The results are in on America's largest universal income experiment

For three years, hundreds of people in Texas and Illinois received payments of $1,000 a month, no strings attached.

It was the biggest study of its kind. And after eight years of research – the results are in. What did we learn?

Today, On Point: The results are in on America's largest universal income experiment.

Elizabeth Rhodes, research director at OpenResearch, a nonprofit research organization. She was the principal investigator on the guaranteed income study, which she’s been working on for 8 years now.

Stacia West, co-founder and director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also an associate professor of social work at the University of Tennessee.

Tomas Vargas Jr., he was part of a guaranteed income program in 2019.

Part I

TIZIANA DEARING: It was just a normal night for Tomas Vargas Jr. He and his wife are watching TV at their home in Stockton, California, when an ad came on.

(STOCKTON AD)

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration will give at least a hundred Stocktonians an unconditional income of $500 per month for 18 months.

This is the nation's first city led guaranteed income initiative. No work restrictions, no requirements, just some extra monthly income for you. The goal of this --

DEARING: Tomas didn't think much about it. Why would he? It seemed to be too good to be true. Now, in 2019, Tomas had two kids, aged six and seven.

He worked part time, and he did extra side jobs to get by. He and his wife were living paycheck to paycheck. And then one day the city called. This money program was real and he could participate if he wanted to, starting in February of 2019, he would get $500 a month for two years, no strings attached.

TOMAS VARGAS JR.: So the first couple months, I was really like, iffy about it. I kept the checks, and I didn't spend them. Because I didn't want to sit there and be like, have a phone call one day and be like, Oh, the program fell through and we're sorry. We tried or anything like that, but luckily, like I said, it never fell through.

It actually extended and it gave me that reassurance of, actually gave me reassurance in our government. Because I really didn't trust anything the government said before ,it was always either you could do one thing and then if you do something else, you get kicked off of it. This is the only program that really dedicated it to me to do what I needed to do with it.

And what I needed to do with it was take care of mine, take care of what I was already trying to take care of, while I was stressing, struggling, and seeing no way out. It opened that door for me.

DEARING: Stockton was offering Tomas a chance to be in what is called a guaranteed income program, sometimes called universal basic income.

The idea is that if you give families cash, they'll know how to spend it and they'll get themselves out of poverty. No work requirements, no conditions, just a check. And that $500 for Tomas and his family. It made a huge difference.

VARGAS JR.: So it helped me not only pay my bills and get a better credit score, but it actually helped me feel what a zero balance was like.

Anybody that struggled with bills, they know having a zero balance is an amazing feeling, and keeping a zero balance is even more amazing. And it just helped me build that financial structure where I was able to keep that ongoing pattern to keep my finances straight.

DEARING: With his bills caught up, Tomas could rethink his job.

Working part time for a delivery company meant few options to advance or boost his pay, but looking for anything else was too risky while he was in the red.

VARGAS JR.: At first, I stood there because I was actually scared. I was scared of sitting there actually taking the risk of taking a day off and doing another interview. Or even say if they found out that I was looking for another job and being fired and let go from that job, and then I would have no income.

What happened when I had the $500 was the $500 gave me that confidence that I can take the day off or I could take some time off to sit there and look for the other job, to get myself in a better position and that's what it did for me.

DEARING: Now, Tomas works for a non-profit. He has better pay, better hours, and can spend more time with his kids.

And that, he says, is the greatest gift.

VARGAS JR.: It gave me the opportunity to sit there and actually be at peace with myself. Actually have time to sit there and dedicate myself to do things with my kids, like the father-daughter dance. And with my son, helping him with his speeches for student council, and having, being looked at from my kids in a different way.

DEARING: And Tomas adds, it's not just about the quantity of time he has with them, it's about the quality. Now that he isn't consumed with living paycheck to paycheck, he can be present with his kids and at peace with himself.

VARGAS JR.: Just back then I was always just the weight of stress and the constant negativity and let down that I always had in my head.

I was scared to ever look at myself in the mirror back then. I didn't recognize and didn't like the person that was looking back at me. But like I said, with the change of the $500, it wasn't that it was just a financial change. It was a mental change. It was a health change.

It was all these things that came with just that little bit of financial health.

DEARING: That was Tomas Vargas, Jr. of Stockton, California. Now, as we noted earlier, Stockton was the first U.S. city in decades to run a guaranteed income program. Starting in February 2019, it ran for 24 months.

