“One of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective,” the great actor and activist Stephen Fry once said. He explained that, in chess, the best move is not necessarily the most ideal chess move, but the one your opponent least wants you to make.
I thought of Fry’s lesson in pragmatic wisdom recently, when the Philadelphia Reparations Task Force was announced. It was created by a resolution passed by Councilmembers Gauthier, Thomas and Brooks, and its charge is to study and make recommendations as to whether and how Philadelphia can provide reparations to Black descendants of enslaved ancestors. Other cities have gone down this path, including, most recently, Chicago, where embattled Mayor Brandon Johnson issued an executive order funding a reparations task force with $500,000.
Let’s stipulate the need to act on what very well may be the biggest threat facing our city: Its worsening wealth gap. When Black net worth hovers at one-tenth of White households, it’s the product of generations of deliberate policymaking, not coincidence. References abound to “systemic racism,” but we get precious few actual definitions. Well, take in the view from 1619 to 1865 to 1954 to 1964 to 1968 and beyond: People of color have undeniably been second-class citizens as a matter of law. Look at the history of redlining — which persists in subtle and not-so-subtle ways today, despite being outlawed — and you tell me that disparate racial outcomes no longer stem from a very particular legacy status in our laws.
But is a debate about making monetary good on the North’s failed promise of “40 acres and a mule” — a radical reparations pledge in its time — a way to actually address the contemporary problem? Time and again, we’ve seen that, when it comes to the well-intentioned goal of achieving racial equity through reparations — like the chess player intent on making the ideal move, consequences be damned — the movement unwittingly plays into the hands of the keepers of an unjust status quo. I’m totally down with the goal. It’s just that, when a reparations task force — particularly an all-African American one, as in Philly — proposes a vast redistribution of wealth based on very real past harms, we’ve seen what happens: Political backlash.
An alternative to reparations
In California, a task force’s recommendation last year that called for over $1.2 million in payments per eligible person has resulted in proposed legislation that would have passed without the R-word rubric anyway, like prison reform and anti-gun violence commitments … but no such payments as part of the package. Or take the innovative reparations pilot in Evanston, Illinois; we hosted that city’s mayor, Daniel Bliss, at our 2022 Ideas We Should Steal Festival. Alas, that program is now being challenged in court by the same group that successfully sued Harvard over its affirmative action admissions policy.
It begs the question of reparations warriors: What problem are you trying to solve for? If the goal is to grow a more inclusive and just economy, does the fraught debate over reparations get us there? Or does it become political sideshow?
Time and again, we’ve seen that, when it comes to the well-intentioned goal of achieving racial equity through reparations — like the chess player intent on making the ideal move, consequences be damned — the movement unwittingly plays into the hands of the keepers of an unjust status quo.
If you want to actually get something done, how about pursuing policies that are more universal in nature, but that by definition move the needle toward justice for African Americans today? The two greatest poverty fighting programs, after all, have been universal: Social Security and Medicaid. Today’s version could be Baby Bonds, or even Universal Basic Income, whereby indigent residents get a lump sum government subsidy each month. Problem is, UBI has a scaling and political challenge, given its central philosophical shortcoming: It doesn’t reward work.
Ah, but now comes a pilot program out of Cleveland that just might have the effect of being the most effective reparations strategy in the country — without even using the term. It’s embryonic, but one can see it catching on because it’s so rooted in deeply-held American values without regard to ideology, values like honoring work and spurring upward mobility. It’s called Universal Basic Employment, and it’s the brainchild of the charismatic social entrepreneur Devin Cotten.
Just the jobs, ma’am
Cotten is the founder and CEO of the Universal Basic Employment & Opportunity initiative, which was created with a $600,000 grant from Cleveland’s City Council thanks to the leadership of Councilmember Stephanie Howse-Jones, and is partnering with the United Way of Greater Cleveland. Starting in 2026, they’ll work with local small businesses in one neighborhood to guarantee 100 workers a salary of $50,000 per year, plus benefits, for three years.
“Home health care aides, folks who turn over beds in hotels — these are real jobs, deserving of dignity,” Cotten said when I caught up with him recently. “An earned income is the gold standard of agency in our country. When you subsidize people by way of work, it gives them the individual agency to solve their own problems. They write the next chapter of their own story. We see UBE as a solution that has the ability to reach both sides of the aisle.”
