Poverty Research & Policy

The Poverty Research & Policy Podcast is produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) and features interviews with researchers about poverty, inequality, and policy in the United States.

Kathryn Edin on the 25th Anniversary of "Making Ends Meet" 06/15/2022

Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana on Race and the Financial Toolkit 06/02/2022

Brieanna Watters and Robert Stewart on Native Americans and Monetary Sanctions 05/16/2022

José Pacas on the Puzzle of Measuring Rural Poverty in the Supplemental Poverty Measure 04/29/2022

Whitney Gent on How Homelessness is Portrayed in Movies and Why it Matters 03/21/2022

Lindsey Bullinger on Evaluating Risk of Child Maltreatment During the COVID-19 Pandemic 03/02/2022

Prentiss Dantzler on the Concept of Who Deserves to Have Access to Public Housing 02/07/2022

Quentin Riser on Family Income Instability and How it Might Affect Kids' School Readiness 01/20/2022

Andrea Elliott and Darcey Merritt in Conversation about Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City 01/13/2022

Anna Gassman-Pines on Early Impacts of the Pandemic for Parents in Service Occupations 12/20/2021

Anna Gassman-Pines on Early Impacts of the Pandemic for Parents in Service Occupations When the pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, Anna Gassman-Pines and her colleague Elizabeth Ananat were already conducting a text message survey among service workers who had children. As early-pandemic lockdowns and business closures began, Gassman-Pines and Ananat were able to pivot and began asking the people they were surveying about job and income loss, challenges that stemmed from school and childcare shifts, whether they were able to access government benefits, and about their own mental health. In this podcast episode Gassman-Pines offers an overview of their findings and discusses how what they learned fits within the larger context of low-wage work in the United States. Transcript: Dave Chancellor: [00:00:04] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm Dave Chancellor and, for this episode, I got to speak with Anna Gassman-Pines about the experiences early in the COVID-19 pandemic of parents who worked in service occupations. Now, before the start of the pandemic, Gassman-Pines and her colleagues were already doing a text message survey with workers that looked especially at how the precariousness of their work schedules affected other areas of their lives. And so when the pandemic hit, they were able to pivot and ask about many of the issues that especially impacted lower earning parents like income loss, shifts to remote learning or changes in child care challenges, accessing benefits, and mental health struggles. And even though we're around a year and a half into the pandemic, these are things that many families are still very much working through today. So let's turn to the interview. Dr. Gassman-Pines, thanks for being here for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast. So you are the WLF BASS Connections Associate Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at Duke University, right? Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of research that you do? Anna Gassman-Pines [00:01:21] Absolutely, and thanks so much for having me. My research focuses on understanding contextual influences on the well-being of low income children in the United States, and in particular, I'm interested in really understanding how parents experiences outside the home in labor markets, in low wage jobs, accessing social services spill over to the home and ultimately affect families and children's well-being. Chancellor [00:01:51] Today we're talking about how lower income working parents were kind of doing in the early months of the COVID 19 pandemic and you have a study that you've done with Elizabeth Ananat that ended up giving us a lot of insights into the picture of people's day to day. But that's not how the two of you kind of originally set out to do this study, right? What was the actual plan here? Gassman-Pines [00:02:14] That's right. So at the beginning of this study, we were interested in two big questions. One is understanding how common schedule changes are for hourly working parents who are working in the service sector. So working in retail, food service or hotel jobs. How common is it for their work schedule to be changed from the schedule that was originally posted or shared with them? And what are the consequences of those schedule changes for the well-being of both those parents and their children? So that was the first big question. The second big question was to try to understand whether. Local regulations that hold service sector employers that they had to give their employees more advance notice and to compensate their employees for changes made to the work schedule after it was shared would either alter the likelihood of those last minute changes or make their consequences less negative for those families. So, in other words, would a local law that tries to make schedules more predictable, improve well-being for working parents and their families, either by making schedule changes less common or by making them less costly? Chancellor [00:03:32] You had a wave of this study in the field in the early