As a leading expert on the topic of unconditional/universal basic income (UBI), a subject area I've been focused on now since 2013, I'm constantly trying to correct misunderstandings and debunk misinformation/disinformation spread about the concept and the evidence behind it.The results of another big test of basic income were released in July 2024…

This discussion took place in a Twitter (X) Space on April 3, 2024. I was joined by land value tax expert Stephen Hoskins, along with my co-hosts Conrad Shaw and Josh Worth, to discuss land value taxes and why they make so much sense to paired with universal basic income. Listen to all ITSA Live episodes: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrF…

Much discussion has been had around basic income as a policy response to automation and as a result, over 150 pilot experiments have been launched in cities across the US to study it. Now in response to the successful results beginning to come out from those pilots, some states are beginning to ban the experiments from happening. One lobbying group…

In our final episode in our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by universal basic income (UBI) advocate and writer Scott Santens. Scott is the founder and president of the Income To Support All Foundation (ITSA Foundation), the Senior Advisor for Humanity Forward, and he also serves on the board of directors of the Gerald Huff Fund fo…

Our fourth episode of our mini-series on the future of work features Gavin Mueller, Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job. We speak with Gavin about the history of the Luddite movement, technological unemployme…

In the third episode of our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by Brian O'Connor, Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. Brian and I discuss the value of idleness in our lives, the burnout caused by the work ethic, and the pressure to view oneself as a project to be continuously realized. We discuss the goods of learnin…

This discussion took place in a Twitter (X) Space on September 6, 2023. I was joined by the co-founders of Comingle - Conrad Shaw and Josh Worth - to discuss the project and universal basic income in general. Comingle is an app being developed to create a small basic income floor for all members. All members will pledge an equal percentage of their…

In our second episode of our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by Andrea Veltman, Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University. We speak with Andrea about what it takes for work to be meaningful, if meaningful work is available to all, and what kinds of economic and social changes are necessary to help others find meaningful w…

In the first episode of our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by University of Leeds economist David Spencer. We discuss the experience of alienated labor under contemporary capitalism, the importance of work for meaning and dignity in our lives, and the reduction of the working week. Spencer persuasively makes the case for less but …

This is the audio of a speech I gave in July 2023 as the closing keynote for England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference. Video available too: ⁠⁠https://youtu.be/U2XbrVQZLnI For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: ⁠⁠http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq⁠⁠ You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: ⁠⁠https://patreon.c…

Political philosopher Chris Zurn has just published Splitsville USA, a bombshell book arguing for the dissolution of the US. We talk about why Chris thinks this has become necessary, how history unnecessarily prejudices us against such a split, and what a post Splitsville future might look like. Draw your own new national maps!…

This episode is a reading of my article, "A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty." Link to read and share the article: ⁠https://www.scottsantens.com/ai-will-rapidly-transform-the-labor-market-exacerbating-inequality-insecurity-and-poverty…

The IEET and the UMB Applied Ethics Center recently released a White Paper on the political, moral and psychological questions involved in regulating the metaverse. J Hughes is the Executive Director of the IEET. Alec Stubbs is the Future of Work Post Doc at the UMB Applied Ethics Center. We discuss the main findings of the paper. You can find the …

This episode is a reading of my article, "ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too", and it is read by an AI I trained on my own voice using Play.HT. It just seemed particularly fitting to do it this way. Link to read and share the article: https://www.scottsantens.com/chatgpt-has-already-decreased-my-income-security/ …

On June 24 I took part in a panel about the macroeconomics of basic income at the 2022 BIG Conference in Portland, Oregon. Here is an audio recording of the talk I gave that day where I attempted to zoom out and look at the big picture of money, economics, and humanity. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/ba…

On July 26 I took part in a conversation on Twitter Spaces where we talked about UBI for over two hours. A segment of about 21 minutes in length was then edited from the discussion and aired on WPKN radio. Here is that episode as heard on the radio. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq You ca…

We continue our series on the war in Ukraine. In this episode Vlado and I talk to journalist and anthropologist Alisa Sopova about what everyday life feels like in Ukraine as the war passes the 100 day mark. We discuss the regional differences in how the conflict is perceived, we ask whether Ukrainians have different views about Russian politicians…

We continue our series on the war in Ukraine. Our guest is Vesko Garcevic, former ambassador of Montenegro to NATO, OSCE, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Vesko is currently Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. We talk about what it means to diplomatically…

