How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She makes the case for the policy called “Universal Basic Income,” in which the government pays everyone a fixed amount of money whether or not they have a job. The book traces the history of the idea, which goes back centuries and has been embraced at various points by people on the left and the right. Lowrey also shares her travels to Kenya, to witness a pilot UBI program, and to India, to explore its high-tech program to bring banking to the poor and could lead to a UBI system. She talks with politician and philosophers, economists and subsistence farmers. And she addresses critics who fear UBI would be too expensive and discourage work. As UBI becomes a hot topic in policy work circles, Give People Money will help you fully understand the idea and consider its profound implications.
Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.
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