Universal basic income: The plan to give $12,000 to every American adult

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The Freedom Dividend is a universal basic income proposal initiated by 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

Yang's plan would give $1,000 a month, or $12,000 per year, to every American over the age of 18, every year. This would get every U.S. adult just below the poverty line which is currently $12,770 a year.

How would it be funded? Yang suggests a value added tax on megacorps like Amazon (which paid zero tax last year). Funnel that money back into the American's people's hands to boost the economy, improve mental health, increase education and lower violence.

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ANDREW YANG:

Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur and author who is running for President as a Democrat in 2020. In his book The War on Normal People, he explains the mounting crisis of the automation of labor and makes the case for the Freedom Dividend, a Universal Basic Income of $1,000 a month for every American as well as other policies to progress to the next stage of capitalism.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ANDREW YANG: Universal basic income is an idea that's older than America, where Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country, he called it the citizen's dividend. Decades later Martin Luther King, Jr. was for it. He championed it before he was assassinated in 1968. And Milton Friedman and 1,000 economists signed a study in the late '60s saying this would be tremendous for both the economy and society. It received so much support that it passed the House of Representatives twice under Richard Nixon in 1971. And the only reason it didn't become law was that Democrats in the Senate wanted an even higher income threshold.

So a universal basic income has been with this country for a long time. And it actually became law in one state in 1982 where now every person in Alaska gets between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, no questions asked, from a petroleum dividend. It's wildly popular, has created thousands of jobs, has improved children's health, has decreased income inequality, and it was passed by a Republican governor, who made this argument to the Alaskan people: Who would you rather get the oil money the government, who's just going to mess it up, or you? And the Alaskan people said 'us', and now it's so popular that a majority of Alaskans which is a deeply conservative state generally the majority of Alaskans said they would accept higher taxes to pay for this dividend moving forward.

My plan, the Freedom Dividend, would pay every American adult, starting at age 18, $1,000 a month or $12,000 a year. This would push every American adult to just below the poverty line, which is $12,770 a year right now. But this money would get spent in Main Street businesses, on car repairs, food and tutoring for your kids, the occasional night out, a hardware store. It would go right back into our economy and would create 2 million new jobs, would grow the consumer economy by 8% to 10%, would make our families and communities stronger, would improved children's health and nutrition, would improve everyone's mental health and productivity. It would decrease domestic violence and hospital visits. So universal basic income is a powerful policy that helps improve human welfare, and that's why I'm proposing it as the centerpiece of my candidacy for president.

So the way I propose to pay for a universal basic income is based on a problem we have right now in our country, which is that more and more work and value is getting sucked up and soaked up by a handful of technology companies. Amazon, for example, is doing another $20 billion in commerce every year, and it's now pushing 30% of American malls and Main Street stores into closing. And so for the average American, you're seeing your Main Street stores close, and unfortunately being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States. The average retail worker is a 39-year-old woman making between $11 and $12 an hour. So the problem America is facing is that even as Amazon is soaking up more and more value, they're not paying much in the way of taxes. You probably saw the headline where last year Amazon enjoyed record profits and paid zero in federal taxes. And so the way we pay for a universal basic income is we put the American people in position to benefit from all this innovation by passing a value added tax, which is something that's already in effect in every other advanced economy. With a value added tax, the American publ...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/universal-basic-income

For a long time, the West shaped the world. That time is over.

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Our theories about the world, even about history or the geopolitics of the present, tend to be shaped by Anglo perspectives of the Western industrial democracies, particularly those in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The West, however, is not united. Canada, for instance, acts in many ways that are not in line with American or British policies, particularly in regard to populism. Even if it were united, though, it would not represent most of the world's population. European ideas, such as parliamentary democracy and civil service, spread across the world in the 19th century.

In the 20th century, American values such as entrepreneurialism went global. In the 21st century, however, what we're seeing now is an Asianization — an Asian confidence that they can determine their own political systems, their own models, and adapt to their own circumstances.

