“
Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek)
“
The market rewards business leaders for making things more efficient. Efficiency doesn’t love normal people.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant. Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills. The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The market doesn’t care what’s best for us
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all. Pretending that they are will lead us to ruin.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
There is limited or no market reward at present for keeping families together, upgrading infrastructure, lifelong education, preventative care, or improving democracy.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
In a world of true abundance you shouldn't have to work to justify your life.
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”
Sam Harris
“
College is being dramatically overprescribed and oversold as the answer to all of our job-related economic problems.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Our lack of family leave for new parents is barbaric, antifamily, sexist, regressive, economically irrational, and just plain stupid.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
increasing automation accompanied by social ruin. We must make the market serve humanity rather than have humanity continue to serve the market.
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”
Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Knowing what’s truly normal or average in a big country like America requires some work.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The subsistence and scarcity model is grinding more and more people up. Preserving it is the thing we must give up first.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Our job-based health insurance system does the very thing we most want to avoid—it discourages businesses from hiring.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.
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Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
“
It killed me that people had to cancel their dreams for endless toil, unless of course we somehow managed to pull ourselves out of these late-stage capitalist dark ages and into a Star Trek (TNG) future blessed with a universal basic income and sweet jumpsuits.
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David Yoon (Super Fake Love Song)
“
Greater flexibility in the workplace demands that we also create greater security. Globalization is
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek)
“
Some of the winners in the current system would make less money in the new world even as patient care improves.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Capital doesn’t care about us.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise). Both options have advantages and drawbacks. But no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what “universal” and “basic” actually mean.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Imagine being a poor person and you find out that the Queen who literally does nothing is making 100 million dollars in a year.
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Joe Rogan
“
So the average American worker has less than an associate’s degree and makes about $17 per hour.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The best approach is what they do at the Cleveland Clinic—doctors simply get paid flat salaries.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
“
America is starting 100,000 fewer businesses per year than it was only 12 years ago, and is in the midst of shedding millions of jobs due primarily to technological advances.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
It is impossible to overstate the importance of truck drivers to regional economies around the country.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
One new model gaining increasing attention is universal basic income.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Discarding the welfare state in favor of a universal basic income is no longer something that would be economically feasible in America’s future. It is economically feasible right now.
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Charles Murray (In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State)
“
Interventionism inevitably leads to socialism, central banking inevitably leads to hyperinflation, total cashlessness inevitably leads to total surveillance, and "guaranteed income" inevitably leads to guaranteed enslavement. A deadly poison remains a deadly poison even when ingested in a gradual manner.
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Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
“
The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
universal basic income. UBI proposes that governments tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use the money to provide every person with a generous stipend covering his or her basic needs.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
In the decades ahead, a life well-lived will often have to be one that does not involve a job traditionally defined. A universal basic income will be an essential part of the transition to a world unlike any in the history of our species.
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Charles Murray (In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State)
“
We are entering an age of super-intelligent computers that can take any complex data set—every legal precedent, radiology film, asset price, financial transaction, actuarial table, Facebook like, customer review, résumé bullet, facial expression, and so on—synthesize it, and then perform tasks and make decisions in ways that are as good as or better than the smartest human in the vast majority of cases.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we are collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they’re complaining or suffering because they’re losers.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Alternatively, governments could subsidise universal basic services rather than income.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
despair and resignation. Fight for each other like our souls depend on it. Climb to the hilltop and tell others behind
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
There’s a very popular notion out there that ideas change the world. That’s wrong. People change the world.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The revolution will happen either before or after the breakdown of society. We must choose before.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Pressing financial concerns, it found, have the same cognitive effect as pulling an all-nighter, or losing 13 IQ points.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
“
People were clapping us on the back, congratulating us on our accomplishments, and we were thinking to ourselves, What are you congratulating us for? The problems are just getting worse.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
The coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of cataclysmic event that brings about drastic changes. I think Medicare For All and UBI are now inevitable. It's either that, or complete chaos.
