These are our most frequently asked questions. If you have any further questions or concerns, please ask them during a live AMA or send us an email at info@thelogicalfoundation.org
Most Frequently Asked Questions
Do you have a screening process for unhoused participants?
Yes. While our research has shown that the vast majority of unhoused people spend money on basic needs and effectively regaining stability, some suffer from extreme mental illnesses and/or addiction. Our programs include a 2-step screening process to ensure that prospective participants with debilitating illnesses get the intensive care they need.
How are unhoused participants given guaranteed income?
We do not hand out stacks of cash. All participants are connected to online banking services through our partner banks and we only transfer funds through online methods. We do this so we can easily audit our activities and ensure that we have good records.
About The Logical Foundation
When and why was the Foundation founded?
The Logical Foundation was envisioned on July 1st, 2021, during a conversation about the most important things our society needs doing in order to have a prosperous future. After much debate, it became clear that a Universal Basic Income, a stable foundation for everybody in society, is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. With the understanding that guaranteed income is also the most cost-effective way to reduce poverty, we came up with a first-principles-based plan to build as much guaranteed income as possible through nonprofit work.
What is the grand vision?
We’ve landed on a very important idea that could transform the guaranteed income community from a scattering of pilots, to a single program that can bring in billions of dollars a year and uplift massive populations of people in need. The platform approach is fundamental to our long-term vision. If done right, we’ll be able to bring in money from every funding source interested in helping any population of people in need in any geographic region and for. And we’ll be able to do it all at the same time. Essentially, it will be the most powerful fundraising machine ever built, and all of the money will be funneled into the most powerful anti-poverty intervention. With your help, we believe we can end homelessness, and maybe even all poverty, over the next two decades.
Do you implement the program yourself or partner with other organizations?
We manage the transfer process ourselves with potential help from financial services partners. We partner with many organizations to both fund our programs and ensure that our participants have access to the pre-existing services that can help them in various ways.
About Guaranteed Income
Conditions: why do we give with “no strings attached”?
There’s strong evidence that
paying people to take certain actions (e.g., ensuring children
attend school) makes them more likely to do so. Depending on the
condition and which aspects of well-being you prioritize, such
conditions can be more or less worthwhile. But they can also be
costly to enforce and can exclude the most vulnerable members of a
community. We believe it is clear at this point that the costs,
inefficiencies, and danger of fraud intrinsic to Conditional Cash
Transfers outweigh the benefits.
“Without targeting or
monitoring of conditions, the estimated long-run CTR [cash transfer
ratio declines] about 40 percent, underscoring that targeting and
conditioning require substantial resources.”
Caldés
& Maluccio (2005)
“By denying noncompliant
(excluded) adolescent girls and young women cash transfers at
precisely the moment when they are most likely to start
childbearing, a myriad of potential benefits might be missed under
CCT programs.”
Baird et al. (2019)
Training: shouldn't you “teach a man to fish” instead?
Training is extremely expensive
and unreliable. It turns out that poor people are generally capable
and skilled enough to work, but only when given the opportunity to
do so. That opportunity can only reliably be provided by cash
because cash gives people the freedom and time to get their plans in
order.
“Skills training and microfinance have shown little impact on poverty
or stability, especially relative to program cost.”
Blattman & Ralston (2017)
Also, the global poor often know a lot about
fishing
and how to
start businesses.
What about the long-term effects of cash?
There is strong evidence showing
that cash transfer programs and guaranteed income programs have
long-term benefits above and beyond other anti-poverty interventions
in the U.S. and abroad. The relevant test is not whether effects
last forever, but whether they’re large enough and durable
enough to be worthwhile. For example, most people would prefer an
investment that returns $99 tomorrow over one that returns $1 a year
for 100 years. Unlike investments, there’s no omnibus measure
of returns with development programs, so aggregating impacts over
time to judge how worthwhile a program is methodologically and
morally difficult. We’re looking forward to reviewing and
creating more evidence on this subject over the next several years,
but below are some examples of these dynamics.
“Four years on, an
experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% …
We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants raised
earnings and consumption temporarily only. Grantees’
investment leveled off; controls eventually increased their incomes
through business and casual labor; and so both groups converged in
employment, earnings, and consumption … We estimate a
discounted present value of total earnings gains of roughly $665 —
almost twice the size of the grant …”
Blattman et al. (2020)
“[W]e collected …
records of applicants to the Mothers’ Pension program—the
first government-sponsored welfare program in the United States
(1911–1935) … Male children of accepted applicants
lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers. They also
obtained one-third more years of schooling, were less likely to be
underweight, and had higher income in adulthood than children of
rejected mothers.”
