Clinton Sodiya Free Money & Silicon Valley Next Big Idea Reading Questions You are to Read and annotate “The Case for Free Money.” and I think there’s more

Clinton Sodiya Free Money & Silicon Valley Next Big Idea Reading Questions You are to Read and annotate “The Case for Free Money.” and I think there’s more Article for this Essay please kindly work with me on this Essay 1
“The Case for Free Money”
The New Yorker
By James Surowiecki
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual
experiment: it started just handing out money to some of its citizens. The town of
Dauphin, for instance, sent checks to thousands of residents every month, in order to
guarantee that all of them received a basic income. The goal of the project, called
Mincome, was to see what happened. Did people stop working? Did poor people spend
foolishly and stay in poverty? But, after a Conservative government ended the project, in
1979, Mincome was buried. Decades later, Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University
of Manitoba, dug up the numbers. And what she found was that life in Dauphin
improved markedly. Hospitalization rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And
researchers who looked at Mincome’s impact on work rates discovered that they had
barely dropped at all. The program had worked about as well as anyone could have
hoped.
Mincome was a prototype of an idea that came to the fore in the sixties, and that is now
popular again among economists and policy folks: a basic income guarantee. There are
many versions of the idea, but the most interesting is what’s called a universal basic
income: every year, every citizen in the U.S. would receive a stipend—ten thousand
dollars is a number often mentioned.
One striking thing about guaranteeing a basic income is that it’s always had support
both on the left and on the right—albeit for different reasons. Martin Luther King
embraced the idea, but so did the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, while the
Nixon Administration even tried to get a basic-income guarantee through Congress.
These days, among younger thinkers on the left, U.B.I. is seen as a means to ending
poverty, combatting rising inequality, and liberating workers from the burden of crappy
jobs. For thinkers on the right, U.B.I. seems like a simpler, and more libertarian,
alternative to the thicket of anti-poverty and social-welfare programs.
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There are signs that U.B.I. may be an idea whose time has come. Switzerland held a
referendum on a basic income last week (though it lost badly); Finland is going to run a
U.B.I. experiment next year; and Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator firm, is
sponsoring a similar test in Oakland. Why now? In the U.S., the new interest in the
U.B.I. is driven in part by anxiety about how automation will affect workers. Bhaskar
Sunkara, the publisher of the socialist magazine Jacobin, told me, “People are fearful of
becoming redundant, and there’s this sense that the economy can’t be built to provide
jobs for everyone.” In the short run, concerns about robots taking all our jobs are
probably overstated. But the appeal of a basic income—a kind of Social Security for
everyone—is easy to understand. It’s easy to administer; it avoids the paternalism of
social-welfare programs that tell people what they can and cannot buy with the money
they’re given; and, if it’s truly universal, it could help destigmatize government
assistance. As Sunkara puts it, “Universal programs build social solidarity, and they
become politically easier to defend.”
U.B.I. is often framed as a tool for fighting poverty, but it would have other important
benefits. By providing an income cushion, it would increase workers’ bargaining power,
potentially driving up wages. It would make it easier for people to take risks with their
job choices, and to invest in education. In the U.S. in the seventies, there were smallscale experiments with basic-income guarantees, and they showed that young people
with a basic income were more likely to stay in school; in New Jersey, kids’ chances of
graduating from high school increased by twenty-five per cent.
Critics of U.B.I. argue that handing people cash, instead of targeted aid (like food
stamps), means that much of the money will be wasted, and that a basic income will take
away the incentive to work, lowering G.D.P. and giving us a nation of lazy, demoralized
people. But the example of the many direct-cash-grant programs in the developing
world suggests that, as the Columbia economist Chris Blattman puts it, “the poor do not
waste grants.” As for the work question, most of the basic-income experiments suggest
that the disincentive effect wouldn’t be large; in Manitoba, working hours for men
dropped by just one per cent. It’s certainly true that U.B.I. would make it easier for
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people to think twice about taking unrewarding jobs. But that’s a good consequence, not
a bad one.
A basic income would not be cheap—depending on how the program was structured, it
would likely cost at least twelve to thirteen per cent of G.D.P. And, given the state of
American politics, that renders the U.B.I. politically impossible for the time being. Yet
the most popular social-welfare programs in the U.S. all seemed utopian at first. Until
the nineteen-twenties, no state in the union offered any kind of old-age pension; by
1935, we had Social Security. Guaranteed health care for seniors was attacked as
unworkable and socialist; now Medicare is uncontroversial. If U.B.I. comes to be seen as
a kind of insurance against a radically changing job market, rather than simply as a
handout, the politics around it will change. When this happens, it’s easy to imagine a
basic income going overnight from completely improbable to totally necessary.

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