And it works quite well:

In 1976, the voters of Alaska approved a Constitutional Amendment establishing the Alaska Permanent Fund. Powered by investments fueled by oil royalties, the Fund pays out dividends (the Permanent Fund Dividend) annually to Alaska residents. This year, the Permanent Fund Dividend will amount to $1,114.

This puts Alaska in the unique position of having run a UBI program for more than four decades. While the program isn’t nearly as generous as Yang’s proposed UBI ($1,000 monthly for adults) or the CTC ($3,600 annually for each kid under 6 and $3,000 annually for each kid ages 6 to 17), it does offer opportunities to study the impact of unconditional government cash transfers.

That’s what Washington State University sociologist Mariana Amorim decided to do. She analyzed dividend payments between 1996 and 2015, curious about how the payments changed parents’ spending calculus. The results were published at the end of October in the journal Social Forces.

What Amorim found is that low-income and middle-income parents increased their spending on items such as clothing, education, recreation, and electronics for children.

“The data suggests that lower-income parents are responsible using cash payments, so we don’t need to be so afraid to give poor people money that can help their families,” Amorim told WSU Insider. “Low-income parents do need to spend a greater part of the money they received on basic necessities—for instance to catch up on bills or to fix a broken car—but they still managed with the leftover amount to invest in their children.”