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There's more depth here than "just give cash". What we've seen in study after study is that if you take low-income people who are struggling and give them more

There's more depth here than "just give cash". What we've seen in study after study is that if you take low-income people who are struggling and give them more money, they use it in ways that improve their lives, they become more productive, and this has profound long-term impact. At the same time, I don't think anybody really disputes that giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives. They need medical treatment before anything else. I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. That would be an interesting one. I would be unsurprised to find that cash alone was insufficient to solve their problems; the most obvious thing they need is education. My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well.

clessg 11y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here. I know many people who may not be where they are without government assistance as a child, myself included. But I also see my alcoholic sister who uses almost all of her child benefits for liquor. That said, without the direct payments, I would expect her to turn to prostitution. So there's that at least.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Our social structure is broken. In a world that wasn't falling apart, such cases would be the responsibility of the family, and the family would have the authority to see it dealt with adequately. That's the way it's supposed to work, and the way it has worked through most of successful human history. As many Westerners have stopped realizing what family life is, they have done all they can to offload these familial responsibilities onto the state so that they can have greater individual independence. A big loss for us, and I don't think we can hang on much longer. To be clear, I'm not saying you're not doing enough, as I obviously don't know you or your family. I'm commenting that even if you were doing all you could (and you probably are), the social support isn't there to make it work.
Cowen 11y ago
I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.
epistasis 11y ago
There's several types of "errors" here: (1) failing to help a person in need, (2) trying to help a person in need and failing, or (3) trying to help a person and instead enabling destructive behaviors. Different people weight these two errors differently. Some people think it's really terrible to fail to help an honest person in need, but don't care as much about the cost of enabling a self-destructive person. Others don't care much about (1), and would in fact not help a single person rather than let (3) happen once. Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.) Unfortunately the 'loss function' of the different types of errors is what really gums up most honest debate on these issues. A lot of these are evaluated on moral principles more than economic costs, which further complicates the story. I disagree with them, but there's a lot of people that think there should be harsh penalties in the world for using drugs, no matter the societal costs. Or that giving anybody a handout from taxpayer money is wrong, even if it ends up saving taxpayer money in the future.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Except giving drug users.cash stops them burglarizing and robbing.
  - aianus 11y ago
    Or you could just give them safe drugs for 1/100 of the cost. 99% of the price of drugs is compensating criminals for risk.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      Yes, I would advocate that. I meant really that being clean shouldn't be a precursor
- DanBC 11y ago
  Expanding on SixSigma's point: Drug users sometimes engage in acquisitive crime to get money to buy drugs. Or they become sex workers. The public health burden of (unregulated) sex work is considerable. So giving these people cash reduces the crime they commit, and reduces the need for them to become sex-workers. Often just giving them the cash is far cheaper than the legal system alternatives - the police investigation and the trial is likely to be expensive. (I accept your point that some people just don't care about saving that tax money, they want "tough on crime" policies) > Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.) This is so simplistic it's almost hateful. It's a failure to understand the complex drivers of a lot of severe drug addiction. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/drug-addicts-sterilised-children-protect http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/drug-ad...
ribs 11y ago
I bet if you gave extra cash to someone who regularly uses heroin and who "maintains", they'll put that extra cash to good use.
- asuffield 11y ago
  If you're also providing them with a treatment programme, yes. It's clearly nonsensical to withhold money from them that they would otherwise have received. It also doesn't sound like a good idea to expect them to pay for their own treatment from the money you gave them. We need both for this to work.
ThomPete 11y ago
The longer term effect is to me whats most interesting here, and I too would love to see some studies in that area. But here is another way too look at it. People with rich parents might not become as successful as their parents but they are rarely ending at the bottom of society. Even if money alone doesn't motivate you (which I think is entirely fair to belive), you are more likely to try and use them for something useful if you feel like it's within your reach to do so. The motivation isn't the money itself but rather opportunity within your reach.
mnre4kgnk4eg 11y ago
"just give cash" is sufficient, because the other things are just as likely to be fall-out from the bad choices that may have been the best of a bad situation (heroin usage, dealing, theft, etc, etc...). There is another comment below about giving in-kind stuff instead of the more fungible cash, but the problems with that (and with your example) boil down to that being moralizing. People want to moralize rather than enable. If a person has the means and doesn't use them, then and only then, can we claim some other problems remain to be fixed, but we cannot even logically conclude that the problems are blocking something debatably-desirable at this point. We can't have a non-armchair/inherently-smug-and-preachy discussion until everyone has a basic income. This problem isn't going away, and is only for lack of numbers. Even someone who wants to die by heroin would be better off being allowed to, than forcing them to harm others (or themselves differently) in order to get there.
