Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. Last February, thirty five year old Thomas
Speaker 1: Vargas received an envelope in the mail. It held a
Speaker 1: debit card with five hundred dollars loaded onto it. I
Speaker 1: was shocked, kind of like thought it was not true
Speaker 1: or it was fake, but the money was real. Vargas
Speaker 1: had been randomly selected to take part in an eighteen
Speaker 1: month universal basic income pilot program being run by the
Speaker 1: City of Stockton, California. Every month until July twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: he'll get another five hundred dollars and be able to
Speaker 1: spend that money on anything he wants. It's in fact
Speaker 1: of my life greatly. I've been able to better, Like
Speaker 1: I guess the goals that I wanted to do. I
Speaker 1: will able to go and sign it back up for school.
Speaker 1: My kids are also able to get more schooling or
Speaker 1: more tutoring if they say ahead of their education. My
Speaker 1: health and my stress level is better. I find that
Speaker 1: I'm more energized, more happier than what I was before.
Speaker 1: Vargas is hoping that the program will eventually expand to
Speaker 1: help more people on a national level. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see helping a lot of people out in a major way.
Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of people struggle or whatever, and
Speaker 1: if they have the opportunity to receive something like this,
Speaker 1: they could sit there and get theirselves out of the situation,
Speaker 1: or sit there and help to make it better in
Speaker 1: some way somehow. It's a long shot, but maybe it
Speaker 1: could happen. In part thanks to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang,
Speaker 1: who's made it a central part of his platform, universal
Speaker 1: basic income has actually gotten some buzz around it. What
Speaker 1: would it actually be like, though, if every American received
Speaker 1: some sort of set basic income from the government on
Speaker 1: a monthly basis. To get a sense of the way
Speaker 1: this could look, I spoke with Stockton's Mayor Michael Tubbs
Speaker 1: and with Suki Samra, who's been tasked with overseeing Stockton's
Speaker 1: universal basic income pilot project. Mayor Michael Tubbs, I want
Speaker 1: to start by asking you how you ended up involved
Speaker 1: in this project. I mean, here you are, six years
Speaker 1: out of college, a whole six years out of college,
Speaker 1: and the first African American mayor of your city, the
Speaker 1: youngest mayor in the history of your city. It's not
Speaker 1: the most obvious thing to take on as a high
Speaker 1: profile signature project. So how did it come about? Well,
Speaker 1: before being mayors, on city council for four years and
Speaker 1: as a city council member representing the South part of
Speaker 1: the city, poverty was just frequently on my desk as
Speaker 1: an issue we never talked about, but we were solving
Speaker 1: for with all these other means. So we would have
Speaker 1: conversations about employed things like education and healthcare, access to
Speaker 1: healthy foods, and safety, and the crux of all those issues,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, was just to persistent rate of poverty
Speaker 1: and how people just were in areas of lack. So
Speaker 1: then when I became mayor, I challenged my team to
Speaker 1: really think through sort of what can a city do
Speaker 1: to really address issues of poverty. And I told my team,
Speaker 1: I said I don't want anything I've heard before. I
Speaker 1: wanted to be bold and a little bit crazy. And
Speaker 1: then they came back with this idea of a basic income.
Speaker 1: I say, well, you know about you guys, it's one
Speaker 1: year in office. I would love to be re elected,
Speaker 1: so maybe we'll wait to our second term to even
Speaker 1: begin this conversation because it seems like, particularly in a
Speaker 1: city that was just struggling from bankruptcy, was a non starter.
Speaker 1: Fast forward to a week after my team came back
Speaker 1: with the idea of basic income, I was at a
Speaker 1: conference on the Future of Work in San Francisco where
Speaker 1: I connected with Natalie Foster, when the co chairs of
Speaker 1: the Economic Security Project, and she said that she was
Speaker 1: looking for a city to pile the basic income in
Speaker 1: Philipdropic we funded, and I said, well, I have a
Speaker 1: task for us to investigate this issue. So then we
Speaker 1: spent six months kind of going back and forth talking
Speaker 1: about what it would look like, sort of some of
Speaker 1: the values we shared, and I finally agreed to do
Speaker 1: it because I realized that too often the conversations about
Speaker 1: poverty or the working poor, even the economic structure of
Speaker 1: our countries, positions people, particularly people of color, particularly women,
Speaker 1: as passive victims or as people who are lazy and
Speaker 1: make bad decisions and need a bunch of coaching and
Speaker 1: financial literacy to defeat poverty. And I thought that Stockton,
Speaker 1: given us diversity, given where we had started from, and
Speaker 1: just given the people I know as mayor, that it
Speaker 1: would be beautiful to a position the people of Stockton, immigrants,
Speaker 1: people of color, women, young people, people who are working
Speaker 1: incredibly hard. As a center of a conversation around what
Speaker 1: does a guarantee income look like in this country? But
Speaker 1: more importantly, what does do you mean? And what type
Speaker 1: of society do we want to live in? So I
Speaker 1: decided to go ahead and launch the pilot. Suki Samurai,
Speaker 1: you're running the program, and I want to learn more
Speaker 1: about the details of how you're going about doing it.