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PARAG KHANNA:

Dr. Parag Khanna is Managing Partner of FutureMap. His books include "The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century" (2019). He is also author of "The Second World" (2008), "How to Run the World" (2011), and "Connectography" (2016). He is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

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TRANSCRIPT:

PARAG KHANNA: Our views and our theories about the world, even about history or the geopolitics of the present, tend to be shaped by the perspectives of the Western industrial democracies. And that means particularly, not just Western Europe and the United States and North America, but rather just the U.S. and the U.K. because of the English language and the role that the English language plays in shaping the overall global discourse. However, more and more what we're seeing is that particularly the U.S. and the U.K. have fallen a bit afoul of the kind of normative constructs that we tend to think of for a normal country, given the populism that is gripping both countries politically.

In fact, you can't really speak in a united way about Western civilization. Canada acts in many ways that are very similar to Western European. And countries like Germany and France have a very different political economy, if you will, than certainly the United Kingdom or the United States because they are the more traditional, social democratic welfare states. So within the West there is the social democratic welfare of states of Western Europe, and there is the more free market kinds of systems of the U.S. and the U.K.

So not only is the West not unified, and even if it were, it would still not represent the vast majority of the world's population. And so another reason why people are more and more calling into question the wisdom, the sanctity, the universality of the models of Western economies and politics is because they really don't speak to the experience today of 85 percent of the world's population, which are governed in very, very diverse ways. Now, the Europeanization of the world in the 19th century did spread parliamentary democracy and civil service and some kind of enlightenment values around the world. And 20th century Americanization also reinforced, to some degree, the virtues of democracy and entrepreneurialism and so forth. However, still, in this century of Asianization in the 21st century, there is a rising Asian confidence that they can determine their own political systems, their own models, adapt them to their own circumstances.

So, for example, they are very comfortable in Asia having a strong role for the state, for the government in the economy, meaning subsidizing industries, dictating which industries should be short of winners and be given more support from the government, having more non-tariff barriers and these kinds of restrictions on foreign investment and so forth to help to steer the economy in a direction that they consider to be stable and progressive and benefiting the whole country. So that's something that Asians are familiar with and comfortable with. And it obviously runs afoul of some traditional Western norms. That's one example. There are other examples also about Asians challenge the Western conventional wisdom and status quo. Many Asian societies, even democratic ones, have a preference for a technocratic kind of government. So they elect leaders, even in the democracies, like India or Indonesia and the Philippines, but they want to have a strong executive leader who has a long-term vision and a real a...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/global-asianization

Why the ocean you know and love won’t exist in 50 years

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Coral reefs may not be able to survive another human decade because of the environmental stress we have placed on them, says author David Wallace-Wells. He posits that without meaningful changes to policies, the trend of them dying out, even in light of recent advances, will continue.

The World Wildlife Fund says that 60 percent of all vertebrate mammals have died since just 1970. On top of this, recent studies suggest that insect populations may have fallen by as much as 75 percent over the last few decades.

If it were not for our oceans, the planet would probably be already several degrees warmer than it is today due to the emissions we've expelled into the atmosphere.

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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: I think there's basically no chance that coral reefs survive another generation. I think that we're looking at the total extinction of those biospheres by 2050 or so. There are some scientists who think there's some hope, and there have been some coral reefs that have recovered. But the impacts are so fast and so catastrophic, and we're so far from really changing course on carbon, it's hard for me to imagine that they endure, which means that the trips that we're now taking now to view those, we'll be taking really on the brink of mass extinctions.

And it's important to keep in mind that globally, we are living already through mass extinction. The World Wildlife Fund says that 60 percent of all vertebrate mammals have died since just 1970. There have been studies that say that insect populations may have fallen by as much as 75 percent over the last few decades. Animals are dying globally at rates never before seen in planetary history, and we are living through that and imposing those costs on the planet ourselves. The ocean is a particularly vulnerable system. It's not just the coral reefs. It's also the circulation patterns. It's the fish populations. And it happens we're also polluting the oceans with enormous amounts of plastic, which are really damaging. I think those people who really love the oceans should be quite terrified.

I think these ecosystems will be transformed really dramatically, very quickly, so that populations of fishermen that lived for decades on a particular fish community offshore will now have to find an entirely different way of life, because those fish will be swimming in totally different waters. And that is true at every level of the ocean ecosystem. The suffering there is not going to be any different than the suffering on land or the suffering experienced by humans. It will be quite catastrophic if we don't radically change course very, very quickly. And this is in part because the oceans do a lot to absorb warming. So the impacts are felt most intensely there.

