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Aurélie SchmiedlinScott Santens says talent just needs a floor to stand on. He's right. But this floor matters most exactly where it's rarest: in the places Social Income works.
A few weeks ago I read an essay by UBI researcher Scott Santens that I haven't stopped thinking about. He builds his case for universal basic income around an unlikely trio: Albert Einstein, a two-person Quebec math-rock band who spent twenty years getting startlingly good at a strange, self-invented style of music, and Ireland's basic income pilot for artists. His point, stripped down: talent is common. The floor and the time needed to develop it are not. Give people that floor — no conditions, no means test, no proving you deserve it — and you get more Einsteins, more artists, more of whatever a person was quietly capable of all along.
It's a compelling argument. It's also, I'd argue, an incomplete one — because it was built almost entirely on examples from high income countries, where the floor mostly unlocks potential someone already had room to explore. For the recipients of Social Income, the same argument applies with even more force, for a more basic reason.
Santens' essay leans on a few pieces of evidence worth naming directly, because they're good evidence. Ireland's Basic Income for Artists pilot gave 2,000 artists €325 a week, unconditionally, for three years — and the independent evaluation found it returned €1.39 in social and economic benefit for every euro spent, while increasing artistic output and reducing reliance on other income and social services. He also cites an Italian research team's talent-and-luck simulation, which found that when funding was distributed equally to everyone rather than concentrated on already-successful people, a far higher share of genuinely talented people went on to have an impact. Reward-the-winners strategies, by contrast, mostly just rewarded luck.
The key takeaway from both examples: talent doesn't need to be identified or deserved in advance. It needs room to surface. Conditional systems are bad at determining who has that room in them; unconditional ones don't have to guess.
Santens conceptualizes the floor created by unconditional cash transfers as providing people with the “space and time” to pursue what they are already good at. That's true, but it also undersells what's happening in contexts of acute scarcity, which is where Social Income operates.
Behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have shown that poverty itself imposes a measurable cognitive tax: the mental bandwidth people have available for planning, decision-making, and future-oriented thinking shrinks under financial stress, independent of underlying ability. It isn't that people living in extreme poverty lack talent or drive — it's that poverty consumes the exact mental resources that talent needs in order to express itself. Removing this mental load doesn't just create free hours in a day. It restores cognitive capacity that was never actually missing, only occupied.
This is also why the "won't people just stop working?" objection collapses so reliably in the data. GiveDirectly's long-running unconditional transfer programs in Kenya and Malawi found no drop in labor participation among recipients — instead, transfers triggered new small-business formation and spending that circulated through neighboring, non-recipient households, creating a local economic multiplier.
It would be easy, but wrong, to end this journal entry by looking for a West African Angine de Poitrine — a singular, viral, unmissable talent that "proves" the argument the way Santens' examples do. That search imports someone else's definition of genius onto communities that have never needed our permission to have their own.
The better version of this argument, and the one I want us to keep building, is quieter: talent in the communities Social Income works with already shows up constantly, in informal trades, in local knowledge, in the small businesses people start the moment they have a floor to fall back on if the first attempt fails. The constraint was never ambition. It was liquidity, and the risk that failure meant losing everything. Every basic income pilot in history, going back as far back as the 1970s, shows the same pattern: give people a floor, and entrepreneurship rises. Social Income gets to watch this pattern play out directly, transfer by transfer.
Santens' talent-and-luck argument shows that spreading resources equally lets talent rise on its own merits, more than rewarding people who already got lucky. Extend that one step further and it becomes a claim about the world: if that's true within a single country, it's even truer between countries — where the accident of where someone is born matters more than any difference in talent ever could. That, more than any one viral musician or one patent clerk (aka Albert Einstein), is the argument for the global redistribution Social Income facilitates.
Aurélie Schmiedlin)
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