Welcome to Litsy!

I‘ve decided to start a new series entitled “My Reading Life” where I interview people who I think are interesting about the books they love. This week I was able to interview Scott Santens, who is the Editor of Basic Income Today, and serves on the board of directors of both the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and also USBIG, Inc.
Check out the interview here:
http://www.athinsliceofanxiety.com/2019/07/my-reading-life-with-scott-santens_27...

Came across this fabulous quote while reading Utopia for Realists by the brilliant Rutger Bergman.

Do you believe in equality, human dignity and rights? Or do you believe in the almighty free market and fundamentalist capitalism, and that the poor, the homeless and people with disability are a burden on economy and need to be ignored and left to die silently on the margins of society?
Either Way, read this book!
#nonfiction #enlightenment

Wow ... this is a book which will make you think. Bregman argues convincingly that whether we like it or not automation is going to change the face of society and work, the only question being whether the change will be for the better or worse. Questions such as how many hours should we work? Should we institute a minimum living wage? Should we institute higher taxes and seek more of a balance between extreme riches and extreme poverty? Or do we

A book that encourages readers to think big & embrace the idea of working towards utopic visions of society. The author provides some supporting studies/experiments for his favorite big ideas - universal income, shorter workweeks, open borders. Good for building optimism; not as big on action items to bring the ideas into reality.

A universal basic income, a 15-hour work week, and open borders across the world. Not exactly revolutionary ideas, but definitely ideas that could start a revolution. Especially when you learn things like the fact that Nixon proposed the basic income idea way back in 1969! Highly interesting and highly recommended read for those curious about how our future could've been and may still possibly be.

*ADD TO CART* Just bought this one, after some positive comments on Twitter about it. I feel it‘s going to be quite an interesting read. #nonfiction

I heard an interview with Rutger Bregman on an NPR talk show and decided to read his book. This was before the infamous unaired interview with Tucker Carlson. My advice: read it! “If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible. Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.” ⭐️

Today‘s education is focused “on competencies, not values.” But that is exactly the wrong way to prepare people for a future that demands creative problem-solving, prioritizing, and imagination. 🏰 🤖 🌱

damning chapter six: a fifteen-hour workweek

A must read for everyone living in today's modern world.
This book has completely open up my mine about the future and where we will innevitably be.
Very well written don't be put off by the length of the book. 50% of the book is citations as Rutger does not quote facts without backing them up.

Bregman presents the economic ideas of the 21st century in a clear and well-researched/evidenced book. Preaching to the choir with me and the arguments can seem slightly one-sided (acknowledged by Bregman in the final chapter) but stacks the case for universal basic income, 15-hour work week and more migration.. I look forward to a political context where these don't seem extreme or utopian ideas!

Precisely when we should be shouldering the historic task of investing this rich, safe, and healthy existence with meaning, we‘ve buried utopia instead...most people in wealthy countries believe children will actually be worse off than their parents. But the real crisis of our times is not that we don‘t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can‘t come up with anything better.

We are living in an age of biblical prophecies come true. What would have seemed miraculous in the Middle Ages is now commonplace: the blind restored to sight, cripples who can walk, and the dead returned to life. Take the Argus II, a brain implant that restores a measure of sight to people with genetic eye conditions...Or the Rheobatrachus, a species of frog that became extinct in 1983 but has literally been brought back to life using old DNA.

In the twenty-first century, the real elite are those born not in the right family or the right class but in the right country.

If there‘s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it‘s in the classroom. Yet that‘s barely happening... The focus is on competencies, not values. On didactics, not ideals. On problem-solving ability, not which problems need solving...If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential 21st century skill.

Even utopias need a tax clause. For example, we could start with a transactions tax to rein in the financial industry. Back in 1970, American stocks were still held for an average of five years; 40 years later, it‘s a mere five days. If we imposed a transactions tax-each time you buy or sell a stock-those high-frequency traders who contribute nothing of social value would no longer profit from split-second buying and selling of financial assets.

the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering...If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who‘s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday. Environmental pollution even does double duty: One company makes a mint by cutting corners while another is paid to clean up the mess.

Bizarrely, it‘s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries. It‘s a fascinating, paradoxical state of affairs. How is it possible that all those agents of prosperity – the teachers, the police officers, the nurses – are paid so poorly, while the unimportant, superfluous, and even destructive shifters do so well?

The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it‘s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace.

After decades of fruitless pushing, pulling, pampering, penalizing, prosecuting, and protecting, nine notorious vagrants had finally been brought in from the streets. The cost? Some (e8,000 a year, including the social workers' wages. In other words, not only did the project help 13 people, it also cut costs considerably. Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008)

Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It‘s not about stupidity

I've been reading a lot of books this summer that are about improving the world in radical ways using practical changes. This book is the best of these that I have read thus far. This book does not need some fantastic technology, instead it shows how these are things that could be done within a single generation and dramatically shape every single person's daily life simply by using evidence and reason. Would highly recommend.

Would recommend this book. It deals with the facts of how society is and how it could be better very well and without being too doom and gloom. Fairly easy to read even with the basic economics stuff in it. I would definitely sign up to a fifteen hour week.

So true.

#basicincome #fairsociety

Along with the rest of the books I've got on my reading shelf I've just started this one too...I've been looking forward to this one.

Besides being blind to lots of good things, the GDP also benefits from all manner of human suffering. Gridlock, drug abuse, adultery? Goldmines for gas stations, rehab centers, and divorce attorneys. If you were the GDP, your ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who's going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and going berserk on Black Friday.

Eradicating poverty in the U.S. would only cost $175 billion, less than 1% of GDP. That's roughly a quarter of U.S. military spending.

And, too often, it seems as if those on the left actually like losing. As if all the failure, the doom, and the atrocities mainly serve to prove they were right all along. "There's a kind of activism," Rebecca Solit remarks in her book Hope in the Dark, "that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results."

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones. --John Maynard Keynes

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that the only purpose of economic forecasts is to give astrology a better image.

The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed. --William Gibson (b. 1948)

From telemarketers to tax consultants, there's a rock-solid rationale for creating one bullshit job after another: You can net a fortune without ever producing a thing.

"People take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level." --George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

In Europe, the number of vacant houses is double the number of homeless. In the U.S., there are five empty homes for each person without one.

Frankly, there's almost no country on Earth where the American Dream is less likely to come true than in the U.S. of A.

This should be an interesting read. I already agree with the first 20 pages: the world has never been better than today! There is less poverty, less war, less malnourishment than any given moment in history.
#stayoptimistic #therightperspective

"'One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one's own beliefs and laugh at them,' observes ... Lyman Tower Sargent. Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind." (P. 28)