A national basic income would fundamentally alter the distribution of disposable income, driving a wide variety of changes in consumption, labor, municipal financing, and beyond. At a time of rapid economic change, such a reform can both provide relief to individual consumers and address inefficiencies in the broader economic system. However, the enactment of a national basic income could produce unforeseen consequences. Scott Santens, Joshua Zane Miller, and Max Ghenis meet to discuss the macroeconomic effects of a national basic income and how we can prepare.

Acknowledged by Andrew Yang as one of those who helped shape his thinking, Scott Santens has lived with a crowdfunded basic income since 2016 and has been researching and advocating for universal basic income around the world since 2013. He is the author of Let There Be Money and is currently Senior Advisor to Humanity Forward while also serving on the board of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and as the editor of Basic Income Today - a daily UBI news hub. His home is in Washington, D.C. where he just moved from New Orleans with his wife Katie.

Max Ghenis is the founder and president of the UBI Center, a think tank researching basic income policies, and the co-founder and CEO of PolicyEngine, a nonprofit that builds open-source software to compute the impact of public policy. He holds a B.A. in Operations Research from UC Berkeley and an M.S. in Development Economics from MIT.

Joshua Miller is a matriculating freshman at the University of Chicago interested in mathematics and monetary economics. He is a research assistant at the UBI Center. He hosts the ThinkCritical Podcast and runs a blog called InTheAggregate.

Larry Cohen is currently the Program Development Director of the Humanity Forward Foundation, and is a board member of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network. He was active in the Andrew Yang campaign in the Los Angeles area and co-founded the Humanity Forward Fund. He is the founder of BuildTheFloor.org and has previously held roles at TOMS Shoes and The Honest Company.

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Exploring the Macroeconomic Effects of a Basic Income