- The lead researcher for a major study on guaranteed basic income says the findings are “nuanced.”
- The study, backed by Sam Altman, awarded $1,000 a month to 1,000 low-income participants.
- Elizabeth Rhodes says that while the study showed benefits, it’s not a quick fix for economic uncertainty.
Lead researcher for Sam Altman’s Basic Income Study says guaranteed wireless payments aren’t a silver bullet for problems facing lower-income Americans.
Elizabeth Rhodes, research director for the Basic Income Project at Open Research, told Business Insider that while basic income payments are “beneficial in many ways,” the programs also have “clear limitations.”
Universal basic income, or UBI, usually refers to making recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of their wealth or employment status, and without restrictions on how they spend the money.
Rhodes led one of the largest studies in the space, which focused specifically on those with low incomes rather than making universal payments to adults across all economic demographics.
The three-year experiment, backed by OpenAI chief Altman, provided 1,000 low-income participants with $1,000 a month without any stipulations about how they could spend it. The study aimed to explore how unconditional cash payments affect different aspects of recipients’ lives.
Initial findings, released in July, found that recipients put most of their extra spending toward basic needs such as rent, transportation and food. They also worked less on average, but remained engaged in the workforce and were more intentional in their job search compared to a control group.
But Rhodes says the research reinforced how difficult it is to solve complex issues like poverty or economic insecurity, and that there is “a lot of work to do”.
The Altman-backed study is still reporting results. New findings published in December showed that recipients valued work more after receiving recurring monthly payments – a result that could challenge one of the main arguments against basic income payments. Participants also reported significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, although these effects faded by the second and third year of the program.
“Poverty and economic insecurity are incredibly difficult problems to solve,” Rhodes said. “The findings we’ve had so far are quite nuanced.”
She added: “There is no clear line in terms of, this helps everyone, or this does it. It reinforced for me the idea that these are really difficult problems that, perhaps, there is no single solution.”
UBI and Silicon Valley
Universal basic income has gained significant support within Silicon Valley.
The apps have long been a passion project for high-profile tech leaders, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerbergand Tesla boss Elon Musk. Some argue advances in AI, which could present a threat to the job security of some employees, have made the conversion more urgent.
Like many of his tech contemporaries, Altman has long supported UBI and even suggested an idea that involves sharing the computation of a future iteration of an OpenAI GPT model, something he called “universal core computing.”
Rhodes first applied for the principal researcher job in 2016 after seeing a blog post by Altman, then president of Y Combinator, in which he announced his plan to support a study of universal basic income. At the time, she was just completing her Ph.D. and had never heard of Altman or Y Combinator.
“I started working on this with Sam in 2016 and at the time, so I was finishing graduate school in social work and political science, and very much outside of the California Bay Area community,” she said. “There wasn’t much happening in this space, in the US. Basic income or cash transfers were still kind of a small idea.”
The global interest in the study’s results was somewhat surprising, Rhodes said, since the team never saw the experiment as a policy suggestion.
“It was never designed to be a policy referendum on UBI or any specific policy. It was an opportunity to really ask some kind of big, open-ended questions about, you know, what happens when you give people unconditional money for to better understand the life experiences of lower-income Americans and the challenges they were facing,” she said.