Aizer et al. 2016)
Do women and men spend cash transfers differently?
It seems that people in need,
regardless of gender, age, or demographic, consistently spend cash
on things that improve their quality of life. We consider it
important to take an individual approach, giving each adult a
guaranteed income instead of only giving money to one chosen
household member. Not only does it reduce stress and eliminate
gendered assumptions, it could empower people in abusive
relationships to excape bad situations.
“While one might expect
differences in outcomes depending on the gender of the main
recipient, based on the four studies included in this review, for
most of the indicators in this review there does not appear to be
strong support for differences arising from specifically targeting
either men or women.”
Bastagli et al. (2016)
Spillovers: how are non-recipients affected?
By definition, cash programs
affect both recipients and those around them. After all, a dollar
spent is a dollar earned by someone else. Because of this, cash
gretaly increases economic activity. When participants
buy goods & services from non-participants, that’s good
for the non-participant’s business and their overall welfare.
Unfortunately, there may be a negative psychological impact on
seeing someone else receive a windfall when you do not. That’s
why we advocate for Universal Basic Income as the logical end-state.
We show that the program benefits
ineligible (non-recipient) households who live in treatment
villages by increasing their food consumption level by about 10%,
approximately half the size of the increase in food consumption for
eligible households. This consumption increase is financed through
higher loans and transfers from family and friends, and through a
reduction in savings.”
Angelucci & De Giorgi (2009)
“Importantly, we document large positive spillovers on non-recipient households and firms, and minimal price inflation … Despite not receiving transfers, [non-recipients] exhibit large consumption expenditure gains: their annualized consumption expenditure is higher by 13% eighteen months after transfers began … driven largely by increases in wage labor earnings.” Egger et al. (2019)
How do you decide to whom to give cash transfers?
Our goal is to build guaranteed
income, or cash transfer volume as quickly as possible and get it to
as many people in need as possible. We landed on our pilot helping
homeless individuals in Arizona because they are one of, possibly
the most, vulnerable community in America. There is a 10% death rate
for homeless individuals in Arizona, 3-4 times higher than anywhere
else in the country, so the homeless in Arizona should not only be
recognized as the most vulnerable group of people in the U.S. but as
multiple times more vulnerable than the next-most vulnerable group
of people. Cash assistance has been proven to be extremely powerful
in helping homeless people re-enter society compared to other
homelessness interventions, and targeting the most vulnerable group
with the most powerful intervention should result in the most
impactful anti-poverty program in the U.S.
Our future plan is designed such
that we can get as much money from funders as possible into the
hands of impoverished people overall. We will therefore be
fundraising from a variety of sources and giving cash to various
different groups of people in need. We may maintain a rigorously
vetted list of vulnerable communities, and encourage donors to
designate their donations to help the most vulnerable groups in
their geographic region, nationally in the U.S., or even
internationally.
Do you give money to men, women, or both?
We give money to both men and women. Innovations for Poverty Action produced an experimental comparison of transfers to men and women and found some modest differences, but overall, both genders used money responsibly. We seek to avoid selecting one person per-household to assist because the contents of various households differ drastically. We intend to be highly individualized, ensuring that each person gets money tied to them (or in the cases of children and certain disabled adults, to a designated guardian). How could it be fair that a program gives a household with 1 working adult the same amount as a household with 1 working adult and 3 kids?
How much do recipients get?
Our pilot program assists homeless
individuals with $Each participant will receive $1,000 per month for
6 months, and participants with children will receive an extra $500
per child per month. Participants will be able to request the first
five transfers ahead of time for large costs such as down deposits
or several months' rent.
Structuring transfers this way
helps to ensure that we don’t lose contact with participants,
and also ensures that participants can use the money in the best way
to fit their needs.
In the future, our Basic Income
Network will likely spend $500 or $1000 per person per month. It is
still up for debate.
Do recipients need to have a mobile phone to participate?
No. We will ensure that each participant gets a smartphone if they don’t have one already.
How do you prevent corruption?
Our pilot program has one staff
member that is also our executive director. There are two primary
reasons it would be incredibly stupid for him (me) to do something
corrupt. First, we have a dedicated auditor. The Young Writers
Foundation is our fiscal sponsor and is obligated to ensure that
nothing untoward is going on in our pilot. Our pilot will have a
very small amount of participants (24 expected), making it
incredibly easy for them to check with all of our participants that
the program is being carried out as intended. Second, my incentives
are extremely aligned with maximizing the positive impact of
our pilot. The results from our pilot will be extremely important
for building the Foundation into a sustainable organization, and the
better our results (the more people in our pilot that achieve
stability), the easier it will be to grow our organization faster.
