I'm actually amazed at how little basic income helps people. The study had a control group which only received $50/month in aid (vs treatment groups that got $1000 a month or $6500 upfront and then $500 a month). The control group improved nearly as much as either of the treatment groups!
In terms of housing, the $1000 a month group only improved by 6% more than the $50 group. That is to say, even if you just give people enough money every month to get an apartment with a roommate, only 6% will actually use it that way.
In the actual report [0], they measure financial well-being, which improves across the board but does not differ between treatment and control. Surprisingly, measures of stress and anxiety actually increased for the treatment groups and decreased for controls.
There were a few positives - the treatment groups were somewhat more likely to get jobs, and used fewer services.
Obviously the organizers of the study want to promote its success, but I think most of what we see here is that homeless is a transient condition for some people, who find housing regardless of intervention. Mainly it's a demonstration that the extra $950 per month does surprisingly little in this population.
> In terms of housing, the $1000 a month group only improved by 6% more than the $50 group.
6 percentage points more, not 6% more. Kind of a big difference. A 26% increase is 30% more than a 20% increase. Group B has a 75% increase in participants finding housing compared to the control group.
> That is to say, even if you just give people enough money every month to get an apartment with a roommate, only 6% will actually use it that way.
While that is statistically correct we don't know why it is only used that way 6% of the time. The greater increase in the lump sum group could indicate that the $1k/month group couldn't pay for application fees, deposits, or other upfront costs even if their supplemented income otherwise could sustain the monthly costs of housing.
>Kind of a big difference. A 26% increase is 30% more than a 20% increase
Percentage point changes are the right measurement. If the treatment group rose by 1%, and the control group rose by 0.1%, would you be excited that the treatment group was 1000% higher improvement than control?
> Percentage point changes are the right measurement.
I'm not really contesting what the right measure is, I'm pointing out how substantially different the two are and that its important to be clear which one you're using.
which shows that money alone does not solve the problem. better would be paid housing and extra money to buy food. and if housing is to expensive then the government needs to work on building more affordable housing. the city of vienna does that for example. according to one statistic i saw 60% of the population live in government supported housing.
I have to say, I was interested in your analysis, it inspired me to read the article for once. It seems your conclusion is quite the opposite of the one in the article. You're free to draw your own conclusions, but often when you see this there's something being left out.
As and aside, it's fascinating how effective the $50 is. It definitely does look like you get diminished returns quickly, though.
(From TA) "staying in housing they rented or owned"
I suspect there's something not being captured here. I'm wondering if there's somehow an option in between "staying in housing they rented or owned", and homelessness.
Perhaps, they're managing to staying with friends and family for part of it. I could see there being some gray area here. The morality of intentionally staying homeless to save money could be debated in various scenarios.
It's also ignoring a number of other dimensions of wellbeing that did improve only in the higher paid groups. Feeling safe where they slept, welcome in society, and maybe most importantly employment.
It's only if you look really close at one metric, which has moral judgements attached to it, and maybe explainable by living arrangement other than pure homelessness (keep in mind the criteria "pays rent or owns house") that things look so pessimistic.
Seems like the discourse on this topic is not permitted to involve the happiness, security, and likely long term outlook (due to being more employed, not just happy feelings). According to your analysis, we basically disregard the wellness of the homeless, and are only permitted to consider how it impacts us.
This is not an unfair critique, you mention some of these things, but they're handwaved away. I think you got the mental health aspect wrong, but quite frankly the results are confusing and a little mixed. The article itself doesn't do it justice.
It should be noted though that this is also trying to completely turn around someone's life, according to one metric for $6000 in 6-months. They know it's gonna end in 6-months. You can only do so much with this. I know you're using the term in the study, but this says nothing about universal basic income, or long term base assistances.
Also, I can't help but note all participants mental health was shown as decreasing, which is just odd. I double checked and it looks like this is 6 months from enrolment, so this is right after getting booted from the program. This is not a shock. People with mental health problems have issues leaving programs THEY paid for.
> I'm actually amazed at how little basic income helps people.
There have been many trials and this is again and again the most stunning conclusion (I doubt this one is even a good example) It is kinda silly how obvious it is in hindsight: A person living on 1 dollar per day will leverage the hell out of 10 cents extra.
I think you’re confused here. The $50 group (Group C) is the control group. That sum was chosen because it was assumed it wouldn’t actually meaningfully change their lives, and therefore we can use their response as a baseline for how to judge Group A and Group B. This would imply that universal basic income makes 20% of people feel like they’re doing better (placebo effect), and 6% of people actually do better.
But this is not what basic income is about, is it? As far as I know, basic income means that everybody receives a fixed income, rich or poor.
What happens in Denver is just a social project, the only thing mildly special about it is that recipients didn't have to do anything in return. But there have been many of such projects in countries all over the world.
This is still a study about UBI, it's looking at differences based on how the income is delivered. A part of UBI, different from other types of aid, is that the recipient can spend the money however they see fit. There are question about how well this will work. Will the recipients benefit or suffer by not being restricted in how they spend? Will they benefit or suffer by being given the money all at once at the beginning of the year vs receiving monthly sums? These are good questions without obvious answers.
If you want to understand more about their study, their methods are available. It answers a lot of the comments below. They do make a distinction and call this "Guaranteed Basic Income" since it targets a subset population: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64f507a995b636019ef88...
No, it isn't. You can't study UBI by giving income to people who don't currently have income. To study universal basic income, you have to give it to everybody--the same amount--including people who already have income, even people who don't need any additional income. And then you can look at all of the effects, negative (people ceasing to work, or not working as much, because they are now guaranteed a certain amount of income independent of how much they work--meaning that overall production of goods and services might go down even as demand goes up) as well as positive (people who previously didn't have income now having it and therefore having more options).
Studying having the spending of the income not be restricted might be worth doing, but that still doesn't make it a study of UBI, because having the spending be unrestricted is not the critical feature of UBI. We already have social programs that give income whose spending is unrestricted, such as SSI and SSDI. What we don't currently have is a program that gives the same income to everybody regardless of need or anything else. That is the key feature of UBI that would need to be studied if you want to claim to be "studying UBI".
Also, you need to consider how it is payed for. It does not just mean that everyone suddenly have an additional income on top of everything they used to have. You now also have money circulating in the economy in new patterns. And you also have new taxation used to finance it. Taken together, this will impact prices and costs, and will drive inflation. The effect cannot easily be predicted. But looking at individual behaviour in a limited experiment where everything else stays the same does not cut it.
