> it handed C$7,500 (US$5,900) with no strings attached to a number of recently homeless people
I'm absolutely all for direct cash assistance and housing assistance for homeless and housing insecure populations. I think direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused and I'm glad to see more experiments in that vein.
I think it's important to understand that "universal basic income" has two usages now: the more precise definition that everyone on HN is familiar with, but also more generally the concept of giving money to poor people with no strings attached. That idea is gradually getting more research and the research has been producing interesting results for some time now.
Of course it's an oxymoron to use "UBI" to refer to the latter. The word 'universal' already contradicts it, as does 'basic income' arguably. But language does not spread by precision, and there are more interesting things to discuss here than terminology.
It can still be a valid economic experiment, it just isn't UBI.
Valid experiment, but not a full UBI experiment.
That said, I do think these kinds of experiments are still helpful for evaluating UBI as a policy. It's good to know that direct cash assistance is an effective welfare program for a lot of cases. It's probably also worth evaluating where direct cash assistance falls short as a safety net.
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.
A real UBI program would also be experimenting with a limited budget. The universal part is a big part of what makes UBI unusual in comparison to the common means tested approaches, and is therefore the part that needs some of the most careful research.
(There might be other public policy reasons to test giving cash handouts to homeless people, like "is this more efficient use of funds than spending the equivalent on homeless hostels and counselling?" but likewise, you have to construct the experiment to actually look at that side of things)
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...
Assuming it costs $10000 per person/yr
If we can agree that 80% of society has their needs met, then if we give to all, we now have an additional 4 times of the overall outlay.
I dont think the cost of administration would be so much, and if so, we should aim to cut down those as much as possible,
I also pulled out that 80% number. As this goes down to 50%, then the argument is easier made that the administrative cost is now equal to the cost of funds we could have just given away.
People won't fill out the paperwork, they'll check the wrong box, the papers will get lost, the wrong flag will be entered on the database, they won't fulfill the criteria on paper but still really need the help: people in need fall through the cracks all the time.
Also, great care needs to be taken with welfare to avoid income traps. It's easy to set up a system where working more means you lose money, and that's hard to get out of. This remains a problem with US welfare and disability payments.
With a UBI, it's simple: do they know who you are, and have you been paid yet.
And the people who have enough are generally easy to find, and have, let's say, a preexisting relationship with the IRS. It's easy enough to tax the UBI back from them, and it would be comforting, if and when they unexpectedly lose their job, to know that a check will be arriving. One less thing to think about.
I have some reservations about UBI, but I'm familiar with the case for it, which I'm conveying here without a full endorsement.
I can get behind this.
Some people argue this, but never with reference to the actual data, which unambiguously proves them wrong. The UK Department of Work and Pensions' unusually bureaucratic approach to eligibility results in admin spends of a little over £6bn, or around 3% of its total budget. If you could eliminate all those costs you'd be able to pay working age Brits a UBI of around £180 per annum!
Sure, you can fire a few low paid Jobcentre employees if you're convinced retaining that sort of admin offers no actual benefit to anyone attending, but it turns out that paying 8 million people who are neither in employment nor willing/able to ask for appointments at Jobcentres a livable income isn't cheaper
(and allows some people who don't technically qualify to fall through the gaps)
If you receive an extra $10,000 that you say you don't need, you could receive it and be in a tax band which gets taxed an extra $10,000. That's more straightforward.
I’ll admit the administrative costs are low compared to no/low income housing or food assistance.
But this can be a be careful of what you wish for type of thing. A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash. I know from my time working with a local shelter.
I know it may be hard to believe, but 20-something drug addicts, the mentally ill, etc, don't exactly manage their budget as well the 40-year-old 85th percentile income earning HN programmer or 75-year-old retired school teacher.
That's not a moral judgment. It's just a fact. And to the degree it's a cultural artifact (i.e. maybe drug addicts in Sweden are veritable CFOs), a UBI won't change that overnight.
Of course not but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. Your other objections regarding poor neighbourhoods and so on are not so much an argument against UBI as an argument against the conditions that made those neighbourhoods poor in the first place; of course those causes need to be tackled as well, but not everyone who is poor is also a drunken, sex-crazed, drug addict.
San Francisco adopted precisely those policies 15 years ago, providing free housing and direct cash payments, and most who live in San Francisco and understand the history of the policies probably have reservations about free housing and direct cash being the "best first approaches". Even Governor Newsom, who was the mayor who did the most to accelerate and materialize those policies (e.g. ~8k housing units for the homeless have been built or converted since 2005) has admitted that those policies were incomplete and naive.
EDIT: s/15k housing units/8k housing units/. Per https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40.... (Google search sucks these days so difficult to find the better sources I originally had in mind.) Note that these are units, not shelter beds. San Francisco has built more permanent housing for the homeless than the entire homeless population when the program started.
Your post lack humanity and nuance. Perhaps you’re jaded by your experiences which is fair but not representative.
Consistent access to sufficient money is life changing for people who grew up without. The change isn’t immediate. You don’t just suddenly adapt. You don’t unlearn the coping mechanisms you develop to survive while your poor. It takes time.
Poverty fucks you up.
The problem of poverty can come multiple ways. One way is lack of opportunity or being in a hole you can't get out of (kids and nobody to care for them, no home, nobody to look up to, mental illness, drug addiction, health problems). But there's also people that just aren't going to do their part to help themselves either. So what we need to do is help people get out of holes to get on their feet. There's a substantial portion of people that will take that money and do exactly what the OP said.
So you've got opinions and anecdotes at best, then.
