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$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
- paulpauper 3y agoOf course it did. The question or debate is not if unconditional money helps, but if it's better than alternatives which may be cheaper, such as food credits. Even middle class people would benefit, like $750 to buy groceries. Inflation obviously will erode some of this new purchasing power.
- mbgerring 3y agoThe point is not that it helped, the point is that they used it to exit homelessness. This is important because of the pervasive and empirically incorrect assertion that people do not have housing because they simply choose not to.
- cwillu 3y ago“i correct“ -> “incorrect”, I presume?
- BurningFrog 3y agoSome people choose to. Any assertion that all or none do are wrong.
- cwillu 3y agoA lot of the debate is very sincerely arguing that it doesn't actually help, so making it clear that it really actually does is important to shut down some of the ignorance: “It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs, but I do think it dispels this myth that people will use money for illicit purposes,” Henwood said. “We weren’t finding that in the study.”
- ska 3y ago> A lot of the debate is very sincerely ... I suspect a lot of the debate is very insincerely arguing that.
- kulahan 3y ago[flagged]
- paulpauper 3y agoHey give me $10k. I won't use it for illicit purposes, but I want the money. This is not a justification for giving money.
- zrail 3y agoThe government is very good at giving people money. It's less good at adjudicating whether people require that money. Replacing every government assistance program with direct, unconditional cash transfers would almost certainly be cheaper than the bureaucracy that must be maintained to ensure only "deserving" people get assistance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ajmurmann 3y agoI'm very much in favor of UBI. Replacing literally "every government assistance program" has me worried though. I think for most folks this will work well. I do wonder about people with special needs though for whom that won't be sufficient. Might it be physical or mental disabilities, it can get more expensive quickly.
- zrail 3y agoSure. UBI would probably work best paired with universal healthcare that covers special needs cases.
- lukifer 3y agoI broadly agree with you, I favor UBI for similar reasons, though I'd maybe frame it less as "very good vs. less good", vs. just acknowledging the enormous overhead costs of means-testing, to say nothing of the consequences when bureaucracy turns corrupt or Kafka-esque. But devil's advocate: is there any reason the same outcome couldn't be accomplished with a negative income tax instead, leveraging a bureaucratic infrastructure which already exists and isn't going anywhere?
- zrail 3y agoI don't really care how it's delivered, as long as it's a regular payment throughout the year that people can depend on. (US specific) The monthly advanced child tax credit, effectively a negative tax, lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty for the short time it existed. Building that into a permanent, regular, universal cash transfer is not mechanically difficult but is intractable politically.
- TriangleEdge 3y agoQuestion for economists: If you give everybody in the US $500 in food credits per month, do food prices go up, or do wages go down? Edit: Let's say there's an expiry function on the credits. Something like you get to keep 50% of the credits if they rollover.
- Alyoshi 3y agoin general that scenario means both go up, although i’m sure you can find weird edge cases. edit: for example, expiration of credit funds could lead to a reduction in wages if it meant less money is spent in the economy than taxed in it.
- eli 3y ago"Food credits" are an expensive and paternalistic Big Government approach to the problem. Is the idea that poor people don't know they need to buy food? Or that the government knows what you should be eating better than you do? SNAP spends something like $0.15 of every dollar on administrative and has complicated rules.
- paulpauper 3y agobetter and cheaper than the $750 going to drugs or alcohol? >Big Government Food credits or $750, you realize it's still coming from taxpayers either way? If someone is homeless it means that they already failed and need help. There is no way it cannot be paternalistic. The question is what is the best solution.
- ajmurmann 3y agoSometimes people have bad luck and typically people have a better understanding of what would help them the most than someone in a government office who has never met them before.
- eli 3y ago> better and cheaper than the $750 going to drugs or alcohol? It didn't. That was one of the conclusions of the study being discussed. At the risk of stating the obvious: someone who's homeless may need medical treatment or, you know, a home more than they need food at that moment. > Food credits or $750, you realize it's still coming from taxpayers either way? The method that costs much less to administer... costs much less to administer. > If someone is homeless it means that they already failed and need help. That's obviously not true. And also isn't how we view the taxpayer-funded fire department coming to put out a house fire.
- ciguy 3y agoThe headline as written should surprise no-one. Anyone receiving free money would probably have their life improved along some dimension, even if it just means they're not doing as many dangerous things to get money to buy more drugs. The implicit assumption seems to be that giving homeless people money to improve their lives is inherently a moral good. Unlike many homeless advocates, I don't think it is a given that taking money by force from productive hardworking people and giving it to mentally ill drug addicts is inherently moral or good for long term societal stability.
- advael 3y agoI think a lot of productive hardworking people's money has been spent on propaganda whose sole intention is to ensure that people equate homeless people to "mentally ill drug addicts" rather than, say, "private equity real estate buyup refugees"
- ciguy 3y agoHow many homeless people do you interact with daily? Because I'm forced to interact with many of them on a daily basis to simply go about my life in the Bay Area. And almost all of them, with very very few exceptions are both mentally ill and drug addicts. I used to think like you, but being forced to deal with them in real life on a daily basis has a way of killing preconceived convenient notions.
- ska 3y agoSelection bias is a strong effect here.
- advael 3y agoI would say more than one on average daily, and these are just the ten percent of homeless people I see that will say hello and interact with me rather than simply go about their own business
- mjamesaustin 3y agoThey're not homeless because they were mentally ill drug addicts. They're mentally ill drug addicts because they're homeless. People without a stable living condition experience severe stress and mental illness as a result. People without necessities to live turn to drugs to alleviate the pain and suffering they experience. This study is one example of how giving money to people to alleviate their conditions can improve their lives and enable them to further engage in self improvement.
- monsecchris 3y agoIf that’s the best they can say about $750 a month, it sounds like a terrible investment.
- ska 3y agoYou are expecting a lot of a headline, no?
- creer 3y agoTo be fair this has to be one of the stupidest headlines.
- jdgoesmarching 3y ago[flagged]
- aziaziazi 3y agoWhat other found would you recommend? Investing in our fellow humans has always been the best investment for any society, if not its sheer definition.
- creer 3y agoWhich fraction of people did it get past temporary hurdles? Which fraction of people did it give time to work on their problems? Which fraction of people did it help find stability? Which fraction of people did it help on mental illness / outlook / comfort / whatever? Which fraction of people did it move within recommended nutrition baseline? How difficult is it to come up with more interesting measures than "improved"?
- hezralig 3y ago"Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered."
- Dolototo 3y agoThe question is more if your fellow humans appreciates you enough to help you. On the other side even the egoistic view would give homeless people money just to have them of streets.
- gonzo41 3y agoDuring covid in Australia, we just put the homeless in hotels. It didn't cost much in comparison to the other government spending around that time and homelessness was largely eliminated. Then we got over the pandemic and tossed people out onto the street. Homelessness for some is a choice by society. Especially in the west.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoLots of "solutions" to homelessness are possible if you're willing to take away their rights, which is what happened to them (and many others) during the pandemic.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoFailing to appreciate egoistic cooperation is a peculiar mainstay of our culture. Both the fixed ideas of cooperation for the greater good, and radical self-reliance are put on a pedestal, and often pursued to the point of irrationality.
- IshKebab 3y agoDifficult to tell what this really answered. Also it seems like the spending was self-reported?
- beastman82 3y agoDid it reduce their agency like it did all the covid unemployed?
- CodeyWhizzBang 3y agoAccording to the article: "Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered." So, it seems like it helped get most people back on their feet and into a place where they can live independently without financial support.
- pests 3y agoI had a bout or two of homelessness when I was younger. A $750 windfall (or equiv at the time period) would have definitely been a huge help at getting past those initial hurdles. Like with the old adage of the $20 boots that last a year vs the $150 boots that last a life time, yet you have a person with only $30 of disposable income at any one time. Poor guy's spent $600 on boots.
- ejb999 3y agoyea, no doubt if you are down on your luck someone handing you $750/month would improve your circumstances in the short run - but it sounds like perhaps you made changes in your life, such that you are no longer homeless - great - but would you, or anyone else not feeling the desperation of being hungry or unsheltered be more, or less, likely to try and improve your circumstances if you were getting a cash handout every month so the adverse affects weren't so bad? Its a serious question - isn't there some benefit to society when people feel the pain of bad circumstances or decisions and then feel motivated to do something about it? I am of the opinion that it does.
