Michael Tubbs: Upsetting the Setup: Creating a California for All

Governance moves slow. The work of the politician and the public servant ought to inherently be one of long-term thinking — of taking in concerns both urgent and longstanding and crafting solutions to them that will live on beyond any official’s term of office. As Mayor of Stockton, California, Special Advisor for Economic Mobility to California Governor Gavin Newsom, and founder of End Poverty in California, Michael Tubbs has taken on some of the deepest problems in the public sphere. In his Long Now Talk, he focused on one of the most long-standing of all issues in human society: poverty. To Tubbs, who grew up in poverty in Stockton and witnessed its consequences first-hand, poverty is not just an ill for its immediate negative effects but how it shapes one’s perceptions. When you’re living under the deprivation of poverty, it’s harder to think about the long-term future. You are faced with an array of short-term demands on your resources: not just your financial resources, but also your mental ones. It is an “incredible privilege,” Tubbs noted, “to have the space, to have the time, to have the mental capacity to think about the future.” Tubbs’ solution — both in his talk and in his time as mayor and advocate — is to start by providing the direct, near-term aid to those pressing problems in the form of cash: a Universal Basic Income. Tubbs pointed to the positive results from UBI trial runs both in Stockton and cities across the country, showing how lifting people out of extreme scarcity allowed them to start thinking about the future. In his remarks, Tubbs was realistic about the depth of the challenge of fighting poverty. No one policy proposal can fully solve a problem that, he said, was built into the “setup” of this country. Yet his tone throughout was one of deep optimism, invoking what he called the “prophetic” power of long-term thinking and calling on all of us to take an active role in planning for the future. Once we are all committed to creating a brighter tomorrow, the slow work of governance can succeed.