Speaker 1: Usually universal basic income goes to everybody, but this is
Speaker 1: a pilot project, so the money's not going to everybody.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to know how many people are getting
Speaker 1: the money, and perhaps most significantly, how you chose them.
Speaker 1: So the question of who was going to be selected
Speaker 1: was determined after a pretty deep community engagement process. So
Speaker 1: we announced the plan back in October of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: and after that we launched into a design phase where
Speaker 1: we asked the community, including elected officials, residents, leaders of nonprofits,
Speaker 1: who they thought should benefit from the program. There were
Speaker 1: three common design ideals that were echoed over and over
Speaker 1: again and that ultimately helped us determine what our selection
Speaker 1: criteria would be. And those three design ideals was that
Speaker 1: the selection process be fair so everyone at about a
Speaker 1: roughly equal chance of being selected. That it be diverse
Speaker 1: and representative of Stockton. So recognizing that diversity is one
Speaker 1: of our greatest assets, making sure that the folks were
Speaker 1: ultimately selected to receive the guaranteed income, we're representative of
Speaker 1: our diversity as well, and that we maximize our ability
Speaker 1: to learn. So Stocktonians recognized the unique opportunity that we
Speaker 1: had to really influence the national conversation around not just
Speaker 1: a guaranteed income, but around an economy that's falling short
Speaker 1: for far too many Americans. So with those three design ideals,
Speaker 1: the selection criteria that we lended on were actually pretty simple.
Speaker 1: One was that folks had to be at least eighteen
Speaker 1: years of age or older, that they lived in Stockton,
Speaker 1: and that they lived in a neighborhood where the area
Speaker 1: meeting income was at forty six thousand dollars or below.
Speaker 1: And that number we settled on because that's Stockton's citywide
Speaker 1: meeting income as well. That was a selection criteria. From there,
Speaker 1: we actually did a randomized selection, so we worked with
Speaker 1: our research team to identify the qualifying neighborhoods where the
Speaker 1: meeting income was again at or below forty six thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: We randomly selected forty two hundred households and sent them
Speaker 1: a letter inviting them to participate. That letter detailed the
Speaker 1: opportunities they had to participate, either as part of our
Speaker 1: treatment group or the folks who are receiving the five dollars,
Speaker 1: or as part of our control group. Of the people
Speaker 1: that responded to that letter and responding entailed going online,
Speaker 1: filling out a consent form one hundred and twenty five,
Speaker 1: or randomly selected to be in our treatment group or
Speaker 1: to receive the five hundred dollars a month. So basically,
Speaker 1: what you're describing is a pretty rigorous design of an
Speaker 1: experiment in a randomized model, which the social scientists like
Speaker 1: to say is the gold standard of the best way
Speaker 1: you can figure out whether something is working. It's too soon,
Speaker 1: I guess, to say whether it's working or not, and
Speaker 1: you don't want to break the structure of the experiment
Speaker 1: by theorizing too soon. But I guess the first question
Speaker 1: that that makes me ask is, let's say it's great.
Speaker 1: Let's say you find after you look through all the
Speaker 1: data after July twenty twenty that there were substantially better
Speaker 1: life outcomes for people who received this five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month payment over an eighteen month period. What happens then,
Speaker 1: I mean, your city is a city, mister Mayor, of
Speaker 1: just over three hundred thousand people, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: and that's a pretty far cry from one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five people. Is there a plausible way to take
Speaker 1: this forward, assuming that it works well? No? No, absolutely.
Speaker 1: I think for me, I've used cities as laboratories of democracy,
Speaker 1: meaning that for any intervention, Being a nerd, I like
Speaker 1: to test it and kind of see what works and
Speaker 1: kind of see impacts before making the case for a scale,
Speaker 1: which is why I think pilots and philanthropy could be
Speaker 1: helpful in that regard. But to answer your question, I
Speaker 1: think for any program my fists to take off at scale,
Speaker 1: it couldn't be city led. I don't know if any
Speaker 1: sea that has the resources to provide one hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month to every resident of as five hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: But what we've seen from design to implementation is bold
Speaker 1: policy proposals and ways to get us closer to there.
