Give People Money

Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and former writer for The New York Times, builds a wide-ranging case for universal basic income (UBI): a regular, unconditional government cash payment to every resident of a country, sufficient to cover basic needs. The book examines UBI through three lenses: its relationship to work, its potential as an antipoverty tool, and its implications for social inclusion and justice.

Lowrey opens at the demilitarized zone between South Korea and North Korea, using the stark contrast between the two countries to argue that economic outcomes are products of policy choices, not inevitabilities. This framing sets up her central thesis: A UBI embodies principles of universality, unconditionality, and inclusion that could reshape economies and end deprivation.

The book's first section examines UBI in relation to work. Lowrey visits the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, where automakers showcase driverless vehicles that analysts predict could eliminate 2.2 to 3.1 million jobs. She traces how Detroit lost more than half its population as auto employment in Michigan fell from over 400,000 in the 1950s to about 160,000. She describes Facebook's AI Research team, whose negotiation chatbots taught themselves to bluff, passed a Turing test (a benchmark for whether AI can convincingly imitate human responses), and developed their own shorthand language, suggesting that artificial intelligence represents a qualitatively different threat to employment than past technological revolutions. Yet Lowrey complicates this narrative by noting that total factor productivity growth, a measure of how efficiently the economy uses its inputs, has slowed since the mid-2000s, suggesting the economy may be getting less innovative rather than more.

Whether or not robots take all the jobs, Lowrey argues that UBI addresses urgent present-day problems. She profiles the Ortiz family of Houston, where every working-age member holds fast-food or restaurant jobs at wages too low to sustain the family. She documents trends driving wage stagnation: the "China Shock," in which import competition from China devastated Rust Belt communities; the decline of private-sector unionization from one in three workers in the 1950s to one in twenty; the erosion of the minimum wage's real value; and growing corporate consolidation. She interviews Uber drivers in Pittsburgh who describe earning as little as $3 an hour after expenses despite lacking employee status or benefits. A UBI, she argues, would give workers the power to refuse terrible conditions and force employers to compete for labor.

Lowrey then takes up the objection that UBI would discourage work. She traces American work culture from the Protestant ethic of the Puritans through Benjamin Franklin's self-made-man mythology and profiles Jenner Barrington-Ward, a Boston-area woman she interviewed whose five years of joblessness felt like "a journey through hell" (57), illustrating how deeply Americans derive identity from employment. Yet the evidence proves reassuring. In Iran, a 2010 program that replaced subsidies with cash transfers equivalent to 29 percent of median income reduced poverty without encouraging mass labor-force exit. Studies of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a Native American tribe that distributes casino revenue to its members, and of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays an annual oil-revenue dividend to every state resident, show similarly muted effects on employment. A 1970s Canadian experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, provided a guaranteed income to all residents, eradicated poverty, and reduced hospitalizations and mental health diagnoses, with only modest reductions in work.

The book's second section turns to poverty. Lowrey travels to a remote village near Lake Victoria in western Kenya, where most residents subsist on less than $2 a day. There, the nonprofit GiveDirectly, founded by graduate students at MIT and Harvard, has launched what Lowrey calls the world's first true test of a UBI: unconditional monthly cash payments of about $22 to every adult for twelve years. GiveDirectly's earlier lump-sum payments produced striking results in a randomized control trial: household assets increased by 58 percent, business and agriculture income rose by 38 percent, and children were 42 percent less likely to go a whole day without eating. Lowrey argues that cash is more effective than in-kind aid, noting that an estimated 94 percent of humanitarian aid is still not provided in cash despite strong evidence favoring direct transfers.

In India, Lowrey finds a different set of lessons. She visits rural Jharkhand, one of India's poorest states, where the Mahato family receives only two of its six entitled food rations due to bureaucratic failures. India's chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, tells her a UBI of roughly $100 per year could reduce the country's poverty rate from 22 percent to less than 1 percent. The government has enrolled over 99 percent of adults in Aadhaar, a biometric identification system, and has begun linking antipoverty programs to it. But fieldwork reveals serious complications: fingerprint scanners fail for laborers with damaged hands, the system ties people to a single ration shop despite seasonal migration, and families lose subsidies during the transition. The economist Jean Drèze describes this imposition as "pain without gain" (111). Lowrey concludes that while the principles of universality and simplicity are powerful, expanding existing high-quality programs may be more effective than a wholesale shift to UBI.

Returning to the United States, Lowrey investigates the deliberate holes in the American safety net. She profiles Sandy J. Bishop, a Maine woman she met while reporting, who spent 247 days in a Portland, Maine, homeless shelter after a cascade of setbacks, and traces the welfare system's roots to Elizabethan England's Poor Laws, which distinguished between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. She evaluates libertarian Charles Murray's proposal to replace the entire welfare state with an $833-per-month credit, finding that the math does not work: Eliminating all means-tested programs, which provide benefits only to people below certain income thresholds, would yield only about $1,582 per person per year, insufficient to lift anyone out of poverty.

The book's third section addresses social inclusion. Lowrey argues that racism is inseparable from any discussion of American welfare, citing research concluding that race is "the single most important predictor of support for welfare" (136) in the United States. She traces how the Social Security Act of 1935 excluded farm and domestic workers, exempting two-thirds of Black workers in the South, and how the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. The result is a racial wealth gap in which the median net worth of white families is twelve times that of Black families. Lowrey argues that universal, unconditional programs could advance racial justice, though she acknowledges that racial diversity poses a barrier, citing evidence that demographic shifts make white Americans more conservative and anti-redistribution.

Lowrey also argues that UBI would compensate unrecognized care work, the vast majority of which is performed by women. She profiles Roxana Giron, a Las Vegas home health aide earning about $10 an hour while caring for two daughters with severe developmental disabilities and three elderly clients. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that compensating women's unpaid care work at minimum wage would add $12 trillion to global output. The United States is one of only two countries out of 185 that provides no form of paid aid to new parents, and rising child care costs caused a 5 percent drop in employment among all American women between 1990 and 2010.

In her final chapters, Lowrey addresses design and financing. A $1,000-per-month UBI for every American would cost roughly $3.9 trillion a year, but she argues this is "more a matter of will than of mathematics" (187). She outlines potential revenue sources including a financial transactions tax, a value-added tax, a carbon tax, and new top tax brackets. She suggests that a negative income tax, which ensures every household reaches a minimum income with the poorest receiving the largest benefits, could cost as little as $200 billion a year. She proposes incremental steps: converting food stamps and housing vouchers to unconditional cash, creating a universal child benefit, allowing everyone to buy into Medicare or Medicaid, and eliminating asset testing and work requirements. She also surveys complementary proposals, including economist Darrick Hamilton's baby bonds, which would provide $50,000 to children born to the lowest-wealth families, and a federal jobs guarantee.

Lowrey reports on the growing global UBI movement: Finland's national trial, Ontario's pilot, a UBI experiment run by Y Combinator (a Silicon Valley startup incubator) offering Oakland residents $1,000 per month, Stockton's planned program, and Hawaii's study of the policy. She closes with a conversation with Philippe Van Parijs, the Belgian philosopher often called the godfather of the modern basic-income movement. In a postscript, Lowrey reflects on the long-term implications of AI through science fiction, contrasting the comfortable world of The Jetsons, the post-scarcity utopia of Star Trek, and the dystopian inequality of The Hunger Games. She concludes that if mass technological unemployment arrives, a UBI alone will not suffice; a broader transformation in how society understands worth, work, and compensation will also be necessary.