23 ms·

An experiment in giving cash to recently homeless people [video]

90 points by neom 6y ago

solosoyokaze 6y ago
As a huge believer in UBI, I think it should also be paired with public healthcare, public housing and ideally public food allowances. Basically all living needs covered. UBI without all of that does risk inflating the price of everything as the excess capital would just get sucked up into private companies and landlords. It's an idea who's time has come though, wealth inequality is so extreme as to be essentially unfixable without a revolution, we have excess food production and the majority of "work" being done isn't actually to the benefit of humanity or even productive. Think about how much time is wasted in middle management, working on ad tech, marketing...
- xvedejas 6y ago
  The real thing UBI must be paired with is a Land Value Tax. This helps prevent landlords from extracting the wealth, since their land-based monopoly won't give them profits; it gets recycled back into state programs (like UBI).
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Most places do have property taxes. Many of them are significant. Some of the UBI proposals are extremely expensive. It’s not as simple as extracting wealth from a tiny fraction of wealthy people. The only way to make UBI work will require increasing taxes all the way down to middle class tax brackets. A middle class person might receive $10,000 of UBI, but see their taxes go up $11,000. Meanwhile a broke college student would receive the $10K UBI with $0 tax increase (or maybe a decrease in taxes)
    - zanecodes 6y ago
      I believe they mean Land Value Tax [0] in the Geoism/Georgism [1] sense, not in the traditional property tax sense; the main difference being that a land value tax does not take into account improvements to the property (e.g. buildings, parks, or any other development). Personally, I would be in favor of UBI, even as someone who would see a net loss on it after taxes, since it would mean that if I ever lose my job (or choose to quit), I will still have the UBI to support myself with while I look for a new one, making it a less stressful event. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
      - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
        Modern property taxes are a superset of pure Land Value Tax schemes. In most jurisdictions, land and improvements are appraised separately and can be taxed at separate rates. Moving to a pure Georgism-style LVT would simply remove the taxation on the improvements. > Personally, I would be in favor of UBI, even as someone who would see a net loss on it after taxes, since it would mean that if I ever lose my job (or choose to quit), I will still have the UBI to support myself with while I look for a new one, making it a less stressful event. UBI isn't really targeted at someone like you. If you were laid off, you'd collect regular unemployment benefits. Many UBI proposals do away with unemployment benefits and replace them with UBI. If UBI was instituted at poverty level (about $1000/month) it would actually be less than the unemployment benefits in many locations. However, that increased tax rate would also reduce your personal savings rate, meaning you'd have a reduced opportunity to build a personal savings buffer. If you're an engineer making engineer wages, you're definitely not coming out ahead under a UBI scheme. You are the source of the UBI money, not the recipient. UBI isn't really meant to cover for things like people voluntarily quitting their jobs. It's meant to stop people from starving and going homeless in the event that they're unable to work. UBI is vastly more expensive than many people estimate. To simply pay poverty-level UBI to the 330 million people in the United States, we'd need to spend $4.2 Trillion annually. That's about equivalent to the entire 2020 federal budget. In other words, just to keep UBI at poverty levels, we'd have to double the federal taxation across the board. Paying 200% of poverty levels would require tripling taxation. We're not going to get there by simple Land Value Taxes.
    - xvedejas 6y ago
      LVT isn't sufficient to fund UBI, it's necessary to make sure UBI doesn't have additional distortionary effects. Property taxes are really not a good comparison for LVT, since they tax property improvements too much and the land itself too little. Calibration is important.
    - account42 6y ago
      > A middle class person might receive $10,000 of UBI, but see their taxes go up $11,000. Meanwhile a broke college student would receive the $10K UBI with $0 tax increase (or maybe a decrease in taxes) Is that a problem?
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  >... Think about how much time is wasted in middle management, working on ad tech, marketing... While I agree about the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” in general, who are you to decide what jobs are “productive?” I wouldn’t trust any central authority to determine that, but rather the decentralized mechanisms that already exist in private enterprise / markets to determine that.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    No central authority has to decide which job is bullshit. I don't think people like doing these bullshit jobs, they do them to survive. Give people UBI and they'll simply quit their telemarketing, soulless middle management, ad tech job... Some of those people will play video games all day, some will create new tech, some will create art... and as you say, no one is in a position to judge which of those are "productive". It's just important to free people from the need to enrich others just to survive.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      And some of them will be re-hired in the same fields but to do those jobs that are not bullshit because of course some middle management jobs, advertising, etc., are useful. It might also allow people to take jobs that are currently not done because they have low status or are simply regarded as uninteresting by employers. I can easily imagine someone being willing to be a street cleaner if they had enough leverage to ensure that it was not a grindingly horrible job.
    - s3r3nity 6y ago
      > It's just important to free people from the need to enrich others just to survive. Before I criticize, in full disclosure: I support UBI experiments. I have my concerns, but until we have data they’re just theory. That out of the way: I don’t think it’s wildly out of line to assume a social contract that you need to provide some value to society to get access to resources (food / shelter / etc.) created by others. If I’m making food from a farm, you can’t just get food from me by existing, you need to offer something of value: working on my farm (services,) or exchanging goods I want to use, like better equipment. Or you give me money so that I can access those other two things. And at the end of the day, we still need janitors, waste management, customer support callers, etc etc - jobs people hate, but must be done. And they will continue to be done regardless of UBI.
- doganengin 6y ago
  Good point indeed. Healthcare related expenses can derail one’s finances regardless of income level. How to finance both will be difficult for most countries but it is worth to experiment around the concept and fine tune over time.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  What exactly then is the point of humanity? To sit around and consume bread and circuses? Isn't this immensely dysgenic, where the productive members of society labour all day to produce goods and services for the unproductive, who will use their ample spare time to reproduce and vote for an expansion of UBI? What need is there to even behave decently and civilly, when all of your needs and income are taken care of by the State? Why study or work hard as a child when your future (I will be a UBI recipient, as is my father, as was my father before him) is already established? If we wish to help the working classes of the West, then we need simply eliminate all unskilled immigration and refugee programs. Demand for workers will rise and pressure on infrastructure, Government services, agriculture and housing will decrease - boosting quality of life without UBI. The other major factor of poverty is of women having children out of wedlock. We should stop incentivizing single-motherhood, and offer universal access to family planning including further development of vasalgel.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    There are plenty of financial motivations to labor other than the threat of shame, lack of healthcare, homelessness & starvation. There are even plenty of non-financial motivations to labor!
  - trashman100 6y ago
    Why not just stop all immigration and tighten and enforce anti corruption laws and close loop holes that allow the 1% and multinational corporations to cheat the system. Immigration is a big part of the growth economic Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable and it has been horrible for the environment. It also keeps business running profitably. We have a growing homeless problem. We have racial ghettos. We have Indian reservation. We have an entire manufacturing belt that has been gutted. We have a growing problem of deaths of despair, including suicide and drug addiction. Instead of casually replacing these people with immigrants and allowing the wealthiest 1% to pay little to no taxes and allow companies like Apple and probably all the big tech companies to play offshore tax games, why not help America keep jobs here and increase the pay for those jobs? This whole growth economics and emotionally manipulating people into accepting immigrants "to do the jobs Americans don't want to do" is one of the most horrific lies I have become aware of. There is no job an American won't do at the right (fair) price. The economy will not crumble if business has no choice but to take less profits and pay better wages. Nothing will change until the incentive structure changes. I don't see anyone talking much about these things. I see monied interests pushing mass propaganda in order to ultimately keep wages low and keep income gains from increases in productivity going to the top. Not everyone should or can program. I would rather live in a world where my COL increases if that means that the people around me, city workers, grocery baggers, etc. are payed better. I'm not even sure my COL would increase. I think through above mentioned changes to incentive structures money can be redirected in a more egalitarian way with very little downside.
ncallaway 6y ago
I haven't watched the video, but from the short description this doesn't sound like universal basic income: > it handed C$7,500 (US$5,900) with no strings attached to a number of recently homeless people I'm absolutely all for direct cash assistance and housing assistance for homeless and housing insecure populations. I think direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused and I'm glad to see more experiments in that vein.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Shut up brainless NPC commie faggot.
- deelowe 6y ago
  yep. It's very important UBI be given to everyone regardless of status/income otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment. This is just welfare with more money.
  - La1n 6y ago
    >otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment. It can still be a valid economic experiment, it just isn't UBI.
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      Yep, this is a great point. There are a lot of great experiments that show that direct cash assistance is a really good Valid experiment, but not a full UBI experiment. That said, I do think these kinds of experiments are still helpful for evaluating UBI as a policy. It's good to know that direct cash assistance is an effective welfare program for a lot of cases. It's probably also worth evaluating where direct cash assistance falls short as a safety net.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    An experiment is always more limited than the thing it is being used to study. If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone; just as in an experiment in physics or chemistry you try to simplify the environment so as to both make the signal clearer and to get it done with the resources available. It's a balancing act. If you insist that the only valid experiment regarding UBI is to give it to everyone then no experiments can ever be done.
isoskeles 6y ago
Why don't these experiments get set up as a closed system, where all the participants are also paying taxes into the UBI program to sustain its costs? They can even go a step further and set up an experimental currency to model what happens when experimental federal government running the experimental program has an experimental budget deficit and sells experimental bonds to the experimental central bank to pay for it all. Why don't the experiments account for these factors?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Because the people receiving this should it be implemented nationwide shouldn't be paying those taxes anyway?
  - isoskeles 6y ago
    The "Universal" in UBI has a meaning, which intends that everyone is an unconditional recipient, including taxpayers. Edit: To add, I'm not sure why we think a real "experiment" wouldn't also include the actual payment into the program. Is there an explanation? All I can see is the intent of the "experiment" is to say, "UBI is good [no matter the cost]." This is unconvincing, to say anything is worth the effort regardless of the cost. But I don't want to set up a strawman. I'm curious if people have a good reason to say why the cost should not be accounted for, or if it somehow is, and I'm just not seeing it.
- dmwallin 6y ago
  How are you going to decide which corporations are you going to tax? How are you going to get citizens from the upper percentage of the tax bracket to just agree to join a voluntary experiment. It turns out that designing studies for national policies is REALLY hard due to the complexity of our modern society. Institutions exist across a large variety of scales and the smaller the study the more you have to account for external factors and abstract out things like funding sources, which are not directly connected to the effect of the money on the populace being studied. It's much easier to look separately at the effects of income, and compare that to separate studies on the effect of higher taxation, to see if the tradeoffs are worth it.
skrowl 6y ago
Math to do this in the USA in case you're intererested: 210,000,000 working age adults * $5900 / mo * 12 months ~= 15 TRILLION dollars per year. The annual GDP of the USA is about 21.5 trillion.
- syshum 6y ago
  Money Printer go brrrrrr It is clear that the Modern Monetary policy is one of infinite spending so why not... by the end of the year we will probably 1/2 to that number in COVID relief anyway
  - trash3 6y ago
    Non stop Yolo meme stonk market. Sign me up!
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      lol leverage me up
- arcticbull 6y ago
  FY2021 budget is about $5T. Private healthcare spending, which is basically just a private tax is another $1.2T. So, we're starting with a "real" budget of $6.2T. This is about 2-3X the budget. Then of course, you can begin walking the number backwards at tax time, and can recover more from folks at the top end of the wealth and income spectrum to offset.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I still don't see why this should be universal. It's a nice slogan but it's not unreasonable to have a cutoff.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    It's convenient because you can kill off all of the "entitlements" programs at the same time. Drop SNAP, unemployment, disability, drop social security, medicaid, drop everything, and cut a check. This materializes in substantial administrative cost reductions. It's an efficiency. You can claw back from folks who don't need it at tax time.
vorpalhex 6y ago
I'm a UBI skeptic but I think we need to keep running these experiments to gather data points. The pro-UBI crowd often times points out - and I think fairly - that a lot of these experiments are too small duration and scope to be very useful. It'd be interesting to see say an entire county try UBI for a year.
- Bellamy 6y ago
  Another USB skeptic here. This is one of those issues where everyone seems to have an opinion. We should let the data to decide.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Also, they don’t phase out any of the targeted programs that also support these people, which is one of the main things that UBI proponents so I will offset the cost
- Proven 6y ago
  > It'd be interesting to see say an entire county try UBI for a year. If that's a skeptic no wonder the US and EU are so screwed.
papreclip 6y ago
It's not a UBI experiment until the taxation part of the equation is also included in the experiment. Injecting outside money like manna from heaven is not UBI
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  Would you argue that: Missions before Apollo 11 were not moon landing experiments because they didn't land on the moon. Projects before ITER (hopes to be) are not nuclear fusion power experiments because the reaction is not self-sustaining. Movie previews aren't audience reaction experiments if the audience didn't pay for the tickets. Or are partial experiments to learn something in fact reasonable, normal and necessary?
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    I believe the person you're responding to is saying that increased taxation is such a necessary component of any UBI system that any test which doesn't take that into account is flawed.
    - robotresearcher 6y ago
      I understand that and disagree.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I'm not sure that partial experiments which test none of the putative downsides are of much benefit to a debate though. I certainly would contest, for example, the suggestion that Neil Armstrong walking on a sidewalk would have represented a moonwalking experiment, because we didn't need to experiment to learn that astronauts are capable of perambulation on earth or learn anything about low gravity from it. Similarly, if you wish to test the hypothesis that a welfare state would be best reorganized on the to each irrespective of his need principle with taxes adjusted accordingly, you're not creating evidence for it by learning that unusually poor people are better off after receiving one off windfall of $7500. The assumption that poor people are better off with more money is already baked into the status quo solution.
o_p 6y ago
Even Hayek approved the idea of a universal basic income. The freedom that a free market provides can only exist when each side of the agreement are free to walk away, in reality many people are in a 'work for me for low pay and bad conditions or starve' kinda of deal which is effectively coercion and against any idea of freedom. Instead of directly giving people money they build highly inefficient aid programs full of bureaucracy just because of pure distrust, if you dont believe that the individual can make the best decisions for themselves and society then you dont really believe in capitalism.
- syshum 6y ago
  Hayek as a proponent of Basic Income, not Unversal Basic Income Hayek believed Basic Income should only be offered to those who genuinely unable to work or provide for themselves in the economy
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marcodiego 6y ago
I like the idea of UBI but for now, it seems viable only for countries with high GDP per capita. In Brazil, suppose GDP reaches 10 Trillion BRL[1] with about 14.1 million unemployed people[2] and 1% of the GDP is "distributed" for the unemployed people (actually making this a non-universal UBI), that gives around 7000 BRL (about 1200 USD) per person per year. It may reach a survivable amount with a lower unemployment rate and higher GDP. I really can only see UBI working for countries above a threshold GDP per capita. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=BR https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy-employment-idUSKBN2871CI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy-employment...
tehwebguy 6y ago
This is super interesting. My last 5 years living on Rose Ave in LA we noticed a growing number of folks sleeping in tents, trucks & RVs on the blocks just west of us. I often wondered how many of the people living on (or basically on) the streets could completely fix their lives with a single payment of $5-10k.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  Also I regret the phrasing “fix their lives” here. A better description of what I’m wondering is if that amount of money could get the folks in question housed and afford them the time to do what it takes to stay housed.
  - antihero 6y ago
    Also RV living is probably quite attractive in some ways, it feels almost dirty spending such a large amount of the money you work for paying off someone else's mortgage or enriching them simply for owning stuff.
    - tehwebguy 6y ago
      There is some appeal for sure, especially in places with good weather and hugely expensive rent. But I spent a week in a very nice tour bus with a very nice bathroom. That was enough to rid me of the idea.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Off topic, but I recall a YouTube video I watched a while back from maybe around a decade ago. There was some man out in LA who had experienced homelessness in his youth and wanted to help people in that situation. To do this, he crowed funded a project where he would build small shelters for people that had locks, and a solar panel feeding into an outlet. A lot of the people indicated that this was a major upgrade to their lives on the streets. Of course the city, and more importantly, the homeowners were livid. There were complaints about having these shelters out and visible for worry of property values. Additionally there was complaints of these being on the sidewalk and that creating safety issues. The city ordered them to be seized and destroyed. The coordinators offered to have them moved , but they were met with not cooperation, and one of the men’s who had lost his shelter reported a cop sneering about how he should “get a job”. There was a city official going on about how this project wasn’t helping anyone and continued to allude to his vague plan to “end homelessness”. Wonder how that worked out for them. Additionally there are a few channels that interview various people on the street and I recall one quote where a man said something along the lines of “I wish my family wouldn’t look down on me for being homeless”. In another, a man claimed he tried to reinitiate contact with his family, who had him arrested. Both of the men seemed sober, mentally stable, etc. in fact, the latter man ended up getting his life together in a stroke of luck. I have to wonder if these more to these stories, but disowning someone simply due to their economic status alone is absolutely insane to me.
Priem19 6y ago
I wonder how Andrew Yang's going to make sense of his advocacy for bitcoin ánd Universal Basic Income.
anotheryou 6y ago
I'm quite disappointed in the video. What is the result of the study? No word about the control... All I get is that people don't spent it on booze (yea trust ppl, not all are addicts) , have more money for food and clothing (o really..) and that the one guy is doing a computer class. As said, I think it's just a bad video, the actual results might be great. Comparing it to using that money trying to help homeless people in other ways would be even more interesting (finding out if this the best way to invest in to minimizing homelessnes).
- eclaw 6y ago
  This really looks like the results suggests that UBI is actually not effective at all, but BBC tried to pick the nice bits and emphasize them. If 80% had jobs a year after they wouldn't be shy about it.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    The important question, IMO, is whether UBI costs less than other measures. It's administratively simple and it can potentially prevent greater costs by virtue of people being unhoused and consuming more services elsewhere. That's enough for me to call it "effective". Being cheaper and better outcomes on the most difficult endpoints would be even better, of course, but I don't consider that essential.
    - ctdonath 6y ago
      That’s the only reason I even entertain the notion of UBI: if you’re going to have a massive welfare state, then the only sensible way is hand everyone $PovertyLine income no strings attached. Otherwise you get a massive costly self-serving bureaucracy making it agonizing for people to get benefits. But you’ll still get the massive economic damage of discouraging productivity and funding vice. If you’re going to do something wrong, at least do it right. But it’s still wrong.
    - woofcat 6y ago
      I've yet to meet anyone who thinks UBI is bad for the poor people. However I've heard no one explain how it can be effectively paid for. Everytime there is this massive hand waving of laying off x thousands of civil servants, which isn't realistic in my mind.
wtvanhest 6y ago
the hardest part of UBI for me to understand is how much of it will be eaten by inflation and how much will actually help people. I’d like to see a lot of research on that part of the topic. Maybe take a zip code and give everyone UBI in that zip and see how things like housing prices change within that zip.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Don't forget to raise everyone's taxes within that zip code as well. You need the full experience.
  - avmich 6y ago
    Or don't raise taxes, if you subscribe to the idea that lowering taxes pay for themselves (to the budget).
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    One of the ideas is that we wouldn't need to raise taxes - simply replace some of the social safety net spending with a baseline monthly income.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      I’ve read that is politically untenable and financially impossible.
      - dillondoyle 6y ago
        Financially no. politically perhaps probably unless we convince Republicans. Beyond SNAP, some social security changes or simply nationalizing healthcare could provide enough savings alone. Impossible to know but many studies say between 200-450 billion per /year in total healthcare costs from universal. Albeit that's a kind of complicated 'swap' from employer & personal costs to a tax. I would love to see something like a passive sovereign fund / 1% corporate share tax use one of those coming trillions in Corona stimi. Taxpayers should directly benefit from federal policy and stimi that goes mostly goes to the corporate bottom line and valuations. Like a pension, the government has no voting/control. Add protections against runaway de-regulation incentives type governing policy. Hell cut military spending 10% gets $93 billion and if we're fixing healthcare cap the profit or pharma too.
foolinaround 6y ago
Maybe the cash can be prioritized in terms of 1) Housing - a hotel kind of setup, where all need to pitch in somehow. 2) Daily healthy food vouchers - extra bonus if they are involved in food prep. 3) Full physical and mental checkups 4) Cash program for those are able to get off this, and earn their own living. This would get them started.
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Can anyone explain to me how UBI is actually paid for, and who will do the work that nobody wants to do if we no longer need to work?
- newbie789 6y ago
  I believe it’s funded by taxation. As for the second part, that’s a good question. I haven’t personally seen any UBI/direct payment studies that led to a significant reduction in people working so that question hasn’t yet been studied as far as I’m aware. If there’s a study that you’ve seen where cash payments to individuals led to a situation where everyone “no longer need to work” and the consequence was a labor shortage, I’d love to read it! That sounds like it’d have to have a pretty large sample size, decently long duration and some top notch analysis to posit a 1:1 “Providing basic housing and quality of life to individuals that may or may not need it” and “No labor is available” ratio.
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    > I believe it’s funded by taxation. You can’t tax people who don’t earn anything beside what you’re already giving them. It needs to be bootstrapped and then be sustainable. > if there’s a study... You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. Let’s assume that UBI payments will match minimum wage laws. Now then... the people who have to get up and travel around 2+ hours to get to their job just to warn minimum wage - if they can stay home with their families and get paid the same instead, you’ve just incentivised them to quit. The companies where they had employees who are now at home getting UBI are forced to shut because they can’t find workers. I’m blanking on it, but I’m sure Das Kapital brings up these examples when going through testimony to the Factory Act.
    - newbie789 6y ago
      > You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but I’m more inclined to take seriously things like results of studies rather than things like thought experiments. In this post in a roundabout way you’re making the case that things like homelessness (for example) need to exist in the real world because otherwise society breaks down in a simulation you’ve run in your head. Personally the way my thought experiment goes it’s possible that the workforce stays the same or even expands due to things like childcare being less strenuous or the inclusion of people that previously couldn’t participate due to lack of access to housing/transportation. That’s just a thought experiment in my head though. I’d love to see a study.
aaron695 6y ago
This has absolutely nothing to do with UBI. It's like the world has a mass delusion. This doesn't help homelessness in the conventional sense - "Participants were identified as not struggling with significant mental health or substance abuse issues." Giving lumps of money of course helps the people you give it to. That would be a stupid experiment. What is of interest and has generally been shown to work is giving unconditional money is more efficient than conditional money or programs. The waste on bureaucracy is more than the good from helping people spend it. No evidence either way in this video.
ylere 6y ago
They published a impact report with more details about the results: https://forsocialchange.org/s/2020_09_30_FSC_Statement_of_Impact_w_Expansion.pdf https://forsocialchange.org/s/2020_09_30_FSC_Statement_of_Im...
kypro 6y ago
This is great if you're struggling for cash to pay rent – just declare yourself homeless and get $7,500 cash from the government. It reminds me a little how most people on welfare in my family pretend they (or their kids) have disabilities to get more money from the state. I know I sound cruel, but sometimes I don't think educated, middle-class people really understand how destructive these kinds of incentives are to poor people. The only way these kinds of programs work is when there is limited resources and a high threshold for who receives support. As it stands I almost guarantee this will cause more homelessness as poor people begin to abuse it. I'm from a poor family and I was born in a poor neighbourhood of my city in the UK. I'm not exaggerating when I say around 80% of females in my family are single mothers living in council homes. The reason for this is obvious – if you're from a working class background in the UK your best bet to move our of your parents home is to have a kid. I love my sister, but she's absolutely screwed her life up chasing welfare programs like this. She didn't particularly want a kid, but she really wanted to move out of my parent's home like her friends so she ended up having a one night stand with a guy she met in a bar. She then declared herself homeless and spent all her inheritance money on a BMW so she would be put to the top of the council house list – this was done on advice from some charity who helps people like my sister get the most out of welfare system, ethical or not. Before I'm judged too harshly here I should say I've allowed a few homeless people to sleep in my home over the years. I probably should do more, but I do at least acknowledge that there are benefits to carefully selecting those who genuinely need help getting out of a difficult situation. But unfortunately there is no helping some (perhaps most) of them, and I say this as someone who has tried. Anyone who has actually spent any amount of time around homeless people would understand that giving them money is often the absolute worst thing you can do. 99% of the time these are not educated middle class people like you and I who will make good decisions with that money. One guy I knew for example received endless help from charities and the government, but the guy had a drug addiction and had absolutely no interest in getting clean or helping himself out of his homelessness. His life was an endless cycle of finding enough money for drugs from people thinking they're helping him, then almost dying and ending up in hospital taking resources away from the NHS. A homeless person I was helping at the time said quite bluntly, "I know this sounds bad, but it would be better for everyone if he overdosed tonight". But it was the truth. No amount of money or compassion could help him. We really did try. I'm all for giving homeless people money, but I'm convinced it can't be done by the government. It needs to be done by individuals with limited resources who can select those who they feel are likely to use that money to turn their lives around. Or even better, if you want to help someone who's homeless and in need of help just offer them a spare room in your home. These types of programs have awful incentives and are pushed in my experience by educated middle class people who have no idea why people end up in situations like this and so end up incentivising people to make awful life decisions through bad government welfare programs.
anm89 6y ago
I never understand these experiments. I don't think many people would argue that if you hand people a bunch of free money it improves their lives. Of course it does. That's the most obvious thing in the world, especially when the project is pre financed and can have no negative financial implications. The problem is that every route to financing UBI involves a radical experiment in public finance that is likely to have cascading effects in every corner of our society, but has obvious issues with inflation,debt load, taxation and ethics. You don't get any data on any of the interesting problems of UBI buy handing people cash you already have. edit: Also that data presents a very shoddy picture of efficacy here. Over a year, the people who get the cash end up having the same degree of homelessness and the same amount of cash in hand
- 542458 6y ago
  > don't think many people would argue that if you hand people a bunch of free money it improves their lives Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of people argue that poor people are only poor because they have poor financial skills (and in the case of homeless people, that they spend all their money on drugs) and giving them more money is trying to fill in a bottomless pit.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    There are many reasons someone can be poor, really bad money management is definitely a prevalent reason. I chuckled at this post on WSB yesterday. Someone wrote "if I had any cash, I'd buy more GME to average out my cost." Someone wisely replied "this is why you don't have cash."
    - happyconcepts 6y ago
      >I chuckled at this post on WSB yesterday. Someone wrote "if I had any cash, I'd buy more GME to average out my cost." I chuckle at your chuckle. To me that "someone" sounds like a short trolling for more longs in the stock. I say this as someone who has lurked WSB on reddit for a long time.
naebother 6y ago
Not sure you can call this UBI. It's targeted aid to those most (visibly) in need. At the very least UBI should be universal. As well as social programs. Otherwise you'll just end up fomenting tensions among those who receive it and those that don't, and eventually it'll be killed. And then there's the problem of UBI not linked to (real) inflation is not really BI in the long run.
happyconcepts 6y ago
Cash will help some homeless people like me. I have endured five years homeless in Los Angeles. Still here, somehow, despite covid, curfews, looters, lack of police, being shot at twice and attacked more than a dozen times. I managed to setup my hn login last month but have yet to figure out how to follow the comment threads effectively from my phone. Yes Los Angeles. Some call it ground zero of the US homeless problem. It started on a Friday morning in December 2015 when my roommate/landlord rushed me from behind with a knife at 8 am in Santa Monica California. Long story short, police believed my white assailant when he lied and said I made it all up. They put his lie down on the report and lied further saying I was agitated and looked crazy (i was in shock because the attack was a huge surprise, and had I not sensed the attack in time it would have been a 7" henkl straight through the heart from behind). I left next day, homeless day#1, but filled with hope for a better tomorrow with no further unprovoked attacks from behind. I got a job at McD and worked min wage living out of an old chevy cavalier i bought off craigslist for $300. And it took a full year to save up enough to rent a small room. Just as I was calling the first ads, in Feb 2017, an armed forces veteran rear ended me in broad daylight breaking my neck and totaling my cavalier. He told me it was his second accident in two months. Hmmm so i guess he fuct up someones Christmas before messing up my Valentines day. I went to an accident attorney who sent me to a chiropractor who broke my neck further and also broke my back. I was expecting therapy, just as any of you might expect. But I was served pain instead, essentially giving me a replay of the original knife attack trauma. So I was not happy when they next recommended I now needed surgery. It was just to use me as meat to bid up the price of an insurance settlement. The surgeon they sent me to wore makeup. As easy as it sounds now to say no to that...it was hard to say no because I have been in constant pain every hour of every day since that car accident. Arg this is too tiring to type this much with thumbs. From my meager start on hn a part of me feels like it isnt even worth sharing the rest of my story. But I am a social creature and I do not want to be homeless until death which is what the Santa Monica police want at this rate. So consider experimenting more please, and you are welcome to start with me.
- deleted 6y ago
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- happyconcepts 6y ago
andrei_says_ 6y ago
Related, Rutger Bregman’s Ted talk on how poverty impacts decision making and how giving free cash improves the ability to manage money. https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...
TeeMassive 6y ago
Most of the homeless can't and don't want to live in homes for various reasons. Even given free housing and food and income they'll invite more people, trash / steal the place, then leave. Just ask any people who volunteered for homeless shelters. It may not look like it, but a lot of people would just stop working if they could, the problem is, those jobs are critical for society to continue to work and would likely cause more problems down the line because idle hands are the devil's workshop.
_448 6y ago
In that video there is a mention that Milton Friedman supported basic income. That is wrong! He opposed UBI. He instead proposed NIT(Negative Income Tax)[0]. As an engineer, I think NIT is far more efficient than UBI. UBI is like "spray and pray" policy, whereas NIT provides support to those who actually require it, automatically. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
- occamrazor 6y ago
  Aren’t NIT and UBI effectively the same thing?
  - didgeoridoo 6y ago
    Think of NIT as steepening the progressive tax rate curve, and allowing it to dip below the y (tax rate) axis for sufficiently low x (income). There exist several “refundable tax credits” today in the US that effectively do this at a small scale, albeit with a lumpy phase-out curve that runs into the same disincentive cliffs as many other welfare programs. UBI, on the other hand, shifts the curve rightward, so everyone’s income is relatively higher and is thus subject to more taxes. (You’d obviously also need to raise taxes overall if your goal is to keep it budget-neutral).
  - Aachen 6y ago
    UBI, universal basic income, is universal. Lowering the tax rate below zero for some people is not universal but only some percentage of the population.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      > Lowering the tax rate below zero for some people is not universal but only some percentage of the population. So what? As long as everyone above the NIT line saves the same dollar amount in tax payments that they would have got from UBI, there's no difference.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago

90 points by neom 6y ago

As a huge believer in UBI, I think it should also be paired with public healthcare, public housing and ideally public food allowances. Basically all living needs covered. UBI without all of that does risk inflating the price of everything as the excess capital would just get sucked up into private companies and landlords. It's an idea who's time has come though, wealth inequality is so extreme as to be essentially unfixable without a revolution, we have excess food production and the majority of "work" being done isn't actually to the benefit of humanity or even productive. Think about how much time is wasted in middle management, working on ad tech, marketing...

xvedejas 6y ago
The real thing UBI must be paired with is a Land Value Tax. This helps prevent landlords from extracting the wealth, since their land-based monopoly won't give them profits; it gets recycled back into state programs (like UBI).
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Most places do have property taxes. Many of them are significant. Some of the UBI proposals are extremely expensive. It’s not as simple as extracting wealth from a tiny fraction of wealthy people. The only way to make UBI work will require increasing taxes all the way down to middle class tax brackets. A middle class person might receive $10,000 of UBI, but see their taxes go up $11,000. Meanwhile a broke college student would receive the $10K UBI with $0 tax increase (or maybe a decrease in taxes)
  - zanecodes 6y ago
    I believe they mean Land Value Tax [0] in the Geoism/Georgism [1] sense, not in the traditional property tax sense; the main difference being that a land value tax does not take into account improvements to the property (e.g. buildings, parks, or any other development). Personally, I would be in favor of UBI, even as someone who would see a net loss on it after taxes, since it would mean that if I ever lose my job (or choose to quit), I will still have the UBI to support myself with while I look for a new one, making it a less stressful event. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
    - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      Modern property taxes are a superset of pure Land Value Tax schemes. In most jurisdictions, land and improvements are appraised separately and can be taxed at separate rates. Moving to a pure Georgism-style LVT would simply remove the taxation on the improvements. > Personally, I would be in favor of UBI, even as someone who would see a net loss on it after taxes, since it would mean that if I ever lose my job (or choose to quit), I will still have the UBI to support myself with while I look for a new one, making it a less stressful event. UBI isn't really targeted at someone like you. If you were laid off, you'd collect regular unemployment benefits. Many UBI proposals do away with unemployment benefits and replace them with UBI. If UBI was instituted at poverty level (about $1000/month) it would actually be less than the unemployment benefits in many locations. However, that increased tax rate would also reduce your personal savings rate, meaning you'd have a reduced opportunity to build a personal savings buffer. If you're an engineer making engineer wages, you're definitely not coming out ahead under a UBI scheme. You are the source of the UBI money, not the recipient. UBI isn't really meant to cover for things like people voluntarily quitting their jobs. It's meant to stop people from starving and going homeless in the event that they're unable to work. UBI is vastly more expensive than many people estimate. To simply pay poverty-level UBI to the 330 million people in the United States, we'd need to spend $4.2 Trillion annually. That's about equivalent to the entire 2020 federal budget. In other words, just to keep UBI at poverty levels, we'd have to double the federal taxation across the board. Paying 200% of poverty levels would require tripling taxation. We're not going to get there by simple Land Value Taxes.
  - xvedejas 6y ago
    LVT isn't sufficient to fund UBI, it's necessary to make sure UBI doesn't have additional distortionary effects. Property taxes are really not a good comparison for LVT, since they tax property improvements too much and the land itself too little. Calibration is important.
  - account42 6y ago
    > A middle class person might receive $10,000 of UBI, but see their taxes go up $11,000. Meanwhile a broke college student would receive the $10K UBI with $0 tax increase (or maybe a decrease in taxes) Is that a problem?
s3r3nity 6y ago
>... Think about how much time is wasted in middle management, working on ad tech, marketing... While I agree about the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” in general, who are you to decide what jobs are “productive?” I wouldn’t trust any central authority to determine that, but rather the decentralized mechanisms that already exist in private enterprise / markets to determine that.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  No central authority has to decide which job is bullshit. I don't think people like doing these bullshit jobs, they do them to survive. Give people UBI and they'll simply quit their telemarketing, soulless middle management, ad tech job... Some of those people will play video games all day, some will create new tech, some will create art... and as you say, no one is in a position to judge which of those are "productive". It's just important to free people from the need to enrich others just to survive.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    And some of them will be re-hired in the same fields but to do those jobs that are not bullshit because of course some middle management jobs, advertising, etc., are useful. It might also allow people to take jobs that are currently not done because they have low status or are simply regarded as uninteresting by employers. I can easily imagine someone being willing to be a street cleaner if they had enough leverage to ensure that it was not a grindingly horrible job.
  - s3r3nity 6y ago
    > It's just important to free people from the need to enrich others just to survive. Before I criticize, in full disclosure: I support UBI experiments. I have my concerns, but until we have data they’re just theory. That out of the way: I don’t think it’s wildly out of line to assume a social contract that you need to provide some value to society to get access to resources (food / shelter / etc.) created by others. If I’m making food from a farm, you can’t just get food from me by existing, you need to offer something of value: working on my farm (services,) or exchanging goods I want to use, like better equipment. Or you give me money so that I can access those other two things. And at the end of the day, we still need janitors, waste management, customer support callers, etc etc - jobs people hate, but must be done. And they will continue to be done regardless of UBI.
doganengin 6y ago
Good point indeed. Healthcare related expenses can derail one’s finances regardless of income level. How to finance both will be difficult for most countries but it is worth to experiment around the concept and fine tune over time.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
What exactly then is the point of humanity? To sit around and consume bread and circuses? Isn't this immensely dysgenic, where the productive members of society labour all day to produce goods and services for the unproductive, who will use their ample spare time to reproduce and vote for an expansion of UBI? What need is there to even behave decently and civilly, when all of your needs and income are taken care of by the State? Why study or work hard as a child when your future (I will be a UBI recipient, as is my father, as was my father before him) is already established? If we wish to help the working classes of the West, then we need simply eliminate all unskilled immigration and refugee programs. Demand for workers will rise and pressure on infrastructure, Government services, agriculture and housing will decrease - boosting quality of life without UBI. The other major factor of poverty is of women having children out of wedlock. We should stop incentivizing single-motherhood, and offer universal access to family planning including further development of vasalgel.
- deleted 6y ago
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- tehwebguy 6y ago
  There are plenty of financial motivations to labor other than the threat of shame, lack of healthcare, homelessness & starvation. There are even plenty of non-financial motivations to labor!
- trashman100 6y ago
  Why not just stop all immigration and tighten and enforce anti corruption laws and close loop holes that allow the 1% and multinational corporations to cheat the system. Immigration is a big part of the growth economic Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable and it has been horrible for the environment. It also keeps business running profitably. We have a growing homeless problem. We have racial ghettos. We have Indian reservation. We have an entire manufacturing belt that has been gutted. We have a growing problem of deaths of despair, including suicide and drug addiction. Instead of casually replacing these people with immigrants and allowing the wealthiest 1% to pay little to no taxes and allow companies like Apple and probably all the big tech companies to play offshore tax games, why not help America keep jobs here and increase the pay for those jobs? This whole growth economics and emotionally manipulating people into accepting immigrants "to do the jobs Americans don't want to do" is one of the most horrific lies I have become aware of. There is no job an American won't do at the right (fair) price. The economy will not crumble if business has no choice but to take less profits and pay better wages. Nothing will change until the incentive structure changes. I don't see anyone talking much about these things. I see monied interests pushing mass propaganda in order to ultimately keep wages low and keep income gains from increases in productivity going to the top. Not everyone should or can program. I would rather live in a world where my COL increases if that means that the people around me, city workers, grocery baggers, etc. are payed better. I'm not even sure my COL would increase. I think through above mentioned changes to incentive structures money can be redirected in a more egalitarian way with very little downside.

ncallaway 6y ago

I haven't watched the video, but from the short description this doesn't sound like universal basic income: > it handed C$7,500 (US$5,900) with no strings attached to a number of recently homeless people I'm absolutely all for direct cash assistance and housing assistance for homeless and housing insecure populations. I think direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused and I'm glad to see more experiments in that vein.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Shut up brainless NPC commie faggot.
deelowe 6y ago
yep. It's very important UBI be given to everyone regardless of status/income otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment. This is just welfare with more money.
- La1n 6y ago
  >otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment. It can still be a valid economic experiment, it just isn't UBI.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    Yep, this is a great point. There are a lot of great experiments that show that direct cash assistance is a really good Valid experiment, but not a full UBI experiment. That said, I do think these kinds of experiments are still helpful for evaluating UBI as a policy. It's good to know that direct cash assistance is an effective welfare program for a lot of cases. It's probably also worth evaluating where direct cash assistance falls short as a safety net.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  An experiment is always more limited than the thing it is being used to study. If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone; just as in an experiment in physics or chemistry you try to simplify the environment so as to both make the signal clearer and to get it done with the resources available. It's a balancing act. If you insist that the only valid experiment regarding UBI is to give it to everyone then no experiments can ever be done.

isoskeles 6y ago

Why don't these experiments get set up as a closed system, where all the participants are also paying taxes into the UBI program to sustain its costs? They can even go a step further and set up an experimental currency to model what happens when experimental federal government running the experimental program has an experimental budget deficit and sells experimental bonds to the experimental central bank to pay for it all. Why don't the experiments account for these factors?

mhh__ 6y ago
Because the people receiving this should it be implemented nationwide shouldn't be paying those taxes anyway?
- isoskeles 6y ago
  The "Universal" in UBI has a meaning, which intends that everyone is an unconditional recipient, including taxpayers. Edit: To add, I'm not sure why we think a real "experiment" wouldn't also include the actual payment into the program. Is there an explanation? All I can see is the intent of the "experiment" is to say, "UBI is good [no matter the cost]." This is unconvincing, to say anything is worth the effort regardless of the cost. But I don't want to set up a strawman. I'm curious if people have a good reason to say why the cost should not be accounted for, or if it somehow is, and I'm just not seeing it.
dmwallin 6y ago
How are you going to decide which corporations are you going to tax? How are you going to get citizens from the upper percentage of the tax bracket to just agree to join a voluntary experiment. It turns out that designing studies for national policies is REALLY hard due to the complexity of our modern society. Institutions exist across a large variety of scales and the smaller the study the more you have to account for external factors and abstract out things like funding sources, which are not directly connected to the effect of the money on the populace being studied. It's much easier to look separately at the effects of income, and compare that to separate studies on the effect of higher taxation, to see if the tradeoffs are worth it.

skrowl 6y ago

Math to do this in the USA in case you're intererested: 210,000,000 working age adults * $5900 / mo * 12 months ~= 15 TRILLION dollars per year. The annual GDP of the USA is about 21.5 trillion.

syshum 6y ago
Money Printer go brrrrrr It is clear that the Modern Monetary policy is one of infinite spending so why not... by the end of the year we will probably 1/2 to that number in COVID relief anyway
- trash3 6y ago
  Non stop Yolo meme stonk market. Sign me up!
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    lol leverage me up
arcticbull 6y ago
FY2021 budget is about $5T. Private healthcare spending, which is basically just a private tax is another $1.2T. So, we're starting with a "real" budget of $6.2T. This is about 2-3X the budget. Then of course, you can begin walking the number backwards at tax time, and can recover more from folks at the top end of the wealth and income spectrum to offset.
mhh__ 6y ago
I still don't see why this should be universal. It's a nice slogan but it's not unreasonable to have a cutoff.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  It's convenient because you can kill off all of the "entitlements" programs at the same time. Drop SNAP, unemployment, disability, drop social security, medicaid, drop everything, and cut a check. This materializes in substantial administrative cost reductions. It's an efficiency. You can claw back from folks who don't need it at tax time.

vorpalhex 6y ago

I'm a UBI skeptic but I think we need to keep running these experiments to gather data points. The pro-UBI crowd often times points out - and I think fairly - that a lot of these experiments are too small duration and scope to be very useful. It'd be interesting to see say an entire county try UBI for a year.

Bellamy 6y ago
Another USB skeptic here. This is one of those issues where everyone seems to have an opinion. We should let the data to decide.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
Also, they don’t phase out any of the targeted programs that also support these people, which is one of the main things that UBI proponents so I will offset the cost
Proven 6y ago
> It'd be interesting to see say an entire county try UBI for a year. If that's a skeptic no wonder the US and EU are so screwed.

papreclip 6y ago

It's not a UBI experiment until the taxation part of the equation is also included in the experiment. Injecting outside money like manna from heaven is not UBI

robotresearcher 6y ago
Would you argue that: Missions before Apollo 11 were not moon landing experiments because they didn't land on the moon. Projects before ITER (hopes to be) are not nuclear fusion power experiments because the reaction is not self-sustaining. Movie previews aren't audience reaction experiments if the audience didn't pay for the tickets. Or are partial experiments to learn something in fact reasonable, normal and necessary?
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I believe the person you're responding to is saying that increased taxation is such a necessary component of any UBI system that any test which doesn't take that into account is flawed.
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    I understand that and disagree.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I'm not sure that partial experiments which test none of the putative downsides are of much benefit to a debate though. I certainly would contest, for example, the suggestion that Neil Armstrong walking on a sidewalk would have represented a moonwalking experiment, because we didn't need to experiment to learn that astronauts are capable of perambulation on earth or learn anything about low gravity from it. Similarly, if you wish to test the hypothesis that a welfare state would be best reorganized on the to each irrespective of his need principle with taxes adjusted accordingly, you're not creating evidence for it by learning that unusually poor people are better off after receiving one off windfall of $7500. The assumption that poor people are better off with more money is already baked into the status quo solution.

o_p 6y ago

Even Hayek approved the idea of a universal basic income. The freedom that a free market provides can only exist when each side of the agreement are free to walk away, in reality many people are in a 'work for me for low pay and bad conditions or starve' kinda of deal which is effectively coercion and against any idea of freedom. Instead of directly giving people money they build highly inefficient aid programs full of bureaucracy just because of pure distrust, if you dont believe that the individual can make the best decisions for themselves and society then you dont really believe in capitalism.

syshum 6y ago
Hayek as a proponent of Basic Income, not Unversal Basic Income Hayek believed Basic Income should only be offered to those who genuinely unable to work or provide for themselves in the economy

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marcodiego 6y ago

I like the idea of UBI but for now, it seems viable only for countries with high GDP per capita. In Brazil, suppose GDP reaches 10 Trillion BRL[1] with about 14.1 million unemployed people[2] and 1% of the GDP is "distributed" for the unemployed people (actually making this a non-universal UBI), that gives around 7000 BRL (about 1200 USD) per person per year. It may reach a survivable amount with a lower unemployment rate and higher GDP. I really can only see UBI working for countries above a threshold GDP per capita. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=BR https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy-employment-idUSKBN2871CI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy-employment...

tehwebguy 6y ago

This is super interesting. My last 5 years living on Rose Ave in LA we noticed a growing number of folks sleeping in tents, trucks & RVs on the blocks just west of us. I often wondered how many of the people living on (or basically on) the streets could completely fix their lives with a single payment of $5-10k.

tehwebguy 6y ago
Also I regret the phrasing “fix their lives” here. A better description of what I’m wondering is if that amount of money could get the folks in question housed and afford them the time to do what it takes to stay housed.
- antihero 6y ago
  Also RV living is probably quite attractive in some ways, it feels almost dirty spending such a large amount of the money you work for paying off someone else's mortgage or enriching them simply for owning stuff.
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    There is some appeal for sure, especially in places with good weather and hugely expensive rent. But I spent a week in a very nice tour bus with a very nice bathroom. That was enough to rid me of the idea.
the_only_law 6y ago
Off topic, but I recall a YouTube video I watched a while back from maybe around a decade ago. There was some man out in LA who had experienced homelessness in his youth and wanted to help people in that situation. To do this, he crowed funded a project where he would build small shelters for people that had locks, and a solar panel feeding into an outlet. A lot of the people indicated that this was a major upgrade to their lives on the streets. Of course the city, and more importantly, the homeowners were livid. There were complaints about having these shelters out and visible for worry of property values. Additionally there was complaints of these being on the sidewalk and that creating safety issues. The city ordered them to be seized and destroyed. The coordinators offered to have them moved , but they were met with not cooperation, and one of the men’s who had lost his shelter reported a cop sneering about how he should “get a job”. There was a city official going on about how this project wasn’t helping anyone and continued to allude to his vague plan to “end homelessness”. Wonder how that worked out for them. Additionally there are a few channels that interview various people on the street and I recall one quote where a man said something along the lines of “I wish my family wouldn’t look down on me for being homeless”. In another, a man claimed he tried to reinitiate contact with his family, who had him arrested. Both of the men seemed sober, mentally stable, etc. in fact, the latter man ended up getting his life together in a stroke of luck. I have to wonder if these more to these stories, but disowning someone simply due to their economic status alone is absolutely insane to me.

Priem19 6y ago

I wonder how Andrew Yang's going to make sense of his advocacy for bitcoin ánd Universal Basic Income.

anotheryou 6y ago

I'm quite disappointed in the video. What is the result of the study? No word about the control... All I get is that people don't spent it on booze (yea trust ppl, not all are addicts) , have more money for food and clothing (o really..) and that the one guy is doing a computer class. As said, I think it's just a bad video, the actual results might be great. Comparing it to using that money trying to help homeless people in other ways would be even more interesting (finding out if this the best way to invest in to minimizing homelessnes).

eclaw 6y ago
This really looks like the results suggests that UBI is actually not effective at all, but BBC tried to pick the nice bits and emphasize them. If 80% had jobs a year after they wouldn't be shy about it.
- mlyle 6y ago
  The important question, IMO, is whether UBI costs less than other measures. It's administratively simple and it can potentially prevent greater costs by virtue of people being unhoused and consuming more services elsewhere. That's enough for me to call it "effective". Being cheaper and better outcomes on the most difficult endpoints would be even better, of course, but I don't consider that essential.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    That’s the only reason I even entertain the notion of UBI: if you’re going to have a massive welfare state, then the only sensible way is hand everyone $PovertyLine income no strings attached. Otherwise you get a massive costly self-serving bureaucracy making it agonizing for people to get benefits. But you’ll still get the massive economic damage of discouraging productivity and funding vice. If you’re going to do something wrong, at least do it right. But it’s still wrong.
  - woofcat 6y ago
    I've yet to meet anyone who thinks UBI is bad for the poor people. However I've heard no one explain how it can be effectively paid for. Everytime there is this massive hand waving of laying off x thousands of civil servants, which isn't realistic in my mind.

wtvanhest 6y ago

the hardest part of UBI for me to understand is how much of it will be eaten by inflation and how much will actually help people. I’d like to see a lot of research on that part of the topic. Maybe take a zip code and give everyone UBI in that zip and see how things like housing prices change within that zip.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Don't forget to raise everyone's taxes within that zip code as well. You need the full experience.
- avmich 6y ago
  Or don't raise taxes, if you subscribe to the idea that lowering taxes pay for themselves (to the budget).
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  One of the ideas is that we wouldn't need to raise taxes - simply replace some of the social safety net spending with a baseline monthly income.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I’ve read that is politically untenable and financially impossible.
    - dillondoyle 6y ago
      Financially no. politically perhaps probably unless we convince Republicans. Beyond SNAP, some social security changes or simply nationalizing healthcare could provide enough savings alone. Impossible to know but many studies say between 200-450 billion per /year in total healthcare costs from universal. Albeit that's a kind of complicated 'swap' from employer & personal costs to a tax. I would love to see something like a passive sovereign fund / 1% corporate share tax use one of those coming trillions in Corona stimi. Taxpayers should directly benefit from federal policy and stimi that goes mostly goes to the corporate bottom line and valuations. Like a pension, the government has no voting/control. Add protections against runaway de-regulation incentives type governing policy. Hell cut military spending 10% gets $93 billion and if we're fixing healthcare cap the profit or pharma too.

foolinaround 6y ago

Maybe the cash can be prioritized in terms of 1) Housing - a hotel kind of setup, where all need to pitch in somehow. 2) Daily healthy food vouchers - extra bonus if they are involved in food prep. 3) Full physical and mental checkups 4) Cash program for those are able to get off this, and earn their own living. This would get them started.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

Can anyone explain to me how UBI is actually paid for, and who will do the work that nobody wants to do if we no longer need to work?

newbie789 6y ago
I believe it’s funded by taxation. As for the second part, that’s a good question. I haven’t personally seen any UBI/direct payment studies that led to a significant reduction in people working so that question hasn’t yet been studied as far as I’m aware. If there’s a study that you’ve seen where cash payments to individuals led to a situation where everyone “no longer need to work” and the consequence was a labor shortage, I’d love to read it! That sounds like it’d have to have a pretty large sample size, decently long duration and some top notch analysis to posit a 1:1 “Providing basic housing and quality of life to individuals that may or may not need it” and “No labor is available” ratio.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > I believe it’s funded by taxation. You can’t tax people who don’t earn anything beside what you’re already giving them. It needs to be bootstrapped and then be sustainable. > if there’s a study... You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. Let’s assume that UBI payments will match minimum wage laws. Now then... the people who have to get up and travel around 2+ hours to get to their job just to warn minimum wage - if they can stay home with their families and get paid the same instead, you’ve just incentivised them to quit. The companies where they had employees who are now at home getting UBI are forced to shut because they can’t find workers. I’m blanking on it, but I’m sure Das Kapital brings up these examples when going through testimony to the Factory Act.
  - newbie789 6y ago
    > You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but I’m more inclined to take seriously things like results of studies rather than things like thought experiments. In this post in a roundabout way you’re making the case that things like homelessness (for example) need to exist in the real world because otherwise society breaks down in a simulation you’ve run in your head. Personally the way my thought experiment goes it’s possible that the workforce stays the same or even expands due to things like childcare being less strenuous or the inclusion of people that previously couldn’t participate due to lack of access to housing/transportation. That’s just a thought experiment in my head though. I’d love to see a study.

aaron695 6y ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with UBI. It's like the world has a mass delusion. This doesn't help homelessness in the conventional sense - "Participants were identified as not struggling with significant mental health or substance abuse issues." Giving lumps of money of course helps the people you give it to. That would be a stupid experiment. What is of interest and has generally been shown to work is giving unconditional money is more efficient than conditional money or programs. The waste on bureaucracy is more than the good from helping people spend it. No evidence either way in this video.

ylere 6y ago

They published a impact report with more details about the results: https://forsocialchange.org/s/2020_09_30_FSC_Statement_of_Impact_w_Expansion.pdf https://forsocialchange.org/s/2020_09_30_FSC_Statement_of_Im...

