Some highlights from the Workshop on Guaranteed Income Experiments, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 22-23, 2024
Michael Howard
The workshop, organized by Roberto Merrill (Philosophy, University of Minho) and Sara Bizarro (Philosophy, University of New Orleans) featured 3 sessions, followed by a keynote address by Amy Castro.
The first session focused on the moral, ecological, and economic value of a basic income.
Jim Mulvale (Social Work, University of Manitoba) explored how to reach both hearts and minds in his talk. BI can complement ecological policies designed to keep humanity in the ‘donut’ where no one falls below a decent standard of living, while also not exceeding planetary boundaries for sustainability. But these appeals to our heads are not sufficient to move our hearts. For this we need moral arguments, and Mulvale drew upon the neo-Aristotelian moral theory of Alasdair MacIntyre, who revives the tradition of the virtues, and natural limits to wealth, and Mulvale found parallels in some indigenous traditions and faith communities.
Michael Howard (Philosophy, University of Maine) made some similar points about the need for limits to wealth and carbon emissions, but framed in terms of liberal egalitarian conceptions of social and global justice. These give some support to carbon pricing and dividend policies—yielding a partial BI. More ambitious, but more difficult to defend and realize is a post-growth society animated by more equal sharing of wealth and resources, nationally and globally, as well as work time reduction and work sharing facilitated by a full basic income, so that we can all live well within sustainable limits.
Soomi Lee (Public Administration, University of La Verne) explored how to make guaranteed income policy fiscally feasible, by modifying current tax and transfer policies. One particularly promising suggestion was to build on the enlargement of the US federal income standard deduction, now $13,850 for a single filer, by making it ‘refundable,’ like a refundable tax credit. In other words, those making less than the standard deduction would receive a rebate bringing their income up to the level of the deduction. By tweaking an already existing policy, this would yield a negative income tax in the same range as many proposals for a guaranteed income. The cost could be reduced by eliminating redundant transfers.
The second session turned to guaranteed income experiments and cash transfer programs. Karl Widerquist (Philosophy, Georgetown University-Qatar) discussed the many important questions that cannot be answered by basic income experiments. For example, you cannot test a UBI scheme because in practice there is an increased tax on wealthier recipients that is never modeled in experiments. UBI is intended for everyone but most experiments are targeted on the poorest, and among the important questions is how those who break even will behave, but they are not included in the experiment. A difficult challenge is how to avoid the Hawthorne effect, the change in people's behavior because they are being watched by the experimenters. Because experiments are usually for three years or less, long term effects such as in the labor market are never tested. Effects on the entire community can't be caught by a pilot, not even in a saturation site such as Dauphin, Manitoba because among the important community effects would be those on the entire society and economy. But experiments do generate stories, and these are strategically important for creating interest and support.
Sid Frankel (Social Work, University of Manitoba) discussed guaranteed income experiments in the Canadian political context with attention to advocates and policymakers. Full implementation of a guaranteed income would not require additional advocacy, but would be a big commitment for a politician. Steps falling short of full implementation open the prospect of delay strategies, opposition from detractors, and fewer opportunities for public support, and the ongoing risk of cancellation as was seen in the Ontario guaranteed income pilot. The risk of cancellation could be lowered by broadening the framing, including questions that the opponents value, and getting broader stakeholder support. To fend off inflated estimates of the cost of a guaranteed income it is important to distinguish program costs from research costs, and to provide estimates of potentially substantial savings from the elimination of some existing programs that would become redundant. A major challenge is ideological path dependence, in particular the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, which is the basis of conditionality and resistance to universality. Path dependence needs to be challenged on several fronts: public opinion, subtle shifts in rules for policy implementation, layering new rules on top of the old, and introducing new interpretations of policies.
Jennifer Ramo, Executive Director of the New Mexico Apple Seed Project, discussed ethical issues that have arisen in small scale cash transfers to high school students at the outset of COVID, and anticipated for a planned program for women with babies suffering substance exposure. Programs should be developed with community members instead of for them. She questioned whether conditionality is ever ethical, but if so, it would be when approved by recipients and with the possibility of compassionate exceptions. Programs at the state level risk benefit cliffs so program design should include counseling so that recipients can decide for themselves whether to risk loss of standard benefits, based on their own risk tolerance. The transition at the end of the program can be difficult for recipients, so there should be upfront disclosure. Above all programs should be designed in accordance with the principle, do no harm.
