Dolly Parton died today at 80.

You’ve probably already seen the tributes pouring in, the greatest hits, the rhinestones, the Jolene memes, the Whitney Houston story, and all of that is real, and all of it matters. But I want to honor her by writing about something Dolly did that most people still don’t fully appreciate, something that should reshape how we think about helping people in their greatest time of need.

She gave people money. Unconditionally. No bureaucrats deciding what they were allowed to spend it on. No means-testing. No paternalism. Just cash, because she trusted that they knew their own lives better than anyone else.

“I always count my blessings more than I count my money,” she once said. “I don’t work for money, never did.” But she understood what money means to people who don’t have enough of it. She understood that when everything you own has burned to the ground, the last thing you need is someone deciding for you what help looks like. What you need is the freedom to decide for yourself. You need money.

A Fire in the Smokies

On November 28, 2016, winds reaching almost 90 mph drove a wildfire straight through the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It was Dolly Parton’s backyard, the heart of Sevier County where she was born into a family that had nothing but each other. Fourteen people were killed by that fire. Over 2,400 structures were destroyed. Families fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

In the 10-minute documentary about the fire and what Dolly did embedded below, the survivors describe what happened in their own words. “The fire just literally knocked on our front door and our whole house was just surrounded in fire, so we had moments to escape,” one resident recalls. Another returned to find “ashes, piles of ashes, everybody saying Gatlinburg is gone.” Don Daily, a maintenance worker at a local resort, said simply: “I lost everything.”

Two days later, Dolly was on the phone with her Dollywood Foundation. As David Dotson, the foundation’s president, describes it in the documentary, she “kind of intuitively and instinctively laid out the essence of the response, which is: we need to put money in people’s hands as quick as possible.”

They would give $1,000 a month for six months to every single household whose primary residence had been destroyed; renters and homeowners alike, rich and poor alike. No applications asking people to prove how badly they were suffering. No restrictions on how they could spend it. She gave the same amount to everyone.

No one yet knew how many homes had been destroyed. The foundation had no idea how much money they’d just committed to give away. “But we decided if we were all gonna jump off a cliff, we’d do it together,” Dotson said.

They named the fund after one of her songs. My People Fund. She launched a social media campaign, hosted a star-studded telethon in Nashville, and raised $12 million. It was nearly double what they’d expected. Nine million of that went directly into the My People Fund. On the sixth and final month, Dolly personally surprised every family with a $5,000 check because more money had come in than anticipated, bringing the total to $10,000 per household. Over 900 families received that money.

The philosophy behind the fund (her foundation calls it “Dolly-izing”) is explained in the documentary. “People should have the ability to spend money on their own road to recovery, however that road looks to them; not to be dictated,” says one of the fund’s administrators. “There were no strings attached. I felt that was the absolute most fair thing.”

That is a basic income. That is what basic income looks like in practice. Recurring, unconditional cash, the same amount for every recipient, with complete trust that they will use it to meet their own needs in their own way. Dolly Parton may not have called it UBI, and the My People Fund was never designed as a basic income experiment, but it functioned as one.

And the results proved her right.

The Evidence

Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee’s College of Social Work at the time, heard the My People Fund announcement on the radio and immediately recognized its significance. As she recalls in the documentary: “I was driving home one day after teaching, and I heard that Dolly Parton was contributing $1,000 a month to each family that was impacted by the wildfires, and I thought to myself, this is a really genuine approach to dealing with disaster recovery.” She contacted the Dollywood Foundation and partnered with them on an evaluation.

The median household income of recipients before the fires was just $1,500 a month. A thousand dollars a month of unconditional cash was transformative at two-thirds of pre-disaster income.

Before the fire, about 50% of recipients owned their homes. Six months after the fire, the majority had shifted to renting. But by the one-year mark, homeownership had bounced back to roughly 50%. People had rebuilt thanks to Dolly.

Insurance coverage, which is often the first thing to slip in low-income communities, actually increased. Before the fires, only 40% of recipients had homeowner’s or renter’s insurance. One year later, 70% did.

About 60% of recipients had savings at the one-year mark. Of those, over 95% reported having more than $1,000 saved. This, mind you, is in a country where nearly half of Americans can’t come up with $500 for an emergency.

And here’s the part that likely matters most to anyone who believes that providing people with unconditional cash makes them work less: the average number of hours worked remained exactly the same (40 hours a week) before, during, and after receiving the monthly cash. People didn’t quit. They didn’t become lazy. They used the money to buy groceries, clothes, to pay bills, and to rebuild their lives, just as Dolly trusted they would.

Dotson put it this way:

“People are so afraid of what people are gonna do or not going to do with the money. I always feel like, at the end of the day, any kind of program or approach that’s built on the belief that people are smart, they’re good, they know what to do, and you trust them to do that — that when you ground something in the positive perspective of humanity, then positive things happen.”

The Ripple to Maui

Seven years later, on August 8, 2023, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century swept through Lahaina on the island of Maui, killing at least 115 people and destroying thousands of homes. When Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson were trying to figure out how to help, they turned to Dolly Parton’s playbook.

Oprah said she was inspired to create her fund after reading about what Dolly had done in the Smokies. The Dollywood Foundation’s president Jeff Conyers consulted with Oprah’s team multiple times to share the lessons they’d learned from administering the My People Fund. As Conyers described Dolly’s philosophy: “These are my people and I want to take care of them and we trust them to know what recovery looks like for themselves and their families.”

And so Winfrey and Johnson launched the People’s Fund of Maui, pledging $10 million of their own money and providing $1,200 a month directly to adults whose homes were lost or uninhabitable. Over 8,100 residents received that money. Nearly $60 million was distributed.

Here’s how The Rock explained why they chose cash: “You want to take care of the greatest need of the people, and that’s giving them money.”

Not food boxes, not gift cards, not a government committee deciding what displaced families deserve, but money. It was money. Because money is freedom. Money is agency. Money is trust. Dolly didn’t need over 250 experiments to know this. Do you?

Books, Empathy, and the Thing She Was Most Proud Of

Dolly Parton held two Guinness World Records and sold over 100 million albums, but she always said the thing she was most proud of was the Imagination Library — the book-gifting program she started in Sevier County in 1995 that, by the time of her death, had given away over 300 million free books to children around the world.

She started it because of her father, who was by Dolly’s account the smartest man she ever knew, and he couldn’t read. “I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams,” she once wrote. So she set out to make sure no child in her community would face that same barrier. Families could sign their children up at birth, and every month until kindergarten, a book would arrive in the mail, and with the child’s name on the label, because Dolly insisted it had to feel personal, not like charity.

Three million books now go out every month to kids in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Ireland. And in the last book every child receives before they age out of the program, Dolly included a letter that contained the following: “Dream big dreams, learn everything you can learn, and care for all those who care for you.”

I think there’s something even deeper here, something Dolly understood intuitively. Books are empathy machines. When we read, we step inside someone else’s experience. We learn to see through eyes that aren’t our own. We practice caring about people whose circumstances are different from ours. And when you’ve spent years doing that as a child by stepping into story after story, and life after life, it becomes easier to look at a real human being and imagine what they might be going through. That is empathy. That is the skill that makes everything else possible.

In a world where some of our wealthiest and most powerful people now openly describe empathy as a weakness — as something to be engineered out of humanity — Dolly Parton lived as a daily refutation of that idea. She never hardened her heart. She once said, “I have to not harden my heart, because I want to stay open to feel things. So when I hurt, I hurt all over. And when I cry, I cry real hard.” That openness wasn’t weakness. If you think that, you can’t be more wrong.

Empathy is not a bug in the human operating system. It is arguably our greatest strength. It is our capacity for empathy that makes trust possible, that makes cooperation possible, that makes communities possible. Without empathy, you have people who accumulate wealth and watch others suffer from a distance. With empathy, you have Dolly Parton — who saw her neighbors’ homes burn, felt their pain, and instinctively responded by trusting them with money, because she knew that’s what she’d want if it were her. The Golden Rule, actually lived by.

The Billionaire She Never Became

Dolly Parton’s net worth was reported by Forbes as being $450 million last year. She was not a billionaire. It has been widely speculated that she could have been one if she hadn’t spent her life giving so much of her money away — to wildfire victims, to children’s literacy, to COVID-19 vaccine research at Vanderbilt that helped fund the Moderna vaccine, to community after community that needed help.

I think if Dolly had ever crossed that 10-digit threshold, she would have seen it as a failure. She didn’t measure wealth the way seemingly most billionaires measure it. She measured it in books delivered, in families housed, in children who fell in love with reading, in people who kept going day after day because someone believed in them enough to hand them cash and say nothing more than: I trust you.

“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life,” she said. She didn’t just say it. She lived it. She built a life that was about building other people’s lives.

There’s a word I keep coming back to in my own work on basic income: trust. UBI is not really about money. Money is the medium. The substance is trust. The message is: I trust you. I trust that if I give you what you need to live, you will use it to live. I trust you don’t need a caseworker checking up on you. You deserve better. Dolly Parton embodied that message more fully than any policymaker I’ve ever seen.

She grew up poor. She grew up sharing. She grew up in a community where people took care of each other. And she spent her entire life scaling that ethic up, not by building institutions that control people, but by building programs that educate and free them. Free books. Free money. No strings. No conditions. No judgment. Just trust.

Don Daily, one of the My People Fund recipients who lost everything in the Gatlinburg fire, put it this way in the documentary, choking up as he spoke: “That’s just not the way it’s supposed to work, and it did. It did — save people’s lives. If nothing else, up in their head where they could keep going on. Just take those next steps.”

Dolly Parton represented the absolute best of what we’re capable of as human beings. She was proof that empathy and trust aren’t naive ideals. They’re what actually work. She won. Not in the way billionaires win — by hoarding more than they could ever use. She won in the way that matters — by making the world measurably better for millions of people, and by trusting them to do the same for others.

The best way to honor her is to do what she did.

If you’d like to continue what Dolly started, you can support her Imagination Library at imaginationlibrary.com.

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I got my psychology degree in 2004 with a focus on cognitive neuroscience after first spending two years studying engineering physics. That background has informed almost everything I’ve written about basic income, especially when it comes to the science of stress, which I’ve written about previously. But it wasn’t until I recently read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will that something newly shifted in how I think about UBI at the most fundamental level as a recognition of what we actually are.

We are not who we think we are. And the implications of that are enormous.

Sapolsky’s book makes the argument that I think for most people is completely unacceptable: there is no free will. Not in the way most people use the term. When you make a decision, that decision is the product of neuronal firing patterns shaped by the seconds before, which were shaped by the minutes before, which were shaped by the hormones of the hours before, which were shaped by the neuroplasticity of the months before, which were shaped by the development of the years before, which were shaped by the genetics and epigenetics baked into you before you ever drew your first breath. It’s causes and effects all the way down. Or as Sapolsky frames it, borrowing from a famous cosmological anecdote: it’s turtles all the way down. There is no turtle floating in the air. There is no moment where the chain of cause and effect breaks and a “you” steps in to freely choose. That’s the illusion.

I know. It’s a lot. Most people won’t accept it. Most people can’t accept it, because the feeling of choosing is so strong that it seems absurd to deny it. I feel it too. I feel like I chose to write this essay. But Sapolsky would argue that I was always going to write this after reading his book, given everything that led to this moment. My reading his words, the neurons it activated, the prior decade of my writing about stress and poverty, my psychology degree, my physics background, my childhood, my mom’s womb, my diet, my inherited mix of genes. All of it. Turtles on turtles on turtles.

So what does this have to do with universal basic income?

I think it might be the most controversial argument for UBI I've ever tried to make.

The Chain of Causation

To understand why, you have to understand the chain of causation. Sapolsky walks readers through it one piece at a time, starting at the moment of a behavior and working backward through every layer that produced it.

A neuron fires and your hand moves. You did something. Why? Because a pattern of neurons in your motor cortex activated. Why did those neurons fire? Because neurons in your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain involved in decision-making, impulse control, and long-term planning — signaled them to using cascades of neurotransmitters. Why did those neurons fire in that pattern? Keep going.

Seconds to minutes before, your brain was awash in hormones that shaped what those neurons did. Testosterone, for example, doesn’t simply cause aggression the way most people assume. It amplifies whatever behavior is already being rewarded in your social context. In an environment where aggression earns status, testosterone makes you more aggressive. In an environment where generosity earns status, testosterone makes you more generous. Testosterone is a hormone that basically is about status.

Then there’s oxytocin and its close relative vasopressin (our love hormones). Oxytocin enhances mother-infant bonding and pair bonding. It makes people calmer by quieting the amygdala. Boost someone’s oxytocin levels, and they become more charitable and trusting in games of competition. Vasopressin does something similar, strengthening pair bonds and paternal behavior. In rodent species, the difference between a monogamous male who sticks around to raise his kids and a polygamous male who doesn’t, comes down to the density of vasopressin receptors in the reward center of its brain. Increase those receptors artificially, and the polygamous male suddenly becomes a devoted father. But oxytocin doesn’t make you warm and prosocial toward everyone. It makes you warm toward people who count as “Us.” Toward people who count as “Them,” it can actually increase hostility, making you more aggressive toward competitors, more biased against outsiders, even more inclined to gloat over a stranger’s misfortune. And the levels of these hormones you carry, these are shaped by your genes, your fetal environment, and whether you woke up this morning next to someone you care about.

Cortisol, meanwhile (our primary stress hormone) shifts your brain toward short-term survival thinking and away from the kind of measured, long-term reasoning the prefrontal cortex specializes in. You didn’t choose your hormone levels. They helped choose your behavior.

Hours to days before, your brain’s wiring was shaped by sleep, by what you ate, by whether you were sick, by what stressors you’d been exposed to recently. That wiring determines what your prefrontal cortex is even capable of doing in the moment of your “decision.” And here’s a finding that gets at the heart of the UBI argument: the prefrontal cortex (the seat of willpower and “good judgment”) is the brain region most vulnerable to depletion. It is the most metabolically expensive part of the brain. It tires. And when it tires, it works less effectively.

Sapolsky describes a study that illustrates this really well. People who were dieting were placed in front of a bowl of candy. Some of them had just completed a series of demanding cognitive tasks. Others had not. The ones whose frontal cortices had already been taxed by difficult mental work were significantly more likely to break their diets and eat the candy. Their willpower was literally depleted. The cognitive effort of the tasks consumed the neural resources they needed to resist temptation.

Now think about what this means for someone living in poverty. We already know from scarcity research that the mental burden of not having enough financial security operates like a background program consuming processing power. It’s been measured as equivalent to losing roughly 14 IQ points, which is comparable to the cognitive cost of an entire night’s sleep and the difference between “superior” and “average” intelligence, or between “average” and “borderline deficient.” If you’re spending your finite cognitive resources worrying about how to pay rent, how to keep the lights on, how to feed your kids, you have less prefrontal capacity left for everything else. Less capacity for patience. Less capacity for long-term planning. Less capacity to resist that drink, that cigarette, that lottery ticket. Not because you’re weak, but because your brain is already maxed out.

Months to years before, the neuroplasticity of your brain — its ability to rewire itself in response to experience — shaped the actual architecture of your decision-making. Chronic stress doesn’t just make you feel bad. It physically remodels your brain. It enlarges the amygdala, the region that processes fear and threat, while shrinking the hippocampus, the region involved in memory and contextual judgment. A chronically stressed brain becomes a brain that is biologically tuned to perceive threats everywhere and struggle to think its way out of them.

New research published in Innovation in Aging even looks at the impacts of long-term financial insecurity and finds that people who experience persistent money struggles or persistent low income in early and middle adulthood perform less well in cognitive tests by age 53 and show significant brain atrophy by age 71. Increased exposure to low household income and financial hardships was associated with lower cognitive processing speed and, over time, it reduced the amount of brain, particularly in men.

And decades before — during childhood, during fetal development, during the moment of conception when your particular genetic combination was assembled together — the foundations of all of this were laid without any of your choosing.

Older Than Thought

One of the things that struck me most in Determined is how ancient some of this neural machinery actually is. Sapolsky describes the neuronal circuits responsible for something as simple as blinking and traces them back to the sea slug Aplysia. Blinking is one of the oldest circuits in neuroscience, operating on principles that are hundreds of millions of years old. The same basic mechanisms that make a sea slug retract its gill when you poke it are the ones that make your brain associate a sound with a shock, or a smell with a memory, or a face with a feeling. It’s the basis of Pavlovian conditioning.

This is the foundation on which all of our “choices” are built. We like to believe that somewhere above this machinery, there’s a rational agent pulling the levers, but Sapolsky argues that there is no level at which the machinery gives way to something else. It’s neurons running on ancient circuitry all the way up. Even the most sophisticated stuff your prefrontal cortex does — weighing competing options, imagining future consequences, overriding an impulse — is itself a product of neurons operating according to the same physical and chemical laws as everything else.

Conditioned associations can be exploited to create links between things that have no logical connection. You can condition someone to associate an out-group like immigrants with fear. You can condition someone to associate poverty with moral failure. You can condition an entire society to believe that hard work is the primary determinant of success when the data says otherwise. These aren’t rational conclusions. They are conditioned responses, running on the same circuitry a sea slug uses to decide whether to retract its gill when touched. And once conditioned, they are remarkably resistant to logic.

You Are Your Environment

If this chain of cause and effect shapes individual behavior, it also shapes entire cultures, and this is where Sapolsky’s book kind of blew my mind.

Sapolsky describes how something as basic as climate and geography can determine the kind of society you’re born into, which in turn shapes the neural development of every person in it. For example, growing rice requires elaborate irrigation systems and cooperative labor among neighbors. You can’t really grow rice alone. You need to coordinate water usage with the people upstream and downstream. And so, over centuries, rice-based agricultural societies developed cultural orientations toward collectivism, deference, and cooperation. Meanwhile, herding sheep or goats requires rugged self-reliance and a willingness to violently defend your flock from anyone who might take it. And so, over centuries, pastoralist societies therefore developed cultures of honor, independence, and retaliatory aggression.

These aren’t just random cultural tendencies. And they get wired into brains. Research in cultural neuroscience has shown that people raised in collectivist cultures and people raised in individualist cultures actually process information differently at the neural level. Their brains are structurally different because their environments were different. Think about that.

You didn’t choose to be born into a rice culture or a herding culture. You didn’t choose whether your community would wire your brain for cooperation or for vigilant self-protection. But those things shaped who you are, down to the architecture of your neurons.

Now think about what it means to be born into a culture of poverty. A culture of economic insecurity. A culture where chronic stress is as ambient as the air.

The ACE Score and the Dice You Were Handed

Anyone interested in human wellbeing should know about the Adverse Childhood Experiences score. The ACE score is a simple count of how many categories of adverse experiences a person was exposed to during childhood like: physical or emotional abuse, neglect, a household with substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, incarceration of a family member, or parental separation.

The relationship between ACE score and life outcomes is one of the most robust in public health. For each additional adverse experience, the risk of negative outcomes climbs. People with high ACE scores are dramatically more likely to become addicted to substances, to develop heart disease, to experience depression and anxiety, to attempt suicide, to end up incarcerated, and to die young. And remember that new study about long-term economic stress and brain atrophy that showed a larger impact in men? It also showed a larger impact for adults with high ACE scores.

Again consider free will. None of these children chose their ACE score. A child doesn’t choose to be abused. A child doesn’t choose to have a parent in prison. A child doesn’t choose to grow up in a home where addiction is the norm. And yet those experiences physically alter the developing brain, changing the trajectory of the entire life that follows. The prefrontal cortex develops differently. The stress response system calibrates differently. Gene expression changes epigenetically in ways that can last a lifetime and even be transmitted across generations.

When that child grows up and makes what we call a “bad decision” by dropping out of school, becoming addicted to something, or committing a crime, we blame them. We say they made a choice. But the neuroscience says their capacity for making what we’d consider the “right” choice was compromised by forces that acted on their brain before they were even old enough to go to school.

When the Disease Undermines the Cure

Sapolsky tells a story in Determined that I think captures this blame problem memorably. A woman with epilepsy was told by multiple doctors not to drive because of the risk of having a seizure behind the wheel. She drove anyway. She had a seizure while driving. She caused an accident that killed a child.

The instinct is to blame and punish her. She knew she had seizures. She was told not to drive. She chose to drive anyway. But Sapolsky points out something that should give us pause: the very same brain abnormality that caused her seizures likely also impaired her judgment about whether to drive. Epilepsy doesn’t just produce seizures. It can affect the frontal regions of the brain involved in risk assessment, impulse control, and decision-making. The disease itself undermines the cognitive capacity needed to properly manage the disease.

This is not an unusual situation. It’s actually the norm for many conditions. Depression impairs the motivation needed to seek treatment for depression. Addiction hijacks the reward circuitry needed to choose sobriety. Poverty depletes the cognitive bandwidth needed to make the financial decisions that might escape poverty. The condition and the capacity to address the condition are entangled. You can’t separate them and pretend that someone is freely choosing to remain in their condition.

Parasites and Vaccines

If you’re still not convinced that our decisions aren’t entirely our own freely chosen, consider Toxoplasma gondii.

This is a single-celled parasite that needs to get inside a cat’s gut to complete its reproductive cycle. To do that, it infects rodents and actually rewires their brains so that instead of being terrified of the smell of cat urine, they become attracted to it. The infected rodent walks toward the cat, the cat eats the rodent, and so the parasite accomplishes its life’s mission. The rodent never “chose” to approach the cat. Its brain was hijacked by a parasite.

Somewhere between a third and half of all humans on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma gondii. In humans, infection has been associated with subtle personality changes like increased risk-taking, slower reaction times, and in some studies, an elevated rate of car accidents and links to conditions like schizophrenia. We are carrying around a parasite that may be quietly nudging our behavior.

And Toxoplasma is just one organism. Your gut is home to trillions of bacteria collectively called the microbiome that are, in a strange and literal sense, part of you and not you at the same time. Did you know that these bacteria produce neurotransmitters? About 90% of the body’s serotonin is manufactured not in the brain but in the gut, by bacteria. Gut microbes also produce dopamine, GABA, and other neurochemicals that directly influence how you feel, what you crave, and how you respond to stress. Research has shown that altering the gut microbiome in mice can change their anxiety levels, their social behavior, and their responses to stress. You are a walking ecosystem. An entire microbial civilization living inside you is participating in the production of the chemistry that underlies your “decisions.” You didn’t choose those microbes. You acquired them from your mother during birth, from your environment, from what you eat. And they are shaping what you do next.

Sapolsky brings up another example that really struck me. During the first Gulf War, U.S. troops were given a drug (pyridostigmine bromide) to protect against chemical weapon exposure. The drug was tested beforehand and deemed safe. But the testing didn’t account for the conditions soldiers would actually face: extreme heat, sleep deprivation, heavy physical loads, and the psychological stress of combat. Under those conditions, the drug interacted with the soldiers’ already-stressed physiology in ways that contributed to what became known as Gulf War syndrome. They now suffer from a cluster of chronic symptoms including fatigue, pain, and cognitive problems.

The drug was safe in the lab but it wasn’t safe in the field because of stress.

This raises a question that applies to far more than war: what else do we think we understand about human behavior, health, and decision-making based on observations made under ideal conditions that don’t account for the chronic stress of real life? Most of what we think we know about willpower, about self-control, about good decision-making — how much of that was studied in people who had their basic needs met, who weren’t worried about rent, who weren’t overflowing with stress hormones? When we judge someone living in poverty for making a decision that a middle-class person in a lab wouldn’t make, we’re comparing results within two very different environments.

From Witches to Patients

All of this leads to the question of where we draw the line between biology and blame.

Sapolsky makes the point in Determined about how in the 15th century, a person who had epileptic seizures stood a real chance of being burned alive as a witch. A handbook for the Inquisition published in 1486 that was used for over 200 years titled Malleus Maleficarum explicitly identified seizures as a sign of demonic possession. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, were killed as a result.

Today, no one burns people with epilepsy. We give them medication. We understand that seizures are a neurological condition, not a moral failing. As Sapolsky puts it, we learned to say a new sentence: “It’s not her; it’s her disease.”

That shift took centuries, but it happened. It happened because our understanding eventually deepened through science. We moved the line of what we consider within a person’s control, and what we consider biology. Sapolsky’s argument is that the history of medicine is really the history of moving that line, and that it has only ever moved in one direction. We used to blame people for things we now understand they couldn’t control. We never move the line the other way though. No one has ever discovered a condition we thought was biological and concluded, “Actually, turns out she’s just a witch after all. Burn her!”

So the question is: where does that line stop? If every new discovery has moved it further from “free choice” and closer to “biological and environmental causation,” why would we assume there’s a line where it finally stops and free will takes over?

I no longer believe we should assume that. And I think the implications for how we view poverty and in turn basic income are pretty profound.

The Just World Fallacy

There’s a name for the belief that people basically get what they deserve. It’s known as the Just World hypothesis. It’s a comforting belief that lets us look at someone who’s struggling and tell ourselves they must have done something to deserve it, and look at someone who’s thriving and tell ourselves they must have done something to earn it.

But the science says otherwise. An Italian simulation I’ve written about before modeled how talent and luck interact and found that pure talent was not the best predictor of success. Luck was. The most successful people in their simulations weren’t the most talented. They were moderately talented people who luckily caught the right breaks at the right moments. And the most effective intervention for ensuring that talent outperforms luck? Giving everyone an equal amount of money. Not rewarding the already successful. Not trying to identify who “deserves” funding. Just giving everyone the same income with the same regularity.

Sapolsky arrives at the same conclusion about luck without modeling. If every decision a person makes is the downstream product of genetics, epigenetics, hormones, childhood experiences, culture, parasites, and environmental stressors — none of which anyone chooses — then the concept of “deserving” collapses. He writes:

“There is no justifiable ‘deserve’. The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered. You may think otherwise, because you can't conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren't made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.”

That passage essentially summarizes the book. I have also never read a more concise destruction of the moral framework that sustains opposition to UBI. Every argument against giving people a basic income floor, every “they should just work harder,” every “why should I pay for someone else’s bad choices,” every “some people just don’t want to help themselves;” it all rests on the assumption that there’s a “they” in there who is freely choosing to fail. Sapolsky’s decades of research says there likely just isn’t.

The Biological Argument for UBI

Now let’s bring this all the way back to unconditional basic income.

If our decisions are not truly free but are the downstream products of genetics, epigenetics, hormones, parasites, childhood experiences, cultural conditioning, cognitive depletion, and chronic stress — none of which any individual ever chooses — then the most rational response is not to blame individuals for the outcomes those forces produced. The most rational response is to transform the environment.

This is the argument for UBI that I think may be the most important one I’ve ever tried to make, and it’s the one that arguably runs deepest and is likely the hardest to accept. It’s not the economic argument, though the economics work. It’s not the automation argument, though automation makes it urgent. It’s not even the moral argument, though the morality is clear. It’s the biological argument. The argument that rests on what we actually are, down to our neurons.

If we know that poverty during pregnancy alters fetal brain development through chronic stress and elevated cortisol — and we do — then we should want no one who is pregnant to live in poverty. Not because they “deserve” help. Because the developing brain inside them will be physically changed by the stress, and that child will carry those changes for life. UBI improves prenatal conditions.

If we know that growing up in poverty raises ACE scores, alters gene expression, impairs prefrontal development, and tilts the stress response toward chronic activation — and we do — then we should want no child to grow up in poverty. Not because those children made bad choices. Because they haven’t made any choices. Their neurons are still being wired. UBI improves ACE scores.

If we know that chronic economic insecurity depletes the same cognitive resources needed to make what we’d call “good decisions” in the same way a difficult cognitive task depletes the willpower of someone trying not to eat candy, then we should want no adult to live in chronic financial insecurity. Not because they need to be saved from themselves. Because their decisions are being shaped by a brain under siege. UBI improves cognitive capacity.

UBI is an environmental intervention. It is the deliberate creation of conditions under which human neurobiology is more likely to produce what we’d call “good outcomes.” Not because people are being forced into good decisions. Because the upstream conditions that shape decisions are being improved. This isn’t a eugenic argument. Don’t make that mistake. It’s an epigenetic one. It’s the environment that matters. And when the environment changes, gene expression changes with it.

We Will All Do Better When We All Do Better

The late Senator Paul Wellstone said it simply: we all do better when we all do better. That statement is redundant, but it’s also deeply true.

We are social animals. Our neurobiology was shaped by millennia of group living. We are affected by each other’s stress levels, each other’s behavior, each other’s presence or absence. A society full of chronically stressed people produces more crime, more addiction, more displacement aggression, more illness, less trust, less cooperation, less innovation, and less long-term thinking. Not because people chose to be that way, but because their environments shaped them that way.

When people say “human nature” is a reason not to do UBI — that people are inherently lazy, or greedy, or short-sighted — they have it all backwards. Understanding human nature at the level of neurotransmitters, at the level of glucocorticoids and cortisol and dopamine and testosterone, at the level of gene-environment interaction and epigenetic modification, at the level of the ancient circuits we share with sea slugs, at the level of the conditioned associations we absorb from our cultures, at the level of the parasites we don’t even know are nudging us — understanding all of this makes the case for UBI, not against it. We are not fixed creatures with a fixed nature. We are dynamic biological systems that respond to our environments. Change the environment, change the outputs.

Basic income doesn’t solve everything, and I’ve never claimed it does. But it addresses what I believe are the most fundamental upstream causes of the most downstream problems: the chronic stress and deprivation that shape human neurobiology from the womb onward. It’s a floor beneath everyone’s feet. It’s the foundational recognition that in a world driven by luck, genetics, epigenetics, hormones, conditioning, and all the environmental forces that no individual ever chose, that the least we can do — the absolute bare minimum of a civilized society — is to ensure that no one’s most basic needs go unmet.

The Just World fallacy needs to go. It needs to be retired the same way we retired the idea that seizures are witchcraft. We didn’t stop restraining people who had seizures, we just stopped burning them. We found medication. We treated them with dignity. We moved the line. We need to move the line again.

The Shame That’s Coming

In 1757, a man named Robert-François Damiens stabbed King Louis XV of France. The wound was minor but the punishment was far from it. Over the course of an entire day, in front of tens of thousands of spectators, Damiens had his flesh torn from his body with red-hot pincers. Molten lead and boiling oil were poured into his wounds. His right hand was burned with sulfur, as were his genitals. Then horses were attached to his limbs to pull him apart. The horses couldn’t do it at first. The executioner had never attempted a quartering before, and it turned out to be much harder than expected. After multiple failed attempts, the executioners resorted to hacking through what remained with knives. Eyewitnesses claimed Damiens was still alive when his torso and dismembered limbs were finally tossed into a fire. He had been calling for mercy for hours. Horrific, right?

This was done as a public celebration of justice.

Fast forward to 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. A crowd estimated at 20,000 people gathered to watch the public hanging of Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted by an all-white jury. The town treated it as a family event. People brought their children. Vendors sold food. Newspapers called it a carnival of sadism.

Today, there is no historical marker in Owensboro about America’s final public execution by hanging. The town has since spent decades trying to distance itself from what happened that day. Residents insist it was outsiders who came for the spectacle, certainly not locals. The shame is so deep that the community would rather erase the memory than reckon with it.

I think about these two events described in Determined — separated by fewer than 200 years — and I think about what’s coming for us when it comes to basic income.

We will look back at the era before basic income with shame. We will look back at a society that understood the neuroscience of poverty, that understood how chronic stress rewires the brain, that understood epigenetics and ACE scores and cognitive depletion and the fraud of the Just World fallacy and chose to do nothing. We will look back at a society that had the resources to ensure no one’s basic needs went unmet that decided that some people deserved poverty. And people will see it for what it was. There will be a reckoning. And when that reckoning comes, everyone will claim they were always for UBI. They’ll say it was other people who opposed it. They’ll say they always knew poverty was destructive and unnecessary. Just like Owensboro says it wasn’t the residents of Owensboro who came to watch.

But we’ll know. The science was there. The evidence was there. The money was there. What wasn’t there was the will to let go of a comforting lie; the lie that people get what they deserve.

It’s time to move the line on poverty and chronic stress. Not because the poor have earned our compassion through sufficient suffering. Not because they’ve proven they deserve help by making the right choices. Because the entire framework of “deserving” is built on an illusion — the illusion that somewhere in human civilization’s chain of cause and effect, there’s a turtle floating in the air.

If Sapolsky is right, there isn’t. It’s turtles all the way down.

The only question is what kind of world we humans build on top of them.

Addendum

For those readers who made it all the way to the end, I want to emphasize that UBI is a good idea for many reasons, of which the argument made here is only one of them. Some readers have taken this as an argument for UBI only if free will doesn't exist. The argument doesn't depend on settling that debate. UBI matters either way.

You do not need to believe that free will does not exist in order to accept this argument. Even if you strongly believe in free will, you must acknowledge that our choices are influenced by a multitude of factors outside our control, most especially chronic stress.

I am not making the case that we are all just simple automatons, nor am I making a philosophical case. I want people to know that poverty has all kinds of downstream cause and effect consequences, as does the chronic stress of financial insecurity that people experience who aren’t in poverty but constantly fear it.

If without UBI, someone has an 80% chance of making a choice you consider to be bad, and with UBI the odds of that drops to 20%, then we should do UBI, especially if that multiplies massively across all of society and all of our countless decisions.

If free will doesn’t exist, UBI is extremely important to improve environments so that better choices are made.

If free will does exist, and someone faced with 80% odds or 20% odds can freely make either choice, UBI is still important in order to encourage the better choice.

In either case, we should do UBI.

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Do you support UBI as a tech dividend? If so, have you signed the AI Pledge for Humanity yet?

Imagine two plots of land in the heart of a big city, side by side, the exact same size. On one stands a gleaming fifty-story tower full of offices and apartments and shops. On the other sits a zero-story parking lot.

Now ask yourself: which owner pays more in taxes?

The tower owner does. We tax the building, so the more you build, the more you owe. The parking lot owner, who built almost nothing, pays almost nothing, even though the dirt beneath that asphalt is worth a fortune precisely because it sits in the middle of a thriving city that everyone else built up around it. So the parking lot just sits there. Year after year. The owner pays their small tax, and watches the land’s value climb—value they did nothing to create, mind you—waiting to sell for a huge windfall.

I think that’s pretty perverse, and a land value tax (LVT) is built to fix it.

A land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of land: the worth of a location itself, not the buildings or improvements sitting on it. That value isn’t created by whoever holds the deed. It’s created by the whole community around it. A land value tax, paired with a universal dividend, can give that value back to everyone in equal shares. It may be the closest thing we have to a perfect tax. It can’t be hidden or dodged. It makes housing cheaper instead of more expensive. And I believe it’s the best way to capture and share the enormous wealth that technology is concentrating into very few hands.

It’s also the final layer of a broader multi-layered universal basic income plan I’ve been building. But it stands on its own, so let me start from the ground up.

What a land value tax actually is

First, a land value tax is not a property tax. It’s really important to understand the difference between the two.

A property tax taxes everything. It taxes the land and whatever is built on top of it. Build a house, add a bedroom, fix the roof, put up an apartment building instead of a house, and your tax bill goes up and up. You get punished for improving things.

A land value tax taxes only the unimproved value of the land itself. Whatever you do on top of it is yours, tax-free. Build a skyscraper or build nothing, the land bill is the same.

Why do it that way? Because, you do not create the value of the land you own. Nobody does individually. The value of land comes from everything around it: the roads, the transit, the schools, the hospital, the grocery store, the coffee shops, the neighbors, the jobs, the whole humming civilization that grew up around that spot. Land appreciates because of the work society does around it. Society makes the land valuable. So when we collect that value and share it, we’re not taking anything any one individual earned. We’re returning something we all made together.

This is one of the oldest ideas in economics, and it was once hugely popular.

The book that diagnosed the problem

In 1879, an American named Henry George published a book called Progress and Poverty, and it became one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century. Working people devoured it, all around the world. The question George asked was the one everyone was and still is: why, in an age of breathtaking technological and industrial progress, did poverty keep getting worse?

His answer was basically, “It’s the land, stupid.” As a society grows richer, the people who own the land capture the gains. Everyone else pays them rent for the privilege of existing near all that progress. George wrote that the great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land.

Every gain a society makes—be it a new technology, a growing population, or a better-run city—makes the land more useful, and so makes it more valuable. But that gain doesn’t lift wages. It gets soaked up into the price of the ground and skimmed off as rent. Work harder, invent more, accomplish more, and landlords simply raise the rent. That is why progress and poverty advance together.

Look around. This process is still happening. It’s a fundamental economic problem.

We generate staggering wealth in places like the SF Bay Area and New York City. And what happens? It becomes more and more expensive to live there. The engineers and nurses and teachers who make those cities run get priced out, while the people who happened to own the dirt get richer for doing nothing. The wealth we create together flows to whoever holds the deed. That’s how the system is designed to work. It’s a system designed by landowners. And George diagnosed it and prescribed the solution about 150 years ago.

