Tag Archives: universal basic income

Imagination

1 Reply
A black and orange floral background with the text, "From What if to What Next - A new podcast series with Rob Hopkins" it also includes a link to the series Patreon: www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext

I’ve talked about how fiction can point the way to better futures, and one thing that really underlies fiction is imagination. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” If we want to overcome the climate crisis we need to imagine a better future than our current cyberpunk dystopia. This is why I was so excited to find the From What If to What Next podcast by Rob Hopkins.

Hopkins and his guests take the listener on a journey to an imagined 2030 that has seen radical change for the better. Each episode focuses on a specific topic, like Universal Basic Income, and the show starts with the guests describing what a day-in-the-life in 2030 might be like.

It’s been said that people find it easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism, and that’s because imagination outside of how to make more money has been relegated to the realm of children. Having an active imagination is seen as a weakness for adults who shouldn’t have their “head in the clouds.”

An animated GIF of Spongebob Squarepants (an anthropomorphic yellow sponge) moving his hands in an arc to create a rainbow out of thin air (water?). His pupils expand as he says the word, "Imagination."
Spongebob exercising his imagination

We need to reinvigorate our collective imagination to move forward as a society. The challenges facing us are serious, but that’s all the more reason to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Imagination and play are pivotal to our survival as a species, and that’s something we often forget, particularly those of us with backgrounds in STEM. Artists are way ahead of us in this respect.

When I was in grad school, I remember a friend from Thailand telling us how the protests there were like big parties with music and dancing. I just didn’t get it. My understanding of a protest was a bunch of angry people waving signs and calling out demands on a megaphone.

Now though, I think protests parties seem more effective. Prefiguring a better world at a small scale, like Occupy Wall Street did, is like a kind of sympathetic magic to create a future worth running toward. From What If to What Next is a great way to start thinking about the possibilities in our solarpunk futures. As we’re still evaluating how things will be when we establish a “new normal” after the pandemic, I’m cautiously optimistic about how we might see a brighter tomorrow.

Do you have any favorite ways to let your imagination run wild? I’d love to hear what you do in the comments! I love going on walks to jump start my own imagination.

Designing money for a solarpunk society

1 Reply

dollar-currency-money-us-dollar-47344.jpeg

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Money is a social construct, but it is a very useful means of exchange between parties without the need of troublesome conversion rates like how many chickens a smartphone costs. One of the best things about social constructs is that they are mutable. Despite the fact that the government would like you to believe that the money they issue is the only way to exchange goods and services, the rise of cryptocurrencies has shown that the true power of money rests with the people. In fact, trust of the public is the #1 reason government-issued currencies work at all. While a government can debase it’s money through overprinting and other abuses, the fact is that money doesn’t work unless everyone believes in its value.

four assorted cryptocurrency coins

Photo by Worldspectrum on Pexels.com

Hypothetical cryptocurrency

Let’s say I’m in charge of a small municipality. While I think people should be able to earn more money if they make awesome contributions to society through some sort of market, I don’t think they should do that at the expense of people dying in the streets or because they can’t pay for medicine. How do I design my money to have the appropriate incentives to make sure everyone is taken care of?

One option is Universal Basic Income (UBI), so let’s bake that in from the beginning. We’ll need to generate the money for the UBI somehow, and the land value tax or the Fair Tax are the top two candidates for simple and fair taxation. Since I also want to disincentive sprawl, we’ll go with the land value tax in this example. In short, the land value tax charges someone a tax based on the amount of land they own. I’ve seen this likened to a rent paid to The People if one assumes all land belongs to the citizens of a given region and that private use is a lease of that land from the true owners.

When someone pays their land tax it goes in a big piggy bank along with all the other landholders. Then, every month each citizen gets a UBI check deposited into their personal account to pay bills, get food, and buy whatever other things they need.

