Interview: Why Chris Hughes’s Philanthropy Is Focused on Guaranteeing Everyone a Basic Income

Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and one of the leading philanthropic supporters of research into the benefits of giving people cash as a means of boosting opportunity and promoting personal autonomy, this week publishes Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn.

The book features both biography and advocacy pitch, interwoven adeptly. Hughes explains how his own life story shaped his approach to philanthropy and led him to support GiveDirectly (he formerly sat on the organization’s board) and to co-found the $10 million Economic Security Project, a network of individuals committed to exploring “how cash can help people adapt to the new economy.”

Hughes has contributed several million dollars to the project and other organizations supporting guaranteed income. The Economic Security Project has support from dozens of grant makers, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Google.org, and the Joyce Foundation.

Hughes takes the reader from his middle-class North Carolina origins to his fateful years as an undergrad at Harvard, where he roomed with Mark Zuckerberg and helped found Facebook, ultimately serving as its head of marketing and communication; to his stint with the digital team for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and his Icarus-like tenure as owner of the New Republic magazine; to his work with the Economic Security Project.

All these experiences fuel Hughes’s belief in the need for a guaranteed income of $500 a month provided by the government to every working adult making less than $50,000 a year. In Fair Shot, Hughes makes his case for this guaranteed income, establishing himself in the vanguard of philanthropists who have recently made economic security and income inequality key funding priorities.

Benjamin Soskis, research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and a frequent Chronicle contributor who has written frequently about basic income, recently spoke to Hughes about Fair Shot. Following are excerpts:

Soskis: One of the themes that stitch together the two parts of your book — your own life story and your call for a guaranteed income — is luck. Historically, luck has been a topic that many leading philanthropists have addressed, from Andrew Carnegie to Julius Rosenwald to, more recently, Warren Buffett, and even Mark Zuckerberg. But you have a very distinct approach to the idea of luck. You pair it with a sort of a negative counterpart, precarity or insecurity. Can you talk a bit about how you engaged this idea of luck in Fair Shot, and how it’s shaped both your thinking about your own life’s trajectory and your advocacy for a guaranteed income?

Hughes: It is very much grounded in my own experience. As I talk about in the book, I worked hard on Facebook for three years, but the financial reward that I got was entirely out of step with the amount of work that I put in. It’s clear that I got lucky. In the first couple of years after coming into that wealth, I thought that I was just an exception.

But over the last several years, I came to think it wasn’t that. It might have been extreme, but it’s not that uncommon. A lot of people in the economy are benefiting from all different kinds of fortune and luck, and almost all of them are working hard. That’s the thing that I find in many ways most challenging to explain. Usually it’s like, “Some people here on the left have won the lottery, and everyone here on the right is working hard.”

The case that I’m trying to make, more or less, is that everyone is working hard, but a small group of people reap disproportionate returns. Fortune 500 CEOs who make gobs of money almost all work very hard. They are also very lucky. These things co-exist.

It’s important to acknowledge that luck is not so much like winning the lottery; it’s a set of specific decisions we’ve made that created an economy where the 0.1 percent owns 90 percent of the wealth in the country. That didn’t happen organically, spontaneously, naturally. It happened because our leaders made a set of decisions. As depressing as that is on the one hand, it also should remind us that we have the power to change it.

Soskis: Your guaranteed income plan is conditional — it’s granted only to those making less than $50,000 a year who are working in some way, though you define work expansively to include being parents, caretakers, and college students. This is, as you explain, not a universal basic income, granted unconditionally to all citizens. Why did you decide against an unconditional and universal cash transfer?

Hughes: I talk in the book about how I came to this work and the journey that I went on. It was initially through the international frame and then more recently, domestically, but it was also about the big-picture, inspiring ideals, those that are also behind UBI: the freedom for people to be able to choose how to spend their time, to choose what to invest in in their lives, and to be able to chase their own dreams. That’s the big picture ideals behind something like the UBI — that everybody deserves that and you have to have economic security to be able to pursue it. Those were the ideals that brought me here, and they still motivate me in the work.

I am, however, very much interested in the here and now. A lot of the time when we talk about the UBI, it ends up being a conversation about the future, about 2050 and robots and self-driving cars. And that world may happen, or it may not happen. But the reality is that the future is already here: Jobs are already coming apart. Income inequality is at historical levels, and the guaranteed income can be a way to address it.

When we began to think about how a guaranteed income could work, it should be for the folks who need it the most, and I see it as a stabilizing force.

