Stockton UBI experiment

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Starting this year, an experimental program called the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) will pay $500 a month to a few hundred of the city’s low-income residents, no strings attached.

The idea behind universal basic income, or UBI, is to provide a degree of economic security for the most vulnerable people in a community. The goal is to counteract the destabilizing forces of globalization and technological innovation that has lead to job loss and wage stagnation for countless workers, according to CNBC.

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It’s no accident that much of the support for UBI comes from Silicon Valley, where the potential for mass unemployment is starker than most other places in the U.S. Major companies there are in neck-to-neck competition to create labor-saving technologies — such as self-driving cars — that will inevitably replace greater numbers of humans with automation and robots.

Stockton is a town already facing these problems — the city has been plagued by a lack of job opportunities, low wages and high housing prices as Silicon Valley exploded around it, replacing once attainable middle-class security with a job market that requires highly skilled workers and relies heavily on automation, according to KQED News

Quote: rxwine

No one is saying this will work, but if big tech companies are seeing this problem already happening, somebody has to start trying something.

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edit - somehow Stockholm got in the title : | --

Quote: Fleastiff

Recent major warehouse used robots to replace 90 percent of its workforce, so some of this stuff may be serious.

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Residents of Stockton, Calif., who received $500 a month from a first-of-its-kind guaranteed-income program were more likely to find full-time jobs, be happy and stay healthy, according to a year-long study published Wednesday.

Supporters of universal income programs — which provide regular, unconditional payments from the government to people — say the findings should dispel common criticisms of the idea, such as that money with no strings attached disincentivizes people to work or encourages them to spend it on drugs and alcohol.

Recipients of the monthly payments were twice as likely to gain full-time employment than others, according to data analysis by a pair of independent researchers, Stacia West of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Amy Castro Baker of the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the money distributed was spent on food or other essentials. Tobacco or alcohol made up less than 1 percent of tracked purchases.