8 ms·

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 atta

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.
  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    > If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone; A real UBI program would also be experimenting with a limited budget. The universal part is a big part of what makes UBI unusual in comparison to the common means tested approaches, and is therefore the part that needs some of the most careful research.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    If you experiment properly, you take people who were in a region on $startdate and give them UBI indefinitely, also levying enough additional tax or welfare cuts on that region to pay for it. That's geographically more limited, and it might be temporally more limited if it turns out to be a massive failure forcing the curtailment of the whole thing, but it's very different from testing to draw the amazing conclusion that penniless people given $7.5k are on average more financially secure a year later, which actually tells you less about a hypothetical UBI than the existing welfare state. (There might be other public policy reasons to test giving cash handouts to homeless people, like "is this more efficient use of funds than spending the equivalent on homeless hostels and counselling?" but likewise, you have to construct the experiment to actually look at that side of things)
- leetcrew 6y ago
  the other issue (and the bigger one imo) is that the experiment described in the video seems to be a one-off payment, which you would expect to have very different behavioral outcomes. if you gave me $7500, I would probably just put it all in SPY and pretend it didn't happen. if you promised me $7500/yr, I might actually change my lifestyle a bit.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  the money has to come from somewhere. Why would you and I, members of the society with our needs met, also need to get money... This massively increases the cost of the programs. this is the part that i don't get...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Because it removes the administrative overhead almost completely. Arguably, that saves even more money than trying to only give it to people who "need" it.
    - foolinaround 6y ago
      this is a good point, but is this true though? Assuming it costs $10000 per person/yr If we can agree that 80% of society has their needs met, then if we give to all, we now have an additional 4 times of the overall outlay. I dont think the cost of administration would be so much, and if so, we should aim to cut down those as much as possible, I also pulled out that 80% number. As this goes down to 50%, then the argument is easier made that the administrative cost is now equal to the cost of funds we could have just given away.
      - samatman 6y ago
        This misses what is probably the more important point, which is that any system which tries to measure who has their needs met is going to screw up. People won't fill out the paperwork, they'll check the wrong box, the papers will get lost, the wrong flag will be entered on the database, they won't fulfill the criteria on paper but still really need the help: people in need fall through the cracks all the time. Also, great care needs to be taken with welfare to avoid income traps. It's easy to set up a system where working more means you lose money, and that's hard to get out of. This remains a problem with US welfare and disability payments. With a UBI, it's simple: do they know who you are, and have you been paid yet. And the people who have enough are generally easy to find, and have, let's say, a preexisting relationship with the IRS. It's easy enough to tax the UBI back from them, and it would be comforting, if and when they unexpectedly lose their job, to know that a check will be arriving. One less thing to think about. I have some reservations about UBI, but I'm familiar with the case for it, which I'm conveying here without a full endorsement.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
Direct cash is not without problems. Theft, mismanagement, exploitation, violence are all known issue of just throwing money at people. I’ll admit the administrative costs are low compared to no/low income housing or food assistance. But this can be a be careful of what you wish for type of thing. A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash. I know from my time working with a local shelter.
- iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
  Do you have any sources for these claims?
  - wahern 6y ago
    Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days. I know it may be hard to believe, but 20-something drug addicts, the mentally ill, etc, don't exactly manage their budget as well the 40-year-old 85th percentile income earning HN programmer or 75-year-old retired school teacher. That's not a moral judgment. It's just a fact. And to the degree it's a cultural artifact (i.e. maybe drug addicts in Sweden are veritable CFOs), a UBI won't change that overnight.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      > a UBI won't change that overnight. Of course not but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. Your other objections regarding poor neighbourhoods and so on are not so much an argument against UBI as an argument against the conditions that made those neighbourhoods poor in the first place; of course those causes need to be tackled as well, but not everyone who is poor is also a drunken, sex-crazed, drug addict.
      - wahern 6y ago
        I'm not objecting to UBI, and certainly not to UBI-like experiments. Nor was SV_BubbleTime, AFAICT. But SV_BubbleTime makes a significant and important point, and a legitimate retort to the opinion, "direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused". San Francisco adopted precisely those policies 15 years ago, providing free housing and direct cash payments, and most who live in San Francisco and understand the history of the policies probably have reservations about free housing and direct cash being the "best first approaches". Even Governor Newsom, who was the mayor who did the most to accelerate and materialize those policies (e.g. ~8k housing units for the homeless have been built or converted since 2005) has admitted that those policies were incomplete and naive. EDIT: s/15k housing units/8k housing units/. Per https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40fd96eccd39 https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40.... (Google search sucks these days so difficult to find the better sources I originally had in mind.) Note that these are units, not shelter beds. San Francisco has built more permanent housing for the homeless than the entire homeless population when the program started.
dang 6y ago
Ok, we've changed the title to use a more precise phrase from the article abstract. I think it's important to understand that "universal basic income" has two usages now: the more precise definition that everyone on HN is familiar with, but also more generally the concept of giving money to poor people with no strings attached. That idea is gradually getting more research and the research has been producing interesting results for some time now. Of course it's an oxymoron to use "UBI" to refer to the latter. The word 'universal' already contradicts it, as does 'basic income' arguably. But language does not spread by precision, and there are more interesting things to discuss here than terminology.