kypro 6y ago

This is great if you're struggling for cash to pay rent – just declare yourself homeless and get $7,500 cash from the government. It reminds me a little how most people on welfare in my family pretend they (or their kids) have disabilities to get more money from the state. I know I sound cruel, but sometimes I don't think educated, middle-class people really understand how destructive these kinds of incentives are to poor people. The only way these kinds of programs work is when there is limited resources and a high threshold for who receives support. As it stands I almost guarantee this will cause more homelessness as poor people begin to abuse it. I'm from a poor family and I was born in a poor neighbourhood of my city in the UK. I'm not exaggerating when I say around 80% of females in my family are single mothers living in council homes. The reason for this is obvious – if you're from a working class background in the UK your best bet to move our of your parents home is to have a kid. I love my sister, but she's absolutely screwed her life up chasing welfare programs like this. She didn't particularly want a kid, but she really wanted to move out of my parent's home like her friends so she ended up having a one night stand with a guy she met in a bar. She then declared herself homeless and spent all her inheritance money on a BMW so she would be put to the top of the council house list – this was done on advice from some charity who helps people like my sister get the most out of welfare system, ethical or not. Before I'm judged too harshly here I should say I've allowed a few homeless people to sleep in my home over the years. I probably should do more, but I do at least acknowledge that there are benefits to carefully selecting those who genuinely need help getting out of a difficult situation. But unfortunately there is no helping some (perhaps most) of them, and I say this as someone who has tried. Anyone who has actually spent any amount of time around homeless people would understand that giving them money is often the absolute worst thing you can do. 99% of the time these are not educated middle class people like you and I who will make good decisions with that money. One guy I knew for example received endless help from charities and the government, but the guy had a drug addiction and had absolutely no interest in getting clean or helping himself out of his homelessness. His life was an endless cycle of finding enough money for drugs from people thinking they're helping him, then almost dying and ending up in hospital taking resources away from the NHS. A homeless person I was helping at the time said quite bluntly, "I know this sounds bad, but it would be better for everyone if he overdosed tonight". But it was the truth. No amount of money or compassion could help him. We really did try. I'm all for giving homeless people money, but I'm convinced it can't be done by the government. It needs to be done by individuals with limited resources who can select those who they feel are likely to use that money to turn their lives around. Or even better, if you want to help someone who's homeless and in need of help just offer them a spare room in your home. These types of programs have awful incentives and are pushed in my experience by educated middle class people who have no idea why people end up in situations like this and so end up incentivising people to make awful life decisions through bad government welfare programs.

anm89 6y ago

I never understand these experiments. I don't think many people would argue that if you hand people a bunch of free money it improves their lives. Of course it does. That's the most obvious thing in the world, especially when the project is pre financed and can have no negative financial implications. The problem is that every route to financing UBI involves a radical experiment in public finance that is likely to have cascading effects in every corner of our society, but has obvious issues with inflation,debt load, taxation and ethics. You don't get any data on any of the interesting problems of UBI buy handing people cash you already have. edit: Also that data presents a very shoddy picture of efficacy here. Over a year, the people who get the cash end up having the same degree of homelessness and the same amount of cash in hand

542458 6y ago
> don't think many people would argue that if you hand people a bunch of free money it improves their lives Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of people argue that poor people are only poor because they have poor financial skills (and in the case of homeless people, that they spend all their money on drugs) and giving them more money is trying to fill in a bottomless pit.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  There are many reasons someone can be poor, really bad money management is definitely a prevalent reason. I chuckled at this post on WSB yesterday. Someone wrote "if I had any cash, I'd buy more GME to average out my cost." Someone wisely replied "this is why you don't have cash."
  - happyconcepts 6y ago
    >I chuckled at this post on WSB yesterday. Someone wrote "if I had any cash, I'd buy more GME to average out my cost." I chuckle at your chuckle. To me that "someone" sounds like a short trolling for more longs in the stock. I say this as someone who has lurked WSB on reddit for a long time.

naebother 6y ago

Not sure you can call this UBI. It's targeted aid to those most (visibly) in need. At the very least UBI should be universal. As well as social programs. Otherwise you'll just end up fomenting tensions among those who receive it and those that don't, and eventually it'll be killed. And then there's the problem of UBI not linked to (real) inflation is not really BI in the long run.

happyconcepts 6y ago

Cash will help some homeless people like me. I have endured five years homeless in Los Angeles. Still here, somehow, despite covid, curfews, looters, lack of police, being shot at twice and attacked more than a dozen times. I managed to setup my hn login last month but have yet to figure out how to follow the comment threads effectively from my phone. Yes Los Angeles. Some call it ground zero of the US homeless problem. It started on a Friday morning in December 2015 when my roommate/landlord rushed me from behind with a knife at 8 am in Santa Monica California. Long story short, police believed my white assailant when he lied and said I made it all up. They put his lie down on the report and lied further saying I was agitated and looked crazy (i was in shock because the attack was a huge surprise, and had I not sensed the attack in time it would have been a 7" henkl straight through the heart from behind). I left next day, homeless day#1, but filled with hope for a better tomorrow with no further unprovoked attacks from behind. I got a job at McD and worked min wage living out of an old chevy cavalier i bought off craigslist for $300. And it took a full year to save up enough to rent a small room. Just as I was calling the first ads, in Feb 2017, an armed forces veteran rear ended me in broad daylight breaking my neck and totaling my cavalier. He told me it was his second accident in two months. Hmmm so i guess he fuct up someones Christmas before messing up my Valentines day. I went to an accident attorney who sent me to a chiropractor who broke my neck further and also broke my back. I was expecting therapy, just as any of you might expect. But I was served pain instead, essentially giving me a replay of the original knife attack trauma. So I was not happy when they next recommended I now needed surgery. It was just to use me as meat to bid up the price of an insurance settlement. The surgeon they sent me to wore makeup. As easy as it sounds now to say no to that...it was hard to say no because I have been in constant pain every hour of every day since that car accident. Arg this is too tiring to type this much with thumbs. From my meager start on hn a part of me feels like it isnt even worth sharing the rest of my story. But I am a social creature and I do not want to be homeless until death which is what the Santa Monica police want at this rate. So consider experimenting more please, and you are welcome to start with me.

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happyconcepts 6y ago

andrei_says_ 6y ago

Related, Rutger Bregman’s Ted talk on how poverty impacts decision making and how giving free cash improves the ability to manage money. https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...

TeeMassive 6y ago

Most of the homeless can't and don't want to live in homes for various reasons. Even given free housing and food and income they'll invite more people, trash / steal the place, then leave. Just ask any people who volunteered for homeless shelters. It may not look like it, but a lot of people would just stop working if they could, the problem is, those jobs are critical for society to continue to work and would likely cause more problems down the line because idle hands are the devil's workshop.

_448 6y ago

In that video there is a mention that Milton Friedman supported basic income. That is wrong! He opposed UBI. He instead proposed NIT(Negative Income Tax)[0]. As an engineer, I think NIT is far more efficient than UBI. UBI is like "spray and pray" policy, whereas NIT provides support to those who actually require it, automatically. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

occamrazor 6y ago
Aren’t NIT and UBI effectively the same thing?
- didgeoridoo 6y ago
  Think of NIT as steepening the progressive tax rate curve, and allowing it to dip below the y (tax rate) axis for sufficiently low x (income). There exist several “refundable tax credits” today in the US that effectively do this at a small scale, albeit with a lumpy phase-out curve that runs into the same disincentive cliffs as many other welfare programs. UBI, on the other hand, shifts the curve rightward, so everyone’s income is relatively higher and is thus subject to more taxes. (You’d obviously also need to raise taxes overall if your goal is to keep it budget-neutral).
- Aachen 6y ago
  UBI, universal basic income, is universal. Lowering the tax rate below zero for some people is not universal but only some percentage of the population.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    > Lowering the tax rate below zero for some people is not universal but only some percentage of the population. So what? As long as everyone above the NIT line saves the same dollar amount in tax payments that they would have got from UBI, there's no difference.
mensetmanusman 6y ago