 Let me introduce Chris Hughes. Chris has spent his career working at the intersection of politics and technology. He was a co-founder of Facebook, a digital architect for President Obama's campaign, and a publisher of Digital and Print Magazine, The New Republic. In 2016, he co-founded the Economic Security Project, a project to explore how to provide financial security to all Americans through cash transfers. He also has worked on a range of progressive causes from his home in New York City. He's an investor and a board member in several New York and California-based startups. And a graduate from what we like to refer here is the Michigan of the East. Harvard, now, you know, when I spend time, when I, you know, often when you're around Ann Arbor, like at lunch or something, you hear people sort of, you know, conversations at the next table comparing Michigan to Harvard. And I must say I did spend a semester at Harvard, and I never once heard anyone at lunch comparing Harvard to Michigan. So I don't know what that says about this particular comparison. But Chris's book, Fair Shot, I think, does an incredible job of laying a lot of the issues that we're gonna be talking about down in a very, I think, compelling argument. And also, one of the things I really like about it is sort of juxtaposing that to his own biography and thinking about sort of the own trajectory of his life and how it's a microcosm of some of the issues that we've seen on the broader scale. So without further ado, Chris Hughes. Thank you. Thank you, Luke, for that introduction for all of you from being here today. I mean, truly this event would not be happening without your leadership, Luke, and the leadership of the entire poverty solutions organization. There's our construction. It's gonna keep us awake. Good. You guys, though in the past few years I've created an epicenter, not just for conversations like this one around basic income, but for conversations in general around economic security. And in a moment when there's many reasons to be pessimistic about where our country is, it's inspiring to me and I know a lot of other people in this room that you guys are opening such an important front in the conversation. So thank you for having us here today and for doing the work that you're doing. So today I'm gonna open up the conversation with and the set of conversations that'll happen over the weekend with a talk about power. We don't talk very much about power in the United States today. Who has it? Who doesn't have it? Where it comes from? How to get more of it? It's like one of those topics which feels often just a little too dangerous. It's a little too touchy to bring up in polite conversation. If it comes up at a dinner party, you know people are gonna have opinions and probably strongly held ones. And I think that's a sign that it matters. And when I talk about power for the sake of the conversation today, what I mean is really the ability to self actualize. The ability to arrange the world of people, places and things in a way that suits your will. The most powerful are those who have the fewest constraints, those who can do what they want, when and how they want it. And in my view, the reality today is that poor and middle class people in the United States of America are losing power and are losing it at a faster rate than we've seen in a very, very long time. The American dream, which I would argue has for a very long time been more of a myth than a reality, is the power to decide for yourself who you wanna be. And even though the stock market is at record highs, and unemployment is at record lows, and all the economists wanna tell you that the economy is doing just great, the reality is that if you work hard, play by the rules, the idea that your kids will do a little bit better than you, that grand old American idea, that's on life support. That's very close to no longer being true. I think every American wants their kids to have choices that they've had, choice to where to live, who to marry, what to do with your career. And my parents certainly wanted that for me. I grew up in a little town called Hickory, North Carolina. It was at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. The town was called Hickory, and it had been a hub for furniture manufacturing and later for telecommunications until those industries for the most part moved overseas. My dad was the son of a country club groundskeeper and mill worker, and he became a traveling paper salesman, the middle man between the big industrial paper producers and small town printers. My mom's parents were both mill workers, and then she became a public school teacher and taught algebra, geometry, occasionally some precalculus at the local public schools. They both did significantly better than their parents had done economically. And that economic security that they enjoyed gave them the freedom to choose who they wanted to be, to be the first in their families to go to school and then choose careers that lined up with their own passions. And they hoped that that march of progress would continue for me, their son. And if you zoom out and you just listen to the very kind introduction or you look at the top line of my own biography, it can look like an extension of the American dream. I got financial aid to leave Hickory and go to a fancy boarding school called Phillips Academy up in Massachusetts. Then I got another scholarship and got to go to Harvard on a mix of grants and student loans. And there, yeah, I did room with Mark Zuckerberg. And we started Facebook our sophomore year, and as I like to say, the rocket ship took off and it exploded and everybody knows many of the details of the story, particularly if you've seen the movie, which is getting a little dated, but it exposed a lot of people to the early years, let's say. But I did three years worth of work at Facebook on the communications, marketing and product teams. And for that, I earned nearly half a billion dollars before the time I was 30 years old. Suffice it to say in my view, that's not how the American dream is supposed to work. That's not up by your bootstraps work. There is nothing that you can call my experience except what it is, a lucky break. But luck isn't exactly the right word for it because it doesn't acknowledge very purposeful decisions that people in power have made to structure our economy this way. And while my story may be extreme, I don't unfortunately think it's that uncommon. A small group of people in our country are getting fantastically wealthy so that our largest corporations are larger than they've ever been. And in this same period, working people are struggling to make ends meet. And what's happening is that stories like mine are making up a collection of stories that create this illusion of economic opportunity. This narrative that if you just work a little bit harder, you too, or your son or your daughter can be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And that just simply is not reflected in reality. What's really happening is poor and middle-class families are losing power year after year while a select few are getting very lucky. Now, in this room in particular, I don't have to go into all the top-line stats, I imagine, that show, that document this idea. But it's just a couple that I think are important. The median household income of Americans has barely budged in the past 40 years while the cost of living has risen by nearly 30%, particularly driven by rises in childcare costs, housing costs, and healthcare costs. Small business starts, a metric that suggests the overall level of entrepreneurship hasn't been this low since it hasn't been this low in decades. Americans are moving far less often than they ever have before. And the cost of housing in our cities is skyrocketing, as is the cost of higher education and childcare. And it's important to say that some groups are much more disempowered than others. In 2016, the average net worth of white families was around $170,000, compared with $18,000 for African-American families and 21,000 for Hispanic ones. On average, a woman still earns 81 cents for every dollar a man earns, and women's median annual earnings are over $10,000 less than men's. But at the same time that people are losing economic power, they're also losing many other kinds of power. For instance, power in our politics. The flood of money into special interests means that elected officials spend as much time dialing for dollars, quite frankly calling people like me to hear my opinion on things, rather than talking to the constituents and reflecting the will of the people they represent. The modern party and primary system makes it easier for fringe candidates to emerge and win. And we end up with people like Donald Trump in the White House, even though only one in four Americans voted for him in the last election. At the same time, corporate monopolies and oligopolies are restricting consumer choice, while giving the illusion of abundance. Walmart and Target seem to offer super-sized options, rows and rows of beautifully colored products. But behind the scenes, companies have actually consolidated in almost every sector a narrowed consumer choice and narrowed consumer power. A single company, Lexotica, owns more or less the entirety of the eyeglass market. Not only the stores themselves, stores like Linscrafters and Pearl Vision, the eyeglass section of Target, but also the manufacturers from the cheapest ones to Gucci and Ralph Lauren, all made by the same company. Consumers have no idea. Two beer makers produce 96% of the beer sold in America. Two pharmacy chains own roughly 90% of the pharmacies in our country. And Facebook, because it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, by some accounts, controls as much as 80% of the traffic that moves through the social web. Not only are these monopolies concentrating power in the hands of a few corporate leaders, they're also keeping wages low. And this connects to the larger topic that I think we're all here to discuss this weekend. When the only employer in town is Walmart, there's no real competitive market for labor. And by some accounts, without the monopsony power of large employers, wages in this country would be as much as 10 to 20% higher than they are today. Now, in case I'm painting too bleak of a picture, it is true that there are bright shoots. We do have iPhones and Netflix. There are more farmers markets than there were a decade ago. But the underlying problem is clear. When you have restricted choice, stagnant wages, and little political power, you have frustration and you have anger. And the rising tide of nationalism and populism in our country is much bigger than economics alone. It's a cultural sense that everyday people are losing their voice, losing their ability to know that their family will be happy and healthy for the long term. And I think it's up to us to turn that tide. A few suggestions on how I think we should do it. First off, I think we need to think comprehensively and aggressively about what should be done. I have had enough with the incremental solutions that nibble around the edges and don't change the fundamental dynamics of how our economy works and who it works for. The economy that we live with today has been nearly 50 years in the making and it needs fundamental restructuring. We owe it to ourselves to think big, to think boldly and to be proud of that. Second, we need a broad and diverse set of practitioners who come from every walk of life to roll up their sleeves and apply their talents where they can. This is where you guys come in. Students and researchers, activists, organizers, political and business leaders, rich and poor, black and white, old and young, we need a mobilization that has not been seen in generations in our countries. Thirdly, let's agree to have a heterodox approach to restoring power to working people. Let's agree upfront that there are no magic bullets, that no single idea, whether it's a universal basic income, a job guarantee or a better competition of policy alone is gonna change all of our problems. We need campaign finance reform, universal childcare, single payer healthcare for every American, streamline licensing requirements, smarter city planning, better housing policy, we need all of these interventions. Let's put at the center of this conversation, though, the simplest and most effective way to give people power, cash. By definition, money is the most liquid, fungible source of power. It enables an individual to decide what she wants, where she wants to go, what she wants to do with her time. Now, I wanna be clear, money is not power per se, you need to have a good option set to choose from, you need to have skills to think through what you want and what you need. But in a world like the one we live in today, cash is the most powerful lever we can pull to empower the Americans who need it most. Now, there are many ways to get cash in the hands of working people who need more of it. You could lower taxes, you could reduce the costs of fundamentally important services like transportation and childcare, you could restructure markets to lower prices of goods, you could raise wages, all of these things would increase the cash in people's pockets and I would argue we should do all of these things. But for the sake of the conversation today, I wanna focus on another route that's been talked a lot about historically. And fortunately today is enjoying a resurgence of attention, specifically how we can create a guaranteed income for Americans. As most of you know, this idea goes back centuries to Thomas Paine, Juliette Reese-Williams, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, all of them supported some kind of guaranteed income. And today, of course, the universal basic income or UBI is getting a ton of attention. A lot of it because people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and others from the technology sector are concerned about the rise of the robots and a potential permanent impact on the nature of employment. There is a lot of fear that jobs are going away. That may be true, it might not be true. Hopefully that's one of the things that we debate over the next few days. But what I would say is that we don't need robots to take all the jobs to know that Americans are already struggling and they need more power and that cash is the most effective way to provide it. So to be very specific, what's the problem that a guaranteed income is trying to solve? I think there are two. One is income inequality, and two, the second is income instability. We have many tools to restructure our economy in the short term, but a guaranteed income specifically if we pay for it through progressive taxation is uniquely able to arrest the upward distribution of capital that we currently have structured in our tax code and bend the curve to make it more fair. Secondly, a guaranteed income that arrives in a bank account every single month, like clockwork, would be a heartbeat of stability, something that you can rely on no matter what. Something that is particularly needed at a time when nearly half of our workforce is part-time, contract, seasonal, or in temporary jobs. The unemployment rate shows none of this underlying instability that we know is only getting worse. Now, I am not, maybe a bit of a surprise, but I am not part of the school who believes that we can create a UBI in the United States today. And this might be an area of disagreement with some in the room. A thousand dollars a month to every American, I think would be too expensive in 2018 dollars. And in my view, not focused on the people who need the most help. But I don't think of UBI as a particular policy or a plan. I think of it as a set of values that inspire a wide variety of policies. So every time that somebody asks me, Chris, what's your plan? I immediately shift the conversation to talk about the values. Specifically, the idea that every single person deserves the freedom and dignity to create their own future, and that cash is uniquely able to guarantee those. If we can agree on that common value set, then I think we owe it to ourselves to think creatively about how to achieve these ends. One might be through a modernization of our tax code that creates a kind of negative income tax, a government cash transfer of $500 a month, every single month, to every adult making less than $50,000. This is specifically the proposal that I talk about in my recent book, Fair Shot. Another different approach might be to create a social dividend. You could fund it through a tax on carbon or a tax on data. And that would provide payments to every single American, probably at a more modest level to begin, but then over time that might grow. Still another approach might be to begin funding a sovereign wealth fund today and create some kind of trigger to enable social security, to pay out those funds once the savings account has gotten large enough. Then we enter an era in American history where there is social security for all. These are just a few of the examples of ideas that are out there, and I know many of you have others. But wherever we are on what particular iteration of this feels most exciting to each of us, I think the end result should be clear. A recurring, regular stipend in the pockets of the Americans who need it most. If we can agree on this as a goal, then we must ask every single person in this room, what can you bring to this fight? What kind of leader do you want to be? Over the past few years, I've grappled with this question for myself and with a large and growing community of people. And I'm encouraged, because not just a few, many dozens approaching hundreds have decided to dedicate themselves in their lives to this problem. And I want to introduce in a video here, you to one woman in the Economic Security Projects Network, Aisha Nyandoro, who I gain inspiration from every week, if not every day. Now Aisha recently had a baby of her own, so she can't be with us here today. But I want to introduce you to her via video because she's an organizer who's decided to launch a guaranteed income pilot for single black mothers in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. This poor estate in our nation. I think we realize that our future is really determined by what we're exposed to and what we're allowed to bring to the outside. That's what I want to do. I am growing up exactly what I wanted to do when I became an adult. I knew I wanted to run a nonprofit. I knew I wanted to work in a community. That's because my grandmother wasn't active. It's because my mother and all of my aunties are social workers. So that was my level of exposure. Living in poverty, if you do not have people being into what your future could be, then that's how we have these generations of poverty that exist. I don't know what Aisha's following to eating off food that I've took to the nation's needs, but I'm so tired of it. We're making it to the class today. We want you to get a certificate of completion. Don't make me have to come to a 16D. Ma'am. We talk about there being a lack of leadership in these communities, and I don't think it's a lack of leadership. I think people are exhausted and I think they're banned with this text. But if I have my bandwidth freed up and I actually have the ability to think and breathe and dream, I think some of the leadership that is this naturally in these communities will begin to manifest again. Proud to my job, I really didn't think that far ahead. I'm just worried about what was right now. I'm going to school for social work. I know that's what my calling is now. That's because of my job. I want to be able to do it on my own. My reality is I can't. I'm not ashamed to say that I need help. I am here to help other people, but I always do. I'm still in need here. So if we just look at the number of folks who live in poverty in this country, the majority of them are women and their kids. And so having that ability to lift women out of poverty would be great. I think basic income could help in so many instances. Giving someone monthly cash would instill a sense of breathing room. I think it should be unconditional. I think we should trust people to know what it is that they need. I think having basic income could really have transformed communities across this country because local leadership would begin to show back up and flourish. If I can get one person to be an answer here, I feel like I did something for that day. If I can get two, I'm overwhelmed. I'm kicking my heels up. Folks with limited income are just like you and I. They have the same dreams that we have. They want their kids to go to college. They want their kids to have bright futures. They want grand babies. They want the white picket fence. They want the opportunity to take vacations. They want the same thing that we want. We're not different. And that's the piece that I really think we have all got to get to. Their dreams that I have with my son are exactly the same dreams that they have with their families. I got a chance to go down to Jackson in February and spend a couple of days with Aisha and several of these moms. And I have to tell you, sitting around a table in the middle of the public housing complex hearing how difficult we have made the lives of these poor, resilient women was shameful. Shameful to me as an American that we have created a system that is premised on a deep lack of trust. Not only do we not provide these women with the springboard to chase their dreams, we've created a whole constellation of social programs which forced them to decide exactly, which forced them to take decisions that they would not otherwise make. Women who don't have their significant others move in with them because if they do, they'll get kicked out of public housing. That's against the rules. Women who don't dare get over a couple thousand dollars in a savings account because if they do, they will suddenly not be able to get access to the benefits that they have now. Women who spend hours a day navigating the complex and woefully insufficient transportation network around Jackson, Mississippi, just to get a minimum wage job. Just so that the government can say, oh well, because you're at Burger King, you're working. When in reality, many of them are working very hard at home to do the childcare that they've dedicated themselves to. Many Americans, including a lot of the people that I grew up with and members of my own extended family, are convinced that other people are standing by, ready to take their hard-earned money, and those people are just hanging out, living on the dole, quote unquote. I think these narratives are driven by a thinly-coded racism that is grounded in a fundamental distrust between Americans, and that cynicism and isolation, I believe, is our greatest enemy in this fight. Over the coming years, we're gonna need a lot of things on this journey, but three in particular stand out, data, stories, and organization. Many of the people in this room have read all the reports and studies documenting the empirical evidence for cash. It's a much larger body of evidence than most people believe, but we need more of it. We know that study after study, that's already been done here in the United States, shows that providing people with cash improves their quality of life across the board. Kids, they stay in school longer, they do better on tests. When you provide families with cash, hospitalization rates go down. Rates of alcoholism and mental health issues decrease. Prime age adults continue to work just as much as they did before, if not more. And perhaps most importantly, people are able to step one step back from the brink. But the more data that we have about the effects of cash, the stronger our arguments will be. So let's do more research. Second, I think we need more stories. We need more faces, like people like Ayesha and