Review by New York Times Review
CHRIS HUGHES, as he will be the first to tell you, has too much money. As he relates in his new book, "Fair Shot," he co-founded Facebook, asked his roommate Mark Zuckerberg for 10 percent of the company, received 2 percent instead and became dynastically wealthy as a result. Hughes is acutely aware of how unfair this is. "Most Americans cannot find $400 in the case of an emergency," he writes, "yet I was able to make half a billion dollars for three years of work." He's also aware that the flip side of people like himself having too much money is that tens of millions of Americans have too little. Over 40 million Americans live below the poverty line, including one in five children under the age of 6. There is a simple solution to the problem of people having too little money: giving them some. As Hughes efficiently and compellingly recounts, the proven and farreaching effects of cash grants include more work; higher incomes; better performance in school and college; less tobacco and alcohol use; and fewer hospitalizations, illnesses and untimely deaths. In short, grants strengthen and empower the poor, making them much more economically and socially productive. "Fair Shot" is a short, easily digestible elaboration of this argument, with a very specific proposal for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At the top end, Hughes wants to raise the marginal tax rate for those earning more than $250,000 per year to 50 percent, both for earned income and for capital gains. At the bottom end, he wants to give a monthly $500 check to (nearly) all adults living in one of the 42 million households making less than $50,000 per year. The resulting America wouldn't just be healthier and better educated ; it would be richer, too, with the economy growing as much as a full percentage point faster than it would without such an intervention. The plan would also, by Hughes's calculations, "lift 20 million people out of poverty overnight." To make his case, Hughes weaves together two stories. The first is a straightforward and accessible autobiography. Hughes grew up in bucolic, God-fearing North Carolina, with little money but a strong sense of community. He talked administrators at Andover into giving him more financial aid than they'd originally offered, moved on to Harvard, had a brief but lucrative career at Facebook and became director of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Then, fatefully, he decided first to buy and then to sell The New Republic, the storied political magazine. Hughes presents the decision to sell his magazine in a few sentences: After spending four years and $25 million trying to "turn the numbers in our financial statements from red to black," he finally came to the realization that the loss-making publication he bought in 2012 was, well, a lossmaking publication. "Unless 1 had a political agenda to promote or an ax to grind," he writes, "there was no future in my ownership." This isn't entirely satisfying. Why give up on subsidizing quality journalism just because you don't have a political agenda? Especially when Hughes's first book, coming out two years after he sold the magazine, is a political agenda, filled with not only detailed fiscal-policy proposals but also shopworn talking points about how "rapid technological advances, globalization, and financialization are pulling the rug out from under the middle class." In parallel to his autobiography, Hughes tells a wonkier tale of the education of a young philanthropist. Flush with his Facebook millions, he travels to Kenya twice to observe two very different attempts at relieving extreme poverty. The first is a trip with the famed Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to see for himself the Millennium Villages Project - an ambitious attempt to give some of the poorest people in the world everything from clean water to cellular connectivity. Then, on his second Africa trip, Hughes joins another economist, Michael Faye, the co-founder of GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that has a much simpler strategy of supplying cash grants to people living on less than a dollar a day. After comparing Faye's approach with Sachs's, Hughes concludes that giving poor people unrestricted cash is generally more effective than trying to second-guess their needs by building them schoolhouses or handing them computers. This insight prompts him to get involved in the nascent campaign for a universal basic income in America. Hughes ends up founding the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit devoted to using cash transfers to end poverty. The book's trickiest maneuver comes when Hughes attempts to synthesize his two stories by explaining how his turbulent tenure at The New Republic colored his approach to the ideal of a universal income. He still believes in a universal cashtransfer policy, it seems, but no longer has the courage of his convictions: "What went wrong at The New Republic," he says, is "the driving reason why 1 favor a more modest guaranteed income" instead. But he never convincingly explains why his failure at the magazine plays such an outsize role in his worldview, especially compared with his successes at Facebook and in Obama's presidential campaign. Hughes's proposal - which he himself describes as a "prosaic and incremental" expansion of the earned-income tax credit - is emphatically not a universal basic income. For one thing, it targets only the bottom 35 percent or so of earners in the country. Worse, it doesn't even reach all of them. The Hughes