The wealth tax that can’t run away

Here’s another thing land does: it sits there out in the open. You cannot hide it.

We have spent decades watching the very wealthy stash money in shell companies and offshore accounts. You can’t do that with land. Land cannot be wired to the Cayman Islands. A land value tax is therefore an unavoidable wealth tax. It’s one of the only ones we’ve got that the rich can’t evade.

When you have more money than you could ever spend, your money goes hunting for assets to buy, and land is the most-loved asset. Extreme wealth inequality is already driving up the cost of housing for this reason. As AI drives a tsunami of even more wealth toward a handful of people, that wealth will pour into real estate too, concentrating land into fewer and fewer hands and further pricing everyone else out.

History has a lesson for us. The cotton gin did exactly what AI will likely now do. It made human labor way more productive but the gains did not flow to the people whose labor it saved. The gains flowed into land. The price of cotton-growing land soared. Those who owned it grew richer, and slavery, which some had expected to be hurt by the new technology, instead worsened. A labor-saving machine made the owners of land more powerful, not the workers. AI is the cotton gin of our century, and without a land value tax, the gains will pool in the same place they always have.

AI is already landing — literally

We don’t even have to wait to watch it happen. It’s happening. Every AI model runs on data centers, and data centers have become the most expensive land use in America. In Loudoun County, Virginia, one plot recently sold for $6 million an acre.

And Loudoun shows what happens when a community actually taxes that. Data centers now generate about $1.3 billion a year, roughly 45% of the county’s tax revenue. It’s so much that the county has cut its residential property tax rate every year for a decade, down 30%, even as its budget grew. The tech industry’s hunger for land actually lowered bills for homeowners. That’s a land dividend in embryonic form: the wealth of the AI age flowing back to the residents whose community hosts it.

Most places are doing the opposite. At least 37 states now subsidize data centers with tax exemptions; Virginia’s alone was projected to cost $1.5 million a year and now costs $1.6 billion. We are paying trillion-dollar companies to occupy our land. As Greg Miller of the Center for Land Economics argues, communities shouldn’t reject data centers or subsidize them; they should negotiate harder. Wherever AI touches down, the land beneath it soars in value, and the tax converts that surge into a dividend for everyone who lives there. No lobbying, no shell companies, no races to the bottom. The more valuable AI makes the land, the bigger everyone’s check can be.

So a land value tax is, in a very real sense, a way to tax the automation of work indirectly. We don’t have to chase every token or tax every robot to capture the gains from automation. We can let the money do what money does—flow into land—and tax it there. Then we spread it back out, universally, so that everyone benefits.

Why homes would get cheaper and why that needs a dividend

Now for the part that makes some people nervous and it’s part of the reason we don’t already tax land value. A land value tax would reduce the sale price of homes. How? A recurring tax on land gets “capitalized” into a lower purchase price. If owning land carries a higher annual bill, buyers won’t pay as much up front for it. The future tax shrinks what the land is worth as an investment.

Cheaper land means cheaper homes. For renters and first-time home buyers, that’s fantastic. But for everyone who already owns a home, their single biggest asset would be worth a bit less. That’s a real issue. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.

I think about this the way I think about universal healthcare. I believe moving to a single-payer system would be an enormous good. It would cover everyone and cost less. It would also put a lot of people who work in private health-insurance administration out of a job. That doesn’t make universal healthcare a bad idea. It makes it an idea that has to come with a way to make the transition less painful.

Same here. Lowering the wealth locked up in homes is good for affordability and bad for anyone counting on their house as their retirement security. That is exactly why LVT needs a dividend, and exactly why it should be on top of other dividends. A land value dividend compensates for reduced housing wealth. And more deeply, it changes what security even means. Instead of “buy land when young and pray it appreciates,” your security comes from a lifelong check that arrives every month no matter what. It’s also a better incentive structure for investing. As Stephen Hoskins argues, taxing land “removes land’s role as the central pathway to retirement-saving” and pushes people to invest in productive businesses instead of speculating on dirt. That’s healthier for everyone, but only if there’s a floor underneath people while the old rules change. The dividend is that floor.

And to be clear, none of this means anyone gets forced out of their home. As Henry George himself insisted, we don’t need to confiscate land—just the rent: “We may safely leave them the shell,” he wrote, “if we take the kernel.” The worry that always comes up here is the retiree who owns a now-valuable home but lives on a fixed income. The fix is simple: let owner-occupiers defer the tax until they sell the home or pass it on. The bill comes due only when the land changes hands. Nobody need be evicted by a land value tax.

The incentive that can’t backfire

Whatever you tax, you tend to get less of. Tax cigarettes, people smoke less. Tax fuel, people drive less. Tax work, people work less. Tax consumption, people consume less. Tax buildings, people build fewer buildings—which is the disaster of the property tax.

Land is the magnificent exception. You cannot get less land by taxing it. The supply is fixed. Tax it at any rate you like and there is exactly as much land tomorrow as there was today.

So what does the tax do? It discourages land speculation. Right now it’s comfortable to hold a vacant lot or an empty house and wait for the neighborhood to do the work of making it valuable. A land value tax makes that waiting expensive. Suddenly the parking lot owner is paying the same as the skyscraper owner next door, and the only way to pay that bill is to put the land to use. Convert the parking lot to a 20-story parking structure. Or build a big apartment building. Or build a skyscraper. Or sell to someone who will.

The result is a tax that increases the supply of housing. More housing means more affordable housing. LVT is a tax that encourages making more of the thing we desperately need more of. That’s why Milton Friedman called the tax on the unimproved value of land “the least bad tax,” reaching all the way back to invoke “the Henry George argument of many, many years ago.”

Public investments, private windfalls

There’s one more source of land value we haven’t covered yet, and it’s the one we all pay for most directly: public investment. Announce a new light rail line through a neighborhood and the land along it instantly shoots up in value before a single rider ever boards a train. The same goes for every new school, park, sewer line, and levee. Public money goes in, and the value of the surrounding land goes up. The economist Joseph Stiglitz proved this formally in 1977 in what’s now called the Henry George Theorem. Spending on public goods tends to reappear as higher land values, by at least as much as the public spent.

New York just wrote this insight into law. Tucked inside the state’s latest budget is a renewed provision (Section 119-r) authorizing New York City to capture the land value created by new transit lines, through a special assessment or an outright land value tax, to help pay for the Interborough Express between Brooklyn and Queens. By one Niskanen Center estimate, that single line could generate $1.5 to $3.5 billion in capturable land value. Build the train, tax the windfall it creates, and the train helps pay for itself.

Now contrast that with how it usually goes. The entire tax base pays for the rail but the gains fall like a lottery prize on whoever happened to already own land nearby. But they didn’t build the rail line. The public did. A land value tax says: if public investment created the value, the public should share the value.

Why a dividend, and not just a tax cut

Some people, hearing all this, will say: fine, tax land, but use it to cut other taxes. Lower the property tax or income tax. Lower the sales tax. Just cut taxes.

This is the same problem I wrote about in my proposal to replace the standard deduction with a standard credit. Cutting taxes helps the rich more, because they pay the most tax to begin with. A dividend helps everyone equally, because it’s the same dollar amount to every single person.

I believe a universal dividend is the most fair way to handle land value, for the reason I’ve come back to again and again: everyone in the community creates the value of the land in that community, even those who don’t pay any property tax. The barista, the bus driver, the nurse, the kid in school; they are all part of why that land is worth what it’s worth. So when we collect the value of the land, everyone should get an equal share back. Not a tax cut weighted toward whoever currently owns the most. A dividend, weighted toward everyone equally.

Watch what that does to different people:

A renter pays nothing into a land value tax. Renters don’t own land. So a renter receives the dividend and pays zero for it. It’s pure gain for them.

A family who owns their own home and lives in it sees their land tax go up, and their combined dividends cancel it out. It’s roughly a wash. They’re fine.

Meanwhile, someone who owns lots of homes pays a higher tax on every one of those plots and receives exactly one dividend. That’s the whole design. It makes hoarding homes more expensive and makes owning your own home far easier. LVT-UBI gently pries land out of the hands of the few and puts it within reach of the many.

I guarantee you that private equity funds that own tens of thousands of homes hate this idea. Oh well, I guess they’ll have to sell some homes to actual people. C’est la vie.

But won’t rent just go up?

The most common fear people have about UBI is that landlords will just raise rents to capture it. It’s a fair fear. It’s also the fear a land value dividend is best built to answer, because every pressure it creates on rent points downward.

Start with supply. As we already covered, a land value tax makes it expensive to sit on vacant lots and empty homes, and it makes building more the best way to cover the bill. More housing means more choices, and more choices means landlords competing for tenants instead of tenants competing for housing.

Then add homeownership. A land value tax lowers the purchase price of homes, and a dividend helps people save up for one, while the tax makes hoarding homes a losing game. Every renter who becomes a homeowner is a customer landlords lose. Fewer renters chasing more homes pushes rents down further.

Then add mobility, which I think is the most underrated effect of all. Right now, most people have to live where the jobs are, which means landlords in expensive metro areas face no real competition from landlords elsewhere. But a UBI is income that follows you wherever you go. Suddenly the person paying too much in a costly city can move somewhere cheaper without giving up their income floor. We already ran a version of this experiment. When the pandemic made remote work normal, people spread out, and rents fell in the densest, most expensive areas while rising in cheaper surrounding ones. UBI would extend that freedom beyond remote workers to everyone, forcing landlords in cities to compete with landlords in cheaper areas.

And if rents do still rise somewhere? Then land values rise there too, the tax collects more, and everyone’s dividend grows. Instead of a rent increase enriching only the landlord, it funds a bigger check for everyone. A land value dividend is a version of UBI where the thing people fear about it automatically pays for more of it.

What the numbers look like

The UBI Center looked at a UK land value dividend. They modeled a 1% tax on land value which raised roughly £55 billion a year in 2021. As an equal dividend to every person, child and adult alike, that’s about $100/mo in 2026 USD. That may sound small but that’s a poverty reduction of 20%. The bottom tenth of the UK would see its income rise by 16%. The top tenth would see its income fall about 2%. Overall, 70% of people would come out ahead.

Now run the same logic for the United States.

Estimating that the privately held land here is at least $36 trillion, a 1% land value tax on that base would raise roughly $360 billion a year. Spread it equally across all ~320 million American citizens and green card holders, adults and children alike, and that’s about $90 a month.

I'd then suggest phasing it up to 5% over five to ten years. Why 5%? Because that's roughly the rate that collects 100% of rent. Land typically earns its owner about 5% of its price in rent each year, so a tax of 5% of today's land value amounts to collecting nearly all of the annual rent of land which is exactly what Henry George proposed we do. And yes, taxing away the rent means land prices themselves would fall. That's the point. The revenue comes from the rent that land generates every year, not from its sticker price. At 5%, the same math yields roughly $1.8 trillion a year—about $470 a month per person—and it keeps growing as land keeps becoming more valuable to use, which it always does. Stack that onto other UBI layers and we're talking about real money, paid to everyone, for their entire lives, sufficient to end absolute poverty.

Why this layer is state-by-state, not national

There’s a problem though. At the federal level, a land value tax runs straight into the Constitution. The Constitution treats a tax on land as a “direct tax,” and it requires direct taxes to be apportioned among the states by population, with each state owing a share that matches its head count. That’s unworkable for a land tax, because land value isn’t distributed by population. The Sixteenth Amendment carved out income taxes from this apportionment rule in 1913, but it never touched taxes on land. So a genuine nationwide land value tax would likely require a constitutional amendment.

That’s a high bar. But here’s the good news: any state can tax land value on its own. A state might need to amend its own constitution to do it, but amending one state’s constitution is a far lighter lift than amending the entire nation’s.

So this is the UBI layer I imagine arriving state by state, county by county, city by city, or some mix of all three. Land value dividends would sit on top of the national UBI layers, the way Alaskans already receive their universal dividend on top of whatever the federal government happens to provide.

This also creates a beautiful competition. A state that adopts a land value dividend makes its housing more affordable and puts money in every resident’s pocket, which attracts people to move there. States that refuse will watch their residents leave. For once, the race between states would be a race to affordable housing and economic security.

Pennsylvania already ran the experiment

Pennsylvania has already shown the good sense of taxing land value. Until this year, it was the only state with widespread municipal use of split-rate property taxes where land is taxed at a higher rate than the buildings on it. Nearly twenty municipalities have done it. Harrisburg adopted a two-rate tax in 1975 to fight Rust Belt blight. Over the next two decades, its vacant structures fell from more than 4,000 to around 500, and its number of businesses more than quadrupled. A study of fifteen Pennsylvania municipalities found that shifting the tax toward land grew construction, and a Lincoln Institute analysis found split-rate towns grew their housing stock roughly five percentage points faster than comparable single-rate towns.

Pennsylvania isn’t even America’s first run at this. In 1912, Houston taxed land at 75% of its value while taxing buildings at only 25%. The results: rents fell 20%, construction jumped 66% in six months, vacant lots filled in, and bank deposits surged. The tax commissioner behind it, J. J. Pastoriza, proved so popular that he won re-election and then the mayor’s office. And the experiment didn’t end because it failed. It ended because the Texas Supreme Court struck it down, to the delight of land speculators who were upset precisely because it worked. Sound familiar?

New York City tells the same story from another angle. In the 1920s, the city exempted new buildings from property taxation by taxing only the land underneath and set off the biggest housing construction boom in its history; one so big it ended the city’s housing shortage in just three years. A city facing a critical shortage, rent-gouging landlords, and inflated land prices built its way out, not with vast public spending, but by changing what it taxed. Taxing buildings less got more buildings. A century later, NYC is circling back to the same insight with its new transit provision.

This idea is finally spreading again. By the Center for Land Economics’ count, LVT went from no state legislation three years ago to two states expanding LVT authority in 2026, seven more with active bills, and two more with emerging interest. Something is shifting. The momentum is unmistakable.

South Korea might beat us all to it

And it isn’t only an American story. South Korea may become the first country on Earth to fund a basic income with a nationwide land value tax. Its president even campaigned on it.

Lee Jae-myung, now South Korea’s president, has spent more than a decade turning basic income from idea into policy. As governor of the country’s largest province he ran a real basic income program for young adults. And in his 2022 presidential run he proposed a national UBI funded primarily by a land value tax and a carbon tax; the argument being that land value belongs to the public and that taxing it can both fund a dividend and curb the real estate speculation eating the country alive. He lost that race by less than one percentage point, in part because opponents stoked fear about real estate taxes. He then won the presidency in 2025 and continues to expand the number of people receiving basic income, starting in rural areas.

And no country on Earth is better equipped to do it. The most common practical objection to a land value tax is that you can't credibly value land separately from the buildings on it. South Korea already does. Every parcel in the entire country, separately from buildings, every single year, with the whole national operation completed in five months and the results published publicly down to the individual lot. The valuation machinery the critics say is impossible is already running there. All that's left is to attach the tax and dividend there too. LVT-UBI is so close there.

The full UBI stack

Now look at all my proposed UBI layers:

• Layer 1: replace the standard deduction with a refundable standard tax credit.

• Layer 2: a stock dilution dividend — a wealth tax the rich can’t dodge.

• Layer 3: a consumption dividend — a VAT or a tiny tax on transactions.

• Layer 4: a carbon dividend — a Pigovian tax on pollution.

• Layer 5: a land value tax and dividend — implemented state by state.

The first layer is a pretty boring but effective tax reform, but the other layers are all meant to distribute dividends based on shared ownership and collective value creation.

This final layer is the oldest idea in the whole UBI story. Thomas Paine argued in 1797 that the earth is the common inheritance of all, and that landowners owe the rest of us a ground-rent for it. Henry George built a movement on it. Alaska has been paying its residents a dividend on shared natural resource wealth since 1982, and no Alaskan calls it welfare. They call it their rightful share. A land value dividend is simply that same logic, applied to the most valuable resource we hold in common and the one nobody can take offshore. Plus it will solve the landlord problem and make both renting and owning housing more affordable.

The skyscraper and the parking lot will always sit on equally valuable ground. The only question is whether the value of that ground keeps flowing to whoever got there first and made the rules, or whether, at last, it flows to everyone who creates its value.

I think it’s past time we collect the rent we’re owed and pay it to ourselves.

If reading this was worth your time, it’s worth sharing with others. Share it, subscribe for free, and if you can, make a monthly pledge or buy a paid subscription to keep this work going.

Thank you to my UBI Producer level patrons and paid Substack subscribers: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Oliver Bestwalter, Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Frederick Weber, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Avary, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Paradigm shift, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Webmemo, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Steve Roth, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Karla Hagemeister, Mark Pierce, Fred Weber, Linda Hearne, David Allen, Janos Abel, Wendy Voahangy Ravano, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons for their support.

Do you support UBI as a tech dividend? If so, have you signed the AI Pledge for Humanity yet?

A 10% value-added tax (VAT) in the United States could raise about $1.76 trillion a year — enough to fund a universal basic income of more than $450 per month for every American citizen and green card holder, adult and child alike, with no deficit spending. So could a tiny 0.1% tax on every transaction that moves through our banking system. In this article I’m going to walk through both options, because I believe a consumption tax is another natural layer of UBI funding. More than 170 countries have a value-added tax, including every single member of the OECD except one. Guess which one. The average standard rate across the OECD is about 19%. Hungary’s is 27%. The UK’s is 20%. Even famously tax-averse Australia has one at 10%. The question isn’t whether a VAT can work. The question is why the wealthiest country on Earth refuses to use the third-largest revenue source in the developed world.

I think part of the answer is that Americans believe consumption taxes hurt the poor. And they’re right — if the revenue disappears into the general fund. But pair a consumption tax with a universal basic income, and something remarkable happens. A regressive tax becomes progressive in outcome.

This article is a sequel of sorts. I’ve already written about replacing the standard deduction with a $375 monthly Standard Tax Credit, and a 1.5% stock dilution tax that would fund a $365 monthly universal dividend. The first layer reforms how we tax income. The second layer taxes wealth in a way no billionaire can escape. This third layer taxes consumption, and I’ll show you two different ways to go about it.

Option one: the 10% VAT

Andrew Yang made the VAT famous in American politics by proposing a 10% rate to help fund his Freedom Dividend. I informally advised him on that, and I still believe it makes good sense. So let’s run the numbers with a maximally broad base, the way New Zealand does it. Tax nearly everything, exempt as little as possible, and handle fairness on the spending side instead of carving holes in the tax side.

Americans now spend just about $22 trillion a year on personal consumption. Even the broadest VAT base ever modeled for the US captures about 80% of that consumption. The roughly 20% it leaves out isn't groceries or clothing; it's the handful of things that are genuinely hard to tax or that nearly every country exempts: government-financed health care like Medicare and Medicaid, education, the services of churches and charities, and the estimated value of banking services that customers pay for indirectly through lower interest on deposits or higher interest on loans instead of through direct fees. Housing gets handled the way most VATs handle it. Rather than taxing the rent people pay month to month, the base taxes the purchase of new homes, treating a house like the durable good it is. That leaves a base of roughly $17.6 trillion. A 10% rate on it raises $1.76 trillion a year.

Now for the dividend. Like every layer in my proposed UBI stack, this one goes to citizens and green card holders. That’s everyone with permanent legal status, adult and child alike, equally. The Census estimates about 342.6 million US residents as of June 2026, and while the Bureau doesn’t tabulate legal status, subtracting temporary and unauthorized residents leaves roughly 320 million citizens and lawful permanent residents. Divide $1.76 trillion by 320 million and you get $5,500 a year or about $458 per month (or $517/mo per adult and $259/mo per child). Call it a deficit-neutral consumption dividend.

I want to be clear about the range here. Estimates with narrower bases come in lower. Yale’s Budget Lab modeled about $1 trillion from a 10% VAT in 2025, and economist William Gale’s plan for Brookings raised $842 billion in 2020 on a base covering only 64% of consumption. The lesson here is that every exemption shrinks the dividend. Exempt food, exempt clothing, exempt this and that for seemingly compassionate reasons, and you end up mailing smaller checks to the very people the exemptions were supposed to protect. The optimal design in my opinion is the broad one.

Doesn’t a consumption tax hurt the poor?

Yes. Alone, it absolutely does. A VAT is regressive by nature because the less money you have, the larger the share of it you must spend on basics. So let’s take one of the hardest cases imaginable.

Picture someone who is homeless and can spend only $1,500 a year on food. A 10% VAT turns that cost into $1,650. We just made one of the poorest people in America pay another $150 a year to eat. That’s indefensible if that’s where the story ends.

But it’s not where the story ends. That same person would also receive $458 a month in UBI. Subtract the $150 they paid in VAT and they come out $5,350 ahead — money for food, for shoes, for a phone to apply for jobs with, or their share of rent. The tax took $150 with one hand and the dividend gave back $5,500 with the other. Run that arithmetic up the income ladder and you find the crossover point: anyone spending less than $55,000 a year on taxed consumption comes out net positive. Anyone spending more becomes a net payer. The combination functions as a negative consumption tax — an alternative to Milton Friedman's negative income tax, working through consumption instead of income.

That’s the beauty of it. A consumption tax is regressive in nature but the pairing with UBI is progressive in outcome, and the more someone consumes, the more they fund everyone else’s basic income. The person buying a third yacht pays for a lot of people’s groceries.

And here’s the part that should make this especially interesting: conservatives already agree. The Republican FairTax plan — a national sales tax beloved by the Freedom Caucus — includes a monthly cash payment of around $300 to every household called the “Family Consumption Allowance,” precisely because its authors understood that taxing consumption without rebating it would tax people into poverty. I’ve written before about how the FairTax “prebate” is a UBI. Anyone who supports the FairTax has already conceded the principle: a consumption tax requires a UBI in order to be fair. We’re not debating whether anymore. We’re debating how.

Even the economists who conservatives most respect lean this way. Greg Mankiw, who chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, uses a story of two hypothetical CEOs, Sam Spendthrift and Frank Frugal. Sam blows his fortune on lavish parties, private jets, and island vacations. Frank invests his, financing the capital and technology that grows the economy. An income tax treats them identically. Mankiw’s point is that the tax code should distinguish between them. A consumption tax does. It taxes the spending, not the producing. Pair it with UBI and you get the version that helps the poor and working class.

But won’t prices just rise to eat it?

This is the other great fear about UBI, right alongside the worry about work: give everyone money and businesses will simply raise prices to capture it, leaving people no better off. It’s a fair worry but a multivariate one. And a VAT-funded UBI answers it in a way no other funding source can, because the tax and the dividend are both coupled to prices.

The dividend is funded by a percentage of what people spend, so when prices rise, the tax collected on them rises too and so the dividend rises right along with it. If a gallon of milk goes from $4 to $5, the dime the government collects flows into the same faucet that pays everyone’s monthly check. This UBI is thus self-indexing. We already have a cruder version of this in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment, the COLA. But the COLA is calculated once a year off a backward-looking index, always chasing last year’s inflation. A VAT-UBI indexes continuously — no annual vote, no formula to argue over, no lag. It’s a COLA without the committee.

The tax that reaches everyone

Here’s something an income tax can never do that a consumption tax can: reach the money that was never income in the first place. The wealthiest Americans have largely opted out of the income tax, and they’ve done it legally. The playbook is well known. Buy assets, borrow against them, and let the estate settle the rest. A billionaire can live lavishly for decades on loans secured by stock they never sell, and because a loan isn’t income, the income tax never touches it. My other UBI layer proposals go after this from two directions already: the Standard Tax Credit proposal taxes capital gains as ordinary income and adds a wealth tax that reaches fortunes whether or not they’re ever sold, and the stock dilution tax skims a share of corporate equity straight off the top. A consumption tax adds a third vector. The moment that borrowed money is spent on the yacht, the jet, or the third home, it gets taxed, because spending is spending no matter where the money came from. Income when it’s earned, wealth while it’s held, consumption when it’s spent: three different angles on the same fortune, and borrowing only slips past the first. A consumption tax doesn’t replace taxing wealth. It catches what the others miss, because eventually, everyone spends.

And it catches more than just the rich. It reaches undocumented immigrants and tourists — everyone physically present, buying things, contributing to the system. I don’t mean that as anti-immigrant or anti-tourist. I mean it as a feature with a good incentive structure. Under a VAT-UBI, every new arrival makes the dividend a little larger for everyone who receives it. The more tourists, the higher your UBI. The more immigrants, the higher your UBI. People who today are told to resent newcomers as a drain would have a direct, personal stake in welcoming them.

For undocumented immigrants specifically, the dividend creates something we don’t currently offer: a built-in reason to follow the rules. Pay the consumption tax with no green card and you get nothing back. Get legal status and the same tax now comes paired with a monthly dividend. That’s a powerful, non-punitive nudge toward legal immigration — but only if the system actually works. Right now it doesn’t. We’ve built an immigration process that is, for most people, an endless labyrinth of waiting lists, backlogs, and immigration courts without even close to enough resources to handle the load. You can’t credibly tell people to “just immigrate legally” when the legal door is, in practice, bolted shut. So this argument comes with a caveat: it works only if we fix the broken system first and make legal immigration a real choice instead of a decades-long maze. Build that functioning doorway, and the dividend gives people every reason to walk through it instead of around it.

The SNAP question: stack it or swap it?

A $458 monthly dividend is high enough to create a choice the other layers can’t, and I want to lay out both sides of this, because it’s genuinely an option, not a requirement.

Option A: add the layer on top of SNAP. Everyone keeps their food assistance and gets the dividend too. Simple. Maximally generous for SNAP recipients. But not everyone in need of food assistance is a SNAP recipient. Only about three out of five people below 130% of the poverty line get SNAP benefits.

Option B: replace SNAP with the dividend, and make it larger. SNAP cost about $100 billion in fiscal year 2024. Fold that into the dividend pool and the monthly amount rises from $458 to roughly $485 per person (or $546/mo per adult and $273/mo per child). And here’s the key fact making replacement possible: the maximum SNAP benefit is $298 a month for an individual and $994 for a family of four, which works out to about $249 per person. Both dividend variants — $485 for all or $546 per adult and $273 per child — exceed the maximum SNAP benefit for every household size. No one would receive less than they do today, and most would receive far more, because the average SNAP benefit is only about $187 per person. And those two out of five people below 130% of the FPL that SNAP doesn’t reach would be reached by the UBI.

I prefer replacement, and I want to explain why, beyond reaching all five of five.

Cash is better than vouchers. SNAP can buy groceries and nothing else. It can’t buy diapers. It can’t buy tampons. It can’t buy soap, toilet paper, a winter coat or blanket, or the gas to drive to the only grocery store within twenty miles. Cash can buy any food anywhere food is sold, and everything else a human being needs to live. Vouchers say “we don’t trust you.” Cash says “you know your life better than we do.” That trust isn’t a side benefit. After a decade of watching cash transfer evidence accumulate from around the world, I’d argue that trust is the key. Dignity does things for people that paternalism and surveillance never will.

And then there’s the marginal tax rate. SNAP phases out as you earn income. It drops by 30 cents for every additional dollar earned. That’s a 30% marginal tax rate stacked on top of payroll taxes, income taxes, and the phaseouts of every other means-tested program. UBI never phases out. Its marginal tax rate is 0%. Replacing SNAP with UBI therefore cuts the marginal tax rate of every SNAP household by 30 percentage points. For someone deciding whether to take a job, pick up a shift, or accept a raise, that can be the entire difference between work that makes sense and work that punishes you for working. We have spent decades lecturing poor people about work incentives while burying them under tax rates that would make a hedge fund manager riot. Replacement with UBI fixes that.

Option two: the tax you’d barely notice

Now for the more exotic route, and one of my favorites to consider. What if instead of taxing consumption at 10%, we taxed every transaction at a rate so small you’d struggle to feel it?

This is the Automated Payment Transaction tax, proposed by economist Edgar Feige — a student of Milton Friedman — who suggested replacing the entire US tax system with one flat micro-tax on every payment that clears the banking system. Every purchase, every stock trade, every wire transfer, every bond sale. No deductions, no exemptions, no tax returns. The tax is collected automatically, electronically, by software, at the moment of settlement.

Feige wanted the APT to replace everything. I’m proposing something far smaller: an APT sized to fund just this one UBI layer. So what percentage rate raises the same $1.76 trillion as the 10% VAT?

The Federal Reserve’s settlement system Fedwire alone processes over $1 quadrillion in transfers per year. That’s quadrillion, with a Q. Add CHIPS, the private bank-to-bank clearing system, the ACH network, and every card swipe in America, and the total volume of US payments comfortably exceeds $1.5 quadrillion annually — more than eighty times larger than the consumption base the VAT taxes. Even if we conservatively assume the tax causes transaction volume to fall by half, as Feige himself did, we’re left with a base of about $750 trillion.

To raise $1.76 trillion from that base requires a rate of about 0.12% on each side of every transaction — a bit more than a dime from the buyer and the same from the seller on every $100 that changes hands. Buy a $5 coffee and you pay about half a cent. Buy a $30,000 car and you pay $36. Execute a $50 million block trade of derivatives and you pay $60,000 — which is exactly the point, because the overwhelming majority of transaction volume isn’t coffee. It’s finance. The wealthy conduct a wildly disproportionate share of all transactions, which is why Feige noted the APT base is more skewed toward the rich than income itself. A flat rate on a base like that is progressive before the UBI even arrives.

However, if electronic payments carry a tax, some people will try to escape it by living in cash or cryptocurrency, so Feige’s design applies a higher rate on cash withdrawals and deposits. And under an APT, crypto's on-ramps and off-ramps through the banking system are themselves taxed transactions, so the toll gets paid either way, and those too could be paid at a higher rate. The tax you’d otherwise have dodged gets collected at the door as your money exits and re-enters the banking system.

There’s also a second way to do this. Instead of taxing both sides of every transaction, tax only one: the deposit side. This is the Automated Deposit Tax (or “Tiny Tax”) developed by William Hermann, who spent a decade promoting Feige’s APT tax before concluding that taxing all transactions was more complex than necessary. His version taxes money only when it lands in an account. Using Bank for International Settlements data, and after aggressively cutting the base in half twice — once to exclude untaxed trading within accounts, once more for behavioral avoidance — Hermann still arrives at a deposit base of about $458 trillion. Funding our UBI layer from that base would take a rate of roughly 0.4% — about 40 cents per $100 deposited.

So which design is better? I think reasonable people can prefer either. The case for taxing both sides is Feige’s: splitting the tax keeps each party’s rate microscopic, which minimizes anyone’s incentive to restructure their behavior around it. And it mirrors the reality that every transaction has two halves, a buyer and a seller, each receiving something of value. The case for taxing only deposits is simplicity: one collection point, one taxed party, one line item, even less to administer. And notice what the deposit-only design does to the cash problem. It mostly solves itself. Paying with cash gains the payer nothing, because the tax never fell on payments in the first place. Feige’s version needs the higher cash rate as a patch. Hermann’s version doesn’t need the patch at all.

Either way, here’s what I most want people to understand: this is not really a new idea. It’s a system already operating at a smaller scale. Every time you swipe a card, the card networks and banks skim a swipe fee of roughly 2% to 3% — automatically, invisibly, by software, with no forms and no filings. Merchants have lived with it for decades. The entire payments system is already a transaction-tax collection apparatus. It just collects for shareholders instead of for the public. Banks could implement an APT or ADT the same way they implement everything else: a few lines of code at settlement, the tax swept into a Treasury account before anyone could even think about evading it. A fee of 0.12% to 0.4% is a small fraction of what every merchant in America already hands to the card networks without a second thought, except this fee would come back to everyone, every month.

The tax base of the AI century

There’s one more reason I believe a consumption tax layer belongs in UBI’s design stack, and it’s the reason I keep coming back to in much of what I write recently: artificial intelligence.

Our entire tax system leans on labor. Payroll taxes and income taxes supply the bulk of federal revenue. So what happens as AI and robots perform a growing share of the work? When a machine takes a job, the paycheck disappears, and so does every tax that paycheck carried. A tax system built on labor is a tax system built on a melting glacier. The answer is to shift taxation toward the things automation can’t shrink and instead will grow: wealth and transactions. The stock dilution tax handles the wealth side. A consumption tax handles the transaction side.

AI and robots don’t earn wages, but they are bought, and they do transact. A VAT captures the value the machines add the moment their output is sold. And an APT goes further still, capturing the torrent of machine-to-machine payments that the agentic AI economy is already beginning to generate — software autonomously buying compute, data, and services from other software, billions of times a day, at speeds no payroll tax will ever touch. Human labor may decline as a share of the economy. Transactions won’t. They will grow. We should tax the thing that grows.

Multiple layers. One floor. No poverty.

So let’s stack the layers to measure the full stack. The Standard Tax Credit: $375 a month. The Great American Dividend from the stock dilution tax: $365 a month. The consumption tax dividend, with SNAP folded in: $485 a month.

That’s $1,225 per month — $14,700 a year — for every American citizen and green card holder, adult and child alike, funded entirely by reforming income taxes, taxing wealth through dilution, and taxing consumption. A single parent with two kids would have a floor of $44,100 a year before earning a single dollar of wages. A family of four: almost $60,000.

And notice something: the VAT and the APT aren’t mutually exclusive. Do both and the consumption layer roughly doubles, lifting the total to around $1,685 per month per person, or more than $20,000 a year. The federal poverty line for a single adult is about $15,650. So that’s a UBI that ends poverty in America — permanently.

None of this requires inventing anything. The VAT runs in 170+ countries. The transaction tax already runs invisibly inside every payment network as processing fees. The dividend already runs in Alaska. The prebate is already in a bill many Republicans love. All the parts are just sitting there, tested and waiting. The only thing America hasn’t done is pick them up and assemble them.

We’re the weird country without a VAT. Fine. Then let’s be weird in the other direction too, and become the first country whose consumption taxes end poverty.

If reading this was worth your time, it’s worth sharing with others. Share it, subscribe for free, and if you can, make a monthly pledge or buy a paid subscription to keep this work going.

Thank you to my UBI Producer level patrons and paid Substack subscribers: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Oliver Bestwalter, Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Frederick Weber, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmuyy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Araya, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Innen, Paradigm shift, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Arjun Banker, Christine Celli, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Steve Roth, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Karla Hagemeister, Mark Pierce, Fred Weber, Linda Hearne, David Allen, Janos Abel, Wendy Voahangy Ravano, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons for their support.

Do you support UBI as an AI dividend? If so, have you signed the AI Pledge for Humanity yet?

Corporations issue new stock all the time — to raise cash, to pay executives, to swallow up other companies. So here’s a question: what if they had to issue a little new stock to the rest of us, too? I call it a stock dilution tax, and I think it’s the cleanest way to pay for a universal basic income (UBI) with a wealth tax. Make every large corporation mint 1.5% in fresh shares each year, sell them off slowly, and hand the proceeds to every American — roughly $365 a month, with no new bureaucracy and nowhere for the wealthy to hide from it.

I’m not the only one thinking about this approach. This week, Senator Bernie Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would hit the biggest AI companies with a one-time 50% tax to be paid in stock and to drop those shares into a fund that pays dividends to all of us. Last year, Trump signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund, and his administration has been grabbing equity along the way — a roughly 10% stake in Intel, a chunk of the rare-earth company MP Materials, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel. And as I write this, senior officials are reportedly in early talks with the big AI companies about having them voluntarily hand the government shares, with a dividend paid to American households floated as one thing to do with the proceeds. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla floated taking 10% of every public company and pooling it for the people. And back in 2021, Sam Altman proposed almost exactly this in his essay “Moore’s Law for Everything” where he suggested an American Equity Fund capitalized by taxing big companies 2.5% of their market value every year, payable in shares.

So the question is no longer whether the public should own a stake in the wealth we all help create. Experts regardless of party affiliation have basically conceded that point. The question now is how. And on the how, I think everyone is making the same mistake.

They all want to build a giant pile of wealth.

I don’t. I want to build a faucet.

The mechanism: a tax companies pay by printing shares

Here’s the deal. Require every covered business entity — public or private — with either more than $100 million in annual revenue or more than $100 million in fair-market equity value to issue new shares or equivalent ownership interests equal to 1.5% of its value each year into a public dividend fund. The revenue threshold captures the roughly 35,000 large U.S. firms that can be measured from Census business data, while the valuation threshold prevents high-value private firms from escaping merely because they have low current revenue or stay private. At today’s valuations, that’s around $1.44 trillion a year. Divide it across every legal permanent resident, adult and child, and you get roughly $365 a month, for everyone, permanently, in a way that grows as the value of America’s corporations grows.

Notice what each company actually does to pay this tax. It doesn’t write a check. It doesn’t sell a factory. It simply issues new shares, the same way a government issues new currency. A company that’s worth $100 billion issues $1.5 billion in fresh stock and the public now owns it.

