Contemporary Authors

• Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World - 2018 Crown, New York

• Slate - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/annie-lowrey-on-her-new-book-give-people-money-and-how-ubi-could-work-in-the-u-s.html

  NTERROGATION
  Universal Basic Income Is Not a Magic Bullet
  The author of Give People Money on the pitfalls and promises of retooling the U.S. safety net.
  By ISAAC CHOTINER

  JULY 23, 20185:45 AM
  TWEET
  SHARE
  COMMENT
  Person sifts through cash.
  Thinkstock.
  On this week’s episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the author of the new book Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World. It’s about universal basic income—the idea that the government would give all its citizens checks every month. Versions of this proposal have caught on with people on the left as well as tech leaders in Silicon Valley and even some hardcore libertarians. Lowrey has written for many years now about economics, but Give People Money is both a reported work—she travels to Kenya, South Korea, and India to view their economic experiments—and a policy brief on what she believes can help alleviate some of the social and political discontent that has arisen from economic change and dislocation.

  Below is an edited excerpt from the show. In it, we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of UBI, whether or not we should be skeptical that so many Silicon Valley titans have embraced the idea, and how to make the safety net less vulnerable to political attacks.

  You can find links to every episode here; the entire audio interview is below.

  Listen to I Have to Ask via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

  Isaac Chotiner: You write in the book that UBI is an “ethos.” What do you mean by that?

  Annie Lowrey: The idea of giving everybody money contains within it a number of principles. One is simplicity. The government is not going to ask you to do something in return for receiving the money. You won’t have to meet certain conditions in order to get it, which is different than a lot of the policies that we have. You cannot, for instance, get a welfare payment unless you meet a number of requirements, including work requirements. Oftentimes, there are also things like having to seek child support from your kid’s dad.

  There’s this principle of universality. Most of our safety-net programs are means-tested. We say, “We’re only going to give it to people who meet these kinds of conditions, these pockets of people.”

  There’s this idea that the government should—and we as a society kind of as an extension—put a floor under people in a very direct way and say, “Regardless of circumstance, we’re going to be doing something to make sure that you’re never going to sink down that far.” That’s not something that the United States does.

  It’s a fairly radical idea, at least for the United States in 2018. What is it about where we are as a society that makes you think we need to start thinking about this now?

  It’s really important to note that Republicans are tacking in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is letting states attach work and volunteering requirements to Medicaid. They’re going to attach them to Section 8 and other federal housing programs. If you talk to a Republican, they’d say that the point is to get everybody working where possible if you’re nondisabled, but functionally, what you’re doing is making it smaller and more complicated.

  This is, in some sense, not where the country is headed right now, but that said, we do have this broad conversation that’s been ongoing for a decade about inequality, about the inability of even middle-class families to keep their heads above water. There’s a tremendous amount of fear about technological unemployment and about the next recession, and I think that it all comes down to this kind of fundamental sense of why, in the richest civilization the planet has ever known, is there still sort of such deprivation and need?

  The other things that you bring up is, one, that it would give workers more bargaining power, and two, that the sort of robot, A.I. infestation—if that’s the word I want—is coming, and we need to be ready for it. Can you talk about those two other things and whether you think they’re good reasons for UBI?

  Say that all of us were getting $500 a month from the government. In some sense, that might make you less likely to work, because you have that money, but it would also make you more likely to demand more from your employer, because it’s kind of like a strike fund. You’re not going to so readily accept a poverty wage if you have that $500, so the idea is that employers would have to make work better, give workers more money, and the equilibrium would reset, with more power going to workers.

  This seems especially important given that the Janus case just came out of the Supreme Court. Unions are just in tatters. Private sector unions are functionally nonexistent in huge parts of the economy. Public sector unions are now getting gutted. So how do you restore power to workers? This is one way to do it.

  Then for the technological unemployment, that robots-taking-everybody’s-jobs argument, I actually find it hugely compelling. It’s just that we don’t really see any evidence that robots are actually taking everybody’s jobs. Unemployment is pretty low. The really big issue is wages. That’s not to say that that won’t be a problem at some point. I certainly think like 50 years from now, that could be a really big issue. It’s just that folks in Silicon Valley, they sort of make it seem like this is a really big problem right now, that all these Isaacs and Annies across the economy are getting replaced by a robot. It’s just not true. I’m interested by that, but I find it so bizarre that for such a long time, the monopoly on the conversation was coming from people who are like, “You should be terrified, because a robot’s taking your job.”

  Our opinion of Silicon Valley, and some of the people who are big names in Silicon Valley who are behind this, has changed and darkened in the past couple years, probably since you started writing. What did you make of the push in Silicon Valley for this idea, and what do you make of it today?

  Absolutely. What I would say is that there was a moment in time where Silicon Valley was legitimately freaking out over their belief that they were creating technologies that would obviate the need for most human work. When you talk to folks now, they especially point to A.I., and I think that there’s almost this funny, numinous quality to their arguments about it. I can’t tell you how many of these folks I’ve asked, and they’re just like, “When I look at A.I., I see this amazing and awesome but also terrifying thing, like we’re going to put all of the truck drivers out of work, because every car is going to be a self-driving car.” Or like, “Watson is better than doctors, and soon we’ll have microrobots.”

  “We have this broad conversation that’s been ongoing for a decade about the inability of even middle-class families to keep their heads above water.”
  — Annie Lowrey
  There’s this sense of guilt of like, “Wow, we’re going to put these amazing technologies out there, but they’re also going to make people’s lives miserable.” I do think that the push for UBI comes out of a sense of guilt as well as a sense of joy. There’s this world in which everybody has less work to do, and it’s really great. We spend more time in leisure. We spend more time with our kids. But that’s not going to happen if people can’t afford basics, and there’s already millions of families that can’t do that. Where I think that the disconnect comes, why I find the UBI conversation out of Silicon Valley a little bit weird, is that we would be able to see that happening if it were happening, right? It’s not hard to see on a national scale how robots would eliminate work, but it’s just impossible to see it in the numbers.

  I think that that has to do with the ways that technology is changing work. It might be depressing wages instead of eliminating work, and I also just think that a lot of the economy is health care work. It’s education work. It’s elder care work. It’s stuff that’s not actually easy to get a robot to do.

  Hosting podcasts.

  Yeah.

  Also the people in Silicon Valley who’ve been high on this idea, or many of them, don’t seem as interested in ameliorating some of those things you talked about, which makes me somewhat skeptical that they’re so focused on this.

  Absolutely. I live in D.C. I can get my groceries delivered. I can get dinner delivered by a little robot. But the truth is that those are not changing the nuts and bolts of the economy, and that very often those kind of services, like the gig economy, function in a few cities. I was just in Des Moines, and there’s no Instacart in Des Moines, and Des Moines is a big city. I think that there’s a certain myopia where they do just a little bit and forget that the whole of the economy outside of the Bay, D.C., Boston, New York, a couple other cities, it’s huge. When you look at the innovation that really is kind of changing the economy in amazing ways, a lot of it remains industrial innovation coming from big ag and big engineering companies. We forget that.

  One of the things you talk about in the book is that this is something that appeals in various forms to everyone, from young socialists to Charles Murray, the right-wing libertarian figure and author of The Bell Curve. One of the fears of people on the left is that UBI would be used by people like Murray and his ideological allies to gut the safety net and replace it with UBI, so what would seem like this really generous basic income that was given to everyone, if you added up all the benefits that were actually being taken away, it would actually be a negative. Is that a political concern of yours?

  Absolutely. There’s this question of how you’re doing benefits, and then there’s this question of how much. In a lot of ways, how much is 99 percent of the game there. Charles Murray’s proposal, which I think he first put out—it’s been quite a while—is that you would give everybody $13,000, $3,000 of which would have to go to health care, so if you’re an adult, you get $833 a month. If you look at the sum of benefits that would be going to a lower-income family through the earned income tax credit, child tax credit, all sorts of other programs, whether it’s SNAP, Medicaid, CHIP, [it’s] way more money than that. Say you’re a single mom with a couple kids—you’d be worse off. You can run the numbers, and you very much could implement UBI and have it increase poverty. That’s why I really dislike the idea that UBI is bipartisan.

  The important thing is if you’re spreading the butter really thin, you’re going to need more butter, or you’re going to need to make sure that this is not a policy in isolation and that instead you’re adding it to a safety net that’s helping people in other ways. One idea that I really do like and actually does have some bipartisan support that’s growing is the idea of doing basically a UBI for children. The U.S. has a really high child-poverty rate. Your average kid is way more likely to be impoverished than your average adult. It’s a disaster from a public policy perspective, because that sets kids on less healthy lifestyles, less good earnings trajectories, so you can imagine doing a universal child benefit, and that would be a policy that would be way cheaper than a big UBI but would be really helpful.

  Part of the reason that a UBI appeals to some people is that right now there’s a tremendous stigma having to do with race, having to do with all kinds of things, that is attached to a lot of our anti-poverty programs. The hope would be that a UBI would take some of that stigma away, because it’s universal. Is that fair, the way I summarize that?

  Yeah, absolutely.

  It seems like the Catch-22 is that if the programs are kept there in addition to UBI, the stigma would remain in some way, and we’d get the political insanity around Medicaid or stuff that we have now. And if the programs were taken away, then you’d have a situation that wouldn’t be as generous for people. Finding the right balance between those things seems really hard to do.

  It’s really, really tough, and I think that this is something that UBI’s boosters have not necessarily grappled with in a complete way. It gets talked about as being this magic bullet, and really it isn’t. It’s a tool. UBI is instructive as an object lesson and a way to think about other policies and other goals. I, despite writing a whole book about it, am not sure it’s actually the best policy or the thing that we should be pushing for as a country. Part of the issue in the United States, part of the reason that we have a lot of deprivation and poverty, is that we have a system that basically says, “If we classify you as a nondisabled adult without dependents, you are almost always, depending on the state that you’re in, denied benefits.”

  The reason that we have such a fragmented safety net is because of our racial history, and I think that there’s a way in which the resistance to this would become really deep and really powerful if people felt like people were getting something for nothing and weren’t working because of it. I think it’s a hard fit with the United States’ ethos in our politics right now, but it’s an interesting way of thinking about that ethos and those politics.

  Universal programs seem to have broader popular support than need-based programs, if you look at polling figures.

  Absolutely.

  I know things like the EITC and Medicaid are, broadly speaking, popular, but Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs we have. At the same time, people can always convince themselves that, “I’m getting something, and someone else who is different than me in some way doesn’t deserve it, even though we’re getting the same thing, and everyone gets it.”

  If you look at the politics of Obamacare, if you look at lower-middle-income folks who are getting benefits through the exchanges, those benefits are often expensive, and they’re complicated—you have to go to this online system, and there’s enrollment periods or whatever—those people are deeply resentful of the Medicaid expansion, often, because Medicaid, first of all, they think it’s better insurance, second, it’s simpler, and third, it’s more automatic. I think that those politics are really fascinating.

  One other way I would note that policies tend to be more popular is when they’re hidden through the tax code. There’s no constituency that hates the earned income tax credit, certainly not in the same way that there’s just a lot of judgment and stigma around a program like TANF or even food stamps. One policy proposal that I think is actually a really good one is written in a paper by a guy named Luke Shaefer and his co-authors. The idea would be basically to run a UBI through the tax codes. You would probably take away some of the programs aimed at lower-income Americans, and using the tax code, you would bump them all, whether they had earned income or not, up to a given level. This would probably be more efficient, and it probably wouldn’t engender as much resistance. Policies that are hidden in the tax code, Americans just don’t think of as being government benefits, even though they are.

  At one point you ask in the book, “Is our American sense of work compatible with UBI?” Because there’s an argument out there that Americans place more value on work as a society than in other European countries. How do you feel about that argument?

  I think that this is a really important thing and a thing that UBI folks have to grapple with. Let’s imagine everybody gets replaced by robots. Let’s say that in that world, you take your person who’s making a nice, middle-class wage, $60,000 a year or something, and you’re like, “It’s OK. We have a $12,000 a year UBI.” That’s a miserable, awful world, right? People are not going to be happy with that. Who’s going to be happy to lose a job and instead get a welfare payment that doesn’t really cover their past salary?

  Americans really do like working. They find a lot of value in it. There’s this great study that looks at folks who are older, and when they stopped calling themselves unemployed and start calling themselves retired, they get markedly happier. They’re literally just happier as people. It’s not impossible to imagine a future in which there is a lot less work and people are happy. It’s just that you would need a really deep cultural shift and economic shift around it. There [are] definitely futurists, economists, and more radical thinkers who’ve started thinking about this—”Let’s make a world without work, and let’s enjoy that.” But it seems totally incompatible with how we feel about work and how it functions in our lives here in the United States right now.

  What was the common thread that you saw when reporting in very different countries about the way the government can help out its citizens that you think are lessons that are universally applicable?

  One really obvious one that comes out of this is that the government should, in many cases, just give people cash, as opposed to trying to do something else. If we had the U.S. government leave all of its programs in place, but instead of getting a food stamp that you could only use on a really specific thing, we just gave you the money, I think that it’s hard to argue that that wouldn’t be a better world. That money is more valuable to you if it’s fungible. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to—and there’s so many studies about this—that people will take their food stamps, and they’ll sell them because they need to have cash to pay the electric bill to keep the lights on or they need gas to get to work.

  The second thing is that I do think that there is something to be said for universal programs, for at least ensuring that everybody gets things somewhat more automatically, than having to go through an arduous application process. Whether that’s running things through the tax code, which I think is kind of a good idea, or whether it’s just making programs more universal, sort of like you see with Social Security, I think that there’s a lot to be said for it.

