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Interesting takeaways:

* They mentioned some degree of "mentorship effect", but didn't clarify how they controlled for this.

* Cash handouts (ie, basic income) prevented desperate measures. The societal cost of the cash could be less than the aggregate cost of the crimes.

> The societal cost of the cash could be less than the aggregate cost of the crimes

This is the idea behind a basic income.

Some experiments are also finding it cheaper to just give people houses than to continue to run homeless outreach programs.

It's part of the idea behind basic income. There are two major angles I think: economic and moral.

Economically, there are a lot of costs that are taken out of the system if we implement basic income, everything from means-tested support (the means testing is very expensive and prone to fraud, etc), to crime that you mention, to the terrible and yet unmeasured opportunity cost of still having the majority of the population working in jobs they hate but need to survive. Imagine a world where everyone is working on something they've chosen to do, which they can feel passionate about (and yes, I do believe people can feel passionate about any job that has a useful purpose, including picking up trash, cleaning the streets, and all those other currently low-status jobs).

The moral side is equally important, though. We live in a society where we don't need everyone to work, not even close. A great many people today work in jobs whose only purpose is to exist as jobs, which don't actually have a net benefit to society other than keeping people out of unemployment. Many others are unable to contribute to society because their skills are not in demand, thanks to automation, outsourcing, etc. Those people are currently made to feel morally guilty for not working, their self-worth as human beings is attacked, debased. This is fundamentally wrong, and is the major challenge of our generation: transforming from a society that liberally distributes shame to people who are not in a position to work for money, to a society that accepts that paid work is just one of the activities a human being might partake in in their life, and neither necessary nor the highest.

If we fail at this challenge, the cost will be unrest, perhaps revolution, probably a regression in the progress of mankind.

We have a tough few decades ahead.

Instead of basic income, what if "basic needs" were all free: Food, shelter, healthcare, and recreation. Money would only be free for people who work. Money gives the freedom to do consume goods that are not free.

Sigh. And now to tear down my own thought. Maybe "free basic needs" works (psychologically) for everyone reading HN. But I'm afraid it could destroy a percentage of the population. If someone has no fundamental drive to work, what happens to him/her when work is unnecessary? Hunger is a pretty good motivator. Maybe working any job is better than not working at all (i.e., better for our our mental state). I guess what I'm saying is this: once we meet everyone's basic needs and remove desperation, we still have the problems inherent to idleness.

Crap, let's move to Switzerland...

I don't understand all these posts worrying about "What would a person do without a job." What do retired people do? What do kids do during summer vacation? They live a relaxing and enjoyable life, spending time with friends and family, and pursuing their interests. Sounds good to me!

Some people who retire die of it. Being told by society that you are no longer useful can kill. Obviously, that's not true of most people, but it does happen.

However, I do think the main reason it happens is also because it is accompanied by the ambient message that those who don't work are worthless, drains on society. If not working was more accepted, the death rate of retirement would likely be much lower.

>If someone has no fundamental drive to work,

The research shows this is an extremely tiny portion of the population. The vast majority of people will find some kind of productive enterprise.

It seems paradoxical but giving homeless people free housing with no strings attached tends to end with them getting a job and rejoining society. They almost never just lay around all day doing nothing.

It's one of the last great Victorian lies still infecting us today.

What coincidental timing! I was just listining to Johann Hari's "Everything we know about addiction is wrong" TED talk[0].

His central premise is that the drug policies of the last 100 years have marginalized and disconnected addict populations. His proposal is that connection is the opposite of addiction.

Interesting to hear temporally adjacent to the idea you express -- providing the means for marginalized populations to rejoin society should be priority #1.

[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_yo...

I agree with the premise that there will be fewer jobs but not that basic income is the solution. Not working can be very unhealthy for most people and I imagine people doing nothing instead of being "artists and scientists".

I'd be interested to hear any other potential solutions. Seems to me the choice is either:

a) basic income, or

b) all the unemployed who can not get a job in the new economy are given a government job. The work in the job doesn't matter, as long as it provides a fig leaf to allow the government to give them the money they desperately need to live.

If its not entirely clear, I think that these non-jobs are are an unfair and incredibly expensive way of giving out benefits. The richer would be better off with a basic income (free money! smaller more efficient government meaning taxing the rich less!). The poor would be better off with a basic income (no social workers or benefit admins judging you! future is predictable so able to start investing for the future!). Its only annoying for those of us in the middle, those who will not benefit much from a basic income (because it won't be a huge amount of money, our taxes are unlikely to decrease) but will also not see much benefit from it (I probably already had a safety net in terms of friends and family, and the basic income will be too small to support the lifestyle I am used to anyway).

But until we reach the new economy where robots completely replace everyone, we don't need "fig leaf" jobs. There is actual, useful, work that can be done. For example, people can be put to work repairing our "crumbling infrastructure" or building new infrastructure (c.f. FDR). Some of them can provide day care for working mothers. Etc.

Basically, take all those cool programs that the left seems to like and make folks who claim to be unable to find a job be the ones to actually do the work.

Once robots take over, eliminating these basic jobs will be so cheap that no one will object. Until then, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves.

