Guaranteed Basic Income and the Post-Pandemic Future
Photo by Sofia Rivera.
Since early 2020, municipal and national governments around the world have begun to implement creative policy solutions to address the ever-shifting economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. For some, this has meant experimenting with guaranteed income programs, an economic policy solution in which governments dole out no-strings-attached cash payments to specific parts of the population they deem most vulnerable.
Many countries are still tinkering: last September, in an effort to revive the Irish art scene, the Republic of Ireland announced a pilot program that would pay 2,000 Irish artists approximately €1,300 each, per month, for the next three years, as recommended by the Arts and Culture Recovery Task Force in 2020. The Irish government implemented the program in an effort to quell the economic instability for artists that was exacerbated by the pandemic; Chair of the Arts and Culture Recovery Task Force, Clare Duigan, said that she believed the program would “reduce the constant level of uncertainty and insecurity felt by many in the arts sector.”
While Ireland's program is one of few to focus on the arts (another being the Creatives Rebuild New York program), the country is not alone in its creative experimentation with short-term income plans that came about following the pandemic. According to the Stanford Basic Income Lab’s Experiments Map, public and private organizations worldwide have implemented 95 guaranteed income pilot programs since February 2020. With this many programs underway, it is worth considering what guaranteed income will look like in a post-pandemic world; as politicians and public opinion move past the pressing financial concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the innovation behind these projects could end with their expiration dates. In order to keep them alive, it is crucial for communities to come together and continue to advocate for guaranteed income in the years to come.
One of the advantages of the guaranteed income model is its adaptability: it differs from universal basic income (UBI), a policy by which all members of a community are paid a no-strings-attached stipend, with little or no prequalifications (UBI played a significant role in Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign, wherein he proposed a Freedom Dividend that would give every American over 18 $1,000/month). Guaranteed income, on the other hand, provides stipends to specific groups of the population and is therefore able to better target a community’s needs, according to policymakers' identifications.
It is critical to note the diversity of guaranteed income pilot programs worldwide today: they vary not only in their selection of target recipients, but also in their sources of funding, frequency of payment, scales of projects, and more. However, all programs are united in their goal of providing assured financial support to the groups outlined in their mandates.
In Germany, for example, the recently-implemented Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen selected 122 adults from a pool of 1,500 applicants to receive €1,200 per month for three years. The project—the first of its kind in Germany—was launched in 2021 by the German Institute for Economic Research and the non-profit association, My Basic Income, to research how guaranteed income affects emotional and psychological well-being. Compared with the Irish artists program, Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen is unique in that it is privately funded and specifically designed to track social and emotional consequences of guaranteed income on its recipients. While the nonprofit existed before 2020, the pandemic served as a catalyst for guaranteed income research, and the results of this experiment could have major effects on how psychologists and economic experts understand the benefits of these policies.
Several guaranteed income programs have cropped up in the United States since the early days of the pandemic as well, but mainly at the municipal level. Some U.S.-based pilot programs, like the Shreveport Guaranteed Income Program, have already concluded and now promise to guide future policy-making. From March 2022 to March 2023, nearly $8,000 was paid directly to 110 randomly selected single parents in Shreveport with an income below 120% of the federal poverty level. The city mayor, Adrian Perkins, led the design of the program with assistance from the Office of Community Development, United Way of Northwest Louisiana, Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, Shreveport Public Assembly & Recreation, and others. Now, researchers will analyze the data collected from participants, including recipients and a control group, to determine how to optimize these projects to best serve the broader community.
Despite such positive messaging and the ostensibly widespread support guaranteed income pilot programs have enjoyed around the world, it is true that the pilot scheme is just that: a pilot. The potential for the continued use of these programs seems possible, but the path forward remains unclear. With war and economic downturn dominating the press circuit, public opinion and political priorities have shifted away from pandemic relief in recent months. But the question remains: why did organizations who funded these experiments put such short-term parameters on them? By emphasizing these pandemic-oriented programs as pilots with built-in expiration dates, they point to the ephemerality inherent in this pandemic-era movement.
To be sure, guaranteed income as a concept is not a new phenomenon: in the 20th and 21st centuries, the world saw approximately 66 such programs implemented globally. India, Iran, and South Korea, among others, were experimenting with guaranteed income programs long before the pandemic, but only a handful of the projects still exist today.
One such historic guaranteed income program, Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, is a system that has been in place since 1982 and uses the state’s invested mineral royalties to pay Alaskan residents a fixed annual income (experts disagree on whether or not this qualifies as a universal basic income model). Although that amount has significantly decreased due to plunging oil prices, the state is committed to providing all residents this income. In Brazil, the Maricá Basic Income program has been running since 2015, distributing unconditional monthly cash payments to the 42,000 citizens of Maricá, a city on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Like the Alaskan system, the program is funded by oil revenues, and in Maricá the amount has increased since 2015, primarily in an effort to ease financial concerns brought on by the pandemic.
While these two programs have been successful, the fact that there are only a handful of long-running guaranteed income programs points to the lack of public support or awareness around the importance of the policy and its benefits.
Some initiatives, however, inspire hope for the post-pandemic future: Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), founded in June 2020 by Mayor Michael D. Tubbs of Stockton, California, is a network of American mayors committed to guaranteed income policies, and has been a leading resource for guaranteed income policy-making in the United States. From Shreveport, Louisiana, to St. Paul, Minnesota, mayors are promising to utilize what MGI calls “Our New Deal Moment” to expand these programs beyond simple pandemic recovery.
It is difficult to say what the post-pandemic future will hold for guaranteed income programs. If anything, their distribution in the United States demonstrates how progressive income policy is hyper-localized and, thus, unlikely to be implemented on national or statewide levels. As we wait for this recent slew of guaranteed income experiments to conclude, we will see whether or not the policies become commonplace in our increasingly globalized society. With groups like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, we have reason to believe they will stay in place, but if we fail to keep guaranteed income at the forefront and celebrate its successes, it is likely that the over 100 pilots will be relegated to a COVID-era blip on the timeline of economic innovation.
Sofia Rivera is a senior in Columbia College studying History with a specialization in 20th century foreign relations. She joined CPR as a Policy 360 writer in 2022, and has covered topics such as the Ukraine War, Saudi Arabian energy policy, and Chinese-Cuban affairs.