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Oliver Markus Malloy (American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America)
“
The social contract between citizen and state is breaking down in places where welfare schemes are accommodating large numbers of beneficiaries whose families have never contributed to the system. The original welfare state was predicated on a notion of reciprocity, but to newcomers it looks more like universal basic income. Welfare states are national, not universal. There must therefore be meaningful limits on what outsiders can claim based on the feat of having crossed a nation’s border.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
“
Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
“
Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor establish any program that transfers general tax revenues to some citizens and not to others, whether those transfers consist of money or in-kind benefits. All programs currently providing such benefits are to be terminated. The funds formerly allocated to them are to be used instead to provide every citizen with a Universal Basic Income beginning at age twenty-one and continuing until death. The maximum annual value of the grant at the program’s outset is to be $13,000, of which $3,000 must be devoted to catastrophic health insurance.
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Charles Murray (In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State)
“
Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.
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Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
“
It’s a rather beautiful discovery: in a world where so many people seem to hold extreme views with strident certainty, you can deflate somebody’s overconfidence and moderate their politics simply by asking them to explain the details. Next time you’re in a politically heated argument, try asking your interlocutor not to justify herself, but simply to explain the policy in question. She wants to introduce a universal basic income, or a flat tax, or a points-based immigration system, or Medicare for all. OK, that’s interesting. So what exactly does she mean by that? She may learn something as she tries to explain. So may you. And you may both find that you understand a little less, and agree a little more, than you had assumed.
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Tim Harford (The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics)
“
Back in the Middle Ages, if you asked the literate monks and scholars how many of the farmers and peasants walking around would be capable of learning to read, they’d scoff and say, ‘Read? Most of these peasants could never learn to do something like that.’ They might guess that 2 to 3 percent of the peasants would be capable of becoming literate. Today we know that the real number is closer to 99 percent. Virtually everyone is capable of learning to read. But if I ask you today how many people are smart enough to study quantum physics, you might say only 2 or 3 percent. This is as shortsighted as the monks were in the Middle Ages. We are just scratching the surface of how smart people can become if we give them the proper tools to learn.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Listen,” said Aurora, hands up, like a policeman halting traffic. “Everyone stop saying cat.” The men went silent. Aurora took a deep breath. “Do you know why we have the Australia Cards? The universal basic income?” “Dunno,” said Jack. “Charity, I suppose.” “Yes,” said Minh. “Why?” “Well—you ever notice the biggest supporters of a universal wage aren’t charities or churches?” “Nah,” said Tommy. “It’s those rich bastards.” “Exactly. Silicon Valley. The banks. You know why? They need customers for the businesses they own, and they own bloody everything. They need our disposable income. But there’s no jobs anymore, the automation they invented took them all. Forty percent unemployment, half the rest working part-time gigs. So: they lobbied the government to give out free money.
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T.R. Napper (Neon Leviathan)
“
The relationship between humanity and work involves money, but in something of a negative correlation. The jobs and roles that are the most human and would naturally be most attractive tend to pay nothing or close to nothing. Mother, father, artist, writer, musician, coach, teacher, storyteller, nurturer, counselor, dancer, poet, philosopher, journalist—these roles often are either unpaid or pay so little that it is difficult to survive or thrive in many environments. Many of these roles have high positive social impacts that are ignored by the market. On the other hand, the most lucrative jobs tend to be the most inorganic. Corporate lawyers, technologists, financiers, traders, management consultants, and the like assume a high degree of efficiency. The more that a person can submerge one’s humanity to the logic of the marketplace, the higher the reward.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
But more profoundly, there is something deeply wrong if even the winners of the mass scramble to climb into the top of the education meritocracy are so unhappy. They are asking, “What are we striving and struggling for?” No one knows. The answer seems to be “to try to join the tribes in the coastal markets and work your ass off,” even as those opportunities become harder to come by. If you don’t like that answer, there are very few others.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Work must be refused and reduced, building our synthetic freedom in the process.136 As we have set out in this chapter, achieving this will require the realisation of four minimal demands: 1.Full automation 2.The reduction of the working week 3.The provision of a basic income 4.The diminishment of the work ethic While each of these proposals can be taken as an individual goal in itself, their real power is expressed when they are advanced as an integrated programme. This is not a simple, marginal reform, but an entirely new hegemonic formation to compete against the neoliberal and social democratic options. The demand for full automation amplifies the possibility of reducing the working week and heightens the need for a universal basic income. A reduction in the working week helps produce a sustainable economy and leverage class power. And a universal basic income amplifies the potential to reduce the working week and expand class power.