In contrast to reparations and UBI, UBE avoids easy political labeling. While polls show that reparations and UBI are seen as “handouts,” there is no such thing as the anti-employment lobby. The most reactionary voter will likely still support the growing of jobs that provide a pathway to middle class living. Cotten, who worked in community development in Cleveland after a front office stint in the NBA’s G League, sees UBE’s mission as twofold. The first is to “bridge folks past the benefits cliff,” the point at which a small bump in salary nudges a worker out of eligibility for public assistance. Using data from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, Cotten’s team has determined that, in Cleveland, $50,000 compensates for that loss in benefits. If the pilot extends to, say, New York, it is likely to be higher, perhaps in the neighborhood of $75,000.
The second is to “dignify historically low-wage work,” and that’s more personal. Growing up in the southeast suburbs of Cleveland, Cotten realized at some point that his family’s middle-class income was largely determinative of his future. “Early on in my life, I realized that Devin’s individual efforts would not be the most statistically significant variable in my success — It was actually my parents’ income,” he said. “I’m not saying we were of means. Just that I lived a middle class life and my parents had the income to create this system for me to succeed.”
Cotten argues that guaranteeing people jobs that pay middle class salaries is a better investment than programs that currently cost federal, state and local taxpayers billions of dollars.
His father was a skilled tradesman at GM; his mother worked at Nestle. As a GM household, the Cottens had access to car loans, health insurance and mortgage rates. “There was a UAW Bible sitting on my parents’ coffee table,” Cotten recalled.
That sort of virtuous economic circle is all but gone now. “What I saw was that an income wasn’t just an income,” Cotten said. “It’s a means to facilitate someone’s life. And now we have this fragmentation between the relationship of wages and what they mean to people’s lives. So much of UBE came about because of me thinking about how do we define an autonomous wage, that income level that, using the Atlanta Fed’s benefits calculator, bridges you past the use of most social safety net benefits and that gives you access to the private sector — to credit cards, car loans and mortgages. When you get there, you’re sending the requisite signals to the private sector to warrant investments that solve the symptoms of poverty. The mission of UBE is to demonstrate that a jobs guarantee policy can be a simultaneous investment in eliminating poverty, and the symptoms of poverty.”
A new virtuous circle
There’s still much to be done to make Cotten’s vision a reality. Currently, he and his staff are in the design phase, partnering with 20 Black men and women who are most proximate to poverty and 20 business partners interested in growth. Soon, they’ll be settling on a neighborhood; they’ll launch in 2026, and hope to add pilots in other cities soon thereafter. (I’ve already put Philadelphia’s hand up as a candidate.) Ultimately, UBE’s interventions will be funded by government, philanthropies like its partner United Way, private donors and other investors. But first Cotten needs to build an infrastructure.
“If I were to walk up to a coffee shop today and say, ‘Hey, here’s a $250,000 check to hire five people, they would be like, ‘Thanks. I don’t really know what to do with this yet,’” he said. “So we need to develop the data and infrastructure and technology to implement the program and track progress. Getting out of poverty is really hard, which is why 40 million people haven’t done it yet.”
So, yes, reparations makes headlines, as we’ve seen here. But, so far, it hasn’t been shown to move the economic needle. Ditto old-school safety net programs; I was at Mayor Michael Nutter’s press conference in 2013 to announce the city’s “Shared Prosperity” anti-poverty plan. It was actually a good plan. Yet it’s now over a decade later, and our poverty rate remains essentially unchanged. Maybe it’s time for some new thinking.
Cotten argues that guaranteeing people jobs that pay middle class salaries is a better investment than programs that currently cost federal, state and local taxpayers billions of dollars. If some of those dollars were diverted to autonomous wages that provide documentation of steady employment — thereby exposing folks to wealth-building resources like credit cards, mortgages and loans— inequality decreases while growth expands. A new virtuous circle, with bipartisan appeal. It was, after all, Ronald Reagan who said “I believe the best social program is a job.” How about taking on Cotten’s challenge and testing that out?
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