Speaker 1: I think of in California, I'm governor in Newsom has
Speaker 1: doubled their earning income tax credit, which is a form
Speaker 1: of giving folks cash and money. Um, there are a
Speaker 1: tax credit. We see folks like send Or Harris with
Speaker 1: her Lift America Act, who is calling for five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a month every month to families in this country
Speaker 1: and make a hundred care or less through the tax code.
Speaker 1: But I also want to take a step back because
Speaker 1: I think if data actually drove decision making, the world
Speaker 1: in general and the society we live in will look
Speaker 1: radically different. So I think the results from the study
Speaker 1: are important. In the data is important, but it's going
Speaker 1: to be most important as the stories that we're able
Speaker 1: to tell about people, people who are just like everyone else,
Speaker 1: that the rest of the body politic can see itself
Speaker 1: reflected in who are doing good things with money and
Speaker 1: who are actually contributing. Can I ask a question about
Speaker 1: that though, I mean, so there's two you said two
Speaker 1: different things there, mister Mary, both of which are really interesting,
Speaker 1: but I think there might be a teeny bit of
Speaker 1: difference between them. So one is that data should drive
Speaker 1: more policymaking, and I'm very sympathetic to that view, and
Speaker 1: I think it's very impressive that you guys are doing
Speaker 1: a proper randomized controlled experiment so that there will be data.
Speaker 1: But then if that's the case, you have to be
Speaker 1: open to the possibility that the data will reveal that
Speaker 1: the program didn't work, didn't achieve any significant effects on
Speaker 1: the group of people who've been who've been getting the money.
Speaker 1: The other angle is the stories angle, that we want
Speaker 1: to get great stories out of a trial like this,
Speaker 1: and for that, I'm like one hundred percent sure that
Speaker 1: with one hundred and twenty five people you'll be able
Speaker 1: to tell some great stories. There will be some stories
Speaker 1: that people who did amazing things and improve their lives
Speaker 1: with a sextra amount of money. But that's not really
Speaker 1: the same thing as the data, right. I mean, from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of an economist who looks at the randomized
Speaker 1: controlled experiment, their whole idea is to stay away from
Speaker 1: the stories, which are the kind of things that you know,
Speaker 1: with respect, that's what politicians like. They like anecdotes, they
Speaker 1: like stories to inspire people. So which is it. I mean,
Speaker 1: is this a case where the stories will help drive
Speaker 1: policy going forward, or is this a case where you're
Speaker 1: going to rely on the hard data as a takeaway. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: well I think we have. There's a bunch of different
Speaker 1: audiences and constituencies we're speaking to. So I think for
Speaker 1: the economists and for those who actually use data and
Speaker 1: look at data, the data is important, and for me
Speaker 1: it is as well. But being a pragmatist and understanding
Speaker 1: just how not just politics but policy and just how
Speaker 1: things happen in this country, narrative is an important part
Speaker 1: of that. And I think particularly when we're talking about
Speaker 1: basic income, we're also talking about issues of race. We're
Speaker 1: also talking about issues of who's deserving. We're also talking
Speaker 1: about issues attached to work and dignity and purpose and contribution.
Speaker 1: We're talking about issues of misogyny and sexism. We're talking
Speaker 1: about all these very thorny issues that no amount of
Speaker 1: data has been able to really move our country as
Speaker 1: quickly as I would like us see us move on
Speaker 1: these issues. But I do think kind of humanizing and
Speaker 1: putting stories and faces behind not just the data but
Speaker 1: the idea policy will lead to some forward step. But
Speaker 1: I think I tell people all the time the data,
Speaker 1: the research that's all independent of me. I have no
Speaker 1: interaction with the researchers, I I don't know who was
Speaker 1: selected that that's going to be independent, but regardless of
Speaker 1: what the data shows, I think it's also an opportunity
Speaker 1: to show just how hard people are working. I think
Speaker 1: the stories, if nothing else, will help illustrate that poor
Speaker 1: people aren't lazy, that people who struggle aren't less deserving,
Speaker 1: and that people have dignity that's inherent to their humanity,
Speaker 1: is not attached to what they're able to produce for
Speaker 1: somebody in terms of work. So that's a really interesting
Speaker 1: point that you raise that Suki. I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you about this, and in your talks with people
Speaker 1: in the community and thinking about the design and implementing it,
Speaker 1: have you encountered anybody who has said to you, look,
Speaker 1: I actually don't want this. My own sense of dignity
Speaker 1: is defined as dignity by work. I want to be
Speaker 1: able to show that I've worked for what I've received,
Speaker 1: and I don't want any part of it for that reason.
