- The top researcher for a major study on guaranteed basic income says the findings are “nuanced.”
- The study, backed by Sam Altman, gave $1,000 a month to 1,000 low-income participants.
- Elizabeth Rhodes says while the study showed benefits, it’s not a quick fix for economic insecurity.
The lead researcher for Sam Altman’s basic-income study says guaranteed no-strings payments are not a silver bullet for issues facing lower-income Americans.
Elizabeth Rhodes, the 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, typically refers to making recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of their wealth or employment status, and with no restrictions on how they spend the money.
Rhodes headed up one of the largest studies in the space, which focused specifically on those on low incomes rather than making universal payments to adults across all economic demographics.
The three-year experiment, backed by OpenAI boss Altman, provided 1,000 low-income participants with $1,000 a month without any stipulations for how they could spend it. The study aimed to explore how unconditional cash payments influence various aspects of recipients’ lives.
The initial findings, released in July, found that recipients put the bulk 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 deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group.
But Rhodes says the research reinforced how difficult it is to solve complex issues such as poverty or economic insecurity, and that there is “a lot more work to do.”
The Altman-backed study is still reporting results. New findings released in December showed recipients valued work more after receiving the recurring monthly payments — a result that may 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, though those effects faded by the second and third years of the program.
“Poverty and economic insecurity are incredibly difficult problems to solve,” Rhodes said. “The findings that we’ve had thus far are quite nuanced.”
She added: “There’s not a clear through line in terms of, this helps everyone, or this does that. It reinforced to me the idea that these are really difficult problems that, maybe, there isn’t a singular solution.”
UBI and Silcion Valley
Universal basic income has garnered significant support within Silicon Valley.
The programs have long been a passion project for high-profile tech leaders, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla chief Elon Musk. Some argue advancements in AI, which could pose a threat to some worker’s job security, 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 compute of a future iteration of an OpenAI GPT model, something he referred to as “universal basic compute.”
Rhodes first applied for the lead researcher job in 2016 after seeing a blog post from Altman, then the president of Y Combinator, in which he announced his plan to support a study of universal basic income. At the time, she was just finishing up her Ph.D. and had never heard of Altman or Y Combinator.
“I started working on this with Sam in 2016 and at that time, so I was finishing up graduate school in social work and political science, and very outside the California Bay Area community,” she said. “There was not much going on in this space, in the US. Basic income or cash transfers were still somewhat of a fringe idea.”
The global interest in the study’s results was somewhat surprising, Rhodes said, as 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 the sort of big, open-ended questions, you know, what happens when you give people unconditional cash to better understand the lived experiences of lower-income Americans and the challenges they were facing,” she said.
