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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

yep. It's very important UBI be given to everyone regardless of status/income otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment. This is just welfare with more money.

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>otherwise it's not a valid economic experiment.

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

Yep, this is a great point. There are a lot of great experiments that show that direct cash assistance is a really good

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.

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.

> If you are experimenting with a limited budget you really cannot afford to give it to absolutely everyone;

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.

If you experiment properly, you take people who were in a region on $startdate and give them UBI indefinitely, also levying enough additional tax or welfare cuts on that region to pay for it. That's geographically more limited, and it might be temporally more limited if it turns out to be a massive failure forcing the curtailment of the whole thing, but it's very different from testing to draw the amazing conclusion that penniless people given $7.5k are on average more financially secure a year later, which actually tells you less about a hypothetical UBI than the existing welfare state.

(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)

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...

Because it removes the administrative overhead almost completely. Arguably, that saves even more money than trying to only give it to people who "need" it.

this is a good point, but is this true though?

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.

This misses what is probably the more important point, which is that any system which tries to measure who has their needs met is going to screw up.

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.

Exactly this. In the UK we have "universal credit", which is a guaranteed payment for people out of work. In practice, claiming this can be so difficult that many must turn to food banks and private charities before they receive their payments.

I like to say that our current welfare system is a safety net, and like all nets it has holes in it through which people fall. UBI is more like a safety blanket, which will catch anyone who falls into it.

if I understood you right, all 100 of us get the $10000, then the 80 of us who file with the IRS gets taxed back for that 10k, so in sum, only 20 X 10000 = 200K get spent.

I can get behind this.

> Arguably, that saves even more money than trying to only give it to people who "need" it.

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!

You could double that number to account for the "fraud and error" spend at DWP: I would presume that further spending in this regard is dedicated to other departments.

Sure, or you could halve it since much of it's admin for pensions, and stuff like disability allowance and housing benefit you don't want to eliminate unless you're cool with UBI leaving people immobile or homeless, and you can't do payments to 36m working age people with no admin. Either way, it's still an order of magnitude or two less than UBI costs.

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

Requiring "means testing", i.e. excluding people who are not in need, is often shown to cost more money than it saves.

(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.

What you're describing is welfare, not UBI. The core principle of UBI is that it's distributed regardless of income.

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.

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