- asuffield 11y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't think you fully understood my point, as you appear to be presenting arguments against making financial support conditional on other things, which I was not endorsing here (that is a whole barrel of complicated which I don't want to open). My point was rather than a financial-assistance-only approach is insufficient: we also need, at minimum, strong education and healthcare support, because there clearly exist groups of people who need them.
  - ryandamm 11y ago
    In other words, in addition to a basic guaranteed income, we should consider universal health care and public education. I agree with that collection of policies, based on my understanding of current economic thinking and research.
- wycx 11y ago
  How about giving people money, and if they are a heroin addict, let them have access to free heroin as well. I would imagine that a stable supply of the substance to which one is addicted, plus money off which to live, would form an excellent foundation for being a non-destructive member of society.
Matumio 11y ago
> I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. This was done in London. Here you go: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/20798745-cb9fbb39 https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money... > giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary. But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.
- asuffield 11y ago
  That's an interesting experiment, although the sample is too small and uncontrolled to give much confidence in the results (I'm completely confident that if I could pick which people received the money, I could find a hundred people in London who would show the same pattern; to really prove the case we need a controlled random sample). Still, this experiment lends weight to the idea that somebody should run that study. > It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary This is an interesting and subtle case: they gave out money, and did some amount of aid work (the article indicates £50k was spent, of which £39k was the handouts, and it's not clear what the rest was spent on), in a city where addiction treatment is free and readily available to anybody who's willing to take it. That combination of things worked, at least in these cases, and I think that's consistent with my expectations that we need combined financial, healthcare, and education support to get really good results. To get more insight we'd need a study which ran the same programme in many locations, including ones where these things are not readily available. > But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective. And therein lies the tricky part: it's definitely true that if you give somebody enough money, it will solve all these problems for them. Unfortunately it's just unaffordable to raise everybody to the median income. Can we afford enough to make a difference at the population level, even if it's not enough to make all their problems go away? I don't know, and we should keep running more and larger experiments to find out.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
cookiecaper 11y ago
"Just give cash" strips people of their dignity and practically ensures they will become permanent wards of the state, as they are left to wallow in shame and without the guidance they need to substantially improve their situation. Every welfare recipient should have a shrewd case worker that dispenses welfare as needed, sees that the recipient is really doing all they can to be self-sufficient, and creates opportunities where the recipient can make a contribution back for the gifts they receive (like volunteering at the food bank once a week), tailored specifically to the recipient's condition.
- emmett 11y ago
  [citation needed] What makes you believe this is true, beyond simple assertion?
- Matumio 11y ago
  If there is just a tiny bit of truth in the stories about the Hartz IV system from Germany, it's actually the means tested welfare system and its case workers (who don't have much time per case) that strip people of their dignity. Up to the point that you think the whole system is designed to punish rather than to help. Just getting some extra cash with no strings attached certainly doesn't strip you of your dignity, and if it does, you can always refuse and demand food stamps instead. In Germany, getting food stamps is what strips you of your dignity. You hold up the queue at checkout while they figure if they can accept those and if they are allowed to give you change, etc.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Real life points to the contrary. It's conditional welfare that strips people of their dignity, to the point of many eligible not seeking it out of shame. I know some examples of that first-hand. "Just getting cash" strips one of dignity no more than "just getting water from the river" or "fruits from a tree" stripped humans of their dignity in the past. Nature provides for us unconditionally. No one is truly independent from the systems they're embedded in, and the assumption that a baseline amount of resources that can form a stable foundation will make one forgoe "improving their situation" is, frankly, offensive to me as a human being.
JamesBarney 11y ago
I don't know that I'd agree that education, at least in the general sense of a 4 year degree, is obviously more effective that cash. We have an enormous number of people with bachelor degrees that are serving food, and PhDs that are slinging building websites(which is challenging but is not a skill much improved by a Ph.D.) What type of education did you have in mind?
- asuffield 11y ago
  For long-term unemployed? They usually don't have marketable skills. Bachelors degrees are clearly not the right answer, since those don't usually teach you any. The usual package in Europe is a combination of remedial math/english/science and apprenticeships in professional trades - things which no plausible "basic income" recipient could afford to get via private tuition, but which can be easily affordable as an organised programme.
  - JamesBarney 11y ago
    Then we're definitely on the same page because I wholeheartedly agree with you.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well. True, but if it indeed helps in most circumstances, then we should just go ahead and do it. Right now people are searching for increasingly obscure cases where cash handouts won't help to block the entire idea. It's an easy excuse to make that enables one to do nothing.
- asuffield 11y ago
  I think that it takes a very special kind of deliberate wrongness to hear somebody say "we need healthcare and education in addition to financial support" and conclude "okay, so let's do none of these things". I don't think that it helps anybody to offer endlessly reduced compromises in an effort to find common ground with people who are willing to do that. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the status quo - even in the US - is already a combined package of financial, medical, and education support. How about just continuing to improve all of them? We already know that they all work well.

