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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/havent-done-yet-examining-policies-one-billion-americans/"></div>In order to restore American greatness, we need more people. According to Matt Yglesias’s latest book One Billion Americans, a lot more. The only way to compete with countries like China to maintain our role as the hub of global innovation is to get to a billion Americans. Through pro-natalist policies and increased immigration, the United States has the physical space and capability to accommodate this massive population increase.
One Billion Americans has a lot of excellent policy ideas: increasing the American population through Yglesias’s prescriptive policies would be beneficial and morally just. And the advantages of population growth themselves should be given more attention. But for those already in agreement with Yglesias, it’s difficult to find much fundamentally new in his arguments or framing. For those in opposition, the book is unlikely to convert.
Yglesias waffles between arguments he believes are pragmatic and those that are encouraging “thinking bigger.” Both of these have value, but he switches between them at random times, operating seemingly at whatever level is the path of least resistance. Are we meant to take his idea of a billion Americans seriously but not literally? His ideas can support a much higher population even if it’s not a billion, but he struggles to establish when it’s time to think pragmatically and when to just think bigger.
Underlying the book, Yglesias believes America should reach a population of one billion because retaining American hegemony is both desirable and uncontroversial in American domestic politics. He doesn’t bother too much with harping on this point, and the rest of the book should still speak to people who want to increase general welfare, even if American dominance is not a shared goal. Reclaiming American power is, as Yglesias correctly points out, a matter of math. The United States has about a quarter of the population of China. We are much richer on a per capita basis, but we derive our international political power from having the largest economy in aggregate terms. We simply can’t compete with China if we don’t rapidly increase our population.
Would adding so many people take away resources from existing Americans? On the contrary, Yglesias demonstrates how population growth causes what economists call “increasing returns to scale.” Having more people means a better diversified and specialized labor market, a bigger tax base for public investment, and more spillover effects from types of knowledge that lead to innovation. Increasing population means higher productivity, but it also means a virtuous cycle where cities invest better in infrastructure and businesses are created to satisfy more consumers. Decreasing population has a reverse feedback loop: businesses move out of town from fewer customers, a narrower tax base means worse public infrastructure, and house prices for existing residents decrease.
Far from being physically “full,” tripling the US population would leave continental America as dense as France and less than half as dense as Germany. We can fit hundreds of millions of more people, but we do need to make policy accommodations to ensure an ideal outcome.
The path to nearly 600 million more people comes through two channels: making it easier for Americans to have children, and letting a lot more people in. The first involves better government support for parents and policy reforms meant to make supporting a family more affordable. Yglesias points to surveys showing a significant gap between the number of children couples desire to have and the number they actually have. The top reasons given for this gap fall under the umbrella of affordability. With no mandated parental leave, low government support for kids, and the rising cost of childcare, having children in America is expensive. Expanding government support through child tax credits, public provision of daycare, and mandated parental leave would all help in increasing families. Inevitably, Americans would see supporting children as a community effort and not just one left up to parents.
These ideas would be positive independent of a quest for American greatness, but a couple crucial aspects remain unaddressed. European countries have similar policies and yet experience sluggish birth rates. They could make the relevant population declines less bad than they’d otherwise be, but don’t European countries show the insufficiency of these policies? If we’re going to get to a billion people, it would be good to know when these policies do and do not work.
The other channel to a billion Americans is through letting more people in. Increasing the birth rate has positive impacts on American population levels down the line, but immigrants show up ready to work, ready to consume, and ready to pay taxes.
In 1980, Fidel Castro allowed Cubans a window to head to the United States. Cubans left the port of Mariel and showed up in huge numbers on the coast of Miami. Miami was inundated with a wave of newcomers ready to participate in the local labor force, needing a place to live, and clogging up the roads. Despite this sounding like a chaotic event destined to drive down the wages of locals, the “Mariel Boatlift” showed that even a huge influx of migrants — mostly low-skilled and with little English proficiency — <a href="https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf">won’t cause a race to the bottom for wages</a> in Miami. There were some frictions in the adjustment process, but the newcomers by and large were a positive impact on the area economically and socially.
