Much discussion has been had around basic income as a policy response to automation and as a result, over 150 pilot experiments have been launched in cities across the US to study it. Now in response to the successful results beginning to come out from those pilots, some states are beginning to ban the experiments from happening. One lobbying group…

This discussion took place in a Twitter (X) Space on September 6, 2023. I was joined by the co-founders of Comingle - Conrad Shaw and Josh Worth - to discuss the project and universal basic income in general. Comingle is an app being developed to create a small basic income floor for all members. All members will pledge an equal percentage of their…

This is the audio of a speech I gave in July 2023 as the closing keynote for England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference. Video available too: ⁠⁠https://youtu.be/U2XbrVQZLnI For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: ⁠⁠http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq⁠⁠ You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: ⁠⁠https://patreon.c…

This episode is a reading of my article, "A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty." Link to read and share the article: ⁠https://www.scottsantens.com/ai-will-rapidly-transform-the-labor-market-exacerbating-inequality-insecurity-and-poverty…

This episode is a reading of my article, "ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too", and it is read by an AI I trained on my own voice using Play.HT. It just seemed particularly fitting to do it this way. Link to read and share the article: https://www.scottsantens.com/chatgpt-has-already-decreased-my-income-security/ …

On June 24 I took part in a panel about the macroeconomics of basic income at the 2022 BIG Conference in Portland, Oregon. Here is an audio recording of the talk I gave that day where I attempted to zoom out and look at the big picture of money, economics, and humanity. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/ba…

On July 26 I took part in a conversation on Twitter Spaces where we talked about UBI for over two hours. A segment of about 21 minutes in length was then edited from the discussion and aired on WPKN radio. Here is that episode as heard on the radio. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq You ca…

From 2019 to 2021, I took part in a convening on automation, opportunity, and belonging to visualize the future and how to get to a better future among the infinitely possible versions of it. Together we crafted over many iterations a vision document of the kind of society we could be in 2040, and the foundations we would need to build together as …

This episode is a reading of my long essay (and now also a book titled Let There Be Money) which is an in-depth exploration of Modern Monetary Theory and why MMT advocates should embrace UBI. Listening will provide a wide macroeconomic view at what money is, what actually causes inflation, what taxes actually do, and why we need to think about all …

On August 3, 2021, I hopped onto Twitter Spaces to talk in-depth about the concept of universal basic income (UBI). Here is the recording of that discussion I had with the hosts of the Space: Jenny Q. Ta, Aaron Bowley, and Dan Whitfield. Because they are part of the #DogeArmy, this discussion also included my thoughts on cryptocurrencies and also t…

This one is a straight up, matter of fact, reality-driven argument for UBI. There will always be failure, and so we should plan for that failure, so that when people fail, it isn't life-threatening. It's a resilience argument for fault-tolerant design of our social and economic system. UBI introduces redundancy, graceful failure, and proportional c…

I've mentioned this argument in a few podcasts over the years, but I finally got around to writing it up as a new part of my UBI FAQ. This argument is another response to the common claim that people provided UBI will just watch TV and play video games. Instead of the usual response using available behavioral evidence, this instead asks, "What's wr…

Steve Forbes recently came out against UBI in a 3-minute video that was filled to the brim with the standard objections to UBI, including the notion that everyone would stop working (which would hurt the economy and their dignity), which of course was really rich coming from someone really rich, who could have never worked a day in his life, but fo…

I originally published this article in 2015, and to this day it remains an article I frequently link to in order to help people understand how expensive poverty is, and how much we would save by directly abolishing it with unconditional basic income. Whenever someone makes the claim that UBI is simply too expensive, use what I talk about here and a…

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system. Her book is …

This episode is a reading of my article published on November 11, 2016 about the importance of UBI to attaining freedom for all. Freedom for all would be an achievement only spoken about in rhetoric and hypotheticals. There will never be true freedom from sexual and corporate exploitation and all forms of slavery until freedom is actually granted u…

This episode is a reading of my article published on April 8, 2020 that goes into what a terrible idea it is to dump everyone onto the unemployment rolls in response to the coronavirus crisis, how automation means many of those jobs are now permanently gone, and just how many lives are likely to be lost as a result. I consider what Congress is doin…

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system. Her book is …

In 2014, I self-published my first article on Medium that to this day I think remains a solid introduction to UBI. Up until this article, I'd been reading a lot about UBI and engaging in a lot of discussion on Reddit about UBI, but this was my first attempt at "giving back" to the discussion with my own thoughts. It did quite well, getting over 100…

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system, and as someo…

Originally published in 2015, this article was written as an introduction to systems thinking, and how if we look at the United States as a system, we can reform it in systemic ways to function better, not just for some citizens, but for every citizen. I think fellow Andrew Yang supporters will appreciate how almost everything I proposed as a fix m…

In this podcast I make the case that there's no policy being proposed by any 2020 Presidential candidate that's as progressive as Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend. This is for all the progressives who think otherwise. Read the article: https://medium.com/basic-income/there-is-no-policy-proposal-more-progressive-than-andrew-yangs-freedom-dividend-72d3…

On January 19th, 2017, I recorded an interview with Sam Seder as his guest on his Ring of Fire podcast to talk about UBI. Until yesterday, I was under the impression the episode had never been posted, because I was never told about it, never saw it shared anywhere, and could never find it anywhere when I searched for it. Turns out, the interview wa…

Freedom, liberty, democracy… these words are used so often that we give them little real thought, rarely holding them up to the realities of what we see around us. What do these words really mean? Do they currently exist for us to celebrate as we appear to think they do? And if not, is there anything we can do about it? Let’s take a closer look. Re…

In the Winter of 1795 and 1796, one of the the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, Thomas Paine, wrote an essay that to this day over two centuries later, remains perhaps the greatest justification of all justifications for unconditional basic income. His argument is founded on the principles of justice, where all human beings are owe…