6 ms·

Austin Gave Poor Families a Basic Income. It Changed Their Lives

20 points by elsewhen 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
> Austin gave 135 low-income households $1,000 each month for a year, and tracked how they used the money and affected their lives. The result, one year later, was that they mostly used the money to pay their rent and other housing costs, according to a new report. This suggests that the money flows directly to landlords. If you give this to everyone, rents will rise by about $1,000/month. I'd recommend against policies like this. Australia has a lot of policies that push money into the housing market and it just means that sooner or later nobody can afford a house. In a practical sense, the only way for people to get better lives is to work better jobs. If people get more money, they just fight to change the distribution of presently available stuff. To cause sustainable improvements, people need to have the skills, knowhow and opportunity to produce more/higher quality stuff.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  >In a practical sense, the only way for people to get better lives is to work better jobs. If people get more money, they just fight to change the distribution of presently available stuff. To cause sustainable improvements, people need to have the skills, knowhow and opportunity to produce more/higher quality stuff. Now do inflation and people who already have skills and are forced to work multiple jobs to afford to live somewhere to do the first job, i.e., NHS workers in the UK. And yet we have council housing here, but the waiting lists are long, and we have plenty of unoccupied and unused properties under private ownership. These are complex issues and it starts with property being treated as an "investment" or a revenue stream rather than what it is—shelter.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The UK's energy availability has collapsed 30% since 2000. Yeah, there are no good jobs. If energy policy gets screwed up that badly, there are really not many options except admitting mistakes were made and doing something sensible going forward. I've been advocating deregulating nuclear power and looking for cheap energy that way for a long time. Possibly renewables has also gotten cheap enough to cover the gap, although realistically it has so much political support the fact that it hasn't suggests it is uneconomic. China just built lots of coal plants. Life has been on the up-and-up for the average Chinese worker. Weird how that works out. Part of helping people get good jobs involves allowing capitalists to build power stations. Handing out $1,000 checks to random families is unlikely to help with that. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom#per-capita-what-is-the-average-energy-consumption-per-person https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom#per...
    - fulafel 3y ago
      From another perspective the UK had the problem of high energy availability (semi-petro-state style). Housing is built so that it needs cheap gas to practically heat. If you go a bit north to colder climates in Europe, people don't have gas, but they spend less on heating.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Yes, been thinking about this too in the past year or so, it's very interesting, but doesn't seem like many people around here in Liverpool are talking about it. A lot of these old houses just aren't built without fossil fuels in mind. I remember coal!
- bruce511 3y ago
