by a string of scandals. SEED has relied on significant outside funding, as have several other L ast October, a fire tore through the apartment complex in Stockton, California, where Laura projects that Tubbs has pursued, including an education initiative that has been run on a twenty- Kidd-Plummer had lived for five years. Nearly a decade earlier, Kidd-Plummer, who will million-dollar private donation. Tubbs first encountered the concept of a universal basic income, turn seventy this year, had retired from her job in the wardrobe department at the Oakland or U.B.I., while he was an undergraduate at Stanford, in 2009, in a course that covered Martin Coliseum, where she had worked for twenty-one years. She eventually moved to Stockton in Luther King, Jr.,'s advocacy for the idea late in his life. The possibility of issuing unconditional search of cheaper rent. After the fire, she and her dog, Poopee, a Pomeranian-Yorkie mix, were left payments to a group of Stockton residents came up soon after Tubbs took office, in 2017, as a part homeless. Ever since, she told me, "I'm just trying to keep my head above water." She stayed in a of his staff's research project on addressing poverty. Twenty per cent of Stockton's residents fall motel for a couple of months, which was covered by insurance, and then with acquaintances. In below the poverty line, which is well above the state average, and residents of color are May, she moved into a loft in North Stockton. She was able to make the deposit on the apartment disproportionately affected. Still, Tubbs was initially skeptical-he worried about funding and using funds she has received as a participant in the Stockton Economic Empowerment thought that the idea could prove unpopular with voters. "This was my first time being elected," Demonstration, or SEED, a basic-income pilot program that has provided unconditional cash he told me. "I didn't want it to be my last." transfers of five hundred dollars per month to individuals over the last year and a half. Before SEED, Kidd-Plummer "had credit cards and had to use them to eat," she said, because she was only The plan started to take shape, though, when Tubbs met Natalie Foster, a co-chair of the eligible for sixteen dollars per month through food stamps. Now she's able to cover food. "I've Economic Security Project, a basic-income advocacy group launched with the Facebook co- always worked, so most programs I'm not eligible for," she told me. "I didn't expect to be chosen. founder Chris Hughes. The organization was looking for a city in which to test a pilot, and gave When I got the letter in the mail, I was floored." Stockton a million-dollar grant. (The program's extension will be funded separately, through a The program, spearheaded by Stockton's mayor, Michael Tubbs, was scheduled to end this private donation.) The funding allowed a hundred and twenty-five participants each to receive five * summer: this month's payment was slated to be the last. In late May, Tubbs announced that SEED hundred dollars a month, an amount that was based on data indicating that around forty per cent would be extended through January, 2021, in response to the economic strain put on participants of Americans can't afford a four-hundred-dollar emergency expense. A hundred recipients in the by the coronavirus pandemic. While the idea of extending the program had been under discussion program are anonymous, while the rest, including Kidd-Plummer, have volunteered to speak even before the spread of COVID-19, Tubbs told me that current conditions made doing so a publicly about their experience. The study set out to prove that a basic income could, according to "moral imperative," as many participants have lost work, and those classified as essential workers the research plan, "lead to reductions in monthly income volatility and provide greater income face increased risk. "CovIn-19 has put the focus on the fact that a lot of Americans live in constant sufficiency, which will in turn lead to reduced psychological stress and improved physical moments of economic disruption, because the fundamentals of the economy haven't been functioning." A random sample of residents in neighborhoods with populations that are at or working," he told me. below Stockton's median income level were contacted. Around forty-three per cent of those who Tubbs, who is twenty-nine, is Stockton's first Black mayor, and its youngest ever. After four years were chosen reported being employed either full or part time. Ten per cent of them are caregivers, serving on the city council, he ran for mayor on a platform focussed on recovery from the 2008 a group that often fails to qualify for unemployment and other benefits. Tubbs told me that he crash, and was elected, in 2016, with seventy per cent of the vote, defeating an incumbent plagued doesn't see a basic income as particularly radical but, instead, as "this generation's extension of the safety net," following in the path of things like Social Security, child-labor laws, weekends, and collective bargaining.expenses tracked or prefer to use cash, they can transfer the money off the card. Castro Baker and Mayor Michael Tubbs doesn't see a basic income as particularly radical but, instead, as "this generation's extension of the safety net. " Photograph by Jason Henry / NYT / Redux Martin-West have also been studying the well-being of people in a control group who did not receive payments. Members of both groups complete monthly check-ins, during which they provide updates and summarize their mental state by using emojis. During the study, the Two professors of social work, Amy Castro Baker, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Stacia researchers have released data on an online dashboard, where observers can read stories from Martin-West, of the University of Tennessee, who have conducted research together on the participants and see spending trends change over time. For example, during the pandemic, the gender and racial wealth