[0:00:00] We're turning now to another session that's been widely anticipated. It's come up time and again throughout the summit, and I'm referring to the basic income session. And we have a veritable who's who on basic income. Truth be told, we have a who's who on pretty much any.
[0:00:19] In all worlds, but we definitely have a who's who in the basic income world. We have Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook. We have Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator. We have Juliana B. Dadanure, here at Stanford, our own expert on basic income and much more from the Department of Philosophy. And we have...
[0:00:41] Natalie Foster, advisor to the Aspen Institute and Open Society and former digital director for President Obama's Organizing for America. I'll leave it to them. They're going to be great. We are here to talk about a really old idea, the universal basic income, which is pretty much the worst name in the world. And I hope in two years when we're having a conversation about this, it's called something entirely different. But it's old in that Thomas Paine talked about it. Nixon talked about it. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about it.
[0:01:11] And it's having a real modern resurgence. The Reddit community has exploded. There are a number of outlets that have a basic income beat, almost, because they see so much traffic when they write stories on it. The Movement for Black Lives has recently endorsed a form of targeted universalism in their policy platform that they put out on August 1 of this year. And so there's a lot of interesting activity. And one thing I've found is it's also a conversation people really like to talk about. And what I'm really excited
[0:01:40] So what I'm going to do with today is to be with you all who are folks who talk about it but also are figuring out how we do something about it, how we start the research process, how we start actually prototyping and experimenting with this idea of giving everyone cash. So I thought we'd start with some level setting on what the universal basic income is. My basic way of explaining it is it's like the game of monopoly. When you pass go in that game, you get $200.
[0:02:09] Every time you pass go. And that's because you need cash to play the game of monopoly. And so perhaps giving people money is a policy for the 21st century. So with that, I'm actually going to turn it over to you all. And my first question is, and we'll start with you, Juliana, what is the way you find yourself explaining the universal basic income? And then what was your journey to the policy idea? And we're starting with you because as an academic, you know.
[0:02:36] You've got the probably longest explanation out there. Thank you so much, Natalie. So let me start by talking a bit about my personal experience then. And so I first started being interested in basic income when I lived in Europe. So I grew up in France, and I lived in England for a while. So as you may know, we have a difficult situation with youth unemployment in Europe. I'm sure you're aware of some of the numbers.
[0:03:03] The worst cases being Greece and Spain, where rates of youth unemployment have gone up to 50%. And what was really interesting to me, both in England and in France, is that the response to youth unemployment and youth poverty was very timid. So in the UK, we have very low welfare payments for young adults. And in France, we had almost no cash payments for young adults below the age of 25 years old. And so I became interested.
[0:03:33] To me, that was very short-sighted. We know the effects of poverty on people's life course are extremely heavy. And it was also cruel because, of course, young people can't be said to be responsible for the structural unemployment they are inheriting. So I became interested in the reasons why that response was so timid. And I think it's almost entirely explained by a discourse of distrust of young adults.
[0:04:01] And discourses of distrust of the poor, more generally. The idea that justified, for example, the denial of welfare payments to young adults in France, where that we should teach them the right values. We should not give them something for nothing. They have a tendency to be lazy, and if we give them cash, they will become even lazier. And to me, that was a ridiculous response to youth poverty. It was short-sighted, cruel, and unfair. So that's how I started reading about universal basic...
[0:04:31] And what I find most exciting and interesting about it is that it has the potential to move us away from the endemic distress of the poor and this obsession with screening out the undeserving poor.
[0:04:46] Which seems to be driving our current systems of welfare provision. So we want to screen out welfare queens and benefits crowners. And I think this obsession is generating very toxic rhetorics in our political communities. And I think basic income by being universal has the potential to move us away potentially from that. How would you define basic income? So there are many, many types of basic income proposal. It's basically we give people cash.
[0:05:16] Different proposals vary in terms of the amount that they propose. They also vary on the frequency of the payment. But I think there are three important features that bring together all the basic income proposals and that are constitutive features of the proposals. Universal basic income is supposed to be unconditional, individual, and universal. So let me tell you what each of these mean and why they are very important.