If it were not for oceans, the planet would probably be already several degrees warmer than it is, but so much of the additional heat that we've been hot housing the planet with over the last few decades has been taken up by the ocean, and that means that the ocean has been totally transformed by that temperature.

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Why are so many objects in space shaped like discs?

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Spinning discs are everywhere – just look at our solar system, the rings of Saturn, and all the spiral galaxies in the universe. Spinning discs are the result of two things: The force of gravity and a phenomenon in physics called the conservation of angular momentum.

Gravity brings matter together; the closer the matter gets, the more it accelerates – much like an ice skater who spins faster and faster the closer their arms get to their body.

Then, this spinning cloud collapses due to up and down and diagonal collisions that cancel each other out until the only motion they have in common is the spin – and voila: A flat disc.

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MICHELLE THALLER:

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: Rick, you have noticed one of the most wonderful and consistent patterns in the whole universe. The universe is very good at making spinning discs. Our solar system is a disc, and all the planets go around in basically the same plane, and they all go around in the same direction. Why should that be?

There are discs all over the place. I mean, think about the rings of Saturn. The rings of Saturn are also very, very thin, and they all go around in the same direction. Galaxies, spiral galaxies are one big disc with everything moving around a common center. Discs seem to be something that the universe likes to make. And, in fact, that really is true. And it has to do with a number of things. It has to do with the force of gravity and something called the conservation of angular momentum.

Now, gravity is very good at bringing stuff together and bringing it together so it becomes denser and denser and begins to fall into the center. Our solar system formed out of a giant cloud of dust and gas about 4 and 1/2 billion years ago. It was actually many trillions of miles across at first, but it had to get much smaller in order for the densities to get high enough and the temperatures also to get warm enough inside to give birth to the Sun, actually ignite a star. So you have this collapsing cloud of dust.

OK, well, you can sort of understand that gravity wants to bring all that together, but why does it start to spin up? There's something called the conservation of angular momentum. And that basically says that if anything has any spin at all, even just a little bit of motion, as gravity brings it together and makes it smaller, that spin is accelerated; it's sped up. And probably the example most people know best of all – you can actually feel this if you want to do this – but an ice skater. If you've seen an ice skater do a spin, usually what they do is that they have their arms outstretched, and they're spinning around relatively slowly. And then they bring their arms in, and they spin faster and faster. It's kind of amazing that any person can keep their balance when they do that. That is an application of the conservation of angular momentum. You have an extended body, your arms are out, and you're spinning slowly. In order to conserve the energy in that spin, as that body becomes smaller, the spin goes faster and faster. And so what happens in these clouds is that a cloud usually has just a tiny little bit of a drift velocity. It's going around the galaxy or maybe a nearby star exploded, and it's kind of all moving in one direction. The cloud itself has a little bit of velocity as a cloud, as a whole. Particles inside that cloud could be going any which way.

But as the cloud begins to come together under gravity, any little bit of spin gets accelerated, actually becomes faster. And so as the cloud collapses, any little directional drift becomes a spin, and the cloud itself begins to spin around. OK, so that gets you a spinning cloud. Why does it collapse down into a disc? And this is an interesting bit ...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/why-are-so-many-objects-in-space-shaped-like-discs

The colossal problem with universal basic income

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Universal basic income is a band-aid solution that will not solve wealth inequality, says Rushkoff.

Funneling money to the 99% perpetuates their roles as consumers, pumping money straight back up to the 1% at the top of the pyramid.

Rushkoff suggests universal basic assets instead, so that the people at the bottom of the pyramid can own some means of production and participate in the profits of mega-rich companies.

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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF:

Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and a professor of digital economics at CUNY/Queens. He is also the author of a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and Team Human, the last of which is his latest work.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: For a long time I was a fan of universal basic income. And the logic I had was that I always hear politicians talking about, 'Let's create jobs for people. That's what we need is jobs, more jobs,' as if that's what's going to solve the economic problem. So the government is supposed to lend money to a bank, who can then lend money to a corporation, who will then build a factory in order for people to have jobs. Do we really need more jobs? In California, they're tearing down houses as we speak, because the houses are in foreclosure, and they want to keep market values high. The US Department of Agriculture burns food every week in order to keep the prices of that food high, even though there's people who are starving and people who need homes. We can't just let people have those homes. Why? Because they don't have jobs. So now we're supposed to create jobs for people to make useless stuff for other people to buy plastic crap that we're going to throw away or stick in storage units or end up in landfill just so those people can have jobs so that we can justify letting them participate in the abundance. And that's kind of ass backwards.

