The Scott Santens UBI Enterprise

This discussion took place in a Twitter (X) Space on September 6, 2023. I was joined by the co-founders of Comingle - Conrad Shaw and Josh Worth - to discuss the project and universal basic income in general.

Comingle is an app being developed to create a small basic income floor for all members. All members will pledge an equal percentage of their income and in return all receive an equal basic income floor of around $50 a week.

This is the audio of a speech I gave in July 2023 as the closing keynote for England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference.

This episode is a reading of my article, "A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty."

This episode is a reading of my article, "ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too", and it is read by an AI I trained on my own voice using Play.HT. It just seemed particularly fitting to do it this way.

On June 24 I took part in a panel about the macroeconomics of basic income at the 2022 BIG Conference in Portland, Oregon. Here is an audio recording of the talk I gave that day where I attempted to zoom out and look at the big picture of money, economics, and humanity.

On July 26 I took part in a conversation on Twitter Spaces where we talked about UBI for over two hours. A segment of about 21 minutes in length was then edited from the discussion and aired on WPKN radio. Here is that episode as heard on the radio.

From 2019 to 2021, I took part in a convening on automation, opportunity, and belonging to visualize the future and how to get to a better future among the infinitely possible versions of it. Together we crafted over many iterations a vision document of the kind of society we could be in 2040, and the foundations we would need to build together as a society to achieve it and the updated social contract it will require.

At the end of our convening, we all signed on to the vision document we had together created. What I am about to read is the text of that document. You can also read it yourself at socialcontract.fundforhumanity.org. My thanks to all of my fellow participants whose names and bios you can find on the website along with the text of our document.

On August 3, 2021, I hopped onto Twitter Spaces to talk in-depth about the concept of universal basic income (UBI). Here is the recording of that discussion I had with the hosts of the Space: Jenny Q. Ta, Aaron Bowley, and Dan Whitfield. Because they are part of the #DogeArmy, this discussion also included my thoughts on cryptocurrencies and also the Fed potentially implementing digital dollars.

My thanks to them for recording the discussion and sending it to me so I can post it here for anyone to enjoy who missed it.

This one is a straight up, matter of fact, reality-driven argument for UBI. There will always be failure, and so we should plan for that failure, so that when people fail, it isn't life-threatening. It's a resilience argument for fault-tolerant design of our social and economic system. UBI introduces redundancy, graceful failure, and proportional control.

This is the engineering argument for UBI: We are all living, breathing, human beings, and we all need money to obtain the food and housing and everything else we need to stay alive. The best way to make sure we all stay alive then, is to make sure we always have a basic amount of money, and the best way to make sure we always have a basic amount of money is to provide it to everyone at all times, so it's always there, no matter what.

Any argument to the contrary is not sound from an engineering perspective.

I've mentioned this argument in a few podcasts over the years, but I finally got around to writing it up as a new part of my UBI FAQ. This argument is another response to the common claim that people provided UBI will just watch TV and play video games. Instead of the usual response using available behavioral evidence, this instead asks, "What's  wrong with that?"

How are we to know that someone watching a ton of movies isn't going to be the next Quentin Tarantino? How are we to know that someone spending all their time playing video games isn't going to be the next eSports star? We can't know these things. It's impossible.

UBI recognizes that, and better enables people to pursue their passions, which may end up being considered valuable by everyone after all, in retrospect.

Steve Forbes recently came out against UBI in a 3-minute video that was filled to the brim with the standard objections to UBI, including the notion that everyone would stop working (which would hurt the  economy and their dignity), which of course was really rich coming from someone really rich, who could have never worked a day in his life, but for some reason still did with his inheritance of the family business.

In response I wrote a long thread on Twitter, which I then used as a script for a video response, which I spent a week editing together into a 10-minute video, complete with charts, quotes, references, and a bit of fun for good measure. I suggest watching the video itself, but if you'd just like to listen to the audio instead, here it is.

I originally published this article in 2015, and to this day it remains an article I frequently link to in order to help people understand how expensive poverty is, and how much we would save by directly abolishing it with unconditional basic income. Whenever someone makes the claim that UBI is simply too expensive, use what I talk about here and ask in return, "What is the cost of not implementing UBI?" Understand that poverty isn't free, and you will understand the return on investment in abolishing poverty, just like the ROI we experience every day in a world now free of smallpox.

