The New York Times Missed the Real Story on UBI and Kids

Baby’s First Years, long-run basic income evidence, and why unconditional cash still beats status-quo poverty metrics

The latest round of discourse about basic income was triggered by a New York Times piece claiming that a recent study showed monthly cash to poor families did nothing for child development. The article centers Baby’s First Years (BFY), a randomized trial that gave some new mothers $333 per month and measured brain activity and a handful of early-development proxies. The headline takeaway: no detectable effect on language, behavioral problems, executive function, or EEG patterns by age four, so the case for income guarantees is “weakened.” What follows is how that framing collapses when placed against design details, the full BFY evidence base, and decades of long-run results from multiple cash programs—including the strongest child-focused findings we have.

What This Study Was and Was Not

BFY enrolled low-income mothers before birth and paid either $333/month or a token $20/month for 52 months, starting at birth. It is the first US RCT designed to test whether poverty reduction in early childhood affects development, including brain function. That matters. But three features of the intervention and its timing make sweeping conclusions irresponsible.

1. Per family, not per person. $333/month was per household. A family with one infant and three other kids still received only $333 in total. This design dilutes per-child dosage precisely where needs scale with family size.
2. Pandemic and inflation shock. BFY’s main study years overlapped with COVID disruptions and an unusual global inflation surge resulting from those disruptions. A small transfer, in real terms, was partly swamped by macro shocks outside the study. The study team and even some ideological critics acknowledged this confounding variable.
3. A narrow lens on early metrics. BFY’s “no effect” claim concerns select early-childhood proxies and EEG patterns by age four. It says nothing about the outcomes that historically move most—schooling, health, crime, and earnings — over the long arc into adolescence and adulthood. BFY’s own pipeline includes broader measures at later ages for exactly this reason.

If you went looking for a small, per-family transfer to create obvious EEG separations within four years of unprecedented external shocks, you designed the perfect test to miss the real story.

The Pattern: Cherry-Pick the Null, Ignore the Mountain

There’s a familiar media pattern on cash policy. Isolate a null result. Elevate it as the result. Ignore the rest of the literature. The Times story quotes anti-redistribution shops like AEI and Heritage (the Project 2025 guys) while giving cursory treatment to the counter-evidence. The result isn’t synthesis—it’s selection, presented as synthesis.

The right question isn’t “Did one narrow measure move by age four?” It is “What does the weight of evidence say about unconditional cash and child well-being across time horizons?” On that question, the answer is not ambiguous.

The Cherokee Natural Experiment: Decades, Not Months

The strongest long-run U.S. evidence comes from a natural experiment within the Great Smoky Mountains Study. When the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians began distributing unconditional per-capita casino dividends, a subset of children in a multi-county longitudinal cohort suddenly grew up in households with extra cash; others in the same study did not. The cohorts have now been followed for decades. Findings across peer-reviewed papers are consistent and large:

• Mental health improved and behavioral disorders fell sharply among children whose families received the income supplement, converging toward non-poor peers.
• Education rose. Added income increased years of schooling and reduced dropout.
• Adult outcomes improved. In adulthood, those exposed to the cash as children report fewer anxiety and depressive symptoms, fewer cannabis-related problems, and better physical and financial functioning; benefits scale with cumulative transfer exposure. The impact was greater the longer a kid had it, and also if both parents got the income instead of only one.

These are the outcomes that matter for a society. They are exactly the ones a four-year EEG snapshot will miss—and exactly the ones cash has repeatedly improved over time. If you want causal evidence that growing up with a basic income floor changes life trajectories, this is it.

Meta-Evidence: Children Gain the Most

Beyond a single natural experiment, cross-program reviews keep reaching the same conclusion: children are the biggest beneficiaries of cash. A review of prominent cash transfer and basic income experiments found improvements in nutrition, school attendance, and educational attainment, e.g., lower obesity risk, higher normal weight for age, and large gains for girls’ secondary schooling—with an additional year of schooling on average in some settings. The direction is not isolated; it is systematic.

Short-term nulls on narrow proxies are not a rebuttal to this literature. They are a reminder that early, small signals are noisy while structural outcomes compound.

The 2021 Child Tax Credit: The ROI Frame That Matters

Benefit-cost analysis is where policy moves from values to tradeoffs. Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy synthesized the highest-quality causal evidence on cash and near-cash and then modeled the permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) enacted in 2021: $250–$300 per child per month, fully refundable. Result: an annual fiscal cost near $97 billion produced social benefits estimated around $929–$982 billion per year in the original model—roughly a 10:1 return. A 2024 methods update, incorporating newer evidence, raised the annual benefits estimate to about $1.54 trillion, strengthening the ROI further to $15 per $1.

This is the frame the Times piece ignored. Even if every EEG study in existence showed nothing, a permanent CTC that cuts child poverty and yields 15-to-1 social returns is still a public-finance slam dunk. The purpose of policy is to reduce suffering and improve life chances efficiently, not to optimize for a lab readout at age four.

The $50-Per-Week Study: Small Cash, Real Changes

If you want a recent US randomized study of teens instead of toddlers, look at the Rooted School Foundation’s $50-per-week RCT, the largest US trial of no-strings cash to high-school students. Over two years across multiple schools, students receiving $50/week:

• Attended more. Attendance rose by about 1.23 days in the following semester.
• Built financial capability. Measured understanding of financial products and long-term planning improved.
• Spent prudently. Roughly 46% went to essentials, including food; many saved and ended the study with a cash buffer.

