but did UBI encourage more productivity from those participants? Is it more than the cost of such a program? I want to know if UBI is a net benefit or not.

It was not a huge difference. They were not less productive, but the measured increase in worked hours was something like 6% if I don't remember wrong. They could take short gigs without losing unemployment benefits for the time and have to deal with the hassle with going off and on the benefits for just a few days of workt. But too small and limited study to really say anything about it.

The important gain would be to give people breathingroom to actually find a job most relevant to their education and skills instead of just jumping on the first available opening to be able to pay the rent. Or even spending some time improving your skills.

In the US I think just introducing universal healthcare would accomplish part of the same thing.

Since the target audience was rhe unemployed, changing up their type of income isn't going to give them a job, so prpductivity is difficult to measure.

The entire point of UBI is to secure everyones basic human needs, not get them a job (unlike unemployment benefits).

If we were to test UBI also on employed people, and observed their behavior, we might avtually gain useful insight into mechanica with UBI. Perhaps we will see more 6-hour workdays with more people employed?

If you already have your basic human needs met then it is just a shortcut to provide the money only to those that don't have that one checked off yet. Otherwise you'd just end up pumping money around from those that don't need it to those that don't need it.

Employment, the only measure of productivity that is considered in this context, was (maybe) modestly increased or otherwise not affected.

Given that it significantly improved mental health, it seems reasonable to expect that this UBI model would lead to some savings in public health expenditure. Arguably there should also be some savings compared to the administration of the current unemployment benefits that require the person to provide evidence of activity and other such things.

How well it compares in practice to the cash cost nobody knows as the experiments are all too short to really tell.

How would measure that? Do you only count paid labor? Is all labor productive?

> 1) less economic troubles and financial stress; 2) Higher confidence in future possibilities; 3) More self-determination and autonomy.

Do we really need to test that though? It seems obvious that giving someone money without affecting their taxes, the price of goods etc would do this.

The issue is that once you roll it out on the society level, it's not the same any more. It will affect their taxes and inflation. Will they still report less economic troubles and financial stress when they receive $500 a month but their rent has gone up by $500?

Why do you say it seems obvious? The most persistent objections to UBI (or welfare or unemployment for that matter) is that they cause dependency and lazyiness; that they destroy the self-confidence and ambition of the receivers. Many still claim that it will make them financially worse off.

Checkout the auto complete in DDG or Google for "welfare causes ...". Look at the arguments in the results.

We can't even have the discussion that you say is "the issue" because society is still stuck at the part you claim is obvious.

The claim is that UBI could create a permanent dependent underclass, and evidence that a cohort of unemployed people receiving lots of money from the government self-reports greater happiness than a cohort of unemployed people receiving relatively little money from the government over the space of the year does absolutely nothing to address that.

It's rather secondary to the real objection to UBI: paying for it.

Quite consistently, at least in Canada and the US, welfare is claimed to cause dependency, lazyiness, and reduce the ambition of the receivers WHILE we are paying for it.

I'm saying BOTH that it's good for people AND that it's affordable are still in dispute and that the claims are clearly not obvious.

Sure, and my argument is that proving that welfare recipients who temporarily received a greater subsidy than other welfare recipients self-reported greater levels of happiness than welfare recipients on less money does absolutely nothing to undermine arguments about welfare dependency.

The arguments - with varying degreees of plausibility - are all of the form 'long term welfare dependency is unhealthy for society' not, 'welfare recipients would be happier if their welfare income was lower'.

Ok. Why are you making that argument to me? I never asserted the opposite? Why are disagreeing with a point I never made?

You disagreed with someone up the chain that the experiment's conclusions were "obvious". Since all the experiment appears to have found is that recipients of temporarily more generous benefit entitlements self report less stress and greater confidence than those who receive less generous entitlement, even most hardened opponents of the welfare state would agree that such conclusions were obvious.

> The most persistent objections to UBI (or welfare or unemployment for that matter) is that they cause dependency and lazyiness; that they destroy the self-confidence and ambition of the receivers.

And that's not conflicting with reporting less financial stress during an intervention. The self-reported consequences from eating some candy are very different from the consequences of using candy as a primary diet for long periods of time.

There are three claims that the comment I replied to said are obvious; two claims are constantly disputed and one is regularly disputed. None are, therefore, obvious.

My point is that there are differences between a) what people self-report and what the outside world thinks about their situation and b) an isolated short-term experiment and a long-term domestic/global thing.

If you won $1bn in the lottery, you'd be quite rich and, in so far that money can make you happy, probably also quite happy. If literally everybody won the lottery at the same time and got $1bn, you'd be back where you were before winning the lottery, as your $1bn wouldn't have the same relative value. Sure, you have a billion, but bread now costs $100k and your rent is $100m.

Ok. But I never said any of those things were true. My only point is that the claims in the study are not obvious, I'm not claiming they are true.

I happen to believe they are but this study doesn't establish that; and we are missing a golden opportunity to do some real UBI studies with the billions in aid that are suddenly sloshing around.

UBI is not welfare. Welfare is supposed to be designed as a safety net to help people get off of welfare and help pay for the people who need it.