[0:05:44] So the first one, basic income, unconditional basic income is unconditional. So we would give people cash without any work requirements, without sanctions, if they do not accept a job or training, which is the opposite of how most welfare systems work. So it's not centered on activation. We don't want people to accept a certain number of hours of work. We don't want people to apply to 40 jobs a week, 40 inexistent jobs a week. What we do is we
[0:06:13] Give it unconditionally. So the reasons for this unconditionality of basic income is that, so first, people have thought, especially philosophers have been writing about the fact that people might just be better placed than street level bureaucrats in deciding what they should do with their time. And the second reason is that there are many activities that are beneficial to people as individuals, but also to their society and community that are not currently remunerated in the job market.
[0:06:42] We're in the labor market. So caring, volunteering, political activism, designing an app that will change the world in some way. All of those are activities that we value as a community that may not at one point or another be activities that are correlated with a wage. So the idea is let's make it unconditional so that all of those activities are also remunerated. The second feature is it has to be individual. So you get it even if you depend on a rich enough spouse.
[0:07:12] So it's not household-based like most mechanisms of poverty relief. And why? Well, for two very basic and related reasons. The first is the liberal view that we should focus on individual freedom and well-being rather than focus on the family as an entity. So we shouldn't just entrust the family as an entity to just make sure that the distribution is actually fair within the unit. It's not always the case. So we have this
[0:07:41] A set of feminist writers who have argued that families, of course, can be places of solidarity and care, but they can also be abusive. And so by providing basic income individually rather than making it household-based, we enable exit options, and we enable people to exit abusive relationships if need be, and we make it easier. And the last feature is it's universal. So everyone within a universe, so either within a city or within a state or within a region,
[0:08:10] gets basic income, whether you're a worker or you're unemployed or you're rich or poor, young or old. And that's for a number of reasons. The first one is that we want to get away from what has been called the benefits trap. So it's very difficult to actually get benefits. You have to apply, you have to go through a very difficult and bureaucratic procedure. Once you're on benefits, if you accept jobs that are precarious and might not last for long, you lose your benefits. And then if the job ends,
[0:08:37] If it doesn't satisfy you in many ways, you're back to square one. So we want to get rid of this benefit strap. And the other reason, and then I'll end here, is stigma. So the reason why we want basic income to be universal is that we want to get rid of this kind of divisive instrumentalization of those who are deserving and those who are not. Those who are assisted, those who are not. Those who are welfare dependent and those who are not. And we don't want to miss anyone.
[0:09:06] And making it universal is the best way of doing this. Okay, so that would be my definition. Great. You're teaching a class now on the universal basic income, right? Yes, in the winter, actually. So that's probably laying out your syllabus right there. Chris, how about you? What's your definition and your journey to this conversation? Well, I'll try to be brief but pretty, hopefully, clear. My view is that our country is in full crisis.
[0:09:33] There has never been a time when the American dream has been, when it's been up for grabs in the way that it is today. And it's because there is a consensus, a growing consensus on the left and on the right that the economy is rigged against everyday people. That's strong language that Mr. Trump uses, but it resonated with many people in the country, and again, not just people on the right.
[0:10:00] I think that there are really important conversations to have about why that is. It's probably somewhat a combination of what automation, globalization, financialization have all done to the economy. But the reality is that we don't need to talk about how machines are going to take all of our jobs in 20 years to realize that today, normal people can't get ahead. Household incomes are less than they were 20 years ago. And the cost of living, or at least for major things like health and education, has gone.
[0:10:30] The only way to think, I think, in a 21st century in a way that's honest and true to the century that we live in is to think big and to think boldly about how we can reset the playing field. How we can say honestly that the economy is not working and it needs to be fundamentally rebalanced and the basic income is a way to do that.
[0:10:53] My view is that there are a lot of different ways to do a basic income, a lot of different levels, a lot of different amounts. There are negative income taxes, monthly cash stipends, expansions of the current frameworks that we have, like the earned income tax credit, universal child benefits, and even social security.
[0:11:11] All of these questions are important design questions that we need a lot more research and a lot more time to understand and explore. But we've got to think about how cash can play a role to give a leg up to everyday people across the country because without it, the economy is, I don't see a path forward, at least in a direction that's gonna provide the opportunity that it has historically. That's great. Sam, how about you?
