MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAnnie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment ... More troubling is Lowrey’s blurring of the distinction between a U.B.I. that redistributes resources from the superrich to the growing number of vulnerable lower-income Americans and one that merely turns programs for the poor into cash assistance. The latter may be warranted, but it wouldn’t touch America’s growing scourge of inequality and economic insecurity, which will be made worse as robots take over good jobs ... Most basically, we will have to confront the realities of vastly unequal economic and political power. Even if we manage to enact a U.B.I., it will not be nearly enough.
Andrew Yang
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSeveral recent books have provided good background briefings for what a U.B.I. [universal basic income] could be ... To these offerings, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, adds his own, somewhat breathless version in The War on Normal People. Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment in Give People Money. Both are useful primers on the case for a U.B.I. The two books cover so much of the same terrain that I’m tempted to wonder whether they were written by the same robot, programmed for slightly different levels of giddy enthusiasm ... Yang suggests it would spur a system of \'social credits\' in which people trade their spare time by performing various helpful tasks for one another ... A core challenge in the future will be how to redistribute money from the ever richer owners of the robots and related technologies to the rest of us, who are otherwise likely to become poorer and less secure ... Sadly, neither of these authors discusses how to deal with this paradox.
