author of "Give People Money". I'm really excited to talk to Annie because

actually we have two degrees of separation. Annie wrote in The New York

Times several years ago about Enno Schmidt and his campaign in Switzerland

and you know Enno is friend of ours at UBI Taiwan where I work so I want to

welcome Annie to to the show today thanks so much for having me great so I

want to get right into it I'm curious first how did you first get

into UBI and why did it click for you yeah so I started writing about it when

I was I was a reporter at The New York Times and I was also writing for the New

York Times Magazine so I think I had heard of it before just like you know

what comes up occasionally in policy discussions but I first wrote about it

when the Swiss run referendum happened um and then I'd been writing a lot about

effective altruism effective philanthropy and just efficacy and

policy programs and so then you know had multiple occasions to kind of come back

to either writing about ubi specifically or just writing about you know more

Universal cash programs or cash transfers and what was it that compelled

you to write this book specifically you know I kind of see ubi as you know a key

that unlocks a lot of doors right so it's a really simple idea but it lets

you talk about universality it lets you talk about feminism it lets you talk

about the problems with GDP about how we measure welfare about government

paternalism and so I think it's kind of unusual and

that people and you know the future of work robots people get really excited to

talk about it and it kind of lets you look at all of these other really

pressing issues that you know are kind of hard to to knit together and that's

one of the fun things about it is you know it's kind of an optimistic sort of

futuristic saying to talk about like heavily intellectual but

let's you pretty quickly descend sort of into the policy and historical weeds of

why we have what we have so that's what I liked about it is it's kind of like a

complicated multifaceted idea and you know one thing that I don't think that's

made it into the book but I almost I thought it was like a jungle gym right

it lets you like do all sorts of sort of crazy interesting things and go crazy

interesting places one of the criticisms that I was reading was that like a lot

of books on UBI there's not a lot of specifics on financing so how do you

address the financing issue and what are some of the Europe lanes getting around

the feasibility question yeah so I've kind of two thoughts about that so one

is that it feels like a pretty high barrier to clear at least in US policy

to argue from the very outset how to pay for kind of a full-fat thousand

dollar-a-month everybody gets at ubi nobody's really talking about that and

almost all of our big social programs have started small and gotten bigger so

Social Security for instance it starts off in 1935 is a fairly limited program

and then proceeds to expand or Medicaid and Medicare right they start off small

and then they slowly get bigger and bigger Earned Income Tax Credit right so

it just feels like you know the question is what are you actually proposing and

what's the bar that you need to clear to get it I think it's much more likely

that the US would do something like expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or

create a negative income tax or have a universal child grant all of those

things are a lot easier to quote unquote pay for I also just think that there's

this way in which we ask for social programs to be paid for whereas you know

things like military spending and tax cuts you know you don't even have to you

don't have to pay for a dime of it and that feels pretty unfair and I think

that that really skews our sense of what's possible so when it comes to the

politics then you mentioned a lot of alternatives I'm wondering what is your

view of negative income tax and

universality of basic income in exchange for maybe more politically feasible

system like yeah absolutely um so I think that

universality is a beautiful and wonderful thing and there are really

compelling arguments for it but it seems to me that you don't want to let more

marginal and stop more marginal improvements from happening that are a

lot more politically feasible just because you believe it should be

universal right so like we have a really bad child poverty program like I think

almost that's like a problem excuse me that's almost like a like a thing that

we should be solving first and you can solve that without without necessarily

going to a ubi again I think that our history suggests

that if you want universality the way is to kind of start small and expand as

opposed to you know immediately radically implementing so take something

like Social Security again it starts small it gets bigger and bigger and

bigger and it's pretty you near Universal and I think that you could

nudge it to being actually universal because it's so close to it so that's

sort of how I think about it do you think that there's a risk that when you

have something like basic income it becomes you know we think that for

conservatives who might find random stories about somebody that's lazy or

something like that how do you avoid those types of scenarios or is it

inevitable yeah so you know we tend to get those kinds

of stories and arguments about social welfare programs but not social

insurance programs welfare programs that are identified heavily with poverty with

poor people programs that give cash or in-kind benefits as opposed to going

giving support through the tax code what that implies to me is that something

like a negative income tax or expanded EITC would come under a lot less

scrutiny than something like the cash welfare program and again if you make

something a middle-class entitlement then I think that people stop asking

those questions nobody really thinks about oh you know is that really a good

house to be buying with your you know home mortgage interest deduction money

so you know who's receiving and how the program is framed matters a lot for how

we judge the program participants and sort of decide whether it's it's our

right to say that the money is well-spent or poorly spent there's been

a lot of that seems lately about experiments for

basic income people from basic income supporters when I was at the BN

conference that was what a lot of people were saying was that experiments sort of

put the onus on for people to prove that they're responsible with money and so it