[0:11:41] Well, I don't have much to add in terms of the definition, but I'll talk about how I started thinking about it. In my work at Y Combinator and at OpenAI and funding startups and working on artificial intelligence, I have realized that the sort of arc of technology has been towards more wealth creation, but more concentration of that into fewer and fewer hands. And that that has sort of had these periods of sort of this like punctuated equilibrium model, and there have been these moments
[0:12:11] Well, we had these major technology revolutions, the agriculture revolution, the industrial revolution, for example, that have really changed the world in a big way in this direction. And I think we're in the middle, or at least on the cusp of another one, where we will see software, and particularly artificial intelligence, change the playing field again. So I think basic income is probably a good idea without a huge increase in automation, but it is an absolutely necessary idea or something.
[0:12:40] Like it is an absolutely necessary idea in the face of increased automation. And what I realized is that people have been talking about this idea for a long time, and there's very little action. It's been the kind of idea that people talk about at panels like this and debate pros and cons of. But there's very little data. In fact, some of the studies from the 70s, which that was a pretty different time anyway, but the data has just been lost. The other studies, I think, have had pretty serious flaws.
[0:13:10] It occurred to me that it would be good to get more data on how this actually works, because these fundamental tenets that I believe are probably true, I can't defend, I don't have data, and also I think the conversation has kind of gone as far as it can without some action. But I generally believe that you can't really have equality of opportunity for people without some financial floor.
[0:13:37] And our society has moved more in that direction, not less. And that if you can give everyone enough money to survive on, then you'll see a lot more good things happen and lives develop in a positive way. I also believe that the goalpost needs to be that it's a net benefit to society. I think, you know, the kind of a very accomplished back as well, people will sit around and do drugs and play video games. And some will.
[0:14:06] And that's OK. The other benefit of this increase in technology in the world is that a small number of people can have a really outsized impact. And so if some people sit around and are lazy, that's OK. And I think this gets at the heart of this very American ideal of hard work being valuable for its own sake that is going to evolve in the coming decades.
[0:14:30] And then the last thing that made me even more excited about it is the very beginnings of our study. I had a feeling that the world was pretty difficult and that the existing benefits programs were pretty difficult for poor people. And I had no idea how bad it was. And just as we've moved into the pilot of our study, we've had to do so much work.
[0:14:50] And the people we've had to work with have been wonderful. But so much work with local, state, and federal agencies to make sure that we don't disqualify people from health insurance or housing or other benefits long term by giving them cash. And it has really spoken just in the difficulty of designing our own study and actually giving cash to people, how hard that is and how careful you have to be to not mess up people's other programs long term. That has really
[0:15:19] It seems to me that we're in a moment where globally there are a number of experiments that have popped up. Finland has announced an experiment. Namibia, Canada is looking at a whole bunch of things. And you guys were the first to launch a modern experiment in the United States.
[0:15:43] What about that? I think a lot of folks have probably read an article or two. It got a lot of press. You know, that was an odd thing. I mean, we basically put up a job posting. And it was not the idea. There were some people talking about it in corners of the internet, but it was certainly not a popular idea at the time. And it was one of these things that just caught fire. And still, I probably get
[0:16:10] More requests from journalists that want to talk about that than any other topic. So we were totally unprepared for that. Never would have expected it. So we have this research group called YC Research where we try and work on things that we think are really important that don't fit the model of a for-profit startup. OpenAI, development of new cities, basic income, new computing platforms, education, stuff like that. And we just said, we're looking for a researcher. We want to fund this research project.
[0:16:39] And it was really surprising to see the amount of interest that that generated and how many other studies have since come forth. There are really two things that people study, one that I think is interesting and one that is not that interesting. The one that I think is not that interesting is just the economic model that works. And I think everyone gets this wrong. In a world where we desperately need a basic income, and actually in any world that I think we're likely to have 20 years from now,
[0:17:09] The automation that will have eliminated jobs will have so greatly decreased the cost of a really good standard of living, assuming we can figure out housing policy, that the numbers that we need relative to what GDP would be, I think it actually would turn out to be surprisingly affordable. So everyone thinks about what it costs today to have a really great life, assuming we have full automation. But obviously, if one of those things moves, the other one does as well.
[0:17:38] So in a world where robots take all the jobs, the amount of money or the fraction of GDP any individual needs comes down a lot. And so we decided that because of that, we didn't want to do an economics-driven study, like how would the country afford this? How much money can we give? What does tax policy have to be? All of that. What we decided we wanted to study instead was how does this impact people's lives? Are people actually happier and more fulfilled? Do they have fewer health problems? Or do they...