Source: grew up in a poor neighborhood.
Source: "Illicit drug overdose deaths resulting from income assistance payments: Analysis of the 'check effect' using daily mortality data", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27402469/
> The findings suggest that scheduling and staffing practices of various emergency service areas in Hennepin County reflect patient load variation associated with time of welfare check distribution. Systematic variation of time or amount of welfare could lead to improved distribution and reduction of emergency services demand.
Source: "Correlation of emergency health care use, 911 volume, and jail activity with welfare check distribution", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1648313/
To be clear, these aren't arguments for removing or rejecting cash assistance altogether:
> The implications are that there is a general check effect and that it was not reduced by ending benefits to persons with drug and alcohol related disabilities.
Source: "Psychiatric emergencies: the check effect revisited", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10331323/
> Disability payments impact the timing of substance use, but receipt of disability payments is not associated with more overall substance use than unalleviated poverty. Money management-based clinical interventions, which may involve assignment of a representative payee, can minimize the purchase of substances with disability payments.
Source: "The Check Effect Reconsidered", https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3094507/
An example alternative model is California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS): https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/california/inhome-suppor... On the face of it, it's a voucher program for the disabled and elderly to obtain in-home assistance (cleaning, bathing, laundry, shopping, etc). But it's actually more of a jobs program for the unemployed or underemployed able-bodied. And in cities like San Francisco a significant fraction of recipients of the vouchers are older drug addicts, and a large number of those paid with the vouchers are able-bodied older adults. There's plenty of rules violations and cheating all around (because people will be people), but arguably the money is nonetheless more well spent--e.g. less of the public expenditure is diverted to drugs--than if the program simply provided cash directly to the recipients.
Obviously, a single mother working two part-time jobs has much more to gain (as does the public) by no-strings-attached, direct cash assistance. Not all poverty looks the same, and not all of the impoverished have or even want the same incentives. That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.
It chafes because it's a common argument for doing nothing at all, or removing all agency from people in the situation. That removal of agency is absolutely a bad thing. I'd argue that people who feel they lack agency in their life are much more likely to attempt to escape that life through drug addiction.
It also grossly over-represents the number of drug addicts in the population of poor people, most of whom would just benefit from the extra money, and is used to falsely equate the two groups.
That was still a moral judgement. Welfare and UBI always have this issue in that everyone has a moral opinion on what recipients of money should spend it on.
If you have money, nobody cares what you spend it on, but if you don't have money, suddenly everyone has an opinion on what you should and shouldn't be allowed to use it for.
That is a moral judgement. It may be one you agree with, but it's wrong to say that's not a moral judgement.
Wake up wake up wake up it’s the first of the month Get up get up get up cash your check and move on
Bone thugs described it in 1999 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PArF9k2SbQk
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.
It's not illogical to prefer giving food and housing to cash. Somewhere around a third of homeless people are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Many have mental problems or just very bad financial skills. Many don't have a way to keep that money safe. If you give homeless people money, there's a very good chance it'll be blown on drugs, booze, or lotto tickets or just stolen. Some people it will help; some it won't. Whereas if you take that same increase in funding proposed and instead, say, expand housing programs, fund food banks, or provide mental health treatment, you know all that money is going to help people. Plus it can help people in ways that they may not help themselves otherwise.
No, in real life money (especially in a country whose debt is denominated in currency it controls) is, almost literally, just made out of thin air. There are consequences of having more money around, and sometimes it is useful to destroy some money in a different distribution to offset some of the effects of creating money that was created and distributed a particular way, but that's a different issue. (This is the relatively uncontroversial part of Modern Monetary Theory; the controversial part is the follow-up “...and, therefore, we she engage in deficit spending a lot more freely than we do now.”
The myth of the fisc (a metaphor held over from commodity money times when it was a decent repres5 of reality) is that money has to come from somewhere.
> Plenty of people don't want to pay the increase in taxes that would be necessary to help the homeless publicly like that.
The idea that taxes are necessary to pay for spending is the myth of the fisc. It's true only to the extent that the government decides it should be true. (Which, as much as people in government talk about it when opposing spending they don't like or promoting tax increases they do like, isn't all that much, hence the absence of anything approximating long-term fiscal balance.)
> Whereas if you take that same increase in funding proposed and instead, say, expand housing programs, fund food banks, or provide mental health treatment, you know all that money is going to help people.
No, you don't; waste, fraud, and abuse in selectively targeted government programs is a very, very real thing, and a lot of the money that doesn't go into waste, fraud, and abuse goes into control measures to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, instead of to the actual program purpose.
Source: more than 20 years in public sector work, the part of it that wasn't in IT specifically in fiscal management aimed at accounting for proper use of funds.
It's not inherently logical either. Your assertion that indirect funding is somehow more effective is unproven. If you want to be strictly logical about it, you decide up front what the actual goals are, and you try and find the most cost effective way to reach them.
It may be counterintuitive, but it's entirely plausible that on the whole direct funding is more effective. There is at least some good evidence pointing this way in some areas. If you dig into any of this stuff in any real depth, you'll find that the "common sense" solutions are often wrongheaded for non obvious ways.
Further: breaking the world into "normal folks" and "homeless people incapable of managing their finances" is far too reductive. There certainly are people whose addictions or mental health issues or whatever make it difficult for them to manage their own finances, but that is a small fraction of the people who rely on some sort of public assistance.
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.
I have not performed the study, but suspect that in the long run this would be less costly than the current system since it's much easier to maintain mental health when you have housing. I would expect most of the participants to eventually integrate back into society and no longer be dependent on the subsidies for basic needs.