This article originally appeared in WIRED magazine.

Hughes called Costello while he was looking for basic income studies that the Economic Security Project might like to finance. The goal of the organization is to provide the money so that researchers can investigate the impact of a basic income on people’s lives. While Hughes has not funded Costello’s research, his group has contributed $1 million to Stockton, California’s basic income experiment, as well as to GiveDirectly, a Google-backed charity that is studying the impact of unconditional cash transfers in Kenya, and other projects.

The Economic Security Project team also recently conducted its own survey of more than 1,000 Alaskans who receive roughly $2,000 per person, per year, through the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is drawn from oil revenues. It found that when faced with a choice between lowering taxes or keeping their cash payments, 71 percent of Alaskans say they want to keep the payments.

“It feels like security,” Hughes says, “and in an economy that zigs and zags and has more part-time jobs, security is hard to come by.”