I caught up with Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and now honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international NGO that promotes basic income.
His latest and new book is Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now.
Today in one the richest countries in the world, 60% of households in poverty have people in jobs, inequality is the highest it has been for 100 years, climate change threatens our extinction and automation means millions are forced into a life of precarity. The solution? Basic Income.
Here, Guy Standing, the leading expert on the concept, explains how to solve the new eight evils of modern life, and all for almost zero net cost. There is a better future, one that makes certain all citizens can share in the wealth of the modern economy. Far from being a new idea, Standing shows how the roots of basic income go back to the Charter of the Forest, one of two foundational documents of the state – the other, sealed on the same day, being the Magna Carta.
His recent books include Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017), The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (2016); with others, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (2015); A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014); and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), which has been translated into 23 languages.
