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Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

So instead of trying to allocate limited resources to those who most need it we should instead blindly split those resources equally among everyone? And this will help the poor how?

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The wealthy will, in effect, receive nothing, as their taxes will increase more than they will receive from UBI.

Two of the strongest arguments for UBI are: 1) we waste a lot of money administering welfare services. UBI is designed to be inexpensive to administer, which directs more money to the poor. 2) research is beginning to suggest that direct cash transfers have better long term impact per dollar spent than just about any other intervention. see, e.g. research on GiveDirectly's impact

The wealthy will, in effect, receive nothing, as their taxes will increase more than they will receive from UBI.

Yes, but what about the working/low-middle class who currently mostly doesn't pay for nor receive welfare? That's money that could be allocated for the actual poor.

The point is that you spend more money trying to do this, and help less people, then just not worrying about it. Attempts at identifying the truly needy end up mostly excluding them and making the aid less helpful overall.

>The point is that you spend more money trying to do this, and help less people, then just not worrying about it.

People keep repeating this. Go ahead and give us the actual numbers involved in your claims to back it up, since it fails even the most basic of smell tests.

>1) we waste a lot of money administering welfare services. UBI is designed to be inexpensive to administer, which directs more money to the poor.

I find it hard to believe we waste more money administering welfare than we will transfer to those who really don't need it under the need-blind UBI.

Under UBI we'll be giving money to many, many people who need it less than the current welfare recipients, and even UBI will require administration.

A solution (UBI) that claims to help a group (the actual needy) that is not tailored to administer to that group is unlikely to benefit them, especially since it's now going to split the fixed amount of benefits to others not in the group.

>see, e.g. research on GiveDirectly's impact

What works in Kenya does not necessarily work at every location and economy. It's not like we have not studied this question in the US for nearly a century, and recent research on foreign third world cases does not overturn a century of research on first world economic aid.

And this is not an argument for UBI. At best it would be an argument to change current welfare programs to give cash aid to those already eligible for welfare.

Do you happen to have any pointers to such research? If anything rigorous (comparable to GiveDirectly's randomized controlled trials) has been done in the US about the effect of just handing out cash, I would really be interested.

Some studies:

http://econweb.tamu.edu/common/files/workshops/PERC%20Applie...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387813...

http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/cfg...

Articles related to the studies:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/25/240590433/what-...

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-... (direct cash vs CCTs)

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3049642/solving-inequality/how-to...

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/wel...

Those are great, thanks! All bookmarked.

Another good read [1]. Here is a quote from the author of some key papers in favor of cash to certain poor, also the author of some pop articles on the idea:

"If I were an enterprising young researcher looking for an idea and experiments that will prove powerful in five years, I would try to find the stake I can drive into the heart of the cash transfer movement."

He states that giving cash is useful if the person is enterprising, such as trying to start a business, and direct cash is what is holding them back. I doubt this is most poor people, especially in the US. Otherwise, cash is not as useful as other poverty alleviation methods.

[1] http://chrisblattman.com/2013/06/27/why-cash-transfers-to-th...

This is quite an interesting paper, thanks. But the idea that cash is useful only if the person is enterprising was not a result of this study, but an opinion that motivated its setup. As they write in the conclusions, it was "our conceptual framework" that suggests that the study has targeted the right (enterprising) people. Which I agree with, considering the variables they were interested in measuring.

Excerpts from the setup:

Groups had to submit a written proposal stating how they would use the grant for non-agricultural skills training and enterprise start-up costs. [...] The central government asked district governments to nominate 2.5 times the number of groups they could fund. [...] Successful proposals [note: randomized] received a large lump sum cash transfer [...] with no government monitoring thereafter.

Excerpts from the conclusions:

These results show that cash grants to groups of young people who develop business plans have large and persistent impacts in moving underemployed into non-agricultural jobs, increasing earnings and work hours. [...] In the end, YOP appears to have reached a group of motivated, able young people, who on average were neither exceptionally poor nor uneducated relative to their peers, in an economy with little financial depth but bouncing back from civil strife. Our conceptual framework suggests this is exactly the group to benefit from a windfall.

The argument behind the U in UBI (universal) is that it removes incentives against work (cases where working harder yields less money), costs less because there's no effort to keep people out, and is repaid as taxes by those with larger incomes.

I'd need to see numbers again, but it's raw numbers we should use to decide how to run an economy, not rhetoric about "helping the poor how?"

The idea is everyone ends up better off because you don't need a giant civil service bureaucracy to apply arcane rules about who does and does not qualify for various subsidies.

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