Y Combinator’s Basic Income Study, featuring Elizabeth Rhodes

What this episode covers

What’s the latest with the basic income study piloted by Y Combinator Research? Jim and Owen sat down with Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes to find out. Rhodes shares insights from the initial pilot in Oakland and the much larger upcoming experiment. Rhodes details the goals and methods of these exciting, important studies. —— Episode Transcript Owen: Hello, and welcome to the Basic Income Podcast! I’m Owen Poindexter. Jim: And I’m Jim Pugh. One of the biggest developments in the last few years in the basic income space was the announcement by Y Combinator Research that they were going to run a pilot on the topic of basic income, to actually better understand what it looks like for people to receive unconditional cash. This happened just about two years ago now, and it really helped to kick off the conversation around basic income in the United States. Owen: So, today, we’re very fortunate to have the person leading that effort at Y Combinator Research. So, welcome to the podcast, Elizabeth Rhodes. Elizabeth: Thanks. It’s great to be here. Owen: So, why don’t you start off by just telling us a little bit about your background as a researcher and how you came to Y Combinator Research? Elizabeth: When I first heard about the job posting I was finishing up my dissertation at the University of Michigan. My background is in social work and political science, and I have been involved in poverty research both as a social worker and in terms of policy on the political science side. I have worked a lot with the existing social safety net, both domestically and abroad, and pretty early in my graduate school time I did an independent study with a Professor and a colleague and we were sort of thinking outside the box on poverty, anti-poverty strategies, and we read, even it was actually Milton Friedman’s first discussion of the negative income tax. And, we sort of reconsidered what that might look like now. And that was my introduction to the topic. I had definitely not heard of the movement for universal basic income. It was more just a guaranteed minimum income in more of the negative income tax model. So, we had written a paper on that and calculated what it would cost to implement a negative income tax now at different levels and different marginal tax rates. So, I was really interested in the topic and then when I heard, someone forwarded around the political science department in Michigan, actually Sam Altman’s announcement that YC Research was looking to do a study and I jumped at the chance. It was no one else. And people would talk about the idea but no one else was really willing to take the risk and invest in this idea that is pushing the envelope I guess in a lot of ways. Jim: Now, Y Combinator Research and the basic income project in particular, is a pretty new thing for Y Combinator, which is a start-up accelerator. So, can you tell us a bit more? What was the motivation here? What were the intended outcomes? What were the goals of this effort? Elizabeth: So, Sam Altman who is the President of Y Combinator had, YC was established to promote innovation and a lot of that can happen in for-profit through start-ups, but there’s a lot of questions and societal level problems that shouldn’t be addressed. Either they shouldn’t, because no one company should develop this certain particular idea or have control of it, or they’re too long, they’re not suited for profit, and so that’s what gave him the original idea for YC Research. And, the first group within that was Open AI which is seeking to develop generalized artificial intelligence in an open source, not for profit environment. And I think he began to then think about what other types of questions like that do we want to

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