This article was originally published in GPR’s Spring 2017 Magazine
Of all the enduring principles set forth by our Founding Fathers, from Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom to James Madison’s drafting of the Bill of Rights, one ideal has seemingly fallen through the cracks. In 1797, Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense,” published his essay “Agrarian Justice,” which called for payments of 15 pounds sterling from the government to all citizens over the age of 21, regardless of employment status. This policy, Paine argued, would provide for the necessary economic underpinning of Enlightenment-era freedoms, which had already constructed broad standards for social, political, and individual liberty.
Over 200 years later, Paine’s principles are gaining traction throughout the world through a legislative proposal known as Universal Basic Income, or U.B.I. The idea is simple: governments send each of its citizens, regardless of gender, income, or race, a monthly check, with no deductions and no strings attached, leaving each citizen free to spend the money however they see fit. Its simplicity is enough to turn many away, but its implementation would explore revolutionary fields of behavioral economics that no other policy has before.
The concept of U.B.I. was floated in academic and policy circles throughout the 20th century before it became a subject of actual consideration by governments today. In the United States, Louisiana governor Huey Long supported basic income as part of his “Share Our Wealth” program in the 1930’s, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a widely-discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Today, several countries and cities around the world have already begun the process of implementing U.B.I. In Finland, a two-year trial began on January 1, 2017 that will send a check for 560 euros (a little under $600) to 2,000 unemployed Finns between the ages of 25 and 58 a check for 560 euros (a little under $600) each month, even if they find employment before the experiment ends.
In Switzerland, a petition for U.B.I. garnered 126,000 votes, enough to merit a national referendum on the policy that will take place on June 5 of this year. In India, chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian discussed providing basic income for the country’s 1.2 billion citizens in his annual economic survey. Subramanian’s plan would only give 7,620 rupees per year to each Indian (around $113), but experts from the country’s Economic Advisory Council say it would reduce the number of citizens living in absolute poverty from 22% to less than 0.5%.
Even in the U.S., influential policymakers and entrepreneurs are beginning to latch onto the idea of a universal basic income. In Oakland, California, a start-up incubator called Y Combinator announced plans to provide up to 100 local citizens with “an amount of money that is sufficient to meet basic needs” for a timeframe of six months to a whole year. Their goal, they say, is not to provide usable data regarding the merits of basic income, but to set an example for how the logistics of implementing the policy may play out on a larger scale.
Advocates of U.B.I. claim that it would give citizens the chance to live unrestrained from degrading, low-wage jobs that will likely be wiped out by automation in the coming years anyway, and instead let them focus on more worthwhile tasks, such as higher education or civic engagement. Additionally, basic income could feasibly replace the United States’ broken welfare system, a bureaucratic alphabet soup (think SNAP, EBT, TANF, etc.) that leaves individuals and communities trapped in cycles of poverty and costs taxpayers billions of dollars per year.
Opponents of U.B.I. have their choice of one of many reasonable criticisms to cite, claiming that a universal basic income would increase government dependence, drive up unemployment, and blow up the federal budget in the process. Additionally, many fear the moral and ethical implications of a society in which fewer citizens have meaningful work to do and more rely on monthly government checks.
The best argument for Universal Basic Income, however, was formed as an accident. In 1970’s North Carolina, researchers studying child development at a local elementary school unknowingly included in their sample group members of a local Cherokee community, whose leaders, striking gold off profits from a casino they had opened, decided to distribute their newfound wealth equally amongst the tribe’s adults.
Compared to their peers, the Cherokee children showed fewer signs of behavioral disorders, earned better grades, and became less likely to engage in deviant behavior as the study progressed. Dr. Jane Costello, the Duke University epidemiologist who conducted the study, quickly realized that the students’ collectively improved fortune was largely a result of a steadier home life, including better parent-child relations and less drug and alcohol abuse, that had been afforded to them by the casino’s income.
As demographics shift around the world and new technology provides drastic changes to our modern labor force, policymakers will have to be creative in finding new ways to make government work for all. To many, Universal Basic Income is the best place to start.