An Experiment in Universal Basic Income

or it was fake, but the money was real. Vargas had been randomly selected to take part in an eighteen month universal basic income pilot program being run by the City of Stockton, California. Every month until July twenty twenty, he'll get another five hundred dollars and be able to spend that money on anything he wants. It's in fact of my life greatly. I've been able to better, Like I guess the goals that I wanted to do. I will able to go and sign it back up for school.

My kids are also able to get more schooling or more tutoring if they say ahead of their education. My health and my stress level is better. I find that I'm more energized, more happier than what I was before. Vargas is hoping that the program will eventually expand to help more people on a national level. Yeah, I can see helping a lot of people out in a major way.

I mean, a lot of people struggle or whatever, and if they have the opportunity to receive something like this, they could sit there and get theirselves out of the situation, or sit there and help to make it better in some way somehow. It's a long shot, but maybe it could happen. In part thanks to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who's made it a central part of his platform, universal

basic income has actually gotten some buzz around it. What would it actually be like, though, if every American received some sort of set basic income from the government on a monthly basis. To get a sense of the way this could look, I spoke with Stockton's Mayor Michael Tubbs and with Suki Samra, who's been tasked with overseeing Stockton's universal basic income pilot project. Mayor Michael Tubbs, I want to start by asking you how you ended up involved

in this project. I mean, here you are, six years out of college, a whole six years out of college, and the first African American mayor of your city, the youngest mayor in the history of your city. It's not the most obvious thing to take on as a high

profile signature project. So how did it come about? Well, before being mayors, on city council for four years and as a city council member representing the South part of the city, poverty was just frequently on my desk as an issue we never talked about, but we were solving

for with all these other means. So we would have conversations about employed things like education and healthcare, access to healthy foods, and safety, and the crux of all those issues, in my opinion, was just to persistent rate of poverty and how people just were in areas of lack. So then when I became mayor, I challenged my team to really think through sort of what can a city do to really address issues of poverty. And I told my team, I said I don't want anything I've heard before. I

wanted to be bold and a little bit crazy. And then they came back with this idea of a basic income. I say, well, you know about you guys, it's one year in office. I would love to be re elected, so maybe we'll wait to our second term to even begin this conversation because it seems like, particularly in a city that was just struggling from bankruptcy, was a non starter.

Fast forward to a week after my team came back with the idea of basic income, I was at a conference on the Future of Work in San Francisco where I connected with Natalie Foster, when the co chairs of the Economic Security Project, and she said that she was looking for a city to pile the basic income in Philipdropic we funded, and I said, well, I have a

task for us to investigate this issue. So then we spent six months kind of going back and forth talking about what it would look like, sort of some of the values we shared, and I finally agreed to do it because I realized that too often the conversations about poverty or the working poor, even the economic structure of our countries, positions people, particularly people of color, particularly women, as passive victims or as people who are lazy and

make bad decisions and need a bunch of coaching and financial literacy to defeat poverty. And I thought that Stockton, given us diversity, given where we had started from, and just given the people I know as mayor, that it would be beautiful to a position the people of Stockton, immigrants, people of color, women, young people, people who are working incredibly hard. As a center of a conversation around what does a guarantee income look like in this country? But

more importantly, what does do you mean? And what type of society do we want to live in? So I decided to go ahead and launch the pilot. Suki Samurai, you're running the program, and I want to learn more about the details of how you're going about doing it. Usually universal basic income goes to everybody, but this is a pilot project, so the money's not going to everybody. So I'd like to know how many people are getting the money, and perhaps most significantly, how you chose them.

So the question of who was going to be selected was determined after a pretty deep community engagement process. So we announced the plan back in October of twenty seventeen, and after that we launched into a design phase where we asked the community, including elected officials, residents, leaders of nonprofits, who they thought should benefit from the program. There were three common design ideals that were echoed over and over again and that ultimately helped us determine what our selection

criteria would be. And those three design ideals was that the selection process be fair so everyone at about a roughly equal chance of being selected. That it be diverse and representative of Stockton. So recognizing that diversity is one of our greatest assets, making sure that the folks were ultimately selected to receive the guaranteed income, we're representative of our diversity as well, and that we maximize our ability

to learn. So Stocktonians recognized the unique opportunity that we had to really influence the national conversation around not just a guaranteed income, but around an economy that's falling short for far too many Americans. So with those three design ideals, the selection criteria that we lended on were actually pretty simple.

