Seventy-Two Hours, Then a Game

Seventy-Two Hours

Mara: Seventy-two hours a week: that is how much a man named Shawn was working when he signed up for a study that would send him a thousand dollars a month, with nothing asked in return.

Eli: That's a full-time job and most of another one. What was he doing with all those hours?

Mara: Building something. He wanted to start his own music company, so he was producing music on top of a job at another company.

Eli: And now a study would pay him a thousand dollars a month. That raises the question under every argument about helping people who are struggling, and under the taxes you might one day be asked to pay: if money came free, would people stop working?

Mara: A research group called OpenResearch set out to see. For three years, from 2020 to 2023, it sent a thousand adults that thousand-dollar check every month. Another two thousand people got fifty dollars a month, as a comparison. Shawn was one of the thousand.

Eli: Today's angle is what free money does to work.

Mara: We'll follow Shawn through three moments: the grind, the day he stopped, and what he said the money bought him. Along the way, we'll find the one version of free money nobody has tried.

The Fear, Measured

Eli: The thousand people getting the full check lived in Illinois and Texas, and the payments ran three years. The two thousand in the comparison group got fifty dollars a month over the same stretch.

Mara: No strings: nobody had to spend it a certain way, keep a job, or keep talking to researchers. But it wasn't money for everyone. It went only to adults 21 to 40, with household incomes at or below three times the federal poverty line.

Eli: And the years were rough ones: a pandemic, a disrupted job market, shifting benefit programs, a rising cost of living.

Mara: So here's the fear, measured. On average, people who got the money were two percentage points less likely to be employed than the comparison group. Across the three years, they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week.

Eli: That's a real drop. Money went in, work came down.

Mara: Real, and small. And watch both groups over time. At enrollment, pandemic unemployment was high, and 58 percent of recipients had jobs. By the end, 72 percent did. The comparison group went from 59 to 74.

Eli: So everybody climbed back, and the people without the thousand finished two points ahead.

Mara: A modest average pullback, then, not a mass exit. OpenResearch also reports recipients were more likely to be actively searching for work and to have applied for a job, though they applied to fewer jobs, which the researchers read as recipients being more selective.

Eli: So the money bought them time to choose.

The Day He Stopped

Mara: Averages don't have a face. Shawn does. In that first year he was putting long hours into his music and his other job. Then he told the researchers, “I felt like I just wanted to take a break, like not do as much work just for myself and my mental.”

Eli: “For my mental.” I like that he doesn't finish the phrase. Everybody knows how it ends.

Mara: He said no particular event prompted the decision. In his words: “It was nothing that made me wanna do it; is just one day, I just decided, you know what, I'm gonna just take a slight break and just either try to do something else or just relax.”

Eli: And what did relaxing look like?

Mara: He said, “I haven't really been doing anything but playing a game really, but it's good.”

Eli: There it is. The sentence skeptics of free money have been waiting to hear. Man gets a thousand dollars a month. Man plays a game.

Mara: It's exactly the picture. The economist Ioana Marinescu, in a 2018 paper on giving people cash, writes that “the thinking goes that people who need financial assistance are not to be trusted, as their financial position reflects a moral failing rather than a societal one.”

Eli: And on paper, Shawn is the moral failing. Except he'd been working seventy-two hours a week. After that, lazy isn't the first word I'd reach for.

Mara: No. And the suspicion never asks what came before the break.

Where the Hours Went

Eli: Shawn spent his freed-up hours on rest. OpenResearch picked other stories to show how people used the money, so think of them as examples, not a count.

Mara: Start with Nathan. After the first thousand-dollar deposit, OpenResearch reports, he cut his fifty-hour week in half to spend time with his four-year-old son, teaching him things he never did or learned from his own father.

Eli: What kinds of things?

Mara: Hunting, fishing, gardening, fixing cars, driving around and listening to music. And playing Pokémon Go.

Eli: So Nathan played a game too.

Mara: Then there's Bethany, who, OpenResearch reports, left her job to homeschool her three children. Two had recently been diagnosed with autism and ADHD and were struggling in traditional school.

Eli: And Tara. After a car accident, her employer wouldn't accommodate her follow-up appointments, so she stopped working. She used the cash to cover expenses while she finished job training and an internship, and by the end of the program she'd started a full-time job.

Mara: Lisa took a lower-paying, entry-level job with room to grow, planning to lean on the checks in the meantime. Two years later, OpenResearch reports, she was in a salaried position making close to six figures.

