$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

What about in many words?

When Nayib Bukele ignored the "experts" and locked up nearly 2% of El Salvador's population, not only did the homicide rate fall off a cliff—economic growth also increased. (Bukele also worked hard to woo foreign investors, without which this would not have been possible; but those investors only felt confident in investing due to the decrease in crime.)

> The idea that people steal because it’s fun or commit fraud because they enjoy seeing their victims suffer is not supported by any sort of rigorous sociological or criminological understanding of social deviance

There's been a spate of carjackings after enforcement went down recently where the objective of the teens as young as 13 and 12 stealing cars if to have fun rides and to show off to their friends.

There was a 13 year old girl who was carjacking.

https://midcitydcnews.com/2023/09/29/why-do-kids-carjack/

> “Some of them don’t have the whole criminal mindset; like they’ll do stupid things,” one officer explained, speaking anonymously, “Like they’ll steal a car around the corner and then stop at a 7-11, say ‘Hey, I want something to drink,’ —but [they] stole the car right there.”

> So, the high percentage of youth apprehended for carjacking is likely due to their risky behavior. Yet, the question remains. What is it that motivates kids to carjack?

> One answer is as old as human adolescence. Stealing a car to joyride is a cheap thrill.

> For Thrills > Most of the carjackings are “not done for any motive except just having fun,” said one sergeant, speaking at a public safety walk.

> “I mean they’re not stealing cars to sell parts, they’re just stealing cars to steal cars,” the officer added. Most cars, he pointed, are taken from one part of the city and later found parked in another quadrant.

....

>A 2023 article in “The Annual Review of Criminology” points out that this is not new. Seventy years ago, the majority of motor vehicle thefts reported each year were the work of young males, stated the study, “many of whom did it for thrills.”

Video of teens discussing the (lack of) charges:

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/viral-video-dc-teens-discussing-...

Another story:

https://www.hillrag.com/2023/12/06/carjacking-is-no-big-deal...

> The teen and several accomplices had pulled an Uber driver out of his vehicle and drove away in it. A police pursuit followed, the teens jumped out after driving into a dead-end street, and fled on foot. Shawn “was trying to scramble back into the house,” McGilly recalled. Police arrested the teenager and carted him away.

> Overnight, McGilly researched restorative justice. He was torn. On one hand, he was upset over his foster child’s arrest. On the other, Shawn might finally suffer the consequences of his illegal actions. It could be a new beginning, McGilly hoped.

> The next morning, McGilly got a phone call from the public defender. The teen was being released; all charges dropped, the lawyer said.

> Shawn told his friends how nothing happened after his arrest, McGilly said. Worse, he introduced other kids living in the house, one as young as 13, to the world of carjacking, which his contemporaries refer to as “free cars.”

> “Kids take other kids for joy rides in stolen vehicles, which they call ‘free cars,’ then graduate to teaching them how to carjack. When they got caught, nothing serious happened. So it exploded,” McGilly said. “We’ve had twice as many carjackings in 2023 as last year, and it’s just because more and more kids were being introduced to it.”

And this isn't just a victimless crime, several victis have died, including a doctor that was run over by his own car that a carjacker was stealing.

I agree! But even with the best education and social support, a small minority will still turn to victimizing others, and no progress is possible until they are neutralized.

Are you underestimating how much people lie, even to themselves?

Esp here. “Hey; want to be part of a study where we give you free money to see if it helps you out?”… “Ok, now how much of that money did you use on things that were harmful to you?” You could perform that study with anyone and you’re going to get BS answers and estimations.

I don't disagree, but my response was directed to someone who was commenting on the average American. Didn't seem reasonable to interpret them differently just to build a more convincing answer.

This is true, but even with all that taken into account taxes on the very wealthy are lower now than they were then.

Selection bias is a strong effect here.

I would say more than one on average daily, and these are just the ten percent of homeless people I see that will say hello and interact with me rather than simply go about their own business

They're not homeless because they were mentally ill drug addicts. They're mentally ill drug addicts because they're homeless.

People without a stable living condition experience severe stress and mental illness as a result. People without necessities to live turn to drugs to alleviate the pain and suffering they experience.

