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A suggested reading list to provide a foundational understanding on topics such as Social Income, Basic Income, financial aid, and poverty
If you have any additional book recommendations, don't hesitate to let us know.
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty
Poor Economics
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Poor Economics
This eye-opening book overturns the myths about what it is like to live on very little, revealing the unexpected decisions that millions of people make every day. Looking at some of the most paradoxical aspects of life below the poverty line - why the poor need to borrow in order to save, why incentives that seem effective to us may not be for them, and why, despite being more risk-taking than high financiers, they start businesses but rarely grow them.
« Refreshingly original, wonderfully insightful ... an entirely new perspective »
The Guardian
Give People Money
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Give People Money
In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey examines the UBI movement from many angles. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor.
« Like UBI, the book is ambitious, and it presents a strong case for cash aid. »
Financial Times
Development as Freedom
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Development as Freedom
In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism.
By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development — for both rich and poor — in the twenty-first century.
« Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development. »
Amartya Sen
Economist and philosopher
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
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Development as Freedom
Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better?
« Even for small givers, a more rational approach to philanthropy can focus attention on areas that make the biggest enduring contribution to human welfare. »
New York Times
The Coming Age of Imagination
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The Coming Age of Imagination
Phil Teer draws insights from the creative and entrepreneurial effects of basic income experiments and weaves them into stories of how the Romantic poets invented consumerism; artists regenerated cities like New York, Glasgow and Berlin; and creative geniuses like David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami and many others liberated their creative spirits and transformed their lives.
The Coming Age of Imagination is a creative manifesto for universal basic income. When we no longer have to worry about money, we have the opportunity to be creative on a mass scale. Simply put, basic income changes everything.
« Phil Teer has advised brands and governments on their creative strategies. He blogs at Artists Create Markets on Medium and has been fascinated by the power of creativity to transform people and places since he wrote his thesis on Glasgow as a postmodern city. »
The Times Bookshop
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
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Good Economics for Hard Times – Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
In this revolutionary book, prize-winning economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. From immigration to inequality, slowing growth to accelerating climate change, we have the resources to address the challenges we face but we are so often blinded by ideology.
« Wonderfully refreshing . . . A must read »
Thomas Piketty
Utopia For Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
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Utopia For Realists – How We Can Build the Ideal World
Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you thought was possible. From a Canadian city that once eradicated poverty to Richard Nixon's near implementation of basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history and beyond the usual left-right divides to champion exciting ideas whose time has yet come.
« A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell. »
New York Times
The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets
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The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets
Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.
What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.
« The book is written in a highly readable style and is accessible to a non-expert. It provides an overview of the world system and contains three stand-out themes: the persistence of extreme poverty; the environmental impact of global growth; and the claim that charity does little to help. »
John Picton
LSE
The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty
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The Life You Can Save – How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty
In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer makes the convincing argument that giving will make a huge difference in the lives of others without diminishing the quality of our own. This book is an urgent call to action and a hopeful primer on how the power of compassion, mixed with rigorous investigation and careful reasoning, can lift others out of despair.
Singer contends that we need to change our views of what is involved in living an ethical life.
« Mr. Singer is a compelling moral voice seeking far more compassion for those who have the least. »
The Wall Street Journal
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Social Income