If only there were a group of people with sufficient money they never had to work! We could study them and see what they did to amuse themselves.
What I'm really curious to personally answer is: what would happen if everybody would be guaranteed a basic income? What kind of problems would it introduce? Would the new minimum income become a poor tool because of corresponding price increases (to capture that income)? Or would it work well long term?
That's why I'd love to see a small country. Preferably not Switzerland or Nordic. Because they've been able to create programs that others have a hard time replicating. A country with a more mixed population (religions, races, education levels).
For example, an important question is if the implementation would require disbanding Obamacare, reverting to the old system, etc. The ability to obtain healthcare can sway a lot of outcomes. I might have pursued a more entrepreneurial path in the past if I had an option of basic income in addition to healthcare.
Same with drug consumption. I would question any "higher drug use" measure as selection bias -- investment bankers aren't generally being drug tested are they? That doesn't mean the overwhelming majority are not eager to earn a productive living.
I think it would be great to drug test for it (but damn expensive and not very libertarian). I bet you'd see a lot of well off people not opting for the free income because they "don't need it" whereas they'd line up for it without a drug test.
The notion that we should drug test welfare recipients is just an outgrowth of condescending Calvinist morality.
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
https://www.nber.org/chapters/c11165.pdf
Why not just spend 2 minutes googling like I did before posting ?
http://www.saprp.org/pm_keyResFind.cfm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/21/house...
I don't know why we are discussing drug tests for welfare, but simple arithmetic provides a very low bar for them to be cost effective. Google suggests a drug test costs $10-30. If welfare costs $15,000/year, then you only need to have a 0.2% positive rate for it to be worth it.
Do you think folks on welfare do drugs at a rate lower than 0.2%?
Yes, it's disputed. Assuming that you/the GP are correct, and that data do exist that people on welfare have reduced "work effort" (how is that measured?), increased fertility, and increased drug consumption, then you of all people know that correlation doesn't mean causation. It could be that their increased fertility and/or drug consumption caused them to go on to welfare. Or vice versa.
Either way, it would be very hard to draw any conclusions from such data outside of correlation.
In addition to confounding, you also run into lots of statistical biases in such data. As someone else pointed out, poor people are screened for drugs at much higher rates than non-poor, because the jobs that poor people work in are much more likely to require them. As such, even if such data exists, it would be very suspect.
Furthermore, drug testing the general population, even one that has marginally higher drug use rates (and I've seen no convincing data of this either way) runs into the problem of predictive value and false positives (for the same reason screening the general female population under 40 for breast cancer results in massively high rates of false positives).
What do you mean 'worth it'? Do you think that the benefits to society of giving someone $15k/yr in welfare are $0?
If so, why not argue for just abolishing social welfare programs altogether--you can even save yourself the cost of all those drug tests!
If not, why do you think society should forgo those benefits because the recipient failed a drug test?
One way to pay out less is to create a barrier such as drug testing. according to the math, drug testing is "worth it" to that end. Its also fairly politically acceptable compared other more extreme examples such as lowering the welfare amount, random denials or killing poor people.
Naturally, I'm not in favor of any of those options.
Consider their headline number - Missouri. Testing cost $336k and found 48 drug users. Assuming welfare costs $10k/person, it saved $480k making it a net positive. All the other states they discuss had significantly higher returns (5-10x).
This all assumes not a single drug user was deterred from applying and also that not a single welfare recipient was deterred from using drugs.
Further, none of these measure the question of whether poor people do more or less drugs. Most of these programs only drug test some people and have expensive human-administered programs to decide who to test: "complete a written questionnaire about drug use" “suspicion-based drug testing for each applicant”, “reasonable suspicion exists” that they might be illegally using “a controlled substance or controlled substance analog.”
The fact that these programs found very few drug users is merely due to the fact that welfare recipients aren't dumb enough to put "yes I do drugs" on a written test.
This article is pulling the social sciences shuffle - find a socially undesirable conclusion, write an abstract hinting that it's false, and bury the truth in the data tables.
Nevertheless, these results are really astonishing and I think you're looking at them all wrong. Some bureaucrat in Utah thought that 460 welfare recipients were suspicious and ordered them tested, but only 18 of them tested positive. The bureaucrat was wrong 96% of the time, and the 4% usage rate is both under the drug use rate for the general population of that state (6% self-reported) and over-represented (because these were the 10% specifically selected people that the agency thought were using drugs).
Anyway, your profit and loss analysis seems fishy to me. It is highly unlikely that by denying 14 applicants their welfare checks the state of Utah saved anything near 100% of the face value of said check. In fact I would say it is quite likely that the state paid some fraction (with no upper bound) of that on subsequent support for and/or enforcement upon the unsupported people and their families, not to mention the general economic loss of not putting that money in motion.
not to mention the general economic loss of not putting that money in motion.
Can you explain what this means? Sometimes I hear language like this describing Keynesian stimulus, but you do know we aren't in a recession, right? We don't have any slack labor force that can be tricked into working by reducing their real wages while holding nominal wages fixed.
Point is it could be the wrong direction. We don't really know yet how it should be implemented. Experiments like this are what is going to tell us.
"Welfare" is in the US Constitution.