Yglesias brings this up to show how immigration does not cause massive job loss or downward wage spirals, and presumably to show how it could apply to the nation writ large. Yet Yglesias admits that something like the Mariel Boatlift on a national scale would be unreasonable: “Nobody would or should propose that the United States routinely increase the size of its labor force by 7 percent over a six-month period.” Huh? How else are we supposed to get to a billion Americans? Even if the number of one billion was meant to be apocryphal, where does Yglesias draw the line of what is deemed reasonable in numbers or for a timeline? Even for those who see the Mariel Boatlift as evidence of the positive impacts of immigration, his framing asks more questions than it answers. In a country that elected Donald Trump, it’s reasonable to ask how politically palatable it would be to let in hundreds of millions of newcomers when recently there has actually been a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-26/what-immigration-crisis-the-u-s-isn-t-being-swamped">net migration out of the United States into Mexico</a>.
Outside of wages, there are immigration skeptics who feel too much immigration would overburden public services. Public schools and other institutions will be pressed quickly to accommodate a new population, and the increased tax revenue doesn’t always time perfectly with the higher demands. But Yglesias glosses over this and dismisses other concerns over increased immigration that occur outside of the labor market. Anyone who is skeptical of the political salience of more immigration is unlikely to have their doubts assuaged.
Of course, we’ll need to make some changes to accommodate nearly 600 million more people. Yglesias rehashes a playbook of technocratic fixes familiar to policy wonks: reform local zoning to build more housing and increase density, enact traffic congestion fees, and invest more in mass transit. America’s inability to build more housing — especially in superstar cities — has made it physically difficult to give everyone a place to live and made it harder to raise a family because of the corresponding house prices. Roads without tolls make driving cheaper than it should be and clog highways while leaving mass transit underfunded.
These are all excellent ideas, but there’s not much in One Billion Americans that’s particularly new. In fact, the policies’ desirability only further underscores the question of why they haven’t been done yet. Housing policy in America is hyperlocal and, while there has been some progress, entrenched interests are a brutal force protecting the status quo. Congestion fees have worked internationally but, even in New York, have faced tough political battles. Legislating zoning at the state instead of local level has been recognized as a great idea but has yet to break through on a large scale. On these process questions, Yglesias offers some potential workarounds, but the reader is left feeling pessimistic about political bottlenecks.
In international development, low-income countries often struggle with improving one aspect of their economy when other weaknesses are immediate impediments. Building a school is difficult if roads are ill-maintained. But roads can’t be built if public administration can’t organize infrastructure projects. But the public administration suffers from weak tax enforcement, and so on. A vicious cycle emerges that makes it difficult to solve one problem without solving them all at the same time. This is analogous to many policies put forth in One Billion Americans and creates another source of political bottleneck. If a population increase isn’t matched simultaneously by an increase in housing stock or investment in infrastructure, housing becomes even less affordable and public services get even more overwhelmed.
There are some ideas in this book that are bold, innovative, and relatively realistic ways to increase American greatness. One is the concept of relocating parts of the federal government into struggling cities. Federal agencies no longer need physical proximity to each other in DC like they used to. They also hire lots of skilled workers with solid wages that can be a boon for struggling communities. Just as an Amazon HQ2 would spur growth in its destination city, relocating different federal agencies to declining cities will have knock-on impacts that encourage companies to relocate and increase the local tax base. Although not mentioned in the book, the BBC for nearly a decade has been slowly relocating some workers from London to outside Manchester with positive results.
Another scheme is a visa program connecting workers to geography rather than a company. If a company wants to hire foreign workers, the government could approve a visa if it were conditional on the foreign worker living and working in cities like Toledo or Detroit. This would encourage the beneficial feedback loop of positive population growth and take some pressure off superstar metro areas like New York and the Bay Area. The relocation of federal agencies and these “Heartland Visas” are great ideas that can occur without other things simultaneously being enacted.
It’s hard to nail down the target audience of this book — whose mind is Yglesias looking to change, who is he trying to educate of the roadmap forward? On the one hand, everyone should hear more about the benefits of higher population, housing policy reforms, and immigration. And policies supporting families could find allies with conservatives who want to strengthen the nuclear family and liberals who want a stronger safety net. But most of his Vox readers have already heard most of these ideas and probably agree with them. The more progressive left will be skeptical about climate ramifications and dismissive of arguments that American hegemony is itself an ideal goal. Conservatives worried about rapid cultural change and a massive investment in public expenditure will wince at many of these proposals.