If you only include homeless people statistically you can expect that they will make poorer financial decisions than the rest of the population.
Also there are other implications, I’m not even sure what’s the point in calling this UBI (the data might of course be still valuable for other purposes).
> If you only include homeless people statistically you can expect that they will make poorer financial decisions than the rest of the population.
Where are you getting this? The article is indicating that only people experiencing homelessness were given this, and its indicating quite a few of the participants of the study got off the streets and even out of shelters.
Not everybody is homeless due to their financial mismanagement, some people just get runs of bad luck.
> The article is indicating that only people experiencing homelessness were given this,
Yes, which is why this is a has nothing to do with UBI. Cash based welfare payments are not a particularly novel idea and there is plenty of data why do they work/don’t work.
> Not everybody is homeless due to their financial mismanagement, some people just get runs of bad luck.
Of course. However on average they are probably significantly more likely to mismanage that money than other groups.
>There are question about how well this will work. Will the recipients benefit or suffer by not being restricted in how they spend? Will they benefit or suffer by being given the money all at once at the beginning of the year vs receiving monthly sums? These are good questions without obvious answers.
Shouldn't they worry more about questions that are related to whether UBI gets implemented in the first place? For instance, whether there's a work disincentive associated with it, or whether the program is cheaper than regular welfare. Figuring out answers to the questions you listed is putting the cart before the horse.
> As far as I know, basic income means that everybody receives a fixed income, rich or poor.
People frame it like that, but in practice it would be offset by increased taxes for most.
For example, everyone gets $20,000 per year as "universal" basic income. However, your taxes go up $20,000 per year or more because you weren't in the lowest tax bracket. We have to pay for the UBI somehow.
UBI of a substantial amount would be incredibly expensive. Expensive to the point that the taxes would have to dip all the way down into the middle class to make it work. So for the average person, that UBI would come in and then go right back out as taxes.
What's a scenario in which adding $20K to my income results in more than $20K in additional taxes? The highest marginal tax rate in the U.S. for 2023 is 37%, and it kicks in after about $578K for a single filer. So increasing my income by $20K increases my tax bill by at most 37% of $20K.
It is not the tax on the UBI that is referred here. It is whatever tax will be neccessary to finance it. You can't reason about this by looking at the current rax system, since it would most likely need to change.
Realistically you may be correct - however, it is within the realms of possibility that enabling poor people to take part in the economy will drive value creation, and that this increase to the tax base could fund UBI.
Stock buy-backs don't create any value, or, if they do, it is obscure to me. You may get a one-time bump in capital gains tax, but it's nothing to build an economy on.
A million new dishwashers, though - that's taxable profit and increased emploment. Could UBI drive a virtuous cycle in which everyone gets richer? It certainly looks from here like inequality fundamentally shrinks the pie, even if it works out nicely for some eaters.
A UBI based on an income tax is not feasible due to the feedback cycle it would engender. As the UBI goes up the % of people who would make the same or greater incomes by quitting and taking UBI would go up. Raising UBI would be extremely popular politically and would go up quickly. This would either drive inflation out of control or erode the income tax base over time until it no longer could support the UBI. Either way it dooms the economy.
> As the UBI goes up the % of people who would make the same or greater incomes by quitting and taking UBI would go up.
That’s not how UBI works. It’s not tied to quitting one’s job. Anyone working earns income from salary/wages in addition to their UBI. Unlike many existing entitlements, there is never a financial incentive to work less.
That's not what I was saying. I was saying that as UBI goes up in $$$ that more people will hit the point where they can live nicely on just the UBI, where they extra income from working is just not worth it due to the increasing taxes minimizing it's reward factor.
But they are not giving it to everyone, just to homeless people. That does not warrant the "Universal" part of the name.
EDIT: I think I misread the whole thing, it really does not say "Universal" anywhere :) Anyway, I think someone, soon will try to use this project as an argument in favor of UBI, which is ridiculous.
But the UBI works completely different at small and large scales. When you test it at small scale it seems to be working exactly as expected. But when you try to introduce it globally (I mean, for the whole country), then it suddenly starts affecting economy as whole, and the only result you get is inflation, and no one is better of with UBI compared to their previous situation. When the news breaks that everyone will be getting free money the natural reaction of all the sellers and service providers is to raise prices.
I mean, I know UBI haven't been tried at whole country scale, but the populist government in my country came pretty close, trying to bribe people with things like social security payments for parents (you get paid a pretty penny monthly for each child you have), or giving extra pension raises to retired people - basically giving away free money to everyone. And guess what? Inflation in my country peaked at 19% in February, luckily it fell down to like 8% in September.
Inflation is not the only component of UBI, far from it, social effects are pretty important too. "Do humans still feel compelled to work when their income is guaranteed" is a critical question that does not require a nationwide test to investigate. I wouldn't be so quick to write off the results here.
The problem is: those humans still need to rent apartments, pay their bills, buy some clothes and food. A person who has UBI + salary will always be able to outbid a person who only has UBI when buying all those goods and services (which are limited in quantity, so you have to compete for them. That's how economy works, at its core: it is a way of managing scarcity).
Which means that after short adjustment period, the prices will rise and you will still need the salary from that shitty job to survive.
It encourages work. The current system which can punish you for trying to improve your situation, with UBI it's always in your best interest to work.
Also, the average person will not have their income increase significantly with UBI. The money has to come from somewhere, and taxes will offset the gains for most. Wealthy folks may see their income reduced by a few percentage points. Poor people can easily see their income doubled.
Another factor to consider is that apartments, clothes, and food are not flatly limited, they're elastic. Currently people with no money cannot participate in the market, so UBI has the potential to drive prices down through demand as well. We're seeing a negative example of this with the current housing market; prices are rising quickly because only wealthy people can afford a house, and less and less affordable housing is created as it's not as profitable.
True, but shitty jobs will pay a lot better and they will enable those workers to find meaningful lives outside their jobs. Having some money vs. no money at all makes a big difference.
That inflation is temporary. Most countries in Europe give money to parents and also have decent retirement payments. Inflation is not a problem, except for other external factors (Ukraine war, COVID measures).
That inflation is indeed temporary - it fulfills its role once the prices reach the level when UBI becomes irrelevant.
