https://www.scottsantens.com/did-sam-altman-basic-income-experiment-succeed-or-fail-ubi/
Deeper dive into the recent UBI experiment showing a bit more nuance about how different groups were impacted. Some highlights:
"Recipients who were single parents at the time of enrollment were about 3.9 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked an average of 2.8 hours less per week than single parent control participants. For recipients who were not single parents at enrollment, we do not find statistically significant effects on employment or hours worked."
"Recipients were significantly more likely (3.3 percentage points) to have pursued education or job training during the final year of the program—an increase of 14% relative to the average control participant. The effect was greatest for recipients who had the lowest household income at enrollment: these individuals were, on average, 34% more likely to have participated in education or job training during the third year of the program compared to control participants."
"In the third year of the program, Black recipients were 9 percentage points more likely to report ever starting or helping to start a business—a 26% increase from the average for Black control participants."
Posted by blue-red-blue
3 Comments
I remain quite influenced by the argument that these studies on UBI do not really study the effect of *universal basic income*, but rather *lucky few basic income*. They study what happens when you give a few random people a basic income, but not what happens when you establish a society-wide basic income. The macro effects of the latter are going to be considerable. And until you try it at scale, its effects remain unknowable.
So, it seems like a ton of the benefits were from people having extra cash to go back to school or move to places with better job prospects and be able to afford rent. Couldn’t this be solved more cheaply by just building more housing in areas with job growth? Decreasing someone’s costs is the same as giving them money.
My biggest fear is that UBI doesn’t scale. It works great when a small percentage of the economy gets it but if everyone gets it, any gains will be completely negated by higher inflation and interest rates. If everyone gets 1k a month, they are all going to try to move to the best places for jobs.
Also, didn’t the study show that participants ended up with worse credit scores than they started the program with?
Allowing adequate housing production the high wage regions is the same as ubi but it costs nothing.
If we lower the rent by 500 a month in SF and LA, renters are 500 richer every month and nobody has to pay for it.
People can enroll in this magical system by moving to high wage areas