yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Can Universal Basic Income / Social Democracy Fix America’s Inequality? | Jeffrey Sachs | Big Think


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

There’s a proposal around that’s got a lot of interest called universal basic income where everybody is guaranteed at least a certain level of income in the society. Some free market economists like Milton Friedman talked about a negative income tax which in effect had the same features of guaranteeing a certain level of income for everybody as a base.

I think from a human rights and decency standard there’s a lot of sense to the idea that everybody in a society should be able to meet their basic needs. There’s on the other hand this sense if you give someone a check whether they’re trying, not trying, working, not working. If there’s no effort, no conditionality involved at all maybe we’re going to get a lot of people that are absolutely doing nothing on the backs of those who are really working.

So the incentive issues are real even if the sensitivity and decency issues are also real. I think that one way to handle this is a little bit more rounded rather than seeing a universal basic income as a check and kind of an unconditional check that’s just handed out as income. I like the idea of social democracy as it’s applied in real countries in Europe, the Netherlands and Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany.

The idea is everybody has access to publicly financed healthcare. Everybody has access to quality publicly financed education including college tuitions. Not a trillion dollars of crushing student debt, but tuitions paid for. Everybody has access to not only guaranteed vacation, but paid vacation. Everybody has access to quality childcare so that moms can go to work knowing that their kids are in a healthy, nurturing environment.

Everybody has access to maternity leave so that moms and also paternity leave, dads can stay home with their kids for several months. It’s kind of decent where you say we have all this wonderful technology, this wealth. Why don’t we live decently, not miserably? If people want a market income beyond that they’ve got to go work for it.

If, of course, they’re disabled or for some reason can’t then there’s added social support but it’s not cash in people’s pockets. It’s decency. It’s public service. It’s basic needs met. I see it as basically living decent lives in decent societies. They have a very different spirit to them. There aren’t a lot of super rich Wall Street hedge fund misanthropes – and I’ll use the term advisably because I find a lot of people on Wall Street don’t give a damn about anybody else except they care about their money.

And I find that really weird. But you don’t find that kind of idea in northern Europe because it’s really looked down upon. And people don’t like it when people are money grubbing. They’re kind of shunned. So the social ethos is different.

I remember once I was running to the airport in Oslo and I fly business class and I’m constantly moving around on trips relentlessly around the world. And I ran up and said, “Where’s the business class line to board?” And the guy looked at me like I was crazy and he said, “Excuse me, we’re boarding the Scandinavian way. Get back in line.”

And I just thought okay, that’s pretty cool actually, you know. Everybody’s in line and let’s all get on the plane. It’s a social spirit. It’s the idea that we like – well by the way this is not people tearing their clothes and living in hair shirts and not enjoying themselves. They like their vacations. They like their boats in the Stockholm archipelago. They like six weeks on their island.

So they live beautifully. But they don’t want gazillions. They don’t want to do it at the expense of others. They want to do it as a society. God, if America could just get a little of that back rather than a president who believes in killers and losers. Sick, but that’s what we got and that is what’s degrading American society.

Not just the technical issues. Not just the rising inequality but this spirit that you’re a winner or you’re a loser. And if you’re a loser get out of the way. That’s Ayn Rand talki...

More Articles

View All
Acceleration | Physics | Khan Academy
I decided to raise my regular household car with a sports car, say Ferrari. Well, clearly, it’s no match for me. It has a very high top speed, but what if we both agree, for the sake of this race, to limit our top speed to say 80 miles an hour? Now, do yo…
Ask Sal Anything! Homeroom - Thursday August 27
Hi everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to the Homeroom live stream! Today, we’re going to be doing an ask me anything about anything. So, if you have your questions, start to put them in the message boards underneath this video on Facebook or Y…
Stock Splits are Secretly Pumping the Stock Market
Stock splits, they’re supposed to be totally irrelevant, right? They don’t change anything about the company, they don’t change anything about the valuation, they don’t change anything about the investing thesis. Well, bizarrely, stock splits are somehow …
Warren Buffett: How Most People Should Invest
[Music] So Warren Buffett, we know he is the world’s best investor, and he has built his fortune by analyzing individual businesses and buying them at discounted prices. His strategy can essentially be summarized by just waiting and waiting and waiting un…
Quadratic approximation formula, part 1
So our setup is that we have some kind of two variable function f(x, y) who has a scalar output, and the goal is to approximate it near a specific input point. This is something I’ve already talked about in the context of a local linearization. I’ve writt…
Climate 101: Ozone Depletion | National Geographic
(upbeat piano music) [Narrator] 15 to 35 kilometers above Earth’s surface, a gas called ozone surrounds the planet. The ozone layer acts as a barrier between Earth and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. However, pollution has caused the ozone layer to t…