What are the effects when you give $1,000 a month in unconditional cash transfers to low-income Americans for three years? Our guests this week studied the behavioral and political outcomes of this in a 3,000-person study. Elizabeth Rhodes is the research director for the Unconditional Cash Study at OpenResearch, a nonprofit research lab founded by OpenAI founder Sam Altman. David Broockman is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and worked as the principal investigator supporting the unconditional cash study. Together, they co-authored, along with others, a paper: “The Causal Effects of Income on Political Attitudes and Behavior: A Randomized Field Experiment.” Rhodes and Broockman join WITHpod to discuss some of the most surprising finds, why receiving cash overwhelmingly didn’t change people’s political leanings, how the money changed people’s attitudes about work and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Elizabeth Rhodes: We asked people what policies would be most helpful to them and we rank ordered them. And cash was up there, but it wasn’t one of the top few, but it was all things about like making other things affordable, like making healthcare affordable, making education affordable, bringing down the cost of housing. They wanted to be able to make it on their own. Like people fundamentally want to be able to make their ends meet. They don’t want a handout and they want to be able to make it on their own.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” With me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, I think like a lot of people, I’ve been voraciously consuming all sorts of articles, reporting, data, polling, takes, as I process the election. One of the questions I keep coming back to and I think has kind of become a kind of central fixation for me, is just how much material conditions matter. Basically to sort of simplify, like, is it the case that there’s a fairly simple story to tell about the last few years, which is that particularly from basically the spring of 2021, which was like after three different rounds of COVID stimulus and checks and before inflation took over, people were at essentially an all time high in personal disposable income. And then they just plummeted in real terms after that in the combination of the cessation of checks and the rise of inflation. So people just got poorer in real terms over the course of basically 2021 and 2023.
And then the trend kind of reversed, inflation started to subside, wages caught up, the economy grew and people were sort of back on the pre-COVID trend, but the experience they’d had was this sort of experience of falling in a just clear dollars and cents, material sense. And that basically explains people saying the economy sucked and voting for change. So that’s one story.
There’s another story where if you aggregate together all the macroeconomic variables and you align them with consumer sentiment, you find that they diverge in a way that they haven’t diverged in the past, which is to say the same basket of macroeconomic variables that did a pretty good job of predicting consumer sentiment going back decades, doesn’t do a very good job starting around when Joe Biden’s elected.
So then there’s a question of like, well, how much of this is just ideological? How much of it is people’s media environments and the information environment? How much of it is just that people’s politics aren’t formed really by their material conditions and that there’s a kind of vestigial left Marxist sense going all the way back to the 19th century, that that’s like how politics should work, but it just doesn’t work that way. People have all kinds of competing political commitments that come from all kinds of places and their material conditions are not really determinative or even maybe that important.
And I think there’s evidence on both sides of these accounts. And I don’t know why I’m obsessing over this question, but it does seem important to me. And so it was in this context that I came upon a really interesting paper. It’s called “The Causal Effects of Income on Political Attitudes and Behavior, a Randomized Field Experiment.” I’ll give a longer version in the conversation, but basically a large experiment in which people were given unconditional cash transfers, that’s $1,000 a month. And this is part of a larger study about what happens when you have a randomized controlled trial for unconditional cash transfers. This is a topic that has been very much front and center in a lot of policy conversations. We did an entire podcast around a randomized controls trial that happened with unhoused people in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada with that study’s author about what happens when you give unhoused people unconditional cash transfers.
The short version is it’s a lot easier to get housing. Shocker.
But this to me was really interesting because this one paper seemed like an attempt at a experimental, rigorous, and systematic test of some of the things that I’ve been noodling on about how much material conditions affect people’s political outlooks. And so I thought it’d be great to get the two authors on this study to talk about this and also the broader questions around universal basic income and unconditional cash transfers.
So Elizabeth Rhodes is the research director for the Unconditional Cash Study at Open Research. David Broockman is an associate professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley. He’s the principal investigator supporting the Unconditional Cash Study and co-author of “The Causal Effects of Income on Political Attitudes and Behavior, a Randomized Field Experiment.”
Elizabeth and David, welcome to the program.
David Broockman: Thanks for having us.
Elizabeth Rhodes: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Maybe, Elizabeth, can you just tell us about what Open Research is and what the study is? Because I know the paper that caught my eye is one offshoot of a larger research project, which makes sense. If you’re putting the amount of time and energy you’re putting into this huge thing, you want to sort of spin off a bunch of different research findings.
So what is this study and what is Open Research?
Elizabeth Rhodes: Open Research is a nonprofit research organization. And our mission is to ask big, bold, open-ended questions that would benefit society as a whole. And back in 2016, one of the earliest projects was the idea of unconditional cash transfers. There was not nearly as much talk about it in the US at that time. There weren’t any other studies happening. And our goal really was to create a foundational study, to collect lots of data on many different outcomes, to get a comprehensive understanding of what happens when you give people unconditional cash.