Globle

I’m not affiliated with Globle, but they have an interesting approach to the incentives issue of the current corporate capitalism system we have. Their approach combines UBI, venture capital, and Kickstarter into a sort of corporations by the people model. As a holder of Globle cryptocurrency, people can vote on what companies and/or products they want to see in the market. Then, based on how those companies perform, part of the company’s profits go to the investors and part goes back into a UBI fund for everyone. It’s hard to say how it will play out, but I do think it’s a novel approach to funding UBI that would also help companies and people work together better since their well-beings are more intrinsically intertwined.

What sort of incentives do you think would bring us closer to a solarpunk society? Let us know in the comments below.

The Rules: Capitalism, UBI, and the Blockchain

2 Replies

003-Beyond-Capitalism_1-1000x770

The Rules Blog recently posted an excellent piece about the relationship between extractive capitalism, universal basic income (UBI), and blockchain technologies. Climate change, pollution, and exploitation of the workforce are largely a function of the incentives baked into the current version of centralized currency and capitalism that we have today. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies offer a beacon of hope that by wresting control of money away from centralized governments and big banks we can remake the economy in a way that serves the people instead of the current system where people serve the economy.

While governments dicker about the merits of UBI and small-scale experiments are starting in some jurisdictions, the blockchain community is already developing some cryptocurrencies with UBI built in. The people writing at the Rules Blog have connections to one of the solutions, Circles, but many others exist such as Manna* and UBU. A short list can be found in this Reddit post.

As I mentioned before, the best chance for UBI in the United States is the FairTax. I think that circumventing the ponderous bureaucracy of government will probably result in a more expedient and fair system than anything we would get from Washington. The other advantage of blockchain-based systems is that they will be truly international and not locked down by the draconian laws of any one given government.

What do you think? Is blockchain over-hyped? Is it the next big thing? Sound off below, and thanks for visiting!

*Affiliate link – I may receive extra Manna if you sign up for the Manna UBI project through this link

Solarpunk, taxation, and universal basic income

1 Reply

6355404323_cf97f9c58e_b

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the big ideas I’ve seen floating around the solarpunk community. To learn more, I read some of the more scintillating chapters of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, and apparently there haven’t been any studies big enough to see what the true impact of a basic income would be on society. The authors suggested that a good starting place would be a baby step toward UBI where everyone got a small stipend.

The Adam Smith Institute recently published a paper on the market case for UBI and outlined the reasons why people should be supporting a move toward UBI. One of the main reasons is mounting concerns over technological unemployment with the rapid rise of automation and AI-driven production. For instance, truck and taxi operators are expected to be displaced by autonomous vehicles in coming years. Many other jobs will be at risk as well as computer systems get better at taking over tasks once performed by humans.

One proposal that I’ve been following that was mentioned in the book was the Fair Tax (HR 25) which eliminates the Federal Income Tax and replaces it with a Federal Sales tax. Where this gets interesting is that as a function of switching to a Federal Sales Tax, everyone in the country is given a “prebate” to account for income disparity at the lower end. This could be considered a sort of light UBI as everyone in the country will get the same “prebate” regardless of their income.

Another bonus of the Fair Tax is that it is only implemented once on an item. Used items are not taxed meaning that we can incentivize conserving resources while giving us a nationwide test of how to implement a full-scale UBI.

Perhaps the best part is that the Fair Tax eliminates the IRS and the current loophole-ridden Federal Income Tax system. I think we all know that the current system has more than its fair share of problems. Every time a new tax “reform” bill is brought up in Congress, we see how much of a losing game the income tax system is.

The Fair Tax is not perfect, but it seems like a workable solution with widespread existing support in the US Congress. More information is available about the Fair Tax at http://fairtax.org/faq.

Sound off in the comments if you think UBI is the way of the future or if you have any thoughts on the Fair Tax. Thanks for stopping by!

Some of the text for this article is recycled from my Tumblr post on the subject: https://solarpunk-gnome.tumblr.com/post/163921938517/taxation-and-solarpunk-a-few-thoughts

Image is “Taxes” by 401kcalculator.org via a Creative Commons license.