clessg 11y ago

Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here. I know many people who may not be where they are without government assistance as a child, myself included. But I also see my alcoholic sister who uses almost all of her child benefits for liquor. That said, without the direct payments, I would expect her to turn to prostitution. So there's that at least.

cookiecaper 11y ago
Our social structure is broken. In a world that wasn't falling apart, such cases would be the responsibility of the family, and the family would have the authority to see it dealt with adequately. That's the way it's supposed to work, and the way it has worked through most of successful human history. As many Westerners have stopped realizing what family life is, they have done all they can to offload these familial responsibilities onto the state so that they can have greater individual independence. A big loss for us, and I don't think we can hang on much longer. To be clear, I'm not saying you're not doing enough, as I obviously don't know you or your family. I'm commenting that even if you were doing all you could (and you probably are), the social support isn't there to make it work.

Cowen 11y ago

I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a very respectable average return.

epistasis 11y ago

There's several types of "errors" here: (1) failing to help a person in need, (2) trying to help a person in need and failing, or (3) trying to help a person and instead enabling destructive behaviors. Different people weight these two errors differently. Some people think it's really terrible to fail to help an honest person in need, but don't care as much about the cost of enabling a self-destructive person. Others don't care much about (1), and would in fact not help a single person rather than let (3) happen once. Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.) Unfortunately the 'loss function' of the different types of errors is what really gums up most honest debate on these issues. A lot of these are evaluated on moral principles more than economic costs, which further complicates the story. I disagree with them, but there's a lot of people that think there should be harsh penalties in the world for using drugs, no matter the societal costs. Or that giving anybody a handout from taxpayer money is wrong, even if it ends up saving taxpayer money in the future.

SixSigma 11y ago
Except giving drug users.cash stops them burglarizing and robbing.
- aianus 11y ago
  Or you could just give them safe drugs for 1/100 of the cost. 99% of the price of drugs is compensating criminals for risk.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Yes, I would advocate that. I meant really that being clean shouldn't be a precursor
DanBC 11y ago
Expanding on SixSigma's point: Drug users sometimes engage in acquisitive crime to get money to buy drugs. Or they become sex workers. The public health burden of (unregulated) sex work is considerable. So giving these people cash reduces the crime they commit, and reduces the need for them to become sex-workers. Often just giving them the cash is far cheaper than the legal system alternatives - the police investigation and the trial is likely to be expensive. (I accept your point that some people just don't care about saving that tax money, they want "tough on crime" policies) > Public policy needs to be informed both by the available interventions, (i.e. give cash, give cash only after a drug test, give treatment after a failed drug test, then cash after completion, etc.) This is so simplistic it's almost hateful. It's a failure to understand the complex drivers of a lot of severe drug addiction. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/drug-addicts-sterilised-children-protect http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/21/drug-ad...

ribs 11y ago

I bet if you gave extra cash to someone who regularly uses heroin and who "maintains", they'll put that extra cash to good use.

asuffield 11y ago
If you're also providing them with a treatment programme, yes. It's clearly nonsensical to withhold money from them that they would otherwise have received. It also doesn't sound like a good idea to expect them to pay for their own treatment from the money you gave them. We need both for this to work.

ThomPete 11y ago

The longer term effect is to me whats most interesting here, and I too would love to see some studies in that area. But here is another way too look at it. People with rich parents might not become as successful as their parents but they are rarely ending at the bottom of society. Even if money alone doesn't motivate you (which I think is entirely fair to belive), you are more likely to try and use them for something useful if you feel like it's within your reach to do so. The motivation isn't the money itself but rather opportunity within your reach.

mnre4kgnk4eg 11y ago

"just give cash" is sufficient, because the other things are just as likely to be fall-out from the bad choices that may have been the best of a bad situation (heroin usage, dealing, theft, etc, etc...). There is another comment below about giving in-kind stuff instead of the more fungible cash, but the problems with that (and with your example) boil down to that being moralizing. People want to moralize rather than enable. If a person has the means and doesn't use them, then and only then, can we claim some other problems remain to be fixed, but we cannot even logically conclude that the problems are blocking something debatably-desirable at this point. We can't have a non-armchair/inherently-smug-and-preachy discussion until everyone has a basic income. This problem isn't going away, and is only for lack of numbers. Even someone who wants to die by heroin would be better off being allowed to, than forcing them to harm others (or themselves differently) in order to get there.

asuffield 11y ago
I'm sorry, I don't think you fully understood my point, as you appear to be presenting arguments against making financial support conditional on other things, which I was not endorsing here (that is a whole barrel of complicated which I don't want to open). My point was rather than a financial-assistance-only approach is insufficient: we also need, at minimum, strong education and healthcare support, because there clearly exist groups of people who need them.
- ryandamm 11y ago
  In other words, in addition to a basic guaranteed income, we should consider universal health care and public education. I agree with that collection of policies, based on my understanding of current economic thinking and research.
wycx 11y ago
How about giving people money, and if they are a heroin addict, let them have access to free heroin as well. I would imagine that a stable supply of the substance to which one is addicted, plus money off which to live, would form an excellent foundation for being a non-destructive member of society.

