There's always this tone when you read articles about poverty, that this is this intractable
problem that we barely understand, let alone, like, have the tools to deal with. We have
the tools. It's called cash. The government spends billions of dollars on these really
complicated schemes to end poverty, but the problem with poverty is not having enough
money. The simplest solution when someone doesn't have enough money is to give them
money. And so that's more or less the idea of a universal basic income. So lots of people
have supported a basic income, or a guaranteed income or whatever you want to call it. Martin
Luther King endorsed one in his last book. Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist,
outlined a specific plan for one. Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve, is an avid
proponent. One thing that gets lost is that it really was a mainstream political idea
in America, as recently as the 1970s. Richard Nixon tried to pass a guaranteed minimum income
inspired by Milton Friedman. It got very close to passing. George McGovern, who ran against
him, ran against him on a platform that included a more generous guaranteed minimum income.
Jimmy Carter tried to pass a minimum income as president. But the point is, this was a
really mainstream idea. It wasn't something that was like crazy, like it sometimes feels
like today. And a few things happened to make it that way. The big one was that there were
a bunch of experiments that tried out a version of a basic income called the Negative Income
Tax in a bunch of different cities in the US and in Canada. And it's one of those experiments
where people will still argue about what the results actually said to this day. What got
reported and passed along by politicians was no one is going to work if you implement this.
That's not true. There was an effect on -- people worked fewer hours, but it was a pretty modest
effect and it's really hard to say where it came from. Like one place it probably came
from was people staying in school longer. But the overwhelming feeling in Washington
was, OK, we had this idea; we tried it; it didn't work; let's move on. But it's totally
possible to end poverty, and we shouldn't act as though this is something that no one
has thought up a way to fix. People have thought up a way to fix it --
the question is if we think it's worth it.