Since then, dozens of cities have followed suit, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Atlanta, Georgia, St. Paul, Minnesota, to Birmingham, Alabama. With national interest on the rise, a non-profit called OpenResearch set out in 2016 to conduct the largest study of guaranteed income programs to date. How effective is giving families unconditional cash?

Last month, they published their results. Elizabeth Rhodes joins us from Oakland, California to talk about the findings. She is the Research Director at OpenResearch and was the Principal Investigator on the Guaranteed Income Study. Elizabeth, welcome.

ELIZABETH RHODES: Thanks so much for having me.

DEARING: Does Tomas, his experience, does it sound familiar to you, Elizabeth?

RHODES: It does. We heard similar stories from many of our qualitative participants in interviews.

DEARING: So he was in Stockton, Elizabeth, and the first thing I want to do is flesh out for people how your research worked. Where were your participants?

RHODES: We originally selected participants from two different states, Illinois and Texas, and we wanted to have a population that was representative.

So we included people from urban areas, cities of Chicago and Dallas, as well as nine other counties in each state that included rural and suburban areas as well.

DEARING: So it's big country. How do you pick Illinois and Texas? And what gave you a sense that if you picked those two, you'd get a feel for how this works, that might apply all the way around the country, in a, I don't know, an Idaho or a Hawaii or a Delaware.

RHODES: We had a couple of different criteria. We worked with local nonprofit partners to distribute the cash. And we looked at potential partners, but the most important thing was the policy context, the existing social safety net. And Illinois has a more generous social safety net. And Texas less, and so we felt that they were representative of the policy context in different states in the country.

DEARING: So as I understand, Elizabeth, what you're telling me is you were looking for a continuum, a really supportive state, a not so supportive state. And if you could bookend it, you'd capture the range of experiences. Is that fair?

RHODES: That's fair. We also, there were no restrictions on movement. And so people were able to move, and by the end of the study, lived in 40 different states and multiple countries.

DEARING: Alright, now there were a couple of other key things here. How many people? Because I imagine the number of people that you look at really helps determine how representative your findings were.

RHODES: We had 3,000 participants, 1,000 of whom received $1,000 a month for 3 years, and 2,000 received $50 a month.

DEARING: Okay, this is a big thing, this $1,000 a month versus $50 a month.

My understanding is that at the beginning, everybody thought they were going to get $50, right?

RHODES: Yes, it was $50 or more is how it was phrased, but yes.

DEARING: But then this changes, and I want to give a little bit of sound here. 1,000 people in Illinois and Texas, they're randomly chosen to receive this $1,000 instead of $50, and that is 19 times more money, just to underscore that. Here's how some of those participants responded to the news.

(PARTICIPANT MONTAGE)

Everybody knows where they were when they feel like they hit the jackpot. They can tell you the minute, the hour. And when that first gift arrived, I'm like, Oh man, this is real. And I'm like, okay, it's the first one. And I think about a third time, they say third time's a charm. I think about a third time.

I'm like, okay, this is real. Someone saying, Oh we want you to do these surveys about your lifestyle and your income and the things that you do. And we're going to pay you for that. At first, it just sounds too good to be true. That's the thing. It just sounded too good to be true.

I actually ended up telling her I'm sorry, but I'm a realist and I'm not gonna believe it until I see it. So when the money hits my account, that's when I believe that I'm actually getting this money.

When he told me, yeah, it's going to be $1,000, I thought I'd misheard him, and I was like, oh, I'm sorry. And then I started to hyperventilate and cry, and we had to take a break.

DEARING: Did you feel like, I don't know, Willy Wonka, Santa Claus for the people who got the $1,000 a month?

RHODES: It was, those phone calls were some of the most unique things I've ever had the opportunity to do. But one of the things I learned from that moment was people were talking about the very specific needs that they were facing in that moment, from a person's father had passed away and she couldn't afford the funeral.

Someone else had just finished school, but couldn't afford the cosmetology license to get a job. Someone else had a traffic ticket. And in that moment, hearing hundreds of different needs, I realized that cash was the one thing that could maybe not address all of that, of those needs, but be allocated towards them. And I also realized how many different directions this would go, how everyone had such specific needs, and cash would have very different impact.

DEARING: And the goal, Elizabeth?