Imagine a country where average income is 2000 USD per month. Now, you give everyone UBI of 1000 USD per month, so the prices keep rising until cumulative inflation reaches 50% - now 3000 USD buys you exactly the same standard of living as 2000 USD used to do before.
So, inflation stops, but no one's life is better after UBI than it was before.
And of course if the government decides to raise UBI from 1000 USD to 2000 USD then the next wave of inflation follows, cancelling any gains once again.
> So, inflation stops, but no one's life is better after UBI than it was before.
This does not follow. Many people may find they have the same quality of life as before. This isn't a failure. The relative significance of $2k is much greater to someone making <$2k (>2x increase) than someone making >$2k (<2x increase). It seems like in terms of influencing behavior, the greater effect would be felt by the poor, and there's more poor.
> The relative significance of $2k is much greater to someone making <$2k (>2x increase) than someone making >$2k (<2x increase).
That only works on individual level, in a world without inflation. it does not work when when you give money to everyone. Yes, I agree, rich people won't even notice that extra $1k of UBI in their pockets. And they also won't notice a price of pizza going from $20 to $30. Poor people, however, will stay poor.
As a general principle: money is not a real thing. It doesn't exist. It's only a symbol, means of accounting. You cannot eat it, you cannot wear it. You cannot fix the poverty by giving everyone money if you do not increase the amount of goods available for purchase in the market at the same time.
Right, so it's always in people's best interest to work harder, but $2k buys a lot more pizza than $0, regardless of price.
> You cannot fix the poverty by giving everyone money if you do not increase the amount of goods available for purchase in the market at the same time.
Supply is elastic. Increasing demand should indeed increase supply.
> Supply is elastic. Increasing demand should indeed increase supply.
That's some Keynesian bullshit, supply is constrained by a lot of factors, demand alone can't increase it. And even when it does, the intermediate step is, guess what? Raising prices.
Because drawing conclusions about what happens if you guarantee income to everyone, based on studying a project that only guaranteed income to homeless people, is ridiculous.
> a small scale trial
Is not what this is. You can't have a "small scale trial" of universal basic income. That's the whole point.
No, what's ridiculous is claiming that conclusions from this study cannot apply to UBI. Nobody is claiming the study models inflation, it's about homelessness.
Basic Income is part of Universal Basic Income, and I think it's pretty reasonable to expect some conclusions apply to each.
No, you still misunderstand: "Basic Income" for some small groups of people works on a totally different principle than "Universal Basic Income" that applies to everyone. One is about giving a break to some unfortunate people, and helping them make a living in the current economic environment. The other is a complete overhaul of the economic reality we live in.
> Nobody is claiming the study models inflation, it's about homelessness.
Since most people are not homeless, I have no idea why you think this makes it reasonable to extrapolate anything from this study to the case of actual UBI.
> Since most people are not homeless, I have no idea why you think this makes it reasonable to extrapolate anything from this study to the case of actual UBI.
Some people are. They were given a basic income. Under UBI they would also be given a basic income. It seems crazy to me to suggest these are entirely uncorrelated.
> Not if it's only given to the homeless.
So I'll ask again, how does Basic Income for the middle class invalidate Basic Income for the destitute?
> They were given a basic income. Under UBI they would also be given a basic income. It seems crazy to me to suggest these are entirely uncorrelated.
I can't tell if you are trolling or are actually confused.
The issue is not that the homeless people were given a basic income. The issue is that everybody who wasn't homeless was not given a basic income. So only a small fraction of people were given a basic income in this study. That is what makes it invalid as a study of universal basic income.
> how does Basic Income for the middle class invalidate Basic Income for the destitute?
This question is irrelevant since middle class people were not given a basic income in this study. Do a study where middle class people are given a basic income and then we can talk.
> So only a small fraction of people were given a basic income in this study. That is what makes it invalid as a study of universal basic income.
You're arguing with a strawman. It isn't a study of Universal Basic Income. This is a study of Basic Income and it's effects on homelessness, so the results of this study should reasonably apply to other situations where Basic Income is provided to homeless individuals (as it would with UBI). To be clear, "the results" are the effect of basic income on homelessness, and only the effect of basic income on homelessness. This is not a blanket endorsement of UBI.
I've been very deliberate with my wording to avoid absolutes. You seem to be suggesting that we cannot model anything at all. Yeah, I think that's insane.
No, I'm arguing with what you actually said at the start of this subthread. See below.
> It isn't a study of Universal Basic Income.
According to you, it is valid input to decisions about UBI. Here is the original post of yours (responding to Detrytus) that I responded to in this subthread:
XXXX
> I think someone, soon will try to use this project as an argument in favor of UBI, which is ridiculous.
Why's that ridiculous? Testing a small scale trial on the people most likely to be effected by a larger scale program seems pretty reasonable to me.
XXXX
Your contention that the study is a valid "small scale trial" of UBI is what I and others are disagreeing with. Nothing you have said changes that disagreement in the slightest; you just keep repeating the same contention we have already disagreed with, without addressing the issues we have raised at all.
> "the results" are the effect of basic income on homelessness, and only the effect of basic income on homelessness.
Which has nothing whatever to do with UBI. Nor is it a "small scale trial" of UBI. It's a study of the effect of providing basic income to homeless people and only homeless people. You can't use the results of that to conclude anything useful about what would happen if you provided basic income to everybody. This has already been pointed out to you multiple times in this subthread.
> Your contention that the study is a valid "small scale trial" of UBI is what I and others are disagreeing with. Nothing you have said changes that disagreement in the slightest; you just keep repeating the same contention we have already disagreed with, without addressing the issues we have raised at all.
Sigh. I've been very deliberate with my wording, and I did not say Universal anywhere in my original comment. If this caused confusion, my follow-up comments should have made things abundantly clear, and I'm still waiting for a rebuttal.
If you insist on putting words in my mouth, know that you are arguing with a strawman.
If you offer free plate glass to all store owners, the stores with already broken windows will have a large benefit. What happens to the glass you gave to stores that don't need the glass? Do they sell it on eBay? Store it somewhere?
Exactly which is why the complaint the OP is making makes no sense. It’s Denver’s Basic Income Project and explicit in who gets it so complaining that it’s not universal is silly.
You bring up a good point. This project is indeed not another completely different project that it has made no claims to be.
