"consider the contrast between how cars and houses are marketed. Cars are sold under brand names, and we have a dual system of federal regulation of designs for safety and auto makers designing cars that are safer than federal regulations require, with certification by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Houses are mainly sold without brand names (I couldn’t tell you who built the house I own here in Alabama) with safety assurances coming through building codes. Many times we see that homes perform poorly in tornadoes or hurricanes, while during a commercial break on the Weather Channel last night there was a car ad touting the model’s crash test rating from the IIHS. If houses are indeed flimsy, there is probably a systematic reason for this."

"Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society."

"Boosting the labor supply is no aim in itself. No one can reasonably want an overworked, hyperactive society. Give people of all classes the opportunity to reduce their working time or even take a complete break from work in order to look after their children or elderly relatives. You will not only save on prisons and hospitals. You will also improve the human capital of the next generation. A modest UBI is a simple and effective instrument in the service of keeping a socially and economically sound balance between the supply of paid labor and the rest of our lives."

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To discuss the connection between UBI and the green movement, it is useful to view the latter as an alliance of two components. Very schematically, the environmental component’s central concern is with the pollution generated by industrial society. Its central objective is the establishment of a society that can be sustained by its physical environment. The green-alternative component’s central concern, on the other hand, is with the alienation generated by industrial society. Its central objective is to establish a society in which people spend a great deal of their time on “autonomous” activities, ruled by neither the market nor the state. For both components, there is something very attractive in the idea of a UBI.

The environmentalists’ chief foe is productivism, the obsessive pursuit of economic growth. And one of the most powerful justifications for fast growth, in particular among the working class and its organizations, is the fight against unemployment. The UBI, as argued above, is a coherent strategy for tackling unemployment without relying on faster growth. The availability of such a strategy undermines the broad productivist coalition and thereby improves the prospects for realizing environmentalist objectives in a world in which pollution (even in the widest sense) is not the only thing most people care about.

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"If the motive in combating unemployment is not some sort of work fetishism–an obsession with keeping everyone busy–but rather a concern to give every person the possibility of taking up gainful employment in which she can find recognition and accomplishment, then the UBI is to be preferred."