A skeptic's guide to Universal Basic Income (with Scott Santens and Sukhi Samra)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You can’t throw a rock without hitting a wandering conversation about Universal Basic Income these days—but in our office, we’re still skeptical. For the first in a two-episode series exploring guaranteed income and its sister idea, guaranteed jobs, UBI expert Scott Santens and Sukhi Samra, the executive director of a real-life UBI experiment in California, join Nick and Paul to make the case for a universal basic income. Scott Santens is a prominent UBI advocate with a crowdfunded income via Patreon. As a writer and blogger, his pieces advocating for basic income have appeared in The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, TechCrunch, Vox, the World Economic Forum, and Politico. He is on the board of directors of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, a founding member of the Economic Security Project, an advisor to the Universal Income Project, a founding committee member of Basic Income Action, and founder of the BIG Patreon Creator Pledge. Twitter: @scottsantens Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens Sukhi Samra is the Executive Director of the Stockton Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), a pilot program to test a universal basic income in Stockton, CA. SEED is the country’s first-ever city-led Guaranteed Income Initiative. Twitter: @stocktondemo Further reading: Our Vision for SEED: A Discussion Paper: https://www.stocktondemonstration.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/SEED-Discussion-Paper.pdf What would a universal basic income mean for America? Stockton thinks it has the answer: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-pol-ca-basic-income-stockton-reparations-20190415-story.html The Progressive Case for Replacing the Welfare State with Basic Income: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-progressive-case-for_b_12236546

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Pitchfork Economics listeners on an upcoming episode we'll be talking about this really
0:06.5	core neoliberal economic idea called marginal productivity.
0:11.2	It's the neoclassical economic idea that the market, because it's perfectly
0:16.3	efficient, always pays you exactly what you're worth. So we want to hear from you, whether you're
0:21.9	a minimum wage worker or an executive or anything in between do you think you're paid exactly what you're worth
0:27.3	Tell us what you do and whether you get paid what you're worth and we'll try to play it on the show.
0:32.6	And here's the number, 731-389334.
0:37.8	Thanks.
0:38.8	A lot of reason that people need UBI is because they are so poorly paid by their employers.
0:47.0	No poverty is really personal and so recognizing that the solutions that we have to take are personal as well.
0:53.0	Our existing safety net, being built on conditionality,
0:57.0	actually causes a lot of problems. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics, with
1:16.8	Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101. I'm Nick Hennower, founder of Civic Ventures.
1:30.0	In this episode of Pitch Fork Economics, we, that is me and Paul Constant, are going to explore
1:39.5	UBI, otherwise known as Universal Basic Income. So Paul what is Universal Basic Income?
1:47.3	Well it is a theory that's grown in popularity I think over the the last 10 years that I've been paying attention anyway.
1:55.5	It's a model for providing everyone with a sum of money no matter how much money they already have or, you know, whether they're
2:05.2	employed or unemployed.
2:08.0	The whole point is to reduce poverty and increase economic equality among citizens and also does spur spending.
2:17.0	Yeah, and there's all sorts of flavors of universal basic income, different plans, different amounts.
2:26.4	And there are a ton of proponents for it from Elon Musk to presidential candidate Andrew Yang, our friend Chris Hughes, and you know in both
2:37.8	progressives and conservatives there are wings that think this is a good idea.
	...

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