And on the other hand, if all of the predictions of the anti-UBI camp are borne out even in a low-income country, then that probably puts a dampener on further research in the US.
I don't think this study is going to provide a knock-out blow to either side, but it could significantly bolster the evidence.
I object to your objection about labeling this as a UBI experiment ;) To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps. The theory is that the recipient of the basic income knows how best to allocate their spending, better than the entity that is making a transfer with strings attached. You may be correct that in practice UBI looks very different in a low-income country than a high-income country, and perhaps also that they may be funded by different types of organization (NGO vs. government), but I think they can meaningfully be called the same thing.
The issue is that there's a lot of nuance here. For example, the claim is that a UBI provides less disincentive to work than alternative (especially means-tested) social assistance programs. But it's likely that all social assistance programs provide some disincentive to work, because they inherently increase the viability of not working (or working less). If you compare a UBI with no social assistance at all, the result will be much different than comparing it with something like means-tested food and housing vouchers.
Moreover, the details are important. If instituting a UBI causes some people to choose to work 40 hours a week instead of 80 and spend the extra time with their kids, that is obviously much different than someone who quits their job so they can watch television and play video games. Even if the change in net hours worked is exactly the same.
The debate on whether social assistance is a good or bad idea in general will happen orthogonally to the debate on what the best manner to provide that assistance is^1.
1) The camp that believes that social assistance is entirely evil is justified in saying that investing effort into maximizing efficiency of a bad thing is a waste of resources - that's a logical position - but I think that it's more reasonable to research our options. Anything more I could type here would just go into my personal opinions.
In relation to 'the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes'.
This is not the fundamental premise.
UBI as a financial leveller or as a minimum support value would be a different number to those in different locations and with different conditions.
Location adjusts cost in terms of amenity values (heating, cooling, travel, etc.) - and it is not desirable to clump the population into one location.
Condition causes a large variation in living cost - good health is not cheap, but it is cheaper than many temporary, long term, terminal, or permanent conditions.
Where UBI does not take these into account - which most don't - there would still be a need for charities and other large scale societal funding mechanisms.
No. A common belief among UBI proponents is that it is generally superior to most means-tested public benefit programs, but it is neither generally (though some, especially right libertarian, proponents do argue for this) seen as replacing all other social welfare programs, nor is it generally intended by advocates to replace any charity (which is a different thing entirely than government social welfare programs.)
In fact, I would argue that there is no one fundamental premise of UBI, because while it is one broad class of policy conclusion, people come to it from widely divergent premises: the various schools of left-leaning supporters don't share much in terms of premises with right-libertarian supporters, they just have the same answer to very different questions.
As developing economies continue to develop and pick the lowest-hanging development fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens to these comparisons. I won't be surprised if, in 50 or 100 years, the poorest 5% of the United States is on par with developing countries. By some accounts, that's already kinda-sorta the case [1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poo...
I'm a donor, and they had a program where they gave cash to poor people in Kenia and the people explained what they did with the money. It was a very interesting reading.
For instance, one of the first, and one of the most common, things people bought was a metallic roof for their home in order to fix leaking. That's something that I, in my urban ignorance, would never predict.
Other common investments were: paying the debt with their children's school, a cow, basic furniture or starting a small business.
Just want to caveat that people tend to make an umbrella claim that automation is killing low-skilled jobs without considering:
a. the pervasive and increasingly evident effects of globalizing low-skilled jobs and the very real wage growth in poorer territories including but not limited to China
b. that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers (which some argue to be impossible, despite there being no supporting evidence)
For clarity, do you mean train people so that those truckers become lawyers, software engineers, financial advisors, etcetc?
If so, I feel like at best that is a statement missing a second part. Ie, I don't think existing "high skilled" job markets could handle an influx of what I imagine is at least double the staffing. I imagine it would immediately result in millions of people without jobs, regardless of qualifications.
So the second part of that is, we'd need to drastically expand the available jobs in those "high skilled" markets. And I've got no idea how we'd do that.
What are all those extra software engineers going to work on? What are those extra lawyers going to do? etc.
A massive part of the planet is still "underdeveloped". As these countries emerge from their eternally-emerging state, there should be no shortage of demand that high-skilled workers in developed countries can capitalize on. Creating intellectual property is an extremely rewarding enterprise and one that can be sold to other less skilled nations (as is already the case).
Inflationary shifts like this have been shown to balance out pretty well and a UBI will reduce the ridiculousness of the income disparity by devaluing highly concentrated wealth.
> “It is easy to have opinions without evidence,” Suri said. “It is time we tried to gather some evidence and started thinking about what the impacts truly are and how it changes people’s lives.”
Also, I had a brother in law who was a raging alcoholic and stole money from his grade-school kids' piggy banks. He always had money for beer. Asshole. He did the world a favor and hung himself.
For all of them, their personal issues overwhelm their ability to be functional adults. They don't clean their houses, they don't mind their kids, they are addicted to various substances and lie about treatment, recovery, and lie about anything anytime it suits their needs in the moment. It's all lie, lie, lie.
There is nothing a UBI or anything else is going to accomplish for these people and it is a myth to believe that payments without oversight or qualifications will lead to positive outcomes. One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it.
Let people face death, then see how they act. Take their kids away, first, though. It's not the kids' fault their parents are deadbeats.
