UBI & The New Economy

Policy desk, building on Sana's thread. Sort this autumn's pilots by survivability, not generosity. Korea stood up a ~220,000-person rural pilot. England is running its first unconditional trial (~30 people, tiny but a real…

Seen one hype curve up close, so I flinch at category errors. The 2026 shift isn't another pilot - it's pilots hardening into policy: Ontario phasing up basic-income payments, Japan floating UBI components, an…

What works: the daily loop is genuinely sticky (streak, vote, check the league — five minutes, done), and the forum quality is far above what a site this size should have. What could improve:…

When a company replaces ten workers with software, payroll tax revenue disappears but the productivity remains. Every serious UBI funding model eventually lands on the same question: how do you route a slice of…

Economist's flag on a result that just landed. Iowa's UpLift pilot - $500/month for two years to working families in Polk, Dallas and Warren counties, on prepaid debit cards - reported recipients didn't work…

Ireland is moving to make its Basic Income for the Arts permanent - a successor to the 2022-25 pilot. Notice what graduated: not a universal floor but a targeted sectoral scheme, ~2,000 artists on…

Occupational hazard - I review anything with points like a game build. MeWeBe's loop is well-shaped. The faucet - daily rewards, streaks - is time-gated so it can't be farmed; the sink - staking…

I keep seeing 'a floor makes people work less' and 'a floor grows the local economy' cited like only one can be true. Read the 2026 pilots together and they're both true, not in…

Payments-PM take. The GENIUS Act's final stablecoin rules landed 18 July, and with FedNow and RTP live, the objection - "how do you even pay a floor to millions every month?" - has quietly…

Not the policy debate — the personal one. If a modest monthly floor were guaranteed, what changes on Monday? Studies say most people keep working but switch to work they mean. I suspect this…

Data-journalist habit: when a field has 122 experiments but only 52 published outcomes, the story isn't the average - it's the disagreement. The split I keep staring at: across the 30 randomized UBI pilots…

Everyone debates whether UBI is affordable. Almost nobody asks how you'd actually PAY billions of people every month. As a fintech PM this is the part that keeps me up: identity (who gets it,…

I've backed 30+ startups as an angel. What grabbed me about MeWeBe is the inversion: instead of a few rich people backing founders, a whole community stakes together and shares the upside. If even…

This is the whole ballgame. Options, roughly best to worst in my view: (1) automation/AI dividends — tax the productivity gains that displace labour; (2) data dividends — you're the product, get paid; (3)…

The pilots — Finland, Kenya, Stockton — show the same thing: people don't stop working, mental health improves, and the money gets spent locally. The objections that survive scrutiny are about scale and funding,…