Posts

Unconditional Basic Income. People around the world are in desperate need of economic relief in a pandemic that has exposed and exacerbated extreme levels of disparity and poverty. A basic income could be the solution. In this episode, we speak with Scott Santens, a writer and advocate for UBI who is also the first person to crowdfund his own poverty-level basic income. We ask about his argument for UBI, the barriers to achieving it, and the future he sees possible for humanity.

How do you jumpstart an economy in a community that has no money? Create a new currency. Will Ruddick is one of the directors of Grassroots Economics, a non-profit foundation focused on community development through economic empowerment and community currency programs. By creating new and secure currencies with blockchain, marginalized communities can more easily become self-sustaining economies.

Rachel Cook, founder of Seeds, is the architect of a new economy. The way Rachel sees it, there’s more than enough money in the world to meet every human being’s needs. But in our current monetary system, the flow of that money is carefully controlled by gatekeepers like banks and investors. Using the power of cryptocurrency, Rachel’s  opening new pathways for giving, allowing wealth to flow more easily from person to person.  Once the barriers blocking access to wealth are broken down, suddenly anything seems possible.

Who’s responsible for our happiness? For most people, finding happiness–true happiness–is a personal journey. But what if the government  took on some of that responsibility? In this episode, we speak with Dasho Karma Ura, President of the Center for Bhutan Studies on Gross National Happiness. We ask about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, key findings, and what we can do to bring us all more happiness.

Jean-François Noubel calls himself an ‘open source earthling’. Though he lives in France, he considers his true home to be within himself. Like a turtle. And though he lives within a market economy, he chooses to live as much as he can in a gift economy instead, without money. But why? As a researcher of collective intelligence, Jean-Francois sees currency as the tool that informs the design of human society. He believes we have to expand our concept of wealth and redesign the currencies that connect us to create economics systems that are fair, civil, and transparent.