I wrote the book to make the case for unconditional cash, but i wanted to grounde ground it in personal experience. I grew up in Hickory North carolina and my mom was a Public School teacher and my dad was a paper salesman. We had a very stable middleclass existence. In my own life i got Financial Aid to countries fancy boarding school and then we started facebook and 2004 and the rocketship rise of facebook is a pretty wellknown story. I ended up making quite a bit of money at my young age and it forced me to think about what is the most powerful way we can think about the economy so the. 1 but keeps getting so lucky is actually not getting lucky at the expense of everybody else. That took me on a journey of what is the most powerful way to help people get ahead and it turns out the evidence is pretty clear on this point. If you provide people with cash, no strings attached, then they invested in themselves, their families and their communities, their kids do better in school, Health Outcomes are better and they work just as much if not more. I think to answer your question, the real reason to empower people with cash is not only to make the moral case we can wipe out poverty with it but also the pragmatic one that people want to invest in and of themselves and there is no more efficient way to do that again providing people with the cash to do so. Host what do you say to the skeptics that argue they will spend more on tobacco or alcohol is there more research to support the . Guest we know a lot about what people do when they get cash, to the point when they have an opportunity to invest so theres quite a lot of studies that show providing people with the resources more often than not they invest in themselves and their families. They dont spend more on alcohol, they dont smoke anymore. In fact, the opposite happens. When we are able to have a little bit more Financial Stability, there is every reason to believe people eat healthier and invest in their Health Outcomes is a question about what we consider to be the right thing to do, the right way to help the poor in particular and there is a sense that we should build more Government Programs and build more regulations to tell people to do this or that with the money. In reality if we can just ground ourselves in the data and challenged somchallenge some ofe financial assumptions. We do very much to help invest in people and by the way this isnt just a sort of left right kind of issue, specifically the income tax credit. Its the size of 7 million here in the United States. Its been supported by people on the left and the right about do people really use this money effectively, and its because there is an immense amount of evidence to show that people are responsible with the money when they are provided and that it is the most efficient way to lift people out of poverty and provide Economic Opportunity. Every president since gerald ford, republican and democrat alike have meaningfully interested in expanding the earned income tax credit, so i think that there is a good case to be made that this is bipartisan view on the issue. Host is the same old men of eech molded freedman idea . Guest the eit c. Came out of the last big debates we had around the guaranteed income in the United States back in the late 60s and early 70s it was widely accepted on the left hand on thand on the right thate guaranteed income could be the most powerful way to ensure no one lived in poverty in america and the most efficient way economically to provide Economic Opportunities like Milton Friedman who was an early proponent of this idea and talked about it and wrote about it extensively in the area. At the same time, there was doctor Martin Luther king jr. Who was making the same case. From the mortal perspective, but at the same moment in history. Richard nixon as im sure you have supported the idea and it even passed the house but eventually failed in the senate and went underground for several decades but they earned income tax credit is one of the policies that came out of that, so it was a kind of stepping stone if you will get overtime has been expanded and expanded again and again because it has that effect. So now we have a new moment. A new opportunity to talk about the nature of work in the United States to talk about poverty and economic mobility in this moment when income inequality is at a historic level. And we would do well to ground as conversation in a conversation about how cash can be the most powerful way to combat and provide Economic Opportunity. Host how do you address the irony that nicole cheney, the head of the office of management and budget expressed that on food stamps instead of making food stamps relatively unrestricted we should shift people boxed meals . Guest is it moving in the wrong direction from the transfer is . Guest i think i agree that would be the new in the wrong direction. Ironically, that kind of outlook that would drive somebody to design a boxed meals rather than providing people with cash is a kind of paternalistic view of government which on the right on the libertarian right have been skeptical of a very long time and so its to tell people not to spend the money on are the cynical moves to tie a lot of the benefits that exist today as a way to throw people off of the role. I think we are moving in the wrong direction, but i think that it is a pattern of economic thinking it but is more focused on doubling down on the debunked trickledown economics which over the past 40 years has created profits for the companies that are instead of working on that problem, they are doubling down on the theory and corporations today are very happy about it. The stock market is near record highs and its my view that me feel good to some in the short term. The bubble is going to burst. The idea that we should be cutting the cost him the operation and telling poor people specifically what they should be eating, most of those things seem just fundamentally out of