I think its clear UBI is not the savior people wish it was, sadly.
As a basic example: While your point about the starting percentages is correct, the study lost partipicants over time. Group A (the 1k/month group) lost 33% of its participants by T3, and Group C (the 50/month comparison group) lost 38% of its participants.
The table you quote from the final study doesn't include the people who were lost, only those who filled out both surveys, T1 and T3. So using it to say they helped a greater percent of people is a bit weird.
They also don't tell you the table for T2 in the final report, you have to go look at the interim one.
The T2 data makes T1->T3 look much less impressive, and definitely doesn't seem to support some amazing gain for group 1.
As far as i can tell, the data looks even less impressive for your claim if you do t1->t2, and T2->t3, instead of just t1->t3 with only both included.
It would certainly be easier to tease apart the point you try to make if they reported the number of originally unhoused vs originally housed that were retained at each timepoint, but they don't.
So what am i missing? Why should I look at these results and think it is amazing?
(Also, I don't think i'd agree the main argument the author makes is based and refuted solely by the results of the denver study)
Maybe you're looking more at the article headline, which implies the author was focused on the study results. The thrust of the article isn't that the programs are ineffective (in fact, toward the end of the article she's quite optimistic that isn't the case). Her problem is that the results are overstated. But one of the prime examples she cites to support that idea does not actually support it. Denver claimed significance, and the study results support their claim.
>The table you quote from the final study doesn't include the people who were lost, only those who filled out both surveys, T1 and T3. So using it to say they helped a greater percent of people is a bit weird.
Why is that weird? The percentage of the test group who found housing is significantly higher than control. We don't know what happened to the people who dropped out---the worst case scenario is that none of them found housing, which leaves the stats as they are.
>So what am i missing? Why should I look at these results and think it is amazing?
They didn't claim it was amazing, they claimed it was significant. The author implied they were lying. They were not. That's what you're missing.
Thats the point of the author, those are minimal variances, and insuficient to claim inpact due to basic income.
Personal opinion. The study itself exert a nontrivial influence on participants. The act of being engaged, regular check-ins... affect positively. Their lives improve independent of the financial component because they are part of the study, not because of the amount of money in the procedure.
Giving individuals money without changing the policy context doesn't actually test the mechanism of action proposed for UBI. (It does, arguably, test the mechanism of action of some proposed private charity [or business-linked] alternatives which do involve cash transfers and don't involve changing the public policy context and incentives, but that's a whole different issue.)
One of them is that means tested benefits are harmful, and I think it's a really strong one.
But another very common defense of UBI is that mass unemployment is inevitable, but because of technological developments that cause wide abundance, so UBI can be used to make that abundance available to the newly unemployed.
The harms of means testing are many. They include:
- Massive organizational overhead to do the means testing, have appeals process, have fraud detection, and fraud punishment. - Personal overhead on those who have to 'pass' the means-testing. This can be non-trivial procedurally, and appeals tend to be very complicated. Moreover, the consequences of making a mistake that gets marked as fraudulent are severe. This makes it quite time- and stress-costly to get these benefits, and makes some people skip them. - It creates weird economic incentives, if done exceptionally poorly, it creates situations where an increase in net income causes a decrease in gross income. In other situations you get an effective marginal tax rate of nearly 100%, which discourages work and prevents the building of wealth by advancing a career.
Others were making more on unemployment than they did while employed. They got checks on a regular basis that meaningfully increased their income level. I’m not surprised or offended if they try to temporarily increase their standard of living in frivolous ways.
But your one unsubstantiated story doesn’t constitute data that can be used to compare to anything.
Other people had the same idea as me. With data! PPP loans taken out during Covid to thousands and thousands of one-person companies and eventually forgiven by the Biden administration.
To make another point, why didn't we see a surge in art and positive improvements when someone gets free money from the government? Because what happened is what always happens: It was wasted.