Speaker 1: Have you encountered people in Stockton who said, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be part of this program because I don't
Speaker 1: like the idea of a handout. We've definitely heard people
Speaker 1: say that they don't want the five hund dollars a month.
Speaker 1: But I think that comes from the point that Mayor
Speaker 1: raised earlier, from more of the racialized and gendered stereotypes
Speaker 1: that exist around the public welfare system at large. A
Speaker 1: lot of folks, definitely when the guaranteed income first started,
Speaker 1: felt like there was going to be a catch, that
Speaker 1: there was no way that they could just get the
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars a month and there wouldn't be strings attached,
Speaker 1: and it's taken at least I mean, it took until
Speaker 1: at least a six seven month mark where people finally
Speaker 1: started believing that a government or an elected official really
Speaker 1: could believe in them enough and trust them enough to
Speaker 1: give them five hundred dollars a month without there being
Speaker 1: anything attached, without it needing to be attached to work.
Speaker 1: And what we see is that the five dollars a
Speaker 1: month is really just an income floor. The five dollars
Speaker 1: a month is not stopping folks from working. If anything,
Speaker 1: it's allowing people to find better jobs. So I think
Speaker 1: to answer your question, there's definitely our country has a
Speaker 1: long history of attaching values to the money and to
Speaker 1: quote unquote handouts that we give to our folks and
Speaker 1: it's taken for our recipients a couple of months to
Speaker 1: really break that down and realize that an elected official
Speaker 1: and really is here to see them thrive regardless of
Speaker 1: what they do with the cash. So you're recently graduated
Speaker 1: from Stanford and that's in the heart of Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: and the Economic Security Project also comes out of Silicon Valley. Recently,
Speaker 1: Andrew Yang, who's a former tech entrepreneur, has put the
Speaker 1: topic of universal basic income on the national agenda in
Speaker 1: his presidential run. What is it about Silicon Valley and
Speaker 1: universal basic income? Why is there some kind of a match?
Speaker 1: It seems even Elon musk as As embraced the idea.
Speaker 1: Why is there this kind of association between the valley
Speaker 1: and tech and on the one hand, and the idea
Speaker 1: of a universal basic income on the other. I think
Speaker 1: if the close association between tech and universal basic income
Speaker 1: is probably rooted in the fact that the folks who
Speaker 1: are in Silicon Valley are most are the closest to
Speaker 1: automation and artificial intelligence, and so when they're thinking about
Speaker 1: the economy, they're looking at it from generally from a
Speaker 1: more future oriented lens in which they see that you know,
Speaker 1: the robots are coming, which will lead to displacement a
Speaker 1: lot of workers, and that will in turn disproportionately impact
Speaker 1: quote unquote originally thought of as low skilled workers who
Speaker 1: tend to be people of color, and a universal basic
Speaker 1: income is positive as a one solution that could mitigate
Speaker 1: the effects of automation. I think for folks who are
Speaker 1: a little bit more removed from the Silicon Valley, it's
Speaker 1: a guaranteed income as posed a solution to an economy
Speaker 1: that's falling short for far too many Americans today. So
Speaker 1: I'll be recognized that the robots are indeed coming. It's
Speaker 1: also a matter of today one in for Stocktonians lives
Speaker 1: in poverty and today away teens in the nation for
Speaker 1: talent poverty. So how can we use a guaranteed income
Speaker 1: to address and make the economy better in this moment?
Speaker 1: Mayor Tubbs, can I ask you if I were designing
Speaker 1: a universal a basic income program, I wouldn't want it
Speaker 1: to be universal. I mean, one of the things that
Speaker 1: I thought was impressive about your program is that you
Speaker 1: targeted it to some degree at people of lower income,
Speaker 1: just by choosing neighborhoods that were at or below the
Speaker 1: city's median income line. I mean, that's not targeting narrow poverty,
Speaker 1: but it's at least trying to avoid giving away too
Speaker 1: much of this money to people who genuinely don't need it.
