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UBI Cash Payments Reduced Homelessness, Increased Employment in Denver (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M] to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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[–] 8 points 3 years ago (8 children)

I've yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that's about it?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Kind of a weird argument, isn't it? If we did the opposite instead, it's not as if you'd expect rents to fall -- on the contrary, rent would go up in response to the added financial burden on landlords. Setting that hypothetical aside, wouldn't a generalized inflation of rents be an acceptable tradeoff for reducing homelessness and untethering the 50+% of young adults who still live with their parents to move and work in more economically efficient environments?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    While I actually consider multi-generational housing a good thing, let's ignore that since the reason people aren't moving out is financial and not social.

    The question is whether UBI is the best way to solve that problem (and others) and I have yet to see data that can be reasonably said to actually be universal for a region. The closest thing I know of is Alaska, and their oil payments are too small and their economy too remote to say much about larger payments in a larger economy.

    To me, because money has a social and psychological value to it, what works on an individual level has no guarantee to transfer to a societal level. I would be very interested to see UBI practiced on an entire economic zone, but good luck getting anyone to volunteer.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    So what if there were 100 or more small scale experiments in 50 different countries, in similar conditions. I won't be playing with the money of the entire nation|state|county|city to possibly lose it and not get elected again!

    I want vaccines to be tested on 30% of the population to see if it works.

    We should be putting this prototype hardware in the hands of 40% of the population to see if there are any side effects before deciding whether to legalise it.

    We will do a double blind test on 50% of the population with these new safety regulations to see if there's an impact on incidences. The study would be invalid otherwise.

    Models and small scale experiments are for wimps. I, the ruler of the democratic country, declare an experiment shall be run at national scale! The economy of region X with will not be comparable to that of the rest of 90% of country!

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    Uh, the key issue is that it's very unclear whether the results will hold at scale, since you're suggesting a modification to society. There's no (or very little) social component to the effectiveness of a vaccine or a new tool. Money is fundamentally a social construct and so what works in isolation or very small groups might not work the same way at large scale.

    If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change. So far I've only seen studies where a few people embedded in a larger society are given money, and that's not the same thing.

    You have to remember that industrialized countries already have a systems where people get money for "nothing," but those quotes do a lot of psychological heavy lifting. Disability, unemployment, retirement, food stamps, etc. The difference being that it's not universal and each payout is either "earned," temporary, or a pity case. As such, the psychology behind that money just isn't the same.

    I'm interested in UBI, I just want to see results that can actually be reasonably transferred to a population the size of my country (350 million) before I make hard statements about its effects.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change.

    I honestly doubt you would. The typical arguments of:

    • it's not comparable to a country of 350M, they're barely as big as $cityWithOver1Million
    • their society is very different from ours
    • their implementation is different from what we could ever manage
    • the circumstances were different

    would come around.

    You're making exemplary conservative arguments to stalemate progress by creating a chicken and egg problem.

    • Won't accept results of change in a small environment because they aren't representative of change in large environment
    • Demand results of change in a large environment before applying them to large environment
    • Won't apply changes to large environment because results of change in large environment don't exist
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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    You just made up a bunch of arguments I would never make. Please don't put words in my mouth. I can't help it if my current stance is an argument made by people who have no interest in UBI at all. Fuck, I want UBI to work as advertised, it would be a very simple and easy solution to a lot of problems (though it obviously wouldn't be a 100% solve for all of them).

    If we can get a small economic zone that's in control of its own currency to run UBI, those results would be likely to transfer to any other larger economy. Really the only requirement is that the country must be in control of its own monetary and fiscal policy and the program must actually be universal.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    That's about it. Why would anyone work for $20k/yr when they could get $12k for free? They wouldn't. So those jobs would bump to $30k+, and a domino affect would occur. Nothing would be achieved other than the devaluing of the American dollar, which would lead to a loss of jobs, increased poverty, and guess what else - increased homelessness.

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