It sometimes seems like the basic income wars will never go away. My first Vox piece on the idea of a government-provided guaranteed income came in the summer of 2014 — a simpler time, the Obama years. I wrote a big feature about it in 2017. Since then, we’ve had Andrew Yang’s presidential run, Covid-era stimulus checks, and massive progress in AI, all of which have made the idea feel more plausible.

We’ve also had some research findings that throw cold water on the concept, at least in the US. Three studies that gave out unrestricted cash to Americans during the pandemic found nulls on all the outcomes they tested: the cash didn’t improve health or self-reported well-being or even, in one study, how well people say they’re doing financially.

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Two more recent, even bigger studies have backed that up. The Baby’s First Years Study, which began in 2018 and gave $4,000 a year to low-income American families with young kids for over four years, found no effects on child development outcomes at the four-year mark. No reduction in behavioral problems, no improvements in language ability — nada. Another study run by the group OpenResearch gave out $12,000 a year to families for three years. While it found some positive outcomes, like parents spending more on their kids, mostly it found null effects, too. Participants spent more because their incomes grew, but they also

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