Stockton, CA Tested Universal Basic Income. Here’s How Recipients Spent It | Hacker News Reader

Stockton, CA Tested Universal Basic Income. Here’s How Recipients Spent It

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28 pointsMontagFTB17 comments

>Plus, he said previous studies have shown people don’t spend the money on frivolous things.

Serious question that I've had for a while: how can anyone actually say this about money, in any domain? It seems like because money is fungible, it would be useless to try to say where a particular $500 went unless it was the only money the participants spent that month. How does research like this account for that?

You withdrew some money from an ATM last night, right? Thinking it was from your salary? Actually that was drug money.

The bank isn't useless, because it keeps track of how much money it receives and hands out, and from whom. So even if you got a note that has been in some drug smuggler's hands, the bank isn't useless.

The researchers do much the same, except with less precision. The bank has full insight into who deposits, transfers and withdraws, the researchers only partial insight into the income and spending of the research subjects. But they can estimate how good their insight is and take steps to improve it. Their results are as precise as their insight is complete. Their results won't be as precise as your bank statement, but they can be precise enough to be useful. After all, the researches can set the terms their experiment so as to get enough data.

From the data, 12%+ either didn’t want to work or were working part time. I’m all for helping people in need, but not when I have to spend my hard earned money on someone that doesn’t want to earn their way.

Serious Question: is there a reason why this percentage isn’t given a public service job in return for this “basic income”? My first though is to let them help their community and in return they are assisted financially rather than just giving out free money.

Then it would be a jobs program and not universal basic income.

People are interested in UBI for as variety of reasons, including possible futures where there are simply not jobs for the majority of humans due to automation, AI, and robotics.

Perhaps that might happen in hundreds of years but in our lifetimes there won't be robots that can do trail maintenance in rugged terrain, or babysit small children, or paint an original mural on a public wall. So I'll never support wasting tax money on UBI. Bring on a public jobs program, like those we had during the Great Depression.

Why won't we have those things in our lifetimes? None of those seem like insurmountable problems even given today's technology.

A public jobs/infrastructure program would work something like this: various states would lobby for money to spend in their states, $billions in large contracts would be awarded to politically connected corporations that would bill at $100/hr keep a large percentage and subcontract the work at $40/hr to smaller businesses that in turn would keep a percentage and hire people to do the work for $15/hr. That is trickle down economics.

If instead you distributed the $billions to every citizen in the country, the vast majority of the money would be spent in local economies on things like day care, car or home repair, taking your kids in for dental cleaning. That is a trickle up economy.

I too reasoned that UBI was liberal social nonsense. But I've been following Andrew Yang's presidential campaign and his justifications make sense from a capitalist point of view. As Yang points out - this is capitalism that doesn't start at zero. It has benefits. Check out his long interviews on Youtube. The Joe Rogan interview is a good place to start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8. If you don't have the time check out his talk with the AARP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXQ3DEFI1eg or the AFL-CIO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlt3nyZdnmI

> the vast majority of the money would be spent in local economies

Or on amazon which is pretty much a front for sending money to China.

yes, we collectively take the potential for some people to abuse it, because the cost of those people abusing it is lower than the cost of not providing universal welfare.

The lack of fallback welfare means that businesses can underpay employees because employment without fallback is not a free market. It restricts who can create new startups to essentially the rich or well connected, again because you need something to fall back on when your startup fails - which most do.

All social welfare systems (UBI or whatever) work with the very basic observation that it is cheaper over all to provide the services even if some people abuse it.

> Of the participants, 43% are working full or part time while 2% are unemployed and not looking for work. Another 8% are retired, while 20% are disabled and 10% stay home to care for children or an aging parent.

It's slightly disingenuous to classify retirees as "don't want to work," though I suppose that's the definition of retirement.

> 20% are disabled

WTF? Is this just an odd (or intentional) sample of people, or are that many people actually disabled?

> 10% stay home to care for children or an aging parent

This one I get. As one's post-tax income gets closer to the cost of elder/child care, outsourcing it becomes less cost effective.

Serious question, why should anyone have to work?

It's easy to imagine an alternate reality where UBI is a thing and working is optional.

I think there's a legitimate case to be made that freeing people from labor should be societal goal.

IIRC people dont do well without work (much of our identity is tied up in working) . Of course you can argue that could change if society changes. But individuals who find themselves without work (due to rapid wealth changes, or losing work) often find themselves depressed

I always hear about identity being tied to work, but I wonder if that's been tested in recent years. Pre-internet, sure, that makes sense. But now that you can do literally anything you want as long as you have the free time to learn it, and you can be instantly connected to like-minded groups. I'm not so sure that work is the source of identity that people think it is.

Losing work isn't the same as not being financially coerced into working in order survive.

Need work in your life to add structure and connections? Great. You can do that even if you can afford to not work. Better, you can be more flexible about how and where you do it. More on your terms. You don't need to turn down jobs because they don't pay enough, or even at all.

To be clear of the 12% you mentioned 10% were caregivers and 2% were unemployed and did not or could not find work.

> But 40% of the money has been withdrawn as cash, making it harder for researchers to know how it was used.

So 40% of it could have been spent on vices and they're just "Trusting" them and then reporting it as evidence?

Discussion posted around the same time as this thread with 70 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21153063

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