One was that folks had to be at least eighteen years of age or older, that they lived in Stockton, and that they lived in a neighborhood where the area meeting income was at forty six thousand dollars or below. And that number we settled on because that's Stockton's citywide

meeting income as well. That was a selection criteria. From there, we actually did a randomized selection, so we worked with our research team to identify the qualifying neighborhoods where the meeting income was again at or below forty six thousand dollars. We randomly selected forty two hundred households and sent them

a letter inviting them to participate. That letter detailed the opportunities they had to participate, either as part of our treatment group or the folks who are receiving the five dollars, or as part of our control group. Of the people that responded to that letter and responding entailed going online, filling out a consent form one hundred and twenty five, or randomly selected to be in our treatment group or

to receive the five hundred dollars a month. So basically, what you're describing is a pretty rigorous design of an experiment in a randomized model, which the social scientists like to say is the gold standard of the best way you can figure out whether something is working. It's too soon, I guess, to say whether it's working or not, and you don't want to break the structure of the experiment by theorizing too soon. But I guess the first question that that makes me ask is, let's say it's great.

Let's say you find after you look through all the data after July twenty twenty that there were substantially better life outcomes for people who received this five hundred dollars a month payment over an eighteen month period. What happens then, I mean, your city is a city, mister Mayor, of just over three hundred thousand people, if I'm not mistaken, and that's a pretty far cry from one hundred and twenty five people. Is there a plausible way to take

this forward, assuming that it works well? No? No, absolutely. I think for me, I've used cities as laboratories of democracy, meaning that for any intervention, Being a nerd, I like to test it and kind of see what works and kind of see impacts before making the case for a scale, which is why I think pilots and philanthropy could be helpful in that regard. But to answer your question, I think for any program my fists to take off at scale,

it couldn't be city led. I don't know if any sea that has the resources to provide one hundred dollars a month to every resident of as five hundred thousand. But what we've seen from design to implementation is bold policy proposals and ways to get us closer to there. I think of in California, I'm governor in Newsom has doubled their earning income tax credit, which is a form of giving folks cash and money. Um, there are a

tax credit. We see folks like send Or Harris with her Lift America Act, who is calling for five hundred dollars a month every month to families in this country and make a hundred care or less through the tax code. But I also want to take a step back because I think if data actually drove decision making, the world in general and the society we live in will look radically different. So I think the results from the study

are important. In the data is important, but it's going to be most important as the stories that we're able to tell about people, people who are just like everyone else, that the rest of the body politic can see itself reflected in who are doing good things with money and who are actually contributing. Can I ask a question about that though, I mean, so there's two you said two different things there, mister Mary, both of which are really interesting, but I think there might be a teeny bit of

difference between them. So one is that data should drive more policymaking, and I'm very sympathetic to that view, and I think it's very impressive that you guys are doing a proper randomized controlled experiment so that there will be data. But then if that's the case, you have to be open to the possibility that the data will reveal that the program didn't work, didn't achieve any significant effects on the group of people who've been who've been getting the money.

The other angle is the stories angle, that we want to get great stories out of a trial like this, and for that, I'm like one hundred percent sure that with one hundred and twenty five people you'll be able to tell some great stories. There will be some stories that people who did amazing things and improve their lives with a sextra amount of money. But that's not really

the same thing as the data, right. I mean, from the standpoint of an economist who looks at the randomized controlled experiment, their whole idea is to stay away from the stories, which are the kind of things that you know, with respect, that's what politicians like. They like anecdotes, they like stories to inspire people. So which is it. I mean, is this a case where the stories will help drive policy going forward, or is this a case where you're

going to rely on the hard data as a takeaway. Yeah, well, well I think we have. There's a bunch of different audiences and constituencies we're speaking to. So I think for the economists and for those who actually use data and look at data, the data is important, and for me it is as well. But being a pragmatist and understanding just how not just politics but policy and just how things happen in this country, narrative is an important part