Megan Lundstrom, Director of the Resilience Fund at Polaris, examined additional issues that come up for a particularly vulnerable population, survivors of human trafficking. Most programs for survivors are limited to crisis response, and programs that address socioeconomic stability are only being developed. There is nothing to address social mobility for this group. Barriers include complex legal needs, debt, credit limitations, access to mental and behavioral health services, and social exclusion. Programs that seek to minimize risk are time efficient but cause harm to the recipients. A trust model is more time-intensive but better suited do the recipients. Voices of Resilience, a community driven basic income pilot for survivors of human trafficking, trusted the claims of recipients rather than requiring evidence—which would have diminished participation--, and was governed by an Advisory Council of survivors, with the goal being “economically thriving survivors,” rooted in community.
Lively discussion followed. Among the issues raised were the cost to recipients of having to tell their stories repeatedly, and getting trapped by the expectation that guaranteed income will make people work more. At the same time, there was acknowledgement that this round of guaranteed income experiments, compared to those in the 1960s and 1970s, is broadening the definition of work to include unpaid care work, and efforts are being made not to make employment the central focus of the experiments. Some challenges going forward include how to achieve consensus on data with so many independent experiments, and how to shape public discourse which often is quite independent of the data, and may require different arguments for different groups. Perhaps the most common error in launching the basic income pilot is trying to start too fast.
The third session turned to basic income experiments in New Orleans. Anamaria Villamarin-Lupin, the Deputy Director of the Mayor’s Office of Youth and Families, spoke about the use of Open Society funds directed to 500 mostly undocumented people during the pandemic. This was allowed by the New Orleans guaranteed income program for 2022, a small pilot giving 125 people $350.00 per month for 10 months, to help youth aged 16 to 24 who are disconnected from work and school. She described how the program dealt with benefit cliffs through counseling and state waivers regarding SNAP. Andrés Acuña, also in the Office of Youth and Families, described a larger program is being considered.
Talia Livneh, Director of Programs for the Rooted School Foundation, discussed a guaranteed income program for schools. Particularly useful was a micro pilot with twenty 12th graders to identify problems before scaling up with larger numbers of students in 9th through 12th grades. Students were given bank accounts and debit cards, which they could control independently of their parents. The program resulted in increased agency and authority, more involvement in extracurricular activities, and increased financial capability. Little of the money was withdrawn in cash, about half of it was used for food and about half of it was left in the bank. Students showed improved academic performance and attendance both of which had been problems leading to the creation of the program. Students were chosen because they were at a critical age in their development, and because they had a close relationship with their school. The school in turn provided valuable infrastructure for the study, giving access to data and contact information. This raises a concern about once again loading schools with social problems that are not otherwise being addressed. Surprisingly, there were no significant problems rising from the fact that some students received the cards while those in the control group did not.
Amy Castro, Faculty Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the keynote address, Resisting the Logic of Capitalism in Guaranteed Income Experiments.
Although Silicon Valley financiers provided funds for some initial guaranteed income experiments, the infusion of cash from the pandemic created legislative space for new unconditional cash programs, now numbering around 150. While this is an opportunity to create a large data set enabling researchers to compare apples with apples, it has been above all a way of helping low-income households. Interestingly there has been support from across the political spectrum despite our current political divisions. A crucial question is how to get from pilots to policy. Castro contextualized GI experiments in the context of financialization, the shift from trade and commodity production to financial transactions as the main source of profits. Financialization creates distance between actors, and financialized subjects, tethering home and life to risky markets, and creating an illusion of possibilities from a sparce buffet of choices that are inviting but destructive. Chronic scarcity enables social control, and blocks the formation of critical consciousness. Agents follow the capitalist script, preoccupied with proving their worth, and blaming themselves for failure to succeed in the market, tendencies exacerbated by programs of short duration and by their own past traumas. Guaranteed income has shown some promise in countering these tendencies, as recipients begin to acknowledge their structural vulnerability, and reclaim their humanity through time and relationships. They realize that living paycheck to paycheck is not their fault. If the logic of capitalism is individualistic, holding each person responsible for their fate, GI conveys a sense of connectedness. Unlike cash transfers and other benefits conditional on performing, GI sparks a pattern of reciprocity. Receiving a gift, people are motivated to give, and this chain of giving smooths over the periods without cash.
The discussion following the keynote was lively, with further exploration of the effects of GI on attitudes toward employment and awareness of structural injustice, and ethical challenges facing GI experiments, including infusion of venture capital into the disbursement process, and calls for open data that could be used by hostile actors. The workshop ended on an upbeat note, with Amy Castro emphasizing that hope is essential to the success of experiments.