Chris Hayes: And so you did one of those studies already?
Elizabeth Rhodes: Yes, so we did a three-year study, a randomized controlled trial, where 1,000 of the 3,000 participants received $1,000 a month for three years. And we had a control group of 2,000 that received $50 a month. And we collected an extensive amount of both quantitative and qualitative data over the course of those three years.
Chris Hayes: And there’s got to be, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of methodological stuff to get right here. So, I mean, I know the way that this kind of research works is that like, when you’re writing the abstract and it’s four sentences, that’s like three years of your life getting all the details right.
First of all, how are you matching, right? So you want to make sure there’s not a selection bias in the group. You want to try to make sure that you’re matching similarly situated groups and then randomizing. Are they across the country? Are they different demographic groups? Like, how’d you do that?
Elizabeth Rhodes: We selected from Illinois and Texas to start with. We wanted, again, a diverse group. So it was limited to individuals ages 21 to 40 at the time of enrollment, partly because we know it would have a different effect across the lifespan. The income included down to almost no income, up to 300% of the federal poverty level. And within that, we wanted diverse genders and race and also county types, so different geographies.
Some of the other studies that have been done are maybe in one city or in one county. So we selected about 10 counties in each state that included suburban, rural, medium urban areas. And we recruited a sample of, I think we ended up having something like 14,000 eligible people to then randomly select from.
Chris Hayes: This is maybe like a dumb kind of cable newsy question, but like, do people sign up thinking, are they told you’re either going to get $1,000 a month or $50? And if so, how does Christmas Day work when they find out if they have coal in the stocking or not?
Elizabeth Rhodes: So actually we recruited for $50 or more per month.
Chris Hayes: There you go, smart.
Elizabeth Rhodes: We did not want to cause any harm or, it was totally random and had nothing to do with anything they did. And so after everyone was enrolled, which took about a year to get all, partly because COVID hit in the middle of it, but after everyone was enrolled, then we randomized into the recipient and the control groups.
David Broockman: Right, because I appreciate you calling out the like, all the little persnickety methodological details. Because of course, as a researcher, that’s what most of our time is spent on. And so just as one of those details, for example, this $50 a month thing, part of why we did that, the control group got $50 a month, is that even though, thanks to the randomization of some people in the control group with $50 and some people getting $1,000 a month for those three years, we know those two groups are going to be comparable except for any effect.
One of the big challenges a lot of other studies now, and also in the past actually of negative income tax, basic income, stuff like that has faced, is if your control group isn’t getting anything from you, then they sort of stop responding to you.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Broockman: And you then don’t get this apples to apples of, there’s all these people that are non-random that drop out of your control group and then you don’t have two comparable groups anymore.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
David Broockman: Yes, intentional little in the weeds things we did to keep our response rates high among everybody. And we don’t see that much, you know, differential drop off between the groups.
Chris Hayes: And how long a period of time, David, did this happen, did they get the money?
David Broockman: Yes, so there’s a few months before people start getting the $1,000. So Elizabeth will have some fun stories of Christmas day, as you put it. Those are some great stories. I think Elizabeth made some of those calls to let people know. So there’s a few months before as we’re enrolling people and then the transfer itself takes place over the course of three years.
So three years, thousand dollars a month. So that’s $36,000 over the course of those three years.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and you can start to see why funding this is non-trivial. $36,000 over the course of three years over, it was how many participants? A thousand participants?
David Broockman: Yes, so it’s $36 million given away to the treatment group.
Chris Hayes: Right, that’s real money. And tell me, Elizabeth, so people knew they were enrolling for $50 or more a month. And then when you call them, or do you tell them they’re getting this money and do you tell them the time duration too?
Elizabeth Rhodes: Yes, we told them upfront exactly how long they would get it. They knew when they enrolled that it’d be three years, but we started the three years, the day that the first, $1,000 payment went out. And we called all 1,000 of them just to make sure they understood, could ask any questions, discuss how it would affect existing benefits. And I think we would know a little bit about what we would see based on those calls, because for every person I talked to, they expressed very distinct needs. Someone’s father had just died of COVID and she couldn’t afford the funeral expenses. Someone else had just finished cosmetology school, but couldn’t afford the license, someone else had just totaled a car.
There were as many people as we called, there were those distinct needs. And in that one moment, cash couldn’t address all of them, but it was the one thing that could be used towards addressing all of them.
And so you could immediately then see the impact going out in so many different directions.
Chris Hayes: M understanding, David, is that this is set up to, you can test a bunch of things, right, in the treatment group. So this is the basic setup. The three years have completed now, is that correct?
David Broockman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So you’ve got this incredible data, and tell me a little bit about the origins of this specific paper on people’s political views, David.