Speaker 1: And I'm wondering, how do you feel about the universal
Speaker 1: part of universal basic income? I mean, my instinct, again
Speaker 1: this is just speaking for myself, is that there's something
Speaker 1: crazy about giving people who don't need large amounts of
Speaker 1: money this kind of money. And I understand that the
Speaker 1: logic behind it is it gives greater dignity if it's
Speaker 1: available universally to everybody. But there you're just trading off
Speaker 1: dignity against significant redistribution of income in a situation where
Speaker 1: programs are extremely costly. So do you how do you
Speaker 1: feel about the universal part of universal income? I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna lie that I actually struggle. I struggle with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And speaking candidly, I think if it was to go
Speaker 1: at scale, it probably couldn't start us universal anyway. I mean,
Speaker 1: Chris Hughes talks about doing some sort of financial tax
Speaker 1: which would help folks making fifty k below with the
Speaker 1: income floor Sendor Harris with her and hundred k below
Speaker 1: for families I think we have to start there and iterate,
Speaker 1: but I would say I've actually have begin to understand
Speaker 1: why universality makes sense, and I think it goes to
Speaker 1: your point around kind of dignity, but also re establishing
Speaker 1: this idea of the commons in terms of and extending
Speaker 1: the social contract. So when I think of a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of public goods, whether it's public schools, even
Speaker 1: extremely wealthy people have access to those things, although they
Speaker 1: may not need them, UM, I think that it does
Speaker 1: build sort of the body politics, if you will. That
Speaker 1: and this idea of dignity has kept resurfacing in terms
Speaker 1: of people don't want to feel like they're they're needy,
Speaker 1: or they're less than UM. They want to feel like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is something that we're all getting UM. And I
Speaker 1: do think there's some there's some value to that UM.
Speaker 1: But I even when we were designing the program, I
Speaker 1: really struggled with the UM at or below the median
Speaker 1: income line, or or the fact that there's some people
Speaker 1: receiving the money who make more than me, who make
Speaker 1: eight hundred K. But then well, I've also learned it's
Speaker 1: that even people who make eighty ninety one fifty two
Speaker 1: hundred k, particularly in areas that are more a lot
Speaker 1: less affordable than Stockton, are still struggling. UM and I
Speaker 1: still have high rates to student debt, UM still may
Speaker 1: not have the best healthcare, and still could use a
Speaker 1: little income ushion as well. So i've i've I've relented
Speaker 1: that fact, and I think that whatever is And also
Speaker 1: last thing, obviously, I also think in terms of what's
Speaker 1: politically possible, given the history of this country and the
Speaker 1: way we other folks, the only way something like this
Speaker 1: we would happen is if the majority of a lot
Speaker 1: of people, particularly people who vote, which are particularly middle
Speaker 1: class people, can see themselves reflecting actually benefiting tagibly from
Speaker 1: said program. So for those reasons, I think it has
Speaker 1: to be, if not universal, as close universal as possible.
Speaker 1: I mean, you ended up that answer in a little
Speaker 1: bit different than the place that you started. I mean
Speaker 1: I when it comes to public schools, I see the
Speaker 1: argument very much that we actually have an incentive as
Speaker 1: a society to try to get the people who have
Speaker 1: the greatest resources to stay in the public schools, precisely
Speaker 1: so we will have a common sense of community and
Speaker 1: so that people with resources will invest to the extent
Speaker 1: possible in those public institutions, rather than diverting their resources
Speaker 1: and their efforts to private institutions. Here where you're talking
Speaker 1: about essentially check, you know, without a social service support
Speaker 1: network associated with it, it does seem to me that
Speaker 1: there's it's harder to make the case that making it
Speaker 1: universal will give everybody a sense of buying. I do
Speaker 1: understand that it might reduce the sense of indignity that
Speaker 1: some people might might suffer, and then we're just trading
Speaker 1: off in a very hard, tragic choice people's feelings of
Speaker 1: dignity against the question of how much money will have
Speaker 1: to will actually have to hand out. Suki, I wonder
Speaker 1: what are the biggest challenges that you've been facing in implementation?
Speaker 1: What are the problems that you've faced so far. I
Speaker 1: think one of the biggest challenges that we've faced has
Speaker 1: been Sama Tubs says this all the time, that change
Speaker 1: moves out the speed of trust. The same is definitely
Speaker 1: true for program implementation. So we've seen since we launched
Speaker 1: in the very beginning of fun the ways in which
Speaker 1: a lack of trust in our institutions has impacted our
Speaker 1: ability to implement. So I'll give a couple of examples.
