More on states and local governments as laboratories of democracy.
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What would a needy person do if you gave them $500 a month, no strings attached?
Stockton, California, is finding out. The city is eight months into an 18-month experiment with basic income, the idea that the government should give citizens a regular infusion of unconditional free cash. And it just released the first batch of data about how recipients are spending the money.
It turns out, they’re mostly spending it on food, clothes, and utility bills.
The data is provisional — the basic income experiment still has 10 months to go — and the number of participants is small: 125 people (out of an estimated 311,000 Stockton residents) who live at or below the median income line (around $46,000), nearly half of whom are working full- or part-time.
But it offers a counter to critics of basic income, who often claim that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances, and that they won’t bother to find work. The evidence does not support that belief.
“In this country, we have an issue with associating people who are struggling economically and people of color with vices like drug use, alcohol use, gambling,” said Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs. “I thought it was important to illustrate folks aren’t using this money for things like that. They are using it for literal necessities.”
In other words, Tubbs wants to destroy a myth — one that persists despite findings to the contrary — that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation. (If anything, evidence suggests it’s the other way around: Poverty itself hurts people’s decision-making abilities by imposing a terrible cognitive burden.)