David Broockman: Yes, absolutely. So I would say, so me and the, you know, other PIs, there’s a lot of papers that came out of this. There’s papers on people’s labor supply, how much they’re working. There’s papers on consumption. There’s a paper on health and its impacts out there and there’ll be more papers to come on a bunch of other things we can preview. But I’m the token political scientist in what is otherwise a group of economists and there’s also Elizabeth’s PhD in social work.
So my view on this looking at the policy debate and you know there’s a set of questions that I knew would be of interest to economists and the economists you know had that down. And my view on this is well there’s also if we think about how this would enter into a policy debate, a lot of questions that I think a policymaker would have. So some of those are relevant to the other papers like how do people spend their time if they work less, what are they doing instead impacts on kids et cetera. But I think a lot of the question that’s both interesting for the policy debate and also I think Chris, as you mentioned at the beginning, that is interesting in general about politics of what happens when people get this money?
And I think in particular we’re certainly not the first paper to think about this question but part of what’s unique about this is that there’s a lot of other programs out there in the world and things that happen to people’s lives where their income changes right. You lose a job you get laid off in Alaska, there’s this permanent fund dividend where you know the residents of Alaska get this…
Chris Hayes: From the oil.
David Broockman: Yes, yes, get this money from the oil. There’s you know all kinds of funny things out there but almost all of those have the common feature that potentially you’re going to somehow attribute the change to government. In some cases literally the checks from the government or in the case that you like lose a job for example, you might say well like I’m losing the job because of the economy or prices are going up because it’s Joe Biden’s fault or whatever or Jerome Powell’s fault or whatever it is.
Part of what I thought was interesting about this is it’s just quite clear and we verify this, the people are very aware the government doesn’t have anything to do with this money and that’s a very unique thing where we can kind of separate out well what do you see when people get money in a case when basically no one thinks the government had anything to do with this versus other cases where there’s kind of varying levels of potential attributions of responsibility.
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
David Broockman: That’s kind of one thing I think that makes this interesting when you lay it next to what we know from those other studies on these other kinds of shocks that happen to people.
Chris Hayes: We’ll talk about what the takeaways are here and I have one big meta takeaway from what I’ve read of the summary of your research which I’ll get to which I think is interesting, but what was your hypothesis or what were your expectations or gut instincts or what did the literature guide you towards about how you thought this might affect the way that people think about politics?
David Broockman: Yes, well so one of the challenges you know since you kind of peel the curtain back a little bit of like you know how the sausage making works with a study like this, I think one of the challenges is that there’s a bunch of different kind of conversations out there both in the academic world, the policy world, the popular you know press world that this kind of study can speak to and so I think given how expensive it was and how unique it is, we’re trying to speak to all of that at once. So I think I don’t know that I came in with any one big like aha we’re going to find this, but I thought there’s a bunch of different of those conversations I think we can kind of inform.
I would say broadly speaking, I don’t know that I expected exactly everything that we found but I would say in general I’m I guess speaking casually, I would say I’m on team nothing matters or almost nothing matters that to say that this is just to say …
Chris Hayes: Yes. I didn’t start there but I’ve just slid down the slide into the ball pit of nothing matters.
David Broockman: I’m half joking in the sense that I do think some things matter a little bit but I do think you know frankly it’s true both in academia where there’s incentives when people find something matters to shout it from the rooftops and when they find something doesn’t matter to say I’m not going to bother publishing that, it’s not interesting. An exciting segment on MSNBC usually doesn’t start with like this doesn’t matter, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes found no effect yes exactly.
David Broockman: Exactly. But I do think it’s relevant in so far as you know and Elizabeth can speak to this a little bit I think one of the really cool things about this study as well is that we had a whole team of people including Elizabeth that did a bunch of qualitative interviews with participants. And I think we can talk a little bit about that like in the qualitative interviews that come out, I think one of the things that you see is people come into this study having the life experiences and upbringing and media consumption they’ve already had and so when we look at we can get more into the things we measure like turnout or you know, views towards different politicians or policies et cetera, we do find some effects on some things that we can get into but people don’t come in as a blank slate and this experience although it’s a significant experience in their lives being in part they’re interpreting it through the lens of some of the things they come in already believing.
Chris Hayes: Absolutely. Elizabeth, I want to talk about two things with you just on again on the sort of background here then we’ll sort of get to some of the results. One is what percentage of their income broadly did $1,000 month represent right? Because if it’s a third of their income or a tenth of their income or half their income, I mean I think we all have some intuitive sense how big a deal this is for them. So what was the kind of baseline?
Elizabeth Rhodes: So the average household income was a little bit under $30,000 and so this was a very large.
Chris Hayes: That’s a big, big chunk of money.
Elizabeth Rhodes: It was a huge chunk it was a very meaningful infusion of cash for sure.
Chris Hayes: So these are people an average household income of $30,000 is above the federal poverty line but far below median household income. So these are people that are I guess we would call working poor if we were to choose a term?
