The Scott Santens UBI Enterprise

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/ For more info about UBI, please refer...

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/ For more info about UBI, please refer t...

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/basic-income-faq You can support these podcasts thro...

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 can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon...

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 a society to achieve it and the updated social con...

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 of this differently in order to achieve what we c...

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 the Fed potentially implementing digital dollars. M...

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 control. This is the engineering argument for UBI:...

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  wrong with that?" How are we to know that some...

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 for some reason still did with his inheritance...

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 ask in return, "What is the cost of not implementin...

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 considered to be one of the most important books o...

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 unconditionally to all, with unconditio...

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 doing as political malpractice. The amount of sufferin...

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 considered to be one of the most important books o...

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 100,000 views and because of its success, I was inspi...

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 someone who even became Special Assistant to the Commis...

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 made it into Yang's campaign platform, from univers...

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-72d3850a6245 For more info about UBI, please refer to...

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 was behind a paywall this whole time. Sam has now gr...

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. Read the article on Medium: https://medium.com/basic...

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 owed their natural inheritance, and the injustice of...

In April 2019, a report titled “ Universal Basic Income: A Union Perspective ” was paid for and published by Public Services International (PSI), a global trade union representing 20 million workers employed around the world providing public services. This report was authored by Anna Coote and Edanur Yazici of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a British left-leaning think-tank. They concluded th...

In 1932, Bertrand Russell wrote one of my all-time favorite essays. In Praise of Idleness focuses on humanity's infatuation with work, and how if we divided the work more evenly instead of relegating some to poverty and others to overwork, we could all work four hours a day without anyone being unemployed, and with more leisure for all. And this was about 100 years ago, so how many hours would mak...

Back in 2016, I pitched an article to TechCrunch about explaining the progressive case for replacing welfare programs with unconditional basic income. This is the article I wrote which continues to be widely shared by readers as one of their favorites of mine, especially now that Andrew Yang is running for president on a UBI design that offers people the choice of basic income or welfare. TechCrun...