months of 2020, so you kind of got like a real time look at what happened right around the middle of March. Gassman-Pines [00:03:44] That's right. So the way that our data collection works is we actually ask our participants to answer daily survey questions. The surveys each day are quite short, but they allow us to get real time information about whether parents work, what their work hours were, whether there were any unanticipated changes to their work schedule and reports about their own and their children's well-being each day. And we had just launched another wave of data collection starting in mid-February, where we were asking these parents to provide two weeks of 14 days or these daily survey reports. And as people were enrolling in that wave over time and those two weeks were starting, that was right when the COVID-19 pandemic kind of burst onto the scene. And what we could really see was almost in real time just how quickly parents lost access to work as restrictions were put into place and how immediately that affected their family well-being. Chancellor [00:04:52] I know for a lot of researchers when the pandemic hit and a lot of these quarantine restrictions kind of came into place, it kind of messed things up, I guess, in terms of study. But you were doing like a text message study, right? So this is in some ways, socially distant-friendly. Gassman-Pines [00:05:08] That's right. So this study was set up to use technology from the very beginning. We use text messages for sending and receiving all of our survey questions. And that is for a few reasons. One. Almost everyone has a basic mobile phone that is capable of simple text messaging at this point, so cell phones have really become ubiquitous. So there are way of reaching all different types of people. But by using text messages instead of a more standard phone survey, people can participate every day in a way that works for them and that allows them to continue to balance their own other work and family demands. So those surveys are sent out each night at seven p.m., but someone might not be able to answer until midnight, and that's totally fine. So we were set up to use this technology from the very beginning, even well before the pandemic and back in 2019. And we'd been communicating with our sample about the study, using phone and text all along. And so we were really in a strong position to continue that work through the pandemic without having to make any changes to the way that we were asking our participants to share information with us. Chancellor [00:06:24] So what sort of things were you asking these workers and these parents, especially as you shifted into, you know, pandemic mode? Gassman-Pines [00:06:35] So once the pandemic hit and we saw how quickly parents work lives were changing, we did pivot to field additional one time surveys to the sample over time. That allowed us to really get a lot more details from them about how they were experiencing the pandemic. So these included in addition to information about their job loss and changes to work. We also gathered information about. Loss of income, both income from earnings, but also income from other sources like government support. We continue to ask questions about parents’ mental health. We have a lot of detailed information about access to social services, both kind of traditional programs that have existed for a long time, as well as programs that were put into place in response to the pandemic. And a lot of other questions about the challenges with balancing work and care in this moment. So, for example, in the fall wave that we fielded in fall of 2020, we asked about remote or in-person child care or school, how where children were and how often schooling or care had been disrupted because of the pandemic. Chancellor [00:07:57] Walk us through some of the results here. What were people telling you about? I think, Early on with the job loss, I know a lot of people lost their jobs in that last half of March of 2020. What did that look like for the people that you were talking to you? Gassman-Pines [00:08:12] Keeping in mind that our sample was folks who are all working in the service sector, which, as we know, has been really hard hit by the pandemic and we saw that in our sample too. So about 40 percent of our sample was laid off during those early months of the pandemic. And for those who were with who were laid off, they experienced substantial losses of income. So we ask a pretty simple question which is asking folks to think back and compare their income now to what it was pre-pandemic. And we ask them to not report the exact dollar figure because that's pretty hard to figure out, but we ask them to put that number into general buckets. Is it basically the same as it was before the pandemic? Maybe it's higher or was it less than before the pandemic? And if it was less, was it more than half of what you had before the pandemic? And so what we see for those who lost jobs is the most common thing is that their income has fallen by more than 50 percent. This is a large income loss for folks who were not making a lot of money to begin with. And the consequence of that has been a big increase in material hardship. So what we're seeing in our sample is big increases in food insecurity from pre-pandemic