  When every government program is declared unconstitutional, this will all be moot, but hopefully not until you sell some books. Is there a way, short of UBI, just in the short term, that you think Democrats—or liberals, or anybody who wants to expand or solidify the safety net—should be talking about this stuff?

  I think the low-hanging fruit—the thing that would be most beneficial to the most at-risk people and might still be politically palatable on both sides of the aisle—is a universal child benefit, or even a broadly means-tested child cash benefit. Basically, you put it under the banner of, “No more kids in poverty here.” You have even some really conservative senators, so your Mike Lees, who really do take issue with child poverty and really want to do something about it, so I think that that’s possible.

  It does just feel like the Overton window is a lot bigger now that Donald Trump was elected, that people are really ticked off. In the event that there’s another recession, I think that the space for policymaking will expand even more radically, so maybe it is a time for just big ideas.

• Recode - https://www.recode.net/2018/7/16/17569212/journalist-author-annie-lowrey-book-give-people-money-universal-basic-income-decode

  Journalist and author Annie Lowrey wants you to understand that universal basic income isn’t crazy
  “The problem with poor folks is that they don’t have enough money.” So let’s give them some.
  By Recode Staff Jul 16, 2018, 5:23am EDT
  SHARE

  MSNBC
  On this episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, journalist Annie Lowrey talks with about her new book, “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.” Lowrey says there’s ample evidence from countries like India, Brazil and Mexico that giving a small amount of cash directly to poor people can make their lives better without discouraging them from getting a job.

  You can read a write-up of the interview here or listen to the whole thing in the audio player above. Below, we’ve also provided a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation.

  If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

  Kara Swisher: Today in the red chair is Annie Lowrey, who writes about economic policy for The Atlantic. Her new book is called “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.” Well, that’s a lot of stuff, Annie.

  Annie Lowrey: I know.

  Welcome.

  It’s a very, very grandiose title.

  I know. Wow! It’s going to solve all our problems?

  Yeah. Something like that.

  All right. Let’s talk about how you got to do this book.

  Yeah.

  You are ... Let me, just by way of disclosure, Annie is married to Ezra Klein, and I don’t really care if she is, but Ezra does another podcast at Vox Media, but it has no impact with what we’re going to talk about here. That’s nice, to have full disclosure. It doesn’t really matter ...

  Yeah!

  ... to your work, but we like to do that, to give it disclosure. How did you get to doing this? You’ve been doing a lot of different jobs, right? You write about economic policy.

  Yeah.

  So this falls into your area and it’s also an area that Silicon Valley has been talking about a lot.

  Obsessively, right? I, yes. I’ve had a bunch of jobs, but I’ve been ...

  Well, go through them, because people like to know people get to places.

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my first job out of college, the economy was falling apart. This was 2007, and I was an assistant at The New Yorker for awhile, in Washington, D.C. Basically, getting coffee, and transcribing interviews, and stuff.

  Then, I made this jump, and became a writer, and ended up as the Moneybox columnist for Slate. So, did that for a while, which was an amazing, and a great job. That’s in D.C. Then I covered Treasury for The New York Times, and wrote about economic policy for The New York Times for some time. Then kind of went and decided to do magazine writing, so I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and now, I write for The Atlantic. That was the general ...

  Trajectory.

  Trajectory.

  Right, right.

  I mean, it’s always been that I like writing about how the government impacts individual humans’ lives, basically. Or how individual human lives impact the government, backwards.

  Right. Right.

  It has a lot of salience out here, in Silicon Valley.

  Right, so how did you get onto Universal Basic ... Because here you are writing about economic policy, right? Which could be anything, like ...

  Yeah. Yeah, it’s like a huge universe.

  Welfare, or whatever.

  Oh, gosh, yeah. Government subsidies for oil and gas businesses, and DARPA, and research, and that kind of stuff. It’s a really huge universe, and so ...

  And it’s the impact of the government on our society.

  Exactly. How the government is shaping the economy and shaping individual financial decisions. I’d written about UBI a couple times, because there had been a referendum in Switzerland that got a surprising amount of support, but didn’t come [to] pass, and then, I wrote about a charity that is based in New York, but is funded with a lot of money from Facebook and Instagram founders, and a lot of tech money, called Give Directly. What they do is they take money, and they give it directly to poor people in Kenya, Uganda, and now, one other country. Trying to remember.

  Anyway, but they give it in the Great Lakes region of Africa, and so, they sort of go, and they target villages that are very low-income. They give people cell phones, and then people get mobile money transfers. This has been shown to work really well, to alleviate poverty.

  Right.

  Where, it’s actually, it’s pretty hard. We know a lot about what makes a change in people’s lives, but there are a lot of things that don’t work very well, right? Like, giving $100 million to Newark’s school system didn’t seem to work very well.

  No, right, right.

  But this does. And then it had just been that there were a ton of experiments, and it became sort of a part of party platforms on the left, in Europe. And so, then, decided to write a book about it. Not so much, sort of stumping for the idea, which Chris Hughes, and Andy Stern, and a lot of other really brilliant people do.

  Right. We did a podcast with Chris.

  Yeah, yeah, friend of the pod, Chris Hughes. But because it lets you talk about a lot of other interesting things, right? Like, why do we allow so much poverty in this country? Should we require something, from people, in exchange for welfare?

  Which is a big debate right now.

  A huge debate right now, right? Should we give people money, should we give them job training?

  Right.

  What trade-offs are we making here?

  Right. Well, let’s set the table for this.

  Yeah.

  Because, we’re talking, this is a global phenomena. Universal Basic has been tried in Sweden, from lots of different countries are trying this.

  Tons, yeah.

  So, give an overall view of where it started. Do a little history lesson for people, of where it started. Because some people, when I mention it to them, they’re like, “Well, that’s Communism, right?” You know what I mean? And I was like, “Well, yeah.”

  Kind of, yes.

  Except, the government is constantly giving value to people, in this similar way, that is like, job training versus money, versus just handing them money.

  Yes. Absolutely.

  Talk about how this came to be. What was the ... because, again, the government does this do already, in different ways.

  Absolutely. I think the clearest and most immediate way to say it, for people to understand it, is Social Security, right? Everybody who’s working, you’re going to pay taxes with the understanding that you’re going to, “get that money back.” It’s not quite as simple as you getting the money back, but the idea is, you’re going to pay a payroll tax, and then, that money’s going to come back to you, when you retire. The truth is that the government does this in all sorts of different ways, either through the direct public provision of services, right? Things like the medical system for the military, or by financing things, right? Like the home mortgage interest deduction. The history of the idea is really long and interesting, so, it’s like, 500 years ago...

  Oh! Martin Luther!

  Yeah. Like, actually, yes.

  Okay.

  At that time, you had a transition from this feudal economy, in Europe, to a mercantilist ...

  Where the lord gives everything.

  Yeah, exactly, to this mercantilist capitalist economy, and this transition, as these big transitions often are, is kind of ugly. You end up with all of these serfs, who, instead of being able to till land that is owned by a lord, and live off of it, instead are working for the lord for wages. This is like a gross oversimplification, but this causes all sorts of poverty, and there’s a lot of wars going on at the time. It causes a lot of poverty, and specifically, urban poverty, so people kind of get booted off of their feudal land. And they come to these cities, and they become beggars. The British Crown decides that they’re going to have to do something about this. So they create this system of, this is in the late Tudor period, “Poor Laws.” Those create workhouses for poor people to work in. They also create a dole. Cash payments.

  Then, for the next 500 years, you have this really, kind of, complicated, interesting history of how governments decide to give money to poor people, and support poor people. We could sit here talking about this for 10 years. It’s a very detailed history. But, since 500 years ago, there’s been this thread of thought, that instead of giving people work, you should just give them cash. The kind of fundamental insight there is that the problem with poor folks is that they don’t have enough money.

  Right, yeah, right.

  It’s nothing else, right?

  Right, right.

  Or not, not ...

  Or they have no ability to make money.

  Yeah, exactly, have no ability to make money, and that the simplest way, and perhaps, the best way, to get them out of poverty, is just to give them cash.

  Here in the US, you have this very bootstraps culture from the very beginning, and so welfare cash payments are provided generally only to widows, single mothers — this is true for a long time. Then, because of the country’s racial history, welfare, 20 years ago, and 50 years ago, maybe, becomes seen as being politically unpalatable, because it’s a way to support black single moms. It gets really demonized. We don’t do cash payments in this country in the way that European and other social democracies, or the European social democracies do. This is all a very long way of saying, that there’s always been this tension.

  It takes on, it takes on, like you said, a demonization, versus in Europe, where the people are used to that.

  Yeah.

  That’s part of the social contract.

  Yep.

  Is that “we’re going to pay poor people to not be as poor as they are.” Right? And not require them to work, and not require them to do anything else. In this country, it is. It’s demonized. It’s that you’re taking money, like, “welfare queens,” that whole concept.

  Exactly. What’s funny is that it’s actually, giving money to poor people is way less controversial in poor countries. A lot of the big middle income countries, India, Brazil, Mexico, it’s really not controversial, to take poor folks and just be like, “Here’s some cash. Let’s get some more calories into your kids. Let’s make sure that you have a roof over your heads.”

  The goal being?

  Yeah, the goal being, let’s alleviate the worst forms of destitution in low-income countries. One thing that’s kind of been quietly happening is that even really low-income countries have built safety nets, kind of in the model of Europe, or the U.S. Ethiopia now has a pretty big system of cash payments to poor people. That didn’t use to be true 100 years ago, because these countries just didn’t have any capacity to do it. Here in the U.S., it’s probably the most divisive place for this because of our really complicated racial history.

  And a national feeling, the bootstraps idea.

  Yeah, it’s also a cultural thing, right? We really, really think, pretty deeply in this country, that able-bodied adults should work, and should take care of themselves, and that that’s the best path out of poverty.

  Right, and we’re not going to help you do it. You’re going to pull up yourself by your own bootstraps.

  Yeah. “Even if we were to help you do it, that would be bad for you,” right? Like, “you should be working, you shouldn’t be on the dole.”

  Right, so talk about how you Universal Basic then came to be, because there’s a version of it happening all the time. Whether it’s welfare, or something, because that’s what it sounds like to people.

  Right, absolutely. I think that you point out a good and an interesting thing, which is that the government is constantly giving and taking money, even from people who would never say that they are on ...

  Yeah.

  Yeah, so the best example of this, in my mind, is there’s a really interesting study that was done by a woman named Suzanne Mettler. She asked people, “Do you receive any ... Does the government help you?” I forget the exact phrasing of the question, but, “Do you receive government assistance, or like are you on a government program?” Poor people, they know. They’re like, “Yeah, I get SNAP, I get food stamps.”

  Right, SNAP is ... explain that.

  Yeah, SNAP is food stamps — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which is, about 40 million Americans use it in any given month, I think. Higher income Americans, they’re like, “No, government doesn’t do anything to help me,” even if they are ... If they have a mortgage, they’re absolutely receiving home mortgage interest deduction, and probably a lot of other things. The government interacts with high income families, but it tends to do so through the tax code, so you don’t really see it, and it doesn’t feel like assistance.

  Right, so they’re getting a kickback.

  Because you’re not getting a check.

  They get a kickback.

  Yeah, exactly.

  Right.

  That’s a really good way of putting it. That’s one of these ways that, culturally, you know, we see the direct provision of cash, or something else, to a low-income family as being sort of ...

  Offensive.

  Yeah, morally different than a high income family getting some money back.

  Because they’re working.

  Yeah, exactly.

  Deserve that thing, own this kind of thing. It is an interesting thing when, you start ... I got a, years ago, when ... oh, those people who hate the government. I forget that group.

  The libertarians?

  Whatever, no there’s a whole bunch of them. They got on the phone with me ...

  Separatists.

  They got on the phone with me and were starting to argue, like, “We don’t need government. We don’t need government.”

  Yeah.

  I just said ... I stay on the phone with these people and I said, “Well, you know, how was your commute to work today?”

  Yeah.

  They were like, “What do you mean?” I said, “You need to get off the streets, because the government built those. You need to get off the highways.”

  Yeah.

  ”You need to stop using the highways. Also, fire department, you can’t use it anymore.” I was like ... I started listing all the things. I said, “How did World War II work out for you? Because that was a really good government addition to you. You’d be goose-stepping down Market Street if we didn’t kind of do that one.”

  Yeah.

  They were like, “Well!” I go, “You use the government all the time when it suits you and not when it doesn’t.”

  Absolutely.

  ”You need to stop saying this, or you need to just go live in a hut in the middle of the woods, which by the way, is probably being maintained by the government.” You know what I mean?

  Yeah.

  We do get payments, but — so talk about this UBI itself.

  Right.

  Why has it come back in this way? Is it just a rebranding of something or is it ... and who started it?

  The current movement comes from ... There’s a bunch of lower-income countries that are ... India being the biggest one, but a lot of smaller ones that are like, “We want to end poverty as simply and cheaply as possible. We are going to do cash payments to as many poor people as we can.”

  Rather than create jobs for them, rather than doing job training.

  Exactly. “We think that they are going to be better off if they are just no longer destitute, if their kids are eating enough, it’s going to give them that little bit of buffer. They might even work more, right? Because they’ll be able to just ... they won’t be in that kind of poverty.”

  Spend more of their time trying to get pennies.

  Right. Whereas in the high-income countries, here in the US, and some places like in Europe, it’s driven by two impulses. One is, “Let’s have the government be smaller, less paternalistic, by just giving people cash, and not kind of meddling in their lives.” This is sort of the libertarian, Charles Murray-type argument. Then the second looks at this country and says, “We have a huge number of kids who grow up in poverty despite all of the money that we spend. We have a huge number of non-disabled adults who are in poverty. Maybe a way to do this is actually just to give them cash.” Let’s like stop and just directly transfer money, because again, we really don’t do unconditional cash transfer payments in this country outside of social security.

