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Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any sources for these claims?

Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days.

I know it may be hard to believe, but 20-something drug addicts, the mentally ill, etc, don't exactly manage their budget as well the 40-year-old 85th percentile income earning HN programmer or 75-year-old retired school teacher.

That's not a moral judgment. It's just a fact. And to the degree it's a cultural artifact (i.e. maybe drug addicts in Sweden are veritable CFOs), a UBI won't change that overnight.

> a UBI won't change that overnight.

Of course not but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. Your other objections regarding poor neighbourhoods and so on are not so much an argument against UBI as an argument against the conditions that made those neighbourhoods poor in the first place; of course those causes need to be tackled as well, but not everyone who is poor is also a drunken, sex-crazed, drug addict.

I'm not objecting to UBI, and certainly not to UBI-like experiments. Nor was SV_BubbleTime, AFAICT. But SV_BubbleTime makes a significant and important point, and a legitimate retort to the opinion, "direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused".

San Francisco adopted precisely those policies 15 years ago, providing free housing and direct cash payments, and most who live in San Francisco and understand the history of the policies probably have reservations about free housing and direct cash being the "best first approaches". Even Governor Newsom, who was the mayor who did the most to accelerate and materialize those policies (e.g. ~8k housing units for the homeless have been built or converted since 2005) has admitted that those policies were incomplete and naive.

EDIT: s/15k housing units/8k housing units/. Per https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40.... (Google search sucks these days so difficult to find the better sources I originally had in mind.) Note that these are units, not shelter beds. San Francisco has built more permanent housing for the homeless than the entire homeless population when the program started.

> Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood.

So you've got opinions and anecdotes at best, then.

Source: grew up in a poor neighborhood.

> Average weekly mortality due to illicit drug overdose was 40% higher during weeks of income assistance payments compared to weeks without payments (P<0.001). Consistent increases in mortality appeared the day after cheque disbursement and were significantly higher for two days, and marginally higher after 3 days, even when controlling for other temporal trends.

Source: "Illicit drug overdose deaths resulting from income assistance payments: Analysis of the 'check effect' using daily mortality data", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27402469/

> The findings suggest that scheduling and staffing practices of various emergency service areas in Hennepin County reflect patient load variation associated with time of welfare check distribution. Systematic variation of time or amount of welfare could lead to improved distribution and reduction of emergency services demand.

Source: "Correlation of emergency health care use, 911 volume, and jail activity with welfare check distribution", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1648313/

To be clear, these aren't arguments for removing or rejecting cash assistance altogether:

> The implications are that there is a general check effect and that it was not reduced by ending benefits to persons with drug and alcohol related disabilities.

Source: "Psychiatric emergencies: the check effect revisited", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10331323/

> Disability payments impact the timing of substance use, but receipt of disability payments is not associated with more overall substance use than unalleviated poverty. Money management-based clinical interventions, which may involve assignment of a representative payee, can minimize the purchase of substances with disability payments.

Source: "The Check Effect Reconsidered", https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3094507/

An example alternative model is California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS): https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/california/inhome-suppor... On the face of it, it's a voucher program for the disabled and elderly to obtain in-home assistance (cleaning, bathing, laundry, shopping, etc). But it's actually more of a jobs program for the unemployed or underemployed able-bodied. And in cities like San Francisco a significant fraction of recipients of the vouchers are older drug addicts, and a large number of those paid with the vouchers are able-bodied older adults. There's plenty of rules violations and cheating all around (because people will be people), but arguably the money is nonetheless more well spent--e.g. less of the public expenditure is diverted to drugs--than if the program simply provided cash directly to the recipients.

Obviously, a single mother working two part-time jobs has much more to gain (as does the public) by no-strings-attached, direct cash assistance. Not all poverty looks the same, and not all of the impoverished have or even want the same incentives. That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.

> That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.

It chafes because it's a common argument for doing nothing at all, or removing all agency from people in the situation. That removal of agency is absolutely a bad thing. I'd argue that people who feel they lack agency in their life are much more likely to attempt to escape that life through drug addiction.

It also grossly over-represents the number of drug addicts in the population of poor people, most of whom would just benefit from the extra money, and is used to falsely equate the two groups.

> That's not a moral judgment.

That was still a moral judgement. Welfare and UBI always have this issue in that everyone has a moral opinion on what recipients of money should spend it on.

If you have money, nobody cares what you spend it on, but if you don't have money, suddenly everyone has an opinion on what you should and shouldn't be allowed to use it for.

A moral judgment is "it is wrong to do X". It isn't a moral judgement to say "We don't want to spend our society's money subsidizing drug and alcohol addiction, we want to spend it on getting homeless people jobs, houses, etc." It isn't a moral judgment to say "we have observed that drug and alcohol addiction are harmful to the addicts and to the society we want to create, so we don't want to spend our money on that." Usually people aren't quite so precise and assume that the "we have observed ... to be harmful" is understood.

"We don't want to spend our society's money subsidizing drug and alcohol addiction, we want to spend it on getting homeless people jobs, houses, etc."

That is a moral judgement. It may be one you agree with, but it's wrong to say that's not a moral judgement.

> Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days.

Wake up wake up wake up it’s the first of the month Get up get up get up cash your check and move on

Bone thugs described it in 1999 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PArF9k2SbQk

You know those aren’t sources and sf is a local microcosm.

Your post lack humanity and nuance. Perhaps you’re jaded by your experiences which is fair but not representative.

Consistent access to sufficient money is life changing for people who grew up without. The change isn’t immediate. You don’t just suddenly adapt. You don’t unlearn the coping mechanisms you develop to survive while your poor. It takes time.

Poverty fucks you up.

It isn't lacking humanity. I grew up poor as well. And what the poster says does indeed happen a lot. This is not to say I don't think the poor should be helped. I was helped with school grants and loans to get me to where I am today, Medicaid, and also welfare for my parents and I. So personally I know how it was, and I know how it is to have to fight that. It is hard and the poor need help for sure.

The problem of poverty can come multiple ways. One way is lack of opportunity or being in a hole you can't get out of (kids and nobody to care for them, no home, nobody to look up to, mental illness, drug addiction, health problems). But there's also people that just aren't going to do their part to help themselves either. So what we need to do is help people get out of holes to get on their feet. There's a substantial portion of people that will take that money and do exactly what the OP said.

I don’t do what I need to do to help myself most of the time. Turns out my reason might be an executive function disorder. Perhaps many of these people who don’t do their part to help them selves are actually suffering from poor mental health?

The problem is that in trying to distinguish between the two groups you'll inevitably fuck it up and ruin the lives of people who could otherwise have turned it around.

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