Quit your job. Save the planet.

Could UBI be the key to economic, racial, and climate equality?

A hand-painted sign welcomes visitors to Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

In Hudson, NY, a radical experiment is underway. Twenty people, over the next five years, will receive $500 per month — with no stipulations on how they spend it.

“We’re excited to partner with a team of independent researchers,” wrote Andrew Yang, the ex-Presidential candidate and universal basic income advocate, in a recent Humanity Forward newsletter about the foundation’s partnership with HudsonUP on their groundbreaking pilot. “[H]opefully,” he continued, the program will “yield meaningful data and stories that demonstrate the power a basic income can have to change lives and transform communities.”

Recent research from an ongoing U.B.I. trial in Stockton, CA — which echoes the findings of experiments in Kenya, India, and Finland — strongly suggests that the recipients of non-means-tested aid are not only less likely to miss rent payments or default on mortgages; they’re less likely to abuse alcohol or drugs. They’re less likely to hit their children or their spouses. They’re less likely to commit suicide.

I first engaged with Universal Basic Income in detail reading Nick Srnicek’s and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. In the authors’ framing, U.B.I. is a radical tool crucial to the transition from neoliberal capitalism to whatever supplants it.

Yang’s interest in U.B.I. (or at least how he talks about it in public), conversely, reflects the attitude of Facebook founder Chris Hughes, whose Economic Security Project helped fund the basic income trial in Stockton.

We need to “think big” and “boldly about how to reset the playing field,” said Hughes in a 2016 basic income panel at Stanford. “The economy is not working, and it needs to be fundamentally rebalanced.” But his dream of a “rebalanced” economy isn’t about scaling down our economies to something permanently sustainable. He wants to ensure that the children of tomorrow have the chance to found “the next Apple.”

Basic income, from the Yang/Hughes angle, is a crucial stop-gap for automation-fueled unemployment. But more importantly, it’s a way to keep the machine of capitalism running. And I don’t fault them for their entrepreneur-centric perspectives. Asking a woke tech bro to imagine life after startups is like asking a mountain lion to imagine life after deer.

But what if you could take a basic income pilot, like the one Humanity First is supporting in Hudson, and hack it? What if you could convert it into a trial, not for papering over our massive income inequality, but for escaping capitalism altogether?

In the Hudson and Stockton trials, recipients are getting $500 per month. But Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend was pegged at $1,000. And the following thought experiment — which occurred to me one morning at 3:50am after watching Yang interviewed on CNN — builds off the latter figure.

The Freedom Dividend was never intended to replace our jobs; it was intended to augment everyone’s income, with the greatest benefit flowing to the under- and unemployed. But why, I began to wonder as I stared at the still-dark ceiling one Wednesday morning, wasn’t $1,000 enough to live on?

I know I’m in jeopardy of sounding like Lucille Bluth (“How much could one banana cost? $10?”). In Los Angeles, if you’re lucky, $1,000 might get you a room in a shared apartment. In San Francisco, you’re fortunate if it buys you a mattress in a shared bedroom.

So, let’s come at it from a different angle. Rather than measuring the gap between $1,000 and what we each currently spend, let’s attempt to build a life for an adult (with no dependents, mind you) inside a $1,000 budget, hypothetically provided by the City of Stockton.

Before we wade into this thought experiment, though, we have to address healthcare. If you’re buying coverage on the market, even if you’re a 21-year-old kid with no preëxisting conditions, your monthly bill is at least $200. So for the sake of this exercise, let’s imagine that in California, the Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom, in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, pass a robust version of Medicare for All that eliminates premiums, copays, and drastically reduces patient prescription drug costs.

So, everyone’s insured. Yay!

(I can hear the deficit hawks out their clearing their throats. “Medicare for All doesn’t make healthcare free! It just shifts when — and who — pays the bill!” Fear not, I touch on these concerns below, and will address them in full in a future essay.)

So let’s meet Mari!

Mariana Guttierez was born in Salinas, CA in 1998 to second-generation immigrants from Mexico. Her father drives a truck. Her mom is a nurse’s assistant. Neither attended a four-year college, and on their salaries couldn’t afford to send their daughter to university. But Mari got a scholarship to U.C. Merced, and by working part time, was able to put herself through school.

But she graduates in the summer of 2021 after completing her last five quarters remotely. She saved money by moving back in with her parents in the summer of 2020. But despite earning a diploma, she’s back in Salinas with no job prospects.

Then one fateful evening she gets a text from one of her college friends, Emilia.

“Mari!” writes Emilia. “Do you know about the U.B.I. program in Stockton?”

“Where they pay you $1,000/mo. if you agree to move there?”

“Yes!”

“Pass lol.”

“I know,” says Emilia, “but check this out. Danny [Emilia’s boyfriend] and I worked out the math, and we think if we can get 10 people together, we can rent a house and buy food WITHOUT NEEDING JOBS.”

“Okay I’m listening,” says Mari.

With healthcare provided by the state, and Stockton expanding its basic income trial to grant every resident $1,000 per month, Emilia proposes, suddenly there’s space for a radical experiment.

“On paper at least,” says Emilia, “there’s an economy of scale when we collectivize our basic income.”

If 10 people are collecting $10,000 per month, she explains, they can rent a 5-bedroom house for $2,000 — leaving $8,000 for other expenses.

“So sharing a bedroom?” interjects Mari.

“Is it worse than living with your parents?”

“Lol point taken.”

