For years, boldface Silicon Valley names have poured money into one weird trick to hack poverty: just giving people money. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes have each spent millions on universal basic income (UBI) pilot projects. Others, like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, remain intrigued by the idea that universal cash payments can counteract the risk of artificial intelligence supplanting, or even replacing, human work.
But that future seems speculative, and so do the dreams of UBI evangelists. The evidence that free cash leads to better outcomes can generously be described as mixed. Less generously, it’s akin to asking the same question over and over again and hoping in vain for a different answer.
The UBI industrial complex (might we call it Universal Basic Universal Basic Income Research?) consists of deep-pocketed foundations, academic centers, and advocacy groups who make unconditional cash transfers a central plank of their anti-poverty agenda. According to the Stanford Basic Income Map, there have been 163 UBI research projects conducted within the U.S., with 41 ongoing. California alone has 16 active UBI experiments.
A cottage industry has sprung up including Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, the Economic Security Project, and Fund for Humanity, all replete with bold promises, sleek websites, and a keen sense for what makes journalists and philanthropists tick. As the San Francisco Standard reported, the tech capital of the world has adopted funding UBI pilots as the cost of doing business, with at least 10,000 Bay Area residents receiving cash from a tech-funded research project. “Between 2019 and 2025,” the outlet reported, “more than $65 million in public funding, as well as donations from Google, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Omidyar Network, and others, has flowed into UBI pilot programs in the [San Francisco] region.”
But the evidence continues to pile up, and it doesn’t match the claims. In the latest example, two new working papers have found UBI experiments had little to no measurable impact on recipients. How many more roads must a man walk down before he can declare the “just give people money” approach to ending poverty in the United States a dead end?
Conservatives, Evidence Collide
UBI has long held a certain horseshoe appeal on the progressive Left and the libertarian Right—both of which are overrepresented in Silicon Valley. The American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray, who is closely associated with the idea, views cash payments to individuals as an extension of Milton Freidman’s “negative income tax” idea, and as a potential replacement for the archipelago of existing social safety net programs.
On the Left, UBI proponents tend to see cash payments as additive to current anti-poverty programs, reducing poverty rates without the paternalism of traditional welfare. Journalist Annie Lowrey gave what may be the most eloquent expression of this view in her 2018 book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, which argues that UBI has the “potential to solve some of our most intractable economic problems.”
It was just those cruel, heartless conservatives who opposed UBI, because who else could stand against giving poor people money? But, as it turns out, conservative principles and research evidence increasingly jibe: handing out checks does not help people get out of poverty.
Unconditional cash experiments have failed to move the needle for nearly half a century. Take SIME and DIME, the Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments pilots of the 1970s. At the time, they were novel, groundbreaking efforts to test the potential of guaranteed income.
Yet the findings then were not dissimilar to what we’re seeing now: negligible impacts on labor force participation, little evidence of change in children’s outcomes, and no real argument that benefits from cash outperformed in-kind benefits like health care assistance. To some, like The Argument’s Kelsey Piper, this news has come as an unwelcome shock.
It’s not that these projects make participants’ lives worse, as the more aggressive conservatives claim. (Six states have passed legislation preemptively banning universal basic income pilot programs, which seems like a stretch—if tech billionaires want to waste their money by handing it out for little return, why stop them?) It’s simply that after billions of dollars in funding, the lack of positive outcomes should convince funders and policymakers alike to give it a rest.
When an initial paper from the “Baby’s First Years” project found that UBI might lead to higher brain wave function for infants, the finding was praised in the New York Times as evidence that “cash aid to parents helps their children’s brains develop in a way that helps them for a lifetime.” Yet in the most recent wave of findings, that early promise faded away.
The results broadly accord with what conservatives have long held: that the barriers keeping low-income people in poverty require deeper solutions than a check can provide. As AEI’s Michael Strain told the Times, poor families face problems ranging from bad schools to violent neighborhoods to a shortage of role models. “Can $300 a month address that?” Strain said. “I don’t know why it would.”
And indeed, four years of $333-per-month payments led to almost no evidence that children whose families received the benefit were any better off than those who didn’t. Another effort, the OpenResearch Unconditional income Study (ORUS), measured the impact of giving low-income households $1,000 per month for three years. It, too, struggled to find any meaningful long-term improvement.