In a similar vein, this is not the Alan Partridge Project, which is a band, and that fact was not mentioned in this article, furthering my initial confusion.
UBI is cannot be truly universal: you have to pay for it, which is sort of what I mean by saying it is means-tested isn't too far from the truth. Those who pay "into" UBI more than what they receive from it are "failing" the means-test here; those who get more UBI than they pay into it in taxes are "passing" the means test.
(Now, obviously, taxes are kind of a grab-bag: it is hard to see, directly, how much of your tax dollars go to any one particular appropriation. But the point stands, and I think an easy approximation would be taxes paid * (UBI paid out / total appropriations) or so.)
UBI is essentially equivalent to having a negative tax bracket, and that bracket would only apply to some people. Necessarily to compensate for that bracket, some or all of the upper brackets must go up, in order to fund the lower bracket.
I.e., if the government writes everybody a $10k check, but due to doing that I now owe $15k more in tax obligations each year … I've not in any material way received UBI, even if there's a $10k check in my account.
Like, if you just wrote everyone a $10k check per year the resulting national debt alone would be absurd…? How would that work?
The massive increase seen in the control group seems to indicate that either ~5% of the money delivers >50% of the benefit, or there were some other factors that were more significant than the money.
Based on what I can tell, their data is solely based on whether they "reported living in a home". This sounds like extremely bad science. I can easily see someone reporting whatever they think you want to hear if you're giving them money. That would definitely explain why the lowest group had such a huge increase. I'm hugely skeptical.
Yeah, this. It looks like any interpretation of the data is complicated slightly by the three groups all having slightly different initial situations, but the approx 34% of people finding stable housing within six months after receiving a monthly stipend that looks sufficient to cover budget room rent vs the 31% who found housing after receiving virtually nothing doesn't look like a promising result.
There are always going to be secular trends of surveyed people regardless of what they're given. First of all a lot of homelessness isn't permanent, so if you monitor a group of homeless people some of them will cease to be homeless over the course of time regardless of whether they're getting anything from you or even aware they're being monitored.
And secondly people are aware they're being studied, and often react. That may be as simple and positive as doing more to help themselves because the nice person showed concern about where they'd be in six months time, but it may also be people acting or claiming to act differently because they believe the payments are linked to what they report (no matter how much surveyors insist it's unconditional and there's no judgement and no possibility of the experiment being stopped or continued...)
It seems to me like demand effects[1] could explain a large fraction of the observed behavior.
People like being given money. If you tell them you're conducting a study to determine if giving them leads to them doing XYZ, it should come as no surprise when they do XYZ, even if the money didn't literally enable it: they are incentivized to XYZ all they can in order to keep the money pump flowing.
Of course Basic Universal Income works in experiments. You select a group of people and give them money for some time. To be honest, it’s no longer basic nor universal. It’s just income.
[Giving money]: helps people significantly improve their living conditions
All Media: is this experiment too extreme and weird to ever try out in practice? We ask these far out kooks if this off-the-wall moonshot could maybe someday happen in a dream land
It doesn't help that they don't have any control group data to compare to. Group C was referred to as "Active comparison group" in their one-pager, which I assumed was a control group, but it isn't. Also pretty small sample sizes involved.
That's basically the control group (but how do you perform a study like this without an actual control group and expect your data to be taken seriously?). 50/month being almost totally meaningless in terms of income. So really this study says that the larger payments goes a long way towards eliminating people sleeping outside and has a small/moderate effect on how many are able to rent/buy housing.
I don't think you can have a $0 control group just because you have to pay the controls to fill out your surveys and such, otherwise their stats will be very out of whack.
Wouldn't it make more sense to compare to existing welfare programs (if there are any?). A bit like new drugs often are not tested against placebo, but against existing drugs which already treat the same condition.
I imagine that would introduce way more sources of error you can't control for, especially since ethically you can't incentivize follow-ups using welfare services they would otherwise already be entitled to.
* Group A reported a 26% increase in participants staying in housing they rented or owned;
* Group B reported a 35% increase in housing they rented or owned;
* And Group C, which received the smaller sum of money, reported a 20% increase in renting or owning housing.
But these are not actually percentages - these are percentage points!
* Group A went from 8% to 34% - a 4.25x increase
* Group B went from 5% to 40% - an 8x increase
* Group C went from 11% to 30% - a 2.7x increase
Which is a lot more dramatic than saying 20% vs 26% vs 35%.
The study authors might have good reason for reporting it this way, such as many participants dropped out of the study before follow-up, which probably skews toward people with more chaotic lifestyles. So the denominator for each group has changed at follow-up and could at least partially explain why all groups saw improvements.
Reporting it in the more dramatic way puts a lot of emphasis on the starting conditions of what were supposed to be randomized groups - I think it would be more misleading the way you propose. If you invert it and report on the % reduction in the bad thing, the numbers would be almost the same as those they report.
The part about people dropping out is complete speculation, right?
The problem with UBI is the landlords will just jack the rents accordingly. That's what happened in the UK when the govt introduced Housing Benefit. The landlords jacked the rent. So effectively the taxpayer subsidizes landlords.
I tend to worry about this too; if UBI has a chance in hell at working we’d have to pair it will a wild increase in the availability in housing including in the biggest and most desirable population centers.
And even if that occurred and the housing cost issue is avoided, companies of all stripes will be angling hard to capture people’s new additional income.
The bit about everyone experiencing worse mental health outcomes was a bit surprising. Given the size of the mental health crisis I'd hope to see that unpacked more in the final report than it was here.
A control group would be people tracked without having received any money. The $50/month group doing nearly as well as the $1000/month group implies to me the overall situation in the city changed, and that's the majority of the improvement. Maybe $50 really was enough to flip over the edge, but we can't tell for sure because they don't have a real control group.
I'm all about _private_ people giving their money away to those less fortunate, but guys... We're talking about a city that is a mile high in altitude and has exotic Winter and Snow seasons, and this is a 6 month study?
If you are asking why the study isn't covering a period of time including winter, it's because the study goes for a full year and this is only a report at the half way point.
> On Tuesday, the group released data on the halfway mark of the pilot program, showing that rates of homelessness and food insecurity decreased, while shelter and employment rates increased over the past six months.
I suppose the cheapest room I can find here is $700 a month. Which wouldn't be unlivable, I suppose. There was a group in the study that only got $50 a month, after all.
