Now in her book, Lowrey brings first-hand accounts of struggling workers all over the world in a series of chapters that exhaustively highlight all the reasons for basic income, from fears of technological unemployment to the more libertarian dream of replacing bureaucracy with simple cash welfare. What stands out about each story is how hard it is to blame her characters for being anything other than victims of an unfair system. Lowrey makes it easy to empathize with each subject, as they make decisions that seem reasonable and indicative of hard work, yet still can't get themselves out of bad economic circumstances ... At times, I wished Lowrey had cut out much of the laborious work on summarizing all the latest research and opinions on the topic and instead focused more on the personal stories ... What the book excels at, and I suspect will make it a must-read as basic income becomes a more mainstream idea from future presidential candidates, is showing the human side of how so many other welfare alternatives fail ... an enjoyable read.

In such a world, with tens of trillions of dollars of wealth, extreme poverty is a choice, not an inevitability. That’s the compelling and compassionate heart of Annie Lowrey’s new book, Give People Money ... Lowrey doesn’t just document the problem; she also offers a simple and effective solution. If you take very poor people and give them money, they stop being very poor pretty much by definition. They also, it turns out, become healthier, work more, and generally become vastly more productive members of society ... Lowrey seems to know there are no easy fixes, but she forges ahead anyway ... Lowrey is convincing on the need to eradicate poverty, and equally convincing that cash transfers can often be one of the best ways of doing so. But she fails to mirror her passionate rallying cry on the subject of poverty reduction with an equally passionate argument for U.B.I. in particular ... she ultimately doesn’t come close to demonstrating that a universal basic income would be the best way to target cash at the poor ... Lowrey ends up falling uncomfortably between the two stools. Her book is an excellent guide to the issues surrounding a U.B.I. But it won’t cause many people to start advocating for one.

Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, provides a similarly upbeat, although more measured, assessment ... More troubling is Lowrey’s blurring of the distinction between a U.B.I. that redistributes resources from the superrich to the growing number of vulnerable lower-income Americans and one that merely turns programs for the poor into cash assistance. The latter may be warranted, but it wouldn’t touch America’s growing scourge of inequality and economic insecurity, which will be made worse as robots take over good jobs ... Most basically, we will have to confront the realities of vastly unequal economic and political power. Even if we manage to enact a U.B.I., it will not be nearly enough.

Distinguished intellectuals on the right, including Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, have advocated for simple cash transfers instead of various welfare programs, a move that would stop the government from micromanaging the lives of the poor. The problem with Friedman’s perspective, which Ms. Lowrey well recognizes, is that taxpayers are typically not interested in funding jaunts by food-stamp recipients to Las Vegas even if those trips really do bring more satisfaction than health care and fresh vegetables. In any case, Ms. Lowrey has little interest in 'eliminating the country’s existing antipoverty programs and converting them to a U.B.I.,' because she believes such a change 'would likely result in an increase in poverty.' Instead, she wants to add cash transfers to the existing safety net, in order to reduce American poverty. This is a tenable position ... We need policies that encourage job creation and working, not policies that pay people not to work.

Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down ... Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy ... By Lowrey’s assessment, the existing system 'would falter and fail if confronted with vast inequality and tidal waves of joblessness.' But is a U.B.I. fiscally sustainable? It’s unclear. Lowrey runs many numbers but declines to pin most of them down.

Ms. Lowrey has clearly done extensive research ... While the author does a convincing job of explaining potential benefits, it’s hard to see how a UBI would ever get off the drawing board in the U.S. in the near-term. In Washington and Harrisburg, most safety-net proposals under consideration focus on restricting programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance, adding work requirements and other barriers — making what are already not universal programs even less inclusive ... Whether you can’t wait for the era of fully driverless cars or are fearful of a robot making you unemployed, Ms. Lowrey’s book is an informative and thoughtful read.

Lowrey...maintains that just like on The Jetsons or Star Trek, we now have the technology to manipulate and redistribute money. Perhaps it’s time to consider a move toward a cashless, and hopefully more equitable, global society.

Drawing on interviews with tech tycoons, development economists, and a diverse sample of the world’s poor, she persuasively argues that U.B.I would actually stimulate higher levels of investment in small businesses, increase workers’ bargaining power, and serve as a buffer against the technological advances that are likely to replace workers with robots. Lowrey is at her best discussing the potential role U.B.I. could play in achieving development outcomes in places like Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states and a prime example of the inefficiency of traditional state-funded poverty alleviation programs. This book is a lively introduction to a seemingly quixotic concept that has attracted thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Martin Luther King Jr., and that continues to provoke.

Much of Lowrey’s exploration is theoretical since U.B.I. experiments are few and far between. Her research took her to often isolated, impoverished areas ... Outside of the U.S., Lowrey’s findings are murkier. The laws and customs of different nations vary widely, and the concept of 'poverty' means something different ... Pilot programs in portions of Mexico and Brazil had led to further experiments in other nations, but interpreting the minimal data from the experiments feels premature. For now, though, Lowrey offers a good starting point. A useful primer on a highly contentious topic.