If you take a nighttime stroll through the downtown district in any major U.S. city – and certainly in my hometown of Baltimore – you’ll find people sleeping on the streets. Advocates talk about “the homeless mentally ill,” and it’s estimated that a quarter of homeless persons suffer from psychiatric conditions. As psychiatrists, it’s good that we care about the homeless mentally ill. As human beings, shouldn’t we also care about the addicted and indigent homeless? In a country of wealth, it continues to be a disgrace that we have people who live in tent encampments, or who literally sleep on the ground in public places with all their belongings gathered around them.
Dr. Dinah Miller
With 25 contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Andrew Yang has caught my attention with his platform for a universal basic income (UBI), or “freedom dividend,” for all adults. Mr. Yang’s premise is a simple one: He’d like to give every person over the age of 18 a $1,000-a-month government-supplied income, funded by a new Value Added Tax (VAT), with no stipulations. I find the concept intriguing. It is the one suggestion that might make a drastic dent in extreme poverty in our country. In theory, every adult would have enough money to afford a place to sleep.
Paul Nestadt, MD, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, agrees with the concept of a universal basic income. “The UBI seems like a humane and egalitarian way to eliminate starvation; it provides a ‘floor’ for poverty. It is a reasonable bare minimum, especially for our patients with serious mental illness who struggle to navigate the bureaucratic steeplechase required to have their basic needs met.” Dr. Nestadt believes that some of the other presidential candidates are supporting policies that would also accomplish this goal.
Marc Nozell/2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Andrew Yang speaking in Manchester, N.H. on January 11, 2019.
So who is Andrew Yang? With no political experience, he bills himself as a technology entrepreneur who started a national education company, then went on to found Venture for America, an organization designed to create jobs. During the first round of Democratic debates, few questions were directed to him, and he was the lone gentleman on the stage without a tie. In addition to the UBI, he supports Medicare-for-all and “human-centered capitalism.” His slogan is “Humanity First,” and his website includes policy statements on a vast number of topics: everything from robocalls to wildfires to free marital counseling for all. His supporters call themselves the Yang Gang, and as of this writing, he polls at number 8 – with just 2% of the projected vote – among the 25 Democratic candidates.
While I find the prospect of a universal basic income appealing from the perspective of making a dent in extreme poverty, this is not the demographic Mr. Yang is targeting. His platform is based on the prediction that automation will continue to eliminate jobs at a rate that will devastate our people and our economy. In his book, The War on Normal People (Hachette Book Group, 2018), Yang writes about the UBI: “It’s simple, it’s fair, it’s equitable, it’s easy to understand, it benefits at least 80 percent of the population, and it will be necessary to maintain the fabric of society during the automation wave.” Mr. Yang contends that at least one-third of Americans are at risk of losing their jobs to automation.
It’s difficult to imagine that it would not be helpful to everyone’s mental health – not just those individuals with psychiatric disorders – to be freed from the worry of earning enough money to survive. While our welfare, disability, and Medicaid systems provide a safety net to many Americans, they certainly don’t cover everyone, and they engender a sense of unfairness and anger. Our current system allows that some people work hard and struggle to meet their basic needs and pay medical bills while others – usually the disabled or the poor – receive government benefits and Medicaid and/or Medicare.
In the “Making Sense” podcast hosted by Sam Harris, “A conversation with Andrew Yang,” Mr. Yang made the point that a UBI is not a new concept – economists and politicians, including Richard Nixon, have supported the idea since the 1960s. A bill proposing a basic income passed in the House of Representatives in 1971 but did not pass in the Senate. In the podcast, Mr. Yang addresses the question of whether people are responsible for their own success, and whether, as Mr. Harris puts it, “it’s just simply wrong to hand out money to people.”
“It’s not as if the truck drivers are about to get dumber and lazier overnight,” Mr. Yang responded. “It’s just that their trucks are going to start driving themselves ... it has nothing to do with their character and work ethic.” He goes on to discuss how workers who lose jobs often leave the workforce and many go on disability.
“Right now, the country’s locked in a struggle between functioning and dysfunction, between reason and unreason, and scarcity and abundance, and scarcity is winning and that’s what we have to reverse through universal basic income; it’s our best way forward.”
If we are optimistic that our government could afford to provide everyone with both a UBI and a universal health plan, such as Medicare-for-all, I still wonder if there might be a societal downside. For self-motivated individuals, a sustenance allowance is unlikely to weaken a drive to achieve. But might there be people who decide they can live on this income, who choose instead to pursue leisure activities rather than pursue education and vocation? Mr. Harris asked Mr. Yang if we would be “subsidizing all the people in their mothers’ basement playing video games.”
Mr. Yang responded, “If you’re getting a thousand dollars a month, then you’re much more likely to get out of your parents’ basement and visit friends and find things to do that are somewhat more social and external-facing. A lot of the reason a lot of these men are retreating is because there’s no real economic security or path forward for them, and they feel much better served by going online and hanging out with their friends and making measurable progress in their gaming environment.”
I like to think that an automatic income would not crush a society’s motivation and productivity, and that money provided to people would fuel education, our economy, an ability to save, and entrepreneurial endeavors, but the truth is that we just don’t know. I would love to see such an experiment done as a large-scale pilot, with the ability to undo the experiment if it fails.
Andrew Yang remains a long shot as the Democratic presidential nominee. His platform, however, is enticing, and he takes on the imminent automation crisis in a way that no one else is actively addressing. His concepts include a degree of humanity that feels welcome when our current president is tweeting that those who are unhappy here should leave. While Mr. Yang is a bit lost in the fray, I do hope his innovative spirit gains some traction.
Dr. Miller is the coauthor with Annette Hanson, MD, of “Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) and has a private practice in Baltimore.