> But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc...

Why would "here's an extra $9k across 18 months" tell you anything about how a low income person would respond to being promised a livable income for life?

Because for those 18 months their lives would be different.

I'd like to see a 5+ yr study specifically because that would allow people to give up low paying jobs, go get a full degree and then get a new better paying job.

18 months isn't that, obviously.

But it would allow you to go and do something. Instead of going from being a waiter to a programmer, maybe you can go from being a waiter to a basic plumber or a truck driver or start a small business or something?

We can all agree that having more cash will improve people health\community\whatever. The big question is what will people do with the opportunity no-strings-attached cash gives them. How many people will just spend the money? How many people will stop working and do nothing useful? How many people will stop working and do something very very useful?

You only need a small proportion of people to make significant changes like this (and thus pay a lot more tax) and suddenly these programs get very affordable net.

You need a very large proportion to make changes like that if it's offset by people using the money to retire from working life altogether[1]. Since this choice can't be made with this study design, it tells us nothing about what people would actually do with no-strings attached money for life, and indeed actively distorts the reality of how people will respond by at least as much as that other great UBI experiment no UBI advocate ever talks about: state pensions....

[1]actually you need an implausibly large proportion simply to offset the amount of people who already don't work and aren't entitled to benefit payments who would be eligible to receive UBI

Respectfully, that is exactly what we need an experiment to prove\disprove. At least some people took this 9k as an opportunity to sit at home playing video games. At least some got a (small) education or started a business.

The issue with pensions as an example of UBI is that the only people getting them are old. So they mostly already have the assets they want, they don't have careers they want to improve, they don't want to start business or earn money, they want to retire...

Yes, old people are also an imperfect proxy for the workforce as a whole.

But this experiment which is designed to make it impossible for participants to retire off the money proves even less about people's likelihood of retiring off free money than the natural experiments where they're encouraged to do so.

Yeah, a bigger, longer, better funded trial would be better. But we can still learn some things from this. I actually get a bit frustrated at all the too small/short/low-amount payment studies out there. But c'est la vie.