An experiment in giving cash to recently homeless people [video]

Ok it's clear the chopper left.

I empathize with this person. It’s clear from his story he does not have a support network.

I think many of the decisions you make that are good decisions are helped by your friends and family. When people act alone or without support, they tend to make bad decisions. (Not to say this is always the case, just something I’ve noticed and felt in myself - I make bad decisions when I feel alone)

The first mistake he made was not seeking assistance after the stabbing incident. Either he didn’t trust anyone or he simply didn’t have anyone he could turn to to take him in. Many people would be able to go back to their parents or stay with a friend after something like that, but he felt that going homeless was the only option.

Even if I wanted to go homeless, I can think of a number of people who would literally drag me off the street and in to their house. Where was that for this person?

Surgery is a decision that an individual cannot make alone, it’s too overwhelming, you need support to get through that.

I think he accepted the surgery but regrets it for some reason. That’s how I read it at least.

A lot of Chiropractic practice is about regaining and preserving good posture and many places employ actual physical therapists and massage therapists. It's true they put too much stock in the spine being the root all ailments, but it's not a total sham. They may not be medical doctors but they certainly do do evidence-based treatments and understand anatomy. From your comment it sounds like you've never been to one and fundamentally don't understand what they are about.

> I have heard too many stories of injuries and paralysis.

There is a saying that every doctor has a graveyard. Chiropractors are no different.

I don't require any evidence, if given practitioner helps me with my problem, while traditional ones can't. It amazes me that people always need someone to blame. How about taking responsibility for your own health and your body well-being?

So why does every NFL and MLB team have a chiropractor on staff and why does the US Olympic team also hire them specifically (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_chiropractic)? If it’s a sham, why would these athletes and their organizations take a risk, especially when money is on the line? Also from what I am reading, serious injuries from chiropractic practice is very rare, and so your claim of “injures more than it helps” seems off, or at least misleading.

It seems to me that your depiction of chiropractors isn’t the whole story. A practice may be framed as a pseudoscience but still be effective or worthwhile, perhaps?

Thanks but I must disagree. Will you come with me awhile and let's look for the bigger fish here before pointing the finger?

Are you aware that for the poor, as I sadly came to find out, the injury attorney is in charge? Just like a coach who calls the plays and decides which players to put on the field, the atty decides on which doctor chiro surgeon etc to send the victim to.

The injury lawyer sent me to a chiropractor who has apparently been in business a long time.

Let me ask you: of all those stories you've heard of injury and paralysis by chiropractors...how many of them resulted from car accidents or other cases where the victim is 'sent' to the chiropractor as opposed to 'choosing' them?

I have met many over these past years who were car accident victims and at least anecdotally it seems like I am not much of an edge case in this specific regard.

I am not trying to argue with you. I guess I am thinking about what you said and I am trying to point out that mere cash payments to homeless are pointless if there are not other changes to these systemic frauds that exploit the poor, the weak, the homeless.

Thank you for this question. I don't have an answer with high confidence right now. Still recovering from a trauma from Monday.

A year ago was different, with less traumas stacking on me.

It seems because a basic evaluation of the extent of my injury has been so elusive.

Im not a quitter but since monday im seriously starting to lean toward pivoting from trying to find work to pursuing disability income status.

If you talk to homeless people a lot of them have interesting origin stories.

Thanks for your question. I do not believe I am a representative example of the homeless population.

But I would venture to say I represent the effects of a culturally biased view of the entire homeless population. A bias that inaccurately portrays homeless as somehow 'deserving' of their miserable situation(s).

Drugs, mental issues, stupidity ... after all I have seen out here these are not typical root causes of homelessness. They are typical consequences of being homeless.

So i was renting a bedroom in a 2bd apartment. It wasnt a motel. I had been living there several months and there were no known issues although I could tell we likely were not to become friends due to differences in value systems. I suspect he has lied successfully many, many, many times in the past.

I like your thinking. But Its hard to clean even a garage with a broken spine, and yes I have tried.

I have been seeking employment out of state too but this the Greater Depression we are in.

Most places do have property taxes. Many of them are significant.

Some of the UBI proposals are extremely expensive. It’s not as simple as extracting wealth from a tiny fraction of wealthy people. The only way to make UBI work will require increasing taxes all the way down to middle class tax brackets.

A middle class person might receive $10,000 of UBI, but see their taxes go up $11,000. Meanwhile a broke college student would receive the $10K UBI with $0 tax increase (or maybe a decrease in taxes)

No central authority has to decide which job is bullshit. I don't think people like doing these bullshit jobs, they do them to survive. Give people UBI and they'll simply quit their telemarketing, soulless middle management, ad tech job...

Some of those people will play video games all day, some will create new tech, some will create art... and as you say, no one is in a position to judge which of those are "productive". It's just important to free people from the need to enrich others just to survive.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. They didn't say anything about banning specific jobs.

> While I agree about the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” in general, who are you to decide what jobs are “productive?”

I don't think OP stated which jobs are important or unimportant. There is some interesting research regarding this issue. I'm paid 6 figures, and the case for my job wouldn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny. There is an entire team of me.

There are plenty of financial motivations to labor other than the threat of shame, lack of healthcare, homelessness & starvation.

There are even plenty of non-financial motivations to labor!

Why not just stop all immigration and tighten and enforce anti corruption laws and close loop holes that allow the 1% and multinational corporations to cheat the system.

Immigration is a big part of the growth economic Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable and it has been horrible for the environment. It also keeps business running profitably.

We have a growing homeless problem. We have racial ghettos. We have Indian reservation. We have an entire manufacturing belt that has been gutted. We have a growing problem of deaths of despair, including suicide and drug addiction. Instead of casually replacing these people with immigrants and allowing the wealthiest 1% to pay little to no taxes and allow companies like Apple and probably all the big tech companies to play offshore tax games, why not help America keep jobs here and increase the pay for those jobs?

This whole growth economics and emotionally manipulating people into accepting immigrants "to do the jobs Americans don't want to do" is one of the most horrific lies I have become aware of. There is no job an American won't do at the right (fair) price. The economy will not crumble if business has no choice but to take less profits and pay better wages.

Nothing will change until the incentive structure changes. I don't see anyone talking much about these things. I see monied interests pushing mass propaganda in order to ultimately keep wages low and keep income gains from increases in productivity going to the top.

Not everyone should or can program. I would rather live in a world where my COL increases if that means that the people around me, city workers, grocery baggers, etc. are payed better. I'm not even sure my COL would increase. I think through above mentioned changes to incentive structures money can be redirected in a more egalitarian way with very little downside.

The important question, IMO, is whether UBI costs less than other measures. It's administratively simple and it can potentially prevent greater costs by virtue of people being unhoused and consuming more services elsewhere.

That's enough for me to call it "effective". Being cheaper and better outcomes on the most difficult endpoints would be even better, of course, but I don't consider that essential.

Doesn't read well tbh. Savings in shelter costs where the only good comparison regarding cost effectiveness and even that they did in a weird way (how did the control also save money on shelter?).

Showing how much more cash savings ppl have after you hand them cash is almost ironic :).

There are many reasons someone can be poor, really bad money management is definitely a prevalent reason.

I chuckled at this post on WSB yesterday. Someone wrote "if I had any cash, I'd buy more GME to average out my cost." Someone wisely replied "this is why you don't have cash."

I think you are taking a wide range of beliefs and summarizing them in the worst sounding way possible. I certainly believe that most homeless people have made some bad decisions to get where they are. I think many if not most of them probably have poor financial skills.

I also believe that many of them were born with a range of disadvantages and could have done very well under other circumstances.

A lot of them also do struggle with addiction and mental illness and it is worth considering that this can mix poorly with handing people a bunch of no strings cash. I don't think that's a reason not to do it at all but it shouldn't be ignored either.

I'm certainly not the worlds biggest expert on homeless people but I volunteer at a needle exchange and have encountered more than most so I'm somewhat speaking from experience. Sweeping this stuff under the rug doesn't make it not true.

> Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of people argue that poor people are only poor because they have poor financial skills

This is certainly a thing. I know people who could be firmly in the middle class, but instead live paycheck to paycheck or worse due to very poor financial decisions they continue to make.

I suggest that 5 of them would be back on the streets within months, and another 5 would only be doing 'ok'.

Many people on the streets are really broken and have a lot of extremely negatively reinforcing habits, to the point wherein they are the most 'opposite of conscientious' we could imagine.

'Money' would just amplify those bad traits.

For example, if you gave a crack addict $1M, why for a second do you even think they would want to even bother undergoing 'training' or 'therapy' of any sort?

The assumption in 'here is a path towards stability' is that the individual is willing and able to even embark upon that path, which is quite a lot of work.

'Highly conscientious and rational actors' who take the steps necessary for stability and prosperity generally are not at the bottom to begin with.

I suggest it might take $500K in effort on the behalf of social services merely to induce some good behaviours.

So yes, $1M spent on social services, maybe free rent, 'on the job training', re-socialization, yes, that might work.

Edit: differentiating here between 'homeless' of various kinds, and 'working poor' obviously. Paying off the mortgage for 'working poor' might work really well to improve people's lives.

Edit: There are homeless people 100M away as I right this as my neighbourhood is mixed. There's a guy I've 'known of' literally for years, and I hear him have other conversations with bystanders. He has access to welfare and social services which is just barely enough to squeak by on rent, food, subsidized electricity, but usually in the summer he makes the choice to rough it, 'outside living' and opts to pay rent in the winter - so he can buy crack (assuming it's crack as that's the drug of choice here) as I see the 'transactions' happening in plain day out in the open. Pouring money on that situation is like pouring gasoline on a fire. There is absolutely no way giving him cash directly is going to help, we literally already do that and we can see the outcome. These situations call for something else.

Would you consider the five-year life outcomes of lottery winners to be a good or poor proxy for this experiment?

I believe you'd get a handful of early deaths, some mediocre outcomes, and maybe 3 or 4 successful people tops out of that experiment.

I think far less would be needed for each person.

If Britney Spears can have conservatorship, why can't other mentally disabled people?

That would be tremendously unfair to working people in or around SF, especially those making $50k or less. That in itself isn't a reason not to raise a bunch of people out of poverty, but what evidence is there that homeless people would move out? One could just as easily argue that most would blow the money on drugs and/or wait around for next year's $50k. Also, is it really a good idea to defund all the programs that this $50k/person pays for in order to turn it into cash handouts? My understanding is that a majority of homeless people are homeless because of an inability to manage their finances and their life, whether we think that's any fault of their own or not. Handing out cash isn't going to fix these people's childhoods, drug addictions, etc. The real way to deal with homelessness is to address the core problems: a poor educational & economic outlook for both young and old, and a thriving underground economy for hard, addictive drugs. These two fuel homelessness, poverty, crime, and child abuse. Watch Mark Laita's Soft White Underbelly: much of this generation may be beyond hope, but the next generation might be helped before they arrive.

$50k per homeless person year? That’s pretty hard to believe without data to back it up. You may very well be correct, but if you know your source, I would appreciate the chance to review it.

It would help some of them, but sadly I think many would not be able to budget the 50k properly and would be homeless again within a few months due to debts, addictions, scams, etc.

Eh , I grew up really poor. A significant number of those homeless people would spend the $50,000 on a new car.

It's just not a very clear issue. I'd argue anyone who doesn't make arrangements to leave California when they catch themselves slipping economically plays at least a part in their homelessness.

In almost every other place in America, you can make out an existence with a bit more than minimum wage. You might not have the best apartment but it's possible.

California, specifically LA and San Francisco are best described as living hells. While a tiny minority is doing fine, most people are either homeless or almost homeless. Even making 100K a year, you're not going to be able to save any money. The vast majority of the city makes less than that.

If it destroys the broader economy to help .5% of people it doesn't particularly matter much how effective it was in helping that .5%.

This applies equally to the top .5% .

Also RV living is probably quite attractive in some ways, it feels almost dirty spending such a large amount of the money you work for paying off someone else's mortgage or enriching them simply for owning stuff.

Living rent-free (or practically so) in a shack or your van is the ultimate insult to society. You're showing everyone else up as idiots. Especially if you don't have to answer to anyone.

People think it's about shelter, but it's actually about status. Not having to do what people tell you to do all the time is very high status. To preserve the conventional status hierarchy you have to be dehumanised, outlawed or "othered".

Anything but decades of servitude to land and capital holders won't be tolerated. That's why the "good people" have to drive you out.

Or don't raise taxes, if you subscribe to the idea that lowering taxes pay for themselves (to the budget).

One of the ideas is that we wouldn't need to raise taxes - simply replace some of the social safety net spending with a baseline monthly income.

On the other hand, if you look at home pricing by year and zip code for the metro, you should see a big bump (or not) as UBI was implemented in that zip code.

It would be interesting, but I suspect most of what you would learn is how fast people are to change their official addresses to something in the zip code, despite not actually residing at said address.

Say whatever you want but don't play the trick of just asserting there is consensus behind your opinion.

There is extremely little consensus regarding inflation right now and because we are in uncharted territory monetarily and in terms of debt levels both public and private, and the consequences(and data) of that can take years to show up(frequently slowly and then all at once) almost everything is speculation, not data driven.

So no, there is not broad consensus that we can just pull some levers and send inflation wherever we want, not even close.

UBI would lead to dramatic inflation in rents in desirable areas. There is only a finite amount of premium real estate.

UBI would just jack up rents by the amount of payment in San Jose or Boulder because the people that want to live there mostly have jobs so their extra UBI would just go to making their commute better.

UBI might help people move from West Virginia to Indianapolis but it won't help people in Bakersfield move to San Jose.