line with where the country is today politically and in the longterm volumes that we want to share the values of thef the dignity of everyone to make their own choices and freedom to be the masters of their own investment and the responsibility that we have to ensure no one in america in 2018 months in poverty the original proposal in your book was 500 per month for families making less than 50,000 a year, so how many people would be lifted out of poverty through this and how many people would receive payments what is the overall structure . It ensures nobody in america lives in poverty so a lot of people talk about a universal basic income these days is that big idea. Theres lots of different ways to slice and dice it to interpret the idea in a debate about how it might work. I am very focused on the income inequality that exists today and what we can do right now to create a first major step towards the eradication poverty and restoration of opportunity in the middle class. So in my view, we can build on and expand what we know works to take the earned income tax credit significantly expand it inside and make it flat so if easier to understand so everybody that makes less than 50,000 in the United States is working in some way or their families or their communities benefit from an income floor of 500 a month of free mom per adult. On this order of magnitude of the benefit is its big and expensive, about half of the cost of the defense is today that it would left 20 Million People out of poverty overnight and stabilize the lives of 90 million americans who very much needed not only a boost to their bottom line but the kind of stability of being able to count on a 500 a month in the background so it is i think a powerful way to begin the work to establish an income floor that in the longterm could potentially be even bigger. But in the here and now today, to me this is a place we dont have to worry about origami to talk about whether the robots are coming from all the jobs in 2030. We know that this kind of policy could be massively impactful in the here and now. Host talk a little bit of the philosophical idea that the poor know best how to solve their own problems. Rather than the government. Guest i mean, i think theres a sense in the country particularly among the elites on the left and the right that a wii the experts can engineer the progress we want to see and i became pretty skeptical of the idea myself and my original way i became skeptical of it is actually from the perspective of philanthropy to begin so after facebook went public in 2012, my husband and i made a commitment to give away the vast majority of our wealth over the course of our lifetime and in taking on that challenge, we began to getk at all the nonprofits that were out there doing good work, and specifically looking at my next opportunity in the period internationally. I have a whole chapter in the book that relates a journey that i went on over the course of several years that specifically highlighted a couple of moments in the book where i spent time with one nonprofit that was working in africa to try to engineer progress. For this idea was that if we could just invest enough in education and healthcare and roads, sanitation, fertilizer, agricultural training, just all these different benefits and though all of this administration and bureaucracy around a small village then all of a sudden we could lift everyone out of extreme poverty and i went on a trip to visit one of those villages and became pretty skeptical pretty fast. We went on a lock and we went into some dormitories that have been recently built to house students and there wasnt really anything in the dormitories. Sheets on the bed, pencils and books, the kind of things youd expect kids to have. It felt a little wrong. We went to the Health Clinic and it also was very clean and orderly as if no one was using it. Later we went and they showed me the computer, the technical guy as im impressed b i am impresse connection to the internet and you ask the teacher what do you do use it for and hes like everything. It turned out to journalists later chronicled the story in this particular village whose computers had never been used. They were later stolen. The villagers themselves were not able or willing or interested to take advantage of so many of these opportunities and eventually petitioned the kenyan government to push out the nonprofit that was administering this. I mentioned this story because it is indicative of this idea that we can just engineer progress. That is indirect contrast to the idea that we can use cash to enable the beneficiaries themselves to choose what they want and to create their own lives and stories. Another nonprofit i got involved with mitterrand took a different approach. Provided cash, unconditionally, no strings attached, and whats more, theyve ran a trial to measure the exact impact of the cash, did it get wasted, was it used productively and they found results that are in line with hundreds of other studies which show that dollar for dollar, cash is one of the most if not the most effective policy thats out there. So i think in the United States context right now there is a big question about who do we trust more to come who should we invest in at this moment in time, more complex Government Programs that lecture the poor on how to spend their money and how to behave, etc. Or those that havent gotten a raise in decades and that we know when provided with cash invested themselves and their families and this is a big debate i dont want to oversimplify it was a bit small and this is a big expect the court of who we want to be as a country but i think that its time to b have emphass on what we know already about how people use the money and bring people more to the place they feel that they can trust him on another antitrust and other americans to be the masters of their own destiny. Host in your book i was fascinated about examples in your book about people who were trying this, but there is one really close to home, its a state that had an unrestricted Cash Transfer for a while. Such a state and how has that worked out . Guest well, up in alaska they have a small income and the story behind the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend is in some ways unexpected. Republican governor back in the 70s when alaska was enjoying a huge amount of Economic Abundance if you will decide if a small royalty on oil and gas company and they would pay a percentage point of their profits into a common fund every year and that fund would distribute 2. 