Regular readers of Continuations know that I have been writing a fair bit about Basic Income and have also given several talks including Techonomy Detroit and TEDxNY. I started thinking about Basic Income after writing a series of posts about employment towards the end of 2012 and started researching the topic in more depth in 2013. I am thrilled to see that there is now an explosion of interest as can be seen on the following Google trends chart
Europe has been taking the lead with a commitment to a test in Finland and a referendum about implementing a Basic Income in Switzerland coming up this year (if you read German or want to give Google translate a whirl, I recommend the referendum organizers’ site).
My own view on Basic Income has also evolved. I now see it firmly as an integral part of making the transition to an information society. In my talk about that transition at DLD in 2014, I already had the sense that something profound was happening but I didn’t have the right framework to really think about it. More recently this has become a lot clearer: we are facing another shift in scarcity, this time from capital to attention.
In the coming weeks I will publish some posts and hopefully also a first draft of my book to clarify precisely in what sense attention is scarce and how basic income helps with that. In the meantime I will be talking more about the topic at DLD 2016 and today on NPR’s On Point.
