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Comment by aimor | Hacker News Reader

This is still a study about UBI, it's looking at differences based on how the income is delivered. A part of UBI, different from other types of aid, is that the recipient can spend the money however they see fit. There are question about how well this will work. Will the recipients benefit or suffer by not being restricted in how they spend? Will they benefit or suffer by being given the money all at once at the beginning of the year vs receiving monthly sums? These are good questions without obvious answers.

If you want to understand more about their study, their methods are available. It answers a lot of the comments below. They do make a distinction and call this "Guaranteed Basic Income" since it targets a subset population: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64f507a995b636019ef88...

https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research

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> This is still a study about UBI

No, it isn't. You can't study UBI by giving income to people who don't currently have income. To study universal basic income, you have to give it to everybody--the same amount--including people who already have income, even people who don't need any additional income. And then you can look at all of the effects, negative (people ceasing to work, or not working as much, because they are now guaranteed a certain amount of income independent of how much they work--meaning that overall production of goods and services might go down even as demand goes up) as well as positive (people who previously didn't have income now having it and therefore having more options).

Studying having the spending of the income not be restricted might be worth doing, but that still doesn't make it a study of UBI, because having the spending be unrestricted is not the critical feature of UBI. We already have social programs that give income whose spending is unrestricted, such as SSI and SSDI. What we don't currently have is a program that gives the same income to everybody regardless of need or anything else. That is the key feature of UBI that would need to be studied if you want to claim to be "studying UBI".

Also, you need to consider how it is payed for. It does not just mean that everyone suddenly have an additional income on top of everything they used to have. You now also have money circulating in the economy in new patterns. And you also have new taxation used to finance it. Taken together, this will impact prices and costs, and will drive inflation. The effect cannot easily be predicted. But looking at individual behaviour in a limited experiment where everything else stays the same does not cut it.

If you only include homeless people statistically you can expect that they will make poorer financial decisions than the rest of the population.

Also there are other implications, I’m not even sure what’s the point in calling this UBI (the data might of course be still valuable for other purposes).

> If you only include homeless people statistically you can expect that they will make poorer financial decisions than the rest of the population.

Where are you getting this? The article is indicating that only people experiencing homelessness were given this, and its indicating quite a few of the participants of the study got off the streets and even out of shelters.

Not everybody is homeless due to their financial mismanagement, some people just get runs of bad luck.

> The article is indicating that only people experiencing homelessness were given this,

Yes, which is why this is a has nothing to do with UBI. Cash based welfare payments are not a particularly novel idea and there is plenty of data why do they work/don’t work.

> Not everybody is homeless due to their financial mismanagement, some people just get runs of bad luck.

Of course. However on average they are probably significantly more likely to mismanage that money than other groups.

>There are question about how well this will work. Will the recipients benefit or suffer by not being restricted in how they spend? Will they benefit or suffer by being given the money all at once at the beginning of the year vs receiving monthly sums? These are good questions without obvious answers.

Shouldn't they worry more about questions that are related to whether UBI gets implemented in the first place? For instance, whether there's a work disincentive associated with it, or whether the program is cheaper than regular welfare. Figuring out answers to the questions you listed is putting the cart before the horse.

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