# Martin Luther King Jr Supported Basic Income

By [Continuations](https://continuations.com) · 2018-01-15

mlk, basic income

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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](https://www.amazon.com/Where-Do-We-Here-Community/dp/0807000671)” 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](https://medium.com/basic-income/mlk-on-guaranteed-income-bfd060fd5314), 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](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Acontinuations.com+basic+income&ia=web). Here are some places to get started:

[Utopia for Realists](https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/0316471895) by [Rutger Bregman](https://twitter.com/rcbregman)  
[Raising the Floor](https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251) by [Andy Stern](https://twitter.com/AndyStern_DC)  
[Basic Income FAQ](http://www.scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq) by Scott Santens

And there is a [section on basic income in my book World After Capital](https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/part-three/Economic.html). If you want to watch a video instead, you can check out [my GEL talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PkCBGS94kc) or [Rutger’s TED talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydKcaIE6O1k).

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*Originally published on [Continuations](https://continuations.com/martin-luther-king-jr-supported-basic-income)*