[0:18:08] Do people get so much fulfillment from work and their jobs, and we don't have any social structure yet to replicate that, are people less happy? Do people learn new things and want to make more money, or are they content where they are? So what we're really interested in studying is not the economic effect on the country as a whole, but the effect on individuals. And these ideas that we hope are true, do people use the opportunity to
[0:18:37] Apply themselves, pull themselves out of poverty, retrain, do new things, find more fulfillment, be happier, be healthier, make their communities better. Or are we wrong about that? And somehow this really does go catastrophically wrong because this need to work and get identity from that and sort of feel the reward of struggling to attain something because that's how humans have been biologically wired for 50,000, 60,000 years and does the whole thing.
[0:19:06] Not work because of that. So that's the element we're trying to study. And you've chosen Oakland. And where are you in the process? We've chosen Oakland. We are in the pilot phase, as I mentioned. So we're now giving money to a small group of people. And we're trying to work out both our data collection of the main study and also the other elements that I talked about, working with the existing service agencies to make sure that we don't cause any problems and that we work with them and get data sharing arrangements in place as necessary. As we've said, we'll do the pilot for as long as we need.
[0:19:35] To feel confident the study's working really well. You really don't want to screw up people's lives in existing benefits programs. And when we get comfortable with that, we'll roll it out to the full scale. Oakland, by the way, has just been amazing to work with. So that's been great. I'm glad you hear that. The mayor says thanks. Good to see you, Mayor.
[0:19:53] That's great. And it seems to me, one thing we've talked about is if the studies come back, like your study and says, actually, this is the only way to save humanity, but there's no sort of political consensus or odd bedfellows or even grassroots support for the idea built, for most people hearing it, it seems like a political non-starter. Although that may have even shifted, I think, in some ways over the last few years as the idea has grown. So I guess my question to you, Chris, is what are some of the other experiments, either
[0:20:23] Is there a political or macroeconomic that you hear of people launching here in the U.S.? Yeah, well, just to give a really quick overview of the research landscape as it exists now, there have actually been a ton of studies and research done on unconditional cash transfers. They tend to be largely in an international context, but they've been happening for decades.
[0:20:48] In the past couple years, one nonprofit, GiveDirectly, which many of you know, really had a very similar experience to what happened with the Y Combinator blog post in that five years ago when I joined the board, we were moving a million dollars, a couple million dollars worth of money, no strings attached, to the extreme poor in East Africa to
[0:21:14] Test the idea of is this more effective or efficient than a lot of the more bureaucratic development programs that existed out there. We ran a RCT, a random control trial, and it showed all kinds of positive benefits. And so much so that it was a bit of a...
[0:21:35] of a lightning bolt, if you will, in the development kind of world. Fast forward to today and GiveDirectly, I think, will move over $100 million this year, many of that from small-dollar donations. And the World Food Program, nearly half of its budget is now not food. It's cash. Because they've realized that not only is it more efficient for them to deliver it and saves money,
[0:21:58] It also helps the local ecosystems and the local economies in refugee camps outside of Syria or wherever they may be working. So there's a lot of research that shows that cash works, it's efficient, and some of the worst fears of like, oh, people just like spend it on booze and cigarettes aren't borne out. It's also worthwhile to remember, we had a moment in the United States when this seemed very close to being a reality. In 1968,
[0:22:26] In the Nixon presidency, I believe the House passed a basic income program, but it was stalled in the Senate because the Democrats didn't think it went far enough. And what ended up happening is the political consensus came apart. But even in that era, there were
[0:22:46] There were experiments that were happening in Denver, in Seattle, in different parts of the country, and unfortunately, they only went for a couple years, so we don't have a lot of great data about it, but in general, we did not see people dropping out of the labor force as some people feared. You did see some unusual things like divorce rates increasing, which at the time was like a big political poison pill, but further research suggests that it's because women actually felt empowered to leave.
[0:23:14] Because they knew they would have some kind of foundational structure. So while I think we have a lot more work to do and research to develop to understand how these kinds of programs might work today, I think it's really important not to forget not only this historical stuff, but current research that we have on the effectiveness of the EITC and other no strings attached cash benefits. Because almost universally, they suggest that it's better for government and better for beneficiaries.
[0:23:44] And then just from a political perspective, like where are some of, are there places where people are starting to think about how you could experiment with this idea at the state or local level? I'm thinking about what I've heard you talk about in the District of Columbia. Yeah, I mean there are, there's a lot of thoughts around experimentation too at a municipal or political level. One of the ideas that has circulated in the climate movement for a long time is let's put a price on carbon.
