Three years ago, ravaged by the 2008 financial crisis and a seemingly endless wave of housing foreclosures, the city of Stockton, Calif., was bankrupt.
Next year, a random sample of the city’s 300,000 residents will get $500 per month with no strings attached.
The project — known as the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) — will be, in a way, the purest expression to date of Silicon Valley’s passion for basic income proposals, which many tech entrepreneurs and investors see as a necessary way to support Americans if artificial intelligence and other automation advances lead to unemployment for vast swaths of the population.
To the tech world, basic income is a way to redistribute the vast wealth that Silicon Valley creates to poorer people and localities left behind. And what better place to start than by redirecting part of a Facebook fortune to Stockton, an overwhelmingly nonwhite exurb of the Bay Area that became the largest city in the US to declare bankruptcy during the financial crisis?
Source: Vox
Photo by Ramiro Mendes on Unsplash