The notion that we can just arbitrarily control inflation in the context of UBI-like spending is not responsible, it's simply not true.

Can you share any relevant evidence regarding inflation being a policy position?

What do the wealthy do with their time? Some of them throw it away worthlessly, others make art. Or start businesses that fail. Some succeed. Some succumb to existential dread of a challenge free life. Some create new challenges.

Why don't poor people deserve the same choices?

I don't understand this argument. People are extremely good at inventing purposes for themselves within their context. If you give people a livable but meager amount of money it's true some people will fritter their life away for a while. But a significant portion of the people on UBI will invent a niche for themselves. The ennui itself is a motivator for people to find something useful to do.

The reason people have a problem with UBI is that we have a tendency to equate our moral- or self-worth with our economic productivity. If you don't draw a salary for services rendered it seems like you're not worth anything.

There are tons of occupations people can have that generate no significant monetary value. Volunteering and taking care of children are two such occupations. These both have tons of value to society. So it's clear to me that economic output is not the only source of value. Maybe it's time for society to recognize the value of those non-economic occupations by paying people for them?

> I think the biggest issue with UBI would be existential ennui. The human being is a beast of burden, we need purpose.

I think that's exactly why it's possible UBI might actually work. We can redistribute away the problem of not having enough money to eat or live, but we can't (and shouldn't) redistribute away the problem of creating a satisfying life for oneself. There must still be an incentive and challenge to improve the world we live in.

>otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment.

It can still be a valid economic experiment, it just isn't UBI.

An experiment is always more limited than the thing it is being used to study.

If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone; just as in an experiment in physics or chemistry you try to simplify the environment so as to both make the signal clearer and to get it done with the resources available.

It's a balancing act. If you insist that the only valid experiment regarding UBI is to give it to everyone then no experiments can ever be done.

the other issue (and the bigger one imo) is that the experiment described in the video seems to be a one-off payment, which you would expect to have very different behavioral outcomes. if you gave me $7500, I would probably just put it all in SPY and pretend it didn't happen. if you promised me $7500/yr, I might actually change my lifestyle a bit.

the money has to come from somewhere.

Why would you and I, members of the society with our needs met, also need to get money... This massively increases the cost of the programs.

this is the part that i don't get...

Do you have any sources for these claims?

The question isn't wether there are problems with direct cash, but rather if it has fewer problems than existing systems, which this study finds evidence of.

The political problem of direct cash transfers is that people find them odious. Money is earned and should not be given, but food can be. This is incredibly illogical but it's our political reality, one that can hopefully be changed.

> A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash

Sure, that's a fair hypothesis. But studies have shown that it tends not to be true, and that direct cash assistance is actually often a remarkably effective intervention, and often more effective than other welfare programs.

The studies have generally shown that a lot of homeless people actually are prepared to just have cash.

I don't think direct cash assistance is a panacea or anything, but the data shows it is often much more effective than people expect it to be.

The studies on this are actually fairly conclusive, so if you want to push back I'd need to see solid data as pushback. Anecdotes won't really convince me otherwise on this topic, because we've had a lot of experiments that have created a pretty strong record.

Think of NIT as steepening the progressive tax rate curve, and allowing it to dip below the y (tax rate) axis for sufficiently low x (income). There exist several “refundable tax credits” today in the US that effectively do this at a small scale, albeit with a lumpy phase-out curve that runs into the same disincentive cliffs as many other welfare programs.

UBI, on the other hand, shifts the curve rightward, so everyone’s income is relatively higher and is thus subject to more taxes. (You’d obviously also need to raise taxes overall if your goal is to keep it budget-neutral).

UBI, universal basic income, is universal. Lowering the tax rate below zero for some people is not universal but only some percentage of the population.

Non stop Yolo meme stonk market. Sign me up!

It's convenient because you can kill off all of the "entitlements" programs at the same time. Drop SNAP, unemployment, disability, drop social security, medicaid, drop everything, and cut a check. This materializes in substantial administrative cost reductions.

It's an efficiency.

You can claw back from folks who don't need it at tax time.

Because making it universal is cheaper.

If you set the cutoff threshold high, then you're barely saving any money and end up spending a lot more on the bureaucracy than you'd save. On the flip side, if it's anywhere close to the income of a middle-class person then you could get an effect where earning more money makes you worse off.

Of course you can taper it off instead of making it a sudden cut-off, but that makes the bureaucracy even bigger.

You are adding costs and extra work because now you have to make sure everyone is on the income bracket and all the complexities of auditing. Its just much more simple and elegant to make it universal, those at the top brackets will have a negative net due to taxes anyway, so why bother?