Vladimir Putin wants to put Russia back on the map as a great power. But what does it even mean to be a great power in the nuclear age? Is that idea still coherent? If it is, can Russia be such a power? And how is Putin using history to frame this quest? What does his framing reveal about him and about contemporary Russia? The second in a series of…

For a while, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could tell ourselves that the American-led liberal internationalist order was on the rise. That story had some big holes in it, but if we squinted a bit it was almost believable. Not "the end of history", but maybe a long vacation from it. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its insistence on de…

From 2019 to 2021, I took part in a convening on automation, opportunity, and belonging to visualize the future and how to get to a better future among the infinitely possible versions of it. Together we crafted over many iterations a vision document of the kind of society we could be in 2040, and the foundations we would need to build together as …

How should we understand efforts at school integration? And how are they related to the idea of equal education? Larry and I consider different historical understandings of integration and the problematic idea of integration as a vehicle for gaining social capital. Larry and Zoë Burkholder just published Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equali…

This episode is a reading of my long essay (and now also a book titled Let There Be Money) which is an in-depth exploration of Modern Monetary Theory and why MMT advocates should embrace UBI. Listening will provide a wide macroeconomic view at what money is, what actually causes inflation, what taxes actually do, and why we need to think about all …

The New York Times 2017 front page story about UAP's (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) spotted by Navy pilots, and the recent report to Congress by The Office of the Director of National Intelligence have generated tremendous public interest. I talk to Professor Avi Loeb about Harvard's new Galileo Project. We discuss what it means to explore UAP's sc…

On August 3, 2021, I hopped onto Twitter Spaces to talk in-depth about the concept of universal basic income (UBI). Here is the recording of that discussion I had with the hosts of the Space: Jenny Q. Ta, Aaron Bowley, and Dan Whitfield. Because they are part of the #DogeArmy, this discussion also included my thoughts on cryptocurrencies and also t…

What happens when the ties between the people who study psychiatric drugs and the companies who make them become too cozy? A discussion with UMass Boston psychology professor Lisa Cosgrove. Lisa Cosgrove, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses on psychiatric diagnosis and ps…

Adam and I discuss the famous, moving passage at the end of the Iliad describing the meeting between Achilles and Priam. We talk quite a bit about Achilles' curious account of how Zeus determines humans' fate by doling out happenings from jars of joy and misfortune. Adam Beresford teaches philosophy and classics at the University of Massachusetts a…

This one is a straight up, matter of fact, reality-driven argument for UBI. There will always be failure, and so we should plan for that failure, so that when people fail, it isn't life-threatening. It's a resilience argument for fault-tolerant design of our social and economic system. UBI introduces redundancy, graceful failure, and proportional c…

I've mentioned this argument in a few podcasts over the years, but I finally got around to writing it up as a new part of my UBI FAQ. This argument is another response to the common claim that people provided UBI will just watch TV and play video games. Instead of the usual response using available behavioral evidence, this instead asks, "What's wr…

Israel has signed normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain. These are the first Middle East peace agreements in two and a half decades. Why now? What does each of the main actors in this drama stand to gain from these accords? Can Middle East diplomacy really bypass the Israeli Palestinian conflict as these agreements attempt to do? And do…

Paget Kagy speaks with Scott Santens about how COVID has shifted his predicted timeline of a universal basic income being implemented in the US, his feelings about the current state of affairs, and addresses common arguments against UBI.By Paget Kagy

The US seems more polarized than it's been in decades. Can we communicate across ideological and political chasms? What does it mean to have a dialogue with someone we profoundly, even vehemently disagree with? If we do have such a dialogue, does it make us any less polarized? Do the effects last? We talk with Professor Barthold about her new book:…

Steve Forbes recently came out against UBI in a 3-minute video that was filled to the brim with the standard objections to UBI, including the notion that everyone would stop working (which would hurt the economy and their dignity), which of course was really rich coming from someone really rich, who could have never worked a day in his life, but fo…

In the last few months, in the wake of recent protests against systemic racism, Confederate and other monuments have been torn down and defaced. What are these monuments supposed to convey? What's the argument for taking them down? Dana and I revisit our conversation about the ethics and politics of monument removal in light of recent events. Take …

I originally published this article in 2015, and to this day it remains an article I frequently link to in order to help people understand how expensive poverty is, and how much we would save by directly abolishing it with unconditional basic income. Whenever someone makes the claim that UBI is simply too expensive, use what I talk about here and a…