Initiative Area

Guaranteed Income

Legacy safety net programs in the United States are inefficient and inadequate in supporting the financially insecure – a reality made painfully apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ample research has shown that unrestricted cash assistance can not only alleviate material hardship among the most vulnerable but also improve physical and mental wellbeing, child welfare, educational attainment, and more. Decades of advocacy and research into guaranteed income – whether a universal basic income or direct cash transfers through the tax system – offer a vision for a government whose support is more universal, less administratively burdensome, and more respectful of the dignity of ordinary people.

Since 2017, before the concept gained mainstream recognition, JFI has evaluated the feasibility of unconditional cash transfers and how they might be best situated among existing aspects of the social safety net in the United States & abroad. We have helped build guaranteed income pilots; conducted field evaluations on the efficacy and impact of cash programs, including the world’s largest in Maricá, Brazil; advised state and federal lawmakers on relevant legislative reforms, including the federal Child Tax Credit (CTC); and provided expert commentary to media and advocates on the state (and the future) of the field. Most recently, we have begun to sketch a vision for how the now myriad guaranteed income demonstrations can be translated into sustainable policy – and thereby help address our nation’s deepening inequality.

PARTNER WITH US

While JFI continues to share design and strategy expertise with pilots, we are increasingly focused on policy design: how cash transfers can make our social safety net work better for the working and middle classes, and what financing mechanisms can help sustain them. To that end, we provide policymakers (mayors, state legislators, economic development teams, etc.) and advocates with policy analysis, including microsimulations of proposed legislation and studies of interactions among existing programs. We are eager to partner with individuals or institutions to extend this work internationally – and to expand our field of study beyond traditional guaranteed income / UBI into other social programs (e.g. housing, healthcare) where the principles of unconditional cash may be beneficial.

PARTNERS

Guaranteed Income Contributors

Social Wealth

Andrea Gama

Affiliate Researcher

Empirical and Field Research

Ege Aksu

Fellow

Guaranteed Income

Jack Landry

Research Associate

Empirical and Field Research

Johannes Haushofer

Senior Fellow

Guaranteed Income

Leah Hamilton

Senior Fellow

Empirical and Field Research

Marcella Cartledge

Fellow

Empirical and Field Research

Roberta Costa

Research Manager

Guaranteed Income

Sara Franklin

Fellow

Empirical and Field Research

Sidhya Balakrishnan

Director of Research

Empirical and Field Research

Yunjie Xie

Fellow

Related Publication Series

From Idea to Reality: Getting to Guaranteed Income

A series on how to implement guaranteed income in the U.S. 2020-2022 With guaranteed income, sometimes referred to as UBI or basic income, increasingly in the policy mainstream, and governments and foundations experimenting with cash transfers as a means for blunting the impact of Covid-19, much remains unknown about how to design such policies most effectively. Drawn from several contributors and with guidance from experts across a range of related disciplines, this series aims to envision what comes next.

Messaging Guaranteed Income

In this special project, JFI researchers have taken a broad range of approaches to the question of guaranteed income in the public eye. In a U.S. nationally representative survey launched several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, we assess how cross-cutting socio-demographic and -economic characteristics affect support for basic income policies, in particular among those facing increasing economic precarity, and how the specifics of the policy—i.e. financing, eligibility and targeting—are viewed by partisan groups. We’ve reviewed the literature on framing and messaging guaranteed income, and hosted international scholars on building support for guaranteed income across political and cultural contexts.

Policy Microsimulations

Microsimulation is a commonly used tool in policy analysis to examine the poverty, distributional, and cost implications of changes to taxes and transfers. It allows us to explore the implications of benefit design (e.g. phase-ins and phase-outs) and financing choices. Although not set up to look at general equilibrium effects like a true macroeconomic model, a microsimulation gives insight into the initial, “gross” impact of a policy change.

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