gaps, were brought on to help design the pilot and evaluate the results. percentage of money that participants spent on food, consistently the largest category, reached Stockton, they told me, was an ideal location: as of 2018, it was the most diverse city in the nearly twenty-five per cent over the monthly average, while the amount spent on recreation country; many of its residents moved from more expensive parts of the Bay Area and continue to dropped to less than two per cent. commute into those cities for low-paying jobs; and it is, historically, the foreclosure capital of the Participants have also put the money toward rent, car payments, and paying off debt, as well as United States. In designing the logistics of the program, they emphasized "rethinking our safety one-off expenses for themselves or their children: dental surgery, a prom dress, football camp, and net with an anchor of justice and dignity," as Castro Baker put it, while addressing "inequality shoes. They've also been able to cut back on working second and third jobs; one participant, a predicated on racism and sexism." forty-eight-year-old mother of two who works full time at Tesla, was able to stop working as a delivery driver for DoorDash. Alcohol and tobacco have accounted for less than one per cent of Each month, participants receive payments on a debit card, which the researchers are able to track. spending per month. No restrictions are placed on what the money can be used for; if participants don't want their Since SEED was launched, the idea of a basic income, which has long been considered a fringe idea, has gained at least provisional support from the Pope, Jack Dorsey, and Nancy Pelosi. Andrew Yang made U.B.I. a centerpiece of his Presidential campaign. More recently, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which is estimated to have kept twelve million people from sinking into poverty, included direct cash payments to every American with an annual income below seventy-five thousand dollars, and there are currently eight bills in Congress proposing some form of additional cash transfer to back up the checks that have already gone out. In May, eighty-four members of Congress signed a joint letter asking that monthly direct payments be included in future relief bills as "the most efficient mechanism for delivering economic relief to those most at-risk in this crisis." Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford University, told me that the bipartisan support for the CARES Act marked a significant shift in thinking about cash transfers. Although both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon briefly considered forms of U.B.I.-Johnson as part of the War onPoverty, and Nixon as an element of the Family Assistance Plan-cash transfers have not, historically, been a widely popular political idea. Nixon's proposal, which failed to pass in the cent of Stockton residents were eligible to take part in SEED.) Though this model falls short of Senate, was criticized on the right for "rewarding wasteful behavior," as Burns put it, and on the universality, it would address a key failing in what's currently available. As Hoynes put it, "more left for endangering existing programs. Ultimately, the idea was adapted to become the Earned and more of the assistance that's provided in America is conditional, and, as is very evident right Income Tax Credit, a system of rebates for low-income Americans that has some similarities to a now, programs that are conditioned on work aren't helpful where work isn't plentiful." Burns told basic-income program but is conditioned on work. Recent calls for U.B.I. have mostly come from me that, even if discussion of U.B.I. drops off, its opponents "have had to at least engage with the Silicon Valley, where libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs embraced the concept as a quick fix for job idea, because it met so many of the needs of the crisis." losses due to increased automation. According to Burns, the current crisis has shifted the focus away from hypothetical disasters toward inequities that already exist. In her view, the automation argument is primarily a distraction, but "if worrying about A.I. helps people look around and think about what's already under way, that's good." The goal of SEED was always to promote the adoption of basic-income programs on a state or federal level, rather than to lay the groundwork for a long-term program in Stockton. Now, as the program moves into its final stretch, its creators have been flooded with requests for advice from pilot programs in development in other cities, including Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Newark, Nashville, and New Orleans. Last month, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution, led by Tubbs, that urges "cities, states, and the federal government to explore the feasibility of a guaranteed income" in response to the way in which "covIn-19 has shed light on economic insecurity and exposed the vulnerability of our current welfare system." Shenna Bellows, a state senator in Maine who is leading a study committee on U.B.I., told me that, in recent months, her constituents "have really struggled with the byzantine unemployment and small-business-relief programs," and she hopes "this crisis will point the way to simpler solutions." Tubbs believes that the potential for a federal cash-transfer program hinges, primarily, on political will. "This country has a history of finding ways to pay for things that we say matter," he told me. According to Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual cost of a truly universal federal-basic-income program in the U.S. would be around three trillion dollars, which is approximately three-fifths of current total federal expenditures. She believes that a more viable model could, at least initially, be structured like the CARES Act and SEED, with an income cutoff set considerably higher than those of current welfare programs. (Around eighty per