Eli: I don't want the warm stories carrying the whole study, though. Take Sophia. She told researchers, “I had gotten two really good job offers. I couldn't accept either one of them because my transportation was down, and they weren't within the city where I could ride the bus.”

Mara: Two good offers, and the thing in the way was a ride.

Eli: Then Tessa. A brain injury years before the study made it hard for her to drive or live on her own. When she enrolled, she was working twenty hours a week at a warehouse job that, OpenResearch reports, was hurting her physical health. She quit, and used the cash for all her expenses, including a surgery she'd been putting off.

Mara: She had applied for disability again and again and been denied, and she kept applying during the program, without success. The monthly checks ended in October 2023.

Eli: The trade shows up in dollars, too. By the end, recipients earned about fifteen hundred dollars less from their jobs than the comparison group. Household income, not counting the checks, was twenty-five hundred to forty-one hundred dollars lower.

Mara: Count the checks, and recipients' households came out about sixty-one hundred dollars ahead on average.

The Version Nobody Has Run

Eli: The payments in Shawn's study were set to stop after three years. So could a check like his ever be made permanent, and what happens when people expect it to last?

Mara: The closest test is from the 1970s, a randomized experiment in Seattle and Denver. Families got thousands of dollars in extra government benefits, some for three years, some for five. Preliminary results showed the five-year families responding substantially more than the three-year ones.

Eli: More years guaranteed, a stronger response, at least there.

Mara: After the experiment, economists David Price and Jae Song report, adults who received those benefits earned about eighteen hundred dollars a year less.

Eli: One example of a check with no end date is Alaska, which pays a dividend every year.

Mara: Oil from the North Slope brought the state a flood of revenue in the 1970s, and voters set up the Alaska Permanent Fund. Each year, a slice of its returns is split evenly among everyone who applies.

Eli: And did Alaskans walk off the job?

Mara: Economists Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu wrote, “In our preferred specification, we do not detect any effect of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend on employment.” What they did estimate was a rise in part-time work, of 1.8 percentage points.

Eli: Now my but. The dividend ran from three hundred thirty-one dollars in 1984 to a peak of two thousand seventy-two in 2015. Per year, not per month. And it's paid from an oil fund's returns.

Mara: Nobody lives a year on that.

Eli: Bigger trials did happen, and governments kept ending them. Finland paid a monthly basic income to two thousand unemployed people for two years, starting January 1, 2017. Its evaluation listed the missing taxation model among its limits.

Mara: The news magazine TIME reported that the government rejected a request from Kela, Finland's social security agency, for more money to expand it. The experiment ended on December 31, 2018.

Eli: Ontario, in Canada, picked three regions in 2017 for a three-year pilot. After a June 2018 election, a new government reportedly cancelled it about a year after it began, and later ended the evaluation too.

Mara: So for anyone hoping to make Shawn's check permanent: when governments had the chance to keep going, Finland's refused more money and Ontario's shut its pilot down. Shawn's own study ran three years, for people under an income cap. And Marinescu calls the effect of paying for a basic income, through higher taxes or cuts elsewhere, a major unresolved issue.

Eli: Meaning none of these experiments has tested the version the whole fight is about: a permanent, livable check for everyone, paid for by everyone's taxes.

A Lot More Freedom

Mara: Here is how Shawn explained what the thousand meant to him: “It is a thousand…since that is covering that portion of the rent…that gave me a lot more freedom to do what I wanted…like to buy certain things, go different places, do different things.”

Eli: “Covering that portion of the rent.” Not a fortune. One piece of the rent, off his back.

Mara: His break is one individual story alongside that average of 1.3 fewer hours a week. OpenResearch concluded that some recipients, as long as they could meet their basic needs, were willing to give up some additional income for caregiving, leisure, learning and exploring.

Eli: And most kept earning: recipients' employment still climbed to 72 percent. Some traded pay for time. The stampede out of work never came.

Mara: That old suspicion, that people who need help can't be trusted with cash, keeps getting tested. In Alaska, no detectable effect on employment, just a bit more part-time work. In Shawn's study, small average reductions, and alongside them, stories about a son, a classroom, a surgery and a rest.

Eli: So maybe the harder question isn't whether people will keep working. It's whether the time they take back, like Shawn's stretch with a game, counts as anything.

Mara: In the Angle app, you can follow Shawn, and the research group OpenResearch too.

Eli: And explore what money with no strings means for work. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time, this has been Angle.