It’s the most painless wealth tax ever designed, and it’s also the most inescapable one ever designed. Think about what dilution does. When you mint 1.5% more shares, every existing share is now worth a hair less, because each one represents a slightly smaller slice of the same company. It’s inflation, but for stocks instead of dollars. And here’s the best part: there is no escaping it. Billionaires can move to Monaco. They can hire the cleverest tax lawyers on Earth. They can route their fortunes through a dozen shell companies in a dozen countries. None of it matters. Their shares are worth slightly less no matter where they happen to sit, because there are simply more of those shares in the world now. You cannot flee dilution. You cannot deduct it. You cannot offshore it. It finds you wherever you are.

And it’s gentle. At 1.5% dilution, the very wealthy don’t lose wealth — they just gain it a little more slowly. Instead of their fortunes compounding at, say, 10% a year, maybe they compound at 8.5%. They still get richer. They just share a sliver of the upside with the rest of us on the way up. I think that’s a deal almost anyone can live with, including them.

My twist: don’t hoard the shares — sell them, steadily, and refill every year

This is where I part ways with Bernie and Trump and Altman and Khosla — and with Matt Bruenig, whose Social Wealth Fund for America is the most carefully worked-out version of the whole idea. Every one of their proposals ends with a giant pile of stock sitting in a government fund, like Norway’s, or Alaska’s, growing over time while it pays out a small percentage of its total value each year. Alaska’s Permanent Fund pays residents a dividend from only a small slice of its holdings, precisely so the fund keeps growing. That’s a fine model if your goal is to hoard wealth.

But why would we want to hoard public wealth? The whole problem is the hoarding. The answer can’t be another hoard.

I’ve written a book about how money actually works for a country that issues its own currency, and the short version is this: the United States does not need to stockpile money before it can spend money. It is not a household. It creates dollars when it spends and deletes them when it taxes. So there is no reason — none — for a vast hoard of wealth at the federal level when we could be putting it directly into people’s hands. A hoard is what you build when you’re afraid you’ll run out. A currency issuer never runs out.

So here’s what I’d do instead. Call it a temporary holding fund — a faucet, not a hoard.

A company issues its shares into the fund. There are about 250 trading days in a year. Each day, the fund sells 1/250th of those shares. And it doesn’t dump them all at the opening bell — it sells them at a slow, steady drip across each trading day, the way an algorithm quietly works a large order so it doesn’t move the price. The goal is to be the most boring participant in the market: to sell every single share over the course of the year so smoothly that nobody can even tell. Then, the next year, the companies refill the fund, and we do it all again.

The proceeds get paid out to every American as The Great American Dividend. We could call the law that creates it the “GAINS Act” — Granting Americans Income from National Shares. We wouldn’t hoard the gains. We’d share them. We wouldn’t invest the gains in the markets. We’d invest them in each other.

To make the system simple, payments would be based on the previous year’s realized proceeds. On January 1, covered companies would issue shares or equivalent ownership interests into a public dividend fund. Over the course of that year, the fund would gradually convert those assets into cash. Then, the following year, the realized proceeds would be paid out in equal monthly checks. That means the 2028 dividend would be funded by the equity collected and sold in 2027, while the 2028 equity batch would be collected and sold to fund 2029. No guesswork. No monthly market swings. Just last year’s shared corporate wealth becoming this year’s monthly public dividend.

“But won’t selling stock every single day crater the market?” That’s a fair question to ask, and the answer is no. The reason why is the whole point of the daily drip. Markets get hurt by surprise and by size: a sudden dump nobody saw coming. A slow, fully predictable, evenly spaced sale of a known quantity is the opposite of that. It’s the most digestible kind of selling there is. And here’s the part that should settle that worry completely: we already run this exact machine in reverse, every single year.

American corporations currently spend more than a trillion dollars a year buying back their own stock — about $1.1 trillion in 2025, an all-time record — removing shares from the market and funneling the gains to the people who already own them. My dilution tax is simply buybacks run backward. Instead of companies pulling shares out to further enrich existing shareholders, we sell shares to enrich everyone. If the market can swallow a trillion dollars of share buying a year, it can absorb a comparable amount of share selling the same way. There's one honest difference — buybacks nudge prices up, and selling nudges them down — but the daily drip keeps that nudge faint, and much of the time we'd simply be offsetting buybacks already underway.

And there's one more advantage I care about. Because the fund sells everything it receives, it never builds up a permanent stake in anybody. The government does not slowly accumulate voting shares and board seats and the power to punish or reward. Bernie and I want a lot of the same things here — broad public ownership of the wealth we all helped build, the rich paying in, everyone collecting a dividend — and his version is sincere about all of it. I just don't want the state holding the controls, and the reason is sitting right in front of us: Trump's administration has been grabbing equity selectively, picking which companies get a federal partner and which don't. That's the danger with state-held shares. The same machinery one administration builds to do good, the next one inherits to reward friends and punish enemies. There's a second danger, too: a government that owns shares in companies it also regulates becomes both shareholder and referee — the very objection critics are already raising. A fund that sells everything is never the lasting shareholder, so it never compromises the referee. So I'd rather the public own the wealth without the government owning the control. My approach is a wealth fund that hoards nothing and controls nothing. A wealth fund that never becomes a power grab.

Why we’ve earned this

You might be thinking: sure, painless and inescapable, but on what grounds do we get to hand ourselves a slice of companies we didn’t build?

On every ground there is.

Start with the research. Almost none of the technology these companies are built on came from the private sector alone, because the riskiest, earliest, least-profitable science is exactly what the market won’t fund. The public funds it. In Jump-Starting America, economists Simon Johnson and Jonathan Gruber lay out how, beginning in 1940, massive public investment — WWII research and then the Space Race panic after Sputnik — built radar, jet engines, digital computers, and eventually the internet that private companies turned into fortunes. Federal R&D spending peaked at around 2% of GDP in 1964. Today it’s about 0.6%. People have no idea how much of the stock market’s wealth was seeded by public money. Every pharmaceutical company on Earth is, in some real sense, standing on a mountain of public-funded basic research. The profits got privatized. The bill got socialized.

Then there’s the new wrinkle: AI. We all trained it. Every search, every post, every photo, every sentence any of us ever wrote online became fuel for these models — uncompensated labor, performed by billions of us, that now powers trillion-dollar companies. That’s why I launched the AI Pledge for Humanity. The people building AI keep telling us that something like UBI will be necessary. Elon Musk says “universal high income” is the best way to deal with AI-driven unemployment, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis has said much the same. Okay. Now let’s hold them to it. We trained the machines. We funded the science. We deserve to be treated as what we already are: shareholders. And companies issuing stock to be sold in our name is how you actually make us shareholders, instead of just promising to.

Turning it up

$365 a month as a universal dividend is a real floor, but it’s a starting point, not a ceiling. There are ways to make it bigger.

First, raise the dilution rate. Because the faucet pays out everything it collects, the math here is simple: the UBI rises in a straight line with the rate. Every extra half a percentage point adds roughly $122 a month to everyone’s check. At 2% it’s about $487 a month per person. At 2.5% — the rate Sam Altman himself proposed — it’s around $608. At 3%, about $730. There’s no hidden cliff, no point where collecting more quietly starts collecting less. You just turn the dial.

So why not crank it to 3% on day one? Because the smart move I think is to just get it going. I’d launch at 1.5%, prove the mechanism works, and get checks into people’s hands, because once a UBI exists, raising it becomes one of the most popular votes in all of politics. Then I’d crank it to 2.5% over a few years, and treat 3% as the ambitious ceiling we reach only once the system is mature. And remember, this is an inescapable wealth tax. Elon’s shares are worth slightly less the instant we mint more of them, and he can’t run from it. It’s so much easier than chasing his assets around the globe with auditors. We don’t have to hunt down his wealth. We just have to dilute it.

Second, I like the idea of pairing the dilution tax with a value-added tax of 10% or a tiny tax on all financial transactions — something like 0.25%, in the spirit of what economists call a Tobin tax. This barely touches an ordinary person who buys and holds, but it bites the high-frequency traders who make their money off astronomical volumes of trades. It would tax the churn at the top and, as a bonus, nudge everyone toward investing for the long term instead of skimming pennies off millions of trades a second. I see it as an optional add-on for a larger UBI.

And then there’s what I’ve argued for elsewhere: replacing the standard deduction with a refundable standard credit. Stack that on top of the dilution dividend and the consumption dividend, and a $100/ton carbon fee and 1% land value tax and we’d be talking about a poverty-eliminating multi-layered UBI exceeding $1,500 a month — over $3,000 a month for a couple and over $6,000 a month for a family of four.

But won’t this shrink my 401(k)?

Here’s the objection that deserves the most honest answer of all, because it’s the one that will worry regular people rather than billionaires. If we dilute every company’s shares, we dilute the shares sitting in our retirement accounts. That’s true. So let’s walk through exactly what it does to us — because once you see the math, the worry should evaporate.

Start with what your 401(k) is actually made of (if you even have one). Almost nobody holds 100% stocks for a lifetime. A typical retirement plan lands somewhere around a 60/40 mix — roughly 60% stocks, 40% bonds. So the drag on your account isn’t the headline rate. It’s about 60% of it. At a 2.5% dilution, a typical account grows roughly 1.5% a year slower than it otherwise would have. At the 1.5% launch rate, under 1% slower. Real, but a long way from scary.

Now the part that matters most, and it’s a matter of simple arithmetic. The dilution cost is proportional — it scales with how much stock you own, so a small saver barely feels it while a large one feels it a lot. But the UBI is flat — the same dollar amount lands in every account, whether you’ve saved millions or nothing. Proportional cost, flat benefit. That means there is a crossover point: below it, your monthly check exceeds your loss, and above it, the loss exceeds the check.

So where does the line fall? Run the numbers and it sits at roughly half a million dollars per person. And here’s the best part — it doesn’t move when you change the rate. Crank the dilution from 1.5% to 3% and the hit your retirement account takes gets bigger, yes, but so does your dividend, so the crossover stays put right around $500,000. No matter how high you set the dial, the same group of people are the only ones who end up net contributors. Raising the rate doesn’t really shift who comes out ahead or behind. It only deepens how much the very top shares with everyone else.

So how many people end up with less in retirement? And who sits above that line? Hardly anybody. Only about 9% of households that have any retirement account at all hold $500,000 or more, and since barely half of U.S. households have a retirement account in the first place, that’s only around 5% of all households. The richest 5 to 10 percent. Everyone else — the overwhelming majority of us — comes out ahead.

It’s even better for couples, because the UBI is paid per person while the savings usually aren’t. In most two-earner households, the bulk of the retirement money sits concentrated in one person’s account, yet both people collect the dividend. Two checks against one diluted nest egg pushes the household crossover up close to a full million dollars. A retired couple sitting on almost a million dollars still comes out ahead. Two basic incomes, every month, for the rest of both their lives, easily outrun the slightly slower growth on their savings.

In summary, a slightly smaller nest egg plus a universal dividend beats a slightly larger nest egg and no universal dividend, for roughly 9 out of 10 of us. The only people who’d be modestly worse off are the households least likely to need the help, the ones already sitting on seven figures.

What we should actually want

Decades ago, the writer Robert Anton Wilson described something he called the RICH Economy — Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis. The idea was that automation shouldn’t be something we dread. It should be something we cheer for, because the machines doing more of the work means more abundance for everyone, paid out as a dividend to all. That’s the world I want. I want our companies to win. I want the robots to work for us and the AI to make productivity charts go up, up, up.

But right now, none of that helps you unless you happen to own a lot of stock. The stock market and the economic security of ordinary Americans have come completely uncoupled from each other. The market hits record highs in the same week that families can’t cover an emergency. The productivity belongs to the machines. The gains belong to the shareholders. And most of us are neither.

The stock dilution tax couples those two things back together. It makes every American a shareholder, automatically, by birthright, in the success of the whole economy — so that when our companies do better, we all do better. Not metaphorically. Literally, in dollars, every month. We get to want them to succeed because their success is finally our success too.

We helped pay for the science. We trained the AI. We are the customers, the data, the workforce, and the reason any of it has any value at all. The wealth was built on a foundation all of us laid, going back generations. Our dividend is not charity, and it’s not radical. It’s ours, and it’s overdue.

Let’s not build a giant pile of stocks. Let’s build the faucet — and finally turn it on.

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Every time I drop a bag of garbage down the chute in my building, I think about debt.

Not the kind you pay back in monthly installments. Not the kind that shows up on a credit report. I mean the kind you can never repay no matter how long you live or how hard you work. The debt of being alive at all.

Someone built that chute. Someone engineered the pipes that carry water to my faucet and the sewers that carry it away. Someone built the truck that takes the garbage somewhere I will never see, and someone built the road the truck drives on, and someone refined the diesel, and someone before them figured out that crude oil was useful for anything at all. The chain goes back to people whose names I will never know. Every time I drop that bag, I am the beneficiary of thousands of years of accumulated effort. I did almost none of that work. I will never be able to do enough work to repay it.

This is the idea David Graeber surfaces in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, drawing on the French anthropologist Philippe Rospabe. Long before money was a medium of exchange or a unit of account, it was something stranger. It was an acknowledgment that you owed something you could never give back.

Rospabe studied “primitive money” — the cattle, shells, brass rods, and copper bracelets used in marriage payments across societies on every inhabited continent. The conventional reading was that these were bridewealth: a man’s family paid the bride’s family to compensate them for the loss of her labor. Rospabe argued the opposite. The payment was not compensation. Nothing of that scale could ever be compensation. A woman who joined a new family and bore children for that family handed over something even a large quantity of goods could never match. The payment was instead, in Graeber’s phrasing, “not to settle a debt, but as a kind of acknowledgment that there exists a debt that cannot be settled.”

Money, Graeber wrote, summarizing Rospabe, “begins, as Rospabe himself puts it, ‘as a substitute for life.’” One might call it a life-debt. “Money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.”

Read that sentence again. Money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.

This is what unconditional basic income actually is. Not a welfare program. Not a stimulus. Not a transfer. UBI is a society asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible — and offering, in return, the smallest possible gesture of recognition. UBI is lifewealth. Not paid to settle a debt, but paid to acknowledge a debt that cannot be settled.

The Time Cone

Imagine your life as a point. Behind you stretches an enormous time cone widening into the past. In that cone is every human who ever lived, every tool they made, every language they shaped, every disease they survived, every fire they tended, every plant they grew, every animal they domesticated, every law they argued over. All of it converges on you. You are alive because that cone exists.

In front of you stretches another time cone widening into the future. In that cone are your children, if you have them, and their children, and everyone they will know and love and work with. All your work — paid and unpaid — is one of the lines feeding that cone. So is your every action, your kindness to a stranger, the time you took to teach a kid something. So is the art and science and knowledge you help generate, or the art and science and knowledge you help support by participating in a civilization where those things can exist.

There is no equivalent for a human life. Not money. Not goods. Not even another human life. The only thing that even comes close to matching a life is another life, but lives are not for trading. When someone is born, and they live, and they have children who have children, and they do work that allows other people to do work, and together they produce art that outlasts them and science that compounds and knowledge that propagates, the total can never be tallied. Even with everything society gives you as your inheritance just for showing up — language, plumbing, antibiotics, the alphabet, basic literacy, the periodic table, music, electricity — it is not enough. The debt remains.

UBI is a small payment, made during your life, recognizing the future time cone you are part of. It is also a payment that makes you feel a debt to the past time cone, to everything that came before you. We owe each other in both directions. Forward and back. Society owes us something it cannot fully give. We owe society something we cannot fully give. UBI is both sides of that ledger written in the smallest possible numbers, just enough to say: yes, the debt exists.

There is a name for the first half of this in anthropological theory: primordial debt. The idea is that money emerges from the recognition of an absolute debt to what gave you life — to your ancestors, to your gods, to the society that made you possible. Graeber engages with primordial debt theory throughout his book, with both interest and skepticism. What he helped me see is the symmetry that primordial debt theory misses on its own. If there is a primordial debt running from each of us to society, there is also a primordial credit running the other way — from society to every individual it brings into existence. We are each born into both at the same moment. Both are absolute. Both are unpayable. The work we spend our lives doing runs along the debt side of the ledger. UBI runs along the credit side. Neither side ever balances. Neither side is supposed to.

What Gratitude Research Actually Found

Psychologists have spent the past two decades building a small mountain of evidence that the simple practice of noticing what you owe other people makes you measurably happier. The opening salvo was Robert Emmons at UC Davis and Michael McCullough at the University of Miami, who in 2003 ran what is now the foundational study. Three groups, ten weeks. One wrote weekly about things they were grateful for. One wrote about daily hassles. One wrote about neutral events. The gratitude group reported higher levels of optimism, fewer physical complaints, more time exercising, and a greater sense of connection to others.

That paper landed in a young field. I got my psychology degree in 2004 with a focus on cognitive neuroscience, which is to say I was studying the brain right as positive psychology was just beginning to crystallize as a coherent discipline. Almost everything we now know about positive psychology came after my time in college. Reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness in 2008 was the first time it really hit me how much there was to learn here that nobody had taught me, and how much of what we think we know about happiness is wrong. I love using what science actually figures out about happiness to live a better, happier, more fulfilled life. If I ever have the time — maybe after we all have UBI — I’d happily go back for a PhD in this stuff.

In the twenty-plus years since that first paper, the evidence has accumulated. The largest synthesis to date came out in PNAS in July 2025: a meta-analysis by Choi, Cha, McCullough, Coles, and Oishi covering 145 studies, 727 effect sizes, and nearly 25,000 participants across 28 countries. Gratitude interventions reliably produce small but real increases in well-being across cultures. Small effects, repeated across a lifetime, compound. So does the alternative.

One finding I want to flag, because it matters for the argument I am making. Several studies on what researchers call the “proximal experience” of gratitude — what it actually feels like — have found that gratitude exercises produce a mixed emotional state. People feel uplifted and indebted at the same time. The uplift is what positive psychology mostly measures. The indebtedness is what Graeber was writing about. They are not opposites. They are the same feeling, viewed from different angles. When you notice what you have been given, you feel grateful, and you feel a debt, because both are responses to the same fact about the world.

I feel grateful about a lot of things. I do not know whether this is because I have lived with my own basic income, funded by patrons, since 2015. It might just be how I am wired or because of how I grew up and what I’ve read and experienced. But I think about it constantly. Literally every time I walk to the garbage chute. Every time I turn on a faucet. There are people on this planet today walking miles to fetch water. I am not one of them. I did nothing to earn not being one of them. I am alive in a building someone built, drinking water delivered by pipes, on a street someone paved, in a country someone fought to build for me before I existed.

Pick up a pen. Could you make that pen from its raw materials? Most of us could not. We could not smelt the metal in the clip. We could not refine the plastic from petroleum we cannot extract. We could not formulate the ink. Maybe you are the rare person who could pull it off given enough time. If so, ask yourself how many hours of your life it would take. A pen costs a dollar. The labor compressed into that dollar runs into the thousands of human-years.

A round-trip flight across the country costs around $500. Many of us complain about that. We have a sense that $500 is not cheap, and a sense that what we are buying is too expensive. But $500 is roughly twenty hours of work at a median wage. Twenty hours of work in exchange for being lifted into the sky and moved three thousand miles in five hours, in a sealed aluminum tube, kept alive in conditions that would otherwise kill you, by a vehicle that took roughly a century of accumulated aeronautical engineering to design, built by a global supply chain of hundreds of thousands of people.

Think about just the aluminum for a moment. The skin of that plane is made out of rocks. Specifically, bauxite ore that has to be mined out of the ground, crushed, refined into alumina, and then electrolyzed at temperatures approaching a thousand degrees or around 200 megajoules per kilogram — a process so energy-intensive that aluminum was, in the 1880s, more valuable than gold. We figured out how to make it cheap. Now we fly across continents in tubes of it.

Twenty hours of your work, in exchange for that. Do you feel you have paid that debt? Do you feel you deserve that capability? I do not. I do not feel I could ever do enough work to pay the debt of a single flight.

Every product from pen to plane is a frozen pool of human effort, almost all of it uncompensated, much of it forgotten, none of it possible without everyone else.

The Stress That Eats Gratitude

There is an obvious problem with telling people to be grateful, and I want to name it before going further.

A lot of people are suffering. A lot of people are exhausted and stressed the hell out. A lot of people are working two jobs, sleeping four hours, drowning in medical debt, watching their rent rise faster than their wages, raising children in a country that does not give a damn whether those children make it. Asking someone in that position to keep a gratitude journal can sound, depending on your tone, somewhere between unhelpful and obscene.

The K-shaped economy we live in is, among other things, a machine for grinding gratitude out of people. Chronic stress narrows attention. It makes the future look like a threat instead of a promise. It makes other people look like competitors instead of collaborators. A brain steeped in cortisol does not notice how amazing a plane actually is. It’s too busy calculating whether the rent will clear.

So when I say I think gratitude is one of the most useful practices a human being can take up, I mean that and I mean that we have built a civilization that makes the practice nearly impossible for huge numbers of people. The fault is not theirs. The fault is the system.

Here is where UBI comes back in.

If you want a society in which more people can feel grateful, you have to give them something to be grateful for. You have to take the goddamn boot off their necks. You have to make the rent clear without panic. You have to make a sick day not catastrophic. You have to make food not a question. The most efficient way to do this, more efficient than any program targeted at “deserving” subsets of the population, is to put a floor under everyone and let them stand on it.

UBI does not solve every problem a human can have. It does not cure cancer (even though it will reduce it). It does not end loneliness (even though it does reduce it). What it does is move the ground beneath you up by a few feet, so the next wave that comes does not drown you. And once you are not drowning, you can look around. You can notice the awesome plane. You can notice the chute. You can notice you are alive.

Trust Is the Substance

There is one more piece of this I want to put in front of you, because I think it is the part most people miss when they argue about UBI.

UBI is not really about money. The money is the medium. The substance is trust.

Money, Alan Watts liked to say, is a way of measuring what we owe the community and what the community owes us. Bookkeeping. But the bookkeeping only works because the people on each side of the ledger trust each other. The dollar in your pocket is a piece of paper. It does what it does because the person you hand it to trusts that the next person will accept it. Pull the trust out and the paper is paper. Money is trust wearing a costume.

UBI takes that same logic and applies it to people directly. The message of UBI, stripped of the fiscal jargon, is one sentence: “I trust you.” I trust that if I give you what you need to live, you will use it to live. I trust that you do not need a caseworker checking up on you. I trust that you do not need to prove you are looking for work. I trust that you do not need to be poor enough or sick enough or pathetic enough to deserve it. You are a human being. You exist. That is sufficient.

Our current system says the opposite. Our current system says: what can you do for me first? Show me a pay stub. Show me a drug test. Show me a job search log. Show me a doctor’s note. Show me you are trying. Show me you are deserving. Then maybe, if I feel like it, I will give you a small fraction of what you need, and I will take it away the minute your circumstances improve. The default is suspicion. The burden of proof is on the person asking to live.

UBI rightly reverses that. It says: Here is what you need to live. Now, if you would like to do something for the rest of us in return, that would be great. You do not have to. But we trust you will, because we already know what kind of species you are.

Trust breeds trust. The places on this planet with the highest social trust are also the places with the lowest poverty and inequality, the highest reported happiness, and the most functional public institutions. The arrow runs both ways. Trust people and they become more trustworthy. Distrust them, and they become whatever they have to become to survive.

Now stack this on top of everything above and watch what happens. A society that distrusts its people produces people too stressed to feel grateful. A society that trusts its people produces people who can finally see what they have been given, and who feel — yes — a debt. A debt they will spend the rest of their lives trying to repay in whatever form best suits them. The cycle reverses. Gratitude becomes possible because survival is no longer in question. Contribution becomes voluntary, which is the only way it was ever going to be sustainable.

This is the part Graeber would have loved. He died in 2020, and the UBI advocacy he was best known for went through his bullshit jobs argument rather than this one — his point being that an enormous fraction of paid work in our economy is work the workers themselves believe is useless, and that this is a moral catastrophe that UBI helps undo. He was right about that. I think the primordial credit argument is the other side of the same coin. Bullshit jobs are what happens when a society demands work for its own sake. A UBI grounded in primordial credit and life-debt is what happens when a society finally remembers what work was actually for.

What the Pilots Already Show

This is not all theory. UBI pilots have been run, with real money, in real countries, with real measurements. The consistent finding across more than a decade of evidence is that giving people unconditional cash makes them happier and healthier, and the mechanisms by which it does so map closely onto the argument I’ve just made.

Finland’s experiment found that giving people the same money with no strings produced 33% less poor mental health than giving people the same money with strings. The amount did not matter. The conditions did. Germany’s 3-year pilot found large gains in life satisfaction, sense of purpose, and especially autonomy — the feeling of having control over your own life. Across the more than 150 U.S. guaranteed income pilots, people given unconditional cash consistently spend more time with friends, family, and community, and report higher trust in other people and institutions. I wrote about all of this in detail in my Finland piece — if you want the evidence in full, read that one next.

What I want to point out here is the shape of the findings. The wellbeing gains seem to be coming from a mix of reduced stress (because survival is no longer a daily stressor), more time with loved ones (because there is finally time to spend), and higher trust in other people (because being trusted makes people trust back). These are not separate channels. They are facets of the same underlying shift. Take the boot off necks and people exhale, and after that exhale they become more themselves.

I do not know whether any researcher has specifically measured gratitude as a vector in these studies. Most validated wellbeing instruments capture something close to its absence — rumination, hopelessness, despair — without capturing the positive feeling itself. My guess, based on the gratitude literature and on everything I have felt in my own life since 2015, is that gratitude is one of the hidden vectors driving the wellbeing gains. You give people a floor. The stress drops. The mind stops spinning on the next bill. And in the quiet that follows, the noticing becomes possible. Whether or not the surveys ask about it, that feeling is doing work.

Interdependence Is the Real Word

There is a word for this that gets used less than it should: interdependence. We use the word independence constantly. We celebrate it. We sing songs about it. We give people awards for embodying it. We almost never use the word interdependence, which is the actual condition of being a human being.

No one is independent. Not really. Not even close. The myth of the self-made person is the most expensive lie our culture tells itself, because it requires erasing every single contribution made by everyone other than the person being celebrated. Even the most extreme case — someone alone on an island, growing their own food, catching their own fish — is depending on what other people taught them about farming and fishing and which plants are poisonous and how to start a fire. Robinson Crusoe does not make it through chapter one without literacy.

Our superpower as a species is not intelligence. Plenty of animals are intelligent. Our superpower is that we are social animals. Our mega superpower is that we are so social we figured out how to communicate with each other after we die. We invented writing. How amazing is that? We pass knowledge across centuries. We build on what came before — not just on the ideas of people we know, but on the ideas of people who lived and died before our great-great-grandparents were born. Specialization, coordination, accumulation across generations: this is what humans do, and it is the only reason anything we have exists.

There is an anime called Dr. Stone that I love so much I sometimes wish I had kids just so I could watch it with them. It opens with the entire human race turned to stone in an instant. A teen genius wakes up thousands of years later, in a world where civilization has crumbled into nothing, and he sets out to rebuild it from scratch — chemistry, agriculture, electricity, antibiotics, glass, steel, telephones — using only the science he learned before civilization ended. He cannot do it alone. He needs a strong friend to lift heavy things. He needs a craftsman to make precision parts. He needs an explorer to find rare rocks. He needs a singer to lift morale. He needs a mentalist and a fighter and a curious child who rolls around in a melon. The show is, at heart, an argument for interdependence. Our diversity is what makes us strong. The scientist needs the builder needs the artist needs the explorer needs the caregiver needs the fighter. The civilization works because all those people exist, all with different interests, all contributing what only they can contribute.

Genius, Scenius, Civilizenius

I have made the Einstein Argument for UBI before. The short version: if UBI enables even one more Einstein over the next century, the program pays for itself many times over — and Einstein himself became Einstein with a patent clerk’s salary and enough time and space to think about time and space. If that argument lands for you, read the full piece after this one. It goes much further, into Ireland’s permanent basic income for artists and the band Angine de Poitrine that I can’t stop listening to.

What I want to build on here is a word Brian Eno coined for the substrate Einstein actually emerged from: scenius — the collective form of genius that emerges from a scene. Individual geniuses do not pop out of a vacuum; they arrive out of communities of people working on related problems, reading each other’s papers, building on each other’s ideas. The “genius” is the visible tip of an iceberg. Scenius is the iceberg. Eno supports UBI for exactly this reason: free up the time, and you get more scenes, more scenius, and more geniuses.

I love this word, and what follows would not be possible without it. Eno gave us scenius. From it I want to derive something larger.

A scene is local. A scene is a few hundred people in a city in a moment. Bell Labs. Vienna in 1900. Liverpool in 1962. Saguenay right now. Scenes are real and they matter. But every scene is itself nested inside something larger. The Liverpool scene did not invent the guitar. Bern did not invent paper. None of these scenes invented language, or roads, or the concept of writing things down. Every scene is dependent on a civilization that built the preconditions for the scene to be possible.

I want to call that larger thing civilizenius. Civilization plus genius plus scenius. The collective intelligence of an entire civilization across time. Scenius is the iceberg under the visible genius. Civilizenius is the ocean the iceberg is floating in. You need both. A scene without a civilization to grow in is a small group of people inventing fire from scratch every generation. A civilization without scenes is a vast inert library nobody is reading. The two together is what produces Einsteins. UBI feeds both. It funds the scenes by funding the people in them, and it feeds the civilization by trusting it to keep building on itself. A thriving civilizenius — full of ideas, full of cross-pollination, full of weird subcultures rubbing up against each other — is the only kind of civilization that produces real surprises.

This is also why looking only at the tip of the iceberg misses the argument. We do not need to find another Einstein. We need to build the civilizenius from which more Einsteins are able to emerge. Everyone you walk past on the street today is, whether they know it or not, contributing to that. The retail worker is contributing. The bus driver is contributing. The nurse is contributing. The mother is contributing. The kid in the library is contributing. None of them get paid what their contribution is worth, because their contribution cannot be priced. It is, in Graeber’s phrase, more valuable than money.

The Smallest Possible Acknowledgment

So here is the argument, distilled.

You and I owe society something we cannot ever repay — call it our primordial debt. Society owes you and me something it cannot ever repay — call it our primordial credit. The work you do for a paycheck will not settle either side. Nothing will. The debt and the credit are the kind of thing money was invented to acknowledge precisely because money cannot pay them.

UBI is the smallest gesture a civilization can make to recognize that fact. It is not generosity. It is not redistribution. It is not even, strictly speaking, justice, though it is closer to justice than what we currently do. It is the simplest possible acknowledgment that you exist, that your existence has value that exceeds anything that could be priced, and that the civilization you were born into owes you the minimum conditions to live. In return, your life — every hour of it, paid or unpaid, productive in the GDP sense or not — contributes to the future time cone that will give to people not yet born what was given to you.

Notice what this does psychologically. Pay people for work and they feel they have earned it. Give people something they did not earn, and they feel a debt. That feeling is key to civilizenius. The gratitude that comes from being given something is what makes people want to give in return — not to a specific person who handed them the money, but to the civilization that made the money possible. A paycheck closes a transaction. UBI opens one. It hands you a debt you will spend the rest of your life trying to repay, in whatever form you find you are best able to repay it. Some people will repay it by raising children. Some by curing diseases. Some by writing songs. Some by exploring the unknown. Some by inventing things no one has thought of yet. None of them will repay it in full. None of them are supposed to.

This is not a utopian argument. Or rather, it is utopian in the only sense of the word I find useful. The Star Trek future is not a world where nobody works. It is a world where work is no longer the price of being allowed to live. People still build things. People still write things. People still explore and create and care for each other. They just do those things because they want to, because they were given the room to want to, because society finally figured out that the way to get the most out of human beings is to stop holding their survival hostage.

I drop a bag of garbage down the chute. Someone else takes it from there. Someone else built the chute, and the truck, and the road, and the country in which any of this is possible. I did not earn this. None of us earned this. We were given it, and given it, and given it, all the way back to the first human who shared food with another human, and all the way forward to whoever will read these words long after I am gone.

The least we can do — the very least, the floor below which there is nothing — is make sure everyone has enough to live. Not because they deserve it. Because the debt exists. Because the debt cannot be paid. Because money was invented precisely for moments like this, to acknowledge what cannot be repaid in any other way.

Think about the things that make you feel grateful. List them. Watch a plane fly overhead and ponder the hands that built it. Pick up a pen and try to imagine making it. Drink a glass of water and trace it backward. Then ask yourself what you owe, and to whom, and what the smallest possible gesture of acknowledgment might look like.

It looks like an unconditional basic income. It has always looked like an unconditional basic income. We just needed an anthropologist to remind us that this is what money was for in the first place.

Epilogue: A Human Symphony

I started taking notes for this article on a plane in 2023, flying to Seoul, reading Graeber’s Debt for the first time. I tweeted about what I wanted to write a month later and then sat on it for over two years, because the argument felt too big to write. Every time I sat down to try, I felt like I couldn’t do it justice. After my recent Angine de Poitrine essay was the first time I felt I could get it right. Maybe by writing about scenius I gave myself permission to write about civilizenius. Maybe the audience for this argument is finally ready. I don’t know.

Either way, here we are. I want to end with a list, because the article is partly an argument for making lists.

If you have read this far, thank you. There are more articles in the world than hours in a lifetime, and you spent some of yours on this one. I am grateful.

If you share this with someone, thank you for that too. The fact that ideas move through the world by one person showing another person something they cared about is one of the most extraordinary things our species does. We are not just social. We are so social we built distribution systems for thought itself. Every share is a small act of trust. I am grateful for it.

I am grateful for everyone who taught me to read and write. My mom who taught me at home in kindergarten. The English teachers who later graded my papers. The editors who pushed back. All the writers I have read who showed me what good prose looks like by example. None of any of my articles exist without them.

I am grateful for everyone whose work I cited and everyone whose work I drew on without realizing I was drawing on it. Graeber, who started this whole train of thought when I decided to read his book on a long flight. Rospabe for his work Graeber drew from. The researchers in positive psychology who spent careers measuring something most of us never bothered to measure. Eno for his music (especially the song I had on endless loop as I wrote this) and his concept of scenius. Roddenberry for the Star Trek future I keep pushing for. The thousands of writers and thinkers I have absorbed, forgotten, and absorbed again.

There is a specific group I owe more directly than the rest. Since 2015 I have lived on a basic income funded by people who decided that what I do is worth keeping me alive to do. They make this work possible in the most literal sense. The people in the UBI Producer level of my Patreon: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Oliver Bestwalter, Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Avary, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Janos Abel, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Arjun Banker, Christine Celli, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Steve Roth, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, along with every other monthly patron whose name is not on this list, are all walking demonstrations of the argument I have just made. They acknowledged a debt that did not exist on any ledger by sending me a recurring pledge, and in doing so they created the conditions under which this article could be written. I owe them something I cannot ever fully repay. The closest I can come is to keep writing.

I think of all of this as a human symphony. Every reader. Every sharer. Every teacher. Every engineer. Every researcher. Every translator. Everyone who picks up a copy of Graeber’s Debt or starts reading a positive psychology book because of this essay. Every person who writes a gratitude list tonight. Every person who quietly decides, the next time it comes up at the dinner table, to argue for UBI a little more seriously than they did last month. Every one of them is a note. The piece is not played by any one of us. It is played by all of us together.

It gives me an immense, almost embarrassing amount of joy to know that another human read something I wrote, enjoyed it, and handed it to someone else to enjoy too, and to know my words will live on after I am gone. That is the whole thing. That is what civilization is. A symphony of human creation and human enjoyment of the creation. None of us could have written the score alone. All of us are playing it.

I am forever grateful to be one of the people playing.

Have you signed and shared the AI Pledge for Humanity in support of UBI yet?

Imagine a room with a thousand people. You know that 999 of them need something to survive, and one of them doesn’t. You have two options. Option one: give the same thing to all 1,000 people, and when they leave through a door where everyone’s income is already being checked, take a bit more from the one person who didn’t need it. Option two: before giving anything to anyone, set up an additional checkpoint inside the room, hire people to run it, create paperwork, establish eligibility rules, and test all 1,000 people — knowing that the test will incorrectly fail dozens if not hundreds of people who actually need help — all to avoid giving something to one person for whom the amount is a rounding error.

That is the choice between universal basic income and means-tested anything. When you frame it honestly, the answer is obvious. But we don’t frame it honestly. We frame it as responsible budgeting versus reckless spending. We frame it as helping the deserving versus subsidizing the rich. We frame it in ways that serve the interests of the people who benefit most from the means-tested version. And those people, as I’ll explain, are not the poor.

