That’s why some members of the Silicon Valley elite, better known for their contempt for government, advocate all-inclusive, no-strings-attached cash grants. In November, Robin Chase, the co-founder and former chief executive of Zipcar, called for a basic income. Venture capitalists like Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures and John Lilly of Greylock Partners, which invests in LinkedIn and Airbnb, have said that it’s time to starting thinking about a U.B.I. The founder of HowStuffWorks.com, Marshall Brain, even wrote a basic-income novel called “Manna.” It contrasts a nightmare world in which robots are managers and workers slaves with a utopian settlement in the Australian desert in which citizens receive a guaranteed share of the wealth created by such robots and devote themselves to dreaming up innovative new technologies. It’s the Silicon Valley version of heaven.

THIS is all very nice, skeptics say, but the U.B.I. still represents a moral hazard. Give people money for nothing, and the lazy will grow lazier and the rest of us will be bankrupted.

But that does not appear to be the case. On the contrary: The U.B.I. gives workers less reason to loll about at home than do perversely disincentivizing policies like the one whereby a dollar earned is a dollar cut from a welfare check. Research suggests that, rather than weaken the will to work, unconditional regular disbursements let people manage their careers more wisely.

In five famous studies on the negative income tax conducted in the United States and Canada in the 1970s, a minimum income did bring down work hours a bit, partly because the unemployed took longer to find new jobs. Researchers speculate that they were holding out for positions that better matched their skills. In the United States, male breadwinners scaled back by as much as 9 percent a year. In Canada, they hardly cut back at all. In both countries, teenagers stayed in school longer. And women with children did spend up to 30 percent less time on the job.

The U.B.I. has feminist critics as well as supporters, and they don’t like that finding. The U.B.I. would encourage women to drop out of the work force, they say, ceding the ground feminism has fought so hard for. But that concern strikes me as, well, paternalistic. Women should have more choices, not fewer. So should men. Equality between the sexes should not require everyone to conform to traditionally male patterns of employment.

Besides, basic income policies have been shown to mitigate specifically female kinds of poverty.

When cash-transfer experiments were conducted in poor towns in India, girls gained more weight and increased the time they spent at school at greater rates than boys, probably because when cash is scarce, the girls get less to eat and are kept home more.

In the United States, as Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer showed in their book on extreme poverty, “$2.00 a Day,” the process of qualifying for food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the welfare-to-work program created in 1996, can be so demanding, bewildering and degrading that many applicants simply give up. And who are the patient souls who wait in those daylong lines, pee into cups for drug tests or go home empty-handed? Women, more often than not, since there are more than four times as many families run by single mothers as by single fathers, and a third more households headed by women are on the dole than those run by men.