and also trouble with basic things like being able to pay rent or mortgage. Chancellor [00:09:47] And I'm curious about some of these mental health questions that you ask, because this is for this been hard for everybody, right? But for people who were experiencing large material hardships, that's going to be really hard, right? Gassman-Pines [00:10:01] Yes, that's right, so we have asked throughout the pandemic questions about parents mental health, both general anxiety and depression we use for each of those. Validated to question screeners that basically could give any practitioner, a researcher, health professional, a sense that this person is at pretty high risk for either generalized anxiety or depression. And what we found is that throughout the pandemic, half of the parents in our sample are screening positive for likely anxiety, depression or both. Chancellor [00:10:38] You had mentioned before looking at some of the government programs that folks may have been either trying to take up. How were those helping or were folks able to access things that made a difference? Gassman-Pines [00:10:51] So there's really two important takeaways from our findings around access to government support. So big takeaway number one is the CARES Act, and the government supports that were provided in response to the pandemic did help in stabilizing family income. At the same time, though, they relied on. Antiquated systems that were, in many cases, understaffed and underfunded pre-pandemic, with the implications being that not everyone who was eligible for benefits was able to get them. So taking unemployment insurance, for example, so unemployment insurance is our main safety net program for people who lose jobs. Access to unemployment was massively increased in response to the pandemic so that many, many more workers, nearly all workers, were eligible to receive unemployment insurance, and it was also made more generous to acknowledge the tremendous financial need during this time. But in our sample, nearly everyone who was laid off tried to apply for unemployment insurance, but many were not actually able to get their benefits. Some couldn't get through the process because it was too cumbersome or difficult, or they didn't have the right technology. But most of them simply just hadn't received benefits, even though they were able to apply and were eligible. The benefits just hadn't arrived yet. And unfortunately, there are racial disparities in the likelihood of that happening. So in our sample, the black families were much more likely to have gotten through the application process, but not yet received their unemployment insurance at the time of our survey. Then the white families in our sample, Chancellor [00:12:56] You study families with children and how sort of this precarity sometimes affects families and how do we kind of situate this in the longer term? I mean, is this just a symptom of kind of like a broader issue that a lot of lower income families have in our country? Gassman-Pines [00:13:15] That's a great question, and I do think that what we're seeing families struggling with now is really only a heightened version of what families were already struggling with before the pandemic. So, for example, in our sample in the fall of 2019, of all the days that we surveyed families, they told us that they had some kind of anticipated change to their work schedule, like having a shift canceled at the last minute, having a shift added on at the last minute, having their hours changed in some way that was happening on about 11 percent of all the days. So when you think about 11 percent of days, what that tells you is that one once out of every 10 days work is not going as planned, which means rearranging child care and other responsibilities. And you can imagine the kind of stress and strain that this was putting on parents under the best of circumstances in a strong economy before this pandemic. And so what the pandemic has really done is heightened all those stresses and strains and made much more visible to two more people. How precarious this balance is of trying to manage unstable work schedules and care responsibilities for young children. Chancellor [00:14:44] What are some of the other implications of this study? What are you looking at? Gassman-Pines [00:14:49] I think the big implication is that more supports for working families are needed. It could include thinking more about. How to smooth and streamline access to these programs and support supporting state and local governments in administering benefits and reducing hurdles for families. And additionally, we should be thinking about ways to strengthen our systems for addressing families mental health needs. Chancellor [00:15:25] Thanks again to Professor Anna Gassman-Pines for talking about her work with us. You can give her follow on Twitter at @AGPines. The Institute for Research on Poverty is the National Research Center on Poverty and Economic Mobility, funded by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The positions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of the Institute for Research on Poverty or ASPE. You can learn more about IRP and the other resources we offer at irp.wisc.edu. Thanks for listening. /episode/index/show/povertyresearch/id/21358385