You obviously have never lived with unstable people who often live just above the poverty line. There’s a reason why share houses and shelters don’t work.
We live just barely above that line, and recently got $600/mo of food stamps revoked, which did an order of magnitude more harm than the pitiful raise that got us there.
The abrupt cutoff for benefits is one of the most inept things the government has ever done. A reduction in benefits should always be less than the increase in income.
I should qualify for my own benefits, theoretically. I'm autistic and bed-ridden, but don't get any of those benefits, because they want me to provide evidence of an active, ongoing job search, as well as previous rejections that show attempts to get a job.
I don't want to do that. I am not someone who needs to tire themself out working for the rest of their life. Yet that is what I would need to do in order to qualify for any support.
I have burnt out of at least 2 jobs already because of severe ADHD and this is just totally soul-sucking and terrible.
I have diagnoses of ASD and ADHD. They know I have both. Soon they'll know I also have DID. Maybe at some point they'll realize how much I need the help.
I totally grant you that $1000 doesn't solve long term homelessness driven by drug addiction and mental illness. That group likely wouldn't spend the money on housing anyway.
But it does offer a viable solution for transient homelessness for working poor who might have lost a job, become disabled, been evicted, etc..
The hope is that having more money can bootstrap a virtuous cycle which allows them to generate a more livable income. The old adage "you have to have money to make money" is not entirely incorrect.
”We were already looking for a spot because I got into a housing program. [...] For the month, I need $3,000 to get through and live paycheck to paycheck. But then getting approved and accepted for it [DBIP], it was definitely a relief. I wasn’t going to have to come up with all the money for the apartment."
"I was actually able to pay off my debts literally just in time for me to get into a place, and I got the receipt just in time saying that I paid off my debt so that I was able to be accepted into housing."
"It's going to rent, to my car, to be able to afford living. To be able to go to this little program I’m going to for 22 weeks [of job training], to be able to make 50-60k a year. For me, that’s living life. That’s where I need to be. [...] Right now, the way I’m striving, I just feel proud."
Along with sharing rent with roommates, homeless people can and do still work and combining that with a basic income can get them over the hump and into stable housing where a single job sometimes can't.
You may have a higher standard of living than a recently homeless person. Also consider that this may not be their only income, and they might share some of the burden with others.
1000 a month can easily get you an illegal room in some basement or someone’s adapted garage, with enough money to spare for a good outfit, a workable phone, and an internet subscription to start applying for jobs.
Even if it did, the cost of moving would be far too prohibitive for me. Even moving between two apartments in the same complex, when someone flooded our building, would have costed over $5,000 if we hadn't made their insurance cover it.
Life improvements when humans have something to take care of their basic rights. Shocking. How many more projects and pilots to collectively keep scratching our heads as a species.
> reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society.
I'm getting major eugenics vibes from that comment. I'm not saying you're for forcible population control, but it's just a tiny hop and a skip from the "poor people are so burdened by having children that they just shouldn't" to "poor people are too dumb to realize that they should not have children so we should 'help' them not reproduce".
Education and reproductive changes don’t alter the reality that you can spend years working on developing skills in an industry that rapidly disappears due to technological upheaval. It also doesn’t change the fact that you can’t remedy a plummeting number of jobs for low-educated people by educating everyone.
Will pilots be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? What do we do about the fact that we need them now, but we won’t in an unpredictable amount of time?
Will truck drivers be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Do you think they will all be amenable to retraining as full-stack developers and financial analysts? Do you think we could even absorb that number of people in other industries, even if we could retrain everyone? And what happens when the jobs they retrained for disappear in five or ten years?
No, it isn't. All of the issues you describe are business realities; they are facts of life that everyone has to deal with. You can't make those issues go away by guaranteeing everyone an income, because those issues are issues of production, not consumption. Guaranteeing everyone an income doesn't magically enable us to predict the future or magically retrain people instantly for new jobs when old ones become obsolete. It doesn't magically get the right goods and services produced for everyone's income to be spent on.
In other words, whether we like it or not, we are all exposed to the risks you describe, and UBI does not magically un-expose us to them. The only really practical way of dealing with those risks is for everyone to take a share of them; that means everyone has to be responsible for their own future planning, for being aware of the extent to which their current skills and jobs are becoming obsolete, and to plan their future accordingly. In other words, every mature adult needs to be able to act like a mature adult and take responsibility for their own lives. There is no magical solution that frees anyone from the need to do that.
> All of the issues you describe are business realities; they are facts of life that everyone has to deal with. You can't make those issues go away by guaranteeing everyone an income, because those issues are issues of production, not consumption.
I believe you’ve thoroughly missed the point.
UBI does not, as you note, “magically enable us to predict the future or magically retrain people instantly for new jobs when old ones become obsolete”. What it does do—in principle—is allow the people who are impacted by structurally decreasing job opportunities and increasing turmoil in the job market to live in something other than destitution. And it does so without many of the downsides of means-tested programs, such as benefits cliffs, negative incentive structures, and operational overhead.
> allow the people who are impacted by structurally decreasing job opportunities and increasing turmoil in the job market to live in something other than destitution
Even if I accept your description of the problem for the sake of argument (I actually don't think you're correctly describing the actual facts), why is universal basic income needed for this? And how does it avoid the obvious problem of increasing these same problems by reducing people's incentive to produce goods and services?
> …why is universal basic income needed for this? And how does it avoid the obvious problem of increasing these same problems by reducing people's incentive to produce goods and services?
For the simple fact that working and gaining an income will always improve your standard of living, unlike means-tested programs today with benefits cliffs and perverse incentives.
We can even potentially reduce or eliminate minimum wage, since basic survival is no longer contingent upon working a job that pays enough.
Additionally, the problems foreseen aren’t a result of a lack of population willing to produce goods and/or services. They’re from an economic future where there are no reasonable opportunities for a growing number of people. What will, for example, ride sharing, food delivery drivers, and truck drivers do when self-driving vehicles eliminate the need for them? Do you believe we have (or will have) jobs to employ the ten-plus million who will be put out of work in the coming decade or two?
> working and gaining an income will always improve your standard of living
Do you mean now? Or under UBI? Or under UBI plus the necessary changes in the tax code to make sure adding more income never puts you in a higher tax bracket that reduces your actual take home income? Even the last wouldn't necessarily make your claim true, since working has costs as well as benefits--paying for your daily commute, for example.