RHODES: The goal at the time was, continues to be just to ask the broad, open-ended question, what happens when you give people unconditional cash? To understand the impact on people's lives, the limitations, when is cash not enough, or perhaps not the most effective. And really to understand people's lives over the course of three years and the needs that they have and the challenges that they face.

DEARING: Now, Elizabeth, we'll get into your results in a bit. I do want to note OpenResearch, that's linked to OpenAI, that's Sam Altman, any editorial control or AI association with this?

RHODES: No. We, OpenResearch is an independent non-profit and our goal with this study, we had academic partners from different universities, was again just to ask broad, open ended questions and collect rigorous, comprehensive data to address them.

DEARING: And did OpenAI have any particular claim to the data?

RHODES: No.

Part II

DEARING: Elizabeth, we've talked about the setup now. Give us the headline. What is the big finding?

RHODES: We have released the first set of results, lots more to come, but the biggest finding, I think, is that people use this money to meet their basic needs.

We see people spending more money on housing, food, transportation, and building up some savings.

DEARING: So let's hear some of those voices. And as I get ready to play you some of those, I want to note the participants aren't talking to the media. We've got audio vignettes of them from the conversations they had with the researchers.

And we're using pseudonyms for them, obviously, to protect their identity. So let's hear from a few people here. First, when Vanessa started getting $1,000 a month, she was working two jobs, caring for her four children, two of which were twin babies, and she found that the extra money meant she could spend more time with her kids.

VANESSA: First thing I thought of is I don't have to work Monday through Sunday anymore. And after I got the first payment, I went from working three days a week and I was still doing the freelance from home. But, so it was crazy because I was working so much, that it was nice to be able to, even though I was still doing stuff from home, it was nice to have a breather. Like I said, I was working seven days a week, so just to be able to back up and spend time with them and not have to wake up at 4 a.m. Definitely made me a better person.

DEARING: Then there's Maggie, single mother of eight. She says before guaranteed income, she couldn't afford anything new, even when she really needed it.

MAGGIE: We don't have to worry about when we're going to get new socks anymore. And it's not just socks, we saved everything. We saved. If the clothing could be fixed, we fixed it. If something broke and we needed to have it, we could, we tried to fix it first. With this, we could just like, oh, that's broken.

We can throw that away now. We can go get a new one. That's the kind of relief it was. That was huge. And it used to make me cry every time I said it, but now I'm just like, whew.

DEARING: Zoe lost custody of her four kids when she developed a substance abuse disorder and she wanted them back, but couldn't afford the money to enter treatment.

When she got the guaranteed income payments, she used the money to move into a sober living home and began recovery.

ZOE: I started to want more for myself, and believe in the possibility of recovering. And as I continued to work on that, I got custody back of my children in 2021. And that was a huge moment in my life. That was something I didn't expect to ever happen really, I was already just at the point of accepting that I wasn't going to, but it was like a miracle. Because I was able to show that not only could I be in stable, I could maintain a place to live, and I was able to build myself up.

And pull myself out of those depths. And then achieve what I thought was unachievable.

DEARING: Elizabeth Rhodes, these are fundamental life changes and their fundamental quality of life changes. Yes?

RHODES: Yes.

DEARING: And were you surprised by these results? What, was there anything that surprised you in these results?

RHODES: I think the most surprising, the stories that we hear, those are less surprising to me. I think when we look at the data as a whole overall, we don't see some of these effects in the quantitative data.

DEARING: What do you mean by that?

RHODES: It is, overall we don't see, we see large improvements in reductions in stress and improvements in mental health during the first year of the study, but by years two and three, those effects fade out.

The same with food security. We see people having, being much more food secure in year one, but those fade out by years two and three. And so what's hard for me as a researcher sometimes is reconciling, we have these conversations, and we hear these transformative stories. But when you look across all 3,000 participants, we don't see those strong effects in the data.

DEARING: We're speaking with Elizabeth Rhodes about the largest research study of guaranteed income. You can find the study and the results at our website. ... You're talking about this data, timing effect, Elizabeth, where you see these bumps when people start receiving $1,000 a month, and over time they start to fade.

That does raise a really important question I wanted to ask you. This rolls out during a global pandemic. I'm sure that the simple, the noise of a pandemic probably in and of itself had some impact, but I'm also acutely aware that here in the United States, there were a series of financial measures that the federal government took, that also changed low income people's financial positions for a while.

