Could a no-strings-attached cash transfer program—which provides financially struggling adults with a guaranteed basic income for a period of time—actually help to fight poverty? In recent years, the concept of distributing unconditional cash to low-income households has garnered praise from politicians and tech titans, and more than 100 cities and counties nationwide have instituted variations of a basic income program during the past five years. Some advocates, most famously former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, have called for a more extensive version of this practice in the form of a universal basic income (UBI), a taxpayer-funded program that would provide cash transfers to all adults for longer durations regardless of employment status.
The notion of a basic income has long been of interest to Professor of Law Daniel Hemel, whose scholarship has examined issues of wealth redistribution in a wide range of areas, including tax policy, pharmaceutical pricing, and motor vehicle registration. In 2020, he and University of San Diego School of Law Professor Miranda Perry Fleischer co-authored “The Architecture of a Basic Income” in the University of Chicago Law Review. The article traces the origins of the concept of a basic income and explores the mechanics of putting a basic income into practice. In Spring 2025, Hemel is co-teaching a new course, Basic Income Lab Seminar, with Adjunct Professor of Law Sarah Blanton, in which students will work on implementing a cash transfer program of their own.
In this Q&A, Hemel assesses the current state of basic income programs, considers what critics get right and wrong about UBI, and shares what he hopes that his upcoming course will accomplish.
What sparked your interest in guaranteed basic income?
I’ve been interested in basic income since high school. I read Milton Friedman when my dad, who was quite economically conservative, recommended one of his books [Capitalism and Freedom] to me. I read it and disagreed with most of it. Friedman is a libertarian economist. I am not myself a libertarian. But Friedman had the idea of a negative income tax, which is approximately the same thing as a basic income. I was intrigued by this aspect of his thinking. And then I read more and more about [basic income] and gained a deeper understanding of its roots dating back to 18th century political philosophy and its history in the United States, including support from Martin Luther King. And as a tax professor today, I spend a lot of time teaching students about the subject of redistribution. So I’ve been interested in it for a while.
Has your view of UBI changed over the years?
The first thing I ever wrote on basic income was a book review for The New Rambler. The title was “Bringing The Basic Income Back to Earth.” And my argument was that supporters of a UBI were making outlandishly optimistic claims about what a UBI could do, and this was potentially setting UBI up for failure. I don’t think that view has changed in the last eight years.
The results from basic income trials that have come out over the course of the last few months are somewhat hard to reconcile. There was a national experiment funded by [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman that didn’t find huge positive outcomes from providing a basic income. And there was also an experiment in Chelsea, Massachusetts that found really positive health outcomes, including a huge drop in emergency room admissions among families receiving a basic income. I think that underscores the need for more research, because we don’t really understand why these different programs are showing different results. One potential hypothesis is that the Chelsea program was focused on a much lower income population than the Sam Altman experiment.
One of the takeaways of the University of Chicago Law Review piece that I wrote with Miranda Fleischer is that with any large-scale basic income program, the devil’s really in the details. There can be iterations of a UBI that I would think of as really great. And there are also iterations of it that I would think of as terrible for the interests of the very people who it attempts to help. And that really depends upon issues such as which programs get replaced in order to finance the universal basic income. How are kids counted in calculating the UBI? The answers and the details can define whether a program is hugely beneficial or harmful.
In calling for a UBI, or the need to expand basic income programs, advocates have raised the prospect of massive AI-fueled job losses in the future. What’s your view?
It’s worth noting that when libertarians talk about a basic income, and when progressives talk about a basic income, they’re not necessarily talking about the same thing. For libertarians, a basic income is framed as a replacement for the welfare state. For progressives, a basic income is often framed as an addition to the welfare state. So what might superficially seem like a consensus can sometimes mask what’s really a deep division.
Now I do think that it’s true that one reason why people are talking about basic income today is because of AI. Since my first writings on a UBI, I’ve said that the argument that we need a basic income because the robots are coming to take our jobs strikes me as unpersuasive. The emphasis on AI and robotics is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s helpful to get people to focus on the centuries-old idea of basic income. Thomas Paine talked about basic income. Thomas Moore talked about basic income. Martin Luther King talked about basic income. On the other hand, the other edge of the sword that focuses on robots and AI as a motivation for a UBI is complicating the case that proponents of cash transfers on liberal grounds want to make, [which] could be a very simple argument about what is fair.
This spring you will be teaching a seminar in which students will work on implementing a basic income program. Tell us more.
We’re testing the efficacy of cash transfers over a limited time. The students are going to need to build from the ground up the infrastructure to do that. I taught a version of this class as a visiting professor at Yale in Spring 2024. There the students found a nonprofit that manages the homeless shelter waitlist in New Haven, and they decided to focus on families that are on the waitlist.
My co-teacher for the Spring 2025 semester class is Sarah Blanton ’07. She runs an organization called 4-CT, which is Connecticut-based. It specializes in designing and implementing cash transfer programs. The structure of the seminar is there’s a pot of money that will be allocated to the students from 4-CT to distribute to recipients. They have to decide who gets it and what the criteria will be, based on data they will collect. My guess is that students will settle upon something like 25 recipients. Whether it’s something like six months, the students will have to decide for themselves how long the payments last for.
Our goal is to have this be in close proximity to NYU Law. And so it will likely be families on the Lower East Side or in Chinatown. And I’ll suggest to students that they partner with a local nonprofit that provides services to families that meet the criteria that they establish. So it won’t be the students just starting from scratch and finding families on the street, but working with a partner in the community.
I think from a pedagogical perspective, having students construct a small-scale basic income program will pay huge educational dividends, in addition to benefitting the families who become beneficiaries of that program. In my classes, we spend a lot of time talking about tax. We spend less time talking about transfers. I thought it would integrate well into a tax curriculum to compel students to make distributional decisions.
You have written that basic income “enhances individual autonomy, freedom and dignity.” Can you elaborate on this theme?
One of the programs that [4-CT] runs provides $500 a month over 12 months to individuals who have been recently released from prison in Connecticut. I’ve talked to a bunch of beneficiaries of this program. And they describe a feeling of dignity arising from the trust that the program places in them after being told everything they need to do over the course of their day. One of the terrible things that poverty does to people is that it takes away their freedom of choice. Even when they’re receiving services in the form of food stamps, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters, they’re not getting to decide how to allocate resources. The government or social service agencies decide for them. And so, implicit in the idea of a basic income is the premise that you, the recipient, can determine your own path.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Posted January 31, 2025