I have been making this argument for over a decade. I am going to make it one more time, and I am going to make it so thoroughly that I never have to make it again. If you believe basic income should exclude those with high incomes, I am asking you to read this entire article before you decide I’m wrong.

The Inconvenient Math of Targeting

The single most important thing to understand about means-testing is that it does not work the way people think it works. People imagine a clean binary: the needy get helped, the non-needy don’t. In reality, the moment you add a test to a benefit, you create two kinds of errors. A false positive is when someone who doesn’t need help gets it anyway. A false negative is when someone who does need help gets excluded.

Here’s what most people don’t think about: these two errors are not equally dangerous. A false positive — Elon Musk getting $15,000 he doesn’t need — is a waste of $15,000, which is approximately what he earns in the time it takes him to salute. A false negative where a single mother get excluded from the help she desperately needs can mean eviction, hunger, medical crisis, or death. One error is wasteful. The other is fatal. Any serious system designer knows which one to prioritize avoiding.

The evidence on how badly targeting fails is damning. Development Pathways conducted an exhaustive global review of 38 poverty-targeted social protection programs across 23 countries and found that these programs miss between 44% and 97% of the people they are designed to reach. The best-performing targeted programs still exclude nearly half of the people they exist to help. The worst exclude almost everyone.

In contrast, universal programs have the lowest exclusion errors. Bolivia’s universal social pension excluded only 8% of its intended recipients. Mongolia’s universal child benefit excluded just 2%.

This is not a minor difference. This is the difference between a system that works and a system that mostly doesn’t.

The Staggering Cost of Testing People

One of the great ironies of means-testing is that it’s supposed to save money. But the logic ignores the cost of the testing itself — the bureaucrats, the paperwork, the IT systems, the appeals processes, the consultants, and the inevitable errors that require corrections.

Georgia’s Pathways to Coverage program is perhaps the most egregious recent example. The state’s Medicaid work requirement experiment, according to a GAO report, spent $54.2 million on administrative costs compared to just $26.1 million on actual health care. The program designed to test whether people deserve health coverage spent more than twice as much on the testing as on the coverage. Senator Raphael Warnock called it what it was: the real waste, fraud, and abuse. The administrative apparatus designed to prevent waste was the waste.

This is not unique to Georgia. The Earned Income Tax Credit — the closest thing America has to a negative income tax — costs recipients an average of 11% of their benefit in tax preparation fees, and one in five people who qualify for it don’t receive it at all because they don’t file or file incorrectly. One in four EITC payments is miscalculated.

Compare this to Social Security, which is universal among retirees. Its administrative overhead is 0.5%. A universal basic income distributed through existing SSA infrastructure would likely be even lower. It’s extremely cheap to direct-deposit identical payments to everyone. It’s extremely expensive to figure out who deserves them first.

Every dollar spent on administration is a dollar that could have gone directly to a person who needed it. The question is not whether we can afford to include the rich. The question is whether we can afford to keep paying middle-men to exclude them.

The “Too Expensive” Illusion

The most common objection to universality is that it costs too much. If you give a basic income to 260 million adults instead of 230 million, that’s 30 million extra payments. At $15,000 each, that’s $450 billion more. How could that possibly be affordable?

It’s the wrong math. The error is treating the gross cost as the net cost. When someone with a high income receives $15,000 in basic income and pays $20,000 in additional taxes to fund it, the net cost of including that person is not $15,000. It’s negative. That person is a net contributor, not a net recipient. The $15,000 goes out and more than $15,000 comes back. The cost of including them is zero. In fact, they’re subsidizing everyone else.

This is true for everyone above the breakeven point — the income level at which the additional taxes paid equal the basic income received. Below that line, you’re a net recipient. Above it, you’re a net payer. A universal basic income and a negative income tax that phases out at the same rate and reaches the same people produce the exact same distribution of net gains and losses. The only difference is that the universal version sends a check and collects a larger tax, while the means-tested version sends a smaller check and collects a smaller tax. The net transfer is identical. One is not cheaper than the other.

What the phaseout actually does is concentrate the tax burden on the people being phased out — typically the middle class or upper-middle class — while shielding the very top from higher taxes. A phaseout that starts at the 90th percentile and ends at the 95th percentile is a tax on those five percentiles that lets the top 5% off the hook. A universal program funded by broad progressive taxation spreads that burden all the way to the top.

I’ve covered this math in detail elsewhere. But the bottom line is this: a means-tested guaranteed income is not cheaper than a universal one. It just hides the taxes inside the phaseout instead of collecting them openly. And in doing so, it taxes the middle while protecting the top.

Who Really Benefits from Targeting?

There’s a question most people never think to ask: if targeting helps the poor, why do the rich keep supporting it?

Development Pathways published a devastating analysis of exactly this question. The conclusion is counterintuitive but critical: the main beneficiaries of poverty-targeting are the rich, while the poor are the main beneficiaries of universal provision. Targeted programs minimize the tax burden on the wealthy because the programs are small. Universal programs require the wealthy to pay substantially more, and in exchange, everyone — including the poorest — gets more.

This is why poverty-targeted programs dominate in countries where the wealthy hold outsized political influence. A key aim of poverty-targeting is to minimize taxation, which disproportionately hits the wealthy even when taxation is flat. The World Bank itself has acknowledged that the push for “better targeting” is more often motivated by cutting entitlement bills than by helping the poor.

The middle class is continually fooled into supporting all of this. They are told that targeting is more efficient, more progressive, more responsible. But what targeting actually does is impose less of a burden on the rich and provide less of a benefit to the poor and middle class than a universal approach would. How convenient for the people at the top for means-testing to be considered “common sense.”

Universality Makes Programs Indestructible

A program for all is harder to kill than a program for some. A program that everyone receives becomes a right. A program that only some people receive becomes a target.

Since 1982, every Alaskan has received an annual dividend from the Alaska Permanent Fund regardless of income. No Alaskan views it as welfare. It’s a shared right to natural resources. It would be wrong if only oil companies and their shareholders benefited from Alaska’s oil. The dividend ensures that wealth is rightfully shared. And because everyone gets it, everyone defends it. Now imagine if that dividend had been means-tested. Would it still exist four decades later? Or would the oil companies and their shareholders have found a way to kill it and keep the money for themselves? I think you know the answer.

The same principle holds for education and health care. Should rich kids be excluded from public school? If they were, rich parents would slash their property tax bills, because they’d be paying for a system their children couldn’t use. Public school quality would collapse. Should high-income seniors be excluded from Medicare? The political coalition defending it would shrink and the program would weaken. Universality among seniors is what makes Medicare a third rail of American politics. That’s exactly the kind of political durability that wealthy interests want to avoid.

The Marginal Tax Rate Trap

Here is where means-testing does its cruelest work. Every means-tested benefit comes with a clawback where the benefit is reduced as income rises. That clawback is economically identical to a tax on earned income.

SNAP reduces benefits by 30 cents for every dollar earned. That’s a 30% marginal tax rate imposed on some of the poorest people in the country. SSI reduces benefits by 50 cents for every dollar earned past a small exclusion. If you receive both benefits, you’re looking at an 80% marginal tax rate on earned income. Add in the loss of Medicaid, housing assistance, or childcare subsidies, and the rate can exceed 100%. Someone can earn a dollar and lose more than a dollar.

Why are we imposing the highest marginal tax rates in the country on the people with the least income, in the name of helping them? We are punishing them for trying to increase their incomes, taxing them at rates that would cause a revolt if imposed on the wealthy. We could choose to move the phaseout to the middle class, but then they’d be the ones hit by those rates.

A universal basic income carries a zero percent marginal tax rate from the payment itself, because the payment doesn’t change with income. The only rate a UBI recipient faces comes from taxes, which can be designed progressively. Instead of a 30% clawback hitting someone, a low surtax could apply across a broader range and generate the same revenue — extending all the way up the income scale to the very top, so instead of only the poorest paying for the phaseout, the wealthiest help pay for it too. Any phaseout is mathematically equivalent to a surtax, but the surtax version spreads the burden instead of concentrating it on those who can least afford it.

There's an additional reason to shift that burden upward rather than leave it at the bottom: those with higher incomes are the least likely to change their actual work behavior in response to higher marginal tax rates. Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva analyzed top earner responses to taxation across 18 OECD countries and found that top earners barely reduce their actual work when taxed more. Meanwhile, research using Danish administrative data found that low-income workers are the most sensitive. Higher marginal tax rates depressed their wage growth and reduced their likelihood of seeking promotions or better-paying jobs. In other words, we are currently imposing the highest marginal tax rates on the people most likely to change their behavior because of it, while shielding the people least likely to change theirs. Universality corrects this by moving the burden to where it does the least harm.

Universality Eliminates Stigma

When everyone gets something, no one is ashamed to receive it. When only the poor get something, receiving it becomes an admission of failure.

This is not abstract psychology. It is a measurable crisis of program design. Research published using USDA data found that 45% of SNAP-eligible nonparticipants cited stigma as a reason for not participating. A 2025 study confirmed that over 30% of eligible individuals across major U.S. welfare programs do not access the benefits they qualify for, and identified perceptions of public stigma as a key barrier. A comprehensive review found that take-up rates across means-tested programs in various countries range from as low as 25% to 80%, and concluded that stigma is likely the main determinant of low take-up.

Think about what this means. If you design a program specifically to help people in need, and a third of them refuse to accept the help — not because they don’t qualify, but because of what they think accepting it says about them — then the program itself is a failure. It is the insistence on targeting only those in need that creates this situation. A universal program would not create it, because there is nothing to be ashamed of when everyone receives the same thing. Stigma is a direct product of targeting. Universality eliminates it entirely.

The most vivid proof of this may be school lunches. Under the traditional means-tested model, some kids get free lunch and everyone knows who they are. The Campaign for Children reports that children from low-income households face bullying, have already-served lunches discarded in front of them, are marked with stickers, or are forced to complete chores — all because of a system designed to help them. Schools that adopted universal free meals saw participation rise by an average of 6.8% for lunch and 12.1% for breakfast, and saw a 15% decline in suspensions by the third year, particularly among students who had previously received subsidized meals. Research in New York City found that universal meals led to reductions in bullying. Yes, that means the kids of wealthy families eat for free too. Is that a bad outcome? Of course not. It is the outcome that makes the program work for the kids who actually need it, by removing the very thing — visible differentiation — that was keeping them from participating or subjecting them to harm when they did.

You Can’t Use What You Don’t Know Exists

Stigma is one barrier to take-up. Ignorance is another. Means-tested programs are complicated by design, and millions of people who qualify for them simply don’t know it. They don’t know they’re eligible. They don’t know the program exists. They don’t understand the application process. They file the wrong form, or miss a deadline, or can’t find the right office, or give up after being put on hold for the third time.

New Mexico just proved this decisively. In November 2025, the state became the first in the nation to offer universal free child care with no income limits. Before that, families earning under 400% of the federal poverty level — roughly $128,000 for a family of four — already qualified for free child care. Four in five New Mexico families were already eligible. Yet when the state made child care universal, something remarkable happened. According to the state's own data, 54% of newly enrolled families had already been eligible under the old means-tested rules but had never enrolled. More than half of the families who signed up after universality didn't need universality to qualify. They needed universality to participate. Whether it was stigma, lack of awareness, confusion about eligibility, or something else — the targeted version failed to reach them. The universal version succeeded.

A universal basic income eliminates these kinds of problems entirely. You don’t need to know you qualify, because everyone qualifies. You don’t need to navigate a bureaucracy, because there is no bureaucracy to navigate. You don’t need to file a special application, because no application exists. The money simply arrives, the same way for everyone, whether you have a tax attorney or whether you’ve never filed a return in your life. That is what it means to design a system that actually reaches the people it’s supposed to reach.

The Engineering Principle

I originally studied engineering, and there’s an old engineering joke I love: before studying engineering, if someone asked me what 1 + 1 is, I’d have said 2. After studying engineering, I’d say I’m pretty sure it’s 2, but we’d better make it 3 just to be safe.

That joke contains a profound truth about systems design. Engineers know that things fail. When you’re building life-support systems, you wisely design for failure. You build in fault tolerance, redundancy, and graceful failure.

A means-tested safety net is a bang-bang system. You qualify or you don’t. If you fall through the cracks, you hit zero. A universal basic income is proportional control. It’s always there. If your income drops, you still have it. If you lose your job, you still have it. If a disaster shuts down your work overnight — you still have it. You never hit zero.

The pandemic proved this in real time. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, the government sent stimulus checks based on the most recent tax return on file, which for millions of people, was their 2018 return. Someone who earned $100,000 in 2018 but was earning less than that in March 2020 was excluded based on income they no longer had. The test used data that was two years old to determine who needed help at that moment.

Had a universal basic income been in place, none of this would have mattered. The floor would have been there the day the pandemic hit. No applications. No processing delays. No old data. No exclusions. That is what engineers mean by fault tolerance.

The Trust Problem

There’s another cost to exclusion that doesn’t show up on any budget spreadsheet: the erosion of social trust.

Research published in the American Journal of Political Science examined Pakistan’s national unconditional cash transfer program and found that being excluded from a benefit program — especially when you feel economically deprived — actively erodes trust in government. International comparative research by Naoki Akaeda confirmed this at a global scale: low-income targeting crowds out social trust, while universalism grows social trust.

We live in an era of collapsing institutional trust. One of the contributing factors is that millions of people interact with government systems designed to determine whether they deserve help, and those systems regularly tell them they don’t — even when they do. Universality eliminates this. Everyone is included. No one has to prove they deserve it. And UBI pilot after UBI pilot has shown that when you give people unconditional cash, trust goes up. This is the predictable consequence of treating people as humans with rights rather than applicants under suspicion.

Just Tax the Rich

Let me address the Elon Musk question directly, because it comes up every time.

Yes, under a UBI of $1,250 per month, Elon Musk would receive $15,000 a year. And yes, under any competent tax system, his taxes would increase by far more than $15,000. He would not be a net recipient. He would be a substantial net contributor. The UBI would function as a tax cut for the poor and middle class and a tax increase on the wealthy, but because everyone receives the same base amount, it could be perceived as a universal right rather than government charity.

But let’s say we couldn’t get his taxes right. Let’s say he evaded every additional dollar and got the full $15,000 for free. So what? That amount is meaningless to him. It is not worth building an entirely separate bureaucratic apparatus to test hundreds of millions of people just to exclude him and the tiny handful of people like him.

And don’t tell me we can’t tax a wealthy person at least $15,000 more. Of course we can. That amount is nothing to them. But beyond that, we can invest more resources in the IRS. We can close loopholes. We can raise rates on capital gains. We can implement a wealth tax. We can shift taxes onto bases that are harder to avoid, like consumption taxes, or impossible to avoid, like land value taxes. Saying we can’t tax the rich is lazy and defeatist. We can, we must, and a universal program is what creates the political will to do it, because the middle class has skin in the game by benefiting too.

The Politics of Inclusion

Does it really make sense to tell the people who pay the most in federal taxes that they don’t deserve to participate in the programs their taxes make possible? That’s bad policy and terrible politics. It turns potential allies into opponents. If high-income taxpayers receive a UBI, they have a reason to defend it. If they’re excluded, they have every reason to kill it. Programs for the poor become poor programs, because the people with the most political power have no personal stake in keeping them strong.

Andrew Jackson said something about this nearly 200 years ago that I think about often. He described what government should provide as:

That’s universality. Blessings that fall on everyone, like rain, creating conditions for everyone to flourish.

The Least Important Opinion in the Room

I want to address something directly to anyone with high income or wealth who opposes universality because they personally don’t want a basic income.

You are centering yourself in a conversation where you should listen to those experiencing means-testing first-hand. Your aesthetic discomfort with receiving money you don’t need is not more important than the material survival of people who have spent their entire lives being failed by the targeting systems you are defending. The people who would benefit most from a UBI — people who have actually experienced means-testing, who have been denied benefits they qualified for, who have been humiliated by caseworkers, who have watched their marginal tax rates exceed anything the richest have paid since the 1970s — those people want it to be universal. They want you to get it too. They want that because they know from lived experience that the moment you add a test, people like them fall through the cracks.

If someone living in poverty is willing to let you have $15,000 you don’t need so that they can be sure they will actually receive the help they do need, then your opinion about wanting to be excluded is the least important opinion in the room. The data supports universality. The economics support universality. The political science supports universality. And the people whose lives depend on getting this right support universality. If none of those arguments move you, then at the very least, go apply for welfare and get denied. Just for fun.

What We Lose by Excluding

When you means-test a benefit, you exclude many, if not most, of the people you’re trying to help. You can spend twice as much on testing as on care. You impose high marginal tax rates on the poorest people in the country. You create stigma that discourages people from seeking help. You build a system without fault tolerance that lets people hit zero. You erode the trust that holds communities together. You create weaker programs that are easier for the wealthy to attack. And you save the rich money on taxes while telling yourself you’re being progressive.

When you make a benefit universal, you reach everyone. You let the existing tax system handle the redistribution. You eliminate the bureaucratic waste. You preserve work incentives. You remove stigma. You build trust. You create a permanent floor that catches every person no matter what happens to the economy. You build a program so popular it becomes politically untouchable.

People’s hearts may be in the right place when they insist on only helping people in need. But doing that requires defining need, and bureaucrats are terrible at that. And the impacts of that targeting create work disincentives, create stigma, create costly bureaucracy, create weaker programs, and require less taxation of the rich than a universal program would. It is simply the wrong answer to insist on excluding the rich. Include them. And tax them.

I believe that the insistence on excluding the rich from public benefits is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda ever sold to the middle class. It sounds compassionate. It sounds fiscally responsible. It sounds like common sense. But it serves the interests of the people at the very top, because it guarantees that taxes remain lower for them, programs remain weaker, and the political coalition defending economic security remains fractured instead of united.

Andrew Jackson wanted the blessings of government to fall like the dews of Heaven — unseen, unfelt, and universal. Instead we built a system of checkpoints and gatekeepers that spends more money deciding who deserves help than it spends on the help itself. The dew doesn’t ask the grass whether it earned the right to be watered. It just shows up. That’s how a basic income should work. For everyone. Including the people who don’t need it. Because including them is what makes the system actually work for everyone who desperately needs it.

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Thank you to my UBI Producer level patrons: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Avary, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Janos Abel, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Arjun Banker, Christine Celli, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Linda Hearne, David Allen, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons for their support.

Have you signed and shared the AI Pledge for Humanity in support of UBI yet?

I’ve been working on universal basic income full-time since 2013. Thirteen years. In that time, I’ve watched the conversation shift from “that’s a crazy idea” to “that’s inevitable.” Especially among the people building AI. And I’ve watched that shift accomplish very little.

That’s the problem I want to talk about today.

It is now routine for AI leaders to say that something like UBI will be necessary. Elon Musk recently posted that “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.” He’s been saying versions of this since 2016. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and a Nobel laureate, told CNN we may need “universal high income” so that AI’s productivity gains are distributed across the economy. Mustafa Suleyman, now CEO of Microsoft AI, warned in 2023 that AI would create “a serious number of losers” and called UBI a measure we need to start talking about “in a serious way.”

But are they truly being serious about it? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently told Semafor she is skeptical of tech billionaires’ stated support for UBI, saying the devil is in the details of their willingness to actually fund it. She’s right to be skeptical. The words are everywhere. The action is almost nowhere.

I say almost because there are a few notable exceptions. One of them is Sam Altman who put $14 million of his own money into a three-year basic income pilot — one of the largest in American history. It mattered. It was real money behind a real commitment. Jack Dorsey, through his #startsmall fund, also directed tens of millions of dollars to UBI pilots and research between 2020 and 2023 — including major support for Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, the OpenResearch pilot, and Humanity Forward. Together, Altman and Dorsey are the rare exceptions. But they also highlight how alone they are in having done it.

Meanwhile, the man on track to become the world’s first trillionaire spent his truly massive amount of resources dismantling government programs through DOGE.

The way Elon Musk talks about UBI is personal for me. Years ago, a friend of mine named Gerald Huff worked at Tesla as a principal software engineer who helped develop the Model 3. Gerald could see where automation was heading. He started speaking publicly about the need for UBI. Elon eventually called him into his office and told him to stop talking about UBI or he’d be fired. So Gerald stopped accepting speaking invitations — and started directing them to me instead. That’s how I ended up giving many of the talks that helped build my career in this work. Gerald died of pancreatic cancer in 2018 at the age of 54, before he could see UBI gain the traction it has today. His mother Gisele founded the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity in his name to carry on his UBI mission. I’ve served on its board since its inception.

What Elon did to Gerald is documented in Gisele’s memoir, Force of Nature. So when I watch Elon Musk post about “universal high income” to an audience of millions — while having personally silenced one of the people inside his own company who tried to advocate for it — I know what the gap between words and actions looks like. If Musk has quietly funded UBI efforts, I’d welcome the correction. I know of others who quietly have, so he wouldn’t be the only one, but color me skeptical.

The pattern is always the same: predict mass disruption, then treat preparing for it as someone else’s problem. And here’s what makes it worse: their casual UBI predictions give everyone else permission to not take AI seriously. When the people creating the disruption treat UBI as a prediction, or even just marketing, rather than an urgent priority, the rest of the world reasonably concludes that the disruption must not be that bad. If the architects of AI aren’t panicking, why should anyone else?

But it is that bad. For fifty years, productivity has soared and wages haven’t. AI is about to accelerate that pattern — driving down wages long before it replaces workers entirely. The disruption is not some distant hypothetical. It’s here. It’s happening in paychecks right now, quietly, before the headlines catch up. It’s happening in the lack of hiring entry level workers. It’s happening in the unusually high unemployment and underemployment rates for recent college graduates. It’s happening through early retirements. More will happen. It will get worse.

Well, I got tired of waiting for the people who should be leading on this to actually lead. So I built something.

The AI Pledge for Humanity

Today, I launched the AI Pledge for Humanity — an open letter and public commitment to turn AI’s wealth into a shared dividend for everyone.

The pledge has two tiers, and both matter.

The first tier is for people with resources to commit. Founding signatories go public with their commitment to invest a percentage of their income or wealth into UBI pilots, unconditional cash programs, and the advocacy work needed to make a shared AI dividend real. Their names, affiliations, and the organizations they support are listed publicly on the pledge page. This isn’t a vague promise. It’s a public, named, specific commitment — and it’s designed to be exactly the kind of thing that the people who keep talking about UBI should be doing but aren’t.

The second tier is for everyone else. If you aren’t in a position to commit resources but believe AI’s gains should be shared, you sign the petition in solidarity. Your signature joins the call and pushes those profiting from AI to step up. You become part of the pressure.

I think of these two tiers as complementary forces. The founding signatories are the proof that serious people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. The petition signers are the weight behind the demand that others do the same.

Why This, Why Now

I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about UBI. I’ve spoken at conferences around the world. I’ve advised political campaigns. And I believe that at this particular moment, the single most important thing the UBI movement needs is not another study, not another pilot, and not another article. It’s accountability. It’s action.

The conversation about AI and UBI has become too comfortable. People say the right things and do nothing. The AI Pledge for Humanity is designed to make that gap visible. It creates a public record of who is actually backing UBI with resources and who is just talking. And it gives everyone else a tool — a link they can share every time some tech leader mentions UBI without doing anything about it. A way to say: if you believe it, sign it. If you won’t sign it, we know what your belief is worth.

I believe this matters because UBI is not just an economic policy. An unconditional income floor does not just distribute money. It distributes freedom. It’s the power to say no — to bad wages, to unsafe conditions, to abusive situations. It’s the power to negotiate the terms of your own labor and the policies that govern your life. No other policy does this. A higher minimum wage doesn’t. A four-day workweek doesn’t. Unemployment insurance doesn’t, nor does it even reach more than about 30% of the unemployed, let alone everyone doing essential work who are underpaid or entirely unpaid. UBI reaches everyone, because everyone is the point.

And we can do this. An economy capable of producing unprecedented wealth is capable of sharing that wealth. The question has never really been whether we can afford it. The question is whether we will choose to do it.

One more thing worth saying plainly. The signatories of this pledge are committing private resources, but private resources alone won't fund UBI at sufficient scale. That requires public investment, which requires that those who benefit most from AI contribute the most to making sure its gains are shared. Wealth taxes. Corporate taxes. Whatever mechanism gets us there. The wealthy people who are actually serious about UBI will recognize that personal giving and supportive policy go together — that you can't credibly say you want a shared AI dividend while lobbying against the means to fund one. History tells us what happens to societies when wealth concentrates at the top and stays there. We should not need to relearn that lesson.

What I’m Asking You to Do

Three things, in order of commitment:

Sign the petition. It takes thirty seconds. Your name adds pressure. It tells every tech CEO, every AI investor, every founder who mentions UBI that the public is watching and expects them to act. Sign here.

Share it. Post it. Email it. Text it. And when you see someone powerful talk about UBI without backing it up, reply with this pledge and ask them: will you sign it?

Become a founding signatory. If you have resources to commit — whether that’s 1% of your wealth or 5% of your income or anything you choose — add your name to the public list of people who are putting their money behind their belief in the need for UBI. You can include a link to the UBI organization or project you support, helping others discover where to direct their own resources. Fill out the form here.

We already have founding signatories including Andrew Yang, Dustin Moskovitz, and other founders and co-founders, CEOs, engineers, AI managers, researchers, and advocates from multiple countries. The list is growing. I want your name on it too.

The Line in the Sand

I’ve spent 13 years making the case for UBI. I believe the case is made. The evidence is overwhelming. The logic is clear. The history is deep — from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman, this idea has allies everywhere.

What we lack is not evidence. What we lack is action.

The AI Pledge for Humanity draws a line. On one side are those willing to do something. On the other side are those content to predict a future they have no intention of building. I know which side I’m on.

We all made AI possible. We all deserve a share of what it makes possible.

If you agree with that statement, sign the pledge. And then send it to someone who needs to sign it more than you do.

Two guys in papier-mâché masks from Saguenay, Quebec, have been playing music together for 20 years since they were 13 years old. For most of that time, they existed in relative obscurity. Then, KEXP posted a video of them playing four songs and the internet lost its mind. As of this week, that video has over ten million views and their song Fabienk is No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 – Global chart. Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame has said they “absolutely blew his f*cking mind”. The band is Angine de Poitrine, and if you haven’t watched the full set yet, stop reading this, go watch it, and then come back. I’ll wait. Or just listen to it while you read this essay.

Okay. Now let me tell you why I think this band is one of the best arguments for universal basic income I’ve come across in a long time, and why Ireland and Albert Einstein are part of the same story.

I first want to make three points, like a triangle, because triangles are very on-brand for this article. Stick with me.

The first point is about Einstein. Albert Einstein did not become Albert Einstein in a university lab. He became Albert Einstein while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. The job paid the bills and left him enough hours in the day to think. That was key. That was the magic formula. Genius, plus a floor under him, plus time. With those three ingredients, one man starting in his twenties rewrote physics. Special relativity. The photoelectric effect. Brownian motion. The equivalence of mass and energy. All four in a single year, 1905, while he was a patent clerk. General relativity then came a decade later. We are still living inside the consequences of what that one man thought about with his basic needs met more than a hundred years ago. GPS satellites have to correct for his equations or your phone would send you to the wrong address. The energy released by splitting an atom is accounted for by his equations. Our entire picture of space and time is his.

Now try to put a dollar figure on that. Go ahead. I'll wait again. You can't. The value one Einstein delivered to humanity is incalculably large. It dwarfs any UBI program you could ever design. And here is the Einstein Argument for UBI in one sentence: if universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.

The thing is, Einstein changed how we think about space and time because he had space and time: he had intelligence, education, a floor under him, and time to think. That's not a miracle. That's a policy choice we refuse to make. How many Einsteins never became Einsteins, because they had genius, but lacked space and time?

The second point is about artists. In 2022, Ireland did something extraordinary. The government randomly selected 2,000 artists out of more than 8,200 eligible applicants and gave them €325 a week, unconditionally, for three years. No strings. No testing beyond being an artist. Just money, every week, so they could make art. Another 1,000 artists served as a control group.

The final results came in last year, and the Irish government read them and made the program permanent. The independent evaluation by Alma Economics found that the pilot cost €72 million and generated €80 million in benefits. Artists in the program earned on average €500 more per month in arts-related income, earned about €280 less from non-arts jobs, and drew roughly €100 less per month from social services. The money let them do more of the stuff they were good at and less of the stuff that was just paying the bills. The evaluators estimated that if scaled up permanently, the program could produce a 22% increase in artistic output. Ireland’s Minister for Culture, Patrick O’Donovan, called the scheme “the envy of the world.” He’s not wrong because other countries are already discussing doing the same.

I want to say that part again because it’s important: Ireland ran the experiment and calculated an impressive return on investment. Every euro invested came back as €1.39 in benefits to Irish society.

And Ireland isn’t alone. In New York State, Creatives Rebuild New York gave 2,400 artists $1,000 a month for 18 months. The impact study found exactly what you should expect: less debt, better mental health, more time spent on art, no drop in other income, and a bunch of artists who started landing grants, residencies, and paid work in their fields because they finally had the space to pursue them. Stephen Roll, one of the lead researchers, put it well when he asked:

The pattern from Ireland and New York matches the pattern from every saturation basic income pilot we’ve ever run, going all the way back to Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. When you give everyone in a community a floor of income, entrepreneurship skyrockets. New businesses get started. People take risks they wouldn’t have otherwise taken. This isn’t surprising. Starting a business is terrifying when the downside is losing your house. It’s a lot less terrifying when the downside is falling back on a basic income.

Ireland did not do this because it was a nice thing to do for artists. Ireland did it because art is an enormous economic and cultural engine, and the current system is incredibly wasteful of the people who run that engine. The Irish government calculated a monetary value for art and discovered what should have been obvious: investing in art pays more than it costs. We can apply that same math to everything a basic income unlocks.

The third point is Angine de Poitrine.

Here is what they are. They’re a two-person microtonal math rock band from Quebec. The guitarist calls himself Khn. The drummer calls himself Klek. They wear black and white polka-dotted costumes and papier-mâché masks with long noses and describe themselves as space-time voyagers. They do not speak to audiences in any real language, just in a made-up one. Between songs they form triangles with their hands and the crowd forms triangles back. They are weird in the absolute best way. They are marvelously, unapologetically, beautifully different.

Quick aside on what “math rock” actually means; math rock is rock music that uses unusual time signatures, odd rhythms, and the kind of structural complexity that makes your foot tap on the wrong beat. Where a normal pop song is in 4/4 — four beats per bar, over and over, like a heart — math rock might be in 7/8 or 11/8 or switch between them every few bars.

And on top of the math, they play microtonal music.

A quick primer for anyone who doesn't know what that means either: Western music uses twelve notes per octave. You can find all of them on a piano — seven white keys and five black. The distance between any two adjacent keys is a half step. Microtonal music uses the notes between those notes. A quarter tone sits exactly halfway between two adjacent piano keys — a pitch that, on a standard instrument, doesn't exist. Most rock and pop you've ever heard lives on whole steps and half steps. AdP lives on the steps in between. As one YouTube commenter wrote, "The elites don't want you to know this, but you can just make your own notes."

To play this music, Khn plays a custom double-necked hybrid instrument — half guitar, half bass — with twice the frets to play the microtonal notes. Klek originally built the first version himself with an actual saw. The current one was made by a professional friend. Khn plays it while looping parts in real time, with both hands, while also working a full pedalboard with his feet. I want to pause on that for a second. I can’t pick a sock up off the floor with my feet. My toes are purely decorative. This guy is using his feet as a third instrument while his hands are playing four times the notes as a normal guitarist, all while peering through his mask’s eye-holes covered by gold dollar signs.

I can’t explain why I love this band as much as I do. There’s just something happening in my brain when I listen to them that I don’t have words for. It’s like the music itself is playing me as an instrument. It’s like I never heard music before this. You know those videos of a hearing-impaired kid getting a cochlear implant and hearing their parent’s voice for the first time? That’s what it feels like when I hear AdP. It makes me very, very happy. And I want more of it. I want more art like this. Maybe that’s selfish. I don’t care. I want more artists to be able to push boundaries, to explore new ideas, to get really good at whatever brings them joy.

Because here’s the thing. Khn and Klek have been playing together for 20 years since they were 13. That’s two decades of two teenagers becoming two masters. Two decades of getting incredibly good at something that, until just months ago, almost certainly was not a significant source of income prior to going viral, and likely functioned as a passion-driven project rather than a primary livelihood. Two decades of pursuing what Khn himself has described as a series of inside jokes about rock music in general that turned, somewhere along the way, into one of the most creatively original things happening in music right now.

How many people, looking at a teenager in small-town Quebec in 2008 sawing extra frets into a guitar would have said “that kid is a genius”? I’m going to guess: none of them.

Angine de Poitrine is what happens when two people get to spend decades getting really good at something weird. They did it without UBI. Maybe they had parents who helped. Maybe they had day jobs. Maybe they had government supports I don’t know about. However they got there, they got there. But here is the point I keep coming back to: without UBI, people like this are exceedingly rare. Einsteins are rare. Khns and Kleks are rare. With UBI, they will be less rare. That is not a hope. That is a statistical near-certainty.

Which brings me to a finding I think about a lot.

Talent is Everywhere. Opportunity is Not.

A few years ago, an Italian research team ran a simulation of how talent and luck interact over a 40-year working life. Scientific American covered it beautifully. What they found was that pure talent was not the best predictor of success; luck was. The most successful people in the simulation were not the most talented — they were moderately talented people who got lucky at the right moments. Which sounds demoralizing, until the researchers did the interesting part. They asked: okay, given that luck is doing so much of the work, what’s the best way to fund people so that talent actually has a chance to break through?

They tried a bunch of strategies. Giving extra funding to people who were already successful did almost nothing. It concentrated more resources in people who didn’t necessarily have the most talent, just the most luck. Mixing “reward the successful” with equal distribution did a little better. Pure random distribution did better than that. And the winner, by a wide margin, was the strategy of giving everyone an equal amount. In their simulation, distributing a small equal sum to every person every five years led to 60% of the most talented people achieving above-average success. Bumping the equal sum up a little led to 100% of the most talented people having an impact.

Let me say that again. When the researchers gave everyone the same amount of money, 100% of the most talented people in the simulation had an impact. When they gave the money only to the “deserving,” most talent went nowhere.

This is UBI. This is exactly UBI. The paper is essentially a mathematical proof that a world with universal basic income is more meritocratic than a world without one, because luck-based distribution — which is what we have now — throws away most of the talent in the room. A UBI world isn’t a world that rewards laziness. It’s a world where the Einsteins and the Khns and the Kleks and the creatives you’ve never heard of yet actually get a shot at mastery that their talent deserves, instead of getting filtered out at age 19 because they couldn’t afford rent.

There’s a history lesson hiding in here that I want to pull out before I go any further. A huge amount of the best music ever made in the UK — The Clash, The Specials, UB40 (literally named after Unemployment Benefit, Form 40), Pulp, Oasis, and many more — was made by people who were, at the time, living on “the dole.” When Britain had a welfare system that gave artists a tiny floor of income and left them mostly alone to do their thing, Britain produced some of the most important popular music of the twentieth century. When that system was dismantled and means-tested and hoop-jumped and shamed out of existence, that pipeline dried up.

The dole worked as a floor. Not a universal one. Not an unconditional one. It came with strings. It was means-tested or contribution-based, which meant earning money reduced it, sometimes sharply. It came with conditions. Forms. Appointments. Proof that you were looking for work. And if you failed those conditions, there were sanctions. Payments cut or stopped. It also came with stigma. You had to declare yourself “unemployed” and submit to a system designed to monitor and correct you. Despite all that, it still did something important. It gave people just enough stability, in some cases, to create.

UBI keeps the only part that mattered—the floor—and removes the rest. No means tests. No earnings penalty. No proving you deserve it. It just shows up, whether you’re earning or not, and leaves you alone to decide what to do with your time.

This is What “Truly Human” Feels Like

Here is the question I want you to sit with. What is it about Angine de Poitrine that has made grown adults in the comments section write things like “30 seconds in: ‘this is fucking stupid’ 18 minutes in: ‘this is the greatest musical performance of the century” and “It’s the first time I’ve felt like a teenager listening to music since I was one”? Why this band? Why now?

I think part of it is that this is happening at the exact moment AI-generated art is flooding the internet. Every day there is more “AI slop.” We are surrounded by the remixing of what already existed into something smoother, less surprising, more average. And into that ocean of generated averageness, two genius maniacs from Quebec walk in wearing polka-dot costumes and start playing notes that don’t exist on a piano, using a custom double guitar with twice the frets each, moving their feet like hands, and the comments section lights up with one phrase repeated over and over: this is truly human.