In fact, for so many of the technocratic fixes, the difficult roadblocks — hyperlocal land control, deficit hawks, negative perceptions of immigrants — are acknowledged but not convincingly dealt with. Perhaps Yglesias means “a lot more people” instead of literally a billion. Yet too many of these ideas seem like nice little hacks that will make small (albeit meaningful) impacts, but nothing on the order of magnitude Yglesias speaks of.
Yglesias doesn’t conduct any new research nor draw on any obscure long-forgotten ideas, and that’s okay. Many books can add value by reframing research in a different way, showing how a different perspective of existing ideas can change our way of thinking. But outside of the often counter-intuitive benefits of population growth, a reader will struggle to see anything new here. In the end One Billion Americans is full of great policy ideas but it provokes more questions than it answers, and is too often a repackaging of existing ideas with a zanier headline.
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Why Haven’t They Been Done Yet: Examining Policies in &#8220;One Billion Americans&#8221;

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/human-rights-case-economic-growth-tyler-cowens-stubborn-attachments/"></div>To illustrate the nature of capital and investment, <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/256134">Economist Frank Knight</a> imagined a plant called Crusonia. The fictitious crop grows larger each season using its own seeds of germination; it continually reinforces its own growth. Named after trees in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with similar self-reinforcing biology, Knight’s Crusonia plants are at first glance unexceptional in appearance.
Economist Tyler Cowen leverages Crusonia plants as a rhetorical device in his recent book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible-Individuals/dp/1732265135">Stubborn Attachments</a> to demonstrate the powers — and pitfalls — of sustained economic growth. In an analogy that illustrates the primacy of capitalistic growth over other economic systems, the perpetual fruits of Crusonia have so much aggregated value over the long-run that small aesthetic or practical differences in alternative plants have become irrelevant by comparison.
Cowen uses Crusonia plants to develop a framework for our political, moral, and daily lives that relies on maximizing sustainable economic growth and respecting human rights. He argues that our modern-day Crusonia plants are institutions, rules, and preferences that nurture “a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom.”
Rather than strive for a narrowly defined deontological or utilitarian future, Cowen himself identifies as a pluralist, believing “no single value is a trump card which overwhelms all other values in all instances.” He takes into consideration myriad values, such as decreasing poverty, empowering democratic institutions, expanding political rights, promoting the arts, and implementing common sense morality. He believes that high economic well-being, brought about by sustained economic growth, has been shown to maximize the likelihood of all these values across the general population.
Between 1913 and today, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy">life expectancy</a> worldwide has increased from about 34 years to over 71 years. Concurrently, the percentage of people <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute?stackMode=relative">living in extreme poverty</a> has gone from 82.4% to 9.6%, and the global <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-world-population">literacy rate</a> went from 26% to 85%. By almost all measurements of life quality, we are significantly better off than we were a century ago. Cowen identifies the underlying cause for all this improvement as sustained economic growth, which in turn has led to sweeping advancements in medicine, greater access to food, and increased access to groundbreaking technologies for many of the world’s poorest.
A devotion to economic growth can conjure up a vision of environmental degradation, inequality, and a generally unrestricted pursuit of material gains. But Cowen’s mission takes all of these concerns into account, with an overall prescription to value the future more than we currently do. With a long-term focus on sustainability, things like immorality, environmental destruction, and citizen disenfranchisement are counter-productive to durable growth.
From a purely mathematical standpoint, small differences can make a big impact in the long-run. The difference between 1% and 2% annual growth is relatively negligible over one year. But over time this gap is analogous to the difference between the economies of the United States and Mexico over the last century. Policies that increase growth even marginally, then, are what Cowen argues we need to pursue. This economic self-control is not something that comes to us easily, and thus we should strive to set up institutions that encourage longer-term thinking.