Elizabeth Rhodes: Yes, although we did have you know a good share that were under the federal poverty line as well. So you know, it ranged …
Chris Hayes: Right, of course. So what was your takeaway before we get to this specific question about how people’s political views or ideological tendencies might be affected, tell me about these qualitative interviews at the end about what you heard from people about how this did or didn’t change their lives.
Elizabeth Rhodes: We interviewed 156 people about every six months throughout the study and it was incredibly illuminating really just the complexity of people’s lives and it provided so much insight into we have these quantitative. just like you talked about earlier. these sort of macroeconomic measures and how much do they reflect people’s lived experiences. even how much does you know standardized survey measures capture people’s lived experiences and we learned that to some extent.
But there wasn’t a single person that was like this was bad for me. I think the ways it was good for people or the ways that they talk about experiencing the extra income varied enormously by their own experiences and by the types of challenges they ran up against over the three years
Chris Hayes: Were there things that really surprised you, things that you were like oh I wouldn’t have thought of that or maybe negative impacts or knock-on effects that you hadn’t thought of?
Elizabeth Rhodes: I think one of the things that surprised me and we can get into this a little bit when we talk about the findings but everyone people said it was really valuable for me but when we ask should this be a policy for everyone, it was not universal across the board. There was a lot of yes it was good for me and I was in the right position at this particular time in my life to take advantage of that, not maybe if you’d given it to me five years ago, it wouldn’t have been the right time.
And so there’s really grappling with some of the questions that we have about under what conditions it has different impacts. I think we saw participants themselves grappling with that and trying to think about if this were to be larger who should get it and what would that look like?
Chris Hayes: So here’s one question I have for both of you and again before we get to this sort of question of we unveil the results keeping everyone in suspense. You know, when I was a kid and I was like a nerdy kid, I would play Sim City. And I think about Sim City all the time because there were two modes, you could play with disasters or without disasters and if you played without disasters, you would just get into this groove and you build your city and things would be humming along and the game was much easier. But then there was a disaster mode where like you would get earthquakes, you would get tsunamis, Godzilla would show up and like wreck a bunch of stuff and that was way harder.
Real life is disaster mode and I think about this a lot in terms of poverty and the reporting that I’ve done on poverty is that even if people can kind of eke it out, right? Like they got their income is like a little more than their expenses or right around and they have enough credit card debt they can float and they can make the car payment, then someone gets cancer, a cousin shows up who’s got an addiction problem and got thrown out of their house, someone gets pregnant, someone goes away who’s earning money and goes to prison, someone gets into a car wreck there’s a wildfire, and people, they can’t recover, it sends them into spirals because there’s not the padding.
I wonder if you encountered disaster resilience or sort of I don’t mean disaster in the formal sense of a hurricane, I mean just like stuff happens resilience and whether you heard that in the stories, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Rhodes: We did. We heard I would say both sides of it where the disasters or just the economic shocks kept coming and the money was helpful but they had set aside, they had goals for what they were going to do with it, but then something came up and they ended up having to spend it other ways. we did see people becoming like on average more resilient. They were more likely to be able to pay for unexpected expenses with cash on hand or savings.
Sort of the flip side of that is they also had more unexpected expenses partly because they’re using it to buy cars or maybe many people weren’t paying rent, they were sort of couch surfing and then they were able to move into housing but then things happen. But they were able to better weather those shocks for sure.
Chris Hayes: And also it’s interesting one of the things, I think I saw in one of the takeaways is that people’s debt actually increases because they take on more debt particularly in the form of car payments because they now have the ability to do that.
Elizabeth Rhodes: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk, David, about what your findings were about how this money did or didn’t affect people’s general political outlooks and commitments.
David Broockman: Yes, absolutely.
So I think there’s a few different areas here that are interesting and from my point of view that kind of non-findings are just as interesting as the findings.
So I’ll start with one. The first thing we’re going to look at and one of the few estimates we have in this paper which is not based on survey data, but real behavior is voter registration and voter turnout. And here, there’s a couple findings out there that would kind of lead you to expect that we would see an effect.
So first of all, there’s a very strong relationship that people higher income vote more. There’s a lot of reasons that you might expect that to be a causal effect and not just a correlation that is not in fact causal. When you have more money, you have more typically more free time and we in fact to verify in this study people did have more free time. They worked a little bit less, less of that time pressure. There’s a bunch of things you can imagine. People with higher income tend to follow politics more, be more informed about politics.
Another reason you might expect that there would be a causal effect here, and you see that in previous studies is, and this gets back to what I was saying about the attributions, there’s been a variety of pretty good studies that when people get a government benefit. So there was for example a lottery where some people got Medicaid access in Oregon or the Alaska permanent fund dividend checks go out. That seems to have this effect on voter turnout when people kind of realize like you know, I have this like stake in government. In this case for a large payment, especially on a relative basis for this population, we find pretty precise zero effect on voter turnout, as well as no effect on things like how much people know about politics, how much they say they consume political news, et cetera.