That’s the key thing for me that differentiates it from other parts of the safety net. The safety net is there to support people who are in poverty or are disabled or who cannot work. It’s important that those benefits are targeted and, I would argue, even bigger than they are. That overlaps with, but is very much distinct from, the guaranteed income, which I see as a kind of foundation of stability for the working poor and the middle class. Not so much a safety-net kind of benefit but instead a reinforcement of the social contract that I think we’ve had a long time in America but unfortunately isn’t true anymore: that if you work, you shouldn’t live in poverty, and you should be able to provide for your family.

And because work is coming apart, and part-time, contract, temporary jobs — the gig economy — is on the rise, we need a stabilizing force. That’s the reason why I think a modest amount of money, $500 per adult, for the people who need it the most, is the direction we should head in.

It’s a very big program, but it’s also feasible. For instance, it’s half the cost of Trump’s tax cuts, if we did the program fully. I see the guaranteed income as a manifestation of the values behind the UBI, and it very well might be in 2050 that we need a full UBI, but I’m very much focused on today.

Soskis: You mention that the popularity of universal basic income has been driven by fears of the rise of robots and automation, leaving many Americans without work. It’s also increasingly been associated with Silicon Valley, and with prominent tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Their advocacy of the cause has received a lot of media attention — for good or ill. But you make the point in your book that the argument for a guaranteed income doesn’t depend on the rise of robots or AI. Can you talk a little about how you’ve approached the challenge of detaching the cause of guaranteed income from the preoccupations of Silicon Valley?

Hughes: People are worried about the future of work in the United States, and specifically about how automation may change the nature of work. I’m interested in that too. I’m not of the school that thinks all the jobs will be gone tomorrow. If you go out and talk to people in Detroit or Ohio or North Carolina — where I grew up — or up in Alaska or California, people for the most part are concerned about the future of jobs, but they are not convinced that their jobs are going to be eliminated tomorrow. But they are, however, convinced that they are working just as hard as they have for decades and not getting ahead.

It’s important that we recenter the conversation to be about how a guaranteed income might work in the lives of working people today who are struggling to make ends meet and not premise it on a somewhat theoretical conversation, which is fun to have at a dinner party in San Francisco or New York but, frankly, somewhat remote from the concerns of working people.

Soskis: One of the more fascinating parts of the book for me, as a former New Republic staffer, was your account of buying the magazine and your attempts to make it profitable in the digital age. It was, to put it kindly, not a success. The lesson you took away from the experience was the danger of “unbridled idealism” and the need to take more moderate, incremental approaches to achieve ambitious ends. Can you talk about how that informed your advocacy for guaranteed income and your co-founding of the Economic Security Project? How might other leaders of nonprofit advocacy organizations, who also might suffer from “unbridled idealism,” think about that challenge?

Hughes: I came to the New Republic guns blazing. I was really interested in bringing the quality journalism that the magazine had done for a long time to a broader audience. And my experiences up until then were with Facebook and the Obama campaign, both of which were rocket ships, where my life lessons were that if you work hard and get some smart people, and put some significant financial capital behind those ideals, the sky’s the limit. When it came to the New Republic, I genuinely wanted and expected it to reach an audience of millions, digitally, on phones, on desktop computers, audio, video, and of course print, across the board. And I learned the hard way that what the New Republic had always been was a special outlet of fantastic journalism for a few tens of thousands of people. I learned in the experience that the institution would have been much better served, and the money I had invested much better spent, if I had taken a much more modest approach. The idea that we had to do everything in some big, grand way right off the bat was mistaken.

It was a big dose of humility. When I came to the basic income issue, [I understood] that UBI is a big idea. It is a controversial idea. It’s an expensive idea.

And so rather than starting a nonprofit to start advocating for UBI here and now, what Natalie [Foster, Economic Security Project co-chair], Dorian [Warren, co-chair], and I wanted to do was to ask big-picture questions — to pull a lot of smart people together into a network where we could ask those questions, where we could invest money in research, small pilots, demonstrations, and convenings — and take the approach that we know less than we want to know. We chose to cultivate a community of people who agree on certain values but who might often disagree on how to make those values happen.

Some folks would have come in and assumed that UBI is a silver bullet to solve all of our problems. We’re doing something very different, in which we are trying to invest meaningful money in asking questions: What is the best way to design this policy, what is the best way to cultivate interest in it? What are some of the pitfalls and risks that go along with it? What are some of the other policies that we need to think about that are critical to get right in tandem: housing policy, or health care policy. It’s a different kind of approach. I don’t know if I would have taken this approach five years ago. But for me, it’s the right approach.

It’s helpful to me to find a sweet spot. Some people think what we talk about is far too modest, many people feel what we talk about is far too grand — so as long as there are people on both sides, I feel like I’m in the right spot.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.