ABEL'S REVENGE:

One cause of the program's especial popularity in Northern California is also a reason for the urgency of its appeal: it is a futurist reply to the darker side of technological efficiency. Robots, we are told, will drive us from our jobs. The more this happens, the more existing workforce safety nets will be strained. In "Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream" (2016), the labor leader Andy Stern nominates U.B.I. as the right response to technological unemployment. Stern, a lifetime labor guy, is a former president of the two-million-member Service Employees International Union. But he thinks that the rise of robots and the general gig-ification of jobs will "marginalize the role of collective bargaining," so he has made a strategic turn to prepare for a disempowered working class. "You go into an Apple store and you see the future," he quotes an economist saying. "The future of the labor force is all in those smart college-educated people with the T-shirts whose job is to be a retail clerk." (This presumes that people will frequent brick-and-mortar shops in the first place.)

By Lowrey's assessment, the existing system "would falter and fail if confronted with vast inequality and tidal waves of joblessness." But is a U.B.I. fiscally sustainable? It's unclear. Lowrey runs many numbers but declines to pin most of them down. She thinks a U.B.I. in the United States should be a thousand dollars monthly. This means $3.9 trillion a year, close to the current expenditure of the entire federal government. To pay, Lowrey proposes new taxes on income, carbon, estates, pollution, and the like. But she is also curiously sanguine about costs, on the premise that few major initiatives balance out on the federal books: "The Bush tax cuts were not 'paid for.' The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not 'paid for.' " When the country wants to launch a big project, she insists, the double joints and stretchy tendons of a giant, globalized economy come into play.

This open planning won't exactly soothe the cautious. A big reason for chariness with a U.B.I. is that, so far, the program lives in people's heads, untried on a national scale. Then again, by the same mark, the model couldn't be called under-thunk. The academic counterpart to Lowrey's journalistic book is Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght's recent "Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy" (Harvard), a meticulously comprehensive, frequently persuasive accounting of U.B.I.'s superiority by measures economic, philosophical, and pragmatic. Like Lowrey, they see basic income as a sound social program and a corrective "hope": not a perfect system, but better than anything else.

Traditionally, a challenge for means-tested aid is that it must determine who is most deserving--a vestige of the old Elizabethan system. Often, there's a moralizing edge. Current programs, Lowrey points out, favor the working poor over the jobless. Race or racism plays into the way that certain policies are shaped, and bureaucratic requirements for getting help can be arcane and onerously cumulative. Who will certify the employee status of a guy who's living on the streets? How can you get disability aid if you can't afford the doctor who will certify you as disabled? With a universal income, just deserts don't seem at issue. Everybody gets a basic chance.

Observers often are squeamish about that proposition. Junkies, alcoholics, scam artists: Do we really want to hand these people monthly checks? In 2010, a team of researchers began giving two-hundred-dollar payments to addicts and criminals in Liberian slums. The researchers found that the money, far from being squandered on vice, went largely to subsistence and legitimate enterprise. Such results, echoed in other studies, suggest that some of the most beneficial applications of a U.B.I. may be in struggling economies abroad.

Like many students of the strategy, Lowrey points to Kenya, where she reported on a U.B.I. pilot in a small village. (She won't say which, for fear of making it a target for thieves--a concern worth counting as significant.) The pilot is run by a nonprofit called GiveDirectly, and is heavily funded through Silicon Valley; in that respect, it's a study in effective philanthropy, not a new model of society. But the results are encouraging. Before GiveDirectly sent everyone the equivalent of twenty-two U.S. dollars a month (delivered through a mobile app), Village X had dirt roads, no home electricity, and what Lowrey genteelly calls an "open defecation" model for some families. Now, by her account, the village is a bubbling pot of enterprise, as residents whose days used to be about survival save, budget, and plan. (The payments will continue until 2028.)

A widow tells her, "I'll deal with three things first urgently: the pit latrine that I need to construct, the part of my house that has been damaged by termites, and the livestock pen that needs reinforcement, so the hyena gets nothing from me on his prowls." A heavy-drinking deadbeat buys a motorbike for a taxi business, sells soap, buys two cows, and opens a barbershop. His work income quadruples. He boasts to Lowrey of his new life.

Purely as a kind of foreign aid, Lowrey suggests, a basic income is better than donated goods (boxes of shoes, mosquito nets), because cash can go to any use. The Indian government's chief economic adviser tells her that, with a U.B.I. of about a hundred U.S. dollars a year, India, where a third of the world's extreme poor live, could bring its poverty rates from twenty-two per cent to less than one per cent. Those figures are stunning. But India is in the midst of major bureaucratic change. Would there be any chance of a U.B.I. finding a foothold in the entrenched U.S. political climate?

Advocates have noted that the idea, generally formulated, has bipartisan support. Charles Murray, the conservative welfare critic, was an early enthusiast. His book "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State" (2006) called for a U.B.I. of ten thousand dollars a year, plus catastrophic health insurance, to replace existing social programs, including Social Security. Rather than fester for years under the mismanaging claws of Big Government, he thought, money could flow directly to individual recipients. "The UBI lowers the rate of involuntary poverty to zero for everyone who has any capacity to work or any capacity to get along with other people," Murray declared.

But although politically dissimilar people may support a U.B.I., the reasons for their support differ, and so do the ways they set the numbers. A rising group of thinkers on the left, including David Graeber and Nick Srnicek, tout a generous version of U.B.I. both as a safety net and as a way to free people from lives spent rowing overmanaged corporate galleons. Business centrists and Silicon Valley types appreciate it as a way to manage industry side effects--such as low labor costs and the displacement of workers by apps and A.I.--without impeding growth. In "The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future" (Hachette), Andrew Yang, the Venture for America founder who has already filed for Presidential candidacy in 2020, recommends the model as a way to bypass kludgy governmental systems. He imagines it paired with something he calls "human capitalism." "For example, a journalist who uncovered a particular source of waste, an artist who beautified a city, or a hacker who strengthened our power grid could be rewarded with Social Credits," he explains. "Most of the technologists and young people I know would be beyond pumped to work on these problems."

Many of the super-rich are also super-pumped about the universal basic income. Elon Musk has said it will be "necessary." Sir Richard Branson speaks of "the sense of self-esteem that universal basic income could provide to people." What's the appeal for the plutocracy? For one thing, the system offers a hard budget line: you set the income figure, press start, go home. No new programs, no new rules. It also alleviates moral debt: because there is a floor for everyone, the wealthy can feel less guilt as they gain more wealth. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd