3 ms·

Researchers gave thousands of dollars to homeless people with positive results

strombofulous 6y ago
Obviously when you give a small subset of a disadvantaged population money, that subset will thrive. When you give all disadvantaged people the same thing, have you done more than raise the floor, creating a population of slightly richer but still disadvantaged individuals? We don't know because we keep trying it on subsets. We've seen this trial plenty of times[0], the outcome is always the same. We either need to give up on UBI or start larger programs. More small trials isn't going to help anyone other than the ~hundreds of people who were lucky enough to win that particular lottery. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots
innagadadavida 6y ago
San Jose spent $17M to build 50 tiny single bed sheds (avg $340k per shed). If they’d put that money in some financial investment returning 10%, they could’ve just given 50 people 35k per year until they got back to normal. Politicians (in this case Sam Liccardo) will do anything for 15 minutes of fame.
commonturtle 6y ago
I'm skeptical of these UBI experiments in general, because they don't take into account that widespread, permanent UBI will change people's behaviour in very different ways from a small, temporary experiment. How do populations respond when they are guaranteed $2k / month forever no matter what they do? Do they simply start asking for $3k / month after that? Does the median individual stop working and watch TV all day, or do they do amazing creative things? One crazy experiment we could try: Give Finland (they've run a small-scale UBI exp before) $1.2 trillion to run a nationwide, long-term UBI experiment on their whole population(5M (pop. Finland) * $24k / year (UBI payments) * 10 years = $1.2 trillion). Make the decision about UBI based on what happens in Finland after 10 years. Not perfect, and it will never happen, but certainly would be a more trustworthy indicator of UBIs real effects on a society :)

Obviously when you give a small subset of a disadvantaged population money, that subset will thrive. When you give all disadvantaged people the same thing, have you done more than raise the floor, creating a population of slightly richer but still disadvantaged individuals? We don't know because we keep trying it on subsets. We've seen this trial plenty of times[0], the outcome is always the same. We either need to give up on UBI or start larger programs. More small trials isn't going to help anyone other than the ~hundreds of people who were lucky enough to win that particular lottery. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

innagadadavida 6y ago

San Jose spent $17M to build 50 tiny single bed sheds (avg $340k per shed). If they’d put that money in some financial investment returning 10%, they could’ve just given 50 people 35k per year until they got back to normal. Politicians (in this case Sam Liccardo) will do anything for 15 minutes of fame.

commonturtle 6y ago

I'm skeptical of these UBI experiments in general, because they don't take into account that widespread, permanent UBI will change people's behaviour in very different ways from a small, temporary experiment. How do populations respond when they are guaranteed $2k / month forever no matter what they do? Do they simply start asking for $3k / month after that? Does the median individual stop working and watch TV all day, or do they do amazing creative things? One crazy experiment we could try: Give Finland (they've run a small-scale UBI exp before) $1.2 trillion to run a nationwide, long-term UBI experiment on their whole population(5M (pop. Finland) * $24k / year (UBI payments) * 10 years = $1.2 trillion). Make the decision about UBI based on what happens in Finland after 10 years. Not perfect, and it will never happen, but certainly would be a more trustworthy indicator of UBIs real effects on a society :)