The public sphere has been a realm of echoing noise, lately, but through it all, readers may have picked up from time to time the notion of a universal basic income — that is, some system or other that guarantees every American a baseline level of money that allows them to subsist, if not live comfortably. Even on the political right, some folks are willing to entertain the idea as a reimagining of the welfare state, but that's not the angle that leads me to bring the question up, just now.
As David Rotman writes in the MIT Technology Review, some folks are seeing a UBI as a way to address the social change when technology ensures that fewer and fewer people actually have to do anything resembling work:
(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State John Kerry appealed to Iran on Thursday to work constructively to help end the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, holding out the prospect of some form of new regional security "arrangement" should Tehran choose to cooperate.
In separate appearances in Manama with his Saudi and Bahraini counterparts, Kerry referred – without elaborating – to the possibility of such an arrangement.
