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Scott Santens

Unconditional/Universal Basic Income (UBI) advocate with a crowdfunded basic income; Founder and President of ITSA Foundation, Author of Let There Be Money; Editor of BasicIncomeToday.com

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My time at UBI Nordic 2019 in Oslo, Norway

Hi, everyone! I'm back from my trip to Norway for UBI Nordic 2019 [https://ubi-nordic.org/]! I was a part of one panel there and also chaired a panel as well. Both of those were recorded on video. Panel 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-HTLSNIaE Panel

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Think Like a Martian About Money and Universal Basic Income (UBI)

My Keynote Speech at Imagine Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics Also available in Italian, Spanish, and Korean Think like a Martian… That’s a lesson I learned years ago from a theoretical physicist named Richard Feynman. I never met him, but he was one of my teachers as a

Think Like a Martian About Money and Universal Basic Income (UBI)
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My Unconditional Basic Income Testimony for Maryland's House Ways and Means Committee

Click here to optionally listen instead of read this post [https://anchor.fm/scottsantens/episodes/My-Unconditional-Basic-Income-Testimony-for-Marylands-House-Ways-and-Means-Committee-e3c9ff] . In mid-February I was contacted by the legislative aide for Delegate Gabriel Acevero of Maryland [https://twitter.com/gacevero] who has introduced a bill [http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2019RS/bills/hb/hb1089F.pdf] to

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One Observed Effect of Unconditional Basic Income: Better More Reliable Transportation

Unconditional basic income means many things to many people, being that cash offers total freedom of choice on what good or service to exchange it for, but one particularly common thing it allows people to newly obtain, who feel they need the most help in obtaining it, is transportation. In

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What is Unconditional Basic Income in One Word?

I've been in a couple rooms of around 50 people or so where we were asked to describe in one word, why we believe unconditional basic income is important, and each time I was impressed with the great variety of responses, but also how certain responses were expressed

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What is There to Learn From Finland’s Basic Income Experiment? Did It Succeed or Fail?

Evaluating the Preliminary Results of a Partial UBI and Slightly Less Bureaucracy Update: Since I published this article, the official final report was released in early 2020. You can read a summary of the findings here [https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income] . After two years of experimentation within

What is There to Learn From Finland’s Basic Income Experiment? Did It Succeed or Fail?
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Basic Income is now a dominant discussion in India's 2019 general election

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Want to listen to this post instead, or as you read it? Click here. [https://anchor.fm/scottsantens/episodes/Basic-Income-is-now-a-dominant-discussion-in-Indias-2019-general-election-e3324r] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With the historic announcement by India's opposition party [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/30/indias-opposition-wants-u

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"The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty." — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not as widely known as it should be, but Martin Luther King Jr. wrote and spoke about the need for an unconditional basic income before he was killed. Here is a video of him speaking about UBI at Stanford in 1967. One of the answers it seems to

"The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty." — Martin Luther King Jr.
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Top 10 Basic Income Articles of 2018

As a moderator of the /r/BasicIncome subreddit, I read a lot of links every year about UBI, probably around 100 per month. Once again, as I did last year, I've compiled a list of the ten articles/papers/reports I consider the most important to read out

Top 10 Basic Income Articles of 2018
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Standing on Shoulders

On November 17, 2018, a true human being named Gerald Huff died of pancreatic cancer [https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=190826268]. He was a fellow basic income advocate and a friend. Like me, he was passionate about UBI, so much so that he had been working