Thursday, June 9, 2016

What's the barrier to universal basic income?

http://www.businessinsider.com/interview-and-analysis-with-basic-income-advocate-rutger-bregman-2016-6

"Speaking to Business Insider in late May, Bregman - whose book Utopia for Realists explores realistic ways of putting into place ideas like UBI and working for just 15 hours per week - said that before there's a real chance of a basic income being accepted worldwide, there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about the concept of work, what we define as work, and why we pay for some types of work but not others.

'The most important obstacle for basic income is a moral obstacle, it is in the ideas that we still have about work. We still work with a very outdated definition of what work is. We define work by getting a salary in a hierarchical relationship with an employer, and you have to get paid.
'All the other things, caring for the children, caring for the elderly, doing housework and volunteer work - we don't consider that as work, even though obviously it is. Try and stop doing those things, go on strike as a careworker or stop doing the dishes and you'll see that it is going to be a problem.'"

I'm still thinking this will happen, though probably not in my lifetime. 

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