Speaker 1: The first is that when we sent out our letters,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier, our recruitment, we did address based recruitment,
Speaker 1: and we sent letters out to randomly selected addresses inviting
Speaker 1: them to participate. So when we sent the letters out,
Speaker 1: we originally only sent a thousand letters because we didn't
Speaker 1: want to fabricate false hope in a city where there's
Speaker 1: a lot of need and a lot of folks who
Speaker 1: need an extra five hundred dollars a month. But when
Speaker 1: we sent those those thousand letters out and we started
Speaker 1: monitoring the response rates, we realized that though we had
Speaker 1: enough responses to fill the treatment group, we didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: have a representative sample of Stockton, and not as many
Speaker 1: folks responded as we hoped. And so then we sent
Speaker 1: out and you thought that their responses might actually have
Speaker 1: been skewed by education or governmental trust or some other thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I certainly have to say that if I
Speaker 1: got a letter in the mail saying, you know, hey,
Speaker 1: would you like to join a survey, just a pilot program,
Speaker 1: and we're going to pay you an extra five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a month for nothing, I think I would be
Speaker 1: highly skeptical of that. I think I would be very
Speaker 1: doubtful exactly, and we heard and it's something that's been
Speaker 1: echoed and what we've heard from our recipients over and
Speaker 1: over again. So when the recipients were notified that they
Speaker 1: had been selected to participate in SEED, they were brought
Speaker 1: in for an onboarding session, which is still one on
Speaker 1: one orientation with a member of the SEED staff. And
Speaker 1: even in that orientation session, folks were expressing their disbelief
Speaker 1: and their distrust that in a time when the federal
Speaker 1: government was shut down, in a time when the ice
Speaker 1: raids were increasing and more and more folks of Hispanic
Speaker 1: Latin ex origin we're actually just hiding themselves in their homes,
Speaker 1: that an elected official could actually want to give something
Speaker 1: for nothing. So that that lack of trust and you know,
Speaker 1: thinking that we were scamed, that we just wanted to
Speaker 1: collect information for other purposes. That was a common thread
Speaker 1: that really impact our ability to implement when we were
Speaker 1: just getting started. Mayor Tubs, do you think that you know,
Speaker 1: all politics is local and the retail politics of a
Speaker 1: city of three hundred thousand plus is very very local.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure you know all your neighborhoods and I'm
Speaker 1: sure on a lot of blocks. You know a lot
Speaker 1: of your constituents and if you if you get re
Speaker 1: elected every year, you've got to be out there, you know,
Speaker 1: hearing and talking to people. Are you worried about jealousy
Speaker 1: from neighbors who say so and so got lucky. You know,
Speaker 1: Thomas got lucky, and you know the city gave him
Speaker 1: nine thousand dollars. Not so much me and my neighbor
Speaker 1: and my other neighbor. I mean one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five families or people. Is it's enough people to be
Speaker 1: known about, but it's also a small enough people that
Speaker 1: a significant number of people might be kind of jealous.
Speaker 1: Have you encountered that yet? Are you imagining that that
Speaker 1: could happen? Or do you think everyone in Stockton is
Speaker 1: such a giving, big person that they wouldn't mind that
Speaker 1: their neighbor makes nine thousand dollars And they don't. So
Speaker 1: what was the fascinating is that we also had this
Speaker 1: conversation during the design phase, and what we've found since
Speaker 1: disbursements is that most folks are comfortable in that I
Speaker 1: didn't pick it was random. They believe that people believe
Speaker 1: in the randomness. They think it really was random. A
Speaker 1: lot of people believe in ranmothers because it's people who
Speaker 1: hate me who got envelopes who said, there's no way
Speaker 1: if he saw how I talked about him on Facebook
Speaker 1: or they got this envelope right. So I think the
Speaker 1: random lottery really kind of innocuate that. As from all that,
Speaker 1: I think part of it is I've been very clear
Speaker 1: with the community in that there's all types of benefits programs,
Speaker 1: nonprofit services in this city that do good work that
Speaker 1: doesn't serve everybody, and it doesn't make them less good.
Speaker 1: And this is not a departure, very good argument, exact
Speaker 1: departure from the status quo. That's just it's another program
Speaker 1: that everyone has a chance to qualify for if you
Speaker 1: beat these requirements, but everybody won't qualify for. And I
Speaker 1: think for the most part people I have been accepting
Speaker 1: of that. And then I also think that most of
Speaker 1: the recipients are not telling people that they received it,
Speaker 1: which is their choice. That's probably clever, yeah, probably smart,
Speaker 1: But when we were first designing it, that was actually
Speaker 1: a big issue because people were saying, you're just gonna
Speaker 1: pick your friends, You're going to pick this certain neighborhood,
Speaker 1: where you're from. A subtext was as only going to
Speaker 1: pick black people. So the random interesting, Yeah, very interesting,
Speaker 1: But the random will actually helped to octuvate us from
Speaker 1: a lot of that moving forward, which bodes well for
Speaker 1: all of us. I want to ask both of you
Speaker 1: about what I see is sort of the big national
Speaker 1: debate downside of the universal basic income question, and it's this.