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Nick Srnicek (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work)
“
The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity.
A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.
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Mariana Mazzucato
“
One result of the federal government’s student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation’s colleges and universities.” Although paradoxical, this result could have been predicted from basic economic theory: when students can come up with more money for college, thanks to the government’s efforts, colleges can afford to increase their tuition. “The empirical evidence is consistent with that—federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation’s colleges and universities.
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Don Watkins (Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality)
“
If you imagine a world of real abundance. Like a world where we built the right AI that's just pulling wealth out of the atmosphere and no one really has to work anymore, because we literally have machines that can build machines that can build machines, that are all powered by sunlight, that do everything better than we can. Now why wouldn't that be some kind of utopia? Well it wouldn't be a utopia because we have these very weird emotions, or many of us do, that make it seem like it would be wrong to spread the wealth around. Most people are living as though they want to live in a world where there's a few trillionaires living in compounds ringed by razor wire, and everyone else is sort of starving to death. It's like a winner take all scenario. And so, we have to find a new ethic whereby people are no longer—their purchase on existence is no longer justified by doing profitable work that other people will pay them for. In a world of true abundance you shouldn't have to work to justify your life. You should be free to enjoy the wealth of the world. If we are going to get to that place, we have to change our ethics around that.
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Sam Harris
“
...a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is all those things and more: a paradigmatic shift that would free people from having to do more work that they did not want to do at all. A UBI would, in essence, lop off the bottom of the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs', where air, food, water, and shelter reside, with self-transcendence up at the other end. A UBI would give people the economic bandwidth to do what they wanted with their lives... Let the robots do the dirty work. Let the people do what they want.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: The Simple Idea to Solve Inequality and Revolutionise Our Lives)
“
People tell ya to grow up… be a man… But what does that mean exactly? Doesn’t it mean to do the right thing… act forthrightly. Well… I think we need to give people money… UBI… Negative tax… whatever the hell you call it. And then parents say, hey, stay out of Politics, WE’RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE… Fine. Where are we from? Belarus? Okay. Well we’re from Belarus, why couldn’t we get UBI in Belarus? Parents say shut up, the President’s a dictator. Oh? Well, call me an idealist, but seems to me like you’re just looking for shit to complain about and run from your problems. A word of advice to potential immigrants. Stay away from this shit hole. These American schools tend to pump out sluts, alcoholics, and non-binary homeless philosophers.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
“
When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part.
Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-educated families, economic productivity shoots up, environmental pressures ease, and everyone is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educating girls may be the single highest return investment available in the developing world.” Why is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered arguments; but the numbers do not lie.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (The Best American Travel Writing 2013)
“
Here's a resume of crucial knowledge you should have in today's world but universities are not providing: Financial - Not just on management, but also on how to profit, how to manage and control flows of income; Linguistic - In today's world, speaking only a language is prove of lack of education. Knowing two languages is a basic necessity, and knowing three languages is essential, while knowing four is merely the ideal situation. Which four languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, and another of your choice, just for fun; Intellectual - It's not about what you know; it’s all about how you think about what you know. Therefore, it's ridiculous to think that there’s only one answer and one way to examine our life. Most students are extremely dumb because they lack the ability to educate themselves, despite their certificates or where they’ve studied. They never read with an intention in mind. And as they graduate, they become completely futile as individuals. This situation is the same all over the world. Millions are graduating every year, without any significant knowledge to live with. Their books are often outdated once they graduate and they're unable to learn by themselves and develop the necessary skills to adjust to the economic society in which we live. Maybe they can keep a job for 3 or 5 years of their life, but then are surprised to lose it and never finding a suitable job again. The world is changing very fast and most people can’t or are unwilling to recognize this fact.
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Robin Sacredfire
“
It is very important to note, however, that the only segment of the population from whom changing our social and economic conditions in the ways that prevent violence would exact a higher cost would be the extremely wealthy upper, or ruling, class — the wealthiest one per cent of the population (which in the United States today controls some 39 per cent of the total wealth of the nation, and 48 per cent of the financial wealth, as shown by Wolff in Top Heavy (1996). The other 99 per cent of the population — namely, the middle class and the lower class — would benefit, not only form decreased rates of violence (which primarily victimize the very poor), but also from a more equitable distribution of the collective wealth and income of our unprecedentedly wealthy societies.
Even on a worldwide scale, it would require a remarkably small sacrifice from the wealthiest individuals and nations to raise everyone on earth, including the populations of the poorest nations, above the subsistence level, as the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, has shown. I emphasize the wealthiest individuals as well as nations because, as the U.N. report documents, a tiny number of the wealthiest individuals actually possess wealth on a scale that is larger than the annual income of most of the nations of the earth.
For example, the three richest individuals on earth have assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product of the fortyeight poorest countries! The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the Gross Domestic Product of the most populous nation on earth, China, with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's population, or 2.5 billion people.
By comparison, it is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.
It has been shown throughout the world, both internationally and intranationally, that reducing economic inequities not only improves physical health and reduces the rate of death from natural causes far more effectively than doctors, medicines, and hospitals; it also decreases the rate of death from both criminal and political violence far more effectively than any system of police forces, prisons, or military interventions ever invented.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
“
Right now, the poverty gap—the amount of money it would take to lift every man, woman, and child across the World Bank’s extreme poverty line—is about $66 billion, as estimated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution. That’s about what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year. It is half of what the world spends on humanitarian aid.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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Let us not underestimate the ingenuity of the poor people in converting what they get from the relief worker to what they want. And that’s just wasteful. They would be far better off if we just gave them the money and let them spend it.
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Milton Friedman
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Once you get people addicted to alcohol in college, you make it almost impossible for them to stop drinking - Milton Friedman. Just kidding. I said it. But inspired by Milton. hehe.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
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The top 1 percent have accrued 52 percent of the real income growth in America since 2009.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
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We are getting better and better at things that will make large numbers of workers extraneous. And we will succeed. There needs to be a dramatic reskilling of the workforce, but that’s not going to be practical for a lot of people. It’s impossible to avoid a lost generation of workers.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
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we are confident that between 2 and 3 million Americans who drive vehicles for a living will lose their jobs in the next 10 to 15 years.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
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Annoying neighbor woman keeps telling me to get a job. You can't just sit around and do nothing. You'd be out on the street if you were MY child... she keeps saying. So what do you want me to do, exactly? Study Elephants in Norway, like YOUR kids? No... she says... you need a PHD for that job. Well I rest my case. Fuck work.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
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Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, argues that if a cashier’s job were a video game, we would call it completely mindless and the worst game ever designed. But if it’s called a job, politicians praise it as dignified and meaningful. Hunnicutt observes that “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
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Die Zeit ist reif für das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen.
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
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Schließlich verdanken wir nur einen Bruchteil unseres Wohlstands unseren eigenen Anstrengungen. Wir, die wir im Land des Überflusses leben, sind reich dank der Institutionen, des Wissens und des sozialen Kapitals, das unsere Vorfahren angehäuft haben. Dieser Reichtum gehört uns allen. Und ein Grundeinkommen wird uns allen erlauben, daran teilzuhaben.
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
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Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
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if one day states themselves begin to mine Bitcoin, the bitcoins and transaction fees that miners now collect on any exchanged bitcoin would be collected by the entire community. This global ‘Tobin e-tax’ would be the equivalent of a universal housing tax, serving to keep the national infrastructure in good condition. It would be an ideal candidate with which to finance an unconditional basic income, even if Marxists do not like the principle very much.4 This would be what activist Aaron Bastani calls ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’.
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Mark Alizart (Cryptocommunism (Theory Redux))
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Perhaps the most prominent argument for a UBI has to do with technological unemployment—the prospect that robots will soon take all of our jobs. Economists at Oxford University estimate that about half of American jobs, including millions and millions of white-collar ones, are susceptible to imminent elimination due to technological advances
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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The issue is not that the United States cannot pull its people above the poverty line, but that it does not want to.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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The vast majority of families in poverty with children do not receive any help for child care. This again makes the United States a rarity: its public child care spending as a share of GDP is one-quarter of that of sixteen other OECD countries
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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studied is just over a year.)
