WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED:

The program, spearheaded by Stockton's mayor, Michael Tubbs, was scheduled to end this summer: this month's payment was slated to be the last. In late May, Tubbs announced that seed would be extended through January, 2021, in response to the economic strain put on participants by the coronavirus pandemic. While the idea of extending the program had been under discussion even before the spread of covid-19, Tubbs told me that current conditions made doing so a "moral imperative," as many participants have lost work, and those classified as essential workers face increased risk. "covid-19 has put the focus on the fact that a lot of Americans live in constant moments of economic disruption, because the fundamentals of the economy haven't been working," he told me.

Tubbs, who is twenty-nine, is Stockton's first Black mayor, and its youngest ever. After four years serving on the city council, he ran for mayor on a platform focussed on recovery from the 2008 crash, and was elected, in 2016, with seventy per cent of the vote, defeating an incumbent plagued by a string of scandals. seed has relied on significant outside funding, as have several other projects that Tubbs has pursued, including an education initiative that has been run on a twenty-million-dollar private donation. Tubbs first encountered the concept of a universal basic income, or U.B.I., while he was an undergraduate at Stanford, in 2009, in a course that covered Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s advocacy for the idea late in his life. The possibility of issuing unconditional payments to a group of Stockton residents came up soon after Tubbs took office, in 2017, as a part of his staff's research project on addressing poverty. Twenty per cent of Stockton's residents fall below the poverty line, which is well above the state average, and residents of color are disproportionately affected. Still, Tubbs was initially skeptical--he worried about funding and thought that the idea could prove unpopular with voters. "This was my first time being elected," he told me. "I didn't want it to be my last."

The plan started to take shape, though, when Tubbs met the co-chair of the Economic Security Project, a basic-income advocacy group launched by the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The organization was looking for a city in which to test a pilot, and gave Stockton a million-dollar grant. (The program's extension will be funded separately, through a private donation.) The funding allowed a hundred and twenty-five participants each to receive five hundred dollars a month, an amount that was based on data indicating that around forty per cent of Americans can't afford a four-hundred-dollar emergency expense. A hundred recipients in the program are anonymous, while the rest, including Kidd-Plummer, have volunteered to speak publicly about their experience. The study set out to prove that a basic income could, according to the research plan, "lead to reductions in monthly income volatility and provide greater income sufficiency, which will in turn lead to reduced psychological stress and improved physical functioning." A random sample of residents in neighborhoods with populations that are at or below Stockton's median income level were contacted. Around forty-three per cent of those who were chosen reported being employed either full or part time. Ten per cent of them are caregivers, a group that often fails to qualify for unemployment and other benefits. Tubbs told me that he doesn't see a basic income as particularly radical but, instead, as "this generation's extension of the safety net," following in the path of things like Social Security, child-labor laws, weekends, and collective bargaining.

Two professors of social work, Amy Castro Baker, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Stacia Martin-West, of the University of Tennessee, who have conducted research together on the gender and racial wealth gaps, were brought on to help design the pilot and evaluate the results. Stockton, they told me, was an ideal location: as of 2018, it was the most diverse city in the country; many of its residents moved from more expensive parts of the Bay Area and continue to commute into those cities for low-paying jobs; and it is, historically, the foreclosure capital of the United States. In designing the logistics of the program, they emphasized "rethinking our safety net with an anchor of justice and dignity," as Castro Baker put it, while addressing "inequality predicated on racism and sexism."

Each month, participants receive payments on a debit card, which the researchers are able to track. No restrictions are placed on what the money can be used for; if participants don't want their expenses tracked or prefer to use cash, they can transfer the money off the card. Castro Baker and Martin-West have also been studying the well-being of people in a control group who did not receive payments. Members of both groups complete monthly check-ins, during which they provide updates and summarize their mental state by using emojis. During the study, the researchers have released data on an online dashboard, where observers can read stories from participants and see spending trends change over time. For example, during the pandemic, the percentage of money that participants spent on food, consistently the largest category, reached nearly twenty-five per cent over the monthly average, while the amount spent on recreation dropped to less than two per cent.

Participants have also put the money toward rent, car payments, and paying off debt, as well as one-off expenses for themselves or their children: dental surgery, a prom dress, football camp, and shoes. They've also been able to cut back on working second and third jobs; one participant, a forty-eight-year-old mother of two who works full time at Tesla, was able to stop working as a delivery driver for DoorDash. Alcohol and tobacco has accounted for less than one per cent of spending per month.

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