> We can even potentially reduce or eliminate minimum wage
This would be an obvious thing to do if UBI existed, but nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing it, and it would be politically very difficult to achieve even with UBI. Nobody wants to be the one who takes away any perceived benefit.
> an economic future where there are no reasonable opportunities for a growing number of people
To the extent this is an actual problem, the way to fix it is not UBI, but removing the massive number of government regulations that make it extremely difficult to start a small business and be competitive. The idea that we are running out of actual opportunities for productive work--that is, opportunities for making positive sum trades that are not being made now because nobody has yet started the necessary business to enable them--is laughable. Human wants are limitless. But the most cost effective ways to satisfy particular wants do change, and people's expectations of job opportunities do have to change with them.
> What will, for example, ride sharing, food delivery drivers, and truck drivers do when self-driving vehicles eliminate the need for them?
What happened to all the horse carriage drivers, grooms, stable hands, etc., etc. when the automobile made horse transport obsolete?
The answer, of course, is that they went and found different jobs. Some of them found jobs in automobile factories, or became gas station attendants, or worked on road paving crews. But others went to work for new businesses, or started new businesses, doing things that hadn't existed at all before, because there were no people available to do them.
In other words, your implicit mental model, which is that there are a fixed number of jobs and once automation takes some away, no others arise to replace them, is simply wrong.
> Do you believe we have (or will have) jobs to employ the ten-plus million who will be put out of work in the coming decade or two?
Historically, that has always been what happens when a technology change makes a large pool of people available for new work, so yes. The only thing that might put a spoke in the wheel is government regulations preventing people from starting new businesses doing new things to employ those people. See above.
> Do you mean now? Or under UBI? Or under UBI plus the necessary changes in the tax code to make sure adding more income never puts you in a higher tax bracket that reduces your actual take home income? Even
Under UBI, but we can end this discussion here since you seem painfully unaware of the basic facts around this topic and so I cannot assume we’re operating under the same general basis of understanding. The U.S. uses marginal rates, so increasing your income cannot reduce your take home pay, full stop. This is a sadly common misconception, but it is quite simply completely untrue.
> Nobody wants to be the one who takes away any perceived benefit.
Sorry, but I can’t help myself here. Nobody? Not even the major political party for whom—if they still had an actual platform—this is a major component of their party platform?
Taxes pay for it, just like they pay for existing benefits schemes. In theory, we could eliminate many of the means-tested approaches we currently use, which impose significant overhead costs from the means-testing. Do those taxes come primarily from industries which are profiting from disrupted heavily labor markets? Do they come from general income taxes, or corporate taxes, or something else? All of these are interesting discussions to have, but "yes but who pays for it" isn't an argument not to do it.
And I genuinely have no idea what you're even getting at with your second question. Nobody? The market? What does UBI have to do with individuals becoming rich?
Historically, "contributing to society" meant directly or indirectly contributing to resource extraction. Now that we are coming to understand that model is not sustainable, perhaps we should re-think what it means to contribute to society. I could see an argument that people who constantly fly internationally are more of a net harm than people who don't, for instance.
> Historically, "contributing to society" meant directly or indirectly contributing to resource extraction.
No, it meant contributing to production of goods and services. Some amount of "resource extraction" is necessary for that, but historically, the amount of production for a given amount of resources has increased dramatically, so we get far more value out of the same resources.
Because they were born into it, people forget the US has been in a 70 year “blip” that’s pretty ahistorical and clearly not sustainable.
More likely then UBI or universal living wages, we’ll just see a return to communal living with shared responsibilities and far more modest personal luxuries: more multi-generational homes, a return of boarding houses and flops, etc
It doesn’t look anything like what we grew up imagining the future to look like, but it’s actually pretty livable overall. Many people already live that way throughout the world, without particular suffering, and even in the US/West most people did until quite recently.
However disappointing to the idea of progress, it’d just be a reversion to the proven norm.
Good point. As a counterpoint but not a rebuttal, places exist with the wealth for single-family homes and pensions to be within reach for almost every citizen - Switzerland, Austria, the nordics. Conditions there are not necessarily replicable in America or my own country. However, a culture of social democracy and investing in the citizenry looks to be a factor, and our countries' prioritisation of minimising tax for the rich and minimising social spend is a pretty good way to prevent this kind of citizen wealth. So fuck us for our short-sightedness.
This is only because we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin. It says a lot about our society when we say that no, poor people should not get more money, it would just be gobbled up by increased rents. Things like socialized housing, medicine, transportation, communication, education, as well as food, would do a lot to solve this, but since we've decided that these essential pieces of modern life should be used as a means to enrich a small few, we deal with this Ouroboros of a society.
> we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin
First, profit margins on things like groceries are pretty small. That's why grocery store chains are heavily consolidated: the only way to make a decent overall income in this business is with volume.
Second, both basic economics and all human history teach us that the best way to maximize the quantity and quality of "life's necessities" that are available is through a free market, where people provide these "necessities" because they want to earn a profit.
Third, to the people who provide "life's necessities", what you call "profit" is their income. If you're saying people should provide "life's necessities" with no profit, you're saying those people should have no income. Is that your position?
If only things were so simple as suggested by the 60 year old textbooks!
Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unnecessary luxuries like packaged foods and off-season produce to undercut local grocers who had otherwise been profitable selling seasonal produce and regional meat.
“But clearly, consumers end up ahead if the necessities are cheaper at the supermarket!” you say.
But of course, with a supermarket organized to maximize profit rather than contribute to a community, they do everything they can to empty the consumers wallet. The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise.
Then, instead of the money folding back back into the local community and local farmers/ranchers, it goes to investors at Nestle and Mars and to industrial farming operations in some distant hemisphere. Given the importance of food and it’s affordability, everything about highly consolidated supermarkets is bad.
Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
> The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise.
If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric.
A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries".
A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices.
> Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way.
In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.
GP did not articulate their point well, but you've straw-manned them about groceries. GP specifically enumerated housing, healthcare, transport etc - not groceries.
I assume HN users are American unless informed otherwise. I'm glad that your health insurance bureaucrats can make a salary, but it's nonsense to believe that's a good way to run a society, even if it is profitable for some or can be deemed to be "free-market provision". There are better models that still generate income for pharma and doctors and nurses.
