By Kenneth Niemeyer and Lakshmi Varanasi
New findings from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s basic-income study found that recipients valued work more after receiving no-strings-attached recurring monthly payments, challenging a long-held argument against such programs.
Altman’s basic-income study, which published initial findings in July, was one of the largest of its kind. It gave low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years to spend however they wanted.
Participants reported significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, though those effects faded by the second and third years of the program.
“Cash alone cannot address challenges such as chronic health conditions, lack of childcare, or the high cost of housing,” the first report in July said.
In its new paper, researchers studied the effect the payments had on recipients’ political views and participation, as well as their attitudes toward work.
They found little to no change in their politics, including their views on a universal basic income.
“It’s sort of fascinating, and it underscores the kind of durability of people’s political views that lots of people who felt kind of mildly supportive of programs like this before, they stay mildly supportive; people who were opposed, they stay opposed,” David Broockman, coauthor of the study, told Business Insider.
Universal basic income has become a flashy idea in the tech industry, as leaders like Altman and newly minted government efficiency chief Elon Musk see it as a way to mitigate AI’s potential impact on jobs.
Still, enacting universal basic income as a political policy is a heavy lift, so several cities and states have experimented with small-scale guaranteed basic incomes instead. These programs provide cash payments without restrictions to select low-income or vulnerable populations.
Data from dozens of these smaller programs have found that cash payments can help alleviate homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity — though results still stress the need for local and state governments to invest in social services and housing infrastructure.
Critics say basic income programs — whether guaranteed or universal — won’t be effective because they encourage laziness and discourage work.
However, OpenResearch director Elizabeth Rhodes told BI that the study participants showed a “greater sense of the intrinsic value of work.”
Rhodes said researchers saw a strong belief among participants that work should be required to receive government support through programs like Medicaid or a hypothetical future universal basic income. The study did show a slight increase in unemployment among recipients, but Rhodes said that overall attitudes toward working remained the same.
“It is interesting that it is not like a change in the value of work,” Rhodes said. “If anything, they value work more. And that is reflected. People are more likely to be searching for a job. They’re more likely to have applied for jobs.”
Broockman said the study’s results can offer insights into how future basic income programs can be successful. Visibility and transparency will be key if UBI is tried as government policy because the government often spends money in ways that “people don’t realize is government spending,” Broockman said.
“Classic examples are things like the mortgage interest tax deduction, which is a huge break on taxes, a huge transfer to people with mortgages. A lot of people don’t think of that as a government benefit they’re getting, even though it’s one of the biggest government benefits in the federal budget,” Broockman said. “Insofar as a policy like this ever would be tried, trying to administer it in a way that is visible to people is really important.”
Broockman added that the study’s results don’t necessarily confirm the fears or hopes expressed by skeptics or supporters of UBI on either side of the aisle.
Conservative lawmakers in places like Texas, South Dakota, and Iowa have moved to block basic income programs, with much of the opposition coming from fears of creeping “socialism.”
“For liberals, for example, a liberal hope and a conservative fear might be, people get this transfer, and then all of a sudden it transforms them into supporting much bigger redistribution, and we just don’t find that,” Broockman said.
Broockman said that many participants in the program would make comments like “Well, I used it well, but I think other people would waste it.”
One hope from conservatives would be that once people become more economically stable, they could become more economically conservative, but Broockman said the study results do not indicate that either.
Broockman said that a universal basic-income program like this “might not change politics or people’s political views per se” but that its apolitical nature could possibly “speak well to the political viability of a program like this.”
