The free-money experiment
ONE EVENING IN EARLY JUNE, LEO AND HIS FAMILY were able to enjoy a treat they hadn’t experienced in months: a sit-down meal at a restaurant. At a fried-chicken chain in a Compton, Calif., strip mall, four of them splurged on a few plates of fried rice, which added up to about $60. Leo, 39, who works as a mechanic, said the dinner felt like a luxury. “It made me very happy,” he says in Spanish.
The family was only able to afford a dinner out because Leo was recently selected to participate in a groundbreaking economic experiment called the Compton Pledge. Between late 2020 and the end of 2022, Leo and 799 other participants will receive, in regular intervals, a defined cash payment—between $300 and $600 monthly, depending on the number of dependents they have—that they can spend however they like. Leo, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala whom TIME has agreed to refer to by a pseudonym, will receive $900 every three months.
The Fund for Guaranteed Income, the nonprofit organization running the Compton Pledge, has partnered with a research group to study the extent to which these relatively modest payments will impact the recipients’ lives: their physical and psychological health, their job prospects and their communities.
In the past six years, similar pilot programs have rolled out in nearly two dozen cities around the country, from St. Paul, Minn., to Paterson, N.J., according to the Stanford Basic Income