There’s no way in hell I’d jeopardize the best
opportunity I’ve ever come across to do a huge amount of good
while creating my own career path.
The two main corruption risks that
typically arise in transfer programs involve (a) manipulation of the
list of eligible recipients and (b) diversion of transfers sent to
eligible recipients. When we are ready for larger efforts, we will
address the first by putting into place a comprehensive audit
process, using multiple independent checks to ensure that recipients
are eligible and have not been charged bribes to get on the list.
These checks will include in-person visits by different staff
members, in-person audits by senior management, remote data audits,
and phone calls with each recipient, all prioritized using modern
analytics. We will address the second through identity-matching
between our records and those of our payment providers, through
comprehensive follow-up calls to ensure money is reaching the
intended recipients, and in some cases through in-person checks.
What are the impacts?
How do recipients use the transfers?
By design, cash transfers let recipients use the money for whatever is most important to them. According to Foundations For Social Change, cash assistance given to homeless individuals was spent almost exclusively on basic needs such as rent and food, while retaining $1,000 in savings even after a year. There is a large body of research from around the world documenting the astpnighingly large impacts of cash transfers on low-income households.
Do recipients spend on alcohol or tobacco?
Foundations
For Social Change, despite giving over 100 homeless
participants $7,500, recorded a 39% total reduction in spending on
drugs and alcohol. In fact, every experiment giving cash to
impoverished and homeless individuals has found a reduction in drug
spending. It seems that when people are given freedom and hope, they
no longer feel the need to blunt the pain of crushing poverty
through drug use.
These results present an
interesting theory. Most people assume that drug addicts would spend
cash assistance on drugs and fail to improve their lives at all.
That it would be a total waste of money and possibly cause
additional harm. These assumptions, it seems, have not been tested
at all, because no one seems very inclined to go out and test them.
It is very possible that those claims are false, and many drug
addicts (if not all) would spend direct cash assistance on getting
to rehab, or elevating their quality of life such that they stop
feeling the need to constantly numb their agony with drugs. Could
giving money (and social connection) to drug addicts be the most
effective way to help them escape drug addiction?
Do transfers create conflict or tension between recipients and non-recipients, or within households?
We are slightly concerned that
participants in our homelessness pilot could become big news in the
homeless community, and potentially be taken advantage of. We want
to ensure that our participants don’t feel any pressure to
spend money on other people, and focus on uplifting themselves. This
is another reason why we advocate for Universal Basic Income, which
would leave none excluded from having economic security.
The available evidence on tension
within households suggests that transfers actually reduce it
substantially. Studies suggest that conflict is driven by the hard
choices that poverty forces: for example, which child should be
allowed to starve. As one woman put it, “there is no peace in
the family when there is no food to eat”. In developing
nations (although we would expect similar results in the U.S.)
Innovations for Poverty Action’s evaluation found “suggestive
evidence that cash transfers reduce domestic violence and increase
female empowerment in both recipient households and other households
in the same village” (
Haushofer & Shapiro 2013).
Is giving cash sustainable?
Usually, when the word
“sustainable” is applied to charity, it means that a
gift “keeps on giving” and that donors need not continue
to make gifts to the same recipient. Since many of our participants
will use some or all of the money to invest in getting jobs, we
believe cash can qualify as sustainable. Indeed, one study of
unconditional cash transfers in Mexico found that household incomes
increased by between 1.5 and 2.6 times the amount of the transfers
due to the returns from increased investment (Sadoulet, Elisabeth
and Alain de Janvry, and Benjamin Davis. “Cash Transfer
Programs with Income Multipliers: PROCAMPO in Mexico.” World
Development 29(6) pp. 1043-1056, 2001), suggesting that cash
transfers are more than sustainable. Beyond short-run income
changes, investments in adequate food, proper clothing, better
health, or more education for children may be “sustainable”
in the long run; even though it will require charity until that
child is done with school, he or she will grow up much better off
and in need of much less assistance than his or her parents.
Not all recipients will invest the
money, however, and it will be gone once it is spent. Donors who
prefer to give a gift that is guaranteed to be sustainable in the
sense that it will provide a steady income stream to the poor will
be able to do so. For designated large one-time donations and
planned gifts, we will set up a Basic Income Endowment which will
ensure that generations into the future have guaranteed basic
income. We can envision a future where this endowment grows to
billions, and can support entire towns, cities, or even countries
with (universal?) basic income.
