{"id":7716,"date":"2018-02-02T13:50:12","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T21:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=7716"},"modified":"2018-02-02T13:51:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T21:51:50","slug":"stockton-rolls-universal-income-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/02\/02\/stockton-rolls-universal-income-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Stockton rolls out universal income experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/picture><\/span><\/span>
City of Stockton.<\/em><\/figcaption>\u00a0Photo by\u00a0LPS.1<\/a>\/Wikicommons<\/cite><\/span><\/em><\/figure>\n
\n

Hard-luck city to offer low-income families $500 per month<\/h4>\n
\n

By\u00a0Adam Brinklow<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0

The city of Stockton is committing to an experiment with a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in 2018: The city will supplement a few low-income Stockton families\u2019 budgets to the tune of $500\/month and then monitor the results.<\/p>\n

Announced\u00a0in October of last year<\/a>, the Stockton pilot will run for 12-18 months. The project is largely the ward of Stockton\u2019s\u00a027-year-old mayor Michael Tubbs<\/a>, who frames the\u00a0Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration<\/a>\u00a0[SEED] program as a potential cure for a shooting gallery of city problems.<\/p>\n

Per SEED:<\/p>\n

\n

When the rug is yanked out from underneath families, they find it difficult if not impossible to find financial security. The negative consequences of economic instability are putting an untenable strain on the education system, health care, and community lives. As work continues to fragment and wages continue to stagnate, the prognosis will only get worse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Tubbs\u00a0tells NPR<\/a>\u00a0the city will consider applicants through June and pay out from a $1.2 million fund of charity grants. Tubbs cites Martin Luther King Jr. as an inspiration\u2014King endorsed \u201ca guaranteed minimum income for all people\u201d during a\u00a01967 speech at Stanford<\/a>, and on other occasions.<\/p>\n

In 2016,\u00a0the U.S. Census estimated<\/a>\u00a0that the median income in Stockton was just over $46,000. In 2012, the city declared\u00a0bankruptcy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u00a0put out feelers<\/a>\u00a0for a similar UBI plan in 2017, but an actual program has yet to manifest. However, private groups have taken the initiative on their own.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span>
Stockton from above.<\/em><\/figcaption>\u00a0Photo by\u00a0Ken Lund<\/a>\/Wikicommons<\/cite><\/span><\/em><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

For example,\u00a0Y Combinator Research<\/a>, a nonprofit affiliate of the Y Combinator startup incubator program, is in the middle of a similar probe right now, offering 1,000 people a sum of $1,000\/month.<\/p>\n

Tesla CEO Elon Musk\u00a0predicted in 2016<\/a>\u00a0that, in the near future, a basic income program of some kind will be \u201cnecessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his own Facebook page to\u00a0praise an Alaskan program<\/a>\u00a0as a model for basic income and encouraged other states and metros to imitate it, citing business wisdom from his startup days:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re losing money, your mentality is largely about survival. When you\u2019re profitable, you\u2019re confident about your future and you look for opportunities to invest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The folks at Y Combinator are pretty frank about why Silicon Valley is suddenly so keen on exploring this old idea: New technology tends to torpedo existing jobs. They even quote former President Barack Obama\u2019s anxious comments about the future of automation in a\u00a02017 proposal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

At some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we\u2019re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As author Douglas Rushkoff noted in the\u00a0LA Times<\/em>,<\/a>\u00a0private interest in basic income is a matter of thinking ahead:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey understand the basic math: If they automate all the jobs, who will be left to buy their services? […] The penniless have no consumer behavior to exploit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City of Stockton.\u00a0Photo by\u00a0LPS.1\/Wikicommons Hard-luck city to offer low-income families $500 per month By\u00a0Adam Brinklow\u00a0\u00a0Feb 1, 2018 (sf.curbed.com) The city of Stockton is committing to an experiment with a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in 2018: The city will supplement a few low-income Stockton families\u2019 budgets to the tune of $500\/month… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7716"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7716"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7718,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7716\/revisions\/7718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}