3 ms·

Participation in the survey wasn’t required to receive the funds for any of the groups. The link to the study is right there. There was no control group. That

Participation in the survey wasn’t required to receive the funds for any of the groups. The link to the study is right there. There was no control group. That term is well defined, and giving an intervention is the definition of a treatment group.

hollerith 2y ago
What cause do you imagine you are helping with your rigid insistence on your definition? What good do you think you might be doing?
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The claim that giving $50 is a control assumes or at least hints that you would get the same outcome giving $0 as you would $50. Because the study showed that there were basically the same results across all treatment groups in some categories (notably, rental housing attainment), the logical conclusion is that giving $0 is the same as giving $1k in affecting the rate of rental housing attainment, if you accept that "study group c" -as the study authors labelled it- was a control. Of course if you read the data, you can see that there is noticeable effects unrelated to housing attainment that scale with more money. So cynically, which is happening a lot in this thread, people are saying that there is basically no benefit to providing additional money at all, which is a conclusion that can only be arrived at by assuming that $0 == $50. As I pointed out elsewhere, economic theory around marginal utility says that the first $50 is going to provide more utility than any subsequent amount. For someone on the street, $50/month may well be a massive improvement in QOL. Put this way, since there is no control group, we can't tell how much of ANY of the effects comes from the first $50 vs. people just being able to pull themselves out of homelessness through other means. We can make assumptions, but that is a great way to come to wrong conclusions. There is a good reason that most hard sciences will not accept a study that doesn't have an actual control group. To answer your question about what good I am doing: 1. I am educating people as to why a rigorous control is necessary to reach solid conclusions, and hopefully getting them to understand why a business insider article is a shit substitute for reading the actual data. 2. I am pointing out that we cannot conclude that $0 == $50 == $1,000 when it comes to housing attainment because that data doesn't exist (we CAN say that in this study $50/mo == $1000/mo when it comes to housing outcomes) I want people to understand that this study is far from conclusive in regards to rental attainment.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    OK, thanks for answering. Almost nobody has literally zero income, and those that do probably have someone taking care of them every day, i.e., are not homeless because they are living with whomever is taking care of them. I'm talking about the US because that is the only country I know well. Theft, prostitution, buying a pack of cigarettes, then selling individual cigarettes, acting as a lookout for a drug dealer and getting welfare benefits by providing a fake ID are examples of ways of getting a little income -- and my guess is that for most homeless the income easily exceeds $50 a month.

hollerith 2y ago

What cause do you imagine you are helping with your rigid insistence on your definition? What good do you think you might be doing?

dghlsakjg 2y ago
The claim that giving $50 is a control assumes or at least hints that you would get the same outcome giving $0 as you would $50. Because the study showed that there were basically the same results across all treatment groups in some categories (notably, rental housing attainment), the logical conclusion is that giving $0 is the same as giving $1k in affecting the rate of rental housing attainment, if you accept that "study group c" -as the study authors labelled it- was a control. Of course if you read the data, you can see that there is noticeable effects unrelated to housing attainment that scale with more money. So cynically, which is happening a lot in this thread, people are saying that there is basically no benefit to providing additional money at all, which is a conclusion that can only be arrived at by assuming that $0 == $50. As I pointed out elsewhere, economic theory around marginal utility says that the first $50 is going to provide more utility than any subsequent amount. For someone on the street, $50/month may well be a massive improvement in QOL. Put this way, since there is no control group, we can't tell how much of ANY of the effects comes from the first $50 vs. people just being able to pull themselves out of homelessness through other means. We can make assumptions, but that is a great way to come to wrong conclusions. There is a good reason that most hard sciences will not accept a study that doesn't have an actual control group. To answer your question about what good I am doing: 1. I am educating people as to why a rigorous control is necessary to reach solid conclusions, and hopefully getting them to understand why a business insider article is a shit substitute for reading the actual data. 2. I am pointing out that we cannot conclude that $0 == $50 == $1,000 when it comes to housing attainment because that data doesn't exist (we CAN say that in this study $50/mo == $1000/mo when it comes to housing outcomes) I want people to understand that this study is far from conclusive in regards to rental attainment.
- hollerith 2y ago
  OK, thanks for answering. Almost nobody has literally zero income, and those that do probably have someone taking care of them every day, i.e., are not homeless because they are living with whomever is taking care of them. I'm talking about the US because that is the only country I know well. Theft, prostitution, buying a pack of cigarettes, then selling individual cigarettes, acting as a lookout for a drug dealer and getting welfare benefits by providing a fake ID are examples of ways of getting a little income -- and my guess is that for most homeless the income easily exceeds $50 a month.