I'm not opposed to this program or dispute the results. But it would be much more broadly effective to remove one digit from housing prices, chiefly by removing the artificial supply restrictions that have caused them to inflate so much over the last 5 decades.

Programs like Down Payment Assistance siphon off public money from worthier causes and dump it into the housing pyramid scheme. I'm afraid a lot of UBI money might be destined for the same fate. The same goes for tech salaries in places like here in the Bay Area.

A lot of effort and money has been spent on trying to make this program sound more successful than it was. They put together a long, design heavy packet to spin the results for media: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdc101bc3cfda2dcf0a2...

When you look at the details, the results aren’t as good as the headlines. There are major selection bias problems with how both the control group and the $1K/month group were selected and retained.

Even the results that differ between groups aren’t all that amazing and feel like they were cherry picked to be easy wins in a study like this. Of course giving people $1K/month results in that group self/describing as feeling like they’re in a better position to handle an unexpected $400/month expense because you’re literally giving them 2.5X that per month. It’s like the study authors handed themselves a guaranteed win and then congratulated themselves on it.

The claims about employment aren’t really supported by the data, either. The PR piece claims this:

> Guaranteed-income recipients also were more likely to secure full-time or part-time employment, or to be looking for work, rather than being unemployed and not looking for work, the study found.

But when I look at the data on page 57 of the report it shows the treatment group ($1K/month) had higher unemployment at 18 months.

If this was a study about a psychology paper or some social sciences hypothesis then the comments would be all over the glaring dishonesty of how these results are being spun. Something about UBI type research causes a lot of people to assume it’s positive and ignore the issues with the research, though. The numbers in this study do not support the enthusiastic headlines at all.

The program gave money to "who were pregnant or had at least one child, lived at or below the federal poverty level and experienced hardship related to COVID-19. Participants were randomly selected from about 50,000 applicants".

There were probably a million people eligible to apply for the program. 5% of them did. So when considering how well the program would scale, remember that the current results come from those in the 95th or higher percentile of motivation to improve their life.

The study doesn't show any "transformative" results. In all parts of the study the treatment group (the group receiving $1k per month) performed about the same or worse than the control group except in 2 cases: access to food and experiences of physical abuse.

The interpretation of the results in the first part of the study sounds like they were written by a PR person with a biased agenda in mind. Read the actual study in the remaining 83 pages [1].

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fdc101bc3cfda2dcf0a2...

Of course, giving anyone money in a vacuum can have transformative results. However, when you apply that to the wider system of economics, it is utterly destructive. If a business knows that you are getting extra money from the government, they would be leaving money on the table by not increasing prices to get for that money. The same goes with real estate, iPhones, healthcare, and everything else. They know you have the money. I equate this with telling a car dealer exactly how much money you have to spend.

Nation who keeps trialing successful thing asks, why does nothing work?

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The only reason we dont have policies that give people money directly is because it doesn’t allow for the people who have money, to control what the people who get it, do with the money

Why, cause what people typically do with money like in UBI situations, is get out from under the control of people with money.

As the system exists, all the money resides with people who don’t want other people to get it. It’s overwhelmingly clear the majority of people with more than living wage amount of money, want to spend it exclusively on their own consumptive pleasure with no positive externalities.

So they’re not going to support or implement policies (via the government they’ve captured) to make it easier for people to be less dependent on existing power structures

Where is any of this confusing at this point? It’s all very specifically explicitly understood to work like this. What’s baffling?