Amy Castro On Early Results From Guaranteed Income Programs 12/15/2021

Amy Castro On Early Results From Guaranteed Income Programs For this episode of the Poverty Research and Policy Podcast, we hear from Professor Amy Castro about the concept of Basic Income, and what she and her team are learning from data coming in from pilot projects around the country. Professor Castro is Founding Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and an Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. --- Transcript: Judith Siers-Poisson: Hello, and thanks for joining us for the poverty research and policy podcast from the Institute for research on poverty at the university of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm Judith Siers-Poisson. For this episode we are going to be talking with Professor Amy Castro about the concept of Basic Income, and what she and her team are learning from data coming in from pilot projects around the country. Professor Castro is Founding Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and an Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Castro, Thanks for joining us today. Amy Castro: Thanks for having me. Siers-Poisson: What do we mean when we talk about a guaranteed income? What is it and what is it not? Castro: Yeah, it's a great question because there's a lot of terms that are floating out there in the public imagination that also in the literature. So, there's three basic terms that pertain to this body of work. First is UBI or Universal Basic Income, and that's the one that people are probably the most familiar with given Andrew Yang's presidential run. UBI is exactly what it sounds like. It's universal. It's an unconditional amount of cash that goes to every single person in a city, a state, a town, a county, whatever that jurisdiction may be. We actually have not had a UBI experiment here in the United States because obviously universality know would apply to everybody. We have not had that yet. Second is basic income. Basic income is again an unconditional amount of cash that is given to a group of people, and it's enough to cover your basic needs. The third category, which is primarily what I study, is guaranteed income. It's not enough money to cover your basic needs but is a fixed amount of cash that's recurring, so you can rely on that money coming each month each week, whatever that cadence may be. And I think that's key about all three of these categories. A characteristic that carries across all is the unconditional nature of it, meaning you receive that cash because you're human, you don't receive that cash because you fit a means test criteria or because you are doing something like participating in a workforce force training program or a financial literacy program. You receive that cash because you are because you exist. And that's really the ethos behind guaranteed income or basic income. Siers-Poisson: And it seems like that point is what distinguishes it from, say, what people used to lump under the umbrella of welfare in the past. Castro: Exactly. And I think that that's why, you know, on the one hand, people are so excited about this idea. And then on the other hand, why there is so much backlash, right, is that we truly are talking about giving away money, no strings attached. And traditionally here in the United States, when we talk about the provision of cash or goods to people who are struggling to make ends meet, we layer it with all sorts of restrictions as to how that money can be spent and who can have access to it. And what's attached to those restrictions are social constructions ideas that are not rooted in reality, they’re rooted in ideology most of the time around race, class, gender, marital status. And they're used as ways to shame and blame people who access these programs. And it really serves as a social deterrent for people to access them. In contrast, basic income or guaranteed income functions completely differently. If you're enrolled in one of these programs or pilots, you receive it because you're human. And the idea is that people know best what they need and what their households need. And secondly, if we think about need, right? So like financial scarcity or financial need, needs fluctuate from month to month and cash is the only benefit that's flexible. So if needs are flexible, we want to have something that's dynamic to match it. And cash is really the only thing that does that in comparison to something like food stamps or SNAP, which can only be used for restricted items such as food that fits a pre-set list that's set by a bureaucrat. Siers-Poisson: So you just explained that this goes to people because they're people, not because they qualify in some way, but then who was targeted for these guaranteed income programs? Castro: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, it's a fancy way of saying it would be what is the recruitment criteria, right? Because we're running experiments scientifically. So we are designing and studying these programs to see what happens when you provide people the money. So one of the big questions that we get any time we're running a new pilot—and right now we're running or at various stages of running twenty-eight pilots across the US at my center—is who gets the money right? And so that's a complicated process that for us happens across three different sets of stakeholders. First, we have our community-based stakeholders, which is what the community wants to set as far as eligibility criteria. Second, you know, elected officials who may or may not be working with us and that are really spearheading the program and helping to kind of get it off the ground. And then third, those of us within the research space trying to determine how do we best leverage this project to answer research questions so that we are informing policy with data. So that recruitment criteria really varies for us from state to state and from location to location. I would say the majority of the projects we're working on right now are focused on people who are struggling to make ends meet. Oftentimes, they have children in the household, and oftentimes there are people who have had some type of a pandemic-related incident with their work: their hours being cut, something to that effect. But that's a general statement of each pilot is slightly different. Siers-Poisson: I want to get into the nuts and bolts of how this works, but first, I want to touch on something that you just said and that's getting feedback from the communities that you are in. And I think that especially the communities that we're talking about are communities that have maybe historically