Hey! Just happened upon this article while searching for something else. Hope the necro isn’t minded.
I wanted to point out that since this article was written—and especially in the last year—basic income at least has become a lot more mainstream. There’s the (failed) Swiss referendum, and apparently Finland and YCombinator are both running basic income trials as well. (More locally, there’s of course the GiveDirectly UBI trial as well.)
Anecdotally, it seems like these events have also been accompanied by many more people (in my particular bubble) being familiar with the idea. Empirically, see below for a graph of [number of articles mentioning basic income] per year in the New York Times in the link below. EDIT: in an April survey “A majority of Europeans (58%) reported to have at least some familiarity with the concept of basic income, and 64% of Europeans said they would vote in favour of basic income.” Not sure about the US at large, though.
Obviously it’s debatable how well we could have foreseen this, but it might be worth thinking about a) to what degree we can predict(/affect) which “weird” idea will gain traction and b) to what extent (the possibility of) this sort of rapid increase in acceptability allows for some relaxation of the “weirdness points” framework.
Hey! Just happened upon this article while searching for something else. Hope the necro isn’t minded.
I wanted to point out that since this article was written—and especially in the last year—basic income at least has become a lot more mainstream. There’s the (failed) Swiss referendum, and apparently Finland and YCombinator are both running basic income trials as well. (More locally, there’s of course the GiveDirectly UBI trial as well.)
Anecdotally, it seems like these events have also been accompanied by many more people (in my particular bubble) being familiar with the idea. Empirically, see below for a graph of [number of articles mentioning basic income] per year in the New York Times in the link below. EDIT: in an April survey “A majority of Europeans (58%) reported to have at least some familiarity with the concept of basic income, and 64% of Europeans said they would vote in favour of basic income.” Not sure about the US at large, though.
Obviously it’s debatable how well we could have foreseen this, but it might be worth thinking about a) to what degree we can predict(/affect) which “weird” idea will gain traction and b) to what extent (the possibility of) this sort of rapid increase in acceptability allows for some relaxation of the “weirdness points” framework.
NYT link. Note, too, the basic income “bubble” in the ~’70s. http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=%22basic%20income%22&format=count
Results from that April EU survey summarized here: http://www.basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/EU_Basic-Income-Poll_Results.pdf