Mayyasi, Alex, “The Basic Income Guarantee

This blog uses Harper Lee’s experience writing To Kill a Mockingbird as an example to support the basic income guarantee. Alex Mayyasi writes, “In the 1950s, Nelle Harper Lee was a single woman living in New York City. … [S]he worked as an airline clerk and wrote in her free time. She had written several long stories, but achieved no success of note. One Christmas in the late fifties, a generous friend gave her a year’s wages as a gift with the note, ‘You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.’ A year later, Lee had produced a draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Published two years later, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sold 30 million copies, and won such polls as ‘Best novel of the century.’”

Mayyasi compares Lee’s gift to a one-year basic income guarantee, reviews some of the history of the idea, and concludes, “The fear is that a basic income could disrupt the workings of the invisible hand, but especially in a world of plenty, it seems just as feasible to argue that it could remove the material barriers keeping people from achieving a higher potential. It’s worth asking, what would happen if we offered everyone the same gift that resulted in Nelle Harper Lee writing one of the greatest books ever written?”

Mayyasi, Alex, “The Basic Income Guarantee,” Priceonomics: the Price Guide for Everything, Aug 15, 2013