So the Center for Budget Priorities points out that in 2020 and 2021, economic security programs reduced the poverty rate by 16.1% and 16%. And then of course, over time, those also faded out. So I wonder, can you really know whether some of it was that versus this, and can you know whether your sort of, your, what's the word I'm looking for, the rollbacks in effect were the result of this cash or other programs reverting?

RHODES: That's a great question. Because of the timing, we had started enrolling participants before the pandemic started. And we had enrolled about half of participants. And we were able to balance, we asked participants what types of pandemic aid they were receiving, whether they were getting expanded UI, the child tax credit.

And across the two different groups, we were able to balance on receipt of the additional pandemic era funds. Hopefully, the goal is that it would not, you wouldn't see that effect in the data. However, I do think, the time when we started seeing the benefits decline, especially with mental health and stress, was when the pandemic aid was fading out.

And so to a degree, they perhaps had a larger cushion and then they were still receiving the $1,000, but without the extra pandemic aid, it certainly did change things.

DEARING: And in a minute Elizabeth, I'm going to bring in another voice, but before we do, did you see any kinds of consistent choices that people who received the $1,000, or frankly, people who received the $50 and the $1,000 made about how they used that money.

Was there a hierarchy there? I'm aware that in other places, in Austin or Cambridge, there's a pretty consistent set of problems that people use this kind of money to solve. What did you find?

RHODES: We found that the options, the possibilities that the money created, depended quite a bit on individuals' circumstances.

Someone who couldn't afforded shampoo before or was months behind on their rent, had a little option. It enabled them to purchase shampoo or to catch up on their rent, but there weren't a lot of other choices. I think people who were better able to meet their basic needs before receiving the money had more options.

People talked about either building up significant savings, pursuing further education, or deciding to take some time off work. And so it really did depend on individual circumstances.

DEARING: And it sounds like how stable the really basic stuff was, and it sounds like you're saying if you didn't have the really basic stuff, that's where the money went first.

RHODES: Absolutely.

DEARING: Any look at community effects, Elizabeth echoing out or amplifying effects around people from receiving this money themselves?

RHODES: The largest impact in terms of percentage change relative to control recipients was on financial support to others. We see participants, it was an average of about $22 a month more that they used to support friends and family.

And we see this especially among the lower income participants. Who, one participant talked about her brother had lost his job and she was able to pay his mortgage payment for a couple of months. Someone else helped with family medical bills. And so we do see this rippling effect where people are using the support to help with others.

DEARING: Elizabeth, let's bring in a second voice here. Stacia West is co-founder and director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania, and she's also an associate professor of social work at the University of Tennessee. She joins us on the line now.

Stacia West, welcome.

STACIA WEST: Hello, Tiziana. Hello, Dr. Rhodes.

DEARING: Stacia West, let me first ask you, any surprises to you? You've looked across a number of different studies and research. In what you're hearing from this first round of results from the OpenResearch, let's call it a pilot or a test program in Illinois and Texas.

WEST: Similar to Dr. Rhodes, I'm not terribly surprised by the findings, right? Whenever we provide unconditional cash, which I think there are around 150 different experiments across the U.S. right now. We see a couple of common themes. So people are going to shore up those back bills that are owed.

They're going to make sure that they have food on the table for their families. And then, after a couple of months, they may start thinking about, okay, what am I, financial future? Where do I want to go? What do I want that to look like? And because there's less material hardship and resource scarcity.

It really frees up the time for people to be able to make those plans. But as the OpenResearch study indicates and Dr. Rhodes has spoken about those outcomes are going to look wildly different based on every different individual. So it's overall, trends toward the positive, right? We saw in this study that people were able to save more.

They were going to the doctor more frequently, and specifically the dentist. They were able to get the medical care that they needed, and they were able to support friends and family. So I think these are all trends toward the positive. And the questions that we're wrestling with now, is how do we implement this alongside the existing safety net, and for what amount of money, for which sort of population, and for how long, to see the outcomes that we want to see.

DEARING: So let's bring another voice in from the study. And again, pseudonyms here, and these are, this sound comes from conversations in the research project. This is DeMarcus and what he said he did with the extra money.

DEMARCUS: The first thing was to save it, stack it. That was my main objective. It's okay.