Because it is. Whatever “truly human” means, this is it. Exploration. Creativity. Joy. Fun. The willingness to try something that might fail and look ridiculous. The willingness to saw extra frets into a perfectly good guitar because you had an idea and you had to play around. The willingness to spend twenty years on something that may never “pay off” in the financial or fame sense. AI can remix the old into new arrangements. And yes, humans remix everything too — every artist is influenced by other artists, every idea builds on older ideas. But there is something qualitatively different about what Einstein did, and what AdP is doing, and what every once-in-a-generation artist or scientist does when they show us something we’ve never seen before. It is the opposite of averaging. It is a leap into new territory. It is what humans do when they are free enough to follow the weird thing.

No matter how good AI gets, I promise you there will always remain a deep, stubborn love for what humans like Khn and Klek make, because part of what we love about AdP is knowing that a real person spent years of their actual life getting good enough to play that. The joy on the other end of the screen is real because the joy on the stage is real.

Genius from Scenius

Brian Eno — the producer, composer, and philosopher of ambient music, the guy who shaped records by Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and roughly half of the sounds you associate with the last fifty years — has a word for what I’m circling around, and it’s better than any word I’ve come up with. The word is scenius. It’s his coinage. It means the collective form of genius that emerges from a scene. The idea is that individual geniuses don’t pop out of a vacuum. Einstein didn’t happen in a box. Einstein happened inside a culture of physicists arguing with each other in the early twentieth century, reading each other’s papers, correcting each other’s math, building on each other’s ideas. The “genius” is the visible tip of an enormous submerged iceberg of other people doing related work. Scenius is the iceberg.

And Eno, for exactly this reason, supports UBI.

Eno’s argument is that the “need to earn a living” is actively hindering us from reaching our collective potential. If we want more geniuses, we need more scenius, and if we want more scenius, we need more people who are free to participate in the scene without having to focus every hour of their life around survival. He has said, in so many words, that UBI is the closest thing he has ever seen proposed to the future he actually wants — a future where the sheer cooperative potential of billions of differently-shaped human minds finally gets to express itself.

I think he’s right, and I think AdP is proof. Because Khn and Klek aren’t alone. They grew up inside a scene. They were absorbing Indian, Japanese, Arabic, Indonesian, and Turkish music as teenagers. They were listening to King Crimson and Zappa and Gentle Giant. Saguenay had a music scene. Quebec had a festival circuit. Someone at Trans Musicales in Rennes booked them. Someone at KEXP in Seattle chose to record them. Someone at the Montreal Jazz Festival let them play. And now, there are guitarists on YouTube and bass players on Instagram and composers in tiny apartments in cities you’ve never heard of watching the KEXP session for the 100th time and reaching for plastic zip ties to play quarter tones. AdP has already joined the scenius. They are now part of the raw material other people are going to make their own weird new things out of.

The dole era in Britain was scenius too. The Clash did not happen alone. The Specials did not happen alone. UB40 did not happen alone. Those bands were in pubs and rehearsal rooms and record shops, rubbing up against each other, ripping each other off, fighting, collaborating, improving, and the dole was what paid the rent on all of that. Take away the floor and the whole scene collapses. Britain learned that the hard way. It is, as Eno puts it, what happens when you make everyone spend all their time earning a living instead of contributing to the shared well.

We are all born different. Every human is a unique instrument with its own weird little tuning. UBI is the thing that lets us actually find out what we sound like together — lets the microtones between us ring out instead of getting tuned away. Scenius is the sound of a whole society finally in tune with its own diversity. We have never heard that sound. I would very much like to.

People ask all the time: what will people do with UBI? Won’t they just get lazy? Will they lose their sense of purpose and meaning? Will they stare at the wall?

No. Of course not. They will figure out cool new stuff. They will impress the hell out of the rest of us with how creative they can be when they aren’t forced to spend eight hours a day filling out forms for no real purpose, in what the late anthropologist David Graeber (who also supported UBI by the way) rightly called bullshit jobs. Humans are the most creative species we know of in the universe, and most of that creativity is being wasted right now on make-work and survival. Free it up, and watch what happens. Some people will make bad art. Some people will make good art. Some people will make a microtonal double-guitar and paint themselves with polka dots. Most people will just live better, which is also fine.

The Point of Bread is to Eat It

In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell pointed out that the whole economy is built on the assumption that production is noble and consumption is frivolous. You make the bread, you are virtuous. You eat the bread, you are wasting time. Russell thought this was absurd, and he was right. The point of bread is not to fuel you to make more bread. The point of bread is to be eaten and enjoyed. To take a few minutes of your day to sit down and think, “damn, that’s some good bread.” Maybe alone. Maybe with someone you love. Maybe with enough time to invent a new sandwich and hand it to a stranger who then wonders if bread was always this ambitious.

Work is important. Nobody is saying work is not important. But the fruits of work are the whole point of work. If you spend your whole life too busy cooking to ever eat, something has gone very wrong.

As I wrote in the Monsters, Inc. Argument for UBI, we are currently running an economy on fear, when joy turns out to be ten times more powerful. A world where more people get to do the science and the art they actually want to do — instead of whatever happens to pay the bills — is a radically better world than the one we live in now. Angine de Poitrine and Einstein are what we get when people are free to do what they truly want. The current world is what we get when most of them can’t.

One more thing before I wrap, because I have not seen anyone else point this out and I can’t stop thinking about it. Look closely at the polka dots on their costumes and their stage backdrops. The dots aren’t arranged horizontally and vertically. They’re rotated 45 degrees. Take that pattern and rotate it back 45 degrees — the dots sit in perfect squares. Rotate another 90 degrees — still squares. The world most of us see. But rotate it that extra quarter turn, the quarter turn they live at, and suddenly the same dots aren’t sitting in squares anymore. They’re sitting in bisected squares — aka triangles. And diamonds. And, if you let your eyes relax a little, cubes. A whole different geometry pops out of the exact same dots.

I think Khn and Klek did a quarter turn to the world. Where the rest of us saw nothing but squares, they saw triangles and diamonds and a hidden dimension that was there the whole time. And now, because we get to watch them, we get to see what they see. We get to borrow their quarter turn. It is, quite literally, glorious.

So let me tie this triangle together.

What Humans Become When They’re Free

Einstein became Einstein, partly because he had a patent clerk’s salary and the time to think. With UBI, more Einsteins will have a version of that combination, and even one more Einstein — just one — pays for every dollar UBI ever cost, and gifts humanity centuries of progress. Science is essential. But it is only half of the picture.

The other half is art. Who are the artist Einsteins? Or maybe I have the question backwards, and the real question is: which artist was Einstein most like? Einstein himself said imagination was more important than knowledge, and he played the violin his whole life, and he thought in pictures. He loved math and he loved music. He said that if he had not been a physicist, he probably would have been a musician.

Math and music have always been the same language spoken two different ways. So maybe the better question isn’t which artist Einstein was like. Maybe the better question is: which mathematician is Angine de Poitrine most like? We need both art and science, and we need more people free to get really good at whichever one brings them joy — especially those who, like Einstein and like AdP, refuse to believe the two are really different things.

Ireland ran the experiment on artists and got a positive return on investment within three years. New York ran the experiment and got a bunch of artists the time and space to finally breathe and create. Every saturation basic income pilot in history has shown that giving everyone a floor leads to more entrepreneurship, more creativity, more risk-taking, more health, more community. The results are in. The studies are done. The math has been checked.

And into this moment of proof walks AdP, fresh off a KEXP session with over 10 million views, looking like a Dada painting, playing the notes between notes, showing us something new under the sun. Two guys from Quebec who spent twenty years perfecting their craft before it ever popped off. This is what human beings do when they have the time and space to do it. Einstein and Angine de Poitrine are not exceptions to the rule. They are the rule of what humans can be when they are free. The exceptions are how few of them we currently get.

With UBI, we will get more. More Einsteins. More Khns and more Kleks. More bread worth eating. More sandwiches we haven’t invented yet. More art that makes you feel like you’re hearing music for the first time, like a bunch of neurons in your brain just woke up and asked where this has been your whole life.

If you already support UBI, keep supporting it. If you don’t yet, I hope this article moved you a quarter-note closer. And whatever you do, please go watch the full AdP session on KEXP. Make a triangle with your hands and waves with your arms while you watch. You’ll know when.

That’s the Angine de Poitrine argument for UBI. I hope it helped connect some dots.

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Universal Basic Income: It’s a foundation!

There is a new trend in Democratic politics, and it is one of the most frustrating things I’ve watched in years.

Senator Cory Booker wants to more than double the standard deduction to $75,000 for married couples. Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to exempt the first $46,000 in income from federal taxes. Katie Porter, running for governor of California, wants to exempt the first $100,000 from state income taxes. This is what passes for Democratic economic policy in 2026: a bidding war over who can shield the most income from taxation.

I get the political instinct. Republicans passed their “One Big Beautiful Bill” full of tax giveaways, and Democrats want to show they can cut taxes too. But this is the same strategic error Kamala Harris made in 2024 when she tried to out-tough Republicans on immigration instead of making the affirmative case for what immigrants contribute to this country. When you play on your opponent’s field, you lose, even when you win.

Taxes are not the enemy. Taxes serve vital functions. The question should never be whether to tax, but what to tax and how to make sure the prosperity we create together actually reaches the people who create it. On that question, Democrats are reaching for the wrong tool.

The right tool is not a bigger deduction. It’s a fully refundable tax credit.

Deductions Help the Rich More Than the Poor. That’s How They Work.

A tax deduction reduces your taxable income. That sounds equal if everyone gets the same deduction, but it’s not. The value of a deduction depends entirely on your tax bracket, which means it’s worth more to those who already have more.

Consider the current standard deduction of $16,100 for a single filer. A worker earning $30,000 is in the 12% bracket. That deduction saves them $1,932. A worker earning $200,000 has income reaching into the 24% and 32% brackets. That same deduction saves them over $4,000. The identical provision in the tax code delivers twice as much benefit to the person who needs it less.

Now consider someone earning $12,000 a year — a part-time worker, a caregiver piecing together hours. The standard deduction zeroes out their small tax bill, but that’s all it can do. It cannot put a single dollar in their pocket. A deduction can only reduce what you owe. It can never give you cash.

This is the fatal flaw in every plan built around expanding the standard deduction. Booker’s plan to raise it to $75,000 for married couples would deliver about $10,000 in annual tax savings to a couple earning $300,000, according to the calculator on his own website. A family earning $20,000? Nothing. The poorest 20% of households would see zero benefit from Van Hollen’s plan because their federal tax liability is already zero.

You cannot fight poverty with a tool that is invisible to poor people, and you cannot reduce inequality with a tool that helps the rich more than the working class.

A Tax Credit Does What a Deduction Cannot

A tax credit reduces your tax bill dollar-for-dollar. If the credit is $4,500 and you owe $5,000 in taxes, you now owe just $500. Everyone gets the same amount of reduction, regardless of their bracket. Simple. Fair. Equality before the law.

But the real power unlocks when the credit is fully refundable. A fully refundable credit means that if you owe $1,000 in taxes and the credit is $4,500, you don’t just zero out your tax bill — you receive $3,500 as a cash payment. The credit reaches below the tax line into the population that deductions can’t touch: the people in poverty.

We know this works because we already proved it.

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan expanded the Child Tax Credit to up to $3,600 per child and made it fully refundable — meaning families previously excluded because they earned too little could receive the full amount. According to Census data, the expansion contributed to a more than 40% reduction in child poverty, driving the rate to a historic low. The CTC lifted 3 million children out of poverty. Full refundability was the main driver, bringing 19 million more children into eligibility.

When Congress let the expansion expire, child poverty more than doubled.

That single year of data is all the proof anyone should need that the mechanism works. The question is whether Democrats have the vision to apply it more broadly.

The Standard Tax Credit: What Democrats Should Actually Propose

Here is what I believe Democrats should do. Replace the standard deduction with a fully refundable Standard Tax Credit — the STC — of $375 per month for every adult and every child, or $4,500 per year per person. Design it the same way the 2021 expanded CTC was designed: anyone can choose to receive the credit as an advance monthly payment, or claim it as a lump sum at tax time.

Like the current standard deduction, the STC is an alternative to itemizing. Filers choose one or the other — not both. Households with high mortgage interest, charitable giving, or state and local taxes can still itemize if that produces a better result for them (although these could also be converted to credits). Everyone else takes the STC, which for the vast majority of Americans will be the far better deal.

This single reform replaces and consolidates the standard deduction, CTC, EITC, WIC, and TANF — converting multiple cash programs into one. No applications. No caseworkers. No benefit cliffs that punish you for taking a raise. Because the credit goes to every adult and every child, a married couple with two children receives $1,500 per month, or $18,000 per year — more than or equal to the combined value of the programs the STC replaces for virtually all households, with a hold-harmless provision ensuring no family receives less than they do today.

Keep the current tax brackets in place for everyone earning under $250k — today’s 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, and 32% rates. Then raise the existing 35% bracket (currently starting at $250,525 for singles and $501,050 for married couples) to 37%, raise the existing 37% bracket (currently starting at $640,600 and $768,700) to 40%, and add one new bracket on top: 50% on income above $1 million ($2 million for couples). Tax capital gains and dividends the same as ordinary income under these brackets — no more preferential rates that let billionaires pay a lower effective rate than their secretaries. The STC replaces the standard deduction as the primary mechanism for reducing taxes on the overwhelming majority of Americans, and the new top brackets raise taxes at the top to help balance it out.

The credit is what makes the system progressive at the bottom. Because it's a flat amount, $4,500 represents a much larger share of income for a low earner than a high one — and because it's fully refundable, it reaches the people deductions can’t. The brackets handle fairness at the top. The credit handles it at the bottom and middle.

Who Pays More. Who Pays Less.

Under this system, the bottom 90% of Americans are taxed less than they are now. A single filer earning $12,000 goes from owing nothing (and getting nothing) to receiving a net refund of about $3,300. At $30,000, they save $2,568. At $50,000, they save $2,416. At $100,000, they save $958. At $150,000, they save $636. At $200,000, they save $420.

For married couples with two credits, the savings are even larger. A couple earning $40,000 saves $5,457. At $100,000, they save $4,831. At $200,000, they save $1,916. At $400,000, they still save $840. Add children — each receiving their own $375 per month — and the savings grow further.

The crossover — the income at which the new system taxes someone more than the current one — lands at around $206k for single filers and $412k for married couples, roughly the top 5% to 10% of each group. A single filer at $300k pays about $2,124 more per year. A single filer at $500k pays about $6,124 more. A couple at $700k pays about $6,249 more. These amounts represent modest fractions of incomes that will increasingly be the product of AI-augmented productivity — income flowing disproportionately to those capturing the gains from technologies we all helped train.

Then the new top brackets kick in. A single filer at $900,000 pays about $17,000 more once the 37→40 rate change takes effect. At $1.5 million, $85,000 more once the 50% bracket takes over. At $5 million, over $540,000 more. Taxing capital gains as ordinary income ensures that the wealthiest — whose income is disproportionately derived from investments rather than wages — contribute their fair share. Add a wealth tax of 1% above $50 million, 2% above $1 billion, and 3% above $10 billion, and the wealthiest finally begin paying their fair share in taxes.

The bottom 90% see their tax burden go down. The next 9% see small increases — typically less than 1% of their income. The top 1% sees substantial increases. The top 0.1% sees the largest increases. This is progressive taxation that reduces the economic inequality of this Second Gilded Age.

How to Pay for It

The cost of a $375/month standard credit replacing the standard deduction is approximately $1 trillion a year. Here are the other tax offsets:

• Consolidating existing programs — CTC ($120 billion), EITC ($75 billion), WIC ($7 billion), and TANF ($17 billion) — recovers ~$220 billion.

• The new top brackets — raising the existing 35% rate to 37%, the existing 37% rate to 40%, and adding a new 50% bracket above $1 million ($2 million for couples) — approximately $135 billion.

• Taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income raises a conservatively estimated $150 billion to an optimistic $220 billion.

• The wealth tax adds another $240 billion or more.

Total revenue: approximately $745 billion to $815 billion. That leaves a gross annual deficit of roughly $245B to $315B. But that shortfall does not account for what happens when you give money to people who spend it.

A Credit Grows the Economy. The Deficit Pays for Itself.

When low- and middle-income households have cash, they spend it. The USDA estimates that every dollar of SNAP generates $1.50 to $1.80 in GDP. Canada’s Child Benefit generates $2 per $1 while recovering over 55 cents per dollar in taxes from the resulting economic boost. A larger standard deduction disproportionately benefits higher earners who save the windfall. A refundable credit puts money in the hands of immediate spenders. That spending is revenue for businesses. That revenue creates jobs. The economy grows from the bottom up.

Calnitsky and Gonalons-Pons analyzed the Dauphin Mincome experiment and found significant reductions in both total crime and violent crime when residents received guaranteed basic income. Scaled conservatively for the smaller poverty-reduction effect of a $375/month credit relative to Dauphin’s near-elimination of poverty, the total societal benefit of the resulting crime reduction is approximately $300 to $500 billion per year — roughly $75 billion of which translates into direct federal budget savings through reduced criminal justice spending, lower Medicaid costs from violent-crime injuries, and recovered tax revenue from people who were not victimized. Evelyn Forget’s analysis of the same experiment documented an 8.5% reduction in hospitalization rates from fewer accidents, injuries, and mental health admissions. Applied to the roughly $620 billion Medicaid and Medicare spend on hospital care, that’s another $53 billion saved. GDP multiplier effects generate approximately $200 billion in additional tax revenue.

Those three offsets total $328 billion — more than the estimated deficit. The plan therefore runs a net annual surplus of roughly $13 to $83 billion in its first year. And those are just first-year, federally-relevant effects. Research led by Irwin Garfinkel at Columbia University estimates that the children’s portion of the credit alone would generate trillions in present-value annual societal returns through higher future earnings, better health, and reduced long-term government spending — a potential 15-to-1 return on investment per child. This is not a costly proposal. It is a plan that pays for itself, even before counting the massive generational benefits to children and the country they will inherit.

This Is Universal Basic Income. Call It What It Is.

What I’m describing is a small universal basic income delivered through the tax code. A fully refundable tax credit paid to every person, monthly, with no conditions — that is UBI. The political scientist Philippe Van Parijs explained years ago why universality is essential even when it seems counterintuitive to include the rich. Giving money to everyone, even the rich, is not better for the rich but better for the poor. The high earners pay for their own credit and more. Universality makes it much harder for the poor to be excluded or fall through the cracks. Those just below income cutoffs are no longer trapped by the threat of losing means-tested benefits if they find a job. And a universal transfer does not stigmatize the poor the way a targeted one does.

Van Parijs also offered a critical insight: sometimes the best way to achieve a basic income is to present it as a refundable tax credit — simply reducing taxation for everyone, with a cash transfer to those whose tax liability is less than the credit. That is exactly what this proposal does. It is UBI, implemented through the mechanism Americans already understand and accept.

“But Won’t People Stop Working?” No.

The most common objection to UBI is that it will discourage work. The evidence says otherwise — and at $375 per month, the question barely makes sense. $375 is not enough to live on. It is not enough to pay rent in any major American city. It is enough to pay for food, take the edge off, cover a car repair, keep the lights on during a bad month. It is a foundation, not a net full of holes. It’s a floor, not a ceiling.

Unconditional income experiments of $500 to $1,000 per month have not shown people leaving the workforce in any worrisome way. Plenty have shown increases. Alaska, which has paid every resident an annual dividend since 1982, saw increased employment. Their similar size UBI — which could be $3,800 this year — has had no negative impact on full-time work and a 17% increase in part-time work, as cash recipients generated more demand that local businesses had to hire more workers to meet.

But the most relevant evidence is what happened here in 2021. About 40 million American families received monthly Child Tax Credit payments of $250 to $300 per child — approximately the scale of a $375 Standard Tax Credit, through the same delivery mechanism, to the population that would benefit most under this proposal. Parents kept working. Employment among parents actually went up slightly. And economists who studied the impact found no measurable inflationary effect from the CTC payments — the inflation that did occur was driven by global supply chains and oil shocks, not by families receiving cash. The Standard Tax Credit has, in essence, already had a massive trial experiment. It worked.

A Foundation, Not a Ceiling

For those on the other side — those who think $375 per month is too low — I agree. It is. $375 is a starting point, not an end point. The Standard Tax Credit is the foundational layer of a UBI that can grow as additional tax mechanisms are added on top. Each layer is a separate income stream feeding the same monthly delivery mechanism. Some illustrative possibilities:

• A 10% value-added tax could raise roughly $1.76 trillion per year. Split 2:1 between adults and children — recognizing adults consume more — that adds about $487/mo per adult and $243/mo per child.

• A 1% land value tax would likely equate to about $200B–$400B annually, with ~$300B as a midpoint estimate based on current rough land value ranges. With the same 2:1 split, that adds about $100/mo per adult and $50/mo per child. I recommend raising this to 5% over the course of 5-10 years, which would raise the amounts to $500/mo per adult and $250/mo per kid and grow as land value grows.

• A 1.5% stock dilution tax requiring the roughly 35,000 corporations valued over $100 million to issue 1.5% new stock each year into a national wealth fund — sold gradually over the following year through normal trading — could generate around $1.33 trillion. Distributed as a productivity dividend, that adds about $400/mo per adult and $200/mo per child that would grow as the stock market grows.

• A $100-per-ton carbon tax on the roughly 5 billion tons of US emissions could raise about $500 billion, adding another $125/mo per person.

• A tax on intellectual property rents — applying to royalties, licensing income, and excess profits from patents and copyrights — could raise roughly $200 billion per year, adding about $60/mo per adult and $30/mo per child.

Stack all of those layers on top of the $375 Standard Tax Credit, and the total reaches around $2,000/mo per adult and over $1,200/mo per child — a full-on basic income floor well above the $1,350/mo 2026 federal poverty line. The child amount would cover about 90% of the median cost of raising a child to an adult. Each layer stands on its own merits: the VAT taxes consumption instead of income in the AI Age, the LVT taxes land and increases the housing supply, the stock issuance tax shares national productivity gains that haven’t been shared since the mid-1970s, the carbon tax reduces pollution and incentivizes clean energy, and the IP tax captures economic rent and expands the public domain. The details of each are for other articles and there can be any number of more layers. The point is that the Standard Tax Credit is the base layer that reduces the income taxes of the bottom 90% of Americans. Everything else can build on top of it.

Closing the Deal

“$375 a month for every American” is a clearer, more compelling, more memorable message than “We’ll raise the standard deduction to $75,000.” One is concrete. The other is accounting jargon. One reaches every single person. The other reaches only those with enough income to benefit — and gives more to those who already have more. Democrats don’t need to become the party of not taxing. They need to become the party that leaves more money in 9 out of 10 people’s pockets after taxing. That is not a tax deduction. That is a dividend on being American.

Stop bidding up the standard deduction. Start fighting for the Standard Tax Credit.

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Universal Basic Income: It’s a foundation!

As I write this, four astronauts are hurtling toward the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew. On April 1, 2026, NASA’s Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center — the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in more than fifty years. For the first time since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in December 1972, human beings are returning to the Moon.

Watching that launch, I felt something I haven’t felt in years. I grew up on Star Trek and The Right Stuff. I grew up believing I might one day work on the Moon, or fly a spaceship, or at the very least live in a world that took its cues from the Federation rather than centibillionaires. That feeling where your chest tightens and your eyes sting because you’re watching your species do something extraordinary — that’s what programs like Apollo and Artemis II give me. And it’s that same feeling that drives my work on universal basic income.

The connection between these two things is not merely a metaphor. It is historical.

In August 1969, three days before announcing his Family Assistance Plan — a guaranteed income floor for American families with children — Richard Nixon asked himself why he was doing it. He had doubts. There was no airtight evidence it would work. There was no overwhelming political mandate. There was only the momentum of a decision-making process that had reached the point where it would actually be proposed. He’d already decided. But why?

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan recounted in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, Nixon’s reasoning came down to three propositions. First, the existing welfare system was destroying the poor, especially the Black poor, and this was becoming the most serious social problem of the time. Second, it was time to bring the South back into the mainstream of American life, and what fundamentally kept the South apart was poverty. Third, it was necessary to prove that government could work — that there was an answer to what Nixon called the “crisis of confidence in the capacity of government to do its job.”

And then Moynihan recorded the crucial line: “The moonshot had been one kind of success; a guaranteed income would be another, at least as important, surely more difficult. America needed some successes.”

Nixon understood something we seem to have forgotten. The Moon landing wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was proof that a democratic government could marshal collective resources, set an audacious goal, and deliver. It restored faith in what we could accomplish together. A guaranteed income, Nixon believed, would do the same — but for the ground beneath our feet rather than the sky above our heads.

He was right. And over half a century later, we still haven’t done it.

We Choose to Do These Things

When John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University in September 1962, he did not promise that going to the Moon would be simple. He promised the opposite. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” he said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

I look at universal basic income the same way. Ending poverty will not be easy. Restructuring an economy where the top 1% owns nearly a third of all wealth — a record high, per the Federal Reserve — while the bottom half of Americans shares just 2.5% will not be easy. Building the political will to guarantee every person an income floor that prevents them from ever falling into destitution — in a country where we’ve been conditioned to believe that poverty is a moral failing rather than a systemic design choice — will not be easy.

But we can do it. We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the knowledge. We have the economic capacity. We have the wealth. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. What we lack is the political decision to distribute that wealth in a way that reflects our stated values. We could return to the level of inequality we had in the 1970s and the rich would still be rich. But the poor would no longer be in poverty as we presently define it, and the middle class would have the stability it once had.

An economy where 10% of the population consumes 50% of all goods and services is not a strong economy. It is a distorted one. It is an economy oriented around serving the preferences of a small fraction of the population, rather than meeting the needs of all of us. This is destabilizing. It corrodes social trust, weakens democratic participation, and creates the conditions for authoritarianism. It is the economic structure of a society in decline, not one reaching for the stars.

There's a joke that floats around the internet where someone sits down with Karl Marx and explains what the world is like today. They ask him for his analysis. Marx's response is not about capitalism or class struggle. It's: "Holy shit, you went to the Moon?" They try to redirect but Marx won't let it go: "The Moon in the sky?" It's funny because it captures something real. If you could explain our world to anyone from the 19th century — the technology, the productive capacity, the sheer wealth — the most baffling part would not be what we've achieved. It would be what we've chosen not to do with what we've achieved. We went to the Moon. We mapped the human genome. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. And yet tens of millions of Americans live in poverty. That's not a resource problem. It's a decision problem.

The Parable of Two Wolves

There’s a Cherokee parable I love about an elder teaching a child. Inside every person, the elder explains, two wolves are fighting. One is fear, anger, despair. The other is hope, courage, love. The child asks which wolf wins. The elder answers, “The one you feed.”

I think about this constantly. Not just as individuals, but as a civilization — which wolf are we feeding? And why are we doing that?

When we launch astronauts to the Moon, we feed the hopeful wolf. When we invest in science and exploration, when we set goals that seem impossible and then achieve them, we feed the hopeful wolf. When we tell stories about futures worth building — futures without poverty, without hunger, without the quiet desperation of wondering whether you can make rent — we feed the hopeful wolf.

Universal basic income feeds the hopeful wolf too. It says, “We believe everyone deserves to stand on solid ground.” It says, “We have the resources to end poverty, and we choose to end it.” It says, “The purpose of an economy is to serve those who comprise it, not the other way around.”

And I believe these things feed each other. When we envision a future without poverty, a future where every person has the freedom to pursue work that matters most to them, it becomes easier to imagine a future where we explore the galaxy. And when we do hard things like put human beings on the Moon and send them on to Mars, it becomes easier to believe we can do the hard domestic work of guaranteeing economic security for every citizen.

Gene Roddenberry — the man who created Star Trek and, in doing so, gave millions of people like me a vision of what humanity could become — understood this. He built a fictional universe premised on the idea that humanity would outgrow poverty, war, and greed, and that our species would dedicate itself to exploration and betterment. As he put it: “Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it’s not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans.”

That vision mattered. It still matters. It matters because the stories we tell about the future shape the future we build. And right now, we are not telling enough stories like Star Trek. Too much of our science fiction, and too much of our politics, is dystopian. It feeds the fearful wolf. We get The Hunger Games. We get collapse narratives. We get fiction that assumes the worst about human nature and then builds worlds to match. We feed the fearful, angry, despairing wolf.

I want the Star Trek future, not the Hunger Games future. And I believe UBI is one of the key policies that gets us there.

What Exclusion Costs

There is a reason Nixon identified the failure of welfare as one of his three motivations. The traditional welfare system doesn’t just fail to solve poverty — it actively undermines the relationship between citizens and their government, and Nixon knew that because he experienced it himself as a kid.

Think about what means-tested welfare actually requires. You must prove you are poor enough. You must fill out forms, attach supporting documents, submit to interviews, and open your life to bureaucratic scrutiny. You must do this repeatedly. And after all of that, you may be told you don’t qualify, even when you are barely surviving. And if you do get it, you can lose it if you work to increase your income, leaving you potentially worse off. The experience is dehumanizing by design.

Research by Katrina Kosec and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo confirms what this does to how people view their government. Studying Pakistan’s national cash transfer program, they found that when someone in need barely qualifies for assistance, their trust in government increases modestly. But when someone in need barely doesn’t qualify — when they are denied help despite being just as desperate — their trust in government collapses by a far greater magnitude. The negative effect of exclusion dwarfs the positive effect of inclusion. It is enormously more damaging to deny someone help they need than it is beneficial to give someone help they need.

This is the trap of targeted welfare. Every time you draw a line and say “you qualify but you don’t,” you create a person on the wrong side of that line who now has a rational reason to distrust and resent their government. Multiply that by millions of people across hundreds of programs with different eligibility criteria, different renewal periods, different documentation requirements, and you get what we have now — a population that broadly believes government doesn’t work. Not because government can’t work, but because for most people who interact with it at its most critical point of contact, it doesn’t.

Universality solves this. When everyone gets the same floor — the same unconditional income that both prevents poverty and enables participation — no one is excluded. The same goes for universal healthcare. No one is told they’re not poor enough or not deserving enough. No one is forced to prove their suffering to a bureaucrat. The floor is there for everyone, just as the Moon is there for everyone to look up at and dream.

The System of Pulleys

Thomas Paine, that great pamphleteer of the American founding, saw this clearly over two centuries ago. In Agrarian Justice, he argued that every person is owed a share of the common inheritance — the natural resources and accumulated knowledge of civilization — and that government’s role is to ensure that share is paid. He envisioned government not as a punitive institution that sorts the worthy from the unworthy, but as what he called a system of pulleys — a mechanism for lifting everyone, in a way that private charity never can and never will.

Universal basic income is that system of pulleys. It treats every person as having equal rights. It looks at every citizen as a shareholder in the economy they collectively comprise. We are all equal before the law when we all receive the same floor — a floor that both prevents us from falling into poverty and enables us to stand upright and and build on a strong foundation.

This is what our founding documents promise, even if we have never fully delivered. All people are created equal. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. These are not just slogans. They are engineering specifications for a society that we have never finished building.

The Moonshot We Still Haven’t Taken

Artemis II is a reminder. It’s a reminder that we can do extraordinary things when we decide to do them. It’s a reminder that the same country that put human beings on the Moon in 1969 — with less computing power than exists in a modern thermostat — can solve the problem of poverty if it chooses to. We went to the Moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. We should end poverty for the same reason.

Nixon was right to connect these two ambitions. The moonshot proved that government could do something magnificent. A universal basic income would prove that government could do something essential — that it could work not just in the extraordinary and spectacular sense of spaceflight, but in the ordinary, daily, foundational sense of making sure no one in the richest country on Earth ever goes without food, shelter, or dignity.

We are the country that first landed on the Moon. We should also be the country that first abolishes poverty. These are not competing goals. They are the same goal — the goal of a civilization that believes in itself enough to do what is hard and what is right.

The astronauts aboard Integrity are about to travel farther from Earth than any human being has ever gone, breaking the distance record set by Apollo 13. Back here on the ground, tens of millions of Americans are struggling to pay rent, buy groceries, or keep the lights on — not because the wealth doesn’t exist, but because we haven’t decided to share it.

We need to decide. Roddenberry imagined a future where there would be no hunger, no greed, and all the children would grow up to pursue what they most wanted to pursue. That future doesn’t build itself. It gets built by people who choose to feed the hopeful wolf — who insist, against all the cynicism and all the despair, that tomorrow can be better than today.

Going back to the Moon is one way to feed our good wolf. A universal basic income for every American is another. And I believe, as Nixon did in 1969, that doing both is how we prove — to ourselves and to the world — that self-governance works. That democracy can deliver. That a government of the people can actually be for the people.

The moonshot we took in 1969 changed how humanity saw itself. The moonshot we still haven’t taken — the one that ends poverty — would change how we live.

It’s time to take it.

If reading this was worth your time, it’s worth sharing. Share it, subscribe for free, and if you can, make a monthly pledge to keep this work going.

Thank you to my UBI Producer level patrons: Gisele Huff, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Jeremy Wertheimer, Andrew Yang, Kimi Avary, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Janos Abel, Miki Phagan, Draper Kauffman, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Joe Ballou, Arjun Banker, Christine Celli, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, John Sullivan, Stephen Castro-Starkey, CodyS, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, bradzone, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Nicolas Pouillard, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Linda Hearne, David Allen, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons for their support.

Looking for a UBI-focused nonprofit to support? Donate to the Income To Support All (ITSA) Foundation to support ambitious UBI projects focused on research, storytelling, and direct implementation to realize economic freedom for all.

Universal Basic Income: It’s a foundation!

There was a time in America when productivity growth and wage growth moved together. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, as productivity rose, pay rose with it. Workers produced more and earned more. That was not charity. It was the natural result of an economy that shared its gains with those who generated them.

That relationship is dead. It has been dead for half a century.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1979, productivity has annually grown over twice the rate on average as typical worker pay. Before the late 1970s, these lines were practically the same line. Then policy choices — the erosion of the minimum wage, the dismantling of unions, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation — broke the link between what the economy produced and what most people received. The income generated by rising productivity did not vanish. It went into the salaries of top executives, into corporate profits, and into returns to shareholders.

A February 2025 study by the RAND Corporation put a number on it. Carter Price estimated the gap between what the bottom 90 percent of American workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned had income growth remained as evenly distributed as it was in 1975. The annual gap in 2023 alone was $3.9 trillion. The cumulative total since 1975 was $79 trillion. Seventy-nine trillion dollars flowed upward, away from the vast majority of Americans, over five decades, because we allowed it to happen through deliberate policy choices.

Some will suggest raising the minimum wage would fix this. It wouldn’t. A higher minimum wage helps the lowest-paid workers but does nothing for the millions above it who have still seen their share of productivity growth erode. Some will point to unions. Restoring union power would help, and we should do it, but even at peak union strength, not every worker was unionized, and unions cannot reach into every home where unpaid care work — raising children, caring for aging parents — produces enormous value invisible to the labor market. No minimum wage increase or collective bargaining agreement will ever put a paycheck in the hand of a parent staying home with a child. Neither would a tax cut.

Universal healthcare? We should have it. Decoupling survival from employment is critical. But universal healthcare distributes healthcare, not the gains of productivity. Shorter work weeks? Worth doing as AI makes it possible to produce more in fewer hours. But shorter work weeks distribute hours of employment, not the wealth generated by the economy. A negative income tax? The net outcome can look like UBI on a spreadsheet, but an NIT phases out as income rises which is the same as taxing the incomes of only those in the phaseout range. It does not provide the same amount to everyone. It does not say to every person: you are a shareholder.

Only universal basic income does that. Only UBI distributes the same amount to every person, unconditionally, as a foundational floor beneath everyone’s feet.

Everyone Deserves a Share Because Everyone Built This

Here is the strongest and most fundamental case for universality, and it goes beyond wages and productivity charts.

As the political economist Gar Alperovitz argued in his essay on technological inheritance in 2016, the overwhelming source of modern economic output is not the labor any individual performs today. It is the accumulated knowledge and technology inherited from every generation before us. MIT economist Robert Solow demonstrated that nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the 20th century was attributable to “technical change” — a catch-all term encompassing technological innovation, accumulated scientific knowledge, improvements in education, better organizational methods, and any other factor that made a given amount of labor and capital produce more output than before. US per capita output grew roughly sevenfold over the 20th century. None of us individually earned that sevenfold increase. We inherited it.

This inheritance argument applies with full force to AI. Large language models were trained on text that billions of people wrote. Audio and video models were trained on audio and video that billions of people created. We all generated that training data. But it is impossible to determine who contributed what, whose data is being used most in any given output, or whose data is qualitatively more valuable. The complexity is irreducible. What we can recognize is that everyone contributed, and therefore everyone should benefit.