of that. And I think particularly when we're talking about basic income, we're also talking about issues of race. We're also talking about issues of who's deserving. We're also talking about issues attached to work and dignity and purpose and contribution. We're talking about issues of misogyny and sexism. We're talking about all these very thorny issues that no amount of data has been able to really move our country as quickly as I would like us see us move on

these issues. But I do think kind of humanizing and putting stories and faces behind not just the data but the idea policy will lead to some forward step. But I think I tell people all the time the data, the research that's all independent of me. I have no interaction with the researchers, I I don't know who was selected that that's going to be independent, but regardless of what the data shows, I think it's also an opportunity

to show just how hard people are working. I think the stories, if nothing else, will help illustrate that poor people aren't lazy, that people who struggle aren't less deserving, and that people have dignity that's inherent to their humanity, is not attached to what they're able to produce for somebody in terms of work. So that's a really interesting

point that you raise that Suki. I actually wanted to ask you about this, and in your talks with people in the community and thinking about the design and implementing it, have you encountered anybody who has said to you, look, I actually don't want this. My own sense of dignity is defined as dignity by work. I want to be able to show that I've worked for what I've received, and I don't want any part of it for that reason.

Have you encountered people in Stockton who said, I don't want to be part of this program because I don't like the idea of a handout. We've definitely heard people say that they don't want the five hund dollars a month. But I think that comes from the point that Mayor raised earlier, from more of the racialized and gendered stereotypes

that exist around the public welfare system at large. A lot of folks, definitely when the guaranteed income first started, felt like there was going to be a catch, that there was no way that they could just get the five hundred dollars a month and there wouldn't be strings attached, and it's taken at least I mean, it took until at least a six seven month mark where people finally started believing that a government or an elected official really

could believe in them enough and trust them enough to give them five hundred dollars a month without there being anything attached, without it needing to be attached to work. And what we see is that the five dollars a month is really just an income floor. The five dollars a month is not stopping folks from working. If anything,

it's allowing people to find better jobs. So I think to answer your question, there's definitely our country has a long history of attaching values to the money and to quote unquote handouts that we give to our folks and it's taken for our recipients a couple of months to really break that down and realize that an elected official and really is here to see them thrive regardless of what they do with the cash. So you're recently graduated from Stanford and that's in the heart of Silicon Valley,

and the Economic Security Project also comes out of Silicon Valley. Recently, Andrew Yang, who's a former tech entrepreneur, has put the topic of universal basic income on the national agenda in his presidential run. What is it about Silicon Valley and universal basic income? Why is there some kind of a match? It seems even Elon musk as As embraced the idea. Why is there this kind of association between the valley and tech and on the one hand, and the idea

of a universal basic income on the other. I think if the close association between tech and universal basic income is probably rooted in the fact that the folks who are in Silicon Valley are most are the closest to automation and artificial intelligence, and so when they're thinking about the economy, they're looking at it from generally from a more future oriented lens in which they see that you know, the robots are coming, which will lead to displacement a

lot of workers, and that will in turn disproportionately impact quote unquote originally thought of as low skilled workers who tend to be people of color, and a universal basic income is positive as a one solution that could mitigate the effects of automation. I think for folks who are a little bit more removed from the Silicon Valley, it's a guaranteed income as posed a solution to an economy that's falling short for far too many Americans today. So

I'll be recognized that the robots are indeed coming. It's also a matter of today one in for Stocktonians lives in poverty and today away teens in the nation for talent poverty. So how can we use a guaranteed income to address and make the economy better in this moment? Mayor Tubbs, can I ask you if I were designing a universal a basic income program, I wouldn't want it

to be universal. I mean, one of the things that I thought was impressive about your program is that you targeted it to some degree at people of lower income, just by choosing neighborhoods that were at or below the city's median income line. I mean, that's not targeting narrow poverty, but it's at least trying to avoid giving away too much of this money to people who genuinely don't need it. And I'm wondering, how do you feel about the universal