So I thought, well, shoot, rather than creating useless jobs, what if we just let people have the stuff that's in abundance? Just let people have the houses. What's the problem with this? And UBI kind of goes along that lines of, well, if we have more than enough stuff, if we don't need everybody working all the time, then why don't we just let people have income? Or at least go to a four-day workweek or a three-day workweek or a two-day workweek. If work is the thing that's scarce, then why don't we mete that out and say, 'OK, we've got these 10 days that you're allowed to work this year. So come on, come onto the farm and do that work, and then you'll have to find something else for you to do the rest of the time.' But in reality, it's not like that. If we were really that efficient, then we wouldn't be destroying the planet with pollution. What we've done is found ways of making stuff and doing things that require very little labor, but externalize a host of other problems to a whole lot of other places. So we could 3D print or something, but where do you get the plastic goop for your 3D printer? What mine in Africa is it coming out of, and which topsoil is it destroying? You know, when we're going to run out of topsoil in 60 years, it means that we're not actually using the appropriate labor intensive permaculture solutions in agriculture and all that. So first off, that whole idea that we're moving towards lower employment is a myth. We've faked lower employment through extremely extractive, exploitative, polluting, and unsustainable business practices.

And second, I was giving a talk at Uber, and I was talking to them about the problems with their business model and how they're putting all these drivers out of work. And here they are, these freelancers working for the company, basically training the algorithms that will be replacing them without any profit participation in the end-game company. And one of the guys got up and basically quoted back to me a passage from my own book, "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" he said, well, what about universal basic income? And when I heard it coming out of their mouths, I realized, 'Oh.' So universal basic income isn't just a way to help people have the money they need to survive and have time to innovate and come up with other solutions. It's becoming an excuse for companies like Uber to not pay a living wage to their workers. So what's the idea? Oh, we'll get the government to...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/the-colossal-problem-with-universal-basic-income

Saying no is hard. These communication tips make it easy.

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Give yourself permission to say "no" to things. Saying yes to everything is a fast way to burn out.

Learn to say no in a way that keeps the door of opportunity open: No should never be a one-word answer. Say "No, but I could do this instead," or, "No, but let me connect you to someone who can help."

If you really want to say yes but can't manage another commitment, try qualifiers like "yes, if," or "yes, after."

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MICHELLE TILIS LEDERMAN:

Michelle Tillis Lederman, CSP, CPA, PCC, is a speaker, trainer, and author specializing in workplace communications and relationships. She was named one of Forbes Top 25 Networking Experts. Her new book is The Connector's Advantage: 7 Mindsets to Grow Your Influence and Impact (2019).

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE TILLIS LEDERMAN: "No" doesn't feel so good. We feel a little uncomfortable. We feel bad saying no. "No" to something is "yes" to something else. And that's the first thing you need to think about to give yourself permission to say no. My husband actually put a sticky note on my computer for about a year with the word "no" on it. And it really did give me permission to say no and to remember that that's allowed. So that's the first thing. Then you want to think about how to say no and how to say yes. Because yes and no are never one-word answers. My favorite on the no side is "no, but..." "No, not right now. No, but I could do this instead. No, but this person might be interested." I look to give a no with the opportunity for a yes later.

For example, somebody asked me to do a pro bono talk. Happy to do those things if they meet certain criteria. This criteria was driving two hours in rush hour to talk to 30 people. It wasn't going to meet that criteria. And I said, if you can get x number of people in the room, and we can do it during this time of day, then I'm happy to do it. So "No, but here's how you can get a yes" is a great way to enable somebody to feel OK and for you to feel OK and not want to avoid that extended relationship. So when we use a "no, but," we give them an opportunity for a "yes" down the road. But we also can use the "no, but" to help them find another way to get that help. No, but there's this great resource you may want to look into. No, but I do know somebody who's working on that. Let me ask if they might be interested in connecting. No, but. I might not be able to help you. But I'm happy to give you ideas on how you can get the help you're looking for.