You're getting a thousand a month for the next three years. You do the math. So if you can save $36,000, boy, you are good. Now I put some away, but just life in general, car maintenance, other bills that came out, maybe came out of nowhere. So it made me realize how important maintaining your finances, knowing your spending habits, your consumerism.

DEARING: Elizabeth Rhodes, what we just heard from DeMarcus and what we heard before that, from Stacia West, I want to pull that out. Because there is this maintaining, this stability. And you use that word, I think, or something similar to it a little earlier in discussing your results. This opportunity to create some level of stability, but then something else out there that seems to then subsequently destabilize again.

Now, I'm aware that in other kinds of looks at people trying to exit social safety net programs at the federal level, whether it's SSI or maybe it's transitional assistance, that what people wouldn't, have historically known as food stamps. There's this thing that can happen where you spend and you start to move out, but then you lose a benefit, because you have a little too much savings, but you don't have enough extra money or savings to make up for the benefit you lose.

Did you see any reporting from people about that, Elizabeth Rhodes?

RHODES: We actually passed a law in one state to ensure that people didn't lose their existing benefits. That benefits cliff.

DEARING: Wait, so wait, a state literally passed a law for your research study in order to keep people from losing those benefits?

RHODES: With our partners, organizations, yes. And it's then since benefited other studies happening in the state as well.

DEARING: Which state was that?

RHODES: Illinois.

DEARING: Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.

RHODES: So people in Illinois specifically, people did, existing benefits was not affected by receiving this money, but the normal sort of fade outs do happen, in that cliff of people talked a lot about if I work this extra number of hours and I lose my childcare assistance, which is worth far more than that extra hour of work.

We see it with participants who were trying to get on disability, they needed to show that they couldn't work for two years, but they didn't know how to support themselves while doing that. And the existing safety net is incredibly helpful. But it does have holes, and people are both ineligible or have trouble maintaining.

DEARING: And Stacia West at the Guaranteed Income Research Center at University of Pennsylvania. Those lead people to make what on one level feel like irrational decisions, but on another level have to be rational decisions about which program's going to give me the biggest safety net. Yes?

WEST: Yes. They're incredibly rational decisions to make.

And in fact, across the country, we evaluate about 35 different guaranteed income programs with about 20,000 participants. And over, I see that those that are struggling the most on the lowest incomes are the best financial actors, they are the most financial actors. They know where every penny is spent.

They know how these programs operate. And one of the things that I think Dr. Rhodes pointed out, too, right, is when we have what we call the benefits cliff really prevents people from realizing upward economic mobility. And it is so extreme in some places that, if you're receiving food stamps, you can't even have a car valued at $1,000.

That would disqualify you to be able to receive those benefits.

DEARING: So before we let you go, Elizabeth Rhodes, you've said this is the first round of data. Much more coming. Is there a sneak peek you can give us at the kind of information that's coming next? Just very briefly.

RHODES: Sure. We're looking at impacts on children and parenting.

Political attitudes and behaviors, more detailed bits of health. There's quite a bit more to come in the coming months.

Part III

DEARING: Let's bring more voices in from the study.

And again, participants in the study are not available to the media, but the researchers gathered some of their experiences using pseudonyms. So let's hear from Evelyn who wanted to buy a house but couldn't get a loan. Because her credit was too bad. So she used her guaranteed income to boost her credit score.

EVELYN: They offered this prepaid credit card, instead of a debit card, it was a prepaid credit card. And so what I started doing is I for sure jumped on that. And I got that credit card immediately through the Chime app. And then I started putting all my bills on that. And now like my credit was like a 420 and now I'm almost up to a 700.

Now I can actually get a loan to get a house.

DEARING: And Alina, single mom, two boys in Chicago. The first thing she prioritized when the $1,000 a month came in was helping her kid's future.

ALINA: Wait a minute. I can really make some really big changes and decisions. I'm like, this will allow me to do some things that I didn't even feel was within my reach.

So I know what I want for my boys. So that's always at the forefront of my mind. So I'm always striving to do better. I didn't know per se where I wanted to send my son to school, but I knew that I wanted him to be educated elsewhere. So once I had the additional income, I started doing more research, like how much would it cost?

Now I really start putting figures to the goal. I started actually exploring the real tangible possibilities, right?

DEARING: Stacia West, we've heard these anecdotal stories. They are compelling. Is there data out there to suggest that guaranteed income can produce sustainable results like this?

