Guaranteed Income Is Not UBI

In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King, Jr. called for direct cash as a solution to poverty. He wanted to guarantee that every person had sufficient income to ensure not only basic subsistence, but a certain standard of dignity. His anti-poverty goal was universal. The guarantee applied to everyone.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Martin Luther King, Jr. | Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967, 171)

Importantly, however, MLK did not advocate for a Universal Basic Income that would distribute the same amount of cash to each person. Nevertheless, some believe that a UBI is the most effective way to achieve MLK’s goal of an income guarantee while others believe that a targeted approach is more appropriate. In recent years, the term Guaranteed Income has come to be associated with the latter—targeting cash payments to those who need them most.

While Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a regular cash payment to all members of a community, guaranteed income could be targeted or universal, but focuses on specific individuals within a community, ensuring that those with the greatest need are prioritized for assistance. Targeting can be less costly and more efficient at reaching particular groups.

Guaranteed Income: A Primer for Funders | Economic Security Project (2022, 5)

The Economic Security Project (ESP) is an American nonprofit organization exploring, among other things, the question of how best to provide social assistance to those the economy leaves behind. This is an important problem. ESP is doing important work.

In considering whether a targeted or universal approach is more effective for cash assistance, the debate between Guaranteed Income and UBI is far from settled.

Personally, even as a die-hard supporter of Universal Basic Income, I am not convinced that UBI is necessarily a better approach to social assistance or social protection than something more targeted.

However, effectiveness in social assistance is the wrong criterion against which to evaluate UBI. If we think of UBI as a mere safety net that catches people who, for whatever reason, fail to thrive in the economy, we blind ourselves to UBI’s true radical potential.

We can rescue people who would otherwise be left behind by the system, or we can fix the system. Both goals are important, but the appropriate policy approach for each might differ.

UBI addresses an infrastructural failure embedded deep within our economic system. We have organized our economy—and society—around the principle that people are fundamentally workers. We expect people to earn their money through jobs, and we try to force our reality to match this expectation. We use economic policy to push money out to consumers through the financial sector and the labor market. This is a dysfunctional approach to money distribution.

If our moral framework dictates that people’s status as workers is what allows them to deserve dignity and money, then that’s a problem. If our economic theory assumes that people are workers, then that’s a problem, too. These labor-centric paradigms leave no room for a world where we can free people from toil by lessening society’s need for labor. Instead, we fear losing our precious jobs to AI.

But technological unemployment never seems to kick in—at least, not at the level of the economy as a whole.

[W]hat everyone feels to have been a technological revolution, a drastic change in our productive lives, has been accompanied everywhere, including Japan, by a slowing down of productivity growth, not by a step up. You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Robert M. Solow | “We’d better watch out,” New York Times Book Review (1987)

This shouldn’t be surprising, but it somehow is. Economists call it the “productivity paradox” or the “Solow paradox.” But what else should we expect when we stimulate the market to try to generate the jobs people “need”? Not only does this approach hamstring productivity, but it also causes overemployment, poverty, oppression, inequality, dehumanization, resource waste, and financial instability—fueling a cycle of booms and recessions.

Should we maintain and improve the existing social safety net so that it better catches people who fall through the cracks of our broken economic system? Absolutely, we should. I’m glad there are people who are working on this project, and a Guaranteed Income might be a useful improvement. If there are folks we can help right now without having to do anything revolutionary, why not help them?

Should we also fix the underlying problem? Again, yes. That’s what UBI is for. UBI might be more politically challenging than Guaranteed Income, but we shouldn’t stop with what’s convenient.

It’s worth considering whether Guaranteed Income proponents and UBI proponents alike might benefit from disentangling the narratives surrounding their respective policy goals. It’s also worth considering whether the subject of UBI even belongs in a conversation about how best to implement safety nets, social assistance, and welfare programs.

Treating the symptoms of a broken system is a far different project from radically restructuring the system itself.