  Right.

  “We know that social security is hugely effective at ending poverty among seniors, let’s just do it for everybody, especially the most vulnerable, and start from kids.”

  Where did it first start? Right, where did it first start?

  The UBI?

  Yeah.

  Yeah, I mean, so no government has exactly a UBI right now, but many have some form of it.

  Right, but these are experiments, where did it start here? Was it by tech people, was it by ... Where did it begin to be experimented here?

  Yeah, so a lot of the energy for it comes from tech, right? Right now, probably, what? 50 miles from here, Stockton, is sending out payments. Y Combinator is sending out payments as part of a pilot. Then, Canada, recently started doing it in the province of Ontario.

  Via a tech company?

  Yeah, no, actually that’s a governmental one. Yeah, so a lot of this interest comes from tech. I think where it comes from tech, a lot of that concern is about, “Well what if robots take all of our jobs and none of us are working?” That’s the kind of the third bucket of interest in it, comes from this great fear that someday we’re all going to be out of a job. You know, that technology is advancing so rapidly that we won’t need people to work in factories anymore, we won’t need truck drivers.

  We won’t need blank, blank, blank.

  Yeah, exactly.

  Talk about the efforts right now that are happening. It’s being tested all over the world, obviously, in other countries. Let’s talk about how it’s being done here, because it is a tech-focused effort.

  Yeah, absolutely. The concern right now is that if ... Say that there’s another recession in a couple years, and all of a sudden, all-

  There will be.

  Yeah.

  Let’s assume.

  Eventually, there’s absolutely going to be one, and businesses see that the price of sort of AI-influenced technology’s falling really fast, and so we have another recession and kind of a jobless recovery again, and you have a huge number of people who are out of work. Right? The government doesn’t have very many measures to help in a situation like that, because unemployment insurance is time-delimited. It’s not really meant to buoy people for long periods of time. Here in the U.S., there’s now a bunch of groups — political groups, think tanks, and tech companies themselves — that are saying like, “Well, in that world, the government giving money to folks might be really, really, really important.” Two of the most interesting experiments... this one that I mentioned, it’s happening in Stockton, where they’re just sending some money to folks. They’re running an experiment. They’re going to see what happens.

  What kind of folks are they ... Is it poor folks or just everybody?

  Yeah, it’s not everybody. It’s just poor folks, and so it’s actually pretty important to note that, yeah, it’s not universal. Right? Part of this idea is that everybody should be getting it, and that if you’re higher-income, we’ll just tax it back. Then the second really interesting experiment is coming from Y Combinator, where they started in Oakland just giving out money, and now I think that they’re in five states. Again, sending money to folks, seeing how it changes their lives.

  Kind of same thing?

  Yeah. They did more targeting of people, and so they were looking in lower-income places, but then they randomized, right? They said, “We’re going to give it to people sort of regardless, without checking to make sure that they’re unemployed or something like that.”

  How much do they give people?

  I think that they are giving like $500 a month, if I remember correctly.

  And are all of them like that in that ... What’s it supposed to represent, the number?

  There’s this idea that it should be low, like a small enough amount that it’s not really going to change people’s decision to work or not. Right? 500 bucks a month is maybe going to help a lot of families, but it’s not going to keep your head above water, exactly. The same thing with like $1,000 a month. $12,000 a year is not going to, it’s not much of a hammock. Right? You can barely live on that.

  Right. Right.

  I think that that would just, I think, for most families, you’d be still far below the poverty line, but it’s enough to really, materially help. 500 bucks is going to help a family quite considerably, especially if they’re lower-income, again, without changing the impulse to work too much. That’s sort of the idea here.

  Not too much so that they don’t sit around.

  Exactly, so lower than a Social Security payment, which really can let people retire, and a lot of folks in the U.S. live on Social Security alone. Just enough to kind of help.

  To help.

  Yeah.

  Then what do they do then? They study it, what people do when they have it, or do they know what happened before and then after, or what’s the ...

  Yeah, exactly. Yes, the idea is to see what happens. We have some other examples of UBI-type payments, and we know a lot about what just giving people money does. One is that, very often, it doesn’t make them stop working. Right? There’s this great fear, “Well, if you’re some 25-year-old kid, and you’re pretty aimless, and you don’t know what to be doing, you’ll just take the money, and you’ll hang out in your mom’s basement, and you’ll never make anything of yourself.” Doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on that, and where it does stop people from working, it tends to be the parents of very young kids, so maybe your mom and you’re like, “All right. My partner will keep working, but I’m going to stay home with a kid,” or —

  Which might have some good effects.

  Yeah, might have some great effects, right?

  Right.

  Then it also seems to take younger kids and to keep them in school a little bit longer. Again, not a bad thing. Right? A pretty good thing, even if it means that they’re out of the workforce a little more. The third thing is that for people who are unemployed, it tends to elongate the period of job search, and so you’re like, “Wait. Are they just hanging out and not working?” It’s like, no, they’re actually waiting for a better job. They’re waiting to connect for a better job. Then on top of that, there’s a lot of kind of just straightforward stuff. Right? Like it bumps people up above the poverty line. It helps smooth their consumption, so like month to month, if you’re really low-income, you’re not going to be eating radically different amounts of food. That kind of thing, and it seems to improve people’s well-being. Right? It’s a bit of a safety net, and so maybe it reduces the cortisol in your blood. Maybe it makes your life a little bit easier. Maybe it reduces stress.

  Right. Explain why you think that the, so the tech people feel guilty about what’s happening, or they just feel like-

  I think so, yeah.

  Is that where it’s from? What-

  I think they’re terrified. I’ve talked to a ton of people in tech, because I’m like, I look out in the economy, and right now, unemployment’s, what, like 3.8 percent?

  It’s very low.

  It’s very low. I’m like, “Where, what are you seeing here in Silicon Valley that makes you so convinced that we’re not going to need to work anymore?” They just see things differently.

  Explain that.

  Yeah. They are like, “Look. What is going to happen with AI is, you’re going to get this kind of flywheel-type effect where technologies are going to be self-improving, and so anything automated is all of a sudden going to be done by a machine. It’s going to make sense for a business instead of hiring a human who might show up drunk or hungover at work, might get sick, might have a baby, might adopt a kid.”

  All these human things.

  Yeah, exactly. All these human things. “We’re going to replace you with a robot, and why not?” A lot of them point to trucks and taxis as being kind of like a-

  That’s the beginning.

  ... first vanguard of this, but then they say like, “Why not anything else? Right? What if every shop you walk into has nobody in it because a robot is restocking? What if we need way fewer nurses and doctors, because a AI-assisted system is just so much better at diagnosing and curing you?”

  Right. Yeah. I always say anything that can be digitized will be digitized-

  Exactly.

  ... and they will do it. I mean, it’s interesting, because, like they were talking ... It was in coal mining territory, and they’re like, “Well, we’re just going to bring coal mining jobs back.” I said, “Your bosses will use robots if it’s better.”

  Absolutely.

  Why wouldn’t they?

  Yeah.

  They’re like, “No, they want to bring back jobs.” I go, “They will get rid of you in a New York frigging minute.”

  In a second! Even think about things that really require big staffs of people. I was talking to somebody about home construction, and they were like, “We are going to prefab homes, so you’ll say, ‘I want a really big five-box home, and I want a two-box home,’ and then you’re not going to need a huge staff of people to construct these, because you’re just basically, we’re all going to be using, like, modular houses.” I have no idea if that’s going to happen —

  Yes, it is.

  but it doesn’t seem crazy to me.

  Of course, it is. Why wouldn’t it?

  And so, what happens? There are some jobs that we know probably are never going to be digitized, like yoga instruction.

  Maybe.

  Taking care of babies. That seems like something that you really need, but how many of those jobs are there? I’m hoping that journalism sticks around, but it’s going to be a robot Kara and robot Annie talking...

  Yeah. It’s true, so they-

  And so they’re terrified about this!

  They’re terrified. When you talk to them, talk about that. They just want to fix it, they just want to, know they’re going to cause pain and want to ...

  I think that they see the upside and the downside. A world in which there’s way less human labor in some ways is great. Right?

  Because then we can write poetry. Right?

  Yeah.

  Short story.

  Exactly. All of us, a lot of our material needs will be met better and more cheaply. At least hypothetically, that should free us up to do better and more interesting stuff. Economists have thought that this would be the case for a long time, and I think that folks in Silicon Valley and tech say that too. They’re like, “This world will be better, but not if everybody is miserable.”

  Right, but then how do you earn money? Then everybody gets universal basic in ...

  Yeah.

  Talk about the various ways it could go, like every single, and who gets what?

  Right. There’s a couple ways to do this. One-

  Everyone gets $1,000 or-

  Yeah, so like the kind of-

  But why should everybody get $1,000?

  Right. The prototypical example is, everybody gets $1,000 a month. That’s going to help. There’s kind of two concerns with that. Right? One is that, say that you have a $65,000 a year trucking job, or an $80,000 a year Bay Area construction gig. Are you going to be happy with $1,000 a month? There’s going to need to be some kind of cultural change, or the UBI’s going to need to be bigger, or something. I don’t know what else. The second thing with that is, right, if you are somebody who works in tech, you’re an engineer, you’re making like $300,000 a year, you don’t need an extra $1,000 from the government. The thing to do there is just to tax it back. Right? Basically, you make it so that if you’re above some income threshold, you don’t get it.

  The other way to do this — there’s lots of other ways, I shouldn’t say “the” other way — but one other way to do this is to do it as something called a negative income tax, where basically if you’re below a certain income level, the government is going to boost you up to that level, and then above there, you’ll just have the same sort of standard thing where the government instead takes money away. That’s a way to do it.

  Who is going to pay for all this?

  Yeah, so there’s a lot of money out there to be taxed, and there’s a lot of spending out there to be cut. People really worry about this. It’s not an impossible ... You look at, we would not need taxes higher than they are in, say, France. Now, we might not like taxes to be as high as they are in France, but the U.S. actually has, among OECD countries, pretty low tax base.

  No, I know, but they still can’t get enough of cutting taxes. I mean-

  No.

  ... look at what Trump just did.

  Right, and that’s the thing is, like culturally we might just totally reject this, and it might be that it has to be 100 years from now when it’s robot Kara and robot Annie, and you and I are like in the singularity, talking to each other, these figments or whatever.

  Where people will accept it. I do want to talk about that, the mentality in this country around it, because every time this has met people, they just, it’s an anathema to the idea, and right now, what’s going on is the idea that welfare should be work with welfare. You have to work. How are you going to do something like this if now people are trying to link welfare, which is a version of this, right, to work?

  There’s been this —

  You don’t get SNAP unless you work. You don’t get this unless you ...

  No, it’s a really amazing phenomenon, and it started in a bunch of red states, that they basically turned a bunch of government programs slowly into welfare. It used to be that welfare was the big one. You need to work in order to get welfare. It’s TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Then there were some work requirements in SNAP or food stamps, but some, especially red, states said, “We want to attach work requirements to other programs,” or, “We want to make the work requirements more onerous, and we want to make sure that people are not getting, are getting very temporary periods of assistance.” What’s happened now-

  Because then they get used to them. Right?

  Yeah. Exactly.

  That’s the concept.

  This is a temporary boost to help you until you figure your life out.

  Well anything that’s temporary then doesn’t stay temporary, right?

  Yeah.

  That’s the whole problem.

  They do. They have these like six-month time limits, or nine-month time limits. After that, you can’t, or for a lot of programs, they’ll say, “You can have this for six months in a five-year period, and that’s it.” What’s happened now with the Trump administration is, they have signaled, they have let states attach work requirements to Medicaid, so this is happening, as we speak, right now. States like Kentucky are attaching a work requirement to Medicaid where there never was one. Additionally, they’ve said that they’re going to attach work requirements to programs in Section 8, so housing assistance.

  So if you get public housing, you have to work.

  Exactly, and then they’re adding more work requirements to programs that already have them, like SNAP. During this time period, TANF is, the amount of money that the government spends on TANF is the same dollar figure, not inflation-adjusted, dollar figure as it did in 1996, so fewer and fewer families are getting it. I think it’s $16.5 billion. It’s just nothing.

  What do you make of this effort to link work with it? Because when you’re pushing about universal basic income, it’s that you’d have to have work attachments to it, correct, or not?

  You could! There’s no reason that you couldn’t, but the issue is that most poor families, they do work. The issue is that they aren’t making enough money, and they don’t have enough to spend. And then the other issue is that for the people who are remaining out of the labor force, they tend to have real challenges connecting to it, so maybe they’re illiterate. Maybe they have a problem with drug or alcohol abuse. Maybe they’re in a really rural area where there’s just no jobs. Maybe they have an undiagnosed disability, and so forcing them to get work isn’t really going to do anything. The other thing is, maybe they’re so low-income that they can’t work. Right? If you don’t have money for bus fare to get to a job, how are you going to get a job?

  Right.

  With those people, work requirements don’t do much, and there’s not very much in terms of supportive services to help people. We’re in San Francisco right now, and San Francisco actually has an awesome model for this and a completely unique model in the country where, with their TANF money, their welfare money, they instead run this job program where they set people up with kind of like apprenticeships, and they connect with local employers, and they provide subsidies. They say, “Hey, if you’ll take this person in the TANF program, we’re going to pay part of her salary for some period of time.” This works really well, so there’s models out there, but again, the country just doesn’t tend to use them, because work requirements and the sort of restrictions on welfare have tended to be a way to cut the program, not actually to help the people.

