The ‘Why Should We?’ New President of Mexico

Faced with a growing wealth gap, scholars are pitching the universal right to homes, education and internet over income.

For 40 years, Robert E. Friedman and his Washington-based nonprofit Prosperity Now have helped millions of people from economically vulnerable communities gain financial security and stability. Income disparity, however, has only grown across the United States. Now, the 69-year-old Friedman is arguing for a macroeconomic fix — and it doesn’t involve the government just doling out cash. Instead, he advocates giving everyone assets like savings, education and homeownership, instituting a system of universal basic assets (UBA). And Friedman isn’t alone.

As cities and countries across the world experiment with the currently in-vogue idea of universal basic income (UBI), a small but growing number of scholars, nonprofits and researchers are beginning to argue for an alternative framework for prosperity. At its heart, they’re pushing for a 21st-century version of the age-old proverb that it’s better to teach a man how to fish than to simply give him fish. Just four years ago, UBA as a modern concept was unknown. Today, it’s emerging as a challenger to UBI as a means to the same goal: less income disparity and greater opportunities for all.

Ahead of his inauguration, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s populist moves are rattling markets — and resembling Donald Trump’s.

New Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, AMLO to friends and detractors alike, sits at a curious place in an even more curious time on both sides of the border. Replacing the widely and wildly reviled Enrique Peña Nieto with his inauguration Saturday, AMLO — also affectionately called La Piedra (The Rock), El Comandante (The Commander) or El Peje, after a fish — is delivering a kind of realpolitik that recalls no one if not his north-of-the-border neighbor, Donald Trump. Not in tone and timbre but in substance as his gut-level convictions spring from a willingness to ask: Why should we?

Obrador, in catering to a hard-core base from both ends of a very different political spectrum under the rubric of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), and composed of members of Mao-influenced and social-conservative parties, is laying out a program like a man with nothing to lose. Closing a year of economic volatility driven by political uncertainties, Mexico’s fortunes as the 15th largest economy in the world are facing some fairly significant stressors.

Richard Legay and his baguettes magiques are a staple of the Marais.

There are many ways to come out to one’s grandmother. A heartfelt one-on-one, a personal letter, dispatching another family member to do it for you. For Richard Legay, the right way was to open a bakery specializing in penis-shaped bread and be the subject of a story on national TV.

“For me, it was like an explosion, to say to the world: I’m gay and I’m proud to be gay,” says Legay of the bold move and subsequent coverage.

That was 17 years ago, and while his grandmother wasn’t pleased then, she later came around. In the meantime, Legay — yes, that’s his real name, and he comes from four generations of bakers — has become a beloved figure in the Marais, in central Paris.