been treated with less respect in the ways that they are given support or help, if they are at all. When you also layer on things like systemic racism and the history of understandable distrust of systems, how do you go in and build those relationships that are necessary to have any hope of being successful? Castro: That’s such a great question. You know, first I’ll own, before I say how, and sort of jump to say how we resolve that problem, or we try to resolve that problem, because I'm by no means saying that we fix it. The first thing I just want to own is that, you know, as a scientist and as somebody who has social work training, this is the hardest part of my job. You know, it's really easy as a scientist to stay in a position of control. And that's how we're trained, is that you hold your research design so tightly. You are the expert, you know, best it needs to happen. You determine the hypotheses, you determine the design and it is in your hands. And it is very comforting, right? You can lean back into your methods training, lean back into your degree, lean back into your institution or your brand, and label yourself as the expert and that feels very safe. But the more you involve the community in your design, the more you are letting go of really being in control. So when we think about the posture of science and the posture of how we engage with community stakeholders, it's crucial that we sort of hold our integrity as a scientist in one hand while on the other hand, being willing to relinquish control to some degree to involve community voice in the process. And when we look back through social science, we see, you know, decades of places where we've been unwilling to do this and we start measuring things, designing programs and policies, without the community input. And then we wonder why it doesn't work. This happened with TANF, or Welfare to Work as we designed this program, assuming it would work without bothering to think, “Hey, what happens if you expect the mom to work and take three busses to get to the other side of a city?” That literally makes absolutely no sense, right? So I will say that at the outset, it's the most rewarding part of what I do. It's also the most terrifying because it means I’m not in a position of control. As far as how we resolve it, there's no way to do it that’s going to make everyone happy. I’ll own that from the start. But a couple key steps. First is making certain that we are involving ourselves from the very beginning of a project with community-based stakeholders and organizations who know their community well. So this means doing that legwork of meeting with CBOs, nonprofits, and also the constituents themselves and the people who receive benefits from those programs to understand best how a program ought to be designed. So in some cases, we involve people in giving us feedback on how we design that recruitment criteria, or another way of putting it who gets the money, and getting that feedback. And then crucially, another way that we involve community stakeholders is in release of findings. So in Stockton, for instance, all of that data that's been released on spending that people can see, that is seen by a group of focus groups of community stakeholders that are not elected officials, that are not people in power. They're regular humans who get to see that data first and work with us to think about how we display this data to the public. Siers-Poisson: So let's get down to those nuts and bolts of how these programs work. First of all, how is the amount decided on? You did say that guaranteed income is not supposed to provide for all expenses, but even given that, it seems like the cost of living in different parts of the country or even parts of a state would need to be taken into consideration. So how do you find that that amount that is going to give you some kind of results that mean something? Castro: That's a great question, and it's one of our most vexing open research questions. So first, Stockton was set at $500 a month. The rationale behind that $500 a month is that the question of whether or not you can absorb a $400 unexpected shock or financial emergency is a standard question or threshold within economic mobility research and something that's standard in a lot of our large datasets. So it sort of made sense to start there. A lot of other cities who have built on the Stockton model have kind of just lifted that amount of money because that's what Stockton did. We have very limited control as to deciding the disbursement amount. And of course, those things are also restricted by the amount of funds that are available to a given pilot. However, some of our larger places and bigger cities with higher cost of living like, for instance, the L.A. area, we're talking about $1,000 a month. So it's really an open question for research and for policy as to how should we adjust unconditional cash based on cost of living. It's not something we have a good answer to yet, and I'm hoping that we will within the next three or four years because, yeah, cost of living is different from one state to the next, from one city to the next. And that's absolutely something that needs to be taken into consideration when we're talking about moving from pilot to policy. Siers-Poisson: So Stockton, which is the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, I believe, as you said, that was the first pilot of this specific type of guaranteed income program. How did it come about? Why Stockton? Castro: So it's incredibly interesting. So first, Mayor Michael Tubbs really spearheaded the launch of that project in partnership with Economic Security Project. So Economic Security Project or ESP, which is headed up by Chris Hughes, former cofounder of Facebook, and Natalie Foster, they had been sort of looking for a city that was interested in potentially testing this idea. Now everyone is kind of running to try find a basic income pilot but go back to 2017, 2018, people are like “you are crazy. You're going to give people money? No strings attached? That's absolutely nuts.” And here's Mayor Tubbs, who you know is, I believe the youngest, if not one of the youngest, who's 26 years old, elected as mayor in Stockton. You know, Stockton had nowhere to go but up. They had experienced the worst that capitalism has to offer. They were once the foreclosure capital of the United States, while also absorbing the cost of housing from the bay area. So it made it sort of an ideal spot to test this idea because one, you had a mayor who was interested and willing to try anything right, willing to take the risk. But second, it really is a