So I think that that null effect is very interesting when compared to what’s out there, because it suggests that part of what is driving that correlation, it could be just basic things of like upbringing and opportunities when you’re young, and that might lead you to do things like be socialized in the norms of voting, as well as get educational opportunities that allow you to earn income, things like that.
But it also suggests to me that part of it is that, people who see themselves as kind of benefiting and having a stake in, for example, government benefits that a lot of which flow to high income people, like the mortgage interest tax deduction or whatever else, also those receiving those benefits and being aware that you’re receiving them also seems to mobilize people, because when you’re getting a benefit part, but it’s not from the government, we don’t see the same effects.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and I think that’s an important finding because it cuts in both directions in terms of the nothing matters. It’s not necessarily that nothing matters if the government were doing it. I mean, I think it would be, we would have it, obviously it’d be very hard for the government to run a randomized control trial.
David Broockman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I’m thinking about how you would negotiate the politics of that.
David Broockman: Well, Oregon did it with Medicaid. So, fuck the policy makers, you can do it. You can learn a lot.
Chris Hayes: That’s true, they did do it.
David Broockman: It is challenging.
Chris Hayes: But, I mean, one of the things that was wild about the Medicaid finding was the lack of findings. I mean, there were differences, but, and this gets to what I think is my big meta takeaway from your incredible work is like, the effects are smaller than I would have guessed.
David Broockman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Across the board on reported wellbeing, on financial health, on actual physical and mental health, there are discernible, findable effects, statistically significant effects, but they are not that big. And what’s really kind of shaking about that is, this was $36 million for 1,000 people over three years. Like, $1,000 a month is about as big as a direct tangible material intervention as you could make in a person’s life with policy, I mean, at a scale, you know?
So, if that changes people’s life so little, it really puts into perspective like, what policy could do, right? Elizabeth, you’re nodding your head.
Elizabeth Rhodes: I have sort of two thoughts in response to that. One is, on average, it doesn’t change things much, but that average does obscure variation. So, there are people for whom it did make a big difference, and then others for whom it wasn’t enough.
But I think it also points out, as much as poverty and growing economic inequality are extraordinarily challenging problems, and I think everyone wants there to be, like, a singular solution, and I think it’s very clear from both our study and others that cash is important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle, and it’s going to take a lot more to address all the different challenges people are facing.
David Broockman: Yes, and getting into the political aspect of this, so, just to contrast a couple different findings. So, as you said at the top of the show, especially, I think, during the Biden administration, there was a lot of talk about this idea of deliverism, right? If we just make people’s lives better off, then they’re going to be like, great, like, let’s vote to reelect Joe Biden, or then Kamala Harris. I think there’s sort of two ways you could imagine that might happen. One is, and there’s some evidence for this in previous work and some evidence in ours, that just, when people are feeling better and they’re just in a better mood, they just kind of like everybody better, including the incumbent president.
And so, for example, we see, basically, any time in our study, we ask someone a version of the question, how do you feel about this group? So, their own racial group, other racial groups, their political party, the other political party, the governor of their state, people are a little more positive, a little. We’re talking, we have these items where it’s like on a zero to 100 scale, how do you feel, we’re moving people like one to three points on that. So, it’s small, but it’s there.
So, you’re like, all right, that’s kind of consistent with the theory. But yes, for a really big intervention, that’s like a really small effect.
Chris Hayes: Yes, although we should say, we should say, it’s just important to point this out, one to three points is an election, is the difference. But like, if either party in a lot of races could have found three points, they would have won, were they instead lost. So, it’s significant in that sense.
David Broockman: Yes, and then there’s the kind of other channel for which I think you could imagine this would work, which has to do more with, well, people actually directly attributing responsibility. And there’s a lot of work kind of in this general area. One recent paper on this I really like is by this professor at UNT, Brian Hamel. He does this cool historical study comparing the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration back from the New Deal. And for those of you who don’t remember learning about this stuff in high school, so the WPA directly hired and paid employees and the PWA basically subsidized private sector employment. And what Brian Hamel finds in this paper is that the WPA, so that’s very visible, right? Because you’re directly working for the government. Right, and it’s like clear that, okay, that’s the government doing this, that increases support for the Democratic Party, which enacted this.
On the other hand, the PWA, he finds has no effect. And that’s because it’s kind of more hidden. And I think that’s very consistent, political scientists use this term traceability, which is basically something happening in your life. Like, can you kind of trace the consequence to something government did? And sometimes that works in the direction of like, there’s a benefit that I’m getting that I don’t realize the government is helping me with, but it also works in the opposite direction, right? There can be bad things that happen to people that they blame on government that isn’t really government’s fault. And so I think, you know, what’s unique about this is the fact that we have these really small effects.
I think I read this kind of next to that other stuff and say, yes, it’s really consistent with, you know, there is a little effect of this, like stuff that you don’t trace to the government, but the effect of the stuff that you do trace is way bigger, kind of consistent with what that paper of Brian Hamel’s.
