These days, to achieve maximum buzz, a policy idea needs the right combination of utopian promise and real-world possibility. You can make the argument that universal basic income has recently offered the headiest brew of that mix, for both the political and philanthropic class.
In its purest form, the idea is to provide a long-term guaranteed cash payment to every member of society without strings, age limits, or work conditions, set to secure a minimum standard of living.
Variants of the idea have bubbled up for centuries, and in recent decades, several localities have adopted versions: In the 1970s, for instance, Alaska started a Permanent Fund to share oil wealth. But the pace of experimentation has picked up sharply of late. Early this year, Finland began a trial program directed toward the unemployed, while in June, Hawaii became the first American state to commit to evaluating the idea. Scotland and India have shown signs of considering the policy as well.
Philanthropy has also taken a shining to the idea, supplying critical support for research on universal basic income, or UBI.
The charity GiveDirectly has raised $25 million of the $30 million it needs for a 12-year program it has begun in Kenya, a study that one analyst has termed an “epochal social scientific event.” This year it began to supply 6,000 adults, chosen at random from 40 villages in Kenya, with a basic income (set at the Kenyan poverty line of around $22 a month). Another group of about 20,000 people will receive short-term aid. Meanwhile, the nonprofit research arm of Y Combinator, a Bay Area start-up incubator, has begun a smaller UBI pilot in Oakland.
Basic-income debates are exciting places for donors to stake out territory.
The appeal of basic income to donors shouldn’t come as a big surprise. From the end of the 18th century onward, the ambitions of “philanthropy,” understood in contrast to a traditional charitable ethic (which had long been premised on the belief that “the poor you will always have with you”) have been fueled by faith in the possibility of a world without poverty. A universal basic income holds out this promise: Poverty could be eliminated by simply giving people money who now have little of it.
And yet, in another respect, the approach runs against the grain of that long history.
Philanthropists have often defined themselves by rejecting traditional charity’s “indiscriminate” nature, its reluctance to make distinctions between deserving and undeserving recipients. Discrimination was how modern philanthropists exercised their talents — and their power. Pulling on strings, setting conditions, determining particular populations to assist: These were all crucial parts of the philanthropist’s craft. Universal basic income represents in many respects a return to charity’s universality and unconditionality. It connects an expansion of philanthropic power to a surrender of philanthropic prerogatives.
So, for philanthropy, universal basic income sits at the intersection of contending impulses and approaches: between radical visions and practical calculations, between ambition and restraint. That ground is an exciting place for philanthropists to stake out territory. But it is also one full of pitfalls and challenges.
Foremost among them is the strong association between universal basic income and Silicon Valley. The links were forged over the last few years, especially as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has become the idea’s most prominent advocate. (Hillary Clinton recently became the idea’s most prominent almost-advocate, revealing that she nearly used it as a centerpiece of her presidential campaign.)
In May, during a commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg pushed the idea, and he did so again a month and a half later during a stop in Alaska on his “don’t-assume-I’m-running-for-president” road trip to every U.S. state. But it’s not just Mr. Zuckerberg. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is also a fan, and just last month, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack and co-founder of Flickr, signaled his support for universal basic income as well.
This association poses a challenge to philanthropy for several reasons. First, the idea of a basic income has absorbed some of the resentment the public harbors toward the nation’s tech elite. We can see this in the somewhat conflicting responses to Mr. Zuckerberg’s UBI advocacy. One version took offense at the idea of a billionaire seemingly calling on the government to expend resources to grant a small sustaining dollop to regular folks, what for the Facebook co-founder would be a rounding error; it led to countless tweets insisting that if Mr. Zuckerberg was so enamored with the idea, he should fund it himself.
The other response seemed to take offense at the very idea of Mr. Zuckerberg’s endorsement of UBI, detecting something sinister behind it. That’s because these critics associate it with one particular justification for a basic income — as a response to the spread of automation and fears of a “post-work” future, brought on by the relentless advance of technological disruption that Silicon Valley has championed. A basic income, in this framework, will be necessary to support the rising ranks of the permanently un- and under-employed.
“There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better,” Mr. Musk recently explained. “I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary.”
Based on Mr. Musk’s logic, many critics have explained support for UBI from tech entrepreneurs as nothing more than a cynical social insurance policy to keep the pitchforks at bay. Silicon Valley will make more of our jobs obsolete, but we won’t get so immiserated that we’ll storm the barricades.
That’s not entirely unfair, and Silicon Valley rhetoric can be easy to caricature. In explaining his support for the policy, for instance, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, insisted that “we need to be ready for a world with trillionaires in it,” one that is “going to feel deeply unfair.” This statement is premised on the inevitability of massive inequality (trillionaires will “feel” unfair, as opposed to “being” unfair), with a universal basic income serving as a sort of opiate of the masses.
Which brings us to the second challenge. The focus on robots and automation has overshadowed a range of other rationales for endorsing a universal basic income. Even among Silicon Valley supporters, the reasons they invoke are more complex. In his Harvard speech, after all, Mr. Zuckerberg held up UBI as way “to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas,” and in a recent Twitter exchange, Mr. Butterfield tied his support of the policy to the possibility of “unlock[ing] a huge amount of entrepreneurialism.”
