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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't UBI operate on the premise that it's replacing many of the existing social programs? For example, unconditional money rather than food/housing assistance. If the participants of the study also get access to these things, doesn't that severely limit the usefulness of this study?

Also, $1k/mo is pretty small. Are you just hoping to observe some behavioral changes at the margin with which to extrapolate?

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That's the end game, certainly, but having guaranteed income and additional programs doesn't hurt the experiment.

The idea is you can help pay for UBI by cutting the then-superfluous programs. But the benefit for people is in having the unconditional safety net, not in having access to only one program.

In the end, though, isn't that just an observation of how people behave with marginally additive wealth transfers? Shouldn't we have enough people who chose the annuity option of a lottery or had an unknown trust bequeathed to them to adequately study this phenomenon? I thought the real idea to be tested would be to take away the $1000/mo section 8 house, and instead give the recipients $1000/mo, and just see if they can more effectively use that resource.

Also, if we're making the usual assumption a UBI is intended to replace [most] needs assessment of state benefits, we need to test how people respond to having $2500/month value in various state cash and in-kind benefits replaced by $1000/month in cash (with the difference pocketed by people hitherto deemed less in need of support)

There seems to be a common bait-and-switch tactic performed by proponents of UBI, in which they mention UBI as a replacement for social programs when talking about affordability, but back away from that assertion when questioned about how to handle (for example) recipients that spend all of their UBI on drugs instead of food.

I see that as a societal symptom instead of a personal failure. I would rather a person spend their time playing videogames* instead of being stuck working dead-end jobs until the day they die.

*Drugs are a different issue, that should be treated as a health problem and dealt with accordingly.

We handle them exactly as we do now... by doing nothing. Today's social programs don't give people more money just because they spent all that they were given yesterday.

It's universal INCOME, not universal "take care of all your problems for you".

Isn't better psychological assistance the better solution to that problem?

Unless you are serving food directly you cannot prevent turning assistance into drugs because you can always just sell whatever you are given.

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