4 ms·

Not shocking because this is HuffPo, but this isn't a good article, and I suspect it's because Mincome (minimum income) did not really provably work (I'm not sa

by wdewind 12y ago

Not shocking because this is HuffPo, but this isn't a good article, and I suspect it's because Mincome (minimum income) did not really provably work (I'm not saying it didn't work, I'm saying there isn't data showing it did). The article is filled with anecdotes of people who appreciated having extra money given to them by the government (shocking). The only time it actually get's close to examining the big picture is here: In 2011, Forget released a paper distilling how Mincome affected people’s health using census data. She found overall hospitalization rates (for accidents, injuries, and mental health diagnoses) dropped in the group who received basic income supplements. AFAICT it did not examine whether or not this made the Mincome project "worth it." So there's nothing here really, or maybe there is, but not in this article.

_delirium 12y ago
I agree; this was a pretty disappointing article. It doesn't add much information beyond just the bare fact of pointing out that the Mincome experiment took place, colored with some anecdotes. Even the short Wikipedia article is more informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
WestCoastJustin 12y ago
This seems to come up now and again, so there is actually many articles about this topic floating around. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview [1, 2], for something little more in-depth check out the University of Manitoba's TOWN WITH NO POVERTY report [3], even Al Jazeera actually has a nice piece with interview from several recipients [4]. If you search Google there is countless good pieces about this experiment [5, 6, ..]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome [3] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pd... [4] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-cana... [5] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-poverty-experiment-called-a-success-1.868562 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert... [6] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/dauphins-great-experiment.html http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/dauphins...
- notahacker 12y ago
  That's kind of the OP's point though: these articles, including the academic one, are all rich in anecdotes and poor in anything resembling hard analysis. We learn that people are warmly nostalgic bout experiments which gave their community more money from outside, that Dauphin residents saw improvements to their general health relative to other areas, which admittedly may have been helped by a relatively new hospital, and that withdrawals from the labour market were small, though people knew the programme was a temporary experiment, the payments weren't that big and labour market conditions were very different then. Major hypothesized downsides to universal BI such as effects on local inflation (of housing costs in particular) weren't recorded as part of the original study. I've always found it strange that Hacker News, a site populated by mathematically-inclined people responsible for all kinds of ingenious micro-optimizations to maximise customer lifetime value by market segment or optimise the ads displayed to demographic X, has so much love for the idea that the optimal formula for distributing benefits intended to tackle poverty is as simple as $WELFARE_BUDGET / $POPULATION_SIZE. Especially based on evidence as thin as these articles
  - ufmace 12y ago
    Woah, wait a second - I hadn't thought of it until I read your "move money from outside", but it sounds like a fundamental part of this scheme that it was financed from outside the region it took place in. IMHO, that makes it basically worthless for any kind of analysis on doing this on a national scale. Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Exactly what you do with that money is a minor detail compared to the fact that it's coming in from the outside. This allows them to completely ignore the essential factor of how to go about taxing the population to get the money to give to those deemed in need, and what the impacts of those taxes and the mincome scheme as a whole will have on the mindset of people in the region.
    - phaemon 12y ago
      > Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Does it not? Your statement is completely wrong so it may well be worth analysing. Google "Dutch Disease" for an example. Check out the "McCrone Report" for ways to avoid this happening.
unchocked 12y ago
There is something here: that basic income has been tried. I wasn't aware of that, and although there's precious little conclusion to be drawn it is important to know that it has happened.
- wdewind 12y ago
  That's my point: it hasn't been tried. It was "tried" in a hyper localized economy, temporarily, without proper data being recorded. For all intents and purposes we still know nothing.

by wdewind 12y ago

_delirium 12y ago

I agree; this was a pretty disappointing article. It doesn't add much information beyond just the bare fact of pointing out that the Mincome experiment took place, colored with some anecdotes. Even the short Wikipedia article is more informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

WestCoastJustin 12y ago

This seems to come up now and again, so there is actually many articles about this topic floating around. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview [1, 2], for something little more in-depth check out the University of Manitoba's TOWN WITH NO POVERTY report [3], even Al Jazeera actually has a nice piece with interview from several recipients [4]. If you search Google there is countless good pieces about this experiment [5, 6, ..]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Annual_Income [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome [3] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20%282%29.pd... [4] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-cana... [5] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-poverty-experiment-called-a-success-1.868562 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert... [6] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/dauphins-great-experiment.html http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/dauphins...

notahacker 12y ago
That's kind of the OP's point though: these articles, including the academic one, are all rich in anecdotes and poor in anything resembling hard analysis. We learn that people are warmly nostalgic bout experiments which gave their community more money from outside, that Dauphin residents saw improvements to their general health relative to other areas, which admittedly may have been helped by a relatively new hospital, and that withdrawals from the labour market were small, though people knew the programme was a temporary experiment, the payments weren't that big and labour market conditions were very different then. Major hypothesized downsides to universal BI such as effects on local inflation (of housing costs in particular) weren't recorded as part of the original study. I've always found it strange that Hacker News, a site populated by mathematically-inclined people responsible for all kinds of ingenious micro-optimizations to maximise customer lifetime value by market segment or optimise the ads displayed to demographic X, has so much love for the idea that the optimal formula for distributing benefits intended to tackle poverty is as simple as $WELFARE_BUDGET / $POPULATION_SIZE. Especially based on evidence as thin as these articles
- ufmace 12y ago
  Woah, wait a second - I hadn't thought of it until I read your "move money from outside", but it sounds like a fundamental part of this scheme that it was financed from outside the region it took place in. IMHO, that makes it basically worthless for any kind of analysis on doing this on a national scale. Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Exactly what you do with that money is a minor detail compared to the fact that it's coming in from the outside. This allows them to completely ignore the essential factor of how to go about taxing the population to get the money to give to those deemed in need, and what the impacts of those taxes and the mincome scheme as a whole will have on the mindset of people in the region.
  - phaemon 12y ago
    > Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Does it not? Your statement is completely wrong so it may well be worth analysing. Google "Dutch Disease" for an example. Check out the "McCrone Report" for ways to avoid this happening.

unchocked 12y ago

There is something here: that basic income has been tried. I wasn't aware of that, and although there's precious little conclusion to be drawn it is important to know that it has happened.

wdewind 12y ago
That's my point: it hasn't been tried. It was "tried" in a hyper localized economy, temporarily, without proper data being recorded. For all intents and purposes we still know nothing.