  To help the people.

  Yeah, that are using them.

  All right. The title “Give People Money,” again, makes people nervous, like why would you give people without something in exchange for it?

  Right, and where does that money come from?

  And where does it come from?

  Whose money?

  That’s the two parts. “Whose money? My money? I don’t want to give people my money.” Let’s talk about San Francisco. You brought it up is, it’s got a very innovative program around welfare that people, they link people with work and things like that. But San Francisco now has become the national poster child for a disastrous situation around homelessness — which, if I remember, it was Care Not Cash, or was it? It was under Gavin Newsom, where they didn’t want to give cash. They tried to fix this in a variety of ways. When you see that kind of poverty, because “there shouldn’t be poverty in this country” is the concept behind this, that nobody should be living in destitution….

  Right, or we don’t have to. Right? We choose it.

  We choose to let them, let people live like this.

  Yep.

  Talk about how, when you look at a city like this, which is so wealthy and has so many opportunities for people that you have this permanent underclass that seems not to be fixable.

  Yeah. It’s a crisis out here, and it’s a really interesting-

  All across California, by the way, where-

  Oh, gosh.

  ... most of the homeless people live, actually.

  Yeah, and it’s funny, I was talking, I was writing a story, so I was talking to a bunch of people in Reno, and they’re like, “All of a sudden, we look like California too, like we have this new homeless population.” Right? I think that that, it’s really interesting here, because you do, you have this chasm between rich and poor. You have a city that is increasingly unlivable for anybody except for people who are so insensitive to the prices of things, because they’re, I mean, they are, they’re manufacturing just such extraordinary wealth out here. It’s really interesting, and it gets to kind of a few interesting issues. One is that the problem out here has to do with housing regulation. It has to do with a lack of housing, a lack of public transit and underinvestment in things. It’s a really complicated, knotty policy problem that would take a lot of things to fix. We could have a, like we could snap our fingers, institute a wealth tax and have a UBI here and San Francisco would still be unlivable for most people. Right? So despite the title of the book, right? Like these problems are hard but not impossible to solve. That said, you know, I think that it is true that when you think about universal cash payments, unconditional cash payments that you have to figure that they are going to be most important for the most destitute. But there, that also becomes one of these kinds of challenging things, right? You know, it’s, there’s all these studies about like why people give or don’t give money to people on the street. And they’re like, “Well, if they’re just going to spend it on drugs, am I really helping them?”

  Right? And I think that San Francisco and a lot of other big and especially big liberal cities recognize that you can’t just give people money, exactly. Like they need healthcare, they need housing. They need supportive services, they might need literacy or job training readiness programs and so the US has some of these things but not others and it’s really interesting again, being in California, that takes a much more aggressive view of this, that has a really fixed set of social services in comparison to a state like Utah or Wyoming or Mississippi. You know, like the federalism means that we’re constantly running a bunch of experiments on these things and despite the fact that California has this really aggressive Medicaid program and a lot of housing programs, you know, you still have a crisis, right?

  Absolutely. So this is not something UBI is to solve. So what is this solving for UBI? What is it trying to solve? Is get people above, give them a working chance to work better.

  Yeah, absolutely. So basically give them a, not necessarily, you know, perhaps-

  A handout.

  Not a handout, but a kind of a safety net. Right? This is a form of social insurance more than it is a form of social welfare. We’re saying that we’re not gonna let anybody in this society fall down too far. And that’s the thing that we do as Americans. There’s no real safety net at the bottom.

  No, no.

  Not like there is in Europe or Japan or a bunch of other countries. There’s just holes and you fall all the way through. So this is one way of doing that, but there’s, you know, there’s others and Democrats, especially, are starting to talk about a lot of these big universal and you know, big universal programs.

  So I think during the Obama years and the Clinton years, you saw this kind of like very careful tentative technocratic policy machinations, right? Like the ACA is a really complicated series of programs to help different people in different ways and the thing that UBI and things like a jobs guarantee or an expansion of the EITC or you know, free college, they’re just big universal ideas that have become really attractive on the left. And again, I think you’re seeing a lot of them come from the national level politicians coming from California.

  We, it’s interesting because we had [Mark] Warner at Code and for a minute there I was like, he should really run for office because he was like, sensible. But he was talking about, he said one of the issues, obviously, is that the Democrats are so fixated on Trump that they’re not going to talk about what they’re going to do, but there’s all kinds of issues they have to deal with.

  One is training, obviously retraining, which they’re not talking about. The ideas behind what happens when things get digitized. What do you, how do you have portable benefits? These are sensible things. Any, any ... he was very much against the idea of all these free handouts, this idea of free college and free this and free that because you can’t pay for it. So you have Republicans on the one side pushing a certain agenda, a very populist agenda where, “fend for yourself, too bad” … and then ruining the budget by tax cuts for the rich and the other side saying “everybody gets everything. Everybody gets every piece of candy. We all get it.”

  Yeah, but you’re right that there’s been this like populist polarization on both sides, right? Republicans are like, no taxes, total free rein for businesses to do whatever the heck that they want and Democrats are like free stuff for everybody and we’ll figure out how to pay for it maybe 100 years from now.

  Right, exactly and we’ll be dead in the end. And so when you have something like UBI coming, what’s the success of it? From where you’re seeing it, when do you know that it’s working or is there never going to be a prove point?

  So I actually, if I were, I’m a terrible-

  In your travels, where did you see it?

  So I mean, it is absolutely working to alleviate poverty in low income countries. There’s nothing to suggest that it wouldn’t do the same thing here. We’re seeing in Canada-

  Give an example of a country, a country that’s like us, Canada.

  Yeah. So Canada now has this UBI set of payments and we’re going to have results pretty soon that are, that are going to show, right? But we have, we have just tons of experimental data from the US, from other countries, from Iran, from all around the world that shows that if you give people money, it reduces poverty. Just really straightforward. And so what I think will actually happen here, I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll see anything like a UBI unless we see those kinds of technological changes that we were talking about and changes in work. But I do think that that one thing that is gaining momentum on both sides is to have kind of a UBI for kids and basically to say we don’t want kids to grow up in poverty anymore. We can all agree that kids are not responsible for their own fortunes. And I think that that-

  We can’t all agree on that. Look at what’s going on with immigrants.

  We think that those kids should be working, dammit.

  Yeah, no but look what’s been happening on immigration, they don’t care-

  I know, I know it’s-

  So we don’t all agree on that.

  My guess, you’re right, we certainly don’t. Yeah, it’s, everything has become divisive, I suppose. But I think that that is probably the low-hanging fruit here. To say-

  So that, what would, how would that look? What would that look like?

  If you have, it would probably be somewhat means-tested. So if your family income for a family of four is less than $30,000 a year, we’re going to give you a $200 cash payment per kid under the age of 15 or something like that.

  Right and that’s a check that you get.

  Yeah, it’d be like some sort of check that you get.

  And you can’t ensure that it goes to the kids, though right? It just, you get it.

  Nope. And that’s one of the hard things, right? Like TANF is supposed to be for kids, right? We focus on the parents a lot, but in order to get TANF, like you got to have a kid and just rhetorically, the conversation focuses on the decision of the parents, but we know through, you know, things like the child tax credit that this tends to be pretty effective and it does, it boosts the number of calories that kids are eating, it keeps them in school for more days and it tends to make the environment in the house better.

  How is it differentiated from TANF or whatever, whatever program people are using, SNAP or whatever?

  Yeah, so I mean the thing with TANF or SNAP is that you are kind of receiving a constant payment, where a lot of the other stuff, again, it happens through the tax code. So something like the EITC, it’s boosting the money that you’re making.

  Explain what that is.

  Yeah, sorry, Earned Income Tax Credit. And so if you’re relatively low income it’s quite likely that the government is basically going to make sure that you don’t pay taxes and you might get a nice rebate and so it’s kind of invisible but it’s really important to people. And same thing with the child, child tax credit, it comes through the tax code, you don’t really see it but we know that it’s really effective.

  As opposed to this which is, how is it different than the others because, how do you differentiate it with parents or whoever is getting it?

  You mean just like in terms of how they’re actually receiving it?

  Right, yeah.

  Yeah. So, you know, SNAP, you get a card and can spend it at a certain number of stores on a certain number of things. You know, Section 8 comes through a kind of complicated series where you’re getting it through the housing. Medicaid, obviously there you are signing up with a government program and then a lot of things come through the tax code.

  Right, through the tax code as opposed to this is just-

  Right but TANF is the only one where you might be receiving like a literal cash payment outside of social security or SSI, which is supplemental security income, which is a program for very, very low income people, mostly elderly and disabled.

  So what is the, from your perspective, from writing this book, going around the country and the world, looking at these programs, what is the likelihood that it’s going to be widespread in this country? I don’t see it with this gang in the ...

  No, I mean we’re going through this unbelievable moment of polarization where there’s no middle, right? Like there’s no sensible middle ground for policy-making. And so I think that right now, if you see, you know, I think it’s likely that we’ll see a Democratic House and Senate again soon, but it’s going to take a long time for that to happen. And if that happens then they’ll certainly pass something. It’s a big question. And so you know what they’re going to focus on. They have a bunch of big ideas out there and I don’t think that the party has coalesced around one but something like this, you’re going to have absolute evidence of it and I would say within ten years there’s going to be European countries that have it and it’s not unlikely that someplace like Canada will, along with all of these lower income countries that are already doing this.

  In the US, I think it’s going to take a lot. Culturally, we are not even close to something like this where we say, “You know what? We’re okay paying taxes for somebody to get money for free, for no, for nothing back.” So I think it would be a big cultural change and I think that that would have to come through, you know, something like a, you know, robots taking all our jobs.

  Where everybody needs it. Where everybody might, more people might need it than the regular poor people, who people in this country despise.

  Right.

  It seems like we despise the poor.

  Yeah, we certainly judge them pretty harshly.

  Yeah. Yeah. And where does that end and will that come with work requirements, do think, UBI?

  I wouldn’t be surprised. They’re pretty pop — you know, I mean, one thing is when we think about the policymaking process in this country, like things do have to get ironed out in the House and the Senate and so, I would not be totally surprised if there was a work requirement that came with this, sort of like in TANF.

  You can’t just have the money.

  You can’t just have it.

  Right.

  But maybe there’s fewer requirements, maybe those work requirements are looser and again, I think it’s, you know, I don’t think it’s unlikely that a state like California or maybe Hawaii are the ones that are thinking about this currently, like, “Let’s try this.” And so I think you might see a sort of laboratory of democracy thing where, where you’ll start to see it happen and then maybe it gets nationalized.

  Then other states will have it.

  Yeah, exactly.

  Like with cars or whatever, like self-driving cars and things like that.

  Precisely.

  Lastly, when you think about the political elements, because I think about that right now all the time, are there surprises that people are for this that you don’t think would be?

  Yeah, there’s a weird strange-bedfellows thing going on. So like, Libertarians really like this idea.

  Yeah, they do.

  Because you just get rid of the government, basically, like thousands of government bureaucrats. And one interesting thing is that there’s actually a lot of Republicans that like the idea of giving cash to kids. They hate child poverty and they’re like, all right, maybe, maybe that’s a good, a good use for that. So you saw Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, who are really arch-conservative senators get behind an expansion of the child tax credit because they want families to have more kids and they want to support those kids better.

  But like most of the, most of the enthusiasm here is coming absolutely from the left and particularly, you know, states with thick left like California where you have all sorts of different coalitions.

  We get a lot of left here.

  Yeah, you have a ton of left here.

  Yeah, we got a lot of left.

  A really diverse left.

  Yeah, they can get real mad too.

  Yeah, they can and there are, you know, it’s funny we’re here talking, this is, this is June currently. We’re talking before the primaries tomorrow and seeing people battle this out is really interesting.

  Yeah, it is. It’s interesting in San Francisco right now, the entire topic is around homelessness.

  Yeah.

  With none of them, with any good solutions that I know-

  No and it’s, you know, I think it’s interesting because I was talking with some folks about this and they’re like, “Until you solve the housing cost crisis for anybody, you don’t solve homelessness, here,” you know? And nobody seems to know how to, how to make houses cheap here.

  Yeah, I was in the park the other day and they were like, “Let’s have one park dedicated to the homeless!” and I’m like, I’m like, “Okay and that makes it permanent.” Like that to me, you know what I mean? It’s not a permanent and it was interesting and I was like, “Why don’t we just give them money?” And they’re like, “No, then they’ll use it ...” It was, it was a fascinating how it popped up and they didn’t like the idea of universal basic income.

  Yeah and it’s kind of, Utah is the state that’s done best with homelessness. They have this housing-first model, but Utah has like really cheap housing prices compared to California. So it’s all well and good-

  Who wants to live in Utah? I’m sorry Utahns. But California’s a nicer place to live. Not anymore.

  Yeah but it, you know, it’s not an impossible problem to solve if you’re living in a state where you can in a city rent an apartment for 700 bucks a month.

  Right, right.

  Where can you, can you rent any, can you buy a parking spot?

  No, you can have a cardboard box at the corner of Market and Sanchez for that and no heating.

  No heating, nothing else.

  So last question. So you think tech is going to really push this? Because there’s so many things tech is like getting politicized on — immigration, whatever. This is a highly political thing. Do you see them being the ones that push this through?

  I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch. Let’s say that there’s a company and maybe it’s one of the self-driving, Waymo or something.

  Right, right.

  And Waymo all of a sudden is responsible for putting like 30,000 people out of a job in one month.

  Right, right.