Michael Howard
The workshop, organized by Roberto Merrill (Philosophy, University of Minho) and Sara Bizarro (Philosophy, University of New Orleans) featured 3 sessions, followed by a keynote address by Amy Castro.
The first session focused on the moral, ecological, and economic value of a basic income.
Jim Mulvale (Social Work, University of Manitoba) explored how to reach both hearts and minds in his talk. BI can complement ecological policies designed to keep humanity in the ‘donut’ where no one falls below a decent standard of living, while also not exceeding planetary boundaries for sustainability. But these appeals to our heads are not sufficient to move our hearts. For this we need moral arguments, and Mulvale drew upon the neo-Aristotelian moral theory of Alasdair MacIntyre, who revives the tradition of the virtues, and natural limits to wealth, and Mulvale found parallels in some indigenous traditions and faith communities.
Michael Howard (Philosophy, University of Maine) made some similar points about the need for limits to wealth and carbon emissions, but framed in terms of liberal egalitarian conceptions of social and global justice. These give some support to carbon pricing and dividend policies—yielding a partial BI. More ambitious, but more difficult to defend and realize is a post-growth society animated by more equal sharing of wealth and resources, nationally and globally, as well as work time reduction and work sharing facilitated by a full basic income, so that we can all live well within sustainable limits.
Soomi Lee (Public Administration, University of La Verne) explored how to make guaranteed income policy fiscally feasible, by modifying current tax and transfer policies. One particularly promising suggestion was to build on the enlargement of the US federal income standard deduction, now $13,850 for a single filer, by making it ‘refundable,’ like a refundable tax credit. In other words, those making less than the standard deduction would receive a rebate bringing their income up to the level of the deduction. By tweaking an already existing policy, this would yield a negative income tax in the same range as many proposals for a guaranteed income. The cost could be reduced by eliminating redundant transfers.
The second session turned to guaranteed income experiments and cash transfer programs. Karl Widerquist (Philosophy, Georgetown University-Qatar) discussed the many important questions that cannot be answered by basic income experiments. For example, you cannot test a UBI scheme because in practice there is an increased tax on wealthier recipients that is never modeled in experiments. UBI is intended for everyone but most experiments are targeted on the poorest, and among the important questions is how those who break even will behave, but they are not included in the experiment. A difficult challenge is how to avoid the Hawthorne effect, the change in people's behavior because they are being watched by the experimenters. Because experiments are usually for three years or less, long term effects such as in the labor market are never tested. Effects on the entire community can't be caught by a pilot, not even in a saturation site such as Dauphin, Manitoba because among the important community effects would be those on the entire society and economy. But experiments do generate stories, and these are strategically important for creating interest and support.
Sid Frankel (Social Work, University of Manitoba) discussed guaranteed income experiments in the Canadian political context with attention to advocates and policymakers. Full implementation of a guaranteed income would not require additional advocacy, but would be a big commitment for a politician. Steps falling short of full implementation open the prospect of delay strategies, opposition from detractors, and fewer opportunities for public support, and the ongoing risk of cancellation as was seen in the Ontario guaranteed income pilot. The risk of cancellation could be lowered by broadening the framing, including questions that the opponents value, and getting broader stakeholder support. To fend off inflated estimates of the cost of a guaranteed income it is important to distinguish program costs from research costs, and to provide estimates of potentially substantial savings from the elimination of some existing programs that would become redundant. A major challenge is ideological path dependence, in particular the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, which is the basis of conditionality and resistance to universality. Path dependence needs to be challenged on several fronts: public opinion, subtle shifts in rules for policy implementation, layering new rules on top of the old, and introducing new interpretations of policies.
Jennifer Ramo, Executive Director of the New Mexico Apple Seed Project, discussed ethical issues that have arisen in small scale cash transfers to high school students at the outset of COVID, and anticipated for a planned program for women with babies suffering substance exposure. Programs should be developed with community members instead of for them. She questioned whether conditionality is ever ethical, but if so, it would be when approved by recipients and with the possibility of compassionate exceptions. Programs at the state level risk benefit cliffs so program design should include counseling so that recipients can decide for themselves whether to risk loss of standard benefits, based on their own risk tolerance. The transition at the end of the program can be difficult for recipients, so there should be upfront disclosure. Above all programs should be designed in accordance with the principle, do no harm.