Chris Hayes: Okay, now here’s the biggest question, right? And you mentioned this a little bit, Elizabeth, about your interviews. The one thing you think this would have an effect on is people’s views on unconditional cash transfer, right? So like, okay, it’s not coming from the government. It might not have an effect on political participation. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel better about this or that racial group, maybe a little bit. The vibes are better, you’re less stressed.
But the one thing you think that this would have an effect on is, before you didn’t have an unconditional cash transfer, now you’ve had one. How do you feel about unconditional cash transfers? What was the effect there?
Elizabeth Rhodes: It’s not as strong as you would think.
But the interesting thing about it is, you know, I looked through all these interviews when we asked them and I kind of ranked, okay, we asked people what policies would be most helpful to them and we rank ordered them. And cash was up there, but it wasn’t one of the top few, but it was all things about like making other things affordable, like making healthcare affordable, making education affordable, bringing down the cost of housing. They wanted to be able to make it on their own.
People fundamentally want to be able to make their ends meet. You know, they don’t want a handout and they want to be able to make it on their own.
Chris Hayes: This is such an important finding. I found in some ways, the most central takeaway here is that the cost of things being too high matters more than whether you can afford it.
Like it still sucks for something to be expensive, even if this cash intervention has made it so you could purchase something. Partly because they know that it’ll go away and partly because they could see out into the future and they know like in the case of housing in a major metro area, like the one I live in, or in the case of education, if you’re thinking about kids, you know, if you’re sort of up a level in income where people are thinking about the cost of college, particularly at, you know, either state or private schools, like it’s going to keep going up.
So that is the source of stress and the main complaint that the things that are most important in life cost too much. That seems like a really important finding, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Rhodes: That and the fact they also talk about, you know, they can work full-time and still have incomes right around the poverty line. They want to work, they want to be able to make ends meet on their own work.
David Broockman: The other thing that, I mean, Elizabeth, I don’t know if you want to talk about this a little more because you’re closer to the interviews than I was, but you know, it’s really striking in some of the transcripts is, one of the interview questions basically ask people, not in our quantitative data, we have a bunch of data about people’s views on government transfer programs. And those in fact do not move on average, you know, consistent with what you see in the qualitative interviews. But in the qualitative interviews, when people are asked pretty directly, like, should this be a policy? You know, some of the comments, and Elizabeth can talk more about this, how, you know, people think, well, like there’s a kind of a distrust that government would actually implement this.
And this is, I think, actually in some ways, like an even deeper challenge for like Democrats to think about is like the very people who would benefit from this policy and are like very happy with it when they’re getting it from a private source, some of them react to some skepticism when they think about what it would look like for a government to implement this.
Chris Hayes: And that skepticism is about Elizabeth, who would get it, whether it would be fraudulent, whether people would set up, you know, fake cousins or whatever. I mean, the ways that it might be abused.
Elizabeth Rhodes: There’s some of that, and there’s also some of the ease and how easy it was for this. They signed up for it. The money came like it was supposed to, the third Wednesday of every month. They didn’t constantly have to recertify.
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Elizabeth Rhodes: And so the fact that it worked in a way that the existing social safety net didn’t have the complexity that they are used to interacting with.
Chris Hayes: What’s so wild, and this is like one of these fundamental contradictions that the more you embed yourself in it, the more maddening it is, is that the social safety net is complex precisely because there is a widely shared suspicion that people will abuse it. And the checks that make it difficult, the income certification, the hoops are there, often born of this ideological position that is shared often among poor and working class people that some other group is going to abuse it. And then it also makes the program suck and worse for people, which makes them angry.
So it’s not like it comes from nowhere. I think people have this idea that it’s like, and it is partly, you know, progressive era, late 19th century Victorian kind of Protestant work ethic stuff about people are going to be lazy and they’ll do drugs or whatever, and you got a check, and they’ll scam you. But those are widely shared beliefs among even recipients. And it then makes the programs harder to deliver.
Elizabeth Rhodes: Yes, and people often will cite single person that they know when they’re talking about people. Well, it’s not on average, you know, there will be people that are going to abuse every system, but they’ll cite this person I know, if you give it to them, this is what’s going to happen.
Chris Hayes: And people in your interviews would say that.
Elizabeth Rhodes: Exactly, yes.
But even the process of figuring out how to protect existing benefits for this study was really illuminating in terms of the complexity of the safety net. We had to work for years. We had to work with partners to pass a law in one state.
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow.
Elizabeth Rhodes: And then once the law was passed, we had to work with people in the Health and Human Services to figure out how do you actually do this within the context of all the regulations governing eligibility and implementation.
Chris Hayes: Right, that must have been a nightmare because you sure as hell can’t have a situation where you show up in Illinois and Texas, you give these people $1,000 a month, and then you destroy their rent subsidies, their WIC, all the social safety net programs. You’ve now made them net poorer. It’s both terrible for them and completely destroys the thing you’re trying to test for. And so that must have been a lot of work to keep all that stuff shored up while they got the benefit.