[0:24:12] And distribute 100% of the revenue to everyday people, citizens, just to check, as part of what it means to be alive. And this comes out of an idea and a tradition, actually, Peter Barnes has been the godfather of it, the thinker, that there are assets in our capitalistic economy that are shared and owned collectively. The air, water,
[0:24:41] Maybe even the financial system that we live in. And not only that, but there's also templates for how we can make sure that everyone is able to benefit from these common assets. The biggest example is up in Alaska. We've got a permanent fund up there. Every single year, every Alaskan adult gets a check for about $2,000 just for being alive.
[0:25:06] Just for being a citizen of the state of Alaska. It's financed from royalties and taxes on oil and gas companies, with the theory being the state of Alaska, the citizens of Alaska, owned all of this land to start. We'll let oil and gas companies benefit from it because it benefits our economy. But they're going to make sure that we, the owners, the people of the state of Alaska,
[0:25:28] So I guess the reason I'm mentioning all these different examples is because I really hope that the conversation around the basic income can evolve and become one that's larger about how do we provide economic security for every American through cash and let's think creatively about how to design programs at multiple different levels of government to begin that work. Great. Julianne, is there more you want to tell us about global experiments that are going on?
[0:25:56] Yes. So just I would like to second the fact that we definitely need more experiments and more data. And there is quite a bit out there in terms that are not. So we shouldn't just look for basic income experiments. There is a lot of data on unconditional benefits or universal benefits for children. So there is a lot of data out there that can help answer some of the questions we have about what cash and unconditional cash can do for people.
[0:26:25] I think it's really interesting how ideology drives people's first response to basic income. So most people, when you ask them, what would you do if you were given a basic income every month, they say, great things. They say, well, very few say, I'll quit my job and do nothing. Actually, no one says that. Most people say, well, maybe I'll just stay in my job, but I'll have a bit more holiday time, or maybe I'll do something else. But they all list very productive or very valuable activities. But when they are asked, what do you think other people
[0:26:55] Are going to do with their basic income. Then you have a very different story. So 8% in a group of 10 will say, they'll stop working. They'll do things that are not valuable. They'll just play all day. So I think it's really ideological. And that's why we really, really need pilots. Maybe I can say something about, so there were small experiments in many different places. There was a very interesting one in Canada.
[0:27:23] In the 70s, which was in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, where
[0:27:31] I think it was 2,500 people received income supplements. And that was very close to basic income because it was unconditional and there was very little control over what they were actually doing with the money. And I think there are two very interesting results from that study. One has to do with health. So it's on health effects, which we don't talk about as much as we should, I think. So there was a drop in hospitalization rates and, of course, related to mental health.
[0:28:00] Because when people actually are more secure, they have much less to worry about, obviously. But also there was a drop in hospitalizations relating to accidents and injury. And at first they were wondering why. And they realized it's because often those forms of injuries are linked in that town and particular types of injuries in ERs were linked to alcohol abuse.
[0:28:24] So there were many interesting health effects of basic income. The communities were just healthier in various ways. And then there was other very interesting outcome of the study, which had to do with stigma, the thing I was mentioning earlier. So there's this really great paper that argues that around Dauphin, people started viewing assistance pragmatically rather than moralistically. So their view of
[0:28:52] Welfare benefits just changed, right? And this is extremely important because of the very divisive rhetoric that we have around assistance. Maybe I can mention also the Namibian experiment, which is a very small-scale experiment that's fascinating that was run in the town of Ojiveo between 2008 and 2009. And there are 1,000 people received the equivalent of $15 per month.
[0:29:20] And the two very interesting effects were on children and crime. So on children, school dropout rates decreased from 40% to 0% that year. And the number of children going to school doubled. So that was a direct effect of the result of the pilot study. And the other effect was on crime. Crime rates dropped by quite a lot.
[0:29:48] Obviously, most of the crimes that they were witnessing before that had to do with people stealing to eat and to survive. So when you give people income and they don't need to do that anymore, they don't steal anymore. I mean, it seems sensible, but there is actually data on that.
[0:30:01] So those two are very interesting. The last one I want to mention is the Indian experiment, which was very important because it tested, in some sense, the community effects of basic income. What does cash does to community? So it was given to a group of self-employed women workers that were already organized in a co-op. And one of the interesting outcomes of that pilot was that there was no labor market withdrawal.