  Let’s say that this happens.

  Let’s say it’s going to happen.

  Uber or Lyft or any of them. I think at that point they are going to feel a lot of political pressure to say, here’s the stuff that we’re doing to actually not just help higher income people scoot around San Francisco a little bit easier, here’s what we’re doing. And I think that that’s the pressure that I would watch for. If a Waymo has to say like we see that we’re putting folks out of jobs, but here’s, here’s what we’re suggesting happens.

  Have you met these people yet? Because-

  I know.

  They take no responsibility for say, you know, wrecking an election, for example. They have no responsibility over the data they collect.

  Yeah, but thanks, thanks to folks like you, the reckoning is happening.

  Reckoning!

  I’m not sure that-

  I’m calling it The Purge now.

  I like that!

  I know, I get to go out and, like, knife everybody, like one night a year.

  Yeah, exactly, but it’s so-

  That would be funny, I think.

  If The Purge happened in San Francisco, I don’t think that there’s a more fun city for that.

  Oh my God, please, let’s not have that happen in San Francisco. I would win, but-

  Oh gosh, I would want to be on your team on that. But yeah, no, there’s this reckoning happening, right? And like maybe there’s like some humility-

  They’ve got to have answers, you know? Tech has to start to have answers.

  Yeah, maybe there’s this sense like, we’re going to drag you in front of a Congressional panel.

  Yeah, if the Congressmen were as smart as they aren’t.

  Sure.

  I think that’s the issue. They don’t even know how Facebook works. “Can you tell me what’s your business ... “ I was like, what?! Like you don’t even understand.

  Oh gosh.

  I know, it was an embarrassment. People get mad at me for saying that, but it was an embarrassment. In any case, we’ll see if they can take on big issues like this. Is there a Senator that’s really behind this besides like Marco Rubio? Is there some?

  Yeah, there’s, so Cory Booker is behind a bunch of this-

  Sounds like a Booker thing.

  A bunch of them have kind of, like, flirted with it. So Bernie Sanders has kind of flirted with this and-

  He likes that? He likes that very much?

  That’s a pretty good Sanders.

  Thank you.

  You know, and there’s, there’s a bunch of these other ones, other Senators that are kind of lining up behind. They don’t want to be seen as being like the centrist anymore. And so like, Kirsten Gillibrand who’s like, “I’m interested in like a jobs guarantee. I’m interested in cash payments.”

  Oh, fascinating. I saw her at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles this weekend, but okay. I’m not saying Nobu, but it was like Nobu. In fact, it was.

  Anyway! it’s interesting to see how they do it. Annie, it was a great talking to you. Thanks for coming on the show.

• WIKI -

  Banner logo
  Wiki Loves Monuments: The world's largest photography competition is now open! Photograph a historic site, learn more about our history, and win prizes.
  Hide
  Annie Lowrey
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to navigationJump to search
  Annie Lowrey
  Annie Lowrey The Myth of Meritocracy (29603514006).jpg
  Born 1984 (age 33–34)[1]
  Nationality American
  Alma mater Harvard University
  Occupation Journalist
  Employer New York Magazine
  Political party Democratic
  Spouse(s) Ezra Klein (m. 2011)[2]
  Annie M. Lowrey (born 1984) reports on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic magazine.[3]

  Contents
  1 Education
  2 Career
  3 Personal life
  4 Selected works
  5 References
  Education[edit]
  Lowery attended Harvard University and wrote for the Harvard Crimson.[4]

  Career[edit]
  Previously, Lowrey covered economic policy for The New York Times.[5] Prior to that, she covered the economy as the Moneybox columnist for Slate. Lowrey joined Slate in 2010 as part of an effort to revamp their coverage of business and the economy.[6] She was also a staff writer for the Washington Independent and served on the editorial staffs of Foreign Policy and The New Yorker.[7] Lowrey has appeared as a guest on the PBS Newshour,[8] The Rachel Maddow Show[9] Morning Joe, Up with Steve Kornacki and Bloggingheads.tv.[10]

  Personal life[edit]
  Lowrey is married to Ezra Klein, the editor of Vox and contributor to MSNBC.[11][12]

  Selected works[edit]
  Lowrey published the books, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018. ISBN-10: 1-524-75876-0).

  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ Pappu, Sridhar (25 March 2011). "Young Pundits Become Washington's Media Elite". The New York Times.
  Jump up ^ Mazel Tov, Media Power Couple – The New York Observer
  Jump up ^ "Lowrey to cover economic policy for The Atlantic". Talking Biz News. Retrieved 2018-03-26.
  Jump up ^ "Annie M. Lowrey". The Harvard Crimson. Jun 5, 2007. Archived from the original on 2010-01-21.
  Jump up ^ "Annie Lowrey leaving Slate". New York Magazine.
  Jump up ^ "Annie Lowrey writes on the economy and business for Slate". Slate.
  Jump up ^ "Annie Lowrey". The Guardian. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
  Jump up ^ "Borders Closes the Book as Decisions Come Back to Haunt Chain".
  Jump up ^ Maddow, Rachel. "Unemployed Could Wield Power". YouTube.
  Jump up ^ "The Super-Rich Are Different From You and Me".
  Jump up ^ Klein, Ezra. "Reconciliation – and more". Washington Post. Retrieved 2 June 2011.
  Jump up ^ "New York Media Power Couples". New York Observer. Retrieved 6 July 2011.
  Authority control Edit this at Wikidata
  WorldCat Identities VIAF: 37151594376005350333
  Categories: 1984 birthsAmerican business and financial journalistsAmerican women journalistsHarvard University alumniLiving peopleHarvard Crimson alumniThe New York Times writersThe New Yorker editorsWomen magazine editors21st-century American women writers
  Navigation menu
  Not logged inTalkContributionsCreate accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView historySearch

  Main page
  Contents
  Featured content
  Current events
  Random article
  Donate to Wikipedia
  Wikipedia store
  Interaction
  Help
  About Wikipedia
  Community portal
  Recent changes
  Contact page
  Tools
  What links here
  Related changes
  Upload file
  Special pages
  Permanent link
  Page information
  Wikidata item
  Cite this page
  Print/export
  Create a book
  Download as PDF
  Printable version

  Languages
  Add links
  This page was last edited on 26 August 2018, at 04:56 (UTC).
  Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
  Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaDevelopersCookie statementMobile viewWikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki

7/31/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1533093664119 1/2
Print Marked Items
Lowrey, Annie: GIVE PEOPLE MONEY
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lowrey, Annie GIVE PEOPLE MONEY Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-5247-5876-9
A journalist who focuses on economic policy explores the idea of reducing poverty through recurring
government payments to every adult citizen.
The concept of a "universal basic income" seems straightforward. As Atlantic contributing editor Lowrey
writes, "it is universal, in the sense that every resident of a given community or country receives it. It is
basic, in that it is just enough to live on and not more. And it is income." The author explores UBI proposals
from three angles: how the money could affect the desire for employment, the effectiveness of the payments
in helping to ameliorate poverty, and how well the payments would bring about social inclusion within
given community. Much of Lowrey's exploration is theoretical since UBI experiments are few and far
between. Her research took her to often isolated, impoverished areas of Kenya, India, and the United States.
In the U.S., the author writes about how many of the impoverished citizens she met had previously
functioned well economically, partly because workers could join labor unions that advocated successfully
for decent wages, on-the-job safety regulations, affordable health care, payment of school tuitions, sick
leaves, maternity and paternity leaves, and the like. As employers dismantled unions--often abetted by
Republican presidents and members of Congress--without punishment, an increasing number of laborers
became unemployed or underemployed. Some ended up bankrupt and/or homeless. Outside of the U.S.,
Lowrey's findings are murkier. The laws and customs of different nations vary widely, and the concept of
"poverty" means something different--and is far more consequential--to families that cannot afford to put
food on the table or find suitable housing. Pilot programs in portions of Mexico and Brazil had led to
further experiments in other nations, but interpreting the minimal data from the experiments feels
premature. For now, though, Lowrey offers a good starting point.
A useful primer on a highly contentious topic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lowrey, Annie: GIVE PEOPLE MONEY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571098/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=28990d84.
Accessed 31 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571098
7/31/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1533093664119 2/2
Give People Money: How a Universal
Basic Income Would End Poverty,
Revolutionize Work, and Remake the
World
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake
the World
Annie Lowrey. Crown, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-15247-5876-9
What would happen if everyone received $ 1,000 from the government each month, no strings attached?
Lowrey, a contributing editor for Atlantic magazine, examines the promises and pitfalls of a universal basic
income, or UBI, in this complex analysis. Considering examples such as Iran, which replaced subsidies for
certain goods with a UBI in 2010, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose tribal members receive
profit payouts on tribally owned casinos, Lowrey debunks the main critique leveled against UBI: that it
would disincentivize work. Drawing on interviews with tech tycoons, development economists, and a
diverse sample of the world's poor, she persuasively argues that UBI would actually stimulate higher levels
of investment in small businesses, increase workers' bargaining power, and serve as a buffer against the
technological advances that are likely to replace workers with robots. Lowrey is at her best discussing the
potential role UBI could play in achieving development outcomes in places like Jharkhand, one of India's
poorest states and a prime example of the inefficiency of traditional state-funded poverty alleviation
programs. This book is a lively introduction to a seemingly quixotic concept that has attracted thinkers from
John Stuart Mill to Martin Luther King Jr., and that continues to provoke. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the
GernertCo. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and
Remake the World." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 82. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532751/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e49431fa.
Accessed 31 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532751

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/books/review/annie-lowrey-give-people-money-andrew-yang-war-on-normal-people.html
  Word count: 1962

  NONFICTION

  What if the Government Gave Everyone a Paycheck?
  Image
  CreditThe Heads of State
  By Robert B. Reich
  July 9, 2018

  GIVE PEOPLE MONEY
  How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World
  By Annie Lowrey
  263 pp. Crown. $26.

  THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE
  The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
  By Andrew Yang
  284 pp. Hachette Books. $28.

  If climate change, nuclear standoffs, Russian trolls, terrorist threats and Donald Trump in the White House don’t cause you feelings of impending doom, you might think about artificial intelligence. I’m not just referring to big-brained robots taking over civilization from us smaller-brained humans, but the more imminent possibility they’ll take over our jobs.

  It’s already happening. Robots and related forms of artificial intelligence are rapidly supplanting what remain of factory workers, call-center operators and clerical staff. Amazon and other online platforms are booting out retail workers. We’ll soon be saying goodbye to truck drivers, warehouse personnel and professionals who do whatever can be replicated, including pharmacists, accountants, attorneys, diagnosticians, translators and financial advisers. Machines may soon do a better job than doctors at scanning for cancer.

  This doesn’t mean a future without jobs, as some doomsayers predict. But robots will almost certainly push down wages in all the remaining human-touch jobs (child care, elder care, home health care, personal coaches, sales and so on) that robots can’t do because they’re not, well, human. Even today, with technology having already displaced many workers, there’s no jobs crisis. The official rate of unemployment is at a remarkably low 3.8 percent. Instead, we have a good jobs crisis. The official rate hides millions of people working part time who would rather have full-time jobs, along with millions more who are too discouraged to look for work (many ending up on disability), college grads overqualified for their jobs and a growing army of contingent workers with zero job security. Blanketing all are stagnant or declining wages and vanishing job benefits. Today’s typical American worker earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 1979, adjusted for inflation. Nearly 80 percent of adult Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next paycheck will be.

  Image
  Advancing technologies aren’t the only cause of this predicament, but notwithstanding Trump’s claim to the contrary, technology is a bigger culprit than trade. The economy keeps growing yet most economic gains are going to a few — largely financiers and, increasingly, inventors and owners of the digitized devices that are replacing good jobs. Our economic system isn’t designed for this. If the trend continues, it’s unclear who will even earn enough to buy all the future robots.

  Economic change on this scale doesn’t happen without something cracking. The shift from farm to factory featured decades of bloody labor conflict; the move from factory to office and other sedentary jobs caused more upheaval. What will happen when robots push most people out of steady work and into lower-wage gig jobs? I doubt we’ll see a revolution. A more likely scenario is a slow slouch toward authoritarianism and xenophobia. We may already be there.

  What’s the answer? Here in the Bay Area where I live, where inventors and engineers are busily digitizing everything, many civic and business leaders are touting something called a universal basic income, or U.B.I. It’s universal in the sense that everyone would receive it, basic in that it would be just enough to live on and cash income rather than voucher-based, like food stamps or Section 8 housing. To the rest of America, a U.B.I. may seem like a pipe dream, but from my vantage point some form of it seems inevitable.

  EDITORS’ PICKS

  When Wives Earn More Than Husbands, Neither Partner Likes to Admit It

  Her Husband Was a Princeton Graduate Student. Then He Was Taken Prisoner in Iran.

  How an Italian Town That Welcomed Migrants Turned Against Them
  Several recent books have provided good background briefings for what a U.B.I. could be, including those by the labor leader Andy Stern, the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and the Belgian academics Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght. To these offerings, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, adds his own, somewhat breathless version in “The War on Normal People.” Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment in “Give People Money.” Both are useful primers on the case for a U.B.I.

  The two books cover so much of the same terrain that I’m tempted to wonder whether they were written by the same robot, programmed for slightly different levels of giddy enthusiasm. Both cite Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman as early supporters of a U.B.I. Both urge that a U.B.I. be set at $1,000 a month for every American. Both point out that with poverty currently defined as an income for a single adult of less than $12,000 a year, such a U.B.I. would, by definition, eliminate poverty for the 41 million Americans now living below the poverty line. It would also improve the bargaining power of millions of low-wage workers — forcing employers to increase wages, add benefits and improve conditions in order to retain them. If a U.B.I. replaced specific programs for the poor, it would also reduce government bureaucracy, minimize government interference in citizens’ lives and allow people to avoid the stigma that often accompanies government assistance. By virtue of being available to all, a U.B.I. would not only guarantee the material existence of everyone in a society; it would establish a baseline for what membership in that society means.

