The Numbers: Why Universal Basic Citizenship
Interactive visualizations showing the human cost of current systems — and what the data says about better ones.
Policy debates happen in abstractions. “Healthcare reform.” “Income inequality.” “Education spending.” The words float past without weight because they’ve been emptied of the reality they describe.
These visualizations put the weight back. Not opinions — data. Not arguments — relationships that the numbers themselves reveal when you look at them the right way.
Scroll through. Interact with the charts. Then decide whether the current system is working.
Where the Data Comes From
Every number in these visualizations is sourced from publicly available datasets. CEO compensation ratios from the Economic Policy Institute’s annual survey. Healthcare spending and life expectancy from OECD and World Bank statistics. Cost-of-care avoidance from the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Surveys. Incarceration costs from the Vera Institute of Justice.
None of this is disputed. The numbers aren’t controversial. What’s controversial is looking at them all at once and asking what kind of system produces these outcomes — and whether we could design a better one.
That’s what Universal Basic Citizenship attempts to do. Not patch individual failures, but redesign the infrastructure of citizenship itself. See the UBC Circos diagram for how UBC’s programs interconnect as a system rather than a stack of independent policies.
Built by Æ for Humanity and AI. Part of the Foundation project — a political movement for Universal Basic Citizenship in the age of AI.