The Underwhelming Results of Universal Basic Income

What if we could end poverty by just … giving people the money necessary to lift them out of it?

That idea has had bipartisan appeal in recent years. But, as our new video explains, a recent experiment showed … it doesn’t quite work out as planned.

The concept is known as Universal Basic Income (UBI). And studying it is hard to do because it’s staggeringly expensive: The cost of UBI has been estimated as roughly 10% of the country’s GDP.

Which is why it was news when the results of an unusually large UBI experiment were released in 2024.

Researchers took 3,000 young, low-income Americans and split them randomly into two groups: They gave 2/3 of them $50 a month and the other 1/3 $1,000 a month, then tracked the results for three years.

As the researchers hoped, the experiment revealed differences between the groups … just not the ones they expected.

The households that received $1,000 a month actually ended up with $3,000-4,000 less each year than those receiving just $50. How? Well, not only were they working less, but they were also spending virtually all the money — and racking up more debt.

The study found some positive results — recipients felt more financially secure, were more likely to move, etc. — but nothing close to a cure for poverty.

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