[0:30:30] So people are often very worried that if we give people cash, they will just withdraw. And some feminists have worried about that, especially in the case of women. They're worried that they will just withdraw from the labor market, and that will entrench existing gender norms. In that particular pilot, there was absolutely no evidence of that. There was evidence of the opposite. People were more likely to be employed after they received cash, which I think is one of the outcomes also of the Give Directly service. OK.
[0:30:56] Yeah, and with the labor market, I've heard people say in some ways it's like the ultimate strike fund, allowing someone to walk off their job that they don't like, which I think could be really important for workers. Or the ultimate seed fund, which means someone has the basic income they need to take the risk of starting a business or becoming an entrepreneur or whatever their vision is. I want to touch on something Juliana said that I have heard from people that I know that have received basic income in some study or program or something.
[0:31:25] And I felt this strongly in myself. It's been a long time since I've lived paycheck to paycheck, but I did for many years. And I remember very clearly how much stress that provides. Even if everything works, it just takes up constant mental bandwidth. It's a constant source of anxiety, and it makes you feel very stuck. It makes people feel like they can't leave a bad relationship or a bad job because there's no slack in the system.
[0:31:54] And it takes up a huge amount. I sort of have this model that people have a set amount of mental capacity to do things. And anxiety drains that. And living paycheck to paycheck and feeling stuck is this huge source of anxiety. And so the thing I have heard, this is not a study, but just anecdotally from everyone I've talked to, and also that I certainly felt myself, is that removing that anxiety and giving that flexibility is actually a
[0:32:22] One of the most powerful things that the unconditionality, the certainty gives. And I think that's where you get, especially for groups that have traditionally not had that, I think that's where you get a very large societal benefit. On the question of work that we were talking about and do people drop out of the workforce or not, my sense is that that is likely to become a very different question over the next few decades. I think that
[0:32:52] There are sort of two things that work has done in society that are likely to change. One is it has... Well, I think if we project the world 50 years forward, it will look barbaric to us now that we use fear of not being able to eat as a motivator for people to do a job they don't like for all of their waking hours. And I think that that has been this part of kind of the social construct is that you motivate poor people with fear of not being able to eat.
[0:33:22] And I think it's always interesting to look back at what our grandchildren will think is very barbaric about, or what people 50 years from now will think is very barbaric about what happens today. I think this is one of those elements. And so I think this question of work because that's something that you have to do, and if not, bad things happen to you, there's gonna be a different social value there. I think the other thing that work provides that is likely to come through very
[0:33:49] Different social structures is this idea of status and fulfillment and the fact that people actually like to be busy and that doing work, feeling valued is this very important, very deep need. And people always conflate that directly with work and always has been so far. I have absolutely no doubt that feeling valued, feeling important, having social status are fundamental biological human needs. I'm not sure they have to come via work.
[0:34:20] That's been the only way so far, but we've had a whole bunch of reasons why that's the case. And I think it's interesting to think about the social structures that might replace those basic human needs. And then maybe we don't worry so much if there is a labor force reduction, because I expect there will be. Well, that brings us to a question of how to pay for it. One thing Tim O'Reilly said yesterday was, if there is a labor force reduction, if robots take our jobs, let's say,
[0:34:45] And then income tax can't be the only way that you pay for a basic income. So we're going to have to rethink the tax structure in many ways. And Chris, you talked about the left and the right coalition. One thing people agree on is getting money into the hands of people. Where it starts to fall apart in some ways is how it's paid for. And so I'm curious if you all have thoughts on some of the ways it could be paid for in the US.
[0:35:12] I mean, I think one of the big questions is what it is. There's a group of folks who believe that a basic income by definition should be $1,000 a month at least, and that is what a basic income is. And then there are many folks who are more interested in sort of incremental kinds of solutions, like what would it mean to give $100 or $200 a month.
[0:35:37] So in my view, the reality is it would be very difficult to pay for $1,000 a month today. It would be close to half of the federal budget, several trillion dollars. There are some people who disagree, maybe folks on this panel. But it would not be difficult to think about providing every American $100 a month or $200 a month, to use what one of our colleagues calls go money.
[0:36:06] 200 bucks a month as Natalie was referencing in her introductory remarks as part of what it means to be able to have access to the first rung of the economic ladder. So there are lots of different sort of sizes. There's also a way to do this which is just providing an income floor which is not as in your initial definition would not necessarily provide universality but it might provide a basic income.
