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UBI Cash Payments Reduced Homelessness, Increased Employment in Denver
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I've yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that's about it?
Kind of a weird argument, isn't it? If we did the opposite instead, it's not as if you'd expect rents to fall -- on the contrary, rent would go up in response to the added financial burden on landlords. Setting that hypothetical aside, wouldn't a generalized inflation of rents be an acceptable tradeoff for reducing homelessness and untethering the 50+% of young adults who still live with their parents to move and work in more economically efficient environments?
While I actually consider multi-generational housing a good thing, let's ignore that since the reason people aren't moving out is financial and not social.
The question is whether UBI is the best way to solve that problem (and others) and I have yet to see data that can be reasonably said to actually be universal for a region. The closest thing I know of is Alaska, and their oil payments are too small and their economy too remote to say much about larger payments in a larger economy.
To me, because money has a social and psychological value to it, what works on an individual level has no guarantee to transfer to a societal level. I would be very interested to see UBI practiced on an entire economic zone, but good luck getting anyone to volunteer.
Uh, the key issue is that it's very unclear whether the results will hold at scale, since you're suggesting a modification to society. There's no (or very little) social component to the effectiveness of a vaccine or a new tool. Money is fundamentally a social construct and so what works in isolation or very small groups might not work the same way at large scale.
If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change. So far I've only seen studies where a few people embedded in a larger society are given money, and that's not the same thing.
You have to remember that industrialized countries already have a systems where people get money for "nothing," but those quotes do a lot of psychological heavy lifting. Disability, unemployment, retirement, food stamps, etc. The difference being that it's not universal and each payout is either "earned," temporary, or a pity case. As such, the psychology behind that money just isn't the same.
I'm interested in UBI, I just want to see results that can actually be reasonably transferred to a population the size of my country (350 million) before I make hard statements about its effects.
I honestly doubt you would. The typical arguments of:
would come around.
You're making exemplary conservative arguments to stalemate progress by creating a chicken and egg problem.
You just made up a bunch of arguments I would never make. Please don't put words in my mouth. I can't help it if my current stance is an argument made by people who have no interest in UBI at all. Fuck, I want UBI to work as advertised, it would be a very simple and easy solution to a lot of problems (though it obviously wouldn't be a 100% solve for all of them).
If we can get a small economic zone that's in control of its own currency to run UBI, those results would be likely to transfer to any other larger economy. Really the only requirement is that the country must be in control of its own monetary and fiscal policy and the program must actually be universal.
That's about it. Why would anyone work for $20k/yr when they could get $12k for free? They wouldn't. So those jobs would bump to $30k+, and a domino affect would occur. Nothing would be achieved other than the devaluing of the American dollar, which would lead to a loss of jobs, increased poverty, and guess what else - increased homelessness.
You obviously haven't even looked at the wikipedia article about the studies. Your assumption has been proven wrong many times.