WEST: I think that is still an open question, Tiziana. As I mentioned earlier, we have a number of different studies that are still continuing across the country, there's one in the county of Los Angeles, that is 1,000 individuals, very similar to the OpenResearch one.

Over the course of three years, there's another that was just released from our center last month. The city of Los Angeles, 3,000 individuals, $1,000 a month over one year, and what I'll say, one of the most outstanding findings to date is that we saw that the recipients of guaranteed income, and I should say most of these recipients are women, just by the nature of the feminization of poverty.

So we're really talking about feminomics here, but women were able to move away from violent relationships. They were able to protect their families, and even after the guaranteed income stop, six months after, they were able to maintain that, right? And keep themselves and their children safe. So I think it is an open question, but we have some signals that suggest, perhaps a one year or an 18-month intervention can be course changing for specific populations within the social safety net.

DEARING: So it may not be a social safety net solution, but it may be a targeted solution for people in the social safety net having very specific kinds of life experiences.

WEST: Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. If it's women that are dealing with intimate partner violence, if it's folks that are returning to the community after serving in incarceration, if it's youth aging out of foster care that need that gap of a couple of years of financial support to find their footing, or in another study in New Orleans, we're providing guaranteed income to high school seniors to understand how that may impact college readiness, college bound identity and entrepreneurship.

DEARING: So one of the questions that's on my mind about that is that poverty, when, and I worked in the anti-poverty field for probably 20 years, right? When we, especially when we see identity links to policy, to poverty, so you talked about the feminization of poverty, right? That tends to play out over a generational time period.

And in any of these studies that we're talking about, we're talking 12 months. 18 months. In the case of OpenResearch, three years. These are short time periods. And even in those time periods, we were often seeing slippage. You just talked about that. So is there any way to actually know unless there is something more like the generational heart study that you saw out of Framingham, Massachusetts where they look at heart impacts on thousands of people for literally a generation.

WEST: Yes. And I think that's where the research needs to head. So we have these data that are primary data, what's been reported to us directly as researchers, but then there's so much other data that's administrative records. So those are things that include child welfare interactions or educational enrollment.

And I think in the coming years, that's where we're going to be headed, to look at downstream intergenerational effects and then using the variability that we see. Was it a one-year study or a three year study. And what outcomes were produced from those different studies.

DEARING: I think about the work of Raj Chetty at Harvard University, right?

WEST: Absolutely.

Where a small change in parental financial input like $3,000 could lead to significant change in the next generation's long term financial security. So also the question may be, are we measuring the outcomes for the right people, right? Inputs to one person, but do we have a way of measuring what the amplifying effects are out?

WEST: That's such a pertinent question. Yes. So in Cambridge we did start to see some impacts actually on children's grades, right? So the recipient group those children were more likely to get A's and B's than those in the control group. And also the parents were more likely to have a college bound identity for their child, or say, I expect my child to graduate from college compared to the control group.

So I think you're absolutely correct. That the input to the parent may have downstream impacts a generation later.

DEARING: Have we seen anywhere, Stacia West? And again, we're speaking with Stacia West now, who's co-founder and director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

What's triggered this conversation is recent data, the first round of data coming out from the largest study of a guaranteed income program yet in the U.S. It was $1,000 a month to people in Texas and Illinois for three years. Have we anyway to understand what the macroeconomic effects of this might be.

I know that one of the pieces of data that's come out from the OpenResearch initiative was small amounts of changes in labor, right? Maybe people work an hour or an hour and a half less a week. But if you had 100,000 people receiving a guaranteed income and they all worked an hour or an hour and a half less.

Now you've got some serious labor impact. So is there a way to understand what the macroeconomic impact of a program like this would be if it went to scale? Because I'm assuming, Stacia West, that the point of doing all this research is to investigate whether this ought to go to scale.

WEST: Sure. You're correct.

We are looking at if it were to go to scale, what would it look like? How would it be implemented? And what absolutely, what would be the macroeconomic effects? I would point you to my colleague, Ioana Marinescu who is a labor economist at Penn with us, who does incredible work on modeling for macroeconomic impact.

However, with Dr. Rhodes's most recently released study. One, I'll say, I would argue that we could all stand to work a little bit less in this country. It's not very good for our health to work as much as we do. But for those that are very concerned with the macroeconomic impacts, I think the OpenResearch study now gives us the necessary data to make those larger macroeconomic models.

