Give People Money

A universal basic income is a regular cash payment to every adult, with no conditions, large enough to cover basic needs. Lowrey takes the idea seriously from several directions at once: as a way to end deep poverty, a simpler alternative to a patchwork of welfare programs, a dividend on a country's shared wealth, a cushion against jobs lost to technology, and a way to pay for unpaid care work. She is candid that these goals conflict and that the costs are uncomfortable.

The reporting is the strength. Lowrey, a writer at The Atlantic who previously covered economic policy for The New York Times, travels to rural Kenya, to India and around the United States, and looks at Alaska's oil-funded dividend and pilot programs elsewhere.

The book was shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, and Lawrence Summers called it the best study yet of the world's experience with basic income. Kirkus called it a useful primer but noted that, because true UBI experiments are rare, much of the argument is theoretical and the evidence from abroad is thin. Readers looking for a detailed financing plan will not find one.

It suits anyone in policy, economics or impact investing who wants the strongest short case for cash transfers, along with an honest account of what the evidence can and cannot yet show.

1. UBI means different things to different people. Anti-poverty campaigners, libertarians who want a smaller state and technologists worried about automation all back it for different reasons, which is why designs and price tags vary so widely.
2. Simplicity is part of the pitch. One argument for a universal payment is that it could replace a tangle of conditional programs, which matters for anyone modeling its true net cost.
3. Work incentives are the crux. Lowrey examines whether people keep working when they no longer need to, the question critics raise first, and the evidence she can draw on is still limited.
4. Alaska shows a dividend can last. Its oil-funded annual payment is the closest thing to a long-running universal payment in the US and has survived politically for decades.
5. The bill is the obstacle. A meaningful universal payment requires large tax increases or program cuts, and the book is stronger on why to do it than on how to finance it.

Lowrey builds the case in stages, moving from the American labor market to poverty abroad and back to the politics of paying for it.

1. Work and technology. She examines fears that automation will eliminate jobs, the more immediate problem of low-paid, insecure work, and how the decline of unions left many workers underemployed.
2. Poverty and the safety net. She looks at the American safety net and the argument that unconditional cash would be simpler and cheaper to run than a patchwork of programs.
3. Evidence from abroad. Reporting from Kenya and India, and drawing on pilots in Mexico and Brazil, she looks at what giving people money has done to poverty, work and spending.
4. Inclusion. She considers how a universal payment could recognize unpaid care work and narrow gaps of race and gender, and why work-ethic politics resist it.
5. The price tag. She weighs the cost, Alaska's dividend as a working model, and the trade-offs between a universal payment and targeted programs, concluding with the case for trying it.

Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award! Surely just giving people money couldn't work. Or could it? Imagine if every month the government deposited £1000 in your bank account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy, but Universal Basic Income (UBI) has become one of the most influential policy ideas of our time, backed by thinkers on both the left and the right. The founder of Facebook, Obama's chief economist, governments from Canada to Finland are all seriously debating some form of UBI. In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movement. She travels to Kenya to see how UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, and India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor. She visits South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in the face of advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labour. She also examines at the challenges the movement faces: contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing. The UBI movement is not just an economic policy -- it also calls into question our deepest intuitions about what we owe each other and what activities we should reward and value as a society.