5 in dividend checks to every single alaskan, man, woman and child. The idea was put up for a referendum in alaska and passed overwhelmingly. So for the past 30 plus years, every alaskan, 700,000 americans had benefited from a Permanent Fund about 1,500 every year and if you are a family of four, you are getting a check for 6,000 every fall, which is a meaningful amount of money. Its not so much money people can hang out and put their feet up and play video games or drop out of the workforce, but it is enough money to help people make ends meet a little more easily. Some of my colleagues were al asked last fall talking to people about what they do with dividends and the Empirical Research about what people do with it backs up many of the stories that we heard. It was people who were using it to cover a month or two of rent that they were behind on. Some folks were using it to prepare for the winter by buying heating fuel. Others were for their college education. Upper middleclass an middle cly people were using it to fund vacations in january to february when its warm and pretty bleak and cold up there. The biggest learning i think we can take away from the Permanent Fund and how it is used is not only do people love it because it provides them a little but of breathing room, its also one of the most powerful factors to be back against the poverty rate in the state of alaska, to lower the rates significantly and to contribute to the fact that alaska is actually the most equal state in the United States of america. And i think that theres a lot we can learn from that and by the way, the idea that people only go to alaska, this is not welfare, this isnt a handout, this is something that each alaskan benefits from and each alaskan can use as they see fit. We know that culturally it is very much possible to create this income with this kind of security and have it be massively popular and effective, and i think that its a great publication for how could we create a kind of alaska for america kind of program. Hillary clinton talked specifically about evaluating the media as a part of her campaign in 2016 she did not end up advancing it but in her book she makes the case that its one of the small set of ideas she wished she had thought more about because of the boldness of it and the power of it to kind of combat poverty and provide mobility to the middle class. Host i would argue its not a small idea either. We struggle so much on capitol hill with how to overcome income inequality. We realize now that has you write about in the economy over income inequality is the largest its been since before the market crash of 1929. We are moving very much in the wrong direction. And your alaska example shows that this guaranteed income may be the single biggest step we could take towards creating income e. Quality without massive under strange is in the structure so thanks so much for pointing out that alaska of all places is at last word at first in terms of its income in quality rather than inequality. Guest i think thats right, and i think its important to say that cash isnt a silver bullet. I wouldnt want the viewers to his dink that im sitting here saying that its is going to solve all of our problems. I think that we need good schools and a Healthcare System that provides accessibility to Affordable Health care to all americans. Weve got to think about smart skills building and training. There are many things we need to do. However, i think that we often jump to these Systemic Solutions first and we miss that sometimes the best solution is the simplest so i think that we should do well to think about cash in the creation of the kind of guaranteed income in america in conjunction with a lot of the benefits, not instead of them. But i do truly believe that it could be the most powerful tool in the toolbox. Host small amounts of regular cach cash produced the feeling of living on the brink which research unsurprisingly shows causes immense amounts of stress and poor decisionmaking. And you talk about the ted talk and people are not poor because they make bad decisions, they make bad decisions because they are poor. Can you expand on that idea . Guest i think rutgers speaks to this as you mentioned, that there is a whole body of Psychological Research which suggests when people feel and live scarcity, when they are feeling like they are on the brink, there is a limited amount of resources and they dont know how they are going to be able to make ends meet it makes them more stressed and depletes the cognitive functions for one specific study that is indicative of a whole set of other it was done in a mall in new jersey and you ask people what would you do if you had your car break down. The cost of repairing the car could be 300. So they asked the groups of people, wealthy people or middleclass people and poor people that question and then immediately afterwards had them do an iq test and unsurprising unsurprisingly, they had the same iq even after being asked this question about what would you do if your car broke down and it would cost 300 to fix it. Then immediately after they said well what would you do if your car broke down and it cost 3,000 to fix it. They then have each group take another iq test and what your n the second scenario, the middleclass people, the folks that have Financial Security did just as well as they did five or ten min