If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
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.
Well we can’t do that until we do that. And shitting on the experiments means we’ll never do the Universal part.
This isn’t really true.
We generally don’t experiment with economic policy because it’s not practical.
The main impediment to UBI is not supporting data, but political will. Voters are so used to punishing poor people that UBI just doesn’t resonate with the voting public. Of course that will change with the continuing encroachment of automation.
Additionally UBI is not all or nothing. You could increase it over time. If 20% of average salary is the objective, then start with 1% this year and increase it by 1% each year for the next 19 years. It will take 20 years to dismantle the other welfare systems anyway.
You know that’s a good point. It takes a few years to get a UBI up to full throughput anyways. I think part of the problem with that approach is it will be more expensive to start, at least on paper. And God forbid we spend money on anything other than the military. But it’s certainly true, we don’t need to switch it like a light switch by any means.
It’s not the critics of the experiments that are the problem.
The “experiments” are just watering down the idea of UBI into “just rename existing benefits programs”.
You’d need to restructure an entire country’s tax systems to really do a proper experiment. No country could just afford to give everyone free money. You’d have to structure it so the average person pays back exactly what extra they got, and build affordable housing for the people that actually choose to live on just UBI.
Nobody is choosing to live on just the UBI though. Study after study shows that people do more economic activity with a proper UBI, not less.
And yes, we are at the precipice where we either make the jump or not.
We can’t meaningfully advocate or plan for its implementation unless we have some idea how it would work. And that it can work.
The sorts of experiments in the OP get us no closer to that. They prove nothing that wasn’t already pretty uncontroversial and obvious, and offer no insights about how these programs might be implemented universally.
Pointing this out does not hold back UBI. Ignoring it, however, does.
The problem is giving X amount per month to homeless people is not a representative study for something called “universal” basic income. It’s just a basic income for homeless people.
One of the biggest theoretical problems with giving everyone X amount per month is that it will simply drive up inflation since there are now $X/mo/person more in circulation (meaning everything will simply go up in price to absorb all that extra money). An experiment like this, as beneficial as it may have been for the participants, unfortunately has no value in proving whether or not that IS actually what happens.