  I hear you, and you make a logical point, if better jobs were out there. Ultimately though there are shortages of lots of things, housing and jobs being but two of them. In an ideal world, an increase in rent would increase the value of housing, which would make building housing more valuable and thus more houses eould be built, thus reducing the cost of housing, thus balancing the equation. Land ownership, zoning, and the cost of commuting to low-paid jobs works against that. One could argue that the homeless of say california move to the unoccupied housing of say detroit, but that presumes there are jobs in detriot. In reality of course there are sufficient resources (food, housing etc) for everyone. But distributing that for the common good, rather than individual gain is a sticky problem.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  If you gave $1000/month to everyone, it wouldn’t necessarily push rent up by $1000. Supply and demand still holds, people have an extra $1k to bid up rents, but that only applies if supply is really tight. In reality, rents are likely to increase not by that much. If you pay for the $1k via progressive taxation, then it will make the lives of people at the low end a bit better, at the cost of making high end a bit worse. The only way to make everyone’s lives better is to increase supply in the supply and demand equation, we get that via improved productivity, which happens via better jobs where your time is worth more.
- cam_l 3y ago
  By that logic, if people work better jobs and they get more money then that must flow to landlords too. I don't see how producing higher quality stuff changes that metric en masse.. unless it's producing more houses. But I agree with your (unstated) point, basic income also needs tighter limits imposed on rent seeking behaviour. But I reckon we need tighter limits on rent seeking behaviour anyway.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I'm not going to argue. But I've had a little time to order my thoughts so I'll expand on my comment. This is a classic pincer manoeuvre in class warfare, where the top of the pyramid brings in a policy that extracts X from the middle class, then divvies it up at at a 10%-90% split between the lower and upper class. The majority of the benefit goes to the landlords. It is a cynical policy. The actual policy that is good for everyone is to generate more wealth so that more of the lower class moves into the middle class. That would be policies that increase the housing stock, removal of policies that unduly favour rent seeking, or the classic land tax that nobody wealthy wants to talk about. We've been at this for centuries - redistribution is not the way to set people up for success. Giving them opportunities to work hard on valuable things is.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Rent increases are capped by the ability of renters to move someplace cheaper. UBI removes place dependencies that reduce people's abilities to move, so it can also have a down ward tendency on average rent. UBI will be a win for landlords with reasonably priced rents in locations with fewer jobs, but it shouldn't enable exorbitant increases elsewhere. Rent is a function mostly of supply. Fix that and you fix rent UBI or no.
thefz 3y ago
My country is currently handing out universal income, which I am vehemently against. Taking money out of the pockets of taxpayers and handing it over to those too lazy to work, additionally disincentivizing them to work, is one of the worst violations of public fairness of our times. There is zero control over how the money is spent, and we witnessed many cases of people perceiving it with no right to, universal income harvesting, corruption, and so on. At least regulate how the money is spent and double, triple check the requests to perceive universal income.
- zx8080 3y ago
  What country is it?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It's not UBI if taxpayers don't get money too. UBI means everybody gets money. In a balanced scheme, those with an average income should be receiving about the same amount as they pay in extra taxes.
  - thefz 3y ago
    It's a minimum income for jobless and unemployed, but the rest of my point stands.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
There can be quite a difference between people who can make every dollar count compared to those who have never done such a thing.

