{"id":8100,"date":"2018-03-16T09:38:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T16:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=8100"},"modified":"2018-03-16T09:38:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T16:38:13","slug":"stocktons-awesome-public-experimen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/03\/16\/stocktons-awesome-public-experimen\/","title":{"rendered":"Stockton\u2019s Awesome Public Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stockton will soon begin a pilot project, experimenting with a universal basic income. But could this be the beginning of something bigger?<\/h4>\n
BY\u00a0JEFF SPROSS<\/a><\/address>\n

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Can the UBI make a difference in Stockton? — Photo by\u00a0throgers\u00a0<\/a>via\u00a0CC 2.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

A universal basic income is coming to the town of Stockton, California\u2014or a limited version of one, anyway.<\/p>\n

What can we learn from this experiment and others like it? Or, more specifically, what do we need to learn?<\/p>\n

In its ideal form, a universal basic income (or UBI, for short) is a regular income for every last person, provided by the government, with no conditions, and no income thresholds. It would avoid the\u00a0perverse economic incentives<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0political resentments<\/a>\u00a0sometimes created by means-testing, and would likely develop\u00a0the same popularity<\/a>\u00a0as other broadly shared programs like Medicare and Social Security. A sufficiently generous UBI\u2014say, $10,000 a year per adult, and $6,000 per child\u2014could virtually eliminate poverty, free people to reject oppressive and degrading labor, and put a basic floor under everyone\u2019s living standards.<\/p>\n

Stockton\u2019s UBI will be a more limited\u00a0pilot program<\/a>: $500 a month, or $6,000 per year. The city\u2019s mayor, Michael Tubbs,\u00a0hopes the experiment<\/a>\u00a0will launch in August, involve at least 100 people, and last about one to three years.<\/p>\n

But making this happen requires clearing a few important obstacles, the first of which is financing.<\/p>\n

One million dollars will be provided by the Silicon-Valley-backed\u00a0Economic Security Project<\/a>. How many more donations the city can bring in will determine if the program lasts the full three years. None of the money will come from city taxpayers.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because Stockton\u2019s finances and economy\u00a0were decimated by the Great Recession<\/a>, leaving it unable to shoulder the experiment itself. It\u2019s certainly conceivable that wealthier city and state governments could run similar experiments under their own power. But running a full-blown UBI through a local or state government budget would be impossible. Even for a major economy like California, a modest $6,000-a-year UBI for the entire population would almost triple\u00a0the annual state budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But at the national level, that aforementioned $10,000-per-adult, $6,000-per-child UBI would require a bit less than $3 trillion a year. And only the federal government has the central bank, and the legal power to issue the currency, which protects it from the vicissitudes of the financial markets.<\/p>\n

So there will almost certainly be no city- or state-level UBIs. This means that in the absence of a nationwide program, what we\u2019ll get are focused experiments like Stockton\u2019s. Some broader questions they will not be able to answer, therefore, include: How would people respond to a more generous UBI, or one that doesn\u2019t have a known end date? Stockton is heavily nonwhite and grapples with much lower incomes and higher poverty than nearby San Francisco. And it suffers spillover effects from its neighbor\u2019s sky-high inequality and housing prices. Would a population of different demographics and circumstances react differently to the same program?<\/p>\n

The questions the experiment\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0answer are thus of a more individual and sociological nature: What do people do with the money? How does their labor market participation change? How do their life circumstances change? Tubbs himself does not know what specific questions they will investigate just yet. But the city has a request out for research proposals, and Tubbs told me they plan to select one by the end of March.<\/p>\n

The UBI is sometimes cast as a rival\u00a0to a federal job guarantee<\/a>, which would provide work\u2014with decent pay, benefits, and conditions\u2014to anyone who wants it. In fact, Tubbs says he actually considered some sort of jobs program beforehand. And he takes many of his cues from the legacy of the civil rights struggle; Martin Luther King Jr. stumped for both\u00a0a UBI<\/a>\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0a job guarantee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But more to the point: The UBI could function as a\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0jobs program as well. Despite worries about mass joblessness brought on by technological advancement\u2014which seems to underlie Silicon Valley\u2019s enthusiasm for the UBI\u2014there\u2019s\u00a0no<\/a>\u00a0evidence<\/a>\u00a0it\u2019s actually happening. The future could always bring something new. But for the moment, America\u2019s persistent wage stagnation, rising inequality, job insecurity, and low labor force participation all have a far more banal explanation: Economic policy has failed for decades to generate enough aggregate demand (i.e. consumer spending), which is the raw fuel for more jobs and really tight labor markets.<\/p>\n