- advael 3y agoUp to and including homelessness? Objectively no. Homelessness significantly prevents both productive economic activity and maintaining other basic necessities, or even seeking help from others. Weighed against what appears to be a purely philosophically-derived assumption that negative reward signals are not only necessary to motivate useful action but have no diminishing returns, I think the proposition that a home makes a lot of the activities one needs to do to "get ahead" in life more physically feasible has a lot more evidence in its favor
- datadrivenangel 3y ago"About 2% of the total went to alcohol, cigarettes and drug expenses — the largest portion of which was cigarettes" I'm pretty sure that the average American spends more than 2% of their income on drugs.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoThat spending was self-reported. Do you think the average American would self-report more?
- meowtimemania 3y agoAlso need to factor in that since the $750 is a recurring gift that could stop at any time, recipients are incentivized to report that the $750 is spent in good ways.
- HenryBemis 3y agoIt is relative easy/simple to calculate this with 'some' accuracy. If you ask someone how much they smoke per day, (that's pretty consistent) and they respond "2 packs of X brand", then you know the brand, you know the price x365 you can estimate the cost. If you point blank ask me "how much do you spend on pizzas every year", I can't just pull a number out of a hat. I will do the math: €20 per pizza x 1 per month = approx 240.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoAre you underestimating how much people lie, even to themselves? Esp here. “Hey; want to be part of a study where we give you free money to see if it helps you out?”… “Ok, now how much of that money did you use on things that were harmful to you?” You could perform that study with anyone and you’re going to get BS answers and estimations.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI think its insightful that there are thresholds if you have $50 and it wont make a difference in getting what you actually need, then fast food and fast thrills are what it will be spent on if you have $750 or some other threshold, you can try to make a difference to get out of it its like “give a man a fish” versus “sign up for fishing classes, get books, equipment and train so you’ll never have to be in the situation ever again”
- nshkr 3y agoAs someone who is nearing 2,000 days of two stints of homelessness since 2017, I can offer feedback that such an amount would help to alleviate basic survival pressures. But, money will not solve any root cause issues. I've been unhoused and out of work for so long that any recovery back to a normal life has become exceedingly unlikely. I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke, nor do I do illicit drugs nor prescriptions. My mental state -- stressed in survival mode -- is very much situational, yet there are underlying factors that have led to a state of permanent dysfunction and reluctance to rebuild. In addition to food stamps, I've survived on help from lifelong/long term friends and strangers (incl'g from kind souls on hn, on a few occasions, even). One kind stranger at the local coffee shop even tried gifting me a new MBP/M2/24GB/1TB a few months ago, but my focus is gone and I was unhoused, still being criminally targeted, so I returned the laptop in like new condition to him a week later. (The side reports regarding systemic/criminal abuse against at-risk folks is a separate but related matter.) These initiatives matter, of course. I'd gladly make use of such money. But, IMO, more important is to focus on root causes at the relevant time -- i.e. in public school settings when unchecked peer abuse occurs, as one example. Such abuse can grow into an irreparable state of dysfunction and life breakdown. hth
- meowtimemania 3y agoWhat factors led to you specifically being homeless?
- lossolo 3y ago> in public school settings when unchecked peer abuse occurs, as one example. Such abuse can grow into an irreparable state of dysfunction and life breakdown. Just guessing but probably there is a reason why he mentioned that.
- nshkr 3y agoCorruption, in a word
- fuzzybear3965 3y ago
- narcindin 3y agoI am happy for Las Angeles to perform a widespread trial of this kind of initiative. Attract people to Southern California that might be homeless elsewhere, help them get on their feet via $750/person/month, then they will get off the subsidy and contribute back to the community! If it works I will encourage a similar system in my hometown. If it does not work then I'm glad we did a trial run first. Note: I'm paywalled from reading the article, how many people did they give the money to and how long was it?
- ciguy 3y agoThis is a hilariously naive and silly take because SF did exactly this and continues to do so. Spoiler alert, they have massively exacerbated their homeless problems and very few are being reintegrated back into society.
- rbranson 3y agoWhich SF program are you speaking of that continues to provide direct cash payments?
- azinman2 3y agoI don’t know why you’re being downvoted. SF absolutely does already give out monthly grants. It hasn’t seemed to move the needle in reducing homelessness, but maybe it make things less dire for those who get it? I guess the question is what’s the goal of the money…
- brandon272 3y ago> I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Likely due to the description of the parent comment as "hilariously naive" and "silly". The tone violates HN guidelines. It's also a more nuanced and complicated issue worth diving into: https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/11/ask-the-standard-does-san-francisco-give-homeless-people-free-money/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/11/ask-the-standard-does-san-...
- mkaic 3y ago
- rufus_foreman 3y agoMoney is good, researchers determine.
- ejb999 3y agofree money, even better.
- ryuhhnn 3y agoWhy is paying into a social safety net considered “free money” but usury is not? Why is it that when rich people as for money it’s a “loan” but when poor people ask for money it’s a “handout”. Free money is never free, money isn’t even real. You live in a society and if you want people to be there for you when you are down, you have a duty to return the favour.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago>> money isn’t even real This is true, in the Philip K. Dick conception of reality ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"), so maybe something we all shouldn't get worked up about? If we stop believing in our duty to return the favor, what happens? Or if we stop believing that there is such a thing as society? If we stop believing in usury, does it exist?
- ryuhhnn 3y agowhy are you assuming I’m “worked up”? I was simply asking some questions and just because I disagree with the original commenter’s characterisation doesn’t mean I’m necessarily upset. In fact, quite the opposite, I’m curious why so many people blindly accept things as “real” when they are only “real” insofar as we make it so.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago>> I’m curious why so many people blindly accept things as “real” when they are only “real” insofar as we make it so Well like you said, money isn't real. Sure is convenient though.
- malermeister 3y agoToday in the "no shit, sherlock"-department.
- nrp 3y agoAs expected, most folks are reacting directly to the headline. The study protocols are more interesting and informative: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3287846/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3287846/v1 Basically, the key factor here appears to not only be money, but an assigned “Miracle Friend” who has recurring check-ins with the individual. The grantees of the funding were all individuals who kept up recurring checkins for some period of time (without being disclosed that this would result in receiving any money).
- nabla9 3y ago(commenting the article, not the title) Here is the interim report of the randomized controlled trial: https://dworakpeck.usc.edu/sites/default/files/2023-12/Miracle%20Money_Nov%202023_FINAL_12.5.23.pdf https://dworakpeck.usc.edu/sites/default/files/2023-12/Mirac... There is already plenty of evidence of how poverty cripples cognitive capabilities and prevents long-term planning. Getting a leg up and slightly more financial security gives people a longer time horizon to plan forward. Well-off people who try living "in poverty" for short period don't experience the stress like people living in actual poverty and stress and can't understand how bad it is. The first path out of poverty is giving people some money without strings attached. On the psychology of poverty https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1232491 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1232491 Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1238041 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1238041
- sullivantrevor 3y agoMy solution is to pay them to pick up trash. Those that do are housed for free.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoWhy ask those people how they ended up this way, and help strategically based on each person's individual needs, while allowing them to feel useful by contributing back to society, when we can just throw money at them. It's easier to throw money at them. I'm sure this will work great, and not become another outlet for corruption.
- ecommerceguy 3y agoThe top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent. (USA) We need to go back to this. Wealth inequality is damaging society far more than ever. From Onlyfans to Bitcoins Scams, social media platforms has only exacerbated the issue. Will the pendulum swing back to morality and just cause away from lawlessness and perversion? Is there a singular root cause for this behavior? Gen Z maybe the last hope.
- soupfordummies 3y agoWoah, had no idea it was that high. And that's in a decade that is considered one of the best in US history (if you were the "right" demographic of course). Any idea what the top tax bracket was that had that rate? Wonder what it would be now adjusted for inflation.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> And that's in a decade that is considered one of the best in US history Amusingly, that's sometimes spun as what happens after a war - until you wonder what happened to Jimmy Carter's post-war economy.
- readthenotes1 3y agoA more important question is how many people actually paid that rate since the tax code was chock full of loopholes, much more than now. Trump manages to pay almost no income taxes for several decades because of a few minor loopholes left behind. Imagine what that meant in the 1950s
- eli 3y agoThis is true, but even with all that taken into account taxes on the very wealthy are lower now than they were then.
- buzzert 3y ago> if you were the "right" demographic of course What about for the "wrong" demographic? You're saying the huge amount of taxes collected didn't go to them?
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- mitchbob 3y agohttps://archive.is/2023.12.20-042515/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-12-19/750-a-month-no-questions-asked-improved-the-lives-of-homeless-people https://archive.is/2023.12.20-042515/https://www.latimes.com...
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