  U.B.I.’s critics understandably worry that it would spur millions to drop out of the labor force, induce laziness or at least rob people of the structure and meaning work provides. Both Yang and Lowrey muster substantial research to rebut these claims. I’m not sure they need it. After all, $12,000 a year doesn’t deliver a comfortable life even in the lowest-cost precincts of America, so there would still be plenty of incentive to work. Most of today’s jobs provide very little by way of fulfillment or creativity anyway.

  Image
  A U.B.I. might give recipients a bit more time to pursue socially beneficial activities, like helping the elderly or attending to kids with special needs or perhaps even starting a new business. Yang suggests it would spur a system of “social credits” in which people trade their spare time by performing various helpful tasks for one another. (I.R.S. be warned.) Surely a U.B.I. would help compensate many people — especially women — for the unpaid labor they already contribute. As Lowrey points out, some 40 million family caregivers in America provide half a trillion dollars of unpaid adult care annually. Child care has become so expensive that one of every three stay-at-home mothers today lives below the poverty line (compared with 14 percent in 1970).

  But how could America possibly afford a U.B.I.? A $1,000-a-month grant to every American would cost about $3.9 trillion a year. That’s about $1.3 trillion on top of existing welfare programs — roughly the equivalent of the entire federal budget, or about a fifth of the entire United States economy. Both Yang and Lowrey come up with laundry lists of potential funding sources — from soaking the rich (raising the top tax bracket to 55 percent, enlarging the estate tax and implementing new taxes on wealth, financial transactions and perhaps even the owners of the robots and related devices that are displacing jobs), to instituting a carbon tax or a value-added tax.

  Whatever the source of funds, it seems a safe bet that increased automation will allow the economy to continue to grow, making a U.B.I. more affordable. A U.B.I. would itself generate more consumer spending, stimulating additional economic activity. And less poverty would mean less crime, incarceration and other social costs associated with deprivation. “You know what’s really expensive?” Yang asks. “Dysfunction. Revolution.”

  If these measures still aren’t enough to foot the bill, Lowrey suggests making a U.B.I. less universal by taxing away U.B.I. payments to high-income earners and reducing other forms of social insurance (for example, eliminating food stamps and welfare programs). As a last resort, she writes, a U.B.I. could be implemented as a kind of negative income tax, by which government simply ensures that every person or household has a certain minimum yearly income. This is what Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman had in mind. Lowrey figures that the cost of such a guarantee would approximate the current total costs of the earned-income tax credit, supplemental security income, housing assistance, food stamps and school lunches. She notes that the simplest way to achieve this would be to transform existing antipoverty programs into unconditional cash transfers.

  But there’s a logical flaw in her argument. Once a U.B.I. is no longer universal or even basic (what if the poor are worse off when other forms of assistance are stripped away?), it’s hard to see the point of having it in the first place. More troubling is Lowrey’s blurring of the distinction between a U.B.I. that redistributes resources from the superrich to the growing number of vulnerable lower-income Americans and one that merely turns programs for the poor into cash assistance. The latter may be warranted, but it wouldn’t touch America’s growing scourge of inequality and economic insecurity, which will be made worse as robots take over good jobs.

  A core challenge in the future will be how to redistribute money from the ever richer owners of the robots and related technologies to the rest of us, who are otherwise likely to become poorer and less secure. This is not just an economic challenge but also a political one. As we know from recent history, vast fortunes translate directly into political power, and such power effectively resists redistribution. Sadly, neither of these authors discusses how to deal with this paradox.

  A world inhabited only by robots, their billionaire owners and a large and increasingly restive population is the plotline for countless dystopian fantasies, but it’s a reality that appears to be drawing closer. If we continue on the path we’re on, we will need to make fundamental choices about how to support human livelihoods and ensure equal participation in our economy and society. Most basically, we will have to confront the realities of vastly unequal economic and political power. Even if we manage to enact a U.B.I., it will not be nearly enough.

  Robert B. Reich, a former secretary of labor and a professor of public policy at Berkeley, is the co-creator of the Netflix documentary “Saving Capitalism” and the author of “The Common Good.”

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

  A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2018, on Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Barely Afloat in America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• Business Insider
  https://www.businessinsider.com/give-people-money-universal-basic-income-book-review-2018-7
  Word count: 1650

  'Give People Money' is a useful book about a bad idea
  Josh Barro Jul. 15, 2018, 10:03 AM
  Opinion banner

  Ezra Klein and Annie Lowrey
  Annie Lowrey YouTube
  I've written before that the idea of a universal basic income is one that needs to die .
  Author Annie Lowrey disagrees, and she explores the concept in a new book.
  Her book provides a framework to examine what changes we can make to make our safety net better.

  Shortly after the 2016 election, I wrote that universal basic income — the blue-sky policy idea of the government providing a subsistence-level cash payment to every American, or at least every American adult — was an idea that needed to die .

  Annie Lowrey disagrees.

  Her new book, " Give People Money ," is an exploration of how UBI could help address three problems in society — disruptive changes in the labor market, persistent poverty, and race and gender biases in the existing income support regime.

  As you might guess from my 2016 column, the book does not change my ultimate view on UBI. And anyway, Lowrey is not exactly urging implementation of the $1,000 per-person-per-month, $3.9 trillion-per-year US UBI proposal she discusses.

  What her book does do is use UBI as a framework to examine why our safety net so often does not achieve what it is supposed to — and to help illuminate what changes, short of a true UBI, we could make for the better.

  A UBI is too expensive to be practical
  At $3.9 trillion per year, a $1,000 per-person-per-month UBI would be equivalent to about 20% of American economic output, or roughly equal to all existing federal government spending. It's also about 20 times the size of the recently enacted Republican tax cut.

  So, you could repeal that whole tax cut, and you'd only be about 5% of the way to financing a robust UBI.

  Lowrey is right to note that not all new policies need to be fully paid for, a fact Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated whenever they have run the government for the last two decades. I agree that the US has a large capacity for deficit spending, a capacity that fiscal pundits have often understated.

  Still, there are limits — a couple hundred billion here, a couple hundred billion there, and eventually you're talking about an amount of new spending that can't be deficit-financed without causing interest rates to sharply rise and creditworthiness of US government debt to be severely undermined.

  Many big policy ideas aren't big enough to reach this threshold, but UBI is.

  So if the government is going to start sending out an extra $4 trillion a year in checks, it's going to have to collect something close to an extra $4 trillion in taxes. And as Lowrey notes, higher income taxes on high earners wouldn't come close to getting you there.

  There are other revenue options, but they're not very palatable. For example, she says a value-added tax could "easily" raise $1 trillion a year. A VAT could do this simply , but not easily. Depending on the exact tax base, such a VAT likely need a rate around 10% to 15% — so it would be a large new tax on American consumers. And it would only pay about a quarter of the bill.

  You could also finance a UBI partly through spending cuts. But as Lowrey correctly notes, many important safety-net programs are not fungible and can't just be eliminated once we give people a cash benefit.

  For example, UBI could not replace Medicare or Medicaid — that would leave people without healthcare. A UBI probably could replace food stamps and cash welfare, but eliminating those programs would save less than $100 billion a year.

  Mini-UBI proposals have their own problems
  One way to make a UBI more affordable, of course, is to make the program smaller. For example, Lowrey suggests you could exclude Social Security recipients and phase out the benefit above incomes of $72,000. That greatly shrinks the overall size of the UBI program, from $4 trillion a year to $1 trillion.

  But these are not small tweaks.

  For example, a phase-out above $72,000 would act like a new tax on the incomes of many middle- and upper-middle income Americans, reducing their benefits as their labor income rises — and that implicit tax would be on top of whatever new taxes are imposed to finance the UBI to begin with.

  This would produce intense divisions between people who would work a lot and pay a lot of new taxes to finance the UBI but wouldn't even get to collect it, and people who would work less and become highly dependent on the UBI to support themselves — and it would mean the UBI was not actually universal.

  Meanwhile, the Social Security exclusion would greatly undermine the purpose of the existing Social Security program.

  Currently, Social Security acts like a forced-savings mechanism. Payroll taxes do little to discourage work, in large part because workers know they earn benefits for the taxes they pay.

  But the average monthly Social Security benefit at full retirement age in 2016 was just over $1,200, not much higher than the theoretical $1,000 UBI. If the UBI excluded Social Security recipients, then Social Security would provide only a small benefit over the UBI everyone else is entitled to, and Social Security contributions would go from savings-like payments to regular taxes.

  Plus, excluding seniors would do much to reduce political support for UBI — especially since those seniors would still be on the hook for taxes (like that VAT) to finance UBI.

  UBI is still useful as an idea, because it provides some clues about how we should redesign existing safety-net programs
  In her book, Lowrey looks at three major challenges surrounding the safety net:

  The labor market is changing and government programs are not necessarily keeping up.
  Despite long periods of growth, many people are still left in or near poverty.
  And programs are stigmatized and segregated, with minorities and women helped less than whites and men.
  The second problem is the one where Lowrey makes the strongest argument, drawing lessons from UBI-like experiments in rich and poor countries to show how poverty can be addressed with cash payments. This argument is strongest in part because it is the most obvious — when you give people money, it makes them richer — but this is still an idea that often eludes policymakers.

  Looking at programs run by GiveDirectly, the charity that seeks to lift poor people in east Africa out of poverty by giving them money, she sees promising results — African villagers know what specific goods and services they need better than international aid groups do, and cash payments not only raise their level of consumption but help them make good investments that make them healthier and wealthier in the long run.

  In richer countries, Lowrey presents mixed evidence of how unconditional payments (like Alaska's permanent fund dividends financed by its oil wealth) affect work decisions, but she shows that when these programs do discourage work, it's often for positive reasons, like encouraging teenagers and young adults to stay in school.

  One lesson here is not to be afraid of cash aid.

  When discouraging business regulation, conservatives often talk about the importance of local knowledge: The person closest to the ground knows best what they need, and planning the economy from on high works poorly. This lesson also applies to aid programs, domestic and international. Poorer people are not stupid, and their local knowledge of their own needs typically outweighs the benefit of having a paternalistic government overseer.

  Our economic challenges are not as novel as they seem
  UBI's proponents often describe it as a policy for a rapidly changing world in which the labor market fails to work like it used to — and where automation threatens to make labor increasingly irrelevant.

  As Lowrey describes, this is not actually happening today — if all our labor is getting automated away by brilliant machines, why do the economic statistics show slow productivity growth? — and I am even more skeptical than she is that such a shift is coming in the future.

  The world already went through a labor disruption far more extensive than the one threatened by robots and artificial intelligence: Mechanization of agriculture, which destroyed the vast majority of the jobs that existed in the economy 200 years ago.

  We found new things to do then. And my expectation, unfortunately, is that labor will remain not only in demand, but a necessarily central feature of the economy, for the rest of my lifetime and beyond.

  Plus, if a machine revolution did come, the resulting productivity boom and economic growth would create a lot of fiscal space to pay for whatever government programs we might need to manage the labor transition.

  The most important policy question to ask is not what we will do if the labor market sharply changes, but what we will do if it stays about like it is now.

  Growth is not translating into as much improvement in broadly-shared prosperity as we would like. Certain sectors of the economy — health care and education, especially — are producing cost pressures that are hard for ordinary Americans to keep up with.

  One lesson from Lowrey's book is that more cash transfers are key parts of the answer to these problems of today and tomorrow. I don't think we'll be able to afford to make them universal. But they could be broader, larger and simpler than they are today.

  SEE ALSO: There are 3 ways Trump has changed the

• Forbes
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2018/07/04/book-review-give-people-money/#49e369c341f5
  Word count: 742

  1,079 viewsJul 4, 2018, 10:41pm
  Book Review: 'Give People Money'
  Gregory Ferenstein
  Gregory Ferenstein
  Contributor
  i

  MoneyFLICKR USER 401(K) 2012

  In the last few years, the public policy idea of giving unconditional cash welfare to all needy citizens, or ‘basic income’, has grown from fringe blogs to a mainstream topic among the highest levels of American political establishment, especially Silicon Valley giants worried about mass technological unemployment. But, as much as I love the topic, the treatment of basic income thus far has often been little more exciting than reading Apple’s user agreement.

  Outside of a few things written for a general audience, there was rarely something I could recommend to a friend who wants something for a vacation beach read or a family member looking for a book club addition. But now, author Annie Lowery has given basic income a wonderful upgrade in her first book, Give People Money.

  Lowrey distinguished herself at The New York Times and now at The Atlantic for her ability to wrap economic policy reporting in compelling stories of personal struggle. Now in her book, Lowrey brings first-hand accounts of struggling workers all over the world in a series of chapters that exhaustively highlight all the reasons for basic income, from fears of technological unemployment to the more libertarian dream of replacing bureaucracy with simple cash welfare.

  What stands out about each story is how hard it is to blame her characters for being anything other than victims of an unfair system. Lowrey makes it easy to empathize with each subject, as they make decisions that seem reasonable and indicative of hard work, yet still can't get themselves out of bad economic circumstances.

