Why Silicon Valley is embracing universal basic income

In a pilot study influential incubator Y Combinator will hand over cash monthly to 100 families in Oakland, California. What's UBI's payoff for tech entrepreneurs?

Silicon Valley has, paradoxically, become one of the most vocal proponents of universal basic income (UBI). Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, web guru Tim O'Reilly and a cadre of other Silicon Valley denizens have expressed support for the "social vaccine of the 21st century", and influential incubator Y Combinator announced on 31 May that it will be conducting its own basic income experiment with a pilot study of 100 families in Oakland, California - a short hop over the San Francisco bay.

Y Combinator will give each family between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, for between six months to a year, to be spent on anything anywhere. Oakland, as Y Combinator says, is "a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality". It might earn the tech sector some goodwill from locals suffering Oakland's gentrification by invading techies, but Y Combinator also hopes to collect valuable data from the pilot on how to implement, manage and scale further UBI initiatives.