Did you test, David, for like people’s general views on redistribution or, you know, that kind of stuff? Did it have any effect there?
David Broockman: Yes.
So generally speaking, when you look at political preferences, there’s not much. So you know, all the quantitative versions of, for example, should there be a government job guarantee? Should the government reduce income differential? Should we increase government funding for programs for the poor and unemployed? Increase taxes? That stuff doesn’t change much.
The one thing that there’s some suggestive evidence for along these lines, which is, I think in the opposite direction of what I would have expected, has to do with people’s attitudes towards work and also work requirements for government programs. So one of the things that we find some evidence of is that when you ask people different versions of the question, basically, is work important? So questions like work is a duty towards society or people should not have to work if they don’t want to. They’re less likely to agree with questions like people shouldn’t have to work and more kind of pro, yes, like work’s really important.
Chris Hayes: Wait, this is the treatment group. You’re saying there’s a drive towards getting the cash appears to cause people to be more responsive to the importance of work?
David Broockman: Yes. Even though we know on average people worked a little bit less.
Chris Hayes: Oh man, I love that. Okay.
David Broockman: And it could be different people in the group, we can’t exactly tell. But so I don’t want to overstate the strength of that finding, but some of that evidence I think is interesting. And one of the ways it appears to spill over, although it’s not super clear, is that people seem to become a little more supportive of work requirements for Medicaid. That’s part of why we don’t find an average effect on views towards redistribution is like we find this one item that goes like in the more conservative direction. And I think that could be because we’re changing views about work.
There’s a few reasons that could have happened. I think one interpretation is that people’s preferences aren’t really changing, but they’re kind of on the interview. They want to kind of signal like, well, I’m not that kind of person who would misuse this.
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally.
David Broockman: And so, they’re kind of like signal to us that they’re more like not that type. But I think there’s also some kind of qualitative stories that came out where people will kind of think about what they were able to do with the transfer and say like, wow, you know, they kind of express their work ethic, let them use the cash to advance themselves in a way that other people wouldn’t have been able to.
I think this kind of has like distant echoes a little bit of some of the discourse around what you were saying with the rise in inflation, but also nominal wages during the Biden administration. People seem to think of like the nominal wage increase as something that they’re responsible for.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Broockman: The price level increase is something that like it’s the government’s fault.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
David Broockman: Even when these two things are like intimately connected and like both is represents the price level going up. And I think in the same way, you know, we see the transfer seems to have this effect where people just make more internal attributions. And so when their lives get better, they’re like, look, I did this work. These good things happen to me like work is great because we seem to see it, especially among the people who get jobs over the course of the study. They’re like, work is awesome. I got this job. This is great. So something about the transfer may be kind of changing people’s attributions of their outcomes as something that they’re responsible for.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One point I just want to make before we wrap up, just because we haven’t said it, but it seems obvious to me and it was clear in the Vancouver study, for people to think like if you give people money, they’re all going to just like drop out and start spending it all on drugs or whatever. That did not happen. Right, Elizabeth? Like there was not like some huge people drop out and just stop doing the things they would normally do and spend the money on intoxicants or whatever.
Elizabeth Rhodes: That did not happen. The biggest increases in spending were on basic needs. People paid rent, they paid transportation, they paid for food and they spent money on their children. So we did not see either spending on drugs, alcohol, things like that. Or, you know, we did see some reduction in work, but people were not dropping out of the labor force. It was generally taking more time to look for a job or working a little bit less.
Chris Hayes: Also, I just want to say, I spend money on alcohol and like it’s perfectly fine for people, you know, depending on how this all goes in their life and what the relationship of the substance is. I don’t want to be too puritanical here about that. I just, there’s, I think, a stereotype, right, about this idea, which I think is even reflected in some of your qualitative interviews, right? Like I didn’t, but I have a cousin who, or there’s someone on my block who I know would. Partly that’s because I think people are often specifically enmeshed in relationships with people with substance use disorder, where they know people that are in the grips of a really intense addiction.
So here’s my final question. I have this kind of theory of American politics and kind of social despair, which basically goes like this. And I’ve said on the podcast before, you’re in a house that’s got three leaks in the roof and you don’t have the money to fix it. And it sucks. And you make do. And you have a lot of like bowls underneath them when it rains, you know, and then someone comes through and maybe it’s the Democratic party or maybe it’s the Republican party, maybe it’s your local officer and they have a new program and they come in and they fix one of the holes. You’re now 33% better.
And they go around saying, you know, we’ve improved the leaks in roofs by a huge amount, 33%. Isn’t it enormous? You know, you could put it on the chart. Look, we spent all this money, but it’s like, you still got two leaks in your roof. So how happy do you want me to be really? And from the perspective of the people in government that pulled off this enterprise, like it was really hard to get the bill passed, to get the money, to actually go out to patch the holes in the roof. It was hard. They understandably feel good about it. The recipients are like, yes, that was good, but I still got two leaks in my roof.