Uncertainty plays a large role in Cowen’s analysis, as he acknowledges the need for epistemic humility when considering policies that we hope will have large impacts centuries later. Tiny differences can be catalysts for massive change. Might one more car in a traffic flow, for example, have changed the plans of a serial killer? Could a missed train prevent a nuclear holocaust? It can be nearly impossible to know what decisions will maximize sustained economic growth and promote responsible, ethical outcomes in the long run, Cowen muses. Nonetheless, there are policies we can enact today with meaningfully higher probabilities of long-term success.
In this world of uncertainty, Cowen puts forth an alternative framing of a classic utilitarian thought exercise about whether a mother should kill her baby if it will lead to a $5 billion boon to society. Rather than the scenario being a choice between the baby and societal monetary gain, the choice is between saving the baby and an enormous amount of uncertainty about how the money will affect the social fabric and our legal institutions — the $5 billion being a relatively arbitrary (and trivial, by global economic standards) amount. By this reasoning, Cowen determines that respecting human rights should trump any flashes of apparent short-term gratification.
Rarely does economic growth enter into the discourse of egalitarian principles or social justice. Cowen laments that discussions focus more on the idea of how to distribute a fixed amount of prosperity than on the morality and responsibility of that prosperity. With all the good that comes from economic growth, Cowen is astounded that so few thinkers have incorporated economic growth into their philosophies as a moral principle. Economic growth and decreasing inequality are not mutually exclusive, and can even be mutually reinforcing with appropriate redistribution. Investing in a low-income child’s education and health, for example, produces far more economic growth in the long-run than the initial investment cost, and also improves his or her life overall.
While certainly not against redistribution, Cowen consequently believes many self-described egalitarians are overly focused on short-term redistribution and not enough on “Crusonian” policies, whose impact dwarfs that of small welfare state transfers. As an example, he cites US worker productivity, which slowed in the early 1970s and has remained slow since. Had it continued at its previous rate until today, the median household income would be nearly $95k, instead of the current $59k. But how many egalitarians have focused their efforts on the productivity puzzle rather than redistribution? As meaningful as redistributive policies are, they pale in comparison to the increase in income from higher economy-wide productivity gains.
Cowen also prompts us to consider the enormous amount of good that migration does for human well-being in the context of welfare state policies. <a href="https://www.cgdev.org/publication/place-premium-wage-differences-identical-workers-across-us-border-working-paper-148">Research suggests</a> that the ability to do identical work in the United States can increase someone’s wage 260% for a Peruvian, 350% for a Filipino, and 700% for a Haitian. This means that mere access to the United States labor market can be the most dramatic source of increased quality of life for people in lower-income countries.  However, amidst unfortunate recent political turns against migration, Cowen observes that “excess [welfare state] transfers…make it harder to absorb high numbers of immigrants from poorer countries.”
With all of Cowen’s praise for the benefits of increased productivity and steady economic growth, however, there still exist important limitations to the extent that increased economic production affects our well-being. This is the greatest shortcoming of Stubborn Attachments.
The concept of Relative Deprivation holds that people’s evaluation of their own well-being is more strongly tied to their relative status than their absolute standard of living. That is, when people evaluate their lives, they do not feel a sense of gratitude when they contrast their present material conditions against those of their ancestors in 1850. Instead, they look closer to home, comparing how much they earn to how much their neighbors earn, how much their salary has increased since the prior year, and whether they feel a sense of agency within their world. While the fruits of economic growth are not necessarily zero-sum, relative status is  — just try comforting a disenfranchised person in our society today by saying, “but no one even had air conditioning a hundred years ago!”
No matter what measurable statistics say, people’s perceptions can often differ from reality. Despite violent crimes halving in the last 25 years in America, <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/30/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/">70% of Americans</a> believe crime has actually increased over that period. Few recognize the colossal decrease in global poverty as well. This raises questions of the extent to which increases to objective measures of life quality actually matter if people do not recognize them. Put another way: If a Crusonia plant grows in the forest to an incredible size, but no one notices it, does it really bear any fruit?