America made the car part of its identity. Your society was moulded by automotive lobbying in the twentieth century, on the hill and in town planning. It's great that car makers can generate income, but they've mugged you. All the mandatory spending on that sector could be optional, and the rational actors in your economy could use that money to maximise their personal profit functions in a way that encourages entrepreneurs to create new value.
It simply should not cost six figures to turn a school graduate into a doctor or lawyer. It's great that universities generate income and employ people, but you made bad choices there. A professor spends 10-20 hours a week teaching a class of fifty - research grants come from industry - where's the fucking money gone?
House builders deserve to get paid, but when you condemn a generation to rent slavery, you curtail their economic activity, making yourselves much poorer collectively and individually than you would be if your young could afford to take part in other parts of the economy. It's not like your rent-seekers can't cream income from other capital investments, there are ways to turn money into more money that increase liquidity for businesses. Housing isn't mandated by the laws of the universe to be an income stream.
If we translate Maslow's pyramid into goods and services, at the bottom we have groceries - which moooost people can afford, yay, you win a point; then housing, which is touch-and-go for a large minority; then leisure time and retirement planning and non-vocational education, which are enjoyed by only the wealthy.
And this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist... where the individuals in question are specifically rich and powerful ones. So you have apparently phenomenal GDP per capita but only 90% functional literacy, and lots of you die indigent because you got cancer. That GDP, I assert, is fucking fictitious. I'm sure America is rich one way or the other but it looks like the books are being cooked. If you claim that a university degree is $50k then your claim of $50k GDP is bollocks. Where is the actual production that you write down as $10k for having a broken arm set?
John Galt shat in your mouths and you're calling it stew.
Sorry if this rambled. GP, please let me know if I've fleshed out your point or missed it entirely.
> GP specifically enumerated housing, healthcare, transport etc - not groceries.
The post I responded to mentioned "food" as well as the other things you list. Last I checked, "groceries" is food.
I focused on groceries because they are closer to being in a free market than any of the other things you mention, all of which are more heavily regulated by the government and therefore are more inefficiently and wastefully provided than groceries are. If we want to talk about giving everyone easy access to "life's necessities", it seems obvious that making the provision of those necessities more efficient, hence making them cheaper and easier to afford, would be a good thing to do. That means making all those other things more like groceries in the way we provide them. That might well decrease the per-unit profit on such things--which is why I pointed out that profit margins on groceries are pretty small. That's what free markets do: they drive profit margins down, not up, through competition.
Most of the rest of your post is simply uninformed about how things in the US actually work. I'll focus on one particular statement of yours to make that clear:
> this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist
Quite the contrary: things that are a mess in the US are a mess because of too much collectivism, not too little. To take your two major examples:
The US health care system is a mess because the people who actually have to make decisions about care--patients and doctors--have no idea what the care they are deciding about actually costs. All those costs are hidden--negotiated collectively behind the scenes by large corporations who have no skin in the game in individual cases, which is where the availability and quality of care actually matters. How can people possibly make decent tradeoffs of benefit vs. cost when providing or receiving care if they can't see and control the costs?
Housing is a mess in the US because much, if not most, urban and suburban planning was done from the top down, by collectivist central decree, instead of from the bottom up, evolving as individual choices and interactions shaped communities. (In Europe, by contrast, most cities and towns developed from the bottom up, and hence were much more suitable for introduction of a few top-down things like mass transit when those became available, because the top-down planners had the benefit of centuries of bottom-up evolution of communities.)
Ha, my reading comprehension fail - I missed that GP explicitly said food.
I apologise for saying you were straw-manning, your comment was apposite.
I think where you and I differ is that you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist, whereas I will characterise actions by organisations and individuals as individualistic or collectivist on a case-by-case basis.
I agree with the principle of individual agency in the default case, but town planning is a prime example where this doesn't work - absent a population with a strong collectivist culture. I've spent time in a rural part of Spain and, please know, the towns are a mess - traffic arteries go down to one lane and detour around houses that someone decided to build where they pleased. It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.
In terms of healthcare, your thesis would stand a hundred years ago, when medical skill was the prime differentiator and drugs were simple and cheap. That is not the case today. For any given condition, the treatment is often a monopoly or has little competition. Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it - is one of the elements that makes American healthcare such an international joke. These companies have a captive market, and the cost of entry is enormous. Respectfully, the idea that what you need is _more_ individualism does not stand up to inspection.
You may have individualism as your highest value, in which case avoidable death in penury is a price you are willing to pay. Most of the world finds that incomprehensible. The common solution in other countries is single-payer. This has the disadvantage that it levies the healthy to pay for the sick, but the advantage that the levy is affordable. It's not as if there is no benefit to the healthy - it is valuable in itself to live free from medical worry.
Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Your principle is a very expensive one. And it's not as if pharma is struggling in Europe. Strange hill to literally die on.
> you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist
No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense.
> It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.
A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped?
Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals.
> Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it
I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism.
Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with.
> You may have individualism as your highest value
I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others.
> Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance?
Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.
> reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society
How would one predict who is going to have children that contribute to society and who is not? If the idea is to stop them reproducing then you have predict ahead of time, after all.
I don't think UBI is a politically stable idea. It will be diluted by different initiatives to favour certain groups over others, and the actual UBI income will soon be eaten by inflation. Fast forward 10 years and the same problems will remain.
> Fast forward 10 years and the same problems will remain.
I don’t have a strong opinion on UBI, but I want to challenge you on this.
If everyone gets $20k per year, let’s say the median earner goes from $40k to $60k. An increase of 50%. And let’s assume that we don’t increase taxes, even though it would definitely play a role.
Pretty soon, inflation kicks in and everything goes up 50% in price.
But a low income earner of $16k per year is now making $36k per year. More than double! So the 50% increase of prices means that the UBI helps the lower income person’s purchasing power to be on a more level field with the middle earners, even though the middle earners obviously still are better off with their larger income. Just less so.
And the person making $200k is now making $220k. But the 50% inflation means that they have to lower their consumption a bit, to be more in-line with the median earner.
So introducing UBI like this causes an automatic rebalancing between different levels of income, somewhat, even if the median earner is unaffected. Obviously this is greatly simplified though.
Poor people buy goods, driving a productive economy. Rich people buy financial vehicles. Yeah yeah yeah liquidity makes it easier for businesses to raise capital... tired old bollocks. However seductive the reasoning may sound, it's turned out to be bullshit every time it's tried. If the financial sector is the most profitable part of your economy, you've got it precisely the wrong way round.