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system. Her book is considered to be one of the most important books on welfare and poverty in America to ever be published, and it concludes with a call for unconditional basic income as the only solution to fix what's broken.

In this episode I read the final part of Tyranny of Kindness which focuses on basic income. Theresa gets into the history of the idea and how an income guarantee almost happened under Nixon, and why it was Nixon, and not LBJ who tried to get a guaranteed income through Congress. Why we don't have basic income will make more sense once you listen to this and understand who stands to lose out, and why that would change the political landscape.

This episode is a reading of my article published on November 11, 2016 about the importance of UBI to attaining freedom for all. Freedom for all would be an achievement only spoken about in rhetoric and hypotheticals.  There will never be true freedom from sexual and corporate exploitation and all forms of  slavery until freedom is actually granted unconditionally to all, with unconditional basic income. Until UBI, the decisions we make will remain compulsory and without our full consent instead of freely chosen.

This episode is a reading of my article published on April 8, 2020 that goes into what a terrible idea it is to dump everyone onto the unemployment rolls in response to the coronavirus crisis, how automation means many of those jobs are now permanently gone, and just how many lives are likely to be lost as a result. I consider what Congress is doing as political malpractice. The amount of suffering already happening and that will happen in the weeks, months, and years ahead, is entirely avoidable, but it requires Universal Basic Income. Listen to this episode, and you will understand why.

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system. Her book is considered to be one of the most important books on welfare and poverty in America to ever be published, and it concludes with a call for unconditional basic income as the only solution to fix what's broken.

In this episode I read Chapter 5 of Tyranny of Kindness which explains the title. It examines the rise of the non-profit sector which operates under the guise of alleviating poverty that truthfully exists as a means of reducing taxes, increasing profits, and funding paychecks through the industrialization of poverty. The concept of TSAR is introduced which is "Table Scraps As a Right", where the creation of a "discard market" enables people to feel good about feeding what would otherwise be garbage to the homeless. I think this entire chapter is extremely important to hear to gain a big picture understanding of just how many people benefit from the perpetuation of poverty, and how no one ever listens to those actually in poverty, who if given the choice, would choose money to spend for themselves.

In 2014, I self-published my first article on Medium that to this day I think remains a solid introduction to UBI. Up until this article, I'd been reading a lot about UBI and engaging in a lot of discussion on Reddit about UBI, but this was my first attempt at "giving back" to the discussion with my own thoughts. It did quite well, getting over 100,000 views and because of its success, I was inspired to keep writing new articles, following it up next with my article about UBI and inflation which was even more widely read and shared. In this first article though you can see a lot of Andrew Yang's UBI: $1,000 per month basic income, 10% VAT, financial transaction taxes, carbon taxes, but most historically, it was this article where I first coined that basic income is not left or right, it's forward. It's because of that I think this particular article may just make it into the history books, seeing that it has gone on to become a central message of Andrew Yang's presidential campaign that is strongly resonating with a growing number of people.

The horror show that is our conditional welfare system remains unknown to most everyone. In 1993, Theresa Funiciello wrote a Pulitzer-nominated book to try to help change that by laying bare the details she learned as a welfare mother herself, and as someone who worked at an organization devoted to helping people in the welfare system, and as someone who even became Special Assistant to the Commissioner of New York State's Department of Social Services. Her book is considered to be one of the most important books on welfare and poverty in America to ever be published, and it concludes with a call for unconditional basic income as the only solution to fix what's broken. This episode I devote the hour to reading the first chapter in the hope listeners will better understand why it's so important to replace welfare as we know it with UBI.

Originally published in 2015, this article was written as an introduction to systems thinking, and how if we look at the United States as a system, we can reform it in systemic ways to function better, not just for some citizens, but for every citizen. I think fellow Andrew Yang supporters will appreciate how almost everything I proposed as a fix made it into Yang's campaign platform, from universal basic income and universal health care, to ranked-choice voting and measuring our success using things that matter to us instead of GDP.

In this podcast I make the case that there's no policy being proposed by any 2020 Presidential candidate that's as progressive as Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend. This is for all the progressives who think otherwise.

