Reddit reviews Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream

You are right ubi is not a panacea, it is a floor to build upon with other policies.

This is why yang has 130+ on his website that DO actually attack inequalities and inefficiencies in our system one by one. Yang focuses on the FD because it is the easiest thing to do in a single term as president -- It doesn't require a supermajority in the house and has bipartisan appeal, making it incredibly easy to implement quickly.


And ubi does help in certain things like unionizing which DO help with inequalities, collective bargaining is one of the greatest tools available to the precariat and is something that is much easier to accomplish when you don't have to ever worry about starving to death.

You can read the book Raising The Floor by Andy Stern to learn more about it, he is the former president of one of the largest unions in the entire country the SEIU.

The idea of democracy dollars by Yang is really compelling:

By giving US voting age citizens $100 a year to give towards a political candidate (if its not given, then it disappears) we can wash out corporate money in politics.

It would be interesting if a candidate has to pick between eligible in receiving democracy dollars versus corporate dollars too, really shows transparency in the candidates allegiance.

Plus I'm sure most politicians hate sucking up to rich people for money.

Re: Unions
Andy Stern who was the former head of SEIU (the largest union) said the future of labor is no labor and we should move towards an UBI. As a side effect, unions will have more bargaining power with an UBI (i.e. they can strike for longer).

His book is Raising the Floor goes into this in more detail: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251

I highly recommend the book Raising the Floor by Andy Stern (former president of the Service Employees International Union). It is one of the few places I've found reasonable discussion of UBI.

I agree that it seems this isn't a topic that is discussed often enough, though it's understandable given how conditioned we are when it comes to work. I recently bought a couple UBI bumper stickers for my car in hopes it'll spark more conversation. There are many communities / countries that are testing some basic principles of UBI. Hopefully this will continue and will help UBI gain some traction. It already has some big names behind it, but it's such a massive undertaking so just a few names isn't enough.

Very interesting article, thanks for posting!

The article mentions several books advocating for UBI, including Annie Lowrey's Give People Money, Andy Stern's Raising the Floor, Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght's Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists. I have not read them, but from the article it sounds like they all make similar arguments in favor of a UBI and differ over the amount it should be. I believe all of them are assuming that it would be done at a national scale - I don't really understand why this couldn't be done at smaller jurisdictions (different states already have different policies about sales and income taxes, and Alaska has the closest thing in the US now to a UBI with its annual oil revenues share), or most ideally (but also more unrealistically) at a global scale (as the article points out a few dollars a week could lift millions of Indians out of extreme poverty.

I hadn't planned to include any of these books in the seminar, but if there is a strong interest in going into more depth on UBI, we could definitely do this. Maybe it would make most sense to select a set of books on the topic and split them amongst the class rather than having everyone read the same book, unless there is one book that is particularly good.

Is there a nomenclature for these two non-fiction writing styles used in these example books?

• Basic Income - It's dense, with lots of references, and very little that could be cut without removing meaning
  
• Raising the Floor - It's casual with lots of personal stories and lots of fluff and it feels like it should have been written as a 15 page magazine article instead of a book
  
  Maybe the first one is "academic"? The second one, I don't know how to call it.

I don't think you understand how UBI works. So tell ya what, you can read-up on the idea here: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251.

When you're ready and have read it, we can discuss the merits of it. Let's have the conversation.

Where's your source for what BI's proponents believe? Seems like a huge assumption given the fact that many of its proponents see it as a transformative economic model to cope with change which is now at a pace too far beyond what is possible for most people to deal with.

For example:
https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251

Sanders' solutions are outdated. Even the former President of the SEIU, is openly admitting that labor lost the fight against capital.

We are headed towards a future where the working class simply does not exist. Check-fucking-mate.