DEARING: So understood about any one given person could stand to work an hour or an hour and a half less. But if you have 100,000 hours, less labor, does that mean a restaurant closes or a McDonald's closes, or you can't keep a public library open? Or are there knock on effects like that have to be considered?

WEST: I think the knock-on effects that I would focus on is what we typically see is that hour less of work is an hour spent in the care economy, right? So providing care, unpaid labor to children and to our elders. And so that's uncompensated care that actually does have macroeconomic impacts.

They just typically aren't counted.

DEARING: So the way to think about it, you're saying is to see where the labor shifts, not the absence of the labor, but where it shifts.

WEST: Correct. Correct. And I think we're seeing time and time again in Tomas's story and in the story of many of the moms that have been talking here today, right?

We see that shift is to caregiving.

DEARING: One of the other questions that seems like it must come up in this research Professor West, is the stigma that exists, and has for a long time, the resistance to providing people unconditional cash resources. The idea that you don't just give people money.

The word handout comes up over and over again. You want to go back, you want evidence, go back to 1996 and the well form reform debates, right? This is a cultural underscoring in the United States. Where does it fit? And is it so strong that even if data shows that this could be successful. It would that mean that there would be resistance to implementation on a larger scale, regardless of what the data might show?

WEST: I think that the myth of the welfare queen that you brought up is dissipating as part of American culture. And I think there are a couple of things that we can point to with that one. We all received, most of us received a child tax credit. Or an economic stimulus under Trump, right? As pandemic era of financial relief, those stimulus payments, right?

So when everybody receives an unconditional cash transfer, right? And the economy is not wrecked, then we have to consider, okay. How does that narrative kind of shift? Secondarily, I think there has been a reckoning with what is expected from laborers in this country in the market economy, where we're not necessarily putting up with poor labor conditions any longer, and we're demanding more because we know that we're worth more as women specifically.

So I think that's a shift that has really changed the public narrative. There, we were able to slash child poverty in half with the expanded child tax credit. The fact that there were legislators that did not want to see that incredible outcome sustained is a little bit of a nonstarter and a talking point, right?

If you accept and would support children growing up in poverty, I don't know what to tell you.

DEARING: So a couple of things there. You made reference to welfare queen. I had talked about '96. Of course, that goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan. Almost a full generation before that, as far as child tax credits go, that's an interesting one to watch now because on the Republican ticket, vice presidential candidate JD Vance has supported the child tax credit and current vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Also, in support of that. So it's going to be an interesting thing to watch in this election cycle. In our remaining time, one of the other things that comes up in this unconditional cash, Stacia West, we've seen other models, micro lending model, right?

The father, arguably, of micro lending, Nobel prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, now being asked by students in Bangladesh to actually be a caretaker for an entire country after that work. You've got the family and independence initiative now up together here in the United States, where the money was in exchange for something and that something seemed to matter to the results.

When in that case it was setting one's own personal goals and tracking one's own results. Is there value that gets left on the table when there isn't either sort of a circle of responsibility to each other. Or, hey, I'll set goals, I'll track my results or some sort of input from the person receiving the cash.

I think that these guaranteed income programs, micro finance, micro lending, and peer support are all aspects that can join together to produce upward economic inequality for everyone. But to your specific point of, are we leaving something on the table if we're not mandating people to engage, right, in a financial literacy class or a peer support or setting one's own goals?

I would say all of that is happening organically, right? In community, we often see that guaranteed income payments are used to help out a neighbor or a family member. We know that folks set up organic savings circles and have, for centuries, and that's how lower income communities have survived.

So I think we just now, looking at the Grameen America study, right? It's really positive findings there that women were able to improve their income from their small businesses and also build community, reduce their stress levels. So I think there's something valuable from each of these different strands of anti-poverty work that could be joined together and create something that could really have a meaningful impact for a large number of Americans.

DEARING: So with what we know right now, in maybe two sentences, Stacia West, what is the takeaway for policymakers right now?

WEST: I think the takeaway that we have now is that we know guaranteed income can have promising impacts for specific subpopulations. So I would point to looking at lower income women that have children, right?

We may see positive downstream effects in their involvement in children's education. We look at women that are in violent situations. Guaranteed income has clearly indicated that it can help them leave those situations. So maybe we pair that with a shelter system. So I look at policy pairing and I think that's the real takeaway here.