The paper’s main positive finding was a self-reported, 0.05-standard-deviation increase in parenting quality, largely driven by closer supervision of older children and less use of corporal punishment. Parents also reported short-term boosts in stress levels and mental health—but those improvements faded out before the end of the study.
The payments didn’t reduce rates of food insecurity, chaotic home environments, or the risk of homelessness. Work decisions didn’t change much, though single parents with a job worked about 2.5 hours less per week and were slightly less likely to work overall (though not to a statistically significant degree). Parents weren’t more likely to find non-parental child care, and the payments didn’t change pregnancy intentions or birth rates. Among kids, there were no improvements in behavioral outcomes, K-12 attendance, school discipline, academic performance, test scores, or college enrollment.
In short, there was no positive movement in any area that you might expect to be improved by an extra $12,000 a year. Sure, with some squinting you could salvage a story that the payments weren’t a total wash. Okay, so maybe the impact on kids’ behavior was slightly negative, but perhaps that was because their parents were home more often and more likely to notice outbursts. Perhaps. But the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it benefits came at a high financial cost. If $1,000 per month for 36 months doesn’t make a modest dent in persistent social problems, will some of the “just give people money” boosters admit that UBI’s utility is limited?
Work Matters
UBI also undercuts the broader case for family economic support in the tax code; namely that families provide important work by raising the next generation. The Child Tax Credit and other conservative ideas recognize that parents bear burdens that non-parents don’t, and so they deserve some insulation from the market economy.
It’s no accident that Republicans expanded the Child Tax Credit in 2003, 2017, and 2025, with further expansion a live discussion on the Right. The policy challenge of buttressing families must be squared with the importance of work, particularly for low-income households—thus the conservative preference for phase-ins and earnings requirements rather than universal cash.
This is the crucial difference between the progressive and conservative perspectives. Conservatives want to support families, not because they think money in and of itself will solve the deep challenges of poverty, but because they believe in affirming and strengthening the institution of the family. As the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of having children go up, the state should step in to help shoulder that load. Work requirements and income phase-ins encourage engagement with society rather than withdrawal. Progressives, on the other hand, often frame UBI as liberation from work, untethering human flourishing from labor market participation.
Another key difference between the Left and the Right is the unit of analysis. When you view poverty as a purely individual phenomenon, as socialist think-tanker Matt Bruenig does, you find a high prevalence of non-working individuals in low-income households because children, the elderly, and the disabled, by and large, do not work. Conservatives don’t evaluate each child as an individual unit—they are concerned with the family as a whole.
As an accounting exercise, we could reduce the share of families who are in poverty by writing them a check. That is why Lowrey says UBI experiments should continue. “The point of giving people money right now,” she wrote in The Atlantic, “is to get them out of poverty.”
But, as these research papers underscore, being counted as officially “in poverty” or not doesn’t tell you much about the lives of those children and families. If a universal child benefit were passed tomorrow, but everything else about low-income households stayed the same—the same schools, the same streets, the same economic opportunities—the studies indicate that we wouldn’t see long-term improvement. Cash transfers that move families just above the poverty line might make spreadsheets look better, but they won’t do anything to address the substantive barriers trapping people in poverty.
What Works, What Doesn’t
Appropriate credit is due to the UBI funders who baked in research evaluation into their pilots. Knowing what doesn’t work can be just as valuable as knowing what does. But the lasting legacy of Universal Basic Universal Basic Income Research may be that policies must take human nature, and the challenges of addressing it, seriously.
You need good schools that teach phonics, build character, and equip teenagers with skills for today’s job market. You need safe streets, with police that address quality-of-life crimes and solve murders. You need strong towns with businesses that invest in their workers, and you need sound monetary policy that gives low-wage workers the chance to boost their wages. Sometimes, that means calling out dysfunction and being unafraid to name things that don’t work.
But that’s preachy. It even sounds, well, conservative. Instead, the UBI boomlet was an experiment in letting compassion short-circuit analysis of what it means to sever income from work and what it takes to fundamentally solve the problems associated with poverty. That’s not to say that direct cash assistance can’t help people in developing countries, or provide a flexible source of assistance in certain discrete cases. But it is to say that after a decade of tech-funded research aiming to “hack” poverty in the U.S., we can now, officially, move on.
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