Lecture & Reception: Earned Income Tax Credit and Universal Basic Income

The Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute at UC Irvine is hosting an evening reception and lecture with visiting professor, Jesse Rothstein.

In his talk, Dr. Rothstein will discuss two policies designed to address issues related to workforce participation in a modernizing world: The Earned Income Tax Credit and Universal Basic Income.
 
The EITC has become the centerpiece of our safety net. The motivating idea behind it is that too few people are working and so policies are needed to encourage work by subsidizing earnings. But what happens to low-skill workers in a world of increased automation when there are simply too few jobs to be had? Universal Basic Income is pitched as a policy that will be needed to sustain workers when low-skill jobs become scarce. The different views of labor markets of the future—one in which low-skill workers have ample job opportunities but require incentives to work for low-wage jobs, and the other with insufficient job opportunities for low-skill workers—point to a real and important tension in choosing the best policies to provide income support.
 
Dr. Rothstein is a professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Institute for Labor and Employment. He is also a research affiliate at UC Irvine’s Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research. In 2010 he served as Chief Economist at the US Department of Labor.
 
The Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute was founded in 2016. Directed by David Neumark, it studies policies and programs designed to encourage economic self-sufficiency. This is the third lecture in an ongoing series entitled Perspectives on Economic Self-Sufficiency.