We should pay people to study and provide higher compensation for better grades. (However, failing can't be allowed to compromise basic shelter/food needs.)

Ouch. What if the grading system is unfair and allows students to game the system by memorizing facts instead of actually understanding what they're studying? (Not quite a rhetorical question, this is pretty much how the educational system in many parts of the world works)

That's what you, and many others, imagine but what does the research say? For links and references to a variety of studies that have attempted to get some data on this issue check out the Basic Income and MINCOME entries in Wikipedia.

And what if there simply isn't enough work, in the traditional sense, to go around? This is a very real issue as automation increases and this time around the newly jobless can't go work on Ford's assembly line or take stenography classes. The fact is there are going to be far more people without jobs than there are jobs available.

It's kind of ironic that in 2015 work is fetishized to a degree that would make Karl Marx blush. This is a worrying trend. As another contributor has already pointed out, if we don't update our, quite literally, outdated attitude towards work and employment we are potentially facing some very serious social unrest.

Not working and not having your basic needs met is probably worse though.

How about basic income and abolishing any minimum wage? (And other barriers to low income employment.)

Basic income creates a de facto minimum wage by setting a wage for a complete lack of labor. I'd think any other minimum wage would be redundant.

A welfare system that abruptly stops paying out when you've got a job sets a de facto minimum wage.

A basic income doesn't prevent you from working for a small amount of money. (And people might even elect to do that, if the job has other good sides.)

I like the idea of basic income, but this does not necessarily need to be basic income. Basic income is a small regular payment to every adult no matter if they have a job or not.

A system where you just pay those that don't have a job a minor income would be enough to stop desperate people from doing desperate things. The reason it makes sense is because the consequences of these desperate acts are more expensive than the payment to stop them from happening

Oh, but you need to think a bit further about incentives. Ideally, you don't want people to lose the small but regular employment the moment they pick up a (possibly unsteady!) job.

I read this article twice and I did find it interesting. However, this title doesn't make sense within the context of the article. Other than a contrived example they made up about rich kids possibly submitting to criminals while poor kids may not, this article focused solely on poor communities and mentorship programs.

On balance, the programs seem to work well in helping people get their lives together by giving them information, mentorship and resources. This does beg the question though: Are people being arrested because they are impulsive or disadvantaged as they did not provide contrasting evidence.

Also, in America nearly 50% of the population are in for drug offenses according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons data current as of may 30th, 2015[0] If all drugs were legal, and convictions on all other crimes collectively didn't double, less people would be in prison.

[0]http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens...

To one degree or another authority implies the threat of violence. For the person confronted with violence, subconscious automatic action is required for survival. Mistakes may be made, but trust in your training is essential. It is the same in sports (football, basketball, ice hockey, tennis), if you have to hesitate and consciously think, you are "in your head" and you'll be beaten. Some of us have been trained to react automatically by our environments. The best training ground for criminal behavior is juvenile detention and other forms of incarceration where hesitation will get you in trouble quickly. Our system is creating these kids who act on auto pilot. If they lose respect they have lost nearly everything they have.

Impulsiveness and Executive Functioning deficits contribute an extreme amount to crime, one of the primary sources of executive functioning ADHD has a number of great treatments. XR Stimulants work, many people in prison have ADHD and wouldn't have been there if they had taken their meds, recently it has become popular to doubt ADHD(See barkley for evidence) it's real and a big deal. The fact that it is so treatable is a miracle. Stop the nonsense.

This is interesting. I want to try CBT myself. I am not prone to violence (thank god) but I do have some bad habits I want to get rid of, such as procrastination.

Are you putting off trying CBT?

I started seeing a CBT therapist this year to be more productive at work (I was also a big procrastinator). It was very effective

> Of course, evaluating whether the therapy itself was the relevant factor here is pretty messy. There’s a lot to these classes other than CBT, and on the surface it looks like a lot of these things could have impacted the results: The programs were administered by adults, who could have created a “generic mentorship effect.” Or maybe simply requiring that they show up to class week after week taught participants self control.

Couldn't they control this by having the other group go to a class, but not do anything?

I was thinking the exact same thing reading the article. It would have to be an actual class, preferably taught by the same person (to control for personal charisma etc) that does not directly translate into behavioral modification but does teach something useful (to avoid dropout/motivation differentials) Music? Sports? I'm not sure.

Absolutely. They tried to correct for this by controlling for all the confounding variables they could think of, which is a GIANT red flag for any study.

Meditation, mindfulness, respect

Maybe a solution would be:

  JailTime = MinJailTime * Last7YearsConvicted

The whole point of the article is to educate you on the fact that people most often don't think of the consequences when doing crime. That's partly why punishment works so badly.

Did you read the article? They quite clearly make the point that there is no clear, direct relationship between offense rate and severity of punishment (17 vs 18 year olds), and they speculate this is because much of the behavior in question happens on autopilot. Hence CBT.

Variations of this have been tried and studied for decades if not more, and if there is one thing blindingly, unequivocally clear, it's that this does not work to reduce crime. (the debate could be about whether that's the (only) goal, my point is that for crime reduction it does not work)

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