By John Torpey,
Ralph Bunche Institute Director
Sep 11, 2020

Originally published here.

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI, sometimes called a guaranteed minimum income) was long a pipe-dream of a segment of the left. It attracted little attention because it seemed utopian… in the bad sense of something that simply could never happen. Meanwhile, some on the right supported an earned income tax credit as a version of a basic income support, but only for those who worked. Government-sponsored income guarantees, in short, have long had small but loyal followings across the political spectrum.

But in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, and even more so in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, UBI began to assume the air of hard-headed yet forward-thinking public policy. The notion was, famously, the signature policy idea of the Andrew Yang campaign. Indeed, UBI was in many ways the tech world’s preferred approach to addressing income inequality, a concern born of the fear that automation and artificial intelligence would put people out of work across whole industries, leading the unemployed to come looking for the tech elite “with pitchforks.”

Still, the idea of a universal basic income has met with serious concerns about cost. In one commonly bruited scenario, adults would be given $1000 a month, or $12,000 a year. This is hardly a king’s ransom–in fact, it is below the poverty level even for a single person—and it couldn’t keep any but the most frugal from working for income in some way. But it would still amount to roughly 1/10 of the total size of the US economy. Against that background, UBI suddenly starts to seem less convincing as public policy.

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