part of universal basic income? I mean, my instinct, again this is just speaking for myself, is that there's something crazy about giving people who don't need large amounts of money this kind of money. And I understand that the logic behind it is it gives greater dignity if it's available universally to everybody. But there you're just trading off dignity against significant redistribution of income in a situation where programs are extremely costly. So do you how do you

feel about the universal part of universal income? I'm not gonna lie that I actually struggle. I struggle with that. Yeah, And speaking candidly, I think if it was to go

at scale, it probably couldn't start us universal anyway. I mean, Chris Hughes talks about doing some sort of financial tax which would help folks making fifty k below with the income floor Sendor Harris with her and hundred k below for families I think we have to start there and iterate, but I would say I've actually have begin to understand why universality makes sense, and I think it goes to your point around kind of dignity, but also re establishing

this idea of the commons in terms of and extending the social contract. So when I think of a lot of sort of public goods, whether it's public schools, even extremely wealthy people have access to those things, although they may not need them, UM, I think that it does build sort of the body politics, if you will. That and this idea of dignity has kept resurfacing in terms of people don't want to feel like they're they're needy, or they're less than UM. They want to feel like, oh,

this is something that we're all getting UM. And I do think there's some there's some value to that UM. But I even when we were designing the program, I really struggled with the UM at or below the median income line, or or the fact that there's some people receiving the money who make more than me, who make eight hundred K. But then well, I've also learned it's that even people who make eighty ninety one fifty two hundred k, particularly in areas that are more a lot

less affordable than Stockton, are still struggling. UM and I still have high rates to student debt, UM still may not have the best healthcare, and still could use a

little income ushion as well. So i've i've I've relented that fact, and I think that whatever is And also last thing, obviously, I also think in terms of what's politically possible, given the history of this country and the way we other folks, the only way something like this we would happen is if the majority of a lot of people, particularly people who vote, which are particularly middle class people, can see themselves reflecting actually benefiting tagibly from

said program. So for those reasons, I think it has to be, if not universal, as close universal as possible. I mean, you ended up that answer in a little

bit different than the place that you started. I mean I when it comes to public schools, I see the argument very much that we actually have an incentive as a society to try to get the people who have the greatest resources to stay in the public schools, precisely so we will have a common sense of community and so that people with resources will invest to the extent possible in those public institutions, rather than diverting their resources

and their efforts to private institutions. Here where you're talking about essentially check, you know, without a social service support network associated with it, it does seem to me that there's it's harder to make the case that making it

universal will give everybody a sense of buying. I do understand that it might reduce the sense of indignity that some people might might suffer, and then we're just trading off in a very hard, tragic choice people's feelings of dignity against the question of how much money will have to will actually have to hand out. Suki, I wonder what are the biggest challenges that you've been facing in implementation?

What are the problems that you've faced so far. I think one of the biggest challenges that we've faced has been Sama Tubs says this all the time, that change moves out the speed of trust. The same is definitely true for program implementation. So we've seen since we launched in the very beginning of fun the ways in which a lack of trust in our institutions has impacted our ability to implement. So I'll give a couple of examples.

The first is that when we sent out our letters, as I mentioned earlier, our recruitment, we did address based recruitment, and we sent letters out to randomly selected addresses inviting them to participate. So when we sent the letters out, we originally only sent a thousand letters because we didn't want to fabricate false hope in a city where there's a lot of need and a lot of folks who

need an extra five hundred dollars a month. But when we sent those those thousand letters out and we started monitoring the response rates, we realized that though we had enough responses to fill the treatment group, we didn't necessarily have a representative sample of Stockton, and not as many folks responded as we hoped. And so then we sent out and you thought that their responses might actually have been skewed by education or governmental trust or some other thing.

