January 17, 2020

Four years after delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” in Washington D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. was at it again.

In 1967, King started planning another march on the National Mall—but instead of focusing on racial inequality, this protest, known as the Poor People’s Campaign, would highlight economic inequality.

The demonstration he envisaged would involve constructing a tent city on the mall, where protesters would pressure Congress using nonviolent methods.

King was assassinated weeks before he could see it through. But as he laid out his vision for the economy leading up to the event, King proposed an idea—shunned at the time but rising in popularity now—of a universal basic income (UBI).

The vision

King was a frequent critic of the economic status quo. But because he was MLK, instead of writing things like “Capitalism is bad” he wrote things like “Capitalism finds herself like a losing football team in the last quarter trying all types of tactics to survive.”

On that note I'll take a step back and let King continue...

“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.”

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization…”

So what was his solution? King focused on the demand side, writing “We must create full employment or we must create incomes...people must be made consumers by one method or the other.”

King believed that no amount of economic growth in a capitalist system would ensure everyone got a job. So he wanted the government to provide every American with a guaranteed middle-class income, one that would rise with the cost of living.

Bringing it to today

Writing about King’s plan in The Atlantic in 2013, Jordan Weissmann called the idea of a basic income “light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today.”

Seven light-years later, basic income has entered the mainstream political conversation, if you consider the sixth place candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination mainstream.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang’s campaign boils down to one tweet:

The candidate’s main policy proposal is the Freedom Dividend, a basic income of $1,000/month for every American over 18. Yang’s reasoning for UBI is very different than King’s, though. He’s primarily concerned about the mass disruption to jobs caused by AI and automation as part of the “fourth industrial revolution.”

To be sure, UBI has more opponents in the U.S. than supporters. I’ll list just a few of the major criticisms here…

It’s too expensive

UBI would replace existing unemployment benefits and increase inequality

By separating work and income, it would warp social relationships

People would have less incentive to work

It gives politicians a pass to sidestep tough future-of-work discussions

In a Gallup poll released last September, 43% of Americans said they supported a universal basic income program.

Bottom line: UBI mini-experiments are happening all over the world, from Finland to Kenya. There’s no conclusive evidence yet, and some economists say any pilot study in an advanced country is doomed to fail. But the fact that we’re even talking about it shows MLK’s little-known economic message is very much alive today.