Following a grocery list like this one, explains Emilia, 10 people can eat for less than $1,000 per month. Utilities, including internet, cost another $750 (it gets hot in Stockton). But after rent and food, the cohort still has roughly $6,250 left over.

Everyone in the house is expected to bring a bicycle, but for inevitable longer-distance and time-sensitive trips, they’ll share a Nissan Leaf. With the lease, insurance, and maintenance, they’re paying another $650. They’ll also share an Adobe Creative Cloud account for $55, and subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, and HBO for another $40. Another $500 dollars will be set aside for collective incidentals (cleaning supplies, soil, gardening tools, board games, etc.).

But even after all those costs are accounted for — rent, food, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, incidentals — there’s still $5,000 left over. When a $1,000 basic income is collectivized efficiently, each member of a 10-person households gets her basic needs provided for just $500, leaving her an additional $500 to spend at her discretion.

“I’m fucking THERE!” says Mari. “When do we move in?”

Some of you just read through this scenario and your heart started racing with excitement. Like Mari, you’d join a U.B.I. commune tomorrow if you could.

Others were yelling at their screens as they perused: “Who the hell wants to live in a tract house in Stockton with nine other people?!”

And yet another subset of readers followed along, thinking: “It’s lovely, and all, that these 10 people can live in their house and survive without needing to work. But the stuff they buy — like food, clothes, software — are still made by people. Isn’t your little commune just exploiting others for its own leisure?”

These critiques are fair. Communal living of this sort certainly isn’t for everyone. And it’s undeniably true that in order for Mari et al to live work-free on just a $1,000 per month, other people have to work to generate the commune’s means of subsistence.

But what if the purpose of our U.B.I. collective wasn’t to permanently exploit a financial loophole? What if the point was to leverage a loophole to gain radical independence from the market, and eventually, from money itself?

To that end, let’s say each of Mari’s housemates sets aside half of her discretionary monthly income — $250 — and deposits it in a communal account. At the end of one year, the house will have $30,000 in savings. After five years? $150,000.

And what if, instead of spending that capital on, say, an annual group trip to Thailand, the commune bought its own land and invested in a cargo container hydroponic farm, a 3D metal printer, or an electricity-generating, water-filtering OffGridBox?

I’m going to be talking about gaining control of the proto-automated means of subsistence, and its role in the sustainable future, in much greater detail in a few weeks. But I will say for now that I believe networked, hyper-local circular production is both the key to eliminating unrecyclable waste (necessary for mitigating climate change) and escaping the owner-worker paradigm (crucial for ejecting from capitalism) — and that collectivizing a basic income is the easiest way to test these hypotheses at scale.

However…

These. Ideas. Are. Dangerous.

GiveDirectly is piloting truly universal, unconditional cash payments to 26,000 people in 200 Kenyan villages. But of the handful of basic income studies currently running in the U.S., none have more than a few hundred randomly-selected participants. So to advocate for hacking the Economic Security Project’s experiment in Stockton, or Humanity Forward’s trial in Hudson, is, frankly, irresponsible. Advertising that U.B.I. is about intentionally eliminating jobs, without reams of context, gives more fodder to the skeptic than it does inspiration to the anarchist.

But the mission of Escape Pod (as I’m finally beginning to outline with this essay, and will continue expanding in the coming weeks) is about carving out a space where diverse groups of people can explore how to create meaningful lives within zero-waste communities that aren’t oriented around wage labor. A robust basic income is critical for building a political movement around these twin missions. But we’ll never get a U.B.I. if people like me are threatening to hack it.

That means, of course, that the money to test my proposal needs to come from individuals of freshly-discovered conscience who made their wealth as titans of oh-shit-I-just-realized-this-was-destructive industries.

As Anand Giridharadas makes clear in Winners Take All, billionaire philanthropy does more harm than good. But if that philanthropy helps undermine the very system in which money equates directly to political power, then maybe it can be a force for radical change? I’m torn, ethically. But given the upsides, I’m willing to take the risk.

We’re all guilty of making the planet increasingly uninhabitable for humans and the plants and animals that share our threatened ecosystems. So perhaps as long as the intention behind the giving is genuine wealth redistribution (rather than tax avoidance or deregulation-lobbying-by-a-sweeter-name), all aid is welcome… 😬😬😬

Or perhaps we can bypass the convince-rich-people-to-fund-us approach and just hack $1 billion from the LAPD budget — or $3 billion from the NYPD — and redistribute it as basic income.

Fewer people will get choked to death by cops, at any rate.

Next time: What to do all day when you don’t have to do anything

And thank you deeply to readers old and new. I especially appreciate the responses, highlights, and claps from Pavane Ravel, Prickly Pam, Mike D., James Smith, Jack Albrecht, Abbey Heffer, Terri DelCampo-Nelson, Sumera Rizwan, Britni Pepper, Kevin Connelly, Tom Canetti, Erika Burkhalter, Ekphrastic Mama, Susan Helfter, Pat Mullarkey, Amy Marley, Terry Mansfield, Martine Weber, Deborah Barchi, Isabela Vasiliu, Vicky O Gilmore, Nick Popov, Dr Michael Heng, Kendra Lavelle, Hollie Petit, Ph.D., Tree Langdon ♾️, Zul Bal, Scott Ninneman, Sarah Abbas, Harsh D. Singh, MSc, Desiree Driesenaar, Stefan Kollenberg, Tessa Schlesinger, Mike Franke, Kevin Rhodes, Eli Snow, Donna L Roberts, PhD (Psych Pstuff), and Lisa Bradburn. I hope you connect with this piece as well!