It is an unconvincing leap to suggest we should reorganize society to only maximize people’s perceived wellbeing. But it is also important to acknowledge the limits that economic growth can have on our own life satisfaction. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman helped develop the concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory">Prospect Theory</a>, which suggests that increases in income, rather than producing a sustained level of higher satisfaction, instead set a new benchmark for our expected standard of living. As our income increases, we are effectively speeding up a “hedonistic treadmill.”
Prospect Theory additionally incorporates an idea of “loss aversion” that suggests we suffer more from a dollar lost than we celebrate a dollar gained. In this way, economic growth’s understated value could be less in what we gain and more from what it allows us to avoid losing. Cowen notes correctly that our economic gains minimize misery by way of preventing death from forces like natural disaster, disease, and violence.
Cowen acknowledges the idea of a hedonistic treadmill but believes the constant pursuit of wealth is necessarily a rational preference for higher income: “Many individuals strive to earn higher incomes, even after they have experienced the strength of aspiration and treadmill effects.”
However, contending a rational basis for hyper-ambitious behavior ignores the fact that many people misperceive the extent to which getting richer will make them happier. In Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the son of a poor man imagines himself in the place of a rich man riding down the street in a carriage, believing the accompanying luxuries will lead to unparalleled tranquility. After a lifetime of toil and wealth accumulation, he lies on his deathbed realizing that, far from giving him happiness, his luxuries merely led to meaningless utility. The parable illustrates that although many measures of life satisfaction are tied to higher income, we are still susceptible to overestimating the impact of more money on our happiness.
Stubborn Attachments is short and intentionally vague on many dimensions. Respecting human rights is an admirable pursuit, but what is the definition of human rights? At what point do income transfers become so excessive that they make immigration untenable? How exactly can we be sure to establish institutions that lead to higher sustainable economic growth? Cowen knows these are important questions but instead chooses to emphasize the need to rethink our big-picture goals. How we get there is still up for debate, but Stubborn Attachments presents a compelling case for redefining our long-term priorities in favor of more sustained economic growth and a greater respect for human rights.
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A Human Rights Case for Economic Growth: Tyler Cowen&#8217;s Stubborn Attachments

A Human Rights Case for Economic Growth: Tyler Cowen&#8217;s Stubborn Attachments

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/strings-attached-argument-universal-basic-income/"></div>Technology, globalization, and a rapidly changing economic landscape are leaving behind many workers and feeding the flames of populism worldwide. Could the solution to mitigating this economic displacement be to just give everyone money?
That’s the idea being pushed by advocates of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in recent books like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-People-Money-Universal-Revolutionize/dp/1524758760">Give People Money</a> by Annie Lowrey and organizations like <a href="https://economicsecurityproject.org">The Economic Security Project</a>. A Universal Basic Income is a cash-benefit given to everyone — no strings attached — designed to alleviate financial burdens of the modern economy. The idea is simple, provocative, and slowly creeping into mainstream policy debates.
The biggest obstacle in successfully enacting a UBI is how high-income countries view work and the social safety net.
Across high-income countries, especially in the United States, our work is a part of our individual and national identity. Everyone’s answer to the question “what do you do?” defines how we see ourselves. The earliest European settlers in America were Puritans and Quakers who believed idleness to be a sin. Upon visiting the United States during the 19th century, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed a unique industriousness and honor surrounding work in America.  Sociologist Max Weber’s concept of the “Protestant work ethic” additionally projected an ethos of societal value being equated with toil that is deeply embedded in our national fabric. When American politicians of any stripe talk about the struggles of a constituency, the group almost always has a modifier of “working.” In contrast to Europeans, Americans significantly believe that the poor can improve their lot with the right amount of effort.
Too often, what it means to “work” is narrowly defined as “market labor for wages” and is increasingly out of sync with the needs and dynamics of modern society. For example, as our population ages more people will spend their time taking care of parents and volunteering at senior centers, earning no wage but surely providing value to society. Eternal chores like housework and parenthood are also essential to existing but are not typically thought of as “work.”
Simon Kuznets, the economist behind measuring economic growth in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), always admitted the shortcomings of using GDP to measure the value of an entire economy specifically because it ignored household work. By focusing on GDP as an indicator of economic health, and therefore societal health, there continues to be a stigma against non-market labor. Child-rearing, elderly familial care, and household chores are ignored by these national statistics, implicitly valueless without an obvious market price. Those who give their time to community organizations or creative endeavors with insufficient market value are not given compensation that can be reflected on tax returns.
