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Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
- fluxem 3y agoOf course Basic Universal Income works in experiments. You select a group of people and give them money for some time. To be honest, it’s no longer basic nor universal. It’s just income.
- psd1 3y agoI assume the fault is mine for not understanding, but what is your point?
- DoubleDerper 3y agoUBI can only work if it's annually adjusted for inflation.
- tharmas 3y agoThe problem with UBI is the landlords will just jack the rents accordingly. That's what happened in the UK when the govt introduced Housing Benefit. The landlords jacked the rent. So effectively the taxpayer subsidizes landlords.
- kyleee 3y agoI tend to worry about this too; if UBI has a chance in hell at working we’d have to pair it will a wild increase in the availability in housing including in the biggest and most desirable population centers. And even if that occurred and the housing cost issue is avoided, companies of all stripes will be angling hard to capture people’s new additional income.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoBusinesses are set up to find out the maximum value what people will pay for their product. If people have more money, won't it just increase the prices of things?
- pastapliiats 3y agoLife improvements when humans have something to take care of their basic rights. Shocking. How many more projects and pilots to collectively keep scratching our heads as a species.
- mmh0000 3y ago[flagged]
- 00117 3y agoMental health declined? As in, worsened? This sounds wrong.
- 2023throwawayy 3y ago> However, researchers did report that all participants showed declines in overall mental health. Sounds like it's accurate. Living in a capitalist hellscape will do that to you.
- paulddraper 3y agoAnd yet somehow still better than a communist utopia
- deprecative 3y agoIs it, though?
- paulddraper 3y agoIt is
- 2023throwawayy 3y agoWhat a well thought out and convincing argument! Thanks for engaging in good faith. /s
- dventimi 3y agoMental health declining over time for people experiencing extreme economic hardship sounds morally wrong to me, but unfortunately, it also sounds very plausible.
- misja111 3y agoBut this is not what basic income is about, is it? As far as I know, basic income means that everybody receives a fixed income, rich or poor. What happens in Denver is just a social project, the only thing mildly special about it is that recipients didn't have to do anything in return. But there have been many of such projects in countries all over the world.
- meheleventyone 3y agoGiving everyone a basic income is more commonly called Universal Basic Income.
- neffy 3y agoOr a pension.
- Detrytus 3y agoBut they are not giving it to everyone, just to homeless people. That does not warrant the "Universal" part of the name. EDIT: I think I misread the whole thing, it really does not say "Universal" anywhere :) Anyway, I think someone, soon will try to use this project as an argument in favor of UBI, which is ridiculous.
- LoganDark 3y ago$1,000 a month won't even get you a small apartment where I live. You'd need double that just to rent one. Denver citizens must be lucky. My current home costs around $1,600 a month, utilities not included.
- 2023throwawayy 3y agoYour takeaway from this should not be Denver has a low COL. It does not.
- LoganDark 3y agoEven if it did, the cost of moving would be far too prohibitive for me. Even moving between two apartments in the same complex, when someone flooded our building, would have costed over $5,000 if we hadn't made their insurance cover it.
- jghn 3y agoThe hope is that having more money can bootstrap a virtuous cycle which allows them to generate a more livable income. The old adage "you have to have money to make money" is not entirely incorrect.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoYou don't need a small apartment to get out of homelessness, you just need a room What's the cheapest shared room (roommate wanted) where you live? e.g. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500#search=1~gallery~0~0 https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500#search...
- Hasz 3y agoWow, interesting that just $50/month did almost just as well as $1000/month.
- grumple 3y agoThat's basically the control group (but how do you perform a study like this without an actual control group and expect your data to be taken seriously?). 50/month being almost totally meaningless in terms of income. So really this study says that the larger payments goes a long way towards eliminating people sleeping outside and has a small/moderate effect on how many are able to rent/buy housing.
- recursivecaveat 3y agoI don't think you can have a $0 control group just because you have to pay the controls to fill out your surveys and such, otherwise their stats will be very out of whack.
- red_trumpet 3y agoWouldn't it make more sense to compare to existing welfare programs (if there are any?). A bit like new drugs often are not tested against placebo, but against existing drugs which already treat the same condition.
- enragedcacti 3y agoI imagine that would introduce way more sources of error you can't control for, especially since ethically you can't incentivize follow-ups using welfare services they would otherwise already be entitled to.
- thegrim33 3y agoIt doesn't help that they don't have any control group data to compare to. Group C was referred to as "Active comparison group" in their one-pager, which I assumed was a control group, but it isn't. Also pretty small sample sizes involved.
- INTPenis 3y agoIt's just a band aid on a bleeding wound. UBI needs to be implemented as a large scale bureaucracy. A network of subsidizations that ensure citizens have social housing, rent payed, and enough to sustain themselves. Like it or not, it requires government regulation. Because otherwise renters will never accept social housing, or tenant who's rent is being subsidized. You can't just hand out money to people.
- onion2k 3y agoSomewhat counterintuitively, UBI reduces bureaucracy. It's far simpler to just give everyone the same basic income than having government agencies checking who should or shouldn't get welfare, which saves vast amounts of wasted money. In some studies it's been suggested that UBI would actually be cheaper to fund that all government social welfare - in other words, under a system of UBI, taxes could go down.
- tgv 3y agoIt doesn’t save vast amounts of money. These bureaucracies hand out much more money than they spend on overhead. Otherwise, over 30% of the population would be working in these bureaucracies.
- asdff 3y agoIt allows for profit seeking if you allow it to be used on for profit necessities. This is why socialized housing, healthcare, education, and all else of life's essentials is so important. No one should be allowed to profit on what you need just to exist in the modern world, that seems so perverse while we have this technological society capable of lifting up so many if incentives were merely adjusted from the individual to the collective.
- lawlessone 3y ago>It allows for profit seeking if you allow it to be used on for profit necessities. This is a feature. I think a UBI will be necessary in the future to just to maintain capitalism. If automation eventually means the average person is unemployed who's going to buy your companies products?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoThe massive increase seen in the control group seems to indicate that either ~5% of the money delivers >50% of the benefit, or there were some other factors that were more significant than the money.
- munificent 3y agoIt seems to me like demand effects[1] could explain a large fraction of the observed behavior. People like being given money. If you tell them you're conducting a study to determine if giving them leads to them doing XYZ, it should come as no surprise when they do XYZ, even if the money didn't literally enable it: they are incentivized to XYZ all they can in order to keep the money pump flowing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_characteristics
- mik1998 3y agoIt looks like regression to the mean.
- mmmpetrichor 3y agoBased on what I can tell, their data is solely based on whether they "reported living in a home". This sounds like extremely bad science. I can easily see someone reporting whatever they think you want to hear if you're giving them money. That would definitely explain why the lowest group had such a huge increase. I'm hugely skeptical.
- notahacker 3y agoYeah, this. It looks like any interpretation of the data is complicated slightly by the three groups all having slightly different initial situations, but the approx 34% of people finding stable housing within six months after receiving a monthly stipend that looks sufficient to cover budget room rent vs the 31% who found housing after receiving virtually nothing doesn't look like a promising result. There are always going to be secular trends of surveyed people regardless of what they're given. First of all a lot of homelessness isn't permanent, so if you monitor a group of homeless people some of them will cease to be homeless over the course of time regardless of whether they're getting anything from you or even aware they're being monitored. And secondly people are aware they're being studied, and often react. That may be as simple and positive as doing more to help themselves because the nice person showed concern about where they'd be in six months time, but it may also be people acting or claiming to act differently because they believe the payments are linked to what they report (no matter how much surveyors insist it's unconditional and there's no judgement and no possibility of the experiment being stopped or continued...)
- webdood90 3y ago[flagged]
- afavour 3y ago> reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society How would one predict who is going to have children that contribute to society and who is not? If the idea is to stop them reproducing then you have predict ahead of time, after all.
- jampekka 3y agoHow are you contributing to society?
- MrStonedOne 3y ago[dead]
- exabrial 3y agoI'm all about _private_ people giving their money away to those less fortunate, but guys... We're talking about a city that is a mile high in altitude and has exotic Winter and Snow seasons, and this is a 6 month study?
- Toxygene 3y agoIf you are asking why the study isn't covering a period of time including winter, it's because the study goes for a full year and this is only a report at the half way point. > On Tuesday, the group released data on the halfway mark of the pilot program, showing that rates of homelessness and food insecurity decreased, while shelter and employment rates increased over the past six months.
- exabrial 3y agoI was pointing out I think it's a little early to draw any conclusions, even if they are positive.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoI'm actually amazed at how little basic income helps people. The study had a control group which only received $50/month in aid (vs treatment groups that got $1000 a month or $6500 upfront and then $500 a month). The control group improved nearly as much as either of the treatment groups! In terms of housing, the $1000 a month group only improved by 6% more than the $50 group. That is to say, even if you just give people enough money every month to get an apartment with a roommate, only 6% will actually use it that way. In the actual report [0], they measure financial well-being, which improves across the board but does not differ between treatment and control. Surprisingly, measures of stress and anxiety actually increased for the treatment groups and decreased for controls. There were a few positives - the treatment groups were somewhat more likely to get jobs, and used fewer services. Obviously the organizers of the study want to promote its success, but I think most of what we see here is that homeless is a transient condition for some people, who find housing regardless of intervention. Mainly it's a demonstration that the extra $950 per month does surprisingly little in this population. [0]https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqtOfZG2sSanWgUdzn-lx-pwSXZKabj-/view?pli=1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gqtOfZG2sSanWgUdzn-lx-pwSXZ...
- 6510 3y ago> I'm actually amazed at how little basic income helps people. There have been many trials and this is again and again the most stunning conclusion (I doubt this one is even a good example) It is kinda silly how obvious it is in hindsight: A person living on 1 dollar per day will leverage the hell out of 10 cents extra. ( https://basicincome.org/research-index/ https://basicincome.org/research-index/ )
- kouru225 3y agoI think you’re confused here. The $50 group (Group C) is the control group. That sum was chosen because it was assumed it wouldn’t actually meaningfully change their lives, and therefore we can use their response as a baseline for how to judge Group A and Group B. This would imply that universal basic income makes 20% of people feel like they’re doing better (placebo effect), and 6% of people actually do better.
- LoganDark 3y ago
- debatem1 3y agoThe bit about everyone experiencing worse mental health outcomes was a bit surprising. Given the size of the mental health crisis I'd hope to see that unpacked more in the final report than it was here.
- serverlessmom 3y ago[Giving money]: helps people significantly improve their living conditions All Media: is this experiment too extreme and weird to ever try out in practice? We ask these far out kooks if this off-the-wall moonshot could maybe someday happen in a dream land
- Izkata 3y agoA control group would be people tracked without having received any money. The $50/month group doing nearly as well as the $1000/month group implies to me the overall situation in the city changed, and that's the majority of the improvement. Maybe $50 really was enough to flip over the edge, but we can't tell for sure because they don't have a real control group.
- buildingsramen 3y agoThis is poorly reported. From the article: * Group A reported a 26% increase in participants staying in housing they rented or owned; * Group B reported a 35% increase in housing they rented or owned; * And Group C, which received the smaller sum of money, reported a 20% increase in renting or owning housing. But these are not actually percentages - these are percentage points! * Group A went from 8% to 34% - a 4.25x increase * Group B went from 5% to 40% - an 8x increase * Group C went from 11% to 30% - a 2.7x increase Which is a lot more dramatic than saying 20% vs 26% vs 35%. The study authors might have good reason for reporting it this way, such as many participants dropped out of the study before follow-up, which probably skews toward people with more chaotic lifestyles. So the denominator for each group has changed at follow-up and could at least partially explain why all groups saw improvements.
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoReporting it in the more dramatic way puts a lot of emphasis on the starting conditions of what were supposed to be randomized groups - I think it would be more misleading the way you propose. If you invert it and report on the % reduction in the bad thing, the numbers would be almost the same as those they report. The part about people dropping out is complete speculation, right?