Universal basic income is neither novel nor effective.
U niversal basic income (UBI) is an anti-poverty idea fashionable among progressives. According to them, the problem can be solved by the government simply giving cash without conditions to people below the poverty line.
There have been a number of UBI experiments in cities across the country. The biggest experimental study to date was conducted by OpenResearch, an organization backed by OpenAI CEO (and UBI supporter) Sam Altman. It gave 1,000 lower-income people $1,000 per month each unconditionally for three years and compared them with a control group of 2,000 people who were each given $50 a month. Three years later, the treatment group ended up no better — and arguably worse off — than the control group. They worked fewer hours and stayed unemployed longer than the people who only got $50 per month. According to the study, most of their newfound free time was spent on “leisure.” To top it off, they ended up with less money in the bank than those in the control group. They spent virtually all the extra income — and racked up more debt. There were some benefits: Those who received $1,000 a month were more likely to move to new neighborhoods and reported a short-term reduction in stress.
These disappointing results would not be surprising to traditional liberals who, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt all the way to John F. Kennedy, were leery of the perils of government handouts. FDR laid the foundation for the modern welfare state with his New Deal. But he doubted the wisdom of cash transfers. “Continued dependence upon relief,” he told Congress in 1935, “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.” He wanted that “to dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Today’s left-wingers, on the other hand, still champion such giveaways against all evidence. While Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, hasn’t explicitly endorsed UBI, he calls for tax increases to fund a major expansion of social programs. When congressional Republicans, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, instituted work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, they were bitterly attacked by Democrats.
Kelsey Piper, an editor of Vox’s Future Perfect project, notes that “homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars” as part of various large UBI studies. “And it’s practically invisible in the data.” Piper says these “careful, well-conducted studies” have resulted in “an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive,” even though “you’d be hard-pressed to hear about it in the media.” She concludes that “winning the war on poverty will require more than just transfers, it will require building and improving institutions that provide education, health care and housing.” In the meantime, however, she says “noble lies have permeated the halls of truth-seeking organizations like the media.”
An outlier is Kite & Key Media, which has put out a new video that summarizes the latest research: “Figuring out how to give people enough support so that they’re not suffering without giving them so much that they lose ambition is incredibly difficult. And, so far at least, no one has figured out how to strike exactly the right balance.”
We already know of a few ways to lift people out of poverty. School choice has shown positive results in improving the dismal test scores of many children. Economic growth that creates jobs at lower income levels puts people on the ladder that can lead them to stable employment. The deregulation of housing construction can alleviate our shelter-affordability crisis. These — unlike a parade of government schemes and giveaways — are things that have been proven to work.
As Piper reports, “the amount we spend on combating poverty today is close to the entirety of GDP in 1969,” and yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.” It’s time to try something different. Universal basic income is an old, failed welfare remedy in a new bottle.