The Midterm elections in the United States were extremely interesting. There was a huge Blue Wave of people coming out to vote against Trump’s party, but unlike most midterm elections, there was also a Counter-Wave of enthusiastic Republicans coming out to support Trump’s party (not to mention strategic voter disenfranchisement and Gerrymandering). The Wave and Counter-Wave made for record-high voter
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Mohammed Jamjoom (host), “Will the midterm results affect Trump’s foreign policy?” Panel Discussion with Karl Widerquist, Eli Clifton, and Rami G. Khouri, Inside Story on the Al Jazeera Network, 8 Nov 2018 Al Jazeera invited me to participate in a panel discussion (on of all things) U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t give me the chance to talk about basic income
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October 23, 2018 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM Tulane University Jones Hall, Room 108 Basic Income is an audacious idea—a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. Yet, growing numbers of people have come to support it, believing not only that welfare systems around the world are too stingy but also that they’re based on an
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My latest discussion paper is a draft of Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, the Prehistory of Private Property (coauthored by Grant McCall, Tulane University and the Center for Human-Environmental Research) The paper addresses the natural-rights-based (“right-libertarian” or more descriptively “propertarian”) justification of private property to show that it is not a purely normative argument. The paper argues that propertarian
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My new short book, The Devil’s in the Caveats: A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens, will be out early in 2019. I’ve posted an early version of it on my Selected Works website. Here’s a summary: “The devil’s in the details” is a common saying about policy proposals. Perhaps we need a
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in November 2007. Public awareness of BIG took a small step forward this summer when the Simpsons Movie made a joke about it. Homer and his family are greeted at the Alaskan border by an official who says, “Welcome to Alaska. Here are a thousand dollars. We pay everyone in Alaska to
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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
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