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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It is not just rich nations that the United States lags behind either. According to the International Labor Organization, it is one of only two countries out of 185, the other being New Guinea, that does not provide some form of aid to new parents.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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Socialists have taken advantage of every crisis to promote their policies and spend millions of dollars on marketing (oh, the irony) to convince young people that socialism can take care of everything for them. Bernie Sanders alone has three houses. He’s made millions of dollars under capitalism while preaching like a crazy person for its opposite. Let’s call him the “Commie Capitalist.” People like him say that socialism can pay off student loans, provide a universal basic income, even provide free college and health care. In 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 percent of young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one like the United States. As if that weren’t scary enough, only 33 percent of the people could even describe with any accuracy what the word socialism means. This is precisely the way Bernie Sanders has wanted it all along: push lies for years until you make a majority of the population ignorant enough to believe those lies.
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Donald Trump Jr. (Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us)
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Researchers believe there is a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years,” the survey’s authors noted.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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In the eyes of economists, long-term unemployment causes “hysteresis,” a word derived from the Greek term for lagging behind.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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prominent group of economists recently looked at randomized control trials of government cash-transfer programs from Honduras, Indonesia, Morocco, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. They found that receiving cash had no effect on the number of hours worked or the propensity to work, for both men and women. Indeed, the cash-transfer programs seemed to boost the amount that men worked, in some cases.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)
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God hurts when people are starving because of human greed enacted by political leaders. God hurts when people are scapegoated and “othered” by governments and then put into concentration camps, bombed into oblivion, or sanctioned into horrific poverty. God hurts when racism is at the core of lawmaking and law enforcement. God hurts when LGBTQIA people, all of whom are beautiful expressions of divine creativity, are targeted for harassment, violence, and being denied the same rights that heterosexual people are given. God hurts every time a new recruit signs up for the military, because the military is always used to kill other children of God. God hurts when God’s creation is destroyed and pillaged to generate profits with no regard to the sanctity of God’s creation and the life it contains. God hurts when his children forget to love their neighbors as themselves by putting profits over people instead of enacting laws that would protect humanity and foster human thriving, such as universal health care and universal basic income would. God hurts when people accumulate vast wealth, while billions of God’s children struggle to live without basic necessities. God hurts when people like Donald Trump blaspheme saying that only he can prevent Joe Biden from hurting God. God hurts when people of faith defend the actions of and offer support to a man like Donald Trump who brazenly admitted to being a sexual predator, has a multi-decades long history of racism, and whose utter narcissism and lack of empathy has fueled his many cruel policy decisions.
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Dillon Naber Cruz (Theological Musings: Collected Essays of a Tattooed Theologian, Vol. 1)
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With universal basic income for everyone, there was an endless supply of money for basic level simulations and there were plenty of jobs for those who wanted to work to upgrade their simulation. For a while, the only problem was decreasing populations as fewer people had the money, time or patience to raise children.
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Peter Clifford Nichols (The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager)
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There is also talk of providing a universal basic income. Will the government pay people a monthly income because they now are forced to stay home after robots and artificial intelligence took their jobs? How long will this continue before the people are deemed useless? What will happen to these useless people? Will globalists do as Yuval Harari suggested, and give the useless people drugs and video games to keep them occupied? Will globalists implement yet another form of population control to rid the planet of useless people? The latest ruse is a plan to stop reproduction by permanently halting puberty in children and butchering their bodies so that they will never be able to conceive. Some states will remove a child from the parents’ home if the parents refuse to go along with this travesty. It sounds preposterous, yet all of this has been openly proposed by global government elitists.
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Perry Stone (Artificial Intelligence Versus God: The Final Battle for Humanity)
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Economists at Oxford University estimate that about half of American jobs, including millions and millions of white-collar ones, are susceptible to imminent elimination due to technological advances. Analysts are warning that Armageddon is coming for truck drivers, warehouse box packers, pharmacists, accountants, legal assistants, cashiers, translators, medical diagnosticians, stockbrokers, home appraisers—I could go on.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World)