plan is restricted to working Americans: people who made more than $6,000 last year, who are looking after dependents under the age of 6 or over the age of 70, or who are enrolled in an accredited college. If you earned less than $6,000, you'll receive only your previous year's earnings - and if those earnings were zero, you'll receive zero. Those who live at the very bottom of the income spectrum would have to continue to rely on America's overstretched social safety net, which, in all too many cases, pays them little or nothing. By creating a hard ceiling at $50,000 a year, Hughes also creates a nasty marriage penalty: He's effectively telling couples where each partner earns less than $50,000 that they shouldn't get married and form a household. That's because, if they do so, thereby bringing their joint earnings above $50,000, they'll lose a combined $12,000 a year in guaranteed income. Hughes quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the architect of a previous attempt at a national guaranteed income, as saying that it failed because it was "both too much and too little; too radical, too reactionary; too comprehensive, not comprehensive enough." Yet his plan seems to make exactly the same mistake. Opponents of nostrings cash handouts will not be particularly mollified by the fact that this plan targets merely 42 million households rather than all 120 millionhouseholds in the country. Proponents of a universal basic income, meanwhile, especially those who see it as insurance for a time when robots drive us all out of work, will be exasperated at the way the plan explicitly excludes the jobless and the neediest. Hughes is attracted to boldness, and played an important part in the achievements of both Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama. But ultimately he's a better follower than a leader. Fired up by his new cause, he could have published a rallying cry, an inspirational manifesto. Instead, he has delivered a book with more footnotes than passion - and, for the very poorest, a proposal that seems deeply unfair. ? Hughes wants to give monthly cash grants to 42 million households. FELIX SALMON is a financial writer, editor and podcaster.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]
Review by Library Journal Review
While a student at Harvard, Hughes cofounded Facebook and is presently the cofounder of the Economic Security Project. He warns that technological advances have led to the "destruction of full-time jobs and the rise of contract labor," which has led to an increase in economic inequality. Hughes proposes that working people making under $50,000 be given a guaranteed income of $500 per month to be funded by increasing taxes on Americans who make more than $250,000. Economists may want to examine the numbers related to impact and cost, such as the statement that "a guaranteed income.would lift 20 million people out of poverty overnight" and that the entire program can be funded by a tax on the richest Americans. A guaranteed income does not address the economic problems of the poor who are not able to work, child-care issues of the working poor, policies that create income inequality, etc. Federal programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Medicaid currently exist to address the circumstances of the working poor. Verdict Recommended with reservations for academic libraries with graduate programs in economics and sociology.-Karen Venturella Malnati, Union Cty. Coll. Libs., Cranford, NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A co-founder of Facebook draws from personal experience to propose a guaranteed income for working people.From a family on the fringes of the middle-class in North Carolina, Hughes earned scholarships at an exclusive prep school and Harvard, where one of his roommates was Mark Zuckerberg. At a time when others were beginning their careers, the author had already cashed out his share of the social media phenomenon, earning nearly $500 million. He raised his personal stock with a key role as the director of online organizing for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. Then he suffered the first major professional setback in his young career. He bought the New Republic and was initially hailed as a savior of the financially beleaguered magazine, but he left four years later with a staff in tatters and the publication in deeper debt. In addition to chronicling his personal story, Hughes offers a manifesto for a guaranteed income of $500 per month for any working adult making less than $50,000, subsidized by those, like himself, who have a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth. He admits that when he mentioned the proposal, "most people would walk away curious at best, suspicious at worst." But the author maintains that such a small amount of financial security would allow workers to ponder leaving jobs they hate or work in fields where there often are not commensurate financial rewards. Mostly, he writes, it's the right thing to do, and the country can afford it. "We live in the richest country on Earth at its richest moment in history, even though it might not feel that way to most people," he writes. And why not? Because "the top one percent of Americans controls nearly 40 percent of the wealth in our countryone and a half times more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent own."Hughes makes a strong case for redistribution of wealth, though the memoir elements of the book are more compelling than the economic analysis. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