  In a trip to Kenya, where the nonprofit GiveDirectly is conducting some of the first basic income field experiments, she spoke to one recipient about what he might do with a cash handout. It's worth quoting, in full:

  MORE FROM FORBES
  “I’ll deal with three things first urgently: the pit latrine that I need to construct, the part of my house that has been damaged by termites, and the livestock pen that needs reinforcement, so the hyena gets nothing from me on his prowls,” Plister Aloo Raudo, a widow, told me, speaking in Dholuo. “One day, a hyena came and took one of my she- goats, dragging her by the legs. She had just given birth to a kid, and it was a pity seeing the kid helpless and so frail. I had to ask my neighbor whose goat had given birth too, to let her goat adopt my new kid so she could suckle and at least have a chance at life.”

  The book itself is a pretty quick read, which I completed on a trip to an out-of-town-conference. At times, I wished Lowrey had cut out much of the laborious work on summarizing all the latest research and opinions on the topic and instead focused more on the personal stories.

  Basic income is still a highly experimental idea, and as much as there is some growing evidence that large cash transfers promote work by giving people a financial and psychological cushion, the true scientific tests of unconditional cash are just beginning in the developed world (like one in Stockton, California).

  What the book excels at, and I suspect will make it a must-read as basic income becomes a more mainstream idea from future presidential candidates, is showing the human side of how so many other welfare alternatives fail. Minimum wage doesn't help McDonald’s workers replaced by burger-flipping robots; a nationwide jobs guarantees may require an impossibly complex bureaucracy.

  But cash— cash is simple; cash is universally beneficial; cash has a pretty good success rate, as evidenced by the lucky few recipients of experiments that Lowrey spoke with.

  Being an informed citizen doesn't have to feel like a chore. To bring policy ideas into the mainstream, I think it’s necessary for people to want to learn about a topic.

  Give People Money is—and I say this with all due seriousness—an enjoyable read.

  Gregory Ferenstein is the editor of the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated publication on tech, health, and politics. In his spare time, he teaches Mathematics and enjoys Capoeira, an Brazilian acrobatic martial art.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/who-really-stands-to-win-from-universal-basic-income
  Word count: 4847

  A Critic at Large
  July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue
  Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income?
  It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s the giveaway.

  By Nathan Heller

  Thus far, U.B.I. lives entirely in people’s heads—untried at any major scale.Illustration by Anna Parini
  In 1795, a group of magistrates gathered in the English village of Speenhamland to try to solve a social crisis brought on by the rising price of grain. The challenge was an increase in poverty, even among the employed. The social system at the time, which came to be known as Elizabethan Poor Law, divided indigent adults into three groups: those who could work, those who could not, and those—the “idle poor”—who seemed not to want to. The able and disabled received work or aid through local parishes. The idle poor were forced into labor or rounded up and beaten for being bums. As grain prices increased, the parishes became overwhelmed with supplicants. Terrorizing idle people turned into a vast, unmanageable task.

  The magistrates at Speenhamland devised a way of offering families measured help. Household incomes were topped up to cover the cost of living. A man got enough to buy three gallon loaves a week (about eight and a half pounds of bread), plus a loaf and a half for every other member of his household. This meant that a couple with three children could bring home the equivalent of more than twenty-five pounds a week—a lot of bread. The plan let men receive a living wage by working for small payments or by not working at all.

  Economics is at heart a narrative art, a frame across which data points are woven into stories about how the world should work. As the Speenhamland system took hold and spread across England, it turned into a parable of caution. The population nearly doubled. Thomas Malthus posited that the poverty subsidies allowed couples to rear families before their actual earnings allowed it. His contemporary David Ricardo complained that the Speenhamland model was a prosperity drain, inviting “imprudence, by offering it a portion of the wages of prudence and industry.” Karl Marx attacked the system years later, in “Das Kapital,” suggesting that it had kept labor wages low, while Karl Polanyi, the economic historian, cast Speenhamland as the original sin of industrial capitalism, making lower classes irrelevant to the labor market just as new production mechanisms were being built. When the Speenhamland system ended, in 1834, people were plunged into a labor machine in which they had no role or say. The commission that repealed the system replaced it with Dickensian workhouses—a corrective, at the opposite extreme, for a program that everyone agreed had failed.

  In 1969, Richard Nixon was preparing a radical new poverty-alleviation program when an adviser sent him a memo of material about the Speenhamland experiment. The story freaked Nixon out in a way that only Nixon could be freaked out, and although his specific anxiety was allayed, related concerns lingered. According to Daniel P. Moynihan, another Nixon adviser, who, in 1973, published a book about the effort, Speenhamland was the beginning of a push that led the President’s program, the Family Assistance Plan, toward a work requirement—an element that he had not included until then.

  Nixon had originally intended that every poor family of four in America with zero income would receive sixteen hundred dollars a year (the equivalent of about eleven thousand dollars today), plus food stamps; the supplement would fade out as earnings increased. He sought to be the President to lift the lower classes. The plan died in the Senate, under both Republican and Democratic opposition, and the only thing to survive was Nixon’s late-breaking, Speenhamland-inspired fear of being seen to indulge the idle poor. By the end of his Administration, a previously obscure concept called moral hazard—the idea that people behave more profligately when they’re shielded from consequences—had become a guiding doctrine of the right. A work requirement stuck around, first in the earned-income tax credit, and then in Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms. The core of Nixon’s plan—what Moynihan, in “The Politics of a Guaranteed Income,” called “a quantum leap in social policy”—was buried among his more flamboyant flops.

  Recently, a resurrection has occurred. Guaranteed income, reconceived as basic income, is gaining support across the spectrum, from libertarians to labor leaders. Some see the system as a clean, crisp way of replacing gnarled government bureaucracy. Others view it as a stay against harsh economic pressures now on the horizon. The questions that surround it are the same ones that Nixon faced half a century ago. Will the public stand for such a bold measure—and, if so, could it ever work?

  “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown), by the economic journalist Annie Lowrey, is the latest book to argue that a program in this family is a sane solution to the era’s socioeconomic woes. Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down. “The way things are is really the way we choose for them to be,” she writes. Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.

  A universal basic income, or U.B.I., is a fixed income that every adult—rich or poor, working or idle—automatically receives from government. Unlike today’s means-tested or earned benefits, payments are usually the same size, and arrive without request. Depending on who designs a given system, they might replace all existing governmental assistance programs or complement them, as a wider safety net. “A UBI is a lesson and an ideal, not just an economic policy,” Lowrey writes. The ideal is that a society, as a first priority, should look out for its people’s survival; the lesson is that possibly it can do so without unequal redistributive plans.

  VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
  Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

  People generally have a visceral reaction to the idea of a universal basic income. For many, a government check to boost good times or to guard against starvation in bad ones seems like an obviously humane measure. Others find such payments monstrous, a model of waste and unearned rewards. In principle, a government fixes the basic income at a level to allow subsistence but also to encourage enterprise and effort for the enjoyment of more prosperity. In the U.S., its supporters generally propose a figure somewhere around a thousand dollars a month: enough to live on—somewhere in America, at least—but not nearly enough to live on well.

  “So basically you’re a dog now.”
  Recent interest in U.B.I. has been widespread but wary. Last year, Finland launched a pilot version of basic income; this spring, the government decided not to extend the program beyond this year, signalling doubt. Other trials continue. Pilots have run in Canada, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Iran. Since 2017, the startup incubator Y Combinator has funded a multiyear pilot in Oakland, California. The municipal government of Stockton, an ag-industrial city east of San Francisco, is about to test a program that gives low-income residents five hundred dollars a month. Last year, Stanford launched a Basic Income Lab to pursue, as it were, basic research.

  One cause of the program’s especial popularity in Northern California is also a reason for the urgency of its appeal: it is a futurist reply to the darker side of technological efficiency. Robots, we are told, will drive us from our jobs. The more this happens, the more existing workforce safety nets will be strained. In “Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream” (2016), the labor leader Andy Stern nominates U.B.I. as the right response to technological unemployment. Stern, a lifetime labor guy, is a former president of the two-million-member Service Employees International Union. But he thinks that the rise of robots and the general gig-ification of jobs will “marginalize the role of collective bargaining,” so he has made a strategic turn to prepare for a disempowered working class. “You go into an Apple store and you see the future,” he quotes an economist saying. “The future of the labor force is all in those smart college-educated people with the T-shirts whose job is to be a retail clerk.” (This presumes that people will frequent brick-and-mortar shops in the first place.)

  By Lowrey’s assessment, the existing system “would falter and fail if confronted with vast inequality and tidal waves of joblessness.” But is a U.B.I. fiscally sustainable? It’s unclear. Lowrey runs many numbers but declines to pin most of them down. She thinks a U.B.I. in the United States should be a thousand dollars monthly. This means $3.9 trillion a year, close to the current expenditure of the entire federal government. To pay, Lowrey proposes new taxes on income, carbon, estates, pollution, and the like. But she is also curiously sanguine about costs, on the premise that few major initiatives balance out on the federal books: “The Bush tax cuts were not ‘paid for.’ The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not ‘paid for.’ ” When the country wants to launch a big project, she insists, the double joints and stretchy tendons of a giant, globalized economy come into play.

  This open planning won’t exactly soothe the cautious. A big reason for chariness with a U.B.I. is that, so far, the program lives in people’s heads, untried on a national scale. Then again, by the same mark, the model couldn’t be called under-thunk. The academic counterpart to Lowrey’s journalistic book is Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s recent “Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy” (Harvard), a meticulously comprehensive, frequently persuasive accounting of U.B.I.’s superiority by measures economic, philosophical, and pragmatic. Like Lowrey, they see basic income as a sound social program and a corrective “hope”: not a perfect system, but better than anything else.

  Traditionally, a challenge for means-tested aid is that it must determine who is most deserving—a vestige of the old Elizabethan system. Often, there’s a moralizing edge. Current programs, Lowrey points out, favor the working poor over the jobless. Race or racism plays into the way that certain policies are shaped, and bureaucratic requirements for getting help can be arcane and onerously cumulative. Who will certify the employee status of a guy who’s living on the streets? How can you get disability aid if you can’t afford the doctor who will certify you as disabled? With a universal income, just deserts don’t seem at issue. Everybody gets a basic chance.

  Observers often are squeamish about that proposition. Junkies, alcoholics, scam artists: Do we really want to hand these people monthly checks? In 2010, a team of researchers began giving two-hundred-dollar payments to addicts and criminals in Liberian slums. The researchers found that the money, far from being squandered on vice, went largely to subsistence and legitimate enterprise. Such results, echoed in other studies, suggest that some of the most beneficial applications of a U.B.I. may be in struggling economies abroad.

  Like many students of the strategy, Lowrey points to Kenya, where she reported on a U.B.I. pilot in a small village. (She won’t say which, for fear of making it a target for thieves—a concern worth counting as significant.) The pilot is run by a nonprofit called GiveDirectly, and is heavily funded through Silicon Valley; in that respect, it’s a study in effective philanthropy, not a new model of society. But the results are encouraging. Before GiveDirectly sent everyone the equivalent of twenty-two U.S. dollars a month (delivered through a mobile app), Village X had dirt roads, no home electricity, and what Lowrey genteelly calls an “open defecation” model for some families. Now, by her account, the village is a bubbling pot of enterprise, as residents whose days used to be about survival save, budget, and plan. (The payments will continue until 2028.)

  A widow tells her, “I’ll deal with three things first urgently: the pit latrine that I need to construct, the part of my house that has been damaged by termites, and the livestock pen that needs reinforcement, so the hyena gets nothing from me on his prowls.” A heavy-drinking deadbeat buys a motorbike for a taxi business, sells soap, buys two cows, and opens a barbershop. His work income quadruples. He boasts to Lowrey of his new life.

  Purely as a kind of foreign aid, Lowrey suggests, a basic income is better than donated goods (boxes of shoes, mosquito nets), because cash can go to any use. The Indian government’s chief economic adviser tells her that, with a U.B.I. of about a hundred U.S. dollars a year, India, where a third of the world’s extreme poor live, could bring its poverty rates from twenty-two per cent to less than one per cent. Those figures are stunning. But India is in the midst of major bureaucratic change. Would there be any chance of a U.B.I. finding a foothold in the entrenched U.S. political climate?

  Advocates have noted that the idea, generally formulated, has bipartisan support. Charles Murray, the conservative welfare critic, was an early enthusiast. His book “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State” (2006) called for a U.B.I. of ten thousand dollars a year, plus catastrophic health insurance, to replace existing social programs, including Social Security. Rather than fester for years under the mismanaging claws of Big Government, he thought, money could flow directly to individual recipients. “The UBI lowers the rate of involuntary poverty to zero for everyone who has any capacity to work or any capacity to get along with other people,” Murray declared.

  But although politically dissimilar people may support a U.B.I., the reasons for their support differ, and so do the ways they set the numbers. A rising group of thinkers on the left, including David Graeber and Nick Srnicek, tout a generous version of U.B.I. both as a safety net and as a way to free people from lives spent rowing overmanaged corporate galleons. Business centrists and Silicon Valley types appreciate it as a way to manage industry side effects—such as low labor costs and the displacement of workers by apps and A.I.—without impeding growth. In “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future” (Hachette), Andrew Yang, the Venture for America founder who has already filed for Presidential candidacy in 2020, recommends the model as a way to bypass kludgy governmental systems. He imagines it paired with something he calls “human capitalism.” “For example, a journalist who uncovered a particular source of waste, an artist who beautified a city, or a hacker who strengthened our power grid could be rewarded with Social Credits,” he explains. “Most of the technologists and young people I know would be beyond pumped to work on these problems.”