Speaker 1: It seems to be that some of the supporters of
Speaker 1: universal basic income sort of see it as a substitute
Speaker 1: for all other forms of social service programs, for unemployment benefits,
Speaker 1: for welfare, because I think in the minds of some people,
Speaker 1: and especially some kind of libertarian leaning tech types, the ideas,
Speaker 1: you know, government programs don't work very well, so let's
Speaker 1: simplify by eliminating those government programs and then using the
Speaker 1: money we save it from those government programs to provide
Speaker 1: universal basic income. If your program ends up working well,
Speaker 1: are you concerned that it might provide data that actually
Speaker 1: is then used to support the position that says this
Speaker 1: is our solution to our social ills, going alongside the
Speaker 1: elimination of some traditional healthic assistance programs. So he maybe
Speaker 1: let's start with you. Sure, So the good thing is
Speaker 1: that are for us, guaranteed income is really meant to
Speaker 1: be supplemental to existing benefits, So a lot of our
Speaker 1: folks are actually receiving other public benefits. So just strictly
Speaker 1: technically speaking, the data won't be able to really isolate
Speaker 1: the effects of a guaranteed income from good good technical answer.
Speaker 1: I like that, and I'll tell you let Mary take
Speaker 1: the visionary answer. Well, Noah, think for me, I've been
Speaker 1: very very very clear that a basic income, for me,
Speaker 1: it's not progress to replace what we've built to build
Speaker 1: something else. And I come from basic income not from
Speaker 1: a libertarian tradition, but from a civil rights tradition, from
Speaker 1: the work of doctor King and the Black Panthers and others,
Speaker 1: in that we need those other things as well. The
Speaker 1: more we extend the social safety net, the better are
Speaker 1: we are. So I definitely think that what's interesting about
Speaker 1: this conversation is that there's so many different, usually competing
Speaker 1: interest around this solution. But I think for me, my
Speaker 1: stake in the ground and my clarity is that no,
Speaker 1: this is meant to be additive, to be an extension
Speaker 1: of our social safety and extension of the social contract
Speaker 1: is to build on what we already have because everything
Speaker 1: we have isn't broken, but there's a realization to everything
Speaker 1: we have also is imperfect, and people are still struggling.
Speaker 1: I think the idea of this experiment is terrific, and
Speaker 1: here's hoping that the data support you and that it
Speaker 1: makes a real contribution to the ongoing question of what
Speaker 1: we can do to make our country a fairer and
Speaker 1: a more just place going forward. And I'm really grateful
Speaker 1: to both of you for joining me. Thank you, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for having us. Thank you. Universal basic
Speaker 1: income is a genuinely fascinating experiment. And if we think
Speaker 1: that in the foreseeable future, some huge number of Americans
Speaker 1: are actually going to lose their jobs as a result
Speaker 1: of increasing automation and machine learning tools, then we kind
Speaker 1: of have to try. That is to say, we need
Speaker 1: to look for every option that we might have to
Speaker 1: enable people to keep some stream of income in the
Speaker 1: face of what could be devastating unemployment. Stockton, California is
Speaker 1: a pretty small sized experiment, but it may produce data
Speaker 1: they will enable us to make wiser judgments about whether
Speaker 1: universal basic income should be part of how we go
Speaker 1: about solving the problem of unemployment in the future. In
Speaker 1: any case, it's a fascinating story from an unusual place,
Speaker 1: and we're going to learn a lot about it in
Speaker 1: the future. And now the sound of the week, I'm
Speaker 1: gathered here with dozens of my congressional colleagues underground in
Speaker 1: the basement of the Capitol because if behind those doors
Speaker 1: they intend to overturn the results of an American presidential election,
Speaker 1: we want to know what's going on. That's Congressman Matt
Speaker 1: Gates from Florida this Wednesday, when a group of Republicans
Speaker 1: tried to barge into closed door impeachment hearings being led
Speaker 1: by the House Intelligence Committee. A lot has happened in
Speaker 1: the impeachment inquiry this week, and what's remarkable is that
Speaker 1: until now almost everything significant has happened behind closed doors.