This is not an abstract philosophical claim. When someone puts up capital to fund a corporation, they often receive a dividend when that corporation matures and generates profits. Our collective human output — our language, our knowledge, our creative work — is the capital that built AI. We are the shareholders. UBI is our dividend.

We Paid for This With Public Dollars Too

The case for a universal dividend is further strengthened by the fact that the foundational technologies behind AI were funded by public dollars. Federal investment through DARPA has been the dominant source of AI research funding since the 1960s. The internet emerged from ARPANET. The NSF funded the research behind Google’s PageRank algorithm. DARPA’s Grand Challenges launched the self-driving car industry. Federal agencies have poured billions into the computing infrastructure, neural network research, and reinforcement learning that made modern AI possible.

We all funded the research that created AI. The appropriate return on that investment is not being told to go find another job. A return on investment is a dividend. We invested. We deserve our cut. And we all deserve to benefit even if we keep our jobs, because productivity will continue to grow, and the benefits of everything that got us here should not only go to one percent of people.

Job Guarantees and Targeted Benefits Are Not Alternatives

Do not offer us a new job as our dividend. A job guarantee is not an alternative to UBI. If someone loses their job to AI and a job guarantee helps them find another, that is useful for that person. But it does nothing for the person whose wages have been suppressed for decades. It does nothing for the parent at home. It does nothing for the retired person or the person with a disability. It benefits only those who take the guaranteed job. Everyone should directly benefit from productivity growth, not just those whose employment situation happens to qualify them.

The same applies to benefits targeted only at those who lose their jobs. Unemployment insurance is a net with holes. It only catches those who fall through a specific kind of floor in a specific kind of way. Meanwhile, everyone watches productivity grow and their share shrink.

We don’t tell stockholders that we can’t trust them with cash, so instead of a dividend, they’ll receive food or housing. That would be absurd. Cash allows people to determine for themselves what they most need. Universal basic services are fine as complements, but they are no substitute for cash in people’s hands.

How Much Should the Dividend Be?

The RAND study provides a useful benchmark. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans were shortchanged by $3.9 trillion in 2023 alone, that number has only grown since. Divided among every adult in the United States, we are looking at a dividend that should be about $1,390 per month here in 2026. Factor in a smaller amount per child — roughly $500 per month — and we are talking about a dividend that would end poverty in the United States.

The poverty line for a single adult in the US sits at $1,330 per month. Therefore, a UBI of at least $1,400 per month for every adult, with $500 per month for every child, would abolish poverty as we define it. This is not fantasy. This is the money that should have been flowing to all of us for decades and was instead funneled to a relative few at the top. The $79 trillion cumulative gap since 1975 represents what was taken. A wealth tax on a significant percentage of that accumulated concentration is not punitive. It is corrective.

Ideas like AI token taxes can help with the narrative for this. So can land value taxes, which connect to the oldest argument for UBI — the one Thomas Paine made at the founding of this country, that the earth is the common inheritance of all. Alaska has operated on this logic since 1982 with its Permanent Fund Dividend, and no Alaskan considers it welfare. They consider it their rightful share. That logic supports both a national resource dividend and an AI dividend.

But we should not get stuck on the tax question first. What matters most is settling on the amount and the principle: every American rightfully receives a universal dividend. Then we assemble the tax mix. If the annual figure is now north of $4 trillion, that is the full dividend target. Perhaps phase it in over five years to avoid a demand shock. But do it.

This Cannot Wait

We cannot start crowning trillionaires while millions of Americans line up at food banks and millions more live stressed out lives of chronic financial insecurity. Those like Elon Musk exist at the end of a long chain of human achievement that every person who ever lived contributed to. It is wrong for one person to accumulate a trillion dollars based on what all of humanity built, while the rest of us are told to go retrain and compete on price with a robot or survive on gig work.

Productivity growth used to be widely shared. It has not been for fifty years. The inequality we have now is already worse than the First Gilded Age. We have the productivity and the resources to end poverty and significantly reduce economic insecurity for all. We have the moral and economic case for a universal dividend. What we lack is the political will to treat every citizen as a shareholder in the economy they comprise.

UBI is our rightful dividend. It is time to start paying it.

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On any given night in the United States, over half a million people have no place to call home. They sleep in shelters, in cars, under bridges, and on sidewalks. We spend billions trying to address this crisis through a labyrinth of programs, vouchers, case managers, and bureaucratic systems — and yet the number of people experiencing homelessness has been climbing. What if we’ve been approaching this problem backwards?

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered a different vision:

“We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay.”

King understood something that policymakers have been slow to grasp: poverty is the root, and homelessness is the branch. We’ve spent decades trying to prune the branches while ignoring the roots. But a growing body of rigorous scientific evidence now points to a deceptively simple solution that works far better than our current approaches.

Provide basic income.

Not vouchers. Not services. Not case management alone. Cash. Unconditional cash directly into the hands of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. And the results aren’t just good — they’re transformative.

The Vancouver Experiment

In 2018, researchers at the University of British Columbia launched what would become possibly one of the most important studies on homelessness ever conducted. Published in PNAS in 2023, the experiment was elegantly simple: take 50 people who had recently become homeless in Vancouver and give each a one-time cash transfer of $7,500 CAD — roughly 60% of their average annual income — with no strings attached.

The results defied every stereotype about homeless people and money.

Over the following year, cash recipients spent 99 fewer days homeless than the control group. They spent 55 more days in stable housing. They retained $1,160 more in savings. And here’s the finding that should put to rest the most persistent myth about giving cash to the poor: there was no increase in spending on alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes. None. In fact, it dropped by 39%. The money instead went exactly where you’d expect it to go if you stopped thinking of homeless people as fundamentally different from yourself — food, housing, transportation, and durable goods.

Even more remarkable was the cost-effectiveness. The cash transfers generated $8,277 in societal savings through reduced shelter use alone, resulting in a net savings of $777 per person after accounting for the cost of the transfers themselves. We didn’t just help people — we saved money doing it.

The New Leaf Project, as it came to be known, was later expanded to 239 participants and disbursed over $1 million in cash transfers. The expanded results confirmed and strengthened what the pilot suggested: cash recipients spent 40% more nights in stable housing and retained 85% more in savings after 12 months. They even earned 21% more in wages, meaning they worked more and/or found better jobs.

“Across all outcome areas, the data told a consistent story. Unconditional cash support led to rapid, measurable gains in housing stability, financial security, food stability, and key aspects of employment, without reducing labor force participation or increasing irresponsible spending.”

When people have resources to meet their basic needs, to feel stability and hope, they reduce their substance use and secure housing. They stop self-medicating their misery because they have less misery to medicate and start improving their living situations.

What Denver Really Shows

If you’ve followed the debate around cash transfers and homelessness, you may have heard that the Denver Basic Income Project “failed.” This narrative deserves a closer look, because what actually happened in Denver tells a far more interesting and hopeful story.

The Denver pilot, launched in 2022, tested three different approaches with people experiencing homelessness. Group A received $1,000 per month for 12 months. Group B received a $6,500 lump sum followed by $500 per month. Group C received just $50 per month. Crucially, all three groups also received something incredibly valuable that often gets overlooked: a free cell phone with a data plan, plus connections to local charities and support services. This matters because in the 21st century, a phone is infrastructure for survival — you can’t apply for jobs, receive callbacks from employers, or stay connected with family who might offer help without one.

Here’s what happened: 43% of those who started unhoused and who got $1,000 a month ended up housed, compared to 25% of the lump sum group and 28% of the $50 group. That’s nearly twice as many people housed in the highest cash group compared to the comparison groups. Full-time employment increased in Groups A and B — from 18% to 23% in the $1,000 group, and from 24% to 37% in the lump sum group. Meanwhile, employment actually decreased in the $50 control group, from 26% to 21%.

Think about that. The group receiving substantial cash saw employment go up. The common fear that giving people money will make them stop working has it exactly backwards. Money doesn’t create dependency — it creates opportunity. It pays for the bus fare to get to a job interview. It covers the work clothes you need for your first day. It keeps your phone on so employers can call you back. It provides the stability needed to hold down a job once you get one.

And what about drug use? This is the fear that dominates every conversation about giving cash to homeless people. Surely they’ll just spend it on drugs, right?

Wrong. The Denver study found no statistically significant increase in substance use across any group. What did change was blood plasma selling — a marker of financial desperation where people literally sell parts of their bodies for cash. Plasma selling dropped by 60% in Groups A and B. But in the $50 control group? It rose by 17%. When people have money, they stop doing desperate things for money.

Numbers don’t capture everything. The qualitative findings revealed that participants in Groups A and B reported decreased stress, increased hopefulness, and reduced anxiety. They started setting long-term goals — housing, school, transportation. Meanwhile, Group C participants could only focus on immediate survival needs like gas, food, and hygiene. When you’re drowning, you can’t think about swimming lessons.

One finding that particularly caught my attention: almost all participants noted feelings of relief when asked about the impact of the program on their daily lives. One participant mentioned how paying for car insurance for the first time made it possible to drive without the constant stress of looking over their shoulder, waiting to get pulled over or get into an accident they couldn’t afford. Another participant noted that cash was fundamentally different from other benefits: “Food stamps, you can only use it on food. Any other benefits, you can only use it on those bills, and oftentimes, you can’t do it, because you’re using cash to pay someone else’s bill because they’re letting you have a place to stay. With DBIP, you can use that cash on anything you want. That makes a huge difference.”

Here’s another important nuance: sometimes what someone experiencing homelessness needs isn’t actually thousands of dollars — it’s fifty. The Denver study included a $50/month group as the control. Qualitative interviews showed that sometimes the barrier to accepting help from friends or family wasn’t the absence of people willing to help, but the shame of not being able to contribute anything. Having even a small amount of money can transform the psychological dynamic of asking for help. “Can I stay with you?” becomes “Can I stay with you? I can help with utilities.” The difference between those two questions can mean the difference between housed and unhoused.

So why do people claim Denver “failed”? Largely because the differences between the treatment and comparison groups weren’t as dramatic as some hoped. But this misses some crucial points: the comparison group wasn’t a true control. Everyone in the study received phones, data plans, and connections to support services. Group C also received more existing welfare support than Groups A and B, whose higher incomes made them ineligible for programs like SSI. When you give the “control” group substantial help too, of course the gap narrows. The real story is that just trusting people with cash worked, and those with more cash improved the most.

Miracle Money and the “Cash Plus” Lesson

Another real-world test of the “give homeless people money” approach comes from Miracle Money: California, a partnership between Miracle Messages and USC researchers. It’s important because it didn’t just test cash—it tested cash plus human connection, pairing monthly payments with a volunteer “phone buddy” (Miracle Friends) designed to rebuild relational support alongside financial stability.

The program scaled up what looked promising in a small earlier pilot. In that initial Miracle Money pilot, 14 people received $500 per month for six months, and among those who were unhoused at entry, 67% secured stable housing.

Then came the larger test. Launched in 2022, the larger study provided 103 unhoused participants in the Bay Area and Los Angeles County with $750 per month for 12 months, distributing nearly $1 million in cash between 2022 and 2024, and tracking outcomes for 15 months across three groups: cash+social support, social support only, and a waitlist control.

Here’s the nuance. Nearly half of the cash group exited homelessness during the study window—48%—but the study did not find a statistically significant difference in homelessness exits compared to the other groups (38% in the social-support-only group and 43% in the waitlist control), meaning researchers couldn’t claim the cash-plus model reduced homelessness in this particular test. That’s not evidence that cash “doesn’t work.” It’s evidence that amounts matter in high-rent environments, and that a payment sized below local housing costs may function more as stabilization and triage than as a housing guarantee.

What Miracle Money did do—decisively—is crush the moral panic. Recipients spent nearly all of the money on basics, because of course they did. In the reporting on the study, the biggest categories were food (26%), housing costs (24%), and transportation (13%). Spending on “temptation goods” (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs) was under 5%, and there was no increase in it. Employment also didn’t drop—again.

And the “plus” mattered. If Denver shows that large enough cash amounts move housing outcomes more, Miracle Money shows something complementary: even when the payment size isn’t enough to buy a clean exit from homelessness in a high rent market, cash still buys breathing room—and breathing room is where better decisions, follow-through, and reconnection become possible.

The Prevention Revolution

Everything I’ve discussed so far has focused on people who are already homeless. But what about keeping people from becoming homeless in the first place? This is where the evidence becomes even more compelling.

In 2016, researchers from the University of Notre Dame published a groundbreaking study in Science that examined what happened when people on the brink of homelessness in Chicago received emergency cash assistance of around $1,000. The results were stunning: recipients were 88% less likely to become homeless within three months and 76% less likely within six months. Even over a two-year period, they remained significantly less likely to ever end up on the street.

This is the prevention insight that changes everything. We currently spend tens of thousands of dollars per person per year keeping homeless people alive — shelters, emergency rooms, jails, social services. New York City alone spends millions putting homeless people up in publicly-funded hotel rooms. What if we invested a fraction of that upstream, before people lost everything?

Oakland’s Keep Oakland Housed initiative has been doing exactly this since 2018, using a points-based system to identify those at highest risk — including foster care youth — and providing $5,400 to $8,150 in assistance. The result? 92% of recipients avoided homelessness six months later. The model is now being deployed across Alameda County.

Consider what universal basic income would mean in this context. It wouldn’t just reduce existing homelessness — it would prevent much of it from ever happening. When everyone has a guaranteed income floor, the cascade of events that leads from a job loss to an eviction to a shelter to the street gets interrupted at the very first step. You don’t need emergency assistance if you never face the emergency in the first place.

Cash Beats Vouchers

Perhaps the most policy-relevant evidence comes from Philadelphia, where researchers recently conducted a randomized controlled trial directly comparing cash rental assistance to traditional housing vouchers. This is the head-to-head comparison that housing policy has long needed.

The results should reshape how we think about housing assistance.

Cash assistance achieved a 100% utilization rate — every single household was able to use their benefit. Housing vouchers? Only 75% utilization. One in four families offered a voucher couldn’t actually use it, despite Philadelphia having a higher-than-average voucher success rate. The reasons are familiar to anyone who has navigated the housing system: landlords who won’t accept vouchers, bureaucratic delays, housing that doesn’t meet inspection requirements, the sheer complexity of the process.

Cash recipients experienced a 63-75% reduction in forced moves compared to controls. Their rate of homelessness was cut by 67% at 18 months — 2.5 per 100 households versus 7.8 for controls and 6.3 for vouchers. They also reported 22% fewer serious housing quality concerns. Cash worked faster and more completely than vouchers because it gave people the flexibility to solve their own problems in their own ways.

This finding illuminates something fundamental about how we approach poverty. We’ve built elaborate systems designed to help the poor while not trusting them. We create vouchers instead of cash because we worry people will make bad choices. But the evidence consistently shows that people experiencing poverty know what they need. They don’t need us to make decisions for them. They just need resources and the freedom to act with agency and human dignity.

Youth and the Missing Safety Net

One population deserving special attention is homeless youth. Oregon’s Direct Cash Transfer Program provided 117 young people aged 18-24 with $1,000 per month for two years, plus a one-time $3,000 payment. At the program’s end, 91% reported stable housing.

Why does cash seem to work especially well for young people? Research from Merrill Lynch shows that American parents give their adult children approximately $500 billion annually in financial support. This invisible safety net — helping with rent, covering emergencies, co-signing leases, providing a place to crash — isn’t equally distributed. White parents are significantly more likely to provide this support than parents of color, reflecting generations of wealth inequality.

Cash transfers for homeless youth function as a substitute for this inequitable safety net. One participant, Gabi Huffman, used her funds for the mundane necessities that separate housed life from unhoused life: car insurance, gas, work clothes, a laptop for community college. She also paid for her father’s cremation. She moved from a church basement shelter to a duplex with her daughter.

These aren’t stories of young adults becoming dependent. They’re stories of people getting the resources they need to build lives.

Addressing the Rent Question

At this point, a reasonable objection arises: if we give everyone money, won’t landlords just raise rents to capture it all?

This concern deserves a full article of its own, but let me offer several responses.

First, UBI would enable many current renters to become homeowners, which actually increases the supply of rental housing. In the Gary, Indiana pilot in the 1970s, home ownership rates increased by over 30% for pilot participants.

Second, UBI reveals true demand for housing — demand currently distorted by the fact that millions who need homes can’t signal that need in the market. Developers need accurate demand signals to know where to build and how much.

Third, UBI creates an entirely new market for landlords. Currently, renting to low-income tenants is very risky because their income is unstable. But a guaranteed basic income makes everyone a reliable renter with predictable income that landlords can trust.

Fourth, UBI should be accompanied by complementary policies: replacing single-household zoning with multi-household zoning, implementing land value taxes to encourage development and push down rents, and where appropriate, rent controls paired with policies that ensure housing supply keeps growing despite the controls. The solution isn’t to abandon cash transfers — it’s to pair them with policies that ensure housing abundance.

What Saturation Would Show

Here’s something important about every study I’ve described: they were all targeted interventions. Cash went specifically to people experiencing homelessness, not to entire communities. We haven’t yet run a saturation pilot in the US (aside from arguably Chelsea Eats) — giving basic income to everyone in an area — specifically designed to measure effects on homelessness.

But think about what such a pilot would likely show. When everyone in a community has a basic income, local spending increases. One fear is increased rents, but local GDP grows. Local businesses hire more workers. More job opportunities emerge for everyone, including those escaping homelessness. The currently homeless aren’t just receiving cash — they’re participating in a more prosperous local economy with more opportunities to earn additional income.

This is critical: basic income is a floor, not a ceiling. It provides a foundation from which people can build. It doesn’t replace work income — it supplements it. And when that foundation exists for everyone, the entire community benefits.

The Truth About People

What all this evidence reveals is something that should have been obvious to everyone from the start: homeless people are people.

They’re not a separate species with fundamentally different desires or capabilities. They’re not Homo homeless. They’re not uniquely prone to irresponsibility or addiction. They’re people who, through some combination of circumstances — job loss, medical emergency, family breakdown, mental health crisis, addiction, domestic violence, or simply bad luck — found themselves without enough money to keep a roof over their heads. Any of us could find ourselves in similar circumstances. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. It’s Murphy’s Law.

Poverty isn’t punishment for poor choices. It’s a condition that causes poor choices by trapping people in survival mode, unable to think beyond the next meal or the next night’s shelter. The cognitive burden of scarcity consumes mental bandwidth that could otherwise go toward planning, problem-solving, and building a better future. Poverty is a trap, not a verdict. It certainly shouldn’t be akin to a guilty verdict.

This is why the fear that cash will be wasted on drugs gets it backwards. Drug use among homeless populations isn’t caused by having money — it’s caused by not having enough. It’s a coping mechanism for misery, a way to escape unbearable circumstances, a form of self-medication when real medicine isn’t available. Study after study shows that when people receive cash, drug use doesn’t increase. Often it decreases — significantly, as the 39% drop in the New Leaf expansion demonstrates. People stop self-medicating their misery because they have less misery to medicate. They start building futures because they can finally see futures worth building.

Supply people with money and they buy food. They pay for housing. They fix their cars so they can get to work. They buy phones so employers can reach them. They pay for the small things — bus passes, work clothes, car insurance — that make the difference between drowning and swimming. They act, in other words, exactly like you or I would act if we suddenly found ourselves without resources.

The Path Forward

The evidence is now overwhelming and consistent across multiple rigorous studies in multiple cities and countries. Cash transfers reduce homelessness more effectively and more efficiently than our current system of vouchers and services. They prevent homelessness before it starts. They don’t increase drug use — they decrease it. They don’t discourage work — they often increase employment. They save money by reducing the need for emergency services, shelters, and hospitals.

Universal basic income would take these findings and apply them at scale, not just to those who have already fallen through the cracks, but to everyone, ensuring that the cracks themselves disappear. An unconditional basic income floor means that hard times happen less often and anyone facing hard times — anyone at all, because it can happen to any of us — has resources to maintain stability while they get back on their feet and rebuild their lives.

Dr. King was right. Abolish poverty first, and the problems of housing will become far more tractable. Transform the poor into purchasers, and they will do a great deal on their own.

The question is no longer whether cash works. The evidence has answered that decisively. The question is whether we’re ready to trust people — all people — with the resources they need to live with dignity.

The evidence says we should. The evidence says it works.

Period. End of story.

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As host of The Basic Income Show and moderator for the Basic Income subreddit, I read hundreds of article every year about UBI. Below, I’ve compiled a list of the top ten articles I consider my favorites out of everything published in 2025.

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10. A Kantian Approach to Everything? On Life Choices and Universal Basic Income by Julieta Elgarte

To start this list, I’ve chosen a philosophical piece from the American Philosophical Association’s blog that approaches basic income from a Kantian perspective. Julieta Elgarte, a philosopher at Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina, argues that we should try to make our life choices not merely as means to external ends, but as ends in themselves—and that UBI is the policy that makes this possible for everyone.

I’ll admit part of why I loved this article so much is that I read How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur last year and it stuck with me. Schur’s accessible tour through moral philosophy left me thinking a lot about Kant’s categorical imperative—the idea that you should never use someone merely as a means to an end—as a general rule to live by if you want to try to be a good person. So when I came across Elgarte’s piece applying that same framework to UBI, it immediately resonated.

What I appreciate about this article is how it frames the case for UBI through the lens of autonomy in relationships and work. Elgarte explains how economic dependency traps people, especially women, in relationships they might otherwise leave, and forces young people to instrumentalize (treat as a means to an end) their very lives by choosing careers based on expected income rather than passion or calling.

Here’s her core argument:

“By freeing young women and men from the economic insecurity that pushes them to instrumentalize their very life—from their most intimate relationships through the abilities they choose to develop to the contribution they make to the world through their everyday work—a UBI would give them the real freedom and the genuine opportunity to choose what they inherently value: to marry for love and to work on their calling.”

This is a great article to share with anyone interested in philosophical foundations for UBI, and it’s a refreshing approach that connects Kant’s famous categorical imperative to concrete policy.

9. André Gorz: From the End of Work to the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Arda Tunca

Continuing the philosophical thread, this piece introduces readers to André Gorz, a thinker who long ago anticipated our current moment. Gorz, who fused existentialism, Marxism, and ecological thought, argued in his 1980 book Farewell to the Working Class that automation would make necessary labor progressively obsolete—but that capitalism would cling to employment as a moral obligation anyway.

What makes this article valuable is how Arda Tunca connects Gorz’s decades-old insights to the AI economy. Gorz foresaw the “productivity-without-prosperity” dilemma: technological abundance coexisting with economic insecurity, wages stagnating while output soars, workers pushed into precarious service jobs. His observation that “capitalism cannot survive without making labor compulsory, even when it becomes unnecessary” describes our current situation with eerie accuracy.

Gorz proposed universal basic income not as a way to preserve consumption, but to guarantee autonomy—freedom from market dependency. A basic income would allow people to divide their lives between paid work, care, art, study, and civic participation. He envisioned what he called a “civilization of time” rather than a “civilization of work.”

“The question is not how to make people fit for the system, but how to make the system fit for people.”

For anyone looking for a deeper philosophical grounding for the case that AI demands UBI, Gorz is essential reading, and this article is an excellent introduction to his thought.

8. Basic Income in Canada is Closer Than You Think by Nancy Wilson

For those following UBI developments in Canada, this article for Rabble is a great update. Nancy Wilson writes about Senate Bill S-206, the National Framework for a Guaranteed Livable Basic Income Act, which passed second reading and is currently before the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. This isn’t a pilot. It’s real legislation working its way through Parliament to form a real plan for basic income.

Wilson does a great job contextualizing the bill’s journey, noting how NDP Member of Parliament Leah Gazan first introduced a similar bill (C-223) in 2021, which died on the vine in 2024, and how Senator Kim Pate has persistently revived the effort. This continuity matters because it shows basic income is no longer tied to a single politician or party—it’s a sustained policy effort with institutional backing.

She also reminds readers of Mincome, Canada’s famous basic income experiment from the 1970s in Manitoba, and its findings: modest reductions in work hours (mostly among new mothers and students), a 17.5% drop in crime rates, and improvements in physical and mental health.

“Basic Income isn’t a utopian dream. It is a real policy initiative that is working its way through Parliament right now.”

Anyone who thinks UBI is politically impossible should read this article.

7. The Cruel Catch-22 of Cash Aid by Mother Jones

This Mother Jones piece is essential reading for understanding one of the biggest obstacles facing guaranteed income programs in the United States: the benefits cliff. It tells the story of Portia, a 27-year-old mother in Flint, Michigan, who is paralyzed below the waist and receives $936 monthly from Supplemental Security Income. When she enrolled in Rx Kids, a guaranteed income program in Flint giving $1,500 to expectant mothers plus another $500/mo for the year after birth, she faced an impossible choice: each $500 payment would trigger a nearly equal reduction in her SSI.

“If I wouldn’t have taken the $500, that would have been another two weeks before I was able to put anything in my refrigerator. These are the decisions that people are forced to make.”

The article explains how this problem has existed since at least the 1970s, when researchers running “income maintenance” experiments in Seattle and Denver were puzzled that eligible residents passed on more money than welfare offered—because signing up meant losing other benefits and having subsidized rents raised.

What’s particularly frustrating is how close we came to fixing this. Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley was working on regulations that would have protected SSI recipients who receive guaranteed income payments, but the effort evaporated after the 2024 election. “We were so close,” says Kathleen Romig, who was helping iron out details at the agency.

This is the kind of article that helps people understand the issues with the conditions and means-testing of existing programs, and to consider what potential reforms existing programs should face in a post-UBI world.

Should anyone ever be worse off if their incomes increase for any reason? UBI makes sure the answer to that is “No.”

6. Yes, Cash Transfers Work by Annie Lowrey

Annie Lowrey, author of the book Give People Money, returns with this Atlantic piece that serves as a powerful rebuttal (aside from my own) to recent skepticism about cash transfer programs. Some critics have pointed to “lackluster” results from recent pilots—Denver’s program didn’t significantly reduce homelessness compared to the control group, Compton’s didn’t significantly improve psychological well-being, the OpenResearch pilot didn’t significantly bolster health outcomes. But Lowrey argues these critiques overinterpret limited evidence while ignoring decades of research showing cash works.

She makes several important points. First, the recent pilots took place during and after the pandemic, when Congress was already flooding families with stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment—making it harder to isolate the effects of any single program. Second, they occurred during an acute cost-of-living crisis brought on by post-pandemic inflation.

But her most important point is this: the pilots did reduce poverty. Participants had more money to spend on housing, transportation, and food. Mothers were less likely to be in poverty.

“You give people money; they have money.”

She also reminds readers that the strongest benefits of cash transfers often take time to appear. Mothers’ pensions from the 1910s-1930s had muted effects on the women receiving them at the time, but significant effects on the lifetime earnings and educational attainment of their sons, decades later.

This is an article to share whenever someone claims some basic income pilots “failed.”

5. What Does Global Justice Look Like in the 21st Century? by Philippe Van Parijs

It’s always great to read something new from Philippe Van Parijs, widely regarded as the godfather of UBI. In this Jacobin interview, he discusses his intellectual trajectory, the prospects for basic income in the age of AI, and the dilemmas of justice posed by mass migration.

Van Parijs offers an important corrective to the typical AI-based case for UBI. He doesn’t expect AI to make the world jobless, but he does believe it will further polarize the distribution of earning power and wealth. UBI, combined with massive expansion of lifelong learning, can counteract this trend.

On migration, he’s characteristically thoughtful. He acknowledges the tension between opening borders and protecting the interests of the worst-off among locals, but refuses to conclude that borders should stay closed:

“High rates of immigration do not make life easier for a generous basic income, but they do not make it impossible.”

What I especially appreciate is his honesty about his own intellectual positioning. When asked about his relationship to Rawls and Marxism, he says he’s “probably best labeled a left-Rawlsian rather than a Marxist” and explains exactly where he finds Rawls insufficiently egalitarian.

This interview is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophical foundations of UBI and how it connects to broader questions of global justice.

4. Basic Income as Power to the People by Karl Widerquist

This essay is a preview of Karl Widerquist’s forthcoming book for the Janus Debates series, and it’s one of the most powerful articulations of the freedom case for UBI I’ve read recently. Karl’s central argument is that UBI gives ordinary people something they desperately lack: real power.

He starts with a critique of our existing checks on power. Our vote is one among millions, easily outweighed by donor money. In the marketplace, we call ourselves “free labor” because we can say yes or no to any one employer, but we lack the power to say no to all the bad choices. A livable UBI changes that:

“A livable UBI is the ultimate check in government and in economics, because it devolves one important piece of real power to everyone as an individual: the freedom from labor-market dependence; the power to say no to any and all employment.”

What I love about this piece is how Karl systematically works through the implications. UBI gives workers the power to demand better wages and conditions. It gives women the power to leave abusive relationships. It gives unions an “inexhaustible strike fund.” It even helps people make better reproductive choices by reducing the financial penalty for having children.

He also addresses the common objection that people won’t work:

“Some people, especially privileged people, allege that we won’t work if UBI exists. We should ask them, are your job offers so terrible that no one with the power to refuse would take them?”

This is an article to bookmark and share whenever someone asks why UBI matters beyond just reducing poverty. It’s about power to the People.

3. Just How Many More Successful UBI Trials Do We Need? by Katie Jagielnicka

Katie Jagielnicka’s piece for The Noösphere is built around a simple but devastating question: at what point does the evidence become sufficient? She writes in response to the results of Germany’s three-year basic income study, in which 122 people received €1,200 monthly with no strings attached.

The results were overwhelmingly positive. Participants worked 40 hours per week on average—identical to the control group. They reported greater job satisfaction and were more likely to change jobs or pursue education. They saved more money and donated more to charity. Women, in particular, experienced significant increases in autonomy.

But Katie’s larger point is that Germany is just one of many successful trials. She walks through GiveDirectly’s 12-year experiment in Kenya, Finland’s state-run study, Canada’s Mincome, and dozens of others. The pattern is consistent: people don’t stop working, health improves, and the feared social collapse never materializes.

“If governments were genuine in saying they will apply ‘evidence-based policy’, we would have a basic income system already.”

This article resonated with me because I've been saying the same thing for years—but what really excites me is that it's no longer just UBI advocates making this point. The frustration Katie expresses is becoming mainstream. "Of course that basic income pilot was a success" is turning into its own meme, because what else would you expect from the two hundredth study to reach the same conclusion? We've developed this strange habit of endlessly re-testing policies we already know work while refusing to actually implement them, and UBI is finally being recognized as exhibit A.

2. Labor Supply Responses to a Very Large Income Shock:

   Evidence from Daughters of Brazilian Military Officers by Marcelo Ferreira

My article about this one is here if you’d prefer to read that to an 80-page academic paper, but this research is by Marcelo Ferreira at Princeton is so important that I had to include it despite it being a long paper. Ferreira analyzed what amounts to a long-term natural experiment in Brazil: lifetime pensions for daughters of military personnel that date back to 1795 under the Portuguese Empire.

What makes this study remarkable is its scale and duration. This wasn’t a two-year pilot with a few hundred participants. Ferreira analyzed data from over 30,000 people receiving permanent, unconditional income ranging from poverty-level amounts to the equivalent of $15,000 per month. If the laziness myth were true, we’d expect labor force participation to collapse at those higher amounts.

It didn’t. The income elasticity of labor supply was extremely low. For every dollar given, labor earnings fell by just 8 cents on average. People who continued working didn’t reduce their hours at all. The reduction came entirely from some women dropping out of the workforce or taking longer between jobs—often to do unpaid care work or be more selective about employment or to just retire a few years earlier.

When combined with the 2020 systematic review finding that 93% of trials showed no meaningful work reduction, and the 2025 End of Year Report covering 27 American pilots that found zero showed a decline in employment, the conclusion is inescapable:

People are afraid of a bogeyman. Unconditional basic income is the foundation of work, not the enemy of it. This debate is over.

1. The Best Books on Universal Basic Income by Matthew Johnson

My favorite article of 2025 is this Five Books interview with Matthew Johnson, Professor of Public Policy at Northumbria University and chair of the Common Sense Policy Group. What I love about it is how it weaves together the philosophical, economic, and political case for UBI through a discussion of five influential books—and in doing so, creates an incredibly accessible and informative introduction for newcomers while offering fresh insights for veterans.

Johnson selects a fascinating range: Marx’s The German Ideology for its emphasis on how material conditions shape our worldview; Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which could surprise people with its arguable endorsement of basic income; Philip Pettit’s Republicanism on freedom from domination; and Guy Standing’s The Precariat on the changing nature of work.

What makes this interview exceptional is Johnson’s willingness to be direct about the political obstacles. When the interviewer asks about cost, he doesn’t hedge:

“Tax rich people. This is supposedly a rich society, in which rewards from working are reducing relative to rewards from wealth.”

He’s equally blunt about the current UK government’s inadequacy and the need for large-scale public investment. But he also makes the affirmative case that UBI isn’t charity—it’s recognition of our shared inheritance:

“UBI should be seen not as a handout but as a rightful share of common wealth.”

Johnson explains why universality matters (it ensures the poorest actually receive benefits, unlike targeted programs with high exclusion errors), why unconditionality matters (it doesn’t create poverty traps), and why basic income changes everything by working through three pathways: increased resources, increased security, and increased predictability.

This is a fantastic recommendation for anyone wanting a comprehensive introduction to UBI. Bookmark it, share it, and consider reading the books he recommends.

Bonus: The Marshall Islands Just Quietly Implemented the First National Universal Basic Income by Scott Santens

I’m including this as a bonus because I wrote it, but the news itself is potentially the biggest UBI development in decades, and everyone who supports basic income needs to know about it.

In late 2025, the Republic of the Marshall Islands passed and funded a nationwide, legally established, permanent universal basic income called “Enra.” This is not a pilot. Not a time-limited experiment. It’s a permanent system paying every citizen living in the country $200 every three months, with children included. There’s no means test and no work requirement.

Relative to their economy, this is equivalent to the United States paying everyone about $750 per month—around 10-11% of GDP per capita. The program is funded by a U.S.-capitalized sovereign wealth fund created under the Compact of Free Association, essentially making it a national dividend similar to Alaska’s Permanent Fund but at a much larger scale relative to their economy.

A sovereign nation has now legislated a permanent, nationwide, unconditional, individual, regular cash payment to all citizens. It has committed around 8% of GDP to that UBI and another 6% to additional distributions for higher-need communities. It has funded it from a sovereign wealth fund built from external rents.

For larger economies, this isn’t a plug-and-play blueprint, but it is a clean proof of concept. A government can decide that a share of national wealth should be paid out as universal basic income. The Marshall Islands just did exactly that.

So, who’s next?

Bonus Meme: Nothernlion’s Extremely Important PSA

I haven’t done this before, but my meme of the year goes to Northernlion.

You need healthcare and universal basic income. Don’t get distracted!

I hope you found this list helpful and if you want to avoid missing any great articles about UBI in 2026, consider a daily visit to the Basic Income subreddit, subscribing to monthly UBI news updates via my ITSA Newsletter, and following @ScottSantens on Bluesky, YouTube, and everywhere else I am where you are too.

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What if I told you that the Portuguese Empire accidentally ran one of the most comprehensive basic income experiments in human history?

Not a one-year or two-year or even three-year pilot. Not a few hundred or few thousand participants. A policy spanning over two centuries, distributing everything from poverty-level incomes to amounts equivalent to $15,000 per month in modern purchasing power. And the results absolutely demolish the idea that giving people money makes most of them stop working for more money.

This is the question that haunts every conversation about Universal Basic Income. It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing a UBI of $1,000 a year or $10,000 a month or anything in between—someone always asks: “But won’t people just quit their jobs?”

The Brazil data, analyzed in 2025 by Marcelo Ferreira at Princeton, doesn’t just challenge the laziness myth. It drives a stake through its heart. And when we combine this historical evidence with the massive systematic reviews of the past decade and the just-released 2025 End of Year Report covering 27 American pilots, the picture becomes undeniable.

We have been terrified of a bogeyman. Unconditional basic income is the foundation of work, not the enemy of it.

The Daughters of the Empire

To understand why this Brazil data is so remarkable, we need to go back to 1795.

The Portuguese Empire wanted to ensure that families of naval officers wouldn’t starve if the male breadwinner died. The solution was elegantly simple: a pension for unmarried daughters that would last for life. The logic was paternalistic but practical—women had limited economic opportunities in the 18th century, so the state would provide a floor for them to stand on.

But something striking happened as the centuries rolled on. In Brazil, this policy expanded. According to Ferreira’s research, the scope grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries even as women’s labor force participation increased and alternative social protections developed. The central legal framework became Law 3765, enacted in 1960, which regulated pension payments to widows and daughters of military personnel. This was essentially when the basic income quasi-experiment started. Prior to 1960, the money was conditional. A reform in 2000 restricted new eligibility to service members who joined before December 28, 2000, but for those already covered, the pensions continued with a small fee.