On January 19th, 2017, I recorded an interview with Sam Seder as his guest on his Ring of Fire podcast to talk about UBI. Until yesterday, I was under the impression the episode had never been posted, because I was never told about it, never saw it shared anywhere, and could never find it anywhere when I searched for it. Turns out, the interview was behind a paywall this whole time. Sam has now graciously made the full episode available without a paywall, and for those only interested in my 20-minute segment, here it is.

Freedom, liberty, democracy… these words are used so often that we give them little real thought, rarely holding them up to the realities of what we see around us. What do these words really mean? Do they currently exist for us to celebrate as we appear to think they do? And if not, is there anything we can do about it? Let’s take a closer look.

In the Winter of 1795 and 1796, one of the the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, Thomas Paine, wrote an essay that to this day over two centuries later, remains perhaps the greatest justification of all justifications for unconditional basic income. His argument is founded on the principles of justice, where all human beings are owed their natural inheritance, and the injustice of a civilization that makes some people worse off than what nature would otherwise provide is an injustice that must be rectified. In his words, UBI is a right, not a charity, that will give currency to the principles of revolutions.

In 1932, Bertrand Russell wrote one of my all-time favorite essays. In Praise of Idleness focuses on humanity's infatuation with work, and how if we divided the work more evenly instead of relegating some to poverty and others to overwork, we could all work four hours a day without anyone being unemployed, and with more leisure for all. And this was about 100 years ago, so how many hours would make the most sense to Bertrand now? If you've never read this essay before, you're in for a treat.
 

Back in 2016, I pitched an article to TechCrunch about explaining the progressive case for replacing welfare programs with unconditional basic income. This is the article I wrote which continues to be widely shared by readers as one of their favorites of mine, especially now that Andrew Yang is running for president on a UBI design that offers people the choice of basic income or welfare.

Back in 2016, I was asked by Vox.com if I'd like to write an article for them about what it's like having a basic income. What have I learned about UBI through having it? Do I look differently at UBI thanks to my own personal experience? This is the article I wrote.
 

Back in September of 2016, I did an interview for Forbes about a fully universal unconditional basic income and to this day I think it remains one of my better summaries of UBI for those new to the idea, and even those familiar with the idea. It succinctly covers most of the main points and I think can be a useful way of introducing people to UBI, so I've recorded the interview as a podcast and hopefully more people will find it by listening to it. 

On April 6th, 2019 I was part of a panel in Oslo, Norway about the Future of Work alongside fellow panelists Guy Standing, Becca Kirkpatrick, and James Bloodworth. The panel was chaired by Basic Income UK's Barb Jacobsen and was part of UBI Nordic 2019.

Panel description: The nature of work continues to change drastically. Experts predict that automation and AI will lead to massive job losses, and the growth of the “gig” economy is creating unstable jobs, with increased demands on flexibility and efficiency. Temporary positions create income  insecurity for workers, and there will be a need to update skills and knowledge continuously. In such a situation, basic income may become a  critical element of future work life.

This was the opening keynote speech I gave at the Imagine Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics in Northern Ireland on March 26, 2019.

From the perspective of beings not from this world, what is money? Why do some humans have so much of it while most have so little? And what message would it convey if human civilization trusted every human being with a minimum amount of access to resources by way of UBI?

By far, one of the the most common concerns, if not the most common concern, in regards to the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is that all prices will inevitably go up as a result, immediately reducing the value of each dollar, and essentially creating a new zero. Let’s call it the “New Zero Argument” against UBI. This episode dives deep into that argument and reveals just how baseless such an argument actually is, given all the variables in the inflation equation, and all the evidence we have to plug into it.

A Bipartisan Free Market Solution to Climate Change Through Atmospheric Justice

Is the technological automation of human labor the greatest justification for unconditional basic income? In this episode, I dive deep into how our problems are very much in the present by going beyond technology and economics, and into human biology itself. I cover what we as humans have learned from animals in the lab and in the wild, and then apply it to the UBI discussion.

Basic income is now a dominant discussion in India's 2019 general election. Here I explain the difference between what's being discussed and how actual UBI works. I also get into some of the details that are commonly misunderstood. 

This is an audio version of my article which you can read on Medium:
 

This is an audio version of my article which you can read on Medium:
 

This is an audio version of my article which you can read on Medium: