 So this, this is where we really start to get into the questions of framing the conversation that we'll be taking on for the next two days. What are the most pressing questions that we need answered and what are the biggest opportunities to do that? And Dylan Matthews from Vox, I'm told to pronounce the V really clearly, has been kind enough to offer to facilitate the panel. So I'm going to turn it over to Dylan. Thank you, Luke. Thank you Chris for the one follow keynote. I want to repeat Luke's suggestion that if you want to come up to have a more intimate conversation I realize this is like a prisoner's dilemma where if you're one person and you do it it's kind of awkward but if we all do it it'll be great. So yeah we have a great panel here with we have we have an economist by trade we have a sociologist by trade we have a philosopher by trade and we have a political theorist by trade Olga who should be joining us shortly and the we're going to be focusing on two main questions on the panel. The first is what questions remain outstanding in thinking about basic income strategy and where advocates of cash go from here. We've learned a lot there's a really expensive literature on unconditional cash transfers as many people in this room could tell you as many people in this room have contributed to but there's a lot of questions still outstanding particularly around political strategy about cost about details and and so we're going to try to dig into that and we're also going to be talking a bit about how sort of younger scholars in here where we're going to lean on afterlome and Olga from the Stanford basic income lab can contribute to that discourse and what kind of research priorities they can they can make to advance our understanding of that. So why don't we start with with you Olga. Can you tell us a bit about the Stanford basic income lab sort of what your mission is and and tell us a bit about your project within that. Thank you. So the lab was started by Professor Juliana Bilalorek who is a professor of philosophy at Stanford and it started in February of 2017 so about a year and a half ago. So our biggest mission I guess within the academic context is to provide a platform of research and discussion and also simulation of new discussion among students and professors. So Juliana has actually taught several grad seminars on basic income which is actually how I got interested in the policy in the first place. We also started working on a online visual map an interactive map which will be a database that were for a variety of of state of research on basic income from different perspectives and we'll try to categorize the discussion on basic income both normative and empirical into different themes and sub themes so that we can have a holistic picture of what is the currency of research of debate and also what the gaps in the experiments are. There is currently five people involved in the basic income lab during herself after all myself two other grad students and we're also recruiting a web developer for the online map. Wonderful. So we have Olga and after all Michael Lewis is here who's a sociologist at Hunter College and one of the founders of US BIC one of the major sort of activist in academic organizations on this. So how long would you say you've been working in the in the basic income world? And how has it changed? I think since the late 90s something like that. So a little bit, a little while. How has it changed? I get this question a lot obviously and I always answer it the same way. There's a lot more discussion about it now than there was then. And so that's one huge difference. Another difference and I guess I attribute this to the role of the internet maybe in the world today but also the discussion is a lot less academic than it used to be. When I first started there wasn't as much and I knew most of the people talking about it and most of them were either philosophers or economists and that was pretty much the way things looked in the 90s early 2000s and that still goes on but but it's a lot broader than it used to be. So those are the main differences. There's much more discussion about it and it's much broader. I guess one other difference is that I guess tied to the second. There there seems to be a lot more attention to the automation arguments around basic income. That seems to be at least in the US that seems to be the argument I hear most about. Well at least until recently in this country. So those are the main three differences. And finally we have Sam Hammond who's a policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. I think Sam is notable in this room for being one of the few people who talks regularly with Republican members. Comes from a more free market background than a lot of people within the movement. So personally prior to working in poverty welfare I worked in technology policy and so that's sort of my introduction actually. I did a lot of welfare work back in Canada but a lot of people get into the automation lens saying this is a response to robots taking jobs. I sort of am the reverse in the sense that speaking to the issues of income instability and things like that that Chris brought up that if those aren't properly addressed we will never get to the stage where robots take our jobs because there will be reactionary backlashes before that takes place. And so I feel like now that I do social policy I'm still in the sense doing technology policy because I'm trying to accelerate the adoption of technology. And the last person who deserves a formal introduction is Ashlam Schwartz who is a political theorist by trade also working in the basic income lab. My understanding is your background is an ancient Greek political theory. Is that right? Yeah I wouldn't call it my background but this is the field of study that I'm currently in. I hope to have more training in this in the coming years but yes my research is not directly on basic income. Got it. Do you see any parallels there? Is there is there any... I actually I never thought about this but I do see a number of parallels. If you think of ancient Greek you see a number of periods especially in Athens and Sparta where you see that a lot of economic tensions between the poor and the wealthy leads to a major shifts in politics and some of these reforms that it causes actually has a lot to do with redistribution of property. So I don't think I don't have anything specific in mind that is a basic income maybe the Spartan model a little bit but I need to think about this more that's interesting. Great so now that we know who everyone is let's turn to question one. So what it is what is it that we don't know about basic income that we need to know both to get the policy right and to get the strategy right if we've decided that we need more cash programs and want to pursue this strategy. So why don't we go down the line start with Sam and have each of you give your take? Alright so we can learn a lot from basic income experiments but there's a lot that we can't know unless until we have a true UBI so like in economics we call those general equilibrium effects right we can have a study that looks at narrowly within you know a cohort in Seattle what you know what happens through a labor supply or what happens to you know how they spend the money but to understand how it will affect the macroeconomy you can't do that in a subset of a city because the money will leak out it's not a self-contained currency zone so there's a bunch of stuff that we will not know until we do it and stuff that's significant potentially very significant so that's one thing the second thing is the durability of the program so it's one thing to test a program on its merits but we don't live in a technocratic utopia where people philosopher kings pick the right policies we live in a democracy and how that plays out is secondary to what's optimal or what a longitudinal study finds Michael looking at this I guess over the long view a lot of the folks even today and earlier who advocated a basic income made certain claims about what it would do and if we ever got one and and if there was some way in the experiments your comments that was standing I think you're right but there were some in the experiments to focus on certain questions I think it less attention I would focus on these so one question is how would a basic income affect how employees and employees interact and and I raise that because one of the claims the supporters of me who have made when trying to make the case of basic income is that it would give workers more bargaining power and it would improve conditions of work wages things like that so presumably so so presumably they would come through come come come through by way of changing interactions between employees and employees so if there was somebody to look at that I'd find it interesting that's one question another question is also in the work area there's a lot of concern about the impact of basic income on labor supply and would it reduce it and that is warranted that makes sense but another question I I think would be interesting is let's say people do work less how do they spend their time if they work less because another claim I've heard is that a basic income would free people up from having to work and that's a labor supply issue but then they might also obviously some people worry that they might do things we might think is problematic right but they might become more civically involved they they might take care of the kids more than they can now because they are working too much so so how would people spend their time if they did have more time they didn't have to have to spend selling the labor how what would they do and then a third question is inspired by having read Chris's book recently and it has to do with how does the broader like public understand or conceive of work do they think that work is just wage labor do they think there are some areas of work that aren't wage labor how far would they expand that definition so so what constitutes work to the general public and if you read Chris's book you'll know where the question is coming from so that's that's those are three I mean they're more about this type of those three I'm talking too much actually my I think my questions are very much in line with your questions Michael and these are things that I'm personally very much concerned with the nature of work the way we think about work and what is that meaningful life so I think the first question is very much I completely agree here basically the question is what will people do when they when they will be given cash so I think one of the probably greatest critiques of basic income is folks who are saying well you know you give people free cash they will just stop working they will be they will be lazy and I think this conception is something that comes up from a very deeply entrenched male liberal ideology a very weird conception of human beings as something that is atomistic something that is completely selfish which means that we have to be very much concerned with the problem of free writing right so I think that one of the biggest question that we have now is well are people really like this or is this the system that caused us to act in a certain way or to reward certain actions so I think this is definitely one of the biggest the biggest questions that I have in mind so but very much related to this is a question of what role should paid labor have in our conception of what the good life is so currently it seems that not only we have to work in order to have our basic kind of necessities of life supply but we also work became this something that is very strongly connected to our sense of self identity and self worth so I think one of the greatest question here is well is this how we want to think about work or should we think about work as something is completely limited to paid labor and this is very much in line with what you just said that given free cash maybe people would be able to fulfill a much broader kind of potential and of human actions and finally this is something very much in line with Chris's comments on power and of self actualization and this idea of the freedom the kind of freedom that we as a society want to be committed to so it seems that given those ideas about work and labor and meaningful life we can maybe rethink our whole conception of freedom and move into ideas of freedom as empowerment freedom to do things freedom to act freedom to create your own identity in your own sense of selfhood that is outside of what we now value as something that is meaningful thank you so from my perspective as a philosopher and a member of the basic income lab at Stanford I see one of the main questions pertaining to the trying to bridge the gap between the normative philosophical on the one hand on the other hand the empirical research of basic income I think often we have very important and interesting debates and disputes even among people who discuss UBI through their normative perspective theoretical perspective that kind of reflect certain gaps in experiments and we might see these disputes as opportunities for designing future experiments in pilot cash transfer pilot programs that could address these conflicts and maybe yield a empirical result solution and to illustrate a sport more more concretely I would like to have one example so when I started researching or reviewing the literature UBI from that philosophical perspective I started with something which is of most most interest to me which is gender justice and UBI and how UBI can hopefully further gender justice and specifically how we can contribute to the way we think and value our care work which is mostly what women do as opposed to men within the household so to give you some context as people as people know women often do much more domestic work such as housework and care work for children the elderly in the household and men and often sometimes they do this because they choose to but often they do that against their actual preference for example because men are often reluctant to become house husband because the label market often structurally speaking favors men and means men's lifestyle and so the debate on UBI and gender I think is focused on two main questions or points one of which is whether UBI has the potential to empower women so ecologically speaking and economically speaking within the household by giving them cash as individual not to the household and the second issue or question is how how we can whether UBI is able to kind of lift the social perception of the value and importance of care work and consequently whether care work can contribute to a better or more fair division of care work among the genders within the household and I think while there has been large agreement amongst feminist political theorists and philosophers about the fact that UBI indeed actually has the opportunity has the power to empower women economically within the household and also improve our perception of care work it's actually unclear and different feminist thinkers argue for against whether UBI would contribute to the division of care work within the household so to the so-called universal care care model or whether which is usually really worrying whether UBI could actually incentivize women to more specialize in their care work and consequently cause a bigger withdrawal of women on average from the labour market which would be worrying especially for these women who actually want to pursue for more employment or have a career so I think the core here is that this normative debate really reflects a kind of gap within the empirical literature or the design of experiments or not design but so the you know what the experiments so far have focused on and I think it'll be interesting to or important to kind of use this interesting conflict philosophically to inform and maybe in thinking how to design future pilot programs on cash transfers to kind of think how to shift their focus or maybe take into account this question and be able to actually see what UBI would do to lives of women and especially protecting women. So it's a long list of questions and a lot of things to answer and I think realistically a lot of these questions are things that we can try to study maybe not conclusively but with with localized trials and we have a number of those coming up we don't have final results from Finland yet, Ontario is still ongoing, Kenya the directly trials is still ongoing. Michael is someone who's watched this literature of all for the last 20 years or so and also someone who specializes in research methods as an academic and is very cautious about what you can and can't conclude causally from these things. What would you expect us to learn in the next few years from the latest bevy of studies and what should we be more circumspect about and more realistic in our expectations? There's a philosopher whose name is Nancy Cartwright and I think her like she has a slogan which talks about evidence-based policy and things like that and she basically the slogan is sort of like if you do evidence-based policy and you do an experimental randomized control trial what have you, what you usually learn is that something works somewhere, it works somewhere and again like the randomized control trial is like the gold standard right or the bronze standard or whatever and I think about her a lot when I read about the basic income studies. There are some done in Finland, some were done I think in India so there are some, there's one in California now and I'm not saying they're all, they're all about to start the same thing and some might not even be called experiments in the academic literature but I'll use that term but they're studies and all over the place in vastly different environments and I guess the caution would be that it seems obvious but as I read about some of the reports from the studies doesn't always seem like it is obvious to people who are writing about them and that is that you may not be able to learn all that much about what would happen in the US from a basic income in India, a study in India right or vice versa right so the caution would be even if a UBI works you learned it worked somewhere in a certain context and you vary the context and you might give very different results and I don't think we know enough in social science to always know why you might get the differences in different contexts like we know their differences, different results, we don't always know why so I don't think we understand human behavior that well even though we claim to be scientists. Absolutely, as part of your work at the Stanford Basic Income Lab my understanding is that you've been been trying to track these experiments and trying to sort of organize a database of what we know. What have you learned from that process and has anything sort of surprised you in looking through that sort of aspects of the literature you didn't expect to see? So unfortunately I'm not the right person to ask this question because I'm dealing mainly with a more normative aspect, a political aspect. However, I am familiar with the work that we're doing in the Basic Income Lab on the experimental aspect of things and I would say that I am kind of shocked by the need to have a really strong rigorous research design that will allow us to actually generalize some of the conclusions. So one of the things that I'm kind of struggling and this is very much in line with what Michael just said is that our ability to generalize from an experiment done in the rural part of India to a post-industrialist society such as the US might be very limited. The needs are extremely different and the kind of struggles that people are dealing with are extremely different. People there take the cash and will basically build their roof over their house. This is something that is sometimes quite different from the kind of struggles that people are dealing with here in the US. So I guess that, yeah, the main thing that I've learned here is I feel like the need for a carefully constructed design that will allow us to generalize our results as much as we can to understand as much as we can about the effects of Basic Income. Olga, as someone who is a philosopher, works mostly on the normative side here. When you're thinking about these normative theories and these debates about, say, if a caretaker is allowance, Basic Income for mothers and other kids and caretakers is more reinforcing general norms or more liberating people without compensated labor, what is the role that empirical research and empirical fact find in place in that? How does it sort of help you or not help you evaluate these theories? So as I said before, I think the empirical research is a key part of the whole debate because when things like these normative disagreements happen, this agreement actually, in the case I was presenting in a second ago, isn't about what's kind of important in life or what people should be able to do and how freely to be, but here the growing was about the actual effect and how people would behave, how their life and behavior would change on UBI versus without UBI. So I think it's not much of debate to go this far without having the actual results of home people and who, you know, often behave so differently, especially, as you said, in different societies and in different economic realities. And I think these experiments in relation to what's happening and what the difference is amongst society could be. And I think it's also important to kind of be able to see a holistic picture and to often people come to UBI to support us, come to UBI with a different perspective because you think there's a lot of UBI in the libertarian, socialist scale, public hand, and have different reasons to support UBI, but nonetheless one is supported. And I think it's important for these people to see the holistic picture and different reasons for supporting UBI, both from the political angles to kind of have a holistic picture of the issue, as well as the different public sectors, gender, justice, poverty, development, and so on and so forth. So, Sam, in your work in DC, I imagine you're referring back to research a lot, trying to figure out which policies are most constant. You let me know about the effects of certain cash interventions. What do you find most useful as a kind of research and as a kind of social scientific contribution, which right you do apply to work in a context that you're doing here in policy making? Yeah, I think it really depends on the policy and the audience. So, for instance, I did a lot of work in the child tax credit and before that, I'm more general on it because you know the child announces, they have a long category of conservative circles. The child tax credit is created by New King, British, Canada, the American child benefit was a conservative party thing across the world in Ireland that family announces that those tend to be driven by conservative parties. The irony is that the Republicans are also the ones that reform cash systems due to single mothers and stuff like that. So, it really depends on the framing. If you talk about child announces in the context of this is a pro-family initiative when parents have financial security, they are less likely to have an abortion, for example, because they know that they'll have income to raise their child. These are things that a lot of conventional anti-poverty advocates may not reach for, but if you're willing to reach for it, you can actually change a lot of minds. And the other thing is that there's coalitional dynamics, especially within the Republican Party. The Republican Party is partly a pro-business wing and partly a sort of socially-conservative wing. And you saw this play out with the tax reform where Rubio, who I work with occasionally, put forward an amendment to greatly expand the refundability of the child tax credit to give more poor families the transfer. And immediately there were coalitional letters from Americans of tax reform and other groups saying, in the Wall Street Journal, editorial, saying this was a growth-killing measure. So those are all things to be sensitive to, but also creates an opportunity to create a wedge issue. And I think wedge issues are kind of a time-honored kind of just a way of injecting a new idea into the policy discourse. The other framing that I've been testing lately is talking about this idea of the free market welfare state that social safety nets are not antithetical to the market. They're actually compatible with the market and make the market work better. They enable entrepreneurship. They ease the adjustment costs from trade and technology shocks. They reduce the likelihood that we're gonna bail out your general motors because if you have a public pension and your pension isn't all tied up with your employer, stuff like that actually can make the freeest market person in the room sort of stop and scratch their head. And there are things that I have a lot of success reaching to because there's the conventional poverty advocacy space is maybe a little more evangelical in a lot of ways and they have certain talking points that they want to use and there are other talking points that they won't use. Like certainly being sort of flexible with your language is really useful when you're talking to Republicans. Yeah, the abortion example is interesting. There's an incredible anecdote in Jason DeParle's book, American Dream, about the Welfare Reform Act in the 90s, which is a great book that anyone hasn't read it, but where Jim Talent, a Republican congressman, proposed a bill that would ban all food stamps, Medicaid and cash assistance for any woman who has a child before she's 21. And New King Gertrude's interested in it and then National Right to Life vetoed it because they knew what that would do to abortion rights. There are a lot of complicated intersections here. So you brought up child allowances and I think that's a good way for us to transition to thinking about specific designs. I think Chris's talk was very useful in laying out a bunch of different models here. I know you, Sam, think of child allowances as a universal cash measure that belongs in the same conversation as basic income as a basic income for kids. Michael, I'm curious how you view that and how you see sort of more limited measures than a basic income that doesn't phase out and covers everyone, including adults in a country. Is this sort of a useful building block? Is it a distraction? I guess I would be what you might call a basic, a hubia purist. And what I mean by that, and I want to be careful, in principle, I'm a hubia purist. I think it should be universal. I think the amount should be as high as it's sustainable, if we don't know what it is. And I think it should not be conditional. That's my stance in principle. But I'm not a politician. I'm not talking to Republicans. I'm not talking to Democrats. If I were doing those things, I might be different. I might think differently, but I'm an academic. I might have the luxury of being a purist, right? And I think that it's important for some people to be purist. Another analogy I use, I hope this is not too strange, but I, though I think about this sometimes, is that I imagine maybe, and I don't know, the year would be 1850, something. We might have been having a discussion about slavery. And some folks might have said, you know, given the current U.S. culture, there's no way we're gonna get folks to give up their slaves. We're not gonna do that, one slave people, right? So what we should focus on is trying to get lost past that would force slave owners to treat them better. Maybe not beat them as much. Maybe they couldn't, like, you know, they had to, like, not work too long per day. I mean, I don't know, I mean, imagine trying to make slavery more humane. That's sort of the idea, right? And you know, that might not have been an unreasonable decision to take in 1850, right? But I think that it should have been some people saying, no, slavery's wrong, people should be free. It should have been abolitionists, right? So I think I'm gonna be the best analogy, but it works for me, right? I think, so I'm a purist, but I do understand that, like, it's possible that there are policies that are not pure that could be steps toward what I want. So there's the goal. And again, I mean, the truth is allowance could be a step in the right direction. So the purist's proposal, right? And fair shot. So I'm a purist, but I understand politics, but I'm not doing it. This one doesn't make the compromise, it's not me. I'll lay down a stake in the ground. Um, actually, one of the things I'm interested in, both of your perspectives on this, since I think as someone who comes out of DC much like Sam, there's sort of an implicit sort of consequentialism about the way that the policy makers in DC think that, you know, I have this goal. These are steps toward the thing that I want and we should just view how close we're getting by these incremental moves. And so I'm curious as people who think really hard about these normative questions, sort of, are there compromises that are worse than not doing anything? How do you evaluate compromises? Are there versions of this that sacrifice entirely the normative goods that we're trying to pursue and thinking about a basic income? Just simple questions like that. I mean, this is an old question of, you know, ideal versus ideal theory. And really the best first thing to do is to think big and to really try to pursue the most innovative policy which sees the most dust and try to overcome different obstacles and not be kind of stopped by these, as Michael was saying, by these, you know, seeming ideas of not being able to kind of go beyond certain limitations of our current reality. Because I guess the people that we remember most from history that make policy makers and the big people who made really the change are people who were afraid of the kind of really transcend the way that others think about things currently. However, if that's really impossible then, I think the second best thing to do is to take the ideal theory route and really try to make some changes as opposed to make no change. You know, if you want to add something, I'll show you. Yeah, I'm going to. I think this is a great question to ask to theorists. And especially for me, the theory is to, with one foot in political science, I'm very much used to hear these kind of questions. I think from a philosophical standpoint, to do things that I find very hard to compromise on are the universality and unconditionality of basic income. I think that a lot of the appeal of basic income as a policy depends on these two aspects. For example, the idea that we are trying to create some sort of new form of citizenship. We try to remove some forms of stigma from what being poor means. I'm afraid that removing these aspects would make it a little less appealing. And my biggest concern with compromises at this point is this. I'm afraid that right now there are a lot of hopes on basic income. And moreover, there are a lot of hopes. There are a lot of people hoping for something new, for something else. My fear is that since there is so much hope on basic income, implementing it in a smaller measure than what might be the ideal or the perfectionist version, if it means that basic income will simply not succeed, it will give a lot of ammunition for people who are against basic income. So I guess the big question is this. If we compromise, and because of this compromise, the results are simply not as good as they can be. Or even there is no real improvement. Will it mean that people will be able to confront basic income more easily and to just bury this prematurely? That's my personal concern. So in thinking about models as well, I think I'd be remiss in not mentioning a discussion that's opened up in DC with my Corey Booker and Bernie Sanders, among others, that I think for a long time if you hung out in sort of heterodox parts of economics for the last 20 years, there were two big ideas to transform the American economy. There was basic income, and there were scared-teeth jobs. And we now have a bill in the US Senate for Bernie Sanders that would create a guaranteed job, which is a point that sort of the traditional $10,000 a year UPI has gotten to yet. And it seems to have a lot of momentum. I know you Michael have written about that idea of a right to work, and in correspondence with Bill Harvey, who I guess has written in excess of this. But I'm curious, to everyone, you can start with Michael, but is this a rival to UPI? Is this two great tastes that taste great together? How should people interested in a catch of this idea as a surgeon? Ideally, we aim for a right to income, whether or not we work, and a right to work for those who want a job, and can't find one in the private sector. So I don't think it is really a rival, but to me, it is a second priority. And this is what I have said to Bill Harvey, who's a good friend for years. And I think he feels silly. I think we, our ideas are different, but we agree on the others. So I have no problem with a right to work. But to me, it's just, it's a second priority to the right to income, whether you work or not. And so maybe she is between them, I would choose the basic income. But it is, I'm not against it. That makes any sense. Sam, this is the new original sellout on the panel. Shill. Shill, yes, I'm sorry. Shill. One of the things I say is that if you move Republicans on matters as principle, you get you Democrats on matters of strategic ambition. This is a debate around UBI, where the center of budget policy priorities, President Paul Greenstein wrote an article saying, we shouldn't do this, because all the schemes we've made with the Greek society programs, we don't want to risk reversing it. So in this case, you know, focus on career programs, you see a similar thing throughout the way Democrats think about policy, where they will end up compromising over requirements or compromising on conditionality to get there for, to get something, right? And so, even when there are wings within the Democratic Party that have bigger ideas, they end up being pulled back to reality by the lack of strategic ambition, because you can't get the decisive turn-codes from the other side of the aisle. That's, I look at job guarantees through that lens. Job guarantee, in effect, is a means-tested program. I worry that it is essentially like a Republican-style welfare program, just scaled up massively. And that doesn't really excite me. One thing I do worry about is that, you know, having been in the scene after three years and seeing how both parties work, Republicans have an ideology, and then they find ways of framing that ideology to that full well. Democrats start with the polling, and take that as their ideology. And I see that again and again, in this case, it's just a truism that if you go and ask people if they want jobs, that pulls really well. And the job guarantee pulls off the charts and there are so many things. But it's the exact same polling questions that Republicans use to justify working requirements, because they go out and they say, should people work if they receive welfare? And they're like, yes, of course. So, I don't necessarily, I'd rather like find the best policy and then find a way to sell it at full well, in other words. And I see this as part of our bigger trend where, you know, for better or worse, the Democratic Party is becoming a party of college-educated wealthy urbanites. And they're no longer, as much as they look back to a party of FDR, they're, maybe this is just a crude Marxist class analysis, but it's very rare for an urban elite to create a universal entitlement program, right? And if the Republicans become a party of the working class, which was the most recent sort of shift, I see the job guarantee as potentially a way of doing something that seems strategic and big, but at the end of the day is exactly what you would predict from an urban elite. Actually, my understanding is that Spartans have been quite a lot around their class. I don't know if they counted as a work requirement, but how do you think about these questions? Can you rephrase the question? Oh, sure. Does it normally trouble you, the idea of sort of tying benefits to work in this way, or do you think there's a voice for a way to work in this discussion? Yeah, a fantastic shift. So, I think that on the one hand, there's a great appeal to any kind of program, especially in these times where in order to live in order to have the basic necessities of life, you have to have a job. So, it has a great appeal. On the other hand, I'm afraid it's kind of kind of putting a band-aid on a very, you know, kind of chocolate in the sense that you will not solve the problems of our society. Especially one thing that it lacks that basically income provides us with is the ability to move forward beyond this what I had mentioned earlier. It's very limited understanding of what meaningful life is and what role paid labor plays in it. So, my concern is that instead of trying to find a solution where we are looking for new opportunities to find what human meaningful activities can be, we will just get paid labor more and more entrenched even more than it is currently. So, I'll give the last word on job safety. Yes, so, I want to say three things. The first thing is that, well, I don't really agree that the right to income and to cash should be prior to the right to work. And this is partially for their reasons, which I've just mentioned, and partially for other reasons. So, with kind of the ability of being there for me and I think for many people is that you're free to do whatever you want. You're free to pursue a job which you find unequal when you look for something for yourself to pursue a person, which maybe is a, well, kind of a revision event, a job which we define as job knowledge. Maybe that's development theory, maybe that's in care of your children, maybe that's doing kind of freelancer style painting or writing novels and so on and so forth. And with the development policy, I know very much that we'll be really able to choose what jobs we want to do and even what sector we want to go into. And they might be courses for a sector or a job which we don't really like, don't find it interesting to fight as a basis for flourishing as a human being for themselves. And we will basically, as soon as the process is implemented, I think we'll lose control over the ways in which people are given the job and what kind of job they're given. They wouldn't have this control. And you would lose the chance of doing stuff which isn't currently under their label or under the label of job work, such as elective volunteering or doing domestic work and so on and so forth. And lastly, I think part of that kill of you guys being able to decapital a human's respect and the idea of having to go to work every day. And that's something which, again, you can provide us with very much so, but not a job that I don't know. I don't know much to me for questions, but I'd like to open the floor if there are people who'd like to pitch in. I don't know if your microphone's going to go around, but. Hi. So I'm glad you ended with that question of granted jobs. And I would have wished that you had invited some of the pioneers of this, the ideas of granted jobs and, you know, there's William Sandy, Darity from Duke, Derek Hamilton from New School. And I don't think they had that idea at that time. It's a substitute to basic income. If you look at the people that are, you know, fighting for it, the Bernie Sanders, and there's a lot of them, these are people who actually grew up, like Chris and got up there. And so they don't have that between basic income and granted jobs. Now, my simple question about basic income, which is gaining a lot of praise, especially under the both countries, is, one, is it sustainable in the long term? Two, what are the macroeconomic and especially inflationary effects of these programs? We haven't looked at those issues, and I'd like to know what you think. One thing I can bring to bear is that so Canada has this Canada child benefit, it's not a true UBI, but it is $6,400, it's gone because it's indexed completion, but it was $6,400 for every one child, $5,400 for children under the age of 17, and it's flat until $35,000 against the phase outs, but it reaches 95% of households. One of the, and this was a non-trivial amount on the rate, $6,400 for kids, if you have two kids, it's like $12,800. Which is that US? So I think- You have big money. I think current exchange rate at 64 is like $4,800 or something. So nearly $5,000 per child is a lot fully refundable. That was instituted, we had an interesting program, that expansion was 2014, 2015, the bank of Canada said they were having to raise interest rates early because they had unanticipated the fiscal stimulus from the Canada child benefit. So it turns out if you have kids, you spend money. So I don't know if you can generalize that to UBI, but there would be a, at least in a short run, fiscal stimulus. Like, what do you mean by that? The first is probably what you're saying, but I've actually met Derek Hamilton and talked a little about this, and I'm not sure you're exactly right about that. Derek, I think Derek is, like me, put in the other direction. He's not against a basic income, but he thinks a guaranteed job takes priority. So it's not really at the academy, but it is priority, I think that's where he stands. It's what we feel hard to do, right? And it's probably got a macroeconomic effect. As a supporter of UBI, the concern, I'm not an economist, but I've studied more than any non-economist you have to economics. And my concern as a supporter has been more about inflation, right? So I, and the way I think about it is, it would depend on how big the UBI minimum is, right? But I guess the way, the mechanism could be that the UBI is big enough to cross some folks which are from the labor market and then employers have to raise wages to bring them back and then they might transfer the increase in wages on to less than higher costs. So that's been my worry. And I don't know if anyone talked to that, but no one asked probably because they don't have it at the national level, but that hasn't worked, right? And as a supporter, that's been my worry about it. So I don't, that could be a problem, I think, yeah. So I think we have time for one more question and I have no way to enforce this, but the more it's a question, the less is the comment. Good afternoon. First of all, congratulations on being shaded. This is very well-meaning and I appreciate it. I'm going to pass you the favorable question I'm getting from my professors at the University of Coimbra. Coimbra, I realize when people don't know where is it, it's in Portugal. It was held in the 12th and the 12th of 19th. It is one of the oldest universities in the world. But the School of Economics where I'm studying is pre-news from the late 70s. The professors there, they are liberal Democrats. They are very, very pro welfare. They are the fan of their heart and soul. So I got this question from three different vocations, from three different professors. They said, when I'm going to explain to them, and I'm going to write my thesis about university income, they said, OK, then I've got improvements that university income is going to strengthen instead of a weakness democracy. They truly believe that UBI will work against democracy because it will be used to dismantle the welfare state. It will be used to instead of help people progress politically, it will help individuals, it will help people to stay far from collectives. Ultimately, it will be citizens' arguments against the state. So the fact that Milton Fritzman and now I know most of our researchers are affecting it, they say, this is going to be used to help people. We don't need a state. We need just an administrator of whatever is going to be coming to a place along the first state. So I would like to hear from the whole panel how would you prepare that? There for the other end of this time. Olga, do you have any thoughts on the question of whether this displaces the welfare state in a way that's troublesome? Sorry, you didn't arise a question. Sure. So I think that there is a lot of things in there, but I think there's the idea of basic income as a threat to the traditional welfare state. I think there's the idea that it undermines democracy by creating more atomized individuals. What are your thoughts on that? I think in a way that actually strengthens democracy because precisely because the rule of rule, the rule of rule is stigma associated with setting people up with others, receiving well-for-hope and cash. And in a way, I feel like if we all receive EVI, even though some of us might end up paying it back with great taxes, which is how it could be funded. In a way, there won't be a stigma associated with people who receive EVI when others don't because it's divisive because it's universal and conditional. And I think it actually moves up the relative burden as well by not having to mini-set certain people for EVI or for other schemes, but a one who receives it, you know, because he's here and he's the one who empties very good practically. And lastly, I wanted to say that it's unclear to me maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but EVI must replace the current work for state. I mean, my understanding is that, yeah, that some proposals of such that it will complement, as long as there is money that can complement the work for schemes that we're currently, which means that this is one of those people or people who need more help, maybe single mothers, for example, will still receive additional benefits in addition to the EVI. So that could be a way maybe more expensive, but maybe ultimately more feasible politically and sociologically for people to do this. I want to approach and answer this question from what I actually studied most of my, most of my work, which is the imagination. And I think that one of the biggest problems today is that we're completely unable to imagine anything that is rather different than what things are, not to mention anything that is better than things right now are. I think that the EVI should view not as a policy, but as part of a greater vision to a new society, something that can captivate people's imagination and mobilize people around. And as such, I think that it has to undermine, in a sense, the social welfare model. I think that this was fantastic for a while, but I don't think that it's the current needs of our society. So I will say this conceptually and philosophically, I would say that if we think of the EVI as part of a greater vision, as part of a greater imaginary, that we won't just rethink about our society, then yes, it might actually undermine the basic understanding we have on the welfare state. I haven't thought much about the question about democracy, so I'm gonna pass on that. I don't wanna say anything, I haven't thought too much about that one. But you have thought about the last one, the undermining the welfare state. When I said the welfare state got involved in the basic internal discussions, there was a lot of time people would talk about the broad support for basic income. They would mention Delta Freedmen, MLK in the left and right, and people still do that. And that worried me then, and it worries me now. Cause I don't, even though it's not true that basic income has to replace the welfare state in the current context, in the U.S., I fear that the more acceptable version of basic income might be the one that some folks at Kato supports, not mine. All right, so I share that work, I do, yeah. I wouldn't worry, I wouldn't stay up at night worrying that UBI is going to be successful and also at the same time successful at repealing the existing welfare state. It's like, one's already big enough to live, because you see this in all kinds of areas that's reformed, especially in the U.S., like there's lots of proposals to consolidate XYZ to pay for A, but it doesn't, you end up getting A and then you end up having XYZ still, cause it's like multiplying in a number of interest groups that you'd have to win over. So that really happens, but there are some pieces where, I would favor a child allowance to replace or the TANF system, for example. In part because TANF has become a conduit for social engineering and for work requirements in it, and replacing that with a bigger universal program and then actually strengthen this democracy because it would, rich family and a poor family of kids would be treated and seen the same plastic matters. So there are cases where replacing a welfare state is good. The other comment I have is there's a conservative view or a kind of libertarian view, a non-community view that is like all of our state exists to do with redistribute, to take from the haps to give the head nods. That's really a wrong picture of what social insurance is. Social insurance is the way we cool risk and it's not strictly taking it, it's not strictly a transfer. If you just take it as a transfer then, yeah, it sort of makes sense to collapse all down to a single transfer. But you wouldn't get rid of the fire insurance or the home insurance and your theft insurance and your car insurance and everything else that collapses into one thing because some people have their homes broken and some people have their heads burned down. So there are insurance programs that can't be consolidated. I think it's a conceptual error. One last question before we finish, which is, you know, I think in theory two, I think I might be for a universal program a meaningfully large or really can't make the numbers work, right? It's, that is a very expensive proposition. So Chris writes his book, I think cuts down to the overall level of the grant and cuts down the full grant to a certain income level. And then on top of that in our discussion, we're talking about a UBI as well as a child security. And I definitely can't make the numbers work on that. So, you know, as part of the next generation of research that we need to do, let me ask two questions. One, you know, as part of the next generation, like thinking about the real costs of these things and what it means that we're actually having a conversation about the meat of this now, like how do we think about these trade-offs that we're gonna have to make if something's gonna happen? And then maybe you could just piggyback on, you know, we talked a little bit about experience as a way, you know, the importance of experience, but what do we think about graduate students who might, you know, they're not gonna be able to go out and, you know, do an RCT on a basic income. So, you know, what's the contribution that they can make beyond sort of maybe trying to connect with one of the experiments we'll hear about over the weekend? And Dylan, feel free to weigh in, even though I go. Sure. Well, I think the question of what graduate students should do, I feel like I should pose to the graduate students. All right. So, as people who are in the Muckabit and are getting into this, what do you feel like are the most exciting projects in this that you can contribute to? And if you had a friend in your department or a related department who wanted to get into basic income, what would you tell them is a great question to work on? Okay. I was very fortunate to be a graduate student. Couple of weeks after I started my program at Stanford, I got an email saying that, well, we're starting a new basic income lab at Stanford. We are moving for applicants. And I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to get a chance as a graduate student who's not studying the RCT basic income to get involved with something that I care deeply about. But I wasn't a lot of graduate student because I kind of figured out what the rest should do. But I try to find intersections between my own work and basic income. And I try to think of how I can use my own resources, seeing that things that I consider myself or hope someday to become an expert in, how can I utilize them in support of something that I care deeply about? So for example, my case, I studied imagination. So my big question is, what does UBI mean for us in terms of the imagination? What role does it play in us imagining something alternative? And I think what I try to do when I talk to my friends at the department and in other departments is trying to see how other people's work might be relevant to the questions that we care about and how we might be able to develop it into a research, research agenda that may contribute to this whole project. One thing that I would like to add is that Microsoft has a philosophy of interest in peer-to-peer justice and political philosophy in general. And finally, so one of the reasons for which I got interested in UBI, and it was like last year was actually, I read all this, one of the trend out, how different theories of justice can justify in different ways, the opinions of one of, you know, justifying the UBI's side. And I was very excited that you can also send different political values on the streets and you can have, you can support UBI because you think it's making more of us effective and to the side, it will be a small new life or because you will get more of a power as a housewife or as an employee, or you justify because what we really see within the industry. And I think in the future, I would like to make, write a paper, maybe even a little one day about, oh, that's never the kind of reasons, like I said, for justifying the same thing. I think also just by creating this user service our lab within academia, it's a good way of making graph students or interests that are living in a web of the possibility of research that we react in different departments and different angles. And I think that potentially creating more of these institutions as maybe parts of the different departments of the idea. Michael, what would you tell your graduate students? I guess as far as like, I'm gonna try to answer both questions at the same time, the greatest in a question and the least in cost I don't know what the numbers were. So the working of the numbers is hard because you have to make assumptions and you don't know the truth of that, right? And so what I mean is you, like, one thing is when you try to sort of cost this out, a lot of folks that I've read, they end up coming up with some number of gross costs and then they stop there, right? They figure out the population, the amount of kids and adults, what do you want to add to the amount of population? That's the cost. But as I see it, that's not really the cost. That's really the income tax and the other tax. Because people are gonna still pay taxes on other income and so the actual net cost is the ridiculous between the gross costs and what you end up with once people are taxed back some portion of the basic income, right? So I would say keep that in mind if you are a graduate student and you're not looking at costs and it is like the wonderfulness of the net cost and not the gross cost. And that's the way it gets tricky because you have to make assumptions. Assumptions about things like what will be the behavioral response to the tax and the house finance and to also the income support. Under the income of the tax and the income of the institution, the fact that you have to think about and so you have to get a center that all those things need to do this. So I guess it gets hard but I would just keep in mind that you're trying to estimate the net cost not the gross cost. And that's an important difference I think that people often don't keep in mind. So as to the question of how congrats students work on this if they don't have $10 million in the country, there's just a ton of different ways. Once I talk into my head, there's a great role of open versus closed personalities and entities involved into reintroduction that uses big five personality tests and different kinds of personality tests to look at the sort of personality correlates to a peer approach to reintroduction. So anyone in any campus can find a statistically significant number of undergrads to do a personality study on. And then you can learn something about how people approach reintroduction. So that's just one example. There are, it's a multi-faceted issue. We're not all going to have big NDER working papers that you know, decades in the making. You can take a piece of this issue from a moment. Both those points, one point on classes that I think one of the papers that I found most useful in thinking of this is from Jess Feuderspan, Elizabeth Rhodes, and Luke, all of whom I believe are here. Looking at the cost of a negative income tax and finding that one large amount of white belt poverty could be financed for roughly the cost of the existing cash and cash, like per raise, things like Section 8 food stamps, EFTC. It's not sort of a CEO estimate, but it's a very useful number and a useful sense of scale there. And I think changed my prior on how affordable policy like that is. And on the graduate students side, I'd say this is a journalist. One thing that I've started to find is most European countries have some kind of minimum income policy. And it's not a basic income. It's not even a negative income tax really. It comes with all these different requirements and add-ons and is usually a sort of thing of last resort. But I don't really know why they work. And I don't know how they differ from country to country. And I don't know how meaningful the differences are. And I thought it would be notable that when Benoit, the Socialist Party candidate for President of France in 2017, ran on a basic income, if you looked at the details of his plan, the plan was to revise the revenues really there at the minimum income policy of France to like slightly reduce the work requirements. See, I already looked at some of these numbers. Do you know anything on that? Can you maybe leave us a here? I mean, there's a ton of different countries in their systems. One thing that I like very much, well, in terms of that, is like very generous women's shareings. Because going back to this instability issues really off, in the U.S. you get maybe 50% of your wages replaced and then there can be upwards of 90%. But there's this trade-off, there's an activation requirement. So people in Denmark, when they're laid off, they keep 90% of their income, but then they're normally coming to jobs in four months. And if not, then they're put into retraining or given steadily escalating the subsidies to be rehired. So that's a way of essentially stabilizing people's incomes, even through ups and downs. The other thing I'd point out is one way to be fair, the cost of a basic income like policy is to keep it temporary, that will upset purists. But if you look at something like food stamps, which is a quasi-cash income support, it's the median person who uses food stamps is in the program for about 10 months. And then they're called spells and they normally have, the USDA calls them trigger events like they either hours are cut back or something put them under the income threshold and they're suddenly eligible. So they don't stay in the program permanently. There is this sort of conservative myth that everyone in food stamps is just free writing off of it, but they kind of do this thing where like, if you go to a hospital, the average person in the hospital is in bed rest. But actually, if you look at the global population, the average person is there for a doctor's visit now. So there's different ways to cut the cross section. So what I'm gonna get here is that if you wanted to have a, say, you could have a program that was like, within a 10-year span, you get to access to your basic income as you've had a lot of however you want it. Maybe you can cut the amount in half and double the frequency or something like that. Then that would function to, if you had a life event that was a big income shock and a big source of income instability to access the universal income support program that didn't have any restrictions on how you use the money or penalize you for going back and forth. So that's an option that I haven't seen explored enough but that's sort of like those things that are ignored. It's just not all that great. And to be clear, it could simply kick you off if you're so qualified after 10 months. It's just most people recover economically. Yeah, exactly. I think we might pretend for a couple more questions. Oh, do we not? No, I'm waiting for the opportunity. So at this time, once again, thank you very much to Dylan and all the panelists. Thank you.