As the city of St. Louis releases today the results of its guaranteed basic income pilot program, your take on whether it succeeded will depend on how you define success.
When Mayor Tishaura Jones and Treasurer Adam Layne announced, in October 2023, the details of the $5 million program—giving $500 a month, no strings attached, to 540 low-income parents of public-school kids for 18 months—Jones said in a press release that the policy, being tried in cities across the country, was “an exciting way to financially empower families and lift them out of poverty.”
The pilot did not quite lift anyone out of poverty, according to an evaluation authored primarily by investigators at Washington University’s Brown School. It did, however, show certain signs that it “encourage[d] upward social and economic mobility”—the program’s “primary aim,” according to its website. In particular, participants used the money to pay their debts in a more timely way, thereby improving their credit scores by an average of 12 points over a comparison group…