The existing safety nets across high-income countries are almost all based around the old-fashioned definition of work as labor that is valued by the market. Social security in the United States is close to a universal transfer system, but getting benefits requires <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/planners/credits.html">working at least 40 quarters</a> — 10 years — before retirement age. Taking care of kids at home for 30 years does not count. One must be earning a wage in the traditional labor market to qualify for social security benefits. Unemployment insurance, too, is only for people who were working for wages but find themselves suddenly without a paycheck because of layoffs.
The modern American safety net is ostensibly designed to be means-tested. This theoretically allows governments to target those most in need. Yet the ethos of rugged individualism and pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps underlies the American welfare system and requires burdensome proof of qualification to the point of shutting too many people out entirely. The architecture of the modern American welfare state has its beginnings in the New Deal, where cultural attitudes more common in the 1930s subtly linger today. Means-testing allows governments to be discretionary and, consciously or subconsciously, these allocations end up being racially skewed. Through various hoops and clauses, the Social Security Act passed in 1935 with enough initial conditions that it excluded <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/03/a-second-look-at-social-securitys-racist-origins/?utm_term=.5bb5ab43d7e6">two-thirds of black workers</a> in the South from receiving benefits. Of the 3,000 loans guaranteed in Mississippi in 1947 by the Veteran Administration, only two went to black mortgage recipients.
The very myth of welfare queens and those who leech off the state have deep racial undertones. Programs designated to help low-income families and disproportionately used by blacks — though used more by whites in absolute terms — are labeled “welfare.” But government assistance embedded in the tax code that is overwhelmingly used by white families — like <a href="http://nlihc.org/article/minority-households-do-not-receive-fair-share-mortgage-interest-deduction">the mortgage interest deduction</a> — is rarely thought of as a handout. Many of these beneficiaries, of course, do not see themselves as being recipients of a government handout.
Government assistance comes in a combination of state- and federally-funded programs. But the discretion left to certain states can explain a lot of the difference. Racial heterogeneity itself may be to blame for a lack of willingness to provide assistance to people of color. A <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/why_doesnt_the_u.s._have_a_european-style_welfare_state.pdf">seminal paper</a> by Alberto Alesina et al found that “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.” A state like Vermont (which is 95 percent white) covers 78 percent of its impoverished families, while in Louisiana (which is 32 percent black) only four percent of impoverished families are covered.
Despite the welfare queen caricature, every part of the American safety net is based around means-testing and/or age requirements and are almost never in perpetuity. There is no such thing as a general “welfare check” that anyone can just go to a government building and pick up. Programs like TANF — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — give financial assistance to families that demonstrate need according to different states’ requirements. SNAP — Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, best known as “food stamps” — provides low-income households with vouchers that can be exchanged for certain categories of food. Even unemployment benefits are subject to their own conditions and have an explicit sunset date. These obstacles, whatever their intentions, are so prohibitive that it’s hard to defend perpetual poverty as the inevitable result of people just “falling through the cracks.” In 2015, just five percent of children living <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/tanf_spending_wy.pdf">in poverty in Wyoming</a> were covered by TANF.
Tying government assistance to incentives is not totally outlandish. There are instances where government benefits can be counter-productively generous to the point of disincentivizing work. But basing government assistance on conditionalities comes from a distorted view that poverty is usually a choice caused by bad decisions. If only we could give people better incentives, they’d be able to escape poverty. This idea is the impetus behind work requirements for government assistance and drug-testing beneficiaries. But requiring work for those who can’t find it is more likely to exclude those in need than provide a spark for the lazy. Imposing drug tests in exchange for food stamps isn’t going to snap a drug abuser out of his/her addiction and back onto a career trajectory. Women and racial minorities, who are discriminated against in the labor market, have even more difficulty finding employment and therefore accessing government assistance. And what about the people who cannot work because of disabilities, or whose time needs to be spent taking care of elderly parents or young children?