Sometimes you want to and get to say yes. So we want to sometimes qualify our yes: "Yes, if..." Yes, if you can get this done for me. Or yes, if you can get this many people in the room. Or yes, if. It could be "yes, after." Yes, I'd love to get on the phone with you after I'm done with this big project that I'm working on, or after I get back from vacation. Just giving yourself a little breathing room in when and the timing of when that follow through will actually happen. So we have "yes, if." We have "yes, after." We could have "yes, with." Yes, with your assistance. Or yes, with another party. I'm happy to work on that. Yes, with some training. So "yes, if," "yes, after," "yes, with," or even "yes, when." And when could be, when I feel that I'm really ready to do that. Yes, when I have gotten that training that we talked about. "Yes, when." So all of these things help give you a little bit of space and manage the expectations of the follow through of that yes.

Tech billionaires could end climate change. So why aren’t they?

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Saving the world from the apocalyptic impact of climate change should be a dream for many Silicon Valley titans concerned about legacy, says David Wallace-Wells, and yet few are dedicating themselves to addressing the catastrophe.

Negative emissions technology funded by Bill Gates exists. It would cost $3 trillion per year to operate and would mean human industry could continue at current levels without global warming.

That figure sounds astronomical, however global subsidies to fossil fuel industries cost $5 trillion per year.

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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: We live in a culture now that is really enamored with the idea of technological innovation. I would say that certainly up until the last couple of years, but even in the aftermath of the 2016 election, there's just been widespread cultural admiration, lionization, even deification of the founders of Silicon Valley and the world that they have built for us. I think that's misplaced faith in a lot of ways. But I think given the scale of the climate crisis, it's especially damning that so few of these people, so few of these founders, and so few of our new billionaires are really invested in the climate crisis and in figuring out ways to address it. And I don't actually even understand why that is, to the extent that these are people who want to see themselves as world historical figures, who are driven in part by ego, you'd think they would see the existential threat of climate change as an incitement to action.

You could theoretically invent a solution to this problem and save the world. And yet very few of them are doing that. Instead, they seem focused on problems that are arising from their own invention. So they're very worried about runaway AI, for instance, artificial intelligence. But climate change is a much bigger problem than that. Climate change challenges, threatens to undermine the entire infrastructure of our modern world, all of our political institutions, all of our social institutions, our national institutions. Everything is vulnerable to the transformations of climate, because we all live within climate. And I think one perverse effect of our cult of technology is that we're learning more and more to think of what's happening on our phones and on our screens as the real world and to be less focused on the impacts that are happening outside our windows. In an awful way, I think that may train us for the climate suffering that we're likely to see over the next few decades. But what I would hope for is that more of these figures are really focused on what are possible technological solutions, and you do see Bill Gates doing exactly that. He's made really significant investments in negative emissions technologies and is, in fact, behind the most exciting research in that area, which is quite exciting. It's a company called Carbon Engineering led by a guy named David Keith that has found that you can take carbon out of the atmosphere at a cost of about $100 a ton. That would mean, in theory that we could completely neutralize all global carbon emissions at a cost of about $3 trillion a year, which would mean that the economy could continue just as it is. Our agriculture could continue just as it is. Our infrastructure, our industry can continue just as they are, and we could just completely suck out all of the carbon that was being emitted for $3 trillion a year, which sounds like an enormous amount. But there are estimates about how much we subsidize the fossil fuel business today that run as high as $5 trillion a year. In theory, we could redirect those subsidies to this technology and solve the problem already. That's in theory. There are huge engineering problems. We'd have to find a place to put the carbon, which would require, the experts say, a new industry two or three times the size of the oil and gas business right now that's just to put the carbon back into the ground. But nevertheless, there are really promising technological paths forward.

We've seen incredible progress on green energy over the last 10, 15 years, much faster than anyone predicted, even its biggest advocates. And we need to continue doing that. So w...

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Why health care should start long before you reach the hospital

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The average American spends about 24 hours a year at the doctor's office. What you do the other 364 days a year mostly determines your health.

Michael Dowling discusses Northwell's focus on environmental, social, economic and other social determinants of health.

Michael Dowling is the author of Health Care Reboot with Charles Kenney.

