Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Prize in Economics
agrees
Basic Income
I am very much in favour, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market
Cory Doctorow, Writer, blogger, activist.
agrees
Net neutrality
The internet isn't nearly so important as racial injustice and vanquishing white supremacy, nor smashing patriarchy, nor rescuing our planet from looters and clmate vandals, nor feudal inequality: but EVERY ONE of those fights will be won or lost with the internet
Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned.
Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
agrees
Vaccines
Vaccines do more than save lives: they can also reduce the use of antibiotics and slow the spread of resistance.
Stephen Hawking, British physicist
The primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.
Amnesty International, Human rights organisation
agrees
Encryption is a human right
People everywhere should be able to encrypt their communications and personal data as an essential protection of their rights to privacy and free speech. Encryption is a basic prerequisite for privacy and free speech in the digital age. Banning encryption is like banning envelopes and curtains. It takes away a basic tool for keeping your private life private.
Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain
Worrying about the rise of evil killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation and pollution on Mars before we've even set foot on it - an unnecessary distraction.
Jamie Oliver, British celebrity chef and restaurateur
agrees
Soda taxes
We should be big and bold. Who is running the country? The businesses who are profiting from ill health or is it us
Katharine Hayhoe, Atmospheric scientist and associate professor of political science at Texas Tech University
agrees
Carbon Tax
We don’t have a price on carbon. And because there is no price, we lack the information to make sound decisions.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and president of the Royal Society
I am very happy eating transgenic maize. Genetically modified foods can make a difference: adapted to drought or more nutrients in a crop such as Golden Rice, in which precursors of vitamin A are introduced and can help prevent childhood blindness.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Social Rights Activist Who Fought Apartheid
agrees
Basic Income
The basic income movement is designed to enhance the dignity and well-being inclusion of all people and move us closer to our vision of social equity
Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup
agrees
Basic Income
Even an extremely modest universal basic income could pay huge dividends
Ray Kurzweil, Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist
agrees
Basic Income
Adopting a universal basic income for all people can help society think creatively with new ideas, develop new industries — and free-up people to work on important future projects. This practical social support program can grow as science & technology rapidly evolve, becoming part of world abundance.
Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
agrees
Robot Tax
Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.
William A. Darity, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University
agrees
Job Guarantee
Each job offered under a federal employment assurance would be at a wage rate above the poverty threshold, and would include benefits like health insurance. A public sector job guarantee would establish a quality of work and the level of compensation offered for all jobs. The program would be great for the country: It could meet a wide range of the nation’s physical and human infrastructure needs,...
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Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT
agrees
Carbon Tax
If we're willing to send half a million fellow citizens into battle, to protect oil supplies and our economic way of life, we should be no less willing to make the small sacrifice of paying more for gasoline. A revenue-neutral plan that reduced Social Security taxes by $1 billion for every penny a gallon of gas tax would leave the working poor and middle class better off than before. In the long t...
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Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
disagrees
Social media threaten democracy
I felt sure that allowing anyone to publish information and making it easy to find would enhance democracy and the overall quality of political debate. However, the partitioning you talk about which started on cable TV and might be even stronger in the digital world is a concern. We all need to think about how to avoid this problem. It would seem strange to have to force people to look at ideas th...
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Jean-Claude Juncker,
The European Union [note: not only the Eurozone] should have a minister of economy and finance. Such a minister should also be the chairman of all euro zone finance ministers and be accountable to the European Parliament.
Goldman Sachs, American investment bank
agrees
Cryptocurrencies
We think the concept of a digital currency that leverages blockchain technology is viable given the benefits it could provide: ease of execution globally, lower transaction costs, reduction of corruption since all transactions could be traced, safety of ownership, and so on. But bitcoin does not provide any of these key advantages.
Justice Thomas Waterman, Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court
agrees
Surrogacy
Banning gestational surrogacy contracts would deprive infertile couples of perhaps the only way to raise their own biological children and would limit the contractual rights of willing surrogates.
Barack Obama, Former President of United States of America
agrees
Carbon Tax
I have long believed that the most elegant way to drive innovation and to reduce carbon emissions is to put a price on it
National Geographic, Magazine
agrees
Vaccines
If children in poor countries got the shots that rich countries take for granted, hundreds of thousands of young lives could be saved.
Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google
I am grateful to the transgender members of the military for their service
Barack Obama, Former President of United States of America
For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a cha... See More
Zeynep Tufekci, Associate Professor at the University of Carolina, writer and techno-sociologist
Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harassment, and distraction
World Health Organization, The United Nations' health agency
agrees
Soda taxes
There is reasonable and increasing evidence that appropriately designed taxes on sugarsweetened beverages would result in proportional reductions in consumption, especially if aimed at raising the retail price by 20% or more
Oxford University,
agrees
Soda taxes
The planned [UK] sugar tax could slash obesity among young children by 10 per cent and create health by stealth
Barack Obama, Former President of United States of America
agrees
Net neutrality
Internet providers have a legal obligation not to block or limit your access to a website. Cable companies can't decide which online stores you should shop at or which streaming services you can use. And they can't let any company pay for priority over its competitors.
Mike Bloomberg, American businessman and politician, former mayor of new york city
agrees
Health taxes
Noncommunicable diseases are a growing global crisis, especially in low-and-middle income countries. There’s substantial evidence that taxes and fiscal policies are essential to confronting this health threat.
Tom Steinberg, Founder and former director of mySociety
One of the most visible signs of victory in this battle for greater protection of people’s data has been a steady increase in the number of personal data choices that an average person is asked to make every week. Popups now abound asking for your permission to do this and that, some of them driven by company policies, others driven by legal requirements. I’m increasingly of the mind that present... See More
Jeremy Corbyn, British labour party politician
agrees
Robot Tax
Companies that replace workers with robots should be taxed in a new settlement between work and leisure. We need urgently to face the challenge of automation; robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant
Mike Bloomberg, American businessman and politician, former mayor of new york city
agrees
Soda taxes
Noncommunicable diseases are a growing global crisis, especially in low-and-middle income countries. There’s substantial evidence that taxes and fiscal policies are essential to confronting this health threat.
Angela Merkel, German Chancellor
The new economics and finance minister role could provide greater coherence to economic policy across the bloc
Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
disagrees
Basic Income
Even the US isn't rich enough to allow people not to work. Some day we will be but until then things like the Earned Income Tax Credit will help increase the demand for labor.
Noam Chomsky, Linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist
agrees
Basic Income
It comes from the right wing originally. Milton Friedman proposed it for example. From his point of view it was part of an effort to undermine welfare state measures. But it doesn’t have to have a reactionary component. It can be interpreted as something progressive. That people have rights. In fact if you read the universal declaration of human rights, 1948, take a look at article 45. It says peo...
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Bill Gates, Philanthropist. Founder and former CEO of Microsoft.
I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent...A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.
Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
disagrees
Basic Income
Paying people not to work will only increase inequality and rancor. [...] If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail.
Nick Bostrom,
Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb [...] We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound
NASA, Space agency from United States
Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the "greenhouse effect"
Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist
agrees
Carbon Tax
Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax.
Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
agrees
Basic Income
It is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality
Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor in economics
agrees
Carbon Tax
People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.
Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain
disagrees
Basic Income
I do not believe in unconditional basic income because this just encourages people to be trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work.
So rather than to pay people to “do nothing” I would rather see a new “New deal” where we pay you to study because I think that today we know how to educate people at scale and the society is pretty good at finding meaningf...
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Elon Musk, Founder of SpaceX, cofounder of Tesla, SolarCity & PayPal
agrees
Carbon Tax
Not paying carbon taxes is like not paying for garbage collection.
Yanis Varoufakis, Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens
agrees
Basic Income
Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.
Cyrus Vance Jr., New York County District Attorney
disagrees
Encryption is a human right
The United States Constitution provides that local law enforcement agents may obtain access to places where criminals hide evidence – including their homes, car trunks, storage facilities, computers, and digital networks – so long as the agents have a search warrant issued by a judge. Carved into the bedrock of the Fourth Amendment is a balance between the privacy rights of individuals and the pub...
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Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics and Musician
disagrees
Basic Income
A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.
John Clarke, Social Activist. Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Canada.
disagrees
Basic Income
If we are to go on the offensive against the neoliberal agenda, surely it is the fight for free, expanded and accessible public services that should be our focus. If present systems of income support for unemployed, sick and disabled people are inadquate, we can demand full entitlement, adequate income and an end to intrusive rules and moral policing.However, rather than hope for a tax funded paym...
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Chris Hedges, American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer.
disagrees
Basic Income
The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal governm...
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Karl Brenke, Economist at the German Institute for Economics (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaft DIW) in Berlin
disagrees
Basic Income
The idea of freedom, which is connected with UBI, is essentially the opposite: namely the loss of freedom. It is no longer individual citizens who take care of themselves, but the state. The citizen thus becomes the subject of an increasingly powerful state. And because the state provides its citizens with income – which it has previously taken out of their pockets in the form of taxes – all futur...
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