There is no settled UBI policy in the political discourse but all proposals share the same foundation. A UBI is Universal: every citizen takes part, regardless of need or age. Universality ensures that the program does not develop resentment effects and does not disincentivize work by disappearing when a recipient goes above a certain income threshold. There is no paperwork needed to prove you’re unemployed or too poor. Universality ensures it runs smoothly; experience shows programs targeted towards the poor like Medicaid operate far less efficiently than near-universal programs like Social Security and Medicare. A UBI is Basic: it is meant to be a cushion against times of financial duress and supplement other income to liberate people who do nonwage labor or want a cushion alongside entrepreneurial endeavors. A UBI is income: it is not a voucher that you can exchange only for eligible food items. It is not payment assistance for housing. Every recipient spends in the way he or she deems is best. A UBI takes the discretion away from the government and gives it to every individual, decreasing the bias of the existing system and eliminating the prohibitive bureaucratic nightmares that prevent more extensive coverage.
It’s difficult to know exactly how a massive redefinition of our national safety net would look, but there’s encouraging evidence already found within the United States.
The Alaska Permanent Fund gives up to $2,000 dollars a year to each Alaskan citizen, essentially as a dividend of oil revenues. The program lifts three percent of the state’s population out of poverty every year. A striking takeaway from the state’s project is how much the universality gives a sense of togetherness that other government transfer schemes do not. Alaskans feel like they are all a part of their state’s success, and no one resents a fellow citizen getting the check. A UBI in America could instill a sense that every citizen is a part of the country’s success, regardless of his or her income.
Internationally, Iran enacted a UBI scheme in 2010 by replacing previous food and energy subsidies with cash transfers. Data from the Economic Research Forum found that the policy change reduced poverty and inequality while preventing a feared mass exodus from the labor market.
These instances point to positive results for cash transfers and, perhaps most importantly, debunk the idea that it will incentivize people to stop working. Evidence throughout studies from low- and high-income countries consistently suggest most people who leave the labor market do so for beneficial reasons like furthering education or taking care of family members. The strong connection between working and self-worth remains even when we’re given money.
Evidence from high-income and low-income countries also disproves one of the most common points of skepticism about UBI: the concern that people will squander their allotment on indulgent consumption. Inevitably some money will go towards less-essential items, but it’s clear that what most of those in poverty need is a financial boost, not a realignment and paternalistic dictation of their economic decision-making.
A UBI is no panacea for the woes of the modern displaced worker. A cash transfer will not alleviate the pains of rust belt workers unable to fill the meaningful void left by lost employment. Instead, UBI should be seen as a cushion for the massive economic disruptions from the digital revolution, disruptions that we have previously only seen during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
The prospect of a UBI is not as farfetched as it seems. Hillary Clinton was close to adding a basic income policy into her 2016 Presidential platform but ultimately <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/12/16296532/hillary-clinton-universal-basic-income-alaska-for-america-peter-barnes">“decided it was exciting but not realistic.”</a> Democratic candidates for 2020, like Kamala Harris and Chris Murphy, have expressed openness to the idea. The success of state-by-state marijuana decriminalization proves that smaller state-based UBI experiments could eventually lead to a more convincing national campaign.
People from across the political spectrum can find something to like in UBI, albeit with differences in its enactment.  For economic conservatives, the attractiveness of the UBI would be its ability to replace much of the clunky bureaucratic features of the American welfare state. For economic liberals, UBI would not replace the existing welfare state but instead complement it. These are not trivial details to work out: <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/17/15364546/universal-basic-income-review-stern-murray-automation">It means that UBI could range from adding nothing to the Federal budget to adding $3 trillion</a>. But before a greater UBI context is considered, the essential task is to convince the public that unconditional cash transfers for every citizen are feasible and beneficial. Redefining society’s view of what “work” is and what it means to contribute to society is no easy feat. Yet we are beginning to be engulfed by the seismic winds of societal and economic change from a globalized digital age. We need a paradigmatic shift in how we view these things in order to ensure a broad-based peaceful prosperity for the future.
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No Strings Attached: An Argument for Universal Basic Income

Will Compernolle is an economist and podcaster in New York City. He also writes music about 18th-century Scottish economists.