This study is one example of how giving money to people to alleviate their conditions can improve their lives and enable them to further engage in self improvement.

The people you are interacting with are not typical. The study I’ve seen shows about one third with untreated mental health issues, and one third with drug problems. I would assume a large overlap in those two groups.

The folks without those two problems just aren’t the ones in your face every day.

A large percentage of the homeless population is just living on the margins, waiting and hoping for their prospects to improve. They may be living in a car, on half on the street and half on someone's couch, waiting for job applications that could give them a livable wage to come back, and so on. About half [1] of the homeless adult population of working age is employed for at least part of the year!

Like you, I have lived in areas experiencing a lot of homelessness. I've stepped over sleeping people and drug needles because there was no other way to get to work or where I needed to go. On the other hand, I think that combining this with the statistical facts gives us a picture of the true size of the problem. The mentally ill and addicts are the visible part of an iceberg of Americans slowly being priced out of affordable housing and access to healthcare.

[1] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/employment-alone-isnt-enough...

The reality is that you don't actually KNOW most homeless people or even know they are homeless, because they are living out of their car and still have a job. The majority of homeless people are simply priced out of homes, not having their entire lives fall apart in a crisis. They are people who were barely making ends meet for a decade, but as rent inexorably rises a couple percent every year and their basic job's hourly rate doesn't, they eventually just run out of options.

I'm confused. Are you interested in evidence-backed policies that get people off the street? Or not?

The tone and energy you are sending is kinda sus.

You are arguing you would rather treat them worse. Cruelty for the sake of it... because anything else would be 'undeserving burdens' on the 'honest working class folk'. If helping one group hurts another (in your mind), of course that's how you would think. Powers that be conditioned you to think (falsely) it's a zero sum game.

People that have mental health issues need help they are not getting on the streets, there just isn't enough to go around.

Addiction is a weird one for me. people call it a disease, your brain undergoes physical changes. disease is a loosy-goosy word I've come to learn (psychological disorders count as diseases apparently?). Addiction doesn't have to start with 'a choice (on the user's part)', but commonly does - which is why I comprehend that some people blame the user for their addiction.

But the core reason people turn to stuff on the streets is: the streets suck. Get people off the streets... suddenly their outlook improves. Funny that!

And yes, the reduced crime/asset rate probably is worth $X coming from taxes spend on this. That's an easy calculation - human live /comfort should be priced fairly high.

Weird, I do. I live within a minute's walk of three separate encampments of homeless people, most of whom seem reasonably sane when I talk to them, and if they have drug problems they certainly aren't more apparent than those of my coworkers on average

I can see their favorite hangout from my window right now. My girlfriend stands next to them at the bus stop she uses to get to her job working for the state helping homeless people.

How about GTFO of here with your presumptive bullshit.

First of all, we don't have to propose an imaginary conspiracy to acknowledge the reality of how we came to think about drugs the way we do: it is documented that the intent of the controlled substances act was to justify criminalizing the political opponents of the Nixon administration. But the downstream effects of this, aside from making medical care much more difficult to access, has been a large amount of money funneled into propaganda that blames drugs for a wide swath of society's ills while also needing to claim that the act of using the drugs was a personal moral failing, in order to justify the carceral approach we have taken to violations of this law. The "evil organization" that puts out a lot of this stuff is only loosely affiliated, usually local law enforcement orgs, though usually federally funded to some degree, the motivations for scaremongering in this way are obvious enough that no conspiracy is necessary there either: they benefit from the fear of the poor, the homeless, and the drug-addicted in a direct, financial way. By now many of them are staffed entirely by people who have grown up in this propaganda-filled environment.

Scapegoating the poor as depraved criminals is a time-honored way of muddying the waters about economic issues that need resolving, and while doing so openly has fallen out of fashion, most people alive today have consumed enough fearmongering and misinformation about drugs that tying drug usage to issues of poverty is an easy way to launder that kind of messaging, and so that kind of messaging is pervasive. So pervasive that you don't even believe that it comes from anywhere, just that it's the obvious truth. In reality, there are tons of high-functioning drug addicts, and the high-functioning part has far more to do with affluence than what drugs they use, just like homelessness, in turn, has more to do with the housing market than it does with drugs. This would seem obvious to me, but what is "obvious" is not a function of some objective universal reality, and only really comments on the subjective context of any given person claiming "obviousness", including both what they've experienced, and what they've been told

When the incentives are strong enough, no conspiracy is necessary, especially when the tricks being used are old and battle-tested ones.

