We have the USV office closed today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” he wrote:
In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the [social] programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I’m now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
I strongly recommend reading a longer excerpt from the book, which shows just how visionary MLK was. He wrote the book in 1967, the year that I was born. Since then we have made extraordinary progress in the productive capacity of the economy. Put differently, we can afford a basic income more easily than ever before.
So on this MLK day in 2018, if you are looking for things to do, read up on basic income. Here are some places to get started:
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
Raising the Floor by Andy Stern
And there is a section on basic income in my book World After Capital. If you want to watch a video instead, you can check out my GEL talk or Rutger’s TED talk.
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Albert Wenger