others. And we need more voices from the communities that a guaranteed income would most powerfully implement. Let's have Ayesha on the cover of Time Magazine talking about a basic income, not Elon Musk. The mayor of Stockton, California, Michael Tubbs, is running a demonstration of the idea of a guaranteed income to specifically amplify the stories of the beneficiaries and to put a human face on who stands to benefit the most. And perhaps ironically, he as an individual has garnered an immense amount of attention, much more attention than he or many of us ever expected. His own story growing up in poverty in a single parent household, having a father who had been incarcerated, seeing his mom struggle with these bills and talking to her about what difference $500 every month could make in her life is what inspired him to lead. And it's what's inspiring other people in Stockton to stand up and demand the right to economic security. These stories have to be told and told more often and told louder in documentaries, on the nightly news, in Facebook feeds and person to person. We have to have stories to change the narrative. And thirdly, we need organization. We need more people focused on how to achieve near-term ends through nonprofits, through city, state governments, and at the federal level. In order to rebalance power, we gotta build some power in our own movement first. The group that I co-run the Economic Security Project is playing I think a central role as an organizing hub in this fight, but ultimately it's not gonna be one group or one nonprofit. To build a movement behind this idea, we need every single person in rooms like this one to take a moment to step back and to evaluate what can I do? Not just in my spare time, but how can I change my life to dedicate it towards providing economic security to all Americans? I believe that the time has come to adopt a sharper, clearer tone about what's happening to our country. The neoliberal rules that our leaders have used over the past 50 years to build our economic system and create this massive imbalance of power, undermine the America that we live in and I think the country that we want it to be. We all have a responsibility to change that direction and I believe that there's no better way to level the playing field and respect the fundamental freedom and dignity of each individual than through cash. Let's use every tool we have to get more of it in the hands of the people who need it most. Thank you. All right, so we're gonna take some time for some questions and conversation with Chris. So Kate and Julia will have microphones going around, so I'm gonna start us off just with a quick softball question. So Chris, you talked a little bit about the evidence base on cash as preferable to in kind, but another piece of the case you're making is monthly cash, regular cash and we have this earned income tax credit, which is cash and some of the evidence you were citing was from the EITC, lumped up in tax returns that people get once a year. So what's the reason for something that comes on a monthly basis more regularly? Well, a lot of the, I think the need for monthly is about the problem of income instability. So income inequality as we know gets a lot of attention but income instability I think is very problematic as well. So according to some economists out of Princeton, in the past decade or in the decade after the Great Recession, 94% of the jobs that we've created in the United States have been part-time contractor temporary. So if we expand, if we think of the gig economy not just as TaskRabbit, Lyft and Uber, but also someone who works at Starbucks and who one week gets 20 hours, maybe the next week she gets 35, maybe the next week she gets 10 and what we can see is that what's happening in economy for a whole host of reasons, not just automation and globalization but the loss of worker power, the loss of power in unions means that a lot of the jobs that we're creating are fundamentally unstable. So the power of a guaranteed income is the cash, the amount itself but also knowing every single month that you're going to have some stability, something to fall back on, something that can help you make rent, pay groceries and supplement the rest of your income. There was a study that many of you have probably seen, there are two that actually I wanna mention. One is that 52% of Americans can't find $400 in case of an emergency, which is a reminder that this is not just, the income instability problem is not just a problem of poverty. That also by definition means that half of the middle class can't find $400 in case of an emergency. So the instability of the cycle is something that is permeating a greater and greater portion of our economy and I think a monthly kind of stipend uniquely solves. The other set of research on this point that I think is really important to mention is the work that Elder Sphere and Sindel Muenthain have done around scarcity. If you haven't seen the book appropriately named Scarcity, you should check it out because what it shows is that when you live on the financial brink, when you don't know where your next meal is gonna come from or if you're gonna be able to pay rent, it has a very real cognitive tax. Aisha uses the language of a bandwidth tax that makes it harder for people to do everything else. So it's a collection of dozens of studies that document this specifically. One of my favorite is they go to a mall in suburban New Jersey and they ask random people that they select, what would you do if your car broke down and it cost you $500 to fix it? And people think about it, they respond and then they take a pretty simple IQ test. And people who are poor or lower middle class generally on that question score about the same as people who are well off. If you do that again though and add a zero to it, so what would you do if your car broke down and it cost $5,000 to fix? Ask the exact same question. Run the same IQ test. What you see is that the people who have less money, their IQ points drop by 14, which is about the equivalent of what happens when people pull all-nighters. And as Schwerer and Luhlen think right in the book, the analysis is these people clearly have not gotten dumber in the course of the 10 minutes to run the study. It's that thinking about what would you do? How are you gonna be able to find the money to be able to make those ends meet? Fundamentally pulls people in a direction where they are immediately distracted thinking about a lot of things and taxes their overall cognitive functioning. So the scarcity is not just a matter of amount, it's also about predictability and being able to have a floor that you can rely on I think is uniquely powerful to providing a little bit more security to the people who need it most. Hi Chris, thanks for the great talk. Some people would say inequality is in power and acted not just with income inequality but wealth inequality. And it's not clear how basic income can deal with disparities in wealth. And the second thing I wonder about is when you think about some of the cynicism that you rightly point to for resisting basic income solutions to poverty, one of the things that we have to battle against is that the poor are undeserving. And I wonder if you would find it useful to talk about corporate tax breaks, corporate subsidies, as also a form of basic income. So it's not just the poor people that are getting the lambs on the street but big corporations are getting it too and you can document ways in which they get that to help kind of push back against the suggestion that the poor are undeserving because they're getting a guaranteed income. Well, so much there. So on the first, I think a lot of, I totally agree that it's not just income inequality and income disparity, it's wealth inequality and wealth disparity, that is a huge problem. And that's why I think that some of the conversations that happen around things like baby bonds should be part of the general basic income frame. If you take the values of cash as a unique way to provide freedom and dignity to people, that's a kind of version that is more focused on wealth building. For those who don't know what baby bonds are, the idea is that you capitalize a savings account for every child born. And that when they turn 18 or some level, they receive a kind of nest egg, maybe $20,000, could be $100,000, could be smaller, could be, I suppose, bigger, gets more expensive. But, and that's one sort of flavor of a basic income that I think is paying more attention to wealth disparities. I also think that a lot matters in the financing. If you can finance a basic income, I mean, through any of the tools that we have to raise revenue that are out there, I mean, you can tax carbon, you could do progressive income taxation, which I think would help somewhat with wealth. You could do a wealth tax in the United States. You could think about that at a state level, you could think about it at a national level. There are constitutional issues, but there's every reason to put that on the table to think, to be even more focused on the wealth point. And I'll also say that we've also thought and worked with people like the Urban Institute to study, are there ways to do a mini version of a wealth tax? Could you create a mansion tax, for instance, that funds an expanded EITC or a basic income? So my point is to say that absolutely, I think the wealth disparity is incredibly problematic. And as we think about the right designs and basic income policy, we should all have that criterion in mind to figure out, well, what do we think is the best way to pay for this? What do we think is the best way to administer it? On the corporation tax break, the Trump tax bill in particular is just astounding in its validation of 50 years of debunked economic theory. I mean, it is trickle-down economics. Like if you cut taxes on people like me and on corporations, it's gonna be great for growth. Well, that has not been true. It's gonna be great for everybody. That has not been true for the past 40, 50 years. And yet we're still doing more of it. And already we're seeing that the tax breaks are not going to the R&D and things that the administration would have claimed, they're going just to share buybacks. Who share buybacks? Help, people like me, who are deeply invested in the stock market. So it won't surprise anybody. I think that that bill was fundamentally misguided and destructive and makes the case harder because now there's less revenue to take advantage of for when there's a progressive majority. I think that the one thing though that should be inspirational to people in this room. Anybody who tells you that a basic income is too expensive is just flat wrong. It depends on how you're structuring it and how large it is and who it goes to. But what I call for, for instance, in fair shot, $500 to everybody who makes 50 grand or less is roughly as expensive as the Trump tax bill was. So if we can afford tax cuts on corporations and the 1%, that's something that all Americans can agree we can afford. I think we can afford an income floor for working people. So I think that it's a call for us to think as boldly and ambitiously about our ideas as those who want to cut taxes, think about those. Thank you very much. I also wanted to ask you a little bit about the relationship between income inequality and asset or wealth inequality. And that if we're thinking about the tax code that very often earnings or income from assets are taxed at a less of a rate compared to income from let's say labor, for example. And if you see that there is a chance to reform that and when we're talking about UBI. I think we must. It's one of the key ways that I think we should pay for it. So specifically making sure that the revenue, the income that comes from capital gains and investment income is taxed at the same rate as labor. I mean, we know that in the long run capital, the returns on capital are higher than the returns on labor. And so the fact that we tax the capital gains at a lower rate than labor taxes, I don't think makes any sense. So I would doubt that closing that loophole is a key way, not just for funding a basic income but for funding government in general. Thank you so much for the talk and sharing. So my question is about, so as you mentioned, the economic inequalities have kind of along some of the line of the social category. So like women or people of color, they are like more like influenced by the stress of the poverty. And I'm wondering how powerful that UBI is to help with, to solve this kind of situation. So one worry is that if, as you say, if UBI is maybe like too expensive to be given to everyone. So maybe they are just given to some of the people who are in need of it. But if we are not challenging some of the logic that the economic is like working right now, like they also, whether or unless we'll like reinforce this stigma against maybe women, maybe people of color. So that's something that I'm worried about. Thank you. I think we all should worry about that. I think that's one of the big, I will call it a fault line, but I think in my view there are really two categories of ways to structure basic income. One that is targeted, and you could call that a negative income tax and expanded earned income tax credit. And the positive of that is it's the people who need the money the most to get it. The negative is the concern that you're articulating, that it plays into an existing welfare frame. The second way, conceptually, to structure basic income is the dividend model. So this is the Alaska Permanent Fund where you capitalize it through some kind of tax on carbon data, you name it, and then everybody gets the same amount. The upside being that I and I have very much seen in focus groups and public opinion research and just anecdotally, that conceptually is a totally different frame for a voter, right? Because then it's like, well, we all own this thing and we all get our share of it. So it's almost magical sometimes because then you escape the hard work of who deserves and who doesn't. Of course, the downside is, is that as soon as it becomes universal, you have Bill Gates getting it. And even if you tax it back at marginal rates, you look at the distribution curves and it helps a lot of middle-class people and particularly, you know, the people who, I think particularly the people who would be better, sort of would be better to target it more closely. So that's a clear downside of it. So I'd love to sort of break out of that dichotomy. Like I just offered it because it's the conceptual frame that I use, but I also think that the work that can be done in rooms like this one is to come up with still other ways of thinking about how to do this. And I would say one other thing, I think we should try both. You know, like we're in an experimental moment with this idea. Let's not be straight-jacketed by one concept. Like, you know, let's experiment with both. Let's talk about how a data dividend might work. At the same time as we're talking about, you know, a negative income tax. Like those things, the rest of the world is gonna hear those as being more or less the same, so we might as well embrace that debate, write those papers, do those experiments to figure out as a community, to move the ball forward as a community so that we know more. Yeah. Just at a time when everybody's coming to a deep realization that education is the key to your child's future. Education and higher education becomes harder and harder to access. You could say it's an unsustainable model. And you can just take a look at the out-of-state students and the foreign students that are recruited by the University of Michigan to get a picture on that. But one thing I think that is really interesting that both the poverty solutions and or WashU in Missouri, that there's six to seven times greater likelihood of a child going to college if they have a savings account. And the size of the savings account is less important than the fact of it. And I think that's a domain I'm working in now, but the idea of, my child will have a future is a very powerful part of the culture of this country just as the undeserving poor's 17th century Euro-history and lit guy, that's been deep. 80% of the people came here in the 17th century were indentured servants, so that had something to do with it. But right now, I think making educational opportunity available to the low income population is a piece of the whole equation. Well, and I think that that's a really important stat to highlight because we can and must talk about student debt crisis, cost of college, absolutely. We should also talk about exactly, I'm not familiar with that study, but it seems consistent with some of the other things that I am familiar with that if students have savings accounts, they're more likely to go to college. I mean, I think they're not just more likely to go to college, they're more likely to experiment, to be open to different ways of designing their own lives. I mean, you know, people, I'm the Facebook co-founder who didn't drop out of college. And people are always like, well, why didn't you, you know, sort of like, duh, you should've, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg and Mark and Dustin, everybody else was doing it. Why did you stay in it? Why was I on full financial aid? You know, one of my family had ever gone to college like Harvard? I didn't have like a big, there was no like, safe, like hammock or whatever, you know, there was no safety net. And so the idea that, you know, this is different than your question, but I think it's similar in that like, the risk profile when you have no foundation, when you have no savings, you're by definition much less likely to think about, well, can I go to college? Should I go to college? Because you're just focused on paying the bills. So I think the key though in rooms like this one is not to set this up as like, either we take