Hacker News Reader

Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite disappointed in the video. What is the result of the study? No word about the control...

All I get is that people don't spent it on booze (yea trust ppl, not all are addicts) , have more money for food and clothing (o really..) and that the one guy is doing a computer class.

As said, I think it's just a bad video, the actual results might be great. Comparing it to using that money trying to help homeless people in other ways would be even more interesting (finding out if this the best way to invest in to minimizing homelessnes).

View on HN

This really looks like the results suggests that UBI is actually not effective at all, but BBC tried to pick the nice bits and emphasize them. If 80% had jobs a year after they wouldn't be shy about it.

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.

That’s the only reason I even entertain the notion of UBI: if you’re going to have a massive welfare state, then the only sensible way is hand everyone $PovertyLine income no strings attached. Otherwise you get a massive costly self-serving bureaucracy making it agonizing for people to get benefits.

But you’ll still get the massive economic damage of discouraging productivity and funding vice.

If you’re going to do something wrong, at least do it right. But it’s still wrong.

I've yet to meet anyone who thinks UBI is bad for the poor people. However I've heard no one explain how it can be effectively paid for.

Everytime there is this massive hand waving of laying off x thousands of civil servants, which isn't realistic in my mind.

Initially, something like this: you give $3.5k/yr to everyone. You cut $3.5k of specific, expensive to administer benefits/year from the people (20% of pop) receiving public benefits. You reduce social security payments by ~$3.5k (about 15% of pop). There's also interaction with EITC and likely some elimination of tax credits with low phase-outs.

Then, you reap some administrative benefit, because you've eliminated a lot of complexity in administration of these programs.

Then, you increase taxation by a bit less than $3500 on average for everyone else, maybe by increasing taxation by some uniform percentage on everything over the poverty line and maybe even sliding down tax brackets a little (it still would be more progressive).

You probably can't get rid of everything: e.g. SNAP makes sure people spend at least some money on food for their kids.

I linked the study below

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 :).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com