It would be not surprising at all. It all depends on how you give the money and in what context. There are a lot of stories about people winning the lottery or getting an inheritance and ending up broke and in rehab (or worse). There is statistics that only a small percentage of people who found gold in various gold rushes managed to keep it long-term.
There's a concept of "poverty trap", where combination of means-tested welfare programs and wage structure essentially makes stopping being poor unaffordable to the poor, because there's a summary income drop when moving up the scale of earned income, and the person can not afford taking that drop.
There's also a concept of external dependency ruining local business, so that if you flood local marked with foreign aid and money, local businesses can not compete or sustain traditional price/market structure and once they are gone, there's no means to sustain the economy but continuing the stream of foreign aid forever.
Giving people money is not always unquestionably positive, all depends on how. That's why real-life testing is important to know if UBI can work or not.
> Anything short of UNIVERSAL experimentation will not address these.
True but one can argue some insight can be gained from small-scale testing. When we test new drug, we do not test it on every person, even though every person's body is different. We test it on limited set of people, and hope they are representative. Sometimes it fails, but it's better than not having any drugs until we can test it on everyone, isn't it?
UBI isn't necessarily income in that it's a person's sole income. In my country people get unemployment benefits if they are laid off, welfare if really bad, food banks, dental care for kids under 18, daycare for kids under school age, medical care (but still carry insurance), some school's pay 70% tuition depending on the circumstances.
So really UBI would combine all those into one, if you don't need it that's great but if you do there it is. Sure some people would live off it but it's no different than doing that now.
If UBI is so great, then similar "almost UBI" proposals should ALSO show good results.
I sincerely doubt that there is a magic line between "similar but not UBI" programs and "UBI" programs where the good stuff immediately appears.
If UBI is impossible to test, then we shouldn't do it.
It would be insanely risky to spend trillions of dollars on something that its proponents claim can't be tested. So we should just not implement it in the first place.
Maybe, maybe not. But it's pretty clear that an economy or society fits the definition of a complex adaptive system, and it's pretty common knowledge in that field that it's possible for there to be phase change transitions, where effects come suddenly and all at once at a specific level of participation of the independent actors.
Analogies include things like herd immunity, or sensitive dependence on initial conditions in weather forecasting.
Firstly, even a smallish percentage of immunity would still see population wide benefits.
Secondly, as diseases are transmitted to people physically nearby, this could be tested by immunizing a large percentage of a single population, such as a small town full of people who don't travel much.
If you are truly concerned about the population wide effects of UBI, then you could do something similar, like fund a small poor town, and give EVERYONE in that small town UBI.
Unfortunately, I expect that of such a test were attempted, you'd see the same exact criticism of it, though. It'd probably be something like "you can't see the benefits unless the entire WORLD is on UBI!!!" or some other further doubling down on the unprovability of it all.
My point being, that this scepticism of actually testing the damn thing seems more like a defense mechanism against the possibility of being wrong. It is just the same lazy approach that everyone has for their pet theories, as a way of deflecting any and all criticism by declaring it unfalsefiable
The big question marks surrounding UBI involve its implementation at a society-wide level. (What are the macroeconomic effects? What if people blow their UBI on dumb things and still end up starving?) Anything short of UNIVERSAL experimentation will not address these.