Good morning! Marine Le Pen is waiting in the wings in France, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in its trans medicine case, and Sam Altman's OpenResearch examines the impact of the child tax credit.
- Policy impact. Since 2016, Elizabeth Rhodes has been leading Sam Altman's study of universal basic income, a multi-year project that started as a way to determine how cash transfers could mitigate the impact of AI-related job losses. The results released this past summer found that while receiving $1,000 monthly payments, people spent more to meet their basic needs and worked fewer hours but ultimately stayed in the workforce.
As the head of OpenReseach, Rhodes is now sitting on a trove of data about people's financial needs and behavior. "One of the things that we always thought about and designed the project around was that it could inform a wide range of policies and programs, not just unconditional cash transfers," she says. For her team's latest project, they examined the impact of the 2021 child tax credit expansion, which happened while they were following the 3,000 families who were part of their cash transfer study.