Matumio 11y ago

> I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. This was done in London. Here you go: https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/20798745-cb9fbb39 https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money... > giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary. But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective.

asuffield 11y ago
That's an interesting experiment, although the sample is too small and uncontrolled to give much confidence in the results (I'm completely confident that if I could pick which people received the money, I could find a hundred people in London who would show the same pattern; to really prove the case we need a controlled random sample). Still, this experiment lends weight to the idea that somebody should run that study. > It's hard to generalize without a larger-scale study, but the article has some evidence to the contrary This is an interesting and subtle case: they gave out money, and did some amount of aid work (the article indicates £50k was spent, of which £39k was the handouts, and it's not clear what the rest was spent on), in a city where addiction treatment is free and readily available to anybody who's willing to take it. That combination of things worked, at least in these cases, and I think that's consistent with my expectations that we need combined financial, healthcare, and education support to get really good results. To get more insight we'd need a study which ran the same programme in many locations, including ones where these things are not readily available. > But if by moderate you mean $100 then of course they'll be begging again tomorrow. It has to offer a new perspective. And therein lies the tricky part: it's definitely true that if you give somebody enough money, it will solve all these problems for them. Unfortunately it's just unaffordable to raise everybody to the median income. Can we afford enough to make a difference at the population level, even if it's not enough to make all their problems go away? I don't know, and we should keep running more and larger experiments to find out.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago

cookiecaper 11y ago

"Just give cash" strips people of their dignity and practically ensures they will become permanent wards of the state, as they are left to wallow in shame and without the guidance they need to substantially improve their situation. Every welfare recipient should have a shrewd case worker that dispenses welfare as needed, sees that the recipient is really doing all they can to be self-sufficient, and creates opportunities where the recipient can make a contribution back for the gifts they receive (like volunteering at the food bank once a week), tailored specifically to the recipient's condition.

emmett 11y ago
[citation needed] What makes you believe this is true, beyond simple assertion?
Matumio 11y ago
If there is just a tiny bit of truth in the stories about the Hartz IV system from Germany, it's actually the means tested welfare system and its case workers (who don't have much time per case) that strip people of their dignity. Up to the point that you think the whole system is designed to punish rather than to help. Just getting some extra cash with no strings attached certainly doesn't strip you of your dignity, and if it does, you can always refuse and demand food stamps instead. In Germany, getting food stamps is what strips you of your dignity. You hold up the queue at checkout while they figure if they can accept those and if they are allowed to give you change, etc.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Real life points to the contrary. It's conditional welfare that strips people of their dignity, to the point of many eligible not seeking it out of shame. I know some examples of that first-hand. "Just getting cash" strips one of dignity no more than "just getting water from the river" or "fruits from a tree" stripped humans of their dignity in the past. Nature provides for us unconditionally. No one is truly independent from the systems they're embedded in, and the assumption that a baseline amount of resources that can form a stable foundation will make one forgoe "improving their situation" is, frankly, offensive to me as a human being.

JamesBarney 11y ago

I don't know that I'd agree that education, at least in the general sense of a 4 year degree, is obviously more effective that cash. We have an enormous number of people with bachelor degrees that are serving food, and PhDs that are slinging building websites(which is challenging but is not a skill much improved by a Ph.D.) What type of education did you have in mind?

asuffield 11y ago
For long-term unemployed? They usually don't have marketable skills. Bachelors degrees are clearly not the right answer, since those don't usually teach you any. The usual package in Europe is a combination of remedial math/english/science and apprenticeships in professional trades - things which no plausible "basic income" recipient could afford to get via private tuition, but which can be easily affordable as an organised programme.
- JamesBarney 11y ago
  Then we're definitely on the same page because I wholeheartedly agree with you.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well. True, but if it indeed helps in most circumstances, then we should just go ahead and do it. Right now people are searching for increasingly obscure cases where cash handouts won't help to block the entire idea. It's an easy excuse to make that enables one to do nothing.

asuffield 11y ago
I think that it takes a very special kind of deliberate wrongness to hear somebody say "we need healthcare and education in addition to financial support" and conclude "okay, so let's do none of these things". I don't think that it helps anybody to offer endlessly reduced compromises in an effort to find common ground with people who are willing to do that. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the status quo - even in the US - is already a combined package of financial, medical, and education support. How about just continuing to improve all of them? We already know that they all work well.