This blog was originally published at the USBIG NewsFlash in January 2001. It’s a good example of the way Basic Income was treated by major media outlets before the recent wave of support took off. On Saturday, December 9th, just after the ruling Liberal Party won a decisive victory in the Canadian Parliamentary election, the basic income guarantee suddenly and
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in March 2014. Basic Income is suddenly the subject of much more discussion around the world. Political movements are growing. The media, social networks, and blogs have suddenly devoted more attention to basic income. Basic Income News (BI News) suddenly has much more news to report. The website is running two-to-five
» Read moreThis audio is a talk I gave on why we need a Universal Basic Income. I gave the talk for the “Sydney Ideas” series in August of 2017, and I’m particularly happy with it. It summarizes the reasons I think are most important, and I think I did a relatively good job of delivering it.
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Apparently I was one of the few people from Cass County, Michigan living in New York City at the time of 9/11 attacks of 2001. Partly because I couldn’t get into my office for a few weeks, I volunteered for the clean-up efforts. Newspapers from my hometown and two nearby towns took the opportunity to do a story with a
» Read moreDo we need a worldwide Coalition of Basic Income Activist Networks to do what BIEN can’t? BIEN is chartered as an “educational charity.” It can educate people about BI and spread news about BI, but it cannot lead or coordinate activism on BI. There are many national and regional BI activist organizations, but no worldwide organization to help coordinate their
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in June 2014. Marshall Brain is a science writer (both fiction and non-), futurist, founder of the website How Stuff Works, and a long-time advocate of basic income. His book, Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future, makes a case for basic income—and for a post-work society altogether—through the vehicle of science fiction.
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This 8-minute video, entitled Universal basic income: money for nothing, is by Lou Foglia for Beme News (CNN’s YouTube Channel). It first appeared on July 25, 2018. It’s a good fast-pasted introduction to UBI. It quotes me at 1:11, slightly misquoting me at one point but mostly getting me right.
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in August 2014. The right-libertarian journal, Cato Unbound, has published a 4-party debate on Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) this month. Matt Zwolinski started it off with a second-best or pragmatic argument for BIG. He doesn’t say outright that BIG is better than many right-libertarians most favored policy of eliminating of all redistribution of
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On this page, I (Karl Widerquist) attempt to keep an updated list of media appearances, big or small; basic income related or not; audio, video, or text; starting with the most recent. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s extensive. Bootstraps, documentary film direct by Deia Schlosberg and Conrad Shaw, in production (2018) UBI: The Silver Bullet, documentary film by the People’s
» Read moreThis piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. It is, I think, the first article I published anywhere. I reproduced it here, because the original piece is not online. Someone asked me to write about sports, but I’m like I don’t play any sports, I ride a bike, but that’s not a sport, that’s transportation.
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