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.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  > If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone; A real UBI program would also be experimenting with a limited budget. The universal part is a big part of what makes UBI unusual in comparison to the common means tested approaches, and is therefore the part that needs some of the most careful research.
- notahacker 6y ago
  If you experiment properly, you take people who were in a region on $startdate and give them UBI indefinitely, also levying enough additional tax or welfare cuts on that region to pay for it. That's geographically more limited, and it might be temporally more limited if it turns out to be a massive failure forcing the curtailment of the whole thing, but it's very different from testing to draw the amazing conclusion that penniless people given $7.5k are on average more financially secure a year later, which actually tells you less about a hypothetical UBI than the existing welfare state. (There might be other public policy reasons to test giving cash handouts to homeless people, like "is this more efficient use of funds than spending the equivalent on homeless hostels and counselling?" but likewise, you have to construct the experiment to actually look at that side of things)
leetcrew 6y ago
the other issue (and the bigger one imo) is that the experiment described in the video seems to be a one-off payment, which you would expect to have very different behavioral outcomes. if you gave me $7500, I would probably just put it all in SPY and pretend it didn't happen. if you promised me $7500/yr, I might actually change my lifestyle a bit.
foolinaround 6y ago
the money has to come from somewhere. Why would you and I, members of the society with our needs met, also need to get money... This massively increases the cost of the programs. this is the part that i don't get...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Because it removes the administrative overhead almost completely. Arguably, that saves even more money than trying to only give it to people who "need" it.
  - foolinaround 6y ago
    this is a good point, but is this true though? Assuming it costs $10000 per person/yr If we can agree that 80% of society has their needs met, then if we give to all, we now have an additional 4 times of the overall outlay. I dont think the cost of administration would be so much, and if so, we should aim to cut down those as much as possible, I also pulled out that 80% number. As this goes down to 50%, then the argument is easier made that the administrative cost is now equal to the cost of funds we could have just given away.
    - samatman 6y ago
      This misses what is probably the more important point, which is that any system which tries to measure who has their needs met is going to screw up. People won't fill out the paperwork, they'll check the wrong box, the papers will get lost, the wrong flag will be entered on the database, they won't fulfill the criteria on paper but still really need the help: people in need fall through the cracks all the time. Also, great care needs to be taken with welfare to avoid income traps. It's easy to set up a system where working more means you lose money, and that's hard to get out of. This remains a problem with US welfare and disability payments. With a UBI, it's simple: do they know who you are, and have you been paid yet. And the people who have enough are generally easy to find, and have, let's say, a preexisting relationship with the IRS. It's easy enough to tax the UBI back from them, and it would be comforting, if and when they unexpectedly lose their job, to know that a check will be arriving. One less thing to think about. I have some reservations about UBI, but I'm familiar with the case for it, which I'm conveying here without a full endorsement.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago

Direct cash is not without problems. Theft, mismanagement, exploitation, violence are all known issue of just throwing money at people. I’ll admit the administrative costs are low compared to no/low income housing or food assistance. But this can be a be careful of what you wish for type of thing. A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash. I know from my time working with a local shelter.

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
Do you have any sources for these claims?
- wahern 6y ago
  Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days. I know it may be hard to believe, but 20-something drug addicts, the mentally ill, etc, don't exactly manage their budget as well the 40-year-old 85th percentile income earning HN programmer or 75-year-old retired school teacher. That's not a moral judgment. It's just a fact. And to the degree it's a cultural artifact (i.e. maybe drug addicts in Sweden are veritable CFOs), a UBI won't change that overnight.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > a UBI won't change that overnight. Of course not but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. Your other objections regarding poor neighbourhoods and so on are not so much an argument against UBI as an argument against the conditions that made those neighbourhoods poor in the first place; of course those causes need to be tackled as well, but not everyone who is poor is also a drunken, sex-crazed, drug addict.
    - wahern 6y ago
      I'm not objecting to UBI, and certainly not to UBI-like experiments. Nor was SV_BubbleTime, AFAICT. But SV_BubbleTime makes a significant and important point, and a legitimate retort to the opinion, "direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused". San Francisco adopted precisely those policies 15 years ago, providing free housing and direct cash payments, and most who live in San Francisco and understand the history of the policies probably have reservations about free housing and direct cash being the "best first approaches". Even Governor Newsom, who was the mayor who did the most to accelerate and materialize those policies (e.g. ~8k housing units for the homeless have been built or converted since 2005) has admitted that those policies were incomplete and naive. EDIT: s/15k housing units/8k housing units/. Per https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40fd96eccd39 https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40.... (Google search sucks these days so difficult to find the better sources I originally had in mind.) Note that these are units, not shelter beds. San Francisco has built more permanent housing for the homeless than the entire homeless population when the program started.

dang 6y ago

Ok, we've changed the title to use a more precise phrase from the article abstract. I think it's important to understand that "universal basic income" has two usages now: the more precise definition that everyone on HN is familiar with, but also more generally the concept of giving money to poor people with no strings attached. That idea is gradually getting more research and the research has been producing interesting results for some time now. Of course it's an oxymoron to use "UBI" to refer to the latter. The word 'universal' already contradicts it, as does 'basic income' arguably. But language does not spread by precision, and there are more interesting things to discuss here than terminology.