And a national UBI would be an excellent way to pump hundreds of billions in additional aggregate demand into the economy. Whether the policy could deliver full employment ultimately depends on other factors, like taxation and Federal Reserve policy. (A job guarantee\u2019s effect is cleaner and more surefire in this respect.) But it\u2019s a live possibility. Since much of that money would go to outlying suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, a national UBI\u00a0could help reverse<\/a>\u00a0the geographic inequity of where jobs and wages currently grow,\u00a0and where they don\u2019t<\/a>. By giving each individual more breathing room to take less work, a UBI could also spread access to work more broadly.<\/p>\n

Stockton, of course, is not running a full UBI, so it won\u2019t be a decisive demonstration of the macroeconomic effects. But $600,000 in a year would be 2.3 percent\u00a0of the annual economic activity in the Stockton-Lodi area<\/a>. That\u2019s hardly peanuts: An equivalent stimulus to the national economy would be $425 billion in a year. And if the city can find enough additional donations beyond the Economic Security Project\u2019s contribution, Stockton will get that annual shot in the arm for three consecutive years. Researchers would be wise to pay attention to the experiment\u2019s effects on consumer spending and the supply of jobs in the Stockton area.<\/p>\n

As for those more individual and sociological questions about a UBI\u2019s effect, in many cases we already have answers.<\/p>\n

Vox\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Dylan Matthews has\u00a0diligently documented<\/a>\u00a0recent pilot programs of various designs, focusing on small populations in Canada, Finland, Kenya, and elsewhere. The tech startup Y Combinator\u00a0is planning another UBI pilot<\/a>\u00a0in nearby Oakland, California. The United States has also seen several\u00a0natural experiments<\/a>, such as\u00a0Alaska\u2019s Permanent Fund<\/a>, and even some official government\u00a0test runs<\/a>\u00a0in the 1970s. (That decade, the federal government\u00a0actually flirted<\/a>\u00a0with passing a UBI.)<\/p>\n

The results\u00a0are remarkably positive<\/a>: There is little noticeable effect on the amount people work, and when work does drop, it\u2019s because people are choosing to care for children, go to school, or hold out longer for a better job with a better wage. Health and life outcomes improve for children in families receiving the checks. People invest\u00a0in all sorts of useful endeavors<\/a>, from business supplies to schooling to housing.<\/p>\n

For Tubbs, it was this very research, and his confidence Stockton could replicate the results, that inspired his decision to take on the UBI experiment. (There\u2019s also the relative bureaucratic simplicity of sending people checks, versus organizing a massive work program.) It sounds like he wants to take an individual, narrative-based approach to sharing Stockton\u2019s results. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to read about outcomes,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s another thing to meet and see the person, and see that they did good things with the dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be able to amplify and lift up stories of the incredibly brilliant and resilient people in the city of Stockton,\u201d he continued. \u201cWhether it\u2019s the mom who\u2019s able to go back to work because she can afford child care, or the student who\u2019s able to stay in school, or someone who\u2019s a caregiver and able to spend time with their family, or someone who\u2019s an entrepreneur with an idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this sense, these pilot programs don\u2019t just defend the utopian ambition of a universal basic income. They defend programs like traditional welfare before the 1990s \u201creform,\u201d or housing vouchers, or even proposals for\u00a0a universal child allowance<\/a>. They defend no-strings cash transfers of any sort; and really, the whole idea of a robust and generous social safety net.<\/p>\n

According to Tubbs, there\u2019s plenty of enthusiasm for the idea out there: \u201cWe get postcards every day from people throughout the nation who are excited, and a lot of people locally.\u201d Despite the research, though, fears that a UBI will tempt people into self-destructive idleness\u00a0still loom large<\/a>\u00a0among commentators, journalists, and other observers; \u201cPeople feeling that if they received the money,\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0would do good things. But some unknown other wouldn\u2019t,\u201d as Tubbs put it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the ultimate point of Tubbs\u2019 experiment is to prove that, no, everyone else really is just like you.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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READ MORE ABOUT\u00a0CALIFORNIA<\/a>INEQUALITY<\/a>UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/section>\n
JEFF SPROSS<\/a>\u00a0is the economics and business correspondent for The Week, and previously worked as a climate and economics reporter for ThinkProgress.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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Stockton will soon begin a pilot project, experimenting with a universal basic income. But could this be the beginning of something bigger? BY\u00a0JEFF SPROSS \u00a0\u00a0FROM\u00a0MARCH 14, 2018 Can the UBI make a difference in Stockton? — Photo by\u00a0throgers\u00a0via\u00a0CC 2.0 A universal basic income is coming to the town of Stockton,… 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":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8100"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8102,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8100\/revisions\/8102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}