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Of course, a sufficiently high ABI would have welfare gotten rid of: no more free housing, schooling, nothing: just live with your ABI. To really calculate the

Of course, a sufficiently high ABI would have welfare gotten rid of: no more free housing, schooling, nothing: just live with your ABI. To really calculate the cost of ABI, you need to subtract the cost of welfare.

smsm42 13y ago
That won't work. If it worked, we woudn't need free housing, schooling etc right now - giving people money would be much easier. The problem is that money is fungible - if you give people money instead of free housing, they'd just by some crap on it and then will come back to you and complain they have nowhere to live, and you're back to square one. That's why there are so many non-monetary benefits - because you can't sell free schooling and buy beer or fancy shoes or a lottery ticket on it. Some benefits - like free phones - can be sold, and they are actively abused and sold.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "The problem is that money is fungible - if you give people money instead of free housing, they'd just by some crap on it and then will come back to you and complain they have nowhere to live, and you're back to square one." That's the fear that leads to all the specific help, but the experiments with unconditional cash show that is not what happens.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    So far I've seen all the experiments conducted in remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with welfare state. What I'd like is to see something like that somewhere in Chicago. I.e. remove all fringe benefits, monetize them and convert to cash payments, and see how that goes. I suspect the result would be much different.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      You've missed several relevant studies. First, the Mincome experiment in Manitoba (confusingly, while "Minimum Income" is something different than "Basic Income", the experiment did test "Basic Income"), which ran for five years in the 1970s and found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome Second, there was a case in London recently where a large lump sum was given to each of 13 long-term homeless men. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-t... Third, unconditional income on an Indian reservation (derived from Casino profits) showed a substantial improvement in the welfare of children from poor families: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens-when-the-poor-receive-a-stipend/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens... You can absolutely find nits to pick about all of these, but they are not "remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with the welfare state". I'd love to see an experiment conducted in Chicago or wherever else, but if people in all of the above, diverse situations (some of whom certainly have experience with a welfare state) behave one way it starts to be perverse to expect something different for an arbitrary new group of people (which isn't to say we couldn't be surprised or shouldn't do more research, to a point).

smsm42 13y ago

That won't work. If it worked, we woudn't need free housing, schooling etc right now - giving people money would be much easier. The problem is that money is fungible - if you give people money instead of free housing, they'd just by some crap on it and then will come back to you and complain they have nowhere to live, and you're back to square one. That's why there are so many non-monetary benefits - because you can't sell free schooling and buy beer or fancy shoes or a lottery ticket on it. Some benefits - like free phones - can be sold, and they are actively abused and sold.

dllthomas 13y ago
"The problem is that money is fungible - if you give people money instead of free housing, they'd just by some crap on it and then will come back to you and complain they have nowhere to live, and you're back to square one." That's the fear that leads to all the specific help, but the experiments with unconditional cash show that is not what happens.
- smsm42 13y ago
  So far I've seen all the experiments conducted in remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with welfare state. What I'd like is to see something like that somewhere in Chicago. I.e. remove all fringe benefits, monetize them and convert to cash payments, and see how that goes. I suspect the result would be much different.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    You've missed several relevant studies. First, the Mincome experiment in Manitoba (confusingly, while "Minimum Income" is something different than "Basic Income", the experiment did test "Basic Income"), which ran for five years in the 1970s and found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome Second, there was a case in London recently where a large lump sum was given to each of 13 long-term homeless men. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-t... Third, unconditional income on an Indian reservation (derived from Casino profits) showed a substantial improvement in the welfare of children from poor families: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens-when-the-poor-receive-a-stipend/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/what-happens... You can absolutely find nits to pick about all of these, but they are not "remote places with extremely poor people having no experience with the welfare state". I'd love to see an experiment conducted in Chicago or wherever else, but if people in all of the above, diverse situations (some of whom certainly have experience with a welfare state) behave one way it starts to be perverse to expect something different for an arbitrary new group of people (which isn't to say we couldn't be surprised or shouldn't do more research, to a point).