Megan Lundstrom, Director of the Resilience Fund at Polaris, examined additional issues that come up for a particularly vulnerable population, survivors of human trafficking. Most programs for survivors are limited to crisis response, and programs that address socioeconomic stability are only being developed. There is nothing to address social mobility for this group. Barriers include complex legal needs, debt, credit limitations, access to mental and behavioral health services, and social exclusion. Programs that seek to minimize risk are time efficient but cause harm to the recipients. A trust model is more time-intensive but better suited do the recipients. Voices of Resilience, a community driven basic income pilot for survivors of human trafficking, trusted the claims of recipients rather than requiring evidence—which would have diminished participation--, and was governed by an Advisory Council of survivors, with the goal being “economically thriving survivors,” rooted in community.
Lively discussion followed. Among the issues raised were the cost to recipients of having to tell their stories repeatedly, and getting trapped by the expectation that guaranteed income will make people work more. At the same time, there was acknowledgement that this round of guaranteed income experiments, compared to those in the 1960s and 1970s, is broadening the definition of work to include unpaid care work, and efforts are being made not to make employment the central focus of the experiments. Some challenges going forward include how to achieve consensus on data with so many independent experiments, and how to shape public discourse which often is quite independent of the data, and may require different arguments for different groups. Perhaps the most common error in launching the basic income pilot is trying to start too fast.
The third session turned to basic income experiments in New Orleans. Anamaria Villamarin-Lupin, the Deputy Director of the Mayor’s Office of Youth and Families, spoke about the use of Open Society funds directed to 500 mostly undocumented people during the pandemic. This was allowed by the New Orleans guaranteed income program for 2022, a small pilot giving 125 people $350.00 per month for 10 months, to help youth aged 16 to 24 who are disconnected from work and school. She described how the program dealt with benefit cliffs through counseling and state waivers regarding SNAP. Andrés Acuña, also in the Office of Youth and Families, described a larger program is being considered.
Talia Livneh, Director of Programs for the Rooted School Foundation, discussed a guaranteed income program for schools. Particularly useful was a micro pilot with twenty 12th graders to identify problems before scaling up with larger numbers of students in 9th through 12th grades. Students were given bank accounts and debit cards, which they could control independently of their parents. The program resulted in increased agency and authority, more involvement in extracurricular activities, and increased financial capability. Little of the money was withdrawn in cash, about half of it was used for food and about half of it was left in the bank. Students showed improved academic performance and attendance both of which had been problems leading to the creation of the program. Students were chosen because they were at a critical age in their development, and because they had a close relationship with their school. The school in turn provided valuable infrastructure for the study, giving access to data and contact information. This raises a concern about once again loading schools with social problems that are not otherwise being addressed. Surprisingly, there were no significant problems rising from the fact that some students received the cards while those in the control group did not.
Amy Castro, Faculty Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the keynote address, Resisting the Logic of Capitalism in Guaranteed Income Experiments.
Although Silicon Valley financiers provided funds for some initial guaranteed income experiments, the infusion of cash from the pandemic created legislative space for new unconditional cash programs, now numbering around 150. While this is an opportunity to create a large data set enabling researchers to compare apples with apples, it has been above all a way of helping low-income households. Interestingly there has been support from across the political spectrum despite our current political divisions. A crucial question is how to get from pilots to policy. Castro contextualized GI experiments in the context of financialization, the shift from trade and commodity production to financial transactions as the main source of profits. Financialization creates distance between actors, and financialized subjects, tethering home and life to risky markets, and creating an illusion of possibilities from a sparce buffet of choices that are inviting but destructive. Chronic scarcity enables social control, and blocks the formation of critical consciousness. Agents follow the capitalist script, preoccupied with proving their worth, and blaming themselves for failure to succeed in the market, tendencies exacerbated by programs of short duration and by their own past traumas. Guaranteed income has shown some promise in countering these tendencies, as recipients begin to acknowledge their structural vulnerability, and reclaim their humanity through time and relationships. They realize that living paycheck to paycheck is not their fault. If the logic of capitalism is individualistic, holding each person responsible for their fate, GI conveys a sense of connectedness. Unlike cash transfers and other benefits conditional on performing, GI sparks a pattern of reciprocity. Receiving a gift, people are motivated to give, and this chain of giving smooths over the periods without cash.
The discussion following the keynote was lively, with further exploration of the effects of GI on attitudes toward employment and awareness of structural injustice, and ethical challenges facing GI experiments, including infusion of venture capital into the disbursement process, and calls for open data that could be used by hostile actors. The workshop ended on an upbeat note, with Amy Castro emphasizing that hope is essential to the success of experiments.