I mean, I certainly have to say that if I got a letter in the mail saying, you know, hey, would you like to join a survey, just a pilot program, and we're going to pay you an extra five hundred dollars a month for nothing, I think I would be highly skeptical of that. I think I would be very doubtful exactly, and we heard and it's something that's been echoed and what we've heard from our recipients over and

over again. So when the recipients were notified that they had been selected to participate in SEED, they were brought in for an onboarding session, which is still one on

one orientation with a member of the SEED staff. And even in that orientation session, folks were expressing their disbelief and their distrust that in a time when the federal government was shut down, in a time when the ice raids were increasing and more and more folks of Hispanic Latin ex origin we're actually just hiding themselves in their homes, that an elected official could actually want to give something

for nothing. So that that lack of trust and you know, thinking that we were scamed, that we just wanted to collect information for other purposes. That was a common thread that really impact our ability to implement when we were just getting started. Mayor Tubs, do you think that you know, all politics is local and the retail politics of a city of three hundred thousand plus is very very local. So I'm sure you know all your neighborhoods and I'm

sure on a lot of blocks. You know a lot of your constituents and if you if you get re elected every year, you've got to be out there, you know, hearing and talking to people. Are you worried about jealousy from neighbors who say so and so got lucky. You know, Thomas got lucky, and you know the city gave him nine thousand dollars. Not so much me and my neighbor and my other neighbor. I mean one hundred and twenty

five families or people. Is it's enough people to be known about, but it's also a small enough people that a significant number of people might be kind of jealous. Have you encountered that yet? Are you imagining that that could happen? Or do you think everyone in Stockton is such a giving, big person that they wouldn't mind that

their neighbor makes nine thousand dollars And they don't. So what was the fascinating is that we also had this conversation during the design phase, and what we've found since disbursements is that most folks are comfortable in that I didn't pick it was random. They believe that people believe

in the randomness. They think it really was random. A lot of people believe in ranmothers because it's people who hate me who got envelopes who said, there's no way if he saw how I talked about him on Facebook or they got this envelope right. So I think the

random lottery really kind of innocuate that. As from all that, I think part of it is I've been very clear with the community in that there's all types of benefits programs, nonprofit services in this city that do good work that doesn't serve everybody, and it doesn't make them less good. And this is not a departure, very good argument, exact departure from the status quo. That's just it's another program that everyone has a chance to qualify for if you

beat these requirements, but everybody won't qualify for. And I think for the most part people I have been accepting of that. And then I also think that most of the recipients are not telling people that they received it, which is their choice. That's probably clever, yeah, probably smart, But when we were first designing it, that was actually a big issue because people were saying, you're just gonna pick your friends, You're going to pick this certain neighborhood,

where you're from. A subtext was as only going to pick black people. So the random interesting, Yeah, very interesting, But the random will actually helped to octuvate us from a lot of that moving forward, which bodes well for all of us. I want to ask both of you about what I see is sort of the big national debate downside of the universal basic income question, and it's this.

It seems to be that some of the supporters of universal basic income sort of see it as a substitute for all other forms of social service programs, for unemployment benefits, for welfare, because I think in the minds of some people, and especially some kind of libertarian leaning tech types, the ideas, you know, government programs don't work very well, so let's simplify by eliminating those government programs and then using the money we save it from those government programs to provide

universal basic income. If your program ends up working well, are you concerned that it might provide data that actually is then used to support the position that says this is our solution to our social ills, going alongside the elimination of some traditional healthic assistance programs. So he maybe let's start with you. Sure, So the good thing is that are for us, guaranteed income is really meant to be supplemental to existing benefits, So a lot of our

folks are actually receiving other public benefits. So just strictly technically speaking, the data won't be able to really isolate the effects of a guaranteed income from good good technical answer. I like that, and I'll tell you let Mary take the visionary answer. Well, Noah, think for me, I've been very very very clear that a basic income, for me, it's not progress to replace what we've built to build

something else. And I come from basic income not from a libertarian tradition, but from a civil rights tradition, from the work of doctor King and the Black Panthers and others, in that we need those other things as well. The more we extend the social safety net, the better are we are. So I definitely think that what's interesting about this conversation is that there's so many different, usually competing

interest around this solution. But I think for me, my stake in the ground and my clarity is that no, this is meant to be additive, to be an extension of our social safety and extension of the social contract is to build on what we already have because everything we have isn't broken, but there's a realization to everything we have also is imperfect, and people are still struggling.