  Many of the super-rich are also super-pumped about the universal basic income. Elon Musk has said it will be “necessary.” Sir Richard Branson speaks of “the sense of self-esteem that universal basic income could provide to people.” What’s the appeal for the plutocracy? For one thing, the system offers a hard budget line: you set the income figure, press start, go home. No new programs, no new rules. It also alleviates moral debt: because there is a floor for everyone, the wealthy can feel less guilt as they gain more wealth. Finally, the U.B.I. fits with a certain idea of meritocracy. If everybody gets a strong boost off the blocks, the winners of the economic race—the ultra-affluent—can believe that they got there by their industry or acumen. Of course the very rich appreciate the U.B.I.; it dovetails with a narrative that casts their wealth as a reward.

  A notable exception is Chris Hughes, who, in “Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn” (St. Martin’s), seeks to shed the idea that special skills brought him success. Hughes, who is helping to fund the Stockton U.B.I. experiment, was part of the dorm-room crew that founded Facebook. By his late twenties, when the company went public, he was worth around five hundred million dollars. Before the I.P.O., he worked for Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign; afterward, he bought a majority stake in The New Republic, mismanaged it so brazenly as to prompt a huge staff exodus, then sold it. He’s forthright about his failures, and he’s diffident about his putative triumphs. “Fair Shot” tells an interesting success story, because its author has doubts about how he succeeded. It’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” if Charlie said “Why me?” and Wonka shrugged.

  Hughes’s book is divided between policy and memoir. When he was growing up, in suburban North Carolina, he writes, his mom clipped coupons and he went to an after-school program with mostly nonwhite kids. He dreamed of a bigger life, and applied to top high schools. Andover offered financial aid, but not enough. He called up its admissions office and pleaded for more. Once there, Hughes felt poor, and sought validation in schoolwork. This led him to Harvard, where he ended up rooming with three guys he didn’t know too well, including Mark Zuckerberg.

  Hughes had no technical knowledge. But he was there when Facebook was being set up, and he could talk and write, so he was put in charge of its early P.R. On graduating, he found himself leading Facebook’s communications and marketing and watching venture capitalists invest “jaw-dropping” sums. It bemused him. “I didn’t feel like some kind of genius, and while Mark was smart and talented, so were many of the other people I went to college with,” he writes.

  Hughes searches for points of exception that explain why he, not someone else from another middle-middle-class family, ended up with half a billion dollars and a speaking circuit out of the gate. His scramble to get into Andover, for one thing, seems central. But should the randomness of this early ambition—which, even if it doesn’t have to do with resources, does reflect community information transfer—really determine who’s in with a chance? Hughes thinks these individual zaps of opportunity have a large-scale correlate: the very economic setup that made him and his roommates super-rich. “In a winner-take-all world, a small group of people get outsized returns as a result of early actions they take,” he writes. Massive tech companies such as Facebook have been possible because of deregulation, financialization, tax cuts, and lowered tariffs rolled out, he thinks, at a cost to ordinary people since the nineteen-seventies.

  “Is the flight completely full, extremely full, or very full?”
  The solution, Hughes has decided, is a modest basic income: five hundred dollars a month for every adult in a household making less than about fifty thousand dollars. He sees it as a boost to the current system, and argues that the money can be found by closing tax exemptions for the ultra-wealthy—“people like me.”

  Six thousand dollars a year is not a lot of money. But Hughes believes that a light padding is enough. He describes receiving his first big payout from Facebook—a hundred thousand dollars—and realizing that if he set aside a five-per-cent return each year he could count on a lifelong annual income of at least five thousand dollars, no matter what. It was a little, but it meant a lot. “The further you get from subsistence, the easier it is to ask fundamental questions like: What do I want, and how do I get it?” he writes. The covetable entity that the Andover kids of his youth possessed wasn’t actually wealth. Their crucial asset was the assurance of choice.

  Framing basic income in terms of choice, not money, helps to clarify both its opportunities and its limits. On the immediate level, one might wonder whether Hughes’s proposal of five hundred dollars a month is really enough to boost one’s existential swagger. That number, he says, would lift twenty million people over the poverty line, but any three-hundred-billion-dollar program should. More to the point are Hughes’s qualms about a universal basic income—or even a lower-middle basic income, like his—replacing means-tested aid. (“Trading in benefits earmarked for the poor for a benefit like guaranteed income, which is designed to provide financial stability to the middle class and the poor alike, would be regressive,” he says.) Why spray so much money over people doing fine, he wonders, when you could direct cash as needed?

  One answer is that it makes the program palatable to those who cannot stomach anything resembling government handouts. A wide range of people stand to benefit from a cushion: any worker with an abusive boss is free to take the basic wage and leave. By certain measures, in fact, giving everyone a flat check naturally rebalances opportunities for choice. A thousand bucks handed to a multimillionaire means almost nothing, but it’s significant for a middle-income person, and for a poor person it could open up the world.

  Skeptics might point out that what was meant to be a floor can easily become a ceiling. This was Marx’s complaint about Speenhamland: a society with a basic income has no pressure to pay employees a good wage, because the bottom constraint, subsistence, has fallen away. We see such an effect already in the gig economy, where companies pay paltry wages by claiming that their endeavors are flexible and part-time and that workers surely have subsistence income from elsewhere.

  Supporters of the U.B.I. frequently counter that the raised floor will lift other things. If workers are no longer compelled to take any available job to put food on the table, supporters say, work must be worth their while. Certainly, this will be true for highly undesirable jobs: the latrine cleaner can expect a pay bump and an engraved pen. But for jobs whose appeal goes beyond the paycheck—in other words, most middle-class jobs—the pressures are less clear. Competitive, prestigious industries often pay entry- to mid-level employees meagrely, because they can; ambitious people are so keen for a spot on the ladder that they accept modest wages. And, since that is an easier concession for the children and intimates of the moneyed classes, influential fields can fill up with fancy people. This is not a problem that the U.B.I. would solve. If anything, paychecks in desirable jobs would be free to shrink to honorarium size, and choice opportunity would again redound to the rich, for whom the shrinkage would not mean very much.

  In that sense, what’s at issue with U.B.I. isn’t actually the movement of money but the privileging of interests—not who is served but who’s best served. An illuminating parallel is free college. One criticism of Bernie Sanders’s no-tuition plan, in 2016, was that many American families could afford at least part of a tuition. With no fees to pay, that money would be freed to fund enrichments: painting lessons, private tutoring, investments, trips to rescue orphans and pandas, and other things with which well-resourced people set the groundwork for an upward-spiralling bourgeois life. Especially among the small subset of colleges that have competitive admissions—the sector of the education market which, today, serves most reliably as an elevator toward class, influence, and long-term employment access—those who truly have no cash for college would still be starting from behind. Opportunity would be better equalized, at least while other things in America remain very unequal, by meting out financial aid as kids actually need it.

  Hughes was one such kid, of course, and then he stepped into a jet stream leading from Harvard Yard to the cover of a business magazine. Now he is part of the one per cent, which means that his son is seventy-seven times as likely to end up in the Ivy League as his counterpart from the bottom fifth in the income distribution. These effects relate to what’s often called “structural inequality.” Since, his story suggests, they have little to do with the details of Hughes’s childhood finances and a lot to do with the decades-long diversion of profit from workers to shareholders, any program to protect the workforce in the long term must go deeper than just redisbursing cash or benefits. Such a solution would need to privilege public interests, not just public awards. It may even require what many U.B.I. fans hate: a rejiggering of regulation. Simply lifting the minimum-income level leaves the largest, most defining foundations of inequality intact.

  The realization that a universal basic income is useful but insufficient for the country’s long-term socioeconomic health—that you can’t just wind up a machine and let it run—may cause attrition among some supporters who admire the model precisely because it seems to mean that no one will have to deal with stuff like this again. It may also dampen the scheme’s sunny political prospects, since a healthy U.B.I. would have to be seated among other reforms, the sum of which would not be cost- or interest-neutral. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a practical idea. It means only that it’s not a magic spell.

  Or perhaps the difference could be split. A couple of years ago, the Dutch professional thought leader Rutger Bregman championed universal basic income in his popular book “Utopia for Realists”—a title that reflects the volume’s tone. Bregman, who studied history, hoped that we could abolish poverty, border control, and the forty-hour workweek. (He prefers fifteen.) He pointed out that G.D.P. is a questionable metric of prosperity, since it doesn’t reflect health, clean air, and other attributes that now define First World success. His interest in a basic income was meant to synthesize the wishful and the practical; like many supporters, he touted it as a matter of both categorical principle and maximized good, and tried to make these virtues square. The effort brought him back to Speenhamland, whose reputation as a failure Bregman called, flatly, “bogus.”

  According to Bregman’s analysis, accounts of Speenhamland’s disastrousness were based on a single report by the commission empowered to replace it. The report was “largely fabricated,” Bregman writes. The era’s population growth was attributable not to irresponsible family planning, as Malthus thought, but to an excess of responsibility—children, once they reached working age, were lucrative earners for a household—plus declining rates of infant mortality. (Parallel population explosions happened in Ireland and Scotland, where the Speenhamland system was not in effect.) Wages were low during Speenhamland, but, the historian Walter I. Trattner has noted, they were nearly as low before Speenhamland, and the extra falloff followed the adoption of the mechanical thresher, which obviated an entire class of jobs.

  Speenhamland does offer a lesson, in other words, but it is not the one most widely taught. In “The Failed Welfare Revolution” (2008), the sociologist Brian Steensland suggests that, if Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan had passed, conservative policy might have evolved along a different path. George H. W. Bush, then a congressman, supported the guaranteed-income scheme. So did Donald Rumsfeld. From the late sixties into the seventies, he and Dick Cheney helped run trials on thirteen hundred families to see how much a modest financial top-up discouraged them from working. The falloff was smaller than expected, and the researchers were pleased. We might hope that, with Speenhamland’s false myths finally cleared, the United States will do better going forward. But our aptitude for managing the future is no stronger than our skill at making sense out of the past. ♦

  This article appears in the print edition of the July 9 & 16, 2018, issue, with the headline “Take the Money and Run.”

  Nathan Heller began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.Read more »

• Nasdaq
  https://www.nasdaq.com/article/review-why-governments-should-give-away-money-20180713-00398
  Word count: 825

  Review: Why governments should give away money
  July 13, 2018, 10:05:00 AM EDT By Reuters

  Reuters
  By Christopher Beddor

  (The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.)

  HONG KONG, July 13 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Few ideas these days are endorsed by both French socialists and American conservatives. Governments giving away money is the rare exception.

  U.S. senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders - all potential presidential hopefuls in 2020 - recently endorsed the different but related concept of guaranteeing jobs. Now Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, has explored the proposal in a smart new book, "Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World".

  One reason the idea attracts strange political bedfellows is because it's something of a policy Rorschach test. The concept is sufficiently amorphous to allow just about everyone to read something into it. Liberals see a scheme that would patch holes in the existing welfare system, address income inequality and bolster the bargaining power of workers. Conservatives are attracted to its simplicity and a chance to slim the government apparatus that administers welfare. For Silicon Valley futurologists, it's a tidy solution to thorny issues posed by the threat of automation leading to mass unemployment, or the doubtful benefits of working in the gig economy.

  A universal basic income also holds promise in poor countries. Direct cash transfers would bypass the corruption and mismanagement that often plagues delivery of welfare or aid in the developing world. They also allow recipients to buy the things they need most, rather than goods chosen by rich donors.

  What's more, there's little evidence that a modest guaranteed income would lead people to down tools en masse. At least, that doesn't seem to have happened in the odd assortment of places that already have some version of a basic income. Alaska, for instance, usually dishes out around $800 to $2,100 to residents each year, funded by the state's natural resources industry. Studies suggest the programme has not led to a significant reduction in workforce participation. Hillary Clinton even toyed with the idea of running on a universal basic income as part of her 2016 presidential campaign, under the slogan "Alaska for America".

  If this all sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. As the Clinton campaign discovered, translating an abstract idea into a concrete policy proposal faces a severe mathematical obstacle.

  Assume the American government paid its estimated 328 million people $1,000 every month. That would cost a bit less than $4 trillion: not too far off the size of the U.S. federal budget. Introducing a true universal basic income would therefore require a root-and-branch overhaul of U.S. government spending, and a massive tax hike to boot.

  The prohibitive cost forces advocates to either dilute their proposal - undermining its appeal - or to argue for higher taxes, which quickly transforms the policy into a proxy call for more welfare spending.

  In developing countries, too, recent research suggests cash transfers are a mixed bag. The effects seem to be temporary, and grizzled development economists are keen to avoid overplaying its promise. Rather than a panacea, cash transfers "probably suck less than most of the other things we are doing", wrote Chris Blattman of the University of Chicago'sHarris School of Public Policy.

  Even so, nitpicking costs can miss the bigger picture. As Lowrey rightly notes, universal basic income is an ideal rather than just a policy. Politicians may not be ready to deconstruct the administrative state, but they might be open to converting some of the most convoluted welfare programmes into straightforward handouts. Cash transfers might also become a useful benchmark against which to measure the impact of other forms of foreign aid.

  Moreover, if the public discussion of a universal basic income subtly undermines the concept of strictly means-testing all benefits, so much the better. As Lowrey observes, the modern welfare state has long been grounded in paternalistic and morally charged language, from calls to help only the "deserving" poor to racially tinged talk about "welfare queens". Such tropes have rarely been grounded in empirical evidence, and are a poor guide to policymaking.

  Governments are unlikely to be distributing $1,000 a month to their citizens anytime soon. But if the debate about a universal basic income results in better delivery of some forms of welfare and foreign aid, or nudges the discussion of alleviating poverty in a more dispassionate direction, it will prove a worthy idea all the same.

  On Twitter

  CONTEXT NEWS

  - "Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World", by Annie Lowrey, was published by Crown on July 10.

  - For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on