Predicating your economy on appeasing the rich is like putting accountants in charge of a company - the headline numbers look good for two years, then it dawns on you that you don't have any products to sell.
You get a more vigorous economy when the poor people can take part, because while they may not spend much, there's a lot of them.
I think there is no point to reason about a scenario which don't involve raised taxes. I can't see it happen. It will most definitely be neccessary, one way or another. I seldom see UBI proponents take a holistic view and consider the whole economy. Most arguments revolve around individuals, with other factors unchanged. I don't think that is an interesting discussion.
The price of low skilled labour will increase a lot, and that will drive inflation. Perhaps some think it will be for the better, and I can see the argument. But it will mean that many companies will not be able to afford the labour they need to operate, and will need to shut down. Perhaps still no problem? But if the economy stagnates, there will be less taxes paid, and harder to finance the whole UBI thing. It will have assymmetric effects. I think it is a kind of singularity thing. The effects will be difficult to predict, but I think it will cause new problems to a degree that other better policies will not.
> I don't see a path where citizens come together to agree on a UBI.
In a convoluted, bureaucratic way, we have many of the pieces of UBI (welfare, unemployment, social security, minimum wage). We just lack the "universal" part. I agree that UBI is contentious, but I wouldn't be surprised if UBI dressed up in some definitely-not-socialism clothing eventually reaches critical mass of support.
> fixing the hard things like education
Sure. Hard, but not controversial.
> ...or reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society.
Excuse me, what? Who gets to decide who has kids and who doesn't? Unless you have some clever voluntary economic way to affect this, then it sounds a lot like eugenics.
A UBI does seem much easier than, say, fixing education or making raising children cheaper. It would currently cost about 20% of US GDP to give everyone a thousand dollars a month, so not feasible yet in the US, let alone in other countries. But we might get there soon.
By reactive, do you mean addressing symptoms rather than causes?
It does if he has a job. Which he must since he says he pays taxes. Having a job means you are producing something that's of enough value to others that people will pay you for it. That's contributing to society.
This study is showing that many people perceive their jobs to be useless, but it neither asks for nor studies any factual basis for their perceptions. The study just assumes that certain jobs are "more useless" than others and looks for correlations between people's perceptions and those assumptions. In other words, all this study really shows is that the jobs of the people who did the study are basically useless, since they are producing no information that is of actual value.
What does education have to do with this? Are we really still pretending in this day and age that education is some magical panacea to fix even a fraction of the ills? A populace with a lot of education and a poor means to earn a living wage just means you'll end up with a lot of educated poor people.
The current way of things is an anomaly in human history. You can't have a continuous consolidation of wealth by the very few AND allow them to capture the means of production and pretend that things are going to be hunky dory in the long run. Either you ensure that the average person can have a comfortable life in your system, or heads are eventually going to start rolling. The only question is how long before that happens.
In South Africa we have about a 38% jobless rate (formal economy) of economically active adults.
We do have a UBI of sorts started during the Covid pandemic for folks who don't have employment and not on any other benefit (current 18 million people) - it is called the SASSA and is about $18 per month (R350).
On the Big Mac Index we are about $2.81
The govt was supposed to cancel it but they keep extending it and are now coming up with inventive accounting tricks to keep it not that our economy can afford a rollout to more people.
> Participants were asked to rate their mental health on a scale of 0 to 10...
average the full sample of participants reported a mental health score of 6.12. [...] In addition, participants took the 10-Question Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (Kessler et al.,
2002). Participants were asked ten questions rating how often they experience specific feelings
related to distress on a scale from 1 to 5.
> Table 16 describes paired sample t-tests of the
participants who completed the enrollment survey and six-month follow-up survey. While
participants from none of the groups showed statistically significant changes,
This should probably have been a period and end of paragraph instead of a comma.
But does it decline relative to a control? I would expect the mental health of the homeless who don't receive the cash to decline, so perhaps the cash lessens or doesn't affect the decline.
Mental health declining over time for people experiencing extreme economic hardship sounds morally wrong to me, but unfortunately, it also sounds very plausible.
It's just a band aid on a bleeding wound. UBI needs to be implemented as a large scale bureaucracy. A network of subsidizations that ensure citizens have social housing, rent payed, and enough to sustain themselves. Like it or not, it requires government regulation. Because otherwise renters will never accept social housing, or tenant who's rent is being subsidized.
Somewhat counterintuitively, UBI reduces bureaucracy. It's far simpler to just give everyone the same basic income than having government agencies checking who should or shouldn't get welfare, which saves vast amounts of wasted money. In some studies it's been suggested that UBI would actually be cheaper to fund that all government social welfare - in other words, under a system of UBI, taxes could go down.
> in other words, under a system of UBI, taxes could go down.
That's a huge [citation needed]. You're funding a program that would cost trillions of dollars per year — e.g., $10k/year (less than I pay in rent for a 1 bed…) would cost ~$3T/year. You're talking about a yearly expense that would outweigh all of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, combined. There's no plausible way that that lowers taxes.
It allows for profit seeking if you allow it to be used on for profit necessities. This is why socialized housing, healthcare, education, and all else of life's essentials is so important. No one should be allowed to profit on what you need just to exist in the modern world, that seems so perverse while we have this technological society capable of lifting up so many if incentives were merely adjusted from the individual to the collective.
It doesn’t save vast amounts of money. These bureaucracies hand out much more money than they spend on overhead. Otherwise, over 30% of the population would be working in these bureaucracies.
In terms of housing, the $1000 a month group only improved by 6% more than the $50 group. That is to say, even if you just give people enough money every month to get an apartment with a roommate, only 6% will actually use it that way.
In the actual report [0], they measure financial well-being, which improves across the board but does not differ between treatment and control. Surprisingly, measures of stress and anxiety actually increased for the treatment groups and decreased for controls.
There were a few positives - the treatment groups were somewhat more likely to get jobs, and used fewer services.
Obviously the organizers of the study want to promote its success, but I think most of what we see here is that homeless is a transient condition for some people, who find housing regardless of intervention. Mainly it's a demonstration that the extra $950 per month does surprisingly little in this population.
[0]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqtOfZG2sSanWgUdzn-lx-pwSXZ...