Indeed, there are prominent tech titans whose support for a universal basic income does not seem to stem from distinctly Silicon Valley preoccupations.
Two of Mr. Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates who became co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz, for instance, have made substantial donations to GiveDirectly, as has Google’s philanthropic arm and the Omidyar Network, funded by the eBay founder. In fact, in a recent Hill op-ed in support of UBI, Mr. Hughes all but shouted, “Enough with the robots already!”
These supporters are largely attracted to the basic-income approach for its potential to curb extreme poverty in the developing world and to reform the international aid complex. In the U.S. context, they view UBI as a response to the general precariousness of many Americans’ lives. The need for UBI, Mr. Hughes explains, “is grounded in the reality that nearly half of Americans already can’t find $400 in case of an emergency.”
More generally, the surge of interest in UBI has flowed from a number of ideological tributaries with origins beyond the Bay Area. Some radicals have linked UBI to a less labor-focused vision of socialism; conservatives and libertarians have endorsed UBI as a more simple and transparent replacement for the welfare state, while progressives have proved sympathetic to it as an instrument of redistribution.
Philanthropy loves bipartisan solutions, but common ground may not exist.
The focus on Silicon Valley advocates has crowded out other ways of thinking about the politics of UBI. In the developing world, for instance, as Stanford anthropologist James Ferguson explains, one radical rationale for UBI is “rooted in a conviction that citizens (and particularly poor and black citizens) are the rightful owners of vast national wealth, of which they have been unjustly deprived through a historic process of racialized dispossession.”
That’s not a view you hear often in Menlo Park or in the arch take-downs of “tech bros” for their UBI advocacy. But it’s another powerful rationale for the policy, one of many that could attract an alternative corps of grant makers and supporters. Yet philanthropic backing for universal basic income, whether in Kenya, Helsinki, or Juneau, must contend with the fact that the policy is increasingly associated with the hubris and hegemony of Silicon Valley.
Yet if the dominance of one particular rationale for UBI poses a set of challenges to philanthropists, so does the full variety of those rationales. Ironically, the ability of universal basic income to attract advocates from across the political spectrum has long been considered one of its more enticing properties. But it could also be a liability.
During his Alaska remarks, Mr. Zuckerberg noted approvingly that the Permanent Fund “comes from conservative principles of smaller government rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net.”
It’s unclear whether this statement reflected Mr. Zuckerberg’s own personal politics or an effort to demonstrate that universal basic income, which some might peg as progressive, also has conservative, and thus broad national appeal. It is true that libertarians have endorsed the policy for reasons similar to those Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned, as a replacement for the social welfare state. They share some points of contact with left-wing supporters, who hope the policy can reduce state control over the unemployed. Yet unlike conservatives, progressives back UBI as a complement to existing welfare programs, and in some European nations, they remain the policy’s most fervent supporters.
Philanthropy is a sucker for bipartisan solutions, but it’s not clear where the common ground exists between approaches backed by the left and right.
Especially in the developed world, any one version of a universal basic income that satisfies a particular constituency is likely to disappoint a rival one. (See, for instance, Finland, where left-leaning factions have soured on the version the Centre Party has adopted, with the explicit aim of “promoting employment,” as opposed to freeing workers from the constraints of the labor market.)
Key decisions on how to fund the policy will produce winners and losers. In its role as a convener, philanthropy can try to find the implementation sweet spot that appeals to the widest range of ideological combatants, but the politics of UBI will be fraught and messy.
Of course, the messiness might very well be worth it in light of universal basic income’s transformative potential.
Yet a final challenge worth mentioning is that this potential could lead some philanthropists to regard UBI as a panacea — or a substitute for a well-funded public sector. Indeed, advocates should appreciate that UBI could distract from maintaining the current fraying safety net.
As political commentator Matthew Yglesias has recently warned in reference to Silicon Valley advocacy for UBI, “Focus on UBI as a potential fix for science-fiction labor-market scenarios serves to distract political attention from both actual political struggles over the labor market and actual political struggles over the social safety net.” Instead, he calls on tech leaders to “embrace regular boring politics.”
Should philanthropy leaders take this counsel to heart as well?The question requires philanthropy to grapple with the nature of its distinctive social contribution. On the one hand, due to its lack of accountability, one of philanthropy’s virtues is its freedom from “actual political struggles,” which allows it to experiment, to push views without majoritarian support, and focus on the long term. It can afford to take seriously policies that could be dismissed as “science fiction.” On the other, it can be risky to untether funding from the exigencies of contemporary politics, and philanthropists will have different thresholds of tolerance for the conjectural and experimental. The possibility of support for UBI will likely hinge on those considerations.
Or perhaps not.
For if universal basic income is ever established in countries or entire regions within the developed world, it will likely arrive incrementally, with partial, conditional variants emerging first — such as with a universal child allowance. Supporting research and advocacy related to these sorts of policies, along with continuing to back experiments in the developing world, points to one way for philanthropy to bridge the realm of “actual political struggles” and a future, perhaps far-off, in which a basic, sustaining income is guaranteed for all.
Benjamin Soskis is the co-editor of HistPhil and a research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Parts of this article were adapted from an earlier piece for Philanthropy Impact, “Philanthropy and Universal Basic Income.”