on student debt crisis or we take on universal basic assets or universal savings or universal basic income. I think we have to do both because if we could solve the debt crisis but still have a lot of Americans who are too poor who don't have the security to then take advantage of poverty or similarly we could solve the security but then if college is still unaffordable, that doesn't work either. So I think it has to be an and, not an or. Yeah. I think we have time for a couple more questions and then we'll. Thank you for your presentation. My mom is a cashier at Walmart in Kansas and reading the Wall Street Journal, I'll see that the Trump tax cut supposedly led to these great bonuses but then when you dig a little deeper, a lot of their Sam stores were closed. My mom still faces the constant threat of being fired for rather arbitrary reasons, can't sit down even though she's an older one. How do you view corporate social responsibility and in age when a lot of those jobs are going to be shed? I'm speaking mostly about corporations like Amazon or Walmart as compared to the Silicon Valley folks kind of bragging themselves up in the role that they'll play in automation. What should they do and do you foresee them supporting universal basic income? I think, well this is an area that I'm thinking a lot about these days and reading a lot about and trying to talk to as many people as I can, both experts, economists and people like you and your mom. I think that corporate social responsibility, I mean it's hard to argue with it but I think too often it's a little bit of, it's dressing up the problem. I think fundamentally we don't have a competitive labor market in many small towns across America because of Walmart. And so not only is it not possible as worker power atrophied so there's no way to organize for better rights but there are in many cases very few alternatives to go for competitive wages. I mean the classic economic theory would be like if place isn't paying enough then you go elsewhere and if you're qualified then you get but if there's one employer in town then that is not true. I mean there was a great paper, there've been a lot of writings about monopsony power and its effects on the labor market recently but the Roosevelt Institute, Marshall Steinbaum who's their chief economist put out a fantastic one maybe two months ago if I would encourage people to read it here. So I guess what I'm saying is I think we have to rethink antitrust policy in the United States to fundamentally change the competitive dynamics not only in retail but in healthcare and finance and consumer goods in several different sectors. The corporate social responsibility it's like sure yeah it's nice that Walmart is buying more organic food but it papers over the incredible monopoly kind of power that they have and so I think the good news is those kinds of policy changes in a world where on the left we have less revenue to work with in a post-Trump tax cut environment fortunately those kinds of policies don't cost money. It's just active enforcement of the rules that we have on the books that a different FTC could do. So I'm hopeful that we pay more attention to this at the same time and the reason that I think it dovetails with a lot of the UBI conversations is because a more competitive environment where wages can rise will get more cash in people's pockets. Now it's not exactly $500 a month in all the stability that's why I think of these things as a constellation that go together but they must in my view all dovetail. They must go together. Okay, we'll take one more question. So I'm a person who receives a basic income type, cash type in monthly through my trap the Bokeh and Manupato Army Indians and there's a lot of tribes who are doing this through peer capital payments, a minority of tribes but I was wondering where do you think the indigenous experience in all this plays in the research or going forward? Do you mind if I ask where you're from? What tribe is it? Southwest Michigan, it's the Bokeh and Manupato Army. It's an Anishinaabe tribe. Oh, I didn't know that one. Well, I'm tempted to turn the question back on you but I'll try to answer first and then if you wanna weigh in on how you think about it too, I'm curious. You know, the research from, there are a lot of Native Americans who have created these kind of basic income or social dividend structures. The one that sounds like your family is from, there are several up in Alaska where they supplement the permit fund dividend and the biggest one is in North Carolina. The Eastern Band of Cherokee for decades have provided a basic income to thousands of people and it's from that setting that you see some of the most compelling research coming out of improved health and education outcomes and you see it lasting. Now I think we're up to Dr. Costello at Duke. It has now a 20 year time horizon on it and you still see people, kids who were in their teens when their families started getting it 20 years later, having lower crime rates, having lower rates of alcoholism of mental health. So I think that it's a really encouraging dataset from a social science perspective. However, it's telling the stories of it, I think is as important. And I should say, you talk to people and I'm curious again what your experience is like and you hear some really inspiring anecdotes of families save this money and they go to college. You hear some people who are pretty skeptical too. So I think that both the good and the bad, there's a lot to learn from how those programs have structured. I don't know if you have anything that you wanna add about your own experience. What I've noticed is most of the concerns people have are not around the income necessarily itself but the politics and everything that goes along with where the revenue is sourced. But yeah, so where I'm coming from, people aren't buying into basic income fully necessarily. Right. You know, at least not everyone. Right, yeah. Great, thank you guys.