20 points by elsewhen 3y ago

> Austin gave 135 low-income households $1,000 each month for a year, and tracked how they used the money and affected their lives. The result, one year later, was that they mostly used the money to pay their rent and other housing costs, according to a new report. This suggests that the money flows directly to landlords. If you give this to everyone, rents will rise by about $1,000/month. I'd recommend against policies like this. Australia has a lot of policies that push money into the housing market and it just means that sooner or later nobody can afford a house. In a practical sense, the only way for people to get better lives is to work better jobs. If people get more money, they just fight to change the distribution of presently available stuff. To cause sustainable improvements, people need to have the skills, knowhow and opportunity to produce more/higher quality stuff.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
>In a practical sense, the only way for people to get better lives is to work better jobs. If people get more money, they just fight to change the distribution of presently available stuff. To cause sustainable improvements, people need to have the skills, knowhow and opportunity to produce more/higher quality stuff. Now do inflation and people who already have skills and are forced to work multiple jobs to afford to live somewhere to do the first job, i.e., NHS workers in the UK. And yet we have council housing here, but the waiting lists are long, and we have plenty of unoccupied and unused properties under private ownership. These are complex issues and it starts with property being treated as an "investment" or a revenue stream rather than what it is—shelter.
- roenxi 3y ago
  The UK's energy availability has collapsed 30% since 2000. Yeah, there are no good jobs. If energy policy gets screwed up that badly, there are really not many options except admitting mistakes were made and doing something sensible going forward. I've been advocating deregulating nuclear power and looking for cheap energy that way for a long time. Possibly renewables has also gotten cheap enough to cover the gap, although realistically it has so much political support the fact that it hasn't suggests it is uneconomic. China just built lots of coal plants. Life has been on the up-and-up for the average Chinese worker. Weird how that works out. Part of helping people get good jobs involves allowing capitalists to build power stations. Handing out $1,000 checks to random families is unlikely to help with that. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom#per-capita-what-is-the-average-energy-consumption-per-person https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom#per...
  - fulafel 3y ago
    From another perspective the UK had the problem of high energy availability (semi-petro-state style). Housing is built so that it needs cheap gas to practically heat. If you go a bit north to colder climates in Europe, people don't have gas, but they spend less on heating.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Yes, been thinking about this too in the past year or so, it's very interesting, but doesn't seem like many people around here in Liverpool are talking about it. A lot of these old houses just aren't built without fossil fuels in mind. I remember coal!
bruce511 3y ago
I hear you, and you make a logical point, if better jobs were out there. Ultimately though there are shortages of lots of things, housing and jobs being but two of them. In an ideal world, an increase in rent would increase the value of housing, which would make building housing more valuable and thus more houses eould be built, thus reducing the cost of housing, thus balancing the equation. Land ownership, zoning, and the cost of commuting to low-paid jobs works against that. One could argue that the homeless of say california move to the unoccupied housing of say detroit, but that presumes there are jobs in detriot. In reality of course there are sufficient resources (food, housing etc) for everyone. But distributing that for the common good, rather than individual gain is a sticky problem.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
If you gave $1000/month to everyone, it wouldn’t necessarily push rent up by $1000. Supply and demand still holds, people have an extra $1k to bid up rents, but that only applies if supply is really tight. In reality, rents are likely to increase not by that much. If you pay for the $1k via progressive taxation, then it will make the lives of people at the low end a bit better, at the cost of making high end a bit worse. The only way to make everyone’s lives better is to increase supply in the supply and demand equation, we get that via improved productivity, which happens via better jobs where your time is worth more.
cam_l 3y ago
By that logic, if people work better jobs and they get more money then that must flow to landlords too. I don't see how producing higher quality stuff changes that metric en masse.. unless it's producing more houses. But I agree with your (unstated) point, basic income also needs tighter limits imposed on rent seeking behaviour. But I reckon we need tighter limits on rent seeking behaviour anyway.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I'm not going to argue. But I've had a little time to order my thoughts so I'll expand on my comment. This is a classic pincer manoeuvre in class warfare, where the top of the pyramid brings in a policy that extracts X from the middle class, then divvies it up at at a 10%-90% split between the lower and upper class. The majority of the benefit goes to the landlords. It is a cynical policy. The actual policy that is good for everyone is to generate more wealth so that more of the lower class moves into the middle class. That would be policies that increase the housing stock, removal of policies that unduly favour rent seeking, or the classic land tax that nobody wealthy wants to talk about. We've been at this for centuries - redistribution is not the way to set people up for success. Giving them opportunities to work hard on valuable things is.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Rent increases are capped by the ability of renters to move someplace cheaper. UBI removes place dependencies that reduce people's abilities to move, so it can also have a down ward tendency on average rent. UBI will be a win for landlords with reasonably priced rents in locations with fewer jobs, but it shouldn't enable exorbitant increases elsewhere. Rent is a function mostly of supply. Fix that and you fix rent UBI or no.

thefz 3y ago

My country is currently handing out universal income, which I am vehemently against. Taking money out of the pockets of taxpayers and handing it over to those too lazy to work, additionally disincentivizing them to work, is one of the worst violations of public fairness of our times. There is zero control over how the money is spent, and we witnessed many cases of people perceiving it with no right to, universal income harvesting, corruption, and so on. At least regulate how the money is spent and double, triple check the requests to perceive universal income.

zx8080 3y ago
What country is it?
bryanlarsen 3y ago
It's not UBI if taxpayers don't get money too. UBI means everybody gets money. In a balanced scheme, those with an average income should be receiving about the same amount as they pay in extra taxes.
- thefz 3y ago
  It's a minimum income for jobless and unemployed, but the rest of my point stands.

fuzzfactor 3y ago

There can be quite a difference between people who can make every dollar count compared to those who have never done such a thing.