Ah yes, let's blame people for their dependence on mind alterning chemicals that if abused build negative feedback loops. While at the same time, those chemicals are touted and lauded in mainstream culture. From rap's "popping bottles" to country's "whiskey makes my girl a little bit frisky".
> For all of them, their personal issues overwhelm their ability to be functional adults.
Doesn't this happen to EVERYONE at some point, temporarily? Where something overwhelms our ability to function. Can you imagine a structure where repeated incidents lead to patterns, and the societal structures we build are not helping to correct those patterns for individuals. Yes, some people will just always make bad choices, but also, some people have never had an opportunity to actually flourish and understand how their choices are not helping. Or even, maybe they are addicted to mind altering chemicals that have literally changed the way they think.
> Let people face death, then see how they act.
If we are sharing anecdotes, my partner works as a therapist with teens with substance abuse problems in the Bronx. I'll never forget the day she called me crying, because one of her 17 year old patients was scared he was going to be attacked leaving the office because he didn't want to join a gang.
He was held up at gun point, had is phone stolen, and his life threatened. You better believe he wants to escape.
Sure, his personal issues are overwhelming his ability to function, but we have to acknowledge that society is not trying to really help him in a serious way because therapy helps, but also economic opportunity as well.
I am an extremely selfish person, and have had great success due to opportunities granted to me through privilege and access. It took a long hard look at myself, to look at someone else, even in the face of addiction, abusive behaviors and acknowledge their personhood and their struggle and say, you are a not able to function, but you are human, and we should try and help.
Some people think addiction is a moral failing; others think it is an illness. I land on the illness side. Treatment works. We can help people, but it requires throwing away the blind judgement.
That is, at least in my experience, what leads to comments like these: "He did the world a favor and hung himself."
What an incredibly harsh thing to say, especially for a situation that is rarely as clear-cut as "person A is bad therefore they should die."
The uncomfortable truths you mention are like bubbles rising to the top. As a society, we're starting to think about things like alcoholism, drug addiction, childhood abuse, etc. and that will hopefully lead to having fewer of these clear-cut moral judgements. I think UBI will also help, because a lot of these mental traps (bad situation -> abuse -> drugs -> bad situation -> abuse etc.) are magnified by poverty.
What's funny is that some of the pushback against UBI (and welfare) is that same moral judgement. "We shouldn't have UBI because some people will spend it on drugs and alcohol."
As someone who is friends with a couple different people who teach critical thinking in college and related to one who does so in high school, I can tell you that this argument-from-loose-contact-with-people-who-unnamed-and-unverifiable-alleged-authoirities involves at least two layers of serious fallacy.
> One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it.
UBI is specifically not about subsidizing behavior; the absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to.
Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers. The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others, and making UBI universal isn't going to solve that because this isn't a very homogeneous universe.
Hm. I'd be far more likely to spend my basic income on booze if I were a cardiologist or highly-paid tech worker than if I were a parent barely scraping by.
Top-notch scotch and expensive wines instead of middling whiskeys and passable table wines. Of course, some amount might also be donated/saved/invested. But I'd probably spend a far larger percentage of that base UBI payout on luxuries/vices than your typical out-of-work joe.
> The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others
Not quite. Parent asserts that those behaviors will happen anyways. And that therefore we are more than justified in pulling the carpet out from under those folks (because the money's not going to help anyway).
Playing out this same argument in the context of a cardiologist lets us cut to the heart of the ethical differences between typical pro-UBI and anti-UBI arguments.
Consider the cardiologist is an absent father who squirrels away his money to avoid supporting his family and then spends that money on various vices (luxuries wine collections, absurdly expensive cigars, etc). Is his employer justified in paying a lower salary? Are his customers/debters justified in not paying up? After all, we discontinued social services for the poor booze hound in the earlier scenario!
Most visceral UBI opponents would find that question absurd on face! The money was earned through hard work and education; the employer has no business prying into the employee's personal choices about how to spend his wages, and a customer or debtor refusing to pay is straight-up theft.
Conversely, many visceral UBI supporters point out that the work ethic on display in that reasoning becomes outmoded as work itself becomes outmoded.
If we don't choose some other metric for decision making, and stick to these ethical imperatives, the conversation more-or-less grounds out here.
An UBI pilot in Madhya Pradesh, India shows exactly the opposite [0]. Villages focused more on healthcare, education involvement improved, frivolous spending decreased, women empowerment was better and personal savings increased.
[0] http://unicef.in/Uploads/Publications/Resources/pub_doc83.pd...
In fact they had a drug screening in FL for unemployment, and like less than 1% of people failed.
I caution that either conclusion would be unjustified because this is not a UBI experiment, this is a charity and aid distribution experiment. The question at hand here isn't "is UBI a wonderful thing" but rather "how do UBI-like distribution methods compare to others?" If you want proof consider that Tavneet Suri's isn't a UBI economist focusing on western countries, "her expertise is as a development economist, specialized in Sub-Saharan Africa" [1]
I object to labeling this as a UBI experiment. "Universal Basic Income" is used to describe various proposals to address inequality and unemployment in developed countries where economic gains and jobs are being automated away from the masses of low-skilled workers and up to the elite of high-skilled workers. This is far from the sub-Saharan African context where the economy is still developing and leaders are mulling how best to sustainably extract countries from extreme poverty.
[1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directo...