Why not put conditions on what people have to do to get transfers?
We choose to provide unconditional, rather than conditional, cash transfers for two reasons. First, empowering the poor to make their own decisions advances our core values of respect and dignity. Second, imposing conditions requires costly monitoring and enforcement structures be put in place. One detailed estimate put the administrative costs of a conditional cash transfer scheme as high as 63% of the transfers made over the first three years of the program (Caldes, Natalia, and John Maluccio. “The Costs of Conditional Cash Transfers.” Journal of International Development 17 pp. 151-168, 2005). Our read of the existing experimental evidence comparing the impact of conditional to unconditional transfers is that there is little evidence to suggest these added costs produce commensurate benefits. Essentially, why waste a ton of money on a bureaucracy when that money would be better spent by participants?
Why not make micro-loans?
The
evidence on the impact of cash transfers
is
far stronger than that for micro-loans, whose
impacts have generally been below expectations.
We think that micro-loans are likely beneficial for the poor, but given the
evidence, see no reason to incur the added costs of administering them.
We suspect that the disappointing
track record of micro-loans may have to do with their structure.
These loans often bear high-interest rates, reflecting the high
costs of administering and monitoring them, which in turn limit
their benefit to borrowers. They also tend to have short-term
structures and require borrowers to begin making repayments shortly
after borrowing. These features make micro-loans less useful for
financing the kinds of long-term investments (e.g. education or
durable goods) that recipients often make with grants. It’s
also completely ridiculous to go around to the poorest people in the
world and attempt to collect on debts gone wrong. A debt collection
scheme is necessary for any debt-based system, but you can’t
affordably, ethically, or effectively conduct debt collections on
extremely impoverished people.
How can I help?
How can I raise money for the Foundation?
Several ways. First, talk to friends about whether they give money directly to those living in poverty. Starting that conversation is a huge step. Second, create a fundraiser on Facebook, our name is (The) Logical Foundation and we’re in Tempe AZ under human services, its a quick and easy way to reach out to your network. If Facebook does not work for you, you can also use Instagram.
Can I partner with the Foundation?
Potentially. We partner with various organizations to promote guaranteed income, increase funding for programs, connect our participants with available services, generate new evidence on impacts, etc. Contact us at info@thelogicalfoundation.org with a description of what you have in mind.
Can I use the Foundation’s logos for fundraising?
Please contact us at info@thelogicalfoundation.org explaining how you’d like to use it, and we’ll evaluate requests on a case-by-case basis.
How can I stay updated on your work?
Several ways: sign up to get updates by email and follow us on Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Instagram
Can I volunteer or intern at The Logical Foundation?
Yes! We have way more need for volunteer work than we do volunteers.
Are you hiring?
We’re always looking to meet exceptional people who are excited about our vision. However, we are currently an all-volunteer team so we cannot offer pay. If you want to help us solve the most important problem in the world, please reach out to us. We can work with you to help you make an impact and potentially become employed once we have the budget.
About the Basic Income Network
Can I apply to receive money?
At this time, we are not accepting applications for cash assistance. In the future, we will open a fast and easy application portal. After people apply, our system will randomly pick eligible participant groups (individuals and families) as funding comes in. We will take great care to ensure that our system is easy & accessible for all.
Can I choose which person receives my donation?
Not if you want to make a
tax-deductible donation. According to IRS rules, cash transfers for
specific individuals, even if they are in need, are no different
than person-to-person gifts and therefore not tax-deductible. If we
allowed you to donate to specific people, we would risk being
regulated as a money transfer service and losing our charitable
status.
However, the ultimate goal of our
work is Universal Basic Income, so we may eventually partner with a
money transfer service company or a 501(c)(4) social welfare
organization to facilitate non-tax-deductible basic income to
individuals and gifts that are more specific than allowed by the IRS
or state rules.
Where does the Basic Income Network send funds?
The Basic Income Network is a platform. As such, our goal is to be capable of delivering funds anywhere in the US at first, with eventual global expansion. Most people and organizations primarily want to make a difference locally, so ‘locally’ will most often be the answer.
Don’t donations go further overseas?
Objectively, a dollar will have more impact on a Kenyan living on $1.5/day than an American living on ~$40/day. However, most people want to make a difference in their local community. Fundamentally, for the first time ever, we will give funders the opportunity to combat poverty in their target area, and in whichever group they are most aligned with, with the most impactful and proven intervention. However, we will enable people that want to maximize the global anti-poverty impact of their donations to send money overseas.
Can I make a one-time donation?
We prefer subscribed annual or monthly donations, however, all donations are welcome.