Time and Human Connection As Luxury Goods: How Guaranteed Income Disrupts Vulnerability

Background and Purpose

Chronic scarcity is causally linked to mental illness, negative health outcomes, a lower life expectancy, and a reduction in cognitive capacity. Income volatility, which references month over month changes in household income, exacerbates scarcity forcing people into a persistent survival state that traps them in the present. This is not to say that individuals experiencing poverty are responsible for their structurally produced outcomes. Rather, their positionality is symptomatic of a social contract tying one’s dignity and worth to market performance while restricting self-determination. While these socio-economic stressors associated with late-stage capitalism are well known, comparatively less is known about the ways it curtails time, derails relationships, and eliminates pathways out. In 2019, these dynamics lead the city of Stockton to experiment with providing a guaranteed income (GI) of $500 per month to 125 randomly selected individuals as part of a randomized controlled trial of unconditional cash over two years. This sub-study of the larger RCT asks the question, “how does GI generate agency over one’s future?”

Methods

In year one 50 members of the treatment condition were recruited to participate in semi-structured interviews to understand the strategies, adaptations, and sense of agency associated with receiving unconditional cash. The interviews were digitally recorded, professionally transcribed and were 1-3 hours in length. Interviews were coded in Dedoose utilizing process-coding with thematic analysis to determine sequence and decision-making on a semantic level, and grounded theory on the latent. The grounded theory analysis employed theoretical coding alongside focus coding to surface meaning-making, perceptions, and coping.

Findings

The experience of chronic financial scarcity and income volatility created two conditions that undermined self-determination and connection: time scarcity and forced vulnerability. Living underneath constant material hardship locked people into a battle with time that mimicked trauma, reduced time for human connection, threatened social ties, and forced them into a vulnerable state relying on people or systems that were either problematic or invited state surveillance. Time scarcity structurally eroded family well-being on two fronts: navigating the administrative burdens of means-tested benefits for paltry benefits and a necessary preoccupation with finances as a matter of survival. This scarcity translated into forced vulnerability that compels people to rely on relationships or living arrangements they would ordinarily avoid. Further, engaging with a punitive safety net traps them in a position of systemic vulnerability with few pathways out. In contrast, we found that GI disrupted this scarcity cycle by providing people with an income floor that created space for them to move away from forced vulnerability towards chosen interdependence or mutual aid relationships they wanted and actively chose.

Conclusion and Implications

From Du Bois (1899) to Stack (1974), social scientists have demonstrated that households living in poverty survive through pooling resources and relying on social ties. But as these data indicate—late-stage capitalism threatens forming, maintaining, and leveraging those kin networks. These findings offer a clear signal to the social work field of the ways that unconditional cash can alleviate time scarcity and forced vulnerability by extending self-determination through cash.