The Utrecht proposal—called “Weten Wat Werkt,” or “Know What Works”—includes six test groups, the members of which will receive slightly different stipends under slightly different conditions. In addition to the group that will receive €960 per month without any work obligations, there is a group that will be given that, plus an additional €150 at the end of the month if they provide volunteer services, such as doing maintenance work on schoolyards. And there is another that will have the same option to volunteer, but will get the money at the beginning of the month and have to return it if they don’t volunteer. “Human behavior is always unpredictable,” Groot says. “We want to know what motivates people, what people respond to.”

There are three other test groups. One is made up of welfare recipients who will keep receiving their benefits, but without their usual work obligations. Another is made up of welfare recipients who expressed interest in receiving the €960 stipend but will continue to receive only standard benefits. And then, lastly, there is a control group of welfare recipients who wanted to keep receiving their usual benefits.

The guaranteed universal income is an idea that philosophers, economists, and politicians have been kicking around in different forms for hundreds of years. Thomas Paine proposed a capital grant be paid to individuals in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice. And in 1853, the French philosopher François Huet made the case for no-strings-attached cash transfers to all young adults, to be funded by taxes on inheritances and gifts.

More recently, the Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman has said he believes that the Netherlands’ welfare system is flawed, not least because it ties employment to well-being. As he writes in his book Utopia for Realists, “government assistance has become increasingly anchored in employment, with recipients required to apply for jobs, enroll in return-to-work programs, and do mandatory ‘volunteer’ work … the underlying message is clear: Free money makes people lazy.”

In fact, an experiment similar to Utrecht’s has already put that assumption to the test. Between 1974 and 1979, economists in Canada selected residents of two Manitoba towns to be sent monthly checks with no strings attached, for an experimental program. But the Canadian government’s interest in the program faded, and papers on it were eventually packed up into cardboard boxes. In 2009, the University of Manitoba economist Evelyn Forget dug up that data, and recently told Public Radio International that she found the number of hours worked in the two towns involved dropped only by 10 percent—mainly because of reductions in hours by mothers who wanted to stay home with their small children and young boys who had previously been encouraged by their families to leave school early and support themselves, but who could now finish high school.