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MICHAEL DOWLING:

Michael J. Dowling is President and Chief Executive Officer of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider and private employer, with 23 hospitals, more than 700 outpatient locations, $12 billion in annual revenue and 68,000+ employees. One of health care’s most-influential executives, Mr. Dowling has received numerous awards, including the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, an honorary degree from the prestigious Queen’s University Belfast and his selection as the Grand Marshal of the 2017 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in NYC. He also serves as chair of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHAEL DOWLING: If you want to improve health, you have to deal with more than just the provision of medical care. So a lot of what medical care gets blamed for or what we call the health system, the hospitals, the docs what we get blamed for are things that we don't have direct responsibility for. In the U.S. we have very, very high mortality, higher than other parts of the world there are lots of reasons for this. For example, death from gunshot wounds is included in the mortality stats. Yet, people who work in health care are not the people who actually kill people with guns. Sometimes, these statistics get all warped. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be involved. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be a catalyst, that we shouldn't be an influencer, that we shouldn't actually be out there in the communities doing things.

Now if you get sick and you come to a hospital, yeah, we can take care of you. But the issues that determine your health go way, way beyond just the provision of medical care. It has to do with lifestyle. It has to do with social circumstance. It has to do with environment, your family situation, where you live. If you're living in a very, very good neighborhood there's a lot of research done on this with all of the facilities that you would have in any top, middle-class, upper-middle-class neighborhood, you will live years longer than the person who lives in a very, very poor area, in general. So if I want to improve your health, I've got to make sure that I have doctors, and nurses, et cetera to provide medical care to you. But I've also got to figure out how to work on all of these other things.

How do I, for example, make sure that there is not lead in the house that you live in or in the apartment building. We had kids living in homes and it still goes on in many of the buildings in New York City and elsewhere where the radiators in the homes were painted with lead paint or lead pipes. Now I can have the doctor go to that apartment every month and treat that kid. But unless I change the paint, or change the pipe, or get rid of the radiator, or cover up the radiator, having a doctor go there every month doesn't necessarily overall improve health.

So I know somebody in the last two days that was at the hospital, had an occurrence in one of our hospitals, goes home. Our hospital sent a nutritionist to the home. That nutritionist sat down with that person for a couple of hours, explained to them how they should be eating. That person, there was a weight issue not substantial but there was a weight issue, there was a high blood pressure issue so they explained diet. They then offered to come to the home and teach the person how to cook those foods that would be more appropriate to improve health. That's how we improve health. The hospital did its thing. But if you don't follow up and do those other things, that person will be back in the hospital again.

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Are you an overbuyer or an underbuyer?

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Overbuyers are people who love to buy — they stockpile things as a result. These are individuals who are prone to run out of space in trying to store their stuff and they may even lose track of what — and how much of what — they have.

One way overbuyers can limit their waste, both money and space wise, is by storing items at the store, and then buy them when they really need them.

Underbuyers tend to go to extraordinary lengths to not buy things. They save money and do fewer errands, however, they often make do with shabby personal items. They may also, when they finally decide to go out to buy a product, go without entirely because the item may no longer be available.

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GRETCHEN RUBIN:

Gretchen Rubin is the author of many books, including the block-buster New York Times bestsellers The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. She also has a top-ranked, award-winning podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and a popular blog, gretchenrubin.com. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

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TRANSCRIPT:

GRETCHEN RUBIN: When you're trying to clear clutter and create outer order, a really helpful question to consider is are you an overbuyer or an underbuyer. And maybe you're neither. Maybe you're just a middle buyer. But many people are overbuyers or, like me, they're underbuyers. So overbuyers are people who just love to buy. They shop. They do errands. They make lists. If they're going to travel, they've got 10 things they need to buy. If their kids are going back to school, they've got 15 supplies that they need. They often will rack up, like, big stockpiles of slow-moving things, like toothpaste or soup. They'll do things like buy something that's going to make a wonderful gift.

They don't know who they're going to give it to exactly, but it seems like a wonderful gift. Or they buy things in multiple colors, or they buy a lot of things on sale. And being an overbuyer means that, often, you have a lot of errands and tasks that you feel like you need to do. You can run out of space because you've got all this stuff that you need to store and manage. You can lose track of how much you have of something because you keep buying a hammer. You don't realize that you have five hammers. And you can spend a lot of money on things that you don't really need yet.