These laws created a very large cohort with decades of data to analyze. For the purposes of the Ferreira study, it was like looking at an experiment with over 30,000 people in it who got basic income from 2002 to 2025. The “start date” of 2002 is because the full names required to link individuals across different datasets were only provided by the Ministry of Labor starting in 2002.

This wasn’t a means-tested welfare check that disappeared if they got a job. It wasn’t a conditional stipend requiring bureaucratic hoops. It was, effectively, a lifelong guaranteed income for a specific demographic. I reached out to the study’s author, Marcelo Ferreira, to clarify some details about how it worked. “It is not conditional,” he confirmed, pointing to official Brazilian Navy guidelines. In 2001, military personnel could opt to contribute 1.5% of their pay to keep their daughters covered under the old rules. “I don’t have data on this decision,” Ferreira told me, “but 1.5% seems like a low fee for getting your daughter covered for life so I would expect that most of them took it.”

Here’s where it gets fascinating. Because military ranks vary wildly, the pension amounts varied wildly too. Some daughters received amounts equivalent to minimum wage. Others received sums tied to high-ranking officer salaries—upwards of $15,000 every month.

This allows us to answer a question that no modern UBI pilot has been able to touch: What happens to people’s motivation to work when a basic income floor is lifelong and enormous?

Conventional economic wisdom—the kind that assumes humans are just mice waiting for pellets—suggests that labor force participation should collapse once the income is high enough to live comfortably. If you’re receiving $10,000 a month for breathing, why would you ever clock in, right?

The answer from the Brazil data may shock you: The impact was small and flattened out over time regardless of size!

According to Ferreira’s analysis, the income elasticity of labor supply was extremely low. In plain English, that means even as the guaranteed income got bigger and bigger, the decision to work barely budged. When I asked Ferreira what lessons we could draw, he emphasized that the findings extend beyond UBI specifically: “Any social transfers have an element of income effect on labor supply, and it seems like 5 to 10 cents per dollar is a reasonable estimate for how much ‘free cash’ depresses earnings.”

Eight cents per dollar to be exact. That was the "labor cost" of providing total financial security. In a study of permanent, lifetime pensions as high as nearly triple the national median earnings, it was found that for every dollar given, labor earnings fell by just 8 cents. It wasn't the total abandonment of work that critics fear; it was a modest, gradual adjustment—even when the amount of money was life-changing and far higher than any basic income would likely ever be.

But here’s what makes Ferreira’s findings even more revealing: when he decomposed the labor supply response, he found that “this transfer induces a 10% decrease on the extensive margin of labor supply after seven years, with no effect on the intensive margin.” Translation: the reduction came entirely from some women either dropping out of the workforce immediately or taking longer between jobs. People who continued working didn’t really reduce their hours at all.

The adjustment happened gradually, “driven by a large temporary increase in the hazard of separation and a persistent moderate reduction in the job finding rate.” In other words, some women used the financial security to leave jobs they didn’t want, and others took more time searching for employment that suited them. They weren’t lounging on beaches—they were being selective or doing unpaid work. And those who stayed employed? They kept working exactly as much as before.

This distinction matters enormously. The reduction wasn’t coming from millions of workers each shaving days off their weeks. It was concentrated among those who chose to exit entirely—often older daughters approaching retirement age, or those who could finally afford to leave jobs that made them miserable.

Think about what this all means. We aren’t talking about a small one-time payment. We’re talking about life-changing, “you never have to work again” money. And yet these women participated in the labor force at remarkably high rates. In many cases, their participation rates exceeded the general population because they had the resources to secure education and childcare.

Tragically, this golden natural experiment may be nearing its end. In October 2025, a bill was introduced in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies—PL 1.160/2025—that would make these pensions conditional on remaining unmarried. If passed into law, if the daughters marry or form a civil union, they would lose the benefit entirely. It’s the typical policy instinct: means-test everything, add conditions, ensure that no one is getting something they don’t “deserve” or “need.”

But for now, those covered under the old rules continue to receive their unconditional income. The Brazilian Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in favor of the daughters when challenges arise. And the data we’ve gathered from decades of this policy remains some of the most powerful evidence we have about human behavior under conditions of permanent, real, financial security.

Defining What We’re Actually Talking About

Before we go further, let’s be precise about what Universal Basic Income actually means, because the term gets thrown around carelessly.

UBI is defined as a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is cash with four additional characteristics: universality, unconditionality, regularity, and individuality.

Everyone gets it, regardless of employment status or wealth. No strings attached—you don’t have to prove you’re looking for work or attending job training and you don’t lose it as a result of accepting a job. It comes reliably, typically monthly, not as a one-time windfall. And it goes directly to individuals, not household heads who may or may not distribute it fairly.

The Brazil pensions were periodic, unconditional cash payments to individuals. And because they lasted for life, they removed the “duration bias” that critics often cite regarding short-term pilots. These women knew the money was never going away. They had every rational incentive to be lazy. And they chose to be productive instead.

Remind you of any millionaires or billionaires who can entirely afford to stop working and don’t?

The Scientific Consensus: It’s Not Just Brazil

If the Brazil study were the only data point, you could perhaps argue it was a cultural fluke, an artifact of a specific time and place. But it’s not. It’s just the most dramatic example of a trend that appears in virtually every rigorous study of unconditional cash.

In 2018, Gilbert and colleagues published a massive systematic review in the peer-reviewed journal Basic Income Studies. The researchers analyzed 16 major basic income trial programs involving over 105,000 people across 12 nations.

The results? 93% percent of reported outcomes showed no meaningful reduction in work when the criterion was set at a 5% decrease or more.

When the researchers looked at the numbers, the laziness argument was statistically nonexistent. In the vast majority of cases, the needle simply didn’t move. Even more interesting was what happened in developing economies, where guaranteed income often led to an increase in work.

Why would free money make people work more? Because it takes money to make money. Basic income acts like venture capital for regular people. It buys the tools. It pays for the bus fare to the job interview. It provides the stability needed to take a risk on a better opportunity. And a small amount of money does not make earning more money pointless.

This was further reinforced by de Paz-Báñez and colleagues in their peer-reviewed 2020 systematic review published in Sustainability. After screening over 1,200 documents on the UBI/employment relationship, they selected 50 empirical cases and 38 studies with contrasted empirical evidence. Their conclusion was unequivocal: “Despite a detailed search, we have not found any evidence of a significant reduction in labor supply.”

Instead, they found “evidence that labor supply increases globally among adults, men and women, young and old.” The only groups that consistently worked less were children, the elderly, the sick, those with disabilities, women with young children, and young people who continued studying. As the researchers noted, “These reductions do not reduce the overall supply since it is largely offset by increased supply from other members of the community.”

The 2025 Reality Check: Zero Decline

If historical data and international reviews aren’t enough, look at what just happened in the United States.

The End of Year Report 2025 from Mayors, Counties, and Legislators for a Guaranteed Income represents the largest body of research on this topic ever assembled in America. It covers 27 finalized pilots that have disbursed over $335 million to roughly 30,000 Americans.

The report’s findings on employment are unequivocal. Out of 27 scientifically rigorous studies, how many showed a decline in employment?

Zero.

In 27 different locations, with different demographics and local economies, and with the standard amount of guaranteed income being $500 a month, not a single pilot resulted in people significantly quitting the workforce. Recipients were actually more likely to find long-term employment.

The specific outcomes are striking. In Ithaca, caregivers increased their rate of full-time employment. In Baltimore, parents missed 9 fewer hours of work per month due to childcare challenges. In Santa Fe, students used the money to finish school.

This is the reality of human psychology. People aren’t quitting en masse because they start each month with $500 to $1,000. They’re keeping their jobs because that check fixes the car that gets them there and they want far more than $1,000 a month.

The ORUS Elephant: Let’s Actually Look at the Numbers

So how do we square all this evidence—the Brazil history, the systematic reviews, the 27 successful pilot studies—with headlines about the OpenResearch study showing a “significant” reduction in work?

Let’s actually look at what those numbers mean.

According to the ORUS researchers themselves, the reduction in work hours represented an “approximately 4%-5% decline relative to the control group mean.” Remember the Gilbert systematic review that found 93% of trials showed no meaningful reduction? Their criterion for “meaningful” was 5% or more. The ORUS result sits right at or below that threshold—and that’s the average across all participants, including groups we’d expect to work less.

When you break it down further, there were no significant decreases in employment or hours worked among childless adults or those over age 30. The reduction was concentrated entirely among single parents—who shifted to unpaid caregiving—and young adults, many of whom pursued education. For everyone else? Zero percent. The “4%” average is being dragged up by people doing exactly what we’d hope they’d do with financial security: caring for their kids and investing in their futures.

A 1.3-hour reduction per week works out to about 15 minutes less work per day in a five-day workweek. Fifteen minutes. That’s an extra bathroom break. That’s a slightly longer lunch. On an annual basis, it’s equivalent to about 8 days less work per year.

Now here’s some context that should make anyone worried about that number feel a bit ridiculous: Japan has the least amount of paid vacation days of any developed nation in the world, and their legal minimum is 10 days per year. The United States is the only OECD country with zero legally mandated paid vacation days.

So even if we take the ORUS findings at face value and assume that $1,000 of basic income universally causes people to work 8 fewer days per year, Americans would still have less time off than Japanese workers. The difference between us and France would shrink from 30 days to 22 days. Does 8 days of additional rest per year sound like economic collapse to you?

But even that framing is misleading, because the ORUS study couldn’t measure what it couldn’t test.

The ORUS study was a micro-experiment. It gave basic income to a thousand people scattered across Texas and Illinois. It measured the labor supply of those individuals, but it couldn’t measure the labor demand that a true UBI would create.

In a genuine Universal Basic Income scenario, everyone gets the money (but not everyone gets a boost after taxes). That means most (but not all) people are spending additional money. That spending circulates through the economy, driving up demand for goods and services. When demand increases, businesses need to hire more people.

This isn’t theoretical. We see it in Alaska every year. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend—where every resident gets an annual payment from oil revenues—had no effect on full-time employment overall. Any reduction was counteracted by spending creating new jobs. There was, however, a 17% increase in part-time employment.

The ORUS study couldn’t capture this multiplier effect because the recipients were too few and too scattered to shift local economies. It measured supply without measuring the demand that universality would generate.

And even setting aside the macro effects entirely, look at who was actually working less in the ORUS data. Again, there were no significant decreases in employment among childless adults or those over age 30. The reduction was concentrated among single parents—who shifted from paid employment to the unpaid (but essential) labor of caring for their children—and young adults, many of whom reduced hours to pursue education.

This isn’t laziness. This is investment. And it’s also freedom.

What Are We Even Doing Here?

There’s one final piece of context that makes the entire “work reduction” panic borderline absurd: artificial intelligence.

We are standing on the edge of the greatest transformation of labor in human history. AI is already handling vast amounts of cognitive and creative work. Entry-level jobs are disappearing. College graduates are finding it harder to get their foot in the door.

In a world where AI and automation are rapidly displacing jobs, why are we so terrified of humans working slightly less? And what does that say about real freedom?

If UBI causes a small reduction in work hours—as people choose to spend more time with their families or pursue education—that’s actually a good thing in an AI-driven future. It means we’re sharing the remaining necessary labor more equitably.

The more work AI does for us, the less sense it makes to hyperventilate about labor supply. We’re solving the problem of production. We have the goods. We have the services. The problem now is distribution. That problem has existed and worsened for 50 years now. We must better distribute growing prosperity.

In an environment where there may not be enough jobs for everyone who wants one, people choosing to work less would actually open up opportunities for those who want jobs. Imagine a work environment where everyone there truly wants to be there and no one feels forced to be there? Imagine that level of freedom from coercion.

The Floor, Not the Ceiling

The lesson from the Brazilian military daughters spans cannot be ignored. They were given a guarantee: “You will survive. No matter what happens, you will have enough.”

They didn’t decay. They didn’t rot. They didn’t retreat from the world. They lived full, active lives. And as the pension grew larger—even up to that $15,000 monthly equivalent—they simply used that security to make better choices.

The systematic reviews covering dozens of trials and hundreds of thousands of people confirm it. The 27 American pilots confirm it. Alaska’s 40+ years of UBI confirms it.

If we implement a UBI and index it to GDP growth, so that as our automated economy gets richer the payment grows with it, the data suggests we have nothing to fear. People want to contribute. They want purpose and meaning.

Ferreira also ran the numbers using a statistics model and concluded that "the redistributive gains from a UBI in Brazil would outweigh its efficiency costs, resulting in net welfare gains." The 5-to-10-cent reduction in earnings per dollar transferred simply doesn't come close to offsetting the benefits of economic freedom for all.

The idea that humans will receive UBI and do nothing but sit on the couch eating potato chips is a cynical myth that has been demolished by centuries of history, multiple comprehensive systematic reviews analyzing over 50 empirical cases, and 27 modern American experimental studies.

UBI is not a ceiling that holds us down. It is a floor. And when you give human beings a solid floor to stand on, they don’t lie down.

They reach for the stars.

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In December 2025, something ostensibly remarkable happened. Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to fund new “Trump Accounts” for American children. Ray and Barbara Dalio followed with $75 million for Connecticut kids. BlackRock and BNY announced they would match government contributions for their employees’ children. Headlines celebrated the generosity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched a “50-state challenge” calling on billionaires in every state to follow suit.

The idea may sound wonderful: give every baby born between 2025 and 2028 a $1,000 investment account that compounds over 18 years at which point it converts to a traditional IRA account, potentially growing into a nest egg of at least around $700,000 for retirement, or to help with college, buying a home, or some other approved reason to withdraw money without a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Who could oppose giving kids a financial head start as young adults?

I oppose it. At least as an alternative to what we should be doing. Not because giving kids money is bad — it’s not. But because this is the equivalent of offering a starving child a coupon for a meal they can redeem in 18 years. It’s offering a drowning person swimming lessons that begin after they’ve already drowned. It’s a cruel joke dressed up as generosity, and the science is overwhelmingly clear about why.

Understanding What Trump Accounts Actually Are

Before we can evaluate Trump Accounts, we need to understand what they actually are — and what they’re not. The details matter, because the headlines are misleading.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4, 2025, the federal government will deposit $1,000 into investment accounts for every U.S. citizen born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028. This is the only group eligible for the government’s seed money. Children born before 2025 or after 2028 can have Trump Accounts opened on their behalf, but they receive nothing from the government, as currently proposed.

The accounts are invested in low-fee U.S. stock index funds until the child turns 18, at which point they convert to traditional IRAs. Parents, relatives, employers, and nonprofits can contribute up to $5,000 annually. Employers can contribute up to $2,500 per year tax-free through cafeteria plans. The money cannot be withdrawn before age 18, at which point it can only be used for approved reasons without penalty until age 59 and a half.

Now here’s what the headlines obscure about the billionaire donations. The Dell family’s $6.25 billion isn’t adding $250 on top of that $1,000 government seed. It’s going to a completely different population: 25 million children who are age 10 and under and were born before January 1, 2025. These children don’t qualify for the government’s $1,000 at all. They’re getting $250 — period.

The Dalio donation follows the same model: $250 each to approximately 300,000 Connecticut children under 10 who were born before 2025. So when you see headlines about billionaires “supercharging” or “boosting” Trump Accounts, understand that the billionaire money and the government money are going to different children. A baby born in 2026 gets $1,000 from the government. A 7-year-old born in 2018 might get $250 from Dell or Dalio — but only if they meet additional criteria.

The Zip Code Exclusion Problem

Both the Dell and Dalio donations come with a geographic restriction: children must live in zip codes where the median household income is below $150,000. According to CNBC’s analysis of Census data, only about 3% of U.S. zip codes have median incomes above that threshold, and 87% of Connecticut zip codes qualify.

This may sound reasonable until you think about what “median” actually means. A zip code with a median income of $160,000 still has families earning $30,000. It still has service workers, home health aides, restaurant employees, and their children. It still has families experiencing working poverty. They’re just surrounded by wealth rather than concentrated with other poor families.

This is the fundamental problem with means-testing by geography rather than ensuring universality. Poor children exist in wealthy zip codes too. A child growing up in poverty in Palo Alto or Greenwich faces all the same developmental challenges as a child growing up in poverty in rural Mississippi — perhaps more, given the higher cost of living and the psychological strain of poverty amid abundance.

When you start carving out exceptions based on zip codes to exclude those who aren’t in need, you inevitably leave behind some of the children who need help the most.

The Trillion-Dollar Problem We’re Ignoring

Child poverty in America isn’t just a moral failure of society itself. It’s an economic catastrophe we pay for every single day. According to research from Washington University in St. Louis, childhood poverty costs the United States over $1 trillion annually — roughly 5.4% of GDP. This comes from lost economic productivity, increased healthcare costs, higher crime rates, and the downstream effects of child homelessness and maltreatment.

Let that sink in. Every year, we hemorrhage more than a trillion dollars worth of resources because we choose not to prevent child poverty. But here’s what makes this choice truly inexplicable: a comprehensive benefit-cost analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy — updated in April 2024 with the latest evidence — found that making the enhanced Child Tax Credit permanent would cost about $97 billion per year but generate $1.5 trillion in social benefits. That’s a return on investment of approximately 15 to 1. For every dollar we invest in directly reducing child poverty, we get back fifteen dollars in improved health outcomes, higher educational attainment, increased lifetime earnings, and reduced spending on healthcare, child welfare, and criminal justice.

We actually know this works because we’ve done it before. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan expanded the Child Tax Credit, making it fully refundable and delivering monthly payments directly to families. The result? Child poverty fell by over 40% — the largest single-year decline on record. The poverty rate dropped to 5.2%, the lowest ever measured. Black child poverty fell by more than half. Hispanic child poverty dropped from 30% to 8%. Each CTC dollar even generated $1.25 in local economic activity. Consumer spending grew the economies of Main Street USA.

Then Congress let it expire. Child poverty immediately more than doubled, shooting back up to 12.4% in 2022 — the largest one-year increase on record, right after the largest decrease. Child hunger spiked 25%. By 2024, nearly 10 million children were living in poverty again. Local businesses across the country took a hit.

What We Actually Learned From the Enhanced CTC

The year following the enhanced CTC’s expiration gave economists a treasure trove of data to analyze. What they found demolishes every argument against direct cash support for families. First and most importantly: the monthly payments had no negative impact on employment. Study after study confirmed that parents kept working just as much as before. If anything, employment increased because over 11% of families used the money to pay for childcare, removing a major barrier to work.

Even more striking: approximately 300,000 households became new small business owners while receiving the monthly CTC. Lower-income parents, defined as making less than $50,000 annually, showed the largest growth in self-employment. The economic security provided by guaranteed monthly payments didn’t make people lazy — it made them entrepreneurs.

The payments reduced desperation in ways that should trouble anyone with a conscience. Before the enhanced CTC, research documented parents selling their blood plasma and taking on predatory payday loans just to feed their children. During the six months of monthly payments, that desperation measurably declined. After the payments stopped? A survey by Parents Together Action found that 45% of parents reported skipping meals so their kids could eat. 64% had to spend down their savings. 84% of parents said the CTC had made them less anxious.

Research funded by the National Institutes of Health found that the enhanced CTC reduced anxiety symptoms by 3.4 percentage points — a 13.3% reduction at the population level. The effects were even larger for Black and Hispanic parents. Other research found that when women receive income boosts from tax credits, an additional $1,000 decreases physical and sexual violence against unmarried low-educated women by nearly 10%. Violence against women and children isn’t just a crime problem. It’s a poverty problem.

The Science of Why Timing Matters

The proponents of Trump Accounts will tell you that $1,000 invested at birth could grow to $1 million by age 28 if the maximum $5,000 amount is contributed annually. They’ll point to the magic of compound interest. What they won’t tell you is that the brain also compounds — but in the opposite direction when exposed to poverty.

The study of epigenetics has revealed that growing up in poverty can literally rewire developing brains. Chronic stress from poverty is associated with dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala — regions critical for learning, memory, emotional regulation, and decision-making.

The Great Smoky Mountains Study, led by epidemiologist Dr. Jane Costello at Duke University, provides extremely compelling evidence. Starting in 1992, researchers followed 1,420 children in rural North Carolina, including 349 Cherokee children. Then in 1996, a casino opened on the Cherokee reservation, and every tribal member began receiving semiannual dividend payments — about $4,000 to $6,000 per year.

The results were stunning. Within four years, the number of Cherokee families in poverty dropped by half. Behavioral problems among Cherokee children declined by 40%, falling to approximately the same rate as children who had never been poor. High school graduation rates improved. Crime rates dropped. A decade later, researchers found that the youngest children when the payments began were a third less likely to develop substance abuse or psychiatric problems as teenagers.

Most remarkably, the children who received cash during childhood showed permanent improvements in two key personality traits: conscientiousness and agreeableness, both of which are associated with higher lifetime earnings.

Another study cleverly used birth timing and tax benefits to track long-term impacts. It found that an increase of just $1,300 in the first year of a child’s life resulted in that baby growing up to be an adult who earned 1% to 2% more income. Math and reading scores increased. High school graduation rates improved. The researchers concluded that “the longer-term effects on child earnings alone are large enough that the transfer pays for itself through subsequent increases in federal income tax revenue.”

The Rx Kids Revolution

If anyone still doubts that cash during childhood — not 18 years later — transforms lives, look at Flint, Michigan. In January 2024, Flint became the first city in America to launch a universal prenatal and infant cash program called Rx Kids. Every pregnant woman receives $1,500 during pregnancy and $500 per month for the baby’s first year of life. No strings attached. No bureaucratic hoops.

The results have been nothing short of miraculous. A population-level study found that Rx Kids cut preterm births by up to 18% and low birthweight births by up to 27%. The program prevented approximately 42 preterm births and 68 NICU admissions in its first year, saving an estimated $6.2 million in healthcare costs alone.

But it goes further. Evictions among participating mothers were reduced by 91%. Postpartum depression and anxiety plummeted. Food insecurity dropped dramatically. Perhaps most powerfully, in a city that had been devastated by the water crisis and years of institutional betrayal, trust in government and healthcare institutions began to rebuild.

A November 2025 study found that Rx Kids produced a 32% reduction in child maltreatment allegations among infants. Before the program, 21.7% of Flint infants experienced a maltreatment investigation within their first six months of life. After Rx Kids launched, that rate dropped to 15.5%. Related research found that a single $1,000 cash payment to low-income households decreases referrals to child protective services by approximately 10% and reduced physical abuse by 30%.

This is what investing in children now looks like. Not an investment account that can’t be withdrawn from at all until age 18 and without penalty until age 60, but money that prevents premature births, reduces child abuse, keeps families housed, and gives babies the healthy start their developing brains desperately need.

Who Really Benefits from Trump Accounts?

Let’s be clear-eyed about who benefits most from Trump Accounts. A child born to a wealthy family who maxes out contributions at $5,000 per year could accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars by age 18. A child born into poverty, whose parents can contribute nothing beyond the initial $1,000, might have $3,000 or $4,000 after 18 years of compound growth. This isn’t leveling the playing field. It’s giving a head start to kids who already have one.

Meanwhile, consider who else benefits. All those billions invested in index funds will drive up stock prices. Who owns stocks? Overwhelmingly, the wealthy. According to Federal Reserve data, the top 10% of Americans own 93% of all stocks. When BlackRock and other financial giants announce their support for Trump Accounts, they’re not just being philanthropic — they’re supporting a program that will channel billions into the very markets they manage.

And there’s another troubling dimension. Treasury Secretary Bessent’s “50-state challenge” asking billionaires and corporations to step up has the uncomfortable whiff of a loyalty test. In an era where the federal government has shown willingness to use its power against perceived enemies, what message does it send when billionaires and corporations are publicly called upon to demonstrate their “patriotism” through donations to accounts bearing the president’s name?

The Real Question We Should Be Asking

Here is the fundamental absurdity of Trump Accounts: we’re being asked to celebrate giving a child born into poverty in 2025 a savings account they can access in 2043, while we simultaneously allow that child to grow up hungry, unstably housed, and neurologically damaged by chronic stress.

We know that child poverty costs us over $1 trillion annually. We know that ending it would generate a 15-to-1 return on investment. We know that the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half for about $100 billion per year while increasing entrepreneurship and having zero negative effects on employment. We know that programs like Rx Kids prevent premature births, reduce child abuse, and save millions in healthcare costs.

We know all of this. And yet, instead of making the obvious choice to invest in children now, we’re celebrating a program that kicks the can 18 years down the road — a program that will do precisely nothing to help the 10 million children currently living in poverty — 14.3% of all kids under 18.

What good is a college savings account to a child who couldn’t focus in school because they were hungry? What good is first-time homebuyer money to someone whose brain was permanently altered by the toxic stress of childhood poverty and ended up in prison? What good is business startup capital to an adult whose educational outcomes were damaged before they ever entered kindergarten?

The question isn’t whether we can afford to help children. We’re already paying — over $1 trillion per year in the costs of not helping them. The question is whether we’ll continue choosing an expensive pound of cure while rejecting the affordable ounce of prevention.

Billionaires want to donate to Trump Accounts? Here’s a better idea: demand to be taxed to fund an expanded, permanent, universal Child Tax Credit. Even better, get behind the End Child Poverty Act that would provide $469 a month to every kid in America. Fund programs state by state like Rx Kids in Michigan that put cash in the hands of families now, when it can actually change children’s lives, instead of locking it away until the damage is already done to further inflate the stock market.

The data is clear. The science is settled. The moral imperative is undeniable. Children don’t need investment accounts that mature in 18 years more than they need food on the table tonight. They need stable housing this month. They need parents who aren’t crushed by financial stress today and every day.

Trump Accounts aren’t a solution to child poverty. They’re a distraction from it — a shiny object that allows us to feel good about “doing something” while doing nothing that actually matters in the here and now. And every child who spends the next 18 years in poverty while their Trump Account compounds is a monument to our collective failure of imagination and will.

We can do better. We know how to do better. The only question is whether we’ll ever choose to.

And if we really want to make “every American a shareholder” as the Trump administration is saying they want to with these Trump accounts, we’d just do Universal Basic Income for all adults and kids and index that dividend to GDP growth.

“When every American owns a share of the most powerful economy on earth, every American will benefit from our nation’s growth. Every American will capture a portion of the productivity gains brought about by AI, robotics, and other world-changing technologies. And every American will be invested in the free-market system and its continued success.”

—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent describing UBI without realizing it

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There’s a revolution happening in mental health treatment, and it’s not coming from pharmaceutical companies or therapy offices. It’s coming from something far simpler and, in retrospect, far more obvious: giving people monthly unconditional income.

A new analysis of Finland’s basic income experiment has just added another brick to what is becoming an undeniable wall of evidence. In the groundbreaking experiment, two groups of unemployed people received an identical amount of money with identical regularity—€560 per month. The only difference was how they received it. One group got it unconditionally, with no strings attached. The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment.

Same money. Different rules. The results?

In the control group receiving conditional benefits at the end of the trial, 24% had poor mental health. In the treatment group receiving unconditional basic income, only 16% had poor mental health. That’s an 8 percentage point reduction—a full 33% less poor mental health—simply from removing the conditions.

Let that sink in. It wasn’t the amount of money that made the difference. Both groups got the same €560 a month. It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out—that created these dramatic improvements in psychological well-being.

This new analysis, published in December 2025 by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the University of Helsinki, confirms what basic income advocates have long suspected: the conditions we attach to welfare aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences. They are active harms. They create stress, anxiety, and psychological damage that persists even when the financial support is adequate.

What Finland Actually Tested

The Finnish experiment, launched in 2017, was a two-year nation-wide randomized field experiment on basic income. Two thousand randomly selected unemployed people received €560 per month with absolutely no conditions—no requirement to look for work, no reporting to unemployment offices, no penalties if they found employment or earned additional income. A control group of over 173,000 continued receiving traditional conditional unemployment benefits of the same amount.

Both groups got essentially the same money. The treatment group’s administrative burden was simply lower—they received their €560 without any conditionality whatsoever. That’s it. That’s really the only difference that was tested.

The researchers measured mental health using the MHI-5, a validated five-item mental health screening instrument that identifies people at risk of mood and anxiety disorders. What they found was striking: the treatment group was significantly less likely to screen positive for poor mental health. The adjusted risk difference was 8 percentage points, with a 95% confidence interval between 3 and 12 percentage points. In plain English, they’re confident unconditional basic income reduced poor mental health by somewhere between 12.5% and 50%, with their best guess being 33%. This wasn’t a fluke or statistical noise—this was a robust, significant finding.

The treatment group was more satisfied with their lives, experienced less mental strain, less depression, less sadness, and less loneliness. They reported better cognitive abilities—improved memory, learning, and concentration. All from receiving the same money with fewer strings attached.

This isn’t an isolated finding. It’s part of a pattern so consistent it should be making headlines everywhere.

The Trust Connection

Perhaps the most fascinating finding from Finland wasn’t about mental health at all—it was about trust. The basic income recipients trusted other people and institutions in society to a larger extent than the control group. They were more confident in their own future and their ability to influence things.

“The basic income recipients trusted other people and the institutions in society to a larger extent and were more confident in their own future and their ability to influence things than the control group. This may be due to the basic income being unconditional, which in previous studies has been seen to increase people’s trust in the system.” [source]

Evidence from Malawi reinforces this pattern. In a cash transfer experiment with adolescent schoolgirls, those who received unconditional payments were 14 percentage points less likely to suffer from psychological distress compared to the control group. Girls who received the same money but with conditions attached—requiring regular school attendance—showed only a 6 percentage point improvement. So here, unconditional cash was 2.3 times better for mental health than conditional cash—a 133% improvement. Researchers attributed the gap to the psychological burden of meeting conditions. Even well-intentioned requirements like education can undermine the mental health benefits that cash provides.

Think about what this means. When society trusts you with resources—when it says “here, we believe you can handle this without us watching over your shoulder”—you begin to trust society back. And when you trust the people and institutions around you, you feel better. Your mental health improves.

I know in my own life, I’m going to feel better mentally if I trust every member of society more. That trust isn’t just nice to have—it’s foundational to psychological well-being. It’s hard to feel good about the world when you feel surveilled, suspected, and constantly required to prove your worthiness. Unconditionality removes that burden, and the mental health benefits follow.

No One Was Harmed—Everyone Benefited

The researchers also investigated whether basic income helped some groups more than others. Using three different analytical methods—conventional subgroup analysis, multilevel modeling, and machine learning (causal forest)—they looked for variations across age, gender, education level, prior employment status, urbanicity, partnership status, and family composition.

What they found was remarkable: the beneficial effects were consistent across all groups. Basic income didn’t help young people more than old people, or women more than men, or the less educated more than the highly educated. It helped everyone roughly equally. As the researchers put it: “Our results suggest that basic income schemes have no harmful effects on mental health across multiple potential axes of labor market disadvantage, and are unlikely to increase mental health inequalities among people in unemployment.”

This matters enormously for policy. One concern about universal basic income is that it might help some people while harming others—that perhaps it would reinforce traditional gender roles or disadvantage certain groups. The Finnish data shows this isn’t the case. Basic income is a universally beneficial policy for mental health.

Cash Beats Therapy

Finland’s findings align with research from around the world. In Kenya, researchers conducted a rigorous study comparing the effects of a $1,076 unconditional cash transfer against a five-week psychotherapy program that cost almost three times as much. One year later, the cash recipients showed higher levels of psychological well-being than the control group. The psychotherapy recipients? No measurable effects on either psychological or economic outcomes.

Perhaps most telling: combining both interventions—giving people both cash and therapy—produced results similar to cash alone. The therapy added nothing. The money was doing all the work.

This shouldn’t surprise us. When someone is drowning in financial stress and bureaucratic anxiety, cognitive behavioral therapy can only do so much. The therapy isn’t addressing the actual problem. Cash—unconditional cash—does.

Germany Confirms the Pattern

Fresh results from Germany’s three-year basic income pilot, published in April 2025, add even more weight to this evidence. Participants received €1,200 monthly for three years with no strings attached. The mental health improvements were, in the researchers’ words, “substantively large and robust.”

Mental health improved by 0.347 standard deviations. Sense of purpose in life improved by 0.250 standard deviations. Life satisfaction improved by 0.417 standard deviations. Expensive, intensive programs often produce effects of 0.1-0.2 SD. Getting 0.35-0.42 SD from “just” giving people money is remarkable. And the strongest effect was on autonomy—basic income gave people the feeling that they had more control over their lives, that their lives were “more valuable and meaningful.”

The German researchers concluded that basic income “functions as a resilience instrument.” It gives people the power to say no—to bad jobs, to exploitative conditions, to situations that harm their mental health. That power changes everything.

Thirty-Eight Studies Tell the Same Story

A systematic review published in Social Science & Medicine examined 38 studies of social security policy changes in high-income countries. Twenty-one studies looked at increases in social security generosity; seventeen looked at decreases. The pattern was unmistakable: policies that improve social security eligibility and generosity are associated with improvements in mental health. Policies that reduce eligibility and generosity are associated with worse mental health.

The evidence isn’t ambiguous. Give people more security, their mental health improves. Take security away, their mental health declines. The researchers also found that cuts to social security tend to increase mental health inequalities, while expansions have the opposite effect.

Cash Transfers Save Lives

In Brazil, researchers studying the Bolsa Família program—covering half the Brazilian population over twelve years (over 114 million people)—found that cash transfer recipients had dramatically lower suicide rates: 5.5 per 100,000 compared to 11.1 per 100,000 among non-recipients. The monthly cash support was associated with approximately a 61% reduction in suicide risk. The effect was strongest among women (65% reduction) and individuals aged 25 to 59 (60% reduction).

We’re not talking about abstract well-being measures here. We’re talking about lives saved. These are thousands of real people who didn’t end their lives thanks to having cash support.

Three Decades of Evidence from North Carolina

Some of the most compelling long-term evidence comes from North Carolina. In 1996, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians opened a casino and began distributing profits equally to all tribal members—a universal basic income for the community that continues to this day.

A Duke University study that was already tracking children’s mental health in the region suddenly became the longest-running observation of UBI’s effects. The results were remarkable: behavioral problems among children in families lifted out of poverty declined by 40%. Children who were youngest when payments began were a third less likely to develop substance abuse or psychiatric problems as teenagers. At ages 25 and 30, those who grew up with the basic income had a third of the anxiety and half the rates of depression compared to those who didn’t.

The casino dividends also improved the community’s social cohesion and self-determination. It wasn’t just individual mental health that improved—it was the fabric of the community itself. Economists have since tracked the costs of the annual dividend versus the savings in expenditures on crime and medical care. They find that by age 26, the benefits of the UBI exceeded its costs by a factor of three to one.

Building Community, Building Mental Health

One of the most underappreciated findings from basic income research is how it strengthens community bonds—and how those stronger bonds contribute to better mental health. In the 150+ guaranteed basic income pilots conducted across the United States since 2020, researchers consistently find that participants use their time and resources to spend more time with friends, family, and neighbors.

In Namibia’s UBI pilot, researchers observed that “a stronger community spirit developed.” Begging had created barriers to normal social interaction—when everyone might ask you for money, you avoid social contact. Once basic income made begging unnecessary, people felt free to visit each other without being seen as wanting something in return. In India’s UBI pilot villages, traditionally separate castes began working together in ways that surprised even researchers.

We know from decades of research that social connection is the trump card for mental health. Basic income doesn’t just give people money—it gives them the time and security to invest in relationships. And those relationships support mental health in ways that compound over time.

The Unexpected Connection to Gun Violence

Here’s where the mental health and social cohesion findings lead somewhere potentially unexpected: gun violence. The United States has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world—nearly three times more murders per capita than Canada and ten times more than Japan. What explains this (besides the guns)?

In 1998, Ichiro Kawachi at the Harvard School of Public Health led a landmark study investigating the factors driving American homicide rates. Using data from all 50 states measuring social capital (interpersonal trust that promotes cooperation), income inequality, poverty, unemployment, education levels, and alcohol consumption, the researchers identified which factors were most associated with violent crime.

The results were striking. Income inequality alone explained 74% of the variance in murder rates. But social capital had an even stronger association—by itself, it accounted for 82% of homicides. Other factors like unemployment, poverty, or education were only weakly associated. Social capital wasn’t just important—it was primary. As Kawachi concluded, when the ties that bind a community together are severed, inequality is allowed to run free, with deadly consequences.

What about guns themselves? In a follow-up study, Kawachi found that when social capital and community involvement declined, gun ownership increased. People who don’t trust their neighbors are more likely to think guns will provide security. In this way, both the number of guns and the number of homicides stem from the same root: eroded social capital. Address the root cause—rebuild trust and community bonds—and both problems may improve together.