Grades did not leap in a single year, but the stability-and-agency story is familiar: reduce scarcity, increase bandwidth, and behavior adjusts in ways that build over time.

The Learning-By-Doing Reality

“Teach financial literacy first” reverses causality. The skill is inseparable from lived practice and the right to make mistakes. Weekly or monthly transfers create repeated cycles for budgeting, error, feedback, and adjustment; 52 chances a year rather than one annual gamble. That’s not a moral claim; it is a design claim about how humans acquire competence.

Start Where You Can, But Keep It Universal

A poverty-line UBI for adults plus a per-child amount is the goal. Starting smaller is not only acceptable—it is strategically correct—if two design principles hold:

• Unconditionality. No work-testing, no behavioral strings.
• Universality. Don’t build stigma and bureaucracy back in through phase-ins and phase-outs at the benefit level; handle progressivity on the tax side.

Even a modest universal floor (e.g., $500 per month) is distributionally progressive after netting the rebate against a flat surtax, because the transfer is worth more at the bottom than the top. The debate should not be about whether universality is “too hard.” Universality is the mechanism that makes the system coherent, trusted, and simple enough to scale.

Policy Windows You Might Not Expect

The politics are shifting in surprising ways because voters like cash with no strings. Two examples from the last few weeks:

• Tariff “rebate checks.” Senator Josh Hawley introduced the American Worker Rebate Act to distribute at least $600 per adult and per dependent child as refundable credits funded by tariff revenue, with phase-outs at higher incomes. Whatever you think of tariffs, the design echoes broad stimulus checks because it is simple, fast, and popular. The coalition for unconditional cash is wider than activists assume.
• Disaster-triggered basic income. In Pennsylvania, HB 1791 — Climate Emergency Basic Income Act — would provide $1,000 per adult per month for up to six months after a state-declared disaster, plus $500 per dependent, without requiring home-ownership, formal residency, or ID. Administration would run through the state emergency-management and labor agencies, making the response automatic and legible when people need it most.

Both items are live because simple cash support works on its own terms and also solves a bureaucratic problem: it is the fastest way to convert public intent into private capacity.

Put the BFY Finding in Its Proper Box

Return to BFY. Even inside the project’s own publications, there are already non-neural improvements recorded in spending patterns, food security, and time use—predictable channels through which later outcomes move. The point isn’t to pre-declare victory; it’s to refuse a premature defeat declared on the basis of an early, narrow slice. Cash’s largest, most durable effects show up after kids reach school and beyond, exactly as the EBCI natural experiment demonstrates. BFY will report those later outcomes in time. Until then, treat a short-run EEG null as what it is: a limited result, not a verdict.

The Empirical Baseline

The case for unconditional income does not hinge on a single study, positive or negative. It rests on convergent evidence across designs and time frames:

• Causal natural experiment: Children exposed to an unconditional income floor in the EBCI study show sustained improvements in mental health, behavior, schooling, and adult functioning.
• Meta-level syntheses: Reviews of cash and basic-income trials repeatedly find that children gain most — nutrition, attendance, attainment — because childhood is where compounding returns live.
• Benefit-cost accounting: A permanent, fully refundable CTC at 2021 levels yields social returns on the order of 15:1, even before counting intergenerational spillovers.
• New RCTs at small doses: Even $50/week moved attendance and financial capability among teens, with spending consistent with basic needs and forward-looking investments.

If your threshold for action is “move EEG bands by age four despite a pandemic and inflation,” you’ve confused instrumentation with policy.

Why This Matters Beyond the Lab

Early-life scarcity is an iceberg. The visible tip is stress, food insecurity, and missed bills. Below the surface is cognitive bandwidth taxation, reduced executive function, and chronic instability that compounds across school years. You don’t fix that with parenting classes or lectures on budgeting divorced from resources. You fix it by reducing scarcity itself, reliably, so families can self-organize. That is what unconditional income does better than any program with strings, and why it outperforms on ROI.

The politics of this are not left versus right so much as systems that trust people versus systems that attempt to micromanage them. Universality cuts bureaucracy and stigma. Unconditionality acknowledges real constraints and treats people like adults. Together they create a policy that is implementable at scale, legible to recipients, and durable enough to survive election cycles.

What a Serious Reader Should Conclude

• A four-year null on narrow proxies is neither surprising nor dispositive. The literature’s big effects are medium-to-long run and show up where we actually care: health, school, crime, and lifetime earnings.
• The BFY study design — a small per-family transfer launched into a once-in-a-century shock — was likely underpowered to move infant physiology in ways the instruments could cleanly detect.
• When you run the numbers correctly, the ROI case for unconditional income to families with children is overwhelming. The 2021 CTC expansion’s benefit-cost ratio is not a rounding error; it is an order-of-magnitude result.
• The newest evidence keeps pointing in the same direction. Even small, unconditional transfers to teens increase attendance and financial agency, inputs that compound later.

If the goal is to improve children’s lives efficiently, you do not wait for EEGs to align with your priors. You scale the interventions that reliably reduce poverty, increase stability, and generate large social returns, and then you keep measuring. That is the path consistent with the data we have, the data we keep getting, and the world we actually live in.

Note on authorship: This piece was drafted with ChatGPT-5 using the full transcript of the newest episode of The Basic Income Show as source material. The model was style-conditioned on a corpus of my prior articles to mirror my tone, structure, and evidence standards (via in-context examples of my writing). I reviewed the output for accuracy and clarity; any remaining errors are mine.

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