And you can even run into the problem of waste, where something like a scented candle kind of goes bad even before you use it or you're able to give it away, or some kind of medicine expires before you even get to the point of using that bottle of medicine. So if you're an overbuyer, you want to say to yourself, hang on, do I really need to buy this thing? Maybe I can store it at the store. I will leave that extra bottle of toothpaste at the store, and I can get it when I need it, because I'm going to store it at the store, and I'm going to hold myself back. Now, there are also underbuyers. Underbuyers are people like me. We don't like to shop. We don't like to spend. And we will often go to kind of extraordinary and silly lengths to avoid it.

Underbuyers typically don't like to buy specialized products. For instance, for a long time, I didn't have a raincoat. Why do you need a coat specifically for rain? I didn't buy Kleenex. I can just blow my nose in toilet paper. Why do I need a special tissue paper to blow my nose? I don't believe in conditioner. I don't use shaving cream. There's a lot of things where I just don't want to buy something. Now, being an underbuyer is good in some ways, because you save yourself a lot of money and you don't run that many errands. But it can also be really inconvenient because underbuyers often don't have things until the very last minute, and then it can be difficult to get them. Like, if you wait till the very last minute to buy mittens, the store often doesn't have mittens anymore. They've moved on. Often, underbuyers are making do with things that are kind of shabby or aren't really suitable for their purpose. Like, maybe it would be nice to use shaving cream to shave instead of using soap, or whatever my makeshift solution would be. And underbuyers often, too, are very inconvenienced, because they are running out of toothpaste, they are running out of saline solution.

There's things where, you know, it doesn't hurt to have a couple spare rolls of toilet paper somewhere in your house or apartment so...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/are-you-an-overbuyer-or-an-underbuyer

NASA’s zero-gravity plane: How astronauts train for microgravity

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There is no way to shield astronauts on earth from the effects of gravity.

Astronauts train for space by going on an airplane that flies high at an arc so that the force lifts them in the air.

However, we can only achieve about a minute's worth of weightlessness this way. NASA researchers have nicknamed this plane the "Vomit Comet."

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MICHELLE THALLER:

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: Jack, you had the question, how do we remove gravity from the anti-gravity chambers that astronauts train in? And you've probably seen films of astronauts in training, floating around in a closed chamber. And it does kind of look like we may have something that can actually shield against gravity. Well, for one thing, I really wish we did because just think about how useful that would be. Think about having, say, a construction site, and you can remove all of the gravity. You could actually move things around really easily. There's so many applications for having some sort of anti-gravity device, but we don't have one.

There is no way to shield astronauts here on the earth from the We train astronauts by putting them up in an airplane and then having the airplane fly very, very carefully on an arc to throw everybody up at just the right rate so they're floating. It may have actually happened to you. You may have been on an airplane, and the airplane actually sort of arced around, and you felt yourself thrown up a little bit. So that's actually what we do in a very controlled way. We only can get about a minute's worth of weightlessness that way. The airplane flies in arc and then goes around again and flies another one. So the astronauts train by doing this over, and over, One of the really amazing applications of this was in the movie Apollo 13.

If you look very carefully, it's a very realistic depiction of astronauts floating around in the weightlessness of space. And that's because they really were weightless. They actually put movie sets inside this aircraft and filmed one minute at a time. The footage of the astronauts floating around the lunar module, for example. Now, this sort of training where one minute you're weightless, and then all of a sudden you're not, and then you're weightless again has a bit of an effect on people's stomach. And, in fact, the NASA nickname for this plane is the Vomit Comet.

It's something that can actually make you feel pretty sick to your stomach, but a lot of astronauts in training also find it really fun. And I've heard it mentioned that there are some pilots that are better than others at doing just the right arc. There are some pilots that as you fly, you're up against the ceiling, up against the floor, up against the ceiling. And then there are ones that get really, really smooth so you have the longest possible time in weightlessness. And, in fact, I heard that the pilot that was best at it would actually put a pencil in front of him as he began the arc to make it feel like you were weightless. And then he would fly the plane around the pencil, trying to keep that pencil in the same position as you went through the weightlessness arc.

So there's no way we can shield from gravity. We only can train astronauts a minute at a time in these aircraft. The other way we train them is by simulating a weightless environment the best we can by using water, by using really, really big swimming pools. At the Johnson Space Center-- one of my favorite places to go in all of NASA — there is a swimming pool, a pool so big that we actually have an entire scale model of a space station underneath the water. The same size as the space station. We put astronauts in basically scuba gear. They have their helmets. There's air being pumped through there. And they can...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/microgravity