Re:12-year study will look at effects of universal basic income
by smsm42 on Monday May 07, 2018 @02:22PM
(#17015078)
> It's just giving some people money. It would be very surprising if this didn't yield positive outcomes for that group.
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?
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?