I found the source for those who like me couldn't understand the article (had to click several links). PDF
http://www.bignam.org/Publications/BIG_Assessment_report_08b...
Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
91–100 of 157 posts
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#92The big problem with UBI, aside from how to pay for it, is that it will not survive as either universal or basic once the voters get their hands on it and decide that, say, UBI benefits should be cut for felons, increased for single mothers, indexed to the cost of rent, etc. In other words, we have a bunch of different welfare standards for people in different situations because that is what succeeds politically, and…
There is also the concern for what kind of welfare programs to implement (or keep) even with UBI - for example, if I blow all of my UBI on gambling/drugs/alcohol/electronics, will society let me starve to death in the street?
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#93Every time you want to evaluate results from social research, you need to ask yourself two questions: 1. Are the results internally valid? That is, did the authors reasonably control for factors other than the treatment (in this case, UBI) that could affect the observed results? Turn out, that this is actually difficult to do outside of randomized control trials. Quasi-experiments and natural experiments all lack ran…
To your points, I'm sure communism comes out looking quite incredible in a limited-time trial with a small population. It's just that dang problem with scaling it up.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#94There ought to be a name for a minimal UBI that can allow people who are normally just scraping by to bridge short periods of unemployment, unexpected expenses etc. £4K wouldn't be much for the average Hacker News reader, but for people on minimum wage it could make a real difference. You can't really call this "Basic Income" though, because that term comes with the build in assumption that it's enough for a person t…
How is this different from unemployment checks? An issue with that approach is that you may end up giving more $$ than the person could earn from any job they could take, effectively forcing them to stay jobless
Unemployment checks usually stop once the person has a new job. UBI does not. It does not create an incentive to stay jobless, or does so to a much lesser degree [1].
If I get $400 in UBI and $500 in salary, the only loss is that I am paying higher taxes on the $500 than I would be in a non-UBI society.
This behaviour also results in the fact that, even though taxes are higher, those in the lower revenue rungs still come out ahead in an UBI society vs a non-UBI scenario.
[1] There is a minor incentive caused by the decreasing utility value of money: The first $100 you earn are much more valuable than the $100 you earn on top of $5000. UBI moves the salary revenue a bit up in this scale, thus making it less valuable.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#95The English is really bad in this, was this article translated or something?
Going by the name of the author (Atha Fromy), I would guess it was written by someone who has English as a second language. This being my assumption I am going to give them a pass on slightly dodgy grammar since I couldn't write an article in any other language.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought there should be an essential basics program, where you can always receive an adequate amount of flour, rice, beans, corn, and other basic foodstuffs to survive. I'd also add toothpaste, soap, and other sanitary items. We can still have food stamp programs that allow people to spend as they please, but the guaranteed floor ensures literally no one need go hungry. Sticking to basics keeps the costs…
What are you going to do with flour, rice, etc.? You need a way to cook it. That means you need an apartment, with a kitchen, with working electricity or gas. Those are the things that really cost people. Giving a bag of flour to a homeless man isn't going to help him.
I disagree somewhat, this program isn't intended to replace all others, it's just minfood.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#97"a quora member answered when asked about the UBI" And at that moment, any semblence of legitimacy disappeared... The main question about UBI is who pays for it and how. In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K, way below anything that most people would consider enough to live on.
>In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K, Does that back-of-a-napkin calculation include the savings you'd get by shutting down most of the government bureaucracy involved in administration of current benefits and not paying salaries to all those government workers? In any country, a huge amount of the money spent on benefits are…
>a huge amount of the money spent on benefits are used just for administration.
I think a lot of people way overestimate the administrative costs. For example U.S. Social Security administrative costs are around 6 billion a year. Sounds like a lot but it's only 0.7% of the total cost of the program[1]. Sure there's a handful of different programs all with their own costs, but it's maybe 20-50 billion a year. That's not that much considering UBI might increase spending by trillions.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#98The big problem with UBI, aside from how to pay for it, is that it will not survive as either universal or basic once the voters get their hands on it and decide that, say, UBI benefits should be cut for felons, increased for single mothers, indexed to the cost of rent, etc. In other words, we have a bunch of different welfare standards for people in different situations because that is what succeeds politically, and…
To be fair, I'm not entirely convinced that a truly universal system is the best. After all, a single parent has significant additional expenses - and should taxpayers be paying to give violent criminals a work-free existence? (Would you pay a living wage to someone who sexually assaulted your daughter?) In the US, this is especially a problem. The cost of living in Texas is low enough that my salary as an engineer g…
> should taxpayers be paying to give violent criminals a work-free existence?
If doing so significantly reduces the recidivism rate (which I strongly suspect it would), then yeah, I'd say that be an easy 'yes'. I wouldn't be at all surprised if $X in free money given to ex-cons translates into much more than $X money saved by society.
Getting mugged costs a lot more than just the money that was in your wallet. There's (often) medical bills, there's police officers to pay, there's lost productivity due to having to replace ID cards and whatnot, etc. If someone then gets charged with the crime, the costs balloon even further as you deal with further police costs, jail time, time for taking the case through the courts, etc. And if they get convicted, there are even more costs associated with that.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#99Every time you want to evaluate results from social research, you need to ask yourself two questions: 1. Are the results internally valid? That is, did the authors reasonably control for factors other than the treatment (in this case, UBI) that could affect the observed results? Turn out, that this is actually difficult to do outside of randomized control trials. Quasi-experiments and natural experiments all lack ran…
About point 1: Since we are dealing here with humans, this criteria is almost impossible to satisfy. You cannot enroll people in a control trial if you know this has a chance to make their lives worst.
> This leads to biased estimates and wrong conclusions.
It does not necessarily leads to 'wrong' conclusions. In social sciences, you have to deal with a truth level that will never yield 100% certainty.
Re: Basic Income caused crime to drop by 40% and strengthened workforce?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moving money from rich people to people much more likely to spend it rather than hoard it should result in a significant GDP boost.
You misunderstand the fundamental mechanism for improving standard of living: productivity gains. Consumer spending does not improve productivity. Rather, investment in capital goods (by those rich hoarders) leads to productivity growth.
That's a fairly basic liberal view, profoundly flawed. Consumer spending improves productivity as a second order effect. Consumer spending improves the demand side of the economic cycle, prompting opportunities for investing in efficiently supplying that demand.
The disruption of the demand side of the economic cycle is the reason behind the loss of competitiveness of economies with high inequality. You get capital accumulation that finds no outlet for investment, other than riding economic bubbles.
This open lecture by LSE, although focused on the UK, touches most important points about inequality: http://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2018/07/20180717t1830vOT/peak-in...