Saturday, August 4, 2018

Fair Shot: a very short review

Chris Hughes has had a very unusual life: prep school and Ivy League educated, he happened to be Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at college and found himself a co-founder of Facebook. Before long, he was retired and trying to figure out what to do with his life.

To his credit, he actually gave this some thought, and tells his story in a short memoir/policy proposal called Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn.

Over the last decade, he's tried various things: becoming involved in politics during the Obama campaign; buying and running a political magazine; getting involved with various charities; eventually making a trip to Africa to try to understand how various non-profits were trying to improve the lives of African villagers.

After all of this, he learns about the ideas that have been bouncing around about "Universal Basic Income," and comes to believe this is a viable and useful approach, so he has written Fair Shot to describe the ideas in more detail.

He calls his effort the Economic Security Project; you can read more about it.

Universal Basic Income is getting a fair amount of press these days; it's an interesting idea.

And it's certainly a more useful thing to talk about than some of the other things that seem to be dominating conversations nowadays. Fair Shot didn't change my mind one way or the other, but I found it an interesting book to read.

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