17/05/25
“Ideas can and do change the world,” says historian Rutger Bregman, sharing his case for a provocative one: guaranteed basic income. Learn more about the idea’s 500-year history and a forgotten modern experiment where it actually worked — and imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
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Intro
- How much money do you think people need not to suffer from poverty?
- Why do you think the poor are poor?
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Watch
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Glossary
- blunt – uncompromisingly forthright
- scarce – insufficient for the demand
- perplexed – completely baffled; very puzzled
- take sth for granted – fail to properly appreciate
- tinker – attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or desultory way
- unleash – cause (a strong or violent force) to be released or become unrestrained
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Think about it
Answer the questions below.
- What did Rutger and Margaret Thatcher use to have in common?
- What did the IQ tests performer on Indian farmers reveal?
- What is the similarity between the poor and a computer running too many programs at once?
- What did George Orwell say about poverty?
- What is basic income?
- What happened in the town of Dauphne?
- What is the cost of eradicating poverty in the US?
- What is poverty?
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Practice makes perfect
Fill in the blank spaces with the mising words.
It all started when I accidentally stumbled ________ a paper by a few American psychologists. They ________ traveled 8,000 miles, all the way to India, for a fascinating study. And it was ________ experiment with sugarcane farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60 percent of their annual income all ________ once, right after the harvest. This means that they’re relatively poor one part of the year and rich the ________. The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered completely blew my ________. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living ________ poverty, it turns ________, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later, I heard that Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study, was coming over to Holland, ________I live. So we met up in Amsterdam to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty. And I can sum it ________ in just two words: scarcity mentality. It ________ out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn’t ________ matter — whether it’s not enough time, money or food.
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