UBI is dead; guaranteed long-term income

Driven by this success, he created an organization organized by Tubbs, Alcors Bermed Income, to expand its pilot city. To date, 42 American mayors have signed up, and additional projects are underway Hudson, New York and Gary, Indiana, Compton, California.

Since the year SEED’s first-year results were released in March, Tubbsi has often been asked what he has learned. “I’m tempted to say nothing,” he told me in late March.

It means that the pilot didn’t say anything that was already obvious to him: from personal experience, he knew that there weren’t many stereotypes about poor people (especially poor blacks) that were “rooted in reality”.

Tubbs was born in Stockton to a teenage mother and a father who was a prisoner. He went to Stanford with a need-based scholarship, and returned home after graduating. He was soon elected to the City Council when he was just 26 years old before becoming mayor.

Tubbs didn’t need the data to know that people could have a bond to make rational economic decisions, but the experience helped him “learn the power of narrative”.

He acknowledged that “sometimes ideology, other times racism,” colors people’s perceptions. He says part of his job as mayor was to “illustrate what’s real and what’s not”. He saw an opportunity to “illustrate what the data protects and what protects the bias.”

The need to change narratives through research and evidence was also evident for Magnando of Magnanda’s Mother’s Board of Trustees. A few days before the third cohort started receiving the money, I asked him what research questions this new cycle hoped would answer.

“Now we have enough data to prove that money works,” he told me. Now, his question was not how would the money affect low-income people, but “What data or discussion points should we get from policymakers … to move hearts?” What evidence might be sufficient to guarantee a guaranteed income at the federal level?

As a result, what made the difference was not more research but the global pandemic.

Pandemic effect

When requests to stay home closed many businesses — and destroyed jobs, especially for already low-income low-income workers — it was harder to ignore the abyss of American inequality. The food lines stretched for miles. Millions of Americans in the face of eviction. Students Without internet access they went from sitting in public parking lots at home to Wi-Fi so they could attend classes online.

That was worse for people of color. By February 2021, black and Hispanic women, who make up only a third of the female workforce, the women’s pandemic was nearly half the job loss. Black men, on the other hand, were almost double the rate of other ethnic groups, according to census data examine By the Pew Research Center.

All of this also changed the conversation about the costs of guaranteed income programs. When the comparison was made between basic income and the status quo, they saw that they were too expensive to be realistic. But in the face of this recession caused by the pandemic, all of a sudden they saw the relief packages needed to launch the American economy, or at least what Jerome Powell, then president of the Federal Reserve, called it. “Downward spiral”With“ tragic ”results.

“Covid-19 represented all the things we work with and are really financially secure with people we work with and have relationships with,” Tubbs says. That is, poverty was not “the problem of the people. It happens with systems. It’s about politics. “

Increased incentive payments and unemployment benefits — that is, direct remittances to unconditional Americans — were surpassed by huge public support. Earlier this year, the Child and Dependent Tax Credit (CTC) was expanded, providing up to $ 3,600 for children, paid in monthly installments, to most American families.

This new benefit, which will last for one year, is also available to families who do not earn enough to pay income tax; they were left out of previous versions of the tax credit. And sending monthly payments of up to $ 300 per child instead of just one allowance at the end of the year gives families a better chance to plan and budget. Child poverty is expected to be halved.

Washington may not have used the language of guaranteed income, but these programs are in line with the definition.

CTC is a “game changer,” says Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, which funded many of the revenue-guaranteed pilot schemes, including the mayor of SEED and Guaranteed Income. In America, “the welfare policy of the decade overturns the sanctions,” he says, and sets the stage for more sustainable policies.

His organization originally thought it needed data from a decade of city-based pilot programs to “report on federal policy making,” the CTC means that guaranteed revenue has arrived, at least temporarily.

Stimulus bills and the CTC make Tubbs “more stringent than ever,” with guaranteed revenue that could soon become a permanent fixation of federal policy.

“We live in a time of pandemic,” he says. “It’s not just kobid-19. There is an earthquake next month. They are forest fires. All of these things are happening all the time, not to mention automation. We need to have the capacity to build economic resilience for our people. ”

Although the rhetoric has moved away from the technocratic concept of UBI, Silicon Valley’s interest in universality has not disappeared. Last April, Jack Dorsey announced a new philanthropic initiative, Start Small LLC, To provide $ 1 billion.

The donations would initially go to the covid-19 relief and then, after the pandemic, move to universal basic income and girls ’education, he said. Focusing the money on those causes, Dorsey explain, were described as “the best long-term solutions to existential problems in the world”.

Although he announced it universal basic income has become one of the biggest funders of StartSmall guaranteed income. It provided $ 18 million to the Mayor for Guaranteed Income, $ 15 million to the Open Research Lab (formerly known as the Y Combinator basic income experiment), $ 7 million to the Humanity Forward, the Andrew Yang Foundation, and recently $ 3.5 million Implement Cash Transfer Lab. For more research on the subject at New York University.

Yang, now running for mayor of New York City, has also moved away from a universally-oriented approach. Rather than sending $ 1,000 a month to all checks, he now advocates a guaranteed minimum income of $ 2,000 a year for New Yorkers living in severe poverty.

Tubbs requires some credit for those rounds. He recalled his conversation with Dorsey in which he told the billionaire: “It will take time to reach universality, but it is urgent to have a guaranteed income … So look, we don’t … We’re going to try a UBI. We can tested to ensure income. Let’s start from there. ”

If there are any signs of his donations, Dorsey remembered Tubbs’ words. What is still unclear is whether he and other technology leaders see guaranteed income as a step towards the UBI or as a goal in itself. (Neither Dorsey nor Start Small staff responded to interview requests.)

Scott Santens, one of the first “Basic Income Bros”, He believes that the initial interest of the technology sector in UBI is still important as a solution to job losses. The pandemic has seen an increase in sales of automation and robots, noting that there has been an increase in inquiries about Amazon’s call center technology and also an increase in purchases of warehouse robots to replace warehouse workers.

Meanwhile, Sam Altman, who helped launch the Y Combinator’s UBI experiment, before letting him run an artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, write a new one manifest about the situation. In it, he urged us to continue to look at the big picture: even though the pandemic has caused a short-term shock, it is technology, specifically artificial intelligence, that will have the greatest impact on employment over time.

Altman asked UBI to finance it with a 2.5% corporate tax. “The best way to improve capitalism is to allow everyone to benefit directly as a property owner,” he wrote.

Would “everyone” include people of color, already? AI biases may be affected at excessive levels? And can the dividend paid from the prey of artificial intelligence make up for that damage? Altman’s manifesto mostly dismisses references to the race.

Receiving comments, he sent a statement through an OpenAI representative saying, “We need to build AI so that it does not do more harm to traditionally marginalized communities. In addition to building technology in a fair and just manner, we must also find a way to share benefits widely. .