This is where basic income enters the picture. Remember Finland’s finding: basic income recipients trusted other people and institutions more than the control group. Remember Namibia: a stronger community spirit developed. Remember India: castes began working together. Basic income doesn’t just improve individual mental health—it rebuilds the social fabric that protects communities from violence.

According to University of Washington sociologists (my alma mater), social activism—people working together for their community—is the single most important factor associated with reduced violence at the neighborhood, national, and individual levels. Universal basic income gives everyone the time and security to engage in exactly this kind of civic participation. It’s not just a mental health intervention. It’s a gun violence prevention intervention too.

The Conditions Are the Problem

The new Finland study makes something crystal clear that has been obscured for too long: the conditions we attach to welfare programs aren’t neutral features. They are active harms. The surveillance, the requirements, the constant need to prove worthiness—besides adding to administrative costs, these create psychological damage that persists even when the financial support is adequate.

We’ve spent decades debating how much money to give people, when we should have been asking whether we need to give it with so many strings attached. Finland gave both groups the same money. The group with fewer strings had 33% better mental health. That’s not a marginal improvement—that’s a transformation.

The evidence from Finland, Germany, Kenya, Brazil, North Carolina, Namibia, India, Canada, and dozens of American cities all points in the same direction: unconditional cash improves mental health. The unconditionality matters. The trust matters. Treating people like adults who can make their own decisions about their own lives—that matters.

The Canadian Mental Health Association has already officially endorsed basic income. So has the Canadian Medical Association. As the evidence continues to pile up, more health organizations will follow. The question is no longer whether basic income improves mental health—that question has been definitively answered. The question now is how long we’ll continue to ignore the answer.

Every day we delay implementing universal basic income, people suffer unnecessarily. They experience anxiety and depression that could be prevented. Their trust in society erodes, in turn eroding faith in democracy itself. Children grow up with chronic stress that shapes their brains and personalities in lasting ways. The science is in, and it’s unambiguous: universal basic income would be one of the most powerful mental health interventions humanity has ever devised.

Conditions are the problem. Trust is the solution. It’s time we started acting like it.

Note: This article discusses the mental health benefits of universal basic income based on multiple peer-reviewed studies and pilot programs. Individual experiences may vary, and basic income should be considered as one component of comprehensive mental health policy, not a replacement for necessary medical or psychological care.

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Eduardo Porter’s new Guardian piece is built around a familiar move: treat universal basic income as a single, maximalist policy meant to replace paychecks, then declare it either unaffordable or socially corrosive, then pivot to means-tested wage subsidies as the “serious” alternative. This time the villain is AI. The structure is the same as last time. He even opens by mocking UBI as a “space zombie,” a sci-fi idea that keeps crawling back no matter how many times critics think they’ve killed it.

The reason it keeps coming back is not Silicon Valley fad-cycling. It keeps coming back because the problems it addresses have kept getting worse for half a century: rising productivity with relatively stagnant wages, growing insecurity, a safety net that a significant percentage of people fall through, and an economy that increasingly rewards ownership over labor. AI does not create those problems. AI accelerates them.

Porter has changed in one meaningful way since he went after UBI in 2016. He now takes the tech disruption of the labor market story more seriously. He now acknowledges that AI can hammer job security, reshape bargaining power, and intensify the distributional fight over who captures new productivity. That is growth.

He has not changed in the way that matters. He still argues against UBI by arguing against a policy that UBI advocates are not proposing. He loves building straw men.

What Porter Got Closer To, And What He Still Misses

Back in 2016, Porter argued in the New York Times that UBI was a poor tool to fight poverty and leaned heavily on two claims: it would be ruinously expensive, and it would reduce work. The expense claim relied on multiplying a big check by a big population as if gross cost were UBI’s meaningful cost. The work claim leaned on a moral story about effort rather than the evidence he himself previously cited on pilots.

That contradiction is why I called him out then. He highlighted evidence showing no meaningful work collapse in the pilots he chose to discuss, then turned around and warned that UBI would make people stop working. I pointed out the hypocrisy plainly: praising a result and then denying it in the very next breath is not analysis, it’s agenda.

In 2025, Porter now repeats the same pattern with updated props. He admits AI could destroy or degrade jobs and wages, then treats that as a reason to reject UBI anyway. He argues that if the AI future is bleak, a broad consumption tax is “ridiculous,” and if the AI future is not bleak, UBI is unnecessary.

That is not a critique. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose pseudo-intellectual trap.

The First Fix: Stop Pretending UBI Means “No One Works”

UBI is not meant to replace the income from all jobs. UBI is meant to ensure nobody falls below a non-zero floor, and to distribute a dividend from an economy we all help create. The floor is the point. The dividend is the justice.

Put in the simplest terms: UBI is a foundation. All income is earned on top of it. A poverty-line UBI is not “the replacement paycheck for the post-work apocalypse.” It’s the equivalent of the foundation of a house. It’s so the house built on top of it doesn’t crumble and fall. It prevents the worst outcomes, stabilizes consumer demand, and gives people leverage to say no to exploitation.

Porter keeps fighting a fictional UBI where everyone gets a middle-class wage from the government and the labor market disappears. He even waves at a fantasy number—“give everyone the median income”—then declares it would cost $14 trillion and therefore the entire concept is unserious.

That is like “critiquing” public schools by multiplying the price of private boarding school for every child and calling public education impossible.

AI Job Loss Is Not 100%. It’s Still Massive. The Right Range Is The Point.

There are two childish stories about AI and jobs. One says AI ends all jobs. The other says everything will be fine.

Both are wrong.

The reality is a wide band of disruption that can be measured in chunks of the labor market large enough to break lives and politics, but not so large that society becomes a sci-fi desert of total idleness. I have been arguing for years that the most realistic path is not instant total unemployment. It is rapid labor market churn, wage pressure, and a race down the job ladder.

That “middle path” now has plenty of backing:

• A 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report concluded that 22% of jobs are expected to be disrupted by 2030.

• A 2025 study jointly published by the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and the National Science Foundation concluded that 25% of jobs could be disrupted by 2028.

• A 2023 report by McKinsey estimated that 30% of hours worked in the U.S. could be automated by 2030.

• A 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimated that two-thirds of jobs are to some degree exposed to automation and that 25% to 50% of work in those exposed jobs could be replaced by 2033.

• MIT’s Project Iceberg has an “Iceberg Index” estimating that current AI systems already overlap with about 11.7% of U.S. labor market wage value in technical capability terms.

That 10% to 25% zone is the disruption Porter should be able to see clearly. It is not the “end of work.” It is the end of stability for many of those who still have some.

Additionally, the spending of UBI will create more jobs for people to take. Without UBI, the net job losses will be larger than without UBI.

Demand Is The Hidden Variable Porter Barely Touches

Porter’s Guardian piece nods at AI and jobs, but it still treats employment as if it’s determined primarily by worker incentives. It is not. Demand creates jobs. People with money create demand. People without money create layoffs.

I laid this out in detail in 2023 with a simple, realistic model: AI makes some workers more productive, firms need fewer workers for the same output, and whether those workers keep jobs depends on whether there is enough consumer demand for the firm to expand rather than cut.

UBI’s macro job effect is not a mystery. A floor under everyone’s income is an automatic stabilizer. It keeps spending from collapsing during displacement shocks. It reduces the odds that productivity gains translate into demand shortfalls and cascading layoffs.

There will always be some amount of demand for human labor, no matter the cost or quality of AI-created goods and services. Just as some people choose to spend more for organic foods, some will choose to spend more on human goods and services.

The Second Fix: Stop Using Gross Cost As Propaganda

Porter’s favorite move is arithmetic theater: multiply a universal check by the population and call the result “the cost,” as if taxes, benefit offsets, and savings mechanisms do not exist.

UBI cost debates that start and end with gross cost are not serious.

Here is the serious part: the net cost of a poverty-line UBI, with realistic offsets and tax phaseout, is not remotely the apocalyptic number critics love to chant. A new working paper by Karl Widerquist and Jack Rossbach updates “back-of-the-envelope” UBI costing with 2024 data and finds that a UBI set at $16,000 per adult and $8,000 per child (with a 50% phaseout accomplished via taxes) has a net cost of around $605.5 to $649.2 billion per year, roughly 2.07% to 2.29% of GDP.

The most important point is not even the dollar figure. It’s the trend: as a share of GDP, a poverty-line UBI has gotten cheaper for more than 50 years—down from about 6.22% of GDP in 1970, to around 2% today.

So when Porter treats UBI as a futuristic luxury that becomes plausible only after some imagined AI endpoint, he is historically backward. If anything, the 1970s were the time to begin. That was when wages first decoupled from productivity and growing insecurity and inequality became government policy.

UBI is entirely affordable, and a poverty-line floor is more affordable now than it was when the modern wage-productivity split began.

The Third Fix: Universality Is Not Waste. It’s The Design.

Porter continues to treat universality as a fatal flaw: money “wasted” on people who do not “need” it. That view confuses accounting with political economy.

Universality is what makes a floor durable. Universality is what makes it automatic. Universality is what makes it non-punitive. Universality is what makes it trusted.

Means-tested programs train people to fear the system and actively discourage people from increasing their incomes. They are booby-trapped with cliffs, paperwork, surveillance, and stigma. They punish volatility in income precisely when volatility becomes the norm. They exclude via bureaucratic testing those who need help the most. That is all the opposite of what you need in an AI-impacted labor market.

Porter’s preferred substitute—the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) wage subsidy—does something even worse: it ties survival more tightly to wages. It explicitly excludes the unpaid work that keeps society alive: caregiving, volunteering, community building. If you do not have taxable earnings, you do not count.

UBI counts everyone. That is the point.

The Dividend Argument Porter Still Refuses To Take Seriously

Porter concedes that capital owners will capture a disproportionate share of AI’s gains and suggests heavier taxation of capital. Fine. That is part of the answer.

But taxation alone still frames the public as petitioners. UBI reframes the public as dividend-earning shareholders.

AI is built on a mountain of collective inheritance: publicly funded research, public universities, decades of government grants, and training data produced by billions of people—living and dead—who were never asked, never compensated, and never given a share certificate.

Gar Alperovitz puts the moral core cleanly: most modern income exceeds what anyone can claim as the product of their own work in the present; it is “a gift of the past,” a technological inheritance. That inheritance is currently routed upward by default. A universal dividend is how you route a portion back downward by right.

Porter’s alternative is still paternalistic. He wants targeted help for the poor and wage subsidies for workers. That is how you build a permanently anxious majority watching a permanently secure minority.

A universal dividend is how you build a shareholder society that includes everyone.

And universal provision builds pressure to tax the rich more than targeting ever can.

UBI Reduces Inequality In Several Direct Channels

Porter waves at inequality and implies UBI is too blunt to matter. That is wrong in at least four ways.

1. Consumption inequality falls immediately because the floor raises the bottom mechanically.

2. Bargaining power rises because the threat of destitution is removed. When survival is not on the line, saying “no” becomes possible. Wages rise at the bottom because employers lose the ability to weaponize hunger and homelessness.

3. Unions strengthen because UBI functions as a universal, unlimited-time strike fund. The ability to withhold labor without starvation is what makes collective bargaining real.

4. Democratic participation rises because time and stress are freed up. That means more organizing, more volunteering, more small-donor politics, and fewer people trapped in the learned helplessness that inequality manufactures.

UBI is not a cure-all. It is the platform that makes other equalizing reforms easier to win and easier to sustain.

Financing: Porter’s “VAT and Income Tax Won’t Work” Claim Is Just Slogan

Porter dismisses income taxation and mocks VAT-style approaches in a future with less work. This is where the critique collapses into vibes.

A modern UBI can be financed by a portfolio, not a single tax:

• progressive income taxes and reforms

• consumption taxes and transaction taxes

• wealth taxes and estate taxes

• land value taxation

• corporate taxation and excess profit mechanisms

• requiring large corporations to issue new stock annually into a National Wealth Fund, diluting shareholder value to fund the universal dividend

Even Porter’s own instincts point toward the real destination: broaden ownership. The difference is that UBI advocates are willing to make that destination universal and automatic, instead of conditional and stigmatized.

Also, taxation is not the only lever. In a world where AI drives disinflationary pressure by lowering costs and compressing wages, some portion of a UBI floor can be treated as macro stabilization, similar in spirit to the pandemic-era recognition that governments can and do create and issue money.

Porter treats that as unthinkable. Recent history says otherwise.

The Missing Layer In Porter’s Work Story: Security, Stress, Democracy

Porter keeps returning to the fear that if people have income, they will work less, and that this is inherently bad.

Even if it were true at the margin, it is not a moral failure. It is a social upgrade. Less forced labor, less desperation employment, more care work, more education, more entrepreneurship, more civic participation.

But the deeper point is what insecurity does to a society.

A chronically stressed population is sicker, angrier, more violent, and easier to radicalize. Insecurity consumes cognitive bandwidth. It increases receptivity to scapegoating and authoritarian “order” narratives. I have argued explicitly that reducing insecurity and inequality is a democratic necessity, not a lifestyle perk.

Universality matters here again. When government delivers a tangible benefit to everyone, it signals inherent worth, builds trust, and reduces the corrosive politics of “makers vs takers.” A universal dividend is not just redistribution. It is social cohesion.

The Real Package: UBI As Floor, Plus A Time Dividend, Plus Public Options

UBI is the foundation, not any kind of ceiling.

A serious “AI economy” agenda stacks policies:

• UBI as a poverty-ending floor that grows with productivity

• universal healthcare so survival is not tied to employment

• shorter workweeks and shorter workdays with no loss in pay so productivity gains become time, not just profit

• stronger collective bargaining rights and antitrust enforcement

• public investment and, if necessary, public employment for socially necessary work that the market underprovides

Porter writes as if rejecting UBI preserves work. In reality, rejecting UBI preserves desperation.

The Bottom Line Porter Keeps Dodging

UBI is not a plan for a world with no jobs. It is a plan for a world where jobs are less reliable as the sole delivery mechanism for survival and dignity.

AI disruption in the 10% to 25% range is not speculative fantasy anymore. It is visible in exposure measures and credible institutional estimates.

A poverty-line UBI is not fiscally absurd, and arguably never has been. The newest costing work suggests it is on the order of about 2% of GDP on net, and it has gotten cheaper as a share of GDP for decades. The cost to directly end poverty with UBI has never been lower than it is now.

And the moral logic is not radical. It is inheritance. Most wealth is built on a collective gift of the past. A universal dividend is a modest, sane way to distribute a portion of that gift to everyone alive now, including the caregivers, volunteers, and unpaid workers all of whom Porter’s preferred policies leave behind.

Porter has grown enough to see AI as a distributional threat. He has not grown enough to stop fighting a straw man UBI that serious advocates are not proposing. He is still arguing against “universal basic income replacing work,” while the actual case is “universal basic income preventing poverty, lessening insecurity, stabilizing demand, reducing inequality, and distributing an earned inheritance to all so that AI literally WORKS FOR EVERYONE.”

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Recently, an account on X/Twitter posted a claim that the basic income pilot in Finland proved that basic income doesn’t reduce crime. They cited a new study analyzing the data which found a “null result” on crime impacts. Elon Musk—the guy most likely to become the world’s first trillionaire who allegedly supports UBI but says he doesn’t until people buy enough of his robots and robotaxis to cause mass unemployment—boosted this signal to his massive following, replying “Correct” to the sentiment that if you think basic income fixes crime by reducing poverty, you’re deluded, and that the real problem is low intelligence and low self-control.

Now it’s even being amplified by Noah Smith on his blog. This really pisses me off.

It pisses me off because it is a classic case of using a specific, highly nuanced data point to tell a broad, dangerous lie. It allows cynics to dismiss the suffering of millions with a “Well, actually” based on a study they haven’t properly read.

The claim that “Universal Basic Income doesn’t reduce crime” isn’t just wrong; it is actively contradicted by decades of evidence from Alaska to Namibia, and from Canada to North Carolina. But to understand why the Finland study showed what it showed, and why actual UBI significantly reduces crime, we have to look at the details that the headline-skimmers routinely ignore.

The Finland Fallacy

Let’s start with the “Fact” layer of our Truth Sandwich: Poverty, insecurity, and inequality are the primary drivers of crime. When you alleviate those, crime rates go down.

So, why did the Finland pilot show a “null result”? If you give people money, shouldn’t crime drop?

The answer lies in the experimental design. The Finland experiment was not a test of Universal Basic Income (UBI). It was a test of a slightly more efficient unemployment system for 2,000 unemployed people.

In the Finnish trial, the treatment group received €560 per month. But here is the critical context: This money was instead of the same amount of their normal unemployment benefit. Finland already has a robust social safety net. The people in the experiment were already receiving money from the government; the experiment simply removed the bureaucratic conditions and means-testing attached to that money to see if it would encourage them to take low-paying jobs without fear of losing some of their benefits.

If you take a group of people who are already getting €560/month with conditions, and you switch them to getting €560/month without conditions, why would you expect less crime? Their material circumstances haven’t shifted. They just have less paperwork.

To put this in perspective, imagine we wanted to test if raising the minimum wage reduces crime. But instead of raising the wage, we took 2,000 workers earning $15/hour and simply changed how they were paid—maybe via direct deposit instead of a paper check—but kept the amount exactly the same. If crime didn’t go down, would you conclude “Higher wages don’t reduce crime”? Of course not. You’d conclude that you didn’t actually raise their wages.

The Finland pilot was a test of bureaucracy reduction, not poverty reduction.

The “Nothing” Problem

There is another massive flaw in using Finland to argue against UBI in the United States: Finland doesn’t have our level of desperation.

Right now, there are approximately 13 million Americans living in poverty who receive absolutely nothing from the federal government. They don’t qualify for TANF (which is notoriously difficult to get). They’ve exhausted SNAP and unemployment insurance or never got them. They are completely outside the system.

These are the people most likely to engage in “survival crime.” When you have $0, and your child is hungry, you don’t care about the law. You steal food. You sell drugs. You engage in sex work. You do what you have to do to survive.

The Finland pilot didn’t study these people because, in Finland, desperate people largely don’t exist due to their strong safety net. Finland’s poverty rate in 2022 was 0.3%. A real UBI in the United States would reach the millions who are currently excluded. It would be the difference between $0 and $1,000 a month.

When you actually make that change—when you move people from “nothing” to “something,” or when you boost the income of the working poor who are barely holding on—the data shows that crime drops like a stone.

The Evidence of Abundance

When we look at experiments that actually increased people’s incomes rather than just shuffling their paperwork, the verdict is undeniable.

1. The Plasma Center Effect
A fascinating recent study looked at what happens when blood plasma donation centers open in a neighborhood. In the US, selling plasma is one of the few ways people with no income can generate cash quickly. It serves as a grim sort of market-based safety net.

The researchers found that when a center opens, there is a 10% to 12% drop in crime in the surrounding area. Property crime and drug offenses plummeted. Why? Because when people have a legal, accessible way to get the cash they need to survive, they don’t need to break the law to get it. It’s not rocket science. It’s basic economics.

2. Namibia’s Crime Collapse
In the Otjivero UBI pilot in Namibia, the entire village was given a basic income. This was a “saturation” pilot, meaning everyone got it (around 1,000 people), creating a community-wide floor. The results were staggering.

• Overall crime fell by 42%.

• The illegal poaching of animals for food/money fell by 95%.

When everyone had enough to eat, nobody needed to steal their neighbor’s livestock. The “survival” incentive for crime evaporated overnight.

3. The Mincome Miracle
In the famous “Mincome” experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, an entire town was guaranteed a basic income for about five years. Researchers found a 15% drop in overall crime and a large 37% drop in violent crime.

Much of this reduction was driven by a decrease in domestic abuse and alcohol-related offenses. Financial stress is a pressure cooker. When you turn down the heat, the pot stops exploding.

4. Domestic Violence in Kenya
In a study by GiveDirectly in Kenya, providing unconditional monthly income to women reduced the instances of physical and sexual violence from their partners by 51%.

Money is power. Financial independence gives people the power to say no, the power to leave abusive situations, and the power to de-escalate household stress before it turns into violence.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) shows this too by the way, with 21% fewer counts of physical or sexual violence as the result of an additional $1,000.

5. The Oh Look I Have Healthcare Now Effect
If you want to know what happens when you stop punishing poverty and start treating it, look at the data on Medicaid expansion. In a massive 2022 study, researchers analyzed FBI crime data from over 3,000 counties to see what happened after the Affordable Care Act allowed states to expand Medicaid.

The results were undeniable. States that expanded the safety net saw a 20% to 32% drop in overall arrest rates compared to states that didn’t.

• Drug arrests fell by 25-41%.

• Violent crime arrests fell by 19-29%.

This is the “prevention” argument in action. When people can access healthcare—including mental health services and addiction treatment—without financial ruin, they don’t spiral into the criminal justice system. A UBI would be a universal preventative care system for poverty that stops crime before the police are ever called.

It’s also a reason to do universal healthcare too.

The Kids are Alright (And Less Criminal)

One of the most insidious arguments against UBI is that it’s a waste of money. But when you look at the cost of crime, UBI is actually a savings plan.

The Smoky Mountains Study
In North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians began distributing a portion of casino profits to all tribal members in 1996. Researchers had already been studying the youth in that area for unrelated reasons, giving them a perfect “natural experiment.”

The results? The children whose families received the income boost saw massive behavioral improvements over the next few decades. As they grew up, they committed less crime. By the time the cohort reached age 21, the number of “minor crimes” committed by the youth had dropped considerably. By age 26, the researchers calculated that the Return on Investment (ROI) was 3 to 1.

For every dollar given to families, society saved three dollars—mostly by not having to pay for police, courts, and jails. It was also the result of better health leading to less need for medical treatment, and better educational outcomes leading to better jobs.

The SSI Cliff
Conversely, we know what happens when you take money away. A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics looked at children who received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for their disabilities but were removed from the program when they turned 18.

The study compared kids who lost the income to kids who kept it. The result? The number of criminal charges for the group that lost the income increased by 20% over the next two decades.

The researchers noted that the “savings” the government achieved by cutting these kids off were almost entirely wiped out by the increased costs of enforcement and incarceration. We are stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, and ruining lives in the process.

Recidivism: Breaking the Cycle

Critics love to claim that “criminals are just criminals” and that money won’t change their behavior. This is the “bad blood” argument, and it is scientifically bankrupt.

In the United States, the recidivism rate is horrifying. About 70% of formerly incarcerated people are rearrested within three years. Why? Because we release them with $50 in their pocket if anything, a criminal record that makes them unhireable, and no housing. We practically force them back into survival crime.

But look at what happens when we change the environment:

• The Just Income Pilot: In Gainesville, Florida, a pilot provided a guaranteed monthly income to formerly incarcerated people. The recidivism rate wasn’t 70%. It dropped by 31% compared to the control group.

• CEO’s Returning Citizens Stimulus: Another program giving cash to returning citizens found consistent reductions in new convictions.

Even in Alaska, studies have shown that property crime drops specifically in the weeks after their Permanent Fund Dividend checks arrive. The larger the check, the larger the impact. When liquidity is available, theft becomes less necessary.

It’s the Stress, Stupid

We need to stomp out the eugenicist notion that crime is caused by low IQ or “bad genes.” This kind of thinking is not only racist; it is biologically wrong.

Scarcity changes how your brain works. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir wrote the book Scarcity, detailing how economic insecurity essentially lowers your functional IQ.

One study showed that Indian farmers performed significantly better on cognitive tests after the harvest (when they had money) than before it (when they were broke). Another study in a mall showed that just getting poor people to think about a large car repair bill caused a drop in cognitive function equivalent to losing a night of sleep or 13 IQ points.

Economic insecurity is like a glitched app running in the background of your phone, draining the battery and slowing down the processor. UBI closes that app.

When we reduce poverty, we aren’t just filling bank accounts; we are freeing up bandwidth. We are reducing the chronic stress and cortisol spikes that lead to impulsive decision-making and violence. We know that inequality is actually more strongly linked to homicide rates than poverty alone. UBI attacks both.

The Macro View: A K-Shaped Disaster

Finally, we have to look at the bigger picture. We are currently living in a K-shaped economy. The top 10% are consuming half of everything, while the bottom 50% are fighting for scraps. Inequality is spiraling, and history tells us that extreme inequality inevitably leads to social unrest and crime.

UBI is not just a crime reduction policy; it is an economic stimulus package for the people who actually spend money.

Unlike the Finland pilot, a real UBI would boost the disposable income of the bottom 60% to 90% depending on tax details. That money doesn’t disappear; it cycles through the local economy. It creates demand. Demand creates jobs.

In Alaska, their UBI has been shown to increase overall employment. Why? because when people have money to spend, local businesses have customers. If Finland had done a real UBI—giving money to everyone in a town and comparing it to a town that got nothing—they likely would have seen the same 15%+ drop in crime seen elsewhere, driven by a booming local economy and higher employment.

The Double Standard of Crime

Let’s be honest about how we talk about crime.

When a poor person steals baby formula, we call it a character flaw. When a rich person steals millions in wages from their employees—which, by the way, accounts for more lost money annually than all shoplifting, burglary, and robbery combined—we call it a “smart business practice.”

Nobody looks at a billionaire committing tax fraud or crashing the economy via subprime mortgages and says, “It must be his genetics.” We understand that the rich commit crimes because they think they can get away with it, or because they simply want more. We need to understand that the poor often commit crimes because they need more.

Conclusion: The Signal in the Noise

The Finland study is a valid data point about bureaucracy and employment incentives within a specific welfare state, but it is a terrible data point about the relationship between poverty and crime.

If you actually look at the mountain of evidence—from the plains of Namibia to the towns of Canada, from the plasma centers of the US to the tribal lands of the Cherokee—the signal is clear: Poverty is a policy choice, and crime is one of its side effects.

UBI also isn’t just about money. It’s about reducing the inequality that tears the social fabric apart. It’s about increasing trust in our neighbors, our politicians, and our government—something the Finland pilot did successfully prove, by the way.

We have a choice. We can keep spending trillions on prisons, police, and punishment to manage the symptoms of poverty. We can keep believing the lie that crime is an inherent trait of “those people.”

Or we can look at the actual data. We can invest in the cure. We can build an economy that serves the needs of the many rather than the wants of the few.

Crime is not a trait. It is not a gene. It is not a skull shape. That is the intellectual on-ramp to eugenics and racism, because it treats social outcomes as biological destiny and uses that story to justify punishment instead of prevention.

Crime is a set of behaviors that responds to incentives, stress, opportunity, necessity, and the degree of inequality and social cohesion in a society.

Elon might be satisfied with a “Correct” tweet, but we should demand the whole truth. And the truth is that universal basic income builds a safer world for everyone.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it and click the subscribe button. Also consider making a monthly pledge in support of my work to have your name appear below.

Special thanks to my monthly patrons: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Bob Weishaar, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Steve Roth, Miki Phagan, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun Banker, Tommy Caruso, Felix Ling, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Juro Antal, centuryfalcon64, Deanna McHugh, Stephen Castro-Starkey, David Allen, Liz, and all my other monthly patrons on Patreon for their support.

As I write this, Christmas is right around the corner again, and I think it’s time I finally write this article that has been in my head for years now as an argument for the universal part of universal basic income. In short, the entire point of the gift-giving aspect of Christmas and birthdays and other occasions involving gifts would be entirely defeated using the logic people use against UBI. People often ask, “Why should we provide basic income only to tax it back from people?” The answer which I will explain here, is that there is importance in both the giving and receiving, even if not considered as efficient from an economist’s perspective. There’s ultimately something about the human tradition of gift-giving itself that I think says something about why universal basic income should be truly universal.

First, as I’ve written about previously, cash is like water in that it can take any shape. Because it can be anything, when it comes to gifts, it’s very tough to beat, unless the intended gift recipient told you exactly what they want, or you know them well enough to give them something they may not even know they even wanted. Economists like to speak about this in terms of “utility” which is really just perceived usefulness.

An economist by the name of Joel Waldfogel formalized this decades ago in his paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas”, concluding that Christmas presents had a deadweight loss of somewhere between 10% and 33%, meaning that so many people receive stuff they don’t want, that up to a third of all Christmas gift-giving is essentially pointless. Basically, if you get a $100 sweater you never wear, whoever gave it to you basically just burned $100. Meanwhile someone else may have worn the hell out of that sweater, but they can’t because it’s sitting in your closet.

In the big picture sense, a lot of stuff being created that has zero utility can have negative macroeconomic implications. Imagine thousands of tons of cotton being used to make sweaters no one wants. That cotton could have been used for something else. The cotton farms could have produced a different crop. Economically speaking, creating stuff no one actually wants is a waste of time and resources. Thus, from an economist’s perspective, gift-giving can reduce the potential capacity of the economy, and thus even increase inflation. If cotton is being grown and used needlessly, stuff that could have been made instead can cost more than it otherwise would have if the supply of the other stuff were greater.

If Americans spend $1 trillion on Christmas, which we did in 2019 pre-pandemic, then a conservative estimate of deadweight loss is $100 billion. That also happens to be the cost of 2021’s enhanced child tax credit, which reduced child poverty by 40%. Child poverty costs our economy over $1 trillion a year, and allocating resources to reduce it by just getting money to parents to spend on what their families need has a massive return on investment of $10 per $1. So looking at it this way, if the money spent on stuff gift recipients don’t want were instead just given to parents as cash to spend as they choose, this would be a much better allocation of resources that would otherwise have been a deadweight loss.

Now of course, there’s more to gift giving than economic utility. That sweater you get that you’ll never wear means something more than the money spent on it. It’s a signal that the gift-giver was thinking about you. They spent time that is precious to them thinking about you, and trying to find or even make something that you would hopefully like or benefit from having. It’s an act of love, friendship, or respect. The meaning of the thing can be far greater than the thing itself. When asked if “giving specific presents as holiday gifts is inefficient, because recipients could satisfy their preferences much better with cash,” economist Austan Goolsbee replied “Instead of proposing to your wife w/diamond ring, you offer a gift card of equal value. Efficient — if you don’t count your hospital bills.”

As the well-known saying goes, it’s the thought that counts. Gift-giving has also been with us for a very long time, well before even the existence of money. As described so well by David Graeber in his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, gifting was what came first, not bartering. People didn’t trade coats for carrots. They just gave people coats, and then that person felt a debt to the giver which at some point may have resulted in carrots being provided in return when it was carrot season. That’s how humans originally interacted with each other - with gifts. If a person in the village was hungry, they were given food. They weren’t told they needed to create some food or make something useful to exchange for food.

That’s just kind of the truly natural way of humankind - giving to others without expectation, but in doing so creating a feeling of gratitude and indebtedness which was then met with a gift going the other direction, further strengthening that social bond. And in a society where people are giving to each other, there is social cohesion. It was a somewhat unnatural step taken to base exchanges on money and even bartering, where two people must exchange one thing for another. So the fact economists even exist to point out the negative utility of gift-giving is itself arguably unnatural, as is the existence of money.

However, we did create a monetary system, and we did create traditions like Christmas where many people are expected to give presents to each other, and it is true that a lot of presents are given that the recipients don’t actually want and wouldn’t have purchased themselves, and so the giving of cash enters the picture.

Giving cash gives the recipient the freedom to choose for themselves what they most want. Some may consider this to be lazy, or even offensive, while others may truly appreciate the money as being a great gift, and far more welcome than a sweater. Giving cash also opens the possibility of two people giving each other cash. This happens in my family quite regularly, where for example I send money to my sister and she sends money to me, but neither of us knows until Christmas.

An economist might look at such a thing as wasteful. If I send $100 to my sister and she sends $100 to me, why did either of us even bother? And if I send $100 to my sister and she sends $50 to me, why not just send her $50 and have her not send me anything? Economically speaking, that makes far more sense, right?

Here’s the thing: that logic is also the logic of a negative income tax, or a means-tested guaranteed income. A negative income tax is where someone with $0 receives the full amount of a cash grant, and then for each dollar their income increases, the amount of the cash grant decreases, until they get nothing. A guaranteed income is almost identical to a NIT, but with a phase-out that doesn’t happen at the first dollar earned, and instead the phaseout starts later. Either way, both involve a calculation based on earnings. The logic of both says that I should ask my sister how much she’s planning on giving me for Christmas, so that we can compare notes and save one or both of us the effort of sending money inefficiently.

Obviously, neither of us are ever going to do that. If we send each other money, so be it, and if it cancels each other out, so be it. It’s the giving and the receiving that counts. When I send her money, it’s because I love her and want her to pick out what she most wants, be it an object or an experience, and when she sends me money, it’s for the same reason. And when I get money from her, I recognize that she wants me to have what I most want, be it an object or an experience, and she feels the same. The fact that we may give and receive the same thing doesn’t make it pointless. What would be pointless is not giving anything at all. That we each may give each other the same amount of money is because we love each other and both want us to have what we most want or need.

That’s also how unconditional basic income works. If I get $1,000 a month in UBI, but my taxes go up $12,000 a year, an economist may look at that as pointless because it balances out to $0, but that’s because they’re missing the point as economists frequently do. It may be economically equivalent for me to get $12,000 and be taxed $12,000 as it is for me to get $0 and be taxed $0, but it is not at all the same, even though it definitely costs the same.

UBI means a society of far greater social cohesion. Everyone is giving to the community and everyone is receiving from the community. The direction goes both ways. A negative income tax, or a guaranteed income, or typical welfare benefits, they all go one-way. Some people receive something and give nothing in return, and some give something and receive nothing in return. It’s a sense of unfairness and lack of reciprocity that is behind so many people hating the existing targeted welfare system, and also why government benefits are so stigmatizing to the point people don’t even want it who desperately need it.

UBI is different. UBI doesn’t care about the perceived economic wastefulness of not balancing things out in advance. It doesn’t care how much you earn or what work you do. It just cares about you. UBI is society saying that we all care about each other, and we all want each other to have what we most need, especially basic survival needs like food and housing. It’s a return to where we started, and where we once naturally existed, where we gave each other what we needed to survive without expectation. It’s a return to being more human.

UBI also recognizes the deadweight loss of giving people stuff instead of money. Benefits-in-kind operate on the presumption that government bureaucrats know who is in need, what they need, and what’s best for them. It’s a system that gives hungry people sweaters instead of trusting them with the freedom to determine for themselves what they truly do need. It’s a system of distrust that erodes cohesion. It’s also a system that in its targeting those in need, misses most of those in need.

The tradition of gift-giving at Christmastime is a beautiful tradition, and I think something that helps foster a more cohesive society. Every time it rolls around, many of us start thinking about what other people might want or need instead of what we ourselves might want or need. It’s empathy-building, which is why Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is so beloved. Christmas strengthens social bonds as people are reminded of how much others care about them. I think it resonates with something deep inside us that really does value thinking more of others than ourselves. Positive psychology shows us that giving to others may just be the most effective road to finding happiness.

“There is scientific proof showing a link in the brain between giving and happiness. One study sought to find out if the prospect of giving could make participants happier. Half the group was told they were receiving money that they needed to spend on someone else. The other half was told they were required to spend the money on themselves. Both groups were told to imagine how they were going to spend the money when they received it. After conducting MRI tests and multiple other tests to rule out any other contributing factors, the researchers determined that generosity improved the level of happiness in participants, regardless of the recipient or the amount of money.”

Studies of universal basic income have also shown increased social cohesion as one of its many impacts. Not only do people not start working less when they get UBI as so many people fear, and even often work more, they also feel more connected to each other and trust each other more. They get healthier and less depressed.

A healthy happy society is one where everyone is giving to each other. If every individual receives something from society with no expectation of return from the rest of society, that is a society where everyone knows they are valued, and also one where everyone wants to give back, perhaps not immediately in a transactional sense, but at some point in the future when they have discovered the best way for them personally to give back to the society that uplifted and protected them.

I’m also reminded of a quote by Benjamin Franklin who definitely agreed with this sentiment of a desire to give back when one has something to give back when he said, “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” Freely and generously, not coercively and selfishly; he didn’t demand the protection of intellectual property from the public domain. He felt gratitude towards everything that others had created that he enjoyed, and wanted to create something new in return. That’s a very human feeling, to want to give when one has already received without expectation. It is against our natural way of being to be forced to give because we had received, or to receive only on the condition that we first give. To give is human. To transact is artificial.

So that’s my gift-giving argument for UBI. Just as we give to each other because of the happiness it provides the giver and the receiver, and just as we would never give each other nothing if the monetary value of what we intended to give each other canceled out, we should provide an unconditional survival income to everyone regardless of how much they earn or how much in taxes they pay, because sometimes utility-loving economists don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Sometimes something is just the right thing to do, and the reason behind doing it goes far beyond what’s being given, and extends to why it’s being given, and how it feels to receive without expectation to know you’re valued - that you actually mean something to someone, or in the case of UBI - something to everyone.

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