I think the idea of this experiment is terrific, and here's hoping that the data support you and that it makes a real contribution to the ongoing question of what we can do to make our country a fairer and a more just place going forward. And I'm really grateful to both of you for joining me. Thank you, Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Universal basic

income is a genuinely fascinating experiment. And if we think that in the foreseeable future, some huge number of Americans are actually going to lose their jobs as a result of increasing automation and machine learning tools, then we kind of have to try. That is to say, we need to look for every option that we might have to enable people to keep some stream of income in the

face of what could be devastating unemployment. Stockton, California is a pretty small sized experiment, but it may produce data they will enable us to make wiser judgments about whether universal basic income should be part of how we go about solving the problem of unemployment in the future. In any case, it's a fascinating story from an unusual place, and we're going to learn a lot about it in

the future. And now the sound of the week, I'm gathered here with dozens of my congressional colleagues underground in the basement of the Capitol because if behind those doors they intend to overturn the results of an American presidential election, we want to know what's going on. That's Congressman Matt Gates from Florida this Wednesday, when a group of Republicans tried to barge into closed door impeachment hearings being led

by the House Intelligence Committee. A lot has happened in the impeachment inquiry this week, and what's remarkable is that until now almost everything significant has happened behind closed doors. Democrats who are controlling the impeachment inquiry have a couple of justifications for the secrecy. The first thing they say is that matters of national security could potentially be involved.

And in fact, the House Intelligence Committee is accustomed to doing all kinds of secret hearings, which it does in a special facility called a skiff, which is exactly the facility that the other Republicans wanted to get into this week. Another explanation the Democrats provide is to say that at an early stage in any criminal investigation, you don't talk to the witnesses in public. You talk to them in private.

Yet a third thing Democrats have been saying is that these aren't hearings at all, their depositions in which sworn statements are taken from witnesses. Now, all of these justifications have some truth to them, and it's also true that historically in investigators in earlier impeachment inquiries have done lots of their questioning of witnesses in private before reaching the point of public hearings. But these arguments also have distinct limitations.

The main limitation is that an impeachment process is ultimately a political process. It's political in the sense that impeachment is conducted by the House of Representatives, which is an elected body, and subsequent trial takes place in front of

the Senate, which is also an elected body. That means that when people's representatives are going to be directly involved in doing the investigation, in mounting the charges, and ultimately in deciding whether they're true or not, the public is always going to want to have a say, and for the public to have a say, the public has to have information, and so, at least in my view, the Democrats are reaching the point where they're running out of

room to continue the private, secret side of the inquiry. They're going to have to pretty soon do what they've been promising for a while now, shift to public hearings in which the entire world and the TV cameras will be able to see what the witnesses have to say. Now that might seem simple or easy, but from the standpoint of the Democrats it's not going to be. The big challenges that the Democrats face are really two. First,

we're already starting to know the story. We more or less know what the allegations against Donald Trump are, and we more or less know that they're true. The President has already more or less acknowledged that he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. As a consequence, when the witnesses appear and testify, the news media may be a little bit less interested in the details of exactly

who did what and when. Then they've been until now, when we've gotten a steady diet of leaked secret information. After all, it's pretty exciting to have leaked secret information on the front page. It's a lot less exciting to have a public hearing where the witness repeats what he or she has already said secretly and which has already

been leaked on the front page of the newspaper. The other big challenge the Democrats are going to face is that in public house Republicans are sure to emphasize in their questions to witnesses the allegation with which Donald Trump began this entire process, namely, the allegation that Joe and Hunter Biden were both participants in an illicit scheme to influence the Ukrainian prosecutor to drop prosecution against the company

for which Hunter Biden was working. Now, Biden has said that neither he nor his son did anything wrong, and almost all Democrats have continued to insist on exactly that. The reality is, however, that when the Bidens come to be attacked day by day by day, hour by hour by hour on national television, that is going to have some distracting effect on the Democrat's effort to keep things

focused laser like on Donald Trump's wrongdoing. In fact, it could pose a very significant danger to the Bidens and an even more significant challenge to the momentum that the Democrats have managed to produce in the context of their impeachment inquiry. All of those things may happen, and indeed I think they're going to happen, but there's no avoiding them in the long run. An impeachment inquiry has to

take place in front of the American public. The Democrats have gone just about as far as they can in private, and the Republican protest dramatized that. This week, Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gancott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can

follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.