynes imagined back in 1930. “We need to keep imagining,” she writes, “so that when the future arrives, we are ready.”

The UBI is certainly on the journalistic radar, with articles or commentary in 2018 published in the Guardian https://bit.ly/2yMd5aT , the New Yorker https://bit.ly/2Ndqegi , the Globe and Mail https://tgam.ca/2NxA0sw , the science periodical Nature https://go.nature.com/2LlLFtT and elsewhere.

Hope to see you soon,

Arthur