creates this strange expectation for policymakers that the poor have to prove

that they're intelligent enough to take care of their own of their own finances

so I'm wondering what is your view of experiments do you think that they're

helpful for the movement do they delay things what is the direction that we

should be taking with basic income experiments I think they're really

important I mean we do have a lot of experimental evidence and suggestive

evidence from other programs like the Syme time studies um but I think that

there's a really important demonstration effect I really do think it matters when

you can point and say you know here's this family and here's what they did

with their money and you know I think that that is helpful in useful I also

think that you could get a kind of laboratory of democracy type effect so

if the government sponsored a state to use its TANF money for a cash program

the next time that there's a recession that could be pretty powerful in

generating evidence to say hey like here's the reason that this might be a

better way for everybody to do it so I think it's really I think it's

actually pretty important and I understand the argument that you're kind

of putting the onus on the poor and you might be inviting more judgment but

ultimately I think that the benefits might outweigh the negatives there do

you think that what do you think is the most compelling evidence that you've

seen for basic income specifically because there's a lot of experiments as

criticisms it's not exactly yeah so what do you see that's the most compelling

for you yeah I mean I think a lot of the anti-poverty evidence is just

unbelievably straightforward right even more so than the kind of like work

support type evidence we know that giving people cash is an unusually good

way to get them out of poverty we know that it doesn't stop them from working

we know that they don't waste the money we know that they don't increase their

consumption of vice goods this is really settled it's settled and poor income

low-income countries with a lot of poor folks it's settled in high-income

countries so I really look at the multiplicity of studies that we have on

that and you know it's just I think it's it's almost so obvious that we forget

that like you can just get people out of poverty by giving them money and you

have all of those kind of down the road effects of getting people out of poverty

right like they're healthier they're happier their kids are healthier their

kids work more and so it's an investment I want to ask you about the job

guarantee there's been a lot of discussion even from presidential

candidates potential presidential candidates like Cory Booker and others

about the job guarantee and I see it as sort of a reaction TVI that's my

assumption is it's kind of ubi light and in a way they think it's solving for

some of the same problems that maybe they're seeing with automation so why is

job guaranteed picking up so much steam and what how do you view it in relation

to basic income um you know I think that there is an argument that in some ways

it's more politically palatable because you have all of these conservatives who

argue that you know low-income people should be pulling themselves up by their

bootstraps that they need to be working that a job is the true way out of

poverty which in some sense is true and you know that makes having the

government be an employer of last resort a reasonable and almost conservative

pro-family policy even if it is kind of costly and so and there is really good

evidence on some job subsidy programs and direct employment programs excuse me

whether from the 1930s or more recently with like you know um

formerly incarcerated folks type thing I think the problem is that it's gonna be

very expensive and difficult to run anything that there's been a lot of hand

waving from advocates about how you would do it that's not an impossible

policy barrier to overcome but you know you'd spend a lot of money and resources

where is the beauty of cashes you just give it out right like we have a tax

system we know how to do it and so I do worry that job guarantee folks are sort

of over-promising and you know because to

really guarantee everybody wins and provide them with subsidized work what

we really do know how to do that whereas you know providing jobs in every ZIP

code in every part of the country is is tough again perhaps worthwhile perhaps

not impossible but but probably a good thing to do and you know I do think that

it's jobs guarantee does fit in with as opposed to supplanting other really

important policy goals such as increasing the minimum wage bolstering

the strength of the EITC and making sure that it goes to more people and

providing an income floor regardless of whether you can work or not because some

folks just can't work and that's okay too

right they have disabilities you know they might need to or choose to stay

home with their kids all of the reasons that an individual might not be right

for the workforce so my last question is about politics I'm curious what do you

think about basic income as a factor in 2020 you have Andrew Young who has

declared and he's pretty much running just only to be I do you think that it's

gonna be a factor and who do you see as they be coming around on basic income

yeah absolutely I think that you have seen Democrats who've gotten

significantly pulled to the left by the experience of the recovery from the

financial crisis and the recession by Bernie Sanders is success and by feeling

that this is a party that needs to be more responsive to the liberal and

progressive desires of its base which is younger than the Republican base more

diverse and more financially fragile despite all of the rhetoric about Trump

voters being economically motivated um you know it's it's it's just not true

right like they're motivated by other things and they're actually more

financially secure and so um I think that you know ubi is certainly

an idea that's gonna come up a lot and I would certainly hope that the end of

poverty and child poverty and much stronger supports for working families

including the working poor are going to be part of the conversation even if UPI

isn't the policy that they ultimately alight on I think it's clear that this

first thing they're gonna be pushing for is Medicare for all or universal health

insurance guarantee which is also another really important policy priority

okay well I'm gonna wrap it up here Thank You Annie Valerie I hope that all

people come through this book we just got it in Chinese here in Taiwan so I'm

really glad as it's picking up steam we're getting more more books even even

in Asia now so I hope that you can join again awesome thank you so much for

having me