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“Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash”

Historian Rutger Bregman’s TED Talk just went live.

“Why do the poor make such poor decisions?”

Scarcity mentality. Losing a night’s sleep is the same as losing 14 IQ points.

Orwell: “Poverty annihilates the future.”

Bregmen goes on to summarize the four-year Basic Income experiment conducted in Dauphin, Canada in 1974.

2 responses to “Guaranteed Basic Income”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    What would Elon Musk say? From this morning at Stanford: Modelling AI Futures

    Reply
  2. sbove Avatar
    sbove

    Bregman’s talk = stupendous. Punch-line summary: via a simple negative income tax mechanism that tops off an individual adult’s income when it falls below the poverty line (as currently defined by US poverty experts), USA could completely eradicate poverty for $175 billion per tax year (~1% of GDP). This is a total bargain when weighed against the positive economic & sociological benefits generated by Zero Poverty (ZP), for instance, a probable $500 billion savings/year in child poverty costs (not to mention untold $billions of savings on ineffective programs like welfare, food stamps, and the direct and administrative costs of numerous tax-break/tax-credit schemes currently in place to help the less fortunate). Basic Income is as important to USA (and the global anthroposphere) as electric-everything, networked everything, and AI’d everything.

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