bellwether location. And when we think about sort of the way that risky lending has really dismantled the middle class and resulted in tremendous losses in wealth, particularly for, you know, Black and Brown households, Stockton was an ideal place to test policy proof of concept because it really kind of fit that Venn diagram of all these, these different forces that are really contributed to the loss of wealth, the United States. Siers-Poisson: So you had, I think it's fair to say, a visionary young mayor who was interested in trying this. So where did the money come from? Castro: The money came from two kind of different categories. So first, you have the disbursement money, so the money that actually goes to the people. That funding came primarily from the Economic Security Project, along with a number of other philanthropists who donated, smaller family foundations, and also some individual donors. And then the science—this is crucial because this is a model that we, we maintain across all the things that we're working on—the funding for the science came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And so we really like to keep a strong firewall between those two sides. So there's not coercion. So, RWJF, you know, really to their credit, specifically, the evidence for action arm of RWJ, really took a chance on our project and funded the research side. So the evaluation dollars were coming from sort of that traditional form of funding. Siers-Poisson: And so how many people were enrolled, and do you think of them as people or as households? Castro: Oh, great question. Yeah. So we tend to talk about sort of the findings at a household level simply because that's how people live, right? They live in networks, they live in households, but the money is not going to specific household, it's going to a specific individual in the household. So we had 125 people in the treatment group, which is another way of saying the people who got the $500. And then we also had a control group who were taking all the same surveys, participating in the same interviews as the treatment group, but not getting the cash so we could compare one group to the other. Siers-Poisson: When did it start and how far along are you now? Castro: So the research ran for two years. Our last payment was in February of this year. So we had one full year of pre-pandemic data or disbursements and then one year of payments during the pandemic or after. We've only released the first-year findings. The second-year findings, that is the total findings, will be released to the public in late spring of 2022. Siers-Poisson: What were the key findings from that first year in Stockton? Castro: So we really saw changes in three key areas. First was income volatility. One of our driving research questions is can guaranteed income disrupt income volatility, which is your money going up and down each month, which really locks people out of financial instruments and being able to plan for the future. We saw less income volatility in those who were in the treatment group in comparison to control after one year. We saw that that sort of stabilization in family finances allowed families to plan for the future. So in the treatment group, after one year, we saw that monthly income volatility really dropped. And one of the ways that we look at that is asking this question: “Can you pay for unexpected $400 emergency expense with cash?” At the beginning of the experiment, in the treatment group, only 25% said that they could do that, along with the control. And after one year, those receiving the cash, 52% of them said they could absorb a $400 unexpected shock, while only 28% of those in control said that. Now this finding is really important because on the face of it sort of obvious, right? If you give people more money, they're going to have more money. But what's key to understand about this is two things. First, that liquidity in the household allowed people to both plan while also absorb the unexpected things that happen to all of us: the flat tire, the missed shift at work, the unexpected copay, which then tends to spill over in a household and cause strain elsewhere in the budget. Second, that liquidity was really pooled across fragile family networks, such that stabilizing those resources in one household actually had a spillover effect into other families where they normally would borrow money and food for those households, which is really key and interesting. And then the second area that we saw big shifts was in our second research question, which was ‘How do changes in income volatility impact health and well-being?” And what we found was that people receiving the cash were less anxious and depressed, both over time and compared to the control group. They reported improved emotional health and well-being, energy over fatigue, again, both over time compared to the control group. Now key, Judith, it's still staggering for me to even think that this is one of research findings is that at the beginning of the experiment, almost everyone in treatment control met the clinical criteria for either anxiety or depression, as measured by some pretty standard measures that we all use at the doctor's office. Most of us have taken these. And so what we saw was that after one year, we saw that treatment group move from meeting that clinical criteria for mild mental health disorder into the category of likely to be well, and that did not happen in the control group. And all we did was provide people with unconditional cash, which is fairly extraordinary. Then finally, our last question was “How is guaranteed income generate agency over one's future? Are we seeing people have greater control and self-determination?” And the biggest finding that we had here was around employment. So, you know, we've talked a lot about assumptions around poverty, and those are certainly very politically driven. And one of the criticisms we often get is “well if you give people cash, they’re going to stop working and they'll just quit their jobs en masse,” which is kind of silly if you think about it, because you can't live off of $500 a month anywhere, let alone California. And what we saw in the treatment group was that at baseline, 28% of people in the treatment group were fully employed and after one year, 40% were fully employed, and we did not see that same shift in the control group. Literally the opposite of what politically we're told will happen if you give people cash. And again, when we leaned into our mixed methods design and followed up with qualitative data to understand, OK, how did this... /episode/index/show/povertyresearch/id/21492896