Monthly Archives: November 2020

Vinay Gupta

Interesting insight, from the last few slides of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go: a major problem with poverty is precarity, the inability to manage the ups and downs of having money one day and not the next. Stressful, hard to plan.

UBI manages the income side, but doesn’t limit the swings of the things you spend money on. One day, your cat gets sick and you have to pay a vet bill. The way we normally handle this is insurance, to smooth out the dips for a (small) cost, say 1-2% of income.

So, UBI + micro-insurance becomes a way to make poverty basically very stable and boring, instead of unstable and stressful. And you can go beyond UBI + micro-insurance to the next level, where risk increases, stress increases, and so does reward.

Interesting guy. His business is Mattereum, the application of Ethereum blockchain to things, in service of a vision of efficiency of consumption that in eliminating waste also supports economic justice (!) Check out https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/engineering-consumption-ac3bd74b1a21