And reading everything that I’ve read on your study, like I kept thinking about that because at the end, these are people who even with the money are not taking fancy vacations, they’re not buying second homes. And I guess my next thought was, this is ludicrous, but is there some end at which you transform? Like can you get someone to give you $180 million and run it at 5k a month? I mean, I’m sort of joking, but I’m not, like at a theoretical level, my priors are that at 5k a month, you’d see enormous effects. And those effects would be huge across the board, health, psychology, but maybe what we find $1,000 month should make us very skeptical and circumspect about what 5x would do.
I’m just curious your thoughts on that, David.
David Broockman: Yes, I would say, you know, one of the things that we’ve made an effort to do in a lot of the different papers. So like the paper on health does this, the paper on politics we’re talking about today does this. We do compare kind of the size of the effects we can rule out given, you know, there’s a margin of error here to just the relationship you would see between income and these outcomes.
In many of the cases, like we talked about with voter turnout earlier, we can reject and say like, Hey, you know, if just like that relationship that’s out there in the world, like if that were all causal, then like even with this thousand dollars, like we can rule out that the effect is that big.
With that said, like we haven’t done the $5,000 a month thing. I would say, I think, you know, another, you know, idea out there in the popular discourse, which I think is very much supported by a lot of the psychological research is this idea of the hedonic treadmill. You know, you see this as well in economic voting, that people are very sensitive to changes much more so often than levels and people habituate to levels over time and that are kind of very sensitive to changes from there.
So like some of the fun psychological stories on this are about like you get into a car accident and lose a limb and like for the six months after you’re like, oh, this is terrible. And then people just kind of like go back to their set point.
Chris Hayes: Reset to their normal happiness level.
David Broockman: Yes. And we, you know, not that I wish losing a limb and, you know, or anything, but like there is that. So I think I both agree with your intuition because it just feels like it must be the case. And yet at the same time, you know, our society over the last hundred years have gotten so much richer and yet we have a lot of the same complaints.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I mean, the contention, right? My hypothesis is that it’s not a linear relationship and it’s not monotonic, that it’s essentially exponential, right? And that there’s a sort of step change along the curve, right? So, like, if you were to sort of measure the treatment effect, at 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, you hit some point where it would just kind of go vertical, right?
I’m no saying that’s necessarily, but like, that’s why I use the sort of three leaks in the roof because is there some point at which like it is completed, right? You fix the roof, right?
David Broockman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: To carry the metaphor forward that you would see some kind of takeoff in the effects.
David Broockman: I would say if anything, I’m not sure, but I guess my intuition is if anything, kind of the opposite where like, if you look at more like, I mean, so if you look at like developing contexts, right, where on average even, you know, relatively poor Americans are way better off than the typical person and, you know, lots of parts of the world, you tend to see on average, much bigger effects. And politics is like much more organized in many places around like the distribution of material goods that make people’s lives better.
Whereas in the U.S. you see this more what we call like post materialist kind of politics where people, even people that, you know, within the U.S. context are not all that well off, like because we’re all so much better off than we were 50 or 100 years ago are putting less and less weight on economic issues, and more and more as we get richer on these kinds of values type and social issues.
So I think that’s one thing we sort of look at here. And if you squint, maybe there’s like a little evidence of that, that like maybe people get a little more liberal on social issues. So it’s not a slam dunk, but I do believe that theory in general. And so I think you might see if you, you know, gave everyone $5,000 without affecting inflation, I think if we were all just $5,000 richer, you might just see people complaining about things that are different, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Broockman: I shouldn’t use the word complain in a pejorative way. Like there’s lots of very valid complaints, a more optimistic way to put it might be people will always look for ways in which they think policy or the government or their lives could be better. And I don’t know that there’s a point at which people say, like, I’m happy with government now.
Elizabeth Rhodes: I guess I would say too, that there are some things, even $5,000 a month, I think chronic health problems were things that it’s access to the healthcare system. And so like participation, like full participation in the economy and in policy and in politics, I think, requires money for sure. But there’s other things that maybe money can’t buy or other things that we would need to address as well to get there.
Chris Hayes: What a piece of work it is, man. I love this conversation and I’m going to keep reading the research. I imagine there’s more stuff that will come out of this, but Elizabeth Rhodes and David Broockman, thank you so much. That was, that was really edifying.
David Broockman: Thank you.
Elizabeth Rhodes: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Elizabeth Rhodes and David Broockman. I learned a lot from that. You can check out more about the study at Open Research, which is the name of the organization that ran it. You can also email us with your thoughts, withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for withpod. You can also follow me on Threads, what used to be called Twitter and Blue Sky at all places. My handle is @chrislhays. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
Why Is This Happening is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Donnie Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was edited by Janmaris Perez, engineered by Fernando Arruda, and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to mbcnews.com/whyishisshappening.