Intro
I think the time has come to do some large-scale experimentation with this idea for guaranteeing a basic income for all. We’ll need something as our jobs begin to get eliminated by robots, automation and AI!
Some experiments both government-funded and private are ongoing now. Out of Silican Valley’s idealism emerged givedirectly.org, which is providing a modest UBI to all residents of some undisclosed villages in Kenya for 12 years. They are then going to apply metrics to see what difference the UBI has made for these very poor residents.
References and related
Out of this year’s World Economic Forum came this paper which gives a good and cogent argument in favor of Universal Basic Income (UBI).
This ConsenSys paper combines two favorite topics: universal basic income and Blockchain. It also introduced me to Ethereum, an alternative blockchain to bitcoin. My only insight here is based on pragmatic observation. If the ideas proposed are so compelling, why aren’t they already in adoption in failed states with no effective currency, namely Venezuela? I think the idea is that each and everyone should generate their own currency units, say 1000 units per month, and arrange an equivalent exchange rate so that my unit has the same value as yours, and circles of trust so that my village’s exchange rate is equal to your village’s, etc. But I would love to see a long-form critical review from a subject matter expert.
I looked a tiny bit at ethereum, but it looks pretty Windows-based and I’m not too keen on anything I can’t run on my AWS CentOS server so I gave up for the time being. Ethereum is interesting because it’s open source and it’s specifically mentioned as the basis for the ideas in the ConsenSys paper. I would like to know its capabilities better. ethereum.org
To contribute to one of these efforts which are in the experimentation phase, you can go to givedirectly.org, which was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine article. They are applying some science to these efforts in attempting to measure their effects.