This week we are taking another dive into a story floating around the news, trying to remove the “AAAAHHHHH! Did You See What (Random Someone) Said About This???” features from the facts. We will not tell you what to think, but give you some ideas from good sources that you can use as you ponder for yourself.

I hate to add in this disclaimer, because I do not believe politicians are inherently evil/bad/selfish/greedy – but on these kinds of hot-button issues, maybe look away from what politicians say. If someone’s job/election depends on getting us fired up for or against something – making us fight each other and Get Very Hysterical – then that person is not an unbiased resource. Consider looking to sources with more facts and less hysteria.

So, having wiped away preconceptions from our minds we are free to look around this topic ourselves.

First of all: what is Universal Basic Income anyway? This definition is from GiveDirectly.org: “A universal basic income (UBI) is a guaranteed, no-strings-attached, recurring payment to every member of society, sized to meet basic needs.”

Stanford has set up a Basic Income Lab, to consider information and ideas around UBI. They identify some defining characteristics:

• Periodic: It is a recurrent payment (for example every month), rather than a one-off grant.
• Cash payment: It is paid in cash, allowing the recipients to convert their benefits into whatever they may like.
• Universal: It is paid to all, and not targeted to a specific population.
• Individual: It is paid on an individual basis (versus household-based).
• Unconditional: It involves no work requirement or sanctions; it is accessible to those in work and out of work, voluntarily or not.​

Is this a new idea? It is not at all new. People have been considering this for a long time. From the website Investopedia: “The idea of providing a basic income to all members of society goes back centuries. The 16th century English philosopher and statesman Thomas More mentions the idea in his best-known work, “Utopia.” Thomas Paine, a pamphleteer whose ideas helped spur the American Revolution, proposed a tax plan in which revenues would provide a stream of government income “to every person, rich or poor.””

And why are people talking about this now? You have probably noticed this – but the balance between the money and property a few people have and what lots and lots of people as a group have is severely out of whack. (Obvious Note: I’m – clearly – not an economist!) And, the number of people who have lost their jobs because tech tools can do them better and faster is increasing. These are bad things, for individuals and for our society as a whole.

A small, sadly typical story about a lot of places as an illustration follows.

Before I moved to Minnesota, I lived in Kenosha, WI. It’s a…nice(?)… place. The entire time I was there – which was years – people I worked with, and even people I met randomly, would tell me that I didn’t belong there. That I wasn’t “from” there so didn’t understand it. That whatever I thought about the town was wrong, because I couldn’t know. That was…frustrating.

But, I did understand the source of that feeling at least. Their town was dying. While I was there two different bottling factories closed. The last local car plant closed. Manufacturing jobs from Jockey International and Snap-On Tools closed, though their headquarters are still there. And that all followed decades of their main business – car manufacturing – slowly going away. There are buildings downtown that I have never seen open, and it’s been over 20 years since we moved there. There aren’t any grocery stores easy to get to for people who live around downtown. Even Walgreens moved away from the area.

You know what is growing? Condos on the lakefront, owned by people who dock their boats in Kenosha. The fancier, larger, newer houses near the highway – bought by people from the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, so they could live more cheaply that in Chicago or Milwaukee. Lots of new businesses and stores are opening up there too – while the stores in Kenosha “proper” continue to fade away.

It’s hard to watch your whole way of life just…go away. And there is no way to bring any of that back. There are no manufacturing jobs returning to Kenosha. There will not be any new car plants built there. Don’t even start on foolishness like thinking that could happen.

Amazon has put in two huge warehouses, and I’ve heard there are 1,800 jobs there. So: yay. Jobs are good, of course. But a job on the line in a car plant not only paid a salary people could raise a family and buy a house on, but it also provided some really good health insurance. I don’t have specific numbers, but based on everything I’ve read the wages at Amazon warehouse jobs are not going to be easy to use to support your family.

And that exact scenario – which, I emphasize, is pretty typical – is why there is more discussion of UBI for people.

And it’s not just blue collar jobs that are going away. Think about everything you do that is routine. Technology/robots can already return books, sort books, and shelve them. Technology tools can already write articles, draw pictures. They can read x-rays better than doctors. They can do bookkeeping and accounting. Some of this is great – tech can eliminate the repetitive, boring stuff we do so we can spend more time with patrons. But think about your job: how much of it is easily replaced? And…then what? It would be nice if we have all though through some possibilities of UBI before jobs are eliminated.

(Quick note, and it’s beyond what we are talking about here: there are a lot of possibilities for AI technologies to make tons of money that can be added to the overall economy. So it’s not just a few final employees supporting the rest of us – there are a lot of possibilities for creating money we can all share.)

From Stanford: “As automation, growing inequalities, persistent poverty, social precariousness and structural unemployment threaten economic security both in the United States and around the world, many policymakers, practitioners, academics and policymakers have begun to consider Universal Basic Income (UBI) to address these issues.

“Within this context, there is an increasing need for in-depth academic research on how to design, implement and evaluate UBI; on what UBI’s potential impacts could be; and, on how it could be turned into an economically and politically feasible program.”

As stated above, this is not a new idea; and it has been tried in small doses in many different places around the world – including in the United States.

Alaska has been one big example. “Since 1982, the state has given each citizen an annual check just for being alive, effectively wiping out extreme poverty. The money — which can range from around $2,000 per person when oil prices are high to $1,000 in cheaper gas years — comes from the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned investment fund financed by oil revenues. Economists investigated whether the payment was leading people to work less and found that “the dividend had no effect on employment” overall. (It has, apparently, had an effect on fertility, encouraging families to have more kids. It’s also had some unexpected effects on the state’s politics.)”

“Another long-running program is the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Casino Dividend in North Carolina. Since 1997, revenue from a casino on tribal land has been given to every tribal member, no strings attached. Each person gets on average somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000 per year. Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.”

Where else has this been tried? Canada, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Iran, Kenya, Namibia, India, China, Japan. It is not a new thing.

The most recent experiment has been in Stockton, California. “The city of Stockton, California, embarked on a bold experiment two years ago: It decided to distribute$500 a month to 125 people for 24 months — with no strings attached and no work requirements. The people were randomly chosen from neighborhoods at or below the city’s median household income, and they were free to spend the money any way they liked. Meanwhile, researchers studied what impact the cash had on their lives.

“The most eye-popping finding is that the people who received the cash managed to secure full-time jobs at more than twice the rate of people in a control group, who did not receive cash.Within a year, the proportion of cash recipients who had full-time jobs jumped from 28 percent to 40 percent. The control group saw only a 5 percent jump over the same period.

“Employment aside, there are clear benefits to unconditional cash programs. The Stockton experiment — which was conducted as a randomized controlled trial and underwent an independent evaluation — adds to the growing body of evidence from basic income experiments around the world, which shows that getting unconditional cash tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime.” (You can read this whole article here!)

And of course, you, me, and everyone you know have all been part of an enormous sorta-UBI trial, receiving cash from the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It’s not quite the same, but it will be very interesting to read about the effects of this money in a few years – to see what happened to people who received it.

The World Bank has some basic information about the idea of UBI. Their report is pretty short, and gives some guidance to implementing this kind of program in a variety of different situations.

The concept of UBI, while not new, is definitely having a moment now. It is worth considering whether a form of this would be helpful to people who are increasingly losing jobs and the prospect for ever replacing those jobs. With a economy so incredibly out of balance as ours is, the idea of figuring out one strategy to potentially help people who need it is interesting.

And remember: politicians want to get reelected, so they have a job. Again: that does not mean they are bad. But it means they are not unbiased. If they can make you fired up, and encourage you to substitute screaming stupid slogans for really thinking – it’s good for their reelections. It is your job to tell them what to do; it’s not their job to tell us what to think. So, although they may be great – don’t get your policy ideas from your politician or a political party. Good information is too important to waste. Support your library, and our flow of good information to all!