Cutoffs create fiscal cliffs. This is not reasonable. You would need to make it so it's smoothly decreases with income and if you're at it you can just skip that step and deduct it from taxes paid.

The argument is that it gets rid of as much of the bureaucratic nonsense.

Say you send everyone a check, adjust income tax so it washes out at something like 2x or 3x the base rate. No extra bureaucracy because your tax authority already has to to that, and at the same time you can same money on administration of a bunch of current programs (and get rid of them). Note that it clearly doesn't replace all programs. But UBI + universal health care of some sort would sure make a dent (US specific).

There are valid critiques of UBI's viability but universality isn't one of them.

You honestly think the US military annual budget is 150 trillion / year?

Because it's much easier to just subtract the UBI at tax time from the high earners than to create an entirely new bureaucracy deciding who gets UBI.

Even if someone was making $1m/day, they still would get it.

The reason behind giving it to everyone of working age is to prevent people from falling into cracks like what can happen with unemployment.

Cause then it will be more profitable to make 199k than 201k. Cut-offs are just a bad idea. If you want to phase it out with income you can just deduct it from taxes. It's easier and cheaper.

And what most people seem to forget is that the vast bulk of the UBI money is immediately spent on local goods and services so it quite likely generates a lot of local economic activity.

Hence the reason the final total was above GDP. That should have been a red flag that there was a problem in the calculation.

>which was actually realistic, would've given out $1000 per month.

I am not from the US, would it be realistic to live on 1k USD a month?

So basically like what exists e.g. in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_de_solidarit%C3%A9_acti...

> I believe it’s funded by taxation.

You can’t tax people who don’t earn anything beside what you’re already giving them. It needs to be bootstrapped and then be sustainable.

> if there’s a study...

You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. Let’s assume that UBI payments will match minimum wage laws. Now then... the people who have to get up and travel around 2+ hours to get to their job just to warn minimum wage - if they can stay home with their families and get paid the same instead, you’ve just incentivised them to quit.

The companies where they had employees who are now at home getting UBI are forced to shut because they can’t find workers.

I’m blanking on it, but I’m sure Das Kapital brings up these examples when going through testimony to the Factory Act.

> The great thing about UBI money is that most of it would go straight back into the economy.

Your first part of the comment sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy and doesn’t answer the question.

> I think this is a much more moral and desirable outcome than the current situation where we rely on putting people in a position where they are forced into degrading, disgusting, or dangerous work. All too often that work is then used to belittle and degrade those people further.

Nice in theory, until you need a plumber for a broken toilet 3am on a Tuesday but nobody is a plumber anymore

(That’s speaking from experience working in the harsher conditions in the plumbing industry)

I'm actually very pro-UBI for this reason. My only concern is that the moment it's introduced people will start to argue that some people deserve more help and history would suggest those well-intentioned arguments will eventually win public support and the benefits of UBI will be lost.

Something that really upset me recently is that for the first time in her life my partner's mum decided she wanted to get a job but when she went to the job centre she was told it was a bad idea because she would get less support from the government. We were both hoping a job might finally get her clean, especially if she was socialising with other people with jobs and functional families. Unfortunately she's now back to abusing drugs and using prostitution as a means to get some extra cash. I'd be lying if I said it doesn't make me extremely angry. We need to be careful we don't create bad incentive structures.

I believe the person you're responding to is saying that increased taxation is such a necessary component of any UBI system that any test which doesn't take that into account is flawed.

I'm not sure that partial experiments which test none of the putative downsides are of much benefit to a debate though.

I certainly would contest, for example, the suggestion that Neil Armstrong walking on a sidewalk would have represented a moonwalking experiment, because we didn't need to experiment to learn that astronauts are capable of perambulation on earth or learn anything about low gravity from it. Similarly, if you wish to test the hypothesis that a welfare state would be best reorganized on the to each irrespective of his need principle with taxes adjusted accordingly, you're not creating evidence for it by learning that unusually poor people are better off after receiving one off windfall of $7500. The assumption that poor people are better off with more money is already baked into the status quo solution.

The "Universal" in UBI has a meaning, which intends that everyone is an unconditional recipient, including taxpayers.

Edit:

To add, I'm not sure why we think a real "experiment" wouldn't also include the actual payment into the program. Is there an explanation? All I can see is the intent of the "experiment" is to say, "UBI is good [no matter the cost]." This is unconvincing, to say anything is worth the effort regardless of the cost. But I don't want to set up a strawman. I'm curious if people have a good reason to say why the cost should not be accounted for, or if it somehow is, and I'm just not seeing it.

That is not really how that works...