Silicon Valley start-ups believe they have a solution for people who fear jobs will be lost to machines as automation becomes more prevalent.
Beginning this fall in a city just 80 miles east of Silicon Valley, tech giants are kickstarting the nation’s first universal basic income experiment, giving away $500 a month to residents of Stockton, Calif., with no strings attached. In the city once known as the nation’s foreclosure capital, Facebook co-founder Charles Hughes will be paying 100 residents through his organization, the Economic Security Project, to support the research and development of UBI around the country.
“It is such a fundamental idea behind America that if you work hard, you can get ahead — and you certainly don’t live in poverty. But that isn’t true today, and it hasn’t been true in the country for decades,” Hughes told CNN in an interview in March. “I believe that unless we make significant changes today, the income inequality in our country will continue to grow and call into question the very nature of our social contract.”
Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs will oversee the implementation. He broke the cycle of poverty on a scholarship to Stanford, later doing internships at Google and the Obama White House. Tubbs told Politico he came back to his hometown after his cousin was shot dead at a Halloween party and decided to get involved with the local government. Earning one of only three endorsements that TV personality Oprah Winfrey has ever given (the others went to former President Barack Obama and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker), Tubbs was elected mayor in 2016, successfully taking down the Republican incumbent and paving the way to introduce the idea of a universal basic income to the city’s 300,000 residents.
“There’s this interesting conversation we’ve been having about the value of work,” Tubbs told Politico. “Work does have some value and some dignity, but I don’t think working 14 hours and not being able to pay your bills or working two jobs and not being able — there’s nothing inherently dignified about that.”
Offering a counterpoint in an interview with One America News, Stockton’s former vice mayor, Christina Fugazi, said she doesn’t think the policy is going to help the city’s issues.
“Implementation of this program will not by any means solve the problems we are having with this city,” Fugazi said. “We do have problems with crime, we do have problems with homelessness, but what we need are jobs and training.”
For decades, advocates of universal basic income have claimed that the cure for poverty is to provide an income floor that citizens will never drop below. Present-day activists point to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a proponent of the policy before his assassination, and to former President Richard Nixon, whose proposed Family Assistance Plan would have guaranteed families of four $1,600 a year.
While there isn’t strong Republican support for these types of initiatives nationwide, universal basic income has seen some unlikely proponents on the Right. In 2016, libertarian social theorist Charles Murray debated Andy Stern, the former president of America’s largest union-turned-universal basic income activist, both of whom agreed that these measures will soon become necessary as automation continues to displace common blue-collar jobs. Not all libertarians, however, believe in implementing the policy.
Jeffrey Tucker, editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research, told the Washington Examiner that he doesn’t think universal basic income will be generally helpful. “I see no value to adding the UBI to the existing apparatus of welfare provision,” Tucker said. “It will be too expensive to sustain. It will fuel more public resentment against the poor. It will disincentivize entry-level job searches. It will be another entitlement that politicians will use to manipulate the public. It’s true that automation is replacing blue-collar jobs, but the reason is high regulation and the minimum wage. We need to address existing intervention before we add more.”
Beyond Stockton, Y-Combinator Research, based in Oakland, Calif., will begin funding two other universal basic income experiments next year, offering $1,000 per month to randomly selected residents in two states, the names of which haven’t been released.
The study will offer participants the stipend for up to five years, tracking how the additional income changes their time use, mental and physical health, financial health, decision making, political beliefs, social behavior, whether they engage in criminal behavior, their subjective sense of well-being, and the effect it has on children living in their households, according to an outline of their plan. Their proposal claims 70 percent of people ages 18-24 experience the most volatile income changes — the same group of people who turned out en masse to Bernie Sanders rallies.
As more research is being done into these types of projects, self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” leaders who support these ideas continue to rise to prominence on the Left.
Most recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entered the stage as a U.S. congressional candidate by beating incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in a New York primary contest. While Ocasio-Cortez has yet to go on record saying she supports Universal Basic Income, she has endorsed candidates who proclaim their support for universal basic income, indicating that more pockets of the country are moving in that direction.
Political philosopher and economist Karl Widerquist told CNBC he remembers a poll from 10 years ago that showed just 12 percent of Americans approved of a universal basic income. Today, 48 percent of Americans — especially millennials — now support Universal Basic Income, according to a new Northeastern University/Gallup survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults.