Speaker 1: Democrats who are controlling the impeachment inquiry have a couple
Speaker 1: of justifications for the secrecy. The first thing they say
Speaker 1: is that matters of national security could potentially be involved.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the House Intelligence Committee is accustomed to
Speaker 1: doing all kinds of secret hearings, which it does in
Speaker 1: a special facility called a skiff, which is exactly the
Speaker 1: facility that the other Republicans wanted to get into this week.
Speaker 1: Another explanation the Democrats provide is to say that at
Speaker 1: an early stage in any criminal investigation, you don't talk
Speaker 1: to the witnesses in public. You talk to them in private.
Speaker 1: Yet a third thing Democrats have been saying is that
Speaker 1: these aren't hearings at all, their depositions in which sworn
Speaker 1: statements are taken from witnesses. Now, all of these justifications
Speaker 1: have some truth to them, and it's also true that
Speaker 1: historically in investigators in earlier impeachment inquiries have done lots
Speaker 1: of their questioning of witnesses in private before reaching the
Speaker 1: point of public hearings. But these arguments also have distinct limitations.
Speaker 1: The main limitation is that an impeachment process is ultimately
Speaker 1: a political process. It's political in the sense that impeachment
Speaker 1: is conducted by the House of Representatives, which is an
Speaker 1: elected body, and subsequent trial takes place in front of
Speaker 1: the Senate, which is also an elected body. That means
Speaker 1: that when people's representatives are going to be directly involved
Speaker 1: in doing the investigation, in mounting the charges, and ultimately
Speaker 1: in deciding whether they're true or not, the public is
Speaker 1: always going to want to have a say, and for
Speaker 1: the public to have a say, the public has to
Speaker 1: have information, and so, at least in my view, the
Speaker 1: Democrats are reaching the point where they're running out of
Speaker 1: room to continue the private, secret side of the inquiry.
Speaker 1: They're going to have to pretty soon do what they've
Speaker 1: been promising for a while now, shift to public hearings
Speaker 1: in which the entire world and the TV cameras will
Speaker 1: be able to see what the witnesses have to say.
Speaker 1: Now that might seem simple or easy, but from the
Speaker 1: standpoint of the Democrats it's not going to be. The
Speaker 1: big challenges that the Democrats face are really two. First,
Speaker 1: we're already starting to know the story. We more or
Speaker 1: less know what the allegations against Donald Trump are, and
Speaker 1: we more or less know that they're true. The President
Speaker 1: has already more or less acknowledged that he pressured Ukraine
Speaker 1: to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. As a consequence, when
Speaker 1: the witnesses appear and testify, the news media may be
Speaker 1: a little bit less interested in the details of exactly
Speaker 1: who did what and when. Then they've been until now,
Speaker 1: when we've gotten a steady diet of leaked secret information.
Speaker 1: After all, it's pretty exciting to have leaked secret information
Speaker 1: on the front page. It's a lot less exciting to
Speaker 1: have a public hearing where the witness repeats what he
Speaker 1: or she has already said secretly and which has already
Speaker 1: been leaked on the front page of the newspaper. The
Speaker 1: other big challenge the Democrats are going to face is
Speaker 1: that in public house Republicans are sure to emphasize in
Speaker 1: their questions to witnesses the allegation with which Donald Trump
Speaker 1: began this entire process, namely, the allegation that Joe and
Speaker 1: Hunter Biden were both participants in an illicit scheme to
Speaker 1: influence the Ukrainian prosecutor to drop prosecution against the company
Speaker 1: for which Hunter Biden was working. Now, Biden has said
Speaker 1: that neither he nor his son did anything wrong, and
Speaker 1: almost all Democrats have continued to insist on exactly that.
Speaker 1: The reality is, however, that when the Bidens come to
Speaker 1: be attacked day by day by day, hour by hour
Speaker 1: by hour on national television, that is going to have
Speaker 1: some distracting effect on the Democrat's effort to keep things
Speaker 1: focused laser like on Donald Trump's wrongdoing. In fact, it
Speaker 1: could pose a very significant danger to the Bidens and
Speaker 1: an even more significant challenge to the momentum that the
Speaker 1: Democrats have managed to produce in the context of their
Speaker 1: impeachment inquiry. All of those things may happen, and indeed
Speaker 1: I think they're going to happen, but there's no avoiding
Speaker 1: them in the long run. An impeachment inquiry has to
Speaker 1: take place in front of the American public. The Democrats
Speaker 1: have gone just about as far as they can in private,
Speaker 1: and the Republican protest dramatized that. This week, Deep Background
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Lydia Gancott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski.
Speaker 1: Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed
Speaker 1: by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is
Speaker 1: Deep Background.