Also, as far as spending other people's money goes, I'd much rather governments be spending mine on mitigating the housing crisis and its downstream effects on individuals than funding law enforcement to harass and make life difficult for society's most downtrodden. Police receive outsized budgets to "clean up" homeless encampments and endlessly violate people's privacy, autonomy, and often bodily integrity in the name of an endless draconian crackdown on the contraband that you would have me suppose is responsible for the existence of the homeless. Even an inefficient approach like funneling some of that money directly to individuals stuck in poverty traps seems a lot more likely to actually make a dent in the problem, rather than constantly exacerbating it. I bet it would be cheaper, too

Thankfully, your limited life experience is not a total and accurate picture of reality, and we can collect actual, rigorous statistics on this kind of thing that don't depend on people without empathy judging from afar.

But why is it OK if you dismiss someone's lived experience AND a few studies in favor of what is only your lived experience?

Given the demographics of the site and people's explicitly stated experiences, it seems plenty of the people disagreeing have had experiences similar to yours.

What do you suppose their "agenda" is, other than encouraging you not to be condescendingly dismissive of a whole group based on your limited sample size?

Surely you know the difference between anecdotal data and actual research?

The other reply to my comment proves that my question wasn't a provocation, but a successful intuition of some people's beliefs in this thread.

Further, the US' lack of universal healthcare shows that it's a societally acceptable stance to not give aid to ill people just because they are ill. I'm not trying to provoke anyone, I'm trying to clarify their belief within a set of beliefs that are socially acceptable.

Sure. UBI would probably work best paired with universal healthcare that covers special needs cases.

I don't really care how it's delivered, as long as it's a regular payment throughout the year that people can depend on.

(US specific) The monthly advanced child tax credit, effectively a negative tax, lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty for the short time it existed. Building that into a permanent, regular, universal cash transfer is not mechanically difficult but is intractable politically.

How would the negative income tax work in practice? Do I need to wait a full year for my tax return to get a lump sum payment?

Sometimes people have bad luck and typically people have a better understanding of what would help them the most than someone in a government office who has never met them before.

> better and cheaper than the $750 going to drugs or alcohol?

It didn't. That was one of the conclusions of the study being discussed.

At the risk of stating the obvious: someone who's homeless may need medical treatment or, you know, a home more than they need food at that moment.

> Food credits or $750, you realize it's still coming from taxpayers either way?

The method that costs much less to administer... costs much less to administer.

> If someone is homeless it means that they already failed and need help.

That's obviously not true. And also isn't how we view the taxpayer-funded fire department coming to put out a house fire.

> I don’t know why you’re being downvoted.

Likely due to the description of the parent comment as "hilariously naive" and "silly". The tone violates HN guidelines.

It's also a more nuanced and complicated issue worth diving into:

https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/11/ask-the-standard-does-san-...

>> money isn’t even real

This is true, in the Philip K. Dick conception of reality ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"), so maybe something we all shouldn't get worked up about?

If we stop believing in our duty to return the favor, what happens? Or if we stop believing that there is such a thing as society? If we stop believing in usury, does it exist?

I agree about having a duty to each other, I guess I'd describe giving money to the poor as an investment to benefit all of us (and clearly the amount paid into the social safety net can be bigger for the rich, who can spare it). But that is a more nebulous payback than loaning money to the rich, who can and will pay it back directly?

"Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered."

yea, no doubt if you are down on your luck someone handing you $750/month would improve your circumstances in the short run - but it sounds like perhaps you made changes in your life, such that you are no longer homeless - great - but would you, or anyone else not feeling the desperation of being hungry or unsheltered be more, or less, likely to try and improve your circumstances if you were getting a cash handout every month so the adverse affects weren't so bad?

Its a serious question - isn't there some benefit to society when people feel the pain of bad circumstances or decisions and then feel motivated to do something about it?

I am of the opinion that it does.

I would think getting them off the street and into shelter is a win either way.