[0:36:31] To a lot of people who need it. So the first question is like we have to define what we want to pay for before we even start looking for revenue sources. Then when we do go to look at revenue sources, if we look at the economy of today, there are massive opportunities through pricing what we own in common, whether that's the air
[0:36:57] How the financial system works. But there are also ways to do it with the existing income tax base. So there's all different kinds of flavors of doing it. And I think at the end of the day there are more questions than answers. We should be honest about that. But we should be clear that we have work in front of us as a community to think about what is the optimal design, how much would that cost, and what's the easiest and most politically expedient way
[0:37:26] And I think with enough smart minds coming together and focusing, we can make that progress in the course of a couple years. I'm optimistic we can. I'll turn it over to questions in a second. But Sam or Juliana, anything you want to add about how it could be paid for? Yeah, maybe something about, so I think we have to be creative. There are many. So we need to look at the European debate on basic income as well, because they've been
[0:37:48] Thinking a lot about how to fund basic income in different contexts and at different levels. So there is a proposal for, of course, national basic incomes. But there are also proposals for regional basic income. So there is this EU dividend proposal that's very interesting. And so I think we need to start looking at different levels as well. And we have to remember as well that there are many, many potential sources of funding. So in the list of
[0:38:13] Sources that often come in the debate in Europe are consumption taxes, wealth taxes, of course, dividends from a sovereign wealth fund like in Alaska. So there are many potential sources of funding. And it will also be partly self-funded because some other
[0:38:30] Mechanisms of public assistance would become redundant. Not all of them, of course, but a few of them would become redundant. So it's also partly self-funded. Just one thing that's always tricky with basic income is the level at which it's set. And I think I would agree with a low basic income if it's just a way to set the system right and to work out the pipelines in some sense for then the basic income to be able to increase.
[0:38:56] I'm all in favor of that. I think in Alaska, we see that people are very attached to their basic income. And we can now think about in different places about how to increase it. But I think it's very important to keep in mind that the goal is for people to be able to lead a meaningful life. And that's going to require much more than $200 a month. And we don't want it to work as a subsidy for employers. This is not what we want. We don't want to give people a bit of cash so that employers then don't have to pay them.
[0:39:23] So we have to be very careful about setting basic income too low and the potential negative impacts it could have. So if we decide to set it lower for feasibility reasons, which I could be in favor of, we have to really think about how this can serve the future goal of having a more substantial basic income. I think the new kind of societal grand bargain has to be something like
[0:39:52] On individuals, it has to be something like you are guaranteed a floor and there's no ceiling. I think we have to be ready for a world in which some people get so rich that it feels gross. Because that's how technology is going to work or already has worked. And the deal has got to be that we're going to find a way to tax that. Those people will still be rich beyond anyone's conception.
[0:40:22] But we're going to redistribute the rest of that. And I think the thing, in that sense, if you can get a society like that, the society as a whole should root for people to get super rich because it's the taxes off trillions of dollars that pay for the whole thing. You know, there's a lot of debate about tax policy.
[0:40:41] And how we do it. But very roughly speaking, I think we have shown for a long time that somehow or other, and the components shift over time with political shifts, we can tax like 25% of GDP. So if there's like a $16 trillion GDP, we can somehow get $4 trillion of that in taxes. And it may be tax on wealth, or income, or sales tax, or property tax, or corporate tax. But somehow we're going to societally get our hands on that money. And then we can figure out how to redistribute that.
[0:41:09] Again, I think we have to believe that in a world where we really need this, the GDP shoots up at a growth rate we have never seen or not seen in a very long time for some number of years. And so the affordability question is not the central question in a world where this is urgently needed. That said, I think to really see
[0:41:41] What I hope to see here. I am less excited about the $100, $200 a month proposals because I don't think that gives people freedom. I don't think that gives people all of the benefits of less stress, less anxiety, a true, real opportunity to go do whatever they want to do in their lives, the freedom to pick up and move and leave a bad situation. And so I am way more excited about thinking about how we get to a world where
[0:42:10] When we get to this, there's a level where it is a true basic income and that all your basic needs are met. Yeah. Well, I'm getting the end. There's no time for questions? Just like two? What? All right, all right. Well, it's not my fault, folks. Well, thank you guys so much for this conversation. And thank you. It's a way out for hosting it.