Center for Ethics in Society Staff and Faculty Spotlights: Sean Kline

Welcome back to our spotlight series, where we profile staff and faculty of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. Our goal is to highlight what is happening in the Center and who is making that possible. Up next, Sean Kline, the Associate Director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab.

You’ve likely heard something about Universal Basic Income (UBI) or guaranteed income, as Martin Luther King, Jr. titled it — periodic, unconditional cash payments to all people. For some, the idea may suggest the end of US productivity; for others, it may register as an answer to poverty.

For Sean Kline, the Associate Director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab, the power of cash to promote social good has motivated him for more than two decades. “My father’s strong but quiet commitment to equity and social justice instilled in me a sense of service and the importance of community,” he explains. “In my adolescence that took the form of publishing an anarchist newspaper and getting involved in the 80s counterculture punk rock scene. In my 20s, it led me to organize communities around the abuses of transnational corporations, and then to me earning a Masters in Poverty and Social Policy at the London School of Economics.”

Despite his degree and proximity to researchers, however, Kline says that for him, “research has to translate into positive social change. I’m a doer at heart.”

To be a part of making change happen, Kline spent more than a decade working in microfinance in Pakistan, Bosnia Herzegovina, Latin America, Africa and Asia. The entrance of commercial banks into the arena, coupled with research revealing that microfinance was useful but not transformative, motivated his professional pivot to San Francisco City Hall. “Government,” he believes, “is the only institution that is, at least theoretically, accountable to people. So I decided to take up a role leading San Francisco’s Office of Financial Empowerment with the elected treasurer, Jose Cisneros. It was an eye-opening experience, with a steep learning curve, about how bureaucracy works and how to get things done.”

At the same time, Kline was learning about GiveDirectly — the largest nonprofit organization in the world that was distributing unconditional cash to millions of poor people, even entire villages in Africa, and was committed to rigorously researching the practice. Eventually, no-strings attached cash became, as Kline puts it, “the baseline against which international development programs were being compared. Essentially, the belief was that if your program to support individuals and families couldn't beat cash, maybe you should reconsider what you're doing.”

In spite of its growing traction internationally, unconditional cash was still viewed by many as a radical policy idea in the U.S. Nevertheless, Kline was able to secure $50,000 and team up with the Stanford Basic Income Lab to host a UBI event in 2017. They invited mayors from across the country — including then-mayor Michael Tubbs, whose guaranteed income pilot in Stockton, California would launch in early 2019 — as well as philanthropists and researchers. Looking back, Kline realizes that that event “really was a watershed moment, where the idea surfaced that local governments could try out guaranteed income.”

It was hard to imagine at that time that three years later, the US government would have distributed almost $1 trillion in cash to people during the COVID pandemic, or that there would be between 60 and 100 active basic income pilots throughout the United States in 2022, Kline reflects. “It all highlights that this isn't about whether disbursing unconditional cash is possible, it's about whether we want it to be possible. I don’t think of social change as something linear. I think things happen when a window opens that you couldn't necessarily have anticipated.”

Since launching in September 2022, the Guaranteed Income Pilots Dashboard has been tracking 30+ unconditional cash pilots across the US. And the data reveals that most people spend the money on “the really mundane stuff that all of us need to spend money on: utilities, food, housing, school costs. But occasionally, you get stories of people who are spending it to go out for their child's birthday, or to take a vacation, or get dental work done, things that so many of us take for granted,” says Kline.

“My partner and I love having bicycle adventures, like riding down Highway 1, or in rural areas across the Marin Headlands. We've even ridden across parts of Finland, Portugal and Spain. These are the kinds of adventures that really excite me, but I can imagine people thinking, ‘Well, you could certainly spend your money on more prudent things than that,’” Kline muses.

But that is the power of cash — the freedom to decide for yourself what makes the most sense for you. Kline believes that guaranteed income can provide more people with that opportunity. 
 

Donna Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, and tutor living in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and was an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.