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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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Time To Crowdfund a UBI Platform

As some of you already know, I'm excited about the potential for Comingle. It's an app that once fully developed and launched will provide a small basic income of around $200 a month, paid weekly, to everyone who signs up for it, who commits 7 percent

Time To Crowdfund a UBI Platform
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Sowing Seeds of Security: How Basic Income Is Taking Root in the U.S. through Local Pilots and Programs

Note: The following is a speech I gave at the 2023 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress that was held in Seoul, South Korea. You can find more of the presentations there online at this link. Thank you for inviting me from my home in Washington, D.C. to be

Sowing Seeds of Security: How Basic Income Is Taking Root in the U.S. through Local Pilots and Programs
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Introducing the Income To Support All Foundation

I'm excited to share that I'm now the Founder and President of the Income To Support All Foundation, a new non-profit whose purpose is to accelerate the implementation of unconditional universal basic income by just doing it and by telling the stories of those whose lives

Introducing the Income To Support All Foundation
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My Closing Keynote Speech at England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference

(The following is the text of my speech which you can also watch or listen to) A few of you already know me, but for those who don’t, I’m just a guy who happened to get really into the concept of unconditional basic income ten years ago. I

My Closing Keynote Speech at England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference
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The Big Red Button Argument for Unconditional Basic Income

Everyone who has followed my writings through the years knows I like to write specific arguments for the idea of unconditional basic income (UBI). One of my own personal favorites is the Engineering Argument for UBI. Another is the Monsters, Inc Argument for UBI. Well, here's another that&

The Big Red Button Argument for Unconditional Basic Income
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Negative Income Tax is Not Cheaper Than Universal Basic Income, Nor is Guaranteed Income 'More Progressive' by Excluding the Rich

Many people don't know this, but Milton Friedman was once asked in the Spring of 2000 what he thought about a universal basic income (UBI) in comparison to his proposed negative income tax (NIT) and this was his response: "A basic or citizen's income is

Negative Income Tax is Not Cheaper Than Universal Basic Income, Nor is Guaranteed Income 'More Progressive' by Excluding the Rich
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A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty.

There is no simple way of discussing the economic impact of artificial intelligence. As someone who has been warning about the impacts of automation for a decade now, and trying to get people to understand that automation has already been impacting us for decades, I can tell you that this

A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty.
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The Fable of the Two-Headed Dragon-Tyrant and the UBI Missile

The following short story is an adaptation of The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom, written by GPT-4 with my prompting (and light editing) in response to the open letter calling for a pause on the development of GPT-5. Once upon a time, in a prosperous kingdom, there lived

The Fable of the Two-Headed Dragon-Tyrant and the UBI Missile
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Did Spain's B-MINCOME Experiment Prove That Unconditional Basic Income Doesn't Work?

Between 2017 and 2019, in the city of Barcelona, an experiment in the provision of monthly cash happened. It was called B-MINCOME. The original intent of the experiment was to test unconditional basic income to gather evidence for a nationwide universal basic income, but the pilot was put through the

Did Spain's B-MINCOME Experiment Prove That Unconditional Basic Income Doesn't Work?
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ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too

Note: You can also listen to this post thanks to an AI I trained with my voice Most of you have by now heard of ChatGPT already, but if you haven't, first I'm happy to hear you're out of your coma, and second, it&

ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too